CHAPTER 51

Crying at Commercials

When Annabelle was very little she asked her mom whe she’d always cry during sad commercials.

“Are you crying?” she’d say whenever a sad movie scene would pass or they would be in the car and a sad song would start.

“No,” Leda would respond, but of course she always was.

“Why do you always cry at sad things?” Annabelle asked her.

“I don’t know. I guess sad things remind me of sad things that I’ve felt,” she said.

“But it’s not real,” Annabelle said.

Leda remembered feeling similarly when she was a child watching her own mother grow emotional over things that weren’t real. She had the distinct memory of walking in on her mom watching Casablanca with tears running down her cheeks. At the time she was terrified at seeing her mother like that. She seemed fragile in a way she didn’t think her mother should be.

Annabelle’s freshman year of high school had been rough. Sasha moved away. She hadn’t been friends with Judith in years. She had a small group of girls whom she’d hang around with, but whenever Leda would press her on what the girls were like or if Annabelle wanted them to come over sometime, she would always shrug and say the same thing: “They’re not really my friends, Mom.”

Leda didn’t worry about it that much. Her daughter was thriving at school. Soon enough she’d be in college, and there she would make tons of friends who were interesting and good and who didn’t worry so much about the frivolities of eyeliner and designer lip balms.

“You’re going to love college,” she said to her all the time. To which Annabelle would always respond, “Isn’t that just something people feel because high school is so terrible?”

“I don’t think so.” Leda thought about herself being in high school and how miserable she was, and for a second she was certain her daughter was right.

Annabelle had taken to walking home from school, so it was unusual when she texted her mom and asked to be picked up. Leda was happy to go get her. Picking up her daughter from school was one of the consistently wonderful parts of motherhood. There was the anticipation of seeing her child, and then the wonderful feeling of seeing her child, and then the whole ride home when she’d get to hear everything about her child’s day. In her mind she would reconstruct all the events as her daughter explained them to her.

“I painted a picture of a zebra and Mrs. Granger hung it up on the wall.”

There was the painting and the wall and Mrs. Granger and the zebra.

“I played foursquare with Leah at recess.”

There was Leah and the ball and the swarm of other children in the blur of recess.

“Everyone loved my science fair project.”

There was the gym and all the projects and the little paper moon that Annabelle had stayed up late to finish.

It was all so vivid in her unyielding concept of her daughter as the most vibrant and stunning person alive.

Pulling up to the high school, Leda saw Annabelle almost immediately. Most of the other kids had already left and she was leaning against the building, looking at her phone. Leda beeped the horn slightly to get her attention. Annabelle looked up and Leda waved vigorously, a programmed response that was probably no longer as necessary as it had been when Annabelle was younger. Annabelle nodded and walked over slowly, continuing to eye her phone.

“Hey, baby, how was your day?” Leda asked her as she sat down in the car.

“Hi. It was fine.”

“I was worried that maybe you were sick, since you wanted to be picked up. Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah, I’m just tired.”

“You’ve been staying up way too late with homework. I hate how much homework they always give you. It’s like, what is the point of living if all you’re doing is going to school and then coming home and studying like a maniac till midnight? You’re a kid, you should be happy and doing kid things.”

“I don’t feel like a kid,” Annabelle said. She was turned with her face toward the window. Her hair had darkened over the years, but it was still highlighted with bright streaks of blond. Leda couldn’t believe how stunning she was sometimes. Sometimes she thought it wasn’t fair that any woman should be that beautiful.

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? They push kids to grow up so fast that it screws them all up and then you have forty-year-olds who ride skateboards around.”

“Where are there forty-year-olds on skateboards?”

“San Francisco.”

“You think everything happens in San Francisco.”

“That’s ’cause it does. Maybe you’ll live in California one day.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You never know. I didn’t think I ever would.”

“But you hated California.”

“I know, but you might like it. I’m sure they’d like you out there. They like you everywhere.”

Annabelle shook her head and sunk deeper into the seat and started picking at her nails. “What are you talking about? Nobody likes me.”

“Oh, stop, everybody likes you.”

“You’re my mom so you have to think that, but it’s actually not true.”

“Annabelle, you’re the most likeable person I know. I wish I were as likeable as you are. Everywhere you go people respond to you.”

“You’re crazy,” she said, closing her eyes.

“It’s the truth, honey.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Really, it is. You’ve got a gift.”

“I don’t have a gift.”

“You have so many gifts. I know you’re going to be an incredibly successful person. I’ve known it since you were born.”

“Mom, please.”

“Not everyone is as lucky as you are. People like you. You’re smart. You’re beautiful. You really have it all.”

“None of that’s true.”

“It’s all true, really. People would do anything to be you.”

“Mom, stop!” Annabelle sat up straight in her seat and turned to her mother. “Don’t you realize that I hate myself?”

Leda looked at her and didn’t answer. She saw in her daughter’s eyes a poison. She felt frightened for a moment.

“Don’t you know how much I hate myself? I wake up in the morning, and I look at myself in the mirror, and I hate everything.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. I hate everything.”

“Don’t say that.”

Annabelle leaned in close to her mom. “I hate my thighs. I hate my stomach. I hate my face. I hate the way I talk and the stupid things I say and all the dumb things I like. I just hate it. I hate myself. Do you not see that? Do you not see how much I just hate who it is that I am? Do you not see that?”

Leda didn’t know what to say. She felt breathless and dizzy. Where was that little girl who was so confident and so judicial and only ever laughed when something was truly funny? Who’d once walked an entire jetty by herself, leaping from big rock to big rock unafraid, emboldened by only herself? She did not look back until she had gotten to the end; she was so sure she’d reach the end. That was gone. Somewhere she’d become fragile.

“None of it’s true. None of it’s true at all,” Leda said.

Annabelle sat back in her seat. Leda tried to tell her daughter everything that was good about her, but she knew she wasn’t listening at all. She knew that no matter what she said, that flash of poison was still there. Seething, writhing, boiling away her insides. Leda wrote much of it off as Annabelle’s being an angsty teenager, because if she’d had to think of what was really happening to her child, her girl, that there was an irreconcilable shift in the foundation of who her daughter was, it’s unlikely she’d have been able to keep living her little life such as she had been. It’s unlikely she’d have been able to be happy.

A month before the start of Annabelle’s sophomore year they watched Dumbo together one Saturday afternoon as they ate leftover pizza. When the scene came on where Dumbo visits his jailed mother and the lullaby plays, Leda immediately started crying. It couldn’t be helped. It was so sad and so dear. It made her think of so many things as tragic and as hopeless and as beautiful. She glanced over at Annabelle and saw that she too was crying. Long tears were running down her cheeks, and she wiped them away but didn’t try to hide them. How sorry Leda felt that her daughter would also cry at things that weren’t real. How sorry she was that it couldn’t be helped.