Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(122)
“Mrs. Weston will pick you up at DFW at the gate. Be sure to remember to write her a thank-you note,” Jenny’s mother says as the car winds toward the airport. She fills the silence of the car with superficial commentary. Her mother has always been afraid of silence. As if it’s her job to banish whatever feelings could come up in the empty space. “Don’t you want to wear the Hermès? You can keep it until your hair grows out. I don’t mind.”
“I’m fine.”
Her mother’s smile falters. “It looks so cute on you. So feminine.”
“I’m fine.”
“I wish you’d wear it.”
Jenny doesn’t answer for a while. “Just once, I’d like it if you cared about my feelings, Mom.”
“Okay. Well. I’m not having this conversation right now—”
“Then when? When should we talk about who I am, Mom? Who you know I am. Who I’ve always been?” Jenny’s eyes fill with hot tears. She turns back to the window, her voice a mumble. “What are you so afraid of?”
They both fall silent and stare out at the neon glow of Berlin. The car hums past the Brandenburg Gate. The East German snipers watch from their square watchtower across those 160 yards of slim, impossible distance. In front, the wall blooms with colorful resistance. Otto waits for a turn, the car’s signal making a comforting metronome click-click-click.
“You know,” her mother says at last. “You go along and you go along and you think if you just try hard enough, you can build this perfect, beautiful life. And that everyone will be happy. You think you can shape everything. But…” She shakes her head.
“No. You can’t shape everything, Mom. But you can shape some things. You can build yourself.”
The car makes the turn. The airport is in view. Planes hover, waiting to land. Jenny’s mother slides her hand across the leather seat, fingers splayed toward her daughter. She’s lost weight; her wedding ring is too big. It’s never occurred to Jenny before that her mother is also hurting and a little lost. Jenny slides her hand next to her mother’s until just their pinkies touch. Her mother hooks her pinkie over Jenny’s, tugging it closer. Then she takes Jenny’s whole hand in hers, cradling it to her side, and they ride like this the rest of the way.
Jenny wears the scarf around her neck. It smells like her mother, like Chanel No. 5 and Elnett hair spray. Jenny finds this strangely comforting, especially as they move through the airport and the stares find her. What’s cool depends on context, and removed from Kreuzberg, she feels out of place and conspicuous. It would be different if she loved the buzz cut, but she doesn’t; she did it to make someone else happy, and in this way, she realizes she’s not so different from her mother after all. She wants to cover her head with the scarf, but she won’t give her mother the satisfaction just yet. But she’s already counting down to the day when her hair is the least interesting thing about her.
Jenny’s mother stays with her until boarding. While the flight attendant calls the rows in both German and English, Jenny and her mother hug. Her mother presses her face against Jenny’s ear.
“I just want you to know…,” her mother says very softly. “That no matter who you are or who you love, I love you. I love you so much.”
Jenny holds her mother very tightly. For the first time in ages, she doesn’t want to let go. Final boarding is called. She breaks away. “Don’t let Alison drive you crazy.”
Her mom laughs. “Too late.”
“I love you, too.” Jenny pulls her suitcase toward the long carpeted hallway that leads to the plane’s beckoning mouth. She already feels as if she is airborne.
“Safe travels, honey,” her mother says. “Oh, and I told Mrs. Weston you’d had a terrible scalp infection—not lice!—and had to cut off your hair. If she asks.”
Jenny keeps moving.
* * *
She has never taken a plane ride by herself before, much less an eight-hour flight across an ocean with a three-hour layover in New York City and a connection to another four-hour flight to Dallas. As suitcases are placed in overhead bins and a clicking symphony of metal seat belts commences, she sorts through the photographs of her eventful summer in Berlin, coming at last to the one of Lena by the wall beside a phrase: Liebe ist Widerstand. Widerstand ist Liebe. Love is resistance. Resistance is love.
“Oh, is this … is this my row?”
Jenny looks up, her eyes moist. An American woman in a smart business suit appraises Jenny, disdain evident in the way she flicks her gaze up to Jenny’s shaved head and then to the flight attendant and back to Jenny.
Jenny smiles wanly at the woman. “Cancer,” she whispers.
The woman’s face reddens with shame. Satisfied, Jenny closes her eyes.
The plane rattles down the runway, accelerates, lifts unevenly. Gravity presses Jenny’s body back against the seat and then releases it as the plane levels off. She feels suddenly weightless.
Jenny imagines telling Richard first. They will sit on his brown plaid bedspread in his room under the posters of classic movies. She will remove her baseball cap and watch his thick eyebrows rise in shocked delight. He’ll reach over and touch her head. “Holy shit! Tell me everything.” She will. Bit by bit, over Dr Peppers and Doritos, she will unspool the history of this summer, of Frau Hermann and the Bridegroom’s Oak, how David Bowie came to record “Heroes.” The Kreuzberg squat, Sophie Scholl, Anke and Zehra, the parties, the haircut, the Stasi, the tunnel. She’ll apologize for not being braver before, when he needed her, and she’ll promise to be a better friend to him now. And when she is ready, she will tell him about Lena.