Chapter Sixteen
Mom never came out and forbade Amy and me from talking about Dad with each other, but she made it so clear that the topic was off limits that I never thought to compare notes with my sister, nor she with me. Perhaps if I had felt closer to Amy, I might have talked about my feelings with her—perhaps if we’d felt free to talk about Dad, we might have been closer. But our relationship was one of the biggest casualties of his untimely and unexplained death.
Before Dad died, I had idolized Amy—she had never given me reason not to. She was my protector and mentor, and I wanted to be just like her: fearless, a talented musician, smart, sophisticated.
Unlike me, Amy was also slender and petite, sought after by boys—yet another reason to envy her. But after Dad died, she changed, and not for the better. It seemed as if I spent all my time trying to figure out how to avoid provoking Mom while she did the opposite. Rarely a day went by that she did not do something to make Mom mad. It never occurred to me that my sister was as confused and unhappy as I, that her behavior was merely an outward manifestation of the same inner turmoil that I was experiencing. I didn’t know how she felt, and I didn’t care: I just wanted her to stop making Mom (and, by extension, me) miserable.
Among our neighbors in Chestnut Hills was a woman named Sunny who fancied herself an artist, though the appeal of her art—large, drab, monochromatic paintings bisected by straight lines which she created by covering the bare canvas with masking tape—was lost on me.
Like Mom, Sunny was a single mother and a teacher. Her daughter, Susie, was a couple of years younger than I and appeared to be having as difficult an adolescence as Amy.
Perhaps if I’d known that Mom’s newfound friendship with Sunny was one of convenience that would peter out after we moved from Chestnut Hills I wouldn’t have had such an aversion to her and her daughter, but seeing into the future was not my superpower. I assumed we were stuck in Chestnut Hills forever, like prisoners abandoned on an island with no hope of escape. My fear was that Mom would turn into Sunny, a chain-smoking peroxide blonde from Germany who made me think of Natasha from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon.
Sunny was always nice to me, but I could not warm up to her or Susie. Like the Awfuls, they were inescapable reminders of what we had sunk to. Worse, they were our new peers. A year earlier I could not have imagined a world in which Mom would regularly socialize with someone like Sunny, with her deadly, smelly nicotine habit and compulsion to create art from masking tape and canvas, her aversion to primary colors, and her socially awkward, miserable tween daughter who was clearly desperate for love, affection, and attention.
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