“No, no, I was wrong. And Lorine, you know her, she’s Lorine. She’s had a hard life.”
“No, you were right! Anne’s queer! She’s a lesbian!”
A silence filled the living room.
My mother finally said, “There’s certainly worse things.”
“How can you say that? In that tone? Like it’s no big deal?”
“Oh, Gracie,” my mother said. “So what? She treated you nice. Remember that old friend of mine you met in Philadelphia? Theresa? She’s a lesbian. I’ve known her since she was eight. So what.”
“So what! I don’t want to be her friend anymore! It is a big deal!”
“Well then, you’ll have to tell her that. I will not lie for you anymore. Anne’s a human being and she deserves an explanation. Every time I see her she asks about you. I really think you need to talk to her.”
“I can’t!”
“You’re a big girl.”
“Oh sure, I’m so big I can walk up to her and say, ‘I don’t want to come over anymore because you’re a lez.’”
“I won’t lie for you,” my mother said. “And the word is lesbian, Gracie.”
I didn’t tell Anne anything. Lorine and her kids came back lobster red from Sea Isle, and another school year started, and I kissed Albie Rooch every day in the alleys of town, or on the playground at night. My father continued to work and drink and read the newspaper, my mother tended to the little kids and kept her distance. She didn’t come into my room and watch me fall asleep anymore.
When I wanted to leave the apartment, I’d sneak a look into the hall, making sure Anne wasn’t out there.
One day I saw her in the bakery. It was Sunday morning; I was out on my own, buying donuts. I took my number and waited in the crowd, when suddenly I heard her voice.
“Hi, Grace,” she said. I turned and she was right next to me, wearing her black coat, her steady eyes devoid of the warmth I had known. Somehow in my arrogance, when I’d imagined running into her, I had envisioned she’d be more forgiving.
“Hi,” I said, my face crimson and warm, and sorry.
“I’ve missed you,” she said, “but I understand how busy you are.”
“Yeah,” I said, stupidly. “School and stuff.”
Anne sighed with relief when her number was called. “See you,” she said, and approached the lit counter. Watching her back as she waited in that bakery I was filled with shame.
It was a month or so later when I overheard my mother and Lorine one Saturday evening after the kids had all passed out on a mattress in the living room. I had been out at the playground with Albie and a bunch of other kids, and I’d come back in to check my face before we all headed to get some pizza uptown. I stood in the darkness, watching the sprawled children sleep, and listening. The pitch of my mother’s voice alarmed me.
“. . . and then he comes home and passes out and stinks up the room and snores beside me in the bed so that I plug my ears and hear my own scream bounce off the walls in my head. I used to go out to the couch before the kids ruined it. Now there’s nowhere. Nowhere. I lie there with my fingers in my ears, trying not to breathe, knowing he doesn’t love me anymore, if he ever did. Night after night, Lorine. And the days are no better.”
Lorine sighed. “God, I wish I knew what to say,” she said. I stood there, body frozen, heart beginning to pound throughout my entire body. I was waiting for more, dreading more, but they were silent now. What my mother had said should’ve been obvious to me, and would have been had I ever had the courage or inclination to extend my imagination toward her then. And yet, what I’d overheard felt both shocking and inevitable, like something I didn’t know I’d always known. Now it was taking root in my heart, and beginning to break it.
“Next time around we’ll be lesbian painters,” my mother said, breaking the silence. “Weird lesbian gals with big white pianos and no kids.”
They laughed together.
“And we’ll freak out little girls like Gracie,” she added.
Another laugh.
“Poor Gracie,” Lorine said, sounding unlike herself. “She’s got it all ahead of her.”
I tiptoed past the kitchen, back to the bathroom. I would not sort it out. I’d let my mother’s sorrow sit inside me, a heaviness, an ache I’d outrun. I was busy, I had places to go, I did not need this horrible interference. I yanked on the chain that turned on the bulb above the mirror. I didn’t look so bad, really, I thought, reapplying my cherry lip gloss and forbidden mascara. I gave my long hair a defiant fifty strokes. My heart slammed inside me. I washed my hands, and bent to take a drink from the faucet, gulping down the cold water as if it could break through the new knowledge stuck in my chest.
