by Kim Green
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. How do you tell your mother you pretended you had cancer because of a telethon? Because you thought your life sucked? Because you wanted to be an exciting person, someone whom others admire, even envy? Someone who has orgasms and sculptures that are reviewed by the Chronicle (the sculptures, not the orgasms). Someone who is more to her children and husband than a place to fling coats when they come off the ski lift for lunch. Someone for whom life thrills.
I took a deep breath. It had nowhere to go; my diaphragm had been pink-slipped. “Okay. I’ll call Ma.” I grabbed the phone and pressed the familiar numbers on autopilot. I was 100 percent sure Ma would be sitting by the phone in a confused version of death-watch mode, not even offering a pretense of continuing to thrive by browsing a magazine or going for her daily power walk. I was fairly sure Eliot would be standing by, whispering affirmations of my shittiness in Ma’s ear. The image caused sweat to pop out on my forehead.
Laurie placed her hand on mine. Our similarly widow’speaked foreheads tilted toward each other, met; they were the only physical attribute we shared, courtesy of Dad.
“Will you stay with me?” I said.
“Okay.”
Suddenly, the sun winks out.
“Raquel?”
I press pause on the nightmare memory of telling Ma and open my eyes to the (glaring) here and now. A big head looms above me, surrounded by frizzy curls. I want to be dramatic and scream, but since I know it’s Sue—I heard the baby, Arlie, shrieking from the front yard during my ruminations—and she knows I know, I fold myself into a sitting position. It is harder than a month ago; I have gained back ten of the twelve pounds. Okay, I have gained back thirteen, but who’s counting?
“Hey, you.” I get up and hug Sue in what even I can see is an anemic manner not befitting a twenty-five-year friendship. Two-month-old Arlie is strapped across Sue’s chest in a fleece sling. She has cradle cap but is still adorable, with a head of strawberry fluff, triangular elfin ears and a wail that says she will give her parents grief when she’s fourteen.
“I’m glad to see you’re not wallowing in self-pity or anything.” Sue glances sharply at the pile of empty processed-food wrappers next to me before pulling out a lawn chair and flopping down in it. “I have come on a mission of mercy,” she says. Arlie starts crying again, more lion cub than kitten. Sue whips out a swollen, blue-veined breast and pops the baby on. Her eyes narrow at me. “What’s your plan, to just sit here until the house is sold and they come to cart you away?” she says after a minute.
“No, actually, I was thinking I’d leave before the cart part. I was going to ask my only friend if I could rent a room. My supportive, not-into-eviscerating-people-when-they’re-down best friend.”
“I see.” Pause. “Where are the children?” Sue is very stern. It occurs to me that she thinks I might be crazy, that she suspects I have done something even worse than The Great Lie. She has been this way ever since the Baron von Mün
chhausen fight.
“They chose to go with their father.”
There is no way around it: This hurts. When I had it out with them, Taylor stared at me in shock, revulsion and relief warring on her pretty face as she processed my rationalizations. Her response, when it came, was to stalk to her room and calmly begin packing her overnight bag. Having expected a higher-volume dramatic gesture—flinging herself into Phil’s arms and sobbing; coming at me with nails extended—I’d been more than alarmed by my daughter’s show of poise. What had made her grow up so quickly? Was it the not-cancer? The not-much-of-an-affair? The not-yet-divorce? Or some combination of the three?
Micah remained true to form, yelling a bit and stomping around, then telling me “You’re pathetic and I feel sorry for you” before adding his duffel to the collection of bags at the front door. I felt almost sorry for Phil; his resourcefulness doesn’t stretch to providing dinner, especially not with the single frying pan he now uses to heat everything from refried beans to Campbell’s Chunky soup.
“And you’re just going to roll over for this?” Sue asks.
