Staying Cool

by Catherine Todd

  “He asked me out, but I had to say no,” my mother insisted.

  I opted for smooth sailing. “That’s wonderful, Mom.” Well, if he’d known her, maybe he would have admired her, especially if he was getting residuals on the reruns.

  I found my mother’s fixation with the television disturbing, particularly when she started confusing the plots with events in her own life. I knew it wasn’t healthy for her to watch so much, but when I’d tried sending her to adult day care, she had kicked up such a fuss for several weeks that they politely requested that we find some other program. A rare failure, they’d told me. Most of their patients thrived on the activities. I couldn’t afford residential care, and short of forcibly taking away the set, I couldn’t think what to do. Lili took her out for walks every day, and I tried to plan an excursion out about once a week, but she seemed to resent even these activities.

  My mother had had a sad life. The only person she had ever really loved was Robby Stuart, and her parents wouldn’t let her go out with him because he was Catholic. My mother told me she wanted to sneak out anyway, but Robby wouldn’t. Instead, he went to the seminary and became a priest. My mother liked to say that she had driven him to it, contenting herself with the notion that God was Robby’s Second Choice.

  When my mother met my father, Victor Santiago, at a dance club, she was almost thirty and destined for spinsterhood. The combination of my father’s ambition to stay in the United States and my mother’s passive aggression towards her parents’ overprotectiveness resulted in a shotgun wedding, and my grandparents were presented with a son-in-law who was not only Catholic but from the other side of the border (and not the Canadian one) as well. By the time the marriage began to unravel, my grandfather had departed the scene in an even more permanent fashion than my father, dead of a heart attack at fifty-three. My grandmother declared to anyone who would listen that my grandfather had died of a broken heart, although it might have been clogged from the daily ration of fried eggs and bacon he consumed with his coffee for breakfast. She became an embittered emotional terrorist who ruled with headaches and grievances and drove everyone away, provided they had anyplace else to go.

  My grandmother was the embodiment of the Family Curse, although she probably wasn’t the first, and she certainly wasn’t the last. The curse had a number of variations, but it went something like this: Naive young woman marries her prince, who turns out to be a frog for reasons that remain unclear, because part of the curse is You Can’t Talk About It. The woman, no longer young, loses her prince/frog to 1) another woman, 2) drink, 3) gambling, 4) religion, 5) disease, or 6) boredom. The woman lives a very long time, alone. Everyone knows she has been wronged, and it is all the Man’s Fault. Eventually she is an old woman, and she is still alone. She still doesn’t talk about it.

  As far as I knew, the line might have gone all the way back to Hester Prynne, who had definitely hooked up with two losers and didn’t talk about it, either. I never figured out what was froglike about my grandfather, except that he was a Mason and a virulent anti-Catholic, both of which had apparently been acceptable in my grandmother’s eyes. My aunt married a man who lost his money, and eventually their house and business, playing poker with “the boys,” who turned out to be the kind of businessmen who later became the subject of multigenerational ethnic crime sagas. My cousin lost her husband to another man, a variation on #1. My mother got double-whammied, having lost one love to #4 (religion) and a husband to #6 (boredom, or its cultural equivalent).

  Maybe it wasn’t a curse after all, but a dogma. A religion of disappointment and failed hopes, with rituals and articles of faith. I wasn’t sure where I stood in this succession, since Michael hadn’t turned out to be a frog, although he had undeniably left me alone. Still, I was determined to protect my daughter. You may laugh, but she was ten years old before I let her watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (“Some Day My Prince Will Come”) or read The Little Mermaid (think about it). When Michael was alive, I’d felt safe enough to make jokes, but nowadays I wasn’t taking any chances. I watched her choice of boyfriends with care, although I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I just wanted her to be independent and happy. Alone was okay, too, as long as it didn’t have Tragic Overtones.

