“Or maybe you’ll pull the plug on the refrigerator?”
I have no explanation for that. Nothing I can even make up. It was like I caught it from that patient of Dr. Benjamin’s who I told Rio about.
“Or maybe you’ll run out of gas and have to call me from Plainview again to get AAA to bring you some—”
“People—” I start, but he interrupts me, calling over his shoulder as he goes into the bathroom.
“Maybe Bobbie’ll tell you that you gotta paint another bunny and you’ll start throwing step stools through windows….”
I did not throw anything, so don’t listen to him. There is a very simple explanation. I was upset about a misunderstanding with Bobbie and I turned too quickly with a lamp I was painting and somehow broke a window in the garage. And if I’d been smart, I would have had the window fixed and not even mentioned it to Rio. But I’ve been so upset with myself, and Rio always arranges for those sorts of things—repairs, appointments, whatever. If it’s going to cost us money without the joy of shopping, he usually takes care of it.
Just as my father always does. Of course, my mother is incapable, incapacitated. But I can do it. I can do it all. Didn’t I start this furniture-painting business myself and then take Bobbie in as a partner when it became too big for one person? Don’t I make money at it? And have satisfied customers and even a reputation? I can do all the calling and arranging. I just don’t, or at least I haven’t.
“What’s my mother going to think—” I ask as Rio puts his toiletries into the bag “—if I come for her in a hired car?”
“When a limo comes to get her? That it’s about time she got what she deserves, I’d guess.” He rolls his camouflage pants and jacket into a ball and thrusts them into his bag.
“And when she wants to go shopping tomorrow?” I ask.
“Tell her there’s something wrong with the Corvette and take a cab.” He is taking the Expedition up to the cabin and leaving the Corvette safely ensconced in the garage.
“She doesn’t like the Corvette, anyway,” I agree.
“Yeah. It ruffles her helmet,” he says. It’s possible that if my father had invested in Aqua Net fifty years ago he’d be retired now in a mansion in Boca on my mother’s support alone. Everything in his bag, Rio tugs at the zipper, fighting with it as if it is purposely being difficult. It seems to me that Rio thinks everything is always being difficult simply to annoy him. “And don’t go crazy with the charging, okay? I left you some cash and right now…well, don’t spend more than we got, okay?”
“If we go at all,” I say, “I’ll pick up a few things to send the kids—some candy and stuff like that, okay?”
Rio stops fighting with the zipper and looks at me. “You know you don’t hafta ask me if you can get the kids stuff. You don’t gotta ask my permission for anything. We’re a little short of cash right now is all. I explained it all to you, remember?”
I know it isn’t in my best interest to say no, and so I nod.
“You sure you don’t mind that I’m going?” he asks.
There is a piece of me that is terrified that he is going. But another piece can’t wait for him to close the door behind him when he leaves. Like so much lately, I don’t know what I want. And Rio plays on it, like he always does.
“I’ll stay. I mean, you’re right about your mother and me being oil and fire—”
I almost correct him, but he hates it when I do, so I admit that the timing could be better, though I don’t know how.
He stops what he is doing and takes my face in his hands. “I can stay, Teddi. I don’t have to go, if you’re feeling shaky or anything. Or if you don’t think that you can take care of yourself and June the Loon.”
I say I am quite capable of taking care of myself, my mother, Rio and anyone who happens to wander in off the street.
Rio looks absolutely stricken and I have to promise that I will not let anyone wander in off the street—that it’s just an expression—but he isn’t easily placated.
Finally he gets up, spreads the handles on his duffel and slides the zipper open. He pulls out his camouflage stuff. “I can’t go,” he says, placing the clothing on the bed beside the bag. “You’re gonna need me here.”
“To do what?” I ask, wishing he would get going already and let me get my day started. “Hold my hand? Go. You need a break from work, and from all this mishegass. You deserve a break. Probably be good for your back. Hey, if I could leave me, I would.”
