The Intimates: A Novel

by Ralph Sassone

  Aside from her mother’s clothing, the only thing she’d retained from their old house was a Chippendale-style dining set she’d had since her first marriage, which she’d plopped into her gleaming eat-in kitchen and which always looked so strange there, so out of place, that Maize had to remind herself it was where they’d had countless meals together over the years, first with her father and then with her ex-stepfather and then alone together after Bruce left. The table where Bruce told corny knock-knock jokes, which Maize had always laughed at, and where he’d helped Maize with her algebra homework because her mother knew numbers but was no good at shapes, and where her mother told Bruce to tuck in his shirt and comb his hair, and where Bruce repeatedly asked Maize what she wanted to be when she grew up and told her it was okay that she didn’t know yet, she had years and years to decide and she could be anything she wanted. Undoubtedly her mother would want them to have lunch at that same table today.

  “Robbie’s mother’s got the wrong idea, just moving from one house to another,” her mother said to Maize in her Audi the morning she picked her up for her visit. “She should buy herself a nice condo like mine where everything’s taken care of by the staff. Maintaining a house is an endless headache.” She stared at Maize directly for a moment and sighed as if remembering it before turning her eyes back to the road. “But I guess she has too much rich-lady pride to move to an apartment.”

  “She’s not like that,” Maize said automatically, though she wasn’t sure that was true.

  “Right, Maize. That’s why she has to pay a maid and three kids to do what most people do by themselves.”

  “Our house was much smaller,” Maize said, because she knew her mother as usual was talking about herself rather than other people. They’d been together two minutes and already her pulse was jabbering from irritation. “I don’t know where you get these ideas, Mom. Robbie’s family is comfortable, but they’re not rich. Or—I don’t know—maybe they were once and they aren’t anymore. If you want to meet filthy rich people you should see the clients I had to work with at André’s office.”

  She caught herself using the past tense—a mistake since she hadn’t told her mother about being fired—so she covered quickly. “Their financial statements would make you throw up. Honestly.”

  That was true enough. Before she was let go, Maize had complained to André about how similar all their clients were—that it might be refreshing to sell an apartment to someone besides a finance person or a corporate lawyer or a trust fund baby or a twenty-four-year-old who had a decorator. Their buyers’ profiles were nearly identical to their sellers’. Sometimes she felt like the organizer of an alumni mixer between Wharton and the Harvard Business School, with a few madcap Sarah Lawrence types thrown in to add color. But André had snapped back, “Get real, Maize. Who else do you think can afford this overpriced crap we’re peddling?”

  “You’re naïve as usual,” her mother said to her now, and she sighed again as they turned onto the road to her part of town. “You can’t avoid rich people. That’s who runs the world.”

  “Yes, yes,” Maize said. “The rich are always with us.” But her mother didn’t get the biblical allusion and she didn’t laugh.

  With that one word—naïve—her mother dismissed not only the sophistication Maize had developed at college but everything she’d been exposed to for the past year in Manhattan, where her mother had never come close to living and which she rarely visited. Maize felt she should defend herself, but why bother? Her mother wouldn’t listen. She bit the inside of her cheek as they drew closer to Sylvan Estates, and her mother engaged her blinker to make a sharp right turn.

  Maize pulled out her cell phone to avoid saying anything else for the moment. She checked for e-mails and text messages (there were none) and sent a text to Robbie reading WITH MOM ON ROAD TO NOWHERE. Then she dialed into her voice mail and, after a long pause, she heard Eli saying, “Maize, it’s me again. I’m starting to feel like a stalker so this is my last try. I’ll leave you alone after this,” followed by a whistling sound from his lips or a faulty connection. She nearly pressed DELETE before she decided to save his latest message, as she had all his others, though she hadn’t returned any in the weeks since he’d started leaving them.

