Mike—what he had sacrificed for her, squelching his anger, swallowing his own needs. She would tell her parents they were on their own now. She had had enough. No more guilt and obligation.
She had disappointed Zoë. Again. Yesterday. And oh, how she had wanted to be there! Career Day at Carmel High School for graduating seniors. All the banners. Students so excited to meet “experts” in different fields: pilots, a screenwriter, an actress (former girlfriend of Clint Eastwood), doctors, research scientists, winemakers, to name only the most popular career presenters. And Zoë had asked her to talk about child psychology.
“Mom, you are amazing. You know that, don’t you? All my friends think so. How you taught at Stanford. Are writing a book. Have your own part-time practice and still try to be there for your family. For Dad and me. We’re all thinking about how to combine career and motherhood. Can you come? Can you? Please?”
Jules smiled, something deep inside her stable and relaxed. Breathing with more solid exhalations. Not jagged and tentative. How could she not make time for her Zoë? Her daughter was so forgiving, so generous of spirit. “I’ll try, sweetheart,” she said. “You know how I love your friends and don’t want to disappoint you. I’ll clear my schedule for you. When is it, exactly?”
Zoë came over to give her a big squeeze. She could feel her daughter’s hands grip her around the ribs, fingers catching on her ribcage, just under the lowest rib. Love handles.
“Stephanie and Kristy both want to be psychologists, too. The three of us are going to apply to the same psychology programs. Stanford is our first choice. Actually my only choice. It’s that or nothing. I know I’m obsessed, but they have the best psychology department ever. And it’s not just about studying rats in cages and statistics either. People to people. That’s what I want to learn about. How people think. What motivates them. How they feel. Why trying their best can still be so awful.”
Jules looked at her daughter’s face. Its certitude. The perfect radiance of youth. And its openness. Frightening at times. Envious at others. Jules looked into those green eyes, flecked with brown, so heavily lashed that her daughter’s glasses had to be curved slightly outward so mascara didn’t leave tracks on the lenses.
“You’ll be the most popular speaker there. And I’ll introduce you, Mom. Only Clint Eastwood’s former lover will get more students.” Zoë looked proud, glowing, savoring this precious thing between them.
The call came on the day of the event, just as school was getting out. Jules was dashing out of her office when the phone rang. She knew she shouldn’t take the call, but she answered anyway.
“Mom, I’ve got to run. I’m late for Zoë’s special day. Have to give a presentation.” Why did I pick up the phone? What’s wrong with me?
“Now, darling, that’s just going to have to wait. It will only take a second, you hear me? It’s an emergency. Our check for this month’s fees at SafeHarbour bounced. The second time now. I told you at my birthday dinner that we’d be out on the street if you don’t come through for us. By five o’clock today. You did get our message, didn’t you?”
Jules had to think. Maybe Mike had erased it before she got home. Passive-aggressive.
“How much is it? I can go to the bank and wire more funds into your account.”
“Well, hurry, won’t you? Before the bank closes. Once they see the funds are being transferred, we can wait for the clearance.” Pause. Her mother’s silence was always hard for Jules to interpret. “Two months’ rent is better than one. Eleven thousand should do it.”
Jules called Wells Fargo as soon as she hung up. The bank was on the way to the high school. She still had time, she’d just be a few minutes late. She could do both. Her credit line would be exhausted now, and all of this would stop.
But the teller didn’t have the wire ready when Jules got to the bank. It would have been faster, after all, if she had gone to her laptop and made the transaction online.
By the time Jules got to the high school parking lot, it was empty.
Stephanie’s mother, Liz, called her minutes after she arrived home.
“Hope you’re not worried. Zoë’s with us. She’s upset. I’m sure you understand.”
“Let me talk to her. I want Zoë to know that I tried. I really did. An emergency came up.” Please, please, Zoë, I know you hate me now. I hate me, too.
“I’ll go get her. Just a second.”
“Please, Zoë, come to the phone,” Jules muttered to herself.