  Anyway, after my father’s disappearance and the divorce, Uncle Robby, now Father Robert, reappeared on the scene as a kind of spiritual adviser to the family. Heaven knows, we could have used it. For a variety of reasons, my mother’s conscience was troubling her, and she needed somebody to talk to, even if not about the big issues. Maybe he felt obscurely responsible. It certainly wasn’t a romantic attachment, not at that point.

  Uncle Robby was far from a surrogate father, but he helped blunt my mother’s suffering. I would always be grateful. He had since been transferred to Philadelphia, several years before, but he still called from time to time. I never knew whether my mother’s reported conversations with him were real or imagined.

  Lili came in from the kitchen with a glass of iced tea. My mother accepted it silently, like homage from a slave. It irritated me; Lili was kind to her and deserved better. “Say ‘thank you,’ Mom,” I prompted her.

  My mother blinked at me. “What for?”

  “She brought you some iced tea,” I said.

  “Where?” She turned her head from side to side. She was holding it in her hand.

  “Here,” I said, showing her. “Your iced tea. See, right here.”

  My mother set the glass down on the table. “What in the world are you talking about, Ellen?”

  Behind me, Lili laughed. My mother sounded perfectly rational. I wondered if she was really as confused as she pretended, but the thought made me feel instantly guilty. I wondered how Lili could take it and decided that her inability to comprehend English perfectly probably saved her a lot of grief.

  “Where’s Andrea?” my mother asked unexpectedly. “She never comes to see me.”

  “She has to write a paper for school,” I told her. “I’ll tell her you were asking about her,” I added, pleased with this moment of lucidity.

  My mother surveyed me critically. “You look pale,” she said. “You need some more lipstick.”

  I smiled. “I’ve just been preoccupied, and I’m sort of tired, that’s all.”

  “I mean it, Ellen. You could use some color. Get out more. You’ll never attract a man if you don’t try a little harder.”

  Lili scuttled tactfully out of the room. I wasn’t sure if my mother thought I was sixteen or forty-four, since the advice was apparently the same either way. I wondered if I was giving off some kind of “stay away” signal, like pheromones in reverse. I sighed, preliminary to changing the subject, but my mother beat me to it.

  “He’s been calling again,” she said in a lowered voice.

  “Who has, Mom?” I thought she might be talking about Uncle Robby.

  She looked at me. “Him. Your father.”

  She said it so matter-of-factly that I shivered. “It can’t be, Mom. Daddy’s dead.” I wasn’t 100 percent sure of that, but my father’s family lived in Los Angeles, and they had sent a terse message to that effect at least two dozen years before. As far as I could tell, they wouldn’t have any reason to make it up, particularly since my mother and they had rarely spoken in all the years since my father skipped town.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said. “If he were dead, how could he call?”

  “That was my point.”

  “And don’t call him ‘Daddy,’” she persisted. “He’s nothing to you.”

  Hostility seemed to focus my mother’s mind wonderfully. I didn’t argue. “Okay, Mom.”

  “I’d like to watch TV now,” she announced calmly, turning her chair toward the set. “My program is on.” She picked up the remote and started clicking through the channels.

  I left my mother watching ESPN and went into the kitchen. Lili was washing the lunch dishes.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her, in my less-than-fluent Span
ish.

  She smiled. “No importa.” It’s not important.

  “You’re a saint, Lili,” I said. “I couldn’t do it.”

  “That’s because you love her,” she said, or at least that’s what I think she said.

  I wished it were as simple as that.

  I felt responsible. I felt helpless. I felt sad about my mother’s disintegration, the piece-by-piece dismantling of the fabric of her life, her flickering reason. I was sorry for her anger. I wanted her to be comfortable and content. I had enough guilt to fill up the continent.

  But love? Love, at least the kind they write about on Valentines and Mother’s Day cards, was more problematical.

  I changed the subject. “Lili, does my mother get phone calls?”

  She shrugged. “Seguramente.”

  “From whom?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Light bulbs, house painters, you know. I don’t always understand.”