I went back quietly through the living room.
“Who’s that?” my mother said.
I didn’t answer her then, or ever. I’d grow up never mentioning that I’d heard a word she said. I walked quietly to the door, opened it, and ran breathlessly down the stairs and into the night, as if I were free, as if after so deliberately turning away from another’s suffering, the darkness of summer could ever look the same.
BERNA’S PLACE
MY HUSBAND AND I WORKED TOGETHER so that the house would be presentable for our only son and his new girlfriend. “It’s serious, this time,” our son had told me. “I think I’ve found my life.” Life, he said, not wife. But really, he’d found the whole package.
Jude, my husband, was a newly retired art professor, and an artist—working in oil and acrylic—and over the years our entire house had turned into a studio. We had paint thinner on the back of our toilet, smocks on the railing, art magazines piled into the corners of the dining room. I told myself this was inevitable: How could a man like Jude be contained in one room? Even the front porch had been conquered by his old cans, the dried brushes piled in a heap below the swing, the scrappy canvases he never seemed to move out to the curb for the trash collectors leaning against the wall by the door. (I’d given up.) In his art he was somewhat successful; the best galleries in Philadelphia had shown his work, and Jude was gratified by a number of fellow artists who seemed to think he was some kind of genius. Articles in the seventies about his early neo-Expressionism said as much. Though he’d never admit it, and often made the joke that he was a has-been that never was, I knew Jude needed to think he was a genius. In his heart he still wrestled with that tiresome affliction that most men trade in for a kind of reluctant humility by the time they turn fifty. Jude, at sixty-four, was still going strong, sometimes painting all night long in the attic, Billie Holiday or Bach for company, a view of the skyline out the window.
He was also very kind; I remember he knew I was tired from a day at work, where I sat behind a counter in a crowded hospital trying to help exasperated, sometimes furious people figure out their health care insurance. When I was mopping the floor to prepare the house for our son and his girlfriend, Jude climbed out of the cave of his work and told me to go take a nap. He’d clean, he said, his eyes still glazed with his art. And I knew he’d apply the same fierce, concentrated energy to housework as he did to his painting. The place would shine.
My son rang the doorbell that evening at dusk; I was struck by that since usually he burst through the door with no warning. I was used to him raiding the refrigerator as if he were still in high school. This night was different, though. This was the night we were to meet his girlfriend.
I was the one to answer. There they stood in the dusk, my handsome son in his maroon sweater and ponytail, a twenty-five-year-old young man who liked his dog, reading, Buddhist meditation, and hiking, and beside him, holding his hand, stood his girlfriend, as he’d been calling her, despite the fact that she was, at least compared to him, old. Sixty, I’d soon learn. Sixty. Nine years my senior. She wore a beige raincoat, and moccasins. She was very tall, with high cheekbones and lank, dark hair parted on the side, and my first thought was that she looked like my pediatrician from childhood, a woman who’d visited my home w
hen I’d had German measles. The resemblance was so uncanny that for a moment I thought it was her, Dr. Vera Martin! I was almost ready to embrace her, for she had impressed me deeply as a child, with a sense of authority that seemed rooted both in her eloquent silences and the sudden warmth that transformed her serious face when she’d finally smile. My son’s friend smiled and the resemblance only deepened.
“Hi!” I said, and stared at this woman who I knew could not be my childhood doctor, who was in fact long dead. So who was she? Not his girlfriend. Not really.
“Invite us in, Ma,” said my son, and I could see he was enjoying my shock.
“This is Berna, Ma. Berna, this is Patricia, my ma.”
Berna reached out to shake my hand. Her eyes were dark and warm. As she opened her coat I saw her sweatshirt was covered with decals of cats.
“I wasn’t able to dress appropriately,” she said. “I’m coming from work, you’ll pardon me, I hope?”
“Work?”
