Falling in Love with Natassia

by Anna Monardo

  “You’re looking good, Nor,” Kevin said kindly.

  “Kevin,” Nora asked, “do you ever feel mad at Mommy?”

  “For dying on us? Yeah, sure.”

  “I mean from before, for the way she was.”

  “How was she?”

  “So…secret. Like, do you ever feel kind of cheated that we didn’t know our grandparents or either of their families? I mean, in a way, it’s a kind of lie to withhold that information. It’s like saying, We come from nowhere.”

  “They always told us about Daddy’s family.” Kevin never held eye contact when Nora tried to talk about their parents. “They were in the Midwest and he hated them. What else was there to know? No way Daddy was going back to those people who let him end up in jail.”

  Nora stared, as Kevin was doing, into the black subway tunnel. “But he stole money from them. His own family. Did we ever think about that?”

  Kevin laughed. “Yeah, isn’t it weird?”

  “And he got Mommy to cut us off from her family, too.”

  “He didn’t do that. After Mommy got pregnant, her mother dumped her.”

  “Dumped her? No, she didn’t. Mommy cut her off when she wasn’t supportive of the marriage to Daddy.” Nora had to raise her voice over the noise of the incoming train, and she didn’t care who heard her. “Mommy and her mom were still close when she was in the unwed-mother home. Remember the story of how her mother sent her money the whole time, and then, after the adoption—don’t you remember?—when her mother showed up and surprised her and brought her a case of California oranges, which was stupid, but at least she tried doing something.” They pushed into the train car and found seats next to each other. “Then she helped Mommy pay for nursing school.”

  “No, no, it was when Mommy was pregnant with you that her mother cut her off. She never told you this?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Nora looked around. Really, no one seemed to be listening.

  “Mommy’s mother was so angry at her for marrying an ex-con that when she got pregnant her mother just cut her off. For good. She told Mommy, ‘You had a chance to get out of it before, but now, with a baby, you’re stuck with that crook.’ Mommy sent her a picture of you, but that was it. She never wrote back.”

  “A crook? Mommy’d never let anybody say that about Daddy. Kevin, how did you ever hear this? I never heard any of this.”

  “One morning early, in the car, when Mommy was driving me to hockey practice.”

  “How’d you ever get into this?”

  “Yeah, it weirded me out, too. We were talking about me getting serious with Bebe Tucker, and Mommy was saying I better not go all the way with her. Mommy said that—‘Don’t you go all the way with that girl!’ And the next thing I know, I’m hearing all this ancient history. Oh, man, she even started crying. ‘I’m a girl who screwed up in a major way, Kevin. Do you understand that? Do you understand I had no choices then?’ ”

  “Kevin, she really cried?”

  “Ah, I shouldn’t have told you. Hey, we’re the next stop.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me before?”

  “It’s just so sad and pathetic, the crazy stuff she was saying. ‘Babies are serious business, mister. You get that girl pregnant at your age, you got a couple of choices, and not one of them is any good. Anything you do will leave you feeling like shit.’ And I’m like, ‘Relax! She’s hardly letting me up her shirt.’ ”

  The movie was very long for Nora; she couldn’t concentrate. Mommy lost her mother because she had me. Her mother helped her and then stopped helping her—because she’d had a baby? Just when Mommy had had a baby? She believed Mommy was in danger and still she abandoned her? Every time people laughed, Nora was annoyed. Once, she tugged on Kevin’s sweater and whispered, “Mommy really said her mother dumped her?”

  “I shouldn’t ever have brought it up.”

  “Sssh,” someone said from the row behind them, and Kevin muttered, “Oh, go shush yourself.”

  Afterward, on the subway going back downtown, close to Kevin’s stop, he said, “So—you’re okay riding to your stop alone?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.” But she didn’t want Kevin taking off into the city, where their lives rarely intersected. Not until he told her more about their mother, told her something, anything. “So,” Nora said, “did you ever end up going all the way with Bebe Tucker?”

  “Are you kidding? Of course. Whoa, here’s my stop.” They hugged for a quick moment, then she had to let him go.

  Mommy talked to Kevin but not to me.

