Chapter Text
My mother left in the middle of the night. That’s why I’m mad at her. Not for leaving, but for doing it like she was afraid of us.
I woke up late the next morning and walked into the kitchen to find my father crying. I had only ever seen him cry once before, when he told me my grandmother died. It was strange both times, almost like he was faking it. His face crumpled so suddenly it looked like he was laughing.
He didn’t notice me, so I stood and watched for a while. I knew what was wrong even before I went to their bedroom and saw the empty drawers (still open, like she just couldn’t be bothered). It had been obvious to me that she was going to leave, in ways that my dad hadn’t wanted to see. I didn’t blame him though. I didn’t really ever blame him. He was too gentle for his own good.
That was the first day of summer vacation, after my sophomore year. As lay in my room, waiting for my father to stop crying and come in to tell me the bad news, I could see how the next two months were going to go. I saw the insincere family friends and my father’s watery eyes. And it exhausted me.
If I’m being honest (why not?) almost everything exhausted me. I’d been feeling kind of fuzzy. I don’t really know how else to describe it. It’s not that I didn’t like have emotions. It’s just that I found it incredibly easy to distance myself. To just kind of watch life go by like it was on TV or something. Participating made me anxious or guilty or sad. And being sad made me guilty. In school I was obsessed with whether or not people liked me, which made me hate myself. That summer I just let my life fall away. It wasn’t hard to hide it from my dad (it’s always so easy to hide shit like that, isn’t it?) because I still came down for dinners and he thought I was just being a teenager. I heard him telling one of his friends on the phone once, through the vent on my floor. Maybe I was. Just being a teenager. I’m always wondering whether the shit I’m feeling is worth anything.
I spent most of my time in bed. I slept a lot, but sometimes I just lay there thinking. If there is one thing I like about myself, it’s my ability to spend endless hours alone, doing absolutely nothing. I never get bored.
Sometime in the middle of July I came down for dinner and my dad had his Important Talk face on. The puffy redness of his eyes kind of took away from its gravity, though. I still heard him crying in the mornings sometimes. I don’t know why he missed her more then.
“What’s up?” I asked after I had filled up my plate and sat down.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to, because I had noticed the brochure he had placed carefully next to my placemat.
“Dad…”
He held up his hand to shut me up.
“Liza, before you say anything. I know we’ve talked about this before, and I know you said you weren’t interested, but hear me out. Lancaster is a fantastic school. I made some of my best, lifelong friends there. I really think you would enjoy it.” His words were lovingly chosen, rehearsed.
“You trying to get rid of me?” I said it jokingly, but I wasn’t sure if I meant it that way. My father didn’t laugh. He just looked at me like he thought I might cry. I wasn’t going to cry.
“No, Liza. No. I just think you could use a change. We both could.”
I didn’t really see what kind of positive change attending a WASPy boarding school could make, but I nodded anyways to appease him and picked up the brochure.
“And it never hurts to start thinking about your future. Lancaster had ties to some of the country’s best universities.”
I hummed and nodded some more like I didn’t already know this. My father had been pushing me to attend his alma mater since I was in seventh grade.
“I don’t know dad, I would miss my friends.” My friends that I hadn’t talked to all summer. “I can still get into a good school if I stay where I am.”
I went back to my dinner and pretended I didn’t see the disappointment on his face.
That night I took the brochure out and looked at it again. I had never seen anything more pretentious. The only thing that looked more artificial than the truly astounding amount of ivy was the smiles plastered on all the “students” faces. Glossy pages showed them doing things like laughing and studying together in the quad, or riding expensive looking bikes through grassy knolls. Everything about it made me think, what’s the point?
I turned the page and found a long address from the Dean of Students. Skimming through it, something caught my eye and I snorted.
Lancaster Preparatory Academy has ties to some of the country’s best universities.
Nice, dad. Quoting from the literature.
Days passed in the same bored summer way, and I stayed in my room and waited for them to end. One afternoon I was lying on my bed, running a flat hand over the rise and fall of my stomach and wondering when I had gotten so fat.
I heard the front door open and close downstairs. My father coming home from work. At the beginning of the summer, right after my mom left, he would come up to my room every afternoon, knocking on my door and sticking his tentative face in. I knew he was trying to gather up the courage to talk about her, but he never did and I never helped him. He stopped coming up eventually.
That day, I was surprised to hear the heavy footsteps up the stairs and the familiar taps on my door. I took my hand off my stomach and tugged my shirt down.
“Come in.”
It wasn’t a tentative face that peered around my doorframe, but a resigned one. The face that came before one of his disorienting laugh-sobs. I braced myself.
“This came for you in the mail.” His voice was deceptively casual as he handed me the envelope. I glanced down at the familiar scrawl, at the lack of a return address.
When I looked back up at my father, the questions heavy on my tongue, his eyes said Don’t ask me. They said I didn’t get one.
So I swallowed, nodded, and thanked him.
After he left I stared at the envelope, just stared at it, for a long time. For so long that I memorized exactly how she wrote the address. I could close my eyes and picture how she attached the “L” to the “I” in my name. Ridiculously, I felt a flare of indignation that she wrote my name at all.
I get into these moods sometimes. I get this feeling that there’s simmering heat under every inch of my skin. It’s overwhelming, frustratingly there-but-not-quite. It makes me want to scream and throw things and kick walls. I can’t do any of those things though. I would never.
