Joel and I put our gear into the back of his car and make our exit from the dive park at Marathon Key. My stomach has finally begun to settle down and I’m hungry. We’re driving along US 1 with the wind blowing through the windows and the sun jackhammering through the clouds. We stop at a little Cuban roadside joint for coffee and subs.
“Feeling better?” Joel asks. I nod.
“It’s funny,” I tell him. “The other day at aerobics class I got so tired. I couldn’t even finish the class. And then today . . . well, I’ve never stayed seasick once I got in the water.”
I gaze at palmetto bushes on the other side of the road. A yellow cat slinks under the table. It looks like a scrawny version of my own cat, Monster, who found and adopted me the day after a bad abortion six years earlier.
“Oh.”
“What is it?” Joel asks.
“I know why I’m sick,” I tell him, setting down my media noche on the round mosaic table. “I’m pregnant.”
As I sail down the escalator at the San Francisco Airport in my long black coat, I look into Hank’s eyes and I am reminded of smoky topaz. I slide into those eyes and find myself ensconced in a warm dark place. When Hank looks at me, he sees a woman carrying a burden. He sees cells multiplying, growing fat, thickening against him like a wall.
Hank kisses me when I reach the bottom, not a passionate kiss, but a soft dry kiss. He is shy about kissing in public places, even here in this airport, but he kisses me, and the glow I feel keeps the chill away, the chill I have felt coming like a long delayed winter. He takes my suitcase from the carousel in baggage claim and tosses it into the trunk of a rental car.
I close my eyes when we get in the car. I had no idea that I would be so tired, that pregnancy would be like a drug, that it would fall on me like the San Francisco fog into which we are driving.
“There’s damage from the earthquake everywhere,” Hank says. “We’ll have to stay at a hotel here by the airport. All downtown is closed.”
“Mmmm,” I answer and nod against the cool windowpane. Then I rouse myself and say, “Not the best time to take a vacation to San Francisco, I guess.”
“It won’t matter,” he says. “We’ll go up north and see the mountains, maybe drive into Nevada.”
Hank grew up in California, but we live in Florida. Our yard is a rain forest and our swimming pool is an emerald pond. When it is not emerald, but chlorine-doused blue, we drink Cointreau and loll in the water in the moonlight. We are not married. He travels for a television network. I work for a newspaper. We planned this trip to California months ago—long before the earthquake happened, before the pregnancy. I told him the news on the phone. I knew he would not be happy about it.
In San Francisco we eat prawns, we buy sourdough bread and Ghirardelli chocolates, we laugh at the seals in the bay because they remind us of our dog, and we drive down windy little streets and visit Chinatown. We appear to be blissfully in love, but we both know that it may be the last time in our lives we ever feel like this.
We leave San Francisco and drive north through small California towns. We steal an apple from an orchard and share it, the sweet juice dripping down our chins. We eat seafood in Eureka and stay in the oldest hotel in town. We drive to Mount Shasta and hike through virgin snow. We stop wherever we see rocks and streams. He collects water in a canteen he has had since he was a Boy Scout. I sit by the stream, my long black coat fanned on the rock, and drink the cool water from his canteen. The air around me is a fresh new skin. Every single moment seems to be amplified, like the slow motion of the cinema; every moment deepens and widens and holds more than just time.
As I am standing by a grape arbor above Jack London’s house, a rainbow stretches across the sky like the trail of a running goddess. I can see the beauty, but I cannot feel it. Hank has grown silent, and I am like someone inside an upturned glass. People will wonder why I am so sad. He’s just a man, they’ll say, and not a very good one if this is how he treats you. But I am still the fatherless girl, the girl who stuck needles in her arms and straws up her nose and drank her way to oblivion until I found the one person who could drive away the demons.
After we visit Jack London’s house, where we see two startled deer and the charred ruins of Wolf House, we head west into the desert. The unspoken fear that has dogged him ever since he learned I was pregnant has caught up to us and clings to his back. He realizes that I am not going to change my mind. I am going to have this child.
