IT’S A RUSH of phone calls in the car ride home, my mom’s voice oscillating wildly between confrontational and saccharine as she talks to the airline employees on the other end of the line. I think I fall asleep for most of the ride, hoodie pulled over my head, cheek against the window. If someone were filming this in black and white, it would be a very dramatic shot in a music video. Adele’s voice should be warbling over this scene.
I resist the urge to sigh loudly when I drop my suitcase in the hallway. My mother doesn’t notice that her only daughter is upset; she heads straight to the breakfast-nook-turned-office and begins typing furiously at her keyboard, as if the harder she presses, the faster her dinosaur of a PC will respond.
“Would you rather stay at the Maison Robespierre or at the place I found off the Rue De La Grande?” my mom asks without looking up from her computer.
“I don’t care,” I say. I spent hours over the past few weeks combing through backpacker message boards to find a hostel with high recommendations for “MEETING NEW PEOPLE!” (and with free WiFi), but that was all for when this trip was mine.
“Of course you care,” she replies. “Which do you prefer?”
But the truth of the matter is, I really don’t, because my choice has already been taken away. All the preparation, all the excitement, all the daydreams about traveling on my own—they’re escaping me, leaving me a hollow shell nodding at every meaningless hotel or restaurant name Alice throws at me. I had already fully imagined the Facebook album I’d be uploading throughout the trip: images of me sipping coffee in Paris, meeting a roving gang of artists, kissing a stranger on the cheek while we both laugh. Wow, everyone back home would say. That Nora sure is an adventurous and independent free spirit. I guess we all underestimated her.
Now, though, I’ll be posting pictures from a family vacation. No, not even a family vacation. The only thing lamer: a mother-daughter bonding trip. And with my mother, who still thinks a fanny pack is an acceptable article of clothing to wear unironically or outside of a music festival.
In the span of a couple of hours, I’ve gone from European adventuress to prisoner. What does it matter which hotel room is going to be my cell?
“I already have a hostel reservation,” I say.
“Don’t be silly, we’re not staying at a youth hostel.” My mom practically spits the words at me. “You can stay with me at the hotel!” She sips the coffee that she had left on the counter to drive me to the airport and winces slightly at how bitter it is cold. “Wouldn’t you so much rather have clean sheets? Maid service?”
“Well, you know, you stay in a big room in a hostel, you get to make friends,” I say to my feet. She doesn’t hear me.
“We’ll have our own big, beautiful room!” Her grin is sickeningly proud.
The worst part about all of this is the generosity that oozes out with every word my mother says, as if I’m supposed to be grateful to stay at some random hotel instead of a hostel where I might meet some cute British boy with an accent and messy hair who would make me forget that Nick ever existed. Now, even if I do meet him, there’s going to be nowhere for us to hang out.
|
ME: |
I forgot to mention that I’m a huge dork. Come back and meet my mom! |
|
HIM: |
Actually I just realized that I am not attracted to you at all in any way. Lovely to meet you, I’m going to go back to the hostel with a seven-foot-tall blonde Dutch girl who is old enough to travel by herself. |
I sit on the couch and put my feet up on my still-zipped suitcase. “What about your job?”
My mom takes a large gulp of coffee, forgetting that it’s cold and a silvery film is already forming on its surface. She grimaces. “I told you. It’s fine. I took care of it.” When I don’t respond, she goes on. “I can work remotely, Nora. This isn’t the third world. They’ll have WiFi. I handled it.”
I guess I missed that phone call in the unending flurry of tasks my mother seemed to complete without a second thought. I begin to wonder if my mother had planned this all along. Had she watched me for weeks as I booked hostels and bought guidebooks, waiting for the best time to weasel her way into my trip? Prepared to pounce when I was too tired and overwhelmed to come up with a good reason why she shouldn’t join me?
