by Mad Dash
Cottie has to pick up a prescription at the drugstore. While I wait, I buy hand cream on sale. Part of my arsenal for the nightly lube job: moisturizer, lip balm, body lotion, hand lotion, foot cream. It’s a wonder I don’t slide out of the bed. It’s our hormones drying up, apparently. “Wait’ll you’re my age,” I heard a woman say to her friend on the subway. “Wait till sex is painful.” Not “uncomfortable” she said “painful.” Can that be true? If so, talking about it must be the last taboo. Next time sex comes up in conversation, I’ll ask Cottie; she’ll give me the true story.
The drab, run-down Madison Theater keeps an unpredictable schedule. “Look,” Cottie says as we stroll by the streaky ticket booth, “something’s playing.” True: About a dozen teenagers are loafing in line for tickets to see a romantic comedy I read a snide review of about six weeks ago. Cottie and I look at each other.
“Want to go?”
“If we don’t, we’ll just have to go home.”
“I’ll call Shevlin.”
The theater smells like butter and wet wool. We take seats on the aisle three-quarters of the way down without asking each other if that’s all right. As soon as we’re seated and comfortable, the lights go out, as if the projectionist has been waiting for us. “Excellent idea,” I murmur as the credits roll. We bump shoulders conspiratorially.
How many movies have I seen with my mother? Or Chloe? I like going to movies with them more than anyone else, more than with the closest friend, more than with Andrew. Even the lamest film is bearable if I’m with Chloe—if I was with Mama; in fact, a terrible movie is better than a mediocre one, because then we can make cracks, be sarcastic, make it a competitive sport, our wit against the film’s inanity.
This one is fairly inane. The hero’s moroseness is supposed to attract the bubbly heroine, but that seems unlikely. All they could possibly see in each other is amazing facial perfection.
My mother took me to see Annie Hall when it first came out. Of course we both loved it. I didn’t understand all of what bittersweet meant until then, and it hit me hard. I was glad to have my mother with me. The film seemed so modern, and she was so old-fashioned. Or no-fashioned; she was just Ma, my often-resisted, occasionally appreciated buffer between childhood and adulthood. We talked about the movie all afternoon, afterward. She understood better than I did why I loved Annie, why she was the first grown-up role model I ever had, not the Bionic Woman or Hayley Mills or whoever. (The second was Vanessa Redgrave in Julia.)
I was thinking about that experience, which seemed even more complicated in retrospect, all mixed up with my fear of growing up and a ferocious impatience to get on with it, not to mention figuring out what kind of woman I wanted to be—when I took Chloe to see Amelie. It was R-rated, but I had a feeling it would be appropriate for her and it was. What a tender, intoxicating, romantic film. I adored it, the daydream quality, Amelie’s exquisite shyness, and her impishness, the wonderful Frenchness of it all. Chloe and I got ice cream afterward, our habit, and talked over the movie. She thought it was okay. Okay? I was still in a happy haze. “It was a little too much, Mom. Like a Disney movie.” She was fourteen; she still had braces on her teeth, she still had freckles. “It was more a fairy tale than a real story. I mean, what was she so afraid of?”
It’s disappointing when your child doesn’t agree with you, especially when you know you’re right, but it’s also hugely exciting. Discussing that film defined our differences in a way nothing quite had before, and never so easily or naturally. I loved my daughter even more, if that was possible, for who she was, who I could see her becoming. And I like to think she added a little bit of ballast to her already crowded cargo hold of tolerant affection for Mom.
What’s this? I’m not paying much attention to this movie, but sometime after the beautiful lovers break up and before they will, I’m certain, get back together, I begin to weep.
Quietly, thank God. Silent tears slipping down, wetting my hands in my lap. The screen is a complete blur. This will stop in a moment, I assure myself, reaching for a tissue in my purse. I mop my eyes surreptitiously, facing away so Cottie won’t notice.
