One True Thing

by Anna Quindlen

  “I feel like my mother’s watching me, judging me, like she sees everything I’m doing,” I said.

  “Oh, honey,” said Jules, “I’ve always felt that way about my mother.”

  “But now I feel like she has the right.”

  “Oh, honey,” Jules said.

  By the beginning of April the grand jury had heard a dozen witnesses. Jonathan had been in town Easter weekend for his appearance. When I told Jeff I had seen him in Sammy’s that night, he said that he imagined Jon wanted to talk to me.

  “Did you throw a drink in his face?” he said.

  “The thought never crossed my mind.”

  “Before I die I’m going to break his nose,” Jeff said.

  “You have my permission,” I said.

  Jeff took me to the cemetery several weeks after Easter. He waited in the car while I wandered between the rows of stones like a tourist, reading all the familiar names, the names in the Langhorne phone book, on the high school class rosters, on the war memorial in the middle of the town square, on the brass plaques to one side of the doors of the lawyers’ offices and doctors’ suites, in the engagement and wedding announcements in the Tribune. James, Benson, Warren, even Best, Mr. Best’s mother, aged eighty-nine. They always said that he had been unusually devoted to her. Perhaps that was my bad luck. Or perhaps it was all the imagined slights over the years, the way I had always looked half amused at his wife’s dithering, the skating and swimming at the lake from which I had excluded his children, the puerile graduation speech criticizing the town fathers for their insularity. “Holden Caulfield couldn’t have said it better himself,” said my father, who was as contemptuous of Salinger as I’d been of the soft and pudgy Best children, improbably named Allegra and Herbert after some long-dead relatives, KATHRYN, said Mr. Best’s mother’s stone. Again my bad luck. Or perhaps he merely thought he was serving justice, or pouring the concrete footing of a midlife shift to politics. Perhaps there was nothing personal in it for him at all.

  My mother’s stone was already in place, a small gray rectangle of granite. KATHERINE B. GULDEN, it said. 1945-1991. I knelt and put my hands against it. I looked back and saw Jeff’s head turned away, the sunlight making a bright stripe in his auburn hair. Faintly I could hear a guitar riff from the jeep’s tape player.

  From the pocket of my jacket I took a trowel and began to dig two shallow troughs. The ground was cold and friable, with limp stringy remnants of yellow grass just below the surface. The deeper I dug the warmer it became, and I imagined that six feet under it was warm as toast. Warm as toast, I said, to soothe myself. Warm as toast. I looked at the stone and imagined the line beneath the dates: HER LAST MEAL WAS RICE PUDDING.

  The stripe in Jeff’s hair was just the color of her own, a warm red-gold, as though the sun was always shining on it. The dirt beneath my nails was a shade darker than her eyes. The Wild Turkey had been just a little lighter.

  I had gone to a farmers’ market to buy seeds and cold frames for Mrs. Forburg’s house, to plant her a perennial border and a vegetable garden. Moving toward the big stall where an Amish woman with silver-blond hair and almost colorless blue eyes had always sold bulbs, I saw a woman with red-gold hair wearing a navy peacoat. Her back was turned to me; she was picking over bulbs, leaning forward to look at the small photographs of flowers that were spiked above each bin, leaning in to ask the woman, in her white bonnet with a virginal frill framing her long oval face, some question about a small knotty tuber on the palm of her outstretched hand.

  So foolish, I thought to myself as I edged around people carrying hanging plants and flats of flowers, brushing by women with big pots of garish red tulips like rapacious mouths swaying on their pale green stalks. So stupid, as she moved away from the bulb stall, still with her back to me, and on to a circular wire display of Burpee’s seeds, looking at the Big Boys and Better Girls. She went over to a corner of the big warehouse building where peat and fertilizer were stacked in fifty-pound sacks, and out a side door into a blue car with some unreadable college sticker on the back windshield. I think she flashed a glance at me in her rearview mirror, and then she was gone, her hair still curving just above the navy collar of her coat.