I shrug. “They’re teenagers. I can’t force them to stay here. Phil rented a two-bedroom apartment in Redwood City. After we sell the house and the divorce goes through, we’ll see what we can afford separately. Micah’s been accepted at Michigan. He’ll go to Ann Arbor on a partial soccer scholarship. Taylor will stay with Phil through the summer, then decide who she wants to live with for her junior year.” Just saying it pains me, but what am I supposed to do? Tay made it clear that the prospect of living with Crazy Cancerless Mom would add significantly to her usual load of teenage angst. I could hardly put her through more trauma simply to salve my own maternal ego, could I?
Sue switches gears. “I ran into Saskia at the corner store. She acted kind of weird.”
Weird only if you feel uncomfortable chatting up the best friend of the artist you recently kicked out of your gallery for creating art under false pretenses.
“Maybe she was having a hot flash,” I tell Sue. “Or maybe she’s just a bitch.”
Sue stands up so quickly that Arlie pops off and lets us know it. “What’s up your ass?”
I shift and release my sweatpant wedgie in a way that is self-evident.
Sue continues, “Stop being such a snot for once. All I did was drive all the way down here to see if you’re okay, and what do I get? A load of smart-ass commentary and evasion. I have some news for you, Quel—they have a right to be angry.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because you don’t act like it. You act like everyone’s being too hard on you or something. Like this is somebody else’s fault. Like you didn’t—”
“I know! I get it already: I’m a big liar. I’m a terrible mother. I’m a terrible wife. I’m a bad friend. I know! So will you just shut up? Will you please, please just shut up?” My heart is pounding so loudly it blots out the shape of my friend’s hurt.
Sue steps back, distress etched into her snub Celt features. “You. . . I can’t talk to you,” she says. Tears shine all down her face.
“Sue, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“The fuck you didn’t. I’m out of here. Man, you are a piece of work.” Sue grabs her diaper bag, her poncho, and her assorted babyware, muttering to herself before turning back around with a finger extended toward my chest. “You’re such a martyr. You know that? You’re so caught up in the idea of your own victimhood that it never occurs to you that you could be the one victimizing someone else.” With each tear that glosses Sue’s pink cheeks, my heart contracts. It’s Münchhausenville all over again. Except that this time my record is tarnished by a second strike. In the high-stakes game of friends for life, I’m on my way to prison with no possibility of parole.
“Quel, I’m saying this to you because I am your friend, and I always will be your friend: You wouldn’t know a powerless moment if it punched you in the schnozz.”
CHAPTER 30
Somewhere Between Great Sex and an Ass Massage
It is Friday night. I am invited to Ma and Eliot’s for dinner. My first instinct, honed by many years of reluctance, is to weasel out of it with an excuse. However, as I sponge-bathe my armpits and private parts in front of the bathroom mirror, rub on half a bottle of anti-wrinkle cream in the hopes that more is better, and comb out my tangles so I won’t be mistaken for a homeless Rastafarian, it occurs to me that I owe them my presence more than I owe myself another night of bad TV.
Out of all the people whom I wronged, Ma and Eliot are the last ones I would have guessed would extend me a quick and relatively painless pardon. Yet they did. Out of all the people whose feelings I trod on, Ma and Eliot are the last ones I would have guessed would brush themselves off and draw me to their hearth for comfort. Yet they have.
My house is too quiet, with the kids at Phil’s. Everything that used to provide comfort—the kid-free master bath, my secret chocolate stash, the now-empty wicker bin for Phil’s newspapers—i
s a rebuke. Everything that used to be annoying—lights left on, muddy footprints on the rug, crap cluttering the foyer, phones warbling—I sorely miss. Frankly, if we get an offer for the house tomorrow, it will not be too soon. Why is it that the good chapters of our lives are woefully short and the bad ones so long and ponderous?
On the way to Ma’s, some chivalrous impulse prompts me to stop at Whole Foods for flowers and dessert. As I pull out of my parking spot with a bouquet of calla lilies and three pints of soy ice cream in the trunk, Mimi and Reggie LeMaitre’s Volvo slides into the adjacent slot. Mimi’s hand rises to the passenger window in a friendly wave before she remembers my pariah status and quickly morphs the gesture into urgent hair smoothing. I don’t see her face redden because I am already waiting at the light, my heart pounding along with the abrasive dance radio station I now listen to because it’s the best way to imagine the kids are in the car with me.
