Chip Talk
“Chip talk?” I said holding up a bag of the Garden of Nature equivalent to Doritos. My mom bought them to make herself feel better about letting us eat junk food.
“Yes, totally, chip talk,” Jamie answered. I separated one side of the bag from the other. Pffffffft. Half a bag of air burst out of the crinkly sack along with the aroma of fake, but made from naturally occurring ingredients, cheese. I laid the open bag on the kitchen table. Jamie sat in her usual chair, and I sat in my usual chair.
“So, what happened?” I asked as I dug my hand into the bag, pulled out a handful of chips, and placed a small mound in front of me on the table. Jamie took one chip at a time. As she started to speak, she took little nibbles off the chip. Most people eat a chip that size in one or, maybe, two bites. It took Jamie, like, five to seven bites, which gave her speech a staccato effect.
“She just cannot stay out of my business. (nibble). She has to insert herself everywhere she is not wanted. (nibble). For the first time in, like, a year my dad offered to take me out to dinner to our favorite restaurant. (nibble).”
“Peelers,” I interjected.
“Yes, (nibble), Peelers. Remember how my dad and I used to go there, like, once a week after my mom died (nibble)? He always got the French onion soup and a steak, and I always got the ranch style chicken fingers (nibble).”
“Right,” I said reaching my hand in the chip bag again. In the time it took Jamie to eat one chip, I finished my first pile. I tried to pace myself by taking a smaller handful. “So, what, did Lisa invite herself to dinner?”
“Yes!” Jamie said with exasperation, accidentally flinging a chip into the air behind her.
“Annoying,” I stated as fact.
“Very annoying! It’s not just that she invited herself along. It was how she invited herself that made me want to scream,” Jamie explained. The pitch and volume of her voice kept rising. I finished my second pile of chips and went in for a third. Jamie held her third chip (a replacement for the one that landed on the counter behind her) in the air like an extension of her hand. She used it to gesture throughout her evil stepmother story. “My dad and I made our plans while she was still at work. We decided to kind of dress up and make it like a father-daughter date night.”
I gestured to her outfit — a red mini skirt, black Doc Marten boots and her black crew neck long sleeve cotton shirt. In other words, she had replaced her jeans and sneakers for the skirt and boots. Oh, and she had taken her hair out of its usual ponytail and brushed it out, too. “Are you wearing earrings?” I asked, noticing a sparkle beneath her long brown hair.
“Yes! I told you, we dressed up!” Jamie answered. I wasn’t sure if she was annoyed at Lisa still (most likely), or she was annoyed that I pointed out her earrings. Jamie was kind of a tomboy. She got really irritated when people pointed out girly things about her.
I tried to refocus the conversation and cut myself off from the chips. I grabbed the bag and the chip clip. “Do not let me eat any more of these,” I said pushing the bag aside.
“Well, am I allowed to have more?” Jamie asked.
“Yeah, totally. I didn’t realize you were still eating them. You’ve been holding the same chip for, like, twenty minutes.”
“Well I’m talking! I’m trying to explain to you — ”
“How the way Lisa asked to come to dinner was worse than the fact that she came to dinner,” I said finishing her sentence.
“I don’t know if it was worse, but it was really super annoying,” Jamie clarified.
“So what did she say? Or was it just the fact that she walked in the house and said anything that annoyed you,” I said with a little chuckle.
“Am I, like, taking too long to tell this story?” Jamie said.
“No, why?”
“Because, I feel like you’re trying to rush me along. Like I’m boring you or something.”
I tried to diffuse what suddenly became a tense moment. “No, of course not. I didn’t mean to rush you. I just know how the very fact of Lisa’s presence can set you off. But go ahead. Tell me what she said.”
“She said, ‘Well, you two look nice! Are we going somewhere?’ Then my dad said, ‘I thought I’d take Jamie out for a little dinner date.’ And then Lisa looks at him with this stupid, sappy, puppy dog look and says, ‘Oh, okay. Well, I hope you two have a nice time together.” Jamie gave me this look that begged for me to confirm how absurd Lisa’s response was. I felt like either I had missed the absurd part or the absurd part was still coming.
I figured a question was the best way to proceed. “So what did you say back?”
“I didn’t say anything back.”
“Oh.”
“But my dad looked back at Lisa with an equally stupid, puppy dog expression and said, ‘Well, Lisa, if you really want to come, you can.’ And then Lisa said, get this, ‘What restaurant are you going to?”
Again, Jamie shot me a can-you-believe-this-crap look. Again, I knew I should have probably acted annoyed to show solidarity with her, but I also couldn’t understand what Lisa said or did that was so bad. I thought maybe I could get Jamie to take a step back and see that, at least so far, this wasn’t such a big deal. She overreacted about Lisa all the time. Sometimes I felt bad for Lisa. It must have been hard to be the outsider in the family and to be raising a kid that wasn’t even her own. Sometimes I thought Jamie could cut her some slack.
I tried to show sympathy without stoking the fire. “So I’m assuming your dad answered Lisa.”
