Hanging Up. Delia Ephron

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ said Maddy. She threw her arms up and flopped down on the floor, dead. “Kerplop, kerplop, kerplop”—she died over and over, all around the ice cream store.

      One night, while Mom and Dad fought, Maddy and I sneaked out. I had just passed my driver’s test, and braving the freeway for the first time, I drove us to the airport. “People always hang out waiting for planes,” I told Maddy. “No one will notice us. They’ll think we’re meeting our parents.” After an hour or so of traipsing from one arrival gate to another, we called Georgia collect.

      “We’re at the airport because of the fights. We don’t want to go home. What should we do?”

      Georgia instructed us. “Go to a motel. There’s a gray one with white iron railings at the corner of Sepulveda and Washington. Not the one across from it with the sign that says ‘Our rooms are tops.’ You’ll think it’s better, but it’s not.”

      Georgia always knew how to advise us so we wouldn’t make a mistake. She even anticipated our anxieties. “You can register in your own name, they won’t ask you any questions, but do you have fifteen dollars? That’s what the room will cost.”

      “Maybe this is where Mom went with him,” Maddy said after we checked in.

      We stood in the center of the room, not knowing what to do, although there were only two choices, bed or television. “We should sleep in our clothes,” I said.

      “Is it safe here?” Maddy wondered. She sat on the tiniest inch of bed, looking down at it warily, then over at me.

      “I’ll tell you what, if you get scared, just say ‘Aroo.’”

      “What’s that mean?” Maddy scooted back against the wooden headboard.

      “It doesn’t mean anything. Aroo.” I marched over to the TV and turned it on.

      “Aroo.” Maddy pulled the blankets out from under herself and tucked her feet in. “Aroo, aroo, aroo.” She snuggled down and put her head on the pillow.

      I got into her bed, although we had never slept in the same bed before. “Move over.” I kicked her.

      “Aroo.” She kicked me back.

      We left the TV on all night.

      In the morning we tried to put the bed back exactly as we’d found it. The sheets were barely rumpled. We had each slept in one position, or else it seemed that way, but we folded and smoothed the pillows so they were again shaped like Tootsie Rolls, and tucked the spread over them, working together, feeling very competent, a team.

      “When they find out where we were, they’ll feel awful,” I told Maddy on the way home. “If they’re mad, I’m leaving forever.” I slammed my hand against the front door, pushing it in, and moved aggressively ahead of her. She trailed a car’s length behind as we hunted around, finally locating our parents in the kitchen. My father said, “Hi, you hungry?” My mother glanced over from where she was squeezing oranges for juice, and kept squeezing.

      A year and a half later, when I left for college, my parents came to the airport and we all pretended to be a family. Mom bought me magazines and Dad stood at the departure gate with his arm around her. The plane was announced and Maddy jumped on me, piggy-back.

      She was thirteen now, taller than I was, and long and gangly. Her legs went on forever, and disappeared into her baggy shorts like firehouse poles that go right through the ceiling. She wrapped her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck. “Maddy, let go.” It was like being locked in a vise.

      “Aroo,” she squeaked.

      Not fair. I shook her loose. “Bye, Dad. Bye, Mom. I’ll miss you.” Big lie. I got in line and didn’t look back.

      During my first two years of college, my mother never phoned. But my father did. There was a pay phone in my dorm that served the entire floor. It was in a wooden booth with glass doors and a seat inside, and I spent more time in that booth talking to my father than the girl next door to me spent gabbing with her fiancé. I began to anticipate my father’s calls. “For Eve,” whoever answered would shout. I approached the phone with trepidation, picking up the receiver and listening to see whether the call was long-distance. You could hear long-distance then. It was an empty sound, like air in a tunnel. If that sound was there, I knew who it probably was.

      “Hello. Just checking in,” he’d say.

      “What’s new?” I’d say.

      “We had a fight last night. Your mother’s driving me crazy.”

      I called Georgia to complain. “Do you believe they’re still at it?”

      “Refresh my memory,” said Georgia, who was now in New York City, working as a girl Friday at Mademoiselle magazine.

      “What?”

      “Mom had one affair, right?”

      “As far as we know.”

      “Well, I don’t mean to state the obvious, but it’s hardly a big deal.”

      “Maybe she can’t get over him, Georgia.”

      “Over that lab rat? Over a man who smells of formaldehyde? I don’t think so. Anyway, doesn’t our father start the fights?”

      “Not exactly. She drinks, which provokes him. Besides, it’s all her fault for having an affair in the first place.”

      “Eve, there are hundreds of people in the country right now having open marriages, swinging, the works, and he is carrying on about one petite affair. You know, when Richard and I get married—”

      “Who’s Richard?”

      “You’ll love him. If he talks. But he doesn’t talk that much in public.”

      “Where does he talk?”

      “At work—he’s a lawyer. Or with me.”

      “Is this serious, or is it like that engagement you had in college? Mom predicted it wouldn’t last.”

      “This is serious. We’re eloping next summer. I can’t have our parents at the wedding. Who knows what they’ll do.”

      I spent the summer when Georgia eloped as a camp counselor in Maine. No sooner had I dumped my luggage back in my dorm room than the pay phone rang. I picked it up.

      “She won’t go to school,” my father said. This was new: He didn’t say hello. He left the front off the conversation.

      “What? She’s dropping out? Put her on, Dad.”

      “Not Maddy, your mother. She says she doesn’t give a shit about Sydney Carton. She’s locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of scotch.” He hung up.

      This was also new: No good-bye. He left the end off the conversation.

      The next day, I answered again. And again I heard long-distance. Then crying. Well, not crying, sniffling. Very large sniffles.

СКАЧАТЬ