Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

  “No it’s not, and also”—you looked at me suspiciously—“does this mean I’m not getting the Lego Millennium Falcon?” The Lego Millennium Falcon was the toy that you’d decided, after much weighing of the options, to select as your primary gift upon turning seven.

  “It doesn’t mean anything. I thought you’d like it.”

  You were still suspicious, but soon enough you’d gotten over it, and we tore open the nine million different parts and pieces of the pirate ship, spread them out on their kitchen table. There were cannons, torches, a tiny parrot, pin-sized gold coins. Huge flags that needed to be tacked up to the boat with twine, and a tiny plank off which to walk our tiny prisoners. It was 10:05 a.m. If we tackled the job the right way, we could have been there all afternoon.

  “Mom!” you said, amid the plastic squalor. “Mom, the clock! We can’t do this now! We have to leave!”

  “We don’t have to leave. It doesn’t take an hour to get downtown.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” You looked at me warily. “What about parking?”

  “It won’t be a problem,” I said. “It’s a holiday.”

  “We can’t be late,” you said, pointing at me with a wee Playmobil cannon.

  Right. Well. “Why don’t you stay here and start putting this together and I’ll go get some makeup on.”

  As I tromped across the grass toward our guest cottage, I thought that maybe this was the first time in your life you’d ever been alone in a house. I turned and saw you through the window, standing at the kitchen table, staging a battle with some pirates. You were swooping them through the air, high-diving them back to the table. You were singing out loud, I could tell.

  AND SUDDENLY IT was 10:40 a.m. and we were sailing over the Murrow Bridge toward downtown, I-90 miraculously free of traffic, sailboats clogging up the waterway on either side of us. The day was Seattle gloomy, but hell, it was still a holiday, and along the shoreline I could see Mercer Islanders relaxing on their docks, setting out in their skiffs. At that very moment Allie’s family was descending on the San Juans, and I wished with everything I had we were with them.

  Instead: I’d spent the better part of the past seven sleepless nights figuring out what to wear for today’s meeting and had settled, rather glumly, on an Eileen Fisher getup that made me look middle-aged and polite. Flowy pants, cashmere T-shirt, a nice scarf. When your father and I were dating, I was prone to a lot of Eileen Fisher, since it travels well and coordinates, and when you’re running a campaign the last thing you have time for is the dry cleaner. Still, if I were healthy, if I still had a figure, I probably would have gone for something a little foxier, for self-esteem’s sake.

  My chemo hair was in a tiny ponytail. I was wearing enormous sunglasses and I didn’t plan to take them off.

  As for you—although I stopped picking out your clothes at least a year ago, I tactfully suggested that you wear a shirt with a collar and clean jeans, and you were fine with it, since you never cared too much about what you were wearing. For a while you were against anything with zippers, but now you owned a small collection of Dustin’s hand-me-down hoodies that you wore with zeal. You also liked superheroes on your underwear; on this, I was happy to indulge you. So there you were, in my rearview mirror, in a blue shirt and blue jeans and a gray Bush School hoodie, looking like a real Seattle boy. You had assorted Playmobils in your lap, plus the power gourd. You were thrumming your feet expectantly on the back of my seat.

  “Knock it off,” I said. You didn’t.

  Weirdly, I wasn’t as nervous as I would have predicted. I think I’d gotten all my nerves out already, or maybe simply calling your father in the first place was the hard part, because this, I thought, this was like going in for surgery, this was like waking up in the recovery room, this was like rehab and buying a wig and tending to the dressing on my side and learning how to eat again. It was like the shock of the diagnosis was over and then it was just a series of long and tedious steps. We’d see your father. I knew how to drink coffee.

