by Phoebe Fox
“Oh,” she finally said. “All right. Well. How are you?”
“I’m fine. How about you?”
“Fine.”
The only sound after that was the clink of the ice in my glass as I raised it to my lips for something to do.
“And how are rehearsals?” I plopped into the silence.
That yielded another small smile. “Good. I forgot how much I love being backstage. The theater is always magical, but from the other side of the footlights...it’s something else.”
“Maybe you could give me a tour after I see the show one night?” I asked offhandedly, and Mom’s teeth peeked out between her lips.
“Would you like that? I’d love to.”
“Sure. It’d be interesting.”
Mom nodded, and sipped her own drink. “So...” she said after a moment, “how’s everything with your practice?”
“Good.” Usually that was where I’d leave things. It was easier to exchange platitudes with my mom than try to go any deeper—at least with civilities we were less likely to grate on each other and start a fight.
But I was trying for more with her, I reminded myself. Time to put a toe in the water.
“I’m really busy with clients, so that’s good. And the group sessions are going pretty well. I think I’m helping a lot of people.”
“You always wanted to help. Do you remember ‘rescuing’ the frog in our backyard when you were younger—around seven or so? You were convinced he was sick and wanted to nurse him back to health.”
A grin tugged at my lips. “I did? That’s funny.” She rarely reminisced with me about my childhood, and I reveled in the moment.
“‘He has a fever, Mommy,’ you told me when I came to check on you. And you’d rubber-banded an ice cube to the poor creature’s back. I don’t know if he froze to death or was squeezed to death.” Her laughter floated out over the mangrove swamp.
I gritted my teeth. “Really, Mom? That’s the story you remember about me liking to help? That I killed something?”
The smile vanished from her face as if I’d kicked her. “Oh, please, Brook Lyn. It was cute. You didn’t know any better.”
This was going nowhere good. I decided to try another tack, but literally nothing came to mind that wouldn’t be a minefield. With Adelaide—a woman I barely knew—conversation flowed like it was spring-fed. How was it that I couldn’t think of a single topic of discussion with the woman I had known my entire life?
Movement from the corner of my eye pulled my focus to our server, bearing a large oval tray with our dinner on it, and I was grateful for something to fill the silence. After setting down our meals and making sure we needed nothing else, she vanished, and I looked back at my mom, who was busy slicing her green beans in halves.
Something about that careful, meticulous gesture tugged on my sympathies, and I took a deep breath. “So...how’s the cast of the show?”
Mom’s eyes flicked up to me, shadowing with disapproval as she saw me pick up a shrimp and bite into it, tearing the flesh out of what remained of its tail. She pointedly looked at my silverware. “You’re coming to the opening, aren’t you? You’ll see them for yourself.”
Reluctantly I picked up my fork. Who the hell ate tail-on shrimp with a fork? “Of course I will,” I gritted out with a forced smile. “I just meant, you know...personally. Do you like them? Do you guys hang out together when you aren’t rehearsing? Are any of them, like...I don’t know...friends?” I couldn’t picture my mother yukking it up with a bunch of theater types, but clearly there was a lot I had never known about her.
She nodded cautiously, as though guarding her confessions to an interrogator. “Yes, I like them, for the most part. Yes, we do get dinner together most nights, or meet between rehearsals to run lines. Yes, I guess you could say I’ve become quite friendly with some of them.”
It was a factual and complete answer to my questions, but it didn’t really tell me much.
“Ma, how come you never talk to me?” I blurted out before I could think better of it.
Her eyebrows arrowed toward each other. “What are you talking about? What are we doing right now?”
I held out my arms, palms up. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m desperately searching for a way to get an actual conversation going between us, and judging from your closed-ended answers, you’re looking for ways to get me to shut up.”
Mom let out a long-suffering sigh, laid her fork down, and stared at her plate as if the tuna might advise her how to deal with her vexing daughter. “What is this really about, Brook Lyn? Did I do something? Tell me what it is.”
I clattered my own fork back to the table and pushed back with my palms on the edge. “That’s not what I—I just meant—”
“Please keep your voice down and don’t make a scene.”
“That! That’s what I’m talking about! You’re apparently big buds with your theater people, and you’ll talk to Sasha all day long, but with me and Stu all you ever do is criticize and worry and give advice we didn’t ask for. Why can’t we just talk?”
“You’re my children.” She sounded surprised. “It’s my job to worry. To help you make the right choices. Not to make the mistakes I made with my life.”
“Mistakes?” I knew my eyes must be wide as eggs. “What do you mean, like us—your family?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Well, then what did you mean, Mom?” Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to try to change our relationship from its usual cordial civility. This was spiraling fast to a place I’d had no inkling of going. But now that she’d said it, I couldn’t let it go. “Do you wish you hadn’t had us? Hadn’t married Dad? Is that what all this theater stuff is about—you’re doing what you really wanted to do with your life finally, now that we’re out of the way?”
The bitterness in my tone startled me, and I realized my accusation was punching out from somewhere deeply buried.
