“All of which you agreed to! Happily!” Henry was now shouting. “Jesus Christ, the thanks I get for making a simple suggestion that you take up volunteering!”
“Be quiet!” I hissed. “You’ll wake Katie.”
But it was too late. Seconds later, I heard her wail, and I could feel Henry’s eyes boring into me from behind as I rushed to my crying daughter, though I don‘t know who was more disturbed, her or me.
Today, on our bench at the zoo, it wasn’t hard to grasp the connotations of what Leigh said: that motherhood could both fill you up and, if you let it, and maybe only if you let it, suck you dry.
“Will you have more?” I ask her, after Allie runs over to us and begs for ice cream money.
“Maybe,” Leigh says. “We’ll see.” She shrugs, then laughs. “I feel like I’ve finally figured this mom thing out. Adding another one might throw the whole balance down the tubes.”
“Well, I’m an untrained expert, but it looks like you’re doing pretty well to me.” Allie hands the ice cream vendor three dollars and struggles, as if it were of grave, consequential world importance, to make a decision on flavors.
“I hope so,” Leigh says. “But you know, you just try to do the best you can. No one ever tells you that the best you can should be enough.”
Allie settles on strawberry and heads back toward us, her cone tipping perilously toward the ground like an unbalanced seesaw until she rights it at the last second. Soon, we hug our good-byes and Leigh smiles a kind smile, saying we should do this again and not too far in the future.
I watch them amble down the brick path of the park, surrounded by a tunnel of lush trees that will soon be shedding their leaves, then renewing them, and I play Leigh’s words over again in my mind. My best should have been enough, I think. So why didn’t enough ever feel like enough for me?
HENRY
We moved to Westchester when I was nearly five months pregnant, six weeks after I quit my job at DMP and right around when my abdomen had blossomed into a perfect curve and my breasts were full and ripe like cantaloupes. Henry promised that I glowed, and the truth is that I tried my very hardest to do just that: to appear lit from within in anticipation of this new being. As if I could will my skin to be a bit rosier, my veneer to be a bit shinier, my aura to be a bit more illuminated. And a lot of the time, it worked; I convinced not only Henry, but myself as well—duped myself into believing that I wasn’t wholly terrified of passing on the damage of my own mother to my new child, that I wasn’t predestined to carve out permanent, penetrating scars.
Henry was more prepared for the change than I was. Or maybe it’s just that for Henry, so little changed—the only difference in his life now was the square footage of our living space and a longer commute—but for me, nearly everything changed. Or was changing. Looking back on it now, maybe our move was when everything really did start to move, to shift, like sand ebbing beneath our toes. The ground was still there, surely, we were still standing, but it was being pulled out from beneath us while we stood atop it, barely noticing. Only later, we’d look down and see that the shore had completely eroded.
Our new house felt big, too big, for little—though not that little anymore—old me. I’d wander from room to room, plodding and bored, checking my watch far too often and wondering how soon Henry would be home to help absorb some of the air, to help fill some of the space. In hindsight, I see now that I should have told him how hollow I felt, how demolished by loneliness I was. But back then, I figured, what’s the point? We’d made the move and we certainly weren’t moving back. Not now. So I flitted about our looming house, and I called Ainsley for power walks, and I decorated vigorously to turn the barren walls and floors and rooms into what I hoped would be a home. Besides, I’d remind myself, soon enough, Katie would be here, and she’d be all the company I’d need. At least that’s what I told myself on my better days.
As the evenings grew cool and the crimson leaves fell around us and when Henry was home early enough, we’d stroll through the quiet streets of our neighborhood, hand in hand, and spill forth our picture of the future—the peach-toned nursery, the looping scent of baby powder, the sounds of tottering, padded footsteps as our little bean learned to navigate her way in the world. Other times, we’d rest on the love seat on the back porch, feet tangled into each other, with Henry’s hand palming my stomach, wordlessly absorbing the new life that kicked inside of me.
