“Thank you. I’m glad you told me.” I handed him the bowl of salad and smiled.
“So, what have your past relationships been like? Who were you dating most recently?”
Oh geez. Here we go. How to explain the disaster of the last few years? Actually, I didn’t want to explain the disaster of the last few years. This was a first date, and one revelation a meal was probably enough. I threw off a few casual answers about not dating anyone seriously and long-distance relationships. But he persisted.
“Where was he?”
“On the west coast mostly.”
“Was he an actor?”
“I suppose. Do you work a lot in LA?” I attempted to change the subject.
“Was he famous?”
I shrugged and rolled my eyes. “I don’t know. It’s really not that interesting.”
“He’s famous. I knew it.”
The waitress arrived to collect our plates and take a dessert order. After she left I steered the conversation back to his job and kept it there with questions about how one goes about choreographing. But I could tell we’d lost something. There was a strain to the conversation now, as though we’d snapped a string and were out of tune. Still, neither of us rushed; it was a perfectly nice conversation. When the check came, he insisted on paying, and when we finally made it out to the sidewalk, he offered to walk me down Flatbush Avenue instead of just jumping in a cab. The night had gotten cold, and we walked briskly toward Atlantic, his hand on my arm as though guiding me. At the subway station I turned, wondering what sort of good night kiss I might be in store for. I was not going home with him or taking him home, curious though I might be. I was going to force myself to take this slow. Mauri had suggested I go into it thinking of it as “just a practice session for you to figure out how to date a normal person.” He was staring at me intently but making no move to kiss me. He reached into his bag. “I forgot I brought you this.” He handed me a thick photography magazine that had the word feminism written across the top. Points for paying attention, I thought. I looked up smiling to thank him.
“So, who were you dating? Jon Hamm?” he blurted out.
“What?” I wondered for a moment if I’d misheard him, and glanced back down at the magazine, but it was just a vintage black and white picture of a topless woman wearing a mask.
“The actor. Jon Hamm. Were you dating him?” His tone reminded me of my nephew’s when he thought he’d caught someone in the act of doing something they shouldn’t.
“Was I dating Jon Hamm?” I thought he must be making a joke. But he wasn’t. I looked at his face. He must have been thinking about this the entire time, I realized.
“Doesn’t Jon Hamm . . .” I stopped. Who the fuck cared if Jon Hamm had a girlfriend? “I was not dating Jon Hamm,” I said with finality, and then tried to laugh it off. Better if this was a fun joke.
“Okay,” he said and leaned down to give me a quick cold kiss on the cheek and a squeeze. “Have a good night.” Then he turned and jogged across the four-lane intersection and disappeared into the subway entrance. I did not move. Had that actually just happened? I turned down Atlantic—it was too ridiculous. Was I dating Jon Hamm? I mean honestly. I went back over the evening in my head. It had been a nice evening, I thought. Had I been unkind about his age? I didn’t think so. I mean, lying about your age by two decades is not nothing, but it hadn’t bothered me that much. I had never been a dater the way some of my friends had, approaching it like sports practice that eventually led to the championship round. I preferred to jump into the deep end with as little thought as possible. Maybe this was what taking it slow meant?
When I got home, I sent him an email thanking him for dinner. The next morning, I got a four-word email response.
Thanks g, me too.
That was it.
I thought about responding. I knew enough to know that this could be saved. I could stroke what needed stroking. Inflate the deflated. Be apologetic. I also knew what else awaited me on Tinder. There was no end of messages, of heys. After I’d come home I’d slipped into bed and started chatting with a number of men, including one named Tiger who lived on the Lower East Side; all the old texting muscles had come alive. The familiar sense of allowing a person into an intimate space without ever having to share it with him. But I had no desire to actually see Tiger, who along the way had revealed that after accidentally sleeping with his ex-wife’s therapist he was no longer using Tinder to date, just to chat. There was a lot of chatting going on here. I had three conversations running, and not a single one of these men had suggested meeting in real life. They simply wanted to tell me about themselves. Dan looked good against this. Good enough.
But the days went by and I never responded. Not in the playing-hard-to-get way, but merely because I couldn’t see a way in which the amount of energy I’d have to put into making him comfortable with me was worth it.
People said things like, “You need to be willing to make room for others in your life.” Suggesting there was something deeply wrong with me if I didn’t. That I was a coward in some sense. But I made room for people in my life all the time; for a while my entire life had been nothing but a room for other people to occupy. Still, I had believed them. It had never once occurred to me that I might simply prefer to be alone, and that that was okay. These same people often talked about the compromise required by a relationship, as if that were the thing that gave it value. No doubt it did. But I was navigating the endless compromise of living without a relationship, and that was hard and valuable, too. And when it came to hard and valuable things, I preferred my version. Maybe this wouldn’t always be the case. But I wasn’t going to be performing acrobatics around a man who might be good enough, simply to keep someone in my life for the sake of having someone there.
Within the week, my irritation and disappointment had slipped away, a stark contrast to the years where I would hang on and on for scraps. It was Mauri who was deeply indignant on my behalf, when next I saw her. “That’s it? That’s all he wrote? That’s bullshit.”
