“Should we get the check?” Mark asks. His directness is unnerving.
“I think that’s a good idea,” I say. But maybe for a different reason.
When the bill comes, I pay, even if Mark is sitting on mountains of family money, or even if Doubleday would have picked up the tab, and excuse myself for the men’s room.
The bathroom has just undergone the sort of New Age redesign that requires one to orient oneself upon entering. Normally bathrooms are intuitively laid out. Not in New York. Not anymore. I was in an empty men’s room recently with a wall of running water and a circular trough in the center of the room. That’s it. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to urinate on the wall and wash my hands in the trough or relieve myself in the trough and run my hands along the trickling waterwall. Eventually a man exited a hidden stall and proceeded to wash his hands in the trough, so I took initiative and peed on the wall.
Since what I’m really here to do is splash some cold water on my face to bring me to my senses, I’m glad when the sinks present themselves as sinks and not basins of plumbing mystery. The cold water is rousing, so I repeat the action two or three more times. What am I doing? Nothing. I look up at myself in the mirror and am almost surprised to see my reflection, water slaloming down my face like tears. I realize now, working on this latest redraft, how much I’ve felt like a ghost. Alone. Writing is an inherently solitary endeavor, immersing yourself in another world, either make-believe or in the past—in my case, a confusing combination of both.
I love Daniel. I’m not unhappy. I finished my book. I’m not a ghost. Not really.
So why does it feel so charged to be seen?
I reach for paper towels and dab my face dry, and when I look up I see Mark’s reflection in the mirror walking toward me from the urinals, zipping up his corduroys. I flinch.
“Jumpy,” he says.
“I thought I was alone.”
“Well, you’re not.”
To prove his point, he steps closer so we’re only inches apart. I don’t want to feel any heat, I don’t want to feel anything, but I do. I start to sweat in my blazer. Flustered, I ask, “Did you wash your hands?”
“Is that really what you want to ask me?”
I can feel blood . . . moving . . . where it shouldn’t. “I don’t know what I want to ask you.” I wish desperately I could do my jumping-jacks thing, since it always helps me to think, but that would require a monumental feat of explanation. The visual is funny, and I emit a small, nervous chuckle.
“I thought one of the advantages of older men is that they knew what they wanted.”
“I’m thirty-one.”
“Yeah?”
“That makes me older men?” This is breaking news to me.
Mark leans in and hugs me tightly and eventually I hug him back. He’s thinner than Daniel—scrawny, almost—and it feels strange to hold him. The side of his face presses against mine and it feels electric, sexual. It’s smoother than Daniel’s scruffy one, softer, younger; he reminds me of a boy I loved in college. I look at the restroom door, almost willing it to open, begging for our privacy to be interrupted, but quickly realize I’m on my own to stop this.
After a good thirty seconds I wriggle him off me. “Okay.”
“Oh, relax,” he says, letting go. I’m souring on this as a catch phrase. He turns on the faucet to wash his hands.
I pivot away from the mirror and adjust myself in my pants, uptucking like a seventh-grader desperate for his classroom erection not to be seen. “We don’t have to make a big deal out of this.”
Mark looks at me with pity. “Is it a big deal?”
“No, no, I guess not.” I lean against the sink, wishing I could click my heels three times and be home safely with Daniel.
Mark leans across me to reach for the paper towels and his arm brushes against my chest; I expect a shock of static but it doesn’t come.
“You’re not going to tell Jo, are you?”
“God, no.” I spit the words out so quickly I almost choke. I look around to see if anyone else has walked in, to see if any of the stalls are occupied.
Mark gives me a puzzled look, She’s definitely not in here.
I want him to disappear. I don’t want to have to say good-bye, I don’t want to have to ask him about his holiday plans, I don’t want to chitchat about the manuscript, about business, about his family in Rhode Island. I just want this to be done.
“Should I walk you to the subway?” I offer, praying he’ll say no.
“Nah, I’ll cab it.”
Cab? I should have let him pick up the bill. “Okay.”
“Happy Thanksgiving, James.” He leans in to hug me again, but I take the opportunity to shake his now-clean hand instead. He rolls his eyes.
“Happy Thanksgiving, yourself.”
I turn back to look in the mirror, as if it will tell me what the fuck just happened, and in a moment he is gone.
◆ SIXTEEN ◆
Our rental car smells like fast-food grease, and as we pass exit after exit along the bleak highway, it’s all I can do to not grab the wheel from Daniel and point the car in the direction of the nearest drive-thru—if only to settle my stomach. The interstate is bleak and lined with bare and colorless trees, their bark tinged with a gray frost that matches the ghostly sky. Trees get thinner when the weather turns cold and I get fatter, craving nothing but the non-nutrition whose negative effects I can hide under bulky sweaters in winter. The drive to my mother’s house near Ithaca is usually just under four hours, but we hit a good deal of traffic in Jersey City on our way out of town; the toll road is faster more often than not, but apparently not today. We hit more traffic at the I-80/I-81 interchange—not surprising, still annoying. Now we’re making good time, but I’m restless, not so much hungry as bored.
