by Heidi Pitlor
Chapter Seven
Kurt watched Cass the next morning while I worked. I flipped through the books that my mother had bought me back when Cass was a baby, books that laid out various sleep systems: a parent could choose to listen to their infant wail for increasingly long periods of time or sleep beside their wailing infant. A parent could choose to establish a rigid routine and schedule their life around sleep and/or feeding, or they could choose other highly structured methods. I thought about the word choice, and how infrequently some people—I—even encountered the opportunity to make any real choices. Sleep training? Clothing colors? When he was sick or I was too depleted to protest, Cass still slept in my bed. He wore whatever fit him from the clothing Maggie sometimes gave us, clothing that her own kids and nephews and nieces, a huge number, had outgrown. Pink, blue, Club Med Aruba. Sleep was sleep and clothes were clothes.
The doorbell rang, and Jessica Garbella stood before me in a teal ski jacket and yoga pants. She had a mass of blonde curls and a kind, healthy face. “Any chance you’ve got some olive oil? I get mine at the farmer’s market, but they’re done for the winter.”
“Sure,” I said. I went to the kitchen for the same bottle of Bertolli that I’d had for maybe three years, and when I returned, I caught her eyeing my living room. Cass had dumped all his laundry in a corner and was now sitting on the pile in his underpants. On the floor, in the center of the room, sat a stack of new stuff for Kurt’s Throne of Waste: an acoustic guitar, a cracked toilet lid, a cat-shaped desk lamp with two legs missing, and a bunch of unraveling baskets. Jessica had never been inside our house, although I had seen hers at the open house with Maggie and the day we had had coffee. Hers was decorated in oatmeal and ocean tones. It was faintly but not overwhelmingly posh, and was very, very clean.
“Sorry about the mess,” I said. “I’ve been working all morning.”
“Don’t apologize! You have work to do! You have better things to worry about than cleaning, right? Women should never apologize.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering if she knew of Lana and her signature phrase. I held forth the small bottle. “Is this okay?”
“I just need it to condition my scalp.” She eyed the bottle. “You know what? You keep it—I’ll just go buy some at that Natural Foods place in Lenox or wherever. No big deal.”
“You sure?”
“Totally. Do you need anything?’
I thanked her, but said no.
She looked behind me, maybe toward my kitchen. “If you’re working all day, I could pick up some prepared food for you guys for dinner? That place has incredible tahini lentil wrap sandwiches. I bet Cass would love them.”
At the time, Cass loved three varieties of foods: Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, almost anything from McDonald’s, and Papa Gino’s cheese pizza. There were a handful of other items that he tolerated, despite my best efforts to broaden his palate. “Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“It’s on me. It’s no trouble if I’m already going there, right?”
“Thanks, but he’s kind of picky.” What more to say? I smiled down at her feet. “I should probably get back to work.”
“Of course. You’re busy—I’m being such a pain. Oh hey, my yoga classes are full, but if you ever want to try it, I’ll make space for you. Just say the word, okay? I’ll even give you the ‘friends and family discount.’ ”
“Allie?”
It was two in the morning, and I had just been out cold.
“This isn’t the best time,” Kurt began. He rested on his elbow beside me. “But, I guess, I mean, I have to tell you something.”
I opened one eye and trained it on him.
“Don’t worry, it’s not so bad,” he said. He gathered the sheet around him and sat up in bed. “It’s just that I’ve decided to go hitch around Northern New England before winter really comes. My cousin up in Manchester invited me to housesit for him for a while. And I might try to hit Montpelier and Acadia. And even Labrador and Newfoundland, too, if I can find a way. There’s a storm coming this weekend, so I’m thinking that I’ll head out in a day or two. I haven’t gone anywhere in weeks. Months?”
It took less than a moment for his words to form a small, hard pit inside me.
