Little Earthquakes

by Jennifer Weiner

  I stared down at my plate. I thought I had been invisible, as far as my mother was concerned. She never went to movies, and I’d never been in anything that had appeared on ABC, so how could she know? Had she actually seen any of the direct-to-video movies I’d made? Or the infomercial that only aired in the wee hours of the morning, for a quote-unquote revolutionary hair-removal system? I’d been Girl with Mustache. Fake, of course, but Sam had never quite let me live it down.

  “So you knew I was married.”

  “Lia Lane,” she said. Her lips—with the lipstick already starting to wander up past her lipline—curved upward. “It sounds like a superhero. Much better than Lia Frederick.”

  “And you know about Caleb.”

  She swallowed hard. Once. Twice. When she spoke again, her voice sounded fragile and cracked as an antique mirror. “I didn’t know his name.”

  I reached into my purse. They took pictures of all the babies in the hospital nursery, and one of the nurses had handed me Caleb’s snapshot when we were on our way home. I’d tucked it into the diaper bag and forgotten about it until I came to Philadelphia and had found it again. Or it had found me. It was the only thing I’d never intended to give away; the one thing I couldn’t let go. Caleb’s face was tomatoey red in the picture, wrinkled and cross looking. He was wrapped in a hospital blanket, and he wore a pink-and-blue-striped cap.

  I pulled it out, smoothed the edges, and passed it across the table into my mother’s hand.

  She took the picture and suddenly every part of her was shaking—her hands, her lips, the loose skin of her neck. “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh.”

  I bent my head. My eyes were brimming. I thought I’d been ready for anything—her anger, her scorn, her cold dismissiveness, her eye-rolling questions of “What kind of drama did you get yourself into now?” But these little hurt baby-bird noises coming from her throat? No. “Mom. Hey, Mom, cut it out. It’s okay.”

  Her grip on the picture was getting tighter. I could hear the paper start to crumple.

  “Mom!”

  I reached across the table, but she was too fast for me. She lifted the picture in the air. And then she started crying. The people at the table next to ours quickly averted their eyes. One of the other waiters showed up and looked at me. Napkins, I mouthed. He nodded and hurried back with a fresh stack of them.

  My mother wiped her eyes with a napkin, her shoulders shaking as she cried without making a sound. When her grip loosened enough, I eased the picture out of her hands and put it back in my purse.

  She looked at me. Her eyes red and watery, and her lips were trembling. I wondered if she’d ever tried to call me. I wondered what I would have said to her if she had.

  “I wish I knew,” she said. Her words were swallowed by a sob.

  “Knew what?”

  “I wish I knew what I’d done that made you hate me so much.”

  I felt the air rush out of me. “You hated me first,” I told her. Because he loved me more than he loved you, I thought.

  She blinked at me. “Is that really what you think?”

  I shrugged, feeling suddenly uncertain. I had believed that, the way . . . well, the way a kid would believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. It was the story I’d told myself, the one I’d constructed as a teenager and had never questioned in all the years I’d been away. And I’d called her and invited her here determined to forgive her, to open my hand and move forward. But . . . the possibility spun in my mind, like a leaf caught in a drain. What if I’d been wrong? What if there was nothing for me to forgive? What if I turned out to be just as much to blame as she was?

  My mother pressed her lips together, speaking slowly, as if every word pained her. “I remember when you were a baby. I was the one who did the feedings, I was the one who changed your diaper, and rocked you, and sang you to sleep, but when your father came through the door . . .” She shut her eyes, shaking her head a little. “Your face would just light up. It was hard for me, a little. I loved you so much, but it felt like you only smiled for him.”

  No, I thought. Oh, no. I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to think about it, I don’t want to remember . . . but I couldn’t help myself. The pictures were coming, unbidden—me in the rocker in a stained nightgown, rocking and rocking while Caleb shrieked. Me wearing Sam’s sweatpants because none of my prepregnancy clothes fit and I couldn’t bear to pull on the maternity ones again, marching the too-short hall like a prisoner, back and forth, back and forth, as the hours piled on top of each other, all night long. Me holding Caleb as he screamed in the bathtub, me holding Caleb as he screamed on the changing table . . . and Sam taking Caleb in his arms for five minutes at the end of the night, lifting him into the air and singing him “Sweet Baby James,” and Caleb not screaming at all.

