The First Time

by Joy Fielding

  “Mom, look at me.”

  “It’s never what you think it’s going to be,” her mother continued, as if Mattie hadn’t spoken. “Somebody says they have something to tell you, and you try and guess what it is, you consider all the possibilities, and they still pick the one thing you didn’t imagine, the one thing you forgot to consider. That’s always the way it is, don’t you find?”

  “Mom,” Mattie repeated, “I need you to look at me.”

  “It’s not fair of you to do this to me.”

  “This isn’t about you, Mom,” Mattie said simply, leaning over to take her mother’s square chin in the palm of her hand, forcing her eyes back to hers. The dog in her mother’s lap began a low growl. “I need you to listen to me. For once in my life, I need your complete, undivided attention. Do I have it?”

  Wordlessly, her mother lowered the still-growling dog to the floor.

  “Right now, I’m in the early stages of the disease. I’m coping pretty well. I can still work and do most of the things I did before. I’ve given up driving, of course, so I take a lot of cabs, and Jake and I have started going grocery shopping together. Kim helps out as much as she can—”

  “Kim knows?”

  Mattie nodded. “It’s been very hard for her. She puts on a tough front, but I know she’s having a difficult time.”

  “So you bought her a dog.”

  “We hoped it would ease her pain, give her something to focus on.”

  “She’s a good girl.”

  “I know she is,” Mattie said, fighting back tears. It was important to get through the rest of her agenda without tears.

  “What do you want me to do? I’d be happy to take her for a few weeks. Kim tells me that you and Jake are planning a trip to Paris in April. I’d be happy to take her then,” her mother said, deliberately ignoring the larger picture, her traditional method of coping. Focus on an irrelevancy, enlarge it until it blots out everything else.

  “We can talk about that later,” Mattie said. “I need you right now, Mom. Not Kim.”

  “I don’t understand.” Again, her mother’s eyes returned to the window. “Do you need me to run some errands?”

  Mattie shook her head. How could she make her mother understand what she was about to ask? A medium-size black dog leaped onto the sofa, making itself comfortable on the cushion beside Mattie, regarding her suspiciously through heavy-lidded eyes. “Do you remember when I was about five years old, we had a dog?” Mattie asked. “Her name was Queenie. Do you remember Queenie?”

  “Of course I remember Queenie. You used to throw her over your shoulder and hold her upside down, and she never complained. She’d let you do anything.”

  “And then she got sick, and you said we had to put her to sleep, and I cried and begged you not to.”

  “That was a very long time ago, Martha. Surely, you still can’t be angry at me for that after all these years. She was very sick. She was in pain.”

  “And she looked at you with ‘those eyes,’ you said, those eyes that told you it was time to put her out of her misery, that it would be cruel to keep her alive.”

  Her mother fidgeted restlessly in her chair. “I wonder how Kim’s making out with George.”

  “Listen to me, Mom,” Mattie said. “There’s going to come a time when I’m going to look at you with those eyes.”

  “We should get back to the others. It’s not right—”

  “I’m going to be virtually immobile,” Mattie persisted, refusing to let her mother rise from her chair, “and I’m not going to be able to move, not my legs, not my hands. I’m not going to be able to do anything to put an end to my suffering. I’m going to be helpless. I won’t be able to take matters into my own hands.” Mattie almost laughed at her choice of words. “The way this disease works,” Mattie backpedaled, “is that the muscles in my chest are going to get weaker and weaker, resulting in breathing that’s shallower and shallower, leading to shortness of breath.”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “You have to hear this. Please, Mom. Lisa has prescribed morphine for when that starts to happen.”

  “Morphine?” The word shook in her mother’s mouth, wobbled into the space between them.

  “Apparently morphine relieves the distress of being breathless. It acts on the respiratory center to slow the breathing down. Lisa says it’s remarkable in its ability to remove anxiety, control panic, and restore calm. But there’ll come a time when the morphine will be on the table beside my bed, and I won’t be able to reach it. I won’t be able to measure out the right amount to end my suffering. I won’t be able to do what has to be done. Do you understand, Mom? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “Twenty pills, Mom. That’s all it would take. You grind them up, mix them with water, pour it down my throat. In a few minutes I drift off to sleep. Ten or fifteen minutes later, I slip into a coma, and I don’t wake up. Within a few hours, I’m gone. Easily. Painlessly. My suffering is over.”

  “Don’t ask me to do this.”

  “Who else can I ask?”

  “Ask Lisa. Ask Jake.”

  “I can’t ask Jake to break the law. The law is his whole life. And I can’t ask Lisa to risk her whole career. And I certainly can’t ask Kim.”

  “But you can ask your mother.”

  “This isn’t easy for me, Mom. When was the last time I asked you for anything?”

  “I know you think I’ve been a lousy mother. I know you think—”

  “None of that matters now. Mom, please, you’re the only one I can ask to do this. I’ve been thinking about this for weeks. And I’m asking you now because, chances are, I won’t be able to ask you when the time comes. All I’m going to be able to do is look at you with ‘those eyes.’ ”

  “This isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.”

