The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [8]
“Whatever, dude. Define ‘peripatetic.’”
Even princes don’t know everything.
4
I have trouble calming down after Jeremy leaves, and not just because I’m sure I’m still totally unprepared for the physics quiz. My skin feels itchy, but not like I have to scratch it; it itches every time I’m still—when I get into bed and try to read, when I turn out the light and try to sleep. I’m thinking about my father, someone I never knew. Or anyway, I have no memory of knowing him, so that’s the same thing.
This is what I do know, and it’s strange to think this, because I’ve never felt the need to lay it out before. He died just after I turned two, and that’s young enough that you can’t really speak yet, and I read somewhere that you can’t build memories before you have the language to express them. I don’t remember living with him, but I know that before my dad died, we lived in a townhouse a few blocks east and south of here. But I can’t remember the house, or the way the furniture was laid out, or the smell of the carpet on which I took my very first steps. And I don’t know how my father died. It’s always been kind of hazy to me. When I was very young, I had this notion of a man falling off a ladder, but I know that’s something I made up, a child’s idea of how a person dies, maybe something out of a movie I’d seen.
After my father died, we moved in with my grandmother—my mother’s mother, who lives across town, on the Upper West Side. Her apartment was definitely not decorated with kids in mind. Everything is white and spotlessly clean. The apartment would be pristine but for my grandmother’s complete inability to throw things away. I think I get that from her—the need to keep things, paired with a compulsion to make things neat no matter how cluttered. I like knowing that—being sure that I got something from her. There must be things I got from my father, things I will never be able to pinpoint.
We moved to this apartment the summer I turned eight, and I started a new school. My school, Jeremy’s school, the one I still go to. It has kids from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and if you stay there all thirteen years, you get a special picture in the yearbook marked with the word “survivor.” I still remember the first day of third grade: I saw Emily Winters with her mother and father; Alexis Bryant’s mother and father, and her big sister leading her by the hand; even the Coles turned out, Jeremy’s mother holding Kate’s hand—she was still too young to go to our school. My mother held my hand tightly, but I don’t think I even looked at her. I was looking at everyone else.
It was the first time I felt that I was missing something the other kids all had. For the first time, I could see that we were different, that there was something weird about me, something strange about my not having a father. And for the first time, it made me wonder—that same skin-itching, can’t-be-still sensation I feel now. I didn’t even realize yet that most kids had never lived with their grandparents. My mother and I used to curl up in her bed at Grandma’s and watch TV and eat ice cream until I fell asleep. I always woke up in my room; I guess she’d carry me there once I was sleeping. My grandmother disapproved; she thought my mother was babying me, that I was getting too old to cuddle like that. I never heard her say anything about it; I could just tell by the look on her face when she walked past my mother’s open door and saw us together. Now I assume she was silent because she felt sorry for us: her daughter, the widow, and her granddaughter, the half orphan.
I did not like this apartment when I saw it for the first time. At my grandmother’s apartment, my mother’s and my bedrooms were right next to each other. We shared a wall, so from my room, even with the door closed, I could hear Mom moving around; hear her voice on the phone, her radio in the background when she read. This apartment is laid out completely differently, with two bedrooms on opposite ends, each with its own bathroom. The kitchen and living room