I sat on the classroom reading rug with the list:
cap
map
nap
snap
Each letter lay in a white sea. Suddenly, they startled me, melted together and stood up as words. They were like open windows. I was elated. I could read anything! Then the jolt of my mother’s voice made me look up. She was standing at the door with my teacher, wearing a coat I’d never seen.
She waved, which made my heart leap, and my teacher beckoned me over. My mother knelt and hugged me hard. My teacher stuffed paper into a folder and wrote my name on the front in red pen.
“I want you to practice on your trip,” she said. “Will you do that for me?” I loved connecting the segmented lines, making the same S, the same U.
“Can I have some more word lists, too?” I said. She gave me a phonics book and said I could keep it.
Outside the school my mother walked us to a station wagon.
“Is this ours?” I said.
“I rented it. Let’s get your sister.”
“Where are we going?”
“On an adventure.”
“Are we going home first?” I looked in the back, which was piled with sleeping bags and new winter coats.
“No, I’ve got everything we need. I’m taking you to see the Grand Canyon.”
“What is that?”
“It’s America’s most magnificent natural wonder.”
We picked Penelope up at her school and crossed the George Washington Bridge and kept going. I sat in the front. My mother wanted to sing Carly Simon songs. I knew the words too, but Penelope got mad and frustrated and tried to make us stop singing; my mother and I looked at each other so she wouldn’t see. We went into one state and then out and then into another, over and over. My legs got hot under the windshield, and I climbed over the seat into the back. My mother said restaurants would be too expensive. She stopped to buy bread and peanut butter and jelly from a service station, and while she drove I made a sandwich with a plastic knife and gave it to my sister. Penelope threw it on the floor and wanted the peanut brittle she’d seen our mother slip into the glove compartment.
“No candy,” my mother said, and Penelope screamed. “Stop it! You two are going to see your country.”
In the dark, Penelope fell asleep.
“Is she sleeping? Do you want to come up by me?”
I eased out from under my sister and climbed into the front again.
My mother covered my lap with her new coat. It was heavy and soft. She called it a chocolate brown shearling, which sounded delicious.
“It’s cold in the desert at night,” she said. “That’s why we needed new coats.”
“But aren’t we broke?” I said.
She flashed glee. “I stole them.”
I said, “Wow,” but I knew that wasn’t a good idea. What if she went to jail?
“I just walked into Bloomingdale’s and stole everything we needed—the coats, the sleeping bags, this—” She pulled a necklace from under her collar. “It’s a fetish. The Indians use them for luck. And we’re going to a reservation, so.” She picked up my hand and started a new conversation in a different, slowed-down mood. “Garrett wanted to come, but I told him no.” That was her boyfriend, an anchorman. “Do you know why we left? I just wanted to be with you. With my girls. You see, I’m very sick.”
“What do you mean?”
She explained “leukemia.” It was such a long word. I would never hear it again without feeling that someone had taken her property, like a label yanked from the back of her sweater.
“Just a few months left,” she said. She started to cry. “Isn’t it good we’re taking this trip? You’ll always remember it.”
I made sure Penelope was sleeping. “Who will take care of us?”
“I haven’t decided yet. Not your father. Maybe Irene?” The thought of her sister cheered her.
“But she lives in London.” We’d been. It was far away.
“Where you were born.” She squeezed my hand hard. “Let’s think of things you could do if you found out you only had a month to live. Come on. You could charge lots of things and never see the bills. Or eat anything you wanted. Penelope could have all the peanut brittle in the world.”
We slept in motels. I lost my tooth, the first one, and in the morning there was a quarter inside a pretty beaded purse. At a motel in Nevada dust, a helicopter arrived with the anchorman. He took us to a roadside restaurant, and they talked about people I didn’t know. He didn’t seem sad. I wondered if I should tell him this was probably his last time with her.
After bedtime I watched my mother and the anchorman talking through the motel-room door. They had set up plastic chairs beside our car. “Those fuckers,” my mother said to him. Penelope was asleep, but I didn’t like falling asleep. “They want to cut off their own grandchildren. The rich son of a bitch.” She was talking about my father’s father. “Would it be so hard for him to give me some money? I went to see him, and he wouldn’t even talk to me. Fine, I thought, I’ll go shoplifting in Bloomingdale’s, and I’ll get arrested. Then you’ll have your goddamned name in the paper because you wouldn’t even support your own daughter-in-law.” The anchorman said something too low for me to hear. My mother said, “But, you know, I was so good at it, I couldn’t get caught.”
By the time I fell asleep she still hadn’t told him about her leukemia.
In our next motel, she turned the television to his channel. He was talking about Cambodia. “And he was just here,” she said. I sat close to the screen and searched his face. I was certain he was thinking about her.
We picked up her friend in New Mexico, her best friend from when they were teenagers in London, and they spoke in giggly voices and didn’t finish their sentences. Our mother got a brown poncho with white llamas on it. For the rest of the way I sat in the back with Penelope, observing how hard they laughed. They cried, too. I couldn’t always tell the difference.
The stretch of the Grand Canyon was too big to take in all at the same time, and when we got out of the car I wanted my mother to stay very close to us. “I had no idea!” she kept exclaiming. “What an extraordinary country!” She rented donkeys, and we rode them down, a single file, a slow, hobbled parade. I was terrified.