I arrive in Woodside without further mishap. Eliot answers the door. He is wearing fluorescent multicolored parachute pants like you see on steroid-freak bodybuilders and a skintight black T-shirt with girlish cap sleeves that looks suspiciously like one of Taylor’s.
“The Black Sheep’s here!” he hollers, presumably to Ma.
I give my stepfather a deliberate once-over. “Nobody told me Hulk Hogan donated his wardrobe to charity for the elderly.”
“Heh heh. That’s a good one,” he says.
For some reason whose source is as yet unclear, I find Eliot a lot less maddening than before. He’s still Eliot, but I have started to view his high-flying platitudes as mostly harmless. His comments about my appearance lack sting, and sometimes, when I’m not alert, I catch myself feeling something like happiness when I think of Ma having someone to spend her golden years with. Unlike me, she, at least, will not do the Elderhostel cruise circuit alone.
Ma hands me a ladle when I enter the kitchen. “Stir and simmer!” she commands me before jogging out of the room.
I lift up the pot lid and sniff. The chicken bourguignonne is weak, so I pour in a little more burgundy wine and a snifter of salt before Ma can come back and lecture me about Eliot’s sodium intake. One properly salted meal won’t kill him, but my mother’s cooking might.
While I stir and simmer, I reflect on my relationship with the older generation. It is on level ground at the moment, a position so unprecedented that I can only attribute it to the shock of my unmasking.
When I phoned Ma after the show taping to explain about the misdiagnosis, just one thing about her reaction was predictable.
“You really don’t have it?” she said.
“No. I’m so sorry, Ma. I tried—”
“What?”
“I tried to tell you, but”—all reasoning comes up short—“I tried to tell you,” I finished weakly.
Ma was silent for a moment, save the slight stressed panting that she sometimes does since she was diagnosed—for real— with early-stage atherosclerosis. I fantasized that she understood how I could have bungled this so severely, and was able to generate compassion.
“Oh,” she said. For Ma, gladness was measured in brevity; thus, she was beyond happy. Then: “Make sure you keep all those cancer research links up on your blog.”
Check.
Ma returns and takes over the stirring. “I almost forgot I had to tape Terry Gross. She’s interviewing Dean Ornish on Fresh Air.” Dean Ornish is Ma’s version of Brad Pitt. While other women find sexual fulfillment in replaying the bedroom scene in Thelma & Louise ad infinitum, Ma pores over low-fat menus and ruminates on the appeal of soy isoflavones, I’m sure with Dean hovering overhead in sinewy splendor.
I pour myself a glass of Ma’s crappy Bordeaux and sit down at the table. “I had another fight with Sue. It was my fault.”
“What happened?”
“I was bitchy and she was right.”
Ma nods. “You always had such conviction about things, even as a child. And backbone. And stubborn? Oy vey iz mir. I once had to force you to apologize to Paige Clark’s mother for telling her you wouldn’t walk to school with Paige because she was too vain to wear her glasses and you didn’t want to get run over by a car just because Paige was a stupid fathead. You were very strong-willed. I think you viewed changing your mind about anything as a weakness.”
Leave it to my mother to paint her kids’ character flaws as virtues. If I turned out to be a serial killer, Ma would have proudly recounted my filleting abilities.
Ma gives the stew another stir and sits down. Her forehead is damp with steam. She takes my hand and rubs it between her strong, squat ones. She can’t stop touching me since she found out I’m okay. It’s like she was storing up all the handholds she wanted to give me when I was sick, and now they’re overflowing.
“Make up with Susie,” she says. “Make up with her right away. After we eat, I’ll get El out of the office, and you can use his phone.”
The subtext is clear: Life is too short to sweat the small stuff. I wonder if she is going to tell me to make up with Phil next. That one is going to be a lot harder.
She attacks from the left flank, so I don’t see it coming. “Your father and I split up once.”
“What?” I have zero memory of this.
