Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) by Sarah Tomlinson Page A

even if there was really nothing fancy about the fluorescent-lit room with its linoleum tiles. Sitting nervously across from a redneck beauty school student with dramatically feathered hair, I watched as she gently tilted my filthy cast—I'd broken my wrist riding my bike on the first day of summer vacation—to dip my nails into the sudsy water, and so begin the process of grooming me into a lady.
    My dad and Eva actually came to visit again that summer, during the same week the Big B and I were together in Portland. Betty took the four of us out to lunch at the most wonderful restaurant in the world—DiMillo’s floating restaurant—located in an old boat moored to a dock in Portland’s harbor. It floated! There was not a single leaf of kale in sight, except for under the sliced cantaloupe used as a garnish on the plate, and even I knew you didn’t eat that (unless you were a glutton like Betty). I was allowed to order whatever I wanted, and I was going to eat fried clams and French fries.
    Best of all, my dad was sitting across from me, looking subdued, his face bare of the big beard he’d sported throughout my childhood, his broad shoulders folded into his dress outfit—a newer plaid flannel shirt—his unruly, thinning hair mostly tamed. Next to him, Eva wore the bright, quizzical expression of a foreigner who needs to pay attention to follow the conversation. It was pretty much the perfect day.
    Only my dad didn’t go in for perfect days in the traditional sense. He reached into his backpack and pulled out plastic bags of prepacked food.
    â€œWe’re on a macrobiotic diet,” he said.
    Eva nodded.
    â€œWhat?” Betty asked sharply, either because she was old and couldn’t hear, or because she was old and couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
    â€œIt’s a principle of eating,” my father began, instantly launching into a lecture on the ideals of the macrobiotic lifestyle and why it was the best choice, not only for him and Eva but for Betty and me, and thepeople at the other tables, and even the waiters, and every single other person in the entire rest of the world. He always did his research and was a great talker, so his argument was convincing. Betty was as likely to become macrobiotic as she was to get a face tattoo. I was not having any of it, not today. I’d seen my share of brown rice in my regular life as a hippie kid. My vacations with Betty were all about eating all of the prohibited foods I could, and then eating more.
    I was actually relieved by my dad’s digression, though, and perked up as I fell into my familiar role as his best listener, ever. Up until that moment, he’d been shut down in his mother’s presence. He was always so convinced she was about to publicly humiliate him or try to manipulate him into doing something he didn’t want to do—as he felt she’d been doing since he’d gone to live with her out of foster care at age ten—that he’d been pulled up inside of himself almost completely as we sat there. For the long minutes he’d been silent and closed down, I’d anxiously observed him, as on edge as I was whenever I read a tense scene in a book, hating any conflict, even unspoken.
    As Betty and I were served our fatty dead qi on a plate, my dad and Eva tucked into their seaweed-wrapped rice balls.
    â€œWhat is that?” Betty asked, her tone sharp.
    And then she lost interest, attacking her meal with the fervor of a once beautiful woman who had long trafficked in the favors of men, and had therefore been on a diet her entire life, and was now going to eat every French fry the universe put in her path.
    My father gazed into the middle distance in his usual intense way—he raised spacing out to an art form—before turning to look at me.
    â€œSo, Sarah,” he said. “We have to tell you something.”
    I smiled, still innocent enough to be unaware that