“Good things?”
“Yes, mostly.”
Cat wishes, I thought. My dad put his arm over my shoulders, and I almost burst out crying.
Before we could talk more about it, Mom appeared carrying something in her hands, and it took me a moment to realize she had collected most of Mr. Periwinkle’s toys. A cat fishing pole, a knitted robin, a wind-up mouse that contained catnip, a jingle bell swat ball. Whether she meant it as an act of kindness or simply wanted to be rid of the clutter of owning a cat, I couldn’t determine. She loved Mr. Periwinkle, I knew, but she loved him from a distance, as you might love a sunset or a snowstorm.
Then I realized if she meant it simply as a means to rid herself of the cat junk, she could have thrown it out and I would have been none the wiser. Over the last years, while I was at school, she had been the cat custodian. Somewhat grumpy, and grudging with her outward affection, she had been as fond of Mr. Periwinkle as I had been. She was simply more private about it. I realized that was something I had to keep in mind about my mother.
“That looks nice,” Mom said about the grave. “You did a good job, honey.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Are we ready?” Dad asked.
I went and carried the box from the garage. It weighed next to nothing. This was the second thing I had buried, I realized, in less than a half year. That probably had some meaning, but I couldn’t divine what it might be.
I held the box and asked everyone to put a hand on it.
“Good-bye, Mr. Periwinkle,” I said. “You were a good cat and a good friend, and no one can ask for more than that.”
Mom, my sweet mom, put her face down and began to cry. My dad knelt on the other side of the hole and helped me put the box inside. Then Mom handed us the cat toys, and we buried those on top, turning our Mr. Periwinkle into a tiny Viking warrior, in his hatbox ship, who would need his weapons and inspirations of joy if he intended to feast in Valhalla with Odin on this gray October morning.
41
“You still haven’t heard anything about him? No word from him, of course,” Mom asked.
It was late. Dad had gone to bed. We sat in the solarium with two cups of tea. Mom wanted to try a licorice-flavored tea that was supposed to be good for muscle and tendon ache. She always tried various teas, few of them effective, but I liked the scent of the licorice in the chill interior of the solarium. I held the cup close to my chest.
I shook my head. I hadn’t heard anything about him.
She didn’t have to spell out whom she meant by him.
“Well,” she said and let it hang.
“Constance says Raef refuses to talk about it. He’ll talk about anything else, but not about Jack.”
“And they’re engaged? Constance and Raef?”
“Yes.”
“That’s wonderful. I wouldn’t have pictured Constance being the first to go in your little group.”
“You mean to be married?”
“I would have put my money on Amy.”
“Amy, not so much, Mom.”
“Do you still have his grandfather’s journal?” she asked, switching subjects.
I nodded. I didn’t have an address for Jack. I had to keep it.
She sipped her tea. I did, too. I didn’t much care for it. I had a Vogue magazine open on my lap, and I occasionally flipped a page. Mom had the Times’ Sunday crossword cut out and clipped to the clipboard she always kept for that purpose. It was Sunday, and I should have been on a train back to Manhattan, except that it was Columbus Day weekend, and Monday was a holiday. I planned to take an early train back, then work in the afternoon.
“Do you like these blazers?” I asked my mom, and I held up a page of the magazine for her to peruse. She pinched her folded glasses against her eyes and looked at the pictures. This was an old game with us. We had always talked clothes, even during the stormier days of high school. One of the few highlights of being home after Paris was shopping for my business wardrobe with Mom. She liked coming into New York and having a daughter to meet for lunch. I liked those days with my mom.
“I’ve never been much for blazers,” Mom said, dropping her glasses down and returning to her struggle with the crossword. “They always remind me of Catholic schoolgirl uniforms. I see their utility, but I just never went for them.”
“I have that camel one, but I hardly ever wear it.”
“It’s hard to find an occasion to wear one.”
I flipped some more pages. Mom sipped her tea.
“Do you like the tea?” she asked.
