I had planned everything to make this part as easy as possible. I made sure that every piece of paper was there, every box checked. All we would have to do the day after the wedding was put the marriage certificate in the package and let the lawyer do the rest. Then we’d pick up Johnny, have pizza at our favorite place and take Harry to the airport. But instead the stack of papers that our new life hinged on ended up in tatters in some guy’s apartment on the fifth floor of a walk-up in Queens. And now I was standing next to a broken copier and crying in Staples.
The copier jams again. I kick the machine through angry tears and shout, “Motherfucking-fuck-shit-ass-fucking-machine!” The copy guy behind the counter looks up blankly, hoping he doesn’t have to come over. Harry pulls me gently away from the copier and takes out his pocket square for my sobs. I look at the purple silk edged in navy blue. I realize that I’ve just married a man who owns a pocket square.
“Darling, don’t do that, don’t cry. It’s alright. Let me get us some help.” I try to calm down and watch Harry approach the counter. “Excuse me, sir, so sorry to bother you, would you mind helping us, please,” and the copy guy gives him that look that New Yorkers often give Harry, like they’re not sure but he might be a time traveler who’s just arrived from the 1800s.
“We’ll be OK,” I whisper to myself. Despite its reputation, New York is full of good people who do the right thing, and Robert was one of them. When we got to Myrtle Avenue it was almost midnight but he didn’t mind and he gave us everything he found. Harry offered him $100 in thanks but he waved us off and said, looking at our wrinkled, sweaty wedding clothes, “Get outta here with your money. Good luck.”
We needed it. Almost everything had been mangled, torn, covered in footprints or coffee-stained in some way after an evening on the floor of a taxi. First we went to my place in Brooklyn. We reprinted my statement and the photos and used a pencil eraser to get the footprints off the bank statements. I ironed the letters from our friends. Then we went to Harry’s place in Manhattan to find the duplicate mortgage statement. That took a couple hours because Harry’s whole apartment was in boxes, ready for the movers. When we finally found it, the hotel reservation for our wedding night long forgotten, we did a quick stop at a deli for a sunrise breakfast of cold caffeine and Doritos so we could get to Staples when it opened to make copies, put everything together, print the form and get to the appointment with the lawyer on time. The last thing was Harry’s personal statement. We couldn’t find the USB stick he saved it on and there was no choice now but to write the whole thing again.
The copy guy comes over to fix the machine. He resets it, trying not to make eye contact. Harry strokes my hair, hugs me. I calm down for a minute. Then, panicked, I say, “Shit, I just remembered, you know what we haven’t done yet?”
“Anal?” Harry says, innocently. I laugh so hard my laughs are silent, until I start crying again. Harry hugs me. “I’m sorry, darling, I wanted to make you laugh, don’t cry.”
“Be serious. This is really hard,” I say, sniffling, wiping my nose, and then we both say, without missing a beat, “That’s what she said,” and even the copy guy has to laugh.
Then Harry says, “You mean calling Sharon’s mum about picking up Johnny? I’ve already done that. Now should I go and collect him? My statement’s done and you’ve almost finished here.” He runs his hand down my arm gently, holds my hand, pushes my hair behind my ear.
“Yeah, you’d better go,” I say.
“Are you sure you’ll be alright?” Harry asks. No. I need him. There’s so much I want to say, so much I’m worried about. But we have to get Johnny, we have to finish this application, he has to catch his flight, he has to start his new job. Whatever I feel has to wait.
“No, it’s fine. You go, let me finish this. Call me when you’ve got him.”
I wait for Harry to leave before I start welling up again. Hot stress tears. The copy guy looks up at me from the machine. “You OK, miss?”
He realizes too late that he shouldn’t have given me an opening. I take off: “No, this is such bullshit. This was my wedding night, I said I didn’t care about not having a real wedding and going to City Hall because we had to, because of his job, and finding a school for Johnny over there, and so many things, we just didn’t have time. But look at me! Look at my dress!”