She could hear whispering, raised voices in the background. Her daughter’s and Stephanie’s. Then muffled sounds. Like whimpering. Tears, maybe. She swallowed hard. Then couldn’t anymore.
Again, it was Stephanie’s mom on the phone.
“Sorry, Jules, Zoë’s just a bit under the weather. And tired. She wants to stay for supper and spend the night. Is that all right with you and Mike?” Jules could hear it in her tone: Stephanie’s mother didn’t want to go further. She was ready to be done with this conversation.
“Of course, that’s fine. Zoë and I can always talk tomorrow.” To her own ears, Jules’s voice sounded saccharine. False. Clenched. Embarrassed. She tried to ignore the sting of it, but couldn’t. What a hopeless fool she was! She didn’t even want to put up with herself. She felt wicked, diseased—something was not right with her. What kind of karma had she created for herself? How was it that she kept making those she loved suffer so!
Zoë stayed at Stephanie’s for a week and didn’t call Jules once.
Jules thought of the little boy she had tested the morning of Career Day at Zoë’s high school. Max reminded her of her own little girl at that age. Same voice. Androgynous—before sexuality took over.
Max was a third grader at El Carmelo Elementary and couldn’t read at grade level. Blond straight hair in a buzz cut, he could have played the starring role in Dennis the Menace. He grinned goofily at her, revealing a big gap between his two front teeth on top. “Mrs. Foster, do I have to take more tests? I just don’t feel like it.” He crossed his arms in defiance and grinned again, this time close lipped.
“We’ve been through this drill before, Max. Just thirty more minutes. Then you can pick out a book to read.” It was ironic to Jules that some of the kids with the most difficulty reading loved books the most. They really wanted to read; they just couldn’t fit the pieces of the puzzle together.
After the little boy had struggled with the test, twisting his head down to one shoulder then the other, mimicking the boxes drawn at weird angles to match up with other boxes drawn from a different angle, Jules took him to the shelf with age-appropriate books. She knew which two books he would choose.
Max reached for Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. And he slyly picked up In the Night Kitchen, too.
Jules raised an eyebrow. “I said one book, Max, not two!”
“Please, pretty please,” he said. “That test made my head hurt.”
Sitting next to her on the low squishy beanbag chair, wiggling and turning the pages at the right time, Max seemed to know how to read.
“Max, you know this story so well. Can you pick out words now?”
Max loved Mickey, the boy who lost his clothes in the batter and milk in the children’s book In the Night Kitchen. Come to think of it, all the little kids loved seeing Maurice Sendak’s drawing of Mickey’s little penis. Always made her wonder why some adults had banned the book, protesting that young minds shouldn’t see such explicitly drawn body parts.
“I just know how to follow along with my finger. My finger does the reading.” Max looked delighted with himself. “That’s why I fooled Miss McLaughlin. I just copy what everyone else is doing.”
Jules laughed. Max had been diagnosed a little later than others. He was a great pretender. But aren’t we all at times?
“Max, see the little boy sleeping here? See the letter Z? What sound does it make?”
“I don’t know. I give up.”
“Zzzzzz.”
“You mean
the letter moves?”
That was why she spent so much time with Max, more than with other kids. He was bright, original, and made her laugh. She needed more of that these days. It was good for her soul. She cared about these kids’ future. Kids like Max. Zoë, though, was no longer a kid but a beautiful teenager, and time had run out. She would be going to college in a few months and Jules would become irrelevant. She had to choose now. The moment of everything.
Consequences, unforeseen consequences. But she should have seen that there would only be so much time to be a mother. Now there were just too many ghosts and too many birthdays, celebrating nothing.
GHOST BUSTERS
They both took vacation time to be there. Uncle Wilson’s memorial service. Mike had enjoyed the company of her favorite uncle, too. But only one week after her mother’s birthday, Jules felt in no mood for more family affairs. Birthdays. Funerals. She was worried about their daughter. Zoë was still at her friend’s house and refusing to take her calls.
