Back Talk

by Danielle Lazarin

  For the first few weeks I picked up the kids for her, Jill tried to press cash into my hand on my way out, but I didn’t let her. I do need the money but I prefer our relationship to be free. Dinner? she’ll ask now on my way out, as if it’s a new idea, though she offers every Thursday. Some nights I stay and some nights I lie. Date, I’ll say, or Plans, or Exhausted. Jill knows when I’m doing it, and she lets it go, so I always come back.

  “My mom’s in,” I say, and she nods. “Cool. Tell her I say hi.”

  Back underground I go.

  • • •

  My mother likes this Mediterranean place a few blocks from my apartment. When I get there, she’s at a table reading a book, half a piece of bread absentmindedly in one hand. I put the bag of clothes against my side, by the wall. She was not even thirty when she married my father, and maybe she’d do it differently now, but then she thought it best to keep a healthy distance between herself and my half siblings. They don’t need a mother; they don’t want a mother, she used to say, even as she criticized the parenting of their actual mother, Emily, the wildness of Jill and Jack up through their early thirties, Caitlin’s distrusting nature. Like living with a sad little ghost, Mom has said of the years Caitlin lived with us.

  “I’m starving,” she tells me without looking up.

  I am, too, and we order.

  Over dinner, she convinces me to play hooky from work the next day to hang out with her. “Take a day. Enjoy this weather before it’s gone.” It’s been unseasonably warm, a last bit of summer even though it officially ended two weeks ago.

  “I do need new glasses,” I say. “Maybe we can do that?” Whenever she is in town, I find things to ask her for advice on—which shoes to wear that day, whether I should paint a wall—because this makes her happy. You need me, she says to me, every visit, but you won’t admit it.

  “Already?”

  I sent her a photo of myself in the ones I’m wearing when I got them at the start of the summer.

  “I have headaches.”

  I take them off and show her how they pinch my temples and the bridge of my nose; they’re too small, but they’re vintage, and I thought they were cool.

  “Those are cute,” she says, and makes me put them back on.

  She presses one side of the glasses against my ear. “You’re sure that’s what that is? You’re sure it isn’t something else? You seem stressed.”

  I pop an olive into my mouth, look for the pit with my back teeth. “I’m not stressed,” I insist, and spit the pit out between my front teeth, depositing it next to the oil-slicked cucumbers on my plate. I think of the dinner table in Brooklyn right now, the beeping of the microwave, my brother-in-law, Dev, cracking jokes, Sacha crawling under the table, food untouched, all the things that Jill calls “a mess” but that I’d happily trade for my mother’s unwitting ability to deflate my confidence in my own feelings, that noisy room for this silence that she thinks means she’s told me something I don’t understand about myself.

  • • •

  My mother’s neglected to tell me, until it’s just before lunchtime the next day, that she is planning on a one o’clock train home; she and my father are going to a birthday dinner at a neighbor’s, and she wants time to decompress beforehand. She leaves me, a new pair of glasses picked out and paid for (we fight over this, the salesman calls us adorable and advises me to listen to her, and it all pleases her), at the lens store.

  It’s over eighty degrees. My apartment feels dark in the afternoon, and I realize this is the last time I will feel warm sun on my body for a long time. I change into a bikini still optimistically in my underwear drawer, grab a towel, a gift from Jill from a vacation she took a few years ago—Turkey? Jamaica?—that has always seemed so much nicer than something that should be on the ground, and head to the meadow in Central Park. I end up falling asleep, and when I wake and rearrange myself, checking for my phone, my wallet, adjusting the strings of my bikini, where I am surely burning, I meet a man. When I retell this story, to friends, eventually, to Jill, I will leave out the sunbathing part, how I didn’t feel naked in front of him, how he barely looked at my body when we spoke. He was looking, I’m sure, before he approached me. He introduced himself using his first and last name, Henry Offerman, lifting his sunglasses to the top of his head as he did this. I told him mine, woozy from the sun, from his simple declarations and questions. He didn’t, as all other men do, feed me a line about it. Hope. His smile expanded. He was wearing a suit. I didn’t know then that he’d quit his job that morning, that he’d spent the past few hours, as I had, walking around with a kind of stolen freedom.

