All The Things We Didn’t Say

By the time the end of the year rolled around, if Claire and I passed each other in an empty hall, all she might say was, ‘Steal any Monopoly money lately?’ I hated her by then. I’d begun to blame Claire for everything that was going wrong-that, two weeks before, I had woken up and realized I’d peed in the bed. That a window in our front room had been broken, and my father asked my mother to call to have it replaced but she argued that he had fingers, he could call to have it replaced, and it still wasn’t replaced because they were at some sort of standoff, and there was still a huge crack in the window, sloppily sealed up with duct tape. That I would probably die an old maid without ever kissing a boy. That my father had begun to spend whole Saturdays in bed, and that my mother didn’t take me shopping anymore.

One late May afternoon, I was in keyboarding class, typing line after line of the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Two girls in the front row leaned close together. ‘Claire Ryan is moving to France,’ one whispered to the other. ‘They’re taking the Concorde.’

I typed a whole line of nonsense so it seemed like I wasn’t listening. France?

I found out later-not from Claire-that her father had taken a position at his company’s Paris office. They had rented a three-bedroom apartment in someplace called Montmartre. I wanted to ask Claire about it, or wish her well, or tell her good riddance, but so many people always surrounded her, all the way up to the very end, that I never had the chance.

The excited chatter that Claire was returning from France had started a few weeks ago. Claire hadn’t told anyone the news herself, but someone’s father worked with Mr Ryan and had found out the details. Claire would be attending Peninsula again, but she would be in tenth grade with me, not eleventh. People nudged Devon Reyes, Claire’s old boyfriend, saying that Claire had probably learned a few tricks, living in a country that was so obsessed and open about sex. And me? I didn’t have any reaction to the news, and no one asked me for comment. The time we were friends felt as far away as my birth.

But it surprised me that Mr and Mrs Ryan were getting a divorce-Claire had never seemed worried about her parents’ marriage. After Mrs Ryan and Claire left our apartment, I followed my father into the kitchen. ‘Perhaps Mrs Ryan just needs a private vacation,’ I called out to him, as if we’d been dissecting the Ryans’ divorce for hours. ‘You know, some time to herself. And then, after a while, she’ll move back into the Pineapple Street apartment, and everything will be fine. It’s probably what all couples need, I bet.’

My father looked at me for a long time. His eyes were watery. ‘Maybe,’ he said, eating from a bag of pretzels, letting loose salt fall to the floor. He tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a sniffle.

2 (#ulink_0094d480-ce9c-546f-a565-2e73e2920d46)

The night after Claire came over, my father declared we had nothing to eat in the house, which wasn’t an exaggeration. We hadn’t gotten the hang of shopping for ourselves yet. But now that we were on our own, we could go out to dinner wherever we wanted, which usually meant Grimaldi’s.

Grimaldi’s was this pizza place down under the Brooklyn Bridge. The pizza was so good that people lined up on the streets for a table. My mother hated eating there because the tablecloths were checkerboard, there were too many children, and they only served pizza for dinner. She hated that all the tables had wobbly legs, and that the wine specials were on a little card-stand next to a pot of fake flowers. As my father, brother, and I piled into the little dining room, I tried to see Grimaldi’s imperfections through her eyes; I scoffed at the place’s paltry selection of sodas, offering Pepsi instead of Coke. I sneered at the paper napkins. That awkward autumn when Claire was pretending she was still my friend, she came here with my family. Just as we were sitting down in a booth, Claire spotted some of the girls from the bus across the room, sans parents, sharing a basket of mozzarella sticks. Claire waved at them enthusiastically, but I shrank down in my seat. ‘Why aren’t you waving?’ my mother hissed. I shrugged; Claire pretended not to hear. Later, I heard my parents talking in the kitchen. ‘Summer should have more girlfriends,’ my mother said in a low voice. ‘Does it matter?’ my father answered. My mother murmured something I couldn’t hear.

I caught a glimpse of Claire this morning in the courtyard at school, just as I was dashing outside to the breakfast cart to get coffees for the popular girls in my first-period French class. Claire was talking to Melissa Green, one of her old friends. Melissa had a frozen, terrified smile on her face, trying to focus only on Claire’s eyes and not the rest of her body. When Claire said goodbye and turned away, Melissa’s expression twisted. She ran back to a gaggle of waiting girls and they started whispering.

‘So what do you think Mom’s doing right now?’ I asked my father as our Grimaldi’s waitress took our order and trudged away.

‘I don’t know, honey,’ my father said wearily.

‘You should try and call her,’ I suggested.

‘She’ll call when she’s ready.’

‘Mom probably wants you to call,’ I said. ‘She could be surrounded by younger guys, wherever she is. She could get tempted, just like Mrs Ryan was tempted by that younger French man.’

My father set down his fork. Even Steven, who had been poring over advanced calculus problem sets-he was a freshman at New York University, but lived in our apartment instead of the dorms-looked up with mild interest. ‘Excuse me?’ my father sputtered.

I repeated what I’d heard from the girls in French class. ‘She had an affair with a younger Frenchman from their local boulangerie. Claire caught them. And that’s why she’s so fat: she ate to console herself. It makes perfect sense.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’ My father looked aghast. ‘And Claire’s not fat. She looks fine.’

‘Fine?’ I echoed. ‘Fine?’

He sighed wearily and excused himself to the bathroom, squeezing down the narrow hall next to the brick oven, which was covered almost entirely with black-and-white snapshots of scowling old women in aprons. My mother once remarked that it was disgusting how many people in New York City-in the whole of America, really-were getting so fat. My father retorted that obesity sometimes wasn’t someone’s fault. What about genetics? What about depression? And my mother sighed and said, ‘Honestly, Richard, what would you do without me? You can’t go telling Summer being fat is okay!’