  Years after, I remember, I read a monograph on grieving that studied bereaved children and found that many thought their mothers had moved away, gone to a new house, a new life, new children. “We are all children,” I said aloud as I read it, feeling foolish, foolish and correct, too.

  The troughs were finished and I took from my pocket the assortment of bulbs I had gone back and bought after the car had driven away, twenty-four in all: a dozen tiny grape hyacinths and a dozen dwarf tulips, small sturdy things less than a foot tall that would have ruffly pale-pink petals like improbable little birds. I dropped them randomly into the holes and patted them softly into place, planting them out of season.

  “You’re not allowed to do that,” said a man walking by in gray work clothes and a checked wool jacket stiff with dirt.

  “So arrest me,” I said, picking the soil up in small handfuls and letting it drop onto the bulbs until they finally disappeared. When the holes were filled, I put some mats of dead grass on top to keep the bulbs warm until the earth thawed, and wiped my hands on my pants.

  Jeff took me out to a diner on the highway afterward. We ate burgers with cooked onions and greasy fries and chocolate shakes and he talked about the handball game he had once a week with Mr. Duane and how difficult it was to tread the fine line between giving the older man a good game and not going all out and trouncing him. “Plus,” Jeff said, his mouth full, “aside from the question of leaving him with a shred of dignity, there’s the very real possibility that if I run him around enough he will keel over with a coronary. Pop’s in much better condition than Mr. Duane and he starts to get windy on me pretty early on when we play tennis these days.”

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “Ah, you know Dean Duane. One story about the glory days of the bull market after another. When giants walked the hallways of Dean Witter Reynolds and the corporate raiders were in the full flower of their manhood.”

  “I meant Papa,” I said.

  “He’s the same,” Jeff said. “Maybe a little better. I think he really misses the both of you. It’s like he had these two great things going and now they’re both gone. He’s stopped asking me to talk you into seeing him.”

  “Do you guys talk about me?”

  “Never,” said Jeff.

  “Mama?”

  “Nope. Nor will he discuss Edith Wharton or Jane Austen with me, or the shortcomings of the modern English major. It doesn’t leave us with a whole lot to talk about over our TV dinners.”

  “Not really TV dinners?” I said.

  “Nah, I just wanted to make your skin crawl. Actually, it’s a lot of pizza and takeout. Have you ever had the Chinese food from the place in the mini-mall just past the Safeway?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Unfuckingbelievable, El. It is the worst stuff you’ve ever tasted in your life, but if you pick it up late all the guys who work there are sitting around eating bowls of what looks and smells like Chinatown food, great fish and vegetables and sauce. So one night I point to this guy’s bowl and I say, ‘Gimme that’ and they all start talking to one another in Cantonese dialect or something, and when I get the stuff home, it’s moo-shu pork and fried rice. It’s Caucasian discrimination, like they think real Chinese food is too rich for our blood.”

  “Did Papa get a laugh out of that?”

  “I didn’t tell him. He doesn’t really resonate to that kind of thing, if you get my drift.”

  “You just don’t try with him,” I said.

  “And the feeling is mutual, dear, unless you’ve forgotten.”

  “You could have felt the same way about me.”

  “I did. But there’s more to you than meets the eye. Besides, you know many attractive women who can be introduced to me. Speaking of which, I saw Tere
sa the other day on Maple Lane. She was visiting Bobby Jackson’s dad, who has lung cancer.”

  “Wow,” I said. “For us, Mama was her only case. But for her, it’s one of so many.”

  “Yeah, but she has a special spot in her heart for you still, I think. She told me to tell you that she’s not seeing the guy anymore, and to ask you why the gorilla crossed the road.”

  “Because he thought he was a chicken.”

  “Whooa,” Jeff said, “you are good. Very good.”

  “That means the lady with the kids and the breast cancer has breast cancer again.” I shook my head. “It never ends.”