  The suit is nice, but not too nice to sit on the grass in. I offered him a part of my towel, which he accepted. We talked for nearly an hour, as if we planned to meet, as if we already knew each other.

  Henry is the first man I’ve been attracted to whom I’ve thought of as handsome, my vocabulary for all the men I’ve been dating in the past few years suddenly inadequate. I’m aware of his age immediately—I know he’s older. He reads more like the people I encounter at my sisters’ parties: securely employed and married, that side of sure. But he isn’t married, and he isn’t that much older. Thirty-two, he tells me, a pause before he asks me my age that Sunday, when he takes me out for dinner.

  “You seem older,” he says to me.

  I look for disappointment on his face but it isn’t that, nor is it pleasure. Interest, maybe? Relief? Theoretically, I carry less baggage. Theoretically, I’ll expect less of him.

  “I’ve always been around adults,” I say, feeling like an idiot; I’m an adult myself, have been for some time. “I mean, since I was very little,” I add.

  It isn’t a scandalous age difference. Eight years is less than half of the difference between my own parents, and he’s still a good measure from my siblings. It’s that he is supposed to be somewhere he isn’t yet—married, paired, at least—and I am supposed to be out wilding, shaking off whatever I’m expected to loosen from myself so I don’t drag it into my next life.

  At dinner, Henry tells me about the job he left, which made him miserable, how doing so made it easy to come up to me that day. “I never would have, on any other one,” he says, smiling at the luck of it. He doesn’t know what his next move is. He wonders if it’s time to go back to Chicago, where he’s from, where his family still is.

  “Don’t,” I say, possessed by a boldness I’ve never had either.

  “Okay,” he says, locking eyes with me, putting down his fork. “Not yet.”

  Henry and I leave the restaurant and head out into a crisp evening, though under my dress, the skin on my back is peeling from that afternoon in the sun. At a corner, my reflex to check for a child’s hand kicks in and my fingers graze Henry’s, on accident, but he looks at me under a light that’s already changed, as if I know something he’s only just realized. He pivots my body toward his and kisses me right on the edge of the curb, the other pedestrians choosing which side to walk around us. Everything seems possible.

  When we say good-bye through the bars next to the subway turnstile, our fingers touching one last time, I wish him a good week, when I mean to say night. The next Sunday, late in the afternoon, he texts to ask if I’m free for dinner. He’s just landed at JFK, back from a weekend with his family, a wedding or some such life event that he’d mentioned offhand. I think about my presence at those sorts of things, how half a dozen people must have asked him if he was seeing anyone. Would he have mentioned me? How we met? How many days has he been thinking about me?

  He takes the taxi directly to my apartment, whose floors I sweep with a paper towel. I quickly load my dishwasher. I am clean, at least.

  His face in my doorway is more than I am ready for it to be, a certain relief at the way he seems to be remembering me, at his slightly stale airplane smell. No one has ever come home to me. I know this isn’t what this is,
but it’s close enough to give me a little ache for it, to let myself imagine a future that’s mine.

  • • •

  By December, Jill’s news is out, and Henry and I are having dinner every Sunday. Sometimes, in between looking for jobs, he meets me for lunch at my office, or for a movie on a weeknight. The whole time we are dating, Henry goes on interviews, which aren’t exactly dates with other women, but sometimes they feel this way, the ones elsewhere—in Washington, D.C., and in Chicago, especially. In these months I learn what he smells like, what he tastes like, the places where he is soft, the sound of him trying not to wake me in the morning, the order in which he puts on his scarf and hat and gloves. When my mother comes to town again, I invent errands so I can talk to him on the phone outside, even though it’s cold and we aren’t talking about anything that has an endpoint. “I have seven blocks,” I’ll tell him, and he teases me about how he is my secret.

