The Grip Lit Collection

by Claire Douglas

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “And you think I do?”

  “Know Jamie? Yes, I do think you know Jamie. I think you know Jamie very well.”

  If she registers my smirky, insinuating tone, she doesn’t let on. She tears open a sugar packet, spreads the grains out on the table, starts writing her initials in them.

  Getting impatient, I say, “Why did Nica break up with him?” And when she still doesn’t respond, I pick up my spoon, bang it twice on the tabletop. “Come on, Mom. It’s a simple question.”

  “With a complicated answer. And not the one you’re imagining.”

  “And what am I imagining?”

  She brushes her hands over the sugar, erasing her initials, and looks directly into my face. “That I was screwing Jamie’s brains out.”

  The crudeness of her language makes me flinch. “So you weren’t?”

  “Give me a break. My sixteen-year-old daughter’s boyfriend? And, besides, two Bakers in love with him was enough, don’t you think?”

  This time I manage not to flinch. To give myself a few extra seconds, I return my spoon to its original spot to the left of my knife, line up the two utensils precisely. I’m hearing a very convincing denial of what I thought was my worst fear. So why isn’t the relief just coursing through my veins? Something in Mom’s face is holding it back, a certain tightness around her mouth. “You have something to say, say it.”

  She snorts. “You don’t want to hear what I have to say, baby. Trust me.”

  She’s right. I don’t. But I do want this to be over, and it can’t be over until she tells me everything. “Say it.”

  She looks at me, then shrugs. As she opens her mouth to speak, though, an electric bolt of fear runs through my body, bringing me to my feet so quickly my chair shoots out behind me, crashes into the wall. She stares at me in surprise. “I have to pee,” I mumble.

  The Bakery Art’s Café’s bathroom is unisex, naturally, and without a proper lock, just one of those flimsy eye hook things. There’s a chair inside, though, and I prop it against the door. After flushing down the bites of toast I throw up, I stand before the mirror, gaze at my reflection. I rinse my mouth out, rinse it out again.

  At last I return to the main area. Weaving through the jammed-together tables and scattered chairs, I make my way toward my mother.

  Mom lifts her cup of coffee, blows on it, even though it must be ice-cold by now. She reaches up, takes out her clip, letting her hair, a brown so dark it appears black—Nica’s shade exactly—tumble to her shoulders, then re-pins it in a slightly different way. She touches the middle tine of her fork, the edge of her saucer, the lobe of her ear. She’s stalling. It’s okay, I tell myself. I can wait.

  “I wish I still smoked,” she says with a sigh.

  “Even if you did, you couldn’t smoke in here. It’s as illegal in Vermont as it is in Connecticut.”

  “I could until someone stops me.”

  I look around, careful to avoid the eye of our waitress so she doesn’t think I’m trying to signal her. I spot a boy with nicotine-stained fingers sitting at a table by himself. I walk over, ask him if he has an extra cigarette. He pulls one out from behind his ear. I stick it between my lips so he can light it. It’s bent from the curve of his skull and tastes waxy from whatever he styles his hair with. I inhale without letting any of the smoke into my lungs. After thanking the boy, I return to Mom.

  “Talk,” I say, as I hand her the cigarette.

  She brings it to her face, drawing on the filter so hard her lips disappear. She holds the smoke in her mouth a long time before exhaling reluctantly. At last she begins: “I graduated from art school at twenty-one. Up until then, I’d lived in a small town in Vermont and Providence, Rhode Island, also a small town. I decided there’d be no more small towns for me. I wanted a big city, the biggest. I wanted New York City.”

  “So what stopped you from getting it?”

  “Money, not having any. I knew if I went there straightaway, it’d be hand-to-mouth, working round the clock to pay for some toilet bowl in a crummy neighborhood. No time for photography. No time for romance. No time for anything. It would be better, I decided, to move to a less expensive city for a year or two, save my pennies, develop a portfolio. I picked Hartford. God knows it’s cheap. And a lot of Connecticut is rural, important to me at the time because I was still taking pictures of twigs and berries. Plus, I knew someone who knew someone whose mother-in-law was the art teacher at Chandler and about to retire. I interviewed for the position and was hired.”

