Mail

by Mameve Medwed

  I go out into the vestibule where a delivery man places a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of long-stemmed roses into my arms as if I’ve just been anointed Miss America. “And it’s not even Valentine’s,” he says. He shakes his head. He leaves and I stand against the mailboxes wishing my mother could see me now. Or some of those cheerleaders I went to high school with. As I am thinking this, the front door opens and in comes another delivery man—this time Federal Express. He is holding a large folder and a small clipboard. “Excuse me, miss,” he says, “can you tell me the apartment number for,” he checks his board, “Miss Christina O’Toole?”

  “Katinka,” I say. “It’s Katinka O’Toole. It’s me. I mean I.”

  “That’s a funny name,” he says. “Though hardly the oddest of the ones I’ve had to deliver packages to.”

  “I imagine not.” I refrain from the delivery of my own prepack-aged explanation of my name. I sign on the line marked with an X and accept the package, which is heavier than it looks.

  Inside my apartment, I lay my booty on the table. I pull out the card which is attached with a silky pink bow. For Katinka with thanks for a lovely night from Jake Barnes who is, thank God, no longer the Jake Barnes prototype. I laugh. I go to the kitchen and find a vase in the newly cleaned and impeccably ordered cabinet under the sink. I arrange the roses, which is not easy since they are, however beautiful, covered with thorns. I prick my fingers. Blood bubbles up. I suck it off.

  I put the vase on the mantel where it looks magnificent. I prop the card next to it. Once Seamus brought me an enormous bouquet of pink lilies bigger than a medium-sized child. There wasn’t a container large enough; we had to siphon water into a wastebasket. Then I found the card—Darling, Break a leg, from the Shubert Theatre Management. Seamus had been called to the Ritz to coach some actress in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. She was leaving for New York in an hour, so had passed the flowers on to Seamus’ “little wife.” It turned out that the yellow centers of the lilies permanently stained my best white blouse.

  Now I sit back and admire Jacob’s flowers intended only for me. They must have cost a fortune, my mother will exclaim, with both admiration and shock at the extravagance. But as soon as I think this, I picture Louie’s gift, the roll of James Fenimore Cooper stamps, and my heart melts. No one on a mailman’s salary could afford the fortune these cost. Besides, compared to flowers, a roll of stamps is the more original gift. I remember the presents I used to make my father for his birthday: a lopsided ashtray out of clay, a tie pin out of old buttons messily glued. “I’d rather have this than anything from Tiffany’s,” he’d croon. I take Louie’s side, feel protective of him, almost motherly. Maybe these feelings come from the child-care books I’ve been memorizing to prepare for Max. Whole chapters are devoted to being fair and prizing each child for his own particular attributes.

  I get up from the sofa and go back to the table. With all this flower excitement I’ve forgotten about the second delivery. I rip open the FedEx package. I pull out four copies of Playgirl magazine. “Yippee,” I yell. “Hip hip hooray!” My apartment is so clean and uncluttered my shouts echo off the walls. I clutch the magazines to my chest and do a little jig. A piece of paper floats out. I reach down to pick it up. It’s a letter from Betty Jean Williamson, the editor, my editor. “Hot off the press,” she writes. “Congratulations from me and the rest of the playmates.”

  My first instinct is to call my mother. My second instinct—the correct one it turns out—is to examine the evidence. Richard Gere’s on the cover. Fully clothed and adorable. I breathe a sigh of relief. I find my story immediately without having to examine the Table of Contents. It’s on paper, finished like the inserts that advertise expensive cars. I run my finger over my name, which is printed in large capitals. I read my story straight through twice. I can’t find even a comma out of place. I’m amazed at how professional a story can sound once printed professionally. The illustration is tasteful. A couple kissing in front of a computer screen. A line drawing which if you omit the computer could be a Matisse. My head swells.