“Huh,” I said. My eyes focused on his worn copy of Walden atop We’re Going on a Bear Hunt over on the bedside table. Since finishing Jimmy’s shed, he had painted the Garbella’s basement. That was a week ago, a week of sleeping late and reading, rather rereading—and frequently quoting to me—Henry David Thoreau’s chronicle of self-discovery, a week of watching Cass for a total of maybe an hour, of shooting hoops and getting stoned with Pete and watching TV and sleeping. “You shouldn’t hitch. Just take the train or something.”
“Trains cost as much as planes these days. I want to hitch—I’ve never done it before.”
“What about Throne of Waste and all the stuff you’ve been saving for it?”
“I’ll finish it when I get back,” he said. “Come with me.”
“What, and bring Cass?”
“Why not?”
“Because he just poisoned himself while Bertie slept in the next room, and because I have to work. Because I have a job. I have to pay rent and I have to be a mother and I have to stay here and be the grown-up. You know, we still owe Jimmy the rest of November rent and December is about a week away.”
“I’ll see if I can make some money when I’m traveling, okay?”
“Doing what?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
I could have thrown his dog-eared copy of Walden in his face. Technically, he was doing nothing wrong. He had never promised me more than he was currently giving us. He and I had explicitly agreed to the same freedoms, and he was merely setting off to enjoy them, something he was able to do as he had no real responsibilities, only his soul’s desires to direct him. I was tempted to ascribe this enviable condition to his gender, although I knew that would have been inaccurate.
“Don’t hitchhike. It’s not safe,” I tried again.
He reached in the drawer of the bedside table for a joint.
“I could use some help with Cass,” I said. “Bertie shouldn’t be watching him so much. Obviously, she can’t handle it anymore.”
“What about asking Sandra to come sit for him?” Sandra was Pete’s wife. She managed a new microbrewery in the next town.
“Why? Because she’s a woman? She already has a job.” Sandra had told me that she never wanted to have kids, that there was too much to enjoy in life without “that sort of straitjacket.”
“No. What the hell? She was good with Cass when they came by here the other day. She played Hide and Seek with him.”
“Just go,” I said, but not before I grabbed the joint out of his hands.
“I won’t be away forever.” He looked over at me. “One quick smoke?”
After he had gone back to sleep, I lay there awake. I finally went to find my book. “ ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. “ ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.” I glanced out the window at the world, black and cold. I hated being so needy, although maybe needy wasn’t the right word. I was something less overt, less invasive. I refused everything and required nothing and so here I was, just about alone with my son, still in Jimmy’s old house in the town next to the one where I had grown up.
I set down the book and reached again for the rest of the joint, now on my bedside table. It took but a few inhalations for me to assure myself that I was doing the best I could, that at least Cass was on the mend now, and that it was time to go to sleep.
When I Told Bertie that she no longer had to watch Cass three days each week, that for now one day would be plenty, she said, “You don’t trust me anymore.”
We sat at the card table in her kitchen. “No, that’s not true,” I lied. A better mother would have stopped this arrangement altogether and kept her son by her side until she figured things out, but with Kurt leaving so soon, I
needed any coverage I could get. “I’m working on this new project now and I’m home a lot more,” I said.
“You can’t work at the same time that you watch him. You’ve told me this again and again.” Soon enough, Bertie would be the closest person to a co-parent that I had. Despite everything, she loved Cass, and he loved her.
“I’m really sorry.” It was all I could say.
“All kids have their accidents. If they don’t get into medicine, they get into the house cleaners or the cat food, believe me. At my daycare I once had a kid eat a whole container of hamster food. Another kid got into my gin.”
I looked at her.
“It was a home daycare. The kid went upstairs into our apartment. You said Cass was feeling better today.”
I had not—and would not—tell her about the hours that we had spent at Berkshire Medical’s ER last night. There was little point. My eyes on her pocked green linoleum floor, I grew angry at something that I could not name.
It occurred to me that, with her new hours, we would see her less and that she would be alone far more. I might not be able to check on her regularly. “Why don’t you give me your son’s phone number?” I said. “You know, just in case of emergency.”
