by Mary Hogan
My dad and my brothers would remember that night for an incident that happened in Dodger Stadium. It was the bottom of the fourth inning. Two protesters—a dad and his son—stormed the field with an American flag they set on the grass and tried to light on fire. Rick Monday, the Cubs center fielder, sprinted over and snatched the flag before a flame could ignite. The crowd went wild. Dad talked about it for days afterward.
“That kid is from Arkansas. What a patriot!”
At Dad’s office, they labeled Mondays, “Patriot Day,” though it was pretty much an excuse to drink beer at lunch.
After that night, Nathan became a Cubs fan. Joey, too. But I remember that evening for something else entirely. It was the night my mother began to leave us.
For months, she walked around stiffly, as if her head were attached to a block of wood. When she turned to answer a question, she swiveled her entire torso. Nobody questioned it. At least not deeply.
“What’s up with your neck?”
“Pulled a muscle.”
“Hot water bottle?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
The sight of that red rubber blob on Mom’s neck became our normal. As did her frequent disappearances into a hidden corner of the backyard. No one ever acknowledged the smell of cigarette smoke in her hair, on her hands, woven into the threads of the cardigan sweater she draped over her shoulders even when it was broiling hot outside. The California sun, she would say, was never hot enough to warm her through and through.
“I need a vacation in Hawaii.”
The whole family would laugh. The closest we’d ever come to a tropical retreat was a picnic table under the craggy palm trees in Echo Park. The ones with the roof rats burrowed in them.
Almost imperceptibly, Mom’s voice lowered. Bit by bit, she sounded husky, nearly male. The strip above her upper lip wrinkled into a picket fence. An earthquake rumble cleared the depths of her throat. She drank water constantly to help food go down. I can still picture her hand resting on her clavicle, as if she were trying to contain the spreading cancer between her thumb and fingers. I remember the orange stain beside her middle cuticle and the peppery smell of the Opium perfume she sprayed to mask her habit. It blended harshly with the Binaca she kept in her sweater pocket at all times. Two quick taps on her tongue when she thought no one was looking. But I always was. Most memories of my mother are stolen sightings infused with the scents of her addiction and its cover-up.
I suppose I should have been angry at my father for letting my mother deny her illness for so long there was no hope of a cure, only horrid treatments that left her too weak to vomit in the toilet. Or for all the lying he did.
“Mom caught a bug from one of the neighbor kids.”
“Your mother is losing her hair because she doesn’t eat enough foods with vitamin E.”
Back then, the words “lung cancer” were uttered only in a whisper, followed by a bitten lower lip and watery eyes. Friends of the family would squeeze Dad’s shoulder and ask, “What can we do, George?” Their conversations fell off a cliff whenever my brothers or I wandered within earshot. No one ever asked us what we needed, what they could do to help us cope with the disappearance of our mother before our very eyes.
I suppose I should have blamed my dad. But I never did. After he corralled us together—my brothers and me on the couch; Dad on a hard chair in front of us; Mom, pale as a full moon, swathed in an afghan on the recliner off to the side—to tell us what we already knew, I didn’t get mad at him at all. Not even after Mom was gone, when he drowned in Budweiser and self-pity. Not when he allowed my brothers to raise me.
“Doing dishes is a girl’s job,” Joey decreed. “That’s the new rule.”
At no time did I feel upset at my father for coming through the front door after work and heading straight for the fridge. The pffft of his beer’s pop-top didn’t ignite my anger. Nor did his weeping or his plop on the couch and the drone of dire newscasts: “Toxic gas leaks kill thousands in India.”
My distress was reserved for one person: Mom. How could she be so careless with a life I desperately needed?
How could my mother leave me?
How could the man who knew me better than anyone else—my Paul—not know that I would wait for him forever?
Chapter Seventeen
SOMETIMES A PERSON NEEDS A WEEKEND AWAY.
“Something is wrong.”
A few nights ago, I came right out and said it. Despite the fact that Paul hated confrontation. Ironic for a judge. But enough was enough. The weirdness wasn’t going away. Before he took Lola to the park that night, Paul had sneered, “What have you done with my keys?”
“I don’t have them, Paul.”
