true,” Chloe said. “It has stunning architecture. Art. History. Culture.”
“You think we don’t have architecture?” Jimmy bellowed.
“Houses are not the same as architecture, Dad!”
“Don’t shout! Since when do you care about architecture? It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard you use that word. Now you want to go halfway around the globe to learn more about house design?”
Chloe found it difficult to speak through a clenched mouth. “Art. Culture. History.”
“So go visit Boston,” Lang said, pushing away from the table. “There’s a big city for you. It has Art. Culture. History. It has architecture.”
“Maine has history too.” Jimmy tried not to sound defensive about his home state. “What about the Red Paint People?”
“Dad, okay, history is not why I want to go to Spain.”
“Why then?”
“I bet it’s to lie on the beach all day,” said Lang.
“And what’s wrong with the beach?”
“You can lie on a beach in Maine!” Jimmy yelled.
“Chloe! Look what you did. You’ve upset your father. Jimmy, shh.” Walking over, Lang put a quieting hand on her husband.
Taking hold of Lang’s hand, Jimmy continued. They both stood a few feet away from Chloe, near the sink, united in their flummoxed anxiety. Chloe continued to sit and stare into her cold, half-eaten chop. “What about York Beach?” he said. “We’ve got five hundred miles of spectacular sandy coastline. How many miles does Barcelona have?”
“Is it warm?” said Chloe. “Is it beachy? Is it Mediterranean?”
“Do you see?” Lang said. “She doesn’t even know where Barcelona is. It’s on the Balearic Sea, for your information.”
Chloe couldn’t help herself. She groaned. Clearly, in between grilling swine and sugar-dusting Linzer tarts, her mother had opened an encyclopedia and was now using some arcane knowledge to … Chloe didn’t know what.
“Mom,” Chloe said, so slowly it came out as mommmmmmmmm. A raw grunt left her throat. “The Balearic Sea is part of the Mediterranean. Look at the map. Don’t do this.”
Undeterred, her mother continued. “They didn’t even have any beaches fifteen years ago. They built them for the Olympic Games. That’s your history right there. Don’t pretend you’re all about the Barcelona sand. Maine has had beaches for five hundred years.”
Chloe blinked at her mother. Lang blinked back defiantly. “Mom, so what? What does that have to do with anything? What does that have to do with me going or not going?”
“Don’t raise your voice to us,” Jimmy said. “So if it’s not for the beach, why do you want to go? Do you want to prove something?”
“I don’t want to prove anything. To anybody,” Chloe said through closed teeth. “I. Just. Want. To. Go. That’s it. You want to know why Barcelona and not Rome or Athens or some other place? Okay, I’ll tell you. Because while you were gallivanting through the glens of Kilkenny and I stayed with Hannah and her mom, Blake bought me a magazine.”
“Oh, well, if Blake bought you a magazine …”
“A National Geographic,” Chloe continued through the sarcasm. “There was an article on Barcelona in it. It sounded nice. So Hannah and I said to each other we’d go when we graduated.”
“So you want to go to Barcelona to punish us, is that it?”
Chloe wanted to scream. “Why would I want to punish you?” she said. “Do you want to punish me? Is that why you’re doing this? It’s not about you. It’s not about anything. Hannah and I fell in love with it when we were kids. We thought it would be fun to go when we grew up. And here we are. All grown up. Her mother is letting her go. Her mother is treating her like an adult. And yet my mother and father are still treating me like I’m eleven years old!”
“Can you act like an adult,” Lang said, “and stop being so melodramatic?”
No one spoke for a moment. Then her father did.
“All I know about Barcelona,” he said, turning toward the sink, “is that in Spain, the drivers are considered the worst in the world.” His back was to his wife and daughter. He didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t face them as he spoke. “It’s a well-known, established fact. The worst drivers in the world.”
Putting her soothing hand on Jimmy, Lang glared at Chloe, as if to say, do you see what you’ve done?
Chloe opened her hands. “I won’t be driving, Daddy. I promise.” Her feeble voice oozed with pity and penitence. The fight had gone out of her.
“You’ll be walking, though, won’t you,” Jimmy said, “while others are driving, poorly.” He lowered his head.
“Not even, Jimmy,” said Lang, caressing her husband’s squared back. “Didn’t you hear her? She’ll be lying on a brand-new beach. Admiring the architecture.”
EVERYONE HAD A MOTTO. CHLOE’S MOTHER’S WAS: “CAST your bread upon the water.”
Her grandmother’s was, “How I envy the handicapped in their wheelchairs who can push themselves around. They don’t know how lucky they are.”
And Chloe’s? Once, to go miniature golfing, Courtney and Crystal arrived at Chloe’s green cabin wearing slinky hot pink dresses and clangy bangles. Lang took one squinted glimpse at the two and stage-whispered to Chloe, “Where are they going to, a parade at a bordello?”
That became Chloe’s motto: To avoid at all costs such an assessment by anyone’s mother, including her own, or by, God forbid, a boy.
Okay, no, that wasn’t Chloe’s motto. That was her wish. You know what Chloe’s motto was?
On the blank canvas of your life with bold colors paint.
Maybe not so much a motto as an unattainable goal.
Chloe just wanted to know who she was. Not who she wanted to be. But who she actually was.
Up in the loft attic open to the living room, she lay on her bed with the ballerina-pink fluffy down quilt and soft pillows, clutching a tattered 1998 National Geographic to her chest, the one with the precious Barcelona article in it. When Polly, the old wizened woman who owned the Shell gas station in Fryeburg, decided to go into the used book selling business, running it out of her garage, Blake, out with his dad one afternoon, picked up a worn copy of the magazine. He paid two dollars of his allowance to buy it for Chloe when she was eleven and he was twelve.