“Want food?” I ask Daniel.
“No, you?”
“No, not really,” I say, admitting defeat. “You okay driving?” We switched seats when we stopped for coffee and a donut, but I’m not sure how long ago that was.
“Yup.”
I think of Mark and the electric aura around him. What this drive would be like if he were here now. I’d be behind the wheel (he strikes me as the kind of privileged city kid who boasts of not knowing how to drive), while his hand would be creeping up my thigh on its way to doing something unsafe at interstate speeds. I pull my coat over my lap in case I get hard.
“You nervous?” Daniel asks.
“Huh?” I worry at times he can read my thoughts.
“About seeing your mother.”
“Oh.” Phew. “Need you ask?”
I was surprised when Kenny called a few weeks back to see if I was coming home for Thanksgiving. He said he hoped so—that Ellen and the kids were looking forward to seeing me.
“Didn’t you hear?” I had asked Kenny.
“Hear about what.”
“Mom and me. We’re kind of going through a thing.”
“She hasn’t said.”
“Huh.”
“Other than to ask if I knew if you were coming.”
Naomi called too, a few days later, asking if Daniel and I were coming for Thanksgiving.
“I think so?” I had said, the heaviest emphasis on the question mark.
“C’mon. Even big-shot authors get holidays.”
Given that my brother and sister both called, it seemed obvious that this was another of my mother’s orchestrations. That she wanted me home for Thanksgiving but was too proud to make the call herself. At least this is what I led myself to believe, what gave me the courage to pick up the phone to call her and accept her non-invitation. That maybe she wanted to work toward resolution too.
I remember she answered only after the machine picked up and I felt self-conscious at the thought of our conversation being recorded.
; “Kenny called. As did Naomi. Daniel and I would like to come for Thanksgiving, if that’s still all right with you.”
“The turkey is seventeen pounds.”
This was the kind of response you often got from my mother. Is it a yes? Is it a no? Is it conversation? Obfuscation? Deflection? It is merely information. There will be enough food if you decide to come. You have to be fluent in my mother to know what it really means: Suit yourself.
I lean in to Daniel to read the fuel gauge; it’s still half full. Or half empty. It feels like it’s been at half something for a while. I stare at the dashboard until the odometer ticks off another mile, then sink back into my seat. A white car with Ohio plates in desperate need of a wash passes us on the inside lane. “If Ohio added another h it would be a palindrome.”
“With a double h?” It sounds weird the way Daniel says it. Aitch. How can it take five letters to pronounce one?
“No—Ohiho. Oh-i-ho.”
“Oh,” he says, realizing. And then, “So?”
“Don’t you think it would be nice to have a state that’s a palindrome? And why not Ohio? I mean, what else does it have going for it?”
“It’s the Buckeye State.”
“Yeah, but what is a buckeye?”
“It’s like a horse chestnut.”
But what’s a horse chestnut?, I want to scream. But then he would answer, and I already know what a horse chestnut is and what I want him to explain to me has nothing to do with nuts at all. Unless you count the cluster of nuts I’m related to.
“Oh-i-ho,” Daniel says. “The Palindrome State.”
“Now you’re talking.”
My thoughts turn to Jackie; she’s been ever-present since I delivered the manuscript to her office forty-eight hours ago. I imagine her reading the latest draft and my stomach churns. I had intended to go home over the summer, Labor Day at the latest, to spend time with my mother as Jackie suggested, but an invitation never came. I knew instinctually if I invited myself I would get my mother on her highest guard, so I let it be. Truth be told, I also knew it wouldn’t be as simple as just showing up on my mother’s doorstep. Jackie made it sound so easy, but in the weeks after my visit to Martha’s Vineyard, I realized I had no idea what was supposed to happen when I got there. Then deadline after deadline passed and it seemed easiest to just fudge another ending.
“Putting a t at the end of Tennessee also makes that state a palindrome.”
Tee.
Daniel looks up from the road and stares at me for an alarmingly long time. “I don’t think that’s even remotely true.”
I gesture for him to look back at the road before he kills us, and then when that doesn’t work I snap my fingers. “Tennesseet,” I say, when I’m comfortable that his attention is back where it should be.
“It’s missing a couple of n’s,” he says. Enns. Daniel doesn’t usually take everything I say so literally when we’re goofing around; perhaps he’s nervous about this homecoming too.
Traffic slows around a bend heading into the low afternoon sun and Daniel applies the brakes.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m being weird. I think I’m more nervous than I let on.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“You’re not that hard to read.”
I look at my boyfriend and feel genuine relief that he knows me as he does. Why do I waste even one minute imagining Mark along for the ride, when everything I need is right here?
Daniel applies the brake even harder, as traffic comes to an abrupt halt.
“Do you ever think about dying young?” I’m always most aware of news stories about highway fatalities around the holidays, maybe because they seem even more tragic.
He looks at me as if he’d like to take back that comment about my being easy to read. “You trying to get rid of me?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Good.”
