In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  Somewhere, about halfway along, Pru yelled: “Dolphins!” We looked, and on the seaward side of our boat, there were three gray porpoises looping in and out of the black water. “It’s a mommy dolphin and her children, right, Mama?” cried Pru excitedly. “You don’t know that,” said Zanny. “It could be a daddy or just three grown-ups.” I rolled my eyes. “Whoever they are, they’re awesome,” I said. Zanny giggled. The porpoises continued to lap alongside us, and we watched them as we slowly heaved forward with every stroke. “But you know what, Mama?” said Zanny. “I think they’re trying to make sure we get home okay, don’t you think so?” It did look that way. The threesome accompanied us right to the cove of our little beach, then undulated away.

  We waved and cheered to them as we pulled in to shore. Pru hopped out onto the rocky beach and went tearing up the meadow to the house, shouting at the top of her lungs so that Mom and Joseph would hear her, “Dolphins! Dolphins! Dolphins!” I pulled the boat up, and then Zanny and I started making our way through the meadow. “I can’t believe you rowed so far, Mama,” she said. “You’re strong.” I gave her a smushy hug. “Everybody had a job—you guys did the singing and talking, and I did the rowing, right?” I said. “We’re a pretty scrappy crew, huh?” Zanny nodded. “It was nice of the dolphins, too,” she said.

  That evening, as I was trying to put the girls to bed, my mother kept on intruding with more and more stories about Odysseus and Scylla and Charybdis and Circe and various plot turns in The Odyssey to which she wanted to compare us and our afternoon adventure. The girls and I were exhausted, and we just wanted to sleep.

  “Ma!” I shouted. “Stop! Please!” My mother stopped on a dime, her eyes wide, and she held up one finger as she reached in her pocket with the other hand, rummaging for something.

  “What are you doing?” I moaned. She produced from her pocket a stack of thick white business cards and handed them to me.

  “I forgot to give these to you earlier, and I just want you to look at them right now,” she said.

  “I will look at them in the morning, Mom—we have to sleep,” I pleaded.

  “It will take you less than a moment—just look at them, and then I’ll go away.” I sighed self-pityingly and looked at one of the cards. Engraved in a refined Tiffany’s typeface were two words: STOP TALKING. I looked up at my mom. She smiled impishly.

  “The idea here is that you, Joseph, Zanny, and Pru are to hand me one of these cards should I become too effusive, all right?” she said. “Now, off to bed with you all, intrepid swashbucklers!” I laughed so hard that I did, for the first time, actually lose command of my bladder. As I ran to the bathroom, Mom tucked the girls in, and when I returned, she hugged me fiercely.

  “You’re a hell of a mother, Susie,” she whispered. “These little girls are so well loved, and they are going to be fine.” I looked at her and beamed. No metaphors: This was just my mother encouraging her granddaughters and me. I hugged her back. Fiercely.

  When we got back from Maine, I started to come out of isolation. Wonderful things began happening. Sometimes, said Truman Capote, there is a God. Every day, it seemed, was that sometimes.

  My godmother called me. “Susie, dear,” she announced, “we are going out for lunch at Bergdorf’s.” Sitting there with my ragged hair, I ate the lobster salad with citrus vinaigrette. I smiled at my godmother. She smelled so marvelous, her signature eyeglasses were so chic, she sounded so wonderful.

  One day, I called up my dear friend Judith. She didn’t know who it was at first. When I repeated myself, she laughed. Then she started sobbing. “Oh, Susie!” she cried. “I’m sorry—I’m just so happy to hear your voice!”

  Ian began pinging me on g-chat several times a day, sending annoying greetings like “Hola!” and “Hey, big mama!” and directing me to stupid websites with videos of Japanese reality TV shows or telling me where to download old hardcore punk songs for free. I knew what he was doing. I love my brother.

  My friend Barbara texted me: “I’m coming whether you like it or not.” I couldn’t have her in that apartment, so I met her at the nearby Ikea. We took the escalator up to the living room area, plopped down on a couch in one of the demo rooms, and made ourselves comfortable. We hung out there all day, talking. People ambled through the room and smiled uncertainly at us. We welcomed them, as if into our home.

