by Jana Casale
By the next song, she was in love. He was on his knees singing a sad ballad. The microphone pressed tightly against his lips. “But I don’t understand why,” he sang. She thought maybe she should have married a man like him instead of someone like John. John was a good man, but how different she would be if she were with a man who sang on his knees and didn’t know why. She looked to her left. There was an average-looking, bearded guy standing beside her. He’d been there the whole time, but only now did she notice him. Or maybe I should have married him, she thought. Who would I be if I were his wife?
After a few more songs she left to use the bathroom. She could still hear the music as she peed. “Ronda S. is a fuck,” someone had written in Sharpie on the bathroom stall. She wondered if they’d meant to write something more but had been interrupted on “fuck.” Can you be a “fuck”? she wondered. She left the stall and went to wash her hands. A girl in a colorful skirt was standing by the mirror wiping mascara off her face. She’d clearly been crying. Leda thought of saying something like, “Whoever he is, he’s not worth it.” But she didn’t. Maybe he was worth it. Who was she to say?
She went back to the hall. It felt lovely to be back into the music away from the bathroom and the crying girl. Now the sound was clear and she could see her lover once more and the way he moved and swayed and seemed so skinny and so sexy that she wanted to break him into pieces and to just inhale him. She danced hard to the next few songs and tried to catch his gaze so she could smile at him. John wrapped his arm around her a few times during the slow songs. It felt nice and didn’t detract from being with her new lover. Why not us all? she thought vaguely. The young bearded guy eventually moved deeper into the crowd, and she could no longer keep track of him. The band played her three favorite songs and the one that she always skipped. She could feel her feet aching and she was getting very sweaty, but it was so wonderful.
“This next song,” he said, “is about something really important to me.”
Me? Leda thought.
“The environment.”
Everyone cheered. The environment was something everyone at this concert loved very much.
The song started slow. She had heard it before on the album but had never paid all that much attention to it. Now she took the time to really listen to the lyrics.
“Do you have any idea how much oil it takes to make this record?”
She liked the message, of course, but the lyrics were kind of indulgent and preachy. That’s something I’d have to talk to him about. She imagined herself out to dinner with him, tentatively broaching the subject. The next song started, and she listened closely to the lyrics again. This one wasn’t about the environment, but it was still kind of preachy. His dancing seemed pretty self-indulgent too. He really wanted to be a rock star. She could envision how irritating this would be. He’d always talk about this big thing he was doing and that big thing he was doing, as she’d be just trying to enjoy a bowl of cereal and get through the day. And where was the bearded man through all of this? Nowhere to be found. It was a relief to be going home with John after all.
“Did you like the show?” he asked her as they walked back to the car.
“I loved it,” she said. “He was great.”
“Yeah, he’s quite the showman, isn’t he?”
“And he’s handsome,” she said. “Hey, is calling someone a ‘fuck’ a thing?”
By the time they had gotten home it started snowing. Annabelle was already in bed. The dark house and the softly falling snow left an almost indistinguishable menace.
“It feels too quiet,” she said.
They went straight to bed, and John fell asleep nearly immediately. She stayed up and read a bit until the house felt familiar enough to fall asleep. She turned out the light and lay on her side. Just as her thoughts began to disjoin in the pleasant purgatory between awake and sleep, she heard a loud noise coming from the backyard.
“John,” she said, “did you hear that?”
“Hmm,” John said, and he rolled over to his other side.
She got up and walked to the hall window that faced toward their yard. Everything was covered in snow already. She looked at the tree and then the shed and then the little slide that they’d left up even though Annabelle had outgrown it. Somewhere out there was a rake that they should have moved before the snow; somewhere out there was a sundial. My backyard, she thought. Then the loud noise, like a scraping, started up again. It was still just the snow, as pristine and unmoved as before, but the sound was definitely coming from the yard, this she could tell. She turned on the hall light and headed downstairs. Without even bothering with a coat, she slipped on a pair of slippers and slid open the sliding glass door that led to the yard.
It was silent again. It smelled cold and new like only freshly fallen snow could. She wrapped her robe around herself tightly and breathed in deep. Alone in the night and cold, she only thought about darkness and warmth and her feet growing damp. The elm trees that lined the right side of the yard dropped snow off their branches. For a moment she considered clearing the lone birch tree, which often lost limbs in the winter, but it was too cold to leave the little stoop. She stood for a little while longer listening for the sound, but it was silent so she started back for the house, and as she turned to leave, there he was: the bright orange cat staring out at her from the snow not six feet away.
“Hi,” she said in a low, startled voice. The cat blinked back patiently and then looked up at the falling snow.
“What are you doing here, little cat?”