  Then deflates when I notice the glossy left-hand page next to the matte right-hand page where my story begins. It’s a full-page ad promoting an elixir to increase your penis size. There’s some quasi-medical text that surrounds an enormous and graphic chart of penises in various stages of treatment. There are seven penises in graduated size drawn not with the economical line of Matisse but the overly anatomical pen of a pornographer. The seventh penis, made elephantine by two weeks’ worth of elixir, reminds me of the giant phallus of Winston Churchill carted around the Agassiz stage in a Harvard production of What the Butler Saw.

  I shake my head. Why aren’t pleasures ever pure? Roses have thorns to cut your fingers. Lilies have stamens to stain your clothes. Great lovers lack college degrees. Ivy League lovers lack Ivy League penises.

  I turn to the Table of Contents, which is ringed with ads for dildoes and edible underpants. My story is the only entry under Fiction though the lists that snake down from Features and Warm Bodies are several inches long. My eyes fix on Warm Bodies and move down to “Lawyers of Chicago: Debriefcased and in the Nude,” page seventy-five. Though I am tempted, I do not rush to page seventy-five. I shut the magazine. I congratulate myself on my superior restraint. What will be next, I wonder, local pharmacists? I will not take this as any kind of sign. And I’m not going to check out those lawyers for either curiosity’s or comparison’s sake. No naked lawyers, no tacky ads are going to blunt my pleasure in being published in a magazine with a circulation far exceeding my family and two best friends. I will feel no shame.

  Thus feeling no shame, I call my mother before I feel the shame.

  “Guess what?” I say.

  “You’re getting married,” she says.

  Which takes me so completely off guard that I sit there holding the receiver and sputtering.

  “Just kidding,” she says.

  “Not funny,” I say.

  “Oh, Katinka. Where’s your sense of humor, dear. I assume you spent Wednesday night at that nice lawyer’s. I called and called. Quite sensible, too, in light of the storm.”

  “The weather was awful,” I say. My mother and I discuss precipitation, snow emergencies, how preferable apartment living is when it comes to shoveling, how she and Arthur spent a cozy evening at home, the storm making them miss the dinner at the Faculty Club.

  I deflect all discussion of my own cozy storm-tossed night and the dinner it would have been a great loss to miss. I know what these discussions with my mother can lead to. You start with men, their degrees, and pretty soon you’re graphing degrees of intimacy. “Guess what?” I start again.

  “What?” my mother says this time.

  “My story. It’s out.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  I open the magazine to my story. I fold and flatten it until the elixir ad is underneath. It looks good like that, a clean page of prose topped by the title and my name.

  My mother knocks with a series of excited little taps. When I open the door she is holding a bottle of champagne and two fluted glasses that I recognize from a shelf of them collected by Arthur’s first wife.

  “Katinka, I am so pleased.” She hands me the glasses and starts to untwist the wire of the cork before she’s even crossed the threshold. “We must celebrate.”

  “It is before noon,” I point out.

  My mother’s eyebrows arc over her glasses in surprise. When have you ever refused a chance to celebrate, her glance seems to say, to have a champagne toast?

  I don’t tell her about my new sobriety in preparation for my four days’ trial run at motherhood. My awesome sense of responsibility. It’s bad enough Max has to experience single parenthood. Does he need alcoholism, too? Not to mention the traumatic effects on poor Daniella, who’s had a hard enough if limited life. But I’ve got four hours till Max comes. And a full bottle of Listerine. One glass of champagne does not a drunkard make.

  “Darli
ng, one glass of champagne does not a drunkard make,” my mother says, now underscoring our close relationship. My God, I think, will we soon start dressing alike, too? Sweaters and jeans bought in duplicate?

  “Well? Where is it? I can hardly wait!”

  I hold it up, the folded part against my chest.

  My mother grabs it, opens it to its full lurid breadth.

  Which she doesn’t seem to notice. She sits down and starts reading, pausing only briefly to pop the cork. While she reads, I have two glasses of champagne. I am just pouring my third when she finishes.