  My parents are going to London for Christmas, to see Jack and his wife and the two girls. They offer me a ticket, casually over dinner one night in Connecticut, where I am for the Thanksgiving weekend (Henry is in Chicago), but I say I want to stay in New York; Henry and I have New Year’s plans. I’ll go to Jill’s for Christmas; the kids are insisting I sleep over. I am vague about New Year’s but specific about Christmas. “Oh, that’s a great plan,” my father says. He’s always amused when Jill and I deliver news about one another to him.

  “Since when are you two so close?” my mother wants to know.

  It’s not much of a stretch to picture Jill as I first remember her: young and cool and mischievous. The cigarettes she never finished in time for me to miss noticing when we met her outside somewhere; I can hear my father clucking his tongue, feel the reflexive tightening grip of my mother’s hand as we approached.

  “I don’t know,” I say. It seems I can’t remember a time when I lived in New York and we weren’t, when their house didn’t feel like mine in a way the one I’m sitting in now does less and less.

  “The free trips will stop after a while, just so you know,” she says with a little smirk.

  “I know,” I say, and try not to roll my eyes.

  “Katherine,” my father says, half-sharply, half-laughing. He still doesn’t know whose side to take.

  “I’m teasing,” she says, leaning back in her chair with the last of her wine. “London in December isn’t much to look at.”

  “I know,” I say again, and ask Dad about work.

  • • •

  On a beautiful afternoon in April, Henry waits for me outside my office building. It’s Friday, and my boss is away for the weekend, so I cut out a little early. Henry’s sitting, knees spread, sunglasses on, on the edge of a fountain in the plaza outside. When I reach for his hand, he takes it with a sigh, and I think he’s just relieved to see me.

  “You up for walking a bit?” he asks.

  “With you? Always.” I kiss his cheek.

  He puts his hand on my face. He’s not usually up for a lot of contact in public, so it seems, then, especially sweet. It’s that kind of day: sunny, not too warm, and my legs are bare, and he smells like a fresh shower and a shave, and I feel, on that Friday afternoon, incredibly lucky, at ease, pretty and smart and on the way to something good, with Henry, with myself.

  My phone dings in my pocket, a coworker asking if I want to come to happy hour with them, but I don’t reply. I explain to Henry that my phone’s on because Jill’s labor could start at any time. Both Anjali and Sacha came just past their due dates, and Jill doesn’t want this one early, but I am anxious for her to arrive, to do what I’m supposed to when she comes. “Sure, sure,” he says, then, “Can we stop?”

  He points me to a park—a small triangle, really, the ivy thick in it already, and the bench is in the shade—and I walk through the open gate with him. “You okay?” I ask.

  Here’s the way he says it: He’s moving to Chicago. Not that he’s taking a job there, which he is, a good job, one that sounds if not exactly right for him, right enough for now, to let him know what might be right for later. This is one of the things we talked about, one of those mornings in bed when I didn’t want to go to work and he had nowhere to be on that day, and the sunlight would get brighter and brighter in my room. He wouldn’t tell me not to go, but he’d lay a hand over my thigh, nudge at whatever I was still wearing in bed. In February and March especially, it seemed we couldn’t get enough of each other, the last days of dark afternoons that I hoped, then, unlike I had any other winter in my life, would stay longer, so we could give in to bed earlier, so that we’d get quicker to the part of the night where he’d fit a hand under each of my breasts and say into my ear, You, and only that, but it was enough. Those mornings were hard, waking up, leaving him. He’d work a finger under the edge of my underwear, or a strap of my tank top, as if considering how responsible he was willing to be for making me late, and we talked about these things, moving and jobs and the future. I believed we were building him, together. I don’t remember if he asked me what I wanted. I was too enthralled by what he was doing to me, the way he always gave in, and I’d let him spin out his mind till it was so spent he could focus on my body, and we’d have sex, quickly, but always at his urging, his failure to let me go. That made it all all right: being late for work, how quickly it was over, how it pained me to think of how long it would be till I’d get him again, looking at me that way, talking to me as if I were the insides of his own mind.

