Larger Than Life (Novella) Read Free Page B

named Isaac. He cooked me pancakes in
     the morning in the shapes of my initials, and he sat beside me at the kitchen table
     when I was struggling through long division. It’s funny; in all my memories of Isaac,
     it’s just the two of us, and my mother isn’t around. When he moved away to live with
     his best friend, Frank, I didn’t realize it was because he’d fallen for someone my
     mother could never be. But if I even hinted at missing Isaac, my mother would walk
     out of the room.
    After Isaac, I never saw my mother date—not in all the years I was growing up—although
     there were plenty of men who flirted with her. There was Louie, who ran the meat counter
     at the grocery store. There was my middle school principal, who kept suggesting I
     was having adjustment issues, although I got straight A’s, simply so that mymother would have to schedule appointments with him. I even had a high school boyfriend
     who broke up with me because he said he found it too distracting that I had a hot
     mom. My mother, however, never showed an iota of interest. I assume she felt betrayed
     by my father, by Isaac. I would have felt sorry for her, being alone for so long,
     if she hadn’t used this as yet another cross she had to bear in the long litany of
     Things She Had Given Up for Me.
    She took jobs far beneath her intellectual level, because she had no college degree.
     She was a receptionist at a dental office, a telemarketer, a meter maid. On the other
     hand, she pushed me to be the academic she had wanted to be. She was militaristic
     in her overseeing of my studying. She bought me SAT prep books as Christmas gifts.
     She visited colleges for me and summarily crossed them off my list if she didn’t feel
     they would turn me into the groundbreaking scientist she wanted me to become. When
     I was a high school junior and a local college gave me a book award for my academic
     excellence, she dismissed it. She scoffed,
They’re just trying to get you to apply. They’d
kill
to have someone like you
. I reveled in the attention and her backhanded compliments—because for my mother,
     that passed for affection. She claimed to only want the best for me, but what I did
     was never good enough. She had not gotten the chance to live her life the way she
     wanted, and so she was apparently going to live
mine
.
    Vassar was one school that met her stringent requirements for excellence in academia
     and my requirements for an energized, engaged student body. My mother agreed it was
     a good match. I’m sure it also helped that although the school was now coed, it had
     a long-standing reputation of producing powerful women graduates in the deafening
     absence of men. I spent four years studying biopsychology, got perfect scores on my
     GREs, and was already admitted to Harvard for a doctoral program before my graduation
     day.
    On the night following the ceremony, my mother came to my senior off-campus apartment
     with a bottle of Dom Pérignon Oenothèque Rosé. “Do you know what this is?” she asked.
    “Champagne?”
    “A thousand-dollar bottle of champagne,” she corrected.
    I thought of all that could be bought with a thousand dollars. “Can you return it?”I asked.
    She shook her head. “It’s priceless. Like my daughter.”
    Her words were like sun on a patch of ice; I could immediately feel myself softening
     at the edges. I watched her twist the wire cage at the neck of the bottle and pop
     the cork, so that the pink bubbles frothed over her hand.
    She poured two glasses—into juice cups, because that was all I had—and toasted me.
     “You know what they say—you can always tell a Vassar girl … but you can’t tell her
     much.”
    I didn’t want to speak. I was afraid I’d break the spell, whatever this magic might
     be. So I sipped from my glass as my mother drained hers. I could feel her eyes settling
     on me, not with pride but as if she were checking me over for quality control.
    “What?” I