“We’ve been thinking,” said Cammie, entering the room in one huge step and throwing herself facedown into the foam mattress of her parents’ bed. “We’ve been thinking of taking a semester off and traveling.”
Tracy ignored her daughter, except to notice that her hip- hugger shorts, scantily built from gray sweatshirt material, read MAUI across the butt in letters nearly as long as the shorts themselves. Tracy made a mental note to pinch her cousin Janis when she saw her in a few hours for bringing the shorts to Cammie from a dental convention.
“Trent and me. We don’t have a real plan yet. But Kenny might come, too. And we’d only go to safe places. Civilized countries. Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, India.”
India, Tracy thought. Teeming streets, emaciated babies, and portly, protected rats swaggering about, river sluggish with ashes and dung. She bit her tongue mentally, thinking, I just want to get out of the house.
“We were thinking . . . ,” Cammie went on.
“Hmmm,” Tracy murmured.
Kenny, short for Kendra, was a girl, Cammie’s roommate at the University of Minnesota. They’d known each other from Westbrook. Kenny had played volleyball at the public school against Cammie’s team at St. Ursula’s.
Tracy had heard this song before. The summer after senior year, Cammie and Kenny decided to backpack across Europe, as Jim had “back in the day.” That had been an easy one to nix. Cammie wouldn’t turn eighteen until early May: There was no way she was going abroad alone. But were Tracy to say now what she thought of the revived plan—which was that times had changed since “back in the day,” that backpackers were perceived not as charmed and harmless waifs (if they ever had been), but as prey—Cammie would have her opening. So she gritted her teeth and went on rolling cotton garments, like swaddled babies in miniature, laying each in her open duffel. Through the open window, the shrieks of a few children playing next door in an inflatable pool roused her teacher’s warning ear. But soon she heard the lowered tones of a mother. Mmm, she thought, laying aside a bright periwinkle sleeveless shell that was only a year old. “Bring no clothes you’d be heartbroken to see ruined,” the packing instructions had read. Cammie sighed gustily and rolled over onto her back, her navel ring winking at Tracy like a drawn dagger.
Kendra was a good, solid girl. Tracy was sure that Kendra’s parents knew nothing about this.
Trent was another matter.
They’d met Trent only twice in the six months he and Cammie had been dating, once when Tracy invited him to Easter brunch.
He’d been a boor.
He’d monopolized the conversation, eaten thirds of everything within reach, and had to leave early for his grandparents’ annual egg roll on their lawn in Lake Geneva. (“Grandfather started it when he was a state senator, and now it’s mostly for the rug rats, but of course, we all have to show the colors!”) No particular words hinted that Trent saw himself and his cousins as the Illinois equivalent of the Kennedys. It was obvious. They had no idea whether he was nice or simply well dressed and good-looking. He looked like a Viking. Tracy could see the point of the pure hormonal allure. But when Tracy asked after Trent during the weekly phone calls she made to Cammie—which Cammie sometimes returned, often at 11:00 p.m.—all her daughter said was, “He’s good.”
But that was all she said about anything.
Jim and Tracy agreed that it was irrational for them to have taken such a serious dislike to a harmless kid after a combined total of ninety minutes of conversation. He was just so . . . self-consciously patrician. Jim met guys he imagined were like Trent’s father every week—guys building third homes, guys building whole developments of third homes for other guys like themselves. And it would always be all Jim could do to contain his gut loathing. Tracy didn’t feel quite so strongly as all that. But the kid was pretentious. Trent’s family lived in what he casually referred to as “the slums of Kenilworth,” a town where twenty-five-year-old lawyers pulled down twice the annual income Jim and Tracy made together. Trent’s former girlfriend had invented a bike seat for women and was already a millionaire. Trent’s father had made so much money in the market, he’d retired at fifty and played polo. Trent wore loafers without socks.
“I know I’m nuts, Trace,” Jim told his wife, “but I think this little prick is slumming with Camille. I think he sees her as the hot number from the wrong side of the tracks. I mean, for Christ’s sake, polo!”
