Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  In fact, he didn’t seem to be going further, but, rather, retreating. Annie came down less frequently than she once had, and if she was sometimes the old affectionate Annie, I’d worried, since the day she joined Rennie in specifying dinner without me, that she was moving toward total rejection. Anyway, Leon was arguing a point I hadn’t reached. I hadn’t been in love for that long; I still wanted to be his baby, not have another, even his. Life was complete, if not simple. As Livvy settled into her job and felt less dependent on me, she’d begun sometimes to do homework in the living room. Occasionally she was so friendly as to ask me how to spell a word, rather than look for her dictionary.

  One evening she asked me to read an essay she’d written for school. Her assignment was to contrast the place where a grandparent—or a parent—had been raised with the place where she now lived. Predictably, Livvy had chosen to contrast Sicily with Manhattan to the detriment of the latter. Less predictably, she was uncertain about some of her memories, and asked me to check them out. The piece was called, “My Father’s Sicily, My New York,” and began by contrasting the filthy water of the Hudson with the clean and beautiful water you could swim in off the northern coast of Sicily, where her father had been raised. At first I thought I was mixed up; I could remember only filthy seaport water within any distance of Palermo. But as I read, I became certain something else was wrong; she was describing a town very much smaller than Palermo, or even Castellemare or Trapani.

  I looked up. She was watching me. I smiled.

  “It’s written so nicely, but I’m a little mixed up. The place you talk about visiting—the villa with the courtyard, the mosaics of animals—I don’t remember a place like that. Not that I remember everything, I wasn’t there as often as you, but somehow . . . it sounds like a much smaller town, even than Trapani . . . It sounds . . .”

  I stopped talking because her expression had changed from patient-snotty, as in, Why did I ever ask her in the first place? to puzzled, and then to dismayed. She took the paper from me, looked at it for a moment, looked up at me. She was close to tears.

  “What is it, Liv? I’m sure you can fix whatever’s wrong, no big deal.”

  “It’s Mirella’s town.” She dropped the paper. “I mixed it up. It’s not Trapani. It’s Patti, where Mirella lives.”

  She began to cry. I didn’t know what to say. I started to move from the chair where I was sitting to the sofa next to her, but she put up a hand, signaling me not to. I sat back down, waited. After a little while, she wiped her eyes, said that the paper was due tomorrow, and she had a lot of other homework, and a math test, and she didn’t see how she was going to fix the paper in time. As she spoke, her panic increased.

  “You don’t think the teacher’11 give you an extension?”

  She shook her head. “No way. She’s a real . . .”

  “Well, let’s see. Maybe it doesn’t have to be rewritten entirely. Maybe there’s a way to salvage it. I mean, in the part of the paper I read, there was nothing about Mirella. Do you talk about her later on?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, maybe you can sort of . . . uh . . . cheat a little. Like . . . well . . . The teacher’s never going to know the difference between a town in Sicily where your grandparents live and a town where your father’s mistress lives.”

  She stood up abruptly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I stared at her, confused by what my brain was telling me she meant.

  Then she continued. “Italy isn’t New York, you know. Everybody isn’t always . . . always screwing everybody else, just because—I should’ve known better than to show you anything.” She was working herself into hysteria now. “I shouldn’t’ve showed you—Just because you put out for anyone who—”

  “All right, Livvy,” I said sharply. “That’s enough. I can’t tell if you know you’re being ridiculous, but—”

  “Don’t tell me I’m ridiculous! I was there all the time and you were never there! You don’t know anything about my father, or Mirella, or what they were doing! You don’t know—”

  “I know that I left your father because he was screwing anyone who’d have him from the day we got married!”

  She stared at me, her face contorted by rage and disbelief.

  “It’s the reason I left, Livvy, it’s the only thing that could have made me go. I didn’t want to leave you, but I couldn’t bear it anymore, and you seemed—”

  I stopped because she appeared actually to be gasping for breath.

  “Livvy? Livvy, I’m sorry, I get very angry and I didn’t realize . . .”

  What hadn’t I realized? I’d known I might someday want to explain why I’d left, but I hadn’t understood the nature of the task.

