“So, the thing is,” Abby concluded unhappily after describing much, though not all, of that crazy day that started out absolutely perfect and then crashed, “if I’m going to die if I don’t see Sean, and if I feel terrible a lot of the time when I do see him, I mean, if those are my only options, life is really the pits. Being fifteen is the pits. I mean, Carrie doesn’t have any problems and neither does Doug and neither does Sara, so it’s me being fifteen, and I always thought it would be so great and I couldn’t wait because it was almost grown up and, you know, everything good would happen. Now I’d rather be seventeen, or twenty-seven, like Sara. I really envy her, you know? She’s so totally put together. But seventeen would be good, seventeen would be great, because then you’re in college, and then you can handle anything, all the things you can’t manage at fifteen, which is a really awful age—”
(An endless year from September till I get there, she thought mournfully, and wondered how she would be able to live until then.)
“—and I hate it.” She saw her mother frown—a real frown that couldn’t be called anything else—and she said hastily, “Well, I don’t really mean that, I don’t really hate it, at least not all of it—” She paused. “Maybe not even most of it. I mean, I totally loved being in the play and I’m going to try out for senior-class play next year—everybody says I should, that I’m really good—that sounds like bragging, but you heard the applause, they really liked it—and you know, Mom, when I was up there I really was Emily, wanting my mother to tell me whether I was pretty or not, and falling in love with George and getting married…it was totally amazing. Did that ever happen to you, that you could be somebody else? You know, just for a little while really be somebody else? I mean, you could go back to your real self whenever you wanted, but, you know, for a while your problems would just disappear. Well, I guess you’d have the problems of this person you are now, but they’re not real because it’s only a play. Except then,” she added sadly, “you’ve got your own again.
“Anyway,” she said hastily, rattling off a list at random instead of whining, “everything’s great, the play and my friends and my family and my new car—” She stopped abruptly. Why couldn’t she remember they weren’t supposed to talk about Mack? Talk about other things, Sara had said. But it was hard, because he seemed to be wound up in just about everything that went on these days. “—to on, cartoon that somebody made me”—this was true, so she did not have to lie to her mother, which she didn’t do well, anyway—“showing me in the middle of the stage, like I’m a real actress on Broadway, and Sean isn’t even that important… What?”
Her mother was gesturing with her hand and Abby wished Sara were there to translate… except that if Sara were there Abby wouldn’t be talking like this about Sean, because she’d rather die than have Sara know about her problems with him because then she might not let her go out with him, and Abby would die if she couldn’t go out with… “What?” she said again. “I don’t understand…”
Her mother was struggling to write, and Abby stood up to read it. Pride yousel.
“Pride myself,” she said aloud. She repeated it slowly. “You mean you want me to take pride in myself. But I do, don’t I? Doesn’t everybody?”
Her mother made a small movement with her head. No.
In the silence, Abby thought about it. Sara had talked about pride when she talked about the Corcorans, about how Pussy Corcoran had been beaten down by her husband, not physically (though who knew that for a fact?), but by his denigrating her again and again until she had no pride in herself; she never stood tall, believing in herself.
“There are a lot of insecure people in the world,” Sara had said, “who puff themselves up by denigrating others. They find people who are vulnerable, and they tear them down, making them feel little and worthless, less than human. It’s probably the cruelest thing people can do to each other: to rob others of belief in themselves, pride in themselves.”
“So what can you do?” Abby asked, thinking of Sean (later she wondered if Sara had raised the subject because she knew more about Sean than Abby thought).
“Protect yourself,” Sara said. “If you have confidence that you are valuable, that you have control over who and what you are and what you’ll become, you can guard your own worth so that no one can take it away from you. People can still cause you pain, but they can’t make you feel worthless.”
Remembering that, Abby stared at her mother, who was trying to tell her exactly the same thing. In the fading light of early evening, her mother looked firm and decisive, not the vibrant beauty Abby remembered, but still a woman with definite ideas and a will to nudge what she could no longer control. “But you can’t just make it happen, pride,” she said. “I mean, if somebody makes you feel bad, what do you do? Sara says you should protect yourself, but she didn’t say how. I don’t want anybody to tear me down, but sometimes I feel really… slow. Like I might think of the right thing to say when I’m in bed at night, but when I need it, I can’t think of it. I’m not sharp and sophisticated, and Sean knows everything, he’s been all over the world; he’s been …he hints about being with lots of women, older women, too, and I haven’t been with anybody. I’m still a virgin, and that’s okay…I think…I mean, I want to be, but sometimes I’m not sure if…”
Tess shrugged one shoulder, as if to say, That will come; there’s time.
Or she might have meant, So lose it; it’s not such a big deal.
Or, perhaps, It’s up to you; it doesn’t make much difference either way; whatever makes you happy.