  I smiled, trying to imagine these conversations. “What do you say to them?” I asked.

  She grinned back. “I say, ‘No speak,’ and then they go away.”

  I laughed. “What about personal phone calls?”

  “Tal vez.” Maybe. She thought. “Not many,” she added.

  Her expression said, ‘What do you expect?’ but she was too nice to say it. My mother had never had a lot of close friends.

  “Any men?”

  She looked at me. “I don’t think so. Why do you ask, Elena?”

  It always startled me when she called me that. Only one other person ever had. I sighed. “She says my father’s been calling her.”

  Lili crossed herself. “Dios mío.”

  It seemed ironic that my mother, who had worked so hard to put everything Latin behind her, was living a life right out of Gabriel Garcia Márquez or Isabel Allende, communing with the spirits of the dead and walling herself off in the past. I always felt depressed after I left her apartment, and when I felt depressed, I usually treated myself to something sinful to eat. Today called for something special, like a French silk pie or white chocolate cheesecake.

  In my salad days, literally, when I could have afforded such an indulgence, I wasn’t allowed to waste my mother’s earnings so foolishly. It probably saved me from the Chubby Shoppe (the dread of every preteen girl) for years, but I wasn’t grateful. Now that I shouldn’t be going near anything with a calorie count above 200, I wanted sweets anytime anything upset me. I also wanted them to celebrate. Or when I was feeling lonely. Sometimes I even wanted them when I was feeling fat, which is definitely counterproductive. My entire culinary history was a tug of war between what I wanted and what I knew I shouldn’t have.

  I settled for a chocolate eclair—with real custard inside, not the usual overprocessed whipped cream that tastes of chemicals and preservatives. I took it home in a little pink box. I put the box down on the kitchen counter and cut the tape. I lifted out the eclair and put in on a plate. The chocolate was bittersweet, dark and rich, and just a bit of the custard oozed out from the pâte à choux. (If there had been contests for “name that pastry” I would have been the Charles Van Doren of my era. And I wouldn’t have had to cheat, either.)

  Then I thought about having to call Cynthia, and how I would probably have to take her out to lunch, or dinner, before I could get her to talk to me. I cut the eclair in half and put one of the halves back in the box. I would eat humble pie. I would ask her forgiveness. I could picture the scene, sitting in some charming beachside cafe, sipping iced decaf cappuccinos. I pictured Cynthia, with her three-hundred-dollar haircut and her body toned by what looked like a zillion weekly hours at the gym (where did she find the time?), receiving homage from the waiter. I recalled how Patrick Wyatt, student body president and Campus Intellectual, had asked her to the senior prom instead of me.

  I put the other half of the eclair in the box with its mate, wrote “Andy, eat this if you want” in black marking pen across the top of the box, and put the box into the refrigerator. Then I got out the phone book.

  She picked up on the third ring, just as I was rehearsing what message I was going to leave on her voice mail. It caught me off guard.

  “It’s Ellen Laws,” I stuttered, with something less than savoir faire. “I didn’t expect you to be home.”

  “Then why did you call?” She sounded curious, not angry.

  I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. Let me start over. If it’s at all possible, I’d like to see you sometime when it’s convenient. I know you probably don’t—”

  She cut me off. “I’m free now,” she said briskly. “Why don’t you come on over?”

  I rang the doorbell three times before I heard a faint “come in” drifting out of the house. I pushed open the door and found her lying on the leather couch, one leg—in a very big cast—propped up on a pillow. The rest of her looked maddeningly intact. A drink with a straw sat on the table, slightly beyond her reach. Without saying anything, I handed it to her. “Wow,” I said. “How did you do that?”

  She smiled. “Skiing.”

  It was June, not the usual month for snow accidents. “Skiing?”

  “In Chile.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sit down,” she offered. “It’s nice to see you again. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Since the last class reunion, I guess.” Where Cynthia had signed autographs for the caterers. Still Queen of the Hop. I’d gone home early.