Ben scrolled through the email. “Good riddance.”
17. What Remains
At the end of February, we sold my parents’ house for the asking price. I had no emotional attachment to the house. We’d moved every six years or so; the only home I still missed, which sometimes haunted my dreams, was the one I’d lived in from ages six to eleven. That was four houses ago. This place had simply provided affordable shelter. The sale was nearly as big a relief as my mother’s nursing home assignment had been; it ensured my father would have enough to live on. I had come home for Zoe’s birthday, and one night I sat at the kitchen table with my father and my uncle who was visiting, amid piles of paper, crunching numbers. My uncle was my mother’s younger brother; he had helped my parents sort out their beleaguered finances many times. I’d cleared my plate since Christmas to focus on the sustainability of Rachel and my company and had grown accustomed to being surrounded by numbers. Still, I had only a vague understanding of all the things he was referring to—retirement benefits versus tax-free accounts, and so forth. The end result, laid out in cold numbers and organized spreadsheets, was comforting; it felt like an immovable stone column I could lean against and count on to remain standing.
Not long after we’d listed the house, the real estate agent arrived and remarked happily on how clean it was. “You could have a showing today!” Now when I looked around, I could see it was even sparser. I asked my father where everything was. He told me that in preparation for the move he’d begun getting rid of things. What things? My father was not sentimental; his manic desire for organization superseded any emotion he might feel toward an object. “It’s just junk,” he said about nearly everything. I began a frantic search trying to figure out what had gone missing since I’d been home a few weeks before. I rifled through closets and raced around the basement, scanning bookshelves to see if I could spot the titles I’d grown up staring at: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; my mother’s co
pies of Jane Austen from university, all signed on the inner cover in her flowing handwriting (all my life people had remarked on my mother’s beautiful handwriting); our old Fisher-Price toys that my mother kept for when my niece and nephew visited. Medley faithfully followed me from room to room. Yes, my mother’s wedding dress was still in the closet, and yes, the Christmas nativity scene centerpiece my grandmother had given us as children was still in a box downstairs.
The next day, I went out and bought a larger suitcase so I could collect things to bring back to New York with me. I packed what was left of a set of dishes we’d grown up with. They had a string of painted blue fishes around the rim; my mother had bought them shortly after she was married and we’d eaten nearly every meal off of them my entire childhood. I wrapped the eggcups carefully in my underwear, stuffed the teacups in socks. I took the goblets I recalled being used at dinner parties my parents had thrown when I was a child. I raced the Christmas decorations over to my sister’s basement, along with boxes of records and books that wouldn’t fit in my bag.
I felt as if I were on a rescue mission, packing up before an oncoming storm. What I couldn’t take with me I organized carefully in a corner in the basement. I taped a piece of paper to it that said DO NOT TOUCH, walked my father downstairs, and pointed to it. “Do not throw any of these things out until I return,” I said sternly. He laughed and threw up his hands. “I won’t!”
I didn’t think it was funny. I understood his rigid cleaning was his own way of implementing some order in a world that had very quickly dissolved around him. A frantic last-ditch effort to convince himself he had some control over what had befallen my mother. I knew he wasn’t doing it to be malicious, but to me, it felt as though whatever beast had been eating up my mother’s mind had stayed behind in the house and was now consuming it. Everything was shifting around me, and nothing could be counted on to be where I left it.
I spent one long afternoon sitting in the basement going through a big box that had been set aside for dumping. It was full of odds and ends, things my mother had obviously intended to organize in some fashion but never got around to. I pulled out the convocation flyer from her university graduation: a yellowing pamphlet plastered with the usual language of hope about the future prospects of the Class of ’68. Paper clipped to it were blurry Polaroids of my mother in her graduation gown, standing with my grandparents. One looked like it had been burned by a cigarette ash. I found a postcard she’d sent them from a summer road trip to Prince Edward Island, her beautiful handwriting the same as it ever was. There was a photo album she’d carefully put together of the year she’d lived with her best friend Pat in Toronto while completing her master’s degree in social work. Slipped between two of the pages was an old matchbook from a bar in downtown Toronto. Each picture had a caption handwritten by her: “Jean locks herself out on the balcony”; “Jack enters the picture, December 1966.” In some of the pictures she was wearing the bridesmaid dresses I’d later turn into Halloween costumes, or disassemble and wear to high school dances. So many bridesmaid outfits—it felt like the uniform of her early twenties. I hadn’t been a bridesmaid for the first time till age thirty-two. Shoved in the box, too, were letters from me from the time I’d lived in England and a postcard from the time I’d visited Paris shortly after my thirtieth birthday. The postcard had a coffee ring on it, hers no doubt. My mother was never without a cup of coffee; growing up we’d find half-drunk cups in various locations around the house, where she’d left them before starting a fresh pot. I could easily imagine her at the kitchen table, reading my postcard, mug perched right beside her. I wanted to keep the card as much for the coffee ring as for the words it held. The matchbox as much as the pictures it was stuffed between. I wanted every remainder of her handwriting. It was all a strange sort of precious detritus generated by her life that let me know where she was, places she’d passed through, drinks she’d had in certain moments. Physical evidence of a life she could no longer remember, but I could now hold on to. A map of her past.
