JESSICA
Emily, who up until that moment had been silently gazing at her phone as if frozen to a stump, suddenly said, “Mother, the Lyft is here and he’s only going to wait three minutes.” She shifted her feet in my old Converse high-tops. I love that she wears them, not that I could ever tell her that. I have to pretend to be vaguely irritated, to make the theft more fun.
“Why?” I was hunting through my purse for something, but I’ve now completely forgotten what. I’m telling you, I’ve got a brain tumor the size of a clementine.
“Because that’s what it says on the app.” The ancient Greeks had the oracle of Delphi; we have an app for that.
I gave up my hunt for whatever it was. “Well, go start putting your bags in the trunk, then, and see what the actual driver says. He’s probably more flexible than an app.”
Emily huffed her way to the door and slammed it. Door slamming—if I may digress for a moment—is a matter of art for my daughter. If Emily wants to express herself, she’s adept at threading the needle between firm closing and actual slamming. Then, when I yell, “Stop slamming the goddamned door,” she achieves plausible deniability with an injured tone. Of course, if she’s leaving the house, she has more options. Emily would probably say she shut the door firmly. I felt a slam. Maybe the slam is in the ear of the beholder. Or be-hearer?
Anna, our live-in nanny, was standing there, patiently waiting for this part to be over so she could go back to bed. I’d told her she didn’t need to get up, but she thinks I’m incompetent (probably based on extensive observation). We don’t really need a full-time nanny anymore, but I frequently have to work late, or on the weekends, and get little to no warning. Part of me knows Emily, at sixteen, is totally capable of taking care of herself, but a bigger part of me thinks it’s a good idea not to leave her alone too much. If you think about it, it’s like having an old-fashioned wife waiting for me at home, fall-backing my career so I can excel in that arena, and plastering over any cracks my kid might fall into. I’m not 100 percent confident it’s working all that well, but Anna has been part of our family for a long time, and you can’t fire family.
“Good luck,” Anna said. I’m sure she did wish me luck, but I had a sneaking suspicion she also enjoyed the prospect of me spending seven days alone with my teenage daughter. Anna is from El Salvador, raised her own three kids, and then moved to the States to help Americans raise theirs. She’s an intelligent woman, and I’m confident she appreciates the irony of my situation: I work incredibly hard to make enough money to pay her to do the work that would prevent me from working hard enough to make the money I need to pay her to do the work . . . and so the circle of capitalism goes. Hakuna that matata, ladies.
Anyway, Anna and I get along pretty well, although we’re basically shift workers sharing the same job. Both of us know the job’s coming to an end, because this trip is about looking at colleges, and then, in another year, Emily will leave home and we’ll both be unemployed. The difference being Anna was going to retire to El Salvador and play with her grandkids, living in a house her kids had built for her in the village they’d all grown up in, and I was going to be alone, rattling around in my pod like the world’s biggest loser pea. I’d go to work, forget everything except what was in front of me, and then come home and call Emily’s name before remembering she wasn’t there anymore.
“Mother!!” Emily was shouting from outside. Two full syllables, both exasperated. I won’t miss that part.
I wheeled my bag to the street. “Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Anna?” I swear to you my tone was neutral, but Emily frowned. You’d need a micrometer to measure her hair trigger these days. Maybe that was what I was hunting for in my bag.
“Of course!” she snapped. She ran to Anna, giving her the kind of full-on, 100 percent hug she hasn’t given me in about three years. Anna looked at me over my daughter’s head, and her eyes held apology tempered with a very light sprinkling of pride. We both know Emily loves me, we both know it’s age-appropriate for her to separate hard from her mother, but I suspect Anna enjoys those moments when Emily is nicer to her than she is to me.
I hadn’t told Emily about quitting yet. I didn’t want to freak her out, and I was kind of hoping my power move would work and John would sort things out before I got back. Besides, this trip is about reconnection and bonding. Em and I are going to be alone together, we’re going to talk, we’re going to laugh and cry, we’re going to salvage the shreds of our relationship and weave them into a beautiful blanket that will keep us warm for the rest of our lives. Something like that, anyway. Some thought that can be typeset against a sunrise and shared online.
No pressure.
This trip is going to be a total yawn, but I am so glad to dip I wouldn’t care if we were silently touring monasteries in rural Wisconsin. (No, I’m not sure why that popped into my head. I think I saw something online about millennial nuns, don’t judge me.) When Mom originally suggested this organized college tour, I kind of raised my eyebrows, especially once I realized it was a load of kids and parents, and therefore enforced socialization, which I hate. But nothing said I had to talk to anyone, right? Besides, at the rate Mom is going, we’re going to miss the plane anyway.
