by Heidi Pitlor
We stood there, Cass with one finger far inside his ear now.
“Don’t pick your ear,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. He did not remove his finger, but it seemed cruel to badger him further.
To write without stopping for Lana’s approval at the end of each chapter was freeing. Time moved more quickly, and before long I sent Gin three more chapters. Again, she said, “Better, but we need more Zach, more Lana, more soft moments between her and Norton. What does it feel like when he graduates elementary school? Is she sad, proud, what?”
I added in whatever came to mind; I wrote things I had heard Maggie say about Connor. I added Little League playoffs and a martial arts tournament. I tweaked stories about me and Cass and wove those in as best I could. To mitigate my unease over all my fabricating, I expanded a rather academic discussion of phones, texting, and social media, and added in research about the impact of screen time on middle schoolers’ brains, Gin be damned. It was Lana’s book, after all, and she had been the one so eager to include research and data.
I added back another day at Little Rainbows for Cass now that payment seemed within reach. He lost his first tooth and I got to play tooth fairy. I left him a note written in swirly cursive thanking him for trusting “me” with such an important thing. His eyes went wide when I read him her words.
The days grew warmer in a brief respite from winter, and the rest of the snow on our lawn melted. Jessica began to come over some late afternoons with tea for us and hummus and carrots or kale chips for Cass, who unfortunately was not shy about his preference for less nutritional snacks. Still, 2017 was turning into a decent year.
One day, Jessica and I went for a walk around our neighborhood during lunchtime, and she confided in me that she and Ron had begun to consider adoption.
“That’s exciting,” I said.
“I know—it’s exciting and terrifying and a million other things at the same time. I assume you and Kurt adopted Cass?” she said carefully.
“Oh! No,” I answered, and I finally explained how Cass had come to be. I may have tried to make it sound as if Daniel and I had shared a prolonged romantic relationship.
“Where’s this guy Daniel now?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But I’m fine with it. Honestly.”
“You are?”
I told her that, in the end, we were not all that compatible. “Things might have been financially easier, and of course it would have been better for Cass to know his father. I guess I’d be lying if I said that I never once wished we had fallen in love.”
“But now you have Kurt!”
I nodded. “Sometimes.”
“He’ll come back. You are so brave, Allie. You had a baby on your own! You’ve done everything on your own.”
“It didn’t feel like bravery. It felt more like necessity—both sleeping with Daniel and having the baby,” I half-joked. “I mean, I was getting older and I’d always wanted a child.”
“I know, it’s a devastating thought that you might never have one, right?”
Before meeting Daniel, I did not remember devastating thoughts, just a nervous hesitation about what my future might hold, as well as real appreciation for the sudden opportunity. And, afterward, a strange comfort at the idea of becoming a mother maybe, alongside a stew of other more complicated thoughts and feelings. But I kept my mouth shut.
The next day, after I picked Cass up from Little Rainbows and steered my truck into my driveway, I saw a person sitting on my front stoop. I had to look closer to see who it was. He had a beard now and wore a brown leather hat that I did not recognize.
Cass flung open the truck door before I came to a stop, and I slammed on the brakes and yelled after him. He ran out to Kurt, and I shifted into park and followed Cass. Kurt appeared more solid in his flannel jacket than I remembered, and he smelled like dirt. He looked entirely different with his beard, older maybe, and frayed, and his fair skin was faintly burned and chapped. He had turned into another person altogether from that man in the pinstripe suit on that wood bench over a year ago.
“You two,” he said. He shook his head. He dumped his big duffel bags on the kitchen floor, and I worried that he would now tell us he was just here for a few hours, that he had decided to go with his new friends to Wyoming or something. He had been gone for so long.
“You’re back? I mean you’re not headed anywhere else right now?” I whispered. I hardly wanted to get into anything more in front of Cass.
“It appears that I am back and not going anywhere any time soon.”
“Good,” I said, relieved to have another adult who could help with Cass. But also something else. I understood then that I had missed Kurt’s presence, his body and his deep voice around the house, his slow saunter, his foot rubs, the curve of his legs against mine when we slept, and his mouth, and the pressure of his lips.
I made grilled cheese sandwiches while Cass told Kurt about Bertie disappearing and our driving around at all hours to look for her, my working “every single minute,” about Jimmy and our Christmas. “What did you do when you were away? Why were you gone for so long?” Cass asked him. “Why do you have a beard?”
“Well, I helped build a barn and I thought I’d try a new look. You like it?”
“A little.”
Kurt told us all about the farm where he had been living. “There were goats and cows and chickens. We collected eggs and cooked them fresh every morning. And there was a rooster they called Magpie. He sounded more like a dog howlin’ at the moon than a Buckeye crowin’. He woke me up every single morning before the sun rose.”
Cass grinned. Evidently he liked this new persona. “What else?” he said to Kurt.
“There was Delilah, the billy goat, and when she got goin’ she sounded like a whiny teenager beggin’ to go to the mall with her friends.”
“You picked up a new accent,” I said flatly.
“Might be I did.” He lifted off his leather hat, revealing the thinning top of his hair.