I wanted to call my mother right now and tell her that I would never, ever believe being fat was okay. And if only she’d seen me doling out coffees to the French class girls in the courtyard this morning-there were such grateful smiles on their faces, and we’d all walked to French class together in a happy, laughing clump. She could’ve dropped by the school; other parents did it all the time. That’s my daughter, she would’ve thought, if she’d have seen me. And maybe her mind would’ve changed about us-about everything-just like that.

When I came home from school the next day, my brother was sitting at the kitchen table. He was always parked at the table doing math, even though he could’ve used NYU’s facilities instead. His glasses made his eyes look enormous.

‘Did anyone call?’ I asked.

‘Nope.’ He didn’t raise his head.

My smile drooped a little. I continued to stare at Steven until he finally looked up. ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Then go somewhere else!’ Steven had my mother’s angular face, but we both shared my dad’s oversized nose. When we were little-when Steven and I were sort of friends-we started a secret club called The Schnoz. Our father mystified us both back then, with his brilliant white lab coat and all his tics-the specific pastries for breakfast, the long runs often at night, the dark, dreary moods that would come over him like a thick wool blanket. We decided that he was secretly a superhero, a mix between a mad scientist and a stealthy GI Joe-Steven was obsessed with the military. Our club mostly consisted of spying on my father while he watched television in the den, looking for superhero clues. But then, Steven turned ten and announced that if he didn’t win a Nobel Prize by the age of 20, he was going to enlist in the Special Forces. My father laughed and reminded Steven how clumsy he was-he’d probably shoot himself in the hand while trying to clean his gun. The Schnoz disbanded pretty much after that.

When he got older, Steven went to Stuyvesant High, the smart math and science school in the city. My mother didn’t ask if I wanted to take the test to go to Stuyvesant. My parents had a huge argument about it-my father said Stuyvesant was the best place for me, but my mother insisted that Peninsula was better because it encouraged the liberal arts. ‘But she’s not interested in liberal arts!’ my father bellowed. ‘She likes science! She won three elementary and middle school science fairs at St Martha’s!’ My mother rolled her eyes. ‘We should let Summer choose for herself,’ my father bargained. ‘She’s going to Peninsula,’ my mother said. ‘End of story.’

Even though my father was right-I wasn’t that into art or history or English-I liked Peninsula fine. And anyway, girls who went to Stuyvesant were nerds who never got boyfriends. Everyone knew that.

‘Do you want a soda?’ I asked Steven, turning for the fridge.

‘No.’

‘We still have the orange stuff Mom bought for you.’

‘Mmm.’ His pencil made soft scratching sounds against the paper.

‘It looks like you’re running out, though. But Mom will probably be back in time to buy a new case.’

He kept writing. Steven had hardly said a word about her since she’d left, so I didn’t know what I thought I was going to achieve, fishing. Steven had hardly spoken to her anyway, except to ask if she could wash a load of his whites. He probably didn’t even care that she was gone. Although, was that possible? Yes, she and Steven were very different-she was so glamorous-but Steven had to have some thoughts about it. Just one teensy feeling, somewhere.

‘Summer, there you are.’ My father appeared in the doorway. ‘I have a favor to ask you.’

He led me to the living room, and we sat down on the couch. ‘Mrs Ryan just called. She wanted to know if I could tutor Claire in biology.’

I stiffened, surprised. I’d looked for Claire at school today but hadn’t seen her anywhere. ‘You said no, right?’

‘I said I was too busy.’

I tried not to laugh. Lately, my father’s version of busy was piling magazines for recycling and watching the home shopping channels-he liked the old people that called in. He probably hadn’t even gone to the lab all week.

My father picked up one of the little plastic figurines from the toy ski slope he’d bought on a trip to Switzerland. It came with four little Swiss skiers, each with a blanked-out, stoic Swiss expression. Steven had been obsessed with the ski slope when my parents brought it home, but it had become more of a Christmas decoration. Last night, on the walk home from dinner, there were suddenly fairy lights on our neighbors’ banisters and Christmas trees in their front windows. It made our naked, untended-to tree in the living room seem so obviously neglected, so I went down to our basement storage space, found the Christmas box, and brought everything up myself-the ornaments, the Santa knick-knacks, the ski slope, even old holiday photos of all of us unwrapping Christmas gifts, my father inevitably wearing a gift-wrap bow on the top of his head. The stuff wasn’t that heavy. And it was sort of fun to decorate on my own.

‘Perhaps you’d like to tutor Claire instead,’ my father suggested.

I shook my head. ‘I’m kind of busy, too.’

He rubbed his hand over his smooth chin. ‘Busy with what?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Well, I’ve already set it up,’ he breezed on. ‘She’s coming over in ten minutes.’

‘Dad.’

He placed the plastic skier at the top of the hill and let go. The skier zipped down. My father caught him at the bottom, tweezed his little plastic head between his thumb and pointer finger, and guided him back up the side of the slope, simulating a chairlift. He made a brrr sound with his lips, impersonating a motor.

When I was down in the basement getting all the ornaments and stuff, an invitation fluttered out from a box. It was for a Christmas party at Claire’s house from that first year I’d attended Peninsula. The night of the party, my mother asked why I wasn’t getting ready. When I said I’d rather watch the Christmas marathon on TV-they were playing Rudolph, Frosty, and The Year Without a Santa Claus back-to-back, a stellar lineup-my mother blew her bangs off her face. ‘It’s not a crime Claire has other friends,’ she chided. ‘It wouldn’t kill you to be friends with them, too.’