  How unconscionably rude she’d been to Eli, whom she’d never given her e-mail address. It made no sense that she froze at the sound of his voice every time and that her hand trembled on the receiver whenever she saw his name on the caller ID screen. Perhaps she was too traumatized by anything or anyone she associated with André’s office. If Robbie happened to be around when Eli called and he asked who was ringing she said either “Sales call” or “Wrong number.”

  At least this latest message promised an end to it all. Eli was undoubtedly getting sick of her by now. The voice mails he’d left after André fired her had grown increasingly heated and repetitious, like a song refrain: “Hey Maize, what’s up? I heard about what happened at the office. How’s your new life of leisure going?… Maize? Hope you’ve been okay the past couple weeks. Just checking in again to see how you’re doing … Maize? Hey. You all right? It’s Eli from the gulag. Can I get you out for drinks or a movie sometime?… You alive, Maize? It’s been almost a month and I’m concerned. Plus I miss you. Please give a call.”

  Now her mother rolled down her car window and waved at the security guard as they approached the complex’s front gate, which looked like a border crossing except that it had a huge wooden sign with carved gilt lettering and a ridiculous man-made waterfall that cascaded even in winter. The guard raised the gate and Maize shuddered as they drove under it, half convinced that it would fall on them and knowing that was as irrational as someone with a fear of crossing drawbridges. In five years she’d never gotten used to the gate or anything else about the complex (or “estate community,” as it called itself). When she’d had to stay with her mother on vacations she didn’t go to the communal pool or tennis courts or the glitzy clubhouse with its gas stone fireplace and wainscoted walls and coffered ceilings. So she was unfamiliar to the other residents, who always eyed her warily like an intruder when they passed her during power walks through the neighborhood down the perfectly straight sidewalks. More often than not, she felt like she should be wearing a guest pass even when she was in her own mother’s apartment.

  It felt to Maize as if her mother had gone out of her way to make her unwelcome despite her assertions of hospitality. Starting with the model of apartment she’d chosen to buy—not a two-bedroom or even a one-bedroom plus den but a jumbo one-bedroom—with the excuse that it was a corner unit and much better positioned in the complex than the larger lines, with a nicer layout and lower monthly carrying costs, although she’d made a bundle selling their house and could certainly have afforded a bigger place if she’d wanted it.

  “Now that you’re home,” her mother said as she sat at the dining table across from Maize, spearing lunch salad, “there are some things of yours in the hall closet I want you to sort through. Otherwise I don’t want to hear you whine if I throw them out. They’re taking up too much room.”

  “What things?” As far as Maize knew, her mother had disposed of everything she hadn’t rescued before her move, like someone fleeing a burning house in the middle of the night clutching mementos.

  “Nothing important. They look like college notebooks and worthless stuff like that.”

  Her mother still hadn’t forgiven Maize for quietly switching her major from pre-law to cultural studies—an interdisciplinary humanist mishmash of sociology, anthropology, semiotics, comp. lit., philosophy, and film—without informing her until it was too late. Her mother had considered it the same kind of willful hippie nonsense that inspired her first husband to come up with Maize’s name, a name she remained sorry to have conceded to in some hormonal fog, though she’d apparently conceded almost nothing else to him before he’d dropped dead at thirty-eight.

  Maize curled her toes at her mother calling her college notebooks
worthless stuff. Even more she resented her mother saying Now that you’re home. Her mother was pointedly ignoring the fact that Maize had her own home in the city now—even if it was comically squalid—with something like a life to go with it. She was skimming over the fact that she’d done nothing in the least to make this condo feel like Maize belonged here, and that she treated Maize like a slovenly houseguest when she was present, and that the house where Maize had grown up was now occupied by strangers. She ignored the fact that Maize’s real family home was elsewhere and locked away from her, as Robbie’s childhood home would soon be from him.

  Maize took a deep cleansing breath to clear her irritation. She wondered what would happen at Robbie’s mother’s house today, now that she wasn’t there to act as a buffer between Daniel and Robbie and his mother. She worried about it.

  “What’s the matter, Maize?” her mother said. “Why aren’t you eating? Don’t you like the salad?”

