Mary stood under the clock in the kitchen and smoked. The hands ticked, ticked, ticked. She called as the church bells struck, but she got the machine.
“Hello? Hello? Ilene? Ilene? It’s Mary. It’s three o’clock. You said I should call you at three o’clock. You said you were really, really sick. It’s three o’clock–whoops, it’s three-oh-one. I’ll call you back.”
Obviously she hadn’t done it the right way. Something was not working out. Mary considered all the possibilities. Ilene could be asleep, or in the bathroom, or even in the hospital, or dead. Or maybe it was that same old thing again, where the person doesn’t mean what they say. Was Ilene just another liar in Mary’s life? What was the right way to talk to a liar? She couldn’t figure it out. What was the way to get Ilene to keep her word? She waited ten minutes and called again. The machine was no longer picking up. Someone had unplugged it. Another nasty trick.
An hour later, Mary’s phone rang. She stood there, smoking, watching the fax come in.
Dear Mary,
You’re treating me like a child.
Love, Love, Love (and I really, really mean it) Ilene Leopold
The only sane response would be to smoke crack. But Mary wasn’t sane. She didn’t know where to get crack, and she wasn’t sure of exactly what it was. All she wanted was a no. Screwing around with someone’s artwork was just awful. Many cigarettes later, Mary came to a realization. What Ilene did was terrible. And yet she got away with it completely. There was nothing Mary could do.
Snap.
And then it all became clear.
Had Eva been playing a horrible joke on her, too, making a fool of her? Day after day, year after year, Eva kept encouraging Mary to do what she wanted, to work on her plays, to schmooze, to go see plays, to have readings, to send out manuscripts, to talk to agents, to actors. Eva pushed her and pushed her. But Eva should know that Mary was never going to make it. That people like Mary didn’t stand a chance. She was in the wrong class. That’s why she had cautioned her about Ilene. Eva knew no one would ever really let her in. She knew it. It was obvious. So why was she spending years pushing Mary to do something that was going to fail? To commit to a world where she could never succeed or excel. It was a sick joke. Eva was treating her like a trained seal. She just wanted to see her bark.
When Eva came home that evening, she said the words “I’m scared about tomorrow.” But Mary was seething. She didn’t feel any empathy.
“Get over it,” she said. Then the phone rang. She grabbed it. “Hello? Ilene? … Oh, Mother?”
Instinctively, both Mary and Eva looked at their watches. Delilah never called this late; she would be too sloshed.
Something terrible must have happened.
“What?” Mary looked up at Eva. “What is it, Mother? Tell me.” Mary loved her mother; she always had. And at this second she knew it, entirely. Mary knew she wasn’t alone if she could love someone that much.
She listened and breathed softly. She felt her own compassion and responsibility and whispered to Eva, “Tom died. ... I’ll be right there, Mother. I’ll pack right now and go straight to the airport.”
Mary was wanted. She was good for something.
Eva touched her hair.
She sat in the chair and watched Mary pack her bags.
“I guess you’re not going to the clinic,” she said. “Hockey will go with me.” Strangely, Eva felt relieved.
The phone rang once. Stopped. They both looked at it.
“Maybe that was Ilene,” Eva whispered.
“It wasn’t Ilene.”
Mary packed enough for four nights. “I was thinking about when I was twenty. The San Diego State College Theater Department. I had no idea; I thought it would be easier.”
No one in her family knew how things worked. There were people on TV; her family sat and stared at them. Maybe she could be on there, too, and then they would look at her with something other than disapproval.
“You had a romantic view of your own life. That’s beautiful. You deserve that.” Eva saw an airplane pass between the stars. She wished on it. “And our life has turned out to be worth it.”
Mary added a notebook. Then took it out and left it on the desk. She added a book to read instead. “I thought I came to New York to make it and fall in love. But now I think I was just pushed out of Del Sol, really.”