We catapult into gaudy, glitzy Reno. I am perpetually hungry. At three in the morning we eat in the hotel surrounded by gamblers edgy to get back to their games. We glower at each other with raccoon eyes. His ragged fear has turned into rage. My passivity has evolved into stony stoicism. The handshake is over; we retreat to our corners.
We go to Virginia City—dirt and dust and a cold wind blowing by brown shops selling turquoise jewelry. We pace along the sidewalks, saying nothing. Then I see a dusty cemetery with toppled tombstones. In the cemetery I stare at tiny little graves, and I can’t help thinking about the last time, my legs up in stirrups, the tube inside me, the sucking sound, the sudden inerasable pain. The hemorrhaging afterward.
We get back in the car, and his pain spills out of him like oil.
Why, he wants to know, over and over again, why must you do this? Why, I ask, why can you not accept this?
“I want you out of the house,” he says.
“Fine,” I answer.
And before I know it we are barreling down a desert highway, the Sierras looming up beside us. I look at the dusky mountains and the hills that look soft and rounded as if patted with two soft hands. I see the thrusts of earth, the long lines of sediment sticking out at an angle showing the pattern of a fault line. This scenery is the result of old upheavals. That’s how it is. You can start off with everything looking one way, and then something happens, and the landscape is changed forever.
I remember that I fell in love with him because he was so different from every other man I’d ever met. He didn’t care about my past. He gave me freedom to come and go. He never said anything he didn’t mean. He had a gentle side that he kept hidden behind his humor. Now I am wishing he were more like other people—that we were more like other couples who get married and have children and are happy about it.
Finally, we pull over and stand outside the car watching the sun shoot purple streamers of light as it sets over the desert. The sand reflects the sky like a still lake. The beauty makes me think there must be a God, so I ask for a miracle, but nothing happens.
The sky blackens. Hank does not look at me.
We get in the car and head to LA where he leaves me in a hotel room with a plane ticket home. When the door shuts behind him, I stare at nothing for a long time. Then I go into the white tiled bathroom, take off my clothes, turn on the water in the bathtub, and sink down.
I think about my mother—she wasn’t perfect, but I never knew anyone who tried harder to be a good mother. Alone, she raised three children, supporting us with her musical talent. Her mother, Skipper, raised four children by herself during the Depression. Skipper was one of the first women to be a licensed riverboat pilot. She worked as a cartographer during World War II. My mother’s paternal grandmother supported her son after her husband ran off to be an actor. She worked as a reporter and a probation officer for the courts where her son later served as one of the most powerful judges in Connecticut.
I realize I come from a long line of strong women at least as far back as the Puritans in the sixteen hundreds, who left everything they had known and boarded ships to come to America. They and their daughters would lose husbands and children to wars and diseases. Some of their granddaughters would go to college. One of them would become a famous poet. They worked. They persevered.
I don’t want to be like them, I’m thinking, as the warm water rises around me. I don’t want to have to be strong. But I might as well wish for brown eyes instead of blue. The earth may be breaking apart under
my feet, but the resolve of generations before me and of the new one inside me is leading me to solid ground.
FOUR
MAY 1992
Hank calls. He’s changed his mind. He sends money and presents for the child he hasn’t met. His mother writes me a letter. He sends a check to help with my expenses. I agree to meet with him.
Two years earlier I had moved with my three-month-old daughter to Tallahassee and reenlisted in graduate school to get a PhD. I figured if I was going to be a single mom, being a college professor was better than working twelve-hour days as a freelance journalist. I qualified for food stamps and Medicaid, I taught classes for very little pay, and my mother sent money.
On Derby Day, Hank, who has gotten a pilot’s license, flies a small rented Cessna to the airport in Ocala, Florida, halfway between Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. I drive down with my two-year-old child in the backseat and meet him at the airport. I’m not sure how to respond to him. I’m not even sure how I feel about him anymore, but he’s here, and he has a legal right to be a part of his child’s life. I’m willing to give him a chance.
Hank gets in the front seat, spins around, and takes one look at the child.