  “No, it’s not. None of it is fair,” Mattie agreed, her hands still gripping the sides of her mother’s chair, blocking her escape, although her mother had grown still. “It’s just the way it is. So I need you to promise you’ll do this for me, Mom,” Mattie told her. “You’ll know when it’s time for me to go. You’ll know when it would be cruel to keep me alive, and you’ll help me, Mom.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Please,” Mattie insisted, her voice rising. “If you ever loved me at all, promise you’ll help me.” Mattie held her mother’s eyes with her own, refusing to let her turn aside, to look away, to hide from the choice that had been made for her. Around them, the dogs panted in unison, as if they too were awaiting her decision.

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You have to.”

  Mattie watched her mother’s shoulders collapse, her eyes fall to her lap in silent acquiescence.

  “Promise,” Mattie pressed. “You have to promise.”

  Her mother’s head nodded up and down. “I promise,” she said.

  “And you can’t say anything about this to Jake. You can’t say anything—”

  “What’s going on?” Kim asked from the doorway.

  Mattie spun around in her seat, almost losing her balance and falling off the sofa. She steadied herself with her hand before scrambling to her feet. “How long have you been standing there?”

  “I heard you yelling at Grandma Viv.”

  “I wasn’t yelling.”

  “It sounded like yelling to me.” Kim inched her way into the room, the tiny white puppy still cradled in her arms, fast asleep.

  “You know how your mother just gets excited about things,” Grandma Viv said.

  “What’s she excited about?”

  “Your new puppy, of course,” Mattie answered, walking to Kim’s side. “May I hold him?”

  “You have to be very careful,” Kim cautioned, eyes shifting warily between her mother and grandmother as she deposited the puppy in Mattie’s trembling hands.

  The puppy was so soft, so warm, Mattie realized with surprise, li
fting him to her cheek, rubbing him gently against her skin, her hands shaking visibly.

  “You’re not going to drop him, are you?” Kim asked.

  “Maybe you better take him.” Mattie returned the puppy to her daughter’s eager hands. She glanced at her mother, red cheeks staining her otherwise pale face, as if she’d been struck. “We should probably get a move on,” Mattie said.

  “I’m not going,” Kim announced.

  “What?”

  “Who’s not going where?” Jake asked, coming into the room, looking from Mattie to her mother, then back to Mattie, his eyes asking if everything was all right.

  Mattie nodded, tried to smile.

  “I’m going to stay here tonight,” Kim announced. “I don’t want to leave George. That’s all right with you, isn’t it, Grandma Viv?”

  “If it’s all right with your parents,” Mattie heard her mother say, her voice an unfamiliar monotone.

  “Of course it’s all right,” Mattie said, full of sudden admiration for her only child. “You’re a very sweet girl,” she told Kim on her way out the front door minutes later, planting a kiss on her daughter’s wary cheek. She understood Kim’s decision to stay was as much about not wanting her grandmother to be alone as it was about not wanting to leave her new puppy.

  “Sweet sixteen,” Kim said with a self-conscious curtsy.

  “Watch your step,” Mattie’s mother cautioned as Jake took Mattie’s elbow and guided her to the car. “It’s still a bit icy in places.”

  “I’ll be in touch, Mom,” Mattie said.

  Her mother nodded, a coterie of dogs barking at her feet, and closed the front door.

  “So, how’d it go?”

  “It was harder than I thought it would be,” Mattie told Jake.

  “She’s your mother, Mattie. She loves you.”

  Mattie reached over and touched Jake’s hand, knowing how hard that was for him to say. Mothers didn’t always love their children, they both knew. “I think in her own peculiar way, she does,” Mattie acknowledged, leaning back in her seat and closing her eyes as Jake backed the car out of the driveway onto Hudson Avenue. She pictured her mother’s stony expression when she was confiding the news of her condition. Would her mother come through for her? Was it reasonable to expect her to be there for her in death as she’d never been in life? Had it been reasonable to ask? Mattie shook her head, determined not to persevere in something that was out of her control.

  “Feel like going to a movie?” Jake asked.

  “I’m kind of tired. Would you mind if we just went home?”

  “No, that’s fine. Whatever you want.”

  Mattie smiled, her eyes still closed. Whatever you want. How many times had she heard her husband say that over the course of the last six weeks? He’s trying so hard, she thought. Home for dinner every night, working out of the den whenever possible, running errands with her on weekends, watching television beside her in bed, even letting her control the remote. When he wasn’t working, he was at her side. When he was at her side, he was holding her hand, or touching her thigh, and when they made love, which they did several times a week, it was as good as it had always been. Was he picturing Honey when he caressed the nape of her neck? Mattie wondered now. Was it Honey’s breasts he suckled, Honey’s legs he parted when he entered her? Mattie quickly dismissed the unwelcome image. As far as she knew, Jake hadn’t seen Honey at all. There were only so many hours in the day, after all. There was only so much energy to go around. Still, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Wasn’t that how the old saying went?

  Where there’s a will, there’s a way, Mattie repeated silently, wondering why people knocked clichés. There was something enormously comforting about clichés. They spoke of predictability, of familiarity, of permanence. The more tenuous her health, the more Mattie appreciated their easy truths and sweeping generalities: Love makes the world go round; Love conquers all; Love is better the second time around.

