The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [6]
“Where are we going?” Phoebe called from the backseat as the Porsche entered Golden Gate Park.
“You’ll see,” Barry said. He was talking to their mother. Chips, Phoebe heard, bytes (of what? she idly wondered). She opened her window and breathed the wet, eucalyptus smell of Golden Gate Park. It had been exactly a week since she’d met Kyle here, and like most stoned memories, the encounter had a sketchy, dreamlike quality. But the feeling of telling Kyle she would go to Europe, having him believe her—that Phoebe couldn’t forget.
She reached over the back of her mother’s seat and touched her frosted hair. Exquisite though her mother looked to Phoebe, an outdatedness made her beauty seem muted in the outside world, inactive. Phoebe loved this. It unnerved her to look at old snapshots of her young, glamorous mother smiling coyly up from under hat brims. She remembered her parents together, how her father would lie with his head in her mother’s lap or playfully slap her behind. She remembered Claude, too, her mother’s single lover in a widowhood filled with meaningless dates—the dazed openness that had fallen on her mother in Claude’s presence, a tension between them filling the room like a charge. But Phoebe loved her mother best as she was now, wistful, out-of-step, her laugh tinged always with sadness, as if things were only funny in spite of themselves. Phoebe saw her mother as still in mourning and treasured the safety this made her feel, like falling asleep knowing someone else will always be awake, keeping watch.
Barry parked beside a clearing full of fruit trees whose leaves were so new they looked wet. He unloaded the car, waving away their offers of help. Barry was dark-haired and tall, his eyes pure black, as if the pupils had sprung wide in some moment of panic and never snapped back. The trait was arresting in photographs—“That’s your brother? God, what a fox,” Phoebe’s friends had been saying for years when they saw his picture—but in life something cut the effect. He moved childishly, neck outthrust, arms loose at his sides, looking always ready to duck.
Barry assembled their picnic, a lavish, daunting array of Brie and red pears, roast beef and bagels and stuffed grape leaves. There was Dom Pérignon in an ice chest, a tiny pot of beluga caviar. Their mother kicked away her espadrilles and sipped her champagne, flexing her white toes. The skin of her calves was so dry it shone like a glaze. “I could do with a few more days of this,” she said.
When they’d all eaten slices of Phoebe’s carrot cake, Barry returned from the car with arms full of gifts. He piled them before their mother, a heap of gold foil and green ribbons. “Goodness,” she said.
Phoebe’s own gift was hidden in the pocket of her corduroys, a silver necklace from Tiffany for her parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary. It would have been Tuesday. “You go first, Bear,” she said, knowing he would like that.
Barry selected a box. Their mother opened it slowly, at pains not to tear the wrapping. She always opened gifts in this same careful way, yet afterward would crunch up the untorn wrappers and toss them away without a thought. “Makeup,” she said, peeling the gold aside.
“They’re the latest colors,” Barry said. “It’s a whole set.”
Rows of tinted ovals sparkled like the watercolor sets Phoebe had used as a child. “I haven’t worn much makeup in years,” their mother said.
“Not to worry,” Barry assured her, proffering a second gift. It was long and flat. Inside lay a card.
“‘A gift certificate,’” she read. “For a complete makeover?”
“What it is, is,” Barry leapt in, “they figure out what goes best on your face, then they teach you how to do it.”
“A paper bag would suffice in my case,” their mother said, putting an arm around Barry. “Honestly, honey, you really spent time on this.”
The next box revealed another gift certificate, this time for a hair salon. Their mother rumpled Barry’s hair.