Sugar Time

by Jane Adams

  I usually call Frances on Sunday mornings—we do the Times crossword puzzle together on the phone, which means I feed her the answers and she says, “I knew that, it just slipped my mind for a minute.”

  “You didn’t call yesterday,” she said reprovingly.

  “I’m really sorry…I got involved in stuff and by the time I remembered, it was too late to call you. I haven’t even looked at the puzzle yet.”

  “It was an easy one this week—I got most of it done before my coffee was cold,” she said. “I thought maybe you met some nice man at Suzanne’s party and went home with him.” The mythical Prince Charming—someone Frances still hopes will appear and save me from my ignominious single state—is the only acceptable excuse for not calling my mother on Sunday mornings. “I hope you didn’t sleep with him—not on the first date, even at your age. Especially at your age,” she added.

  “As if,” I said—why do I always sound like my own kid when I’m talking to her? Peggy says it’s a form of infantile regression, and that’s probably true, because the closer I get to Frances, the younger I become. When I see her, and even sometimes when we just talk, I feel like that fat, uncoordinated nine year old who couldn’t do anything right except get good grades in school and make her laugh. Which wasn’t enough for my mother—beauty and popularity were what counted with her, at least for her daughters. Her son, whom she thought destined for success, prestige and wealth, disappointed her, too.

  My brother is a high school teacher who lives in Oregon with his born-again wife; they raise llamas and seem perfectly content with their lives, which Frances considers evidence that Pete is as crazy as my sister Joan, who spent her young adulthood dropping in and out of psychiatric hospitals until she was appropriately medicated with lithium. Neither one has lived up to my mother’s expectations that her children reflect well on her. By default, I’m the only one who even approaches that—at least I’ve written a few books, been on Oprah and Phil Donahue, and had a hit TV show for a few years, which almost makes up for divorcing Ted without getting a good settlement.

  My mother is one of those people who uses up all the oxygen in the room. It’s not that the conversation is always all about her, but she experiences any of her children’s shortcomings as narcissistic insults—to her, not us—and she tends to dwell on them: my barren romantic life; my son’s failure to graduate from college; my sister’s weight problem, which is much more important in Frances’s scheme of things that her mental instability; Pete’s career choices; and his wife’s disinterest in clothes and makeup, let alone her religious views. Conversely, our accomplishments belong to Frances, not us; like Joan finishing her Ph.D. at age 40 and going on to a successful career as an educational consultant; Pete growing his llama herd into a nice little sideline; his home-schooled son graduating from MIT at nineteen; Jessie snagging an ambitious, handsome husband; or me getting an Emmy.

  “So how was the party?” Frances wanted to know. “What did you wear? It was so sweet of Suzanne to invite me—I sent her flowers, you know. Did she like them?”

  “She loved them—that was very thoughtful of you, Mom.”

  “You know how fond of her I am…she was so kind when Daddy died. So how was it?”

  I regaled her with the details Carrie had given me about the party and a few more I confabulated, and when we hung up, I was clenching my jaw the way Jessie does when she’s shining me on to keep me from finding out stuff I’m better off not knowing.

  By the middle of the week I’d almost forgotten about the false alarm, which was my take on the episode with the octopus. In spite of coming awake a few times in the middle of the night and taking my pulse or thinking twice before I had a cigarette (and then having it anyway), I was well into denial. I think denial, along with its first cousin, repression, is unfairly maligned; it’s actually a pretty effective way of dealing with shit when it happens. But clearly Dr. O’Neill, whose receptionist called to schedule me for a follow-up, didn’t think it was as useful a method of coping with life as I do.

  His office was in a medical building two blocks from the hospital. The magazines in his waiting room didn’t tell me much about him—the usual newsweeklies, National Geographic, Men’s Health, and Sail. The art on the walls ran to well-framed photographs of six meter racing yachts and Ansel Adams studies of Yosemite. There were a half dozen other people already there; I gave my name to the receptionist, who weighed me and took my blood pressure, then handed me a form on a clipboard and motioned me to a seat.

