Love, in Theory

by E. J. Levy

  In the past her mother’s revelations have been painful—June’s father’s infidelity; her parents’ impending divorce; her mother’s donation (after June left for college) of all June’s childhood belongings to charity. “You’re only young once,” her mother reasoned, meaning June wouldn’t need the toys again, but June sometimes wonders if she has ever been young. “I was thinking of having children,” June said, hoping to wound. “Oh you were not,” her mother laughed. And, as always, she was right. June can’t imagine having kids. Having a mother is enough.

  June flies into Chicago on December 23, the busiest flight day of the year. LaGuardia, from which she departs, is crowded with cranky passengers burdened with gifts and tired children and the grim resign that major holidays inspire. CNN broadcasts airport delays and snow. Sometimes June thinks she sees Greg, the guy she has been dating, amid the swirling crowd, but it is never him, just some other lanky, six-foot guy with chestnut hair that falls into his eyes and a sexy, melancholy droop to his neck. Sometimes she thinks she sees her shrink.

  Despite a three-hour flight delay, June’s mother meets her at the O’Hare gate, cheerful as an elf and reassuringly unchanged: defiantly unfashionable in a navy parka and jeans, her gray hair still worn long past her shoulders. At fifty-three, her mother insists on dressing in grad-student gear circa 1973, the year June was born.

  But something about her mom is different, like a picture hung at a tilt, and it unnerves June. Ever since she inherited a small fortune from a wealthy aunt six months back, June’s mother has been behaving strangely. Often she is out when June phones her; when she’s in, she’s often giddy and vague. It has crossed June’s mind to wonder if her mother’s doing drugs again; her mother was a flower child in the sixties, before June was born, and now that her mom’s been freed from a day job, June fears she’s headed for a flower-power relapse. But June knows better than to ask.

  Her mom greets her with a brisk hug and a “Long time no see. You look terrific. How’ve you been?” as if June were a long-absent friend, a person with a life and a past of her own, as if her mother weren’t the central feature of her twenty-seven years.

  “I’m fine, Mom,” June says, conscious of eyes on them—the willowy Korean daughter and her short, squat, Anglo Mom. “Can we go home?”

  Exiting the parking garage, as they wait in line to pay, June’s mother reaches for her billfold and pulls out a photo, a snapshot folded in half.

  “I have a surprise for you,” her mom says.

  “I hate surprises.”

  “Oh, June Bug,” she says.

  For a moment, June feels oddly sick, afraid of what the photo may reveal, afraid that this time—at long last—it will be a man.

  Since her parents’ divorce fourteen years ago, her mother has not so much as dated. “What do I need with a man, when I have you?” she’d said to June and her brother, Sam. But June fears a change is coming, slow as tectonics, and as world-altering.

  June takes the photo in shaky hands and squints at it. She should’ve known: a rug.

  “What do you think?” her mother asks, breathless as a girl. “It’s a Norwegian kilim, eighteenth century. Dowry rugs like this are very rare.”

  And very weird, June thinks. To the Moorish template of geometric forms has been applied the palette of an Easter egg—pastel pink and green and yellow and orange. The combination looks somehow wrong: the cheery midwestern colors applied to a Near East design. On the back are scrawled its dimensions (4×6), a merchant’s name (Menendian), and price ($10,000).

  “Wow,” June says of the price.

  “Isn’t it?” her mother says, taking the photo back. “That’s just the word for it: it’s a wow.” She stares for a few seconds at the beloved image as if she can’t bear to put it away, then does.

  The apartment—where her mother has lived since the early seventies when she was a young mother and a student of East Asian history and June’s father was a professor of economics—looks much as it always has, except the coffee table is piled high with back issues of Oriental Rug Review and June’s old room looks like a seraglio.

  Her mother has transformed June’s room in her absence. Now the bookshelves are lined with volumes on textiles, her old bed heaped with cheap printed Persian rugs her mother purchased years ago—before receiving the inheritance—which she can’t bear to throw out but has no use for.