My paranoia is interrupted by a text from Lena: I know you’re on a plane right now, but have THE BEST time in Paris and send me 17 postcards and a croissant. Also you’re so brave. Usually when I get a text message, I reply immediately out of habit. But now, looking at her message, I get a sensation in my stomach akin to a fifty-pound rock dropping into a shallow pond. There’s no emoji for “Looks like I’m going to have a curfew when I’m traveling throughout Europe after all! Good-bye, discotheques; hello, matinees of Cats in the West End!”
And so I don’t respond, and to the percussive backbeat of my mother pecking at her keyboard, I start scrolling through Instagram. My finger lingers on a picture of Lena kissing Nick’s cheek at a soccer game, which makes me feel only slightly less nauseated than the prospect of spending weeks in Europe with Alice Parker. Is it too much to ask that after you break up with someone, they should be forced to move to Canada and never interact with anyone you know ever again? You’re not in love with him, I tell myself in my most grown-up voice. That way your stomach clenches when you think of him isn’t love. It’s jealousy, infatuation, regret, embarrassment, lust—anything but love. Mind over matter! Excelsior!
I scroll past, proud of myself, through the pictures of skeletal fashion bloggers posing with bug-eyed sunglasses and mucus-green juices. They’ve all mastered the same look: marble countertop with a magazine, headphones, coffee, and a designer lipstick accidentally-on-purpose strewn to look artistically askew.
I close Instagram, and, for the millionth time, I open the DCYA website on my laptop and am greeted by photos of the idyllic Irish countryside and students painting on canvases and posing together by a lighthouse. A SUMMER OF ARTISTIC GROWTH AND FRIENDSHIP reads a banner at the top of the page.
I’m temporarily comforted by the fact that I’ll eventually be one of the students in those pictures, smiling a vague stock-photo-model smile and posing by an Irish lighthouse with new friends. And none of those friends will be dating a boy I used to be in love with.
Within forty minutes, my mother finishes packing her suitcase and, with a few claps, shepherds me into the car to drive back to O’Hare, this time by the light of full morning.
After my mother finishes a final, curt phone call to some poor woman at United (“Thank you, Deborah. Have a lovely day.”), we’re left to sit in silence.
“Is your suitcase under twenty inches?” I ask. I know the answer, but I’m picking a fight. I’m entitled, okay? My mom—who doesn’t know the first thing about art, I should say, who wouldn’t know her Monet from her Michelangelo—made the unilateral decision to completely upend my trip. I’m allowed to rub in the fact that I was the only one who prepared.
She doesn’t reply.
“Twenty inches,” I repeat. “Your suitcase?”
“What?” she says, not looking away from the road. “No, it’s my tan suitcase. Twenty-three inches.”
“UGH. European airlines are different, Mom! They charge, like, more than the actual flight for checking luggage, and their overhead compartments are smaller! Rick Steves specified that if you’re traveling throughout Europe, you should only have a carry-on. That’s what he does.”
“Who is Rick Steve?” my mother asks, completely missing the point.
“Steves. And he’s, like, the European travel-guru guy. You’re going to have to check your bag if it’s bigger that twenty inches.”
“Well, if I have to, I’ll check the bag,” she says in a reserved voice.
My voice comes out louder than I intended. “And that leaves me where? Waiting by the luggage carousel for you when I could be out, I don’t know, meeting new people? Exploring a new city like I was supposed to be doing?”
My mom turns to me with that Mom look and a pause that usually means I’m about to have car privileges revoked, but then her face softens. It’s the face she makes when she sees an acquaintance at the grocery store who doesn’t know that she and Dad are divorced. Hide your left hand. “Yes, we’re doing wonderfully, thank you for asking.”
“I know a trip with your mom may not sound like fun on paper, but I’m so excited to spend some time with you, Nora!”
I tighten my lips into something that might be a smile but is probably closer to a dog with peanut butter on the roof of his mouth.
Mom senses my moment of weakness and moves in for the kill. “You’re going to miss me when you’re away next year.”