In Beverly Hills, my mother and her friend talked a guard into letting us through the gates of a fabled hotel, and we drove under palm trees and had drinks at a bar. Natalie Wood came in, and my mother almost went and talked to her. We drove to Malibu to stay with another best friend. She grew tomatoes on her patio, and she let me pick some. It was very sunny, and the hot leaves smelled better than anything I’d smelled before. Everyone was always happy around my mother, always doing the things she suggested.
When we got back to New York, my mother discovered the hospital had mixed up her chart. She didn’t have leukemia! They’d been trying to contact her!
“But no one could find me because we were driving around the country,” she said to me. “I pulled you out of school the day I got the letter.” There had been an envelope with test results, she said, and she’d read the letter and thrown it away and rented the car. “I came straight to your school. I didn’t know what I’d do if they didn’t let me take you.”
She told the miracle everywhere. “The stupid hospital’s stupid mistake,” she said to people on the phone. “I should sue them and make them pay for the trip. And some poor woman out there doesn’t know what little time she has left. How horrible.”
Soon after, our mother noticed the man across Lexington Avenue from her bedroom window. Each weekday morning he trotted down the steps of his brownstone, walked to the corner and hailed a cab. She figured out from watching that he was married. Getting ready for school in her room, one of us might look out and say, “There he is.” She came to the window and stuck her tongue between her teeth. She called him “fetching.”
One afternoon we came out of our room where we’d been playing, and our mother was handing the man a drink on the couch. He stood up.
“You must be Susy.”
He had a British accent. He shook hands with Penelope. She looked funny, doing such a grown-up thing. My mother’s childhood accent was fluttering around. Later I imitated it for Penelope, which was like tickling her. I could make her laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe.
Colin came over a lot. “Everyone thinks he’s on a business trip in Egypt,” my mother told me when he came to spend a whole weekend. That night in my constant insomnia I thought about the short distance between the bed he was sleeping in now and the bed he was supposed to sleep in.
My mother said Colin had to stay in New York and work. He had a very important job at Sotheby Parke Bernet. But the three of us were going on an exciting trip. I was six and Penelope four. In Tangier we arrived at a palace and forgot our jet lag. We couldn’t believe we got to live here, like princesses. The hotel stood in a bright courtyard surrounded by short trees. “Olive trees,” our mother said. She opened her arms. “This is all ours.” A woman peeked from a doorway wearing a veil that covered everything except her eyes. We thought she was a princess. There were no other guests.
The first night, as our mother unpacked our things, she told us that the cook was named Fatima and spoke only Arabic, and that oranges grew here. We might see monkeys. She kissed us and went to her room down the hall. I stayed awake, feeling unsettled.
The next day Hugh arrived. Because Hugh was a friend of Colin’s we already knew him a little. She explained what “lover” meant. At lunch she said the spicy fish soup was absolutely divine.
“Can’t you feel your lips tingle, girls?”
Mummy and Hugh took us to a crowded market in the city, and they bought us flat purses made of leather and stamped with gold. We filled them with the coins Hugh gave us.
In the afternoon they slept, and the next day Penelope and I wandered under the olive trees. It felt like the air had stopped breathing. There was a stilled fountain and tables without chairs. We found a shed for a hiding place. I worked the door open, Penelope behind me. Her palm was hot against my cotton shirt.
“What’s in there?” she said. She was nervous. It smelled sour, but I couldn’t see. The sun had made our eyes useless for the dark.
We heard whimpers, and I pushed with my shoulder until the door opened all the way. A dog looked at us, curled around a bunch of puppies. They were the size of eggs and covered in mucus.
“We have to tell Mummy!”
“It’s puppies!” said Penelope.
“They just got born! Let’s go tell her!”
Then a noise made us jump back. I thought we were in trouble for seeing the puppies, but it was a taxi pulling into the courtyard. As if in a magic trick its door opened to reveal Colin. He looked red in the heat but pleased, and he bent down and said he’d come as a surprise.
“Do you have any coins?” Penelope said, holding out her new wallet.
Our mother appeared in bare feet. She did look surprised. We had to wear our sandals all the time because the stones were burning hot, but she didn’t notice as she walked toward us. She wore a long silk scarf crisscrossed over her breasts and a skirt that showed the shadow of her legs. She put her arms around Colin’s neck, and they tilted their faces, kissing.
“Let’s see if we can get you your own room,” she said, and they went inside. She looked back and widened her eyes.
When she tucked us in that night she said the three of us were in charge of a big secret.
“I can trust you, right, darlings?” she said. “Colin mustn’t ever know that Hugh’s here.”
We said yes. We wanted her to come see the puppies. She said she would tomorrow.
In the morning she called a taxi and took me and Penelope to an empty beach. We brought steak sandwiches packed by the princess in the kitchen, but the wind blew sand into them, and our hair into our mouths, and we couldn’t eat. Tar flecked the beach, and during dinner that night with our mother and Colin, Penelope and I picked at the black glue on the soles of our feet. “Do stop it, you two,” she said. “It’s unattractive.”
Our mother spent the rest of the week going back and forth between our room and the other two rooms. She took food into Hugh’s room. We took milk and scraps of bread to the shed and left them on the floor for our secret puppies.