“You’re hijacking your parents’ stories, buddy?”
“Shut up, Quinn,” he said, embarrassment plain on his tanned face. “I’m going to get another,” he said, holding the beer bottle in front of me. I looked down the nose of mine, into the bottomless amber darkness. I still had some left. “Want one?”
“Sure,” I said. In retrospect, not because I wanted more beer. But because I didn’t know what it was I wanted. Because when life gets quiet or uncertain or loaded with that dampness before truth, there was always something to fill it in. Because we can always sip instead of think.
Before he left to find beers, Phelps looked at me, studied me, looped a strand of hair around my ear, and asked me a question he’d come to ask me many times, too many times: “Am I boring you?”
At this, I smiled sweetly, and said something that was true at the time. “You couldn’t bore me if you tried.”
“Am I fat?”
It’s not even eight in the morning.
“No,” Sage answers. He races around our apartment, coffee cup in tow, cleaning up clutter. Both of our mothers arrive in a few days. Typically, I get more than this, more than the one-word response that he must utter as a man who wants to survive.
“Victor thinks I’m fat.”
“Of course he does,” Sage says, flipping through a thick stack of bills we haven’t paid.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, if you start realizing that you’re in good shape, that you are far from fat, you just might not need him anymore. And that wouldn’t be good for little Victor’s bank account.”
“He’s not little, Sage. And why does everything have to be about money to you? Not everyone’s a banker, all hot and bothered by the bottom line. Some people care about other things, like helping people for instance,” I say.
“Like my super-charitable wife-to-be who spends hundreds of dollars a week sculpting her figure when she could donate it to some worthy cause?” Sage’s eyes wander to Katie Couric, who gesticulates wildly while talking to George Clooney about his ever-baffling bachelor status.
“What? Katie deserves your undivided attention, but not your future wife?”
Sage is quiet. He runs his fingers through his hair. It’s gotten a bit long. “Yes, actually. She actually talks about things; it isn’t all about her. Self-obsession gets stale.”
“It’s Katie’s job to talk about things. She has a freaking script and now I’m the self-obsessed one? And I hate to break it to you, but Ms. Couric has a team of Victors. How do you think she gets those legs that apparently hypnotize you?”
Sage doesn’t take the bait. He continues his efforts to bring order to our chaos.
“Too bad Katie’s too old for you. Though you never know these days. She’d probably love your new surfer dude coiffure,” I say, running my fingers through his hair. “And a little Botox here, Restylane there, and she could pass for thirty.”
“Isn’t that fascinating?”
Hula curls up on top of the pile of mail, frustrating Sage’s sorting efforts. He purrs, apparently oblivious to the brewing storm in his midst.
“If you spent half the time you spend with Victor learning to drive you could get a license like the rest of us human beings. You’re twenty-seven. You have a law degree, a mortgage, we’re getting married, but no license.”
“Barbara Walters doesn’t drive. And no one’s knocking her. And she’s doing just fine, isn’t she?” I say. “Why is it always the driver’s license, Sage?”
He doesn’t understand that New Yorkers don’t drive, don’t need to drive. When I hit the landmark age of twenty-one, I began carrying my big navy passport to bars.
“It’s just symbolic. I love you, Bug. But you’re in so many ways a child, refusing to grow up. My own little Peter Pan.” Suddenly, he flashes a bright and conciliatory smile.
“Petra Pan,” I say. “As if that’s a crime.”
I’m quiet. I don’t have the energy to argue with him.
The silence stretches on and I fill it in with those three words we say when we’re scared of silence. “I love you.”
“I love you,” he says back.
Suddenly, these words seem strange. Suddenly, it seems as if we are reciting lines from a script, a predictable script. And maybe we are.
“I know you think it’s boring, but one of these days, we’re going to have to grow up, start paying these bills…” he says, waving them about, “and stop drinking like nineteen-year-olds. After a certain age, it’s not cute to be irresponsible.”
Sage has cleverly substituted the royal “we” for “you,” but I can see through it; this is about me.
