“So scientists detected light from a star that exploded more than seven billion years ago.” He ran a finger under the lines in the page he was squinting at. “It was the most distant object ever visible to the naked eye. Can you believe that—seven billion years? A gamma-ray burst, it’s called.” He laid the magazine on the table, and she caught a hint of the expression she’d found so appealing (so irresistible, really) twenty years earlier: his eyes bright and his mouth slightly open with excitement at discovering something that fascinated him. When she met him, he was in the first year of an architecture design program; he wanted to plan additions to people’s homes, or maybe even the homes themselves. She remembered the drawings he showed her, and the excitement in his voice when he pointed out details of cornice molding and gambrels, transoms and newel posts.
But after that year, he left the program because, he said, there were too many architects out there; he’d been advised that jobs were scarce. “You’re going to quit without even trying?” Susanne asked, knowing she had not managed to hide her dismay. By that time they were engaged. Gil shrugged and said maybe he’d go back someday, but in the meantime, since he had to have a guaranteed income, he’d start hiring himself out to do the handiwork he was so good at, and small contracting jobs. Even then the word “small” bothered her, but it meant she could teach on an adjunct basis and still have time for her sculpture, so she stopped encouraging him to return to school.
Back then, she believed he was selling himself short because he didn’t have enough self-confidence. It took her years to understand that he wasn’t settling; he genuinely enjoyed building and fixing things for people who couldn’t do it themselves. He liked setting his own hours, hiring his own people, and keeping his own accounts. He came up with the name Odd Men Out for his business, and Odd Men Out it remained for the next twenty years. During that time he took on workers, at one time overseeing a crew of a dozen. Now he was down to himself and two others, and the time had passed when Susanne might have applied for a tenure position.
At the breakfast table the morning she began her affair, Gil had picked up the magazine to look again at the story about the gamma-ray burst and told her, “That’s before the earth formed. Before the sun, even.”
Behind them, their daughter walked into the room saying, “What happened seven billion years ago?”
“Oh, my God!” Susanne dropped her toast, a blob of jelly streaking a student’s sentence. “Why aren’t you at school?” She rubbed at the essay words with a napkin, though they weren’t worth cleaning: The difference between the two Davids is, Donatello’s looks more like a girl then the one by Micheal Angelo.
Behind her, Joy reached into the cupboard for cereal. “Teacher in-service. I told you that last night.”
“Look at this,” Gil said, handing Joy the magazine as she sat down. She let her muesli go soggy in the bowl as she read the story about the star.
“Totally cool, Dad,” she said, and Gil looked at Susanne as if to say See?
Susanne stood. For most of their life as a family, they’d referred to themselves, all three of them, as Team Us. But in that moment, it felt as if the other two had teamed up against her. She pretended not to notice as she packed the mostly bad essays into her bag, and told them she’d be late because of the reception for the Lewison Award.
Now, over their pasta at Rubio’s, Gil put down his napkin and stood. “We’re done, right?”
“I don’t know. Are we?” For a moment she wasn’t sure what he meant by done. The idea that he might have been referring to the marriage gave her a punch to the gut.
“Listen, I’ll move back in. As long as you promise me it’s over.” It; this took her a moment to decipher, too. Then she understood he meant Martin. As with death, Gil could not bring himself to say the word. “Every time I think of him touching you, and you touching him—” She knew better than to try to assuage his discomfort, and he seemed to appreciate this. He left her with the check, which she took as a gesture of punishment. I deserve it, she thought, as she reached to pay.
At home, turning into the driveway, she noticed the big boat of a car—a Plymouth Fury—parked across the street and down a few houses, in front of the Hahnemanns’. One of Betsy Hahnemann’s aromatherapy clients, no doubt. Momentarily it struck her as odd that a person who was into aromatherapy would drive such a shitbox—what Gil would have called a beater—from the sixties, no less, but she didn’t pause to dwell on it. When she got inside she was tempted to respond to Martin’s text message, if only because she knew how he’d feel if she didn’t. But she persuaded herself that it was better for both of them if she managed to resist.