“Oh,” Abby cried in frustration. “I wish you could just tell me what to do so I could do it, and I wouldn’t have to worry whether it was right or not. I wish Sara would tell me, or somebody. But nobody does. Well, you know, Sara thinks I’d probably be happier in the long run if I stayed a virgin, but she doesn’t say I have to stay one or she’ll kick me out of the house or make me do hard labor or anything like that. Not that I want her to say that…I don’t want her to. That would be a dictatorship and I wouldn’t like that either.” She looked at the clock on the wall. “I have to go; Sara will have dinner, and I have homework and …Sean may call.” She put her strong young arms around her mother’s thin, bowed shoulders and hugged as hard as she dared. “I love you. I’ll be back Saturday, so we can talk some more then. I love to talk to you. I love you.”
On the bus home, she thought of driving her own car, in just a month, when she finished her high school course and took the test and passed it with a gold star (did they give gold stars when they gave you a driver’s permit?), and then, in September, when she was sixteen, she’d get her license and drive without anybody else in the car (if Sara said it was okay), and the more she thought about those things, the more cheerful she became, until she walked into her house humming and smiling and loving everybody.
“Well, that must have been a wonderful visit,” said Sara, stirring risotto at the stove. She kissed Abby, thinking of Emily begging her mother to look at me.
“Oh.” Abby realized she had not thought about her mother once, not while she was with her and talking about herself, not on the bus coming home. She took the wooden spoon from Sara. “I’ll do this; I like to. She seemed happy,” she improvised, about Tess. “I told her about school and—”
“And about Sean?” Doug said, leering around the doorjamb.
“And about the usual stuff,” Abby said, making a face at him. She ladled simmering stock into the risotto, and kept stirring. “She said she was proud of me.”
“For what?” Carrie asked. She was slicing mushrooms at the center island, her tongue caught between her teeth as she concentrated on making them the same size.
“Just…for being me.”
“I’m writing a story about a girl who doesn’t know who she is; she forgets her name and her address until—”
“Amnesia,” said Doug, swinging around the doorjamb, staying away from the action so he would not be given a job.
; “Doug, it would be so helpful if you would set the table,” said Sara, and smiled at him as he gave a deep sigh.
“I know it’s amnesia,” Carrie said loftily. “I wasn’t sure you’d know, so I was careful not to use it.”
“I know every word you know,” Doug retorted.
“How can you? You haven’t lived as long or read as much or thought as much or talked as much.”
“Well, nobody talks as much as you, that’s for sure. You could talk a guy’s head off.”
“How was your day, Sara?” asked Abby, making up for not paying much attention to her mother that afternoon. “Any more miserable Corcorans?”
“Do I set a place for Mack?” Doug asked.
“Of course,” Sara said. “He lives here.”
“But he doesn’t eat here a lot, unless you’re going out.”
“We’ll set a place for him anyway.”
“He’s so erratic,” Doug said gloomily, shooting a glance at Carrie as he emphasized the word.
“Like unpredictable, irregular, and inconsistent plus just plain annoying?” Carrie shot back, and they both burst out laughing.
And Sara was laughing as she described it to Reuben on Sunday morning. “They have such a good time; words are their favorite toys.” They were walking from her house to the lakefront, the first time they had been together in the morning, the first time Abby and Doug and Carrie had made sufficiently extensive arrangements with friends that Sara and Reuben could plan an entire day and evening together. “We all grew up with Mother creating word games at the dinner table, and in the car, even when we worked in the garden …whenever two or more of us did anything together, at least part of the time was spent playing with words.”
“Lucky,” said Reuben. “What I learned was the vocabulary of bagels and schnecken, the varieties of rye flour, the ingredients in challah and knishes—”
Sara was laughing. “Not true.”
“Only partly,” he admitted. He grinned. “However, I did absorb an astonishing education in baking, none of which I’ve forgotten: not one of my parents’ lessons in front of a mixer or oven. One of these days I’ll make you apple strudel according to my mother’s recipe, and I promise you’ll say it’s the best you’ve ever eaten.” They crossed the street into the park, and turned toward the lagoon. “In fact, will you let me make you dinner one night? All your restaurant suggestions have been excellent, but I’d very much like to cook for you.”
“I’d like that,” Sara said. “But then it will be my turn. It’s time you met my family.”
“It is,” he agreed, as casually as she, and they crossed the path crowded with bicyclists, skateboarders wearing their caps backward as they sailed off curbings and benches, and a steady stream of joggers, and took to the grass. It was almost as crowded there: lovers sprawling under the spreading trees; young families picnicking, playing volleyball, gliding dreamily in swan boats on the lagoon or holding one-sided conversations with animals in the zoo and its miniature farm; nannies gossiping within fenced playgrounds where small children swarmed like chattering monkeys on jungle gyms and pumped their legs to swing ever higher, their delighted and somewhat scared laughter rising in the sun-gold air; and groups of tourists disembarking from buses to stroll through the gardens and the conservatory, photographing each other in front of the spraying fountain or the city’s skyscrapers barely glimpsed through the trees.
“Lovely,” Reuben said. “What a wonderful job this city has done with its open space. Parks and the lakefront stretching from one end to the other. This seems to be the friendliest; it may become the model for the one at Carrano West.”
“It’s hard to think of building a whole village. Have you planned where it will be?”
