“I’m so happy for you,” I said. “The last I’d heard, you’d started a travel website that was doing really well.”
“So well, in fact, that—along with our other jobs—we were able to save enough to afford a down payment on this place. We thought about what part of the country we loved the most, with all the activities we liked to do, and here we are! If you’re ever in Idaho for skiing . . .”
“If we’re ever in Idaho for anything, we’ll visit the Haynes Hideaway,” I promised.
* * *
Shortly after we celebrated our anniversary, Pamela and Nick broke up. They’d been living together so long that it was hard to think of them as not married, and they had seemed so handsomely matched. They both were style-conscious, both loved New York, both liked to visit the trendy clubs and restaurants, and neither wanted children.
“What happened?” I asked when Pamela was in town one weekend and I invited her and Elizabeth and Moe over for dinner with Patrick and me.
“I don’t know,” Pamela said. “I just looked at him one morning and decided he was running on empty.”
“Come again?” said Moe.
“He just seemed like a shell of a man. Nothing inside! I suppose he could have said the same about me. We shared a lot of external things, but . . . I realized I didn’t know how he felt about all kinds of issues, things we’d never talked about. And every time I brought up a topic, he said he hadn’t thought much about it and he didn’t want to start now. We just lost interest in each other, I guess.”
I felt cold all over, because that’s exactly the way it had been between Dave and me. And I could almost see us now, in Pamela and Nick. It was the feeling you’d get after you’d escaped a car crash by a sudden swerve.
“Sure there’s no one else?” Liz asked.
“No. And you know what? I’m happy being single. Not that I wouldn’t consider having a man in my life if I found someone just right, but I’m not lonely. And besides, I’ve got some growing to do.”
“Don’t we all,” Patrick said.
* * *
Patricia Marie and her boyfriend wanted to get married. She was twenty-three, exactly the age I was when Patrick and I married, yet why did it seem so young? I knew if I tried to talk her out of it, she’d be all the more determined. Both she and her husband-to-be were a year out of grad school and were looking for work there in Massachusetts in molecular biology, so it wasn’t as though they were clueless about life.
I wonder if any parent ever feels that her son or daughter marries the person she had in mind. I never thought a lot about it, but I suppose if I had, I would have imagined that Patricia’s fiancé would greet me for the first time with a firm handshake and a gracious, Hello, Mrs. Long. It’s a pleasure to meet Patricia’s mother. A young man in a suit and tie, maybe. A young man in a suit and tie holding a bouquet of flowers. A young man in a suit and tie holding a bouquet of flowers and looking at my daughter with such love and devotion that I knew he would care for her the rest of her life.
Instead Patricia had come home for spring break in her senior year with a short, curly-headed young man, in torn jeans and a T-shirt, whose sneakers seemed impossibly huge to me.
“Mom, this is Zack Sheldon,” Patricia had said on her way to the kitchen to get a soft drink for him.
“Hi. How you doin’?” he said, not even bothering to shake my hand.
At first, Patrick and I figured he was one of many boyfriends she’d have. Zack made himself comfortable on our hide-a-bed in the family room, stayed up late at night playing cards with Tyler when he was here, helped himself to whatever food he found in the fridge, and generally made himself at home.
But when he came back for a week over the summer and we began to suspect that Patricia was not staying in her own room the latter half of the night, and when we heard them talking about the various companies and labs they might apply to after grad school, we realized they were serious about each other.
It wasn’t that Zack was objectionable, exactly. It was just that he was so different from what we had imagined.
“Does he have to slouch that way?” Patrick said, observing Zack out on the deck with a beer can in one hand, the newspaper in the other. “Can you see this guy going on a job interview with curvature of the spine?”
“Can you see him waiting for Patricia at the altar with his shirt tail hanging out?” I asked, a bit more to the point.
But Patricia loved him, so we decided to be as accepting and supportive as possible. After all, they shared the same interests, the same kind of work, they both liked to ski—something Zack had taught Patricia—they both wanted children, and when they argued, they seemed to do it intelligently, always coming up with reasonable solutions.
“Well, Zack,” Patrick said, shaking his hand, “welcome to the family.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Zack said.
Couldn’t he show just a little more enthusiasm? I wondered.
His family lived in Rhode Island, and when we went up to visit, at their invitation, we found them warm and down-to-earth, and liked them immediately.
But almost everything I had imagined about having a daughter—a daughter preparing for marriage—turned out to be wrong. Patricia did not want a big wedding, a church wedding. And most disappointing of all, she did not want to wear my mother’s wedding gown.
“But . . . but I had it preserved! I’ve saved it all these years for you!” I said.
She stared at me incredulously. “I wasn’t even here! I wasn’t born yet! How could you be saving it for someone you didn’t even know!”
I tried to calm myself. “You’re right. But . . . well, you’re named after the woman who chose it. I’d sort of hoped that dress could become a tradition, passed down from mother to daughter to—”
“Or not!” Patricia wore that amused look she gives me sometimes when we disagree. “Mom, it looked great on you in your wedding photos, but I want a simple sheath dress, cocktail-length. I don’t want a veil or any of that jazz. It’s just not me. Okay?”