But a second later it starts again. This time there’s no stopping it, and when Cottie slips her arm through mine, I start to cry in earnest. It’s an embarrassing, unexplainable lapse. And strange, because the tears came so much sooner than the emotion that provoked them. Whatever it is. The usual, I suppose. Loss. I feel incomplete. I’m missing.
I glance at Cottie, try to speak, apologize—she’s got tears in her eyes. Is it sympathy for me, or could she be thinking of her mother, gone but still deeply missed after fifty years? Or of her daughter, who flies in and out of her life at random intervals, uncatchable as a butterfly?
I lean my head on her shoulder. It comforts both of us, I think. Onscreen, the morose lover convinces the poignantly brokenhearted but still effervescent heroine that they belong together. Yes, well. Get it while you can, children. Don’t look ahead. There’s no percentage in knowing what’s coming, because you can’t prepare for it. And once it happens, there’s nothing to do but endure.
“I could’ve driven you home,” I tell Cottie while we wait in front of the theater for Shevlin to pick her up. At five o’clock, the sun is a glowing ball just starting to sink over the mountain. My mountain. A flock of starlings falls like a net over the mansard roof of the bank across the way, rises up, falls back again.
“I know,” Cottie says, “but this is fine. He likes to do it.”
I imagine he does. It’s so sweet. I wouldn’t dream of asking Andrew to drive me somewhere or pick me up. Is that another loss? What a mood I’m in. “Well, Cottie, what can I say. I’m sorry for being a noodlehead.”
“Now, don’t say that.”
“I don’t even know what was the matter with me.”
“Sometimes we just need a good cry.”
“Usually not in a public place, though.”
“When I was going through the change, I cried through the whole funeral service of a man I never met in my life.”
“Oh, I do that all the time.”
We sling our arms around each other and watch cars stop and go at the intersection, Dolley’s rush hour in full swing.
“Well, I’m not one to go around cheering people up,” she says.
“I think you are.”
“Bad things are bad things. And they always hit when you least expect them—for some reason, whoever’s in charge made that a rule.”
Maybe she isn’t one to go around cheering people up.
“Life’s nothing but saying good-bye, if you care to look at it that way.”
“Oh God,” I say with a shiver. “I don’t.”
“Me, either, but sometimes you can’t see any alternative.”
“So then what do you do?”
“What I do is try to stick myself into it more. If I’m the one who has to let go, then I try to do it, not have it done to me. It doesn’t hurt as much that way, plus you can learn something in the process.”
“I guess.”
“Not that learning something does you any good next time. You think it will, but it doesn’t. Oh, honey, we just have to go through it all.”
Shevlin’s truck pulls up to the curb. Despite the fine weather, he’s got the earflaps down on his old green cap. I’m not sorry to see him; I don’t want any more of Cottie’s hard wisdom right now.
“Did I make you feel sad?” Worry lines crease her face. “Lord help us, that’s the last thing I meant to do.”
“You didn’t.”
“Anyway, I forgot the main thing.”
She’s become very dear to me, I realize, her long, thick-skinned face, the way it breaks up and shines when she smiles. Her unvarying kindness to me. “What’s the main thing?” I ask.
“The main thing…” She spreads her arms wide, pulling out the blue wool of her cardigan like benevolent bat wings. “The main thing is we’re here right now, alive and kicking. What a shame to w
aste a minute because it won’t last. You can’t stop change, so you might as well give it a big hug and get on with it.” She salutes me, then hauls herself up into her husband’s Ford F-150. The muffler’s bad. Roaring off down Madison Street, they sound like reckless teenagers in a hot rod.
Reaching for the car keys in my coat pocket, I pull out something wrapped in paper—and smile, because I know what’s inside before I open it. A couple of cows standing on their hind legs.
Five whole hours in the house by herself—a record for Sock, who’s wild to see me. A quick survey of the downstairs reveals no damage; it’s either upstairs or my dog has turned into an angel. We put off finding out by taking the flashlight and walking down to the road.
