Home Making

by Lee Matalone

  “So you want to know how he is doing?”

  “Yes,” I say, rubbing my fingers along the stem of the glass. I drink, not looking at him.

  He adjusts the silk scarf around his neck, flattening and smoothing the edges against his chest. He wears expensive beiges and whites that have small, just detectable stains on the pant legs and down the fronts of his button-downs. Reclined in the cafe table chair, his ankle is crossed and residing on the knee of the other leg. A royal purple sock brightens out from under the hem of his pant leg.

  “More. Please. Just a little bit,” I tell him, as he tops off my glass.

  “He should be fine.” He crosses his arms over his chest. He is a man that is always in a position of repose, but he is not as comfortable as his posture makes him out to be. “Are you relieved?”

  “That is a complicated question.”

  When he laughs, his body rocks forward and he presses a hand to his paunch.

  “I have to tell you, you need to relax. You’ve known that his prognosis was positive for some time.”

  A young man with blond-white hair and white skin comes over to Raj and takes his hand. Raj’s eyes alight, and he holds the man’s, the just recently boy’s, hand in his as they greet one another, make talk.

  “This here is one of the best OBs you’ll ever meet,” he says, introducing me.

  “Was.” I drink to empty my glass.

  “Yes,” he says, turning to the man. “I will see you later, in a few hours.”

  The blond-white man disappears back inside the bar with his entourage.

  “He’s a bright one. He has a good sense of the patient.” He leans into me and grabs my hand. I believe he is devoted to Neha, but he is touchy with everyone, leaving enough room for wonder. “You will be fine. You have good instincts and you followed them. Now do not worry. How much longer will you be in town?”

  “I guess not much longer now.”

  “Well, it has been good to have you around. We both know how hard a good friend is to come by for people like us.”

  “People like us?”

  “Physicians. Aliens. Strangers to this place.”

  I squeeze his hand. He takes my hand and holds my wrist up to his nose. “J’adore?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  His laugh releases my hand from his. We laugh together.

  “I need to get back.”

  “Come on!” He picks up the wine bottle, shaking the contents to show how much drinking there is left to do.

  “I think you can handle it without me.” I rise from my chair and he, too, rises. We meet at the middle of the table and kiss one another’s cheeks.

  “It will be fine! You will be fine!” he calls out after me. As I leave, there is laughter and another bottle ordered. The blond-white boy wanders back to our table, taking my place.

  There were perfect moments, with both of my husbands.

  While living in Wisconsin, Neil and I’d go to this particular French restaurant, whenever we could scrounge up the money to do it. The waiter knew us. Charlie. He liked us. Well, he liked Neil. After one meal—the oeuf cocotte au foie gras!—we came out and our car was dotted in croissants. Little crescents on the windshield, on the trunk, even croissants perched on the side mirrors. At first, this made us sad. We wanted to stuff them all in a bag and take them home and cherish every bite. But, as we later found out, they were trash croissants. The pastry chef had messed up the dough, so Charlie was putting them to good use in giving them a new life of mischief.

  What else was there to do but start a little war? A torrent of croissants flew back and forth across the car, littering the parking lot with slivers of the moon. Driving home, we could barely contain ourselves, our clothes slipping at the facade of the apartment.

  Or, years later, Chloe, Daniel, and I on the way home from the hospital after she was born. Chloe and I in the backseat. It was Orchestral Suite no. 3 in D minor playing on the radio. I wanted a drink. He stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of Laphroaig, and the three of us sat in the backseat of the liquor store parking lot, Daniel and I sipping from the bottle.

  Neil left me (for a younger woman, a natural blonde with the luxury of time and energy to contribute to doting) like all of our loves leave us: quietly, loudly, suddenly, predictably, with many traces, crumbs inedible.

  Daniel, the Father of Chloe: He is a story I cannot yet tell myself.

  From this view, it may not seem like it, but I have loved, root and branch.

  When my life is not this strangeness, I can be found at home. That may seem like an obvious statement, but some people always seem to be out and about, running errands, lunching and dinnering with friends and acquaintances, ellipticaling at the gym, road tripping on weekends, whereas I like to be home. There is nowhere better than the quiet of home.

  The house I live in, the house I bought over thirty years ago now, is the house I chose for Chloe. This neighborhood’s name has the word lake in it, but the body of water behind my house is really a man-made pond, a lovely pond with water and algae, nonetheless. It does not disappoint, as far as ponds go. This pond homes geese, many of them. In the winter, down they come from Canada and take the water as their temporary home. The pond is also home to an array of fish. For twenty years, a neighbor across the pond has stocked the water with bass. The geese know this, somehow. Also, snapping turtles. Once, Chloe found one up the hill from the pond in our front yard. He looks naked. He needs a hat. And so she placed, carefully, an Uncle Sam–style top hat, paper red white and blue, on its head. He cocked back and shot his neck at her. But she was okay. There were no accidents that day.

  The call of the geese. The quiet. The road to our house curves down and away from the main street of the suburb, ending at the three-bedroom prairie house tucked in between some grass and trees.

