“Lift your arms,” she said. “It clears your airways. And if you haven’t already, you should look at it, because it’s utterly fascinating. Who knew? At this new women’s group I go to, we took out mirrors and—well, we looked. No, stop laughing. Sit up. Don’t be embarrassed. It is mesmerizing, I tell you.”
“Mom!” I said, and she stopped, her fingers still fluttering, after outlining a vagina in midair with her cigarette. People were looking in our direction.
“What?” she said.
“Mom, please. I can’t talk about this here,” I whispered.
She laughed. “Oh, but it’s fine to talk about these things,” she said. “In fact, we have to! And by the way, just so you know, it’s not really the vagina that you’re seeing, it’s the vulva. And that’s a word you’ll never hear!”
“I think I need to change the subject,” I said, and she laughed.
“Okay. We’ll talk about what you want to talk about,” she said. “Shoot.”
I stared into my cup of coffee for a moment, hoping a moment of silence would signify a suitable transition. Finally I said, “I need to know something. Do you ever see yourself going back to Daddy? I mean, when you’re done with … all this?”
“All this? What exactly is all this? My life, you mean?” she said. She exhaled a plume of smoke and folded her arms. “Just tell me this. Did your father tell you to ask me that?”
“No. But look at him. He’s a mess. He’s been demoted at work, he—”
“I am not responsible for that, Annabelle.”
“No, no, of course not. I just didn’t know if you even knew about it—”
“I can’t care about that right now!”
“But you lived with him for twenty-something years. And now he really needs you. And he really, really loves you.”
“Okay, I’m going to explain this to you only because I love you and we can talk about anything. The truth is that I was not put on this earth to care for this one frail man, this man who doesn’t want to feel things, who runs away from life and not toward it. How about me? Am I just supposed to give up everything just so that one man can think life is all rosy and beautiful for all time? One man, Annabelle! So that he doesn’t ever have to face the fact that he has some responsibility to make other people happy, or to make them feel good or needed or anything? Is that all my life is worth? Is it?”
“But you know he loves you,” I said weakly. “And he wants you to be happy.”
“Oh, what the fuck does that even mean?” she said, and I blanched. This was another surprise, that my mother even knew the F-word. “I am going to tell you something. It may not be a big deal to you, but for the first time—the first time ever in my life—I am on my own. And I am sleeping with a man who cares about what that experience is like for me.” She leaned forward and bared her teeth. “And you know what else? I am having orgasms!”
I put my head down on the table, dimly aware that my hair was in my soup. “Jesus, Mother.”
An older man and his wife two tables away got up and asked to be moved to a different table.
My mother burst out laughing, but when I looked at her, she also had tears streaming down her face, streaking her makeup. “Don’t look at me. Don’t look. I’m a mess,” she said, and wiped at her face with her napkin. “I’m sorry. No, I’m not sorry. I’m going to stop apologizing for every damn thing. And now I’m going to the ladies’ room.”
She got up and tottered away on her platform flip-flops, and I sat there, sipping my coffee and looking out the huge plate-glass diner window and thinking about sex.
Outside, some high school students sauntered past, the boys slouchy and scared and the girls wearing spiky boots and low-cut blouses and scary makeup like whores, and they were laughing and hitting each other and trying to push one of the guys out into the middle of traffic so he could be killed and ruin their lives for all time.
Look at them, I thought. I supposed it was sex that made them act that way. They were just trying to pass the time until one of them figured out how they could all get laid. They thought that would be the thing that would make them happy.
It seemed like the saddest thing in the world.
And yet, here we were: all of us doomed passengers in steerage on this huge ship of sex. Prisoners, even. I looked down at my fingers, which were twisting my napkin all around, turning it into a noose. And my poor mother was the most pitiful prisoner of all, reading The Joy of Sex and sleeping with an artist guy who couldn’t even keep his sandals together in a pair. Where was that other sandal?