  She pauses to take another drag on the cigarette. What she’s saying doesn’t have anything to do with Nica and Jamie, but I’m interested almost in spite of myself. She’s always been so evasive about her past, so cagey with the details.

  “That first semester was lonely. I was the youngest faculty member by nearly a decade. I barely spoke to anyone outside the classroom. And I was spending most of my non-teaching time in the campus darkroom. And since I was a dorm parent I didn’t get out much on nights or weekends. I was making it through, but I was counting down the days. Then came the Alumni Winter Fund-Raising Luncheon. I would have skipped out, only I’d already missed the Alumni Fall Fund-Raising Dinner and I was skating on thin ice with Dean Crowley as it was, so I went. That’s where I met James. He was—”

  “James?” I interrupt. “James who?”

  She looks at me. “James Amory.” Like, who else?

  “Jamie’s dad,” I say, clarifying.

  “Well, not then he wasn’t. He was just James. Crowley used to trot him out at all the fund-raising functions. Still does. He’s an Amory, a direct descendant of one of the original Chandler Academy families. Represents continuity, I guess. Not to mention, he looks great in a three-piece suit. He looked especially great in a three-piece suit twenty years ago. The speech he gave that day wasn’t exactly impressive, but it was charming, self-deprecating. He noticed me as soon as I walked in. He was shy, though. I had to go up to him.”

  I’m in shock. I’m beyond in shock. I’m in disbelief. Mom and Mr. Amory? I’m careful, though, not to reveal myself. My voice neutral, I say, “Was he married?”

  “Not then, no.”

  “But he’d already met Mrs. Amory?”

  “They were engaged. Didn’t stop the girls from chasing him, though. He was tall and graceful and lazy-eyed, like some big beautiful cat.”

  “Sounds like Jamie.”

  “Jamie’s his twin.”

  “You were in love with him,” I say instinctively.

  Mom’s mouth turns down at the corners. “I never said that.”

  “You were, though, right?”

  She’s looking at me, the expression on her face an old one, as old as my memory. It’s telling me that, once again, I’ve disappointed her, have said something wrong, something nobody else would wish to have said, have failed, in the most fundamental of ways, to get it.

  “Love’s such an imprecise term,” she says, tipping her head to the ceiling, releasing a moody tendril of smoke. “Which love do you mean? What kind? Tenderness? Sentiment? Longing? Lust? Obsession?”

  I return her look. No way is she going to pull her cool number on me, shame me into muteness, make me too self-conscious to ask her to elaborate. Not this time. “Were you in love with him? Yes or no?”

  She shakes her head like she’s amused. “Oh, Grace. You’re still such a child.”

  “Answer.”

  “All right, yes,” she says, annoyed. “Yes, I was; I was in love with him.”

  “So what was the problem? He wasn’t in love with you?”

  “No, he was.”

  “But he was in love with Mrs. Amory too?”

  A scornful laugh. “In love with her money.”

  “I thought Mr. Amory was already wealthy. I mean, already rich,” I say, correcting myself without thinking, without even realizing. Mom hates euphemisms. Thinks they’re frumpy beyond belief—middle class putting on airs. I feel that wa
y about them too now, of course.

  Mom, catching both the error and the revision, smiles.

  Swallowing back my irritation with myself, I say, “Well?”

  “His family used to be but they weren’t by the time he came along. There was enough to get him through Chandler and Princeton and that was it. When I met him, his J. Press shirts were frayed at the collar and he was living at home while he studied for the bar.”

  “I didn’t know he was a lawyer.”

  “Trained as one but never practiced. Never had any intentions of practicing, is my guess.”

  “An aristocrat,” I say.

  “That’s right.”

  “And yet he was still willing to leave his loaded soon-to-be wife for you. Why didn’t he?’

  “She got pregnant.”

  “And you got dumped?”