  But I would be lying if I said my stomach wasn’t tight as we walked down Second Street toward Tully’s. You were racing ahead, your pockets bulging with your toys and your gourd, and I screamed at you to stop, but you were deliberately not hearing me. You would get there first if I didn’t catch you. “Stop!” I screamed as loud as I could, and passersby stopped to stare, but you didn’t hear me. Hadn’t I trained you to hear me? Not to run away from me on city streets? And now as I ran after you—all that was happening in my abdomen, it really hurt to run—I realized what a fool I was to plan it this way. Why were we both meeting him at the same time? Why didn’t I meet him first, just to lay down some ground rules, just to make sure he understood what was happening?

  Because by the time I reached you, it was too late.

  He was right there, outside of Tully’s. He was bending down, looking at you. He had a shopping bag on each side, wrapped presents peeking out. I had not seen this man in almost seven years. He looked exactly the same. He was kneeling. You were showing him something. I slowed down to gather my breath. Whatever was happening ten feet away from me, it was too late to stop it.

  I walked slowly. I was still walking slowly as he leaned in to give you a hug. Usually you didn’t like being hugged. Usually your arms hung stiff at your sides. This time, though, you hugged back.

  “Dave,” I managed to say. I had practiced this at home, what I’d say, how it would come out. If I remember correctly, I thought I’d memorized some pretty good lines. But I couldn’t remember a thing correctly.

  He stood, reached out to me, so I let him hug me. It felt good to see that I didn’t think I was in love with him anymore. He smelled strange, like Pine-Sol, and he’d developed a bit of a gut. He was softer than I remembered. And not quite as tall.

  “Karen, hi,” he said. He took a step back but was still holding on to my elbows. I wondered if he could see that my muscles were desiccated. I wondered if he could see that I had chemo hair. Could he see the way my face had gone ashy?

  “You look great,” he said. Perhaps he could not.

  I swallowed. “I see you’ve met Jakey.”

  You and Dave were standing next to each other and you had your Playmobil pirates clenched in your hands. Of course you had the same expressions on your faces. Of course you looked exactly alike. “He says he has presents for me,” you said.

  “Tully’s is closed,” he said. “The holiday.”

  “What? Shit,” I said, and then I blushed, because did he really need to know I was the kind of mother who cursed freely in front of her six-year-old? And also clearly I wasn’t on top of my game anymore because if I were I would have checked to make sure that Tully’s was open on July 4, I never would have assumed. I pulled on the door once just to double-check and he was right.

  “Maybe we should take him to our house?” you said. “So I can show him the pirate ship?”

  “What?”

  “Well,” your father said, pulling out an enormous wrapped something from one of his shopping bags. I was furious, of course, that he brought you all this crap like he was trying to buy your love, but then again I’d be furious if he hadn’t, so I didn’t know what to do exactly. Right there on the wide Seattle sidewalk, you started to shred open an enormous present. “Skull Island!” you said with as much enthusiasm as you’d ever said anything in your life. Skull Island was a Playmobil set designed to go along with the pirate ship. It cost $120 and there were at least three other packages in your father’s bags, and they were all just as big.

  “How did you know?” I asked your father.

  “Facebook!” he said with a dumb grin, and I realized that I bragged way too much about the day-to-day shit I did on Facebook, like I needed approval for everything, the gifts I bought you, the gifts I promised. I’d put a picture of the pirate ship online, and in the thirty spare seconds I had to get dressed this morning I’d posted another of you opening it joyfully.

  And now you had met both your pa
rents and it looked like both your parents were going to bankrupt themselves trying to buy your love. This seemed unfair. I shouldn’t have had to buy you stuff to make sure you loved me more than you loved him. You were now reaching into the bag to pull out more booty and I felt this was unseemly. “Jake, not now.”

  “But—”

  “You can’t open all this stuff on the sidewalk.”

  “So where should we go?” Dave asked, jauntily.

  “Please can we just go to the house, Mom, please? I want to show him all the other stuff. The pirate ship.”

  Dave put his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know if your mom needs—”

  “Oh come on, Mom, it’s okay, right? Can’t he see the pirate ship?”

  I swear to God I could have killed myself over that pirate ship. “We could just go to Starbucks.”

  “No!” you said, and you looked so stricken, your little face. “I hate Starbucks! We don’t even live that far! I want to show him my stuff!”

