Lotta was smart, and she knew perfectly well that the so-called Celebrity Vacation weekend in Los Angeles was devised to cheer her up because everybody was depressed about Noddy. The pinpoint hole left by that tiny subtraction was turning out to be a solid monument: one of those monuments that, as it recedes in history, doesn’t shrink, but swells, and gains a bulk and a gravitation in getting farther away. Lotta knew she was the family weather vane; it was her assigned job. And as a daughter she showed all diligence in undertaking that burden, the duty of being happy. Or at least seeming happy. Sad to see. The first onset of the lifelong loneliness. Which we all do vanish into. Even the trusting little girl with the shining eyes, even she will vanish into it, the universal business of being, or seeming, “happy.” In the airplane line, standing behind her, he gave her carry-on a nudge with his toe and said, “Wanna trade? They’ll reject this one of mine. It’s too big.”
She knew he was just razzing and flirting, and she didn’t respond.
“They give beautiful girls a break. They’re hard on sneaky old guys.”
She sighed. She had detected the obtuse fatherly strategy to flatter.
“Ah, don’t scoff. Don’t scoff at the whole inevitable beauty problem,” he said, while a kind of hand inside his chest was just slipping its first gentle but businesslike grip over his heart, the same hand that’s holding the whole world, and the little-bitty-baby, and you-and-me-brother. “If you got beauty, you have to go along. And play along. It’s still a sexist world out there, darling. Your generation might get things fair and square, but, still, you’ll find everything is always gendered and sexual and sexist and sexy.” He stopped there, having shocked himself, too, because it was true, the Freudian fact so large that he, for one, would never stand back and size it up.
She scorned to respond or even turn around. Instead she dove to unzip her carry-on and got out her little music player along with its skein of white wires for earphones. He had humiliated his teenager by talking audibly in the boarding queue, and in repentance he promised himself he would think before speaking, and censor all comments except the necessary ones, from now on, throughout the weekend. Just to be in public proximity to a father is shaming. Lotta sometimes, in horror of his banality and gaucheness—or just anticipating it—held herself perfectly motionless, matching her background, the most delicate prey in the world. Her announced dread, this weekend, was that she wouldn’t be talented enough to go on a “Fantasy Celebrity Vacation.”
As she foresaw the advertised Three Days and Two Nights—recording session, video production, publicity party, stylist consultations, vocal coaching, limo cruise of Hollywood, gala music awards ceremony—she supposed that all the other children would have some special pizzazz and, furthermore, some kind of genuine, actual gift, along with the cunning and the social skills to display their gift to advantage. And Mark knew she might be exactly right. She might be entering in with a bunch of little egotist monsters. Who, however, would be very adroit little egotist monsters, succeeding well at the game. It was L.A. The whole thing could be an environment crueler than those high school corridors. But the brochure literature had been emphatic, in particular about the staff’s care for everyone equally, in the nurturance of self-esteem irrespective of any natural inequities in perceived talent, as the Fantasy Vacations rep said in their first phone call. And she added, Self-esteem for young people is Fantasy Vacations’ stock-in-trade. We’re very mindful of making the whole experience “Not About Winning-or-Losing.”
After they’d located their side-by-side seats on the plane, Lotta had pulled out the SkyMall catalogue and started flipping through it: whack whack whack. Then she tossed her hair—always the Lotta prelude to an utterance—and, referring to the fact that this was her mother’s first day on a Habitat for Humanity job site, she drawled, “Mom sure looked cute in her carpenters’ pants,” with an actual sneer. The sneer had been appearing only recently in this sophomore time of life, a time requiring so much bravery, so much baseless faith. Absolutely baseless faith. There’s no reason for hope during adolescence. When he was that age it looked to him like the girls were perfect and had everything easy. Lotta was pretty but she was not one of the popular kids, and the principle spur for this “Celebrity Vacation” experiment was that she’d started, during these last months of her sophomore year, to toss off snide little jokes about killing herself and about certain sex acts the girls in her class have picturesque new names for. As if they knew anything about it. And then there was her getaway plan. It started by her saying that they ought to move out of Marin County. When asked where they might go, she responded, “Iceland is supposed to be good.” This in total seriousness. She’d heard great things about Iceland. “Or anyplace rural.” Then she got in touch with her cousins in Connecticut and began talking about boarding school and, on her own initiative, sending away for application materials. So there. It seemed clear—in her silences, and her absences from rooms, in her ardent deadpan relief when making an exit of any kind, in her practice of secrecy in sending out boarding school applications—that the time had come for her to seek the world. If not this one Connecticut boarding school, then some other.
The particular comment on her mother’s work pants was intended as an offer of peacemaking. During the drive to the airport in the cab, she had been making sarcastic, unnecessarily cruel observations about her mother. About her mother’s looking like a homeless person during an odd week or two, this spring, when she was going out alone to pick up litter along the highwaysides of Marin, for miles, for whole afternoons, pretending it was a public-spirited environmentalism rather than simply a disguise of maimed grief—a solitary pastime, which fortunately ceased when the rainy season came back, and a pastime that probably would not return anymore, now that she’d hooked up with Habitat for Humanity. Father and daughter, both, were ambivalent about a middle-aged mom’s ambition to apprentice as a carpenter. It was a program called Women Build. Audrey used to be a lawyer, right up until the maternity leave. Right up until maternity leave, she’d worn heels every day. She’d carried a four-hundred-dollar briefcase, and she’d billed for her time in six-minute intervals. Six minutes of her time was worth so much, it was funny around the house. Now she had a tool belt. It was a red, tough, nylon-web tool belt, and, wearing it, she walked out through the doorframe stubbier in stature, without the heels. Habitat for Humanity seemed an implausible adaptation but a development to be treated with patience, because of course it had to do with the fetus. Everything did. They should never have given it that name, nor should they ever have watched its early sonogram movies, in their little family screening with popcorn they called the NodFest.
Lotta, for her part, pretended to be particularly intolerant of a mother’s going into construction. She’d been judging the world lately through the eyes of her girlfriend peers at school. And that gang seemed strict in their pragmatic “crush-the-weak” ethic. Lotta was doing her best to show no mercy, not anywhere. Having ridiculed her mother’s pants, she went on slapping through the pages of the SkyMall magazine, not stopping to actually focus on anything illustrated there. (That one remark about her mom’s carpenters’ pants was a risky-enough sally into new dialogue.)
Mark, meanwhile, had been doing his usual reconnaissance of his airplane seat, its furnishings, his home away from home. Airplane seats in general he found to be blessedly symmetrical environments, but there were always a few stubborn built-in asymmetries: the weldedshut chrome ashtray in the armrest because this particular plane was a retrofitted 727; the hole for plugging in a headset; the germy tray table latch tilted like a big accent mark; the elastic pouch of desolate magazines with articles comparing restaurants in major cities, describing visits to spas, evaluating the shopping experiences in resorts. Are those—spas and shopping?—reasons for some human beings’ staying, ostensibly, “alive”? Apparently, yes. But Mark, being honest with himself, wasn’t a snob. He knew his own reasons weren’t much more exalted. Particularly lately. He arranged himself in the Southwest Airlines seat. Over the years he’d more and more succumbed to his phobic dislike of touching airline magazines, gummy from many human handlings, which would stay eight inches from his knees during the forty-minute flight.
Because the tray table