  “Darling, it’s simply wonderful,” she says. Her eyes brim with tears. She cried over my acceptance at Radcliffe, too, blurring the signature of the admissions officer.

  Now she discusses my brilliant style, my brilliant use of character, my brilliant dialogue. Praise bubbles up like the bubbles in my glass. She turns to the contributors’ page where it says that I was born in Old Town, Maine, and live in Cambridge, Mass. She is slightly disappointed the note does not contain the fact that I graduated from Radcliffe College or teach at a building in Harvard Yard. But this regret does not diminish her pride in me, which is now soaring to such an inflated level I feel the need to puncture it.

  “But look at this,” I say. I point preemptively at the seven penises.

  My mother looks. She smiles. “So?” she says.

  “So!” I exclaim.

  “So what,” my mother says. She shrugs her shoulders.

  I am astonished. My mother is shrugging her shoulders as if this were the most normal thing in the world—to have your story surrounded with penises. I remember the set of instructions my mother gave me before I went off for college, about being a good girl and all the things a good girl wouldn’t even try. About what you see in a big city, about what you have to close your eyes to. “As if these things don’t happen in Old Town,” I’d said, “another Peyton Place.”

  “Katinka, you always try to shock me,” my mother said. “Why dwell on the seedy side of life.”

  “Katinka, nothing shocks me,” my mother says now. She slides her hand over the penises. “It’s all a part of life.”

  I show her the letter from Betty Jean Williamson. “Congratulations from me and the rest of the playmates,” she reads out loud. She picks up the magazine again. It falls open to one of the lawyers, fortunately not the debriefed centerfold, but a lawyer whose briefcase covers crucial parts of his anatomy. He’s sitting on his desk with a brass scales of justice next to a rather fetching dimpled knee. “I wonder who the rest of the playmates are?” my mother speculates.

  I grab the magazine from her. “The other editors, layout people, printers, the publishers …” I compile a list of the kind of support staff that would work at a university press.

  My mother doesn’t seem to hear. “Speaking of lawyers,” she says.

  “We weren’t,” I say.

  “Lately they seem to be getting such a bum rap. As if people have forgotten the nobility of the law. Of justice. Of truth.”

  “Of tax loopholes and multimillion-dollar real estate syndications,” I add though my heart isn’t in it.

  “Your father always wanted to go to The Law School,” she says dreamily, ignoring me.

  “He did?”

  “He said he couldn’t afford to. But I think secretly he was scared.”

  “Daddy. Scared?” I picture my father, cautious and self-effacing. But he championed the cause of the Penobscot Indians. And had faced down some ruthless developers. Quietness doesn’t have to mean timidity.

  “Remember Frenchy Levesque, a childhood friend of your father’s. He was Phi Bete at the U of M?” She sighs. “He had other offers but like me had to attend college locally.” She sighs harder. “He managed to get himself into Harvard Law and off to Cambridge. He didn’t last more than three weeks.”

  “What happened?” I spin stories of foul play in Austin Hall or poisoned mystery meat in The Law School cafeteria.

  “Utter humiliation. The first day he was told to look to the right of him, look to the left of him—those students would soon flunk out. A few days later he was called on in class. They use the Socratic method, dear. Arthur can explain.”

  “No need. I saw The Paper Chase on video.”

  “I guess Frenchy was so nervous he stammered. Even though he was prepared, his mind went blank. Then the professor asked him where he’d done his undergraduate work. When Frenchy replied the University of Maine, he was told to go back to that cow college and study agriculture.”

  “The arrogance,” I exclaim.

  “The waste. Frenchy joined the family contracting business and went around in overalls.”

  “Which maybe he preferred to a three-piece suit.”

  “A trade over a profession?” my mother asks, incredulous. “Sadly, for your father this was a cautionary tale.”

  I commiserate. I try to remember Frenchy. Back in Old Town I knew three Frenchys. Frenchy the janitor at the Community Center who had guarded his closetful of sour-smelling mops like a bank vault, Frenchy the plumber who dropped a wrench into our soil pipe. Perhaps Frenchy Levesque was the one who had painted our house.