It’s too early for crickets, or if it’s not, I can’t hear them over the tree frogs. Sock is fearful of the dark, sticks with me instead of exploring the woods this far from the house, but I’m not. I only take the flashlight so I won’t trip over a rock or a rut. Nothing spooks me; I never have crazy thoughts about bears or snakes or depraved mountain men. I’m a hundred times warier about being out alone at night in D.C. than here.
“Hi, Ma.” Instead of a star, I see her in the moon tonight, a kind-faced half-moon wearing a patient smile. “Cottie and I had a nice time today. You don’t feel replaced or anything, do you? Because that would be…that would be nuts.”
Sock and I stop fifty feet from the road—I’m still nervous about her and cars, plus I don’t care for us to be picked out by anyone’s headlights at night. It’s quiet though; not a single car passes as we stand in the shadowy lane, the flashlight off, sniffing the air and listening to night sounds.
“Mama? I wish…”
The dog and I start back for the cabin.
“I wish I’d been better. Andrew says no, but I think I could’ve been a better daughter if I’d had time. If I’d just thought. I’m so sorry about Mr. Dreessen. I wish you were here, so I could tell you. I miss you, Mama, and I can’t seem to…”
I pick up a stick on the side of the drive, use it for a walking stick until Sock takes it from me. I didn’t even know how sick my mother was. When she called to say she couldn’t come up for her graduation, Chloe was disappointed but not devastated. They weren’t as close as they could’ve been—that’s another one of my regrets. They should’ve seen each other more often. They should’ve loved each other as much as I loved them.
The hospital called two days later. Mama had had a heart attack in the night. She’d managed to call 911. I can’t bear to think of that, her fear and pain, how alone she must’ve felt, dialing the ambulance by herself. I should’ve tried harder to make her move up here. I was halfhearted about that. Self-involved.
She died in the hospital. I was in the air—they told me what time, and I figured out I was eating mini pretzels and drinking orange juice when my mother died. This is the part I can’t let go, it’s like a burn wound that will not heal. I couldn’t have saved her, but I could have held her hand so she wouldn’t have been alone when she left. That’s all I wish. That we could’ve been together when it was her time.
Mama had beautiful skin—I have my father’s dry, Irish skin. I skip the nightly lube job, though, despite having a new jar of hand cream. Too tired; going to bed early.
How did it happen that Sock sleeps with me? At first I’d find her at the foot of the bed in the morning, then she began to jump up even when I was looking, now she has her spot beside my left hip. I like it, though. I like to put my hand on her back—she always faces away from me; some kind of modesty, or perhaps I snore—and feel the soft up and down of her breathing.
The clock dial glows red in the dark: 9:52. Behind my eyelids I see silent pictures, scenes I’m either imagining or remembering from today, lots of people, all strangers, in perfect Technicolor, walking, talking, gesturing, laughing. This happens once in a while, and usually presages a sleepless night.
Sock moans, burrows deeper when I turn on the light. I’m reaching for the hand cream, but at the last second my hand veers to the phone. I punch in Chloe’s speed-dial number.
I hope she’s not in the library. She’s such a good child, she turns her phone off when she’s there, lest she disturb other students.
“Hello?”
“I want you to major in drama.”
“Mom, hi. I was going to call you.”
“Darling, erase everything I said, I don’t know what I was thinking. I desperately want you to major in drama, or anything else you feel passionate about. Actually, I sort of do know what I was thinking.”
“What?”
“But it doesn’t matter now. I got mixed up, that’s all, I reversed you and Greta.”
“Me and Greta?”
“Do you think she’s still awake? Oh, she would be, it’s early. I have some names to give her, photographers I know who might want their websites redone.”
“Mom.”
“Sweetheart, I just want you to know you can do anything you want. Why would you ever listen to my advice anyway, you’re a hundred times smarter.”
“Well, in this case, I wasn’t going to.”
“So I noticed. What if I’d said I was going to cut off all funds?” She laughs gaily. “Where are you?”
