“No, it’s fine. I’m just surprised, that’s all.” I said that he hadn’t asked me anything about his father in years. I thought he’d forgotten about it, or given it up. “What did you say?”
She held her palms up in front of her, as if to show that her hands had been empty, she’d had nothing to offer my son. “What could I? I told him I didn’t know anything more than he did—that you used a sperm bank, that it was all anonymous, and that there was no way to track him down.”
I slumped back in my seat. Of course she couldn’t have told him anything other than these things, but I still felt relief. “I don’t know why he insists on using the word ‘father,’” I said. “Jack’s a father. What Will had was a donor. But you try telling him that.”
I could see that she had more to say, but wasn’t sure she should. “Go ahead,” I told her.
“It’s just that I don’t understand why you don’t understand. ‘Father’ is the correct word, the biological word. The social word. Whatever you want to call it. The guy fathered him.” She paused, and I watched her mind continue to move behind those eyes I loved. “I don’t understand why you keep saying there’s nothing you can tell him. You get that he’s not asking for a name, right? Or an address or anything. He’s asking for whatever code they assigned the donor, however the sperm bank kept track.”
I looked away and told her, “I don’t have it anymore.”
Now she was the one who seemed shocked. “Well,” she said, and I could tell she was saving the question of Why for another time, “you may not have it, but they would. He’d settle for knowing what clinic you went to. Give him that, and you’re off the hook—they’ll be the ones to tell him he’s out of luck, if he inquires, because the donor didn’t agree to be contacted. Right?”
I made my murmuring noise, the one that could have meant Yes or No or anything in between. Grettie knows that noise. Sometimes she calls me on it, sometimes she doesn’t. This time she didn’t, probably because I was recovering. But I knew it didn’t mean she wouldn’t ask me again sometime on Will’s behalf, which she had no reason to think was not on my own behalf, too.
Was this why I’d never told her about it, both when I got pregnant and ever since? Because I anticipated that precisely this situation might arise someday—she’d be sitting around just chatting with Will, and he’d ask her what she knew about his father, and by not telling her anything I was saving her, in that potential moment, from having to make the same choice I’m facing now?
Not to mention the threat to him if she did know, made the wrong choice, and told him.
Since when do you keep something this big, and this scary, to yourself? I’ve been tempted to tell her, so many times. The truth is that I was just too afraid. Ashamed. Afraid. Well, both. Ashamed of what she would think of me. Afraid she’d want me to do something, when back then I didn’t have what it took.
Now, it feels too late to say anything. I need her too much. I can’t take the chance that it would change things between us, her knowing I’ve lied for so long.
And I should have realized that I’d been stupid, naïve, not to understand how important it would be to Will. After my surgery, when Grettie told me he still wanted to know, I should have cut it off at the pass—his wish. I should have brought up the subject we hadn’t mentioned between us for years, and reminded him that there was no revelation forthcoming, because there couldn’t be.
But I didn’t do it. First because I was weak from surgery, then because every time I imagined having the conversation with him, I was afraid of what it would do to him. I was afraid the emetophobia would come back.
Who am I kidding, I was also afraid he’d hate me. And I was right to think it, because look at where we are now.
I wasn’t forced to drive the alternate route to Grettie’s house—there was no sign of whatever problem had shut down the highway on my way up to the hospital, and all lanes were open now—but I didn’t trust myself on the fast road, given how shaky I felt over being shut out of my queue. Well, let’s face it, about losing my job. Not that it came as all that big a surprise, but thinking something might happen and actually having it happen are always two different things.
So I retraced my trip along the back roads, which was slightly longer but much prettier than the highway. I should have taken this route to and from the hospital the whole time, I thought, feeling moved by all the green around me as I drove past school fields and neighborhoods lined with old trees, an old-fashioned garden stand (Fay’s Fresh Flowers!) and even a couple of horse pastures. Now, it’s too late.
I like summers more now than I did when I was depressed—on sunny days back then, all I could think about were happy people doing happy things, and how far I was from them—but fall has always been my favorite. And I can’t help feeling cheated, because last fall was so awful, and here I am probably not going to get another chance.
Technically the trouble started during the summer, just before Will left for college. It still pulls me up short to realize I’ve only seen him once since then, when he brought home his girlfriend Sosi for the long weekend of his Thanksgiving break.
“What kind of a name is Sosi?” I said, when he called to tell me (tell, not ask) that she was coming. I hadn’t even known he had a girlfriend.
He took offense, assuming, I could tell, that I was reacting to the foreignness of it. It’s true that it sounded kind of New Age-y to me, and I’m not the biggest New Age fan. But what I really meant was, Where does the name come from? I was genuinely interested. When I clarified, he said, “Her family’s Armenian. It means some kind of tree.”
I didn’t want a stranger in the house for four days, but, more, I didn’t want to alienate him further, so I said I was looking forward to meeting her. “We’re going to stay in my room,” he replied, in a voice that was the tonal equivalent of a chin raised in defiance.