The copy guy glances at my white mini-dress, blackened by a night of subways and taxis, but quickly looks away because he knows he’s not supposed to look at customers’ dresses, even if they ask him to. “I mean, I know it’s not a real wedding dress but it’s my wedding dress, you know?”
The copy guy is so young he still has acne and he doesn’t know. “Um, would you like some water or somethin’?” he asks, trying to remember if he got any training about managing the copying needs of crazy brides.
“Sorry, no, that’s OK. Thank you, though.” He begins to creep away from me but I start up again: “It’s just, it’s a lot, you know, I’m going all the way to London. We have to say bye to everybody and pack everything, my kid’s only five, I mean, what if it doesn’t work out? And look at this, do you know what this is called? A fuckin’ pocket square. He has, like, four of these. What the fuck?” I show the copy guy the purple handkerchief in my fist.
“Um, do you want to call somebody maybe?” he asks. I notice his name tag.
Johnny.
I can see my Johnny, nineteen years old, skinny and sweet at his first job. I remember Frankie, this one time I watched him at Foot Locker, when an old lady made him get ten boxes of sneakers and then didn’t buy any. How he laughed when she left instead of getting mad.
I turn to the copy guy. “I’m sorry. You didn’t want to hear all that. It’s been a rough night. I’m gonna get outta your hair in a minute.” The young man backs away, relieved that I’ve released him. I hope he doesn’t remember this encounter ten years from now and then decide not to propose.
I rub my eyes. I sit down on the floor, lean my head against the copier, try to finish this paperwork, not surprised that this is how my wedding turned out. I knew it was going to be a quick City Hall job but I hoped that some small part of it would be memorable and not because of the “And then she called me Gonorrhea” way that we’ll always laugh about whenever we tell the story. I mean the bar—I’ll never forget that, even though we had to leave before the end. But for my wedding night I wanted a beautiful moment, something pure to keep for when we’re old that’s just for us. Instead I have Robert in Ridgewood, standing in his boxer shorts with a cat on his shoulder holding my baby’s passport. That’s alright. At least I got a new last name out of it that people can pronounce.
All I have left to do is go through Harry’s statement, line by line, and look for any mistakes, replace the pages if he messed up.
I turn the page. Stop short.
One day in Battery Park I saw a young woman and a small boy on the path ahead of me. The little boy fell over and cried and the young woman quickly scooped him up and covered him with kisses. In a flash he took off running as she gave chase. It was a lovely scene; very ordinary but very happy. But then she suddenly tripped and fell over quite spectacularly, landing face down upon the pavement. I wanted to go to her aid but then I recognised her and stopped where I stood.
It was Gigi lying on the ground laughing. She did not try to get up quickly to recover, or to pretend that nothing had happened. I watched as she laughed and the little boy laughed too as he tried with all his might to help her off the ground. Realising that she had become a spectacle, she stood up, lifted her head high and said to the passers-by, “New York, thank you, you’ve been great,” and she took several bows as her little boy applauded. The stony-faced New Yorkers softened as they passed and could not help but smile.
It was the Gigi I had left more than ten years before, grief-stricken on the steps of her family home.
And I was humbled, for like the city, she too was still standing and had begun to live again. I did not know if she would remember me, or if the sight of me, so tied as it would be to the memory of that worst of days, would upset her. But I knew that if I did not approach her then I would spend the rest of my life in a purgatory of “what if.” For, truly, how could I not love her? A woman who had gone to the edge of life and back, and who could still laugh, or, at least, who laughed so that her child would laugh freely, unaware of the pain she carried.
He saw me fall. He never told me. He was too polite to mention it that day. Too kind to draw attention to my lack of grace. Too possessive of this memory to ever share it until he thought he had to write it on this piece of paper to keep me with him. I hold the paper to my chest. Copy guy Johnny rolls a desk chair over to me. He hands me a cold Diet Coke.
“I found this in the back and I thought maybe you needed it. Um, congratulations on getting married, I mean, the guy seems alright.”
I take the can gratefully, wishing I could tell this boy’s mother what a nice kid she raised.
“Yeah, he is,” I say. “He’s beautiful.”
