His mother moved to hug Abigail and kiss her good night—then blushed as Abigail turned her back in a defensive block. Andrew couldn’t remember the last time his mother’s face had turned red like that. Abigail hurried out of the room and came back with fresh towels—the kind reserved only for very special guests—while Andrew struggled with his parents’ two heavy suitcases, which he deposited in the hallway, to the side of the guest bathroom. Why did his mother have to pack so much for a few days’ stay? Their guest room was too small for anything but one queen-size bed and a small nightstand. Even the closet wouldn’t hold a standard drag-bag suitcase on the floor.
“My, the weather is frigid this time of year. And oh, my arthritis,” his mother said, rubbing the gnarls on her knuckles. “But nothing would keep me from seeing my ‘sun,’ my one and only son, the sunshine of my life. A mother’s love is always constant, you know. And soon my two grandsons will be off and about, not remembering me. How very sad. That’s why we must make our visits longer,” his mother said.
His father was quiet. Andrew was worried. He had followed his investment advice in the beginning and had lost everything. Now he left it to others—mutual fund companies. Once, he remembered, Jules—or was it Joanne?—had asked if their mom had her jewelry in a special place, just in case they had to find it. In an emergency, is the way whoever said it had put it. Well, their mother had just started yelling: “You can tear the house apart. Look in all the closets. Inside pots and pans, for all I care. When I’m gone!” That had been the end of broaching the subject of their parents’ assets.
It’s none of my business anyway, Andrew thought. He had his own problems.
Sitting down next to the Christmas tree—that year the Martha Stewart colors were white and gold—Aida seemed to Andrew to be displaying a general sort of weakness, the kind he remembered his grandmother sometimes experiencing under stress. She reached out for her son’s arm, to steady herself, to avoid tumbling over. Abigail offered her hand instead, but she pushed it aside and fell back into the overstuffed wing chair.
“My mother said my life would be easy if I married a good provider. ‘Become a doctor’s wife,’ she said. Well, if she had lived to see me now. My troubles began when I got married.” She paused and looked at Andrew. “I didn’t mean for your father and me to be such party poopers. We can talk about this later. No need to ruin our visit. And Abigail, you needn’t get involved with our petty personal problems. That’s just for family to deal with, you know.” She smiled at her daughter-in-law—a fake smile, Andrew thought. He knew Abigail would never be family to his mother. “Have you been busy with that Spiegel seed catalogue again, honey? That’s where you do most of your shopping, isn’t it? A regular farm girl.”
Abigail fingered the buckle on the strap of her overalls. “No, these are from Sears, down in Manchester,” she said. Her tone didn’t hold the slightest trace of offense, but Andrew knew better. “Andrew likes me in overalls. Says there’s no place for fancy clothes and makeup in Vermont.”
“Andrew’s so handsome, you know,” his mother went on as if Abigail hadn’t even spoken. “I would be worried, if I were you.”
Ouch, Andrew thought, belching a baby-burp-up taste.
“He’s such a looker. We had to fight the girls off, throwing themselves at him in high school. He favors me, you know. Same dark chestnut hair, Italian lover eyes.” His mother laughed and girlishly tossed her dyed locks.
His first serious girlfriend, Carrie, had been his college sweetheart at Wooster College. How his mother had loathed her. Nearly fifteen years earlier, before he had met Abigail, he had taken Carrie to Wong’s Chinese restaurant, the only decent restaurant in Akron, to meet his parents, announce their intended engagement, and celebrate his father’s birthday. Wong’s was considered very exotic for northern Ohio, a region of the state not known for “ethnic” anything—clothing, food, residents—outside of Cleveland, that is, which was an ethnic mishmash that the Whitmans found unnerving at that time. They felt safer back in their own white enclave.
At Wong’s, white waitresses dressed in tight, gold-and-red-embroidered, Suzy Wong–style dresses. The bar was very popular; Andrew always felt he was in some exciting country in Asia—or at least on a Hollywood set—when he was there. Definitely not in Akron, anyway.