“We have; we’ve bought the land, but we still need one more approval before we can start building. The county insists that the neighboring town, River Bend, annex our development, and that’s fine with us. We thought everyone agreed, and the River Bend City Council was ready to vote to approve, but in the past couple of weeks the townspeople and some neighboring farmers have made a few statements—one of them wrote a letter to a neighborhood newspaper—objecting to what we’re doing, or what they think we’re doing. It’s not serious, probably a few malcontents; we’ll talk to them, and as soon as the annexation is approved, we’ll begin.”
“Why wouldn’t they like it?”
“We don’t know. We don’t even know how many are complaining. There was the one letter to the paper—we don’t worry about isolated letters—but yesterday an editor at the Tribune called for a comment about two letters that will appear in tomorrow’s paper. Two letters in a citywide paper. It begins to sound as if someone is organizing it.”
“Why? To stop you from building? Who would benefit from that?”
“We don’t know. And it may not be true. Would you like to see it? Where it will be?”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
“Then we’ll drive there. It’s about an hour away. Shall we find a place for lunch first?”
“Why don’t we buy something to take with us? We’ll be the first people to eat in Carrano Village West.”
He smiled. “I find it quite wonderful that you come up with the right answer to every question.”
“Oh, not every one,” she said lightly (thinking, Reuben assumed, of her family or her job—or another man?—but the sun was shining, the day was warm and fragrant, and the hours stretched ahead of them; it was not a time to probe).
They turned to walk back to Sara’s house, past the apartment buildings near the lake, to the houses of Sara’s neighborhood, most of them more than a century old, survivors of the great Chicago fire, the Depression, two world wars, and how many family traumas, tragedies, and triumphs played out in each one? They all stood exactly the same distance from the street, three stories high, their massive oak front doors bearing brass handles in the shape of monsters—dubious choices, Reuben thought, for welcoming guests—myriad chimneys sprouting from steeply slanting slate roofs that shaded the front doors like the straw hats of Asian farmers, and small front yards surrounded by low wrought-iron fences. Each yard was a carefully tended garden of ground cover dotted with sculptures, or flowers that changed with the seasons, or rose and peony trees rising amid evergreens pruned in the shapes of deer and owls.
The air was fragrant with damp earth and new-mown grass, honeysuckle, magnolias, and early roses, even some late, lingering lilacs. Tunnels of oaks and maples shaded the streets, sunlight filtering through their leafy branches and spilling to the sidewalk like gold coins.
As Sara and Reuben walked, they heard through open windows the sounds of Sundays at home: scales practiced on a piano, a radio broadcasting the news, a father calling children in from their backyards to wash their hands for lunch, the clatter of dishes, a dog barking as a ball thumped against the wall. Reuben breathed deeply, feeling wonderful. He took Sara’s hand. For this moment, when the world seemed serene and ordered, it seemed quite believable that there were no problems of the past, only possibilities for the future. He glanced at Sara’s profile, admiring it, happy that she could be as absorbed in her thoughts as he was in his, that often she was content to be silent, not desperate to fill every moment with chatter as so many people seemed to be, as if any space in a conversation meant failure, and had to be glossed over with sound.
But that sound most likely would contain personal information, many might say, especially when two people are still getting to know each other, with much to explore. And that was true of him and Sara: they had much still to explore. But there was no reason to hurry.
“I love it here,” Sara murmured. “I love being part of the city, part of the beating heart of other lives.”
Reuben nodded. “A nice way to put it. I think that, or something close to it, whenever I walk anywhere in New York.”
And was she giving him an opening for their first truly revelatory conversation? If she was, he let it go by. He was not ready to open many
of the closed doors in his life. How many of us are comfortable revealing personal disasters we might have prevented had we been more analytical, less fervid, firmly in the driver’s seat rather than a passenger driven by our gonads and insecurities?
Had we been, he thought wryly, grown up.
But by the time we’re grown up enough to see what we did wrong, we would much prefer to keep it to ourselves, so that others—especially those we want to impress—might not wonder if there could be residue of those weaknesses still in us.
And, in fact, might there be?
He reflected on the fragments of information he and Sara had shared so far: there were quite a few of them. And there could be more, if they came to trust themselves to reveal what could be painful or embarrassing or even shameful; if each came to trust the other to receive it without ridicule or censure.
Or they would never get to that point. In which case, he thought, we won’t talk about the past at all. Today and tomorrow can fill hours of conversation if we work at it, and the door to the past kept firmly locked.
And Sara, too, he reflected, seemed quite satisfied to talk about subjects other than herself and her family, that large bunch of people who filled so much of her life with their needs and demands, and their delights. And yet, he reminded himself, she had invited him to dinner. It’s time you met my family. Yes, but there had been no mention of a date. No necessity for whipping out calendars to inscribe dinner and introductions. A simple, vague It’s time.
And so be it, he said to himself with finality. (And knew, beneath all the bravado, that it was not true: that, this far along, he knew he wanted Sara to understand who he was and how he had come to this point in his life, and that he wanted to understand what had made her the person she was today. It was just that it had been so long since he had truly opened up to someone that he did not know how to begin. Or whether she would want him to, if he did figure it out.)
The Real Mother Page 13