“Not even, Jimmy,” said Lang, caressing her husband’s squared back. “Didn’t you hear her? She’ll be lying on a brand-new beach. Admiring the architecture.”
EVERYONE HAD A MOTTO. CHLOE’S MOTHER’S WAS: “CAST your bread upon the water.”
Her grandmother’s was, “How I envy the handicapped in their wheelchairs who can push themselves around. They don’t know how lucky they are.”
And Chloe’s? Once, to go miniature golfing, Courtney and Crystal arrived at Chloe’s green cabin wearing slinky hot pink dresses and clangy bangles. Lang took one squinted glimpse at the two and stage-whispered to Chloe, “Where are they going to, a parade at a bordello?”
That became Chloe’s motto: To avoid at all costs such an assessment by anyone’s mother, including her own, or by, God forbid, a boy.
Okay, no, that wasn’t Chloe’s motto. That was her wish. You know what Chloe’s motto was?
On the blank canvas of your life with bold colors paint.
Maybe not so much a motto as an unattainable goal.
Chloe just wanted to know who she was. Not who she wanted to be. But who she actually was.
Up in the loft attic open to the living room, she lay on her bed with the ballerina-pink fluffy down quilt and soft pillows, clutching a tattered 1998 National Geographic to her chest, the one with the precious Barcelona article in it. When Polly, the old wizened woman who owned the Shell gas station in Fryeburg, decided to go into the used book selling business, running it out of her garage, Blake, out with his dad one afternoon, picked up a worn copy of the magazine. He paid two dollars of his allowance to buy it for Chloe when she was eleven and he was twelve. Reading about Barcelona burst her heart into a flame.
She’d read the article so many times since then, she had it practically committed to memory. Redeeming touch of madness. Millionaires on motorbikes, witches caked in charcoal dust, pimps and uncrowned kings. Miro, Picasso, Dali, firebombed girls in whorehouses. Just think about that! Firebombed girls in whorehouses. Barcelona has been inventing herself for a thousand years. With her parents talking below her in their tiny bedroom next to the front door, a nearly defeated Chloe caressed the cover of the magazine, pressed to her breasts, kneaded it like a rosary, prayed to God, please, please, please, and strained to hear the snippets of their parenting. From up here, it was just rising and falling pitch, up down, questions, quiet replies, voices, tempers, tides. For some reason her father’s voice was muffled, unclear. Her mother’s alto rose through the rafters.
Jimmy yelling suddenly and Lang yelling back. The walk down that long dirt road from the school bus is responsible for Barcelona, she says, and Jimmy yells, are you crazy, Mother?
“Better she go with the boys, Jimmy. Blake keeps everybody safe. He’ll keep her safe.”
She can’t hear her father’s response. Only Lang’s voice is clearly heard.
“I don’t want her to go, either, husband.”
“You know she’s leaving, Jimmy. You know that, right? She’s leaving home in three months. For good.”
“Okay, I’ll tell her she can’t go.”
“Don’t be sick with worry, Jimmy. She’ll be fine. Disaster won’t fall on us twice.”
Now Chloe hears her father’s voice. “Not on us,” he says. “On her.”
Chloe crept on her hands and knees to the railing, as if crawling on all fours would make the attic floor less creaky. Her Barcelona magazine on the planks in front of her, she pressed her face between the slats. They didn’t want her to go. She expected nothing less. Her parents weren’t Terri Gramm. They were never going to say, oh, sure, honey, Barcelona with the Spanish boys and your two horny boyfriends and topless beaches and incorrigible Hannah. And you, our only child, who’s never been anywhere without us, not a problem, you go, girl.
Chloe wanted so desperately to graduate, to be self-reliant, to sign her own applications, to take herself out of state, to travel on her own, to be grown up, that it was a physical ache throughout her whole body. A throbbing. What do I have to do, her body cried, to be taken seriously, to be thought of as a fledged human being, not just a fledgling? What do I have to do? It is so painful to live like this, thwarted, dependent.
Her ear was wedged between the slats, listening for a possible seachange.
What else could Chloe say to persuade them? Mom! she wanted to cry. I want to be the girl who later in life when she was old could say, yes, when I was young I traveled by myself on a train through Spain. I don’t want to be the girl who will tell her kid, no, I’ve never been anywhere, except North Dakota where I was born, and Maine where I married your father, and Kilkenny one time when somebody died, somebody who with his wanton recklessness ended up wrecking my careful life.
But Chloe couldn’t say that, just as she couldn’t say that maybe in Barcelona she would have sex with her boyfriend. Or that she might sunbathe topless on the man-made beach, built just in time for her Olympian topless body.
As she sat with her ear to the empty air below, she cupped her hands under her breasts and bounced them up and down. She wanted to sunbathe topless in front of Hannah, so that in this one way, she could come out slightly ahead, because Hannah bested her in everything else. Hannah was always playing a game of one-upmanship. Why couldn’t Chloe play just this once? Hannah was passive-aggressive, a constant downer, not a smiler, an inveterate shopper who made Chloe spend more of her allowance than she ever wanted to, to try to keep up with blouses, skirts, dresses, the latest boots and gloves. The size 2 girl who was always dieting, who told everyone she was fat, the long-limbed girl, aristocratically mouthed, and small-pointy-breasted. What other city could offer Chloe this particular intangible? Bathing topless on the beach in front of their two boyfriends and a city full of strangers, so she could win. How small. How stupid. And yet how completely essential. Could she do that in York, Maine? How could Chloe’s noblest desires fly side by side with her soaring pettiness?
Hannah, who was loved through and through by Blake, and still, it wasn’t enough.
Chloe fell asleep on the floor, her head pressed into the railing. She was woken up at one in the morning by her mother, who helped her into bed.
Please, Mom, she whispered half-asleep, reaching out to touch her mother’s face, or maybe she only thought she whispered. You wanted to be a dancer once. Let me do this one thing for me, but also for you. Let me live what you never lived, far away in whirling dancing noise and nights of magic flowers until the world blows up.
CHLOE DIDN’T KNOW HOW BLAKE HAD MANAGED IT, BUT BY the time her mother dropped her off in front of the Academy bus circle the next morning, every single person she met on the way to homeroom knew about their impending Catalonian Bacchanalian sexcapade. That must have been how Blake painted it, judging from the arched eyebrows and the innuendo smiles.
“Who do you think you are, Isabel Archer?” was what her mother had asked her as she pulled into the parking lot.
Chloe looked at her blankly. Lang stared back. She folded her plump arms. “You have no idea who Isabel Archer is, do you? What do they even teach you?