  “Are you all right?”

  She wasn’t all right. She was like someone who’s swallowed a piece of chicken bone and is just realizing it’s jammed in her throat. But when I took a step forward, she gestured at me to keep back. Finally, she brushed past me and went toward the bathroom, closing the door behind her. It didn’t lock. I went up to the door and listened. Water was running. I heard choking, then coughing. Then it was quiet.

  “Livvy?” I called after a bit. “Olivia, just let me know you’re all right and I won’t bother you.”

  She opened the door. I stepped back. She walked past me without looking at me, and went to her room.

  She barely spoke to me in the days that followed.

  I’d written Angelo an occasional brief note, but now I called him for the first time since asking him for money. I said that Livvy had been with me for a long time and I needed a vacation. Also, I thought she needed to know that he hadn’t forgotten her. Furthermore, while she was over there he might try to undo some of the damage he’d done to her view of me. He might want to tell her that however temperamental I’d been, I’d loved her and taken care of her much of the time—good, low-voiced care—when we weren’t in the kitchen. I said it was important to get her out of this notion she had of her mother as the devil, her father, the angel who never went astray, was always there to care for her. When he pretended not to know what I was talking about, I said that if he told Olivia some of the truth, like that Mirella wasn’t the Virgin Mary, it might be easier for me to live with her until she graduated from high school. He caught the implied threat, said he would speak to Annunciata, see if they could bring Olivia to Rome for Easter week. Olivia would have to behave, though; Easter week was very important to Annunciata. Annunciata, how could he tell me? This was no “porca madonna.” This was a true saint.

  “Yes, of course,” I said as I tried to concentrate on the business at hand. “That’s very nice. Now, one of the things Livvy has to learn is . . . I mean, you might talk to her about her boyfriend. It would be a good idea for her to know that if she’s not a true saint, if she ever goes to bed with him, no matter how Catholic she is, she should protect herself.”

  “Protect herself?” It was nearly a whisper. “Of course, she protects herself. She isn’t sixteen yet! She must not, she must not . . . Who is the fijo de ‘na mignotta (son of a bitch) who tries to—”

  “I’m not sure he’s trying anything,” I said. “But she’s spending a lot of time with him, and sooner or later—”

  “You must not allow it!”

  I smiled into the phone receiver.

  “Indeed. Why don’t you fly over for a few weeks, and then you can not allow it.”

  A lengthy silence.

  I said, “It’ll be better if she doesn’t know the visit idea came from me.”

  He said, “No problem, I talk to her all the time.”

  “You do?” I was astounded. “You mean, you call her?”

  “No,” he said. “She calls me. Through her friend who works for the phone company.”

  A few days later Livvy informed me, obviously very pleased, that her father wanted her to come to Rome so she could spend the Easter holiday with him.

  “How nice,” I said. “Did he ca
ll you?”

  “I called him.”

  “I hope you did it on Sunday. Those calls cost a fortune.”

  “It doesn’t cost anything,” she said.

  “Oh? Pablo?”

  She laughed. “Pablo wouldn’t . . . He’s such a straight arrow.”

  “So who’s the other guy?” I risked asking, since she was in a civil mode.

  “Nobody,” she said. “The guy who came to install my phone. The one who . . . He’s how I met Pablo.”

  I nodded. “Does the company know about all these calls?”

  She shrugged. “It’s one of the reasons they work for the phone company,” she said. “They can call all their relatives.”

  I asked no more questions. Actually, I was relieved to hear that Pablo was a straight arrow. That was the impression I’d had during my one brief conversation with him.

  It was the best of Easter vacations, it was the worst of Easter vacations. Mrs. Borelli was retiring. It had been decided that, particularly since I never gave classes Easter week, no sitter would be needed for Leon’s kids. I gave Annie and Ovvy keys to my bottom lock, the only one I kept on during the day. (Rennie refused the offer.) I’d thought of doing this before, but since Livvy often seemed irritated by the kids’ presence, I’d held off. In fact, it was during this week, when life seemed so easy, when Annie and Ovvy wanted to see if Parenthood was around any place that I admitted to myself for the first time that I wished Livvy had never come to the States. I knew how I would feel if I hadn’t been allowed to see her at all. But if she’d continued to live with her father and had visited me, or allowed me to visit her . . . It was a rainy afternoon and we told Rennie we were going and took off, no need for me to worry about what kind of hostility I’d face when I brought them back for dinner.

