Sleeping Tigers

by Robinson, Holly

  Mom was describing her cross-country odyssey. Yesterday, unable to reach me for the fourth day in a row, she’d taken a cab to the Boston airport and bought a ticket on the spot. “I just had this feeling that you needed me,” she said, her chin trembling.

  She had called me every ten minutes from the San Francisco airport for two hours before finally giving up and phoning Karin. As she talked, I could imagine it all, even the suitcase packed with clothing that had been ironed and meticulously rolled into narrow tubes to avoid wrinkling, the tidy handwriting on the note she’d left for my father describing each plastic container in the freezer.

  I was still incredulous. Mom had never traveled alone, not even to her sister’s in Rhode Island, because my father had convinced her it would be unsafe. Dad had deliberately bought a house in a town “on the way to nowhere,” just to keep his family untouched by city sinner ways. He was certain, therefore, that we were all easy prey.

  “Your mother could carry on a conversation with a deaf mute for six hours,” Dad believed, “and his ears would be bleeding from the noise while some idiot snatched your mother’s purse on the sly.”

  “Why did you really come?” I asked her now. “I still can’t believe you’d just show up without talking it over with me first!”

  Mom rolled her eyes. “Why should I? Look at you. First you dump a perfectly good man who wants to marry you. Then you drive across the country and leave your family behind. Now you’re caring for a baby that you say is your brother’s with nary a word to me about it.”

  She stabbed a finger in the baby’s direction. So far, she had refused to touch Paris or mention her by name. “Why should I tell you anything? It’s clear that communicating with me is at the bottom of your list of priorities.”

  “You could have gotten an explanation over the phone,” I pointed out, then immediately realized my mistake.

  Mom’s eyebrows lifted over her prim pale blue eyeglasses. “Certainly I could have been spared a great deal of money and agony, if only you’d had the courtesy to return my calls.”

  “I wasn’t the only one not calling you back,” I reminded her furiously. “What about Cam?” My mother, in a matter of minutes, had reduced me to a scowling, sullen adolescent.

  “Cam is a boy,” she sniffed. “You hope for more from a daughter. Besides, I’ve always counted on you to be responsible.” Her voice caught and she glanced away, embarrassed. “Now, will you please just tell me what’s going on? Who is this child? Karin says she’s Cam’s daughter.” Her knuckles were white on the coffee cup.

  I told her everything. Paris, meanwhile, kept climbing off the deck and I had to keep hauling her back onto it, since she was so determined to dig in the dirt and chow down on a couple of clumps of sod.

  Somewhere between telling Mom about searching for Nadine in the park and the mugging that followed, I went inside to fetch a set of wooden spoons, a couple of pans, and a colander. I filled one of the pans with dirt while I finished filling my mother in on Cam’s vanishing act to Nepal. Paris squealed and sprayed dirt around us like a piglet rooting for truffles.

  “You spoil her,” my mother observed.

  “What? How? I haven’t bought her a thing, other than essentials!”

  “You pick her up every time that child says ‘boo.’ Honestly, Jordan, that baby has you wrapped around her little finger. How’s she ever going to learn patience if you never say no?”

  “I say no plenty, believe me. But I say yes whenever I can. I’ve got to make up for what Paris hasn’t had.” I didn’t realize the truth of this impulse until I’d voiced it.

  “It isn’t good for children to get everything they want. That teaches them that the world is at their beck and call, instead of teaching them patience. And it’s certainly not up to you to make up for anything. Least of all, this child’s life. Cam’s the one who’s got to take responsibility. She isn’t yours.”

  This stung. I decided to derail her with questions of my own. “So what does Dad think of you coming out here? Didn’t he want to come?”

  Mom grimaced. “Daddy refuses to travel anywhere that isn’t a direct line between the television and the refrigerator.”

  I stared at her, comprehending at last. “You hatched this plan in secret and left for the airport before he woke up this morning!”

  “No,” she corrected. “Daddy was awake. He was out mowing the lawn when I left. He couldn’t hear the taxi.”