  “She said just the opposite. She said to tell you she thinks of you often and it will all be over soon.”

  “I know. She called me that night after she saw you. She sounds good, although she says she has two patients now who are fading fast.”

  “Are you going to go see her?”

  “Maybe,” I said. What I didn’t say was that when I had asked Teresa whether I might take her to dinner to thank her for everything she’d done, she replied quietly, “The hospital has asked me not to see you until after all this is settled.”

  “Et tu, Teresa,” I said.

  “That is not fair, Ellen,” she said evenly. “I want very much to see and talk with you and I am very concerned about you. But it is important to other people that, for now, I keep this job.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “We will talk after,” she said. “For a long time.”

  I made no social feints, no more trips to Sammy’s. I knew why Jeff chose a restaurant fifteen miles from home and then chose a booth with no other diners seated around it. My voice had automatically taken on a quieter timbre, the better to avoid being overheard. There were fewer messages on the machine, but the assisted suicide and euthanasia zealots still pursued me, and a psychic from Missouri called twice to say that she had talked to my mother, who was very happy and forgave me.

  The huge bruise shaped like an open mouth on my left breast had turned from blue-purple to yellow-green, then disappeared, but I had never been able to reconstruct precisely how it had come to be there. Sometimes I would be reading or watching television, How Green Was My Valley one night, I’ll Cry Tomorrow the next, and a momentary tableau would be there before me, a tangle of limbs, frantic movements, loud cries, and I would put my head in my hands.

  “Do you remember a Chris Mortensen?” I asked Mrs. Forburg one night when she was correcting essays on Pride and Prejudice.

  She nodded. “Nice boy,” she said. “His father used to bounce him and his mother around a good bit and his mother was an alcoholic, and not a recovering one either, but somehow he turned out very sweet, the kind of boy who’d help you get your car out if it got stuck in the snow in the parking lot. I’m surprised you know him.”

  “I met him in passing one night.”

  “He comes to Al-Anon sometimes. I think he goes to meetings himself, too, although I can’t say for sure.”

  “AA, you mean?”

  She nodded again. “Whether he inherited it from Mom or started in because of Dad, I’m pretty sure he had a problem. Although maybe he’s working on it now.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said.

  “Things are tough all over,” she said. She passed me a sheet of looseleaf with a single sentence on it. “The girl named Elizabeth in the story is a snotty bitch!” it said. “What should I reply?” she asked with a small smile. “It’s true,” I said. “But reductive,” she said. “Write that,” I said, “‘true, but reductive.’ That’ll knock him for a loop.”

  “Why do you assume it’s a boy?”

  “The bitch part. I don’t know. The snotty stuff. It sounds like the cute girl with the locker next to his is ignoring him so he projected onto Jane Austen. Write: Please see me after class and we can compare and contrast the courting rituals of nineteenth-century England with your difficulty getting dates.”

  “True but reductive,” Mrs. Forburg said.

  “Are you going to lose your job because people think you’re harboring a lesbian murderer for carnal purposes?”

  Mrs. Forburg started to laugh. She was wearing a bright red sweater, and her face above it, red-cheeked and shiny, made her look when she laughed like the bride of Santa Claus. She even shook when she laughed, like a bowl full of jelly, although I would never tell her so because she was more sensitive than she pretended about her weight.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know, it just sounded so much like a cheap television tabloid show. Ellen, I’m sixty-three years old. I’ve been teaching for thirty-two years and I’ve been at Langhorne for twenty. I’ve been asked a hundred times why I don’t get a job at the college and I’ve always had the same answer—”

  “That George Gulden wouldn’t hire you.”

  “That may be true. I suspect your father would think I’d irreparably sullied myself by teaching slow fifteen-year-olds. But I like teaching slow fifteen-year-olds. They need me more than the A.P. kids do, who think they’ve invented the sexual undercurrents in violence when they read Macbeth or start writing poetry without capitals, and, in most cases, without meaning, after they’ve read cummings.”