  The house itself needed work. Hardwood throughout the living and dining rooms and kitchen, but an ugly amount of carpet, it’s true. Wallpaper. So much of it, the 1980s kind, floral. It’d strike fear in you, the wallpaper.

  For Chloe and me it was just right. With its big windows and open spaces, she would always be able to find me, to know I was there. Even now that she’s grown up and gone, it’s still what I need. It’s me. It’s just right.

  “I need you,” Chloe says over the phone.

  “Baby,” I say. “I’ll come over this weekend.”

  “I know we said the end of December but now would be better.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you still come around Christmas, too? I’d like to have you and Beau for dinner.”

  “Don’t eat me,” I say.

  “Not what I meant, Mom.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just kidding. Just trying to help.”

  “I will make sure I put the firmest pillows in your room.”

  “Whatever is fine. Whatever works.”

  “Mom, we both know that is not true.”

  “Well, I’ll be there.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I say.

  Henri barks. Pat calls. Cyb. Cyb.

  “Hold on,” I say. “Just a few days.”

  Even though I’m retired now, people still want baby stories. People always want to hear about the deformities, the deliveries of babies conjoined, missing limbs, possessing noses without nostrils. They do not want to hear about the healthy babies, or even the syndromes that hide, the Marfan, the autism. I do not offer them more than this one story. If they want protracted horror, they can read the news.

  A cyclops?

  Yes. That is the actual medical term (cyclopia).

  What did the mother think? Seeing the baby come out with one eye? Can you imagine, seeing a baby come out of you that had one eye? I can’t. I’d die.

  That’s what the baby did. She didn’t survive for more than a few minutes.

  I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t know how I could carry that baby the whole nine months.

  Well, you wouldn’t.
Now we can tell from the ultrasound. Most people choose to abort.

  Oh. Well. That’s a relief. I mean, for the baby. For the mother and the baby.

  I give them what they want, complete the story for them, but their imaginations want to keep on running. As some people fantasize about healthy babies, others fantasize about disaster. Sometimes, those people are the same people. They never ask, What was the delivery you are proudest of? What delivery was the most exuberant? What delivery changed your life? No. They want cyclopia, they want heartbreak.

  Neil was the love of my life. It is easy to see, to say that now. For some, love comes early in a brief bright burst. It is not meant to last long. What do they call those flowers that bloom only for a day? All radiance for twenty-four hours and then, nothing. But we still appreciate that flower, whatever its name, for offering even a passing glimpse at its beauty.

  What the hell do they call it? Beau would know something so obscure. Chloe is always sending me apps I should download for sharing lists of books we both should read and identifying songs I like on the radio. Why not turn his brain into a piece of software? Ask Beau.

  In the kitchen there is pie. My daughter’s pie. Really one of the most beautiful pies I’ve seen. And this is her first pie.

  “Is it good at all?” she asks. “This is a new recipe.”

  “Yes,” I tell her. “It’s perfect.”

  “Is this what we are supposed to do after dinner? Is this what’s right?”

  “Chloe. I said the pie was great.”

  “I feel like I’m failing at all of this. What do I do? What am I supposed to do?”

  I want to make her feel better. I want her to know that home making is no simple task, that it requires erring and erring and tears and gin. Messing up is part of the process. These bumps and depressions are part of it. She needs to know that she doesn’t need her little dog or some husband to do it. She can do it on her own. Some of us have no other choice.

  My fingers taste red and sweet. The skin of her cheeks taste the sweetness, I hope, too. I hope she hears my thumbs sing, It’s alright. It’s alright. It’s alright.

  In the car at the McDonald’s parking lot, warming ourselves over a carton of French fries, she is telling me about this dream she is having, about a shed or shack on the edge of the sea, and I ask, “What does it tell you about what you’re feeling, this dream?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m supposed to be comforted on this beautiful island, but I’m stranded here. I’m stuck. The water is biting at my feet. I could be overtaken by the sea at any moment.”

  “That’s how you feel?”

  “I feel like he’s marooned me here.”

  Later that afternoon, in her shed, she is caulking windows. Her coat puffs up and around her face. Strands of her fur collar cling to her wind-chilled lips.

  “It is a bit cold to be doing this, isn’t it?” I say.

  “It needs to be done.”

  She does not say, There is no one else to do it for me.

  “You have not talked to Pat, have you?” she asks, one arm propped on her hip and the other bent vertical, the caulking gun in ready position.

  Through the gaps in the doors and windows, the wind forces its way into the shed. The glue hardens against the cold air.

  I tell her everything that she wants to know, nothing more. Now she knows enough, enough to hurt her, to maroon her on an even more remote island, without even her mother for comfort. But this is a mother’s job, too. To teach her she needs to be able to survive on her own. To show her that when I die she will not die, too. She will go on caulking and loving and fearing.

  For two days, she does not say a word to me. She does not tell me to leave, but she does not say much more than to ask me if I’d like a cup of coffee in the morning. I keep to myself while she works in the shed. During the day there is hammering and power drilling and in the night there is the sound of water filling pots and chicken roasting in the oven, the hush of doors closing. During the day there is the shh of sitting on the couch with a book and in the evening the dull rhythm of slicing vegetables. There is the quiet that comes from leaving doors open, of waiting for her.