  “I felt precisely this way about Henry before the divorce,” her mother says, referring to June’s dad, as they sit drinking sherry in the living room. “I could see all the flaws in the manufacturing, but I couldn’t bear to get rid of him.”

  Her mother addresses June in an exhausted, sentimental tone, the tone June as a child heard her use with friends on the phone, and it is clear she has decided—in the way her mother has of making up her mind about how things are going to be without telling others involved—that June is old enough now to be her friend.

  June’s mother hums as she refills their glasses, smiling to herself, and June wonders if her mother’s drunk.

  “How’s your young man?” her mother asks, handing June back her glass.

  “Greg,” June says. Her mother never calls him Greg. June wonders how he is. “He’s fine, I guess.” June wonders if Greg is happy now; June wonders if she is. Despite her therapist’s best efforts, June is not convinced of the merits of happiness. Despair, June believes, is a crucial part of her personality. Her shrink says this is depressive logic, but June thinks happiness is overrated; she suspects a pharmaceutical plot: “If we’re in a war on drugs,” she’s asked her shrink, “is Prozac war by other means?” Her shrink has made meds a condition of her therapy, but June is pleased to find they have had no effect: despair has not abandoned her. The only consequences of note are dry mouth, appetite loss, and a jittery feeling in her legs when she turns out the light. Sorrow is still with her, like a twin.

  June’s mother talks about politics and rugs and inquires politely about June’s job at an educational publishing house; she asks about the raise June had been promised after her annual review. And June politely answers.

  Her family’s formality used to shock June’s friends, as had her mother’s blue eyes, her English features and oatmeal-colored skin. They found it cold. But June knows it’s a code for love, like any other, a pattern they make. Beneath the formality born of her father’s Korean discretion and her mother’s New England reserve is fierce feeling, a small bright thing, like the candle her father used to light before the image of his ancestors.

  June’s mother has tried to teach her about rugs, but June retains only the nomenclature, which she adds to her store of family hieroglyphs, the meaning of which she has yet to decipher. She takes the words away with her from these visits, carrying them home along with the gifts of clothing her mother gives her, things that June will never wear (crocheted vests; calf-length formal dresses with large, abrupt bows; skorts—part skirt, part shorts).

  June’s mother has taught her that yarn may be twisted clockwise, in an S-spun, or counter-, Z-spun. That wool is the most common fiber used in Oriental rugs but silk is better and, as in clothes, to avoid rayon. She has learned the difference between rectilinear (composed of angular geometric figures) and curvilinear designs (composed of floral motifs and often more intricate).

  She has learned that rugs—like all territory, like tiny nation states—have borders and fields (the large open spaces at the centers, where the principal pattern is).

  She has learned to name the parts of a rug (warp, weft, fringe, kilim, field, medallion, main and guard borders) as once she learned to name the parts of her own body.

  She even knows the seven categories into which each pattern fits: the medallion (at the field’s center); the repeated motif; the all-over pattern; open field; panel rugs; portrait rugs (from the end of the eighteenth century, depicting landscapes, historical events, European paintings); and prayer.

  As June goes to sleep on the pull-out couch in the living room that night
(her old bed too heaped with textiles to be cleared), she feels toward the rugs, which hang on every wall and cover nearly all the floor, an almost sibling rivalry she has never felt toward her brother, Sam. The two of them were more like long-term lodgers who shared a boarding house. After their father returned to Korea and their mother went to work, they had each gone their own way, passing one another quietly in the hall, each seeking a singular kind of comfort. Her brother—now a senior at Reed—found it in Buddhism; June—an assistant editor at a small educational publishing house in Manhattan—found it in books. Their mother took solace in textiles.

  At breakfast, they split the paper like an old married couple. June takes the science section and her mother the front pages of the Times. Occasionally her Mom looks up to share some bit of news about Sam (who’s spending Christmas at a Buddhist monastery) or the polity.

  When June looks up from her scrambled eggs and toast, she sees a man’s photo on the fridge. Where June’s report cards used to hang beside her brother’s drawings is a small black-and-white of a man in a tie. June’s eyesight isn’t great and she doesn’t want to stare. But she can see full well it is a man. And not her brother.

