A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  “Kids,” he yelled into the family room. “Aunt Lucy’s here.”

  As usual, she found herself slightly unnerved by the cavernous two-story foyer, with its elaborate chandelier, which seemed to rise above them like the lobby of an office building. Beyond Paul, on the wall behind the sweeping staircase, was something new: an enormous painting, six feet high at least, a Degas-like scene of ballerinas in a gold-painted frame.

  “Holy cow,” Lucy said, nodding in the direction of the painting.

  “That’s how Paul’s latest client paid his bill,” Cokie said, blowing her nose again. “You love it, right? Because I love it. We all love it.”

  “Don’t start,” Paul said.

  Cokie shrugged and went toward the kitchen as her children trooped into the foyer. She touched each of them along the way, a light skim across their foreheads as if she needed to verify that they were real, hers, still fresh and lovely. Sean was the only one to protest.

  “Hey, Mom, you have a cold or the plague or something,” he said, yelling into the kitchen. “Don’t touch that pizza dough either.”

  Molly and Jack hugged Lucy around her waist. Sean stood off to one side and seemed to be looking for something in his pockets.

  “Will you let me babysit, Aunt Lucy?” Molly said, grabbing Lucy’s arm. “Please? I’m taking this babysitting class in school, and then I get this certificate. I’d be totally responsible.”

  “I’m sure you would, Mol,” Lucy said, gently peeling Molly’s hand from her arm. “Let me go get the hummus. I left it in the car. I’ll meet you guys in the kitchen.”

  Paul turned on the front porch light and walked outside with Lucy.

  “So how’s everything?” she said, meaning it almost literally: Cokie, the bills, the business, what it was like to face middle age, and all the angst in between.

  “Lousy,” he said with a smile. “But we have our health.”

  “Cokie looks tired,” she said.

  “She has a cold. Nothing serious,” he said. “I’ve got a client on the fence. If I can nail a decent contract, we’ll be solvent again. But don’t say anything, okay, because the kids don’t know.”

  “They don’t know?”

  “They think we’ve gone green, conserving energy and reusing aluminum foil.”

  “So how are you paying for the braces and the piano lessons and the mortgage, Paul?”

  “Home-equity loan, credit cards. We’re coping. And I’m looking for a job in case this client doesn’t come through. The mailman told me they need an assistant manager at T.G.I. Friday’s.”

  “Good for you, keeping your sense of humor,” Lucy said, opening the car door to retrieve the hummus. Paul waited until she turned around and handed him the ceramic bowl.

  “I’m dead serious,” he said, and she could see by his half-sick expression that he was. “Cokie would die, but we gotta pay the bills. Do you know what a new lacrosse stick costs?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I guess I’m about to find out.”

  “Yes, you are. Jumping right on the roller coaster, poor girl.”

  Paul laughed a little too loudly at his own remark, and she found herself in the odd position of being worried about him. She was accustomed to being the one people worried about, with her excessive schooling and lack of a boyfriend.

  They walked back with the hummus and found Cokie in the kitchen with the kids, rolling pizza dough. Lucy always thought of their kitchen as a little too antiseptic, with its stainless-steel center island and its gleaming KitchenAid mixer squatting on the counter near the sink. A medieval-style pot rack hung above the six-burner Viking range, and a glass-fronted hutch displayed Cokie’s collection of tiny enameled boxes.

  Cokie rubbed her nose with the back of her hand to prevent a sneeze, leaving traces of flour across her right cheek and eyebrow. She rinsed her hands and took a box of cold tablets from the cabinet near the sink, washing two of them down with a swig of Amstel Light. By the set of her shoulders, Lucy could tell that she would rather be in bed watching Entertainment Tonight.

  “So tell us about your baby,” Cokie said. “What’s his name?”

  “I’m calling him Mat,” Lucy said. “He’s four, and if everything works out, I should be going to Russia over the summer to pick him up.”