“But we hardly ever talk. To be honest, I doubt he’d come running if I needed him. He’s not what I’d call a good man. Anyway, he lives in Wichita.”
Jimmy came by that evening for rent and leaned into the doorway, sniffing around. “Smells good in here.” Kurt was preparing something Mexican in my kitchen.
I hated to ask. “You want to stay for dinner?”
Jimmy gave me a weird look and shrugged. “Why not?” He followed me inside the living room.
Thankfully Kurt had moved all the items he had collected for his sculpture down to the basement. In the kitchen, Jimmy glanced over Kurt’s shoulder at the chocolaty chicken broth simmering and softening the chunks of onions and tomatillos. The counter was covered in new glass containers of anise and coriander seeds, cloves and cumin, wrappers from stone-ground Mexican dark chocolate.
“Looks like mud,” Jimmy said.
“You guys don’t know this, but back when I was in college, I thought about becoming a professional chef for a while,” Kurt said.
“There are lots of things I don’t know about you,” I said. I did not know how he had been able to pay for all the ingredients of this meal, for example. I did not know when he would come back from this trip, or if, while hitchhiking, he would be picked up by a psychopath and left robbed and dismembered by the side of Interstate 91.
I watched Jimmy hoist up his silver track pants and take a seat at the table. He removed a toothpick from his shirt pocket and poked deep between his molars. His eyes scanned the cluttered kitchen, the dishes packed inside the sink, the overflowing trash can, the smear of something—chocolate?—on a cabinet door. This was his house. This was his stove on which our dinner was cooking.
He yanked the toothpick from his mouth and looked with curiosity at something he had extracted.
In the corner of the living room, Cass sat on the floor, arranging his crayons in a rainbow before him. I went to retrieve my laptop and put on “Rock Around the Clock” at full volume in order to drive out all the little sorrows rustling around inside me. Cass and I danced around the room, singing every word. This song was our game changer. Music often was, for us—we both liked the Ramones, the Jackson 5, Queen. Cass howled with laughter as I spun him up in the air and into the kitchen, barely missing Jimmy’s back. The song ended, and Cass brought his crayons to the kitchen table, where he drew a picture of the ocean, complete with a curl of moon overhead and wooly clouds and, I thought, a prodigiously rendered dolphin leaping in an arc from the water.
“Kurt tells me he’s going on a long trip?” Jimmy said, eyeing me above Cass. “You’ll cover December yourself? You got enough work these days?”
I nodded and kept my eyes on my son, as he added some purple to his water, some orange to his moonlight.
Back in the sleep-deprived, emotionally volatile, but also reverie-filled early days of his life, I began writing an essay about being a single mother. I wrote about the blunt and occasionally offensive questions from strangers (“What country did your baby come from?”), the unsolicited advice, but also my unprecedented affection for this boy. I had heard so much from Maggie about postpartum depression. When Connor was born, she was hardly able to get out of bed for weeks. Her doctor had put her on medication. I prepared myself for the worst, but my connection with Cass was immediate and so overpowering and physical that I wondered if I was actually experiencing the love of two parents for this soft, mewling, frightened-seeming little boy. “Welcome” had been my first word to him. I slid my finger inside one of his fists. It curled around me like a shrimp.
At that point, I had been ghostwriting for about seven years and had produced little personal work other than a few stunted tries at prose poems about the joys and frustrations of anonymity. I had published seven, almost eight books, but not one word under my own name. I had the notion that I had begun to absorb all these voices that I was ghosting, that they were beginning to saturate my consciousness, and that my own voice, whatever that was, had begun to atrophy.
I ended up drafting about half that essay during the strangely calm first weeks, when Cass slept well and often. I wrote of the double-edged sword of single-motherhood: Such joy! Just a year earlier, I had feared that I would never have a baby. Now I had this beautiful, healthy boy all to myself. I had this beautiful, healthy boy all to myself. I wrote about eight pages that culminated in thoughts that would be interesting to no one but me, thoughts like: “Dear Cassidy: What if my car finally dies or my landlord decides to sell this house or you grow sick and we run out of food and there is no one to stay home and watch you while I run to the store?”
