Girl Dinner

Sylvie told her mother she wasn’t to come over and check on her tonight. Like she had the last time. If that happened again, Sylvie said, the Tomlinsons would see her on their doorbell camera–did she know the Tomlinsons had gotten one of those doorbell cameras?–and then they would know she had come over to help. And if that happened, Sylvie said, the Tomlinsons would never hire her to babysit again. Ever.

“Why would they do that?” Kate asked.

“Because,” Sylvie said. “They’d think I was some little kid who needs her mommy to come rescue her.”

Come rescue her. Kate let those words pleasantly have their way with her. “Oh, I don’t think they would think that,” she said. She was standing in the doorway to Sylvie’s bedroom, whose shades were still drawn, although it was nearly noon, their edges limned with light. Sylvie was still in bed. A comforter that would soon need washing slumped from her feet to the floor. “I would think it’s nice having a babysitter next door whose mother is just a phone call away.”

Sylvie gave her a look, a look she turned on her more and more often, Kate noticed, without wishing to notice. A look that seemed to say, What do you think life is? Sylvie was newly fourteen. Kate was a single mom, Kate and Sylvie’s father having divorced the year before. Or no, it was two years ago, Kate realized. This being January and January being the new year. January had a way of doing that sometimes, giving you a bit of the slip when you didn’t stop to think about it. The next thing you know, you’d written the check wrong.

“Could you close my door?” Sylvie said. “I need to get dressed.”

“Sure thing,” Kate said. But she didn’t move from the doorway. Instead she watched Sylvie, who had closed her eyes and wouldn’t open them until she heard the door click shut. A routine from childhood.

“Mom,” Sylvie sighed. “Just go.”

“Oh, I am,” Kate said, more brightly than she had intended. “I’m going.”

 

If anyone had asked Kate if she felt like she was getting older, she would say yes, she did, in small ways that likely didn’t matter, but no on ever asked, so Kate kept her observations to herself. Which was largely how life felt since the divorce: a series of kept observations, on after the unspoken other. Not that she was complaining. No. She didn’t want to date anyone, not really anyway. She’d made a few feeble attempts earlier this year–last year, she meant–but nothing ever came of it. Besides, Kate reasoned, she liked her freedom. Divorce had freed her of more disappointment, anger, and resentment that it had left behind, which was kind of it. Kind, too, of Dan, her ex. Poor Dan, figuring himself out at forty-one. He’d arrived so late to the party of himself that the only one still waiting up for him was Jessie, his research assistant, a decade and a half his junior, too young to think him strange, this professor with his ear recently pierced, his jaw auditioning its first beard, his conversation so one-sided and self-absorbed it could only be mistaken for introspection. They were together now, Dan and Jessie. Of course they were.

Here was something Kate noticed about getting older: her short-term memory had lost something off its fastball. Not much, but still. Enough that it would catch her by surprise, and she would think, Now, that’s strange, without quiet crossing over into Now that’s worrisome. A coffee filter already placed inside the maker, while she stood pinching a second between her fingers. Leaving a water bottle on her nightstand, then another on the downstairs countertop, and then discovering a third in the car’s cupholder., its much-vaunted technology unnaturally sustaining ice cubes into day two. The same garden nozzle mistakenly ordered twice. The time she’d left work early, thinking she’d requested a half day, then turning her car around and returning to the parking lot when she’d realized she’d mixed her days up, her parking spot still waiting for her, lunch hour not yet elapsed, with no one the wiser.

Had Sylvie noticed? The thing was, since the divorce, Sylvie had become such a different person, beyond the usual transformations of puberty and the attendant dramas of high school, that it was nearly impossible to tell what she thought or felt about anything. Who was Sylvie now? Formerly shy, a keeper of diaries and a doodler of woodland animals, Sylvie had acquired dozens of friends in the past year, it seemed, and many more than that, if her social media accounts were to be believed (Kate kept track of her daughter’s online presence, but from a respectful, empowering distance that Sylvie might one day thank her for). In the past few months alone, Sylvie had joined the student newspaper, yearbook club, and cross-country team. This from a girl who wandered home early from neighborhood playdates because the other girls wanted to have a sleepover, who liked nothing more that spending the weekend at home with her parents, sleeping in on Saturday, skipping church together on Sunday, nibbling on leftover pizza straight from the fridge. Where had that girl gone?

As much as Kate loathed to admit it, Sylvie’s independence seemed to arrive right around the time Dan and Jessie moved in together. Sylvie spent some weekends there, but hardly ever talked about her father, and never, in any circumstances, talked about Jessie. What was there to say? Jessie was young and predictably pretty, and, from the few occasions when Kate had had to awkwardly communicate with her, seemed somewhat embarrassed to be in the situation she’d fallen into, which, although failing to endear her to Kate, had kept some of her resentment at bay. The remainder had been transformed into relief. You want to spend your life with Dan? He’s all yours! Enjoy his self-contradictions masked as personal growth. Wander alongside him into his misremembered childhood, where he was so often disappointed by others. Say hello to his irritating habit of passive-aggressively contradicting nearly everything you say, then acting wounded when you point this out.

“What do you do together on weekends?” Kate had asked Sylvie once, early on, before deciding never to ask questions like these again.

“I dunno,” Sylvie said. “Just whatever.”

“Does your father cook for you?”

Sylvie shrugged. “Not really. We mostly get takeout or, you know, grab something out.”

So Jessie doesn’t cook, Kate thought, with some satisfaction. “Where do you usually go?”

“I dunno,” Sylvie said. “It depends.”

“Fast food? White tablecloth? Five course tasting menu?”

Sylvie didn’t say anything. She was staring at her phone, the screen held away from view. A stance that would soon become her default position. “Why do you care so much about where we eat?”

“I don’t,” Kate lied. “I was just making conversation.”

“Why don’t you, like, just ask Dad if you want to know?”

This, a response as maddening as Sylvie’s why don’t you just Google it? A leftover from her middle school years.

“Because I thought I could ask you,” Kate said. “Seeing as how we were having a conversation.”

Sylvie scrolled through something on her phone, smiled to herself. “We were?” she said.

 

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