He looked back at her and blinked again. She expected him to dash off in a moment, but he did not. He seemed like the kind of person who would have stood in that snow beside her all night, just blinking at her and the snowflakes. He was as part of the calm as the night itself, and she thought, What if I’d married someone like him? Would I not have felt so much more patient with myself?
It wasn’t hard to convince the cat to come inside, a few cans of tuna and some gentle coaxing. Annabelle woke up and helped her mom with the kind of quiet enthusiasm that only a child can yield at the prospect of a new pet. Before long he was in the house and eating tuna, and not much longer after that he was on the couch purring and rubbing against the cushions. By the next morning he was on Leda’s lap like he’d always been there, her patient husband who would stand in snow with her. They named him Horace.
CHAPTER 51
Crying at Commercials
When Annabelle was very little she asked her mom whe she’d always cry during sad commercials.
“Are you crying?” she’d say whenever a sad movie scene would pass or they would be in the car and a sad song would start.
“No,” Leda would respond, but of course she always was.
“Why do you always cry at sad things?” Annabelle asked her.
“I don’t know. I guess sad things remind me of sad things that I’ve felt,” she said.
“But it’s not real,” Annabelle said.
Leda remembered feeling similarly when she was a child watching her own mother grow emotional over things that weren’t real. She had the distinct memory of walking in on her mom watching Casablanca with tears running down her cheeks. At the time she was terrified at seeing her mother like that. She seemed fragile in a way she didn’t think her mother should be.
Annabelle’s freshman year of high school had been rough. Sasha moved away. She hadn’t been friends with Judith in years. She had a small group of girls whom she’d hang around with, but whenever Leda would press her on what the girls were like or if Annabelle wanted them to come over sometime, she would always shrug and say the same thing: “They’re not really my friends, Mom.”
Leda didn’t worry about it that much. Her daughter was thriving at school. Soon enough she’d be in college, and there she would make tons of friends who were interesting and good and who didn’t worry so much about
the frivolities of eyeliner and designer lip balms.
“You’re going to love college,” she said to her all the time. To which Annabelle would always respond, “Isn’t that just something people feel because high school is so terrible?”
“I don’t think so.” Leda thought about herself being in high school and how miserable she was, and for a second she was certain her daughter was right.
Annabelle had taken to walking home from school, so it was unusual when she texted her mom and asked to be picked up. Leda was happy to go get her. Picking up her daughter from school was one of the consistently wonderful parts of motherhood. There was the anticipation of seeing her child, and then the wonderful feeling of seeing her child, and then the whole ride home when she’d get to hear everything about her child’s day. In her mind she would reconstruct all the events as her daughter explained them to her.
“I painted a picture of a zebra and Mrs. Granger hung it up on the wall.”
There was the painting and the wall and Mrs. Granger and the zebra.
“I played foursquare with Leah at recess.”
There was Leah and the ball and the swarm of other children in the blur of recess.
“Everyone loved my science fair project.”
There was the gym and all the projects and the little paper moon that Annabelle had stayed up late to finish.
It was all so vivid in her unyielding concept of her daughter as the most vibrant and stunning person alive.
Pulling up to the high school, Leda saw Annabelle almost immediately. Most of the other kids had already left and she was leaning against the building, looking at her phone. Leda beeped the horn slightly to get her attention. Annabelle looked up and Leda waved vigorously, a programmed response that was probably no longer as necessary as it had been when Annabelle was younger. Annabelle nodded and walked over slowly, continuing to eye her phone.
“Hey, baby, how was your day?” Leda asked her as she sat down in the car.
“Hi. It was fine.”
“I was worried that maybe you were sick, since you wanted to be picked up. Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, I’m just tired.”
“You’ve been staying up way too late with homework. I hate how much homework they always give you. It’s like, what is the point of living if all you’re doing is going to school and then coming home and studying like a maniac till midnight? You’re a kid, you should be happy and doing kid things.”
“I don’t feel like a kid,” Annabelle said. She was turned with her face toward the window. Her hair had darkened over the years, but it was still highlighted with bright streaks of blond. Leda couldn’t believe how stunning she was sometimes. Sometimes she thought it wasn’t fair that any woman should be that beautiful.
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? They push kids to grow up so fast that it screws them all up and then you have forty-year-olds who ride skateboards around.”
“Where are there forty-year-olds on skateboards?”
“San Francisco.”
“You think everything happens in San Francisco.”
“That’s ’cause it does. Maybe you’ll live in California one day.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You never know. I didn’t think I ever would.”
“But you hated California.”
“I know, but you might like it. I’m sure they’d like you out there. They like you everywhere.”
Annabelle shook her head and sunk deeper into the seat and started picking at her nails. “What are you talking about? Nobody likes me.”
