Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “Two marriages, both of them failures. You’re a two-time loser,” Floyd said. “And your children hate you. Father figure!”

  “Unlike you, the ideal husband.”

  “I was married to a perfidious bitch,” Floyd said, without rancor but with force. “She was hideous, she had no soul, she was a retromingent she-wolf, and you could have used her piss to etch glass. Your wives were wonderful. They moved on to better things, obviously. I think it’s called trading up. I need a tape measure and a felt-tip marker. Make it snappy. I don’t have all day.”

  Both the tape measure and the marker were in the same drawer under the kitchen counter. I slid the drawer open and put them into Floyd’s hand.

  “Not this kind,” Floyd said, tossing the tape measure onto the counter. “This is a tailor’s accessory. I want a carpenter’s measure, the kind that rolls out of a metal canister and extends to ten or twenty-five feet.”

  “You said ‘tape measure.’ That’s a tape measure. Notice the tape.”

  “The other kind is also called a tape measure, dork-face.”

  “I think you’ll find”—this catchphrase was also a key element in the teasing—“the instrument you want is a mechanical rule.”

  “I think you’ll find it’s called a tape measure,” Floyd said, and as he spoke, he popped the cap off the marker and tried to scribble on his hand. “It’s dead. It’s dry as rat shit. You must have left the cap off.” He flung it away.

  “Because it won’t write on your greasy skin.”

  “‘Writes on all surfaces’—that’s what it says. Epidermis—squamous tissue—is a surface!” As he spoke, he glanced quickly at my bookshelf to see if there was a title he might borrow, and saw none apparently, because he began to head out of the house, still talking. “I have to go. This was a wasted trip. You’re putting on weight. You’ll be as wide as Franny if you don’t watch out—she’s a perfect sphere. Whose middle name was Sphere? Don’t embarrass yourself by trying to guess. It was Thelonious Monk. Celtics game Friday—come over, we’ll get pizza and watch it.”

  “That’s the night of the dance recital.”

  “Oh, sorry. I forgot you’re trying to nail that single mother. Ordeal by boredom—you sit through the daughter’s recital in order to get your hands on the mother. But ask yourself, is it really worth all that trouble for a piece of ass, bearing in mind—and here the sage raises a cautionary finger”—he raised the finger in my face—“that a single mother is damaged goods and you are merely bottom-feeding.”

  To be offended by such banter was to risk losing his friendship. The only proper response was to give it back to him in the same spirit.

  “You’re absolutely right. I should follow your example. I would be much better off watching TV with a can of beer in one hand and my dick in the other. Mary Palm never fails, and your fidelity to onanism has never wavered.”

  He laughed at the abuse. We were even—it was over. He said, “Walk me to my car.”

  Outside, he told me that he had seen Mother the previous day. She had reported that Fred was in Chicago on business, that Gilbert had received a commendation from the State Department for exemplary service, that Hubby had hurt his back lifting a bag of potting soil.

  Floyd said, “Dad used to call it ‘loom.’ He said ‘peltering’ when it rained hard. Funnily enough, he spoke colloquial French. Amazing how he deferred to Ma. I miss him.”

  “He saw that she was weak. He was being tactful.”

  “She always had to win an argument. Do you find her irritating? Sometimes I think I’d like to hit her with an iron pipe. Just keep whacking her.” He laughed again and said, “She’s still communing with Angela, who is apparently in better fettle than the rest of us. That is so fucking spooky it doesn’t bear thinking about. Who is the scholar who describes how primitive people are guided by the dead?”

  “I think you’ll find it’s Bronisław Malinowski, as well as most of the field anthropologists he inspired,” I said.

  “The answer I want is Lévi-Strauss—not the man of the pants but the man of the people. The grateful dead. I wonder if Jerry Garcia knew that?”

  “By the way, the ungrateful Franny and Rose stopped by on Sunday.”

  “Did they bring you candy? Did they address you as though you were six years old? Is it from talking to their kids all day? They all belong in spazz class.”

  “Benno juggles. Bingo plays the harmonica. Jonty kicked a windshield to smithereens when he was a mere lad. Jake ate a Styrofoam cup. Give them a little credit.”