“You used to love that I drink like a college girl,” I say. “Here I’ve been convinced that it was one of my most alluring features.”
I laugh, but find no echo.
“You’re right,” I say, and he is. Time to grow up. “But it all strikes me as boring. Responsibility can be boring.”
As I say these words, I think of Phelps. Of course I do. Because they are his words. Practically his mantra.
“Is that the rumor these days?” Sage stops what he’s doing and looks at me. “Are you getting bored with me like you did with him?”
“No,” I say, a bit too quickly. “Of course not.” I grab the bills out of his hand, place them on the counter, and hug him.
“You know something?” I say. “He liked that I drank.”
“Or maybe he didn’t care,” he says. “Maybe he was afraid of what would happen if you dried things out. Of what you might say and learn and become. I’m not scared.”
And these words, these simple words, slice me. Because they might just be true.
“Marriage will no doubt transform me,” I say, nodding. To him. To myself. But even as I utter these words, I know they are weak. Marriage doesn’t transform people. It just brings them together and they transform each other. Or try to. I know that in life there’s no silver bullet. There’s no happily-ever-after. Evolution does not occur with a simple exchange of saccharine vows. But still. Sometimes I want to believe that marriage will change me.
Sage looks at me, eyebrows arched, skepticism clear in tired eyes.
I nod. “Once your wife, I will all of a sudden drink like a twenty-one-year-old.”
As Sage smiles, those eyes, those bright eyes, glaze over with amusement and defeat.
And it hits me. Here I am. In the tub. Caught in a passing storm of predictability. Living in a world of clichéd confections: of bankers and lawyers, of diets and trainers, of Eiffel Towers and dark chocolate truffles and champagne, of bickering and boredom, of paying bills and missing an ex. Of meaningful silences peppered with platitudes and profanities and clumsy jokes.
Chapter 15
There is something about mothers. Whether your own or someone else’s, whether Northern or Southern, liberal or conservative, they spill bits of wisdom as they walk. They just know better. Depending on the day, this can be infuriating or enlightening.
Our mothers are both in town. Today, Sage and I will each spend the day with our own mother. Tonight, we will all come together for dinner. And hope for the best.
“You can’t hide behind that mountain of mascara,” Mom says, gripping her glass of sangria with both hands, studying my eyes. “At least not from me.”
I’ve never been comfortable with Mom’s stare. Toughen up. Grow a thick skin. As a little girl, she hurled these clichés at me. To this day, the woman can still see right through me.
We sit in Cilantro, the small Mexican restaurant on my corner. The walls are deep red and the bar boasts an impressive array of tequilas. It’s quiet at this hour. The bartender rests up for happy hour, leaning elbows on the bar he periodically wipes down to appear busy.
“Frida Kahlo, now that was a real woman. She didn’t live by the rules; took life by the horns even though she had polio. Slept with men and women, was wined and dined by Picasso, a fan of good tequila and raunchy jokes,” Mom says,
speaking as if she knew this woman, as if she was a friend from college. “You know she had an affair with Leon?”
Met with my blank stare, she clarifies. She means Leon Trotsky, the Communist leader. “She was even arrested for his murder.”
“She had a unibrow, Mom,” I say. What I don’t say is that this is about all I know about this Frida Kahlo, that she failed to pluck in that important place. Oh, and that Salma Hayek played her in a recent movie.
“Yes, that was her trademark…her way of saying fuck you to conventions. And people thought she was beautiful.” Growing up, my parents didn’t swear in front of us. Only behind closed doors and only once in a while. Certainly, we weren’t allowed to swear. Since Dad died, Mom has embraced profanity like a long-lost friend.
“So if I had a little less mascara and some renegade eyebrow hairs, you’d approve?”
Mom smiles, shrugs her shoulders, and takes a Frida-sized sip of sangria.
April’s coming to a close already, but it’s the first time I’ve seen her since Sage and I got engaged. It’s just us girls—mother and daughter—catching up over chips and guacamole and a deliciously illicit pitcher of red sangria. I’ve decided this is well within the firm’s nebulous definition of “personal day.”