“Oh, stop, everybody likes you.”
“You’re my mom so you have to think that, but it’s actually not true.”
“Annabelle, you’re the most likeable person I know. I wish I were as likeable as you are. Everywhere you go people respond to you.”
“You’re crazy,” she said, closing her eyes.
“It’s the truth, honey.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Really, it is. You’ve got a gift.”
“I don’t have a gift.”
“You have so many gifts. I know you’re going to be an incredibly successful person. I’ve known it since you were born.”
“Mom, please.”
“Not everyone is as lucky as you are. People like you. You’re smart. You’re beautiful. You really have it all.”
“None of that’s true.”
“It’s all true, really. People would do anything to be you.”
“Mom, stop!” Annabelle sat up straight in her seat and turned to her mother. “Don’t you realize that I hate myself?”
Leda looked at her and didn’t answer. She saw in her daughter’s eyes a poison. She felt frightened for a moment.
“Don’t you know how much I hate myself? I wake up in the morning, and I look at myself in the mirror, and I hate everything.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I hate everything.”
“Don’t say that.”
Annabelle leaned in close to her mom. “I hate my thighs. I hate my stomach. I hate my face. I hate the way I talk and the stupid things I say and all the dumb things I like. I just hate it. I hate myself. Do you not see that? Do you not see how much I just hate who it is that I am? Do you not see that?”
Leda didn’t know what to say. She felt breathless and dizzy. Where was that little girl who was so confident and so judicial and only ever laughed when something was truly funny? Who’d once walked an entire jetty by herself, leaping from big rock to big rock unafraid, emboldened by only herself? She did not look back until she had gotten to the end; she was so sure she’d reach the end. That was gone. Somewhere she’d become fragile.
“None of it’s true. None of it’s true at all,” Leda said.
Annabelle sat back in her seat. Leda tried to tell her daughter everything that was good about her, but she knew she wasn’t listening at all. She knew that no matter what she said, that flash of poison was still there. Seething, writhing, boiling away her insides. Leda wrote much of it off as Annabelle’s being an angsty teenager, because if she’d had to think of what was really happening to her child, her girl, that there was an irreconcilable shift in the foundation of who her daughter was, it’s unlikely she’d have been able to keep living her little life such as she had been. It’s unlikely she’d have been able to be happy.
A month before the start of Annabelle’s sophomore year they watched Dumbo together one Saturday afternoon as they ate leftover pizza. When the scene came on where Dumbo visits his jailed mother and the lullaby plays, Leda immediately started crying. It couldn’t be helped. It was so sad and so dear. It made her think of so many things as tragic and as hopeless and as beautiful. She glanced over at Annabelle and saw that she too was crying. Long tears were running down her cheeks, and she wiped them away but didn’t try to hide them. How sorry Leda felt that her daughter would also cry at things that weren’t real. How sorry she was that it couldn’t be helped.
CHAPTER 52
The End of Forever
Before she even woke up she knew. The previous night her dad called and told her that her mom had fainted. She listened to his voice, the very deep register of it. The same voice she heard her whole childhood broken away in branches about eating all your breakfast and shoveling snow.
“But she’s okay. She’s asleep now. I can wake her up if you want to talk to her,” he said.
“No, let her sleep. I’ll call in the morning,” Leda said.
But that night she had a restless dream about lactating.
“I don’t have a baby. I don’t have a baby,” she’d said over and over, and when she woke up she knew her mom had died. Seconds later her dad called her. It was an aneurism. He said it in the same booming voice, but he was crying so hard that she didn’t think she’d ever heard him say a
nything about breakfast or the snow.
When she was six years old Leda asked her mom, “Do you wish I was still a baby?”
“I like you at every age. I loved when you were a baby, but I love you now just the same,” her mom said.
“Do you wish you were still a kid?” Leda asked her.
“No, I liked being a kid, but I wouldn’t want to be one anymore. I’ve already been a kid.”
“I think if I were a grown-up I’d wish I were a kid,” Leda said.
“I don’t think you will. You never miss things like that once they’re gone.”
Her whole life Leda found that advice to be true, that you never missed the times that were gone enough to go back to them, but when she lost her mom she no longer felt that way. She wished so much to go back to it all.
“How could you do something so stupid?!” her mom once screamed at her. If only I could hear that again, she’d think. If only I could hear it again forever.
When she told Annabelle about her grandmother dying, Annabelle cried and said something muffled in her tears.
John cried too. He said, “But I just talked to her.”
Leda was sick to her stomach all that day. She felt that she should call her mom and ask her what to do, how to stop being such a wreck. Her mom would have known exactly how to not be a wreck in the situation.