Rebels Like Us. Liz Reinhardt
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few shades darker than my mother’s at the end of summer. By contrast, after a summer spent at our communal family beach house in Santo Domingo, my skin would be a light sepia with a spattering of umber freckles. I’d admire myself in the full-length mirror in the bedroom I shared with half a dozen of my girl cousins, each one of us a different shade of gorgeous and proud to announce it. One of the first slang phrases I picked up in the DR as a kid was hevi nais, which my cousins said about anything and everything—cute new outfits, beautiful hairstyles, too-tall sandals, our sun-warmed skin. It basically means “very nice,” and it’s the kind of casually confident phrase that still makes me feel beautiful and strong in my own skin. I loved the fact that while everyone else in school had their twenty-four pack of Crayola colored pencils, I had my set of seventy-two Prismacolor Premiers with a range of russets and taupes and ochers for my family pictures.
“Can’t a girl define her own cultural heritage?” I snap, annoyed that nothing feels easy with my mother anymore. Not even a conversation about something as simple as freckles.
“Oh, there’s no denying you got plenty of my genes. Even if the freckles are open for debate, you have an Irish temper just like your mother.” I want so badly to smile back at her, but my heart is a cold, congealed pile of old tofu. “You and Jasper might look more like Dad at first glance, but there’s a lot of me mixed in there too.”
“Huh, I’m kind of surprised you even remember how Jasper looks,” I bite out. “We barely see him or Dad anymore.”
“Ag, we were just in Paris this autumn—”
“About that.” I interrupt before she can go into professor mode. My mother is a champ at talking for forty minutes straight at a clip and barely pausing for breath. “I thought you and Dad were making up or something. But you and that guy you worked with had...whatever gross mess going on, and you kept it up after we got home. I still don’t get it.”
Am I accusing my mother of cheating on my father? That makes no sense. They’ve been divorced for years...but the boundaries of their relationship weren’t always crystal clear. I know more about their up-and-down, back-and-forth, off-and-on relationship than I should because our apartment was tiny with very thin walls. Sure, I could have been thoughtful and put on headphones or something when Mom called her best friend, but sometimes I got tired of being surprised by my mercurial parents and their chaotic relationship.
“Okay, this is not a conversation I can have with you right now. Or probably ever, if you want the truth. I know you’re not a baby anymore, but that doesn’t mean you’re privy to every detail about my marriage to your father, okay? Frankly, it’s complicated and it’s private, how your father and I—”
“What? Screwed up your marriage and all our lives in the process?”
My words skid to a stop like a dog that finally caught the car she’d been chasing for miles and has no freaking clue what to do with it.
The tendons in Mom’s neck bulge when she swallows. She squirts more aloe on her fingers and rearranges her features until they’re her best estimation of calm. I prime myself for her raging Irish temper, but she talks in this infuriatingly measured way.
“Agnes, I know you’re angry. I know you blame me. I know you want answers that will help this make sense, but you’re old enough to know that there aren’t always easy answers in life. There are things you can’t understand—”
“I bet I could.” My knees knock under the counter because the little I do know has made me so angry. What if I find out more? What if things between us get even worse? “We used to talk. You used to let me know what was going on with you.”
“It hasn’t always been easy to know when to tell you things.” Mom takes a deep calming breath, one her yoga gurus would be proud of. “Have you spoken to your father?”
“I missed his call from before. I’ll call him later.” I’ll try anyway. I love my father, but our phone calls are always awkward and stilted. We communicate mostly through text, and that’s basically comprised of sending each other funny memes or links to interesting NPR articles. Not exactly deep, but it works for us. “Why are you asking?” She’s avoiding eye contact like it’s her job.
“You...you just need to talk to him. That’s all.” Her words are like a judge’s gavel hitting the bench.
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
“There are some things that aren’t open for discussion.” The words are quiet but firm. “I try to respect your privacy, baby. But you have to understand that I need that back from you, even when it’s hard.”
“When respecting my privacy means you lose everything you care about, get back to me, okay?” I shift back and bump my shoulder on the wall behind me and bite back a scream.
“Let me see,” Mom offers, sounding worried again.
I’m torn between wanting to soak up that worry and wanting to throw it back in her face.
“I’m good.” I bite the words out and turn my shoulder, so she’s left with a goopy blob of aloe dripping down her fingers.
“Sweetie, you’re in pain. Let me at least spread this last bit—”
“I said I’m good,” I growl, sliding off the stool, a carton of cooling Chinese food crushed in my fingers. I grab a bottle of water from the fridge and call out, “I’m going to eat in my room!” Any residual guilt I had about ditching Mom this Friday has evaporated completely.
“Agnes? Agnes! Please come here!” Her words shake, but she stands perfectly still behind the counter.
I stalk down the hall and slam the door to my room. I instantly hate being holed up in this still-unfamiliar space, alone.
When my mother’s sordid tale first started making the rounds in her gossipy department after we got home from our annual Thanksgiving in Paris, it was just a rumble under the surface. TAs would stop whispering when I walked into the office, and I’d hear only my mother’s name and the snapped-off end of a sentence that was definitely filled with dirt. When I went to the bookstore to grab an order for my mother, the snide clerk gave me major side-eye and suggested Madame Bovary as an add-on to the pile. I didn’t get his passive-aggressive dig until a week later, when I realized it wasn’t only the stress of grading fall semester research papers that had her so tense.
There were mysterious hung-up phone calls at all hours of the night. Staff meetings she came home from in tears. I found her laptop open with an updated résumé on the screen, and her friend from college had sent an email titled Unexpected Spring Semester Opening... You Are a Shoo-In! So the clues were blaring in my face like a full-blast neon sign for weeks, but I was dealing with my own drama.
Apparently Lincoln interpreted I’m going to see my family in Paris for a week as Do whatever you want with as many girls as you can while I’m away, and one of those girls contacted me as soon as she realized the guy she was falling for was already someone’s boyfriend. A few hours before the call, Ollie had brought over dozens of nail polishes and painted intricate designs on my fingernails and toenails, then Lincoln’s, then her own, then we rubbed every bit of it off and started all over again, the smell of nail polish remover burning our throats. My last coat wasn’t even dry when the girl’s voice cracked across the line. There’s something you need to know about your boyfriend.
Lincoln.
Was it irony that, while I was loathing my mother for leaving some poor yoga-loving blogger home wrecked, my own boyfriend was screwing half the girls’ tennis team?
He cried—actually he sobbed—when I confronted him and then, exactly three weeks later, whoosh, my mom threw our life into chaos with her announcement that she’d been Skype interviewed for a fantastic spring semester position in Georgia and she got the job. We were moving. Everything went really fast after that. Our apartment was almost empty in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and we had a tree so pathetic, it made Charlie Brown’s look like the one at the Rockefeller Center. While the rest of the world was