by Robbi McCoy
viewing his mother as both the nurturing teat and the…” In her own voice, she said, “Ah, well, let’s not go into that.”
“Why don’t you take anything seriously?”
“Because it’s so boring. Besides, you wouldn’t like it, would you?”
I considered that for a moment, then said, “Probably not.”
“He was at school the other day, you know, when you gave your talk.”
“He was?”
“Yes. He wanted to see you, but he didn’t want you to know he was there.”
“Did he say anything about it?” I asked anxiously.
“He said he didn’t recognize you, like you weren’t his mother at all.”
I sighed. “Great.”
“But I told him about our lunch afterward, how excited you were. And I told him that maybe you weren’t the same, but you were really happy now, and that was better, at least for you. I think maybe that made an impression on him. I mean, like, he couldn’t really want you to be miserable, now, could he?”
One would hope not. So, I was really happy now? I smiled to myself. Yes, for the most part. Things had just been getting better and better.
I inspected my mother’s flower beds for insects and diseases, finding them in good shape except for a few aphids, which I flicked off with a fingernail. When I got to the blooming freesias near the kitchen window, I heard Rosie’s laugh from inside, and then Bradley’s deep voice. My heart quickened. I hurried inside to find Rosie and Bradley sitting at the kitchen table in conversation.
Bradley was a big, bristling young man, healthy and beautiful.
It had been so long since I’d seen him and the photos had been an inadequate preparation for the real thing.
“In the Czech Republic I actually ran into a guy I knew,”
Bradley was saying. “There are Americans all over the place in Prague. Just hanging out.”
“The new expatriates,” Rosie said, nodding.
22
“How long since you’ve been to Paris?” Bradley asked.
“The last time I was there was about five years ago. It’s good to go back after you’ve already done all the tourist things so you can absorb the spirit of a place. On my third trip to Paris I spent one day just strolling through the Bois de Boulogne pretending I was a native out for a Sunday walk.”
I stood in the doorway, incredulous.
“I did that too,” Bradley said with enthusiasm. “I pretended I lived there, imagining what it felt like for the people who really did, trying to imagine myself living a completely different life from my own.” Rosie turned to look at me and Bradley followed her gaze.
“Mom,” he said tentatively, rising. I held out my arms. He approached and hugged me wordlessly. When he stepped back, his face was serious, emotional, with that familiar tell-tale quiver at the left side of his mouth. He didn’t know what to say. Me neither.
“I got you something,” he said at last and pulled a small package from his shirt pocket. “For your trip to Paris.”
Under shiny paper was an electronic device about the size of a checkbook calculator. “What is it?”
“A French language translator,” Bradley said, taking it from me. He demonstrated. “Look. You type in a French word like
‘amour,’ and it gives you the English equivalent.” He held it up so I could read the LCD image. “Love.”
My eyes misted as I took the device.
“Or you can translate an English word into French,” he said. “Well, this ought to come in handy. Merci beaucoup.”
I met Brenna, then, who was a warm, lovely girl with an elegant carriage. “I’m so glad I’ve finally gotten to meet you, Jean,” she said. “I wish it could have been sooner, but Brad’s been sort of stubborn about it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps understandably.”
She nodded. There was strain among our little group during dinner, but the worst was over. Bradley had forgiven me and was 22
trying to overcome his unease. And Mom and Dad, once they’d met Rosie and realized she was such a regular person, managed to relax a bit. Rosie dominated the evening, of course, talking politics with Dad, swapping traveling horror stories with Bradley.
I heard her welcome laugh frequently.
My mother was impressed with Rosie’s appetite, for she was never shy about eating, and the ham with the mustard paste was a big hit with her. We downed a couple of bottles of wine while we ate, and everyone was feeling a little friendlier, it seemed to me, as the meal wore on.
“I didn’t vote for you,” Dad told Rosie as we were finishing dinner. “Do you know why?”
Oh, my God, I thought. I can’t deal with this. How can he be bringing this up? “Dad!” I barked, coming out of my chair.
Rosie held up a hand to me and gave me a look that said she had it under control. “Yes, I know why,” Rosie said with mock antagonism, pausing for dramatic effect. “Because of my criticism of the city manager.”
“How’d you know that?” he asked, astonished.
I let myself fall back into my chair, my pulse returning to normal.
“Because I happen to know that the two of you are friends.
He told me so when I introduced him to Jean. You were in the Navy together.”
Dad snorted, then grinned and pushed himself away from the table. “Hey, Bradley,” he said, “come on out to the garage. I want to show you my new rod and reel.” The two of them left together and Amy excused herself with the intention, I was sure, of calling her boyfriend.
“Well, Rosie,” said my mother, “I did vote for you.”
“Oh, thank you,” Rosie replied.
My mother stood a little unsteadily and began to stack the plates. “I thought, what difference does it make who she sleeps with anyway? Nothing to do with running the city.”
“That was very forward thinking of you,” Rosie said, handing her plate over.
22
“Yes, well, that was before I knew that you were sleeping with my daughter, wasn’t it?”
