Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  My mother hugs me tightly, but she does not say anything. She does not even nod her head. She's too smart for this. She knows that in a little while I will stop crying, that in a few hours I will remember that Jack does, in fact, usually see through his wife's games and manipulations, and that it is only around the issue of his son that he is sometimes blind to the point of foolishness. She knows that it is far better not to be on record as having criticized him.

  “Is she getting married, at least?” my mother asks. “I always used to pray that Annabeth would get married and be happy. Just so that I would not have to think about her anymore.”

  “I don't know,” I say. I've been hoping for the same thing; that Carolyn would fall in love and marry, that all her jealousy and bitterness would be swept away by a new and thrilling passion, and that my guilt could thus follow suit. How typical of this woman to torture me with a baby but begrudge me the relief her marriage would have provided.

  After a while I realize that I am no longer crying—I am making noises like a person who is in tears, but my eyes are dry. I sit up.

  “Well,” I say. “I'm hungry.”

  “Shall I make us dinner?” my mother says. “I was going to broil some salmon. I can run up to the market and get another filet or two.”

  “Do you still have that crepe pan you bought me in high school? We can make salmon crepes, then we'd just need the one filet. And we can make dessert crepes, too. I saw some Nutella in the pantry last week.”

  I put a Joni Mitchell CD on the stereo. I bought my mother both the CD and the stereo for her first birthday after the divorce. My father left her all the furniture in the house, every photograph, including the ones of his own children, even the TV set. But he took the Bang & Olufson sound system.

  My mother and I listen to Joni Mitchell bemoan the paving of paradise while we mix crepe batter, doing our best to sing along. We cook well together. Long ago I graduated from sous chef to equal partner in the kitchen, but today I let my mother order me around. I dip the pan in batter when I am told to, I allow her to slide the pancake off the Teflon with a twist of the rubber spatula, her motions still smooth and practiced even though we have not made crepes since 1992. She stirs up a simple tarragon sauce for the salmon and we each eat three crepes. When it is time for dessert I leave her with the crepe maker while I drive to the market and buy a pint of whipping cream and some salted hazelnuts. When I get home I whip the cream with just a pinch or two of sugar, crush the nuts, and we eat dessert with our fingers, smearing Nutella down our chins and smiling at each other with chocolate-covered teeth.

  While we are loading the dishwasher my mother says, “It puts a terrible strain on a marriage, dealing with an ex-wife.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if your father's and my problems didn't have an awful lot to do with Annabeth.”

  I pause while I'm wiping off the crepe maker. “Your problems had an awful lot to do with Daddy being an asshole.”

  She doesn't reply for a moment; instead she takes her time rinsing the suds out of the sink. “She used to write letters to the girls, telling them she was going to take them for the day, or for Christmas vacation. It would break my heart to see them get so excited, packing their little overnight bags. More often than not she wouldn't even come to pick them up, or she'd just take them for a couple of hours when she'd promised them a whole week. The girls would be so sad. Lucy would cry for days, and Allison would get that horrible little scowl, you remember the one, with her chin all thrust out?”

  “Yes.”

  “The last time Annabeth saw them,” my mother says, turning around and leaning against the kitchen sink while she dries her plump hands on a dish towel, “when you were about three or four years old, she had them all worked up over a trip to California, to Disneyland. I told your father to speak to them, to warn them that she'd probably back out, like she had before, but he wouldn't. He claimed that not even Annabeth would be so cruel as to renege on a promise like Disneyland. Well, of course, when the big day came, she was nowhere to be found. A few days later she came by with one of her boyfriends and took the girls up to the Catskill Game Farm for the afternoon.”

  I pause while I am pushing the chairs neatly under the kitchen table, the legs squeaking across the tile floor. “I remember that. I remember when they went to the Catskill Game Farm. I was so jealous.”

  “You remember that? Really? You were so little.”

  “They brought home water pistols. And Allison got a stuffed pink frog.”

