by Mary F. Pols
So one evening, after a fish dinner that involved no butter or cream, I took a deep breath and launched into it.
“You keep saying how bored you are at work,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s time you either ask for different responsibilities there or start looking for a new job? Something you might find more stimulating.”
“I can’t until I find a place to live,” he said.
“Why not?” I said.
“You told me you didn’t want me bringing my computer in and setting it up in your house,” he said. “I can’t look for a job without having my computer set up.”
So it was my fault?
“Oh, don’t give me that,” I said. “You tell me you spend all this time at the office playing fantasy baseball or whatever it is. Certainly you could be browsing job sites then. You could at least get some ideas.”
How was it that I could go from maternal to annoyed with him in five seconds flat? Sometimes I was too mercurial for even me to understand. I wanted to help, but I slipped into scolding mode so easily.
“I guess,” he said.
“What is it you want to do with your life?” I asked. “I don’t even know. You used to talk about business school, but you took that class at Stanford and then seemed to lose interest.”
“The class was okay,” he said. “Not really what I expected, though.”
He put his head in his hands.
“Why is it you’re interested in the financial world?” I said.
“I just need to do something fast-paced,” he said. “Otherwise I get bored.”
It takes Matt at least seven minutes to open a can of cat food and divide it between Casco and McGee’s dishes, a task I think should take forty-five seconds. He does wash their dishes, and freshen up their water bowl, which is nice. However, since he is often doing this while I’m trying to prepare dinner on the approximately two square feet of counter space in my kitchen, I am acutely aware of how long it takes him. I wouldn’t call him fast-paced by nature.
“Do you have a larger game plan?” I asked. “One I just don’t know about?” I wanted so much for the answer to be yes, for him to have some secret ambition I could help him achieve.
“No,” he said very quietly. “I don’t. I don’t have any idea what I want to do. I never have.”
Well, there it was, the heartbreaking truth. Such an absence of aspirations was alien to me. Bouts of shyness and lack of self-confidence had occasionally waylaid me on my own path, but I’d known I wanted to be a writer since I was eight. However much I wanted to help Matt, desire and direction weren’t seeds I could plant for him.
“I don’t think you’re going to be happy until you figure that out, Matt,” I said. “I know you resent me pushing you, but I do want you to be happy.”
“I know you do,” he said. He sounded so defeated, I started to cry.
I don’t think Matt knew how to hope. I remember a conversation I’d had with him when I was waiting to hear whether I’d gotten the fellowship. I’d been full of enthusiasm and “what ifs,” prattling on about how cool it would be to spend a year at Stanford.
“Well, let’s not get too excited about this,” he’d said. I was cooking dinner and Dolan was sitting on his lap, turning the pages of a Curious George board book.
“I’m not saying it’s guaranteed by any means,” I’d said. “But I think they’re down to like twenty-eight people for twenty spots. I’ve got a better than fifty-fifty chance of getting it.”
“I just don’t like to get too hopeful about things,” he’d said.
“You don’t like to be hopeful?” I’d asked.
“When I have hoped for things in the past it seems like it’s never worked out. So I try to not get too worked up about things that might happen, so it’s not so disappointing if they don’t,” he said.
I’d said nothing more. To know that this was the attitude Matt had gone through life with, or most of life with, was just overwhelmingly sad.
Now I walked over to my houseguest, who looked so bleak, and knelt down in front of him. “You need to start thinking about what you want,” I said. “You need to hope more. It’s good for you.”
ONCE, when my siblings and I were all sitting around the dinner table bitching about some new development on a piece of coastal property, my father had looked up from his bowl of soup and said, “Let this be a lesson to you in the impermanence of all things.” The room had gone dead quiet and we’d all stared at him. He was a philosopher, but he did not often share profundities at the dinner table. He calmly dipped his spoon into the soup and went back to eating.
I had no idea at the time that my father was quoting Buddhist wisdom, but the phrase became a part of my thinking. “Let this be a lesson to you,” I’d said, watching a movie theater I’d liked being torn down. “Another lesson,” I’d said, coming upon a freshly paved road through woods previously unsullied by tar. Picking up the pieces of a vase I’d loved, knocked over by McGee’s tail, I’d remind myself, “…in the impermanence of all things.”
Still, I was not prepared for the reminder I got about impermanence two weeks later. After breakfast Matt had headed off to his weekly softball game, and Dolan and I had settled into a morning of playing with his railroad set. My cell phone rang just as I’d finally figured out how to reproduce the figure 8 on the box.
“Yeah, the car just died,” Matt said. “I’m on Treasure Island, waiting for the tow truck. I’m thinking maybe it’s the alternator.”
I knew he knew nothing about cars. I’d watched him be completely flummoxed by opening the fuel tank cover on this one.
“Matt, you didn’t let it run out of oil,” I asked. “Did you?”
“No,” he scoffed. “I’m sure it’s not that. No lights have gone on or anything like that.”