“Who are you?” he says.
She stares at him with brown saucer eyes that match his own; at that moment they fall in love with each other, and our fates are sealed. Hank sells his house and moves up to Tallahassee with us.
One day when we pull up to the babysitter’s apartment, Emmy gets out of the car, looks at Hank, and says, “Hank, love you.” Then she slams the door and runs inside to play. He’s the first person she says that to.
A year after our reunion, we get married at a little wedding chapel in Lake Tahoe and come home with a couple of coffee mugs that say, “The Party’s at Harvey’s.” These are our wedding mementos.
My mom had retired from her myriad of jobs in Jacksonville and moved to Edenton, NC, and we’d make occasional forays up there to visit. The drive from Tallahassee to Edenton took an eternity. My mother also came to visit us in Tallahassee at least once that I can remember. I know this because I have a picture from when we went to the opera.
In the picture I have of her from that visit, she is standing by the fountain in front of the auditorium at Florida State University, wearing a dark green velvet dress and holding the hand of fouryear-old Emmy, who has one leg out in an arabesque and is balancing on the wall of the fountain. My mother is heavier in this picture than she had ever been before—solid, seemingly immovable.
My mother became old in fits and starts. Every time I saw her, I noticed some surprising new mile marker. On this visit I discovered she could no longer keep up with me when we walked anywhere. I found I needed to walk very, very slowly. Her heart, she explained . . .she had congestive heart failure. I was nonplussed. She had never had anything wrong with her heart before—except a murmur she’d had since birth. The past twenty or so years she’d been an inveterate walker. That was her exercise, a way for us to spend time together, to talk and laugh. And now, all of a sudden (or so it seemed to me), we were cr-aw-ling. We had become characters in a movie, moving in slow motion, each step exaggerated and excruciating as the world seemed to stop spinning in space. Of course, I hadn’t planned for this when I got her and Emmy in the car to go to the opera. I had carved out just enough time for us to speed over to campus, find a parking space, and sprint to the opera hall. We barely made it.
During this visit, I kept thinking there was some way to “fix” my mother. At the time I had come across a set of five exercises called the Tibetan rites. A man who had supposedly discovered them in Tibet said that these exercises would have old bodies dancing like teenagers.
“Here, Mom, just do this,” I said. So with my agile thirtyseven-year-old body, I demonstrated the rites in the living room of our little ranch house. Spinning was the first one. I got my mom to slowly spin three times. (You’re supposed to build up to twenty-one.)
After the third spin, she was out of breath, and a bright red blood spot suddenly bloomed in her left eye. Shit, I thought, I’ve killed her. She’s had an embolism or something. But my mother survived whatever it was. Of course, she was a big disappointment to me, having gone and grown old like that. Where was my playful friend?
This is the last picture I have of my mother without a walker. The Buddhists teach impermanence—an idea that still confounds me. In my mind my mother is permanently laughing and vigorous, physically strong and intellectually at the top of the mountain. But today (many years later) as I sit on my front porch on a chilly autumn morning, yellow poplar leaves carpeting the ground, I am aware of my own mortality slowly ticking away. My doctor has informed me that my bones have already begun the process of deconstructing themselves. One day my daughter will look at me in shock and dismay as I can no longer keep up with her. And I—this I of this moment—will be just a ghost in her mind.
FIVE
APRIL 1999
Hank doesn’t want to leave Tallahassee. We’ve been fairly happy here in the land of the canopy road. I have my friends, Hank has his work, and Emmy goes to a small private school where the children never have homework or tests and yet still learn as much as kids in the state-sponsored gulags.
Now Hank is being offered a job in Charlotte, North Carolina. Oh, please, I silently intone, please, accept the job. I’ve lived in Florida all my life, and the opportunities for me to make a living in this college town with its cup running over with PhDs are just about nil. The one full-time teaching job I had thought I might get went to one of my friends instead.
