Read Online Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Maria Semple
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Humorous, Family Life, Contemporary Women, Fiction / Family Life, Fiction / Literary, Fiction / Contemporary Women, Fiction / Humorous
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to ceiling with a mad jam of photos, images torn from magazines, notes to myself, random trinkets. On the floor, waist-high stacks of the photography books I use for reference, and a glass jug that held the stubs of all the colored pencils I’d ever burned through.
“Thank God you’re an artist,” I said to Spencer. “Most people who sneak a peek think I’m batshit.”
Spencer couldn’t resist a closer look at my current project. I was working on a commission for the Telluride Film Festival, fiddling around with the idea of the knots in aspen trees looking like eyes. Or something. Scattered on the desk were strips of film, glass eyes I’d found at a curio shop, and an out-of-print book flagged for Herbert Bayer photographs.
“Imagine being you!” I said. “Seeing the inside of my car, apartment, and studio in the same day. It must feel like skipping first and second base and going straight to third!”
“If I’m making you nervous,” Spencer said, “I can just go.”
“Don’t go!” I screeched, scaring even myself.
Joe’s and Timby’s breakfast dishes were still on the table, a diorama of half-eaten toast and half-finished orange juice.
“It’s like the final day of Pompeii around here!”
“You and your sister,” Spencer said quietly. “It’s none of my business what happened. I’m not judging. You can stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Why are you guys fighting?” Timby asked.
“How about you show me that art,” Spencer said.
I hustled into Joe’s office. For the first time since the shock of The Flood Girls, it was just me and me. My body knew it and involuntarily dropped into Joe’s leather chair.
This. Shit!
The lethargy pressed down on me. My breathing slowed. I lowered my face into my spiderweb fingers.
Ivy. Whenever I think of her, the first image I always have, she’s in profile, in her twenties, smiling, curious. She was born trusting and stayed that way, believed in people, saw the good in their stories, in their intentions, played along with how they wanted to be perceived. Her skin was so delicate you could see a blue vein running along her strong jaw. Her physical beauty was the first thing people noticed. She spoke quietly, drawing them into where they wanted to be, closer to her.
I wonder if she learned that from our mother, who could only whisper toward the end. Mom’s friend Gigi would pick Ivy and me up every day after school and take us to the hospital. Each day, Mom’s voice grew weaker.
Then one day, it was Daddy standing at the school gate.
I was nine. Ivy was five.
My memories of our mother’s death (not the dying itself, but the days after) are a numb jumble dominated by my father’s cluelessness and the flamboyant grief of show people.
Forty years later, though, the memories that cause my chest to curl in and ache are those of Ivy.
Within a week of her death, Mom’s friends threw a celebration of her life. Broadway was dark on Mondays, so they borrowed the Minskoff, where Bette Midler was doing a one-woman show.
Daddy, Ivy, and I arrived at the theater and found ourselves receiving condolences in a random huddle in the center aisle. At the back of the stage, in the shadows, was the huge mechanical ape hand in which Bette Midler made her entrance.
The lights flickered. Father Kidney started up the steps to the mic. But the theater wasn’t a quarter full.
“Shouldn’t we wait for everyone?” I asked Daddy.
“It’s a big theater,” he said, and we took our seats.
I began to tremble. This was how her “tribe,” as my mother called her theater friends, wanted her remembered? A priest speaking on a borrowed stage in front of another woman’s props to an empty house?
My mother wasn’t theirs to humiliate. She belonged to me. She was elegant and precise. She’d gone to boarding school in Switzerland and made us cheese soufflés in little ramekins and posed nude for a German photographer and filled our house with fresh flowers.
I turned to
“Thank God you’re an artist,” I said to Spencer. “Most people who sneak a peek think I’m batshit.”
Spencer couldn’t resist a closer look at my current project. I was working on a commission for the Telluride Film Festival, fiddling around with the idea of the knots in aspen trees looking like eyes. Or something. Scattered on the desk were strips of film, glass eyes I’d found at a curio shop, and an out-of-print book flagged for Herbert Bayer photographs.
“Imagine being you!” I said. “Seeing the inside of my car, apartment, and studio in the same day. It must feel like skipping first and second base and going straight to third!”
“If I’m making you nervous,” Spencer said, “I can just go.”
“Don’t go!” I screeched, scaring even myself.
Joe’s and Timby’s breakfast dishes were still on the table, a diorama of half-eaten toast and half-finished orange juice.
“It’s like the final day of Pompeii around here!”
“You and your sister,” Spencer said quietly. “It’s none of my business what happened. I’m not judging. You can stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Why are you guys fighting?” Timby asked.
“How about you show me that art,” Spencer said.
I hustled into Joe’s office. For the first time since the shock of The Flood Girls, it was just me and me. My body knew it and involuntarily dropped into Joe’s leather chair.
This. Shit!
The lethargy pressed down on me. My breathing slowed. I lowered my face into my spiderweb fingers.
Ivy. Whenever I think of her, the first image I always have, she’s in profile, in her twenties, smiling, curious. She was born trusting and stayed that way, believed in people, saw the good in their stories, in their intentions, played along with how they wanted to be perceived. Her skin was so delicate you could see a blue vein running along her strong jaw. Her physical beauty was the first thing people noticed. She spoke quietly, drawing them into where they wanted to be, closer to her.
I wonder if she learned that from our mother, who could only whisper toward the end. Mom’s friend Gigi would pick Ivy and me up every day after school and take us to the hospital. Each day, Mom’s voice grew weaker.
Then one day, it was Daddy standing at the school gate.
I was nine. Ivy was five.
My memories of our mother’s death (not the dying itself, but the days after) are a numb jumble dominated by my father’s cluelessness and the flamboyant grief of show people.
Forty years later, though, the memories that cause my chest to curl in and ache are those of Ivy.
Within a week of her death, Mom’s friends threw a celebration of her life. Broadway was dark on Mondays, so they borrowed the Minskoff, where Bette Midler was doing a one-woman show.
Daddy, Ivy, and I arrived at the theater and found ourselves receiving condolences in a random huddle in the center aisle. At the back of the stage, in the shadows, was the huge mechanical ape hand in which Bette Midler made her entrance.
The lights flickered. Father Kidney started up the steps to the mic. But the theater wasn’t a quarter full.
“Shouldn’t we wait for everyone?” I asked Daddy.
“It’s a big theater,” he said, and we took our seats.
I began to tremble. This was how her “tribe,” as my mother called her theater friends, wanted her remembered? A priest speaking on a borrowed stage in front of another woman’s props to an empty house?
My mother wasn’t theirs to humiliate. She belonged to me. She was elegant and precise. She’d gone to boarding school in Switzerland and made us cheese soufflés in little ramekins and posed nude for a German photographer and filled our house with fresh flowers.
I turned to
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