My mother is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. She’s a lawyer and can see a hole in an argument from a mile away, which makes life a little challenging. However, for some reason, it takes her approximately forever to get out of the house if she’s not going to work. On a workday she clacks around in the kitchen, her wireless earbuds and vacant expression the only clues to the conference call she’s attending, grabbing coffee and unsalted almonds and taking whatever weird supplement she’s trying out that week. She always wears her hair in one of those low knot things at the back of her head, like a ballerina, but I think she’s prettier when she wears it down. If I walk in she points at her ears so I won’t speak to her, and then—if I’m lucky—she’ll throw me a smile before leaving, clicking the car keys in her pocket. On a non-workday, like today, she only has to put her phone in her purse and walk out, but she’s always forgetting something, or going back to turn something off, whatever. Let it burn, I say.
Generally, she’s been a lot spacier lately. I’m not going to drop the M word, but in Health we learned it gives you brain fog to go with your dry vagina and night sweats. I’ll be brutal; they didn’t really sell it, though it was still better than that childbirth video. It’s amazing there’s anything left of your vagina to dry out.
My phone pinged and I told Mom the Lyft guy was waiting. She snapped at me to stall the driver, no pressure, that’s fine. Then when she finally dragged her butt outside, she sarcastically reminded me to hug Anna as if I’d forgotten. Which I had, not the point. Anna is awesome; she takes care of me and leaves me alone, which is the very definition of good parenting, in my opinion. She doesn’t expect all that much from me, unlike my mother. I’m doing my best here, but for Mom that’s never going to be enough.
The Lyft driver was on top of his game. No four-star ratings to lower his average, no sir. He had water bottles. He had hand sanitizer. He had cool jazz playing, and the car smelled of coconut and mango. A mini-vacation on the way to vacation.
I asked my mom if we were sitting together on the plane, but she didn’t know. I’m not scared of flying, but I don’t love it, and Mom said the flight was over five hours long and longer on the way back. Kill me now.
I love my mom, don’t misunderstand me, she’s just a bit up in my beak. She thinks about me too much, it’s creepy. My friends think she’s cool, but that’s because she’s not going to remind them to clean their room or ask about their homework. She waits till they’re gone and then leans in my doorway, like she’s, you know, dropping by, and asks forty thousand questions. If she cares so much about my homework, she should do it herself.
“Mom?”
I smiled at Emily. “Yes?”
“Are we sitting together on the plane?”
“Actually, no. I have to fix it at the airport.” When I’d checked us in the night before, I’d seen the mistake but hadn’t been able to fix it online. Emily shook her head.
“It’s fine.” She paused. “We don’t have to, I just wondered.” In her lap her hands made a half gesture that disowned interest in the outcome.
“Okay,” I said, letting it go, which is my latest parenting strategy. Apparently, I have a tendency to overanalyze everything and then dare to ask follow-up questions, and she gets pissy and I get pissy and we’re off. We’re only ever three sentences away from a fight.
My sister, Lizzy, had gently pointed out this habit, and after wasting forty minutes defending myself, I accepted that anxiety about Emily was making me treat her like an unfriendly witness. But not on this trip, baby. On this trip I was going to take some sage advice and talk to my daughter as if she were a visiting cousin from another state.
“How long is the flight?” asked Emily.
“Around five hours, give or take.”
“That’s nuts, it’s quicker than driving to San Francisco.”
I bit down on the explanation of time as a relationship between speed and distance. This was something else Lizzy told me not to do.
“You’re mom-splaining,” she’d said carefully. “It makes Emily feel like a child and she doesn’t want to feel that way. It’s better intentioned than mansplaining, but equally as irritating.” Lizzy is a completely disorganized part-time teacher and mom of three whose husband is barely contributing enough money as an actor to keep them in ramen noodles, and who is inexplicably happier than I am. Her kids are all at Peak Kid age, so she doesn’t know about teenagers yet.
So I said nothing. Both then, to Lizzy, and now, to Emily.