  “I can’t believe this! You ran away from home?” I pictured my father coming into the kitchen, his white t-shirt tucked into the sagging waistband of his shorts, skin red from the sun, the graying hair on his barrel chest matted with sweat.

  Dad would come in, like he always did while mowing, to ask my mother to pour him a glass of lemonade. He would wait in the kitchen, yelling her name. Then he would check the laundry room and living room, frustrated that Mom wasn’t there to pour out the lemonade and compliment his mowing. He’d finally climb the stairs and mop his brow with the damp t-shirt, thirsty and irritated, still disbelieving.

  In the end, when he didn’t find her, would Dad finally find the glasses in the cupboard above the dishwasher and pour the lemonade himself? And, when he did finally read Mom’s note, would he try to call her, or just crumple the paper in his big ham of a fist?

  “Daddy will be on his own for breakfast and lunch, of course,” Mom was murmuring, more to herself than to me. “But he can certainly manage cereal, and he’ll probably go to the diner for a sandwich. I’ve got suppers in the freezer, though, if he can just manage the microwave. Enough for a month.”

  “A month?” I squeaked. Where the hell was my mother planning to stay? The answer was obvious, yet unthinkable.

  My mind raced. First I was responsible for Cam’s disappearance, now my own mother’s! “You’d better call Dad and tell him where you are,” I commanded. “Right now.”

  Mom raised her eyebrows. They were as gray as her hair, I realized, like moths that had alighted on her pale forehead. “Your father knows where I am. If he has anything to say to me, he can just pick up the phone himself. I programmed my cell number into the house phone so that he can’t lose it, and left him a note about how to dial me. All he has to do is push one button.”

  “If you don’t call him, I will,” I threatened.

  “And I’ll tell him all about the baby. That should get your father on a plane in no time.” Mom smiled her gracious church smile.

  She had me: I certainly didn’t need Dad here, too, blustering and blaming.

  My mother set her coffee cup down and surveyed the garden. The fog was a sheer mist tinged gold by sunlight. “With those red flowers climbing the wall, and the palm trees over the fence, this place looks like a movie set. At least some of what you told me about California was true.” This last was an accusation, but mild.

  “More toast?” I pushed the plate in my mother’s direction, but Paris speed-crawled across the deck to intercept it. She gnawed on a second corner of toast, turning it in her hands like a squirrel fiddling with a nut. She had deposited more toast on her t-shirt than in her mouth.

  I remembered the pile of laundry on the floor of my closet. How would I get to the laundromat without a car?

  My mother was watching Paris, too. “That baby’s knees and hands will be full of splinters if you let her crawl around on the deck,” she predicted glumly. “Children die from splinters, you know. Blood poisoning before you know it.”

  “I can’t keep her in the crib every minute.”

  “Why not? There’s nothing wrong with confining a child for her own safety,” Mom said. “You and Cam spent hours in the playpen. It’s the only way I got things done. I certainly never thought of carrying either of you on my back like a papoose! That’s a sure fire way to spoil a child. No, even when we went into stores, I expected you to behave.”

  “At seven months old?”

  “At every age!” My mother bristled, then sighed. “And what sort of name is Paris? A Californ
ia name, I suppose.” She watched Paris play for a few more minutes in silence, then added, “She’s filthy. She’ll need a bath before you let her crawl around on that white rug in there.”

  “Oh, God,” I moaned. “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t have the energy. Every bath with Paris is The Battle of Waterloo.”

  “Nonsense. You’re just not firm enough. Let me give that child a bath, teach her to mind her manners. Then we’ll get that brother of yours on the phone and sort this out.”

  “I don’t know, Mom. Paris is as slippery as a guppy.”

  “I haven’t drowned a child yet.”

  Chapter ten

  Paris protested when I left her with my mother, and no wonder: Mom handled the baby at arm’s length, gently but firmly, the way you would an unruly puppy. “Who died and made you boss?” my mother demanded, pinning the baby in place with one hand while she efficiently laid out the bath towel and fresh clothes on the bed.