I looked at my grown daughter and decided she was right. She would look better in a simple sheath dress. She didn’t need any of that “jazz,” as memorable as it was to me. Hadn’t I changed the dress to suit me? Patricia deserved the kind of dress, the kind of wedding, the kind of husband that suited her best, and she would have it.
* * *
“What do you think, Dad?” I’d asked one weekend, helping him plant more tulip bulbs in his side yard. His back had been bothering him a lot, and Sylvia had arthritis in her hands, yet they both loved working in their garden. We wanted them to be able to enjoy it as long as possible. I’d been telling him the latest incident of “Patricia Gets Married” as we worked.
“I think Patricia is going to do whatever she wants, and you’d better let her make her own decisions,” he said, smiling a little. “I know. I had visions of her in Marie’s dress too, but when you come right down to it, what’s a dress? Choose your battles carefully, Al. If you’re going to disagree with your only daughter about something, let it be more importan than a dress.”
I looked at him fondly. “How did you ever get to be so wise?” I asked.
He laughed. “By raising you,” he said. And then he asked, almost bashfully, “Did I do a good job, do you think?”
It occurred to me that up until then in my relationship with my father, I’d wanted him to be proud of me. I’d wanted to prove that I was a wise mother, a supportive wife. I wanted, spoken or unspoken, his approval. I had never thought that he might need mine. There were times I still longed for reassurance from Patricia that she had really forgiven me for that slap, understood our disagreements, knew how much I loved her and cared. How pleased I was whenever Tyler thanked me for something or told me I’d made a great dinner! How eagerly I wanted my own children’s approval!
“Dad, you didn’t just do a good job of raising Les and me, you did a spectacular job,” I said. “You were father and mother for both of us, and I u
sed to tell you more personal stuff at the dinner table than my friends told their parents in a lifetime. I don’t know how you managed it so well.”
He beamed. His laughter came in short, jerky little chuckles, the kind he couldn’t hold back when he was happy, and I reached out over the bag of potting soil and gave his shoulder a squeeze. The older we got, the more alike we were, father and daughter, man and woman. The more human.
* * *
No matter how “simple” someone wants a wedding to be, it’s not. In fact, Pamela, a bridesmaid multiple times, once remarked that the simple weddings are sometimes the hardest.
“You won’t have to reserve a church because we’re holding the wedding outdoors,” Patricia told us. “We want the reception outside too.”
“Outside,” Patrick and I repeated numbly.
“No roof?” asked Patrick.
“We’ll tell the guests that if it’s raining, they should bring umbrellas,” said Zack.
I believe he was serious.
I imagined blue sky when the guests left home for the wedding, clouds rolling in when we started up the hill to the little circle of pines where the ceremony would be held, and a cloudburst right after the “I dos.” I imagined the bride’s four-inch heels sinking down into the mud and the bride’s mother sliding unceremoniously down the bank on her backside.
I phoned Gwen as soon as I could.
“The wedding’s going to be outside?” she repeated. “What are you going to do for chairs?”
Chairs? Chairs! If we had the wedding in a town hall, there would be benches. If we held it in a church, there would be pews. If we held it outside, it meant we’d have to rent chairs and pay to have them hauled up the hill, set up, and hauled back down again. Either that or all the guests would stand.
I phoned Elizabeth.
“Outside?” she exclaimed. “What will you do for air-conditioning?”
Was this a generational thing? I wondered. Something that people Patricia’s age just take in stride? Were we showing our age with all this fretting?
“You know,” said Sylvia, “these things tend to work out. If everything goes smoothly, it will be a day they always remember. And if there’s some major mix-up and we can keep our sense of humor, they’ll always have an interesting story to tell about their wedding. That’s the stuff memories are made of.”
It was indeed a lovely wedding. The evening before, showers were predicted, but Patricia was nervous enough without me reciting the weather forecast. She’d given the impression of being so relaxed, so cool, but obviously, she wasn’t that way at all. I sat with her in her room, giving her a pedicure and trying to be funny while she did her nails. She had scoffed at the idea of having anything done professionally except for her hair.
“Well, Patricia, it’s the night before your wedding. I’ve never been the mother of the bride before. What do we do now? Are we supposed to have a mother-daughter talk?” I was massaging lotion between her toes, her green cotton robe pulled up above the knee.
“You mean about sex and stuff?” She grinned.
“If you want.”
“Sure, Mom. What do you need to know?” The old joke. We laughed.
“Did I tell you that the night before I was married, Aunt Sally and Uncle Milt were staying with us to attend the wedding. I was upstairs packing my suitcase, and Aunt Sally came in my room, looking very uncomfortable. ‘I haven’t done a very good job by you, Alice,’ she said. ‘But this is something a mother should do, and I have to take the place of Marie.’ She slipped a little tube of something in my suitcase and whispered, ‘Lubrication.’ I stood there trying to think what needed lubricating. My suitcase? Our car? And then it hit: me.”
Patricia and I howled.
“She was right, of course. Except that Patrick and I were beyond that point by then.”
Patricia wriggled her big toe affectionately against my hand. “You’ve done a good job, Mom,” she said. “You always answered the questions I asked, and then some.”