“Not a lot. Do you?”
“It tastes too licorice-y.”
“But good for your joints and tendons.”
She reached to the table beside her chair and used the remote control to turn on the gas fireplace in the corner of the solarium. It popped into action immediately. She loved running the gas stove. She said it made her feel like a pioneer woman. Mostly, I thought, she liked the contrast of the cold glass pressing against the warmth inside the room.
She smiled at the fire and pushed the crossword off her lap.
“Did I ever tell you about the pumpkin war I fought?” she asked. “I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about it lately. I guess it’s just the season. Did I tell you the story?”
“No, Mom. Pumpkin war?”
“Oh, that makes it sound more dramatic than it was. But I fought it alongside a few of my friends. We must have been in, oh, seventh grade or so. And we got to talking about the unfairness of boys coming by and smashing the pumpkins we’d spent so much time carving. Are you sure I didn’t tell you this?”
I shook my head, fascinated.
“It was my idea, I suppose, but I talked all my friends into pushing pins from the inside through the pumpkin skin so that each jack-o’-lantern became as prickly as a porcupine. I don’t even recall where I got the idea; maybe I read it somewhere. Anyway, it was us against these imagined boys—the boys who smashed our pumpkins. We pictured them sneaking up to our doorsteps, reaching for the pumpkins, then jumping back when they were pricked by the pins. It was actually a pretty devilish idea. Each night that the pumpkins survived seemed to be proof of our cleverness. It was really very fun. We’d meet in school each day to report that this or that pumpkin had made it through the night. It was the first thing I ever led—counterterrorism, right?”
“Mom, you rebel! So did the pumpkins make it through until Halloween?”
“We ended up smashing them ourselves. I’ve always wondered about that. One night we got on the phone and decided to smash them. We all found gardening gloves so we could pick them up or whatever, and we smashed them. I think we missed having the boys’ naughtiness or something. I’ve never been able to understand our motive.”
“Did you clean them up?”
“No, of course not. Lazy little twits that we were! My dad poked his finger on a piece before I told him what happened. I remember he gave me the strangest look when I explained it to him.”
“I think you were guarding your virginity, Mom! It all sounds very Freudian.”
“You know, I thought the same thing!” she said and laughed. “I’ve always thought exactly that. The masculine surge and the feminine repulse! I don’t think I’ve ever told this story to anyone. How odd that it came to mind.”
“Why tonight?”
She shrugged, obviously amused with the recollection.
“Why not tonight, I guess? I imagine I’ve been thinking about Jack, too. I didn’t know him, of course, but he might have been a little like the girls and me smashing the pumpkins before anyone even approached them. Sometimes it’s easier to ruin a thing than to guard it. Does that make any sense?”
“It does, Mom, but we don’t have to figure out Jack’s motives. I’m trying to let all of that go under the bridge, so to speak. Bygones be bygones. That’s what I want now.”
She nodded. She poked the remote control and nudged the stove a tiny bit higher. Then she picked up the crosswo
rd puzzle clipboard and propped it on her lap.
“Not loving this tea,” she said.
“Me, neither.”
“My joints don’t feel any better, either.”
“Isn’t that always the way?” I asked.
42
What you do is work. That becomes the answer for everything. You dress in the early dawn, showered, powdered, hair cut to a smart set, the clothes in your closet mirroring back an image of a gal on the go. That’s absurd, you know, but that’s what you think of when you address your wardrobe. What you want, mostly, is a good-looking outfit, not dowdy, that can transform, when necessary, into something chic and hip and provocative. Why not? you ask yourself when you bend to the mirror in your apartment—an apartment that is either tropically warm or refrigerator cold—and apply makeup, why not have your times in New York City? Why not enjoy what it is to be young, free, single, in one of the great cities of the world? Jack was wrong about that. New York City is not a prison the prisoners built for themselves. No, no, it is something rich and fun and festive, something occasionally desperate and frightening, an edge of some sort of world, and you like knowing you belong, had conquered a small corner of it, had it licked.
