“What do you mean, for once?”
“You’ve gone your whole life with your hands off the wheel, trusting someone would always steer you back to center, like your precious Paul protecting your job even when you pissed off the wrong people, me picking up your slack at home while you were at meetings half the night…”
“You’re a fine one to talk about picking up slack! When you’re writing, you’re barely alive to the rest of us, and that doesn’t count the occasional book tour. And don’t you dare mention Paul to me in that tone. You have nowhere to go with that argument.”
“I have never been flippant about our family.” Max pushed his hands into his eyes and looked at me again, his mouth hard. “You know what that mistake cost me. Costs me, still.”
“So you think I’m flippant, then? Careless?”
“Show me how you’re not when the doctor says you have cancer, and in the middle of telling you how you can fight it, how you can win, you throw your hands up and walk out, and now you’re telling me you won’t do it. Boom, just like that, with practically no information at all. All the while those tumors are growing…Mira, you have to do this. For the children. For me.”
“For you!”
He stepped toward me and I thought he was going to pick up his glasses but he grabbed my shoulders and put his face in front of mine, such that I couldn’t look away, and there he held me.
“You have to do this. I won’t let you die!”
“That hurts!” His fingertips bit into my arms and I tried to squirm away but he wouldn’t let go. I scrunched up my face and turned it away.
In my ear, he yelled, “Mira, are you listening to me?”
My mother used to say that, as she stood above me, looking down her long nose, ticking off my failures as a daughter and a human being.
And then something inside me shut off, and I felt Max’s heat dissipated by a coolness sprung from within me, and his voice seemed to echo and grow distant. It was from this place of coolness that I felt him let go of my arms and retreat.
I went to my studio to meditate, watching the gulls tease the harbor as I did so. It might have been minutes or hours later I don’t know, but Max came back, positively soaking with apologetic tears. I accepted his apology but told him I considered the issue closed.
He shrank away, assumed his deferential, attentive pose, and that’s the way it’s been for the past nine days.
Until this morning on the pier.
My door creaks open. I lift my head off the pillow, and it’s Max, his face crinkled up like it always does when he’s worried.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
“You won’t have to lock me in to keep me from throwing myself off the pier.” I push down the urge to giggle because none of this is actually funny. That’s clear enough by the look on his face. He’s aged a year since this morning. Ten years since ten days ago.
This has hurt him, too. I’ve failed to see just how much until just now. I’ve failed to realize how the fear of loss can turn outward, so panic looks like rage, love turns to screaming and demands.
I prop myself up and hold out my arms. “I could really use a hug about now.”
He comes to the bed with surprising alacrity for a sixtysomething man who spent all night on a half-deflated camping mattress. He folds his arms around me and nuzzles the top of my head with his chin.
“You know,” my voice comes out in a whisper, though I didn’t mean it to. “I’m scared shitless. Absolutely out-of-my-mind terrified.”
“Oh, Mira. Who wouldn’t be?”
“Katya, probably. She’d probably already be under the knife, telling the doctor to hurry up because she’s got a meeting.”
“She’s as human as anyone, she just tries not to show it. Not unlike someone else I know.”
“I don’t know what I’d be like without both breasts.” I didn’t even know I was going to say that. It just popped out into the air. I can tell by a shift in Max’s position that he’s surprised, too.
“Why, Mira. What do your breasts have to do with how wonderful you are? Don’t get me wrong, they’re good breasts.”
I laugh and wipe my eyes. “Good breasts? Is that all? And you call yourself a writer.”
“Round orbs, glowing like the moon.”
“Okay, go back to ‘good’ then.”
Max scoots down on the bed until he’s eye level with me. “I’d miss it.” He strokes the wicked left one lightly, making my nipple perk up. “But not as much as I’d miss you.”
My sweet, adoring Max. As I’m kissing him, his reading glasses fall from the top of his head and bop me in the nose. We giggle because it’s not the first time that’s happened, and he takes them off, tossing them carelessly so that they slide off the end table and clatter on the floor. That’s happened before, too.
I need more moments like this, like hearing my husband’s glasses hit the floor before we make love. I need many, many more moments like this.
He nudges my bathrobe off my shoulders.
Moments just like this.
I run a brush through my hair and wonder how I’d look without it. Maybe I have a weird-looking head. I try to remember baby pictures. Did I have a nice round one or a funky-looking potato shape?
Max has gotten dressed and gone off in search of brunch provisions in the pantry and to rally the troops.
Hair and breasts. Do I really need them? And anyway, the hair grows back, I think. Assuming I don’t die.
A coldness snakes down my back because I can see the scalpel hovering over me, and I shake it off.
It’s not that easy, like my family would have me believe. It’s not that easy to let them cut you apart.
I smack the hairbrush down and go in search of a dress to wear. Must get out of this room and this brooding. Time to be with my family before they all scatter again.
In the kitchen I find Katya, wearing the clothes she wore on Friday, business-meeting clothes, expensive and chic, if a bit wrinkled.