  “You’ve just described Ellen Gulden, class of eighty-five.”

  “Yes, I have, and if that was all I remembered about Ellen Gulden, class of eighty-five, she wouldn’t be here.”

  “The girl named Ellen in the story is a snotty bitch.”

  “True, but reductive. I remember meeting your parents at an open school night when you were a sophomore, that year you were taking senior A.P. English and we were trying to figure out how to keep you occupied for the next two years. And I suddenly understood the pressure you must be under, trying to emulate this extraordinarily cerebral and remote man on the one hand and this extraordinarily warm and nurturing woman on the other.”

  “It never occurred to me to emulate her.”

  “Then what have you been doing for the last six months?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Oh, that answer is really beneath you. You know exactly what you’ve been doing. You’ve been doing the right thing at enormous personal cost. And now at the end to somehow be blamed for it—it’s a Goddamn outrage and I’ll tell anyone who asks me. They say that no girl becomes a woman until her mother dies, but all this is ridiculous.”

  “In my case it should be father.”

  “Well, father then. Your father’s dead to you, isn’t he? You never see him. You never talk to him. Wasn’t your image of your father always just …” she looked up, narrowing her eyes, as though she was searching for the word on the wall of the living room that held a print of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, the attentuated arms and yearning posture always reminding me of how my mother had looked that day when we’d had our picnic above the college. “Wasn’t your image of your father always just refracted through your mother’s belief in what he was? Wasn’t he really just her creation?”

  “He has a very strong personality,” I said.

  “Does he? He has very broad mannerisms, I’ll agree, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a strong personality.”

  “I feel like I’m in analysis,” I said.

  “Self-analysis,” Mrs. Forburg said.

  “You still didn’t answer my question about your job.”

  “Sure I did. I said the best part of my job is dealing with the kids who need me most. And I’m eligible for Social Security. And if some of the parents of this town are dumb enough to boot me because a twerp like Ed Murphy wants to see empathy as a sexual perversion, they don’t deserve me. And you’ve avoided my observations about your family.”

  “My father is not dead. He’s in my head all the time. He’s a running commentary, that voice of his, like subtitles.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Her, too, but no commentary. Just a presence. Like God. There’s not a whole lot of room for me in there.”

  “Oh, hone
y,” said Mrs. Forburg, and she sounded just like Jules. “That is you.”

  The Montgomery County Courthouse was past its prime. It sat just beyond the green, up a small hill, behind a narrow swath of parkland planted with flowering fruit trees where people often ate their lunches in the warmer months. The library stood across upper Main Street from it, an old red-brick mansion with big square rooms that made for a rabbit warren of reference books, old texts, current bestsellers, and heavily used children’s classics. The courthouse was white-gray, with columns along its front, a heavy urnlike light fixture suspended from chains above its ornamented doors, and at the cornice line, just below the front roof, a quote from Shakespeare, BE JUST, AND FEAR NOT.

  The courthouse had been built at the turn of the century, and looked not unlike the building in which the Langhorne English department was housed; the same architect had designed them both. The smaller houses around it had been transmogrified into law offices and tide companies. But all the time we’d lived in Langhorne there had been constant complaints about the old courthouse, that the courtrooms were difficult to heat and air-condition, that the judge’s chambers were not large enough. Most of all there were complaints that the old courthouse was too great a distance from the offices of the prosecutor and the police, built some years before in one of the commercial developments that had insinuated themselves amid the corn and bean fields and stretches of undevelopable stony land far from Langhorne proper.

  The courthouse looked like the sort of courthouse habitually used in movies, and there had been a huge uproar when I was in junior high school and a television production company had come to town to film a pivotal scene in a true-crime drama on the shallow steps that led up to its columns and front door. The Tribune had run stories on page one about the movie, about the leading actor, about the use of Langhorne locals as extras. It had been one of the biggest stories I could remember, but not bigger than my own.