“She’s a vet,” my son jumped in, beaming at her. He was more animated than I’d seen him in years. “She makes housecalls. A traveling vet. I went with her today. She’s excellent. Harry—that was his dog—loves her. That’s how we met. She’s the only traveling vet in town.” He took a deep breath; he seemed filled with a kind of desperate, nervous excitement—so different from his usual taut calm.
“A traveling vet,” I said. “Well well. That’s something. Please, come in, sit down.”
The two of them followed me into the living room. I felt I was dreaming. Berna sat down. She made no noise as she sat. No little groan of pleasure. No sigh. She sat with her long back as straight as the poised tails of the cats on her sweatshirt, her eyes and the eyes of the cats too alert, so that I felt like a small crowd was quietly assessing me. Griffin sat beside her, and held her hand, and suddenly I asked him if I could speak to him in the kitchen. I felt toyed with, and wanted him to know.
“Why didn’t you mention she was old enough to be your grandmother?” I hadn’t meant to hiss at him. In the kitchen light his brown eyes widened.
“What’s your problem?” he said. “Did you turn into Dad or something?”
“Griffin, this is ridiculous! Don’t act like you’re not enjoying the shock value of this! She looks like my childhood pediatrician, who was old then, and dead now!”
He scrunched up his face in a sort of disgusted confusion. All the composure I’d seen for the past two years, composure that had struck me as false, had left him. I knew his palms were sweating. I felt for him, but it struck me as comical, his expecting me to take this in stride.
“I want to marry this woman,” he said. “I want to marry her. This has nothing to do with your childhood doctor, or shock value.” I saw he was deadly serious. So, I thought, this is how his strangeness has found itself a home. Let’s hope it’s temporary, a pit stop.
Berna appeared in the doorway, a tall, long-limbed sixty in a cheap, baggy cat sweatshirt that somehow was dignified enough on her.
“Look,” she said. “Let’s be up front here, shall we? Let’s get it all out on the table. Go ahead and tell me what’s pressing in on you: I’m old enough to be his mother.”
“Grandmother,” I said.
“Grandmother then,” Berna said, with a kind of pride that lifted her chin. “Though I’d have to have given birth at an awfully young age to make that a true statement.” Her voice was soft and steady with confidence.
“I’ve finally brought Berna here because she’s the first woman I’ve really loved. That needs to be known and digested.”
“That’s what you’re telling her?” I said to him, remembering a string of girls named Cindy, and the three Jens, two of whom I’d become quite friendly with.
“I told her because it’s true, Ma. Okay? Now it’s all out in the open. You want a beer, Bern?”
“Sure,” said Bern.
And I heard my husband coming down the steps. Here we go, I thought.
My husband and son never got along. I used to blame Jude— he’d been so absent during Griffin’s childhood, so self-absorbed, and my son had been born, it seemed, awestruck by his father. Terrible combination. In those early years we lived out in the country and Jude painted in a large shed; Griffin was like a dog, waiting too patiently for the master to finally notice him and play. The more absorbed his father was, the keener Griffin’s need became; Jude claimed there was something manipulative in this, but my heart broke for my child, and I think I rightly feared his very soul was being shaped by the intensity of his longing. Maybe that can be said of all children.
I’d beg Jude to give the boy a little attention, and he did, but it was the wrong kind. He’d take Griffin to the art museum. He’d try to make him memorize paintings, learn perspective, listen to facts about the artists. Griffin tried his best, and told Jude he wanted to walk into Pierre Bonnard’s paintings and live there, but you shouldn’t do this with a seven-year-old unless the kid is oddly brilliant, a prodigy, which Griffin never was, and I know this disappointed his father, and I know, also, that his father blamed my genes. I come from a long line of Midwestern farmers. If I said any big words in my mother’s presence, she cocked her eyebrow, which meant for me to get down off my damn high horse. Intelligence was a force to be tamed into utility.