  After the house sold—the day before the housing bubble burst and the markets collapsed in 2008—I took my share and invested it in a little house, in that same Brooklyn neighborhood that I was scared to visit just five years ago, but in a safer part of it. It was what I could afford, but it was a disaster, full of carbon monoxide leaks and lead drinking-water pipes. I slept on the floor on a mat and cried every night. It was two months before my children could stay overnight there. I had to book cheapo rooms at the Comfort Inn in Brooklyn via Priceline to spend the night with them, charging it to a credit card that I pushed to its five-digit limit.

  One time, I said screw it, fun was in order. I booked a discounted room at the Hilton in Times Square for five nights. Zanny, Pru, and I were tourists in our own city. At the box office where Young Frankenstein, the musical, was playing, the manager looked at the kids and me and said, “Tell you what—if you come to the matinee, I’ll give you seventy-five percent off the tickets.” So we went to see it (I was counting on their not getting the blue humor, and they didn’t). We ate at the giant Dallas BBQ; the waiter gave us extra fries, on the house. That Sunday, we went to Saint John the Divine for the annual blessing of the animals. We took pictures as they trotted down the aisle: a donkey, a miniature camel, a wallaby. We ate Korean barbecue afterward and visited Columbia. “This is where Mama went to college,” I said. “If you want to go here, you’d better start studying now, friends!” We all giggled. We went on a tour of Butler Library, roamed through the stacks, peeked in on the students hunched over in their carrels. All those books. All that work being worked on. My babies.

  By and by, the house was repaired for safety. It did not have a working stove or fridge; there was no dishwasher. On autopilot, I went to the salesman at the fancy kitchen appliance emporium whom I’d befriended during the last two renovations in Park Slope. When I walked in, the first thing Ira said was: “Look at you, blondie!” The second thing he said was: “So, what—moving again? Another Wolf range now?” For some reason, it was too much: the absurdity, the assumption, the sadness. When I broke down, he sat me down and presented me with a box of tissues.

  “Listen to me, doll,” he said. “The same exact thing happened to me. Worst period of my life. But now, I’m happily remarried thirteen years—my kids have the best stepmother in the world!” He showed me his ring and then took hold of my hand. “You are going to be fine. Not for a while, but you are going to be fine.” Forget the Wolf range and the crazy expensive fridge—please, you don’t need that stuff—it’s the home that counts, he said; your home is going to be beautiful because you and your kids will be in it. Then he gifted me with a ridiculous deal and waved me out. “Better than fine—you’re not going to believe how great you’ll be!”

  A woman I’d always chatted with in Park Slope, where she owned an upscale home furnishings and clothing boutique, turned out to live in my new neighborhood. One day, she came by unannounced with giant shopping bags full of fancy scented candles, lovely hand-painted curtain panels, and linen tea towels. “You need things like this to feel good,” she said in her fabulous Polish accent. After seeing the disaster afoot, she returned with stylish shelving and track lighting from her store. “You take them—they will look beautiful in your kitchen.”

  I didn’t have anything to cook with. Cal had taken all the cookware and cookbooks with him, which was fair. But I had nothing, didn’t know anything, and had no money for takeout. I got a set of pots and pans from Ikea for thirty bucks, went online for recipes, and started cooking. Because I had next to no money, I established two rules: (a) If it could be made, I would make it myself (meaning I made
the bread, cereal, granola, cookies, cakes, cleaning products; no canned, presoftened beans, but dry ones that I soaked overnight; pizza, dough included; and so on); and (b) Dinner had to cost under ten dollars. We lived off the vegetables and herbs I planted in the garden. I did it. My children were amazed at first, but they came to expect it. Which pleased me beyond reason.