The PowerPoint slides of family reunions and ordinary holidays were on a timer. One by one, at ten-second intervals, each photo—about four feet square—flashed on the screen. Some of the slides were very old ones—more than fifty years at least, Jules reckoned, converted from even older emulsion photos. Photographs had been expensive way back then, and her father’s family had been so poor. There was one black-and-white of Uncle Wilson as a baby. There were lots of other photos, too: the wedding photo of Uncle Wilson and Auntie Alice, a black-and-white photo she would have had trouble identifying. The sporting goods store on opening day. Slides of good times with their large, boisterous family—two successful sons and six grandchildren. The other brothers included, her father excepted.
Then flashed the color ones. Some she remembered. The twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of his store, for example. She heard the click-clicking of the space bar on the computer keyboard. More slides. The expected ones: the happy family gathered for first high school, then college graduations (for both sons—no playing favorites). The cap and gowns were the same throughout. Only the faces and the tassels were different. Then there was Charlie’s medical school graduation. Lots of photos of that day. Repetitive, and a bit monotonous, perhaps, but a thoughtful and caring photographic tribute.
The Hyatt hotel in Los Angeles provided the easel for more old photos—hard copies, pinned haphazardly. There wasn’t a single one of her dad. Nor any from her family, except one of her, standing on her uncle’s commercial fishing boat, a bloody rag held over her left eyebrow.
Jules adored her uncle, and had hated returning to Ohio that summer after visiting him. She was almost sixteen years old. Grown up. California had seemed like another country to her back then. The water was still, the sun so hot on the Santa Monica pier that her flip-flops stuck to the planks, almost melting into the boardwalk. A Disneyland of rides—Ferris wheel, carousels, roller coasters, and the arcades, honky-tonk but thrilling. Andrew and Joanne, who was only eleven or twelve at the time, were going on Uncle Wilson’s fishing boat, too. Jules absolutely loved riding in her uncle’s old red pickup to the pier. Their dad had come along, but hadn’t really wanted to. She had felt he knew he wasn’t wanted. By anyone. Even then.
“Hey, little princess, ready to catch some albacore—the biggest and best there are?” Uncle Wilson gave Jules a long, delicious hug, his sun-leathered face all crinkly and grinning, part toothless and part gold toothed. She didn’t even mind him calling her “little.”
Jules always grinned like a freak around him. “Yeah!” she jumped up and down, feeling giddy. No one back home would know she had reverted back to being a little girl around him.
“Me, too,” Andrew broke in. “Boys always get more fish. Dad knows I can get the biggest one. You just watch me. He’s going to be so proud of my catch.”
But Uncle Wilson ignored him. And Jules loved him for that, too. Andrew dragged his pole to the other side of the boat, but no one looked up.
Her uncle whispered conspiratorially, his Coppertone lotion smelling sweet and rich to her, a fragrance she thought for years afterwards was aftershave: “I told Andrew the other side of the boat’s better. But the fish are biting here. He’ll be out of our way. Guess he doesn’t want to share the water … or the fish.” He laughed.
Jules had felt honored that Uncle Wilson preferred her fishing skills. By then, all her friends called her “Jules.” Not so girlie. But her uncle had called her that when she was in kindergarten, way before she had decided on what she wanted for her name. He had said she was like a chest of jewels, precious and beautiful. A family treasure. Jules loved the sound of it now. Her new name had sounded so grown-up and luxurious. Deirdre and her other friends thought so, too.
Joanne clutched Jules’s hand as much as she’d let her. She was still the baby in the family, although she was past baby age, and almost as tall as Jules was. But Joanne had sponged up their mother’s fear of boats and water.
As Jules was feeling the hot sun on her face, sticky with sweat and suntan lotion, her pole jerked in her hand. Squeezing her eyes tight and shaking off her sister’s hand, which rested on her arm, she clutched the pole with all her strength. Nervous, twitching with excitement, almost dropping the pole, she screamed, “Uncle Wilson, help! Help me! I don’t want to lose it.”
“Don’t you worry, pumpkin. We’ll get this one good.” He called out to her father, “Barbie, get the net … quick!”—all the while keeping a firm grip on the pole, his hand over Jules’s.