Andrew had insisted that Carrie, his soon-to-be fiancée, be invited to celebrate his father’s birthday. Halfway through the evening, his mother stood up in a silvery satin cocktail dress and toasted her husband with her Tsingtao beer. His sisters, Jules’s husband, Mike, and Carrie—all dressed in jeans—raised their beer mugs, too.
“To my dear husband, whom I saved myself for, not giving away the ranch before we got married,” his mother said, speech slurred, staring down at Carrie. He saw a few drops from his mother’s mug sprinkle the top of Carrie’s head.
“What!? You weren’t a virgin and you goddamn well know it. And I didn’t find out about it until our wedding night!” His father sounded exasperated, a little bit bitter, even after all that time. Andrew thought how amazing it was that some feelings didn’t die out. Maybe even got stronger.
“Well, you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference anyway,” his mother said. “I wasn’t going to die guessing.”
Andrew looked at Carrie, and his heart went out to her. Virginity was still an ideal in the Midwest—among everyone, including parents who obviously hadn’t practiced what they preached.
“Wow, and in the 1940s, no less … I guess you could say you were ahead of your time,” Jules had laughed—trying to lighten the mood, Andrew thought. He had always thought she had a freakish grin, like someone in pain. He wondered if she knew what her face looked like when she was around their mother. Come to think of it, what did his own face look like? he wondered.
Carrie had looked down at her lap. Her eyes grew shiny, and seconds later two tears, barely detectible, slid down the inner corner of her right eye. She looked up at him, waiting to be rescued or at least supported. Given a smile, perhaps. But he offered nothing.
“You’re absolutely gross,” Jules had said to their mother quietly, shuddering.
Andrew watched as their father stood up quietly, walked over, and tapped Carrie gently on the shoulder before marching stiffly back to his seat.
Andrew had felt embarrassed for her, but not moved to action. Jules, though—she seemed to feel a sisterhood, a solidarity, with Carrie that he couldn’t imagine. She had guts—perhaps to the point of recklessness—and knew her mother’s dark side as well as any of them.
Their mother looked alternatively oblivious and defensive, triumphant and chastened. He was no match for her. He wanted to be, but he hated making things worse. He just wanted to be more like his father.
No one ever saw Carrie again after that night. After their breakup, Andrew didn’t mention her anymore, although he tried to Google her for years after his marriage to Abigail and the birth of his boys. All four of them.
“Oh, Aida,” Abigail said, interrupting Andrew’s reverie. He blinked. It surprised him that he was thinking of Carrie after all this time. His wife was a different story: a Carrie killer. He had met her on the rebound, six months after Carrie broke up with him. At a dental conference in Cleveland. As in almost everything, Abigail won out.
She was the only daughter of the dean of humanities at the University of Denver, and every humanities professor on campus dreaded having her as a student, because they knew her opinion counted far more than peer reviews or lists of publications. She was an “opinion leader.” And in Andrew’s mother’s defense, she did look like she would rather plant squash and fava bean seeds than look at a copy of Vogue. Her hair was untamed. She didn’t toss her head and try to make her hair swing. His mother said it was because her hair was dirty and she didn’t care. But Andrew liked that about her.
She made no exceptions for Andrew’s mother, no matter how aggressive she became. Despite continuous protestations to call her “Mom” or “Mother,”
Andrew had never heard his wife address her mother-in-law as anything but Aida. Jules couldn’t—or wouldn’t—call their mother “Mom” either. She also wore overalls—but that was where the similarity between the two women ended.
“Maybe I was a bit hasty with Carrie,” Andrew’s mother had said to him when the twins were babies. “She was stunning, the way I was at her age. She was no match for me, you understand—but she was pretty. Still, Abigail is certainly a small price to pay for being with my one and only son and my twin grandsons.”
And now they had a third child—Ethan, an angelic, Raphael-like cupid with blond hair, blue eyes, and very fair skin. Their newest little blessing from heaven; another Whitman to add to the burgeoning family tree.
“Don’t you want a little girl, so you could have one of each flavor?” his mother had asked before the baby was born.