Mom closed her eyes and shook her head, then looked at me again. “Brook Lyn. Do you want me to tell you that everything in my life happened just the way it was meant to? That I wouldn’t change a thing?”
Well, yes, actually. That would be nice.
“I can’t tell you that,” she went on, not waiting for my answer. “I didn’t expect to meet your father when I did. And I certainly didn’t plan to be pregnant immediately after that. It all happened very quickly, and it just simply was the way things were before we had a chance to think about whether it was what we would have planned. It was the situation at hand. I don’t know if I’d do things the same way, and I don’t believe things are meant to happen. I know this is the way they did happen. And this is the path I’m on, so I embrace it.”
I tried to keep the pain her words caused me off my face, but judging from the way her face tightened, I didn’t succeed.
She reached across the table for my hand, and I let her, but made no effort to grip her fingers back. “But I can tell you that you kids—and your father—are the best part of my life,” she said intently. “I couldn’t be prouder of my family. You’re all good people. Hard workers. You love each other. You’re not on drugs.”
Eh, I’d take it.
The tightness in my abdomen loosened ever so slightly, and I swallowed back the lump that threatened to choke me. “But is this what you wanted, Mom? Are you happy?” We’d touched on a raw nerve I hadn’t even known was there, and my voice was small, blown away in the breeze off the gulf.
“Brook Lyn.” Mom squeezed my hand slightly and then let go, pulling hers back and reaching for her fork. “Happiness is a choice.”
I thought about my mother’s words the whole drive home—straight up 41 this time. I would have been blind to the gulf route anyway with my mind churning the way it was.
Every kid wants to hear her
parents say she’s the best thing in their lives—and to my surprise, my mom had. Sure, it was amid a handful of caveats and disclaimers that were more like what I expected from my not-exactly-warm-and-fuzzy mom, but if I heard her answer as an adult, as a therapist, instead of as her daughter, I had to admire it.
Happiness is a choice.
I knew from the article Sasha wrote about my mom in the spring that my mother been accepted to Juilliard on a partial acting scholarship when she was younger—the first I’d ever heard of it. I’d known she was good after the first time I saw her act in Lion in Winter—but I didn’t know she was that good.
She had to turn it down, though, because her own parents wouldn’t pony up the rest of the tuition, and Mom couldn’t afford New York and the pricey school without it. She never got to chase her dream. Instead she had us—again not part of her plan, and yet, despite how much Mom often grated on me, she’d been an amazing mother. She was the one who brought us all together—still—every week for a family dinner. She’d created all of our holiday traditions. It was even Mom who’d initially welcomed Sasha into our family, calling Sasha’s parents directly the first time my sad, withdrawn seven-year-old best friend asked if she could stay at our house so she didn’t have to go home to their fighting. Mom made it sound as if they would be doing her an enormous favor if they would entrust their little girl with our family for the weekend so that her own daughter had someone to play with.
I don’t remember a time Mom wasn’t there when I skinned a knee or fell off my bike or came home crying from some slight from my friends at school—not to wrap her arms around me and comfort me, as I might have wished for, but to pick me up, set me back on my feet, and remind me I was stronger than whatever had knocked me down.
When my father cheated on her while she had two small children at home—a fact he’d confessed to me once in the blackest of my despair over Kendall, and then had never spoken of again, and which Mom had no idea I knew—she’d stood strong then too, somehow working through it with my dad, learning to forgive him, and even loving him wholeheartedly again all through our childhood without any trace of the resentment or anger or rage I know she must have once felt.
She wasn’t the kind of squishy-soft mommy I’d always wanted. But maybe she was the one I needed. One who faced challenges head-on and didn’t let them mow her down. One who took whatever life handed her and made something out of it that she then decided was exactly what she wanted, and chose to be happy.
The one who’d raised me to be just like her.
I wasn’t a victim, the way I’d been acting this past week. I was strong like my mom, and whatever was happening between me and Ben, I could face it. And I could handle it.
And I wasn’t the same person I’d been even just a few months ago—when I’d confused strength with hardness, with a cold, rational façade that precluded the genuine strength of vulnerability and openness and the courage to show your feelings. Strength wasn’t feeling no fear, as the old saw went. It was feeling the fear and doing it anyway—that thing that was making you afraid.
It was choosing to be happy. No matter the outcome.
I picked up my phone at a red light and dialed Ben.
twenty-two
I didn’t want to talk things out over the phone, so I kept it short and light, as though nothing had changed between us—we talked about our days, I asked about Jake, and before we hung up I made sure to mention Saturday, our customary date night.
“There’s a new Indian restaurant that opened up downtown—Saffron,” I said casually. “Feel like checking that out this weekend?”
There was a moment’s hesitation, but I didn’t let myself freak out about it. Luckily, since it was followed by, “Sure, that sounds good. Meet me there at six thirty?”
I also didn’t let myself freak out about his wanting to meet there, instead of picking me up as usual. Maybe he had something going on beforehand, or would already be downtown, or...it could be anything. Harmless.
