With Friends Like These

by Sally Koslow

  “What was that?” I croaked.

  “Panic attack,” Sheila said. “Textbook case. We see it all the time, only usually from the daddies.”

  “Are you going to send me to a hospital?” I hated hospitals, places where daughters like me were required to visit whiny, helpless, attention-seeking, chain-smoking mothers.

  “No, I’m going to send you home,” she said. “After you’ve rested.” She looked at her watch. “We’re here for another hour and you’re welcome to stay.”

  “I have a Xanax in my bag.” My new client was a psychopharmacologist.

  Sheila managed to give me a look of reprimand. “Absolutely not.”

  I thought it best not to inquire about Ativan or Klonopin. It would be hard enough being somebody’s mother without producing a child with two heads. Somebody’s mother. I worried that I’d surrender to another wave of panic, but if anything, I felt numb.

  “Do you meditate?”

  “I’ve been your patient for twelve years. We’ve gone out socially. What do you think?”

  “Right.” Sheila began to stroke my hair. Fighting every instinct, I didn’t pull away. “As your doctor, I want you to at least enroll in a yoga class. I can recommend several excellent prenatal programs.”

  Was she going to start in on breast pumps? Hemorrhoids? Peanut allergies? Preschool applications, Chloe’s most tedious obsession of late? Sheila caught my flinch.

  “Actually, we can discuss that on your next visit.” She looked at a calendar. “For the foreseeable future, please stick to the basics we went over before—no caffeine, which includes Coke and chocolate. But not to worry. Sex is okay.”

  Hot sex, cuddly sex, oral sex, anal sex, morning sex, insomnia sex, reconciliation sex, public-place sex, shower sex, back-seat-of-a-taxi sex, airplane sex, phone sex. None of it was a temptation. Sex was what had put me in this condition.

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Now, is there someone you can call to take you home? The father, perhaps?”

  I’d seen enough of Arthur for one day, and what good would he do anyway, carless as he was? Chloe answered before her phone finished its first ring. “Hi there,” I said. “I’m pregnant.”

  “Not exactly a news flash.”

  “I’m going to stay pregnant,” I added. “For about six and a half more months.”

  She responded with surprising quickness. “I never expected anything else.”

  “Then why didn’t you speak up?”

  “Not my place,” Chloe said, though had she been in my situation, I couldn’t imagine that I wouldn’t have run my mouth. “What do you think of the ring? Do you love it? I’ve been waiting all afternoon for you to—”

  I interrupted her blathering. “I know this is asking a lot, but is there any chance you could pick me up at Sheila’s and drive me home?” Requesting favors is a practice with which I have had limited experience. “Please?”

  Chloe showed up in a half hour. I spent the first five minutes in the car trying to listen to suggestions for baby names—did I actually look like the kind of woman who’d name her son Marco de Marco?—and the remaining forty with my jaw dropped while I listened to a tale about a man I found hard to believe could be Xander Keaton.

  CHAPTER 43

  Quincy

  It had been two years since I’d set foot in Minneapolis. On the last visit, for my mother’s funeral, it was lilac season. Now, as I stood outside the airport, a northern wind slapped me in the face, a wake-up call asking why I’d made the trip. But after last week’s phone conversation, I didn’t feel I had a choice. I’d bought my tickets with Dr. Frumkes’ blessing: I approached normal life cautiously, more fatalist than optimist, allowing myself the most modest sprinkling of hope.

  “Quincy, dear,” a voice had croaked when I’d picked up our phone. “Do you remember me?” Of course I remembered my childhood next-door neighbor, the saint who for the final year of my mom’s life had checked on her almost hourly, delivering mysteries, walnut fudge, and eventually sympathy.

  “Sylvia, how great to hear from you,” I said. “Merry Christmas.” The holiday was ten days away.

  “Same to you and that handsome husband,” she said. “Please forgive the early morning interruption.”

  “It’s not so early,” I said. “It’s already past nine in New York.”

  “Of course,” she answered. “I’m such a goose.”