“Whatever God wills is always welcomed,” Abigail had replied sweetly. Andrew envied her seemingly effortless ability to render their mother speechless. Abigail would not shed a tear over anything his mother said. She was the only one who would never react to her criticism. How he wanted to learn that!
“But surely after the fatigue and demands of twin boys, in your heart you want a baby girl,” his mother had pressed on, her voice rising at the end of her sentence.
But Abigail had been unruffled, unblinking. “My heart matches God’s—only he knows what will truly make us happy,” she said.
His mother, as in most of her conversations with Abigail—was finally silenced. She had confessed to Andrew once that Abigail seemed like some other species, but she didn’t quite know why. So unrelated—like she’d come from a gene pool of unknown provenance.
Now, his mother moved in for a closer look at her grandbaby, and Abigail pulled the infant towards her breast. Arms outstretched, his mother’s jowls drooped, and she shivered a bit as she let her arms sink down to her side, deflating.
“Oh my, he’s different,” she observed, staring into the baby’s ice-blue eyes. “He is a cute little guy, so freshly baked.” She lip-printed his soft cheek while Abigail still cradled him.
“If you want to touch him, wash your hands,” Abigail instructed, elbowing her mother-in-law away. “I usually don’t let smokers touch Ethan, you know. But you two are exceptions, of course.”
Andrew’s mother sneezed. Does she think Abigail smells feral? he wondered. Maybe his mother was allergic to his wife.
Abigail reached into her pants’ pocket and offered his mother some Altoid breath mints. “Here, take two of these. So Ethan’s not offended. Babies are very sensitive, you know. They have a superb sense of smell.”
His mother was the one offended. Her shoulders hunched, her thin lips in a tightly pinched line. “What else should I do before kissing my own grandson?”
Andrew heard the ice in her voice, but Abigail didn’t crack.
“Oh, that’s it for now … I guess. It’s really a privilege to be trusted with someone else’s baby, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
Andrew could hear his mother’s words inside his skull: “I’ve held more babies than you have.” But that’s what she would say to her own daughters. Abigail was not family. She was the lucky one. Andrew took satisfaction in the fact Abigail wasn’t afraid of his mother, not like everyone else. That was her most admirable quality.
He loved staring into baby Ethan’s sweet little face: a few fine blond strands, a very pink bald scalp, blue eyes staring up at him. He was a beautiful infant—so different looking from the twins. After his mother finished washing her hands at the kitchen sink, he watched as she took the baby from Abigail. After a few seconds, she frowned and passed Ethan to him.
“This is no grandson of mine,” she said. “Both sides of our family have only black or chestnut-brown hair, and either black or brown eyes. This is not my son’s child. If he had blond hair and brown eyes, or dark hair and blue eyes, it’s possible he could be my grandchild. But this baby … not a chance!”
Abigail smiled. “Oh, Aida, can’t you be happy for us? That we have another little boy? God didn’t want to give us a baby girl this time. Don’t be disappointed.”
It was late. Midnight. They all went their separate ways to bed.
The house seemed quiet, but not at peace. His parents had left very early—in a cab this time, Andrew had an oral surgery to prepare for. He had heard the door click as they left, but he hadn’t risen to say goodbye to them.
It was still dark when he downed his muddy coffee and went to strip the bed in the guest room, making it tight with new sheets, GWMA-style. He wanted to rid his house of his parents’ smell. Thank God, life could now go on as usual. He backed the car out of their one-car garage, grateful that he hadn’t had to leave his car outside that night. He and Abigail always fought over whose turn it was. The loser had to allow a good ten to fifteen minutes to wipe all the snow off the windshield and warm up the engine after the car had been out all night. In the pitch dark.
Later that night, as they sat on the couch watching a talk show on TV, Abigail scrunched up next to him, trying to cuddle. But Andrew wasn’t in the mood.
“What’s wrong, hon?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Andrew muttered. “My mother just puts me in a bad mood, that’s all.”
“Is this about Ethan? What she said about how he couldn’t be your son because of his blond hair and blue eyes?”