  “I forgave him a lot because you loved him so much.”

  “Forgave him what?”

  She sighed again without meeting my eyes. “It’s water under the bridge,” she said. “It was so long ago.”

  I turned all of my memories of my father over in my mind—the zoo and the flower shows, the restaurant lunches and the ice-cream cones in the park. I wasn’t much liking what I saw on their flip sides. When I was eight and nine and ten, some days I’d come home from school and he would be there. We’d sneak out of the house to matinees and fill up on licorice and fast-food hamburgers afterward. “Don’t tell your mother,” he’d say, smiling a conspirator’s smile as he slid a twenty-dollar bill out of her wallet and into his own. “This is our secret.” It had never occurred to me, at that age, to think about why he was home all the time, but now, I wondered.

  And there’d been more. Sometimes there would be a woman who’d join us at the movies or at McDonald’s or Friendly’s or Nifty Fifties afterward. “This is Susan,” he’d say. Or Jean or Vicki or Raquel. His hand would linger on the small of her back. “A friend of mine from work.” Susan or Jean or Vicki or Raquel was always younger than my mother and prettier. Jean had had platinum-blond hair and a breathy giggle. Vicki had given me a lipstick that came in a ridged gold tube. Had I known what they were back then? Had I known all along? Had she?

  “He had girlfriends,” I said. I waited for her to say no, but she didn’t say anything.

  Her sigh moved across the table like a cold wind. “I hoped you didn’t know that,” she said. “I hoped he’d at least have the sense not to tell you.”

  “So why did you stay with him? Why did you stay, if you knew?”

  She tightened her fingers on the handle of her purse. “It’s different when you have a child.” I thought about Ayinde and Richard and saw how that could be true, how a baby could make you forgive even the worst transgressions. “I didn’t want to divorce him because I knew that if I did you’d never see him again. He’d just pick up and start all over someplace else, with someone else, and he’d tell you he’d visit, but he wouldn’t. I knew him well enough to know that.”

  “But that’s what happened.”

  “One of his girlfriends gave him an ultimatum,” she said. Her voice was low and toneless. “Me or your wife. He . . .” She licked her lips and took another sip of tea. “Well. You know what he chose.”

  Not me, I thought. He hadn’t chosen me. I remembered, with a hot flush of shame, how after Sam and I got married, I’d gone to a fancy stationery shop on Rodeo Drive that was known for its hand-calligraphied wedding invitations. They’d made me a proof, but I never went back to place my order. One was all I wanted. There was only one person I wanted to receive a piece of cream-colored paper announcing that Lia and Sam had become man and wife. I’d sent it to the last address I had for my father: an apartment complex in Arizona. Three weeks later, I’d gotten a letter in return, a note, really, on a ripped-out page of a legal pad. Congratulations, it read in his familiar back-slanting handwriting. And now that you are a “big success” in Hollywood, maybe you can spare something for your “Old Man.” I’d never told Sam about it. I’d never told anyone. Well,
that’s that, I had thought, and I’d tucked the note away. That’s that.

  “He loved you, in his way. Probably better than he ever loved anyone else.” She gave me a small smile. “You were his girl. Remember how he used to say that? He’d come home . . .”

  “ . . . home from work and swing me in the air,” I said. My voice sounded like it was coming from the end of a tunnel. “You’re my girl.”

  “Well, work,” my mother said. “Sometimes it was work, and sometimes . . .” Her voice faded. Her hands fluttered in the air. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to learn this about him. I’m sorry about your . . .” She tripped over the words. “Your son.”

  “What about the quilt?”

  She looked at me, her eyebrows drawn in puzzlement. It was the least of my questions, the least of what lay between us, but it was all I could think to ask her about.

  “That quilt. The Strawberry Shortcake quilt. The one you wouldn’t buy me. And then he got it for me and he left and you never got me a new one. You said we couldn’t afford it.”