  “No, it’s good. I’m not very hungry.”

  “I made it just for you, with shrimp, because I know you like shrimp,” her mother said.

  “Thanks.” Maize picked at it and ate one shrimp, slowly, to show her gratitude. She breathed deeply again, but it wasn’t enough. She needed more air.

  “Do you think we could finish this outside on the deck?” Maize said. “It would be nice to look at the lake while we eat.”

  “It’s hot and buggy out there,” her mother said. “The lake’s not moving right, or moving enough—something like that—so there are millions of mosquitoes. We’d be eaten alive. Let’s stay here.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “So how are things at the apartment?” her mother said. “Did you and Robbie repaint your bathroom yet?”

  “Yes,” Maize said, though they hadn’t. “It looks a lot better.”

  “What color did you pick?”

  “Oh,” Maize said. “Something neutral.” She heard her own vagueness. “A shade of blue.”

  “Blue isn’t neutral,” her mother said.

  “Light blue,” Maize said. “It was Robbie’s idea—actually, Robbie’s boyfriend’s.”

  “Isn’t he a medical student? What on earth does he know about interior decorating?” her mother said.

  Maize shrugged. Even with lies she couldn’t avoid her mother’s contentiousness; that was her mother’s animating force, much more than any other quality. Her mother had scraped her way into the middle class, putting herself through community colleges and state universities and getting a C.P.A., and she’d bought all the accessories of a bourgeois matron years before she was one, defining herself piece by piece like an actor assembling a costume, starting from the outside in until she had the role down pat. But she hadn’t quite escaped her background, Maize thought. She still had the poor person’s habit of luxuriating in her bad luck and the injustices she’d suffered, trundling out resentments and displaying them proudly, the way a different kind of nouveau riche displayed jewels and cars and furs and the fake heirlooms they’d bought from somebody else’s family. Perhaps nobody truly got away from her history, remaking herself from the ground up, but Maize supposed the illusion of it was essential: if you didn’t have that you could hardly get out of bed.

  She rose and walked through the living room to the sliding glass door. If she couldn’t dine on the deck she could at least look at the lake. That was something. She thought about Robbie and then about Eli, finding it hard to consider them next to each other in the same room—as though they were opposed ideas—but forcing herself. She imagined introducing them at her empty apartment before she relocated the meeting to a more neutral venue—a street corner or a theater or a restaurant—just the way Robbie had with her and Daniel before this trip.

  “Sit down again, Maize,” her mother called. “We haven’t finished. And I need to talk to you about something.”

  Maize went back to the table. Her mother was staring at the grain of the mahogany tabletop, which was remarkably free of scratches and dents, as if she were counting the striations. It was unlike her not to be looking Maize straight in the face, and when she spoke her voice had gone flannelly.

  “I’ve always wondered…” She broke off in midsentence, as if she had to swallow something large though her mouth was empty. She splayed her hands on the tabletop. “I’ve always wondered … Well, I might as well spit it out.” She exhaled.

  “All right,” Maize said.

  “I’ve always wondered if Bruce was inappropriate,” she said.

  Why was her mother rehashing this now, a decade after their divorce? Of course Bruce had been inappropriate. Their marriage was an unsolved mystery to Maize. Bruce was shambling and sloppy and her mother was anal-retentive. He was upper-crust and paunchy and preppy and her trim, aerobicized mother was from a family of construction workers. She and Bruce had done nothing but bicker until her mother kicked him out—Bruce relocating first to a garden apartment nearby, then to Key West, then to Santa Fe and San Francisco, and finally to an address in Marin County that Maize had scoped out repeatedly on Google Earth: what looked like a small bungalow with trees that Maize imagined were fragrant eucalyptus and an aquamarine rectangle that might or might not be a swimming pool. Although she’d gotten birthday cards from Bruce they didn’t speak anymore. But all that was a long time ago, Maize thought. Move on.