  Rennie, at thirteen, was no fonder of me than she’d ever been, but she had grown more involved in life away from the home, had friends, went to sleepovers, and so on. Annie was almost ten now, Ovvy seven and a half. When they had dates that required an escort (Ovvy, primarily; Annie could go to many of the places she wanted to go on her own), I happily walked or rode with them. Sometimes I wanted to go even if I wasn’t needed. On another rainy day toward the end of the week, a friend of Ovvy’s who’d thought he wasn’t interested in making cookies was visiting. Tears of contentment came to my eyes when I heard Ovvy tell him I’d bake any kind of cookies they wanted. It was as though my pleasure in cooking with and for him had become a badge of worth. Leon thought it was funny that I insisted on maintaining the charade of not sharing his bed, but I was afraid of change. Life was sweeter than it had ever been, and I was terrified to upset some balance we’d reached without knowing its precise weights and ingredients.

  The kids had announced that they didn’t want to go to camp that summer. Leon said, “All this seems to be working so well, I thought maybe you’d want to spend the summer with us in Southampton.”

  He laughed at my happy, hopeful expression.

  “Of course, if you’re determined to maintain the separate-beds nonsense . . .”

  I was silent. Of course, the charade would be over. It was probably time for the charade to be over, but it still scared me. A lot of things scared me. The show scared me. It was scheduled to begin in September. Sheldon had informed me that I must be available for “last-minute stuff” he wouldn’t specify, and it would surely be more convenient if I was in the Hamptons, since that was where everyone else connected to the show would be. I promised Leon I’d stop running downstairs in the middle of the night, but then I woke up at three in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep upstairs, so I did. I left him a note saying I apparently needed to wake up in my own bed. On Friday, the same thing happened, except I didn’t even fall asleep.

  On Saturday night, with just one day of Easter vacation left, we took the kids to some dreadful movie they adored, then picked up the Sunday Times on the way home. When they were in their rooms for the night, we brought the paper into Leon’s room to read. While I was still looking at it, Leon pulled me toward him, making nice around the edges, kissing my close ear, then the back of my neck. When I’d put aside the paper, he made love to me with exceptional tenderness and vigor.

  Afterward, he said, “No downstairs, Cara. It’s way past time, even without the summer factor.”

  I drifted off to sleep, but awakened at a later time, crying over the loss of someone I couldn’t even identify. I snuggled up to Leon, then grew afraid of awakening him. But when I tried to get up, he rolled over on top of me and made love to me again. Then, still lying on top of me, in me, he realized I was crying.

  “Jesus,” he said tenderly, “you really are . . . Listen to me. In the morning, you stay in bed, and I’ll go out and tell them you’re here. Okay? So it won’t be a surprise?”

  There were all kinds of jokes I might have made if I’d been awake enough so the joking part of my brain was assembled. Like: And if they don’t like it, we’ll take it all back. As it was, I simply allowed my eyes to close again, dry this time, and when he got off me, I curled up away from him and drifted into sleep.

  I awakened, though not enough to know where I was, to someone’s knocking at the door.

  “You see?” I heard a child’s voice I couldn’t immediately identify ask. “I told you she wasn’t there!”

  It was Annie.

  Rennie said, “She could be sleeping.”

  Now I knew where I was. But where the hell was Leon? I looked at the clock. It was ten past nine.

  “Phone call, Caroline!” Rennie called loudly.

  Oh, Jesus. The only person it could be was Livvy.

  “Okay,” I called back. “I’ll take it in here.”

  The door burst open. It was Annie, distraught, She looked at me as though there were an axe in my hand and a bloody baby on the bed. Then, before I could speak, she closed the door.