I agreed and we said good night and hung up.
Things were clearly not the way they always were—there was a tension between us we never had. But Saturday night we’d talk things out, and I’d face it head-on instead of running.
The next morning I called Sasha before my first client to tell her about the call with Ben.
“So he said he wanted to meet you for your date, and you aren’t worried? Really?”
“Well, I wasn’t. Geez, Sash!”
“Sorry. I just...Oh, wait, are you doing that thing where you shut down and act like you don’t care?”
I sighed. “No. I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m doing that thing where I try to be a grown-up and not get panicky. Something weird happened that night, and I’m just going to ask him about it. I’m going to tell him how I feel.”
“Wow. That’s kind of...huge.”
“You think it’s too much? I shouldn’t say anything?” I heard the doubt creep into my tone.
“No, no—I think it’s really great, Brookie. I just mean it’s huge for you. I know you must really like him, and you’ve gotten so brave about letting yourself be open to your feelings, and...I’m so happy that you...”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Sasha. Are you crying?”
“No.” She sniffled.
“You’re an idiot.”
“I’m really proud of you, Brook.”
“Okay, Tammy Faye, we’ll talk when you’ve collected yourself,” I said dryly.
But as we hung up, I felt a little glow of pride in myself.
“I’m Sheila. Amherst.”
Sheila held the claw dangling down beside her chair between the tips of two fingers, as though it might burn her. She’d been the first to pick it up when we all settled into our chairs that Saturday morning, surprising me as much as it apparently did everyone else in the group. Except Dina Jones, who leaned back in her chair, arms crossed in her usual position, assessing Sheila as if she were a calculus problem she was working to puzzle out.
“So...um, my fella...Tom...he broke up with me a couple of months ago.” Sheila wasn’t looking at anyone in the group while she shared this; she kept her eyes trained on the ground, and spoke so softly that I had to make sure the sound of my breathing didn’t drown out her words. “Right after I signed up for this group he came back, so I was going to cancel...but I didn’t, because...well, I’m worried he might not stay.”
I frowned at her terminology. Sheila seemed absent in her summation—a passive recipient of whatever Tom decided to offer her. But I tried to reserve judgment until I heard the rest of her story.
“So I’m here. I guess that’s all.” She made a quick flick of her wrist that swung the claw forward, and she let it drop to the center of the circle.
Antonio leaned forward to pick it up—he shared nearly every meeting—but I held up a hand to stay him. “Hold on, Antonio. Sheila, let’s talk this out a little. You say Tom came back—you mean you two are back together?”
She nodded.
“And are you talking about what happened with your breakup—or have you?”
Sheila lifted a shoulder. “Tom doesn’t like to talk about stuff like that. He says that’s for women and fa—um, gay people, he means.”
“What?!” Dina barked across the circle. But when I looked over at her she had already piped down. She caught my eye, holding up her hands to show she was finished, but shooting a dark scowl over to Sheila, who fortunately was still staring at the ground. I was afraid the fierceness of it might have made the skittish girl implode on the spot if she’d caught Dina’s eye.
“Okay,” I said, keeping my tone neutral. “You said you’re worried he might not stay. What makes you think that?”
Another half shrug. “I don’t know. Sometimes things are really great.” A soft smile came over her features, whi
ch she promptly hid by tipping her head forward, sending a cascade of hair over her face. “I keep trying to make sure they stay that way, but I always manage to say or do the wrong thing. I know his last girlfriend really hurt him, and so I try to be nothing like her, but sometimes I think that’s the exact wrong thing to do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she was pretty close to perfect. She’s smart and successful—she owns her own boutique—and she’s confident and really outgoing. She loves to travel—I’m afraid to fly—and she’s beautiful and has style, of course, with her job. And I, um”—she indicated her own outfit, a bland beige oversize T-shirt and washed-out jeans—“don’t.”
“Do you know her?” I asked, confused at Sheila’s detailed description.
Sheila shook her head. “No, just from stuff Tom tells me. He doesn’t mean to—it just pops out when we have a fight.”
There were restive rustling sounds from the group, as if they had to channel their unvoiced reactions into movement.
I could relate; pity flooded my heart. This poor girl was apparently treated to a litany of how wonderful the woman before her was—the woman Sheila was not—and made to feel inadequate over it. Judging from her self-effacing demeanor, she clearly suffered from a poor self-image anyway. It sounded like this guy was playing right into her vulnerabilities, using them to control her, to make her feel worse about herself, to raise his own self-esteem by plunging hers to rock-bottom.
“Sheila,” I said gently, “it seems like Tom might be comparing you to someone else a lot. Maybe he’s not really appreciating who you are.”
“Oh, no!” Sheila looked up at me with pleading eyes. “I think she—Desiree is her name—I think Desiree just really messed him up, made him feel bad about himself, so sometimes he can’t help doing that to someone else. To me, I mean. He doesn’t mean it. I just...I guess I hoped maybe you could help me figure out how to help him past it.”