My mother cackled loudly as though she had made the best joke of all time and took her stack of plates into the kitchen.
Rosie looked at me, her eyes open wide. I looked at Brenna, who was trying desperately to suppress a laugh. I just shook my head.After dinner Rosie helped my mother clean up in the kitchen, and I could hear them arguing from the front room about spaghetti sauce with unnecessarily loud assaults on each other.
“If you put in mushrooms that big, they just sit there like ugly lumps,” Mom was saying. “Everything should be small so it all blends into a sauce, not like a salsa, for crying out loud.”
“If you cut them that small,” Rosie said, “you can’t taste them.
Besides, they’d disintegrate after all those hours of simmering.”
They seemed to be enjoying themselves. Rosie had intuited a basic truth about my parents to help her ingratiate herself with them—they liked to argue.
Bradley and I talked about his trip and about his plans for the future, which, I was happy to hear, included returning to college to finish his degree. Whenever Rosie was near me, regardless of what she was doing, he tensed slightly as though he was afraid he might witness some affection between us. We carefully avoided touching one another. We obviously had some distance to go, but it was a promising start. He was trying.
Later, when dinner had sufficiently settled, I helped Mom serve up dessert.
“Rosie’s okay,” she said, slicing a strawberry pie into eighths.
“Thanks. I really appreciate that. And everything. I know it’s awkward.”
“I guess you two are like a real couple, then?”
“Uh, I’m not sure what that means but, yes, I guess so.” I lined up small plates and filled them with wedges of pie.
“Then why aren’t you living together? If you lived together, you could share expenses. Do you know how much money you’re wasting living in two places like this?”
230
/> I was momentarily stunned, as I wasn’t expecting the conversation to go in this direction. “I’m making plenty of money now. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“Well, that’s good.”
Plopping Cool Whip on the pie slices, I thought about her question. “I’m glad I got my own place, though,” I said. “I’ve been enjoying the independence of it. Just taking care of myself for a change.”
“It’s kind of lonely, though, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes it is. Not so bad now as it was at first. When you live with other people, you’re always responding to them responding to you. You get an experience of yourself that’s a sort of reflection of what they see. So you’re a mom or a wife. When you’re just with yourself, you don’t have the luxury of the ready-made point of view. You have to experience yourself on a different level. And I have to say that I’m enjoying the woman I’m getting to know. She’s so full of vitality, for one thing.”
I looked up from the plates to see my mother looking thoughtfully at me. “You’ve really changed, haven’t you?”
I nodded. “In a good way, I hope, Mom.”
“Well,” she said, suddenly boisterous, flinging her arm into the air, “I never thought Jerry was any good for you anyway.”
I stood there flabbergasted as she picked up two plates and flounced into the dining room, saying, “Rosie, how about dessert?
You’ll never guess what I put in this strawberry pie.”
Shortly after that, the party broke up. Bradley left first. At the door he kissed his grandmother goodnight, then turned to me.
“Love you, Mom,” he said. I squeezed him tightly. By the time Rosie and I left, I was exhausted. It had been an emotional day.
Another hurdle had been cleared—parents, family gathering. It could have been a lot worse.
“What did I tell you?” Rosie said on the drive home. “Your family loves me.”
“Everybody loves you.”
“That’s true. Your mom’s a riot. I like her a lot.”
I shook my head. “You never can tell.”
231
Chapter Twenty
When I first moved to the apartment, I resisted buying anything for it. I thought of it as a brief stop on my way to something else, but, gradually, it was feeling like my sanctuary, that proverbial room of one’s own. It was Tyler who got me started personalizing the place when he arrived one evening with an armload of towels, a shower curtain and throw rugs, saying, “I can’t bear your bathroom for another day! All those mismatched things you brought over from your old house, it’s too wretched.
I refuse to pee in a room with no color scheme.”
I had to admit that the bathroom was a whole lot more inviting when he had finished with it. So I bought some artwork for the walls and a few pieces of furniture, and I let the place evolve into something uniquely mine. I began to feel safe and contented there. And I quit asking Rosie when, if ever, she thought we might live together. It had seemed urgent to me in the beginning, as if I had to move into her house to secure our relationship. But that would have been no real security, of course.
She knew that. She told me the joke about how lesbians show up 232
on the second date with the U-Haul. The things you do in haste, out of fear, don’t hold up, she said. In February, it had hurt my feelings, but in May, I had to agree that no harm had been done to our relationship by this arrangement. We were fine. We were great.
One of my most cherished new possessions, an object I put up a special shelf for, was a three-legged bronze bowl, a reproduction of those exquisite old dings. It had recently arrived on my doorstep from Beijing with a note from Cindy, thanking me for making her feel so welcome in our city and inviting me to come to visit her in China. The note also hinted that I would soon be doing business with her colleagues, who had been favorably impressed by their visit. That might occasion a trip or two to China, I thought, extremely satisfied with myself. France, China—where to next?