Though it’s true, it has been on my mind recently. Mortality. I think it’s all this time spent with Jackie, with her pushing me to find resolution, finality, an ending.
“Wait,” Daniel protests. “Do you think you’re going to die young?”
“No, I’m going to live a very long time.”
“Oh, really.”
“Yeah. I’ll probably live to be one hundred and eight. Of course, by then you’ll be gone and I’ll be with someone much younger.”
“So they can change and feed and bathe you. Romantic.”
“Very.”
Just like when I entered the world. My blood flow will slow and I’ll probably lose my words and my ability to speak, to write. My identity. I will have no idea who I am anymore, and will have only strange faces around me and I will scream and wail until my next basic need is met.
“My life, the palindrome,” I observe.
“Your life the palindrome.” Daniel nods, impressed.
◆ SEVENTEEN ◆
Daniel offers to go inside first and break the ice and I tell him not to be silly—I am not going to hide from my own family. I hang back anyway, under the pretense of unloading luggage from the trunk.
“Smooth,” Daniel says, as he returns from the front door to grab our bags. He sees right through my ploy.
“What?” I say, innocently.
He rolls his eyes.
Kenny’s wife, Ellen, greets us at the door. “I thought I heard a car.” She has a dish towel flung over her shoulder and looks like she’s been working all day in the kitchen of some holiday movie made specifically for a women’s cable channel. She’s approaching forty and retains all of her good looks, even if her body has softened slightly from carrying two boys. I set our things down in the mud room.
“You did and here we are!” I say the last part louder for my mother’s benefit, like how you would make a lot of distinctly human noises while walking in the woods during hunting season so as not to get shot. Confused by the volume of my voice, Ellen shoots me a weird look before pulling us in for a hug. I like Ellen, always have. She was crazy competitive before she married Kenny and had the kids—she played field hockey at some women’s college—and when we used to stay up late nights playing cards or board games she would fight like hell to win. Now she does her best to set an example of sportsmanship, but it’s easy enough to access her inner competitor with just two glasses of chardonnay.
The smell of roasting turkey hits the foyer. Daniel and I exchange looks; we are both in dire need of a good home-cooked meal. Food lately has been whatever American-looking crackers they have at the Korean market and slices of pizza from the place on the corner. Unless cheese is a food group, we are desperately malnourished.
“It smells fantastic,” Daniel compliments.
“Well, turkey’s just about to come out of the oven; then we’ll put the sides in. Dinner should be in about an hour. Give you time to say hello to everyone and have a drink.”
“And Mom?” I ask, peering around the corner into the kitchen, looking for any sign of her, fully prepared to duck back from enemy fire.
Ellen looks at me while slightly shaking her head. “Your mother’s putting on a sweater.”
She used to make glorious meals, my mother, so it seems odd that Ellen is at the helm today. My mother wasn’t a gourmand, but she kept our family happy and well fed and I used to love to help her. The kitchen itself has changed very little since I left for college. The dishwasher is still marigold, as is the stove. The fridge is now white; the one that matched the other appliances gave out around the time I graduated. (When it died, she was angered about having to toss groceries that should have been discarded years prior. “Salad dressing doesn’t go bad. Raspberry jam? I don’t think so.”) The wallpaper is coming up at the seams, and the linoleum refuses to stay tucked under the radiator in the one corner. If my father were around he would fix that with his hot-glue gun.
There’s a burnt smell that always seems to linger, the result of years of abuse of the oven’s self-cleaning function. I know this room like the back of my hand, right down to the Charles Chips cookie tin on the counter that, sure enough, is still there.
Before I can fix that drink, I’m tackled by three nephews, the oldest of whom is six. William and Zachary are Kenny’s boys and Aaron belongs to Naomi; all three are like small cheetahs learning to take down an aging gazelle. My only hope in getting them off me is a plan—dragging them to some watering hole with the hope that I can hold my breath.
“Uncle Daniel is here too!” That’s an easier tactic.
The boys freeze, focus their sights on Daniel, and pounce with coordinated precision. Daniel lets out an excited yell as he’s tackled, then trudges slowly into the living room with William on his back and dragging the other two, who are clutching his legs. Domino jumps and barks and nips at their heels, her pudgy body taxed by all the excitement. Daniel looks back at me and smiles. In another life he would make a great dad; he loves this family chaos.
Naomi passes them on her way into the kitchen and yells, “Just steer clear of the dining room!” She selects a cube of cheddar from an appetizer platter and pops it into her mouth. “We’re eating off of the good china today.”
“Fancy.”
“We have our own china room now, like at the White House.”
“Naomi,” I say, part protest, part greeting. I squint my eyes and am surprised to recognize some of my father in her. “Or, should I say, the Honorable Naomi.” I haven’t seen her since she was appointed mayor of her small town.
“Ugh. You and Kenny are both the same. It’s not a big deal. Everyone on the council takes a turn.”
We hug, and Kenny appears from the living room, where he’s been watching the game, and we high-five on his way to the fridge. We look more and more alike with each passing year, even if I’m a few inches taller.
“Either of you want a beer? Madam Mayor?”
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