Page 64 of Of Literature and Lattes
Janet raised a challenging brow. Alyssa sipped and almost threw up. “That’s disgusting. Are you trying to kill me?”
Janet howled. “I can’t believe you drank it. I love that you did that! It’s your favorite salad from Bistro North. The kale salmon with fennel... Here, pass it over.”
Alyssa handed her the glass and washed her mouth out at the sink. “What are you doing?”
“Taking a sip.”
“You can’t do that. It’s foul.”
“You did. It’s not funny if the joke’s only on you.”
With that Janet drank half the glass before gagging and bumping Alyssa away from the sink to wash out her own mouth.
The next afternoon Alyssa came home from Jasper’s covered in grease. She had accidentally tipped an oil drainage pan onto herself. Janet was already in the laundry room vigorously scrubbing her own hands and arms.
“I shattered a glass bottle of ink all over myself.” She snorted, taking in her daughter. “You’d better get in here. You look worse than I do.”
The two of them stood side by side scrubbing themselves down with Goo Gone for a half hour. Both emerged pink, sore, and too hungry for soup that night.
“But tonight’s your last night. Dr. Laghari said no solids for four days,” Janet had groaned. “We can’t give up now.”
“One meal can’t matter, Mom.”
“But what if it does?” Janet pitched her voice low and earnest. The weight of the world, or at least Alyssa’s gastrointestinal integrity, hung in the balance with this one last liquid dinner.
In the end they sat at the island together eating an entire recipe of sweet potato soup, from the pot.
And those were only two memories Alyssa now held close. There were two other hand scrubbings at the sink that turned into bubble fights as Janet washed off paint and Alyssa scrubbed at grease from Jasper’s Garage; there was the afternoon they decided to eat only what Janet had in the garden and ended up with a ragu of tomatoes, zucchini, kale, yellow squash, and parsley—and nothing more. Then there were the two nights of movies, curled up in blankets, drinking tea, laughing atBook Clubor crying withMrs. Miniver.
But neither addressed the elephant in the room—the tensions, the misunderstandings, the chafing attitudes, or Janet and Seth’s upcoming wedding. Or maybe, Alyssa thought, she had it wrong and the elephant was gone after all.
Part of her wanted to believe that was true, and to finally let it go, because this was the first time Alyssa felt side by side with her mom rather than two steps behind, unable to keep up. She no longer felt small, weak, lost, or even alone.
Janet found her at the bottom of the stairs staring up at her favorite painting. “You have always loved that.”
“You never did. Why’d you and dad buy it?”
“Buy it? It was my honors project in college.”
“You painted that?” Alyssa turned to her mom.
“You can have it if you’d like.”
“Someday, yes, but... Come on, Mom... How could you never tell me that? Does Chase know?”
Janet tilted her head at Alyssa’s question. “I doubt it. Why would I bring it up?”
“But... how did you just stop? You had real talent. You trained. It just feels wrong.” She looked back to the painting. “Like a lie.”
Janet laughed, a short rueful sound full of self-awareness, even self-reproach. “Of course it’s not normal. Nothing about it was or is. I can’t even tell you it was a different time, though in some ways it was; I can’t tell you anything to explain it other than it was never an option for me.” She faced Alyssa. “I had to fight for every step with my parents, and that got too hard. I got tired of fighting... Then I started fighting somewhere else.” She reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her daughter’s ear.
Alyssa felt herself tip into the touch. “Dad?”
Janet shifted her gaze back to the painting. “Not your dad, at first. He didn’t know how much painting meant to me. And to some degree that was what hurt the most after a while. But if I never shared with him how much it mattered, how was he to know?” She shrugged. “Of course I only came to that realization after we divorced.”
“I had you on a pedestal, you know,” Alyssa whispered.
Her mom nodded and ran her fingers through Alyssa’s hair again, pulling a strand over her shoulder. “Toppling idols can be a messy business. If I’d been more honest with you, all of you, we might not have gotten to where we did.”
