by Jan Ellison
She stepped toward us in the fog. Did it shoot through the air between you right then—the speeding bullet of recognition or desire?
She climbed into the car next to you. She was holding a book, which she dropped into the side pocket of her bag so she could shake your hand.
“Robbie, this is Emme,” I said. “Emme, this is Robbie.”
“Nice to finally meet you, Robbie,” she said.
You lifted the book out of the pocket of her bag and examined the cover. “Zen Koans?”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“What’s a Send-Going?” Polly asked from the back.
You laughed. “Zen ko-an,” you said slowly. “It’s a paradox, or a puzzle, used to teach enlightenment. For instance, ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ ”
“Why do you know this?” I said, turning to look at you.
“My department chair is interested in the link between physics and enlightenment.”
Jonathan glanced back. “He is?”
“Yep.”
“Wow,” your father said. “Interesting. So if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?”
“Actually, when a tree falls, it creates shock waves. And when the shock waves reach an ear or an artificial mechanism like a microphone, they’re transmitted into what we call sound,” you said. “The shock waves themselves are not sound.”
“But does it make a sound or not?” Clara asked.
“We don’t really know,” Emme said. “That’s the mystery we’re intended to sit with.”
“Are you a Buddhist?” you said.
“Oh, no,” Emme said. “I just saw the author speak at a bookstore in the Mission. He made it all seem so simple. He said we can achieve happiness not by remaking ourselves, but by subverting unhappiness. By throwing it overboard.”
“I like that,” Jonathan interjected enthusiastically. “Let’s all throw unhappiness overboard.”
“But you’re already happy,” I said to him, not altogether kindly. His optimism and good humor occasionally struck me as bordering on delusional. “You don’t need to throw it over, because you never invited it on board in the first place.”
He looked at me and grinned. “Nothing wrong with happiness.”
IT WAS SEVEN months later that he announced he was moving out. You had been gone from the house for a week. It was a bright February afternoon, and we were driving in the car. The sun was making metallic streaks on the windshield. The girls were at home with a sitter. We were returning from Sunday brunch at Mel’s, a tenuous reenactment of what had often been our version of date night. It had been a relief to escape the relative quiet of the house since the holidays had ended and the leavings had begun. First my brother had returned to L.A. and my father to Maine, inviting us all to come visit him there soon. Then my mother left, and finally, Robbie, you did. Things were still strained between your father and me, but he had been the one to suggest the date, and I was encouraged that he was making an effort.
He squinted forward and lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the glare. Then, without a preamble of any kind, he announced that his author friend who lived in Gold Hill, the one who’d invited us all over on the Fourth of July, was leaving in a few days for a year abroad. He’d offered to let your father move in as a house sitter.
“You’re moving out?” I said.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“As soon as I pack up.”
He told me he planned to work in partnership with a team of researchers he’d met in the fall on a major new initiative at the Stanford University Medical Center—the development of content on health-related topics that could be packaged and sold for digital distribution. He was giving up the office space he’d leased in the city for fifteen years. He intended to work directly out of the house in Gold Hill. It made sense professionally and economically. Also, Stanford had made a sizable investment, which would pay all the hospital bills. And he could take a higher salary than he ever had before. We would no longer need to worry about money, at least not in the short term. We’d be fine without the salary I’d been paying myself since the store turned profitable a decade earlier. I wouldn’t have to rush to reopen as soon as the damages from the flood were repaired. I could wait until I was ready.
We had reached the business district, almost deserted on a Sunday afternoon. The street was deep in the shadow of downtown. He pulled over and parked. He didn’t look at me.
“You did all this without telling me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Why?”
“I guess I feel like we need some time apart.”
I sat in the seat beside him, stunned. I should never have confessed. I should have wiped my one indiscretion—one indiscretion in more than twenty years—from my conscience, and our marriage would still be intact.
I started to cry. Then I groveled. I pleaded. I grew angry. But his mind was made up. He’d thought it all through. He figured the girls could stay with him alternating weekends and an evening or two a week until school got out. Then, in the summer, they could split their time between us.
He had been facing straight ahead, looking out the windshield, but now he turned to me, and I could see in the relentless blue of his eyes that he was not going to change his mind.
“Are we getting a divorce?”
“No, we’re not getting a divorce,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. We’re just … I don’t know what we’re doing.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” I said. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You’ve done enough.”
“It was one night, Jonathan. It was stupid. It was pointless.”
He said nothing. Because the thing that had broken him was not the thing I was trying to explain away.
Five
SATURDAY, MARCH 17. St. Patrick’s Day. Seven weeks since you left this house, six since your father did, too.