  There was a pause, which I restrained myself from filling. Sylvia Swenson was the kind of woman whose health you learned not to inquire about unless you had twenty minutes free to put your feet up for a soliloquy about heartburn and hearing aids. Nonetheless, my heritage prompted good manners. “How is everyone? Janelle and Dwight? Susan and Hap? The grandkids?” My brain surprised me by delivering the names of my earliest babysitters and their graying, interchangeable spouses, who now lived in trim ranch houses on modestly landscaped quarter-acre lots fringing the city.

  “Very well, thank you. But dear, I’m not phoning about them,” she said.

  That’s when I realized something must be wrong, because second to ill health, Sylvia never missed an opportunity to ramble about her children’s latest minivans and diets and their offspring’s hamsters and hockey leagues. “It’s your tenants, Quincy dear. Those people you rented your mother’s lovely house to.” She enunciated “those people” as if she were biting into one of her lemon drops.

  Rarely a month passed without a grievance shouted on letterhead from Mrs. Crybaby, Esq.’s firm, return receipt requested. What about the mice? We’d never had vermin before, discounting squirrels that ran relays around the backyard. Would you pay for a gardener? Esq. and her husband couldn’t mow the lawn and pull a few dandelions? Would you lower our rent, considering that we’ve repainted the house ourselves? They hadn’t asked for my permission to paint the walls the blackish green of a Bavarian forest, and after looking at the photographic evidence, I decided my renters had managed to turn an interior already heavy with oak wainscoting into something as gloomy as a grave.

  Besides, as Jake pointed out, the Crybabies were getting a bargain. After Mom had died, the woman I’d met with from Gopher Homes Realty set the price, which I was too grief-stricken to question. The next day she’d presented me with a three-year lease to sign and happily pocketed her commission. But this broker was no Horton; whenever I wanted her to run interference, she was invariably AWOL, leaving to close on a property that she made clear was far more important than mine. The problem this time was noise, Sylvia reported—loud parties every night. “They could wake the dead,” she said, and instantly apologized, for fear that I’d think she was referring to Mom.

  After the Gopher Homes broker failed to return several calls, Jake offered to travel to the Twin Cities for a showdown. This made no sense. He was starting a major trial, while my days—even my months—stared back at me like unfilled parentheses. I was feeling, if not mellow, at least fueled by appreciation for my stable pregnancy. Even the betrayal inflicted by Jules had begun to feel remote. Which was how I came to return to my childhood home, having succeeded in making an appointment with my tenant, a Dr. Miller, on the pretext that I was in town for business and wanted simply to say hello. The meeting was scheduled for Tuesday morning.

  When the taxi pulled up, I was sucked into a cyclone of nostalgia: pedaling my bike on the elm-shaded street, drawing a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk, reading Betsy-Tacy and Tib while curled on the window seat. I was prepared for the house to look shrunken, smaller in reality than in my memory, as homes and old boyfriends generally do. But 4924 Oliver Avenue towered above the other houses on the block, its two stories crowned by a smaller third floor that sat on the brown shingled roof like a top hat. The house was too sturdy to be called graceful—standard-issue Arts and Crafts, without a swirl of whimsy—but the fortress beckoned me as if she were a stout grandmother, all but giving off the scent of baking bread.

  I rang the bell, expecting to be greeted by a member of a Rolling
Stones cover band. A man in a Mr. Rogers cardigan answered. He was silver-haired yet unlined, half-glasses dangling from a cord around his neck, in slippers, resembling a rocker no more than I did Dolly Parton.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Peter Miller.” He extended his hand, which was large and warm. “Welcome to the Twin Cities.” He chuckled. “What am I saying? I’m welcoming you back to your own home.”

  Welcome. The word kissed my soul. This supposed giver of ear-piercing parties chuckled as he motioned me into the vestibule. The red tiled floor gleamed, and on all but one birch bark hook—we’d bought them on a trip to Itasca State Park, to see the headwaters of the Mississippi—were the knit caps and tartan scarves common to an upper Midwest winter. He added my coat to the empty hook. “The coffee’s ready, and I hope you don’t mind that it’s decaf,” he said as he directed me toward the dining room, where two places had been set with striped plates and large orange mugs. “Corn muffin?”