“It was the spring of 1968. I know that because Laurie missed the cutoff for kindergarten that year, and I had to get a babysitter so I could go back to work part-time. Stu didn’t want me to work. That was a big part of it. I was so angry. At the time it seemed like he represented everything traditional and paternalistic about men that we were fighting against. I couldn’t understand why what he wanted should trump what I wanted. Things were different then.”
I try to recast my gentle, patient, loving father with the marauding misogynist Ma is painting, and fail miserably. “What happened?” I ask.
“Well, I went to my parents’ for a week, and Grandma Adele came in to cook and clean for him.” Ma shakes her head. “She never liked me. She wanted Stuey to marry Joanie Weinberg.”
I take a sip of wine. “Would you seriously have left him, or—not to make light of it or anything—was it more a dramatic gesture on your part?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t have left Stu over something like that. Work? Feh. I just needed to be angry about something. The sex, maybe. But work? With two beautiful girls to raise? Not a chance. I just wanted him to know that he could take his positions, but there were going to be consequences.”
The sex. Ugh. But how bad could it be? They had managed to conceive two children.
“What was the, uh, problem?” Delicacy: hopefully contagious.
“Your father, bless his heart, was a bit of a nonstarter in the sex department, I’m afraid.” Ma gets up to fluff the brown rice, which she buys at a natural-food store and has the fibrous, swollen texture of a rattan chair thrown into the sea.
“Oh. Okay.” In spite of my own recent attempts at sexual escapades, I think we all know I am a stolid traditionalist at heart (for sure when it comes to knowledge of my own parents’ mating rituals).
“He had other qualities,” Ma continues. “God knows there’s more to marriage than the sex. He was great with you girls. Very hands-on for his time. And a good provider. And smart! We did the crossword together every Sunday. He always got the hard ones. Stuey was good with cars, though not handy generally. And he understood how to balance work and family. So many men at that time never took vacations. But we went somewhere every year, plus the holidays. We had wonderful family trips. Remember the time we went to Rosarita? And stayed in that wonderful casita on the beach?” Ma’s almond eyes are warm. I don’t remember Rosarita, but it doesn’t matter, because seeing Ma melt at a memory of Dad gives me goose bumps. The good kind.
“Eliot knows how to please me,” she tacks on with surprising firmness.
“Um . . .” My comfort zone is receding into the distance, like a city skyline viewed through a jet-plane window.
Ma looks me straight in the eye. “One thing you learn when you’re
an oldster like me is, things aren’t as either/or as you used to think. It is possible to love people in different ways. To love them as much without loving them the same way or for the same reasons. The young have an obsession with equity. When you age, you come to terms with a different—in a way, clearer—sort of justice. You’re all in the same boat, so you don’t have the urge to split hairs over what are essentially unimportant things or things you can’t control.”
I let that sink in. “Are you talking about Dad and Eliot or me and Laurie?”
“What do you think?”
“I think . . .” What did I think? That Ma always favored Laurie and found me and my accomplishments wanting—and made it perfectly obvious. That it hurt. That, over the years, the hurt accumulated, filming over my innate good sense like a ripening cataract. That a dire fate can leave you feeling weirdly exultant. That although I’ve been right about some things lately, I’ve been wrong about a lot more.
Outside, the automatic sprinklers kick into gear, hitting the window every few seconds with a hushed tat-tat-tat. The drumroll sensation lends a sense of urgency to the current line of inquiry.
“Why were you always so damn hard on me?” I ask Ma. It is luxuriant, saying it out loud.
“Because you were worth it. Because you are worth it.”
“Laurie . . . it was like she could do no wrong. Like everything she did pleased you. And nothing I did.” Steamy anger pulses in my chest. It feels good. “It always felt like, to you, we were nothing more than our success, our performance in some game. And Laurie always won the game, because I never knew the rules exactly, or played by them well, in any case—”
Ma is shaking her head before I can even finish. “Laurie has certain gifts. You have other gifts. In a lot of ways, she’s not as tough as you. She cares more what people think. She has a more textbook definition of what it is to be successful. You’re more like me. Independent. Eccentric. A questioner. A risk-taker.”