My room. The only totally “me” place on earth. He’s going to de-Libby it.
“Things change, Lib. And the thing is, your mom and I have between us a pretty cool combination of abilities that we can leverage, plus the house itself. I have my realtor experience and your mom’s got her customer service skills from the Inn, and the timing is perfect because you need to leap from the nest.”
“But . . .” I’m starting to catch on to the central point, finally, “where am I supposed to leap to?”
“You,” Dad says, pointing a finger at me, “are going to start building some character! Increasing your resilience, and your work ethic! You’re going to get a job and start looking for an apartment. Either that or you can start paying the Airbnb fees starting July 1st. I’ll warn you, though, I’m going to charge you at-market rates, and I already know I can get five hundred bucks for a weekend!”
Five hundred? Our town may be dripping with Victorian charm, but our too-dark, bunker-like split-level house is not. The idea of anyone wanting to pay that kind of money to stay with my parents, any money at all really, is hilarious.
But I’m not laughing.
“Isn’t it wasteful for me to be paying rent over the summer when I’m going to have the cost of tuition and somewhere to live in the fall?” I ask carefully.
All of a sudden Dad goes from bombastic to squirmy, and Mom starts strangling a cloth napkin.
Uh-oh. Something’s wrong. Something else.
“Did you . . . you’ve applied to some schools, right?” Mom says.
“Yes. To six schools. The deadline was just a few days ago.”
“And you applied for scholarships as well?” she asks.
“Of course. I’ll get some money, but it’s only a few hundred here, a couple of thousand there. I’m not going to get a full ride anywhere. But Dad showed me the statement for the education fund just a few months ago—last August maybe?—and there’s enough in there that, with some scholarship money, and if I work every summer, I should be fine.”
Suddenly neither of them will meet my eyes.
“Guys, what’s going on?”
“Tell her,” Dad says to Mom.
“No!” Mom says with shockingly uncharacteristic sharpness, and then gets up out of her chair and starts backing away from the table. “You tell her.”
For a second Dad looks from Mom to me, open despair in his expression, but then he scowls and lifts his chin with familiar belligerence, and says, “We got a little behind on some of our payments—”
“A little!” Mom mutters, shaking her head in a way that tells me this is recent news to her as well.
“Okay, more than a little,” Dad says, without looking at her, “and we needed to take that money out.”
“The education money?”
“Yes.”
Mom has been edging her way, crumple-faced, toward the kitchen doorway. Now she disappears through it entirely.
“I promise you,” Dad barrels on, “this is a blessing in disguise. You’ll value an education you paid for yourself far more than one that’s just handed to you. And maybe this’ll make you realize you should study something useful, not this flaky art history stuff.”
“Museum studies. And I—”
“Whatever. Waste of money.”
“It’s not!” I say, in a more strident voice than is wise given that there’s no point trying to explain this to him—how for the longest time my dream was to be an artist, but how after tons of hard work that started feeling like banging my head against a wall, I realized that I don’t have the talent. I’m good at making stuff but I’m not the real deal when it comes to painting and drawing, and no amount of “believe in yourself” slogans will change that. Plus, I don’t enjoy instability, and I’m not sure I have the temperament for toiling in obscurity.
Still, it was a loss. But then I went to my first big city museum on a school trip and was clued in about all the other art-related jobs that exist—art historian, curator, exhibition designer—and suddenly I had a path forward that made sense. Dad helped me transform my room after that, but he never really understood the rest of it.
So all I can do now is repeat, “It’s not a waste of money.”
“That’s the sort of courses girls used to take back in the day when they were only going to college to catch a husband. If you think about it, in saving you from this fate, I’m actually being a feminist! After all we didn’t raise you to be a housewife or some kind of socialite.”
“S-socialite?” My head is spinning with the bizarre and terrible turn this conversation is taking. I want to say to him that the point of feminism would be that the choice is mine, not his. I want to grab my lifetime of good report cards and wave them in his face. I want to tell him that I look at his life, and Mom’s and die inside at the thought of staying in this town and becoming like them—that I want to run like hell from here, and learn and grow and do something, lead a life that means something.
I want to say all these things, but they are still not the point. Dad has a way of confusing me about what the point actually is, to the degree that I shut down completely. Even when my future is at stake, which it clearly is.
“One day when you’re successful and independent,” he’s saying, “and you haven’t flaked out and squandered thousands of dollars your family painstakingly saved to go live like a wastrel on some Mediterranean island, dashing everyone’s hopes and throwing away your future—”
“But Dad,” I finally manage to say, hating myself for the pleading in my tone, “I’m not Jack, I’m not going to do that!”
“Damn right you’re not!” Dad roars. “And when you haven’t, you’ll be able to look back and realize we did you a favor. You’ll know you did it on your own and you owe nothing to anyone.”
Least of all you!
Dad glares at me, and I stare back, furious and despairing and trying desperately to think of something to say that will change his mind, the situation, both.
And then the lights go out and Mom sails out of the kitchen, happy face freakishly restored, and carrying a cake.
A cake!
With lit candles on it and everything.
“Congratulations, Libby,” she says, wearing a determined grimace. “Six schools!”
“Huh?”
“You applied to six schools! That’s wonderful.”
Six schools I probably can’t go to anymore.