Better than Perfect

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Pulling up into my own driveway ten minutes later, I had to admit that my house looked just as perfect as Jason’s. The gardeners and the pool guy still showed up right on schedule, so it wasn’t like in the movies where you know the family inside is falling apart because the grass is waist high and weeds are growing everywhere.

But as soon as I got out of the car, I could tell my mother was having a Bad Day. Exhibit A: it was a beautiful August afternoon, yet all the shades in the house were drawn. Ever since my dad had moved out, my mother had Good Days and Bad Days. On Good Days, she met friends for tennis, went for lunch, shopped. Maybe had a committee meeting.

On Bad Days, the shades stayed down. And so did she.

Bad Days were the real reason I hadn’t gone to France with Jason’s family.

“Mom?” I pushed open the front door. My whole life, my house had had the same smell—I’d always assumed it was some combination of my mom’s perfume and this lavender-scented powder she had the housekeeper sprinkle on the rugs before she vacuumed. But now the house smelled ever so slightly different, and I’d started to wonder if what it had smelled like before hadn’t been plain old happiness.

“Mom?” I called again.

I heard a faint response from the direction of my parents’ bedroom. Or I guess I should say my mother’s bedroom, since my dad had a new bedroom in his new apartment in Manhattan.

I walked up the stairs, passing the pale squares that lined the walls in place of the family photos that used to hang there. My mother had always been astonishingly organized. The minute there was the hint of a chill in the air, I came home to find my T-shirts replaced with sweaters, my shorts replaced with jeans, my sundresses in plastic bags at the back of my closet. So it wasn’t exactly shocking that she spent the weekend after my father left removing evidence of our happy family from the walls. The surprising thing was that she hadn’t already had the walls repainted and hung with replacement art.

I walked down the hallway to my mom’s bedroom, my eyes on her door, forcing myself not to look at the gallery of blank squares that lined the hall. My mom’s room smelled even worse than the rest of the house, as if the air in there were thicker somehow, or maybe just unhappier. The shades were pulled so low there was barely enough light to make out her shape on the bed.

“Mom?” I asked into the darkness. And then I said it again, more sharply this time. “Mom?”

There was a rustling of sheets, and one of my mother’s arms stretched up over her head. “Hi, honey,” she yawned.

“Mom, I thought you were getting up when I left.” I tried to make my voice light, as if I were joking, not mad. Then I crossed the room, snapped up the shade, and opened the window.

“What time is it?” she asked.

I looked at her bedside clock. “Almost four.”

“Sorry.” She covered her mouth and yawned again. “My back was killing me, so I took a muscle relaxant. It must have really knocked me out. Have you been home long?”

Since June, I’d watched my mom—who used to know my schedule better than I did—try to fudge her way through conversations about my life. I’d first realized what she was doing when I came home after taking my SATs and she asked me how my morning had gone, clearly having no idea where I’d been. Over the summer she’d gotten cagier. She asked open-ended questions or offered up general statements that made it seem as if she was respecting my privacy when really she had no idea how I was spending my time.

“I was at Sofia’s. We spent the day shooting smack and hacking into people’s bank accounts for cash.”

“Ha-ha,” said my mom, and then she added, “How could you be a hacker? You can’t even remember the alarm code.” At least she was trying to be funny. I gave her a smile. A for effort.

She shook her head and sat up against her pillows, reaching for a small bottle of pills on her bedside table. My mom had always taken medication—she had insomnia, so she sometimes took something to help her sleep. And whenever she had to do a presentation for this charity she was on the board of, she took something called a beta blocker so she wouldn’t (as she put it) “sweat through my dress and then pass out.” And her back bothered her sometimes, so she had a prescription for the muscle relaxant she’d apparently taken earlier.

There had been bottles of pills in her bathroom for as long as I could remember. But now her nightstand sported a veritable pharmacy: She had drugs that were supposed to help her sleep and drugs that were supposed to help her wake up. There were drugs she was supposed to take to not feel anxious and drugs she was supposed to take to not feel sad. But no matter how many pills she took, there were still days like this one, where no matter what time I came home, she was in bed.