When I first took this job, I had envisioned it as a high-class secretarial position, but it had turned out to be so much more than that. That was my doing, Rosie told me. All of the partners were astonished at how completely I was running the organization. They were just sitting back enjoying the ride.
When Rosie told them about the likelihood that this French deal was going to materialize, they voted to give me a substantial raise because they too had originally envisioned the position as a glorified secretary.
So things were going fantastic on both personal and professional fronts. I was no longer just waiting to move in with Rosie. We didn’t have to live together to have a life together. I was willing to wait, indefinitely, if necessary, if that was the only way she could deal with her fear of the future. In the meantime, I contemplated the possibility of buying my own house, maybe one of those charming old places near the university with an attic and a sprawling front porch. I was thinking ahead to visions of grandkids on tricycles. I’d need a yard some day. And some day, I mused, when Rosie was too old to throw bales of hay around her barn, I would invite her to come live with me and she would gratefully accept, riding her motorized scooter up my front walk 233
while my great grandkids carried in her luggage.
Financially, purchasing a house wouldn’t be possible for a while, but I was saving a good chunk of my salary, so it wasn’t unrealistic to plan for it. And there was going to be some sort of settlement, I knew, from my divorce, which I was now ready to set in motion.
Feeling somewhat buoyed by the success of Easter, I arranged to meet Jerry for lunch to talk about what would come next. I had been avoiding him for quite a while, using poor Amy as a go-between when necessary. We were no longer talking much on the phone either, so I wasn’t sure what his state of mind was.
He arrived at the restaurant looking neat, but tired.
“How’ve you been, Jerry?” I asked across a white tablecloth.
“How do you think?” he answered resentfully. “Why did you ask me here?”
Okay, I thought, no small talk. “I’m filing for divorce. I’m meeting my lawyer Thursday. I didn’t want you to be surprised by it.”
His expression was hard. He was protecting himself from grief with anger. “Is that it, then? You’re not even going to try to reconcile? Our life together means so little to you that you aren’t willing to make even a little effort?”
“We’ve been over all of this,” I said. “I’m happy with my decision.”
“So, twenty-two years up in smoke?”
“Try not to think of it that way. We had a good life together.
Now let’s move on to something else.”
The rest of the meal was a disaster. When he looked at me, it was with disgust. He was gruff and callous. I had underestimated his anger.
“How’s your mother?” I asked over a bowl of clam chowder.
“Fine.”
Then, as he picked at his salad, I asked, “Do you like Bradley’s girlfriend?”
“She’s okay.” That was practically the extent of our conversation. We each paid for our own meal and left the 234
restaurant together. On the sidewalk, in a shower of spring sunshine, he stared at me coldly and said, “What you’re doing is wrong. You’ve ruined my life and you’ve humiliated your entire family.” Then he turned and walked away.
Although I had managed to be strong enough in Jerry’s company, later that night, after dinner with Rosie, I remembered the sneer on his face, the contempt in his voice. I broke down.
“What is it?” Rosie asked, sitting on the couch beside me.
“We lived a lifetime together and now he hates me. You should have seen the look on his face.”
She held me and said, “It’s still a fresh wound for him. He’s not moving on as fast as you are. Don’t expect too much, too soon.”
I nodded, thinking how true that was. Jerry and I seemed to be living in two different temporal realities.
“Maybe, eventua
lly,” she said, “his hostility will subside and you can be friends. And consider this, Jean. You’re forty years old. You’ll probably live another forty years. You were with Jerry twenty-two. That means that you’ve got a good chance of being with me longer than you were with him, and you’ve already started on a whole new set of happy memories.”
“Very daring prediction,” I said, noting how interesting it was that we were both thinking about being together in our old age. “Very unlike you, Rosie.”
“Did it make you feel better?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I had to get you in a good mood somehow, ’cause I want to fool around.”
I laughed as she pushed me down on the couch and straddled me.Sometimes I felt that Rosie had given me my life, that I had set it aside somewhere long ago and she had recovered it for me.
She said I had found it myself, was still finding pieces of it, and she just happened to be standing alongside one of the big pieces when I found it.
I didn’t realize it ahead of time, but of all the hurdles I had 235
to jump on my way to embracing my new lifestyle, the last and biggest of them had nothing to do with friends and family members and their degree of acceptance. It was about my own degree of acceptance. I was beginning to understand, finally, what Rosie meant about the many steps involved. It wasn’t just a single change that happened. It was a process, and I could imagine that it could be a long one for some people, spanning many years, even decades.
I didn’t know how many steps were involved or even when I had taken one. It was a natural, subconscious progression. But a day did come when I understood that my point of view had indeed shifted, just as Rosie had predicted. That day happened in mid-May when the California Supreme Court overturned the ban on gay marriage. In the excitement that followed that news, I realized that I had, at some point in the last several weeks, identified myself thoroughly with the gay community. This felt personal to me. For weeks, Tyler and I had been reading and talking about gay rights in America, understanding, but not really feeling, that we were a part of it. Suddenly, here it was in our neighborhood, in our time. It wasn’t history. It was happening right now. It was history in the making.