ON THURSDAY NIGHT, your father came to collect the girls for an overnight in Gold Hill. I had been crying earlier, and before he arrived, I looked at myself in the mirror—really looked—for the first time in months. I smoothed the wrinkle between my eyes. I put drops in to clear away the red. I put on lipstick and mascara. I ran a brush through my hair, wishing I’d taken the time to wash it. I studied my profile, then my back side, in a hand mirror—the curves I’d always tried to camouflage, which your father had claimed to love, and the hair he’d claimed to love as well. Welsh hair, from my mother’s side, straight and long and still a dark brown, except underneath, where the gray threatened. The face was my mother’s, too—thick black arched eyebrows, the eyes beneath the same as yours, a fiercer, lighter green than people expected to find in our olive-skinned faces. A narrow nose flanked by what your father had once called “discriminating” cheekbones. Fullish lips and straight front teeth. Crooked bottom teeth I’d long ago learned to hide when I smiled.
I forced my face into a smile now, looking to see if whatever your father had first fallen for was still there, but my relationship to my overall appearance was as erratic as ever. I looked once, and glimpsed the old prettiness, but when I looked again, from another angle, it seemed to have been a trick of the light, and I could find only a series of small but certain flaws—in the skin, the shape, the hair—that were growing in strength and number as time marched on. I fell back into the tired script I’d been running all my life: If, when I looked, I was not perfect, how could I be beautiful? And if I was not beautiful, how could I be loved? I was not the only woman who ran that script. A worldwide industry promoted and supported its story. But since last summer, it had reached deeper for me. It had moved from the skin and the shape and the hair straight to the heart.
Polly appeared in the doorway as I was staring at my face.
“What are you looking for?” she said.
I turned away from the mirror. How ridiculous to indulge in vanity with the question of your well-being hanging in the balance.
“Nothi
ng,” I said to Polly. “Nothing at all.”
JONATHAN DID NOT ring the bell or knock. He opened the door with his key and came in. Polly pushed past me down the stairs. Clara emerged from her room and followed. I watched as your father embraced them.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
The girls went to collect their things, and your father stood for a minute with his hands in his pockets, surveying the room as I came down the stairs. He walked into the kitchen to get himself a glass of water.
“What’s that whirring noise?” he said.
“It’s the refrigerator.”
“Why is it making that sound?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long has it been doing that?”
“I don’t know. Awhile.”
His tone was vaguely accusing, vaguely annoyed, which I took as a good sign—he was still territorial about this house. He dragged a chair over and lifted a panel at the top of the refrigerator and peered inside.
“Do you have any tools?”
“I guess I have whatever you didn’t take.”
He found an old toolbox in the garage and stood on the chair again and lifted off the panel. He stuck one tool in, then another.
“There,” he said, putting the panel back and returning the tools to the toolbox. He was so appealing, standing there, so useful and solid and familiar, I wanted to fall into him and demand to be forgiven. But Polly and Clara came into the kitchen with their backpacks, and Polly wrapped her arms around your father’s legs and he laid his hands on her head. I could tell he was taking sustenance from Polly’s embrace just as I so often have, especially since your accident. Even before it, in August, when I dragged myself downstairs the morning after my return from London, and Polly looked at my face and opened her arms and squeezed me while I cried. Which is not to say that Polly is always kind. Or that Clara is, either. What six- and nine-year-old girls are always kind to their mother?
I FORGOT THAT it was St. Patrick’s Day today, and when I picked the girls up from soccer practice, Polly reached up and pinched the flesh at the back of my arm.
“Ouch,” I cried. “What was that about?”
“It’s about you’re not wearing green,” she said bitterly. “And it’s about you didn’t tell me I was supposed to, and I got pinched.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Polly, but you shouldn’t pinch me like that. It hurt me.”
“She’s right, though,” Clara said. “You should have told us.”
I turned to look at Clara, suddenly angry. “You know what? I’m doing my best,” I said sharply. She blinked up at me, and I continued. “Mommies can’t always be perfect.”
She took a step backward, away from me, and Polly burst into tears. I picked Polly up, and she laid her head on my shoulder. I reached toward Clara and held her against me, but I could feel the resistance in her. At nine, she had begun to see a truer picture of me than Polly could. She had begun to see what I saw—not beauty, but imperfections. I let her pull away from me.
“I’m sorry I pinched you, Mommy,” Polly whispered, sounding very sorry indeed.
“I’m the one who’s sorry,” I said.
Mothers can’t always be perfect, but they can be much better than I was last summer.
YOU RETURNED HOME from your third year at Northwestern on June 9, our wedding anniversary, the day before the photo arrived. We’d planned a dual celebration in honor of our long marriage and the recent announcement that you’d been named a Northwestern STEM Scholar, making you eligible to spend your senior year studying at research institutions around the world that partnered with Northwestern. During the summer and fall, you’d be at Lawrence Berkeley working on an optical computing project. In January, you’d head to the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan, to work on space weather research, specifically solar wind. Then, for the grand finale, you hoped to find a project in the area that most interested you—light-source machines.