After years of rejection, Griffin finally gave up. He was twelve, then. He got a dog for his birthday that year. It seemed to me that all his love for his father got transferred onto the dog, a mutt from the shelter Griff named Roberto, for the great ballplayer Roberto Clemente. Roberto was a bit mangy and looked heartsick, but loved Griffin the way dogs love boys. A simple solution, I thought. Roberto went everywhere with Griffin—they even let that dog into the grocery store. Things were easier for Griffin after that. He became a teenager who said very little to either of us. In high school he found an enormous friend named Jack J. Pree, who wore thick glasses and who managed to attract certain girls despite his obesity. Jack lived with his aunt and uncle, drove a monstrous, ancient gold Buick, called himself the Fatso Existentialist and called Griff Brother Soul. It was the sort of mythology Griff needed. Brother Soul and the Fatso Existentialist spent days just driving around with aging Roberto hanging out the window, the three of them listening to old blues and new punk. Nights they read philosophy books aloud, or had water-balloon fights in Jack J. Pree’s tiny hedged backyard, which was five doors down from us. Through a hole in the bushes, I spied on them. I loved my son, and I’d become a spy in his life.
Jude walked into the kitchen that evening, and I saw, for a moment, how handsome he was, which still happened when I was aware that someone else would be looking at him for the first time. Griffin, Berna and I had taken seats at the oak table by the glass wall that looked out onto a little patio. Berna had first stood at the window and admired that space. “Lovely,” she’d said.
“Hey, Griffin,” Jude said, and looked at Berna. “Where’s your girlfriend?” he said.
Berna got up from the table.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Berna Kateson.” She walked over and shook his hand. She was nearly as tall as Jude.
Griffin watched them with utmost seriousness, waiting for his father to do something wrong.
“Griffin and I have been together for quite a while now, so we thought it was time to meet you,” Berna said, again with her distinct, almost imperceptible chin-raising pride.
“Uh-huh,” said my husband. “I see.” He shot a look at Griffin, then his eyes settled on my own, and I looked down, away from him, so that he was stranded in his shock. Berna sat back down.
“I realize this isn’t a typical scenario,” she said. “I realize one might feel a little baffled when faced with the possibility of their son marrying an older woman, even a very successful one.”
Jude opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of wine, poured himself a glass, and sat down with us at the table.
“So,” he said to Berna, and looked at her with coldly urgent eyes. “Why
don’t you tell us about yourself. About your success.”
“That seems a kind of power-play question,” Berna said. “So maybe I should ask it of you. Why don’t you tell me about yourself? Your success?” She smiled back at him, without malice.
I could feel Griffin loving this. Her simple composure must have seemed like real bravery to him.
“Well,” said my husband, “I’m sure Griffin here has told you all about me. I’m sure it’s been a stellar father-son relationship report. It was all Little League and fishing trips with Griff and me.”
Berna laughed, generously, I thought. Jude squinted his eyes at her, then looked at me as if to say, are we dreaming?
“We’re both wiped out, actually,” said Griffin. “We had a day that was hard on the heart, didn’t we, Bern? I mean, we should tell the story of our day and put things in perspective, right? Rather than spend more time on this petty American bullshit?”
Whenever Griffin didn’t like something he called it American. This had been his habit for years.
“We had to put two cats down, and tell a dog owner that his dog had one week of life left,” Berna said. “Nobody took this well. We became on-the-spot grief counselors, which isn’t unusual.” She massaged her temples. She stuck her limp dark hair behind her ears.
“We?” said my husband. “Did my son go to veterinary school since I last saw him? Or is he simply Granny’s sidekick now?”
“He’s studying to be an assistant,” Berna said. “I’m sorry you’re obsessed with age, but I’d have been foolish not to expect it.”
Berna sipped her beer. Then a great burst of laughter escaped from her mouth. Very, very odd. A shocking contrast to her whole bearing, which was elegant reserve.
“Excuse me,” she said, as if she’d burped. Her eyes flashed, widening, her lips suppressed a smile.
“Can we go into the other room where it’s more comfortable?” I said, as if we would all turn into different people if our chairs were softer.
Thank You for the Music Page 6