  Except there’d never been a first time.

  “How about we stop at the supermarket and pick up a couple of steaks?” Jake was asking. “I make a terrific steak, if you recall.”

  “Sounds wonderful.” Mattie marveled at the enthusiasm in her husband’s voice. He’d have made a great actor, she thought, then decided that emoting in the courtroom was probably not all that different from emoting on the stage. Or emoting in the bedroom.

  The car pulled to a sudden halt, and Mattie opened her eyes to find them parked in front of a medium-size supermarket on North Avenue. “I’ll just be a minute,” Jake said, already half out of the car.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  Immediately he was at her side, opening her door, helping her out of the car, escorting her inside the brightly lit store. “This way,” Jake directed, guiding Mattie through the produce section, past the aisles full of canned goods and cereal boxes and fruit drinks and paper towels, toward the surprisingly large meat section at the far end of the store. The effortless way he moved, the sureness of his steps, told Mattie he’d been here before. With Honey? she wondered, trying to mask her sudden sadness with a smile.

  “You seem to know your way around,” she commented, despite her best efforts to remain silent.

  “All supermarkets are pretty much the same, aren’t they?” he said easily, reaching for several steaks, examining them closely beneath their tight plastic wrap, then returning them to the shelf, selecting several more.

  “How about these?” Mattie grabbed a couple of steaks. “These look pretty good.” She was about to offer the steaks for Jake’s inspection when a sudden tremor, like a small earthquake, caught hold of her arm, tossing it into the air as if it were weightless, as if it were no longer connected to the rest of her body. The steaks shot out of her hand and across the aisle, narrowly missing another shopper and knocking over a display of exotic cheeses in a nearby bin.

  “What the —?” the woman shopper exclaimed, glaring at Mattie.

  “Oh, God,” Mattie cried, burying her hands beneath opposite arms, feeling queasy and faint, panic growing in her gut, threatening to erupt. It was happening again. Just like in her mother’s kitchen. Except she was no longer in her mother’s kitchen. She was in a public place. How could she do this to Jake? How could she embarrass him again by creating a scene in public? She couldn’t bare to look at him. She couldn’t stomach the look of horror and disgust she knew she’d find on his face.

  And then another steak went flying across the aisle. And then another.

  Mattie’s eyes raced toward her husband, who was leaning over the meat section, gathering more packages into his hands, grinning impishly from ear to ear.

  “My God, what are you doing?” Mattie asked, not sure whether to laugh or cry as he sent two more steaks flying across the aisle.

  “This is fun,” Jake said, unleashing two more. “Come on. It’s your turn.” The woman shopper ran for cover as Jake dropped another steak into Mattie’s hand.

  Before she could give herself time to think, Mattie hurled the packaged steak over her shoulder, hearing it land with a thud somewhere behind her as Jake followed suit with a barrage of lamb chops. By the time the manager arrived with the security guard, the entire meat section lay in scattered bundles across the floor, and Mattie and Jake were too limp with laughter to offer either explanations or apologies.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I think I could use another drink.” Jake looked around the old-fashioned Italian eatery known as the Great Impasta, silently signaling the busy waiter for another glass of red wine. The popular restaurant was located on East Chestnut Street, just north of Water Tower Place, only blocks away from his office, and was a favorite spot with many of the lawyers in his firm, two of whom Jake noticed dining together with their wives in a dimly lit corner of the room. So far they hadn’t spotted him, for which Jake was inordinately grateful. They were two of his least favorite people—privately, he referred to them as Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dumber—and besides, he’d had
enough excitement for one day. He pondered again what strange force had overtaken him in the supermarket, deciding not to overanalyze what was clearly a simple act of spontaneity. Except that Jake Hart was anything but a spontaneous kind of guy. Honey claimed that even his ad-libs were carefully researched and rehearsed in advance. Honey, he thought, closing his eyes in consternation, remembering he hadn’t called her all day, knowing how disappointed she’d be—with the situation, with the way things were going, with him. (“It just takes a minute to pick up a phone,” he could hear her say. “Really, Jason, I don’t think I’m asking for all that much.”)

  Bad boy Jason, bad boy Jason, bad boy Jason!

  Badboyjason, badboyjason, badboyjason.

  “Something wrong?” Mattie asked.

  Jake opened his eyes, stared across the red-and-white checkered tablecloth at his wife of sixteen years. She didn’t look that much older than the day he married her, he thought, watching as the candle from the middle of the table cast a warm glow on her otherwise pale complexion. Her hair was a little longer than when they’d first met, and she’d lost a bit of weight in the last few months, thinning out the natural oval of her face, but she was still a very beautiful woman, probably one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. “I just remembered that I forgot our anniversary,” he said, realizing this was true. “January twelfth, wasn’t it?”

  Mattie smiled. “Close enough.”

  He laughed. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right. You made it up to me earlier.” Her smile widened. “First time I’ve ever been thrown out of a grocery store.”

  “I have to admit I rather enjoyed that myself.”

  They laughed together, one laugh echoing the other, the two sounds overlapping, intertwining, harmonizing.