  “Whatever you’re comfortable with, Karen,” your father said softly, and it occurred to me that perhaps we were having a parenting discussion, and perhaps it wasn’t going well, and perhaps you were about to have a temper tantrum on the sidewalk and I would do anything I could to avoid that. I might curse in front of you, but really, as a mother, I wasn’t as bad as all that. My six-year-old did not still have temper tantrums.

  “Please!” you said, hysteria in your voice.

  “Jake, I don’t think—”

  “Please.” You had dropped the Playmobil. “Mom?”

  Do you remember what meeting him felt like? The street in front of Tully’s? The way the rain started to fall? I bent down to look you in the eye; you looked down at the street.

  “Okay,” I said, straightening up. “Let’s go to the house. Jake, you can show Dave some of your toys. But remember, we have to leave at two, okay?” I looked at my watch. It was only five past eleven. “So Dave can’t stay very long.”

  The block and a half to the car you and Dave walked next to each other, with me a half step ahead; you two chattered away about Skull Island, and twice you asked Dave to reveal what was in the other boxes, and he wouldn’t, and he asked you all sorts of stuff about where you lived and went to school and who your friends were, and you told him about Kelly the hamster and your best friend, Kyle, and you told him about Mrs. Crane, your old kindergarten teacher, and how you’d be starting first grade in the fall. You’d have Mrs. Dubrov, who supposedly loved music, who supposedly made her kids sing a new song every morning. You were talking so fast! You told him about camp and how you were in the camp play and I had no idea you were in the camp play, which evidently was Peter Pan and evidently you were going to be one of the Lost Boys. And then we got to the Hyundai and you got into your booster and your father looked at me funny.

  “He still has to sit in a booster?” he said, not like he was accusing me of having done something wrong, but maybe I’d just been a little overprotective.

  “Up till eighty pounds,” I said. “It’s the law.”

  “Is that just a Seattle thing or is it everywhere?”

  “It’s everywhere,” I said, and added “dummy” to myself, although of course if it weren’t for you I wouldn’t have known a thing about booster seats or pirate ships or skull islands or Peter Pan. But then I thought, Isn’t he an ambulance chaser? Shouldn’t he know these things? And then I saw that he was leaning back to help buckle you in, even though you knew how to do it yourself. And you, of course, let him.

  Then we were all in the car, our first family car ride, back out to I-90 and home toward Mercer Island. Dave Kersey was in the seat beside me. I turned the radio on and then I turned it off.

  “Away we go,” Dave said. I forgot how he used to say stupid shit like that.

  I explained that it was my sister’s house, and that her husband did quite well, and then I realized I sounded like I was apologizing for my sister’s success, so I shut up and looked out the window. In the backseat, you were ripping into Skull Island. I told you not to lose any pieces and you ignored me. Your power gourd was rolling around on the seat next to you.

  “So how are you feeling, anyway?” your father asked me. His Pine-Sol smell was filling up the car and making it hard for me to breathe.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean with the cancer.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Facebook,” he said. “I read that—you’ve been writing about ovarian cancer.”

  “Oh,” I said. Facebook. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you in treatment?”

  “Remission,” I said. For some reason there was traffic—what were you people doing, assholes? Didn’t you know it was a holiday?—so I had no choice but to slow down, although it occurred to me I could just plunge us all into Lake Washington and be done with it.

  “That’s great. You working?”

  “I’m managing Ace Reynolds. Remember him?”

  Dave chuckled. “Ace Wastes Pace Case,” he said. “How could I forget?”

  “It’s reelection time,” I said. “He’ll win.”

  “Good for him,” Dave said—why should he have cared about Ace? “You look good, Karen, you really do.”

  I sighed. I did not. “Tell me about yourself, Dave,” I said. “What have you been up to?”

  “Well, as you know, I’m married,” he said in this dumb declarative way, as though he just wanted to warn me in case I had any ideas. As though I would ever have any ideas! I clenched my fists around the steering wheel and kept driving.