  “Unique talents that will serve them in adulthood. ‘Can you describe the key tactical decision of Pickett’s Charge that determined the Battle of Gettysburg?’ ‘No, but I can juggle.’ Did you ever notice . . .”

  He had slipped behind the wheel of his car, a battered Mercedes with a Harvard decal on the back window, a parking badge on the windshield, and a Question Authority bumper sticker. He frowned and looked thoughtful and blinked as if he had forgotten what he was going to say. He revved the engine, a blatting diesel, and then put his head out the window.

  “Yeah. Ever notice? When you get a divorce, you look around and everyone seems happily married. And you want to sob with self-pity, seeing all those jolly families, or old couples solemnly holding hands.” Floyd craned his neck and, taking his time, pursed his lips as though to begin singing but instead spat heavily onto my driveway. “Then you meet someone and you get serious and make plans. And you look around—and every married person you know is miserable.”

  Floyd’s mockery rang in my ears the night of the recital. The event was staged at the senior center, the only hall for hire in the area—and my first time inside, a kind of initiation, for I had often gone past it on performance nights (Alice in Wonderland, Two Nights Only or Contra Dance, All Welcome). I had never been tempted to go inside, though I had wondered who might be there. Now I knew: people like me, romancing single mothers with children who played music and sang and danced. A car went past, a man inside, the man I had once been, going out for a solitary drink.

  This was a new stage in my relationship with Missy, meeting other parents, being presented to Missy’s women friends, all of them the single mothers of Madison’s friends. The pains they took to pretend they were not sizing me up made it obvious they were doing just that, scrutinizing my shoes, my jacket, my thinning hair. What sort of prospect was I? They seemed to me a weary but trying-to-be-cheerful sisterhood of divorcées, beset by what they would have called “issues”—children, child support payments, the cost of living, school tuition, ex-spouses (like Buzz Gearhart) who’d found new love and remarried, while these sisters were burdened by work and demoralized by growing older. Lonely mothers, unwillingly single, watching their daughters attracting boyfriends.

  One mother tapped a video camera and said, “I’ll make a copy for you.”

  Seeing it all with Floyd’s skeptical eyes, I got sad—sadder still as Madison sauntered onstage, dragging her feet, with her troupe of break-dancing buddies. They wore hooded sweatshirts, baggy shorts, too-big sneakers, and baseball caps on backward—the rebellious getup of street kids. They pranced and tumbled and made gang-related hand gestures and finger signs, nodding to the music—sweet-faced girls mouthing loud raw words.

  Ain’t listenin’ to ya, ain’t listenin’.

  “What is this music?” I asked, wondering what Missy would say.

  “Gangster rap,” she whispered.

  The dancing was expert, the collapsing children, the spinning legs, the angry music stirring them. But the precision, this skill, made it somehow more awful for being accurately bad, the mimicry of something so mediocre as to be dangerous. Now they were tumbling, the wildly flopping dancers seeming like furious urchins.

  When they took a bow—swaggering, more wrist play—Missy angled herself to get a look at me, as if assessing the vigor of my clapping.

  After that, sylph-like girls and pale boys wearing lipstick strutted onstage, scissoring their legs
in a ballet. One of them looked like Franny’s son Max. I tried to imagine Madison in a tutu and wondered what my reaction would have been. Had she chosen rap music because she was defiant? I knew why I hated rap: it was ignorant and crude; lacking harmony, it wasn’t music at all but a succession of boorish insults. During the next act, an ensemble playing Mozart, I spotted Bingo up front at the edge of the stage, blow-sucking on her harmonica, Franny and Rose seated in the front row.

  “I’m starving. How about a pizza?” I said as the recital ended. Fearing that Franny and Rose would see me, I excused myself (“I’ll warm up the car”) and met Missy and Madison at the side entrance of the building. Madison still had her costume on, the hoodie, the baggy shorts. She appeared to be sulking—still, I supposed, in the defiant mood of the rap song.

  “You need to work harder to get to know her,” Missy used to say. Or, “We need to work on our relationship. You have anger issues. You’ve got a lot of hostility—you need to work on that.”