“That’s not the truth.” Eva rocked–it was her favorite chair. “Honey, you had choices and you had awareness and you were active; you made your life happen. Don’t take that away. Every morning you choose our life. Your reach for it, and engage it, and deepen it.”
“How do you know it didn’t just happen to me?”
An ambulance passed, sirens wailing. Someone else was having a catastrophe.
“I was thinking about you this morning.” Eva rocked. “I was thinking about how when we first got together, you told me that story about all the girls you had sex with when you were in high school. How you used to get them to kiss you in the movies. I loved it; it was a great story. I didn’t realized until years later that it had never happened that way. You wished it had. So then you came here and made it real. I admire that girl so much.”
“That solitary, horny oddball?”
“I admire you.”
Mary took one pair of pajamas. It was hot in Del Sol. “I keep reaching for that normal life, and it never happens.”
“What’s a normal life?” Eva’s voice was lulling, but her eyes were glassy.
“Something I don’t have,” Mary said. “And I don’t know how to get. Something you can sum up.”
“That’s what we have,” Eva said. Her voice was as soft as the wind on a hot, lovely beach day, the wind on the skin of the woman you love. “We give each other meaning, even if it’s only in private. When it’s just the two of us, we have so much. You say the most beautiful things to me.”
“Like what?”
“You say ‘I’m glad you’re here.’ And ‘I am your family, I will take care of you.’ You say ‘our niece/nephew’ and ‘dinner’s ready.’”
The suitcase was packed. Mary felt a strange, abstracted sentimentality that could easily become forgiveness, responsibility, and compassion–or it could just as easily get filed away.
“Okay.”
“Call me as soon as you get in.”
“Okay.”
“Mary?”
“Okay.”
23
“Please stop, Daddy, please.”
“Stew, what you did is serious, it’s criminal.”
The room was churning around Stew, and for the first time he saw the color of the furniture, brown and green. The drapes were beige. This wasn’t his home anymore. It was just a place. His father’s miscomprehension was so unbearable that there was nothing else Stew could stand to notice. He wanted to go deaf and blind. No sight of his disappointed, angry, hurt, sad father.
“Daddy, please just stop saying that. Just stop, for five minutes. Five minutes, five minutes.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Marty said for the fiftieth time. He kept repeating it over and over. No matter what Stew said, Marty took it as an insult. “I’m ashamed to even think of what you did to Victor. What should I do? Should I call the police? I was so happy when you were born. Just ask anybody.”
“Daddy, please stop saying that.”
“Shut up.” Marty couldn’t negotiate. He didn’t understand how it worked. “You can’t have it both ways, Stew. Either you’ve got nothing to be upset about, or you got to pay the piper.”
Stew was very still, trying to figure out how to explain to Marty to stop saying mean things so that they could talk about what really happened.
“I can’t decide until you stop.” Maybe that would work. There was too much pounding on him; Stew couldn’t get a grip. Stop it. Stop. Stop.
Marty put his hands on his hips, then he swung them around, like he was trying to fly. “Life doesn’t work that way. You got to get control of yoursel
f. It doesn’t depend on me.”
“Stop saying that. It’s making me insane. I’m going to kill you.”
“You’re going to kill me? I’m going to kill you.”
“Daddy.”
“I know you, and I know you are the kind of person who would hurt a little child.”
Stew started to cry. “How do you know?”
He showed his pain, how successful his father was at hurting him. He showed his father that he had won, that the purpose of these insults, which was to defeat Stew, had worked. So now he could stop, the winner.
“Because, Stewie, you have secrets.”
“So do you.”
“That’s how I know.”
Stew saw a blur of yellow out of the corner of his eye. It was his mother, her hair newly dyed. She had been sitting there all along but hadn’t said anything, like a lamp. But now she was standing up.
“You’re crazy,” Brigid said. “You’ve got to get out of this house. Now. Get out. Good luck.”
Marty picked Stew up. The kid wanted to be touched, but not to be thrown away.