Fine, I said, though I didn’t mean that I was fine with it—what I meant was that I would not object. I told him I would let Grettie know that we were bringing an extra person to Thanksgiving dinner. “Oh, that reminds me, she’s vegan,” Will said. He told me, further, that Sosi was allergic to dogs. Could I arrange to put Scout in the kennel that weekend? Fine, I said again, although this also took me aback.
After we hung up, I went to the computer to find out exactly what a vegan was, and what one could eat. Then I went into Will’s bedroom. We’ve lived here since he was a baby, when Grettie pulled some strings and got my name approved for the list of first tenants in this small townhouse complex that combines rentals with condo units—it’s pretty much the only place you can live in this town without having to own. I was thrilled at the idea of bringing Will up here, because the schools are so good. (Well, who am I kidding, also because Grettie was nearby.) There’d been three beds in Will’s room since then: crib, big-boy bed, and then the full-size double we brought in when he was in middle school, after we painted the room together. A dark green. It would have been too dark for me, but he said the color made him feel like he was sleeping in a forest. “Is that a good thing?” I asked, and he looked at me as if he thought I might be joking. “Of course it is,” he said.
He had taken down all the old posters (Shrek, Buzz Lightyear) and after we repainted he put up two new ones, both reflecting the spirit of tai chi. Yield and overcome was one of the captions; the other was the quote about there being more than one path up the mountain. He’d started taking tai chi classes the year before at the suggestion of his pediatrician, who thought it might help with his asthma. Practicing the full and deep breaths of tai chi can stimulate the lungs, the doctor told us, and increase the amount of air flowing in and out, eventually reducing asthma’s overall effects. It sounded like a stretch to me (I’m afraid I might even have used the term New Age in a scornful way), but I found a beginner’s class for Will at the community center, and to my surprise, he took to it right away.
Tai chi turned out to be perfect for him, because he’d never liked ball sports, he didn’t have the best eye-hand coordination, he didn’t get picked for teams in gym class until the very end. With tai chi, he didn’t have to worry about letting anyone down. And he could do it whenever he wanted—he didn’t need a field or a court or any equipment, just his body and a knowledge of the right moves.
I was glad he’d found a sport he liked, although he had to correct me at first; it wasn’t a “sport”—it was a practice. It was a mental discipline, as much as it was physical.
Yes, it’s exercise, he said, but you’re not supposed to work hard. It’s supposed to be easy. You’re supposed to go as slow as you possibly can, and when you think you can’t go any slower, you slow down some more. He said, Isn’t that a relief?
I know why he said that, about easy being a relief. From the time he was little I told him about something my own mother had taught my sister and me, beginning right after our father left: if every morning you could do something difficult, it would give you a feeling of accomplishment and put you in a confident mood for the rest of the day. My mother’s method was to take a shower before breakfast, with water as cold as she could bear. My sister called bullshit on that—not literally, we weren’t allowed to swear, but she thought it sounded nuts. Even though my mother sometimes poured her first drink right after that shower (not that we were supposed to notice; it was supposed to look like regular orange juice), I believed for most of my life what our mother told us. It made sense to me. It was why I always took eight a.m. classes in college, and why, until I got sick, I liked to exercise first thing and get it out of the way.
The class Will took was called Meditation in Motion. I was intrigued, I admit, and I loved the names he taught me of the different postures: Repulse the Monkey, Rooster Stands on One Leg, Snake Creeps Through the Grass. They sound like little stories in themselves. I guess that’s how they originated, in China, all those centuries ago.
One day Will asked me to do a two-person posture with him called Push Hands. The object is to upset your opponent’s balance while maintaining your own. He showed me a video first, to give me an idea of what it should look like. “But it’s not fair,” I said, “I’m so much bigger than you are. I don’t want to make you fall.”
In fact I wasn’t actually that much bigger, by then. He’s on the short side but so am I, and it had taken me longer than it should have to realize he’d almost caught up to me. A sly smile came over his face when I said what I did, and he told me, “You won’t.” We stood across from each other in the living room and tried it. “You want to sink down as low as you can,” he told me. “It helps keep you rooted and signals humility. Also, the higher a person stands, the easier she is to knock over.”
Why did he say “she,” I wondered? I was the one who kept losing my balance, and it made me annoyed. “It will work better if you stop trying so hard,” Will said, and that annoyed me, too.
I couldn’t understand why he’d asked me to do this particular exercise with him. Did he want to show that he could knock me off center, get the upper hand on me—literally—every time?
It flustered me. I felt foolish. Afterward he said, “You might want to try a class yourself sometime, Mom. A lot of older people take it up because it helps with balance and proprioception. That means knowing where you are in the space around you, even when you have your eyes closed. It helps you stay stable.”
“I know what proprioception means,” I said, though the truth was that I would not have been able to articulate a definition.
“It’s also really good for your core.”
Maybe someday I’d look into it, I told him. When I was an “older person.” I hoped he might smile at that, but he didn’t. Instead he shook his head a little, but I saw that it was with affection. Soon afterward he took to practicing in his room instead of in the living room, where he’d started out when he didn’t mind me watching.