I hoped that he was hamming things up just for Cass’s sake. I was not entirely sure what to think of this faux farmer shtick, maybe in part because it was a residue of his long time away, and evidence of his happiness elsewhere. “I hate to be a spoilsport,” I said. “But I’m on deadline right now. You mind if I go work at the library?”
Kurt agreed to watch Cass, and the two of them headed into the living room. I saw Kurt pull a piece of maple sugar candy from the side pocket of one of the duffel bags. I could breathe again. With his help I might even finish this book with time to spare. I would sleep better at night. I would have sex again. Maybe I could even finally finish To the Lighthouse, its pages now dried.
Still, over the years I had thought, maybe fantasized, that Cass and I were a self-contained unit bucking the odds, thriving in our subversion of tradition and its bounds. Me and Cass, my sidekick, the two of us doing just fine on our own. Very few people could single-handedly manage everything in their lives, of course, but for so long, forever it seemed, I had tried to do just this. Independence had been my north star, but I could not single-handedly manage everything in my life. At least not now. This understanding was both a relief and terrifically sad.
Ours is a time saturated with technology, an unprecedented flood of videos and images for which the younger teen boy may not be prepared.
Seated at one of two carrels, I researched the tween and teenage boy’s brain and male impulsivity and aggression during these years, as if I had not already seen it first-hand when I had subbed. I wrote of trying to maintain one’s parental authority in the face of the adolescent need for independence and choice; ways to teach boys to respect girls and their own and each other’s changing bodies; the capacity and function of language, the role of demeaning words that could be heard nearly everywhere lately, particularly in the realm of politics.
So much lecturing. I had to bring it back down to earth. I added a brief scene of Norton and his friends getting a b
ite to eat after their martial arts class.
When I returned home, the furniture had been pushed to the sides of the living room to make room for a huge floor puzzle. Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles lay partly finished, with pieces strewn everywhere. “I got it up in Vermont for our future painter,” Kurt told me.
Cass tried a piece that showed one of the tilted paintings, and it fit. “Look!” he said.
Something inside of me grew and swelled and filled every empty part.
And then, the feeling shrank. I wondered why love so often felt like sadness. “Don’t be wonderful,” I wanted tell Kurt, and might have if we were alone. “Don’t behave like Cass’s father unless you plan to be this person for the rest of time. Don’t be good to me unless you plan to always be good to me.”
“It’s me,” my mother said over the phone one morning. Kurt and I were still in bed, and I had been tucked inside a dream that he and I and Cass were hanging out at Lana’s house and rearranging her living room for a visit from Aretha Franklin. I resented being yanked back to reality. I heard Cass moving around in the other room, and caught up with my mother, but could not shake my resentment. “Lottie’s friend Maura said that her daughter put away a hundred dollars a month and ended up saving over thirty-five thousand,” she said. “I wish Ed and I had done something like this for you when you were young. We started saving way too late, and then you had to rely on that scholarship and then even some of that fell through at the end.”
“Mom, please,” I said. “I don’t earn enough to start that kind of account right now.”
“You’re not twenty-three anymore. And you know, Cass should probably be in preschool every day, not just some days. Believe me, when he’s older, you’ll understand what it’s like to want him to be independent and really thrive so that you as a parent can let go and not worry anymore and just enjoy your own life.”
We had been talking for maybe five minutes and I already wanted to throw a brick through a window. “Lana Breban,” I heard myself say. “She’s who I’m working with right now.”
“Oh!” my mother said. “She’s that famous feminist?”
“Yes,” I said.
Behind me, Kurt made a sleepy sound.
“Now forget I just told you that.”
“I read her op-eds all the time—and her speech at the Women’s March was incredible. She’s becoming really famous!”
“Yeah, she’s having a moment. The time is right.”
“You know who’s a huge fan of hers? Patty Copeland. She joined Twitter just so she could follow Lana.”
I could all but hear the gears turning in my mother’s mind. “Mom. This stays between us.”
Kurt, now awake, stared over at me. He may have heard everything.
I went to finish our talk in the bathroom and ran my finger along the cracked edge of a floor tile as she spoke.
“I just want to be able to brag a little about you. Sue me for feeling proud of you. Come on, Alligator. Let me namedrop just this once?” she said. She had not called me “Alligator” since I was a kid.
I did not buy this maternal pride. My mother was not a person content to be outdone by someone she envied. “Maybe you just want to tell her I’m working with someone like Lana, someone who’s so well-known and influential and everything because in reality, I—and you—are none of these things, and you desperately wish we were. I mean, at Tanglewood, all those times you pretended that you didn’t work at the ticket booth or the gift shop, but that you were there as a tourist? Did you think I didn’t know what was going on? All that stuff you’ve taught yourself over the years about wines and art that you can’t even afford?”
“That is just nasty.”
“I’m only being honest,” I said.
“All right, we’re being honest now? How about your telling me and Dad about this big, secret job right there in a crowded restaurant? And your being so high-strung about Cass that night? I wasn’t the one who was embarrassed in front of all those people at Tabitha’s.”
“I didn’t want to go to Tabitha’s in Lenox! And I wasn’t embarrassed in front of them. I was just feeling judged by you and Ed.”