  There was silence over the table, and her mother was looking directly at Maize now. “Sure. I guess Bruce was inappropriate,” Maize said. “To use your word. But you’d know better than me.”

  “No, Maizie. What I’m asking is whether Bruce was inappropriate with you.”

  “What?” For a second she didn’t grasp what her mother meant, but then she did. “What?”

  “It’s okay to tell me if he was,” her mother mumbled.

  “No,” Maize said. “He never did anything sketchy. He didn’t do anything, Mom. Ever.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Maybe a little something?” her mother said, as if she were bargaining for a discount.

  “Absolutely nothing,” Maize said.

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I am not afraid,” Maize said, and she wasn’t. If anything she was livid. It was her mother who was behaving inappropriately with her, trying to caricature Bruce and foist the damage he’d done to her onto her daughter—sealing away the fact of Bruce’s existence by tarnishing whatever pleasant memories Maize might still have of him. It constituted a kind of theft. But it had the opposite effect of making Maize recall Bruce all the more fondly: Bruce saying “Upsy-daisy” and carrying Maize into the house at night when she’d fallen asleep in the car and couldn’t be roused by her mother’s prodding; Bruce buying noisemakers and fezlike party hats on New Year’s Eve when Maize was little; Bruce bringing her ginger ale and toast and magazines when she got sick; Bruce crooning loudly and badly along with Bono as he drove them in his car—the Subaru he gave Maize when he left—knowing his voice was awful and making a joke of it by saying, “I coulda been a star!”; Bruce making hilarious simian faces behind her mother’s back toward the end, whenever she nagged them both about how sloppy they were and how low-rent their manners, while her mother demanded to know why Maize was laughing at her when she was addressing serious matters.

  Maize missed Bruce more than she’d admitted to herself, and far more than she’d ever let on to her mother.

  That was like so much of her adolescence with her mother: Maize had never told. A million secrets large and small she’d kept from her mother since turning twelve. She assumed that was natural unless you were one of those dippy girls who said things like My mom is my best friend. But sometimes she wondered why puberty marked the growth of secrets along with breasts and strange hair, multiplying secrets and more secrets like mutant cells, and the desire to hibernate from the same adults you’d been so close to and once believed you couldn’t live without. As if adolescence were a cult you got initiated into overnight that forbade conta
ct with old intimates lest you backslide.

  Her father had died when she was four. Bruce was as close to a father as Maize had ever come, and then he was gone, and now her mother wanted to destroy whatever remained of him, the way certain people weren’t content to throw away their trash, they had to have the satisfaction of burning it.

  Maize looked to the right, past the sliding glass doors, past the deck to the man-made pond lined with benches no one ever used. Her mother didn’t have a lawn to speak of or care for anymore and that was a relief to her, she’d told Maize repeatedly since moving here. That was the way she liked it.

  Then Maize looked across the room at her mother, who was staring at the tabletop again. Her mother had once been beautiful; Maize had pictures to prove it. With effort she could be beautiful again. She was still attractive. But her features had tightened and drawn in on themselves over the years as she’d gradually closed down her life, going from friendships to periodic phone chats with her daughter and her sister in Illinois, from a real house to an impeccably dusted one-bedroom apartment with a double mattress that groaned under her in mockery every time she turned to face no one in the dark, from two marriages to sporadic dates (arranged by a paid service) with men whose age, height, weight, coloring, education, and interests were listed in printouts like items on a delivery menu.

  Her mother had something approximating boyfriends—men she went out to dinner with occasionally, or to a movie, or whom she met after work for coffee dates—and for all Maize knew she had sex with them. But apparently none of them lasted, since there was no evidence of them in her condo. When she mentioned them glancingly to Maize, it was in the same tone as saying that she’d just had her cabinets repainted or her carpeting steam-cleaned or that a plumber had come to clear a clogged pipe. It sounded like a necessary bit of maintenance work she’d had to undertake before sending contractors back through the security gate, into the unguarded world outside her complex.