Once, a couple of months ago, I couldn’t sleep. So I got up at 3:00 in the morning and jogged around my neighbourhood. I don’t know why I did it, I don’t even jog. And I regretted it once I was out because the streets and the spaces between the houses were dark and scary. When I got back, I was sweatier but the simmering wasn’t gone. So I found an old Xacto knife, you know the ones you push up? I got it out of my dad’s toolbox and scratched at my arm with it. At the inside of my elbow. I didn’t think about it, I didn’t even really feel it. I just did it. I was disappointed at how difficult it was to break through the skin. I remember it made me laugh a little, that I was mediocre even at this.
The feeling, the heat under my skin, had still been there when I put the knife away and admired the little red line I had left. But I was glad that I had accomplished something.
Later my mom found the knife. I hadn’t thought at the time to be angry with her for going through my drawers. I’m not even sure if I’m angry about it now. I don’t know what I would do if I had a kid like me.
I was up late one night and she came into my room and sat on my bed, her butt scooched to the very edge, and started chatting about something like her day or my classes or the dentist. And then all of a sudden she goes, “Oh, what happened to your arm, sweetheart?” Like she had just been looking around and her eyes had passed over the fading marks.
I think I said something stupid like “I scratched myself in my sleep” or “I fell”. I wished fleetingly that we had a cat. And then my mom reached around me and opened my drawer, digging around in it and then resting the knife on her leg.
“You didn’t fall, did you?” She said then, like she was a prime-time detective and this was the end of the show. I doubt that was her intention. She was probably trying to affect some kind of sympathetic tone. Or like the tone you would use in an intervention.
I guess I had wanted people to see. Why else would I have done it in such an obvious place? Maybe when I did it I imagined – somewhere in the back of my mind where I store the things I don’t like to admit to myself – I imagined people seeing and saying Oh poor Liza, brave Liza, damaged Liza. Instead of tragic admiration I got hot damp shame.
Sitting in my room now, I tossed the letter aside unopened and dug in my bedside table, where I had hidden the knife two months ago. I liked pushing it out of its case. I liked the vein-paper resistance of my wrist when I pressed the blade against it. It was still difficult, maybe because behind all the stupid numbness I was scared, but I don’t really think it was that. Skin is just kind of hard to break through. After a couple of minutes I drew a little drop of blood. I put the knife aside and stared at it. I pressed the separated skin together and made the redness bubble over. As it moved sluggishly into the center of my palm I thought, if my mother can run away, so can I.
My father was thrilled when I told him I had changed my mind. That I wanted to go to Lancaster. It was late to apply but he assured me he could pull some strings.
“I’ve poured a lot of money into that place, Liza,” is what he’d said.
He stood over my shoulder as I filled in the application, asked if I was going to be homesick. I thought that was kind of funny, since I had pretty much been living on my own for the past month anyways. That wasn’t his fault though, so I just smiled and nodded and told him I would call every week.
The Tuesday before my move-in date, my father took me out for a farewell dinner. Like I was moving across the globe, not just the province. It wasn’t until we were in the car on the way to the restaurant, which was in some painfully fancy country club, that he told me we wouldn’t be alone.
“You’ll love Sammy,” my father insisted, his voice reedy and nervous. “He comes with his father to play tennis with us sometimes. He’s got a great backhand.”
I knew he expected me to be indignant at being ambushed. Either that or thrilled at our dinner partner’s tennis prowess. But, as had been my pattern lately, I found it difficult to muster up enough energy to really commit to either reaction.
My father carried on when I didn’t say anything, “Anyway, he’ll be at Old Lanny with you. His father and I were thinking he could show you around. Never hurts to be prepared!”
“That’s great, Dad. Thanks.” I hoped my smile looked engaged, because really I was just trying to conceal my wince at his referring to Lancaster as “Old Lanny”.
Sammy Thaler looked exactly like how you would expect him to look. Stupidly tall, artfully tousled blonde hair, a hand that was dry and warm to shake. I wondered if he hated being called Sammy.
I shook his father’s hand too.
“You remember Mr. Thaler, don’t you Liza?”
I didn’t. I felt like I knew him anyways though. I had met enough of my father’s ‘Old Boys’, country club friends to recognize the artificially large smile and overly bleached teeth. My father would fit in better if he were capable of sliminess.
“So,” Sammy was saying as we waited for our drink orders. I felt guilty that he had been dragged down here to fraternize with the pathetic new kid, but there was no hint in his disconcertingly open face that he had been coerced. His smile was much more honest than his father’s. “Are you excited for school to start?”
I wasn’t really anything, but I tried to think of what someone else in my situation would say.
“More nervous than excited, probably.”
“Nothing to be nervous about! Sammy’ll keep an eye out for you, won’t you Sammy,” Mr. Thaler cut in, not waiting for an answer before returning to the in-depth conversation he was having with my father about thoroughbreds or fine wines or something.
“You really don’t have to,” I murmured to Sammy, feeling like a child. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he chuckled. “I mean you will be. Fine. It’s a pretty laid back school. But I don’t see why we can’t be friends.”
“No, of course,” I smiled, still feeling a little uncomfortable. Change the subject. “Are you excited? To go back?”
“Yeah, yeah I am. I mean I know it’s kind of weird, but I like school. It gives me something to do all day, you know? And I think our tennis team is going to be really great this year.”
I nodded, not really sure how to react in the face of all his unreserved charm. Every word out of his mouth was genuine and easy. I didn’t know how to be friends with someone like that, but I liked being close to him all the same. I liked how he talked like we already knew each other. I wondered what it was like to be Sammy Thaler. I was glad I would have someone to talk to on Monday.
Without thinking about it, I leaned forward and said, “Do you like being called Sammy?”
His laugh was surprised, and he leaned forward too.
“No,” he said conspiratorially. “No, please call me Sam.”