  “I saw,” I said. “She looks very nice.”

  “She’s great,” he said. “She works in banking.” He paused. “We can’t have children.”

  “Well, you did have a vasectomy,” I said. Dummy.

  “We reversed it.”

  I felt something prickle my eyes, refused to blink.

  “I don’t mean . . . It’s been . . .” He looked out the window and began thrumming his fingers on the armrest the way you thrummed your feet on the ride over here and again Lake Washington beckoned to me, the icy plunge.

  “Do you like Star Wars?” you asked Dave from the backseat.

  “Of course,” he said. “Didn’t your mother tell you?”

  “I didn’t ask her,” you said. “I didn’t think she’d know.”

  “He likes Star Wars,” I said. “I should have mentioned it.” Dave kept his collection of vintage Star Wars figurines lined up according to value along three shelves in his bedroom.

  “Which one’s your favorite?” you asked. “Of the movies?”

  “Empire Strikes Back,” he said. “They’re all good though. I even like the prequels.”

  “I’m not allowed to see Empire yet. Only the first one.”

  “That’s a great one too,” Dave said. “Empire Strikes Back is a little more violent.”

  “I have to wait till I’m eight,” you said. “I’m only six.”

  “Six is an excellent age,” Dave said. “I remember six very well.”

  You were making the residents of Skull Island shoot each other in the face. “How old are you?” you asked him.

  “I’m forty-eight,” Dave said.

  “Wow,” you said. “My mom’s only forty-three.”

  “I know,” Dave said. “And her birthday is April 18.”

  “She’s an Aries,” you said.

  “I know,” said Dave.

  “What’s your birthday?”

  “I’m April 4,” he said. “An Aries, like your mom.”

  “Is that why you liked her?” you said. “When you guys met?”

  “It’s one of the reasons.”

  I was still clutching the steering wheel. There needed to be a different subject, something else I could stand, but I wasn’t sure what. Dave and I broke up just after my birthday. I remembered that birthday, my thirty-sixth birthday, in my old apartment in Chelsea. Griffith had just sent us a check for $12
0,000; I was going to use my cut as a deposit for a new apartment. A two bedroom on the Upper West Side. In a good school district. I had just found out I was pregnant. Chuck and I were ramping up the business then; he didn’t know that I was pregnant and he didn’t even know it was my birthday, but when he came to the apartment with takeout so we could go over some business plans, he found me on the floor, in my T-shirt, staring into space.

  The thing is, Jake, of course I never wanted to be a single mother. Raising you has been the best thing I’ve done in my life, but it’s not how I would have planned it. I always left the domestic daydreams to Allie; growing up on Long Island, she was the one who would analyze other people’s houses and cars and decide she’d want this one when she was a grown-up—no, maybe that one. And she’d have three children by the time she was thirty and a handsome husband who went to work every day and that’s pretty much what she got. But while she was so focused on being supermom, I focused more on being successful at work. I didn’t make meeting someone a priority.

  (That’s what I used to tell myself when I felt sorry for myself—it would have been different if I’d had different priorities.)

  But I suppose the truth was that he just never came along. I thought your father was it—I thought he was the man I’d been waiting for—and in some ways I guess he was, because he’s your father. But then it turned out that he wasn’t the right man either.

  And then once you came along—some of my friends told me I should keep dating, that of course there were men out there willing to take on a single mother in her late thirties, but I never found any. Once I had you I didn’t really feel like continuing to look. And my shell ossified; I didn’t want anybody else in our little life. Our apartment on West Seventy-Fourth. Our hamster, our vacations, our piano lessons. Nobody else’s. Ours.

  Then I tuned in and you two were discussing somebody named Boba Fett.

  Thank sweet Jesus the traffic on I-90 started to move.

  DAVE, TO HIS credit, didn’t seem overly impressed with Allie’s estate. He raised an eyebrow and said, “Nice place,” and when I explained that Bruce had a fancy job with Starbucks, he nodded and said, “That’ll do it.”