  It was a kind of medical history—actually, it said “Lifestyle Factors and Heart Disease”, a nice cheery headline if I ever read one. I checked all the boxes that applied—well, mostly all. I was a little more honest about the cigarettes than I was in the hospital—face it, Sugar, you smoke a pack a day, who are you kidding? The alcohol questions weren’t a problem—I’d rather spend my discretionary calories on cheesecake than booze, and if I’m somewhere I have to order a drink, I nurse along a single cassis or a glass of wine at dinner.

  “Do you or have you used any of the following substances in the last year?” gave me pause. Was my occasional toke of pot a risk factor for heart disease, and was it any of O’Neill’s business? You can’t really keep anything private these days, especially not medical records, so I checked “not applicable” with one big mark that took in the whole depressing category.

  I put “occasionally” on the question about sex, and upped my number of recent sexual partners to “one”, which was only true in my dreams, unless “recent” meant two years ago. I left “current medications” mostly blank—I still had the pills I’d gotten from the hospital pharmacy, but I wasn’t sure what they were or where I’d put them.

  The exercise part didn’t take long. I really ought to do something about that, like drag the Nordik Trak out of the other bedroom where it’s covered by a pile of clothes and put it in front of the TV where I won’t be able to ignore it.

  I scrutinized the food section—maybe on the way home, I’d stop at Whole Foods, it was right on the way. Plenty of salad greens and fresh fruit, maybe some fish—I was already feeling so virtuous that when the nurse took the clipboard and beckoned me into O’Neill’s office a few minutes later I wasn’t prepared for the disapproving look on his face.

  “I don’t think you realize that this is a serious situation,” he said. “Your blood pressure is higher than it should be, you should weigh fifteen pounds less, and your cholesterol is very problematic—you’re not taking the medication, are you? And you’re still smoking, I see. If you continue this way, the next cardiac event could kill you.”

  I was formulating a good retort—“We all have to go sometime,” maybe?—when to my complete dismay and utter embarrassment, I burst into tears; unlike most men, it didn’t faze O’Neill at all, and also unlike a shrink’s office, his didn’t have one lousy box of Kleenex.

  He looked bored while I sniffled a few times and downright disapproving when I wiped my nose on the back of my sleeve.

  “What will it take to convince you to start paying attention to your health?” he asked. “Do you not know that heart disease is the leading killer of women, especially women your age?”

  Actually, I didn’t—was there a ribbon for heart disease like there was for AIDS and breast cancer? Did I have one? Did I want one? I tried to compose myself by looking at the diplomas on the wall. He’d graduated from medical school later than I’d thought and I calculated that he probably wasn’t more than a few years younger than the last man I had sex with. Not that O’Neill was my type. But neither was that other guy—what if he turns out to be the last one I ever—

  “Is there something wrong?” he asked, interrupting my depressing conjecture. “You look uncomfortable.”

  “Sorry, just…you were saying?”

  “I see here you’re a writer and producer. For who?”

  I resisted the urge to correct his grammar. “I’m in television.”

  “A pretty stressful job, I su
ppose.”

  “More when I’m not doing it than when I am. I have a show in the works…it’s the waiting around for it to start that’s stressful, not the work itself.” Which wasn’t exactly true; I was writing the show as well as running it, which wouldn’t be any day at the beach, and if the series based on the pilot resulted, I’d be co-producing it as well.

  “And you have a family…two children, is that right?”

  “And a grandchild on the way,” I added—I’d already crossed him off my “maybe” list anyway.

  He brightened. “Well, that ought to give you a reason to take better care of yourself.”

  To be charitable, he probably thought that was encouraging, but it only made me sadder. Of course I was looking forward to the baby, but was that enough to live for? What about all those other things I’d never gotten around to doing? Maybe I was too old to be the First Woman Who, or learn to speak fluent French, climb Mt. Everest, write a great novel or even a good one, but if I really wanted to do any of those things, wouldn’t I have done them already? Come to think of it, my life list was pretty outdated these days; I was no longer interested in backpacking around Europe or being Mick Jagger’s squeeze. And the big item that was still numero uno—finding the love of my life—didn’t look like it might ever happen.

  I suppose I thought Ted was that person when he took the ring out of the Cartier box and placed it on my finger; it was so long ago I can’t remember. Or maybe it was simply time to get on with being a grown-up; everyone else I knew was married, and I’d always planned to have my children before I was 30. Ted Kane was smart, funny, out of Harvard undergrad and Columbia Law, and he almost looked Unitarian, with his blonde hair and straight nose. In addition to those attributes, he was crazy about me.