I thought about the thousands of text messages I’d exchanged with 646, and how no one would ever find them in a box. Or see any evidence at all of the time or effort or emotion that had gone into them. They were such cold, intangible proof of my lived life. What would any of us leave behind in this new digital age? What actual space would our lives take up in the world once we were gone?
I collected some of the cards and pictures and took them with me to the nursing home. My trips home now had a new rhythm; instead of hours spent on the phone with doctors, I triangulated between my sister’s, my father’s, and my mother. I thought there was a chance my mother might get some enjoyment looking at the old photos; for a long while her long-term memory had remained at least somewhat intact. And there were still flashes of it now and then. But none of it meant anything to her. She gazed at it all pleasantly and politely, the same way you look at someone else’s child’s artwork. “How nice,” she said. All this history, hers and inevitably mine and my sister’s, and one day my niece’s and nephews’, was no longer attached to her.
The same went for the bookcase my father moved into her room at my request. I filled it with all her copies of Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie and Ellis Peters, carefully organizing them based on author and then color. I lined up all the Harry Potter books I’d given her on the bottom row. But when I returned two days later, there was a sheet over the bookcase; apparently other residents had been wandering in and taking the books. My mother hadn’t noticed they were there, let alone missing. The stories meant nothing to her. She was herself now in a land with no stories. Except there was no way out of her new country, no map, no exploration, just the goal of keeping her safe and comfortable, and put.
But she did nothing but wander. It was as if some part of her knew she’d been released from everything that had kept her attached to her life. On the walls of the hallway leading to her room were taped up sheets of paper with the name JEAN written on them in all caps, and arrows underneath pointing back to her room. My mother, a woman who left the house only when required, now liked to go into other people’s rooms and lie down in their beds, the old lady version of Goldilocks. She no longer even remembered the dog. The photo I’d put of Medley in the alcove beside the door to help guide her home was useless.
The things about my mother that stubbornly remained, however, were her knowledge of my father’s name and her insistence on helping other people. When it came time to bring her to the dining hall for lunch, she’d insist on walking over to the food serving station, convinced she worked there. She always asked where my father was. I wondered sometimes what would remain for me if I ever reached this stage. What had been hammered so deeply into my psyche that even as everything else fell away, it would still stand, like ruins of a lost kingdom?
Eventually my father packed the books up and dropped them off at a secondhand bookstore; fortunately I’d already grabbed the copies of the Harry Potters that had my notes inscribed to her. You’ll love this, I wrote on the inside of one flap, it makes me feel as if we were back sitting on the couch. I was, I now realized, the keeper of my history, and hers. All these pieces I’d been grabbing at so frantically were really just me trying to reconstruct her memory for her, in her absence.
•
A few weeks after I returned to New York, Rachel went into labor. The morning her water broke she texted me. Are you up? It may be nothing, but I think my water may have just broken. I sent her back a picture of Julie Andrews singing “I Have Confidence”—we’d named our company after a lyric from The Sound of Music—and then biked into the city and met her and her sister at Katz’s Deli, where we ordered sandwiches and fries to take with us to the hospital. On the way out I asked the cashier if we could keep the ticket stub they normally took when you paid, as a memento. I pointed at Rachel, her protruding belly. “She’s in labor.” He handed it back, giving us a sideways look. “Good luck,” he said, waving us out the door. Rachel’s contractions were s
till too far apart for her to go to the hospital, so instead we stopped at a massage parlor in the East Village and got massages. “How far apart are the contractions now?” I called to her through the curtain between our tables, envisioning her delivering her baby in a massage parlor.
Ruby was not born in a massage parlor. She arrived healthy and round thirty hours later, at eight o’clock the next evening. I’d left Rachel at the hospital with her sister and Maddy, who was acting as Rachel’s doula, at 4:00 a.m., when the doctor said it was unlikely the baby would arrive that night and Rachel needed rest. Second Avenue was empty, and I flew down it on my bike the way I’d done for so many years after long waitressing shifts, weaving back and forth along the avenue, relishing the feeling that I had the city to myself. This would probably be what remained if I ever suffered the same fate as my mother: the desire to be on my bike in the empty, predawn streets of New York. The air was fresh with spring, and overhead the low clouds were catching the light from the city, making the sky glow. There was construction down near the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, and I stopped to let a truck go by. A worker in a reflective vest nodded at me. “You have a good night.”
“My friend is having her first baby,” I said.
“Well, congratulations,” he called to me. “This is a great city to be born in.”
Yes, I thought pedaling onto the still-dark bridge. No matter what she did or where she went for the rest of her life, Ruby would be able to say she was born in New York City, after a stop for takeout at Katz’s and a detour to a massage parlor in the East Village. Talk about a great beginning to a story. The next evening Maddy texted me a picture of Rachel with Ruby shortly after her birth, somehow managing to capture with it the exact extraordinary moment when someone you know so well makes the transformation into motherhood.
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