Gil returned an hour later, having gone back to the office to collect the clothes and other things he’d brought with him on his “hiatus.” They slept in their bed together, though they each seemed intent on avoiding the other’s limbs. The next morning Susanne suffered a guilt hangover, remembering their conversation in the restaurant. Him touching you. You touching him. After school she took Joy to buy a cell phone, adding it to her own plan instead of Gil’s business one. She hoped it would make her feel better to see Joy’s excitement, and it did, for a few minutes. But that excitement seemed to recede when Susanne said, “Just don’t tell Dad yet, okay?”
Joy was in the middle of opening the box to admire her new possession. She paused, and a look of mischief combined with something else came into her face. “Did I mention I’d like a pair of UGGS, too?” It was a strained joke between them because she mentioned it every few days, along with the fact that Christmas was coming. Though she knew Gil would disapprove if he found out, Susanne had bought a pair for Joy and hidden it in the closet to save as their big gift to her. She was tempted to give her the boots sooner, because Joy was wearing a pair of cheap knockoffs from two years earlier, which leaked.
But no, she would have to wait until the occasion called for it. Joy said, “Buy me some UGGS and I’ll keep any secret you want.”
“What?”
“Never mind. I was just kidding.” Joy put the phone back in its box and the box in its bag as she looked out the window. People had begun putting up Halloween decorations, and ghosts billowed through the trees.
“It won’t be long now,” Susanne said. She was referring to Halloween, but she could tell from her daughter’s expression that Joy thought she meant something else.
After Gil returned to the house, Susanne awaited for the reconciliation to make a difference in their daughter. It didn’t take her long to realize how silly her fantasy had been—that Joy, seeing her parents reunited, would suddenly come around and revert to the sunny, smiling child they had always known. It occurred to her that there must be more to it than Joy worrying about their separation and the family’s finances; maybe the stress of entering her last year of high school and the fact that she had to make decisions about her life afterward were as much to blame for Joy’s sullenness as anything else. Susanne couldn’t help feeling lighter, and literally breathing easier, when she considered that whatever was happening with Joy might not all be her fault. Even with Gil back in the house, Joy spent most of her time in her bedroom, and barely spoke when the three of them were in the same room.
The night after Gil’s return she’d dyed her hair black, without announcing her plan; when she emerged from the bathroom with her hair still dripping, both Susanne and Gil exclaimed, and intuitively Susanne knew that Joy had done it less because she wanted to change her hair color than because she wanted to hurt them. This realization was painful in itself, and the hair did hurt Susanne physically to look at—the effort her once-blond and smiling little girl had spent to cover all the brightness that wanted naturally to shine through. As if she might be trying to erase or conceal the best part of herself with that dark, impenetrable dye.
What happened to that child? Once she had twirled around in the backyard shouting I get to be alive! Now her own mother barely recognized her.
At least she hadn’t gotten a tatto
o, like Delaney Stowell. Susanne wondered what Delaney’s father, the shrink, made of the azure-eyed serpent curling down his daughter’s shoulder. Dye would wash out eventually. She hoped the same would be true of whatever it was her daughter was going through. She couldn’t wait for Joy to come out on the other side.
Stand up straight, Susanne was tempted to tell her in the meantime. And please don’t hide your face like that. They were things her own mother said to her, but she wouldn’t remember this until later.
Normally Joy slept until noon on the weekends, so Susanne could tell her husband was as surprised as she when, on the Saturday before Halloween, their daughter got up before eight o’clock—an ungodly weekend hour for her—and asked if she could take the car to “go see Grandma.”