  I’d eaten pancakes in the hotel coffee shop but didn’t say no. The man smiled as he poured the coffee and steamed milk. “Delicious,” I said, not knowing how to start the conversation I’d come here to have. From a faraway room, classical music played.

  “I apologize for being hard to reach,” Peter Miller said. “I’ve just returned from Panama.”

  “Vacation?”

  “Working on the canal. I’m a geologist at the U, with a grant from the Smithsonian.”

  “How interesting,” I said as I buttered my muffin. “I guess that means you’ve been out of town recently?”

  “For six months. My son was staying here with my wife, until …” He turned his head, seemingly transfixed by a beam of morning light piercing the leaded glass window. “My ex,” he added as he faced me again. “We’re separated. She’s moved to Oklahoma.”

  I stumbled for words. “I’m so sorry”—and not only for this stranger’s altered marital status, which he seemed to regret, as well as for invading his privacy, but for what seemed like the complete absurdity of my mission. I was sorry for everything but the coffee and especially the muffin. I could have eaten two.

  He waved away the awkwardness. “What brings you to town, Mrs. Blue?”

  “Quincy,” I said. “An interview.” I started yammering, and the polite emptiness on this geologist’s face told me Maizie May had never made it onto any of his mental maps.

  “I gather from your message this was the house you grew up in,” he said after I stopped talking a Sylvia Swenson streak. “Did you want a look-see?”

  More than anything. “I don’t mean to trouble you.”

  My tenant smiled and got up from the table. “Come on.” He began to lead me through the downstairs rooms, every one immaculate.

  I could see my mom in the pale blue kitchen making soup from the vegetables she’d grown in our garden; carrying pop bottles to a basket next to the back door—Alice Peterson recycled ahead of her time; reading in the sunroom, whose faded cushions she’d sewn years before; looking for a volume from the encyclopedia—it was still there—in the living room, whose many shelves were now half empty. I saw Peter Miller focus on a large gap; his wife must have taken her books. He looked toward the wide stairs underneath a stained-glass window patterned with grapes. “Want to see your girlhood room?”

  I made a show of looking at my watch. “Darn,” I said. Darn? “I arranged for the taxi to pick me up in fifteen minutes.”

  “But you’ve come all this way.” Now he was a father gently lecturing a daughter home from college. “Go up there—I’ll be here.”

  I walked the stairs, pausing on the landing to look out the window at the crabapple tree, which, come late May, would be in full pink flower. Then I tiptoed up to the second floor and opened the first door. We’d used this bedroom for my grandparents every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. Now it was a study, with rows of bookshelves. Geology Essentials by Peter Miller, Ph.D., sandwiched between sports biographies and Civil War histories.

  The second door had led to my mother’s sewing room, with jars full of buttons and baskets of remnants she would turn into doll clothes. In the Miller household, this was an athlete’s shrine—rows of shiny trophies spoke of a young man’s accomplishments.

  The third bedroom had been mine. Where twin beds with cherry headboards once stood was a frilly canopy bed, exactly the sort I’d prayed for years that Mom would buy. I walked inside and circled the perimeter. The white milk glass ceiling fixture was unchanged, two popcorn balls dangling from my ceiling. This room, too, had books—Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Judy Blumes. But they weren’t my books, and much as I wanted to settle into a red corduroy armchair tucked into a corner, I forced myself to continue to the third bedroom. Here I found, quietly abandoned, an elaborate set of drums, amplifiers, and two electric guitars: guilty as charged.

  Called by Mozart, I ventured on, across the square center hall. Behind the next door was the far larger bedroom where Mom had been a prisoner of the Alzheimer’s that had taken her life far too soon. I peeked inside to find her grand sleigh bed, its heavy cherry sides and headboard as much throne as bed. It was made up with lacy white linens not unlike those she’d used herself. I could picture her sleeping, her breath whispering in time with Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. She looked content, her silvery blond hair spread across the shoulders of her pale blue nightgown. Her eyes were closed. I imagined that she was peaceful, dreaming, maybe even of me.