  Cal didn’t want the couches we had bought together, and they literally did not fit through the door to my tiny new house. But shortly after the house was ready for move-in, my mother called to say that my grandmother’s house in Virginia needed to be cleared out. Nana, who had been staying in an assisted living home near my mother, was ninety-three, and it was time. None of the cousins wanted the furniture. Did I? That Thanksgiving, a year to the date of Cal’s and my separation, I collected the furniture from my grandparents’ three-hundred-year-old house in Middleburg, Virginia, where I had spent every Christmas after my parents divorced. Back in Brooklyn, our couches were the Victorian settees that once sat diplomats and heads of state in my great-grandparents’ palatial apartment in Washington, D.C.; the Federal grandfather clock chimed every hour, just as it had in my grandparents’ parlor; the quilts on our beds were stitched by my great-great-grandmothers and maiden aunts from Louisville, Kentucky. I made my children’s room comfy and bedecked it with fairy lights and books. But the artwork was still the artwork, and my father’s painting went center stage on the main wall. We moved in with our dog, parrot, four hamsters, and two hermit crabs. Zanny said to me, “You know what I love about our house? It’s so cozy, even though it’s usually messy. And when you don’t look out the window, you feel as if you’re in the forest.”

  In the forest. For the first year in that house, I would wake up in the middle of the night at least three times a week and not know where I was. Zanny and Pru, as if answering a beacon, would often groggily appear at my doorway and crawl into bed with me, and we would all fall back to sleep in a snuggly tangle.

  When Cal and I agreed on a divorce settlement, we signed the papers in a Park Slope mediator’s office. We had not disagreed about anything. We wanted joint custody, wanted the kids to stay as close to each of us as they always had been, wanted to talk regularly about the kids to keep each other up to date. We walked out of the office and onto the street. He was wearing a coat I’d never seen before. I looked at him. He looked past me. “Well,” he said. “I guess that’s that—take care of yourself, Susie.” We shook hands. He got into his car, I got into my car.

  A few minutes later, I broke down. I called him, sobbing: What happened? It was inevitable, he said. He should have known it that first year, when I moved to Washington. It was such an obvious sign. Cal chuckled caustically. Look, Susie, he said. I’ve obviously been doing a lot of thinking about everything, and I’ve come to the conclusion that everything we used to say about our souls being connected, that there was something written in the universe—that was all bullshit. It was something we said to rationalize why we were still together when we obviously shouldn’t have been. We stayed together out of fear. If we had really paid attention to all those signs, we would have become friends a lot sooner and saved ourselves a lot of time that we ended up wasting. But we have the babies—and that’s what counts.

  Really? I said. You really mean that? Yes, he said. I do.

  The first Christmas was a horror. The tree was too small, Zanny and Pru wailed. I knew it; I couldn’t afford a bigger one. I had less than ten dollars in my bank account after buying it. I downloaded some free Christmas songs into my music player, perched it in its speaker apparatus, and brought up the Christmas ornaments and stockings from the basement. Zanny’s stocking was nowhere to be found. I sat down on the couch.

  “You know what?” I said. “I’m going to give you mine—the one I had as a little girl.” Zanny took it, and I could see that she was happy to have it because it was special. But then she burst into tears.

  “What are you going to use, Mama?” I would use the one that we’d gotten for Uncle Ian when he used to spend Christmases with us. I liked that one; it had bobolinks on it, which reminded me of Granddad.

  “But it’s not yours!” she cried. She lurched upstairs, sobbing. Pru and I stood in the living room, surrounded by the dusty cardboard boxes of ornaments.

  “Are we still going to decorate the tree?” Pru asked. The instrumental theme to A Charlie Brown Christmas was playing. I looked at Pru. I shut my eyes for a beat, and then opened them. Little baby mammal. I smiled: Yes, we were definitely going to decorate the tree, but how about a little hot chocolate first?

  “Yay!” cheered Pru. I poured cocoa into my grandmother’s tea-cups; we sipped.

  “Do you feel like this is a hard Christmas because things are so different?” I asked. Pru nodded, spooning around her drink. “I feel that way, too,” I said.

  “We already decorated our tree at Daddy’s,” she said. “It’s really big—it’s so beautiful, Mama.” I asked her to tell me about it, and she described it in her widened-eyed, grand-gesturing, “magical world” way.

  “It sounds beautiful, love,” I said. “I bet it was so much fun to decorate it.” She nodded that it was. “Our tree at Mama’s will be beautiful, too, just different,” she observed, shrugging. “It’s okay that it’s small—it doesn’t mind with me.” I snuggled her.