  ON FRIDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHTS, Mommy used to come up to Nora’s bedroom, which was huge, with high ceilings. She’d turn off the bold overhead lights, make the room dark, and carve out a small, intimate space by turning on a dim Tiffany lamp at the side of Nora’s bed. Nora, Mary, and Mommy huddled under different corners of Nora’s huge down comforter. Did any little girl ever have as much comfort in her life as Nora had when she was young? “So, my girls,” is how Mommy always started. Sometimes Mommy came upstairs when it was just Nora, but she arrived more often and stayed longer when Mary was spending the night. “Mary Mudd, you remind me of myself,” she used to say, especially when Jerry and Dorie were especially negligent. Mommy and Mary both had to make their way in the world without a mother, something Nora knew nothing about at that time. Nora was the daughter of a pretty, fun, present mother—so present—right there on Nora’s bed, talking. But it made Nora dizzy sometimes with frustration: the only way to get closer to her mother’s true heart, to her locked-in secrets, would have been to become a girl who had no mother. Like Mary. Often Mommy had advice for Mary. “Listen, you are a dancer, you’re going to be a star, but dancers need a next career, you hear me?”

  Back at the loft after her visit with Kevin, Nora sat up for hours, nested into her corner of the couch, considering the news Kevin had just given her. Mommy was a birth mother of an adopted child. We knew that but never talked about it. Never. But apparently Mommy never stopped thinking of herself in that way. And how could she? How stupid to think that she would. And how stupid for Nora to have been jealous of Mary’s and Mommy’s motherlessness. And maybe how wrong, too. Maybe for Mommy bringing Mary into the Conollys’ life had really been an offering to that baby boy she didn’t get to bring home with her. How Mommy loved mothering Mary. “Promise me, Mary, that you will go to college. Say it.”

  “I promise, Mrs. C.” Mary said it rolling her eyes, blushing, obviously savoring the coddling she never got at home. “I’ll go to college.”

  “Both of you girls. Nora, you I don’t worry about with college, not with your good grades, but, whatever you study, you turn that into a job that’s a career that guarantees you steady income, benefits, savings. I don’t care who you marry, how good he is, you make sure you keep savings for yourself off to the side. Nobody needs to know.”

  Nora had come to assume that Mommy held on to her self-sufficient privacy as a way to keep some distance from Daddy because he was a man who was less than completely trustworthy. At times during her own marriage, Nora had even allowed the thought: Mommy, see, I’m like you now. I have a husband I don’t trust, too. But maybe it was in her privacy that Mommy managed to keep her lost baby close, maybe even closer than she held Nora and Kevin. How much in Mommy’s life had really been about that baby boy?

  For the first time in a long time, the word “eternally” slipped into Nora’s mind. Some losses linger and never really leave anybody out.

  DURING THE WEEK of sitting shivah, Lotte’s apartment was swarming with people, and Mary grieved like everybody else. Nora. Mary had never been so wrong about anyone or anything. One afternoon up at Hiliard, she’d seen a raccoon staggering across the thawing circle driveway. The animal had obviously been hit by a vehicle or poisoned or attacked by something big. The raccoon wasn’t quite dead yet, but it wasn’t right in any way. That was exactly how Mary felt now; meanwhile, she was stuck watching all these people acting like
it was the end of the world that David was gone. That mean old man. Mary had to get out of the apartment. She tossed leotard and sweatshirt and sneakers into her backpack. She had two gym passes left over from Christmastime. “Natassia, come with me. It’ll be good for you, change of scene, change of air.”

  “I don’t want to. I’m staying here with Daddy.”

  “Leave her alone, Mar,” Ross said. “She wants to stay here with me.”

  Mary didn’t like any of it. Ross and Natassia were now inseparable. Except for the hour or so when he left the apartment to go to a meeting. Or took the phone into a bedroom to argue long-distance with Harriet, who never did show up. Apparently, they’d had a fight in the Minneapolis airport and she’d got on a plane back to Spokane.

  People were pulling Natassia aside and asking her, urgently, “How’s your father doing, sweetheart?” Mary was almost tempted to give Natassia the phone and say, “Here, start dialing, call some of those slutty old friends you used to run around with. Go, ride the subway, just get away from your sick father.”