A MONTH later, to my astonishment, Grant showed up at my father’s house. I had just finished mopping the kitchen floor, and I was eating a falling-apart taco and reading a magazine out by the pool when I heard the doorbell ring. I wiped my greasy hands on the back of my shorts and went to answer the door.
And there he was, tall and pale and blinking so fast it was as though he were the one shocked to see me there, as though I’d showed up in the last possible place on earth he would expect. We stood there, both of us speechless for a moment, and then he pulled me to him and kissed me over and over again. He’d rented a car and driven down from Santa Barbara that morning, he said, asking for directions along the way.
He was blushing. He looked so adorably awkward and amazed at himself, so utterly and unpretentiously charming I couldn’t get over it. He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a piece of paper, all folded neatly into a square. It was a letter offering him a teaching position at Columbia University. “So I’m here to tell you that I’m going to New York,” he said, breathless from all the kissing. “It’s a job. I got the one I wanted.”
“You’re going to New York?” I said. “Wow.”
I led him into the kitchen, and I poured us Cokes, and he told me about the job, and how it was closer to his family in New Hampshire, and how besides that, it was a wonderful opportunity, and he’d get to work with a guy he’d always wanted to work with. He’d been following this guy, some labor historian, for years, reading everything the guy had ever written, and now he’d be in the same department. The whole time he talked he was looking at me with such intensity I had to keep looking away. It was as though his eyes were lit from behind in a way I’d never seen before.
I was leaning against the kitchen counter and I kept dropping things; it was disconcerting, the way he was looking at me. Later he asked if we could go for a swim in the pool—he’d even brought his swim trunks along. Everything seemed surreal, like a slow-motion movie with the colors too bright. We couldn’t stop laughing. I showed him that we had a waterfall that could be turned on, and he kept coming up to me and enveloping me in hugs, giving me little kisses all over my face.
“Have you ever made love in a pool?” I said to him, and he closed his eyes, pained.
“Don’t talk like that! I don’t ever want to think again about anybody you’ve ever made love with,” he said in a whisper. “From now on. Ever again.”
“No?” I said. “Okay, then.”
He fumbled with the trunks for a moment, and I thought he’d taken my question as some kind of invitation and was about to undress right then and there, when really pool sex was so much more appropriate at night. But then I was astonished to see him pull something shiny out from the billows of blue cloth. Did men’s trunks have pockets? That was the main question rising up in my mind when he took my left hand and held it out in front of us, like a specimen of a hand floating on top of the pool water.
“I guess you’ve seen this coming,” he said in a shaky voice. “But I want you to marry me and come with me to New York.” He was doing something to my hand, trying to slip a ring on it, I realized too late, after I’d pulled my hand away.
“Oh!” I said.
“Listen. I don’t know how to do this right, but I really, really love you,” he said, and cleared his throat. He licked his lips and started talking fast. “I think you’re the sweetest, most beautiful girl in the world, and I’ve been living
for our telephone conversations. It’s the only thing that gets me through these days, knowing that I get to talk to you every night. Keeping the secret about this job was the hardest thing for me to do, but I wanted to tell you in person. And ever since I knew I was going to come here and ask you this, I couldn’t eat or drink anything. And I know I’m different from you, and I’m probably never going to be cool, but I love your paintings, I love that you do art, I get it, and I won’t ever tell you that you should do paintings that match somebody’s couch. I will keep you in paint and canvases for the rest of your life, and if you really want to teach elementary school, then I think you’ll be the best teacher there ever was. And I love that you dress so cute, and I love the way you smell and the way you sing in the shower. I used to camp out on the floor outside the door when you were showering just so I could hear you, and the first time we made love was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I was so afraid you were going to say it couldn’t happen again. I just want to spend all my time looking at you and telling you things, and even though I’m just some nerd who thinks about strikes and contracts all the time, I want you to know that I’m financially solvent right now, I have some investments, and I’ll always do anything I can to make you happy. Your happiness is going to be the main thing for me. From now on. Forever. I mean that.”