“I like my makeup, Mom. This is New York City, not Wisconsin. We do things a little differently here if you hadn’t noticed, or don’t you remember?” I say.
The makeup thing has always been one of Mom’s biggest buttons to push. As a teenager, I layered on thick foundation when I was mad at her. I lined my eyes with harsh black smudges. Mom said she hated this because she said makeup hid the dusting of freckles on my nose that darkened each summer, the spots that made me ME.
Today, Mom’s face is clean-scrubbed with hints of childhood freckles, faded and few, freckles I’ve inherited in unfair quantities. Her smooth skin belies her age; after almost six decades, it’s milky white and very close to wrinkle-free, thanks to a daily regimen of SPF 30, well-placed umbrellas, and a collection of impossibly vast sunhats.
And she, like me, has two very distinct eyebrows.
I know very well that Mom isn’t launching an intervention about my abuse of cosmetics, but I’m trying to put off her inevitable—and inevitably astute—analysis of me.
“Oh, don’t I know. Even though we lived here for thirty-odd years, this place never ceases to amaze me. And I’m beginning to see you really belong here. I never really felt like your father and I fit here,” she says, wiping her lips with a green paper napkin. A shred of napkin sticks to her upper lip, but I don’t tell her. “But you…you and your brother are different. You’re becoming quintessential New Yorkers, I daresay.”
“Despite good intentions, Mom, you’ve produced a pair of New Yorkers,” I say. “This probably could’ve been avoided by not giving birth to us here, or, say, raising us here. If you wanted us to be Midwesterners, you should’ve stayed put in Michigan.”
Mom’s right about one thing: She didn’t fit here. As she would have it, she chose not to. She was never like the other private school mothers—coiffed creatures dripping in pastel cashmere and diamonds who wintered in Palm Beach and summered in the Hamptons, stick figures who’d mastered the affected cocktail party guffaw. I went to school well before the Botox-and-pocket-dog wave, but these women no doubt have both today. Mom wasn’t the prototypical outsider though; she claimed to be more of an amused observer who never quite penetrated the inner circles of dinner parties and gossip and said she never wanted to. She nurtured strong opinions of the world of privilege in which she and Dad raised us, a world they at once shunned and embraced. The world they chose for us.
“Mom, I’m a New Yorker. It’s not a crime.”
“Point taken, counselor. I still cannot get over that ring of yours. It is gargantuan,” she says, masterfully changing the subject, grabbing my hand for at least the third time to pull it closer to her. Her comment’s not exactly a compliment.
“I know what you think of big rings,” I say. “But don’t blame the boy. His mother picked it. Same as hers. It’s like she wants me to morph into a copy of her. You will witness tonight why that is a scary notion.”
Mom nods and smiles.
“I bet Frida didn’t even wear a ring,” I say.
As she studies my ring, I study hers; a thin gold band and a small round diamond. It’s beautiful. Even though I was a tomboy, I asked to try it on every once in a while. Each time, staring into that diamond, that diamond from Dad, I was mesmerized anew. Mom never wore the ring while teaching; presumably being the happy wife didn’t jibe with her rants on feminist independence under the law. She would put it on each night, though, when she got home. Now that she’s retired, now that he’s gone, she wears it all the time.
“I don’t even want to know what kind of money he spent on this, this, um, little bauble,” she says, running her finger around her sweating glass and laughing. Her laugh—deep and gravelly, purely contagious—is a relief.
“Does he make you laugh?” she asks. “We get older, we can’t help that, but we don’t ever have to stop laughing.”
“Do I seem laughter deprived to you?” I ask. Am I laughter deprived? I try to think of the last time I laughed so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. I can’t.
Mom has always preached about the power of timely humor. So many people, she’s argued, glorify wisdom and accomplishment, financial integrity and social status, but that the real gem is humor. “So few people have it, I mean, really have it. The gift of funny, the ability to laugh loudly and deeply and make others follow suit,” she said.