“Then some?”
“Everything you told me, I told the girls at school, and then I started bringing their questions to you, pretending they were mine. ‘Ask her about this,’ they’d say, or ‘Ask her about that.’ You were educating a whole class and didn’t know it.”
“Are you serious?”
“Cross my heart.” She had no makeup on at all, and looked like the impish girl she was back in seventh grade. She cocked her head, then, and studied me: “You must have missed a lot, Mom—growing up without a mother.”
“I suppose I did,” I told her. “But you know what? I’ve come to know her better than I ever thought I would from the things she left behind: her books, her pictures, her recipes, her letters. . . .”
I massaged Patricia’s foot there in my lap. “I would have liked my mom, and I think she would have liked me. And she absolutely would have loved you.”
“I hope Zack and I are as happy as you and Dad,” Patricia said thoughtfully. “You’ve had a really happy marriage, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I think you could say we have,” I told her. “But no one is always happy . . . or always angry. In a good marriage you feel content most of the time, satisfied with the way your life is going and with the person you married. Most important, satisfied with yourself.”
* * *
The showers tapered off by morning, and by the time the catering service arrived to put up tents, the grass was drying. The tables and chairs were set up in the big tent, the food brought in, and at four o’clock the justice of the peace arrived, a jolly, good-natured man who seemed in no hurry to rush through the ceremony.
All of us looked splendid in our finery—the Sheldons with their three other grown children; Lester and Stacy wearing the adoring expressions of a fond uncle and aunt, the triplets in the row beside them; and Dad and Sylvia, holding hands.
As the bridesmaids started up the hill in their buttercup yellow gowns and slippers, I noticed proudly that Tyler, who stood beside the best man, seemed mature beyond his years. He was in his third year at Oberlin, considering a career in social work. He had girlfriends, but no one special yet, and made a handsome addition to the wedding party. As for the groom, I’ll have to admit that I looked more favorably on his best man than I did on Zack. Why couldn’t she be marrying him? I wondered guiltily.
But as I watched Zack’s face as he waited for Patricia to be escorted up the hill on Patrick’s arm, the way his own arm encircled her when she reached him, the rapport they had with their friends at the reception, I realized that if Patricia married a man I liked best, she would not be Patricia, but merely a clone of me. And as our eyes met when the ceremony was over and she started back down the hill as Mrs. Zack Sheldon, I told myself once again that often our children know far better than we do what’s best for them.
* * *
To recuperate, Patrick and I returned to Ireland, something we’d promised each other a long time ago. We went over the summer and allowed ourselves to do all the things we hadn’t had time to do on our honeymoon. Yet there were favorite places we remembered and wanted to see again, and if we decided we’d seen enough of Ireland, we’d hop over to Scotland for a while. After living so regimented a life between his job and mine, it was delicious just to wake up in the mornings and say, “What shall it be today? City or country?” And then take all the time our hearts desired.
When the trip was over and Patricia found out we’d been away, she said, “What’s this about a second honeymoon?”
“Not even the second. We’re still celebrating the first,” Patrick told her.
27
VIVA LA ALICE
Patrick and I, Dad and Sylvia, were going to Virginia for Christmas. It was weird to see Lester the father of ten-year-old triplets. Definitely weird to see him at the age of fifty-seven. Patricia and Zack were with the Sheldons up in Rhode Island this Christmas, and Tyler was at his girlfriend’s, so it was no problem for us to get up early and head for Fairfax.
It had always been the rule in Stacy’s family that no one could open presents on Christmas morning until everyone had eaten a proper breakfast. It was the policy now in Lester’s, too. Stacy didn’t want people filling empty stomachs with chocolate and candy canes, so we arrived around nine thirty, and as soon as we sat down at the table, Lester’s children appeared with a “Christmas Manifesto,” printed out on their computer. Each of us had to sign that we would not “dawdle over breakfast” past ten o’clock and that anyone who wasn’t finished eating by then would have to open his gifts last.
“Honestly, now!” Stacy said, embarrassed, but both we and her parents thought it funny, and we all managed to take our coffee cups with us into the living room by ten and gather around the tree. When the big red box in the corner was opened, however, revealing Rollerblades not only for the “Tumultuous T” but for their father as well, we reached for our coats and gloves and headed outside to watch the maiden voyage, the triplets filling the house with deafening shrieks and Lester protesting all the while.
“I haven’t been on skates since I was seven!” he kept saying.
“You’ve been on ice skates, and that’s good enough,” Stacy told him.
“I think we’ll watch from inside,” Stacy’s mom said, opening the curtains a little wider, but Dad and Sylvia went outdoors with us.
Les and Stacy lived at the bottom of a gentle hill, and in winter the street was sometimes closed off for sledding. It was the first Christmas Stacy could remember that the children hadn’t prayed for snow. Now they wanted bare streets and sidewalks, and bare is what they got.
They practiced clunking around on the sidewalk for a while, perfecting their balance, but within twenty minutes, the triplets were taking long, jerky strides, arms out at their sides. At last, when they were all adept at staying upright, Les included, they turned their feet sideways and climbed to the top of the hill.
Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) Page 37