Preparing for their visit I pictured him and his girlfriend in the bed together, even though I had never seen a photo and didn’t know what she looked like. Will’s window gives out onto the courtyard we share with the other units in the quad. When he was younger we used to spend a lot of time in the yard, having picnics or sitting on the small bench to read together, but we stopped doing those things when he started middle school; now that I think about it, that year was a real turning point for us, the ending of some things and the beginning of others. Before then, when the subject of his father came up, it always included the question of whether Will could find out who that man was. If he could meet him. When he first asked, I told him that I was sorry but it was impossible, because I had used an anonymous donor. I explained what that meant. Even I didn’t know who it was, I said.
But that didn’t stop him from making up stories, or from searching the world. “Look at that man,” he’d say, if we were out somewhere and he saw a small boy reaching up to hold his father’s hand on the way into a store or a restaurant. “Maybe that’s him.” When I said No, I didn’t think so, Will said, “But you said you don’t know who it is, right? So it could be him. It could.”
I had no choice but to say Yes, it was possible, but very unlikely. It pleased him to hear me say this, I saw. It happened more times than I could keep track of. Shortly after he began taking the tai chi lessons, he stopped asking, and stopped pointing out fathers and sons. I dared to feel relieved; I thought he’d replaced his first obsession with another, healthier one, or come around to understanding that we all have questions we’ll never get answered. Until Grettie told me after my surgery that he was still waiting for a revelation, and a year later he brought it up himself on his eighteenth birthday, triggering the rupture we still haven’t recovered from.
There’s a big elm tree in the middle of the yard, its branches hanging over the bench. I imagined Sosi looking out from the bed and saying it looked like a giant umbrella.
But no, I remembered—it was I who used to say that. And it only looked like an umbrella when it had its leaves, which were gone now at the end of November.
They were scheduled to arrive on Wednesday night in plenty of time for dinner, so I looked up some vegan recipes online and settled on a fettuccini Alfredo, with mushroom sauce instead of meat. I was happy to find it because fettuccini Alfredo is Will’s favorite, and this way I would be taking both of their wishes into account. He would appreciate that, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t they both? I had it in the oven baking at five o’clock; he’d told me to expect them around six.
But at six-forty-five, after I’d put the meal on warm and had to tide myself over with cheese and crackers, he called to say they were going to be delayed. The traffic is terrible, he said.
That’s okay, what time, then? I asked. He said he felt bad about this, but they probably weren’t going to make it there until after I went to bed.
It didn’t make sense, because their school was less than three hours away in regular traffic, and he’d told me they planned to start the drive after lunch. I wouldn’t be going to bed for another four hours. But I didn’t say any of this—I just told him I’d made them dinner, and they could eat whenever they got here. Just stick it in the microwave, I said. He thanked me, but when I got up on Thanksgiving morning, I saw that it hadn’t been touched.
Nevertheless, I was determined to present myself as a mother my son could be proud of. The girl came out of the bedroom first, yawning, wearing a pair of his flannel pajama bottoms and a flesh-colored camisole. Her hair—she was a redhead, which surprised me, I would have thought he’d have mentioned this—was a wild tumble around her face, so that at first I could barely make out her features. I introduced myself and said I hoped she’d slept well. I told her I hadn’t heard them come in last night; they must have been very quiet. In saying this I was trying to reassure her that if they had done anything intimate in his room, I hadn’t been aware of it. But I’m not sure she picked up on my in
tention. “He didn’t want you to wake up,” she said, putting out a thin hand to shake mine. “I’m really glad to meet you. I’ve heard so many things.”
What kind of things I could only imagine, but I tried to put them out of my mind.
“He looks like you. And you’re so pretty!” she exclaimed, as if she were only now just noticing, or just now realizing that this would be a nice thing to say. “He didn’t tell me that.”
I mumbled a thank you and said it probably wasn’t the type of things boys said about their mothers. When she turned to head to the bathroom, I looked at my reflection in the microwave and couldn’t help a little smile.
I was glad she hadn’t called me Roberta or, worse, Bert. She didn’t call me Mrs. Chase, either. She didn’t call me anything, which I guess was for the best.
I turned on the TV, hoping that the Macy’s parade might have started, but it was too early. When he was little this had been Will’s favorite part of Thanksgiving; he enjoyed the parade even more than going to Grettie and Jack’s house to play in the woods with Cam.
He came out of the bedroom before Sosi finished her shower. I was making scrambled eggs, and he looked into the pan and said, “You know she can’t eat those, right?”
“Oh, damn,” I said. I’d forgotten about the egg part of vegan. “Well, there’s toast, too. You’ll eat the eggs with me, though, right?”
He answered that he didn’t know, he thought he’d rather not, maybe he’d just have coffee and save his appetite for dinner. “But I’ve put six eggs in here,” I said.
He shrugged. “You can save the rest.”
We heard the shower stop, and I pushed the pan to a cold burner. I stepped closer to him to make sure Sosi wouldn’t hear us, and did my best to ignore seeing that as I did so, he took a step away. “Are we going to have any time just the two of us?” I whispered. “This weekend?”
“Why, do you have something to say to me?” He looked amused, as if he already knew my answer and it was the lame one he expected me to give. His expression sliced through my heart. “Did you change your mind?”
The Gretchen Question Page 5