I looked down at my clothing, my Ferragamo pumps, and didn’t answer, thinking that she used to dress this way, too, that I was just as she’d made me, which gave her no right to judge.
My mother took my hands in hers. “What’s troubling you?” Her voice, once a combination of broad midwestern and New York City lockjaw, had become as syrupy and singsongy as the girl’s behind the counter had been. Her silvery-gray hair, which she’d been wearing in ridiculous Pocahontas braids before she’d left, was clipped short now, almost a buzz cut that exposed the oval shape of her skull and her elfin ears. Her pale-blue eyes looked enormous in her face. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and her skin was freckled and rosy from the sun. There were no earrings in her ears, no rings on her fingers, not a single bracelet or bangle, and she was barefoot underneath her robe, her toenails unpainted, her small feet calloused and tanned.
“Dad was in the hospital. He had a blocked artery. They gave him a stent.”
She sighed. “He has so much stress in his life. He needs to slow down.”
Whatever. “His new wife. . I found out some things about her. Some bad things.”
She nodded again. At least she was looking at me and not at her guru, whose framed portrait beamed down from the front of the room. The Baba had grown his long hair even longer, and was sitting cross-legged, a beatific smile on his face, like a white Jimi Hendrix in a bathrobe.
“They want to have a baby.”
This, finally, got her attention. She cocked her head at a quizzical angle, eyes narrowed, jaw tight. I remembered that expression from when I’d come home to tell her that another girl had stolen my bookbag at lunch, and from the time she’d been ousted as head of the annual diabetes dance (this was the year after she’d insisted that the passed appetizers be vegan). I heard her take a deep breath, inhaling through her nose, before she said, “The Buddha instructs us to welcome new life in the spirit of gladness and joy.”
“Mother.”
“Satya,” she corrected, touching my knee beneath the blanket.
I felt my lips curl. “Satya. They’re paying some woman to donate her egg. They’re paying another woman to carry a baby for them. And this woman, Dad’s new wife, is seriously no good.”
She reached forward, placing her cool hands on mine. “Change is the only constant,” she intoned. “Sorrow is like a leaf in a stream. Sit on the banks. Watch it pass.”
“You may recall,” I said, with some asperity, “offering me slightly different advice before the Barneys sample sale.”
She smiled. Serenely. Indicating her plain robes, she said, “Suffering ends when craving ends,” like this was a message of incredible profundity instead of something her guru had probably cribbed from a Starbucks cup. “I was lost to myself in New York. Now I’ve come home. So what about you, Bettina? What is it you crave? How can you find your way home?”
“I’ve got a ticket on the five-thirty flight to LaGuardia,” I said. It wasn’t like I could tell her that home was forever lost to me, because home was the five of us, together, the way we used to be. Nor did I mention that, hoping against hope, I’d bought a ticket for her, too.
She rose easily to her feet and walked me to another fountain, this one outdoors, a verdigris-green bowl into which water trickled from a sculpted flower. We sat there in silence, smelling sage and some flowers I didn’t recognize. “Be well,” she said. I knew it was a dismissal. She kissed my cheek and glided off to her chores.
It wasn’t until I’d dropped off the rental car and was flying back to New York that I figured out what else I wanted: my father’s safety, his happiness, an assurance that he would not get his heart broken again. These were perfectly reasonable things to desire. Trey was too wrapped up in Violet’s new teeth and soiled diapers to care; Tommy was too busy chasing women who thought it was witty when a man sang a heavy-metal cover of “Sunny Came Home”; my mother had renounced the world entirely; which meant that I would have to keep my father safe. If I did that, maybe I could keep India’s bony, grasping hands off our money… and maybe I could have a chance at the thing I most missed and most wanted: my family back.
The Monday after my trip to New Mexico, I was down in the Crypt, wearing white cotton gloves, working with a Tensor lamp and a magnifying glass and tweezers to determine the value of an antique silver locket that was part of a new lot of jewelry. “These things are precious to me,” the woman who’d brought them in had said. “They were my mother’s.” I’d dug out a reference book, trying to determine the age of the locket and whether the chain was original to the piece, when Darren Zucker called.