  “Want some juice, Mom?” June asks.

  “No thanks, bug.”

  June rises from the table and goes to the fridge. At the door, she looks at the photo and sees it’s not. It is just a JPEG from the Web: a nineteenth-century etching of a gentleman in coat and tie, beneath which is the caption: “Ask Doctor Kabistan: Advice for the Ruglorn.”

  June laughs.

  Her mother looks up from the Times.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Ma,” June says, “you’re obsessed.”

  After breakfast, her mother takes her through her latest acquisitions, pointing out familiar details—noting the popular motifs of boteh, herati, Mina Khani, Memling Gul. Her mother speaks not of price but of personalities—which, like price, depend on many factors: material, origin, design, condition, rarity.

  Her mother praises each rug’s qualities like she’s praising a child’s. She offers “rug rules,” as another mom might offer beauty tips: Silk—she says—is best, not only for its sheen and fineness, but for its adaptability to dyes, its natural resilience. Avoid antique washes, which like bleached hair, cheapen. (It is desirable to have dyes fade with time and use, but faking it is a fault.) Condition counts: Has it been damaged? Has it been skillfully repaired? Has it aged gracefully? Origins matter: not just the country, but the weaving district and availability of others from that region. (“A rug should not forget where it comes from,” June’s mother says.)

  Post-tour, June goes to the bathroom and when she comes back, her mother is staring into space. She has the deflated, slightly disoriented look she developed soon after the divorce. Sometimes June would come on her mom in the laundry downstairs, stopped halfway through folding a sheet or a towel, the cotton bent over her arm as if she were a waiter attending table, stock still and staring. She has that same look now, having come to the end of her rugs. And June knows that her mother needs her. There’s no one else. No man. No drugs. Just them, like always. For always. And she feels flushed with love and a desire to protect her tiny mom—her generous, vulnerable, compulsive-obsessive mom.

  “Ma,” June says, setting a hand on her shoulder.

  “Oh,” her mother says. “Yes? What?”

  “Want a cup of tea? I’ll make us tea.”

  “Oh, no,” her mother says, “No, thank you, June Bug.” Her mother looks around the room, filled to overflowing with patterns and books and rugs. “What now?” she asks. It is a big question, expanding like a hollow bubble in the room.

  “Simple,” June says, taking her mother’s hand. “We get your rug.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” she says.

  “But you can.”

  “It’s the day before Christmas, the streets’ll be mobbed. They’re probably closed.” Her mother looks a little gray, saying this, “Maybe somebody’s already bought it?”

  “Let’s try.”

  In their excitement, they leave without their coats. The frigid air beneath the gray sky is bracing, but it feels good as they race together for the train.

  The rug merchant, Mr. Menendian, greets June’s mother with the mandarin courtesy of the Muslim; he offers tea and opens his hand to indicate seats for them, two plump kilim-upholstered chairs. Before retrieving tea, he unfurls the precious rug like a banner at their feet.

  He explains to June, as if introducing a guest, that the rug is a Norwegian dowry. He points out the date woven in the border (1793). He explains that the girl likely wove it for herself, for her trousseau, in hope—or perhaps in preparation (he smiles at June)—for marriage. Then, after a decorous inclination of his head, he withdraws.

  June’s mother points out details—the girl’s initials, the rarity of such a rug. But she needn’t bother. June can see for herself the beauty of the thing, which seems to possess—in its very weave and weft, in the delicate but urgent colors—the ardor of a heartsick girl.

  “It’s very expensive,” her mother says, crouching beside the rug.

  “You should get it,” June says.

  “Do you think so?”

  “I do.”

  To own it, June thinks, would be like owning love itself.

  The Norwegian dowry kilim—which is not large, even rolled and wrapped in paper and plastic, it’s no larger than a bulky coat—has a chair to itself at the Kyoto Gardens, where they go to celebrate their purchase and Christmas Eve.