  Mom smiles, but she’s angry. A stranger wouldn’t be able to see it. I can tell, though, by the way her eyes grow long at the corners. She doesn’t like the way I’m talking to her. So what. “That’s the short version,” she says.

  “Were you upset?”

  She doesn’t respond. Just taps ash into her saucer.

  “You were devastated,” I say. “Then what happened?”

  “Your father offered to cook me dinner. It was a couple months after it had ended with James, but I still wasn’t myself. Otherwise, I never would have said yes. It wasn’t that he was bad looking. His features were nice enough. There was something blurry about his face, though. You couldn’t remember what it looked like if it wasn’t right in front of you. I used to catch him staring at me all the time at school. I thought he was sweet.” The contempt she lets touch her voice when she says this last word is, I know, as much to hurt me as to insult him.

  I don’t react. Just say, “Well, the date must have gone all right.”

  “I showed up at his place, lonely and depressed, got drunk on bad wine and pregnant on even worse sex. That was the date.”

  “Jesus, Mom.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to know the truth.”

  “If that’s how you felt, why didn’t you get an abortion?”

  “I was going to. I’d scheduled an appointment at the local clinic. I just told your father as”—turning up the hand that isn’t holding the cigarette—“I don’t know why I told him, actually. Courtesy, I suppose. He dropped to his knee, proposed on the spot. He knew I didn’t have feelings for him, that I was still hung up on James, but he said he loved me enough for both of us and wanted the baby. The thing is, I knew I was in no state to be making life-and-death decisions. I was still walking around with a black cloud over my head. So I let him talk me into skipping that first appointment. I meant to make another one but I never did.”

  And there you have it. Not only am I the product of a pity fuck, I was this close to getting sucked into some doctor’s vacuum besides. I’d always known that Mom didn’t love Dad the way he loved her. I’d done the math, though. I was born just six months after the two of them got married. I figured that meant there was genuine passion between them at one point, even if, for Mom, it had faded. I feel sad for myself, sadder for Dad. “What next?” I say. “Not happily ever after obviously.”

  Mom stabs out her cigarette, drops it in her cup. “No, not happily ever after. You were only six weeks old. One day I was taking a walk with you in your baby carriage in Colt Park. James was doing the same with Jamie. All we did was look at each other and it was on again.”

  “He treats you like shit and you take him back? Just like that?”

  “I wouldn’t have under normal circumstances, but, Gracie, picture my situation. I woke up one morning and I didn’t recognize my own life. I was married to a man I barely knew, never mind liked, never mind loved. My dreams of becoming an artist, of bright lights big city, were circling the drain. I had this baby—you. And I loved you but you were after me constantly. Crying for me, latching on to me with those tiny little lips, sucking me dry.” She shudders at the memory. “You just needed, needed, needed—it never stopped.”

  “I was a baby, Mom. What did you expect? That I’d be able to discuss the influence of Rothko on the work of Nan Goldin with you? The difference between the Leica M6 and the Leica M7?”

  She’s silent, her eyes on the cigarette butt floating in her coffee.

  Suddenly my energy’s gone. I’m not even angry anymore. Just tired. Tired and depressed. All I want to do is go back to the car, drive home, fall into bed and never get out. “This conversation’s over,” I say. “I’ve heard enough. You’re right. I shouldn’t be kicking over logs. I’m putting this one back, okay? I’m putting it back.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I can answer the question of why Nica broke up with Jamie myself now. Somehow she found out about the affair that you and Mr. Amory were having and felt too weirded out to continue dating Jamie. That’s why she never gave him a reason. She was protecting him. Didn’t want to tell him his dad was a cheater.”

  Mom’s lips twitch, and I know that once again the dark scenario I’ve envisioned isn’t quite dark enough. “What?” I whisper.

  She rubs at a stain on the table with the flat of her thumb.

  I clear my throat. “Mom, what?”

  “James and I aren’t having an affair. Not anymore. We haven’t been together in more than seventeen years. It ended for good when I got pregnant and—”

  “I thought you started up again after you got pregnant with me.”

  “Not pregnant with you, baby,” she says, her voice gentle. “Pregnant with Nica.”