“Just checking in,” he said. “How was your trip?”
“Fine,” I said automatically.
“I was wondering what you decided to do.” His voice was high, a little nasal, the voice of a Woody Allen wannabe for whom the whole world was a joke.
“Are you billing me for this?” I asked.
“You have a suspicious and untrusting nature. But I respect that. And no, this isn’t business. I was just curious. It’s how I wound up in this line of work — being curious. And I was thinking you might want someone to talk to. You know, do the Franklin list.”
“Pardon?”
“Ben Franklin. Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper. List the pros and cons. We could have lunch.”
I closed my book and gently replaced the necklace in its box. Darren Zucker was not my ideal confidant, but he’d been a good sport about our trip to Hoboken, and besides, I did need to eat. There were no windows in the Crypt, but when I’d arrived that morning the weather had been a beautiful day, the sky deep blue, a light breeze stirring the treetops. September in New York City always felt, to me, like the year’s true beginning. It made me think of the last days of summer, loading up the station wagon in Bridgehampton for the ride back to the city. We’d stay in the Hamptons as long as we could, wringing every last minute out of August. My parents would throw a barbecue on Labor Day, inviting anyone who was left: the neighbors, our staff, their kids, the lifeguards who’d watched us swimming all summer long. We’d eat chicken and ribs, potato chips and thick slices of watermelon on paper plates. Games of tag and Marco Polo and hide and seek would form, break up, and re-form, and, as it got late, children would fall asleep all over the house, in beds, on couches, in nests of blankets and pillows on the floor.
As the night went on, the grown-ups would gather on the porch and the lawn, drinking vodka tonics or beers. On that night, instead of their usual jeans and chino shorts and tennis skirts, they’d get dressed up, the men in button-down shirts and jackets, and the women in Lilly Pulitzer skirts or sundresses that left their tanned arms and shoulders bare. Some of them still smoked back then, and I remembered looking at the lit cigarettes bobbing and darting like fireflies, music coming from a CD player plugged in on the porch, the sound of their laughter, and how I would think, This is how I want it to be when I grow up.
Darren and I met at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. Where else, I thought wearily, would a committed hipster take a girl for lunch? He’d already staked out a bench when I arrived and was waving at me, wearing his glasses, khakis, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, checked blue-and-white, which looked like it had been swiped from some homeless man’s closet. I was in my usual office wear, an A-line black cotton skirt, a plum-colored boatneck sweater with three pearl buttons at each sleeve, low-heeled shoes, and a gold necklace. “Chocolate? Vanilla?” Darren asked, holding out two cups. “The line gets crazy, so I bought one of each.” He’d also gotten two cheeseburgers with everything and an order of fries.
He opened the paper sack, and we spread our lunch on our laps. Darren took a big bite of cheeseburger and sighed happily, the way a man with his mouth full of meat will, as I removed the lettuce and tomato from my own burger with my fingertips and set them aside before carefully peeling away the cheese.
“Oh, come on,” he said as I took a small bite. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those rabbit-fo
od girls.”
I didn’t bother to respond. For years, I’d read those “Make the Most of Your Figure!” articles, the ones that told you how to dress if you were a pear or an hourglass or an inverted triangle, and I’d used all the tips they’d recommend to try to balance my narrow shoulders and flat chest with my wide hips and heavy thighs, but I wasn’t sure whether any of it did much good. Nor did dieting help. I’d done the rounds with that in high school, two weeks of grapefruit and hard-boiled eggs, a stint on Weight Watchers sophomore year and another on Jenny Craig when I was a junior. When I started college I’d tried a few of my roommate Vanessa’s diet pills, but all they did was give me a permanent headache and make my mouth feel like it was crammed full of cotton. Each time I’d lose ten or fifteen pounds, but it never changed my essential imbalance, the way that my body looked like one woman’s torso grafted onto another woman’s bottom.
“I think you look fine,” said Darren, eyeing me slowly, up and down. His ridiculous glasses bobbled on his cheeks as he raised his eyebrows. “Nice gams.”