  That’s when I felt it. The sensation was, at first, like a guppy doing laps in my belly. Not until the twitch repeated—twice—did I understand it for what it was. My baby’s first kicks. From the window, a crisp winter sun spotlit a circle on the braided rug. I stepped into it and could feel not only my unborn child but surely my mom, who was blessing this visit and this new life, wishing for me all the comforts of home.

  I lingered for a minute, maybe two. “You okay up there?” I heard Peter Miller call.

  “On my way down,” I shouted, though I wanted to stay rooted within the golden halo of what I was sure was an angel, not that I would mention her to Jake. I walked downstairs.

  “Got a moment for a refill?” my tenant asked. “I’m hoping you might give me a chance to explain some things.”

  Ah, he knew about the parties. “Only a few minutes,” I said, checking the grandfather clock. We sat again at the table.

  “I want to apologize for those reams of hostile letters my wife kept sending your way,” Dr. Miller began as he refilled my mug. “I suspect you’re here partly to see if I’m as unhinged as they suggest, and I can’t say I blame you.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Not at all.”

  “You’d have every right to think my wife and I were a bit off. The truth is, she—my ex—was—is—unwell—manic-depressive—and when she’s in her frantic phase, there’s no stopping her. And, you see, she’s an attorney. Was an attorney.”

  “I never took those letters seriously.” I hoped he wouldn’t notice that I squirmed.

  “That’s a relief. Thank you. In any event, I’m glad you’re here, because with my change in circumstances …” Now it was he who was stumbling. “I have the opportunity to return to the canal in a month’s time, and the truth is, this house is far too big for me now that I’m alone, with my wife gone and my kids away at school. I’m lost in this much space. I know I have one more year on our lease, and I certainly will honor my obligation, but Mrs. Blue”—here he looked truly forlorn—“should you want to break the contract and seek another renter, the truth is, you could command a far higher rent. With Lake Harriet only blocks away and all the running and biking paths in the park … did you know that you can run for miles, all the way to the river?”

  “Excuse me,” I said, and walked to the living room to look out front. My taxi waited. “I hate to be rude, but I really do need to go. I’m sorry for being abrupt, and I want to thank you for this chance to stop by. I’ll definitely think about what you said, Dr. Miller—or is it Professor?”

  “I
t’s Pete.”

  “Pete. I’ll talk it over with my husband, and we’ll see what we can do.” I couldn’t resist a smile, and not just because my guppy was doing another flip turn. “I promise.”

  He helped me on with my coat, and we shook hands. I stepped quickly down the walkway to the curb, hoping Sylvia Swenson hadn’t spotted me, and had the driver take me to my hotel. I’d planned to spend the late morning and early afternoon at the Walker, visiting with sculptures I thought of as old friends, but instead I collected the small bag I’d stored at the hotel and went straight to the airport.

  “I got a seat on an earlier flight,” I reported to Jake before I boarded.

  “Great,” he said. “Did you give that bastard what for?”

  “Not exactly,” I confessed. “There was a misunderstanding.”

  “That’s a relief. Hope the trip wasn’t a waste of time. Did you at least stroll down memory lane?”

  Over a loudspeaker, my flight was called. I’d thought about waiting to ask until I arrived in New York, but I’d lost my impulse control, along with, suddenly, any desire to raise my child in an apartment house, where—no matter how fancy—the downstairs neighbors would complain about small feet running on a floor or little fingers pressing all twenty elevator buttons.

  I felt my face break into a smile, like ice splitting on a lake. “Jake,” I blurted out, “how do you feel about moving to Minneapolis? I know just the house.”

  The decision felt less like escape than a sweet return. If I didn’t need to board my plane, I even might have called my friends. Including Jules.

  CHAPTER 44

  Chloe

  I’ve always felt that Fifth Avenue, come late November, is one long, irresistible bûche de Noël. Wearing my cheeriest coat, my ritual is to start at Rockefeller Center for the lighting of the tree. I stake a claim near the ice skating rink and wait for hours, letting myself melt into the city’s most polite crowd. Once the switch is flicked, I drift north toward Central Park with the happy herd of parents and children—feeling nine years old myself—to gawk at windows bedecked for the holidays.