  She looked down at her hands, and in her face I could see the outline of how she’d look when she was an old lady. It was probably the way I’d end up looking, too. “That quilt was the only thing he ever gave you,” she said. “I wanted you to keep it so you could remember your dad.”

  “That’s not true. He gave me lots of things. My Barbie dolls . . . my tea set . . . my roller skates . . .”

  My mother was shaking her head.

  “But . . . but . . .” Oh, this hurt. I was remembering my father leaning over me as I lay in bed, setting a bag or a box beside my pillow, whispering, “Look what Daddy bought his number-one girl!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wanted him to be a better father—a better man, really—and when he couldn’t, I guess I didn’t see the harm in pretending. So I’d buy things for him to give you, and I’d wrap them up, and I was just happy to know that you liked them. I wanted to give you everything you wanted. Every mother wants that, I think.” She wiped her eyes with her napkin. “I wanted to give you a better father, most of all, and when I couldn’t give you that . . .”

  I didn’t know what to say to her. I didn’t know if I could say anything.

  “All those plays,” I finally said. “All those plays in high school. Bye Bye Birdie and Mame and Gypsy. You never came . . .”

  “You didn’t want me to,” she said. She smiled a little. “I believe your exact words were that you’d kill yourself if you saw my face in the audience.”

  I shrugged and managed a smile of my own. “Well, I was an actress.” I remembered those fights. “Don’t come,” I’d told her, slamming my flimsy bedroom door. “Don’t come, I don’t want you there!”

  “So you never saw my face. But I was there.” My mother loosened her grip on her pocketbook long enough to reach inside. She pulled out a manila folder I’d have just bet she’d stolen from some supply closet at her school. She slid it across the table. I opened it and found a crumpled flyer, a leaflet for the first comedy troupe I’d joined. It was ten years old and had been folded and refolded, and the paper felt as soft as linen in my hands. “Where did you find this?”

  “On eBay,” she said. Underneath the flyer was a page cut out of TV Guide. It was a story about a series set in high school that had aired for half a season seven years ago. I’d been a featured extra, which meant you could see me in every episode that had aired. In the picture you could see the side of my face.

  “That’s not from eBay,” she said. “I got a subscription. That and Entertainment Weekly and People. And all the tabloids, too.” The same ghost of a smile revisited her face. “I bring them to the teachers’ lounge when I’m done with them. It’s made me pretty popular.”

  I flipped through the folder. There I was in an ad for a made-for-TV movie that had aired on a channel that my mother’s cable system didn’t even carry. There were pictures of me in dresses and jeans, in miniskirts and bikinis, and finally, one of me in my Las Vegas wedding dress. Razor ad-man Sam Lane and his bride, actress Lia Frederick. My Hollywood-blond hair was piled on top of my head in the updo I’d let the hotel’s hairdresser talk me into. My stomach was still flat, and I could see, in the background, the brilliant bottle-green feathers of one of the birds in its cage in the lobby.

  “Look,” she said. Her hands were shaking. “Here.” At the bottom of the folder was a stack of yellowing programs. She fanned them out in front of me. My name was on the cover, my old name, my high school name. Lisa Urick. “Every single one. Every single night.”

  I gripped the edges of the table tightly. “You didn’t want me to go to L.A.”

  “I didn’t want you to go when you were eighteen,” she said. “I wanted you to go to college first. And I just didn’t know how to talk to you. You were so angry at me, so angry all the time . . .”

  I said nothing. I had been angry. Maybe I’d been angry at her because she was there, and I couldn’t be angry at my father because he wasn’t.

  “I kept track, though,” my mother said. “It got harder once you changed your name, but I think I’ve seen every single thing you’ve ever done. When you were on The Price Is Right . . . ”

  “Oh, God,” I said, groaning as I remembered my five-day stint filling in for an ailing Barker’s Beauty. “The actual retail value of this showcase . . .”

  “But I guess you missed my television debut,” she said with a sly smile.

  “What? Not . . .”

  She nodded. “Jeopardy!”

  “Oh, Mom! Your dream come true! Did you win?”