  Oh, Jesus, where on earth was Leon?

  I picked up the phone and got a dial tone. I hung it up. My head hurt for the first time in a while. I went into the bathroom, where a legal-pad page was taped to the mirror over the sink.

  Sweetheart: The girls are still sleeping, Ovvy and I are getting some bagels and lox. If you wake up before I get back, just wait in the bedroom so I have a chance to tell them you’re here. Love and kisses, L.

  Terrific. I got dressed and went back to bed, lying there until I heard the front door open and close. Silence. Voices. I thought of Livvy’s outrage when I’d referred to her father’s mistress, told myself I should have fought Leon harder. But we couldn’t have gone on indefinitely as we were. A couple of minutes later, Leon opened the door, smiled ruefully.

  “I seem to have screwed up.”

  “Mmm.”

  “It’s Annie, not Rennie, who’s upset. Rennie seems to have been telling her for a while, and Annie was denying it.”

  I told him I wanted to go downstairs.

  He said that he was really sorry, he shouldn’t have gone out, but now, here we were, and my running out wasn’t the way to make it pass.

  I didn’t believe it would make any real difference, any more than his being there would have made a big difference, so I stayed.

  It didn’t pass.

  Breakfast was very quiet. Afterward, Leon said he thought we needed a sort of family conference, and Rennie pointed out, in the snotty fashion to which guessing correctly had entitled her, that we couldn’t do that because we weren’t a family. Ovvy, with no strong sense of a line we’d just crossed, was purely bewildered by what was going on.

  “What I don’t understand,” Leon said, “is that you were Cara’s friend before I was. She was crazy about you before she ever met me. She cares about you more—” He stopped himself. “She didn’t want to sleep up here, because she was afraid you wouldn’t like it.”

  Annie shrugged. It didn’t matter what I hadn’t wanted to do. It mattered what I had done.

  “Of course we don’t like it,” Rennie said. “We don’t like anyone e
lse in Mommy’s bed.”

  Annie began to cry.

  Leon put his arm around the back of her chair, caressed her arm.

  “But it hasn’t been your mommy’s bed in many years. Your mommy and I . . . It’s just as though we’re divorced.”

  “You’re not!” Annie said fiercely, Rennie only slightly less so. “You’re not divorced.”

  “I think I’d better go downstairs,” I said. “I have a lot of work to do.”

  If Annie wasn’t the kind of kid to keep carrying on over our sleeping arrangements, neither did her love affair with me resume. She hadn’t liked any woman who shared her father’s bed, and she wasn’t going to make an exception in my case. Ovvy was puzzled by the fact that she passed up even afternoon cookies and milk at my apartment, not to speak of any other meeting with me that didn’t include Leon, and some that did.

  Leon wasn’t hurt, as I was, but he felt circumscribed by the children in a different way than before. For the first time he talked about divorce. I told him I was afraid they’d be even angrier with me. He said he couldn’t be controlled in this matter by what would make his children angry. In fact, the angrier it would make them, the more he knew he had to do it. They had to understand that the split was real and permanent. He hadn’t told me many horror stories about his marriage, but there were plenty to be told, and if I ever entertained the thought that he might go back to Joanna, I could forget about it right now. That was not one of the thoughts I’d entertained. On the other hand, the children, particularly Rennie, apparently had daydreamed about it in some serious fashion.

  I’ve come to believe that the world our children carry around behind their eyes is vastly different from the one we see, that even as adults, we trust our memories over what reality tries to convince us happened. I told Leon about Livvy’s shock when I referred to Mirella as her father’s mistress. He joked that you could take the girl out of Rome more easily than Rome out of the girl. It was too true to amuse me. And, predictably, no matter how much he “made it clear” to his children that this divorce was “for himself,” and “just makes legal something that’s been true for years,” the girls blamed it on me. Ovvy, who had no memory of his mother and had long since deposited his lovely Oedipal baggage with me, was unaffected by the news. But Annie began going to substantial lengths to avoid me. And Rennie, who’d been less upset than Annie about my sleeping with Leon, reacted violently.