  I felt apprehensive, leaving Paris again so soon. But I had no car, much less a car seat, and I had a mountain of laundry and groceries to buy besides. I couldn’t possible manage Paris along with the laundry bags and groceries. As I was leaving, my mother stood in the apartment doorway, Paris squirming under one arm, naked and furious.

  “Jordan,” she said, “I’m sorry I’ve intruded, but I did not spend my life teaching you and Cam the important values in order to just stand aside while the two of you throw away your upbringing and become bums.”

  “I am not a bum!” I protested, clutching the garbage bags of dirty clothes. “I have a master’s degree! A good teaching job! And I had a decent car, until that idiot drag queen mugged me!” This last point weakened my position, so I added, “I have a life!”

  “You call this a life?” my mother shouted over Paris’s enraged howls. “You had a decent apartment in Boston and a fiancé, and now you’ve given up all that security to do what? To live in a home the size of a chicken coop? You don’t even own laundry baskets, God help you!” Mom raged and slammed the door.

  Two hours later, I emerged from the laundromat. I still carried garbage bags, but at least now they were filled with clean laundry instead of rank. I wondered what to do with them while I shopped for groceries.

  I hadn’t been able to string two thoughts together since my mother’s appearance. Originally, I’d planned on popping over to the market while the clothes were in the dryer, but the hum and warmth of the laundromat lulled me right to sleep. I’d awakened on a plastic chair to find my chin damp with drool and an elderly woman in zebra leggings impatiently yanking my hot laundry out of the dryer.

  Now I lingered on the corner like a bag lady, waiting for a shopping cart to drop out of the sky so that I could make it the three blocks to the grocery. In answer to my prayers, a horn blared from across the street. “Hey, Beautiful!”

  It was Ed in his rusty Saab. Once again, I was struck by how rarely I’d thought about him. My life had been turned upside down by Paris, and now my mother was proceeding to turn everything inside out. Ed was a shadowy memory.

  And David? Where did he fit into my life? Somewhere, I hoped.

  I crossed the street towards Ed with both garbage bags flung over my shoulders. Very attractive. But Ed treated me like Queen Victoria, leaping out of his car to take the garbage bags and open the car door. He wore tattered, paint-stained overalls with a black t-shirt and had tied a red bandana around his head. In his Herculean grip, the garbage bags swung like clutch purses.

  “Thanks,” I told him. “What are you doing in this neighborhood? You look like a pirate, with that scarf around your head. Are you on lunch break from a job?”

  “Nah. I’m modeling at the school later, but I was painting my kitchen cupboards.”

  “You’ll pose with the paint splatters still on, I hope. You’re so decorative, with all of those teal accents on your skin,” I teased.

  He grinned. “Absolutely.”

  “But that still doesn’t explain why you’re looking for me.”

  He shrugged. “Karin told me about your car, so I thought I’d help you run errands. Your mom told me where you were.”

  “I’m too tired to say no,” I agreed, and climbed into the front seat.

  Ed slipped in beside me. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said, easing the car onto the street.

  “Sorry, I’m just…” I buried my head in my hands, realizing. “You met my mother?” What in the world would she think of me, booting one man out in the wee hours, only to have another show up that same morning?

  “I did.” Ed nodded. “Where we going? Bell Market?”

  “If you really don’t mind. Did you talk to my mom?”

  “Not really. She seemed a little distracted.”

  I dropped my hands and turned to look at him. “What do you mean?”

  Ed grinned. “Well, some kind of parrot was screeching inside the apartment when I rang your bell. And your mom looked like she’d just taken a shower with her clothes on.”

  I grinned. Discipline the baby, indeed. “I don’t have a parrot.”

  “I know.”

  While I ran into the market, Ed sat in the car and read a magazine. I remembered my father doing the same thing throughout my childhood, waiting in the car with Cam and me while my mother shopped. He’d listen to the radio and curse the Red Sox, the Bruins, or the Celtics, and wonder, “What the hell does your mother find to do in there?”