Tracy stared at Cammie’s asinine navel ring and thought, What the hell do I care? Why did she let the disdain her exquisite girl child felt for her sweep through her like an infection? Why did Cammie’s obvious and even clumsy attempts to push Tracy’s buttons never fail? Was it because Camille still seemed like an exotic bird that Tracy had somehow, with paws as clumsy as oven mitts, extracted from a net of complexities and raised with an eyedropper? Was it because it had taken a scant two months of college—only until Thanksgiving—to transform her daughter from a bright, fluttering ribbon into a razor strop and that it had gone downhill from there? Tracy could consider this philosophically. But when Cam still curled herself nonchalantly into the curve of her father’s arm (and stiffened when Tracy hugged her), it hurt. That was all there was to it.
I just want to leave, she thought. Let her go to India.
It was all good. Tracy took a nice, cleansing breath.
Cammie had just turned nineteen. Most girls rebelled a good three years before that. Tracy was lucky. They’d had a long run of mother-and-daughter amity. They had stored memories that would one day make the two of them chuckle indulgently over this awful time. Cammie would come around in time. When she had her own kids. People said so. If Cammie changed her mind as often as she changed her clothes, this was normal. If she longed to break open the door of her lovingly constructed cage, so be it. Her deskmate at school had a daughter who was a cokehead. A woman in her book group had a son who’d spent two full years making elaborate computer printouts of quarterly grades for a college he’d never attended. Cammie had a future and enjoyed a rather frenetic and modestly alcoholic social life that made Tracy grateful she didn’t know more about it. It was all normal. And shitty.
Tracy zipped her duffel closed with room to spare. “You want lunch?” she asked Cammie. “I’m making a salad—”
“Don’t you want to make some asshole objection? Or were you even listening?”
“I was listening, Cam. Don’t swear. I mean, please don’t swear.”
“Dad traveled all over the world before you guys got married. He would never have done it if he hadn’t done it when he was young. And I’m ten times as streetwise as Dad was.”
“No doubt,” Tracy said, thinking that Cammie was as streetwise as a gherkin in a sealed jar. She had grown up more streetwise than her child. Cammie had been raised as solicitously as a rare orchid. “But you’re not twenty, either.”
“Why do I even try with you?” Camille asked with a sigh. “Kenny’s parents trust her.”
“We trust you.”
“Uh, sure.”
“We don’t trust other people.” Tracy felt the transmitted thrill of Cammie’s triumph. She’d gotten a rise out of her mother.
“Don’t you ever get tired of saying that?” Cammie demanded.
Actually, Tracy thought, I do get tired of saying that. She switched leads.
“And you have the money saved for this. . . .”
“But you see,” Cammie said, “we wouldn’t need that much. A few shirts, a skirt for looking at churches, sunglasses and scarves, a sweater and one of those jackets you scrunch up, one good pair of walking shoes . . .”
On the bitten tongue of her mind, Tracy totted up two, three, four hundred dollars. And that was without bras or underwear. But who would need those?
“I mean emergency money,” she said to Cammie.
“I have my credit card.”
“You have your father’s credit card in your name.”
“Can you think of anything else to bitch about? Okay, I t
ried. This discussion is over.”
What discussion was that? Tracy thought. But she couldn’t rein in her impulse to ask, “What about insurance, Cam? What if you got so sick in one of these civilized countries that you had to be hospitalized? What about the chance our health insurance for you will run out if you’re gone one minute longer than a full year from school?”
“A year? Are you deaf? Did I say a year? Or a semester? Butt out, Mom. I brought this up . . . just to be polite. I can do this if I want to. Why do you have to stomp on everything until you squash the fun out of it!”
“Cam, nobody wants her kid to drop out of school. You make it sound like prison,” Tracy said. “You like school. You always have.”
“It is prison,” Camille retorted. “And maybe, duh, I’m not the way I’ve ‘always’ been. I think three-quarters of school is total bullshit.”
“Don’t swear,” Tracy said reflexively.
“Oh, fuck, Mother. Bullshit is hardly swearing!”
Tracy felt a telltale pulse at her temples. “How’s the job going?”
“I love being with Dad,” Cammie said sullenly. Jim was a senior partner in an architectural firm. “I even love my hard hat.”
“And you don’t want to do what Dad does yourself?”
Camille nicked at her thumbnail. “I do, someday.”