Silence.
“Maybe he’s taking a nap down below,” Jules said, wishing her father had stayed back at her uncle’s house with her mom and Aunt Alice. He just got in the way.
“You know, he’s never there when you need him. Said he wanted to go fishing. But then all he does is sleep. Well, we’ll have a good time anyway, Jules. Without him.”
Uncle Wilson called to Andrew as they struggled with the line.
“Andrew, get the net. It’s under the bench you’re sitting on. Hurry!”
With one expert yank, Uncle Wilson had reeled in a stunning metallic, shimmering fish—somersaulting and panicking on the line the whole way in—and heaved it on deck. Andrew slowly waddled over with the net, probably hoping to sabotage Jules’s catch. His face was subdued as he looked down at the squirming, lashing wild thing.
Jules yanked the net from her brother and scooped up her gyrating, flip-flopping trophy, but Andrew jerked back—so hard that the end flew up, just missing her left eye and cutting deeply into her eyebrow. A shocked look on his face, he dropped the net and ran.
Jules cried out in pain, dropping the fishing pole and holding the left side of her face. Then Jules bent down to retrieve the net, blood dripping into her eye. Uncle Wilson gently took it from her hand and scooped up the fish. The albacore was bleeding from its mouth as he unhooked it, her blood dripping, the two trickles of red mingling on its silver scales.
“Let’s put it in the cooler on ice,” Uncle Wilson chuckled, depositing the thrashing fish into the Coleman ice chest. “We’ll have a feast tonight!”
Jules grinned, ignoring the blood—both hers and the tuna’s.
“Now, let me see that eyebrow, princess,” Uncle Wilson said as he matter-of-factly reached into his tackle box for bandage tape and gauze. “Looks deeper than it is,” he said. He washed it in saltwater, so gently that it felt good. “We could go down and get your dad to double-check you don’t need stitches.”
“Nope.” Jules smiled now, relieved. “I trust you. Let Daddy sleep. He likes to dream about marrying Donna Reed.”
Uncle Wilson looked puzzled, but said nothing.
She beamed as Joanne opened the red-and-white Coleman cooler again and again to peek at the albacore. Andrew came back to take another look as well; he sulked as Uncle Wilson stretched his tape measure across the fish’s glistening side. After that, Jules didn’t see either Andrew or their father for the rest of the day. So much for boys getting all of the fish, Jules gleeful
ly kept repeating to herself … silently, she hoped. It was the best day ever.
Jules liked that memory. A real family outing.
The banquet room at Uncle Wilson’s memorial was full of tears. The first testimonial was from Charlie, Uncle Wilson’s older son. The UCLA neurologist. He had pages of notes. The microphone at the podium was set too low for him to speak into it audibly at first. After fidgeting with the mike, he began:
“My dad was the best dad ever.” Jules could hear that he was struggling to find his voice. “Never shirked his responsibilities to any of us: my mother”—Jules listened to her Aunt Alice’s muffled sobs—“my brothers and me, our friends. We may not have had much in the early days—when two boys and their parents live above a store in two tiny bedrooms, and one was actually a closet, that’s what they call ‘cozy’—but we never owed anyone anything.”
Jules caught Charlie’s smile as he looked down at her, picking at the cheesecake, and it made her wince.
“What we didn’t have in dollars we had in respect for each other. And love. We had each other’s backs, and we were and are stronger for it. My parents have made lots of sacrifices for all of us, too many to count. Our dreams became theirs. I can’t say I even knew what my father ever dreamt for himself. Everything was always for us. To you, Dad; I’ll miss you.”
Slump shouldered, Charlie walked back to sit down across from Mike, who patted him on the shoulder, man-style. “Hey, you did a good job,” was all he said as a gesture of comfort.
Jules wondered why she and Mike had been seated at the table for guests of honor, as if they were the close inner circle. Family.
At first she thought there had been some mistake. Why was she invited to the legal offices of Hawkins and Davis? Her cousins seemed to know.
Things Unsaid: A Novel Page 8