  Jack was sitting at the counter, quietly creating something robotic looking out of Legos. Sean, having been sent to the refrigerator to get some presliced pepperoni, threw an elbow as he walked by, sending Jack’s Lego robot to the floor. Jack slipped off the stool, stood behind Sean, who was sorting through the cold-cut drawer in the refrigerator, and punched him in the kidney.

  “Mom, did you see that?” Sean said. “Jack just punched me for no reason.”

  Cokie turned a glazed eye toward the refrigerator. “Out of my sight,” she said.

  “Both of us?” Sean said.

  “All of you,” Cokie said. “I need to speak to Aunt Lucy privately.”

  The boys and Molly left for the family room to watch TV as Paul put the pizzas on their browning stones in the oven. Cokie sat down on a stool and ran her hands through her multicolored hair.

  “I just want to say, Lucy McVie, that you astound me,” she said, looking up at Lucy, who was dipping a carrot in hummus. “Don’t you think you should have called me before you made this life-altering decision?”

  “Here we go,” Paul said.

  “Stay out of it, Paul,” Cokie said. “I’m just telling my sister-in-law that it might have been wise for her to consult with someone, a close and caring relative, before she decided to bring a child into this world.”

  “He’s already in this world,” Lucy said, nervously biting the carrot. She tried to think of a reason to leave before the pizza was out of the oven.

  “I mean this world,” Cokie said, exasperated. “I mean the world of Cub Scout fund-raisers and kindergarten homework and going to three, yes, three sporting-goods stores to find the regulation mouth guard for lacrosse camp. Do you have any, any idea what you’re getting yourself into?”

  “She didn’t check with Mom,” Paul said, “so why should she check with you?”

  Lucy became aware, instantly, that her decision had prompted a flurry of phone calls, probably hours spent discussing her situation and whether this was “wise” from the perspective of people who had “been there.” She could imagine them all, eyes lifted to the ceiling: “What does she know about sitting up all night with a kid who keeps throwing up on the bedspread?”

  “It’s what I want. I thought you’d be excited about it,” Lucy said.

  “I just think you need to open your eyes,” Cokie said.

  Lucy could see that Cokie needed to have her say. She decided to get it over with.

  “Enlighten me…”

  “Let me just give you a little rundown of my week,” Cokie said, slurring slightly, the cold tablets kicking in. “On Monday, I got up at six, made coffee, three lunches, five breakfasts, cleaned the kitchen, packed a snack and a water bottle for each kid, spent ten minutes looking for Jack’s sneakers, which turned out to be in the laundry hamper, found Sean’s overdue library book, and dropped the kids off late at three different schools, which prompted a call from Molly’s principal, whose helpful suggestion was that I leave the house just a few minutes earlier, because my kid was missing valuable instructional time.

  “Then I went to work, where I listened to the dentist complain about the car insurance on his fully loaded BMW. I worked until three, came home to find the house full of Sean’s hockey friends, who were also kind enough to empty the refrigerator, which meant I had to go grocery shopping, drop Molly off at Irish step, come home, clean up, run back to pick up Molly, cook dinner, clean up, help everyone with homework, do two loads of laundry, bake cupcakes for the chess-club bake sale, and clean up again. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  “Of course,” Lucy said. “But I don’t think—”

  “And that was Monday,” Cokie continued. “That
was a good day. By Friday, I am completely incapable—”

  “Incapable,” Paul agreed.

  “—of putting dinner together. I just can’t face it, cooking and setting the table and begging them to eat broccoli, just to dump half of it in the garbage and clean up for the fiftieth time this week. And this never ends. The seasons change, the mess may look a little different, but it’s always there. Twenty-one meals a week, and since no one in this house likes the same food, you can at least triple that. Week in, week out, that’s thousands of meals a year I have to plan for. And if I don’t do it, I’m a bad mother. Check the pizzas, Paul.”

  A wisp of smoke escaped from the oven door as Paul opened it and took out one pizza with a paddle.

  “The edges are burned,” Cokie said. “Sean won’t even touch it. Check the other one.”