  “Thank you, my rabbit,” I said. “I think you’re pretty amazing to see things that way, even though it’s hard.” Even though I wasn’t sure that she would feel that way a day from now, and it was certainly not how she would always feel. Even though she was young enough not to be as hard-hit as Zanny. Whom I needed to check on now. I asked Pru if she would like to be the first tree decorator. She jumped at it, and I climbed the stairs.

  Zanny was slumped on her bed, head down on the mattress. I sat next to her.

  “It’s hard, poodle,” I said finally. Zanny raised her head and glared at me.

  “I hate this Christmas! It’s so terrible! I thought it would be fun, but it isn’t! Our Christmas music isn’t even the same!” I nodded.

  “When we go downstairs, we can put on the music that you’re used to,” I said, praying that I could find it on some free download site. She jerked upright, wiping her face.

  “It’s not just that,” she spat. “Nothing is the same—we can’t even find my stocking! I don’t know why everything has to be like this—it’s so hard!” I felt a black bolt rip from my head into my gut. I scooped her up, held her, and then stroked her hair.

  “This Christmas is really hard. It is hard for you guys, it is hard for me, and it is hard for Daddy,” I said. “This will be the hardest one because everything is so different and strange. It doesn’t seem like it now, but every year will get easier.”

  “Why is it hard for you?” Zanny howled. “You’re the one who wanted things like this.” That was more than I could bear. Nobody had wanted this, I said, my voice trembling—nobody would ever want this. This was the last thing Daddy and I ever wanted to happen, and we were both incredibly sad, especially because of how much it hurt her and her sister, but also because we had been best friends for almost twenty years. Then why, she cried, did we do it?

  What was I doing? How could I answer that? How could I?

  I heard myself saying this: Daddy and I are best friends, but we do not have a husband and wife relationship. And if you do not have a husband and wife relationship, you cannot be married—that’s just how it works.

  Zanny thought about this. If we didn’t have a husband and wife relationship, she asked, then why had we gotten married in the first place? We had thought, I replied, that we did. So, she said, how do you know whether someone is your best friend or your husband?

  It’s very tricky because they can seem kind of the same, I said—sometimes you just don’t know for a long time. I looked at her. But let me tell you something, my bunny, I said. Just because we cannot be married does not mean that Daddy and I don’t love each other; we always have and we always will. And I thi
nk Daddy is the most perfect father there is, and I always will. And we love being your parents, and we always will. It is hard now, but it won’t always be so hard. Zanny’s brow relaxed, and she unfolded her arms.

  “It still doesn’t feel like Christmas,” she said. I agreed. “But you know what? I bet it didn’t feel like Christmas on the first Christmas either,” I thought aloud. “Mary was poor and young and she wasn’t married and she didn’t know what was going to happen to her. And then she had to have her baby all alone in a barn surrounded by animals. Think about that—how scary and hard that would be. But Mary found a way to be happy at the same time.”

  “Yeah, but at least she had something to look forward to,” said Zanny. “She had all those wise men coming with all those presents.” I laughed, though it wasn’t funny because she hadn’t meant it to be funny. I hugged my little Zanny.

  “You know what? I hate to say it, but I don’t think all that stuff actually happened,” I said, surprising myself. “I don’t think there were any wise men or shepherds or presents—I think it was just Mary alone in the barn, delivering her first baby, and realizing that her little schmushkie coming into the world was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened. That was Christmas.” Zanny considered, turning her head around in my lap.

  “But the star was definitely there,” she said. Then all of a sudden I remembered something that had happened when Cal and I first learned that I was pregnant with Zanny. After the doctor’s appointment in which we had seen our fishy baby girl darting around in utero via the ultrasound screen, Cal and I had played hooky and gone to the Hayden Planetarium. Dwarfed under the giant dome, looking up into the eternal night of space, I had listened to Tom Hanks narrating the story of red giants and black holes and had been filled with dread and sadness: It would all come to nothing. But then a frothy, light cloud appeared, filled with cheerful-looking little fluff-balls: a star nursery! Millions of new stars were born in celestial birthplaces like this, said Tom Hanks—it was happening all the time, all over the universe. When we walked out of the planetarium, I was beaming. I had a star inside.