“I’m not ‘leaving you,’” he says, bracketing the words with his fingers before shoving some of his clothing back into his bag. “Don’t forget that this whole thing was your idea. Jesus, I hate it when you say things like I’m leaving you. Why do you have to be a drama queen about everything?”
“I only meant that if I could take a break from me, I’d go. I was trying to empathize with you, that’s all.”
“Maybe if you went to South Winds for a couple of weeks, while the kids are away, and—”
I push my hands into the pockets of my shorts. That way I can’t strangle Rio. “There’s nothing wrong with me…” I say between clenched teeth “…beyond being distracted. Dr. Benjamin says so. And there is no way I’m going to a place like South Winds. Now, if you offered me a couple of weeks in Bermuda…”
“I did offer you a week in Aruba, remember?” he asks. I don’t, but there is no chance in hell I’ll admit that. “But you said you didn’t want to be so far from the kids, with them away and all. I bet you don’t remember that, do you?”
“Of course I do,” I shout at him, remembering vaguely discussing an island at some point in time, but wondering how I could have passed up Aruba. Not that I could go with the kids away, which is exactly what he claims I said. “Would you go already? There’s no reason to worry about me. I mean it, I’ll have my mother here to keep me busy. And I can start getting the kids’ rooms cleaned out so that when they come home they’ll be ready to start school with a fresh, clean slate.”
“That’s my girl,” he says, patting my head and then letting his hand trace the side of my face and cradle my chin. “And if anything goes wrong, you know what to do, right? You call me and I’ll call that doctor of yours, or you can call the lady yourself and she’ll—”
“Look,” I say. “I know you’re worried about me, but there is no reason to be. I’m fine, I’ve been running a house for more than twelve years and I think I can manage a couple of days more without burning it down or defacing it or killing anyone and hiding the body in the basement.” Present company excepted.
Rio looks contrite. “Okay, okay. I didn’t mean to get you all upset,” he says softly. “I just love you so much that I—” He coughs, his eyes filling up so that I can’t lace into him and tell him if he doesn’t stop treating me like a nutcase I might really become one.
“I’ll be fine,” I say. “You need any help packing?”
“All done,” Rio says. “Gotta get my stuff from the shed and then I’m set. I’ll meet you in the kitchen and we can have some breakfast or something before I go, okay?”
Rio never has breakfast at home. I’ve always had this fantasy in my head—probably a leftover scene from some movie—where Rio reads the New York Times (that’s how I know it’s a fantasy) and sips coffee across the table from me. He reaches around the newspaper for a slice of toast (in one of those silver toast holders) and reads aloud something important to me. Of course in my imagination he is wearing a suit with one of those old cravats like in Life With Father or Cheaper by the Dozen, and not a set of camos and dog tags.
And he is reading the financial page and not the ATV listings in Buylines.
“You sure I’m capable of making you breakfast without burning my pans?”
“Don’t start,” he says. “’Cause I’m not sure of anything. Except that your sarcasm isn’t helping anything.”
Just go, I think to myself while I smile innocently at him.
“I’ll just have a cup of coffee,” he says
, hefting the duffel bag. “I’ll go get my rifles.”
“A cup o’ Joe,” I shout after him, imagining that’s what they say when he stops in the diners upstate. Just knowing he is going feels so freeing that I decide to run out to the yard and cut a couple of flowers for our “last meal” before he leaves.
I laugh to myself as I head down the steps behind Rio.
Guns and Roses. That’s Rio and me, all right.
CHAPTER 22
I’m not so far gone that I don’t know a mistake when I see one. But with my mother already here, it is too late to do anything about it.