  Mary really had to go out. She pulled Kevin from the crowd. “You have to do something for me, Kev.”

  “Anything.”

  “Promise me you’ll make sure Natassia doesn’t leave this apartment while I’m away. I need three hours.”

  Mary walked, from West End and Ninety-first Street to lower Broadway. An hour of straight walking. At the gym, it was lunchtime. The Stairmasters and stationary bikes were occupied, so was the treadmill. Mary found the rowing machine and got started. It was almost unbearable, peaks and peaks of guilt rising and falling and rising into the most distant landscape within her. It truly was almost too much. How hurt her daughter had been—in babyhood, as an infant, in childhood, as a teenager. Hurt not only by Mary but also by Christopher, Ross, Lotte and David, and Nora. Nora! Natassia, utterly exposed to every whacked-out force in the world. Mary pushed the machine, punishing her arms and legs. It was a wonder Natassia hadn’t been hurt worse. Or maybe she had been. Maybe there was more bad news to find out. Mary kept rowing.

  On the wall in front of her was a pretty-landscape poster, and Mary rowed into the hills of the poster. Up and up, endless hills of green guilt. Occasional valleys, then up again into the thin atmosphere of self-hate, the unbreathable air. Down into the bleak, black shadows of failure. Gretel without Hansel. The hills went on, all across the long horizontal poster; in the center was the broken glass of a waterfall cracking over rocks.

  Finally, the manager of the gym came over. “Lady, a few people have come talk to me. You been on this machine already for over an hour. What are you, in training to be a galley slave?”

  Leaving, drenched, Mary passed under the poster, read the title of the photograph: “Taebaek Mountains.”

  Later, back at Lotte’s apartment, Mary asked Ross, “Where’s the Taebaek Mountains?”

  “South Korea. Why?”

  CHRISTOPHER AND KEVIN were in Christopher’s studio in Chelsea. Christopher needed Kevin’s help to set up a timed device for his newest piece: one canvas with another canvas laid over it. Christopher had four sets of these, and he wanted Kevin to help him figure out how to mechanize the top canvases so they would slide open and closed. He wanted the top canvases to be very slow-moving, so that at first the viewer wouldn’t even know the movement was happening. “Okay, Kevin, what I want is, when we’re all done, I want a total of nine sets of canvases, all of them moving in opposing times.”

  “You mean alternating times?”

  “Whatever.” The telephone rang. Christopher answered, “Yeah?”

  “Sorry to bother you, but this is important.”

  “Hey, Nora, hi.”

  Christopher felt Kevin watching him, listening. Nora was saying that a note from Lotte had just arrived in the mail. “I have to read this to you.”

  “Yeah, go ahead, read it.”

  “ ‘Please come to my apartment this Saturday afternoon, April 7, around two o’clock. I’m moving from my apartment, into a little penthouse around the block on Riverside Drive. I’m getting this big place ready to put on the market. There are piles of David’s art books, and Ross wants Christopher to have them. There are some French prints I want Nora to have. The grand distribution will take place this Saturday. It would mean a lot to me if you could be there. Much love to you both, Lotte.’ ”

  “Okay, so we’ll go,” Christopher told Nora. “We’ll have to go.”

  After he hung up, he said to Kevin, “Lotte’s moving out of her apartment? What’s up with that?”

  “It’s a big controversy. If you guys had gone to any of the funeral stuff last month, you would have heard about it.”

  “Kevin, don’t. There’s a thing going on between your sister and Mary, and it’s just better this way right now. Mary hasn’t said anything to you?”

  “Out of nowhere, Lotte came up with this studio apartment. Turns out, she’s owned it all along, for forty years. She never gave it up when she and David got married. She’s rented it out all these years. She never even told Ross about it. She’s been putting away a bucket in rent every year.”

  “Did David know?”

  “Nobody really knows. Natassia’s freaked out about the whole thing, moving out of the apartment she grew up in and all that. But Lotte’s just like, ‘It’s my turn now. I’m living alone, the way I want to.’ She gave Ross forty-eight hours to decide if he wanted to keep the big apartment. He decided to put it on the market. He gets half of the money.”

  “Who gets the rest?”