Somehow, I learned to put my isolation aside. I’d read all about it in a magazine—which one, now, I can’t remember. But I’d imagine myself heaving my loneliness upward and setting it down, leaving it on the side of the road by the grocery store or at the mall by Pottery Barn. After mentally unfurling it, I’d drive away, skidding out of the parking lot, exhaling with relief, but too afraid to look in the rearview mirror in case I discovered that I hadn’t left it there at all, that, in fact, it had weaseled its way back into the car, back into me, and dumping it on the side of the road, dumping it anywhere, was nothing short of impossible.
Chapter Thirteen
When Jack returns from his mother’s sickbed, he also returns with new gusto for his novel, the one that has floundered like a graying, flopping fish since we met. At graduate school, prodded by Vivian and her aspirations, Jack wrote and rewrote and re-rewrote drafts upon drafts, many of which his professors admired well enough, but none of which earned him publication or garnered awards like some of his peers.
Occasionally, after a glass of red wine, and ample assurances that I wouldn’t judge him, we’d sit on his futon, reading together—he’d jot down notes or mutter something to himself, then hand me a page, and so it would go, passing the pages back and forth as if we were a fluid entity. Upon graduation, he was offered his much-sought-after position at Esquire, and he tuned back into his “novel,” if it could be called that because, to the best of my knowledge, it was really only sputtering starts of disconnecting chapters, only when guilt overtook or when Vivian injected him with an IV of ambition.
“Seeing her there, you know, stuck in bed, and looking so frail,” Jack says tonight between sips of a Heineken, “you know, I just realized. It’s time to shit or get off the pot.”
“That sounds fantastic,” I answer, only mildly engaged; I’ve heard this false start before. Many, many times before. I lace up my sneakers to head out for a late run.
“Oh, by the way,” he says, “Leigh told me you guys had a great time at the zoo yesterday. I’ve officially been given my family’s seal of approval.”
“You needed a seal of approval?” I stand upright and try to sound less offended than I am. “You’re twenty-seven years old, Jack. You seriously need their approval?”
I think of Henry and how after he proposed, he told me that he’d taken my father for drinks before our Paris trip, not so much to ask for his permission, but to assure my dad that he’d watch over me for the rest of my days. It wasn’t approval that he sought, and I admired him, always, for that confidence, of never second-guessing, of being sure of his choices because for him, his choices were sensical, like a math problem resolving itself as it was intended to be solved.
“Well, of course I need their approval,” Jack says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Family comes first, and if you’re going to be a part of my family, I’d just want to be sure that we all jelled.”
“We’ve been dating for two years. And only now you’re worried about jelling?” I say tersely. The lace on my left shoe feels too loose, and I wiggle my heel to secure my foothold.
“Well, maybe now,” he says, moving toward me and placing his hands on my hips, “I’m ready to make it more than two years.”
I open my mouth to say more but I’m so stunned by his innuendo—that was innuendo, right? I think—that I opt to overlook my irritation at his need for familial approval. I’d grown so accustomed to turning a blind eye that it wasn’t hard to do.
“Okay, get going on your run,” he continues. “I want to fire up th
e computer and get writing. I figure if I crank every night after work for the next month, I might be able to get this to agents by Thanksgiving.”
“Sounds great,” I answer. “Dive back in there. Just like you always say.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he says, cocking his head in question.
“Nothing.” I shrug, too late. The tiny slip of judgment flew out of me before I could clamp down on it.
“Nice try. What did you mean by that?” he says.
“Forget it,” I answer, heading toward the door to squeeze in the jog before the sun disappears completely.
“No, seriously, Jill, what the hell was that supposed to mean?”
Oh fuck it, I think. His earlier comments about Leigh are still sticking under my skin like a wayward flea, but more so, I’m still broiling with resentment at his refusal to take me along to aid his mother the previous weekend. I can feel my anger pulsing through my blood, even as I try to pretend that I’ve washed it clean. His in-ability to acknowledge any wrongdoing riles me further.
So why don’t you just say that? I ask myself. Why don’t you just launch in and tell him the goddamn truth?