  “Did she? I don't recall. What I remember is that the next day at breakfast the girls were even more obnoxious than usual. It got so bad that I tried to send Allison to her room, but she kicked up a fuss, shouting about how she wasn't going to listen to me, not after I'd refused to let her and Lucy go to Disneyland with their mother.”

  “What?” I sit on the table, drawing my knees up under my chin. My mother so rarely tells these stories about my older sisters, about how badly they treated her, how poorly behaved they were. Neither does she complain overmuch about her predecessor; even now that she has joined her in my father's past. This is a rare and unaccustomed treat.

  “Annabeth had told them that it was my fault, that she had been planning on the trip, but that I had canceled it.”

  “She did not.”

  “She did.”

  “Oh my God! What a bitch. And they believed her?”

  “Of course they believed her. Or at least they decided to believe her. The alternative, that their mother was lying to them, would have been intolerable.”

  “What did you do? Did you tell them the truth? Did you make Daddy tell them the truth?”

  “Oh, we tried, but it didn't do much good.” My mother gives a funny little half smile. “Still, I got my own back.”

  “What do you mean? What did you do?”

  The back of my mother's head is reflected in the window over the kitchen sink. The collar of her pink blouse is folded up and now she smoothes it down. “Well, you know my old mink coat with the sable collar and cuffs?”

  “Of course. I'm counting on inheriting that one day.”

  “Would you like to know where I got it?”

  “Tell me,” I say, a trill of excitement in my voice.

  She leans forward conspiratorially, as though Annabeth Giskin herself might be lurking nearby and eavesdropping on our conversation. “A few months after the Disneyland fiasco, in the autumn, I got a rather strange telephone call from a pleasant older gentleman who owned a fur storage vault in Paramus. He had called Daddy's office first, but had asked for Mrs. Greenleaf. The receptionist, a new girl, gave him the home number. The man from the fur storage vault was calling all his customers to let them know that he was going out of business. Poor thing, his son, who was in business with him, had died, of leukemia, I think. He just didn't have the heart to continue. He and his wife were retiring to Florida.”

  “And?”

  “And he asked me to pick up my mink-and-sable coat.”

  “And?”

  “And I did. Paying, by the way, nearly six years in back storage fees, which cost me a pretty penny, I'll have you know.” She gives the kitchen a once-over with a practiced eye and then begins to head out the door.

  “So?” I say, insistently.

  She pauses and smiles over her shoulder. “It's a nice coat, don't you think?”

  “It's a beautiful coat, Mom. I mean, you know, if you don't mind the whole massacre of small mammals thing.”

  “So that's how I punished Annabeth.”

  “Wait a second. It was her coat?”

  She winks.

  “Oh my God! You stole her sable coat!”

  “I did not steal it. The woman left it in storage for years without even bothering to pay the fees. I merely redeemed it. And it's not sable. It's mink, with a sable collar and cuffs.”

  I am giggling now, agog with newfound respect for my mother's audacity. This is a woman who never assert
s her dominion over anything, who spends her life making sure other people are happy, comfortable, well fed. Her life is a constant bustle of organizing others' needs and desires—the precise brand of ibuprofen they prefer, a Primaloft pillow if they are allergic to down, violin lessons if they show an inclination toward the musical, a basket containing chocolate chip muffins, a gift certificate for the dry cleaner, and a bouquet of pink and yellow gerbera daisies if they are newly moved to the neighborhood. This is the very first time I have ever heard of her taking something for herself, and it is a calf-length mink-and-sable coat.

  “Wait a second,” I say. “Didn't Daddy notice that you were wearing his ex-wife's fur?”

  “No,” she says, flicking off the lights in the kitchen and leading me up the stairs. “Funnily enough, he never did. I always imagined that he probably recalled buying the fur, but simply forgot which wife he bought it for.”

  As my mother is tucking me into bed I say, “I don't think I've had such a nice night since Isabel died.”

  She kisses me on the forehead. “You know, sweetie, I'd like a photograph of Isabel, if you've got one.”