“Well, then . . .”
“Well, then what? Jesus, I’m not talking about joining an ashram. And I’m not eloping with Trent! Do you think I’d want to end up like you did, twenty with a baby?” Camille mocked her, glee shining from her obsidian eyes. Cammie’s magnificent eyes were so dark that when she was an infant, the pediatrician had a hard time distinguishing her iris from the pupil. “Go back to your packing, Mom. Sorry I brought it up. I was under the impression we could talk.”
“Cammie,” Tracy pleaded, “we can talk. I just think of . . . you crying in some cold street in Edinburgh or Delhi . . . ditched by . . . somebody or other.”
“Let’s just forget it. Please! I hate it when you turn on the guilt.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. You tried to talk to me, and I lectured you. . . .”
“You think? You’re always saying, Talk to me, Cammie, talk to me. How’s school, Cammie? Anything new, Cammie? Are you keeping up in graphics, Cammie? Just go back to folding. You’re a great folder. Look at those . . . Bermuda shorts.”
“They are not Bermuda shorts,” Tracy said with deep forbearance. “They’re ordinary long shorts.”
“They’re blue-and-purple plaid, Mother! I’ll bet you have a purple polo shirt to go with.” In fact, Tracy did.
“They’re a modest plaid, one pair. The others are solid colors. I have jeans. I have a rain jacket. I have two swimsuits, both with low backs and high necks—”
“Those shorts will make your butt look as big as the garage. And it isn’t, so why would you buy them?”
“Because guess what, honey? I don’t care. I’m going sailing with my friends, and I don’t care who looks at my butt.”
“If you don’t care, why do you walk forty miles a day on the treadmill?”
“It’s cardiovascular. So you don’t kill me before my time,” Tracy answered, sitting on the bed and smiling at Camille, who promptly popped up.
Tracy wondered if Cammie knew that her mother would go on thinking about their altercation for days. Cammie would forget it by nightfall.
Tracy further wondered if Trent was just a convenient hometown honey. Or was it first love, like a sock in the solar plexus, a virus in the soul, its side effect a kind of luxurious sun blindness? Was Cammie now the queen of blow jobs? Was Trent her first? Jim had been Tracy’s first, the summer after high school. And despite two other hapless adventures at college in Champaign, he’d been her last. Tracy looked at the indignant, departing rear end of her beautiful daughter. Cammie sent a histrionic look over one shoulder. Cammie’s square chin was softened by lips people now paid to have replicated by cosmetic surgeons. She had lathe-turned shins, a model’s rapturous belly, and long, long black hair that glinted blue in the sun. She was so absorbed with making a haughty exit that she nearly fell off her four-inch-thick flip-flops—“guaranteed” to banish cellulite for only $29.95.
What boy wouldn’t want her simply on sight?
Yet Cammie was a smart girl. She’d already declared engineering her major, to Jim’s nearly fatuous gratitude. Jim had spent hours stroking the left brain of his older child, with math games, dismantling and reassembling phones, and complex wooden puzzles. He’d bragged to his own father that his daughter could fix an engine the way other girls could braid their hair. (Grandpa was not impressed.) It was, perhaps ironically, the way Tracy liked to think that Ted, a high school junior, came by his love of anything outdoor and physical from his mother.
How dull I must seem to my daughter, Tracy thought as she went into the kitchen and began to wash and slice lettuce and tomato. Would she have been so rude to her own mother? Unthinkable. So ruthless with her mother’s emotions? Unthinkable. In her sophomore year of college, at the age Camille was right now, Tracy, at least technically, had to have an abortion. It wasn’t even her choice. She and Jim had used double protection, not knowing that this was more, rather than less, dangerous. And they would have gotten married right then if they’d had the chance: They had married the following year. But the pregnancy was ectopic, a fairly major surgery that compromised her fertility. Alone in the hospital, with only Jim to comfort her, unable to confide the fact of her surgery to her family, grateful at least that she was not a minor who would have had to have her parents’ permission, Tracy had mourned and ached. But still, she would no more have told her mother than have invited her to watch the operation. Her mother had never even seen Tracy’s scar. Her mother had never seen Tracy unclothed since Tracy was eleven. Had Cammie needed an abortion, Tracy theorized, she would have run home from the University of Minnesota to more fully torment Tracy with the fact.
