“Are you hungry?” Mom says when I walk in the door. She’s always trying to feed me because she thinks I’m too thin.
“No.”
“But you’ve been gone all day.”
“I had a granola bar at rehearsal.”
“That’s not enough,” she says.
“I’m starving my zits. If I withhold nutrition, what choice do they have but to go elsewhere?”
“They’ll stay, and you’ll get too thin.”
Mom opens the freezer and pokes around. Then she closes the freezer and opens the cabinet. Then she closes the cabinet and opens a drawer.
“Aha! Found them!” Mom says, and pulls a package of Milano cookies out of the drawer.
“Can I ask you a question?” I say.
“Anything,” Mom says.
“It’s about girls.”
Mom stops what she’s doing.
“Girls or girl?” she says. She seems excited, which makes me feel kind of sick inside. Mom is desperate for me to be happy. I guess that’s what a mother is supposed to want, but it feels like a lot of pressure.
“It’s about girls plural,” I say. “At least for now.”
“Okay.” Mom sits across from me, biting at a fingernail.
“What do girls want?” I say.
“The same thing as you,” Mom says. “What do you want?”
“Girls.”
“Okay, maybe not exactly the same thing.”
Mom opens the package of Milanos, sniffs at the inside, then closes them again. I notice she’s looking thin, too. Not just thin, but tired.
“Do you think girls are so different?” Mom says.
“They are,” I say.
“Am I?”
“You’re not a girl.”
“Thank you very much.”
“I mean you were a girl, but you’re a woman now.”
“I still remember being a girl,” Mom says, “even if it was ten thousand years ago.”
“Okay,” I say. “What did you want ten thousand years ago?”
Mom thinks for a second.
“Boys,” she says with a laugh.
I consider that. Girls want boys as much as boys want girls. I think of Maria dancing around the stage in West Side Story, thrilled because she met a boy. For a second it seems like an exciting idea, but I don’t believe it. Because girls don’t want boys in general; they want certain boys. Boys with accents. Boys who play sports. Boys who are popular.
I don’t think Mom is lying, I just don’t think she has the whole story. Mom hasn’t dated anyone in the two years since Dad died. And if you count her time with Dad, it’s been over twenty years since she was on a date. So I can’t trust her memory on things like this.
Mom sighs, looks out the kitchen window.
“Can you believe it’s still light out?” she says. “And it’s past seven.”
She gives up on the Milanos and puts them back in the drawer.
“Have you thought about summer vacation?” she says.
“No,” I say, even though I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
“I was thinking we could go away somewhere. You know, get away from things.”
“All of us?” I say.
Mom hesitates. “Josh is doing a summer school program. So it’s just you and me, kiddo.”
“Big surprise,” I say.
“That’s not fair,” Mom says. “Josh is in college now. He’s got different priorities.”
“Fine with me,” I say, because I don’t want to get into it. “You and I should do something.”
“Good,” Mom says.
Summertime.
We never had to think about summer before. Summer was simple. It was about painting.
Every summer Mom would take some time off from work, and we’d all go to New Hampshire, to this place outside of Concord where we had a little cabin and Dad had a painting studio down the road.
Mom, Josh, and I would leave Dad alone all day, go off to the lake or out for a hike. We’d come back together at the end of the day. Dad would put something on the grill and we’d spend the night as a family, playing Scrabble or going into town to see a movie.
That was our summer tradition, the rhythm of my life as a kid. There was nothing to think about. There was summer and what we did in the summer. It was simple.
It’s not simple anymore.
I sit at the kitchen table, and Mom puts an apple juice pack in front of me without my asking. She pops a straw through it.
Mom says, “If you could go anywhere, where would you go?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
But I do know.
I’d go back in time.
I don’t say that to Mom. It would freak her out.
I pull out the straw and squeeze the pack, watch a drop of juice dribble down the side.
Mom sniffles and turns away from me. She wipes a tear from her eye. She does it fast and dries her hand on her thigh like it didn’t happen at all.
“It’s a good idea, Mom. To have a vacation.”
“You think so?” she says.
She smiles a little. That makes me feel better.
She says, “I had a crazy idea we might go to Europe. I’ve got some money saved up. It would be something different.”
“Very different.”
“Somewhere we’ve never been. A new experience.”
“A new experience,” I say. “Good idea.”
Mom nods like she agrees, like we have a plan now.
But honestly, I don’t think she’ll do anything about it. Last summer we had this same talk. We planned a trip to California, talked about it for months, then stayed home. The plan dissolved, and we ended up stuck in New Jersey, both of us pretending it wasn’t summer at all.