  I stiffen under my worn comforter and dig my toes into the bed, feeling the quilted bumps of the mattress. To distract her from the picture I cannot yet give her, I tell my mother about the Walk to Remember.

  “Mindy asked me to go with her, before she got pregnant.”

  “Hmm.” She smoothes my hair away from my face.

  “I am so relieved that she isn't making me go.”

  “Are you?”

  “The whole thing smacks of vacant sentiment. Wandering around Central Park at dusk with a bunch of other families whose babies have died. It's ridiculous.”

  “Why ridiculous, Emilia? Don't you think it might be comforting to be in the company of people who understand what you're going through?”

  “Grief counseling doesn't help.”

  “Well, this is hardly grief counseling, now is it? You'd just be walking in the park with other women and other families. It would be a kind of memorial to Isabel. It sounds lovely to me. It sounds very healing.”

  I close my eyes under my mother's warm hand. She knows, I think, that despite my artfully contrived cynicism, it sounds lovely to me, too. To walk in the park with a group of people to whom no explanation is necessary, no excuses required. A group of women hollowed in the same way. To walk through the cold park, as the winter sky darkens and the branches are sketched black against the gray drifting clouds. To say Isabel's name with the name of so many other small gone things. It does sound lovely. It does sound healing.

  “If I decide to go, will you come with me?” I say.

  “Is that okay? Are grandparents invited?”

  “I'm sure they are. I'm sure everyone is invited.”

  “I'd love to go then. I'd be honored.”

  “If I decide to go.”

  “If you decide to go.”

  Chapter 20

  In the morning, I call Jack on his cell phone. He and William are walking along Eighty-first Street toward Amsterdam Avenue. They are meeting friends for brunch at Sarabeth's. Scott and Ivy were friends of Carolyn and Jack's. Couple friends. The one time Jack and I tried to socialize with them was a complete disaster. Over the course of a single evening, Ivy made me recite my age in a dozen different ways. She asked me what year I graduated from high school, when I was at Harvard, if I was old enough to have voted against the first President Bush, if I was too young to have watched Laverne and Shirley in its first run. She and Scott exchanged meaningful glances over comments of mine that I had thought would be innocuous, and when either of them mentioned Carolyn's name they apologized profusely. Since that dinner Jack has played squash with Scott a few times and gone skiing with him once. I think they have lunch occasionally. I don't think Jack's ever taken William to see them, although I imagine William and Carolyn are regulars at Scott and Ivy's apartment in the Apthorpe. Now, when I am gone, Jack and William are jumping at the chance to hang out with Scott and Ivy.

  “I'm going to stay here in New Jersey for a couple of days,” I say.

  “A couple of days?” Jack says.

  “Yeah.”

  “But you don't have any clothes.”

  That's not quite true. I found an old pair of underwear in my dresser. They are high-cut bikinis and look absurd with my low-rise jeans, but they are mine. Or were, in high school. I am wearing a Harvard Women's Law Association sweatshirt that I gave my father. When I found it in my mother's drawer this morning I said, “I cannot believe Daddy left this. I gave this to him. It was a present.” Still making excuses for him, my mother had murmured something about his expanding girth. When I was in college and law school I would buy my father aggressively feminist T-shirts and sweatshirts as a joke to which only I understood the punch line. He gamely wore a black T-shirt embroidered with a mountain crest and the words ANNAPURNA: A WOMAN'S PLACE and one that said AMHERST LBQ—LESBIAN, BISEXUAL, QUESTIONING AND PROUD. The only gift he ever turned down was a tank top I picked up at a pro-choice march on Washington. I argued with him, but my father refused even to go for a jog with the words BUSH, OUT OF MINE emblazoned across his chest.

  Somehow my mother and I had forgotten to pack these shirts when she first threw him out, and when he had come to the house to retrieve the rest of his belongings he had not bothered with them, leaving them in the bottom drawer of the dresser that had once been his and that now was filled with my mother's off-season clothes.

  Now I tell Jack, “I've got some old stuff here, and I can pick up anything I need.”