Of course, Tracy and her mother had more in common. And less.
By the time she was not much older than Cammie, Tracy was married and a mother—just as her own mother had been married and had given birth to Tracy’s younger brother, Edward, by the time she was twenty-one. As she’d once quietly explained to Tracy, when Tracy announced her decision to go to four-year college, “Girls in my set went to typing school then.” She’d been so obviously and utterly relieved when Jim and Tracy married. And Tracy knew full well the reason why. Her mother feared that Tracy—just shy of six feet tall and as broad across the shoulders as Jim—would end her days as a stereotype, the sturdy maiden phys ed instructor, the basketball coach in low heels and polyester suits, sexually ambivalent, sporting a tight perm and joining bus tours to the Napa Valley.
But though their lenses on life were different, Tracy had never stood toe-to-toe with her mother and cawed insults at her, had never stormed out of the house not to return for two days, never ripped down her handmade Swiss dot curtains and replaced them with mothy black velvet panels too long for the windows or rolled up her eyelet quilt and found a spread that looked to have been knitted from Brillo pads. Commie would hang up on Tracy in frustration over a single comment. Two days later, just as Tracy’s gale of tears had subsided, she’d call back with a chirpy apology and a rapturous description of the strapless dress she’d found at a thrift shop. She announced her decision to smoke, because Frenchwomen did and they never died young. Panicked, Tracy and Jim discussed a way they could reach Cammie and hit on her vanity. But before she could mail off the detailed letter a physician friend had written for them about the aging effects of smoking on young skin, Cammie reported with a sigh that, after three weeks, she’d given up smoking. It made her hair smell.
Cammie had always been that way, a bit like a train on a mountainous track, a little progress, a vertiginous switchback.
But now, her disgust with all things Tracy had spread to Ted, once not only Cammie’s adored younger brother, but her best pal. And that seemed utterl
y cruel. Ted was a mommy’s boy, Cammie said behind his back. Cammie could hardly contain her disdain when her brother casually dropped a kiss on his mother’s head as he headed out to baseball practice. Tracy still remembered the little girl who’d crawled into bed each morning making endearing whimpering sounds, licking the tip of Tracy’s nose and calling her “the mama puppy.” At this point, those memories were like a hundred paper cuts.
“Salad’s ready,” she called to Cammie. When Cammie flounced into the room, Tracy said, “I really am the dullest person alive, Cam. But in a way, it’s on purpose.” She felt Cammie stop, listening. “Most people look forward to their excitement more than they enjoy it. So I try not to anticipate too much, and I usually end up surprised by how happy little things make me. Now, take Aunt Olivia, she always had adventures. Each one was bigger than the one before. And it seemed to me that she was always bored.”
Cammie replied, “At least she was always hot. She’s a really sexy Euro woman. She wouldn’t wear plaid shorts.”
Despite themselves, they both laughed.
“Weren’t you ever wild, Mom?” Cammie pleaded. “Like, for a day? You must have had ten minutes of passion when you were twenty. You married Dad. You had me.”
“I tried to have you,” Tracy said, thinking, Yes, I was wild. I was a daredevil . . . of a sort. “And being able to try to get pregnant, instead of being afraid of it, like other girls, probably made me like sex more. I was married. So, yeah, I was free. And who says I don’t still like sex?”
“Too much information,” Cammie said. But a moment later, and in a different tone, she added, “Look, I know you don’t like it when I swear. But you kept hounding me. Anyhow. You tried to have me. You said. But you didn’t. Have me.”
Cam rarely brought up her adoption. Tracy wondered, Why now?
“No, I didn’t,” Tracy replied, thinking, This is my chance to lay it out. Be honest. She’s asking for it. And she can see my heart, as if she had eyes that performed magnetic resonance imaging; she always could. But it was not a conversation Tracy wanted to start before leaving for ten days. The moment passed. “You know, shorty, I still wouldn’t have it any other way. I would never want another kid instead of you. You know that.” The unexpected dazzle of Cammie’s smile thrilled Tracy. She did still love being loved.