  When I came out again with the shopping cart, Ed popped the trunk and loaded it for me, another thing I remembered Dad doing for my mother. It was nice to have help. Despite this domestic role play, though, Ed and I skated along the conversational surface until we were parked in front of my apartment. Perhaps that, too, was marital behavior, I reflected: saying nothing of import while you team up to perform life’s survival tasks.

  “It was nice of you to invite me to the beach the other day,” I said, fumbling with the car handle and the words at the same time. “I’m glad Karin could go with you.” I took a deep breath. “Ed, things with you and Karin were never really over, were they?”

  “I’ve always cared about Karin,” Ed said. “I was a wreck when she left me.”

  His expression was as stolid as ever, but I could hear the pain in his voice. No way was this man over my best friend.

  “You and Karin clearly have some unfinished business,” I said. “We had fun, but now you should go back to her and figure things out.”

  “You seem awfully sure.” Ed turned toward me, resting his arm along the back of my seat.

  In this strong daylight, I noticed how deep the lines were around his eyes. He was in the middle of his life, tired of treading water. “I am sure,” I said.

  “Is it because of Karin?” His voice sounded more hopeful. “Some sort of loyalty between childhood friends?”

  “Loyalty is part of it, especially because Karin still has feelings for you.”

  “She does?” Ed’s eyes shone. “Feelings that go beyond friendly?” By the sudden urgency in his voice, I suspected that getting my permission to see Karin might have been the real reason Ed had originally sought me out this morning.

  I was so relieved to be off the hook, to not be hurting Ed, that I laughed and leaned over to hug his broad, hard torso. “She does,” I assured him, and kissed Ed on the neck—all I could reach–just as a car slowed beside us and stopped, the engine idling.

  I turned to look at the car beside us, and met David’s eyes through the open window as he hit the accelerator and sped away.

  It was my mother’s cure-all remedy that revived me enough to sit up in bed: flat ginger ale, a cheese sandwich, and a bowl of tomato soup thick with oyster crackers. This was Mom’s cure for everything from flu to menstrual cramps.

  It was nearly noon. I’d been in bed for fifteen hours, drifting in and out of sleep, slightly feverish. Just a cold, I told my mother, who nonetheless called Karin.

  Karin hadn’t m
oved from her perch at the end of the bed since her arrival, and we’d been chatting aimlessly. Mom looked on from the safe distance of the wicker rocker but said little, her focus on knitting a bright strawberry hat for Paris. She had already made the baby a ridiculous pair of pink leg warmers that Paris refused to remove.

  Ed had appeared, too, after Karin telephoned him. I’d never had this many people in my studio apartment at the same time. With the three of them hovering over my bed, I felt like Dorothy in Kansas, coming out of her tornado-induced coma and insisting that Oz was real.

  I felt like a coma victim. I was completely exhausted. After David had driven away yesterday afternoon while I was sitting in Ed’s car, I’d taken Paris from my mother under the pretense that Mom should sleep off her jet lag, put the baby in the stroller, and race-walked to the clinic. When I arrived, Enrique had told me that David was finished seeing patients for the day and gave me directions to David’s house.

  “Way I understood it, Doc was in a hurry to get his beefy buns over to your place.” He narrowed his eyes at my red, perspiring face. “Said he wanted to help you out because you’d lost your wheels. Everything okay?”

  I hurried from the clinic through the heart of the Mission and up into Bernal Heights, puffing behind the stroller as I wound my way along the steep crooked streets. David lived on a dead-end street in a house painted the deep magenta of eggplants and tricked out with lime green trim. The windows were open, and a dog yammered inside when I rang the bell.

  Nobody answered. I peered into the windows and made out furniture that looked hammered together out of fruit crates and a grand piano in the living room. A dog the size of a rabbit repeatedly launched itself off the top of the sofa and against one of the windows, trying to attack me through the glass.

  I sat on David’s steps until the sky darkened and the air grew too chilly for Paris’s t-shirt. Where had David gone? Why wasn’t he answering my phone messages or texts?