“So where were you really?” she asked after swallowing a small blue pill.

“Mom, you know where I was. I was saying good-bye to Jason. They’re leaving for France.” I glanced at the clock again. They weren’t even at the airport yet. I could throw some clothes in a bag, hop in my car, buy a plane ticket, and be holding Jason’s hand on the runway before the sun set.

My mom rubbed her forehead. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m just so … fuzzy.” And then she squeezed her eyes tightly as her voice broke. “I’m sorry we’re not going on vacation this year.” A tear slid out from between her lids, and she bit her lip. “I’m so sorry about everything.”

This happened on Bad Days. On Good Days, I’d come home and my mother would be full of plans for the future: She was going to go back to work. She was going to redo the house. We were going to go on a cruise at Christmas. Some of the things she talked about doing really sounded fun, and I’d eat dinner imagining my mother returning to her job as a consultant, which she’d done before I was born, or picturing her and Oliver and me on a flight to Seattle, where we’d board a ship bound for Alaska. Other times, her ideas were tedious, like when she’d show me a dozen swatches of blue fabric and ask which one I thought would be best for the couch.

Still, anything was better than this. Bad Days just sucked.

“Mom, it’s okay.” I crossed over to the bed, sat down, and put my arm over her shoulders. She patted my hand and sniffled while I looked around the room. Even with the shades and the window up, it felt like a prison. I pictured Oliver, who’d stayed up at Yale for the summer and who’d texted me yesterday that he was going camping with friends for the week. I wondered if my dad had canceled the reservation we’d made for the house in Maine that we rented every summer or if he was planning to go without us, to walk the familiar floors of the house by himself. I imagined Jason getting out of the car in the airport’s long-term parking lot, the sound of jet engines revving, assured he’d be thirty thousand feet up in the air soon.

How come everyone had a get-out-of-jail-free card except me?

I got to my feet. “Why don’t I make us a salad?” I said. “I’ll put lots of fruit in the way you like it.”

“I don’t know if there’s much in the fridge,” said my mom. She looked at me apologetically, and I noticed how much gray there was in the roots of her hair. My parents had been a very good-looking couple. I’m not just saying that because they’re my parents. My mom’s hair was long and blond. (It had been naturally blond when she was younger, and as she got older and it got darker, she highlighted it.) She and my dad were in great shape, and they both wore expensive, designer clothes. My mom always liked it when I told her that one of my friends had said she was well-dressed or beautiful, which happened pretty regularly.

Right now, though, with her strangely bisected hair and her wrinkled T-shirt and yoga pants, my mom wasn’t going to be getting compliments from my friends anytime soon. She just looked tired. Tired and a little bit old.

“If there’s nothing in the fridge, we can order.” I didn’t want to look at her thinking about how old and tired she seemed, so I turned and went to the door. “I think you should take a shower and get dressed.”

Because on Bad Days, I sounded like the mom.

“You’re right, honey,” she said. I heard her pull a tissue from the box on her bedside table and blow her nose. “Kathy called before.”

I turned around. “Really? That’s great. What’d she say?” Aunt Kathy was my mom’s younger sister, and one of my favorite people in the world. She and her husband lived outside Portland, Oregon, and I guess they were what you’d call hippies. They didn’t grow pot or homeschool their kids or anything, but they didn’t care about stuff like money or fancy cars. Kathy taught preschool and her husband was a doctor on an Indian reservation. My mom and my grandparents had all gone to Harvard (well, my grandmother had gone to Radcliffe), but my aunt had gone to Oregon State. I sometimes wondered if she felt bad about that—whenever we were at my grandparents’, there was always a lot of Harvard talk—but I’d never asked her.

“Well …” My mom furrowed her brow, then quoted her sister: “She said, ‘I don’t like the way you sound. I’m coming out to New York next week.’”

“Seriously? She’s coming to visit?” I felt a sense of relief so intense it startled me. “That’s awesome.”

My mom laughed, then made a funny choking sound. She buried her nose in her tissue, but not before I saw her face crumple.

“Mom, it’s gonna be okay,” I promised her. I could hear the irritation in my voice, and I wondered if she heard it too.