So when Hank says he has the possibility of a real job with benefits and a salary and not as much travel, I’m ready to start packing. For one thing, Charlotte is only five hours away from my eighty-one-year-old mother, and I want to see her more than just the couple of times a year we now manage. He’s leaning in that direction but first we have to take an exploratory trip to North Carolina.
Hank, Emmy, and I are in Hank’s truck with Jaxson, our black labrador retriever. Jaxson is a sweet, dumb moose of a dog with one invaluable ability. He knows how to become invisible. This is an essential skill for a dog to have if you are going to be sneaking him into hotel rooms and other places where large beasts aren’t welcome. That first night we check into a cheap motel room on Independence Boulevard, which we will later learn is the ugliest street in Charlotte. A security guard stands at the top of the parking lot, watching as Hank and I lurk around, putting our things in the motel room, waiting for an opportunity to sneak the dog in while Emmy stays in the Blazer with the beast. With his full beard and bulging belly, Hank has an uncanny resemblance to Fidel Castro. We must surely look like we are grifters with a dead body to dispose of.
The suspicious security guard wanders down past Hank’s old Blazer while Hank and I watch from the motel room doorway. He peers into the window of the truck and sees an adorable eightyear-old girl who smiles angelically at him and waves while the ninety-pound dog lies at her feet on the floorboards as silent as stone. We laugh about this for months to come. Our little con artist. We couldn’t be prouder.
Although Hank isn’t happy about the move or the idea of getting up and ironing clothes to wear to work every day, he takes the job. I get a full-time teaching gig at a nearby college. The move is a tough one, but necessary. For one thing, I’ve got a souvenir from my days as an addict—a sometimes debilitating case of hepatitis C. Eventually I need to do something about it, and that something will surely require health insurance. So we find a pretty two-story house with a porch and a creek in the backyard, and we settle into our new lives in suburbia as if we’re normal people.
Neither Hank nor I really have the hang of this marriage business. I don’t know what his excuse is. He comes from a nuclear family unit, headed by two upstanding Orange County California Republicans. But I have only had the example of my mother and my two older brothers, all of whom did time living with my railing, egotistic, alcoholic father, who (luckily for me) left whe
n I was three. I should perhaps mention the stepfather experiment that didn’t work out so well either. Shortly after my mother married this man, he developed a taste for vodka, lots and lots of vodka, and for my teenage babysitter. My mother didn’t repeat the experiment after he skulked out of our lives.
When Hank berates me for not making enough money, I shrug my shoulders and go on doing what I love to do: writing and being involved in various unprofitable artistic ventures. He doesn’t like to socialize, and I could hang out with people all day. He’s a staunch Republican (though not the church kind), and I am definitely not (though I am fond of certain offbeat churches). But we’re affectionate with each other and faithful. He’s not a big drinker, and I gave up the last of my legion of bad habits soon after he came into my life. He keeps me sane. When the demons start to close in, he makes me laugh and they disappear.
Our favorite holiday is Halloween. Our first Halloween in Charlotte, Hank and Emmy carve a pumpkin. Hank draws the face and then shows Emmy how to cut it.
“That’s good, babe,” he says even when she lops off the jacko’-lantern’s tooth.
Hank uses his electronic ingenuity to create two glowing eyes that peer from the bushes of our house. He and Emmy make ghosts out of old sheets to hang from the trees, and I allow spiderwebs to accumulate on the porch. We know how to do this much.
My mother and I talk on the phone nearly every night. We have always been close, even when I was at my most awful. When I was a teenager, I started doing drugs like a lot of kids in my generation. The difference between me and most other kids was that I was an overachiever. I had to do more and harder drugs than anyone else—cocaine, heroin, Dilaudid, morphine. I fell in love with drugs and built a fortress around myself with them. Throughout those years my mother somehow never gave up on me. She bailed me out of jail. She sent me to drug programs. She told me over and over again, “This is not you. I know who you are.” Finally, after my stint in prison, the love affair lost its luster. Then I met Hank on a video shoot in Miami (I was the production assistant, he was the “genius” engineer), and he swept away any vestiges of the old druggie that lingered inside me.
Wait Until Tomorrow Page 2