  “Three days in a row. Sixteen thousand dollars. Not enough to come back for the Tournament of Champions, but I got the roof fixed.” She ducked her head. Typical, I thought. Give any other woman in America sixteen thousand dollars, and she’d splurge on jewelry or a spa vacation. Give it to my mother, and she’d fix her roof. “It was hard to come home afterward,” she admitted. “Knowing I wouldn’t have anything to look forward to. And I wondered . . . well, if maybe you’d see me, and think about getting in touch.”

  My eyes filled with tears again. I remembered how Sam had once flipped to Jeopardy!—this was on our honeymoon, at that enormous hotel in Las Vegas—and I’d threatened to throw the remote control into the toilet if he ever subjected me to any sort of game show. “As God as my witness,” I’d told him, “I had to watch Jeopardy! five nights a week for eighteen years, and I’ll never watch Jeopardy! again.” He’d agreed in a hurry, although maybe the fact that I’d been wearing the white-lace merry widow, the one with cutouts over the nipples that one of my friends had given me as a joke, had something to do with that.

  “Did you meet Alex Trebek?”

  She giggled—actually giggled—as her cheeks turned pink, like a schoolgirl with a crush. I could see her history in her face then, the clear-eyed, smart, pretty girl who’d married Fred Urick and hoped for love for the rest of her life but wound up teaching fifth grade, with a husband who didn’t work and who ran around and a daughter who’d disappeared.

  “Mom,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry about everything.”

  She nodded. “I know,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, too.” It was a start, I thought. Maybe someday I’d be able to show her the other pictures I had of Caleb, the inked footprint I’d brought home from the hospital, the pictures Sam had taken of the two of us in the bathtub, the little knitted white hat I’d made him. It was a start, I thought again, as I reached across the table and took my mother’s hand.

  BECKY

  Becky sat up in bed and was hit with a wave of dizziness that sent her reeling back to the mattress. Food poisoning, she thought, as the room spun. It was an occupational hazard. Typists got repetitive stress injuries, executives got ulcers, chefs got forty-eight hours of vomiting, shivering, diarrhetic misery. Serves me right for eating those oysters, she thought and closed her eyes, groaning. It would be rotten luck for her to get sick. Life was so good. She hadn’t heard fr
om Mimi since the Tragedy of the Christmas Ham. Neither had Andrew. Not a single phone call, not one e-mail, not one page, not a single slutty baby outfit in a package addressed to A. Rabinowitz. Sometimes Becky felt as if she were living under a radioactive cloud that would split open and rain down poison at a moment’s notice, but most of the time it was wonderfully peaceful, blissfully quiet.

  Andrew emerged from Ava’s room with the baby, still in her pink pajamas, in his arms. “Not feeling good?”

  “Ugh,” she gasped, as another wave of dizziness rolled over her. “I think I’m sick,” she said and flopped back down on the mattress. Andrew felt her forehead and the glands in her neck.

  “No fever, but it could be a stomach bug. Want to call the doctor?”

  Sure, Becky thought. And get lectured about the ten—no, fifteen—pounds she’d failed to shed since Ava’s birth? “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Do we have any ginger ale?”

  Andrew carried Ava down to the kitchen and came back up, five minutes later, with flat ginger ale and a plate of saltines. Becky sipped and munched. “Much better,” she said. “Yum. You know, I don’t think I’ve had a saltine since I was . . .” Her voice trailed off. She stared up at Andrew. “Oh, shit.”

  Andrew had the nerve to look pleased as he carried Ava into her room. “I think Grumbelina and I are going to take a walk,” he said.

  “Oh, shit,” Becky repeated.

  “Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Andrew said. He was beaming as he carried Ava out of the room. Becky heard him say, “Would you like a little brother or sister?”

  Oh, shit, she thought again and pulled the quilt up over her head.

  Fifteen minutes later, Andrew and Ava were back, with a bag from the drugstore.

  “What is that child wearing?” Becky grumbled, taking in her daughter’s ensemble of red-and-yellow-checked corduroy pants, a lime-green onesie, a pink sweater, and a blue ski cap. Andrew was a dear, sweet man, but he was also color-blind. At least he’d avoided the hot-pink fake-fur-trimmed leggings that Mimi had sent, along with matching marabou mules.