“Dad’s got the camp stove out,” she says, glancing at me before turning her eyes back to the contents of the counter. “So we should be able to manage a brunch, though we’ll have to eat in shifts, with such small burners.”
I’d anticipated my family’s not-so-organic eating habits and purchased old-fashioned hearty breakfast food. Pancake mix from a box, fatty bacon. Syrup in a bottle shaped like an old woman. I’ll have some muesli and juice, most likely. Also, I need to find that tea for Irina.
Katya rummages in the cupboard above her head. She’s tied her hair back in a sloppy twist speared through with a pencil. Her face is drawn into a tight mask of anxiety.
I move to her side. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Fine.”
“How are the boys?”
“Grounded all summer.”
I toy with the ends of my hair, which I’ve woven into a braid and pulled over my shoulder. “You know how sorry I am. I’ve already flushed the pot that was left.”
It’s a through-the-looking-glass moment. The mother apologizing to the child for poor behavior. When did this happen to me?
The others start filing in, wearing their traveling clothes, casual stuff that will get wrinkled from hours in the car. Darius and Irina come down the steps, hand in hand. She looks pale and clutches her husband’s hand. I notice he walks as close as he can to her without getting tangled in her feet, eyes on her, always.
“Hi, Mom,” says Ivan, with a bashful smile, one arm slung over Jenny’s shoulder. His T-shirt says, I MAKE STUFF UP. She has her arm wrapped around his waist, and she fits snugly next to his chest. They look like puzzle pieces. What was that Shel Silverstein book called? The Missing Piece, that was it. Ivan loved that story. But Jenny was never really missing. It was Ivan, missing the point, as usual.
“Hey, Van,” says Katya, eyes on the mixing bowl. “Whatever happened to Barbie? Did she make it home in the monsoon?”
“She sent me a text this morning about what a b
ast—” Van stops, noting his nephews and niece. “What a jerk I am. So I’m assuming she survived the night. Oh, and Kat? She sends her love.”
A ripple of laughter flutters across the kitchen. I notice that for once, Van isn’t pulling his ear.
Chip and Taylor approach me, eyes downcast.
“Grandma,” Chip says. “We’re really sorry.”
“Yeah,” adds Taylor. “We didn’t mean to get you in trouble with Mom.”
I try to hide my smile with my hand. They obviously believe the wrath of Katya is something not to be trifled with. “I appreciate that, boys, and while I don’t like that you went through my things, I’m the one who’s sorry. I had no business bringing that stuff in the house when you were coming.”
They start to shuffle away, and I stop Chip by his shoulder. In a low voice I tell him, “It’s not all fun and games, you know. I saw some kids get pretty messed up in my day, and saw some bad things happen to them. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a joke because it’s not.”
I have no idea if what I said meant anything to him, because he only nods and gently extracts his shoulder from my hand before turning back to the living room. He pours an orange juice from the carafe that someone set out and stands next to his father. The resemblance is startling. If not for the buttery amber color of his hair, like Katya’s, he’d be the very image of his father.
Charles looks like he’s about to throw up.
“Thanks for trying,” Katya says, energetically whipping the pancake batter. “If he doesn’t listen to me, he’s not going to listen to you. Especially when you do it yourself.”
“I had to say something.”
Katya stirs a few more times, and I say, “You’re going to whip it into a mousse if you keep that up.”
“How are you feeling, Mom?” She doesn’t take her eyes off the batter, but tilts her head in my direction.
I go back to playing with my braid. “Okay for now. Hard to believe there’s anything wrong with me.”
“There is, though. You know that, right?” Katya abandons the pancake batter and regards me with a hand on her hip. “You can’t pretend it’s not happening. And you know”—she drops her voice low so the children won’t hear—“it’s not like you’ll go gracefully if you just let it run wild inside you.”
My breathing feels too shallow suddenly, and I clutch at my heart. I consciously slow it down, deepen my breath, uijayi pranayama, my yogi would say.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to sound harsh. But I can’t feel good about you making these decisions until I know you have all the information.”
The family is talking in groups of two and three. The boys are asking Darius about the BMWs he sells. Kit and Reenie are talking about babies, Kit carrying on about how much she wants a baby cousin, preferably a girl, and suggests a name that sounds like Areola. Max works away trying to light the camp stove, which he finally does, putting on a pot of perk coffee.
No one’s talking to me at all.
“Do you ever wonder why you’re here?” I ask, not really to anyone in particular.
Katya has been washing her hands at the sink. “What?”
“I sometimes wonder what I’m really doing here, anyway.”
No one else seems to have heard. Katya comes closer, drying her hands on a towel. She approaches warily. “Is that what this is? You think you’re pointless?”
“The university doesn’t want me anymore. You kids don’t need me; in fact, sometimes I wonder if what I ever said sank in at all.”
“What does that mean?” She tosses the towel on the counter.
“I tried so hard to raise you the best way I knew how. To not be trapped by material desires.” Now I turn my gaze at Ivan, giggling with Jenny. “To have self-confidence to pursue your dreams, to treat yourself with respect.” At this I look at Irina, now in a chair with Darius massaging her shoulders. She’s staring at her new wedding band.