  She was going to be cool and pretend there was nothing unusual about my sudden desire to see her, but I wasn’t ready to accept her hospitality on that basis. I walked into the dining room.

  “You still have the Telles,” I said, when I had come back to where she was lying.

  She tried to look puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I? It’s a beautiful painting.”

  “You might have changed your mind.”

  She gave me a shrewd look. “It’s just a painting, Ellen, not a symbol.” She straightened up a little, pulling herself upright against the cushions. “What’s on your mind?”

  “To apologize, for one thing.”

  To give her credit, she didn’t ask “What for?” What she did say was “Why now?”

  “It’s overdue, don’t you think?”

  “Ellen, it’s been several years, and we’ve seen each other half a dozen times since then. It’s not necessary to dredge it up after all this time.”

  “I think it is.”

  She shook her head. “You weren’t yourself. It was a very bad time for you. I understood.”

  I really hated her being understanding. It put me even more in the wrong. “That’s not an excuse for what I did. You shouldn’t forgive me so easily,” I told her.

  She smiled thinly. “I didn’t say I forgave you; I said I understood,” she said. “Did you ever go to the grief counselor I recommended?”

  She’d recommended a grief counselor, a widows’ support group, and a generic psychologist. I didn’t go to any of them. What a rebel. “No,” I said simply.

  She shrugged. “Too bad. So why are you really here? Obviously, you didn’t come just to grovel.”

  I laughed. “Actually, no.”

  She patted the seat next to her. “Come and sit here, and tell me what I can do for you.”

  I hesitated.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you pay. It doesn’t hurt your case any that Richard turned out to be a shit anyway, not just because he slept with you.”

  “Okay,” I said, relieved.

  She shoved a pile of papers and books aside to make room for me, and one of them fell to the floor. I picked it up. It was, honest to God, volume one of Remembrance of Things Past.

  “Are you really reading this?” I inquired.

  She gave her head a little self-deprecating shake. I wasn’t fooled. “Well, I’ve been meaning to reread Proust, but I haven’t had any time. I thought that as long as I was laid up here anyway…” She trailed off apologetically.

  I sat down, taking a surreptitious peek at the pile agai
n to see if there was really a Danielle Steel hidden underneath. No dice. I sighed. At least it wasn’t in the original French.

  “Well, I’m impressed,” I told her honestly. It killed me, but I felt I owed her at least that much.

  Cynthia flashed me a big crinkly smile that I found irritating, but, naturally, I swallowed it. “So where do we go from here?” she asked.

  After a perfunctory autobiographical update, I told her. About the trial, the verdict, and my interest in finding out more about Natasha Ivanova. She listened attentively, like the good journalist she was, until I had finished. Then she sucked thoughtfully on her straw.

  “I’m not sure I can help you a lot,” she said finally. “I didn’t do much research on Ivanova Associates, although you’re welcome to whatever I have on it. I can’t remember anything that leaps out right now, although I do seem to recall there was something unusual about the matchmaking service.” She shrugged. “I’ll think of it in a minute.”

  “I’ve read the article, but I don’t think there was any mention of her service,” I said regretfully. “I was hoping there might have been something more you could remember about her, personally, but I guess you couldn’t cover the subject in that kind of depth.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, we were going to do a whole series on dating and matchmaking services in the L.A. area, instead of just the one survey article,” she said. “So many people are using them now, and there are lots of issues to be covered. Scams, what kind of people use the services, e-mail, that kind of thing. If you ask me, e-mail seems to be the last best refuge of the rogue, and there’s enough to write a whole issue on that. I have lots of research I didn’t use.”

  “So what happened?” I asked her.

  “OJ,” she said, with a rueful laugh. “Not only did we have to do a full range of articles on the trial, but there were all the peripheral issues, too—spousal abuse, defense attorneys, Marcia Clark’s love life, that kind of thing. I didn’t get a vacation for more than a year, and when I finally went on a major trip, look what happened.” She patted her cast tenderly.