“ ‘Judged?’ Why would you feel judged by us? That’s ridiculous.”
I pressed End.
Fuming, I paced as much as was possible in my small bathroom. I considered the absurd amount of currency that my mother gave to others’ opinions of her and stubbed my toe against the baseboard, hollered a few choice words into a towel, and decided to take a shower. I must have stayed a half-hour or more in the steam of the hot water, scrubbing my elbows and feet, working the shampoo into my scalp with my fingernails, and rinsing every last bit from my hair.
Kurt sat up in bed, reading Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. When he saw me, he set down the book. “What’s going on?”
I told him as little as I could—yes, I had just leaked the identity of my client to my mother. Yes, this client was Lana Breban.
“Get out,” he said. “Birgitte used to be obsessed with her column in the Times.”
This information landed a little off-kilter for me. “Really?”
“Allie, that’s awesome!”
“It is pretty awesome,” I said. At least I could be sure that Kurt would not spill my news to Birgitte. Mostly sure.
We all know or have met a teenage boy who comes home from high school, grabs a snack from the cabinet, and takes it up to his messy bedroom. Media would have us believe that this is an inevitable fate, that women are the only ones to shop, cook, and clean for our families. Why not teach your son to cook and even encourage him to make dinner for the whole family—and maybe one or two of his friends—once a week? Why not ask him to clean the house in exchange for something, perhaps extra money, thereby teaching him that cleaning is labor and should be valued as such?
I considered writing a scene of Norton cooking or cleaning. The last time I had asked Cass to make his bed, he had said, “Why? You never make your bed.” I said something about being the mother and the boss and respect, and I probably did not speak with enough conviction or volume, because no bed had been made since then.
A few days after Kurt’s return, the Garbellas hired him to do their taxes and help get their finances in order. It was enough to cover some of the back rent that I owed Jimmy, as well as a furniture-making course in Lenox. Kurt had built some Adirondack chairs up in Brattleboro and said, “I think building furniture might be something I’d want to do for a living.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Yeah. If I do say so, my chairs were pretty good. And it felt great to make something that other people might even want to buy, you know? Anyway, I’m going to check out a salvage place, see if there’s some old wood I could play around with. Okay to take the truck?”
A voice inside of me said that making furniture had to be about as lucrative as farming heirloom tomatoes. Wouldn’t it be better, given his finance background, for him to start up a small accounting or tax firm here in town? But another voice told me to cool it, that furniture-making certainly beat doing nothing, and that finding one’s passion was no easy matter. I thought of how my father had been a cabinetmaker and of the pieces of furniture he had made himself: the little desk that had been in my room growing up, the end table that I had covered in stickers. Maybe this loose serendipity meant something about Kurt and me.
I knew so little about my father, and I went to find the old shoebox that I kept at the top of my bedroom closet. Inside were a few mementos of my childhood: my first library card, a favorite Garfield comic strip, a postcard from Aunt Setti and Uncle Nathan, one small photograph of my father, Eli Lang, holding me. In it, he sat on a plastic folding chair, wearing shamefully small yellow athletic shorts, a Cat Stevens T-shirt, and round John Lennon–style wireframe glasses. He had a dark beard, a mole above one eyebrow, and was, I thought, a relatively handsome guy. I was swaddled in a white blanket, and the only part of me that was visible in the picture was my wi
de-open mouth. One of his hands hovered near my stomach and he gazed down at me, his own mouth ajar as if he were saying something, maybe trying to calm me. I was two months old and he was thirty-four. A year later, he would be gone.
I considered calling my mother and making amends. It had been days since our argument, and I still felt sick about it.
Soon, I told myself. Soon enough, if I did not hear from her first.
That afternoon, Kurt fixed a pipe under the sink that had gotten clogged with one of Cass’s socks. Maybe it had been there a while; he was old enough to know better now. Kurt went off to find Cass. I tried to ignore the heavy smell of Drano, and returned to my laptop at the table.
I was nearing the end of Lana’s book, and set out to write about separating from your son if and when he went to college. I advocated for allowing him to choose his own path, whatever this might be, and afterward pausing to honor your own accomplishments in raising him. How about a trip somewhere or a nice dinner with family or friends, if possible?
I looked over at the photograph of Lana still taped to my window before launching into the final chapter: “Adulthood.” I could see Cass and Kurt through the window, dragging branches and carrying sticks across the lawn. When Cass was twenty-five, I would be sixty-four. I tried to picture myself as an older person and it was hardly difficult; thin creases had appeared on my neck. At some point, my hair had grown coarser and the grays near my left temple had joined in a stripe. There were moments when I grew distressed about aging and the unstoppable passage of time, but others when my changing appearance and Cass’s new abilities fascinated me. We got to be a number of different people in one lifetime. What would Kurt look like in the future? An image came to me: an amalgam of himself, that photograph of my father, and my uncle Nathan. And Cass? At twenty-five? Kurt chased him in a circle around the yard, and they both disappeared from view. When they returned, they tried to build a towering structure from the branches. It was the strangest thing—the two were framed inside the center windowpane right above Lana’s picture. They looked as if they had all been caught there, placed just so for my viewing.