“I know,” she squeaked. “I know, honey.” She took some tissues out of the dispenser, one after the other in rapid succession, then blew her nose. “I’ll be okay. Just let me shower and I’ll come down.”

“I’ll see what we have to eat,” I said. I waited to close the door behind me until she flipped the covers off her legs and got out of bed.

There was a blank rectangle on the wall immediately to the right of my parents’ bedroom door; I didn’t need to see the photo that had hung there to remember it. It was of my father, taken the day he and Oliver came home from their first father-son camping trip. My dad had a three-day growth of beard, and he was standing by the door of our old Subaru, a backpack in one hand, a fishing rod in the other. He looked like a man who could handle anything. He looked like a man who could fix anything.

I want my dad, I thought to myself. I want my dad to fix this.

But I knew he wasn’t going to be able to. After all, his leaving was the reason everything was broken in the first place.

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“Not like the religion,” Sofia said, slapping my foot with the flash card she was holding. “Catholic lowercasec. We’ve done this one already.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” I said, biting my lip. Sofia was lying on her bed and I was lying on the floor with my legs hooked over the bed and basically draped across Sofia’s lap. Sofia’s room was tiny, which meant that when we were in it, we were always more or less on top of each other.

“You keep saying okay, but you’re not saying what the definition is,” Sofia said. She leaned on her elbow and looked down at me, her black curly hair tumbling over the edge of the bed. I’d always envied Sofia her hair, but she said it was more trouble than it was worth; all during swim season (and most of the off-season), she just shoved it into a ponytail.

“Patience is a virtue,” I reminded her.

She rolled away onto her back. “You know what I think of when I hear stalling like that? I think of all the people who are applying to Harvard early action.”

“Do I do this to you about Stanford?” Sofia was obsessed with going to California, which she believed was her spiritual home. Her mom’s family was from there, so if she got in, her mom was going to move west with her, which Sofia was actually happy about. I couldn’t imagine my mom moving to Cambridge with me if I got into Harvard. Of course, I couldn’t imagine what was going to happen to her when I left, either.

It was one of the many, many things I tried not to think about lately.

“You are competing with hundreds of girls who want to go to Harvard,” Sofia reminded me.

“Thank you so much, Sofia Taylor.”

“Thousands of them!”

“What is your point?” I swung my feet off the bed and sat up, irritated.

Sofia sat up also and pointed at me with the index card. “My point is they can probably all define catholic. So why can’t you?”

Like a bolt of lightning, the definition came to me. “Including a wide variety.”

Sofia held up her palm. “High five, baby. That’s the last of them.”

I slapped her hand lightly, then lay back down. Sofia was also retaking the SAT, but she only wanted to get her score up by a little bit. Even though we were supposedly both studying, our study sessions had turned into her spending hours trying to drill vocabulary words into me.

“Do you want to stay for dinner?” she asked. “My mom says she misses you.” Sofia’s mom was a nurse on a maternity ward. She’d started working the night shift when we were sophomores because she said she got to see Sofia more if she worked from midnight to eight a.m. Usually they had dinner together before her mom went to work.

“Let me call my mom,” I said. My mother and Jason’s mother said they liked Sofia’s mother, but sometimes I got the sense they didn’t totally approve of her. She’d had Sofia on her own, and they lived in a pretty small apartment, and she worked, while both of our moms stayed home. Whenever Sofia and I had a sleepover, we almost always stayed at my house. My mom had never said I couldn’t sleep at Sofia’s. Instead, she’d say, “I think I’d prefer if you two slept here.” Now she could use as an excuse the fact that Sofia’s mother worked at night, but she’d “preferred” our sleeping at my house even when Sofia’s mother was home.

I was a little nervous about leaving my mom alone, but staying at Sofia’s for dinner wasn’t exactly the same as going to France for two weeks with Jason’s family. I dialed, but it went right to voice mail, and there was no answer on the home number.

When I’d left the house in the morning, my mom had been about to go play tennis with her friend Laura. She’d been wearing her whites and she’d seemed to be fine. But between then and now, had a Good Day become a Bad Day?