“It’s just that this is a pattern, you know; you stop, you start, you flounder, you get back up, but it never amounts to anything.” I pause, considering. “I guess I just wonder why you bother, when it doesn’t seem like you’re really that interested in writing in the first place.” I exhale, relieved to nick his armor in the same way that he nicked mine, even while knowing that this is the very thing, these whittling arguments, that I’ve been dodging—like tiptoeing around broken glass—since my return.
“Well, that’s awfully below the belt,” he says, his voice elevated, his eyebrows askew. “And for the record, you couldn’t be more wrong.”
“Fine,” I sigh. “I’m wrong.” I’m struck with an odd sensation of not caring too much either way, a passivity that feels unfamiliar, like I might have actually neutered myself.
“No,” he escalates. “I can’t even believe that you have that little faith in me! That you think I’m some sort of lazy dilettante who can barely wipe his own fucking ass!”
“Oh Jesus Christ,” I say. “Calm down. I never said anything of the sort.”
I could already see this spinning into a fight from our earlier days, the kind that ended with bitter silences and halfhearted apologies and residual blame that would nip and ding and gnaw their way into our relationship until one day, we woke up and saw scars, real scars, and then I’d flee to a bar and meet Henry, who was supposed to be my salvation.
“Look, I’m sorry; what I said came out wrong.” I backtrack though I’m not sure how sorry I am. “All I was saying is that just because your mom might want you to become the next great writer doesn’t mean that you have to take it up as your calling. You should figure out what your passion is, not her.”
“So now you’re telling me that I’m doing this just because of my mom?” Jack sits flatly on the windowsill, and I can see the sun quickly slipping behind the horizon. Echoes of my fights with Henry bounce around my mind; how quickly one can misinterpret and skew and let it all get away, like an eel from a fishing line.
“No,” I say, so anxious to put this behind us, just like I always am. “I’m just saying that you’re responsible for your own life, that’s all. Not her, not me. You.”
He purses his lips. “As if I didn’t know that,” he says.
“Good,” I answer, kissing him lightly but avoiding his eyes, then heading out the door, running, running, running as if Jack is the only one who needs to take a closer look at responsibility and ownership and what role we each have in claiming our own.
FOUR DAYS LATER, it is a rainy Friday afternoon, one that has ushered in a temperature nosedive, such that in the office, we’re all caught off guard in our tank tops and still-summery dresses, and we spend the duration of the day shivering and rubbing our arms or clutching chalky hot chocolate that someone dug up in the back of the office pantry. The weather forecast warns of flooding, which people use as an excuse to head out early, and by 4:30, my office hums in near silence, the walls bouncing with gray from the clouds perched impossibly low just outside my window.
My mother’s note, though tucked away in my top drawer under pens and Post-it notes and DMP letterhead, cries out to me daily, as if it is emitting some sort of sonar alarm that only I can hear. Finally, I relent.
I dig underneath the paper clips and the uncapped highlighters and the month-old invitation to the Coke party, and wrestle her letter to the surface.
Could she really have been here this whole time? I think, as I stare down at the handwriting, which is as familiar to me as my own. I’d asked my father this very question when I called to tell him about her correspondence, but he had no answers. He just hung mutely on the phone, stuttering his responses, as surprised as I was, I suppose, that my mother hadn’t needed a true escape; she just needed an escape from us. Growing up, when I’d thought of her, which I had tried to do as infrequently as my psyche would allow, I’d always assumed that she’d gallivanted to Paris or had set up a seaside shop in St. Lucia or had owned a restaurant in Madrid. Never once did it occur to me that she’d hover so close. If you wanted to flee your life, after all, why wouldn’t you run as far as possible, so there was no chance of ever looking back?