But when my mechanic called later to give me the verdict, it turned out that was exactly what Matt had done. He had driven it without oil and now it was a lump of useless metal. He had it towed in front of my apartment and it just sat there. I struggled mightily with the impermanence of this thing. There was nothing Zen-like about me when I confronted him. “Who did you expect to change the oil? Did you ever even check the oil?”
“No,” he sniped back. “I didn’t check the oil because I never wanted a car that was so old that you have to check the oil all the time.”
“Three months you had it,” I said. “You never thought about the oil once?”
The word “incompetent” hovered in my brain until I couldn’t stand it anymore. After four days of the silent treatment, which he responded to with his own silence, rather than the abject apologies I wanted, I finally said it. We had put Dolan to bed and were sitting at the dinner table and I was grilling him about what he intended to do about getting another car. Then I said it. “Sometimes I think you are just incompetent.” As the last word rang in the air, I felt like Jadis in C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, using the Deplorable Word, the word that ended a whole world. His jaw clenched and then pulsed, in that way that seems as unique to men as an Adam’s apple. Then he went to bed. He had no other means of escaping me.
“Eesh,” Liza said the next night. “You might as well have called him impotent.” She was piloting her SUV through the Mission, looking for a parking space. We were going out to dinner. I had decided I needed to get away from my roommate.
“He is incompetent,” I said. “He can’t do anything. I asked him to peel potatoes the other day and you should have seen him, fumbling through it. It took him a half hour.”
“He’s probably scared he’s doing it wrong,” she said.
“He was! He left all the eyes in.”
“I’m sure he’s scared of you,” she said. “You’re scary. I’m scared of you. You’re like a snapping turtle in that kitchen of yours. That’s why I never offer to help.”
We looked at each other and laughed.
“But one last thing,” I said. “The other day he called me to ask if there was something wrong
with the milk because there was all this goop on top.”
Liza was trying to light a cigarette and make a left-hand turn at the same time. “Cream?” she asked.
“Exactly,” I said.
I was conscious both that I needed to complain and that I wanted to complain. The source of this urge needled me, but for the time being, I wasn’t going to let it stop me. Liza needed to hear each and every one of my grievances against Matt.
“Hugh called me the other night to ask me where Henry’s baseball uniform was,” she said as soon as she’d gotten the cigarette lit and exhaled long and hard. “At his house. I said, ‘How should I know?’ We’re almost divorced and he still expects me to be his housekeeper.”
“Let me have one of those,” I said.
“No,” she said.
“Liza, he’s the nicest guy in the world but he let the car run out of oil,” I said. “He’s sleeping in the trundle bed I bought for him because he doesn’t even have a futon. Give me one.”
“You’ve got to just let him fail a few times and figure it out for himself,” she said, handing me a cigarette. “If he’s incompetent, it’s not your problem. How many times have I said this to you?”
“But he keeps failing,” I said. “And never seems to figure it out. How can it not be my problem? I don’t want Dolan growing up with a father who expects the freaking Tooth Fairy to change his oil for him.”
“You shouldn’t have bought him a car,” she said. “You should have made him buy it himself.”
“I don’t know how I could have done that,” I said, exhaling out the window, guiltily imagining a dark future of breast cancer and premature death and Dolan without me. But these were dire times. “Short of taking him at gunpoint to a dealership. And cosigning his loan papers. And it did make my life easier. For a few months. Fuck. What am I going to do now?”
“You’re going to tell him he has to get another car,” she said. “On his own this time. No hand-holding. Tell him if he wants to see his son he has to get himself a means of transport.”
“I don’t want to threaten him with something I’d never do to him,” I said. “Or to Dolan. Plus he’s living with us, so it’s not like that’s a real threat.”
“Well, you need to get him out of there anyway,” she said. “You need to start charging him rent. And none of this has to be a threat. You just have to be firm: ‘This is how it’s going to be.’”
“I have no problem being firm,” I said. “You know that.”
“Firm without being critical,” she said. “There’s a difference. Firm doesn’t have to be hurtful. Critical can be hurtful.”
We both knew what she was talking about. Once we didn’t speak for the better part of four months. She’d been angry with me for a perceived allegiance with Hugh—it was hard to stop being friends with someone you liked because a marriage was breaking up—and we’d gone back and forth in frustration with each other until I’d finally written her a scolding letter telling her exactly how unreasonable she was being. At the time I thought it was brutally honest and thus helpful. In retrospect, it was sanctimonious and unhelpful. For months there was nothing but awful silence between us, until her brother John brokered a reconciliation. I was lucky we were still friends.
“There’s a spot,” I said, pointing to a car that was about to vacate a parking place.
“Finally,” she said, putting her blinker on. “Did you make dinner for them before you left?”
“Just some spaghetti,” I said.
“I knew it,” she said. “Enabler. Why are you still cooking for him anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said, opening the car door. “Let’s go to dinner and talk about anything but Matt. I feel like a broken record.”