“I didn’t say you had them, I asked what you did with them.”
“Haven’t seen them, haven’t touched them.”
“Oh? Did they walk away on their own?”
“Did you look in the bedside drawer?”
“What, you think I’m stupid?”
Flames flared in my gut. “No.” I spoke with deliberate calm. “You’re not stupid. But you’re not yourself, either.”
Lola was pretending to be asleep on her dog bed. I saw her lift one eyelid to look at us.
“Who the hell am I, Fay? Tell me. I’d like your expert opinion.” Turning away from me, Paul stomped down the stairs.
“See? Right there. The Paul I know wouldn’t be such a jerk.”
“Name-calling. Nice. Lola, come.”
Lola didn’t move. She hated to be told what to do. Paul’s foot hit the bottom step hard. He said, “Shit.”
I said, “Something is wrong.” What I didn’t do was point out the fact that we’d had another silent dinner: Carmine’s delivery, chicken scarpariello. Paul had seemed confused. Fork or hand? He’d looked at me with a beseeching expression that instantly broke my heart. In the next second, he looked away and grabbed a gooey, saucy chicken thigh with his bare hands. Instead of using a napkin, he licked his fingers one by one. His wineglass was so fogged with greasy fingerprints it looked like it had been processed at a crime scene. After dinner, Paul filled the dishwasher, but forgot to start it. Again.
Something was wrong. As his wife, I knew. Something had to be done. But what? From the downstairs hallway, my husband shouted up at me, “You’re a doctor now? I thought you painted lampshades.”
It landed like a machete in the center of my chest.
“Lola. Come. Now.” Paul meant business. Lola knew it. She rose to her feet and tiptoed down the stairs to him. Bending over the railing, I yelled, “We have to talk about this, Paul.”
“No. We don’t.”
I heard the jangle of Lola’s leash and the crinkle of the plastic shopping bags Paul used to pick up her poop. With a slam, my dog and my man were out the door.
Yeah, sometimes a wife needs a weekend away.
“Kate?” I called Paul’s daughter-in-law. John and Kate Agarra live in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, a forty-minute train ride from Boston. Two hundred miles from New York. Their daughter, Edie, is in high school. Though, seriously, Edie came out of the womb an adult.
“Mom is afraid to be still,” Edie quietly told me one Thanksgiving. Her mother was in the kitchen with a crème brûlée blowtorch, caramelizing the handmade marshmallows on top of the organic yams. The rest of us were seated around her dining room table waiting for her. Edie was five. Five. What kindergarten kid has insight like that?
Brenda, Edie’s other grandmother—the biological one—believes that Edie’s body houses the reincarnated soul of Josephine Cochrane. The woman who invented the dishwasher. Like anyone’s ever heard of her.
“My granddaughter was born to change the lives of women,” she says, with proprietary pride. And, frankly, a touch of instruction. As if Edie’s job is to fulfill her grandmother’s promise.
“Or we could get men to do housework.” That’s what I said the last time Brenda spewed her edict. Which made Edie laugh out loud. I mean, the kid is in high
school. Isn’t being a teenager hard enough?
“What’s up, Fay?” Kate asked me over the phone.
“I want to kidnap your daughter.”
Kate laughed. “Shall I provide the blindfold?”
“No need. I want her to see where she’s going. Ocean House. Girls’ weekend with me.”
“The spa resort in Rhode Island?”
“You know it? My friend Anita recommended it. It’s only an hour and a half from Boston by train. I’ll meet Edie at the station Saturday morning, then put her back on the train before dinner Sunday night. If she has homework, I’ll make sure she does it between her mani and pedi.”
Kate laughed again. Even though her pulled-togetherness makes me feel like a hair ball, I like her. She has a core of kindness beneath her shell of control. It isn’t always easy living with a husband like John.
“Boxed wine? Seriously, K?”
“It’s a new thing.”
“I like the old thing. Get rid of it.”
I’d seen that exchange with my very own eyes.
Kate Agarra is one of those inexhaustible women who schedule Pilates class while everyone else is in REM sleep. She oils her cuticles in the hybrid SUV at stoplights and volunteers with a vengeance. When she thanks someone, she presses her palms together Namaste-style.