  But not forever, as it turned out. The first few times he cheated I overlooked it and went on massive self-improvement campaigns—if it was my fault, which it must be, I could fix it. It wasn’t, or so my shrink told me, but since the divorce, none of my relationships had worked out much better than my marriage. What I’d mostly learned in the analysis that was my fortieth birthday present to myself was that I’d never been loved the way I deserved to be loved—wholly, completely and unconditionally. Not by Frances, my father, or any of my boyfriends, both before and after Ted.

  Until what Peggy calls my naturally oppositional personality asserted itself I was very good at being whoever a man wanted me to be. Since Ted fooled me by pretending to be a mensch, I’ve been more attracted to the ones who don’t and aren’t. “I like men with edges,” I once told my shrink, “you know, difficult ones with complex personalities.”

  “Mmm,” she said, “the kind who tend to criticize, control, or both.”

  “Well…sort of.”

  “Edges are just something you cut yourself on,” she said. “Is that really what you want?”

  Well, yes and no, I told her. “What I really want is for someone to love me the right way.”

  I still wanted that, and everything O’Neill said made me realize once again that if it hadn’t happened yet, it probably wasn’t ever going to.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a grandmother—I just knew that that wasn’t going to be enough. I didn’t say that to O’Neill, though. “I’d like to see you in three months, unless you have any symptoms before then,” he said. “I expect to see some positive change by that time. After all, relatively speaking, you’ve still got plenty of good years left.”

  My cell phone rang as I was leaving O’Neill’s office. It was Zach, calling from another doctor’s office three thousand miles away.

  “She started spotting and having contractions, but it was a false alarm,” said my son-in-law. “Dr. Levine wants her on full bed rest from now on, but she says she’ll go nuts if she has to stay in the hospital for the next two months. My mother can probably help out, but—”

  Stacy Stillerman’s idea of helping out would be regaling Jessie with dire warnings about every potential obstetrical or pediatric disaster and sending her maid over to clean Jessie’s house. Not that it couldn’t use it—things fall off her and Zach like a deciduous tree, you can follow their trail from the front door to the bedroom, and while the kitchen in Zach’s restaurant is as clean as an operating room, I wouldn’t be surprised if the board of health closed down the one in his house.

  Jessie can’t stand Stacy, which secretly pleases me—no competition there—and even Zach can only tolerate his mother in small doses.

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “Oh, God, would you?” The relief in his voice was as thick as his béarnaise sauce. Was there any choice? Of course not. By the next morning I was winging my way west, having hastily thrown some clothes in a suitcase, packed up my laptop, and cancelled out of a panel at the 92nd Street Y with the cliterati—Nora, Erica, Vanessa and me, one dame each from movies, books, theater and television, plus Candice Bergen. I don’t get that many chances to pontificate publicly about why there are no uppity women characters on TV anymore, especially not in such exalted company; I’d probably been a fill-in for Linda Bloodworth Thomas or Diane English, but it was a chance to remind the power dames that I was still around, and also to schmooze Candice. I wanted her to play Amelia, the elegant, charming and still sexy widow who rules her very private inquiry firm—and her headstrong twenty-something daughter, a computer whiz with a pierced nose, a sloppy wardrobe and a smart mouth—with the proverbial velvet-gloved iron hand. Until she turned a guest arc into a steady role on Boston Legal, she hasn’t had her own series since Murphy Brown, and even she, Spader and Shatner together won’t be able to keep that one alive much longer. Also, the script of my pilot happens to feature the theft of an illegally acquired Old Master from a chateau in France, where she used to live. That wasn’t a coincidence—I’d had Candice in mind for Amelia from the beginning. I’d planned to casually slip her the script after the panel, since if she were interested it would go a long way toward convincing the pilot gods to smile on me.

  Before I left for the west coast I e-mailed my tenants and asked them to charge up the battery on my old BMW. I’ve hung onto it since I bought it after Going It Alone went into syndication; I keep it in the garage in Laurel Canyon, thus avoiding the temptation to rent the latest statusmobile when I land in L.A.