Whatever response I had dissolves like a lump of sugar in my throat, and I silently vow to try to be a good sport to my mom for as long as I can. I don’t even draw in the car on the way back to the airport. My mom asks me to pick the radio station. Clearly she’s trying her best too.
Because of the last-minute ticket purchasing, both my mom and I have tickets in middle seats. While we wait at Gate 2B, I scan through the other passengers en route to Paris and make a mental roster of who might be flanking me on the eight-hour flight to come.
Option 1: A couple, both with flaxen-blond hair and stained sweatpants, fishing in the bottom of their McDonalds bags. I silently pray I won’t be surrounded by the smell of McSweat for the entire trip.
Option 2: An impossibly cool-looking girl with inky black bangs who bobs her head along to whatever beat is pulsing through her massive headphones while reading a copy of Mein Kampf. This girl is either far cooler than anyone I have ever seen in Evanston, Illinois, or she’s a neo-Nazi. Fifty-fifty odds.
Option 3: A model-handsome man with red hair and a ginger beard, someone who should probably be cast on a premium-cable television show about nineteenth-century Scotland if he hasn’t been already. A venous arm is slung around his girlfriend, a woman with a chubby round face and long hair down to her butt. Her hand is on his knee. I imagine the PDA I’d be enduring with those two on either side of me. Is it possible for STIs to go airborne?
I’m feeling fairly hopeless, when suddenly I see a boy—a man, really—with an undercut and a full tattoo sleeve. He’s reading Joan Didion and has a guitar case between his feet. I think one of his tattoos might be a dwarf from Lord of the Rings.
Still looking at him, I pull out my sketchbook, hoping he’ll notice that I’m also an artist. I flip to the next empty page and draw a punk rock Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, looking up at the boy—man—after every pencil stroke. He doesn’t look at me. I concentrate on my face, hoping to look introspective and focused on my pencil movements. I bite my lip. If he looks over right now, he’ll see a sexy, determined artist too focused on her casually amazing sketch to even look up.
Please let him be seated next to me. Please let him ask to see my sketchbook and think my designs are perfect for his album cover, and please let him secretly be an about-to-become-famous musician. Please let us wander the streets of Paris together, working on our art. “Wow,” he’ll say quietly, as we sit at a café and he sips espresso while watching me sketch, “you’re . . . that’s amazing.” But he’ll actually say it in French, because he’s fluent in French.
And when we go to the Grammys together, the paparazzi will whisper, “That girl he’s with, she’s the one who did the iconic design on the album cover. Can you believe they met on a plane to Paris?”
* * *
Once I’m boarded with my book on my lap and my economical (twenty-inch!) carry-on appropriately stowed in the overhead compartment, I watch the rest of the passengers trudge through the aisles with the dead, listless gaits of zombies in a Romero movie. My mother has already settled herself two rows ahead of me, her head cradled by a blue nylon neck pillow. A dour businessman with a laptop that looks like it’s from 1987 has claimed the aisle seat of my row, but the window remains mercifully free. I breathe a sigh of relief when the four girls in Ugg boots slide into the row ahead of me, and again when I spot the McDonald’s couple disappear into their seats at the front of the plane. As the line of passengers thins, I see the boy—my future fiancé and artistic partner—making his way toward my row. Maybe if I stare hard enough, he’ll feel my gaze and make eye contact.
Five rows to go.
He’s definitely coming to sit here.
Four rows.
This is the first time one of my imaginary scenarios has actually panned out.
Three rows.
Okay, time to look back at my book. I can’t be staring at him when he gets here.
I open the novel in my lap and force myself to concentrate on the words as my skin prickles and I wait to hear his voice: “Excuse me, that’s my seat in the window there.”
I read a sentence in my book, then the same sentence again, and then a third time. Thirty seconds pass, and I realize it’s been too long. Just as I’m deciding whether or not to look up, a woman’s voice breaks the silence.
“Just there,” she says.
The businessman and I rise to let her in, and while I’m in the aisle, I notice that the guy with the guitar case and cool tattoos and handsome eyes has taken a seat right next to my mother.