I laughed. Tears were springing up in my eyes. “I—”
He held up his hand, the one that was still holding the ring he’d tried to put on my finger. “I know what you might say—that we don’t know each other well enough and that we should wait—but I feel like I can love you no matter what else I find out about you. And you know everything there is to know about me. You lived with me in my bedroom for five weeks, and I’m afraid that now you know me as well as I know myself.”
I stared down at our legs and feet, which looked white and wavery through the blue, ripply pool water. Life was so much more complicated than he knew. Who gets married anymore, was what I was thinking. Nobody! This would be seriously shocking to people. I looked out at the old swing set at the other end of the yard, the one that David and I had spent hours swinging on as kids and which we now sat on every night when we smoked dope together. The truth was—I’d glimpsed it sliding around in the corners of my mind, but now it was blazing bright, front and center—that I was turning into my mother, my former mother, here in this house, dusting the furniture and opening the drapes and waiting for her to get over her little love affair and come back and take on this role again. But she wasn’t coming back, and now my father was seeing someone new, a woman from across the street who had started sneaking casseroles over and inviting him to hot-tub parties. The truth was that my parents were out living their lives and they were all right. It had been pretentious of me, after all, to think I could save them, to think I could make one iota of difference. Grant had been right about that, and maybe he was sensible and smart and would be right about all the rest of the things that came up in life, too.
I looked up at him, and he’d gone blurry on me. I felt my knees buckle then, and he held me up and kissed me, and when we were done, I said yes.
He was so overcome he dropped the ring, and I had to dive down to the bottom of the pool and feel around until I found it and brought it back up to give to him so he could give it back to me.
[five]
2005
I’m in my studio, drinking coffee and putting the final touches on the drawing of Bobo’s mom, a bushy-tailed squirrel relaxing in her yellow workout outfit (with a suitable hole in the back for her tail), kicking back in her living room after she’s finally gotten Bobo put to bed, when Sophie calls me. I see her number on the caller ID and get myself set for one of our typical conversations—how lonely she is with her husband away, how hard it is to work at a magazine with catty women, how worried she is about whether the baby will be normal—but when I pick up the phone, she is screaming. At first I can’t even make out the words, but then I hear “blood” and “baby” and “help me,” and I just want to climb right into the phone, and I want her to tell me what the hell is happening, but I can’t get her to. She’s mostly just shrieking, making hysterical, gulping sounds that don’t add up to words.
“Sophie, please just stop screaming and tell me what’s happening so I can help you,” I say, trying not to shout.
And then she manages to tell me enough that I can fill in the details. She’s at work, and she’s in the ladies’ room, and she felt something wet, and she looked down and there was blood everywhere. Everywhere. I close my eyes. She is calling me from the stall, and that’s where she still is now—alone in the office restroom in New York City, with blood filling her shoes. I go completely, icily calm while I think of what we should do. I’m on automatic pilot, and then whatever is running my brain tells her that I’ll click over and call her boss and then the boss can call 911, and somehow we’ll get her an ambulance to take her to the hospital, and she agrees to this, even calms down enough to remember the extension number of the phone on the boss’s desk. And we do all this, and the boss goes in and gets Sophie out of there, and an ambulance comes, and they take her to the hospital, I presume. And after all those wild, impossible phone calls—I am on the line hearing the boss talking to her, comforting her, hearing Sophie crying, hearing the paramedics arrive and come for her, putting her on the stretcher, the men’s competent, gentle voices saying, “Can you lift up here? There, you’re okay, that’s fine”—after all that is done and it is time for just the waiting, I sit in my study in the sudden crash of quiet, and I look out at the pure white snowfall and think that she is probably losing the baby, and possibly losing her life as well, and I’m so stunned I can’t even cry. Can’t do anything. Can’t lift my arms or breathe right.