  The other pizza emerged unscathed. Cokie threw back her head and finished the Amstel Light, then grabbed a pizza wheel and divided the pizza with startling efficiency.

  “I don’t want to scare you, Lucy. I just want you to go into this with your eyes open,” she said more calmly, as if cutting the pizza had purged her frustration. She called into the family room. “Pizza’s ready.”

  The kids sat down and began to eat pizza, telling jokes as they drank root beer.

  “Aunt Lucy,” Sean said. “Spell pig backwards, and then say ‘pretty colors.’”

  Lucy complied, glad to be talking to anyone other than Cokie. “G-I-P pretty colors.”

  The three root-beer drinkers laughed until they gagged, as Lucy smiled indulgently. Cokie, meanwhile, stood by the sink, rubbing her eyes. Lucy came over and squeezed Cokie’s shoulder. “You okay?” she said.

  “That was good,” Cokie said, laughing convulsively. “You should have seen your face.”

  five

  * * *

  Dear Lucy,

  It should be March now, almost spring. If I were you, I’d get on that beat-up Schwinn you have and take the loop around the reservoir. Remember the day you got your skirt caught in the bike chain and fell off near the library?

  I loved it that you didn’t need the latest gadget or the newest clothes. You had a way of making the right choices for yourself, like with the saints. I’m not saying I always got it, but it was right for you. See how tolerant I’ve become in my old age?

  Last March, as I recall, you spent three or four nights sleeping in a waiting-room chair at the hospital when I had my first close brush with mortality. It’s not surprising that I developed pneumonia, but I remember being shocked, even in my fever-induced haze, that this might be the end. You can mourn your own mortality with every birthday, but it really doesn’t hit you until you can’t breathe without forcing yourself to think about inhaling and exhaling.

  You finally talked them into letting you in the room, but you were wearing so many layers of paper and latex, I didn’t know you at first. Then you took my hand, and I saw your eyes, the only part of you left uncovered. You were pleading with me, willing me to stick around with the force of your stare. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I think I got better because you made me.

  My mother never even made it to the hospital that time. She told me later that she tried to get her doctor to prescribe some Valium so she could fly, but he was out of town, so she got in her car instead but had a flat tire in Georgia. She told me you called her when the crisis passed, and she was so drained by the whole experience, she went back home to Florida. I know I’ve told you before, Lucy, but you have no idea how lucky you are to have the parents you have. They have their faults, sure, but they’d do anything for you. Anything.

  Writing these notes is getting harder and harder. I can’t guess where you are, who you’re with, what your life is like. I worry that I’ll seem pathetic to you. I also worry that I’ll say something to hurt you, and I won’t be around to make it right. Let me issue a blanket apology, right here, right now. The last thing I want to do is hurt someone who always had my best interests at heart. Someone I loved.

  Until April,

  Harlan

  Lucy had been awake since six thirty, unpacking boxes of books in the new duplex in between checking her e-mail every ten minutes. Harlan’s first and second letters had clocked in at precisely 8:00 a.m., and this one arrived at the same time, just as normally as the ones from people presumably living. She wondered how long Harlan had spent on this project of his, tapping away at his keyboard for hours at a time, ticking off the months, the seasons, maybe even the years of her life with a story she couldn’t read ahead to finish. She couldn’t decide if she was deeply touched or terribly saddened that he would spend so many of his final hours thinking not of his own death but of her future.

  The day he was admitted for pneumonia had been one of the most frustrating of her life, because the doctors had put Harlan in isolation and wouldn’t give her any information because she wasn’t a relative. But she had gleaned from the nurses that he might not recover, and so she had slept in the waiting room under the protection of a night-shift supervisor who felt sorry for her.

  Days had passed in the pitiful way they do in hospitals, until they agreed to let her see him, maybe just to make her go away. She knew, though, when she saw him that he wasn’t going to die. She could tell that he hadn’t given up. What he had interpreted as her willing him to live had been her certainty that he would.

  She read the e-mail again.

  Someone I loved. But in what way, Harlan? In exactly what way?