  “Natassia. In a trust, till she’s twenty-one. But she’s set now, for graduate school or whatever. If she makes it that far.”

  “What do you mean, if she makes it? Natassia’s not that messed up. Everybody exaggerates.”

  “She’s a pretty messed-up kid. I don’t know all of it. She’s got a shitload of stuff to figure out. Mary won’t tell me. Mary is so good at protecting Natassia. I tell you, when it comes to that kid, Mary’s like a bear.”

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, when Christopher and Nora arrived at Lotte’s, there was in the apartment an air of euphoria, giddiness almost. The estate-sale lady had stuck little round yellow price tags on all the furniture. There were clothes racks in the dining room stuffed with Lotte’s and David’s clothes for sale. Bedspreads and sheets and towels were priced and stacked on the bookshelves. Costume jewelry was spread out on coffee tables and on card tables. Stacks of records on the radiator covers. Books and books and books.

  Nora cringed. “This is embarrassing,” Christopher whispered into her ear. “There’s something really tacky going on here.”

  Making Nora and Christopher even more uncomfortable was Ross, who kept thanking them for all they’d done during the funeral. He knew about the food Christopher had sent, and with all the confusion of that time, he imagined he’d seen them at the funeral and at the apartment. He even apologized for not having had a chance to talk to them. “I’m sorry, but with everything going on…I didn’t mean to blow you guys off.”

  “Ross, I’m really sorry about your dad,” Nora said, and hugged him, and when she did she was sure she smelled stale beer. Mary said he’d stopped drinking. As always, she felt Ross’s too-tight hug, that embrace that insisted that her breasts touch his chest. Ross.

  And then, as always, a too-long hug for Christopher, too, as if to say, See, I hug everyone too close, not just your wife.

  The hour Nora and Christopher spent in Lotte’s apartment that day felt like participating in a performance-art piece done by amateurs, a bad play.

  Until Mary walked them down the hallway to the door as they were leaving—then the afternoon turned more sinister, scarier. “I have to talk to you two,” Mary said in a low voice. She kept staring up at Christopher, who kept looking away. “Natassia wants all of us to have a session with her therapist in Hiliard. That’s how she wants Ross to find out.”

  “He doesn’t know yet? Oh, Mary, how’d you get through all this—”

&nb
sp; Mary cut Nora off. “You guys just need to show up.”

  “We’ll be there,” Christopher said. Nora watched him pull his date book from the inside pocket of his jacket. Does Christopher know what he’s in for? “When?” he asked.

  Mary handed over a business card. “Here’s the address. Next Saturday at ten.”

  “We’re there, Mary,” Christopher said.

  CHAPTER 39 :

  APRIL

  1990

  It was Saturday morning, ten o’clock sharp, and Nora was looking around the office of Heather Jamison Jonson, M.S.W. Finally. This is it. The day was too warm for April, and everyone was dressed inappropriately. Natassia was tugging her sweater away from her neck and puffing breaths down into her black turtleneck. Mary had on a long maroon Danskin skirt over black leggings and ankle boots, and a too-big gray sweater; she kept pushing up the sleeves, then pushing up the sleeves of the black leotard underneath. A ridiculous outfit, but Nora immediately understood: unsure of what to expect, Mary had done what felt safe, she’d dressed for dance. Nora knew Mary inside and out, and even if their friendship was over, probably was over, Nora would never stop carrying within her all she knew about Mary, who hadn’t said a word to Nora yet or even glanced over at her.

  Ross looked more professorial than medical in his chinos and tweed wool sports coat and dark-blue chamois shirt and brick-red tie; his collar seemed to be darkened with sweat. Christopher was sitting right next to Nora. She couldn’t remember what he was wearing, and she was too nervous to look at him. She herself that morning, not knowing how to prepare for this event, had put on the evergreen jersey-knit wide pants and tunic she wore when she anticipated difficult or long days at her office. A silver pendant and silver-and-jade earrings went with this uniform. In the crotch of her evergreen pantyhose, Nora was sweating.

  Natassia, Mary, Ross, Christopher, and Nora. They were assembled for a double session (one hour and forty minutes), so that all the important adults in Natassia’s life (most of them) could be “brought up to speed” on Natassia’s recovery.