I yanked at my skirt. “Nice gams? What are you, Raymond Chandler?”
“I am a detective,” he said, and poked a straw through the top of a waxed-paper cup, sucking down his chocolate shake with a noise that sounded like a clogged toilet finally managing a flush.
“I just like to eat things one at a time,” I explained.
He looked at my lap, where I’d arrayed the burger, the bun, the cheese, the lettuce, and the tomato, each in its own place on the white waxed paper. “Is that, like, a condition?”
“Habit.” I took another bite of the burger, holding it carefully with the pads of my fingertips.
He wolfed down his own lunch in half a dozen jaw-distending bites while I looked him over. He was a rangy guy with broad shoulders and thick legs, full lips and a cleft chin and a surprisingly dainty nose. Thick eyebrows, light eyes, pale skin, and an unlined brow that made him look boyish, like he didn’t have a care in the world as he reached into a battered canvas satchel at his feet and pulled out a legal pad and a pen. “Okay,” he said, writing PROS and CONS and dividing them with a line slashed down the center of the page. “I’ve got half an hour, but I bet we can solve this by then. Pro?”
“My father is living a lie,” I began. “His wife isn’t what she says she is, and he deserves to know that.”
“And you’re sure he doesn’t know?”
I nodded, because I was positive that if my father had any idea who India really was, he would never have married her. Almost positive. If he had some kind of ridiculous knight-on-a-white-horse fantasy. . but then I dismissed it. There was no way my father could have known what I knew about India and married her anyhow, let alone agreed to have a child with her.
“More pros?” he asked.
“Maybe if he knew the truth, they’d get divorced. Or the marriage would be annulled,” I said, thinking out loud. “Maybe my mother would come to her senses.” I said it—putting it out there, as Vanessa, who was a big fan of putting things out there, used to say — even though I knew it was unlikely.
“Is your mom still in the city?” Darren asked.
I shook my head. “She’s. .” This was painful to admit, but Darren was basically a stranger, a stranger who’d been on my payroll, which meant that he was obligated to keep my secrets. Besides, it wasn’t as if we had friends in common. There was no one he could gossip to who’d be interested. “She’s in New Mexico. In an ashram.”
“An ashram?” he repeated. “Whoa. Did she read Eat, Pray, Love?”
“She said she wanted to live authentically.” The last word came out more scornfully than I’d intended. I looked around to see who might have heard, but the other people in the park seemed focused on their food, or on one another.
Darren raised his eyebrows. “You don’t approve?”
I shrugged, feeling foolish, nibbling at a lettuce leaf to buy time. “She sends me pictures of herself in the sweat lodge.”
“Good times.” He grinned. “My mom sends me articles she clips from the newspaper. Like, actually cuts them out with scissors. Recipes, mostly. Those Mark Bittman ones, with six ingredients. You think your dad still loves her? Your mother, not mine.”
“I do,” I said automatically. My parents never fought, never even disagreed until my mother took up with the Baba. Then I thought of my father and India, beaming at me as they’d told me their “wonderful news,” the way he’d tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. I couldn’t remember him ever looking at my mother like that, or touching her so tenderly. My parents had been equals — at least at first. When they’d met, at the University of Michigan, my mother was the one who came from a wealthier, more established family, and she was a year ahead of him in school. Her parents had gone to college; my father’s parents had not. India was different — younger, smaller, more fragile, more in need of a wealthy man’s patronage. Maybe that was what he found appealing.
“And the stepmother?” Darren asked. “What’s she doing that’s so bad?”
“Beg pardon?”
“I mean, did she turn your bedroom into a sex dungeon?”
I smiled — it was a funny thought — and shook my head.
“Steal your boyfriend?” Darren continued. “Run over your dog?”
“She hasn’t done anything to me,” I admitted. I wiped my fingers on a paper napkin. “And I don’t have a dog.”
“Somehow,” said Darren, “that does not surprise me.” He’d finished the first milkshake. He lifted the second one, tilted it toward me, and started drinking almost before I’d finished shaking my head. “Do you think she makes your dad happy?”