I DID KNOW. I started cooking for him because I wanted to make it easy for him to be there, for Dolan. He’d be that much more willing to babysit if he knew he’d get a nice hot meal. I guess it was a form of bribery, to entice him to be around for Dolan. Which was unnecessary, ultimately. I also thought it would make us feel more like a family. And it wasn’t exactly agony, since I love to cook. But in all our time together, I had built up a lot of resentment over feeding Matt. And the food-related resentment was just part of the bigger resentment. The death of the Mercedes had drained my reserves of goodwill. Why did I have to do everything? Why had he never even attempted to cut Dolan’s fingernails, for instance? Maybe this is how it was with husbands. But husbands could be counted on to make you feel good, at least occasionally, right?
“We need to talk,” I said to him that weekend. Dolan was in his room, allegedly napping, but actually singing to himself and thumping his sippy cup of milk against the wall. Matt had taken my car to go look at two shared apartments that morning, but he hadn’t been enthusiastic about either of them. His pace of apartment searching was such that I was getting worried my friends had been right.
“Okay,” he said, folding himself into a chair, probably thinking, Not again! Casco immediately jumped up onto his lap and began licking herself. Through the window behind him, I could see the dead Mercedes. Leaves were piling up on its windshield.
“I need you to take more initiative around here,” I said. “While you are living here, you need to cook at least twice a week.”
“I will,” he said. “I keep meaning to, but it’s hard to plan for it.”
This wasn’t a good thing to say to me. Trips to the grocery store were hard to fit into my day, but they weren’t something I could avoid. I had to feed my son. I had to pack him lunches. I made the time.
“Well, start planning,” I said to Matt. “Start with thinking about what you’re going to cook for dinner next Tuesday.”
“I will,” he said. “Maybe I’ll make that chicken with papaya.”
“That would be great,” I told him. “And what are you going to do about the car? We can’t go back to you not having one.”
“I know,” he said. “I guess I have to see if I can get a loan.”
This is where it got hard for me. When I’d bought my Jetta, I had done a lot of research, about loans and the best way to buy a car. I’d ended up turning it into a story for the paper. I felt as though I knew a bit about the process, and I was sure I knew more than Matt. But this time it was all up to him. Liza’s words rang in my head.
“Maybe you could call your dad to ask for some advice,” I said neutrally.
“I think I’ll call Charlie,” Matt said. “He’s pretty good at this stuff.”
“Good,” I said.
With the help of his stepfather, Matt was approved for a loan a few days later. I winced when he forgot to get approval from the credit union on the particular used car he’d picked out and they declined the loan, after he’d already driven the car off the lot. I waited to see what he would do, praying he wouldn’t ask me to help. Again, thanks to Charlie, he figured it out. After the aborted effort with the Mercedes, phase one of my long-term plan to see him established in more of an adult life was complete, and I was pleased. Now on to phase two. We had reached the last weekend of the month and he still hadn’t found an apartment.
“Starting October 1, you are going to have to start paying some rent,” I told him over dinner. We were having pasta with shrimp, which meant that Dolan needed only minimal coaxing from both of us to eat. “Three hundred the first month. If you are still here in November, you’ll have to pay $650.”
He looked irritated. I remembered his mother telling me he’d been upset when she’d asked him to pay rent. But the very next day, he found an apartment in Oakland he could move into immediately. The neighborhood wasn’t what I would have picked out, and his roommates didn’t seem like people he was thrilled to be living with, but as I kept telling myself, these were not my choices to make. At least I no longer had a roommate and Dolan had a father who lived close enough to come for dinner on short notice or pick him up from preschool when the need arose.
THERE IS SUCH A THING as an autumn chill in California, albeit not
much of one. A few weeks after the death of the Mercedes, I turned the heat on for the first time. The smoke alarm went off within thirty minutes, and there was a vague burning smell coming from the furnace. I called the gas company, and they came out the next day.
“Just dust,” the guy said cheerfully. “You’ve got a season’s worth of lint and cat hair down there, and then you turn the thing on, and it just starts to burn off. I’ll vacuum it out for you.”
Matt was standing there with me. How I wish he had the gene that would make him able to diagnose the source of such a smell. I know this is sexist of me, but if I can, and do, make Thomas Keller’s sautéed salmon with a beurre blanc and leeks, I would like the person who eats a dish like that in my home to just occasionally contribute something I could contribute but would rather not. I know I should just be grateful that he is better at brushing Dolan’s teeth than I am.
The repairman suggested I move all the coats off the rack above the furnace.
“Could they catch fire?” I asked. I felt silly asking, but I’ve wondered. If I step out of the bathroom after a shower and shake a few drops of water down there accidentally, it sizzles.
“No,” he said. “It’ll just dry them out. But don’t leave anything on top of the grate. And don’t let your little boy play on top of it.”
Dolan was peering around my leg at the time.
“That’s a great old furnace,” the guy said cheerily, on his way out the door. “Must be fifty years old, but it’s in good shape.”
“Well,” I said, picking up my vacuum cleaner, which I had been storing on the grate. “I better move this.”
The vacuum cleaner was the nicest thing I owned. I bought it shortly after becoming a mother. A freelance check had dropped from the sky, so I splurged. It was a Miele, a German brand Liza introduced me to a couple of years before. She has two. “Yes,” she had told me. “They are worth $600. Worth every penny.”