  When her mother goes to the restroom to wash up, June orders hot saki. The place is filled with variously Asian faces and Jews, the only ones out tonight. The smell of ginger and wasabi and soy and hot tea fill the room, and June feels a rare moment of pure contentment.

  Years ago, June’s shrink asked her what she loved (“love is a good place to start,” she’d said), and June was hard pressed to answer: she’s never known what she might want as much as her mom wants these rugs. The only thing she’s sure she loves is them—her crazy mom and long-absent dad, and for a while there, she thought, just maybe, Greg.

  She’s scrutinizing the menu, trying out tastes on her tongue, when her mother returns.

  “June, I have someone I want you to meet.”

  When June looks up, her mother is standing beside a tall, smiling, bald man.

  “Isn’t this a wonderful surprise?” June’s mother says.

  June wonders if it is a surprise or if this is her mother’s way of breaking bad news.

  “June, this is my good friend Mark Goldberg. Mark, my daughter, June.”

  “Nice to meet you, June,” Mark says. “You’re as pretty as your pictures.”

  “Isn’t he a charmer?”

  June wonders if he’s a gold digger after her mother’s cash, but she guesses not, given that he has no hair and is not a looker and wears a shirt of dainty pinstripes, a navy cashmere coat slung over one arm. Fiftyish, she guesses. He’s probably a shrink, she thinks, no, worse, a csw. He has the latter’s sheen of professional kindness, solicitude billable by the hour.

  “Won’t you join us?” June’s mother asks.

  Mark looks at June. “I hate to interrupt,” he says.

  “Don’t be silly,” June’s mom says. “You’re not interrupting. We’d be thrilled.”

  June looks away.

  “So this is the rug,” Mark says, patting the roll, as he takes a seat.

  “Do you have rugs?” June asks, meaning, does he collect, but it comes out wrong.

  He touches his balding pate.

  “Think I need one?” he asks, cutting his eyes at June’s Mom, then he laughs good naturedly, as a man in a toupee would not. June watches the two of them laugh.

  “So,” June’s mother says, “what looks good?”

  “I’m not hungry,” June says.

  “You were starving half an hour ago, bug.”

  “Must be the drugs,” June says. “Imipramine kills
your appetite.”

  June’s mother raises her menu a little higher, like a shield. June knows her mother hates this subject, hates even to hear meds mentioned. June’s despair is like a stain, a sign of damage, of poor repair, which her mother shies from, perhaps feels incriminated by.

  But Mark takes it in stride.

  “I know the feeling—all the drugs I used to take in college made me scrawny as hell.” He pats a solid belly. “Hard to imagine now.”

  June loathes these fifty-somethings with their chummy recollections of the sixties, as if they were forever young, which he is not.

  “I’m going to go wash up,” June’s mother says. “Order me a whiskey sour, will you?” she places her fingertips on Mark’s hand as she rises.

  For a few moments they sit in awkward silence. And sitting there, the old feeling returns—the furious swollen ache that feels like a terrible itch, as if her soul were allergic to her body, or she to the world, a terrible straining against the skin, which her therapist has told her is anger. It’s this anger that drove her once to try to cut her way out when she was fifteen, to slice her arms, like a nineteenth-century physician letting blood. All she wanted was a little more room. But there’s no more room.

  “Tell my mom I didn’t feel well, will you?” June says, rising from her chair.

  “June,” Mark says, beginning to stand.

  “What?”

  Perhaps it is the tone of her voice that stops him. He sits back down.

  “Good to meet you,” he says. “See you around.”

  June takes the El home, comforted by the clatter of the tracks, the sway of the illuminated cabin, which slides like a fat bullet over the streets, with her body safe inside; like the others in the car, she sways into the turns like delicate seaweed, like the plants in the aquarium she kept as a child. Gone now. She thinks perhaps the aquarium was meant as an object lesson, to teach them young about loss. Soften the blow. But it hadn’t. She’d been shocked when her father left when she was thirteen. Shocked, too, when Greg broke up with her last month without warning or excuse. Despite practice, nothing softens the blow. The clatter of the wheels on the tracks reminds her: loss is loss is loss is loss is loss.