When his mother first entered Belle Meadow (which Joy insisted on calling BM no matter how many times her parents asked her not to), Gil had made it a point to visit her every day. He believed that dropping in unannounced, at random times—no set schedule—would result in better care, because the staff would be invested in having her bathed, dressed, and “presentable” (Gil’s word) for when her son came by. Susanne originally thought him cynical in this, but one Sunday night when they stopped in after having been away for the weekend, they found Emilia sitting in a corner of the Solarium by herself, facing the wall, wearing a stained sweatshirt and sweatpants that didn’t fully cover her goose-bumped legs. When they turned her wheelchair to face them, they saw dribbled chocolate pudding drying on her chin. At the sight of his mother’s smeared face, Gil recoiled. Susanne knew what would happen next, and it did. Her quiet-mannered husband went to the nurses’ station and let them have it—quietly, but for a long time. She caught the occasional words of explanation from the nurse in charge—short staffed, chaotic, emergency—but it was clear that Gil’s message got through. There had not been a time since then that Emilia hadn’t appeared in pristine condition (and most of the time better dressed than Susanne) when they came to visit. She didn’t usually make sense when she spoke to them, but she always looked good.
When Joy took a job at Belle Meadow as lobby receptionist for the summer, then stayed on for a few after-school shifts once summer was over, Gil backed off his schedule of daily visits because Joy said she’d keep an eye on her grandmother. But she could only stand to go down to the memory-care unit for a few minutes at a time, she told her parents. “It’s totally depressing. That’s what we all have to look forward to?” she said. “No thank you. I’m going to lie down for a nap one day when I’m ninety and die in my sleep without knowing. That’s the only way to go.”
“We should all be so lucky,” Susanne remembered murmuring, not sure whether she wanted her daughter to hear her or not. She and Gil decided not to push her to visit Emilia more often, assuming it would only backfire.
So when Joy got out of bed four hours before she normally would have on a weekend, then asked if she could take the car to visit her grandmother, Susanne could tell that although Gil felt pleased by the question, the pleasure was tinged with suspicion. He told her he’d been planning a visit himself before dinner, after he finished building a retaining wall in the Moultons’ garden, and he’d love it (and he was sure her grandmother would, too) if Joy wanted to accompany him.
Joy thanked him, but said she had plans at the mall later and would rather go to BM in the morning. Like, after breakfast. Gil reminded her that the staff didn’t usually have Emilia out of bed that early, but Joy just shrugged and said that was okay with her, she’d hang out in the dining room and wait. “You don’t have to come with me,” she told Gil, but Susanne knew it was a measure of his desire to take advantage of the opportunity to do anything with Joy—especially visit his mother—that he agreed to call the Moultons and rearrange his schedule, to accommodate her request. And it was a measure of Susanne’s desire to foster her still-tentative reconnection with Gil that she offered to make the trip to Belle Meadow, too.
“Whatever,” Joy said, and Susanne tried to avoid recognizing her daughter’s displeasure that they hadn’t just let her take the car and go to the nursing home by herself.
They arrived at eight forty-five and were admitted by Mr. Trujillo, who stationed himself in his wheelchair at the entrance every morning and spent the day operating the automatic door by pressing the button with his Hush-Puppyed foot. “Good morning,” Susanne told him, and pressing the tube in his throat from an old tracheotomy, he rasped (as he did to any remark anyone made to him), “Easy for you to say.”
As Gil had expected, Emilia was still in bed. The nurses were surprised to see them so early. “Joy was eager to visit her grandma,” Susanne said, recognizing that it sounded like an apology because she was afraid the staff would feel the need to hurry through the complicated process of getting Emilia up and ready for the day. For an instant she felt her daughter glaring at her, but then Joy must have decided (Susanne realized, looking back) to play the role she’d been cast in, and nodded to affirm what her mother had said.
Jason, one of the nursing assistants, came out from behind the desk to let them know that there were doughnuts in the dining room. Susanne waited for Joy to decline; she hadn’t eaten a doughnut in years, because of what they did to her stomach. But instead she said, “Awesome. Thanks,” and accepted Jason’s invitation to show her where the doughnuts were. She smiled, then followed him, as he punched in the code to let them out of the unit without setting off the alarm.