  This wasn’t romance, it was work. I had never imagined love in these terms, though I knew all about negotiation and adjustment. In my family no one worked at relationships. They smiled, they told lies, they gossiped, they stabbed each other in the back, they always said yes and never meant it. No one worked, no one changed. Could I?

  “I hate the crust,” Madison said at the pizza parlor when the waiter, a young man in a paper hat, slid the big cheesy disk across the table.

  “Anything else I can get you?” the waiter asked. “Miss?”

  But Madison wasn’t listening. “It tastes like wood.”

  “Miss? Maybe get you a beverage?” He was being excessively polite, bowing to her. “We’ve got some delicious lemonade in the cooler.”

  “I hate lemonade.”

  “We’re fine,” Missy said, smiling at the waiter.

  I was suddenly very angry at this fourteen-year-old waving the waiter away with a grunted dismissal, appalled at the waiter’s forced smile, swallowing his exasperation in the hope of being tipped.

  “You don’t have to eat the crust, honey,” Missy said. “Why are you smiling, Jay?”

  At the horror of it all, and the memory of Mother saying, “Eat it. It’s the best part. It’s a sin to waste food. People in China . . .”

  Missy was smoothing Madison’s cheek, and I saw that she was not wearing the commitment ring. “Be an angel and go clean off that makeup, sweetie.”

  “Why do I hafta?”

  “Do it for me, darling.”

  Madison’s grumbling in this ghoulish makeup seemed especially menacing. But she went, complaining under her breath, scuffing her sneakers. Missy watched her, setting her lips in a smile of pride.

  “She’s getting so big,” Missy said, and still approvingly, “She really has a mind of her own.”

  That was the moment to say, Maybe she should learn a little politeness. But I had something else on my mind now. I took Missy’s hand and pressed it. “What happened to the ring?”

  “It’s in a safe place. I love that ring. Listen, I’m glad you want me and that you’re committed to me and Maddy. But that still has to be our secret. I’m just not ready for other people to know it.”

  “What about Madison?”

  “She’s not ready either.” She looked up and, seeing Madison coming back to the table, her face scrubbed and girlish again, whispered, “Say something positive about her recital. She danced her heart out. She needs to be validated.”

  “Hey, you didn’t even touch it,” Madison said, lifting a slice of pizza, folding it in half, and taking a bite.

  I said, “I liked your ensemble a lot.”

  “What’s an onsomble supposed to be?” Her mouth was full of pizza, dabs of tomato sauce on her cheeks. She chewed, wrinkling her nose at me.

  “Your rap group.”

  “My posse?”

  “Right. It was really nice.”

  “‘Nice.’” She quoted me in my own voice and sulked.

  “I mean, it had lots of rhythm. Good moves.”

  “Whatever.” She cocked her head to the side. “I think you mean our shit was dope.”

  “Maddy!” But Missy seemed to be screeching with approval.

  I was silent. Perhaps Maddy knew I wanted to slap her. “Children always know when you’re hostile” was one of Missy’s sayings. Yes, I was hostile, but I also wanted to placate Missy. I had no idea how to accomplish that. I hated the thought that I might be auditioning for another marital flop.

  A family at a nearby table was contending over a half-finished pizza—mother, father, three small boys, all different sizes, a troop of humans. The mother was harassed, picking at her wild hair with one hand, snatching at it with a brush with the other. The father sulked, wolfing a piece of pizza on his own, the kids each nibbling in his own way—one licking his fingers, another chewing with his mouth open, the youngest with his face against the table, eating a slice of pizza like a dog, lapping at it, no hands.

  Once again, I saw them, as I saw most people these days, no longer as simple village folk, who, though hungry, always eat slowly—I had known such people, who usually seemed the soul of politeness, with the good manners of people who know it is fatal to have bad manners. No, I saw most people these days as monkeys, eating with dirty hands and chattering. That staring husband and father, chewing and making noises with his mouth full—that would be me. I had aced my audition, I had been accepted, I was rehearsing that role as Big Monkey.

  Floyd had said, “You meet someone and you get serious and make plans. And you look around—and every married person you know is miserable.”

  “I hate to see food go to waste,” I said as we left, half the pizza uneaten on the table.