“Our daughter won’t grow up thinking that success is a minimum of five thousand square feet,” Kate had decreed when Edie was a baby and John got a job offer in Cupertino, California. “We are not living in Silicon Valley.”
John, a coder, could work anywhere. He didn’t much care where they lived. So the family moved to Newton Centre—a suburb of Boston—and bought a Georgian colonial with a circular driveway that was neither cheap nor small. We’re talking a maid’s suite on the first floor. It’s that kind of house. Still, though Kate dislikes the pretentious spelling of “Centre,” she likes Boston’s feel of substance and permanence. It’s so unlike the towns in northern California where the goal is making a killing at a meaningless dotcom that solves a problem created by another meaningless dotcom.
“If Edie doesn’t jump at this,” Kate told me, “I will.” She made it sound like a joke, but I knew she could use a break from all that flawlessness she lugs around.
“Deal. If Edie says no, you and I will go.”
Edie said yes. Which was what I’d hoped. She was exactly what I needed: open, easygoing, the ideal distraction from the heavy marriage I’d been lugging around lately.
Chapter Eighteen
OCEAN HOUSE IS A GRANDE DAME OF A HOTEL. PERCHED on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic, it resembles a huge lemon-chiffon cake: multitiered, intricately decorated with white icing. Originally built after the Civil War, it was restored to perfection a few years ago. The croquet lawn and putting green are carpets of basil-colored grass. Even in cold weather. The chef’s garden is bursting with herbs and exotic vegetables and fruits no one has ever heard of like cucamelons. Ocean House is the kind of stunning place that delights your eye at every turn. Like the Alhambra in Spain.
“Oh, Fay.” Edie’s jaw dropped when she saw it. As I’d hoped it would. It felt good to give an appreciated gift.
Paul hadn’t wanted me to go. I hadn’t cared.
It was a weekend of chilling. In every way. The cold air off the Atlantic reddened our cheeks when we were outside; inside, we ate spiced salmon on the heated terrace and drank champagne in the Secret Garden. Edie, of course, wasn’t old enough to drink, but she was old enough to take a few sips of mine. I booked a detox facial, body polish, and deep-tissue massage. Edie chose the spa pedicure, organic facial, and an ancient sea salt massage, which, she admitted afterward, was a mistake.
“I’d just shaved my legs!”
We giggled and floated around in white robes and terry-cloth slippers. Saturday night, we ate popcorn and watched a movie in the hotel’s screening room; Sunday morning we bundled into down jackets and strolled on the beach before brunch.
“Mom is making me crazy,” Edie confessed. She knew she could tell me anything and I wouldn’t tell a soul. Like the fact that her dad was rarely home. And her mom sometimes left the room when he was.
“She’s always stressing about me deserving our family’s good fortune. Like my SAT tutor—who I didn’t even ask for—if I miss one session, Mom goes all Armageddon on me. ‘Do you know how lucky you are to have a tutor? Do you know how many families can’t afford one?’ Sometimes I want to scream, ‘Hey! It’s not my fault Dad made us rich!’”
“Whom.”
Edie turned to me. “Huh?”
“The tutor for whom you didn’t ask.”
Like Paul’s, Edie’s laugh was big and unabashed. “Okay, maybe I do need an SAT tutor.”
Grinning, I hugged my granddaughter and she hugged me. As we walked, wet sand flipped into our shoes. We snuggled into our jackets and listened to the waves being sucked back to sea. We meandered in comfortable silence. After a long while, Edie quietly asked, “So, what’s going on with Granddad?”
Quickly, I swallowed my surprise. “What do you mean?”
“Last time I saw him, he was, I don’t know, weird.”
“Weird? In what way?” As if I didn’t know.
She took a deep breath. “I didn’t want to say anything, Fay.”
I stopped and faced her. “What happened?”
She bit her lip. “Well, we were walking in the park, you know, like we always do? All of a sudden, he gets this strange look on his face. Like he’s lost. Then he asks me, ‘Which way is home?’ Like he doesn’t know.”
My heart fell to my knees. “That must have scared you.”