In eighth grade I did a project on Los Angeles International Airport for Social Studies. I had to read about the history of air travel, traffic patterns, architects; it was like 10 percent of the grade. I was a total suck-up. I worked on that thing for weeks. I made one of those tri-fold boards and a freaking diorama with little bushes my mom found somewhere, and tiny cars and planes. I really got into model making and origami and that kind of thing, and I got an A, not to flex or anything. However, the only fact I remember is that LAX gets over eighty-four million passengers a year, and as we came up on the terminal, it looked like every one of them had decided to travel today. The driver squeaked past two buses and defied the laws of physics to fit into a space much smaller than the car. Five-star review for you, sir.
I followed my mom into the terminal. She knew where she was going, because she always does. She’s very certain, my mom. I snapped a pic of the terminal while we were checking the bags, then captioned it Gateway to hell and posted it. The terminal smelled of coffee and printer ink, like always. I got that feeling I get in airports: DEFCON 3, slightly on edge, ready for delay or confusion. Then I noticed a cute guy walking towards the security line, and I start moving in that direction, one of my rolly wheels clicking loudly. Awkward.
Emily was ahead of me at the scanners, and I watched as she easily removed her shoes, dropped her laptop and phone in one tray and her jacket in another, and turned to go through the metal detectors. This is what air travel is to her; this is what it’s always been.
I remember September 11 clearly; we all do. I’d been filled with joy, walking my dog in Riverside Park and enjoying what was, even for New York in early fall, an exceptionally beautiful morning. I was a young lawyer, working hard but having a lot of fun, and my life rolled ahead of me like the yellow-brick road. Of course, that had been 8:00 a.m., and by 9:15, things would never be the same again, but for Emily, who at that point was an unsuspected and rapidly dividing clump of cells in my body, this level of airport scrutiny and anxiety was normal. If they’d waved her through with a smile and let her run up to the gate, she’d refuse to get on the plane.
Somehow an entire family had gotten ahead of me at the line for trays, so I was able to watch Emily go through the metal detector and wait for her stuff. A cute guy smiled at her, but I don’t think she even noticed. She’s very pretty, but in a way that apparently isn’t fashionable right now: She has her own eyebrows, her own hair color, her own cheekbones and freckles, and in general she’s more Hepburn than Kardashian. It’s all very well that I know Audrey’s a better choice than Kim (no offense, Kim). Emily needs to know it, and it doesn’t seem like she does.
When I got to the gate, I headed to the desk to try to change our seats. I’d thought Emily was right behind me, but when I looked around, she was nowhere to be seen. I remembered she’d muttered something about Starbucks. The check-in agent didn’t look thrilled to see me, but then again, I was probably either the first of many or the last of many, and I would pace myself, too.
“Yes, hi,” I said, with what I hoped was the right blend of friendliness and efficiency. “I was wondering if it was possible to change seats? My daughter and I aren’t sitting together, not really sure why, my assistant made the reservation”—assistants, seriously, what can you do?—“and we’d really like to be together on the flight . . .” I trailed off and showed the agent the little square code thing on my phone screen.
The agent, who looked like she didn’t care if a walrus made the reservation, scanned the phone and gazed at her invisible screen.
“Oh, I’m sorry, we’re fully booked. Your best bet is to wait until you’re on the flight and ask the attendant if he or she can help you swap with someone.”
“Has everyone checked in?”
“No, not yet.”
“So there may be empty seats anyway?”
The woman looked at me and then at something to my left.
“We’re not together?” It was Emily, who had arrived holding an enormous cup colored pink and blue in stripes. Honestly, does she know nothing about glycemic load or bladder capacity? I’d be willing to bet she’d spend longer photographing that than she would drinking it.
“No,” I said, hoping she’d back me up and guilt the gate agent into pulling strings.
“It’s not a problem,” she said instead, the little traitor. “It’s not like we’re never going to see each other again, we’re going to be constantly together for seven days.” She smiled at the gate agent and added, “It’s probably a good thing.”
Instead of being cool, I said, “Don’t you want to sit with me?” and even I could hear the telltale inflection of hurt feelings.
Emily couldn’t, apparently, because she shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Oh.”
Emily started to turn away. “Mom, it’s not a big deal, I’ll see you at the other end.” Then she walked away and slid down a wall to sit on the carpet, putting in her earbuds and pulling out her phone. Already sitting separately.
I turned back and saw the gate agent looking at me properly for the first time. Fantastic, now she thinks I’m one of those mothers who helicopters even while on an actual airplane.
Instead the woman handed me a fistful of drink vouchers, and said, “I have a teenager, it’s delightful. Have a drink on me.”