“I think,” I said, “that if she does, it’s a happiness that’s illusory and transient.”
He frowned. “Jesus, where’d you go to school?”
“Vassar. And it won’t last,” I said. “A person like that, she’ll get bored. She’ll leave him.”
“And take all his money?” Darren’s voice was innocent enough, but he knew — he had to — that India couldn’t leave with more than a few million of my father’s dollars. Unless this folly they were embarking on came to pass. Unless they had a baby.
“It’s not that,” I said. I was reluctant to say what I really thought, but, again, I reminded myself that Darren was an employee, that he’d keep my confidences. “I’m worried that she’ll hurt him. That she’ll break his heart.”
There it was, out in the open. “Is that what happened with your mother?” Darren asked.
I nodded again. He pointed to the uneaten half of my bun. “Are you going to finish that?”
“Yes,” I said, “I am.”
He shrugged, sucked fruitlessly at the milkshake cup, then asked, “There’s no chance she really loves him?”
I started ripping my lettuce into shreds, feeling Darren’s eyes on me, his careful regard. It felt good, I acknowledged, to have a boy look at me like that. “I’m not sure,” I answered, wondering in what universe I was qualified to answer questions about love. I’d never really had a boyfriend. Crushes, yes, dates, yes, kissing and fondling on dormitory beds, somewhat. I’d lost my virginity the week before college ended with a boy who I was pretty sure was gay, not because I loved him, or even particularly liked him, but because I couldn’t bear the thought of receiving my diploma before I’d had sex. I knew that I was a throwback. I knew that I would have been more comfortable in an era of corsets and clear expectations, of good manners and muted voices, where men didn’t hawk phlegm on the street and undress you with their eyes and use fuck and shit like yes and please.
“I don’t know how much I know about love.”
Darren started to sing. “I know. . something about love. Gotta want it bad.” His voice was surprisingly tuneful.
“Are you in a band?”
“I was in a girl group, actually. I sang the high parts.” He shook his head sadly. “Then Curtis started up with Deena, and Effie took it hard.” He hummed a few bars of “And
I Am Telling You.”
“That must have been difficult.”
He shrugged. “It’s why I have chosen the stable and well-paying life of a professional investigator, instead of pursuing my passion for doo-wop.”
I folded the remnants of my lunch into the paper sack and wiped my hands again. Darren said, “You know, my folks split up, too. It turned out to be the best thing for them. FYI.” He held out his hand for my trash, tossed it, then came back and picked up his pad and his pen. “If you tell him, what good comes of it?”
“Well, then he’d know. Then he could make an informed decision.”
He scratched the side of his nose. “But he’s already married her. That’s a decision, right?”
“Not an irrevocable one. Marriages can be annulled…”
He shook his head. “That’s mostly for soap operas. In the real world, actually, it’s a lot harder than you’d think.”
“He could get a divorce.”
“True.”
“He could sue her for fraud. He could say she’s misrepresented herself.” Of course, I knew that such a lawsuit would place him even more in danger of being mocked on the Internet than a mere annulment or a simple divorce would have.
“Also true.” He pulled off his ridiculous glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose, then rested his head on the back of the bench, and closed his eyes.
I glared at him. “Are you going to sleep?”
“I am not. I’m enjoying the day. This weather’s great. I grew up in Miami. It never cools off down there.” He stretched his arms up over his head. When they came down, one of them landed around my shoulders. I pulled away, startled. . then shrugged and settled back against him. He was strange, but funny and interesting. I’d known a lot of guys, but not many of them were interesting, and not many of those were interested in me.
“They’re having a baby,” I blurted. “With a surrogate.”
He opened his eyes and pulled his hands back. “Now that,” he said, “would change things.”
“I know that.” My voice was sharp. “Don’t you think I know that? My father’s fifty-seven. Do you think he’s got any business having a baby? He’ll be seventy-five years old when the kid graduates from high school. Almost eighty when it’s done with college.”
Then Came You Page 16