  “Pregnant with Nica,” I repeat dumbly.

  “I wanted him to leave his wife. He wouldn’t do it. Said he couldn’t risk losing his son. No mention of the daughter he’d be giving up.”

  “So Mr. Amory is Nica’s father,” I say, half thinking that this truth, too, will fall away, be denied or contradicted, exposed as false as so many truths have been today. But it doesn’t. It stands between me and Mom, as dense and solid as a brick wall. “How can you possibly know for sure? You were married to Dad at the time. You slept in the same bed.”

  She starts rubbing at the stain again. “Because I just know, all right? Without going into the gory details I—”

  “Go into them.”

  She exhales heavily, then says, “Your father and I were sleeping in the same bed, but that’s all we were doing in it.”

  “So Dad knew Nica wasn’t his?”

  “Well, presumably he knows where babies come from so how could he not?”

  “Did he know whose she was?”

  From the way Mom’s looking at me I can tell that the question’s never occurred to her.

  “What about Nica?” I say.

  “What about Nica what?”

  “Did she have any idea that she was breaking the law, both legal and natural?”

  “Oh, Grace, don’t be so melodramatic.”

  “Why not? It’s a pretty melodramatic situation—two family members fucking. I mean, how creepy can you get?”

  “All families are creepy in a way.”

  I stare at her, not believing what I’m hearing. “You’re quoting Diane Arbus to me right now?”

  She shrugs.

  “Or maybe you didn’t see them as family. I mean, she was Nica, but she was also your daughter, right? An extension of you? And you weren’t related to the Amorys, so she couldn’t be.”

  “I knew Nica and Jamie were related. But they didn’t share a mother.”

  “They did share a father, though.”

  “Oh, please. Fathers don’t count. You have one. You know.” Mom sighs. When she speaks again, her tone is softer. “Look, as soon as Nica and Jamie started dating, James and I discussed the situation. We decided the smartest thing to do would be to just stay out of it. If we interfered they’d just want to be together that much more. And they were only high school kids. It wasn’t as if they were getting married. It was puppy love.”

  “Yes, but puppy love le
ads to puppy sex. What if Nica got pregnant?”

  “I gave you girls the safe sex lecture before you hit puberty. I had Nica on birth control at fourteen.”

  “But people have accidents.”

  “If she’d had an accident, we would have taken care of it.”

  I look at her sitting there, legs crossed, hand draped over the top of her coffee cup, exuding self-assured feminine ease. If I could just smash open her skull, pick out the information I need, that’s what I’d do. Anything would be better than talking to her. And then I say, “How did Nica find out?”

  “James walked in on her and Jamie one afternoon. Turned out, he was okay with the two of them being together in theory but when it was right in front of his face he felt differently.”

  “Not so much of an aristocrat after all, huh? Scandalized by incest. How bourgeois.”

  She ignores the dig. “He told them to get dressed, asked Nica to join him in his study.”

  “Just Nica?”

  “James is very careful with Jamie. Doesn’t want to upset him.”

  “Why?”

  “Apparently at his old school Jamie had a problem with drugs.”

  “Had, past tense? Please, Jamie’s the biggest pothead I know.”

  “I can assure you,” Mom says dryly, “pot is not what James is concerned about.”

  I want to ask what Mr. Amory is concerned about then—a few psychedelics, cans of beer?—but am afraid of getting sidetracked. Instead I ask, “What happened in the study?”

  Mom’s eyes narrow in recalled anger. “What happened? James let his hair down is what happened. He told Nica everything. Told her about us, about him being her real father, about the pact to keep it all a secret. Then he begged her not to repeat any of what he’d said to Jamie.”

  “You heard this from Nica?”

  “From James. He called the next morning to check up on her. Said when she’d left his house the night before she was positively beside herself, crying so hard he was worried about her driving. He also thought she’d stolen a bottle of whiskey from his liquor cabinet. I was furious with him. Not just for letting her drive when she’d been drinking, but for blabbing. Especially without warning me first, not even a …”