I smiled uncertainly, worried she was about to offer me some advice from her secure spot in the future of my life. Sometimes this advice is the best (Oh, yes, my four-year-old did that all the time, you don’t need to book a therapist, shampoo the rug) and sometimes it’s useless (Oh, you should never bribe your kids with M&M’s, they’ll get addicted to sugar and die an early death).
However, the woman merely lowered her voice and said, “Good luck. Have a nice trip!”
I was waiting in line at Starbucks when my phone started blowing up. Texts from Ruby, Sienna, Francesca . . . “Call me.”
“What’s up?” I called Sienna first.
“Dude,” she said, sounding stressed, which is so not her vibe. “Mrs. Bandin called Lucy’s parents and now her dad is flipping out.”
Lucy is a junior, but she’s in a different friend group. “On a Sunday? What for? Why?”
“No one knows. Lucy’s not saying. And I heard Bandin called Rosalie Sumner’s parents, too. What the actual frick?” She paused. “You know those girls, right?”
I swallowed. “I’ll call you back.” I hung up and smiled at the Starbucks woman, despite the fact that I felt like throwing up. “I’ll have the Unicorn Frappuccino, please.”
“What size?”
I was on autopilot. “Venti, please.”
I called Sienna back, trying to keep it together. “Hey. Yeah, I know them, we do stats together.”
“What do you think happened?”
“No idea. Did she call anyone else?”
“Ruby said she called Becca’s mom.” This was more serious. Becca was in an adjacent friend group. I knew Becca pretty well.
“Wow,” I said, the sounds of the airport bending and stretching around me as I walked mechanically back to the gate. I could see my mom standing at the desk and headed towards her. Don’t say anything . . .
“I gotta go, plane’s leaving soon. Text me.”
“Cool.” Sienna hung up, and I reached the gate.
Mom was pissed that we weren’t sitting together, but I was relieved. I needed time to think. I could only guess at what was going on, but my guess was pretty educated. I slid down the wall and sat there on the carpet, then distracted myself by getting a great pic of my drink superimposed on a plane so it looked like it had wings. I didn’t actually drink very much of it, but the picture was sharp.
When we landed I had like three hundred snaps, forty-two texts, and even a Facebook message, which could only be my grandfather. I scanned the texts and took a deep breath. I put my phone away and waited to get off the plane.
This is the bit of flying I hate the most. The plane lands and even though everyone’s flown before, half the passengers get to their feet and stand awkwardly waiting for the doors to open. It’s like repeatedly pressing the elevator button, totally pointless. I remember when I was younger, my mom whispered to me, People who punch elevator buttons over and over think they control the universe, and I bet land-and-stand people are button punchers all the way. They freak me out; they’re big and tall and standing between me and the door. Until this point we’ve all been civilized travelers, but now we’re revealed to be several hundred people in a highly flammable metal tube.
I pretended my seatmate wasn’t looming over me, holding his carry-on six inches above my actual head, and took a picture through the window of the plane. I captioned it, added a cute location tag, and sent it. Here’s where I am, people, in case you were wondering. We’re like spacewalking astronauts, re-tethering ourselves to the mother ship by phone. Nobody wants to be that guy floating away with the reflection of the moon in his visor, right? Or the lone wildebeest on the nature documentary, stupidly eating grass while a lion creeps up on it. Our phones keep us safe in the herd, although right now I’m trying to ignore the vibrating coming from inside my bag. My English teacher Mr. Libicki would say I’m overdoing the metaphors, but he still talks about Myspace, so, you know, consider the source.
When I turned off airplane mode, a whole series of texts came buzzing in. For a moment I felt anxious, then remembered my kid was sitting somewhere on the same plane and was therefore unlikely to have been in a car accident. One was from Valentina, one from Laurel my assistant, and four were from Frances. Despite Frances’s many wonderful qualities, she is a terrible texter. She never sends one text if four are possible. She types, she hits send, she thinks of something else and sends that, and then she thinks of yet another thing and sends that. I’d asked her why she didn’t simply wait to hit send until all her thinking was done, and she was genuinely surprised and said her brain didn’t move on to the next thought until the first one had been sent. But as I’ve already noted, she makes up for it elsewhere.
“I’ve been thinking about your new law firm . . .” read the first text.
Then: “You can have those billboards you see all over LA, with a giant picture of you wearing a power suit in a dubious shade of blue . . .
“And it can say: Wronged? Make those bastards feel the Burn!
“Because your name is Burnstein, get it?”