  “Imagine,” my mother says now, “a Phi Beta Kappa painting our house.”

  She smoothes her skirt, which I notice for the first time sports a design of little Parthenons. “Given Frenchy’s experience, your father was somewhat concerned about how you’d fare at Radcliffe coming right out of Old Town High.”

  “But Daddy did that himself.”

  “Things were different then. Admissions committees paid more attention to merit, less to extracurriculars and geographical distribution.”

  “Are you telling me I wasn’t qualified?”

  “Of course not, darling. Just that we had our worries. You know, small-town girl in the big city, inadequate preparation compared to students from exclusive boarding schools. That was why we were so pleased about your taking up with Seamus. We figured he’d help you.”

  “A giant misconception.”

  “So we learned.”

  “Seamus was less interested in helping me make the grade than in making me.”

  “I gather, though there’s no need to be crude.”

  “Frankly, Mother, have ye such little faith in my abilities to think I’d need a man to get me through?”

  “What a question, Katinka. We all need a man to get us through.”

  I am preparing an insightful feminist argument which she deftly sidesteps before I can squeeze the first sentence out. She skips into the living room and lets out a hoot. “Look at these roses!” she exclaims. She cranes her neck to take a sniff. But even in high heels and on tiptoe, she is too short. Luckily, she doesn’t seem to notice the card.

  I lower my eyes modestly. “From Jake,” I admit.

  My mother claps her hands. “Such extravagance!” She is as clearly delighted as if she herself is the recipient of this floral tribute to womanhood and the benefits of having a man in a woman’s life. “Make some coffee, Katinka, we have a lot to talk about.”

  We go into the kitchen. My mother seats herself at the kitchen table. This is dangerous territory, moving from the specific of my story to the general of a chat. I put the water on to boil. I have delaying tactics. A bag of whole French roast beans in the freezer. A coffee grinder that sounds like a jackhammer and is excruciatingly slow. “Don’t bother with that,” my mother says as I unroll the Coffee Connection’s insulated bag. “The instant will do perfectly.”

  I stir the instant into two unmatched mugs. The unwatched pot has boiled instantly. I add water. Offer sugar. Take out the milk. I sit across from my mother. With two hands, I grip my mug, an anchor in this shifting world. “Shoot,” I tell my mother, readying myself for the firing squad.

  She tells me about her plans to sell the house. How she’s arranged to have the trim painted. “Frenchy’s son,” she confides in a tone that suggests that the father’s failure at the law school has condemned the son t
o a life of ladders and gallons of Benjamin Moore.

  “Not exactly the House of Atreus.”

  “True,” she concedes, “but still sad.”

  No sadness, however, shows when she talks about unloading the house she was brought to as a bride.

  “Widows aren’t supposed to make sudden decisions,” I say. I have read this somewhere. In Ann Landers? A dentist’s waiting room?

  “New widows,” she corrects. “I’ve been a widow for years.”

  And high time I’m over it she implies. As if it’s a cold or a little patch of depression you need to get through. She goes on about the wedding plans. What date to set. What hall to hire. “Of course I’ll want you as my maid of honor.”

  “I’d be honored.” I sip my coffee. I wish we hadn’t finished the bottle of champagne.

  “And Zenobia. Wouldn’t it be nice if she were my attendant, too?”

  I mime enthusiasm, a nod, a too bright smile. We only children, solitary and old before our time, can claim the sole privilege of not having to share. No longer, now that I’ve been afflicted with a sibling like a sudden not quite benign growth. Co-maids of honor, I suppose, in matching taffeta. Or rather—and worse—a matron and a maid. Perhaps in fact there are a few drops of champagne left. I consider going to check when my mother and I hear the clatter of letterbox flaps from the vestibule. My mother’s head tilts, ears perk as alert as a Doberman’s.