“I’ve had it with you,” Marty said, lifting his son like he was a bag of laundry.
“No, Daddy!”
Marty started dragging Stew toward the front door. Stew struggled and then kicked. He wriggled free. Stew was screaming. Marty grabbed him by the arm and dragged him back. Then Marty opened the front door. Stew grabbed onto the door frame. He dug his heels into the carpeting and tried to be heavier. The carpet held him back, but then his legs buckled and Marty pulled him, sliding on his knees against the carpet, up to the threshold of the house. Stew grabbed a table leg, but it had no anchor and the table turned over. On it was a lamp, some magazines, and a can of Coke. The coke spilled and the lamp fell over. The magazines slapped onto the floor.
“You bastard,” Marty said.
Now they were at the threshold again. Stew grabbed onto it, trying to keep his father from throwing him out. He hooked his foot inside the frame and clawed at it. His father pried open his son’s fingers, the way he’d counted them when Stew was first born. Then Marty reached down and grabbed Stew’s foot and pushed it out of the house. He pushed Stew down on the front step and slammed the door.
It was suddenly quiet. Marty didn’t know what was going to happen.
“This isn’t what any of us wanted,” Brigid said.
Marty was panting. He felt awful. He felt so sad, he couldn’t bear it. Marty bucked up. He was too old for this. What could he do now? “He calls me Daddy,” he said, hands outstretched, helpless to Brigid. “But what is he, a man or a boy?”
“Don’t blame yourself,” she said, not going to him, letting him sweat it off. “We’ve had a happy life. You tried everything. This is his problem. He’ll straighten himself out. Don’t worry.”
Stew sat on the front step, backward, looking up at the closed door. He was disappearing. Something was happening to his skin. It was changing; it changed color and then it started to tremble, slide, and disappear, reappear, then finally be gone. His body was running, but he was not running. His mind was closed. There were no thoughts. He looked at his pants. They were torn. How would he get new ones?
He stood up and walked down the block.
As Stew walked he saw all the shapes of his life. Those flat, white rectangles where his enemies lived. The long green tubes of lawn, the squares of cement. He saw the round, blank faces of his enemies. Heard their threats. He saw their throats. They waved at him with bloody hands. Breathing was hard.
24
“I can’t believe I’ve got this wire sticking out of my tit.” Eva felt strangely relaxed.
It was Hockey’s first day trip out into the world after coming home from the hospital. A surgical biopsy for Eva felt like just the right thing. Something light.
“I can’t believe we had to go to another clinic to get it and then take a cab, with you in your robe, to this clinic for the actual biopsy. Who thought of this?”
Eva held his hand. “Welcome to the wacky world of women’s health care.”
“It is its own monster.”
As they sat in the second waiting room, Eva imagined Mary getting off the plane in California. She knew they would talk on the phone that night, each sharing their own story about mortality. If this biopsy was positive and she had to have a mastectomy, or worse, would she tell her family, and would her mother come to see her? That family that had never helped her, would they visit? Would Ethel finally bring little Maison Toibyn so that a dying Eva could pat him/her on the head? Would cancer bring them back together again?
Hockey seemed better. He was a great person to have through all of this. Clinics were mother’s milk to him. He had no anxiety and knew exactly how to act. It was easy. She’d seen Jose’s pain and Hockey’s pain, so pain wasn’t foreign, the horrifying naturalness of it.
If there was going to be a second half to her life, what was she looking forward to? Mary. Anything else? The truth was that Eva was not excited about being a lawyer, fruitlessly helping people who would never be treated fairly. There, she’d admitted it. Perhaps being sick was a way out of those prisons we choose to live in, like the wrong career.
“Do you ever feel that dying would be easier?”
“I know it would,” Hockey laughed. He felt so comfortable. “But death may not be my fate.”