  I wait for Jack to apologize for fighting with me. I think he is waiting for the same thing, because he doesn't say anything.

  “Well, I'd better go,” I say. “See you in couple of days.”

  “Come home, Emilia,” Jack says.

  “I will,” I say. “I haven't left. I'm just in Glen Rock, visiting my mother.”

  “Come home.”

  “I will.”

  My mother and I spend the day shopping. We go to Lord & Taylor, and I try to convince her not to buy another navy blue cardigan, or at least to buy one in cashmere rather than wool blend. She tells me that I have developed expensive tastes, and then when she sees that this upsets me she tries to buy the cashmere cardigan. I do not let her. I tell her it doesn't look good on her, that it makes her look fat. Then I buy it for her.

  We go to the movies that night, in the next town over. My mother refers, sotto voce, to the people who live in this town as “the yuppies.” My mother always adopts these phrases eight or nine years after they have passed from the zeitgeist. We are in the car when she says this and I tell her she doesn't need to whisper; I promise that no one can hear her. My mother apologizes and this makes me feel so awful that I criticize her parallel parking. “Just pull into a spot,” I say. “Or let me do it. Pull over, and let me do it.”

  My mother does not point out that I am a terrible driver, much worse than she is. She does not remind me that I failed my driving test twice, once because I could not parallel park, and that I have been in four car accidents, ranging from a fender bender in the parking lot of my apartment building in Cambridge to a major pile up on Route 4. The latter was not my fault. The other guy was drunk, and it is a miracle that nobody got hurt. The cop who called to tell my parents about the accident and to reassure them that I was unharmed, albeit hysterical and threatening to sue both the drunk and the city of Paramus, suggested to my father that he consider sending me to a defensive driving course. Or to anger management classes. Now my mother actually pulls the car over, ready to let me park it for her, but a space opens up and she noses in.

  We share a popcorn, a package of Twizzlers, some Raisinettes, and a large Diet Coke. The movie is a romantic comedy, and it makes me so depressed that I want to scream. I chose this movie because I knew it would have no babies in it, the actors were all too young to play parents, but sitting in the theater, two rows behind us, is a couple with an infant. Since w
hen, I would like to ask them, is it considered acceptable to impose one's squalling brat on an entire theater of paying customers, all of whom are seeking an escape from the real world, some of whom have surely paid money for a babysitter to watch their own children? But in fact, this baby is incredibly quiet and had I not turned around to see if the theater was sold out, I would never have noticed him. He does not make a peep. I make more noise than he does, shifting in my seat and blowing my nose.

  “Are you all right?” says my mother. “Do you need another tissue?”

  “I'm fine,” I say. I stare at the screen and tell myself I am crying because I am so worried that the main characters of the movie will never realize that the antipathy they think they feel is really an undercurrent of irresistible sexual tension.

  After the movie is finally finished, after I have forced my mother to wait for the credits to roll and the baby to leave, we get up. My mother gathers the wrappers and boxes from our candy and soda, as well as those left behind by our neighbors.

  “You don't have to do that, Mom. They pay people to do that. They'll sweep the whole place up after we leave.”

  “You saw the little dancing boxes, Emilia.”

  “They don't really expect anybody to pay attention to the little dancing boxes. Everybody throws their candy wrappers on the floor in the movies.”

  “I don't, and neither should you. It's rude.”

  I sigh. She's right. It is rude.

  While we are walking down the street to the car I feel something different about my mother. Her tread is somehow lighter than it has been. I am lethargic and heavy-footed but she is downright effervescent. Walking next to her, I feel like a child holding on to a helium balloon.

  “What's with you?” I say.

  “Hmm?”

  “You seem happy.”

  “Do I?” my mother smiles to herself.

  “Yes, you do.” I didn't mean to sound so grouchy. I try again. “You seem really happy.” Not much of an improvement.

  “Oh, I'm not. I mean,” she laughs, “I'm neither happy nor unhappy. I'm just myself. I liked that movie, though. Didn't you?”