Once I can move again, I call Grant, and he listens to the story, and at first I can feel him calculating what needs to be subtracted from this tale because it’s me telling it. You might as well know that I have a reputation for exaggerating, and with medical stories particularly, I am not to be trusted. But then he understands—with my last breath of energy, I finally make him understand—and he says in a heavy voice that he has a class just beginning, but he’ll assign them some reading, then he’ll try to come home.
“Okay. No, you should stay at school.”
“What do you mean? I thought this was what you wanted.”
“I have to get to New York,” I say. I feel so prickly and frightened that I can’t bear the thought of anyone near me. It’s as though my skin hurts, like when you’re coming down with a fever. There are bargains I need to negotiate with the powers, places I need to travel all alone in my head. “It’s fine. Really. Just wait there, and I’ll call you when I know more.”
He hesitates. “Should I call Sophie, do you think?”
“Grant, she’s in the hospital. They’re doing things to her.”
“That’s true,” he says. “But why can’t they tell us something now?”
“Because they’re fixing her. And we have no choice but to let them take care of her for us,” I tell him. “I love you,” I say before I hang up. He says he loves me, too, and to let him know as soon as I know anything. Anything at all.
And then I hang up and of course I wish I had told him to come home. There is no pleasing me. I want him and then I don’t want him. I pace around the house, and find myself doing odd things like turning on lights and turning them off again, dusting the furniture using the palm of my hand instead of a dust cloth, and standing in the doorways of the children’s bedrooms. Nick’s room was pretty much cleaned out when he left for college: he took all his sports equipment and trophies along with him. He barely lived in that room anyway. He was always outside, shooting hoops or climbing mountains or skiing, and if he was home, he was usually in a “boy nest” in the den, with his pillows, his smelly pile of fleece blankets, and his computer. All that’s left are his posters of Star Wars characters, curled up at the edges. He wouldn’t ever let me put them in frames.
But Sophie’s room is now a shrine to her high school years. The bookshelves are still crammed with her field hockey and lacrosse trophies, old Baby-sitters Club novels, ancient People magazines, yearbooks, prom pictures. In the corner are her field hockey stick, her baby pillow, and her ice skates. She painted this room fuchsia when she was in ninth grade—Grant said it was the color of one of his headaches—and then she insisted on a huge polka-dot round rug in lime green, a maroon plaid bedspread, and burlap brown curtains. We’d gone along with the madness, joking that these colors showed latent avant-garde tendencies that meant she’d grow up to be some kind of true artist, but it turned out to be just a whim. Recently she told me the room never felt right, but she’d been too embarrassed to ask that we paint it white and hang up pink or yellow curtains, like everybody else had. Oh, she had my number, all right. I wanted to indulge her every creative impulse and create the perfect safe, artistic world for her from the very moment she slid out of me and I discovered myself in possession of a daughter—and she always thought she needed to be extraordinary to please me.
I do what I always do when I’m distraught: I call Magda in Atlanta. As soon as she answers the phone, I tell her what’s going on, and even though she doesn’t know one thing about pregnancy, she says that she’s heard stories about bleeding, stories that didn’t turn out to mean the end of the baby or the mother.
“It will be all right,” she says.
“Are you just trying to make me feel better?” I ask her, and she says of course not because nothing can make a mother feel better when her daughter is in another city, bleeding. Magda doesn’t have kids, so Sophie and Nicky have been her honorary children, and I have often sat in the middle of the night on the floor of my mudroom, whispering into the phone to her about some monumental child-related problem that I needed advice on. She finds it hilarious that I rely on her for counsel, when back in college she was a druggie of the highest order, and she’s made it something of a lifelong policy to always be involved with bad, heartbreaking, or otherwise unmarriageable men. The nice ones bore her, she says. But she is wise and funny, and besides my mother, she’s the one person who really knows me. And now that my mother is dead, Magda is the only one left.
The Stuff That Never Happened Page 7