They were sitting in the very feminine waiting room of the pink clinic on the tony pastel Upper East Side. All the upholstery, carpeting, and wallpaper were floral. The chairs were dainty, really too small for most behinds. The décor was intended to make the patients feel feminine, even as they were about to get carved up. Even though almost all would never, ever feel that they met or could meet the feminine standard that the décor proclaimed. It was the famous double bind, the one that showed up in every part of life. This promise, waved in front of her at the moment she was least able to fulfill it. Like the existence of the niece/nephew she had never seen and yet loved. Or her mother, who wouldn’t live forever, but felt no pressure from that fact to start being kind. These promises were tangible, and yet impossible to obtain.
“Any advice?”
“Well,” he said, thumbing through House Beautiful. “If you do get sick, just keep working. I stopped and it was a big mistake.”
“Or take a trip with Mary around the world.”
“Yeah, then go back to work.”
They looked so normal, the two of them. Like the other men waiting with their wives. People approved. The other men were thinking about their prostates, their cholesterol, their mistresses, their angioplasties, their future and past strokes. Hockey fit in perfectly. He, too, was on a new medication.
“How do you deal with uncertainty?”
“I can’t,” he said. “From time to time I prepare for different outcomes that seem certain, and then they don’t come true. It’s dislocating, the lack of explanation. Sometimes, though, the craziness, the wild ride is actually exhilarating. Once you get used to constant terror. I have a limit. I mean, we all do. But most people never have to reach it. I know how much terror I can endure.”
“So what do you do when you pass your limit?”
All the paintings on the floral walls were of flowers.
“I have to become another person,” he said, like someone else would say Pass the salt. “Someone who can endure it. And the old Hockey is never seen again. It’s happened a couple of times. You want to know the three most dishonest words in the English language? Get over it. If you’re a conscious person, you can’t get over anything real. It changes you.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Eva said.
The waiting room was filled with solemn old ladies and their half-dead husbands. This was the end of the road and they knew it. If this was to be her tragedy, it would be a clear one. Something that everyone would understand and acknowledge. Something to which they would respond appropriately. Not like the nebulous tragedy of her family that no one could define. Mary was the only family Eva h
ad ever known. Mary. She was so real. She was the only real thing in Eva’s life. She was right here in Eva’s mind. The feel and width of her.
When Eva went in for prep, she saw Hockey smile and wave. The orderly sedated Eva, and she was wheeled into surgery. Right before she fell asleep, she saw Dr. Kumar’s face looming over her, smiling. Dr. Kumar was nice. She made a joke and Eva laughed. Then she fell asleep.
That night she called Mary, but no one answered. She must be at church, Eva thought. Or maybe at the bar.
25
Stew tumbled up Carole’s front walk without hesitation, even though he wanted to hesitate. He wanted to stop and think things over carefully, weigh all the options, but he couldn’t. There didn’t seem to be any options. In a way, he just forgot. It was all already in motion. What was logical or right didn’t matter anymore. This was a different kind of world now.
Stew knocked quietly on Carole’s door. Then he walked around in a circle. Then he rang the bell. He did that for fifteen minutes. One knock, one circle, one ring. Finally he went around to the backyard. Carole was sitting there in her lawn chair drinking a Diet Coke and smoking. She was watching a small TV, propped up in the kitchen window, plugged in over the sink. She was acting like she was inside, but she was outside. The only concession being her ugly pink-tinted sunglasses. She looked so familiar, Stew loved her.
She had been there when it happened; that made them close. The incident that never took place. The non-event. Somewhere inside of her Carole knew what the truth was. She knew he hadn’t done anything to Victor; she just had to pretend to get Mommy’s approval. But now it was only the two of them, so no more lying. She would have to fess up and stop all that pain.
Then, for no reason, Carole made the decision to start screaming. Accusations are always easier than telling the truth.
“What are you doing here? What’s wrong with you? Look at you. You’re a mess. Don’t come around here looking like an insane person.” She didn’t move from her chair.
The Child Page 14