The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [26]
“But I saw people last week—”
“What about Celeste? You used to see so much of her. Then not going to graduation—”
“You said you understood!”
“I know it,” her mother said, thoughtful. “I’ve been a big part of the problem, looking back.”
“What problem?” Phoebe cried.
“I was always afraid you’d run wild and something would happen …” her mother said in a thin, quiet voice. “I’ve held you back.”
Phoebe had lost her bearings. She sat in silence.
“You know, I hadn’t planned on telling you this quite yet,” her mother said, “but lately I’ve been giving some serious thought to selling the house.”
“Really?” Phoebe said, uncomprehending.
“Just, it’s so big, and soon I’ll be the only one living there. I’ve been dreading telling you, frankly,” she said with an odd laugh.
Phoebe jerked upright in her seat. “What do you mean?” she said. “You mean sell our house?”
Her mother turned to her in alarm. “It’s just a thought.”
“How could you even think that? Sell the house?” Phoebe’s voice filled the car.
“I haven’t sold it. Honestly,” her mother said, flustered. “I was thinking aloud.”
They’d been idling at a curb, but now her mother reentered traffic as if to flee the subject. Phoebe felt wild. Selling the house was the wrong thing, the worst possible thing. “So I guess I can go,” she said, incredulous.
Her mother looked blank.
“To Europe.”
“No, sweetheart. No. I meant that I understood the impulse.”
“You can sell the house but I can’t go to Europe?”
Her mother shook her head, clearly puzzled. “It’s a bad idea, Phoebe, isn’t that obvious? Of all things—that?”
It was like yesterday, with the silver necklace. The hidden world was there, but suddenly her mother couldn’t see it.
“You let Faith,” Phoebe said.
Her mother glanced at her. It was a bad thing to say. A long silence fell while they pulled over at Oak and Masonic, where Phoebe got out each morning for work. Her mother wore a silk blouse with a bow at the neck, her Diane Feinstein blouse, she called it. In the Panhandle, purple-clad figures performed Tai Chi on the wet grass.
Her mother rested her elbows on the steering wheel. “Just getting her out of this city seemed like a godsend.”
Phoebe nodded, anxious to agree.
“I thought Wolf could take care of her,” her mother went on. “But that was too much to ask, even of him.”
Phoebe kept nodding, a jack-in-the-box. “That makes sense.”
“Does it?”
Her mother turned to her. In the bare morning light her face looked slightly swollen, large-pored, as if it had been bruised at one time and never quite healed. Phoebe felt the weight of her response.
“It does,” she said, shaken. “Mom, it totally does.”
The fog was beginning to thin. Houses emerged with colors replenished. Phoebe left the car, waving as her mother pulled into traffic. She watched the back of her pale head until the Fiat disappeared, then walked to work full of vague foreboding.
The Haight-Ashbury intersection had vanished.
Nostalgies were to blame, their zealous removal of the street signs having finally persuaded the city to stop installing new ones. From inside the café where she worked Phoebe often saw tourists traversing Haight Street with maps aloft, aware that they were close, so close, but unable to find the dead center they sought.
Much remained of the sixties: whole-food stores with their bins of knobby fruit, head shops, an occult store full of shrunken heads and tinted crystal balls. But Milk and Honey, where Phoebe worked, had nothing in common with these places. It was a new café full of red neon hearts and white tile, owned and run by gay men. Being neither gay nor male, Phoebe of course was on the outside, but the feeling of this was easier, somehow, than being on the outside where she should have belonged. She listened with passionate interest to her colleagues’ tales of growing up in strait-laced American towns where they’d dated cheerleaders and made faggot jokes, bluffing their way through one life while they dreamed of another.