  It could have meant that he loved the way she wore hats, or her uncanny memory for birthdays. It could have meant, “Should you ever require dialysis, count on me for rides.” It could have meant, as he had said, “I respect and admire the choices you’ve made.” Or it could have meant, “Would you mind if I kissed you?” There were categories of love. You couldn’t just throw the word out there without placing it in some sort of context, and though he was gone, she still needed to know. Someone I loved.

  She glanced at the clock. She threw on an old pair of jeans and a fleece jacket, ran a brush through her hair, nearly poked out her eye putting on a quick coat of mascara, and then headed for the car. The radio had nothing to offer but drivel—cheesy advertisements, pop songs by those big-breasted women who couldn’t sing, oldies that were carved into her brain so deeply, she couldn’t bear to hear them again. She switched off the radio and watched the trees go by, allowing herself to replay her favorite immature fantasy: Harlan shows up at her door and tells her that the past year was all a dream. He’s been away, in the Brazilian rain forest, where they’ve discovered a cure. Long embrace. Fade to black.

  Inside the IHOP, plates and utensils clinked and scraped. Her parents were already sitting in a booth, drinking coffee. Bertie got up and hugged Lucy, then sat down next to her, leaving Rosalee the extra room.

  “Ah, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” said Bertie. “Your mother’s after me with the Atkins. But when you’re in a pancake house, I say you order the pancakes. Or the waffles, depending on your preference.”

  Lucy glanced down at her father’s belly, which ballooned over his pants, the legacy of forty years with a cook who thought of mozzarella as a food group. She found that people with potbellies tended not to be overly critical of others, as if the belly itself was a repository of sympathy. It reminded her of the time she had come home from second grade, upset because she had gotten a spelling word wrong on a test. She had been reading since she was four, and she had become accustomed to perfection. Her mother had brushed it off, but her father had picked her up and hugged her. “So, my little genius, you’re human,” he had said, kissing her hair. “I’m relieved.”

  She turned over her coffee cup for the waitress to fill. “So how’d that rototiller work out for you?”

  “Like angels singing the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus,” said Bertie. “Cuts through the ground like butter.”

  “And straight through the hose,” Rosalee said.

  “Which shouldn’t have been where it was,
” he said under his breath, winking at Lucy.

  “Never mind about the rototiller,” Rosalee said, brushing the dark bangs from her wide forehead. “We wanted to talk to you about the adoption. My friend Patty says you should check out any adoption agency with the Department of Consumer Protection. Just make sure everything’s on the up-and-up.”

  “You think I should be worried?” Lucy asked.

  “Patty says some of them give false information about the children: disabilities, wrong birth dates, things like that. It’s just wise to check.”

  “Cokie thinks I should call it off,” Lucy said flatly.

  She felt the discomfort of minor guilt, knowing this pronouncement would bring her parents to her defense. They had no idea she had already picked out the color she would paint Mat’s bedroom, already purchased a Tonka dump truck and a stuffed penguin to place on his bed, already anticipated the way his brown eyes would widen when he saw his own small bathroom decorated with the fish wallpaper she had ordered from a catalog. They clearly thought her toes were in the water, when she had already jumped into the lake.

  “Call it off?” Rosalee said. “Did she really tell you to call it off?”

  “Basically, yes.”

  “That’s just the stress talking,” she said. “The woman is too thin. It’s a little-known fact, but stress is actually absorbed by fat cells. It gets diluted.”

  “On that note,” Bertie said, “I’ll be having the tall stack of pancakes with a side of bacon.”

  When the food arrived and Bertie had tried out all six varieties of syrup, Lucy remembered something she had wanted to ask her mother.

  “Ma, who’s Willard? I showed Nana Mavis a picture of Mat, and she started crying over someone named Willard.”

  Rosalee put down her fork. “To think that she remembers.”

  “Remembers what?”

  “He would have been my brother, but he died before I was born. He was your Gram and Gramps’s firstborn, Mavis’s first grandchild, and she came to see him every day, or so I’ve been told. He died when he was three, and I was born five years later.”