“Yeah. I guess. Is he okay?”
Oh, how I wanted to open up. To spill the secret: the craziness in our lives had multiplied like a flesh-eating bacteria. I hadn’t even told Anita how strange things had become. How could I? Paul was a sitting judge. Livelihoods were at stake. Convictions could be overturned.
A few weeks before, in a restaurant on the east side, Paul had interrogated the waitress: “You mean to tell me, miss, if I get up from this table, and march into the walk-in, I won’t find a single piece of branzino? Is that what you expect me to believe?” Then he reached across the table to take my hands in his. “You look beautiful tonight, my love.”
A few nights before, after my attempt to reboot our love by making love, I whispered, “I want you to see someone.” Near sleep, Paul grinned when he said, “You’re right here. More convenient.” It was something the old Paul would say, before he began to leave me bit by bit. I’d laughed. He did, too. Loud and full. The bellow I fell in love with. Up from the heart of the man I adored.
“Will you?” I’d asked, softly.
“Mm-hmm.” He was more asleep than awake. I took a chance.
“I’ve noticed things, Paul. Ever since—” I mustered my courage. “Spain.”
His eyes flew open. “Not that again.”
“No, not that. Other stuff. I love you. Something is wrong.”
Pulling away from me, Paul said, “Why can’t you ever enjoy the moment? Why crowbar an agenda into everything? We’d just made love. You think that’s the right time to bitch at me?”
His words were a slap in the face.
“Mind your own business, Fay,” he snapped at me. As if my very own husband had nothing to do with me. Wobbling into the bathroom, he slammed the door.
Oh, how I wanted to confess to Edie that I was scared, too. But how could I? Edie only seemed like an adult. Paul would feel betrayed. He was her granddad, after all. She was his only grandchild.
“Big case,” I lied. “They sometimes mess with his head.”
With a slight shiver, I continued along the bubbly shoreline and steered the conversation toward safe subjects like the way a mother can drive a daughter nuts.
LATE SUNDAY EVENING, when my key unlocked our downstairs apartment door, Lola ran to me, barking.
“It’s me, you nincompoop,” I said to her. Then I took her head in
my hands and kissed her on her doggy lips. Calling up the stairs I shouted, “Paul? You here?”
“Lola?”
I sighed. I put my stuff on the bench at the foot of our bed. With Lola scampering ahead of me, I climbed the stairs and injected a breezy tone into my voice. “We had such a glorious weeken—” The sight of my husband silenced me. Paul’s greasy hair was tornadoed all over his head, his white T-shirt was stained with smears of peanut butter. Gray stubble covered his chin and neck. He smelled foul.
“Did you sleep in those clothes?” A rhetorical question. I could see that he had. They were the same clothes he was wearing when I said goodbye Saturday morning. When I hadn’t wanted to tell him how much I’d needed a break from him. How upset I felt at his inconsiderateness.
The TV was blaring. Cracker crumbs tumbled down the front of Paul’s shirt. Remnants of peanut butter soiled his fingers. The open jar had peanut goo all over it. I could see peanut butter fingerprints on the refrigerator handle. My grown man—New York State Supreme Court Criminal Judge Paul Agarra—had used his fingers as a knife.
Yet, at that moment, seeing Paul sitting at our table like a grubby child softened me. The endorphins from Ocean House still flowed through my veins. He looked like a street kid, his belly round beneath his dirty shirt. I felt compassion. He was going through something. Maybe it would pass on its own? It’s what I wanted to believe, so I did. We would be “us” again. Forever anded: Paul and Fay.
Stepping close to my husband, I ran my hand over his warm, damp forehead and smoothed his wild hair. Gently, I asked, “How are you doing, my sweet?”
Paul’s placid expression went black. “When the fuck are you going to stop taking my emotional temperature every fucking minute?”
Okay. Now it was time to tell.
Chapter Nineteen
“ISAAC?” THE NEXT DAY, WHEN I KNEW PAUL’S COURTROOM was in recess for lunch, I called his law clerk.
“Fay.” He picked up on the second ring. “How are you?”
My brain flip-booked responses: freaked out, gaslighted, scared, pissed off, mystified.