“You have everything you need?” I ask her after I’ve spent the entire afternoon getting her settled into Dana’s room. Before I even went to collect her, I took down Dana’s Ricky Martin posters, removed the collection of Powerpuff girls that my mother refers to as “dust collectors” from the windowsills, and took away all the pillows I made for Dana out of Britney Spears Concert Tour T-shirts. I found a carafe for the bedside table that I painted for Dana, a clock that glows in the dark (though not too brightly) and wooden hangers for all of my mother’s clothes. I even found fresh drawer lining (scented—I hope she’ll forgive me) for the drawers I have emptied for her use.
“Do you need anything else?” Not that there is anything left to need, as far as I can see.
“I don’t know how you can live like this,” she says, picking at something stuck to Dana’s bedspread. “You need a good maid in here, Teddi.”
“I’m kind of between housekeepers at the moment, Mom,” I say, not mentioning that my mother’s household is, as far as I know, still being maintained by Angelina, and that Angelina is the very reason she is here with me. No use stating the obvious.
“One thing has nothing to do with the other,” she tells me as she runs her fingers across the top of the headboard as if she’s in some commercial for Pledge. “Your house needs cleaning. You don’t have to be here when Angelina cleans it. You can trust her with that sort of thing, you know. I’ll leave a message for your father to tell her—”
“I’ll get a cleaning service in,” I say, my shoulders sagging from the weight of an hour and forty-two minutes with my mother. “I should have done it before this.”
“We’ll tell your father to arrange it for Monday,” June says. She opens Dana’s window and lights a cigarette, glares at me and blows the smoke out the window. She is waiting for me to tell her she can’t smoke in the house. I am taking her window maneuver as recognition of the rule.
“I’ll take care of it,” I say, but I know I won’t.
“Did you have some idea about dinner?” she asks, looking at her watch. “You know how bitchy I get when I’m protein-deprived.”
“Really?” I ask, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice and resisting the urge to ask how one tells the difference between her general attitude and her protein-deprived state. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Well, you’d have to be paying attention to something outside yourself, dear,” my mother says, leaning out to crush the cigarette on the outside of my house before stooping to primp in Dana’s mirror.
“Why would you say something like that?” I ask, thinking about what Dr. Benjamin would make of this conversation. And the reason you let your mother, while you were extending your home to her, speak to you in that manner is? she would ask. “Why would you say something purposely hurtful to me, when I’ve taken you in, taken your side, done everything, all along the way, all my life…”
“What did I say?” my mother asks, looking innocent and confused. “I didn’t say anything about what you’re wearing, as I promised your father I wouldn’t. As if he deserves any kindnesses from me!”
“‘What I’m wearing?’” I repeat, looking down at my black capris and my man-tailored shirt on which I’ve fashionably raised the collar and tied the tails around my waist. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”
“This is 1997, not 1957, Teddi,” my mother says. “And Elvis has left the building.”
“Don’t you know what year it is, Mom?” I ask. Sometimes I forget that my mother is really sick, and not merely terminally annoying. “It’s 2005, Mother. And capris are back.”
My mother rolls her eyes. “Well, they shouldn’t be. I know! Let’s have Dana’s room painted for her as a surprise,” she says, running her hand down the wall and tugging at a seam in the wallpaper that has ‘Dana’ printed all over it. “She’s too old for this name stuff. She knows who she is, doesn’t she? And all this lavender!”
She stands back from the bed, putting up her hands to frame the scene. “I see taupes and beiges and browns. Very sophisticated. Maybe with a leopard throw for the bed.”
I put up my hands the same way and squint through them. “And I see Dana screaming her head off and never speaking to me again.”
“Your children are too willful,” June says. “My children never would have questioned my judgment in matters of taste.”
“Your children never had the nerve to have their own taste,” I say. “It wasn’t until I was twenty that I even knew I had an opinion on what color a wall ought to be. I thought every room was supposed to be taupe and beige and brown.”
“Exactly right,” she says, fingering the lace curtains through which I wove lavender ribbons to match the ones on the heart wreath Dana and I made together. “Anything else is tacky.”