Of course.
I spend the rest of the flight in and out of an uncomfortable sleep. At one point, I think my mom comes by to check on me, but I force myself to keep my eyes shut. I read half a chapter of Invisible Man, our summer reading assignment for AP English lit, that I barely remember, except that at one point I made a mental note to draw one of the scenes for Ophelia in Paradise, but now I have no idea which.
By the time the captain declares (in an impossible-to-place accent) that flight attendants should prepare for landing, I have no idea whether we’ve been on the plane for ten minutes or ten hours. The entire metal tube with its flickering dim lights and the omniscient headphone buzz has become a world unto itself.
The cabin lights ding to life, and the businessman lifts his head from an uncomfortable-looking angle, glaring at me as if his neck problems tomorrow will be my fault.
My mother waits for me just outside the plane doors, looking far less sleepy than I’m sure I do. She asks how my flight was, and I say it was fine. I ask how her flight was, and she says fine. Sparkling conversation, really.
“Sit next to anyone interesting?” I ask. Maybe she and the boy bonded, and we’re all going to meet up in Paris.
“I didn’t notice,” she replies.
“Can I get a coffee or muffin or something?” I say, realizing exactly how hungry I am for the first time now that I’m eyeing an airport Starbucks.
“We’re in an airport,” she says without even looking at me, and she begins striding away, her shoes clicking on the linoleum floor. It’s the exact walk I can imagine her using to intimidate clients in her office. “Besides,” she adds, “you shouldn’t be getting Starbucks in Paris. We’ll be at our hotel soon. I looked up the address, and there are a dozen patisseries on the same block.”
She pronounces patisseries like a pretentious college junior who just got back from six months studying abroad in France.
“But I’m hungry now.” If I were traveling alone, I’d be able to eat what I want, when I want, and not have to deal with any snobbery about an airport muffin.
My mom gives an exaggerated sigh and fishes in her pocket, pulling out an open bag of raw almonds. “Here,” she says. “This is why you should plan ahead for this sort of thing.”
Hungry as I am, I can’t think of anything less appetizing than my mom’s pocket almonds. “Thanks,” I mumble and transfer the bag into my own pocket.
Then, because my mother hadn’t realized how much easier it is just to bring a carry-on to Europe instead of checking a bag, the two of us drudge side by side toward baggage claim like zombie versions of the girls from Madeline. Yet another delay before I can get real food.
“Why don’t you get us a taxi?” My mom pulls her suitcase from the luggage carousel. “I need to make some calls.”
“For work?”
“No, not for work,” she snaps. “I just need to take care of a few more reservations for the trip.”
I sense something in her, something evasive and sharp like a splinter buried deep under skin.
“You don’t need to call anyone at work?” I ask, pressing.
“No,” she says, checking her nail beds to make sure they’re as pristine as ever. “I do not, thank you.”
So my mother just made the impromptu decision to take a weeks-long trip with me overseas, and now she has no more calls to make for work or frantic e-mails to return? An itching realization creeps into my head. She probably told them about this trip a month ago. What if she’s been planning to come the whole time?
That’s what my brain keeps whispering to me on the silent cab ride through the dark Paris streets, still buzzing with life even at midnight. My mom had given directions in slow, deliberate French, well enough that the cab driver understood her.
By the time we finally arrive, the lobby is empty aside from a single sleepy teenage concierge who hands us a large brass key after plucking my mom’s credit card out of her hands. There’s no restaurant in the hotel. I pull an almond from my pocket and eat it miserably. It tastes like sawdust and sadness.
Tomorrow I will look at the city, at the art, at this entirely new landmass that I had to fly across an ocean to see. Tomorrow I’ll visit places I’ve only seen pictures of and eat pastries that look like spun silk. Tomorrow my eyes will be less puffy and watery and my skin will be less dry.
But tonight I’ll dig through my clothes to find a toothbrush and drag myself into a twin bed with a flat, heavy blanket, and I’ll fall asleep so that this day can finally be over.