The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [14]
6
There are things that even the Coles don’t know. Maybe they know that my dad’s parents live across the country, and even that I see them for one week every August. But they don’t know that when I visit them, I feel like I’ve been transported back to the 1950s. My grandparents still have a black-and-white TV with an antenna, and my grandmother cooks spaghetti and meatballs, and they call dinner “supper.” There’s white bread and margarine in the middle of the table, and Oreos and milk for dessert. And no one knows that when I was little, I would pass the time by pretending I was someplace else, usually someplace exotic; that I was a princess trapped in a mystical tower, waiting for a prince to break through the enchantment to set me free.
Every corner of my dad’s parents’ house reminds me of a different fantasy I had there when I was small, a different story I made up to keep myself busy. Sometimes I get caught up in the stories all over again. There are childhood pictures of my father on the living room wall, right next to my baby pictures, but they don’t seem connected to my fuzzy idea of a father. I have no memory of my grandparents with him, no memory of them before my father died. They could just be a nice old couple I spend time with.
You know, if my mother could’ve gotten away with it, I bet I wouldn’t even know that he died—like, if a girl could grow up fatherless without some kind of explanation, she wouldn’t have even told me. But it’s not the kind of thing you can say absolutely nothing about; only nearly nothing.
My whole body has gone curious, not just my skin. I tap my fingers on my desk while I wonder if my father’s death was sudden, when I should be studying for a history exam. I chew my lip till it cracks in study hall while I wonder if he was ill and had time to put his affairs in order, or if it was sudden and my mom was left scrambling. Curiouser and curiouser: now that the switch has been flipped, it’s all I can think about. I think about it until my head hurts. Sixteen seems far too old to be this clueless. Now, I’m almost ashamed that I haven’t looked for answers before; now, I can’t imagine going much longer without answers, can’t possibly go on living with this curiosity that makes me scratch till my skin is raw and my whole body tense.
Jeremy comes over on Thursday night too. By Friday night I expect his call; I’m wide awake, and I’ve waited to wash my face and things so that my face isn’t covered in lotion. It’s always the same: he smokes his cigarettes, I fake-smoke one or two, and I wait for him to explain what he’s doing with me, to explain why he needs to leave his house every night. But we barely speak. I’m beginning to suspect that Kate is really sick, since she still isn’t back in school, but I don’t ask him about it. Now that I think it might be something serious, it would be nosy to ask; before, it seemed like just making conversation.
On Saturday, Gram—my mother’s mother—takes me out to lunch. Gram always says that I don’t eat enough, though she also always says to be careful to hold my stomach in when I stand up because it’s sticking out. When she says things like that, I remind myself that she’s had a hard life: her family died in the Holocaust after she had escaped to America, and her marriage to my grandfather was arranged because his family had a good business. They had a successful, if not happy, life together, I suppose. My grandfather made a good enough living to take care of my grandma, and there was even enough left