“Especially if they have a history of . . . well, substance problems.”
I kept smiling. I swallowed the rest of my Coke and handed her the bottle.
“Let’s see the house,” I told her.
She smashed the Coke into a recycling bin the color of the sky. “What’s the hurry? You East Coasters are always in a rush.”
I was about to tell her I had dinner plans, and then realized I didn’t want to tell her who I had them with. “I’m excited to see this future you’ve planned for me.”
Chapter Five
· isabel ·
“I made sandwiches,” my cousin Sofia said as soon as I walked in the door to the House of Dismay and Ruin that evening. She said it so fast that I knew that she had been waiting for me to walk in the door so that she could say it to me. Also, I knew that even though she said sandwiches, what she meant was please look at this culmination of a culinary process involving more than four hours of preparation.
I asked, “In the kitchen?”
Sofia blinked huge brown eyes at me. Her father — one of the numerous males who had been jettisoned from our collective lives — had aptly named her after the drop-dead gorgeous actress Sophia Loren. “And a little in the dining room.”
Great. A sandwich that filled two rooms.
But there was no way I couldn’t accept one, even if I was meeting Cole for dinner. Sofia was my cousin on my mom’s side. She was a year younger than me and lived in breathless fear of failure, time passing, and her mother falling out of love with her. She also adored me for no reason I could discern. There were plenty of other people more worthy of her adulation.
“They wouldn’t all fit in the kitchen?” I kicked off my slouchy boots at the front door, where they landed on a pair of my mother’s slouchy boots. The empty coat rack rocked, tapping against the sidelights before righting itself. God, this place was soul-sucking. Although I’d been here for twenty-one Tuesdays, I still wasn’t used to it. The McMansion was sterile enough to actually remove pieces of my identity every time I returned to it, insidiously replacing them with wall-to-wall white carpet and blond hardwood floors.
“I didn’t want to be in anyone’s way if they wanted to make something else,” Sofia replied. “You look pretty today.”
I waved a dismissive hand at her and walked into the dining room. Inside, I discovered that Sofia had spent the afternoon preparing a long, color-coordinated buffet bar of homemade sandwich toppings. She’d carved flower-shaped tomatoes, roasted a turkey, shaved a cow’s butt. Conjured four different flavored vinaigrettes and aiolis. Baked two different kinds of bread in two different shapes.
It was arranged in a spiral with the vegetables in the very center. Her phone and huge camera lay at the end of the table, which meant she’d already put it on one of her four blogs.
“Is it all right?” Sofia asked anxiously. She crumpled a napkin in her lily white hands.
This was usually the part where people assumed Sofia suffered from heavy parental expectation. But the only thing I could tell that my aunt Lauren expected of Sofia was for her to be as stressed out as she was, and Sofia seemed to be doing that admirably.
She was a finely tuned instrument that hummed in emotional resonance with whomever she was standing closest to.
“It’s a gross overachievement as usual,” I said. Sofia sighed in relief. I circled the table, examining it. “Did you vacuum the entire upstairs, too?”
Sofia said, “I didn’t get the stairs.”
“God, Sofia, I was joking. Did you really vacuum?”
Sofia peered at me with giant, luminescing eyeballs. She was such an imaginary animal. “I had time!”
I attacked a piece of bread with a serrated knife. Goal: sandwich.
Side effect: mutilation. When Sofia saw my struggle, she hurried around the table to help me. Like a slow-motion murder scene, I wrestled the knife out of her hand and cut two uneven slices on my own. Aunt Lauren had no problem with her being so goddamn subservient, but it bothered the hell out of me.
“What about that book you were reading?”
“I finished it.”
I selected roast beef and shaved Parmesan. “I thought you had that collage-sculpture-thing.”
Sofia carefully watched me select a very green mayonnaise.
“The first part is drying.”
“What is this? Arugula? When is your erhu lesson?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about Sofia as the whitest girl in the world taking erhu lessons. I couldn’t decide if they counted as cultural appropriation or not. But Sofia seemed to enjoy them, and she was good at it, like she was good at all things, and no one on her erhu blog ever seemed to complain, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Watercress. It’s not until tonight. I already practiced this morning.”
“How about a nap? Normal people nap.”
Sofia looked at me very heavily. What she wanted was for me to take it back and tell her that no, she was actually normal, everything was fine, she did not have to take deep breaths because this was not an emergency, this was life, and this was how it looked for everyone.
Instead, I returned her heavy gaze with a long blink, and then I took a bite of the sandwich. I couldn’t believe Sofia had spent yet another afternoon with condiments as friends.
“You should get a life,” I told her, swallowing my bite. “This is delicious and it offends me.”
Sofia looked cowed. Whatever small creature that was my guilt was pricked. And now I was thinking about how my mother kept saying the same thing to me. Getting a life, I mean.
I kept telling her I would get a life just as soon as I found people worth hanging out with. It was possible Sofia just hadn’t found anyone worth her time yet.
I said, “Look, let’s go out tonight. You can put on something red.”
“Out?” she echoed, just as I remembered that I was supposed to be going out with Cole. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten, but on the other hand, I could. Because it was like having a good dream and forgetting it by the time you got downstairs for breakfast.
I felt a not entirely great sensation in my stomach, like someone was opening an umbrella inside it. It was like I was afraid of Cole, but it wasn’t that. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be who he thought I was. He’d been so charmed by the idea of me in California, like the state and I would be good for each other.
I wondered what I was walking into.
“Damn,” I said. “Not tonight. I have dinner out. But tomorrow night. Red. You and I.”
“Dinner?” she echoed.
“If you keep saying everything I say, it’s canceled.” I took another bite of the sandwich. It really was an exceptional sandwich.
“Where’s your mother?”
I never knew how to refer to my aunt Lauren. When I said Lauren to Sofia, it sounded like I was being snotty. When I said your mother, it sounded like I was being cold. And I could not say your mom, because I never said the word mom if I could help it. Probably because I was snotty and cold.
“At a closing,” Sofia replied. “She said she’d be home before Teresa.”
Teresa was my mother. When Sofia said it, she sounded neither snotty nor cold. She sounded respectful and fond. What ferocious magic that was.