Suddenly I was mad. Why shouldn’t I have a fun dinner with Sofia and her mom? Why should I have to worry about the quality of my mom’s day?

I texted her. having dinner @ sofia’s. home later. I hesitated, then added call if u need me before hitting send.

“Oh my God, Beth, this is amazing.” In front of me was a plate with chicken and apricots, tomato salad, and corn on the cob. As I bit into the corn, I realized it was the first home-cooked meal I’d had all summer—even on Good Days my mom picked up dinner at La Scala or the Garden of Eating. The irony of my mom’s judging Sofia’s mother’s mothering was fully revealed to me.

“It is good,” agreed Beth, taking a bite herself. She was wearing her nurse’s uniform: white pants and a bright pink short-sleeved top with blue teddy bears on it. Her gray hair was cut short, almost like a swim cap. Unlike my mom, Beth had never colored her hair, and she didn’t seem to worry about how she looked or what she weighed or wore. She always commented on how nice my mom looked, and once Sofia had told me that her mom had said that my parents were glamorous. But it never seemed like Sofia’s mom was jealous of how pretty my mom was or how happy my parents were. Which was probably smart given what my mom looked like lately and the way my parents’ marriage had turned out.

Beth grinned, pleased with her cooking, and took a bite. “Sofia, the tomato salad is perfect.”

“Thanks, Mom.” Sofia made her face the picture of exaggerated puzzlement. “I wonder who taught me to make it.”

“Hmmm,” said Beth. Her smile widened, and she patted Sofia lightly on the cheek. “I wonder.”

Sofia always used to say she was jealous of my family, but even before my parents separated, I was sometimes jealous of her. There was something so casual and easy about how she and her mom were together. My mom and I used to go out for dinner just the two of us sometimes, but it was always a Dinner. My mom would read about some new restaurant in Manhattan or near our house and she’d make a reservation and we’d get all dressed up, and once we were there, she’d order some seasonal cocktail and then she’d look around and say something like, “Here we are!” and it was like what she was really excited about was the idea of our being there. If Sofia’s mom took us for dinner, it was usually to the Chinese restaurant in downtown Milltown, but somehow it was always more fun.

As if she could read my mind, Beth asked, “How’s your mom doing?”

I didn’t want to lie, but I knew my mom would be embarrassed if Beth knew about her Bad Days. “She’s been playing a lot of tennis, but her back was bothering her the other day, so she might have to slow down a little.”

Beth didn’t point out that she hadn’t asked about my mother’s tennis game. “Maybe we could have her over.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I know she’d appreciate that.” I didn’t know if she’d appreciate it, actually. My mom liked to host—she and my father were always throwing dinner parties, and when she went out with friends, she liked to pick up the check. I wondered how she’d feel about having dinner at Sofia’s, if she’d be comfortable letting Beth cook for her. She’d bring an expensive bottle of wine, and she’d ask Beth if she liked it and tell her all the things she was supposed to be tasting in it—oak and cherry and undertones of, I didn’t know, wheat or yeast or black beans or something. The whole thing sounded completely awful, but hopefully Beth wouldn’t follow up on the invitation.

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I ended up staying over at Sofia’s. The movie we watched didn’t end until after ten, and the last thing I felt like doing was driving home. I texted my mom that I wanted to stay, and to my surprise, she texted right back saying that was fine and telling me to have a good night.

Apparently, I’d been wrong about it being a Bad Day.

In the morning, Sofia and I took our practice SAT, and then we went to Bookers for coffee. While we were waiting for our lattes, my dad texted to ask how the test went, and I told him I thought I’d done better on the math section than I’d been doing, and he said that was great and he’d see me Wednesday for dinner. My parents had both been really worried when I got such bad SAT scores in June, like it had never occurred to them that their splitting up might have ramifications besides my dad’s needing to inform everyone of his change of address. Suddenly my father had started calling me all the time and asking how I was feeling (which he’d never done when he was living at home and his work schedule meant we sometimes went days without seeing each other). He’d always asked about my practice SATs, though, so it wasn’t like that was new. What was new was that now when he asked if they’d gone up, he’d tell me how proud he was of me and how impressed he was that I was working so hard. I think he was scared that if he didn’t encourage me, I’d bomb the test and he’d have to tell all his friends how his son went to Yale and his daughter went to community college.