“Nah. What does my mom know about genetics? She was just shooting her mouth off. Never liked blonds for some reason. Always called them ‘pasty faced.’ ”
“Hmm. Don’t pay attention to the old bat. I don’t like to speak ill of people, but your mom’s the biggest bitch I know.”
Tell me something I don’t already know, Andrew thought. Still, he didn’t like it when Abigail called his mom a bitch. Carrie and Grissim had both been kinder.
When Ethan was sixteen months old—his big boy—Andrew remembered his mother’s words again.
He had walked into the kitchen to start a big pot of water boiling. He loved their old-fashioned stove, how it had a folding metal top to hide the burners, converting to a work surface for cutting boards and mixing. He relished how much cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing it was with its metal top flattened down. The kitchen in general was soothing to him, just as Ethan’s breathing had been when he was an infant. The gentle, trusting sound of his inhalations and exhalations, like the back-and-forth petting of a kitten, had always put Andrew at ease.
Andrew enjoyed being a father. The pleasure of knowing you could love and be loved. Like his love for his father and his father’s love for him. All sons loved their fathers and vice versa, right? The only difference was, Andrew felt comfortable showing his love for his sons—and his need for theirs.
Abigail had just closed the books for the day. He knew he could trust her with money—with everything. Besides, she was better than he was with accounting.
“Oh, darling, our books are worse and worse,” Abigail said, looking over his shoulder into the pot of water on the stove. “We have to talk.”
“Does it have to be right now?” he asked. “I’d like to get the show on the road. The twins are going to be famished when they get back from baseball practice.”
As if they had been eavesdropping from the sandlot, Adam and Jake rushed into the kitchen, occupying all the space in the room.
“What’s for dinner? We’re starving,” Adam asked, giving his mother a big kiss on the cheek while Jake waited his turn to do the same. They knew how to manage her.
“Guys, we need some alone time. Can you go do something—like take a shower? You have that guy smell, stinky and sweaty. Go clean up while we talk,” Abigail said as she reached for the box of spaghetti in the pantry, not making eye contact.
Andrew thought that was strange. His wife always got twinkly eyes whenever one of their sons kissed her. Just like his mother had. What’s going on?
“That’s gross, Mom. You’ve been married too long to have alone time.
But hey, we don’t want to know.” He shook his head and threw up his hands. “Let’s get out of here, Jake, before they embarrass us. Geez.”
Andrew heard the thud of baseball cleats through the house as they escaped upstairs.
“Hon, can you give Ethan a meatball while we talk?” Abigail asked.
He spooned out a meatball, cut it into tiny pieces, and put it into a plastic Toy Story bowl for his little boy. He picked up Ethan and after a wet, sticky kiss—Why do kids always have sticky mouths, even when they haven’t been eating anything sugary?—he placed the toddler on his food-encrusted booster seat.
“Okay, what’s so important?” he asked as he reached for salad greens and a bottle of salad dressing from the refrigerator.
Abigail looked on edge. Burdened. She had never been that way before. Not even when Ethan fell down after trying to run on his still-unsteady feet, hit his head, and had to be taken to the hospital.
“We have to talk about Ethan. There’s something I have to explain.”
“Must we now? I know his tantrums are nerve racking. It’s just a stage. I’m so tired. I just want to eat with you and the boys. I need some downtime.”
But no, something was wrong. Andrew could feel it.
“No, no. It’s not his tantrums.” Abigail paused. “I know you love Ethan as much as I do, sweetheart.” She smiled and came over to where he was sitting. Feeding Ethan.
“Remember, darling, the Christmas before last, when your parents came to visit?”
He couldn’t remember what she was trying to have him remember. What was one Christmas from another? They all blurred together in his mind. His parents staying, Abigail getting irritable, the boys getting overexcited by all the lavish gifts, and then his parents leaving without saying good-bye.
“Don’t you?” Abigail pressed. “It was the Christmas before last. Ethan was no longer so wobbly headed, was beginning to look around, trying to understand his world. Your parents told us about their money problems getting more and more serious. Asked for help. Now do you remember?”
Things Unsaid: A Novel Page 14