Sort of.
Not too much makeup, by the way. Never too much. Just enough to give yourself a glow, an outline, a definition. The bathroom is still foggy, but when you step back, you can see your cloudy form. A gal on the go. You turn this way, back, the other way, back, check the line of your skirt, the tuck of your blouse, the height of your heel. It works, it usually works, and you are aware of being young, very young, and of being in demand for your youth, because what did your division boss quote? He said the most powerful people on earth are rich old men and pretty young women. Maybe he was right—who knows?—but right now you simply assess that you are competently dressed, correctly dressed, and on the way down in the apartment elevator, you go through your purse and say the modern rosary of Cs: cell, comb, credit card, condom.
Then it’s New York City. You step out, and it’s cold, cold as hell, the wind pushing through the buildings, everyone moving quickly, trying to get indoors, to get to work, no lollygagging. You’d like to take a cab just for the luxury of it, and you have the funds for it—not a bad salary, not at all a bad salary, it turns out—but at this hour of the morning, the traffic, especially the crosstown traffic, would be torture. So you hustle to the nearest subway entrance, go down into the cave, a mythological creature Constance would be able to identify, then you slide your monthly pass through the turnstile, knock the three-armed fanny patter with your thigh and hip, check your phone as you find a place to stand on the platform. The subway station smells like panting, you’ve always thought, like the lair of some awful creature whose breath, year after year, painted the walls until no other smell could find a purchase. As you think it—you think it every day—you look at your phone and check a dozen things. Stock market. Basic headlines. Messages, texts, e-mails.
You do not look for anything from Jack. You gave that up long ago.
You didn’t give it up, but you pretend that you did. You tell yourself that you did. And that amounts to almost, kind of, the same thing.
Then the train comes in, and you step on, turn sideways, find a pole to hold on to as the train begins to move forward. It’s okay. It’s early enough that it’s okay. And the reception on your cell disappears, and you sling into the darkness of the between-stations world, and you think of Vulcan, for Constance, and of all the creatures below the earth, the dirt animals, and that strikes you as strange, not a healthy thought, and when you finally reach your stop you are glad to get out, glad to move quickly toward the light, a square of daylight, and the cold brilliance of winter in New York City.
Then you are career girl, a girl on the go, because you like what you are wearing, like how it feels, and you can tell some men you pass are appreciative, and you stop at a coffee truck and order a medium, skim, two artificial sweeteners, then decide to splurge on a fruit salad kind of thing that comes in a plastic container. You carry everything toward your building, the coffee’s warmth entirely welcome, and you push through the revolving door to find Bill, the security officer, standing behind the check-in desk, his eyes passing to the cameras that show him every corner of the workplace.
“Hey, Bill. How’s it going?”
“Fine, Ms. Mulgrew.”
“Glad to hear it. Am I the first one in?”
“Just about, I think.”
You ride the elevator up—again something mythological about this up-and-down life, this above the ground and below the ground—and for a blinding second you think of the mighty Esche, the European ash, covered now, probably, in snow. You think of Pan’s statue watching the Jardin du Luxembourg, and then the elevator arrives at your floor, twenty-third floor, and you feel yourself tighten and come more alive, work, work, work, sacred work. It’s okay, you like work, and you move to your desk, hang up your coat, put your coffee down, toss your bag into your bottom drawer, look around. One of the supervisors’ office lights is on—Burky’s, you figure—but you are not game for him, not so early, not yet, so you sit down, boot up your computer, plug in your phone to the spare power cord you keep on your desk, and that’s that. Open for business.
You take a minute to wiggle the top free on your fruit, put on last night’s economic report from The Wall Street Journal, eat the taste of sunlight and sweetness, and behind you, and around you, lights begin coming on, a little foot traffic noise arrives, and the day has begun, and Jack is still missing, and your heart, your treacherous heart, refuses to let him go.
43
There is a feminine protocol to these things.