“You could have done worse,” she says wryly, snapping out the towel to fold it again. “We turned out more or less okay.”
I shake my head; she took that far more personally than I meant. “I’m very proud of all of you, what you’ve accomplished. But I sometimes think it was all innate within you, and my influence was nil.”
Kat leans against the counter next to me, facing the family. “Do you remember when we had that big fight about the dress?”
“Oh Lord, not that again.”
“You were trying to force me to be a nonconformist. Do you get the irony in that? You wanted me to conform to your ideals of being a rebel. So, I rebelled by being as conformist as I possibly could. We were no different than millions of other mother-daughters in the world, only you were the one smoking pot and dressing like a hippie.”
“I wasn’t smoking then.” Not much, anyway.
“You know what I mean.”
“So my influence has been opposite of what I intended? That’s not something to treasure on Mother’s Day.”
She moves around to stand in front of me. “You influenced us more than you know, but you didn’t do it with slogans and granola. You did it just by existing. And anyway, you’re still needed. Look at Reenie, she’s about to go to pieces as it is.”
Katya doesn’t know about the bleeding, and I’d like to tell her, but it’s not my place to do so. “So, it’s only Reenie who needs me?”
Katya turns back to the kitchen counter and starts mopping up stray bits of pancake mix. “I need you,” she says in such a low voice, it’s like she’s speaking to herself. “I might need you much more pretty soon.”
I catch her eye and raise my eyebrows. She looks over her shoulder at Charles and gestures with her head.
Ah. I see. I can also see the tan line on her left hand where her wedding ring used to be.
In the quietest whisper I can manage, I ask, “Are you splitting up?”
Her only answer is a tiny shake of her head.
I’m distracted from Katya by a loud chorus from the family. I look up to see Ivan, pulling his ear and turning pink in the center of a crowd. They are all exhorting him to do something, but what I don’t know.
I pick up on it when Jenny says, “I’ll go get your guitar. You don’t show off your talent enough.” She skips away up the stairs, like she’s been running up those steps her entire life. It’s remarkable sometimes how easily someone slips into a family.
“Oh, I showed off my talent enough in college,” Van says, grimacing. “Parking myself under a tree outside and playing sensitive folk songs. You know I didn’t get one single person stopping to listen? Not even the old man who dug cans out of the trash to return them for the deposit.”
Katya remarks, “You probably picked a really poor location, full of people too busy to stop. You always were crap at marketing.”
“It’s a fair cop,” says Ivan in a foppish British accent, winking at Jenny, now presenting his guitar. I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, but Jenny seems to think it’s funny.
“Coffee’s ready,” says Max, as Ivan arranges himself on a kitchen chair. Even Chip and Taylor drift in from the living room. Ivan strums and hums and tunes up for a minute, and takes a breath to start.
A cell phone goes off, playing “Ride of the Valkyries.”
Katya whips around and glares at her husband. Charles takes the phone out of his pocket, punches a button, and it goes silent.
Ivan clears his throat as Jenny announces, “He just wrote this. Like just now, this weekend.”
And so he begins. As he sings, he stares down at his guitar, never once glancing up at the rest of us. I never knew his voice was so nice; a pleasant, easy tenor. As long as he’s fiddled with that guitar and scribbled down lyrics, I’d never heard him do more than hum.
She has a pretty linen suit
And a fresh unlined face
Staring at her diamond
Everything is in its place
What am I supposed to do
If all thi
s is not enough?
I’ve been climbing all my life
But still there’s more above.
She tells me
You know there is no perfect
Only real life and liars
All anybody’s trying to do
Is keep putting out the fires
What’s perfection anyway
But lifeless symmetry
To hell then with perfect
Give me real life and liars
The last notes ring away, and no one speaks for a moment. I steal a look at Katya. Her mouth is open slightly as she stares at her brother unblinking, her hands are—for once—completely still.
Ivan breaks the silence. “It’s not finished obviously, and it’s not very good, I’m not sure about the line about putting out the fires and I think the melody is—”
“Oh, shut up,” Jenny says cheerfully. “It’s marvelous.”
“Wow, Van.” Katya, next to me in her unfamiliar stillness, hasn’t taken her eyes off him yet. “That’s…wow. Really good.” She shoots a quick look at her husband, then down at the floor.
“Yeah!” chirps Kit. “I bet the radio would play it. That oldies station anyway.”
“Oldies!” scoffs Chip. “How can it be an oldie if Uncle Van just now wrote it?”
Kit scowls at him. “You know what I mean! Simple listening music, whatever.”
“Easy listening,” says Van, smirking. “Thanks, Kit.”
Van searches out his older sister’s eyes, but she has turned back to the counter, again stirring that batter to within an inch of its life.
Max abandons his post at the camp stove and grabs Ivan’s hand in both of his for a healthy shake. “Wonderful, son. That’s the best you’ve done yet.”
Real Life & Liars Page 26