The St. Ambrose School for Girls(52)



This is a conclusion I have heard before, usually from teachers, and always spoken in the same awe-tinged tone, as if I’ve done something remarkable to earn the IQ I happen to have been born with. As if that IQ in some way makes up for all problems that come along with the intelligence. Not for the first time, I want to tell someone who’s passing that pablum off on me that I would trade those high numbers for normal functioning ones in a heartbeat if I had the choice.

“And you even know what the book is about.” She exhales up to the ceiling this time. “Not just the plot, but what it means.”

I have to give her credit. There’s no undercurrent of envy or jealousy. I suspect this is because, given that she birthed me, she has a claim to fame on my brain: Even though I didn’t get this intelligence from her, I wouldn’t be here without her.

Or maybe that’s an unkind conclusion. She doesn’t look grasping in any way right now. She just looks exhausted. Confused, exhausted… and scared.

“It’s about an unreliable narrator,” I say as a way to apologize for thoughts she’s unaware I’m having. “And how an artist translates his life and actions into a present where he has culpability, but no accountability.”

“Huh?”

I nod to the coffee table. “The book.”

“Is it any good?”

“Some people consider it one of the great novels, so yes, it is.”

“See. I told you.”

My mother is seemingly unaware of possible parallels, and I’m not surprised when she doesn’t ask anything further about the novel. Though she will explore all manner of details concerning Hollywood’s elite and their revolving bedroom doors, she is uninterested in any literature whatsoever. This pick-and-choose is a little incongruous, given her upwardly mobile aspirations. You’d figure she’d prefer the binding of a hardcover over the flimsy staples down the center crease of an Us Weekly magazine, but this is a reminder to me that people are incongruous. None of us are all one thing or another, and sometimes our incompatibilities are at fundamental levels.

Except for Greta, of course. She seems very solid on what she is.

My mother looks around for an ashtray, as if everyone smokes so there must be one here. When she doesn’t find what she seeks, at least she doesn’t ash on Ishiguro’s masterpiece. She gets up and goes over to the sink in the galley kitchen, leaning her hip on the counter and tapping her cigarette into the drain.

“You’re better than I am,” she says in a small voice. “I wish I were like you, but I’m not and I never will be. What I can do, however, is get you where you need to be, where the education is, where the opportunities are. And that is here.”

I blink. There has never been any hint of her thinking like this, and I am not referencing the education part.

“I’m not better than you,” I tell her. Because I know what she just said is true, and she has suddenly become incredibly vulnerable to me. I will never abuse an underbelly. Not when it comes to my mother, not when it comes to anybody. I’m vulnerable all the time, everywhere, because of the way my brain malfunctions. I’m too familiar with how an exposed weakness gets kicked.

“We both know that’s a lie,” she says.

She takes another drag and taps her long forefinger on the dwindling length of the cigarette. As she stares into the drain, I wonder if she is looking down it and seeing her youth and ambitions, her fantasies about who and what my father was, her excitement and her optimism, all of it long since masticated by time. She looks old, standing beneath the harsh lighting of a ceiling fixture that has no shade. She looks like a failure.

“I’m going to be okay,” I say forcefully. “I really am.”

As I stare across Nick and Sandra’s apartment at her, I become very certain that if anything happens to me, Tera Taylor’s brilliant, broken daughter, there will be no more annual subscriptions to any number of magazines that will distract her, and her never-ending supply of below-average boyfriends will do no better a job than they do now of giving her steady purpose.

If I commit suicide, I’ll also be committing murder.

Tera Taylor will be dead, too.

My mother shakes her head. “You have to understand… that I believed it happened because of the town we’re in.”

“I’m sorry, what?” I say.

She shrugs and continues to focus into the sink, into the drain. When she runs some water, I imagine her salt-and-pepper gray ashes melting down and disappearing.

She clears her throat. “I thought that you were driven… you know…”

“Crazy,” I provide. “You can say the word.”

“I don’t like to. It gives everything too much power. You’re not crazy, you’re just different.”

Okay, now I know where I get some of my magical thinking from.

“When you had to go away…”

“To the mental institution,” I supply.

“It was a clinic.”

“For people who are crazy.”

“Stop it,” she snaps as she looks over at me. “You don’t have to be so damned blunt.”

A broken bone is a broken bone, I want to say. Calling it an “ouchie” doesn’t change the necessity of a cast—or what happens if you can’t put one on the injury.

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