  “The Golden Arches never looked so golden,” he says. His fingers weave in his lap. He searches out the car window for what other people have been doing while he was in a hospital room thinking about the cells mutating inside of his body. This is normal obsessive behavior for undergoing chemo. To wonder how other people go on ordering McFlurries when chaos is at work in the molecular.

  “Soon enough, you can have all the Big Macs you want.”

  “By then I won’t want them anymore,” he says.

  I say, “Yes. Isn’t it funny how life works?”

  In his driveway, the car hums, waiting for him to get out. He coughs but manages the exit by himself, brushes off the notion of French fry salt from his pants.

  I assure him, “You will be fine doing this on your own.”

  This house looms for such a small house. Solitary on the corner and full of presence. The only one like it in the neighborhood. It is not meant for just one person, one man. I still hope that he recognizes his error, soon.

  “Will you call her?” I do not need to say, When you are better, because we both know that he will, eventually but soon enough, be free of the disease. Which means that soon he will have to deal with normal life problems, if not with Chloe than with a new woman, tiffs over toothpaste left open on the bathroom counter, jealousy over Another Man, things that he may have thought he would never have to think about again. I wonder, does his surprise health bring lukewarm feelings?

  He says, Of course. The front door shuts and locks after him. Of course. Of course. Of course.

  There is no dirt in heaven, the welcome mat says. We lay it at her door.

  “Ridiculous. It’s just what I needed,” my daughter says.

  She has already outfitted my car for the road. A thermos full of coffee (black, strong) and a travel bag of snacks (cashews, leftover Halloween candy), though the drive is only two hours and change.

  “I can stay longer, if that’s what you need,” I say.

  “No. I have a lot to do. And you need time alone.”

  “But I’d go a little longer without that for you. You know that.”

  “I know.”

  She opens the garage door. Outside the light is hazy, the sky impeded by clouds. It could snow or rain. Around my neck she wraps a pashmina, weaving the silk around and around before tying it off. Like a good French girl she kisses me on both cheeks and then hugs me deeply, without a preference for personal space, like a good American girl.

  “See you at Christmas,” I say.

  “Don’t forget your pillow,” she says.

  They say that when a woman carries a child, fetal cells cross through the placenta, enter her body, course through her bloodstream, take refuge in her liver, her lungs, her thyroid, her heart, her skin, and eventually wander all the way up to her brain where they stay, indefinitely.

  I wonder if every mother, the ones I create and the ones I will never meet, have the same thought at some point in their lives, the good ones and the bad ones and the in-betweens (that area where most of us fall). I wonder if we all share the same hope, to have the same magic power somehow bestowed upon us: to travel back to one afternoon early in our child’s life, a week to a few weeks after birth, when our bodies have started to heal and we are getting reacquainted with the world of routines. It is that moment when Daddy is away and all the other caretakers have left us in peace, and the baby is at your breast and you never in your life had such a feeling in your chest, this knowing that you can never let her go, that you will forever be connected in some mystical way. This moment of harmony is not the moment of conception, when she is only partially on your mind. This moment is the moment of connection between her lips and your breast, where there is no separation, physical or metaphysical. In this moment you know that for all the trauma you have suffered, for all th
e suffering you have witnessed, you know there is no love greater than this and you believe in God.

  That fact makes so much sense. In those nine months, you feel yourself becoming her. Maybe that is why it is easy to call women crazy, bipolar, mad, split personalities. We are carrying two people inside of us at once.

  The Other House

  I am not expecting the color of his cheeks, engorged in pinkness, when he opens our, his now, front door, and when I lean in to embrace him for the first time. I am not ready for the muscles in his biceps, which stiffen as his arms wrap around me.

  “You were not expecting this,” Pat says, taking my coat and waving me into the foyer.

  “But that’s a good thing.”

  He leads me to the couch. It, and a coffee table I do not recognize, an iron-and-glass-top construction that only a certain type of man without a woman could find appealing, are the only pieces of furniture in what was once our family room. On top of the glass he has set an unpressed French press. A small stream of vapor floats out from the edges of the lid, floating away down the hall back toward the front door. In the winter, we had to roll up towels and shove them beneath the doorframe. Our house could get so drafty. We would hold one another close on this couch, but the cool found its way into our bones anyway.

  We sit next to one another, our knees turned inward toward one another. I scoot away so that my back is up against the arm of the couch.

  “I won’t stay long,” I say.

  “Why don’t you? I’d like you to.”

  “I need to run to Lowe’s and get more paint.”

  “You’re still doing that?”

  “Painting? Yes. Of course. Rome, you know.”

  “Rome?”

  He scoots himself closer to the coffee table and presses the plunger of the press down, sending oaky bubbles speeding to the surface. The couch is too soft. His thighs shake as he pours me a cup, balancing on his fragile legs, which have not regained the musculature of his pre-cancer body. He is not completely put back together. Part of me sighs in relief.