Tenuously, I type her name into my browser. I feel my heart quicken as I push “Enter,” knowing that what I turn up will open new doors, doors that I’ve slammed shut for nearly two decades, doors that my first time around, I was perfectly okay with—no, more than okay; I was completely at peace with keeping them locked for good. I remember explaining all of this to Henry on our third date over spaghetti Bolognese in a tiny Italian joint decorated with colored Christmas lights in Little Italy, right before we went home and slept together for the first time. And how he seemed to absorb my angst, how he deflected my bitterness and didn’t judge me for it, how it felt like I finally purged myself and in doing so, I could lay these wounds to rest. But I never did, of course. Wounds like this don’t just seal themselves overnight and disappear into the ether. Because even after they’ve healed, even after the scars are entirely undetectable, the memories of the damage are still seared into your brain, like posttraumatic stress from a mugging. You tell everyone that you’re fine and you even convince yourself that this is so, until one day, a man leers a little too close to you on the street, and you find yourself dissolving into fear and panic and sweat all over again. This was what it was like to live with the memory of my mother’s abandonment. Even when I pushed it good-bye, it lingered, like a stench that you’d grown so used to, you couldn’t smell it any longer. And then, later, after we’d married, Henry wouldn’t let me forget it, anyway, as if he thought that reclaiming my maternal bond with her would somehow cure me of all my ills.
Google returns no hits on my mother’s name. I lean back into my chair, almost relieved, and reach for my hot chocolate. It’s only then that I notice that my hands are shaking.
How could someone’s life be so invisible that even Google can’t find them? I wonder.
“You’re still here?” Josie pops her head in the door frame, then wanders in and plunks down in a chair opposite my desk. “I thought I was the only one left.”
“Keeping the midnight oil burning,” I say, turning my head from the computer screen but keeping my eyes on it until they’re forced to look away.
“I hear you,” she says, removing one of her heels to rub the arch of her foot. “Speaking of which, I just got off the phone with the Coke guys—”
“What happened with Bart?” I interrupt.
“Oh, Jesus, nothing.” She waves her free hand and turns crimson. “That was just one too many drinks talking.” She shakes her head and her voice drifts off. “Or something.”
“Or something,” I agree.
“Well, anyway, more important, good news. Coke’s decided to hire us not just for this campaign, but for all their adv
ertising: print, radio, TV.”
“Wow!” I say. “That’s amazing! Congratulations, Jo.”
“Don’t congratulate me . . . you’re the one who did this. And so . . .” she pauses for effect, “as of Monday, consider yourself an account director.”
“Seriously?” This definitely didn’t happen in my old life. Back then, my back was patted and I heard “job well done,” but never was I heralded as an advertising genius, which is more or less what this promotion—two years early—trumpeted. “Thank you, Jo!” I rock back in my chair, as some sort of exclamation, and it creaks in reply.
“My pleasure,” she says, slipping her shoe back on. “You’ve earned it. Now go grab that boyfriend of yours and celebrate.”
“Oh, well, he’s actually at his parents’ house this weekend. His mother broke her hip, and he likes to be at her beck and call and all of that.” I feel the enthusiasm sucked from my body much like a punctured tire. “But you should head home yourself. Hang with the kids and all that.”
She shrugs. “They’re actually visiting Art in San Jose. Their last gasp of summer before school starts next week.”
We both stare at the floor, embarrassed to acknowledge the obvious: that neither of us has any other place to be, that neither of us has anyone who needs us badly enough to vacate our hushed, melancholy offices.
“Well, I guess that’s it,” she says finally to break the silence. She stands to leave. “Don’t work all weekend, okay?”
“Promise.” I smile but drop it as soon as she rounds out of my office. I reach for the phone to call Jack and tell him about the promotion, then think otherwise. Whenever Jack is with his mother, I feel like my calls are an intrusion, like he’s humoring me until he can click off and return to his first priority.
I shuffle papers around on my desk, hunting for busywork, until I realize that my mother’s search results, or lack thereof, still blare out from my screen. I grab her letter and reread it once again, like I haven’t already committed every word and every hint of meaning behind them to memory. Biting my bottom lip, I reconsider my search tactics, and then type her phone number into the Google bar. One entry pops up.
Time of My Life Page 11