“Whatever those are,” I’d said to your father when we received the letter from the dean outlining the plan and informing us that tuition, travel and living expenses were to be provided through a STEM scholarship.
The girls had spent the day making a cake, elaborately frosted on one side with a 22, for the number of years we’d been married—close enough, your father said to me, with a wink—and on the other side with a long green painted stem (they had not understood STEM was an acronym) topped with a real daisy they’d picked from the backyard.
“Did you know that the name of that flower is translated as ‘the day’s eye’ in Old English?” your father had said. “Because of the way it opens at dawn.”
“You’re full of fun facts, aren’t you?” I said.
“Can we watch it?” Polly asked. “Can we get up really early and go in the backyard and see?”
“Sure,” your father said. “Sure we can.”
I gave him a look. “Dawn? Really?”
“Why not? It’ll be fun.”
You’d allotted us only two nights, because your classes at Berkeley were beginning in a few days and you wanted to settle into the room you’d rented in a shared house off-campus. Over dinner, you told us you’d been lucky enough to secure a three-month stay, beginning in April, at a research institute in Oxfordshire, England, with a light-source machine.
“What is a light-source machine?” Clara wanted to know.
“It’s a synchrotron, technically,” you explained. “It generates infrared and ultraviolet light invisible to the naked human eye. Researchers use it to see unimaginably small things no other apparatus, much less the human eye, can see.”
“It can generate light ten billion times brighter than the sun,” your father added.
“Wow,” Clara said.
“Why do you know that?” I asked your father.
“Because I’m full of fun facts,” he said, smiling.
“Dad just knows about interesting stuff, Mom,” you said.
“Oh, really?”
You caught yourself. “Not to say that you don’t.”
But of course that was exactly what you were saying, and I felt the old tug of discomfort. Your father was trained as a doctor; you were a STEM Scholar; I didn’t even have a college degree. And the thing that concerned me—the lighting of homes—was trivial compared to the matters that preoccupied you and your father. You, science in its purest form. Your father, science as it applied to the health of the body. Never mind that my salary from the store contributed significantly to the family income. Never mind that it had helped support us, over the years, when the books your father edited and published—books on chronic disease, arthritis, diabetes, cancer—unexpectedly failed to sell, or cost too much to produce. Or when the book publishing business as a whole felt the reverberations of the changing economy.
“Looks like we’re both going to be in the business of making light,” you said, trying to appease me.
“But Mom’s lights aren’t brighter than the sun,” Clara said.
“And why do people want all kinds of lights made of junk, anyway?” Polly asked.
“Well, because it’s beautiful junk,” I said defensively. “And people need a little beauty now and then.”
“As long as it’s not form over function,” you said.
“What’s wrong with a little form over function?”
“Give her a break,” your father said. “Someone does need to put beauty in the world, and your mother does it very well.” He stood up and fished a box from a drawer in the hutch and handed it to me. “Speaking of beauty.”
“Jonathan,” I said, taken aback. “We said no gifts.”
“I know. But this is long overdue,” he said. “Open it.”
Polly pulled the box out of my hand. “Can I open it?”
“Sure,” I said.
She opened the box. Inside was a diamond wedding ring. I picked it up and slipped it on and held it up to the light.
“You didn’t need to do this,” I said.
“You’re crying,” Clara said.
“It’s all right if she cries a little,” your father said.
“I’m crying because … it’s beautiful.”
It was the diamond from your father’s grandmother’s ring, he explained, and the three smaller stones in the setting were to represent each of you. He’d had it made to replace the cubic zirconium he’d bought me when we were first married, which in turn replaced the gumball-machine ring he’d slipped onto my finger when he proposed.
“I wasn’t sure whether you’d like gold or white gold,” your father said. “I figured you could have it reset if you wanted something different.”
I stood up and kissed him.
“I don’t want something different,” I said, and I meant it. And not just about the ring, but about our twenty-one years of marriage. The people we’d made. The life we’d shaped together, exactly the life I wanted. I had no reason to suspect, standing there, that the very next day, I would begin to act not as if I wanted to give that life away, but as if I wanted something different to go along with it.
AFTER DINNER, WE all played charades. Then you read the girls a bedtime story, and your father promised to wake them up early so they could try to watch the daisies open. You slept in your old room.
“I changed the sheets,” I said, pulling the covers back.
“Gee, thanks, Mom. ’Cause I’m not used to sleeping on dirty sheets.”
“I know, I know.”
“I brought my laundry.”
“That was collegiate of you.”
“If you don’t have time, it’s no biggie.”
“I have time.”
I threw a load in right away. It gave me pleasure to wash all those dark T-shirts and dark sweatshirts and dark jeans that smelled of aftershave and outdoors. Some of it, I guessed, had not been washed since I’d laundered it at Christmas. Thinking of it now, I can’t help remembering the clothes you were wearing when the car flipped. The clothes they cut off you, which I washed and kept, because I could not bear to throw them away.