  I was parroting Mother, of course, and I hated myself for it. But no one heard me, no one cared, and why should they?

  “Thanks so much, sir,” the waiter said, holding the door for us, grateful for the large tip I’d given him to atone for Madison’s rudeness.

  No sex that night. A stifled “I love you,” a chaste kiss for Madison’s benefit. Missy reminded me that Madison had soccer practice tomorrow and the bank was open on Saturday mornings.

  The next time I saw Mother, the following week, she said, “You must be so busy making plans.” When I squinted at “plans,” she said, “Wedding bells.”

  “I’m not getting married. It’s a commitment ring. I’m not engaged.”

  “You said you were engaged. Doesn’t engaged mean engaged to be married?”

  “No. I’m committed. That’s different. It’s like going steady.”

  “Committed to what? To whom?”

  “To the, um, young lady.”

  “But doesn’t committed mean committed to marry her?”

  “In the end, I suppose. If all goes well.”

  “That’s what I mean. So you must be making plans.”

  “No plans at the moment, Ma.”

  “Oh?”

  When Mother said “oh?” she looked like an interrogator in a dungeon. Her “oh?” meant: Let’s go through this one more time, and now I need more detail. Mother had always been prosecutorial.

  But I had no more detail to give. On reflection, I had less detail than the last time Mother and I had discussed this, weeks ago. And speaking of Missy in this offhand, almost denying way made me self-conscious. I realized we had not talked since the recital—an unusual lapse of five days. I had called but had gotten her answering machine, Madison’s voice asking the caller to leave a message. I had left a succession of messages, which, as the days passed, had become increasingly bumbling and apologetic.

  Sunday came, a car crunching the driveway gravel—I hoped it was Missy. No, a Subaru Forester, Franny at the wheel, Rose beside her, the twins, juggler and harmonica player, in the back seat. More candy, more fruit, a wedge of muenster cheese, and more gossip. What a melancholy fate to be visited by people you dislike when you want to be visited by people you love.

  “Hubby has hemorrhoids, so I gues
s he’s not a perfect asshole after all,” Rose said.

  “One of Fred’s dogs has a hernia,” Franny said, laughing, and, “God forgive me, Floyd’s talking of having his nose reshaped. He says he’s having trouble breathing, but we think it’s a size thing.”

  “I think Ma’s losing it,” Rose said. “You’re the only sensible one in the family.”

  A visit meant a review of the whole tribe, with the pretense of making me feel better. But I felt worse. After they left I was uneasy, apprehensive. Something was wrong. Since knowing her, I had not gone a whole week without hearing from Missy. I called again, and this time, early on a Sunday evening, she answered.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you,” I said.

  In a low tortured voice, Missy said, “I’m a wreck. Maddy’s coming apart. How could you do this to us? I thought I could trust you.”

  I hardly recognized the voice, the tone, the accusation. It was like a demon voice in a dream, irrational, accusing.

  “I don’t get it. What ​—?”

  “Don’t interrupt. I’m not finished. Madison is devastated. She came home in tears. She’s humiliated. She knows everything.”

  “About us?”

  “Yes, about us,” she said fiercely in her betrayed victim’s voice. “About the ring. About us getting married. I told you she wasn’t ready for this,” she went on, drowning out my protests. “She says I’m abandoning her. I told you she had rejection issues. She’s talking about taking drugs. ‘Self-medicating.’”

  “How did she find out?”

  “Why don’t you ask about her state of mind? Why do you only care how she found out? She’s a mess! The kids at school know. The other mothers know. Everyone knows. It was supposed to be our secret. The other kids were teasing her about the wedding.”

  “Why teasing?”

  “Because you’re old, I guess.”

  “I’m not old,” I said.

  “Look in the mirror.”

  At this point in the conversation I was seeing a new Missy, a different Gearhart, as in turbulent times one encounters surprising and sometimes shocking aspects of one’s lover. I had seen her overprotective side and her businesslike side. But this was a rash, insulting, unforgiving side, and I saw how, in her belief that I had betrayed her confidence, I had failed her; how, more in search of a father for her child than a companion for herself, she had concluded that I was the wrong man. As I was mulling this, she hung up on me, cutting off her own tormented voice.