“I really like Gabriella, Michelle, and Kim.”
I took off the headphones and objected, “Not Michelle…”
“It’s not because of you, it’s because of the Beatles song. I can sing it to her when she’s little. It sticks in your head, don’t you know it?Michelle, ma belle, these are words…”
“Please, Naya. I love you, but your singing voice is like nails on a chalkboard.”
“And Gabriella is the girl fromHigh School Musical. And Kim is—”
“Naya, don’t say it—”
“For Kim Kardashian!”
“I swear, I’m trying not to judge you, but try a little harder, please.” I told her. “What’s Will want?”
“He likes Jane. I don’t know why. He just does. I mean, we could go with Michelle Gabriella Kim Jane. That way nobody gets the shaft.”
Nobody but the kid, I thought.
“What if it’s a boy?” I asked.
“It’s a girl,” she replied solemnly.
“How do you know?”
“A mother knows these things!”
It struck me that one of the reasons God invented obstetricians was because mothersdidn’tknow these things, but she seemed so certain that I didn’t want to contradict her.
Mike and Sue almost never left the apartment anymore. Sue had finished her degree but hadn’t bothered looking for a job, and with no band and no ambition, Mike just hung around keeping her company. They spent all day watching movies and TV and eating. Jack called them bums every chance he got, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. Sue had money from something or other, so she could afford to loaf around. Mike didn’t, but he had a gift for squeezing anything he wanted out of his mother.
Mary had come over a few times. Her visits were always unnerving. Mike ignored her, Jack was curt with her, and only Agnes’s occasional presence made those moments tolerable.
I think Jack was disappointed in her. Time kept passing, and the divorce she’d promised never happened. Jack’s father had moved into an apartment on his own, but after the separation, things screeched to a halt, and I think Jack feared they’d backslide, so he wouldn’t let himself get his hopes up.
Nelle had gotten a place of her own. Or rather, she’d found a place and her parents were paying for it. She wasn’t interested in going to school—she said it wasn’t for her—but she did take all kinds of stupid online classes that allowed her to add lines to her résumé. She had a LinkedIn page, but no one was getting in touch with her because she had no relevant experience in anything. She didn’t care, though. She was enjoying her free time.
Things had changed between us. We weren’t close the way we had been when we were girls, but we still met up to talk sometimes. Our discussions were short and trivial, but they were something, and I appreciated them. No matter what, she had been an important part of my life.
I was telling Jack about her one day when he said, out of nowhere, “I get where she’s coming from. School sucks. I’ve honestly been wondering why you don’t quit.”
He was lying on the bed looking at his phone, but this was something he did sometimes, acting distracted when he really wanted to talk about something serious. I was sitting on the ground at the time, mixing paints and looking at a blank canvas.
“Excuse me?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. You’ve been complaining about school constantly lately. You don’t need a degree for anything. Maybe you should drop out.”
Passing a streak of green paint over the canvas, I said, “Look, I may not be in the most enthusiastic phase right now. But that doesn’t mean I want to quit.”
“You said Nelle was taking online classes. You could do that. Or something else, if you wanted. I just feel like you’re wasting all your time doing two things that aren’t going anywhere.”
Two things: he meant my painting and school. Jack didn’t understand dedicating yourself to something that didn’t bring an immediate payoff. He was like Mike in that way: they both thought you had to be having fun all the time. For me, though, it was different, and as many times aswe’d had this discussion, he never would understand. I liked painting, and I didn’t want to give it up. And the same went for school. If I started something, I needed to finish it. Jack didn’t understand how backward my family was, he didn’t know how hard I’d had to fight to get them to even consider college. That had been an accomplishment on its own, and I wasn’t going to give up now.
Instead of responding, I gave Jack a menacing look that told him we weren’t going through this again. He grunted to show his disagreement, but he didn’t insist. Instead, he asked, “What are you working on there?”
“Something ugly. It’s an abstract painting of you not listening to me when I tell you how I want to live my life.”
I meant it as a joke, but there was a grain of truth to it. I held up the canvas as Jack was rolling his eyes, and when he was done being sarcastic, he stared at it a moment. “It’s not bad,” he said. “My mom says a true artist doesn’t imitate reality, they create their own, or some mystic shit like that.”