Before we slid into the banquette of the restaurant on Fourteenth Street, before we settled in at all, Constance held out her hand, and Amy and I gave out the obligatory girl squeal.
Amy grabbed Constance’s hand and held it close.
“Get out of town! It’s beautiful,” she said, examining it. “Classic setting. Platinum, right? Not white gold. Oh, it’s beautiful, Constance, just beautiful. An Empire cut?”
All of this happened on our way to the table. I couldn’t believe the stars had aligned to bring us all together. Constance had returned from Australia ten days before—engaged!—and Amy had arrived from Ohio on a job-search swing through New York. Our get-together had happened almost by itself, which only went to make it seem even more miraculous. It also made me feel surprisingly adult. Here I was, a denizen of New York City, having lunch with girlfriends in the middle of my working day. It gave me a kick. I knew the other girls felt the same way.
The maître d’ tolerated us and held the menus while we slipped into the green banquette. It was a Vietnamese restaurant named something Crab. The Beautiful Crab or the Enchanted Crab. Constance had read about it in The New Yorker and suggested it. We had arrived at the door almost at the exact instant, Constance and Amy sharing a cab over from Penn Station.
We put Constance in the middle. Amy and I took turns passing Constance’s finger and hand back and forth.
“Okay, I want the whole story,” Amy said. “Did he propose cute? What happened? And we’re going to need a scorpion bowl for this. Three straws, please.”
The waitress—a petite Vietnamese woman in black trousers beneath an olive tunic—hadn’t even fully arrived at the table, but Amy had already given her a mission.
“Three straws,” the waitress said, confirming.
“Three straws,” Amy agreed.
Then for a second, before Constance started, we went silent. It felt so good to be back together, to be one group again, that we all felt—I guessed—a little shy. We looked around the restaurant, pretending greater interest in the furnishing than we probably felt. But Amy saved us by snagging a busboy and asking for water.
“You have to ask for water in every damn restaurant now,” Amy said. “Are they trying to save dishwashing fluid or water or what?”
“I guess in case of a wate
r shortage,” I said lamely.
“This is New York! There’s no water shortage here, is there? Not that I’ve heard of, anyway. Okay, Constance, give us the story. You know we want to hear it. Don’t leave anything out.”
Constance blushed. She hated being the center of attention.
“We were out checking the fences on the station,” Constance began. “And Raef—”
“Wait, how big is this station?”
“Big. Very big. Hundreds of acres, but the land is dry and not very useful. I guess you can still get big parcels of land up in the desert for next to nothing in Australia. Raef’s family owns a lot of the land around those parts. He has an extended family, so everywhere you go, there’s an uncle who has this plot, an aunt who has this one, a cousin … you get it.”
“So you’re out checking the fence?” Amy said. “I can’t believe our prissy Constance is out checking fences in Australia.”
The busboy came with our water. He poured out three glasses. Constance paused while the busboy finished. Then she continued.
“He leaned against the fence, and he looked out at the desert, and he asked me if I could imagine spending my life here. It wasn’t dramatic. He said he would make sure we traveled and that we could spend time in the United States, but that he wanted me to consider being his wife and living in Australia with him. That was all.”
“Did he get down on a knee?” Amy asked.
“No. We’re not like that.”
“You mean sort of…”
“Just those outdated roles. I don’t know. Raef doesn’t go in for much in the way of formality or tradition. I’ve never met anyone who lived more for the day. He doesn’t stand on ceremony. Most of the Australians I met despise ceremony. They have a bit of a hangover from the British rule, but most of it is pure Aussie.”
“What did the desert look like?” I asked.
“Oh, beautiful colors. Red, mostly, but that doesn’t do it justice. All the doors to the house are kept open, screened, but opened. And you spend a lot of time on the porch. You visit different porches depending on what time of day it is. It’s a farming society, really, although I guess herding is more accurate. They run thousands of sheep. Everywhere you look, you see sheep.”
The Map That Leads to You Page 22