“Walking back to the dorm.”
“Is it a nice night? It’s beautiful here.”
“Did you talk to Dad?”
“Not lately, why? Oh—he didn’t talk me out of anything.”
“Okay. I just thought—”
“No, no, I came to this brilliant realization all by myself, your father had nothing to do with it. I gave…I think…I sort of reversed…I gave the right advice to the wrong people. I made Greta myself and—well, I don’t know what I did with you. I was trying to be practical for you. Really, really motherly, trying to make up for…” Oh God, trying to make up for not being daughterly enough? This was all about guilt?
“Practical, Mom. I don’t know.”
“I know. Not my strong suit.”
“And you should know, I might change my mind again. I could decide to major in anthropology.”
“Oh, you’d be fabulous at that.”
“Or archaeology.”
“They’re not the same?”
“Or French.”
“Ooh, formidable.”
“Hi,” she says to someone, then back to me. “So how’s your vacation going? Have you bonded completely with the land yet?”
“We are as one. I had lunch with Cottie, she asked all about you.” I tell her about the movie we saw.
“Sounds great. Hey, you still miss me, though, don’t you?”
“My best movie pal? Are you kidding?” She is, but I’m not. If she knew how much I miss her, it would ruin this conversation. “Okay, babe, I’ll let you go, I can hear you’ve arrived.” Chatter, doors slamming. “I love you the most.”
“Love you, Mom.”
“And honey? I just want you to know, even though I didn’t see it coming, it makes absolutely no difference to your father or to me that you’re a thespian.”
She hangs up groaning.
Except for a couple of brisk, all-business conversations about how things are going this week at the studio, Greta and I haven’t spoken to each other since our fight. She sounds spacey when she answers the phone. “Uh-oh,” I say, “did I wake you?”
“No.”
“Did I…get you from something—”
“I was playing a computer game. What do you want?”
“Um…how are you?”
“Fine.” I picture her at her computer, zapping aliens or piloting some virtual heroine through a maze. I see her in her nightgown, her carrot hair sticking out like candlewicks. After a pause, she says grudgingly, “How are you?”
“I’m fine, too. Hope I’m not calling too late.”
“No, I told you.”
This is going to be harder than I thought. Well, nothing to do but plunge in. “Okay, here’s the thing. I’m very glad you’re marrying Joel
.”
“Oh, Dash.” In two words, she sounds tired and dubious.
“No, anyone can see he’s nuts about you. You’re perfect for each other.”
“You don’t have to say this.”
“But I mean it. I think you’ll be great, and twenty-five is not too young to know what you want.”
“Well, I don’t think so.”
“And…I’m proud of you for knowing what you want to do with your life. It’s me I feel sorry for, I’m the one who’s losing you, but I really admire you for knowing your mind and…well, I just wish you happiness, that’s what I’m calling to say. And success, and satisfaction, and a long, long life with Joel and little—shit, I can never remember—”
“Justin.”
“Justin. You, Joel, and Justin, a ready-made family. It’s so right, and…I was so wrong.”
“Thanks, Dash. It means a lot, you saying that.”
“And I apologize for all the other things I said.” Might as well make it official. “Just disregard all that, please. I wasn’t in my right mind.”
“No problem.” Her laugh sounds big and relieved. “Totally forgotten. But how come, I mean, where did…”
“I was crazy, what can I tell you? Temporary insanity.” I can think of no kindhearted way to explain to Greta that, basically, I made her up. It would be insulting to tell the truth: that from the moment we met, I took her for a person she’s so far from being (me) that I couldn’t see her at all. And then I wanted her to make all the decisions I didn’t make twenty years ago. What willful blindness, what monumental ego. I’m ashamed. “Let’s have a party.” What a brilliant idea. “Would you like to?”
“A party?”
“To celebrate your engagement! We could have it at the studio. With men if you want, or it could be more like a shower, all women. But I think men, don’t you? Then we can drink more.”