Sofia had to go to work at three. She was the assistant to the under–pastry chef at the Milltown Country Club. Jason and his family were members, and before we’d gotten too busy on weekends with extracurricular stuff, I’d gone a bunch of times as his guest, but I’d never played on the golf course, which overlooked the Long Island Sound and was what the club was famous for. Still, I’d always loved how you just signed for things you ordered. When I was younger, I’d begged my parents to join even though neither of them played golf and we belonged to a club with tennis courts and a pool that was closer to our house. Now that I was older and doing things like working with Children United (albeit ineffectively) for the right of girls in rural Pakistan to go to school, I wasn’t so sure I’d groove on the club. Plus Sofia said that when you were an employee, you found out what a fascist state the place really was.

When I pulled into the driveway, I saw that the shades were down in my mother’s bedroom. We were having another Bad Day.

“Mom!” I walked through the first floor, calling for her, but she didn’t answer. I felt myself growing irritated. What had happened to the mother who made me go to school in fourth grade when Sarah Williams and Lucy Broder had kicked me out of the popular clique and I’d tried to convince my parents I was sick so I wouldn’t have to face any of my now-ex-friends? Hiding doesn’t help anything, my mom had said, snapping up my shades and getting clothes out of my drawers. Your problems will still be there when you come out, so you might as well face them and get it over with.

All I’d wanted was one lousy mental-health day, and she’d forced me to get dressed, eat breakfast, and go to school.

Meanwhile, here she was taking a mental-health season. What did she think, that if she stayed in bed long enough my father would realize he’d made a terrible mistake and move back home?

I got to the top of the stairs and flipped on the lights. When I saw that her door was closed, I got even more annoyed. My mom had a beautiful house, plenty of money. Food on the table. Two degrees from Harvard—where she’d gone as an undergraduate and for business school. All over the world were women who would kill to be in her position. My phone buzzed with an email. Since it was almost four o’clock in New York, I knew it was from Jason. Every night, at ten o’clock his time, right after his family went to dinner, he sent me an email. I wanted to open it immediately, but I forced myself to wait.

Reading it would be my reward for getting my mother out of bed.

“Mom!” I pushed open the door. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and when they did, I saw that her bed was unmade and empty. “Mom?” I looked around the room—the door to the bathroom was closed. Could she possibly be taking a bath? My mother loved baths, which she called the greatest luxury of the civilized world. Personally, I couldn’t think of anything more boring than taking a bath. Sometimes I even got bored in the shower. But if it cheered her up, who was I to complain?

“We went to Bookers, and I got cherry tomatoes at the farmers’ market,” I called through the bathroom door. “Sofia’s mom told me how to make this awesome tomato salad I had at their house.” As I talked, I straightened up my mother’s night table, glad that there were fewer pill bottles there than I remembered seeing yesterday. I hated how many pills she’d been taking lately. As I crossed to the bathroom door, I picked up her robe from the floor.

“Mom?” I knocked at the door. “Does that sound good to you? Tomato salad?”

There still wasn’t an answer. My mom had a radio in the bathroom, and sometimes she listened to music while she took a bath, but I couldn’t hear any music playing. I knocked again. “Mom!” I shouted.

The only sound on the other side of the door was silence, and suddenly I felt uneasy. “Mom?” I snapped my knuckle against the wooden door. For no good reason, my heart started beating very fast, and I felt light-headed, as if there weren’t enough oxygen in the room. “Mom!” There was still no answer, and I knocked harder, hard enough that my knuckle stung. I dropped the robe onto the floor and put my hand on the knob. To my relief, it turned easily in my hand, and as I pushed the door open, I thought of how stupid I’d been to be so scared and how my mom was probably out of the house and had left the bathroom door closed and here I’d been yelling at her and freaking myself out when she wasn’t even there.

And then the door was open and I was looking at her body lying on the floor in a T-shirt and underwear, her hand and arm smeared with blood, blue pills scattered like drops of rain across the white tile floor.