“Yes, he told her we were going to Peeler’s. She knows that’s our favorite restaurant.”
“Yeah, everyone knows that’s your favorite restaurant. You have, like, every birthday dinner there,” I said.
“Right, so you would think that my step-mother could see that this was a special occasion. But she said, ‘Oooooh, you know, I could really go for a bowl of their French onion soup!’ As if her craving for French-frickin’-onion soup should be the deciding factor!”
“Did you or your dad say anything? Like, ‘We’d kind of like to just a have a special night for the two of us?’” I asked.
“No, we didn’t have a chance. Lisa goes, ‘Give me two seconds. I’ll just throw on a different dress and splash some water on my face, and I’ll be ready to go!’ Have you ever known Lisa to just splash some water on her face? Never. Splash some water on her face means redo her entire face of make-up.”
“Did you say anything to your dad when she left the room?” I asked.
“No, I was honestly so pissed off, I just walked out the door and came here.” As she uttered those words, her phone rang. It was her dad, of course. She didn’t answer the call. Instead, she just sent him a text saying, ‘I’m at Sarah’s. I’m fine. Just go have dinner with Lisa.”
“Are you hungry for something more than chips? I can heat up some of our leftovers from dinner,” I offered. “My mom made teriyaki chicken. It’s really good.”
“Sure,” Jamie said, and then she typed another text to her dad. “Having teriyaki chicken with Sarah.” I got up and pulled out the leftovers and a plate. It seemed like Jamie was digging in further and further with her dad and Lisa. She sat staring at her phone. Every few minutes, her face registered new frustration as she received another text from her dad. She exhaled loudly like she was trying to fog up a mirror. Then her thumbs shot off speedy replies.
The microwave beeped. I brought Jamie her plate of steaming teriyaki chicken over rice. “What’s happening now?” I asked nodding to her phone.
She put it down (finally), and took a deep whiff of the food in front of her. “Mmmmm. What’s happening is teriyaki chicken in my belly!” She stabbed at the chicken and blew on it to cool it down. She put it in her mouth too early, though. After fanning her mouth for a few seconds, she let the bite fall back onto the plate. “Sorry! That is really good and really hot.”
“Patience, my dear friend. It will cool off. Do you want something to drink?”
“Yes, please. Ice water would be awesome. By the way, the service here is way better than at Peeler’s.”
“Well,” I said, “we aim to please. Or, at the very least, we aim not to piss you off.”
“You think I’m being ridiculous, don’t you?” Jamie said.
“No, I get it. Lisa annoys you, and she never lets you and your dad have any time alone together.”
“Yes, but — ” Jamie began.
“I just wonder if you’ll ever not be annoyed by Lisa. You know, for your sake,” I continued.
“Well, it would help if she stopped for one second to think about what she says or does and how it makes me feel,” Jamie said.
“Yeah, totally. I get that.”
“Especially on — ”
I cut her off. “She should have just told you and your dad to have a nice dinner and then ordered some French onion soup for delivery.”
“Especially on — ” Jamie started again.
Once again, I kept talking. “Why was she craving French onion soup on June twenty-first?”
“Especially on June twenty-first,” Jamie said looking down at her plate.
Suddenly, it occurred to me why Jamie needed that dinner date with her dad. It was June twenty-first. The summer solstice. The longest day of the year. The longest day in her life five years ago.
We walked home from school that day with a happy sad feeling because we were in second grade, and we had to say goodbye to our favorite teacher, Mrs. De Bruin. Summer lay ahead of us.School was behind us. We liked school then.
We had already made plans to go to the pool after school. My mom picked us up, and Jamie’s mom, Linda, planned to meet us around five o’clock with dinner. We lost track of time. Imagine our surprise when we finally emerged from the pool at five-thirty absolutely starving, ready to devour what we hoped would be burgers and fries and milkshakes, only to find out that Jamie’s mom hadn’t arrived. My mom told us to change out of our suits. She was sure Linda was stuck in traffic and probably the battery in her phone had died.
My mom was wrong. Linda’s phone battery was fully charged. But Linda had died sometime between one and two in the afternoon.
Jamie slept over at my house that night. We got to watch a movie.
Her dad came to talk to her the next morning in our living room. He explained to Jamie what happened to her mom, and my mom and dad explained it to me. Something about Linda’s heart. It had gotten tired and stopped working.
I waited and waited at the top of the stairs pressing my face between the bars of the bannister waiting for some sign that I could go downstairs to see what my best friend looked like now that she didn’t have a mom. I ran to my room and grabbed Snoozy, my oldest and most important stuffed animal. When my mom said it was okay, I ran down the stairs and found Jamie sitting on her dad’s lap. They both had red, leaky eyes. I handed Snoozy to her. Five years ago on June twenty-first.
“Lisa’s an idiot,” I said, “and so am I. It’s June twenty-first.”
“Yup,” Jamie said looking up at me. “Happy summer.”
I reached for the bag of chips again, pulled off the clip and placed a fresh mound on the table in front of me. Then I turned the open bag toward Jamie. “More chips?”