  The job is one thing. But then, on the bench, his face a shade of red not from the walk, but from shame, he mentions Paige, by name, as though she were a mutual friend. I know Paige. Paige, he almost married. Paige, whom he moved to New York to forget. I’m still holding his hand and not letting him take it away. He begins, at that moment, actually, to stroke my palm with his thumb, but we’re both sweaty and clammy at this point, our bodies in various states of panic. Paige is in his mind again. She is in his life again. He still loves her, he’s realized. Enough to give it another shot, enough to say it aloud to me.

  I still haven’t taken back my hand. I’m still holding on.

  “Hope,” he says, part question, part apology. No one ever knows how to say my name right when they are disappointing me.

  The best thing to do would be to let go of his hand, to not ask him to explain, but I need to understand what I’ve missed. We talk in the park for another hour, quietly, as the sun starts to sink and the day turns flat. When I’ve heard all that I can, I take the train to my sister’s in Brooklyn.

  • • •

  Jill is finally, at this stage, not going out on a Friday night; she opens the door in a dress and no makeup, as radiant as ever. Dev has just come in from work, and gives my arm a squeeze as he loosens his tie. “I’ll order us food,” he says, and goes upstairs to change. I finally cry in the kitchen, where, on various babysitting nights, I’ve held each of the kids against me as they’ve wept over grievances that felt ridiculously small: a broken plastic toy, a wrong look from a friend, and more so now.

  Jill, a month from her due date, moves as fast as she ever did. The kids are downstairs watching a movie, but she takes me into the pantry, closes one of the two doors, and wraps her arms around me. “I’m sorry this is a shitty hug. There’s a giant human in the way.”

  She gives the impression of being delicate of body and bone—her fine features, her pale coloring—but she is unafraid of risk or person or making a mistake, generous. Her hugs, when given, are like being wrapped in a straitjacket. She doesn’t ask me why I’m crying, but what she can do. Still in her grasp, I shrug.

  “It’s that boy, isn’t it?”

  “That man,” is all I can get out. She opens a fresh box of tissues from a shelf behind her, hands it to me, whole. I tell her what happened in the park.

  Jill says to me, “Clearly, he’s not good enough for you. He’s not ready.”

  It’s the
sweetest of lies. He was perfect. I am the girl who made the other girl look like everything, who made him ready for her. I am the one who’s not good enough.

  • • •

  Two weeks later, my mother is in town, just for the day. She has an appointment with a lawyer, something about the business she used to own, but she wants to have coffee with me before. She meets me at my building and we take the train together in the direction of my office.

  We stand, as we always have, up against the far set of doors. The train is full, but not bad for a morning commute. She rests her hand on the crook of my bent elbow for balance. She squints at my face.

  “What?”

  “You using a new moisturizer?”

  My mother is obsessed with my skin.

  I shake my head no. Then I start to cry.

  “Why are you crying?” she asks, pursing her lips, wiping a tear from my cheek with her thumb.

  “I don’t know,” I say. I have made it almost three years here without crying in public; leave it up to her to make this happen.

  It all comes out then, the whole story of Henry, how we met, how I felt about him, how it’s already over.

  As I tell it, my mother doesn’t look at me—she has never been able to do that when I cry, even as I do so silently, as one does on public transportation. I try to look at her, but my glasses are cloudy with my tears. “Not here,” she whispers, adjusting the shoulders on my coat, smoothing my hair. She’s out of practice with New York City, the way people use subway cars like holding spaces: putting on makeup, finishing work, sleeping and eating and checking themselves out in the doors as if no one else is watching. We all are; we just pretend not to be. I am but one body in tears on the 1 train. I only mind crying here because my mother is watching me do it.

  When we get off the train, she hands me a tissue from her purse.

  “You’re too young for that, anyway,” she says. “You understand?”