I grinned, then realized I was the only one still sitting in my section of the plane and scrambled to my feet. I checked the seat-back pocket, because that’s how I’ve lost several phones, then I spotted it hiding in my own hand. I need coffee.
Emily was waiting for me, more or less patiently, inside the gate. She was staring at her phone, of course, but looked up and smiled as I came off the Jetway.
“How was your flight?”
I smiled back and said, “It was fine, how was yours?” like two normal people greeting each other. This was going to be easy. I cannot believe I thought that; had I learned nothing?
“I watched movies, it was alright.” She turned and headed off, slinging her backpack on her shoulder. “We have to get the bags, right?”
“Yeah.” I followed her, slipping my phone in my purse. Emily was walking and texting at the same time, which always makes me wonder if humans will develop some kind of crown-of-the-head sonar, like dolphins or bats. Maybe she already has it, because I’ve never seen her run into anyone. Bit of a disappointment, I won’t lie.
The hotel was a standard chain hotel, but they’d added a lot more eagle-themed decor than would normally be advised. By focusing on eagles and flags, they’d managed to emphasize their location at the heart of American government without appearing to take sides. There were also a lot of state flags decorating the walls of the lobby, and, as always, I felt jealous of Michigan. I mean, yes, California has a bear, and that’s cool, but Michigan has a moose, an elk, an eagle, and what appears to be Sasquatch, at least in the version hanging in the lobby. There’s a lot going on, for a state flag.
Up in the room, Emily immediately flipped open her laptop and connected to the Wi-Fi.
“There’s an actual TV, you know,” I said. “Maybe we could watch a movie?”
She looked up, surprised. “Wow, I haven’t watched an actual TV in ages.” She regarded the big box for a second, then shrugged and went back to watching the smaller screen in front of her. “I’m okay, thanks.”
I frowned. “Okay you don’t want to watch a movie, okay you don’t want to watch TV, or okay something else?”
She frowned at me. “Uh . . . I don’t feel like a movie. But go ahead.”
“Won’t that bother you?”
She waved her earbuds at me, then popped them in her ears.
I hesitated for a second, then said, “Don’t you think it would be nice to do something together for once?”
She didn’t hear me.
“Em? Emily?”
“What?” She pulled out a single earbud and glared at me. “Why do you talk to me when you can see I’m not listening?” The human voice is capable of many subtleties, but she wasn’t employing any of them.
I shot back, “Why don’t you listen when you can see I’m talking to you?”
She sat up a bit. “Alright, what is it?”
I sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Clearly it does. What? Is it about the trip?”
“No, I was saying it might be nice to do something together.”
She waved her hand around at the room. “We are doing something together. We’re spending a week looking at colleges and stressing out about my lack of future. Isn’t that enough?” She paused. “It sure is for me.”
That hurt a bit. I knew I should let it go, but I don’t know . . . I was tired, I had expectations I shouldn’t have had, and I was hungry.
“Well, I’m sorry being around me is so exhausting.” I knew as soon as the words were out that I had just put myself in the wrong, which is an incredibly galling realization. It’s one thing to be irritated, it’s another to express it, and it’s a third to relinquish the high ground with your first salvo.
I know Emily so well I could literally read her thought process. A minute widening of the eyes—she wanted to fire back. A breath—she knew she shouldn’t, because right now I was the one who owed an apology. And then her mouth opened and clearly her hormones had come crashing around the corner of her mind and told her to fire on all cylinders.
“It’s not exhausting, being with you. It’s . . . stressful.” Her tone was calm. Then she stuck in the knife. “It’s not like I get to do it all that much so, you know . . .”
Somewhere she has a list of my buttons, I swear. There’s probably an app for it. “Well, you have me all to yourself for a week now.”
“Do I?” She sounded scornful. “Did you leave your phone at home?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Did you even put a vacation bounce on your email?”
I said nothing, because I hadn’t. This is the problem with being able to work from anywhere . . . you end up working from everywhere.
She regarded me coolly for another moment, then sighed and turned back to her screen, putting her earbuds back in so she didn’t hear my sigh.
I went to take a shower. When I stepped in I felt like crying, but managed to wash that away with everything else.
When I came out of the bathroom, she was asleep. Or pretending to be asleep. It’s a funny thing; at home she never goes to sleep before I do, but right now she was sacked out at 9:00 p.m. Which wasn’t even 9:00 p.m. for us, seeing as we had just arrived from the other coast. At home she wouldn’t even have started her homework.
But I climbed into bed and turned out my light, too. Two can play at that game.