“He’s got to be twenty-five at least,” Gil muttered, watching Jason walk away with his daughter. “Right?”
“I would think so,” Susanne said, trying not to wonder if he was older or younger than Martin. Jason was one of the aides most familiar to them, because he was often on duty when they came to visit Emilia. They were always glad to see his name assigned to her, because he was one of the strongest members of the staff and could perform by himself many of the duties that required two less-sturdy people.
“Is he cute?”
It was the kind of question she loved Gil for—of course he knew the answer, but wanted to hear it from her—and it made her smile. “Yeah. He’s cute.”
“Is this something we have to worry about, do you think?”
She smiled again as Joy and Jason approached, each holding a half-eaten doughnut. “No. I’m sure it’s just a crush.”
“Well, I guess we have our answer about why she wanted to visit now.” Gil gave her a wry smile back. “Even I wasn’t naïve enough to think she got up at this hour to see my mother.”
And in fact they ended up leaving before Emilia even woke up, because after eating two of the doughnuts, Joy said she didn’t feel well and thought she might puke. Susanne could tell that Gil was biting back some version of You should have known better. When they got home, Joy shut herself in her room for an hour or two. When she emerged, Gil said he was going back to Belle Meadow and Joy could come if she wanted, but she pretended she didn’t hear him and said she was going out.
Error Analysis
These questions do seem kind of bogus,” Natalie said. A little more than a week left before she would take the civil service exam, and she’d asked Tom to help her study over a pitcher of Samuel Adams Octoberfest at the Tent Pole.
Tom had been the one to point out to her the lameness of the Life Experience Survey section, which consisted of questions such as Within the past two years, how many times have you taken a day off because you did not feel like going to work? A) Never; B) Once; C) Twice; D) Three times; E) More than three times. “I think you should write in ‘F, too many to count’” he said, and Natalie laughed and said, “Yeah, or maybe ‘What business is it of yours?’”
“And check out this Error Analysis,” she added, picking up the page in front of her. “‘In assessing why you have answered questions wrong, consider the following: you may have misread the question; you may have lost track of time; you may have had difficulty distinguishing the important and unimportant parts of a complex question; you may have chose
n an answer simply because it looks good.’” She wiped foam from her mouth with the back of her hand. “How about ‘Because I’m a doofus’?” Tom smiled even though that section had caught his interest, making him realize how consistently he relied on D: choosing an answer, to any question in his life, just because it looked good.
The question of why he was here in a bar with Natalie instead of home with his wife, for instance. Yes, they were dive partners on the rescue team, and that meant something; you felt an obligation to help each other out. That looked good, as an answer.
But of course he had an obligation to Alison, too—a much higher one. Was he having difficulty distinguishing the important and unimportant parts of a complex question? No. The question was not complex. The answer was easy: he dreaded going home to Alison because she’d told him on the phone that she’d had “an inspiration” about how he could get on her father’s good side.
Tom couldn’t have cared less about getting on Doug’s good side for his own sake, but he’d given up trying to convince Alison that she shouldn’t care, either. Every time he brought up the subject of the hold Doug seemed to have over her, she responded with some version of Look who’s talking. Tom hadn’t figured out a way to explain the difference he saw between his efforts to preserve his father’s business—attempting to fulfill the vision his father had worked so hard for but failed to achieve—and what struck him as a childish wish on Alison’s part to remain her father’s Ali Cat, even as she yearned to become a parent herself.
Arriving home from the Tent Pole, he stepped in the door feeling wary. Before he could even greet his wife, she was all over him with her idea about how he could curry favor with her father. “I was thinking that maybe you could find something out, give him some information,” she said. “You know, that he could take credit for. That the board will notice, when it comes time.”
How Will I Know You? Page 15