Cass handed Kurt his finished picture and—bless him—Kurt set down his spatula and swooned. “Someday your art will be in a museum.” The most direct way to my heart had to be through my son.
Jimmy reached out and socked Cass on the arm, grinning. Cass yelped, came running to me, and buried his face in my chest.
“Don’t be a pussy,” Jimmy said.
“Jimmy. Jesus,” I said.
“You’ve got to teach him to take it,” he said.
“Why? So he can grow up to be like you?” My son had no one other than me to advocate for him.
“This is the world. The world isn’t soft. Allie, no one else is going to coddle him like you do, or let him wear a pink i lovermont T-shirt.”
“To hell with the world these days.”
“Dinner?” Kurt said loudly.
We took our places around the table. I poured the water and bit back the desire to continue berating Jimmy. The chicken mole was sweet and piquant and velvety, the salsa crisp and tangy.
“Not bad, Kurt,” Jimmy said. He mentioned a ranch home across town that he was considering buying. This would be his fourth property—paid for at least partly with the rent money that we gave him. “It’d need a facelift. Some new bushes out front, for starters, so maybe you can help out,” he said, looking at me.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“You hear stocks are up? Maybe our new president isn’t so bad after all, hey, Allie?” Sometimes Jimmy enjoyed taunting me about the fact that his “side” had won the election.
“You hear that he’s averaging twenty lies a day?” I said.
Kurt glared at me.
“Give him a chance,” Jimmy said. “He’s not even in office yet and the libtards are all crying their eyes out.”
“I’m sorry, ‘libtards’? I find that term infantile and moronic, if you want to know the truth.” I was well aware that I had just now sounded like the “coastal elite,” and I opened my mouth to say more when Kurt cut me off: “Who wants more wine? Or food? I made a ton, so everyone has to have seconds.”
“I’ll have more,” Jimmy said.
“You know what’s also moronic?”
I said. “The fact that he’s still talking about Hillary. The election is over.”
“Listen,” Kurt said, his eyes moving between us. “I am about to say something that you both need to hear. Repeat after me: ‘I will not talk politics with this person, at least while Kurt is out of town.’ ”
“This isn’t just everyday politics,” I said. “This is the future of our goddamned democracy.”
“ALLIE,” Kurt moaned. He flashed me a look that said, Jimmy is your landlord and you are only screwing yourself right now.
“Say it with me, Hon.” Jimmy grumbled, laughing.
But what I really wanted to say was, “What exactly do you admire about the new president? Was it the time he told an interviewer, ‘It doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,’ or when he said that a female opponent was too ugly to win votes? Was it his comment about Mexicans being rapists or his birtherism? Was it his comment about dating his daughter? Or the one about Megyn Kelly?”
But I had a son who needed a home and lived in a town where rent prices were on the rise. My cash flow was so unpredictable that no other landlords would have put up with me for this long. I reluctantly repeated the words alongside Jimmy: “I will not talk politics while Kurt is out of town.”
“We need some booze,” Jimmy said. He reached for his wallet and handed me a $20 bill. “You want to run out and get a six-pack of Coors and a bottle of chardonnay or whatever for you?”
It seemed a kind of olive branch, an olive twig. “Sure. Be back in a few,” I said, and headed out.
Still riled, I allowed myself to sit in my truck outside Discount Liquors and listen to Sarah Vaughan singing “Mean to Me.” I took my time in the store and tried to center myself. Jimmy was hardly the only person in the country who had voted the way he had. Getting through a day meant alternately enduring and rejecting patriarchy.
Back home, I set the Coors and a six-pack of Guinness for me and Kurt on the counter.
“Jesus,” Jimmy said, peeling back the tab on a can. “You drink that tar? I bet it gets you hammered after three sips.”