expectations about things that weren’t there. She’d done that too often in her life, and she’d learned. She unpacked her things hastily, in a disorganized way, because she was not the neatest person in the world, and made her bed with the sheets and antique patchwork quilt her mother had sent from home. A couple of family photos on the dresser and she was set.
A Polaroid shot of her mother, smiling, and her fifteen-year-old sister, Belinda, squinting against the sun; their arms filled with their three cats and a dog, all mixed breeds, all named after the Marx Brothers; the garden of their large, airy house in the background—that was one picture. Her father, in his new incarnation as a swinging single—his hair grown long, aviator sunglasses, a Perrier T-shirt a size too large that still didn’t hide his little pot belly—was in a photo by himself. His snapshot was several years old and he wasn’t single any more, but Kate really wasn’t up to installing that family picture yet. Her father had dumped them—her mother, sister, and herself—when he turned forty. He had been a normal, rather stodgy stockbroker, and suddenly he skidded into delayed adolescence, announced that his life was half over and he was going to die without ever having found out who he was, and went off to live in Mill Valley, where people were reputed to have a good time in their hot tubs and to partake of a free and energetic sex life.
“ I’ll tell you who you are,” her mother had called after him as he left. “You’re an asshole!”
Then she had cried. Kate did not cry at all. She knew someone had to be strong in that family, and it certainly wasn’t her father, who had fled, or her mother, who was like some helpless, bewildered animal shot for sport, or her sister, who was only a kid at the time and had wailed for a week.
“There goes Mr. Right,” her mother said, her eyes misting over.
“Mr. Thinks-He’s-Right,” Kate said.
How could he throw it all away? So what if her mother wasn’t a sex object? She was a little overweight and she never bothered with makeup and she wore kind of old-lady clothes, but she was smart and warm-hearted and poetic and she was a terrific mother. She would always listen and she never intruded. Kate didn’t want a young, sexy mother who tried to act like one of her children. She wanted just the one she had. But now Kate realized that all the years she’d thought she was having a perfect childhood it had been a lie.
Her father wasn’t a sex object either, but he was the one who left and found adventure. She understood intellectually why her father wanted a new life, she really did, but she would never be able to understand it in her heart. She felt betrayed. She never intended to get married. She wanted to be a famous writer.
She was majoring in creative writing, but in the middle of last year after her first great love left her, and The Incident in the Laundry Room happened, and things started piling up on her, she began to get writer’s block. Now she was thinking of changing her major to English lit so she wouldn’t flunk out. She had tried and tried to analyze her problem, and she had finally decided it came from the fact that she really hadn’t lived yet. How could you write about things you didn’t know? She was only eighteen. She had a drawer full of lugubrious half-finished stories with titles like “City of Heartbreak” and “Children of Pain,” which she was ashamed to show to anybody. She couldn’t reveal herself in real life, but worse, she couldn’t even reveal her feelings in her stories. How could she ever be a writer if she wasn’t willing to get hurt by criticism and rejection? Half the time she didn’t know what she felt, and the other half of the time she wondered who would care anyway. She felt ignorant of all the secrets of real life. Being young was like being in a trap: you could try as hard as you could, but you couldn’t get out There—where the real