Well, Mom has it. That much is for sure. And sitting here, halfway through a pitcher of sangria and a basket of tortilla chips with this woman, my mother, a generation older and wiser and funnier, I hope that her humor, even a fragment of it, is tucked away in my genes.
“Mom, none of this is important. I should’ve known that you would come here and throw a feminist wrench in my happiness. And now this lesson on laughter? I should’ve known this wouldn’t be easy.”
“Easy’s never good,” she says.
“Is that necessarily true? Maybe good things are often simple.”
Mom smiles. The sangria has stained her teeth. She’s never had braces. “Life isn’t a fairy tale, Prue.”
“Sage bought me a beautiful ring and he wants to marry me. Can you believe someone wants to spend his whole life with your daughter, your crazy little Prudence?”
“I love it when you call yourself that, Prue. You threw your dad and me for a loop when you changed your name. Now I kind of understand it, but it hurt a little—as if you didn’t want to keep the first gift we gave you, your name.”
Frankly, I hadn’t even realized that I called myself Prudence. I haven’t referred to myself that way in ages, and usually it’s when I’m at an airport handing over my passport. I’ve never legally changed my name, which always gave the parents a modicum of hope. I’ve chalked it up to laziness.
But now, sitting here with Mom, the woman who carried me in her belly, the woman who nurtured me through all my phases, I’m not so sure. Maybe I held on to my name for a reason. Maybe it’s a name I will grow into one day, something I have just saved for later. Until I’m ready for it. And maybe this was all part of the plan. Maybe Phelps was right after all. Maybe parents have blueprints for us, for who we will become.
“Oh, Mom. I thought you’d gotten over the name thing,” I say, knowing very well that she’s never gotten over it. Parents don’t get over these things.
“I know, I know. But you will always be Prudence to us, to me. And it’s just that…” she says, looks down, and pauses. The calm before the storm. I know Mom.
“What?”
“You’re getting married. Knowing you, you’ll probably change your name. You’ll be Quinn McIntyre. Born: Prudence O’Malley. Died: Quinn McIntyre. It makes me sad. It’s like you are leaving us behind. Finally, leaving us behind.” Her eyes are glossy with tears. She avoids m
y eyes.
“Knowing me? What does that mean? In case you don’t remember, I’m the one who changed her name when I wasn’t supposed to. What makes you think I will change it when I am supposed to?”
“Your rebellions, Prue, they’re so predictable. You spend so much time trying to be different, but…”
“Like mother, like daughter.” I say. “Last time I checked we were both lawyers. And you’re more of a housewife than I’ll ever be. Don’t go calling me the cliché.”
Mom’s silent. She pushes a glob of guacamole, now a faint brown, across her small plate.
“Plus, even if I do take his name like you did when you married Dad, you have to admit you love the name Quinn McIntyre. Mom, it couldn’t sound more Irish. You are going to have freckly little grandkids one day.”
“Who drink like fish,” she says. Her laugh slices through tears that have begun to glide down her pale cheeks.
“Like Frida,” I say.
Another moment saved.
I ask Mom if she wants more guac and she nods. The waiter, the little Mexican waiter with a postcard mustache, appears with the guacamole cart. Call it good service. Call it good old-fashioned eavesdropping. Mom and I watch as he grabs two avocados and swipes them into thin slivers with his big knife. Now, he slices the slivers the opposite way, rendering the avocados—once beautiful imperfect spheres—into tiny cubes.
Mom and I are transfixed. He drops the cubes into the little black pot, adds tomatoes and peppers, and begins smashing away, clobbering green with stunning aggression. I wonder if there’s anything behind that energy. Maybe he is just good and quick—efficient. This man spends his afternoons smashing while I spend mine hunched over my desk on a veritable IV drip of Diet Mountain Dew trying to get an assignment done so I can get home and watch primetime TV on TiVo.
“Avocados—are they fruits or vegetables? I can never remember,” I say.
Life After Yes Page 14