  I unloaded Tory from her travel kennel at the airport and we took a cab home. When I moved back to New York ten years ago, I moved some of my things into the studio at the back of the property, renting the house itself to a couple of newly minted lawyers who’ve acquired twins, partnerships, and their own mortgage in the interim. Whether I re-rent it or not, sooner rather than later I’ll have to tackle the big-ticket maintenance I’ve been postponing—a new roof, a new paint job, and probably a new drain field, too, given the temper tantrums mother nature so often unleashes on southern California. But until I’ve got the money and time to deal with it, my little studio will do fine.

  Nobody was home, but the front yard was littered with packing boxes, and there was a note on the windshield of the freshly washed car welcoming me back—another reminder that I was in California now, since nobody in New York ever does anything that nice for their landlord. It almost makes up for the deflation of self esteem, like a slow leak in an old tire, that afflicts me when I first get back here and everything I’m wearing seems hopelessly out of date, every one of my excess pounds is glaringly evident, and everyone I see is at least two generations younger than I am.

  I put my suitcase in the trunk of the Beemer next to my dusty gym bag, which was stuffed with workout clothes so old they probably hadn’t even invented spandex when I acquired them. I’d succumbed to one of those occasional impulses that affects every woman after she’s been dumped by a man and purchased a lifetime membership in a health club in Westwood Village, which I resolved I’d reacquaint myself with unless it had been replaced by a trendy new restaurant featuring pan-Balkan fusion cuisine. I’d need some new gym clothes, too. But you can’t buy those unless
you can wear them without looking like you need them, which sounds as ridiculous as cleaning the house before the maid comes, but makes perfect sense in southern California.

  I unlocked the door of the studio and filled a water bowl for Tory, then let her sniff around the not unfamiliar yard, stopping here and there to pee in exactly the same places she always did, even though it was more than a year since she’d come to California with me. I breathed in the familiar sun-warmed scents of orange and jasmine, the slight metallic undertone that’s like a little reminder that California isn’t really paradise, even though it seems that way when you’ve just arrived from somewhere else, especially New York. As I stood there, not really thinking about anything, feeling the soft air settle around me and fitting myself back into the place where I’d carelessly spent so many years I’d never get back, time reeled backward, flashing momentarily like a strobe lighting up a dark room. … A fourth of July barbecue the summer we bought the house, the night I went into labor with Paul and suddenly realized my life was about to change and there was nothing I could do about it, the day John Lennon was shot and Ted told me he was leaving while I sat in front of the TV watching the crowds gather in front of the Dakota, not sure who I was crying about.

  When we bought the house the studio was just a decrepit shack at the back of the property with a sink, a toilet and a leaky roof. For years it was where we put things we didn’t use anymore, like baby swings and three wheeled bikes; after Ted left and I banished every trace of him from the house in an orgy of redecorating, I fixed up the studio and turned it into a rental unit. The neighborhood isn’t zoned for it, but I did it anyway—it’s easier to say you’re sorry later than ask permission first, and besides, I needed the money.

  At first I only rented to gay men, who always improve property values and are more reliable than actors. Mostly they were thoughtful and kind, like Marc, who found a Wolf stove at a garage sale in Encino and dragged it home one day, and used to leave wonderful home-made challah on my doorstep every Friday. Patrick had planted and tended a beautiful rose trellis that was just coming into bloom. Jeffrey, who was an investigator in the D.A.’s office, once picked up Jessie at the police station and brought her home after she was arrested for shoplifting at Nordstrom’s. It was one of Ted’s weekends, the only time I felt free enough of my maternal responsibilities to do something you don’t do when you’re a single mother like go to Esalen and hang out naked in the baths, bring a man you’ve just met home for the night, or invite a group of your friends over while an earnest woman in a Che Guevara tee shirt and surgical pants who’s doing outreach for the Women’s Clinic demonstrates how to use a handheld mirror and a speculum in order to get to know your own vagina. Ted happened to be playing golf that day, but Jeffrey was home, and when the police called I turned to him for help. Jessie spent the next three months of Saturdays cleaning restrooms in MacArthur Park, a diversion program for first-time offenders Jeffrey worked out with the juvenile court judge. Ted was royally pissed off, since he was all ready to challenge Nordstrom’s right to arrest Jessie in the first place—something that seemed reasonable even to me, since she had three hundred dollars worth of cosmetics stuffed in her purse.