My house is mostly hunter green, accented with bright white and varying intensities of salmon. Dana’s lavender bedroom doesn’t exactly blend, but self-expression for a teenager is a lot more important than blending in with her mother’s color scheme. At least I think so. “Thank you, Mother, for your decorating opinion.”
“Not that your house isn’t lovely, Teddi. For Syosset. Of course, if this was Cedarhurst, people might assume you were brought up on the wrong side of Peninsula Boulevard. But, since none of my friends will ever see it, what difference does it make? You needn’t worry about embarrassing me.”
“Thank you again,” I say. “It was the primary worry of my life until now. But it’s been replaced with dinner. What did you have in mind?”
“Well, if my advice isn’t important to you…” she says, her voice trailing off as she sits down on Dana’s bed, looking peeved. She is no more peeved than I am, no more dejected.
My God, did I actually think, hope, that one day she and I would bond, have what other mothers and daughters have? Sometimes it feels as if we are actresses, saying the same lines, playing the same roles, time after time, and still not getting anything right.
What role do I play with my mother? The long-suffering victim? The wronged one? The martyr? Isn’t that what Dr. Benjamin asked me? Isn’t it what she meant when she asked me why I was taking June home to my house? Because I need to be the martyr?
And what role does my mother play? The Wicked Witch of the West? Faye Dunaway in Mommy Dearest? Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce?
“Of course your advice is important,” I say, kicking myself for being so easily manipulated, telling myself it doesn’t count if I am a willing accomplice. “But Dana’s at a sensitive stage right now.”
“And I’m not?” my mother asks, one eyebrow raised. “I’m not fresh out of the hospital? You’re worried about her feelings and not mine?”
“I worry about everybody’s feelings,” I say. “And right now I’m feeling hungry. How about we walk up to the Plainview Shopping Center and have dinner at Kebobs?”
“Walk?” she asks.
“Well, I thought we could stop at Carvel on the way back and use up the calories.”
If my mother knows what is going on, she doesn’t say, and I am grateful. It’s not going all that badly until I take her into the kitchen in the daylight.
She clutches at her heart dramatically when she sees the piles of dirt out the window. Actually it is amazing she can see through the windows with all the dirt and dust clinging to them. I have had Mr. Windows come four times to clean them, but it is hopeless. Of all the z
illions of things I’ve forgotten lately, how could I ever have forgotten to prepare my mother for the idea of a pool in the backyard? Dr. Benjamin will no doubt have a field day with that little slip.
“Oh, right. I didn’t tell you about the pool, did I?” I say as brightly as I can.
“Remember your slippers,” my mother says simply. “The floors are cold there.”
I ask her where, but she just looks at me like I ought to know.
Oh. There.
“Are you okay?” I ask her when I see that she is shaking. “I could close the blinds in here.”
“I bet they have some good name for that,” she says, fingering the newly upholstered kitchen chairs.
I am about to tell her self-delusion when she apparently finds the word she is looking for herself.
“Chenille.”
“Actually, it’s cordless corduroy,” I correct her, tucking one of the chairs under the table. “I’ve got to turn off the hose on the rosebush,” I add as I slip out of my loafers and into the rubber garden clogs I wear in the backyard, noticing as I do that Rio has accidentally left a couple of things by the back door. “Oh, shoot.” I hold up Rio’s hat and rifle.
“No, don’t shoot,” my mother says in response.
“Guess he won’t be shooting,” I say. “Guess I’m not really too sorry about that.”
“It’s a very low-class hobby, Teddi,” my mother says as she fiddles with a cigarette but doesn’t light it. “It’s something you’d expect from trailer trash. And it’s time the man gave it up.”
I don’t answer her because not only do I agree, but what is really going through my head is that a man going hunting wouldn’t forget his rifle. I am thinking about how Rio has hardly made love to me for months. And how that’s been—like his going away for the weekend—a relief. Holding his rod, I admit to myself that something has been missing between us for a long time.
Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway? Page 16