She really didn’t know anything about anything. I wondered how, just a few short months ago, I used to think she was smart. Outside the window was the Boston Common and the Public Gardens, and I looked at them instead of her, stretching my neck. Reaching, reaching.
“Did you twist it or something in class?” she said, and I chose to ignore her.
I ordered Lapsang tea because the name was lyrical (new vocabulary word, number 100), and I filled my plate with all the miniature cakes and things, but my mother, who ordered Earl Grey, the most boring tea ever, just sat there.
When my mouth was full of scone, she said, “Well, Madeline, the thing is…”
Then she stopped talking and I stopped chewing and then she said, “Have you ever heard of the Providence Ballet Company? The ones who do The Nutcracker every year in Providence? In a college auditorium?”
I kept chewing, worried.
“Well,” she said, “actually, I spoke to the teacher you would have there, Misty Glenn? And she said that they might be able to use a real theater this year.”
“The teacher I would have?” I said. My scone had turned all dry in my mouth and I considered spitting it out. But you just don’t spit out scones at the Ritz-Carlton. It isn’t ballerina-like. It isn’t even saintlike.
“Oh, Madeline,” she said, and her face crumpled the way it did right before she started to cry. “I just can’t do it anymore.”
“Do what?” I said. I glanced around to make sure no one was watching her. But the room was full of a bunch of old ladies in wool suits and gray buns, sipping and staring at nothing at all.
“Ever since your father left, I am having organizational problems,” she said. She made a weird face, trying not to cry.
“Okay,” I said.
“This drive into Boston every Saturday is too much. The traffic, the time, finding someone to watch Cody, Cody crying because he doesn’t want me to leave him, the cost of this class over one that’s literally right down the street from home—”
My face didn’t crumple. I didn’t twist it all funny. I just cried. Hard. My mother had already driven my father away, and now she was taking the one thing that mattered the most in the world to me. Maybe God was testing me or something. Aren’t saints supposed to be tested? But this was too much. She was telling me how I would be in the advanced class with Misty Glenn. She was telling me that soon they were having auditions for a ballet set to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and I could try out. But all I could do was sit there and cry and hate her even more.
Then, the next week, she gave me more bad news.
“It’s going to be the trip of a lifetime,” my mother said. Of course I didn’t believe her. She was an expert on exactly nothing. Unless you counted messing up lives. That she was excellent at. For starters, I now took ballet lessons with a woman who looked like a cheerleader and chewed gum while she showed us what to do. Also, her cell phone always rang during class and her ring tone was the theme from The Addams Family TV show.
I watched my mother lay a bunch of maps and guidebooks on the kitchen table.
“Naples,” she said, opening one of the books to a picture of happy people eating pizza at an outdoor café. “Florence,” she said, opening a different book and pointing to an enormous statue of a naked man. “This,” she said, “is Michelangelo’s David.”
“Who cares?” I said, and made myself yawn.
“Imagine it,” she said. “Pompeii! Pizza! Italy! I can’t say enough about Italy!”
My mother has the plainest face in the world. Her eyes are brown, her hair is brown. All ordinary. She likes to remind me that when I was little I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Last time she said that, I told her, “Oh, really? Well, I also thought Mount Rushmore got that way naturally. So I guess I made a lot of mistakes.” This was called a zinger, and Sophie and I practiced them sometimes after school if she had nothing better to do. Zingers are mean. Lately, sometimes I get a strong urge to be mean to my mother.
“What do you think?” she said now in her best upbeat voice.
“I think you should wear lipstick every day,” I said. That was not a zinger. That was sarcasm, which is even harder.
“Thank you for the beauty advice, Madeline,” she said. She didn’t sound upbeat anymore. I smiled at her and she smiled back, both of us sarcastic. “Now tell me what you think about our trip to Italy.”
I said, “I don’t want to go.”
Outside, it was still winter, a rainy gray winter. The streets of Providence were like an obstacle course of puddles and slush and old snow that had gone dirty and hard.
“Of course you want to go to Italy,” my mother said. “Everybody wants to go to Italy. It’s something people want.”