5
glue
A Wednesday in August 2016, 12:30 p.m. London, Grand Euro Star Lodge Hotel, Room 506
I light a cigarette and open the window. There’s a scraggly city pigeon on the ledge. Not a fat, middle-class, wood pigeon who only pecks respectably around the back gardens of houses with newly renovated extensions. She’s the kind of pigeon I used to ride the Staten Island Ferry with. She hangs out on building ledges, by the Tube station, on the tracks of the Overground—where the action is. A badass city pigeon with a missing foot. You know how that happens? Human hair. Urban pigeons build their nests with shit they find in the street and sometimes they use human hair, which gets caught around their feet like a tourniquet so that while the pigeons sit on their eggs they feel their feet rotting off their bodies from lack of circulation. Then the chicks hatch and grow up and leave. And the mother pigeon just limps and hops and crash-lands for the rest of her life. So, I guess things could be worse.
I take another drag and exhale. The last time I smoked was the night before my custody of Johnny was finalized. He was eighteen months old. I smoked my last two Camel Lights on the fire escape of my apartment in Brooklyn, looking down at St. John’s Place: the bodega and the laundromat; the old trees and wide sidewalks; the brownstone spectrum from derelict to gentrified. I’d already quit by then because I didn’t want to be that lady pushing the stroller with a cigarette in her hand. I didn’t want Johnny to have the kind of baby blanket that I used to carry around when I was little, with its two perfect burn holes where the ash had fallen from my parents’ cigarettes. There were parts of me that were Ma’s that I couldn’t change—my laugh, the way my weight settled on my hips—but I didn’t have to be a mother like her. So I quit, but I saved the last two cigarettes in case of something big and I smoked them the night before they made me his mother. Tonight will be the night before something too but I’m not sure what.
I put the cigarette out on the ledge and the pigeon coos at me. She doesn’t like smokers. She has high standards. Just like Rebecca. Rebecca, who’s just sent me a text:
Eugenia, Harry said that you were called away urgently. Rest assured that the children are being suitably supervised. Do let us know how you’re getting on. Best, Rebecca
“Called away urgently.” Wow. Now is she really saying, “I know you disappeared to get drunk and watch TV in a hotel room alone you crazy bitch,” or did he tell her something to make it sound classy and important? Well, whatever he told her, now she’s helping with the kids, and, if we get through this, I will hear about how she rescued my children today every time I see her. Reason enough not to ever go home. If you asked me to describe Rebecca I would say, She ends text messages with “Best,” and I feel like this would tell you all you need to know.
I pound on the ledge to scare the pigeon and light another cigarette. I don’t need her avian judgment. I check my email compulsively for Harry’s response. Response to what? You didn’t tell him anything.
It took a long time for Harry to tell me about his parents. One night, Johnny had one of his Michelle dreams. “But Jeej, I don’t remember her, I don’t remember!” he said, wailing, half-awake. Holding him, I said, “It’s OK. She loves you. She gave you to me and I’m not going anywhere.” He had no memory of her but her presence through her absence was very real for him. I tried to do what the social workers said. Tell him that he was always loved and wanted whenever it came up. And it came up every time the mother died in a cartoon movie, every time there was an orphan in a fairy tale or a widower starting to date again in a family sitcom. I showed him photos, I gave him the chain with her name plate and his grandfather’s gold crucifix. He kept them under his pillow in a special box. But each time she visited him this way I was eaten up inside, worried that I wasn’t—hadn’t been, couldn’t be—enough for him. It’s hard to compete with a ghost.
That night, when he could hear my voice breaking, Johnny’s raw semi-conscious love for her just too hard for me, Harry took Johnny from me. He put him back in bed and stroked his hair until his breathing slowed and steadied. Harry had never done that before, but it was so natural to him, like a muscle memory. Closing Johnny’s bedroom door, he said, “Poor lad. It’s different but it’s the same.”
Later, just before we went to sleep, Harry said to the ceiling, “I was lucky. I had time with him. Mum hadn’t sent me away to school yet so I spent every minute by his side.” And he told me, lying in the dark while I held his hand, about the last months with his father. Doing his homework by his bedside, reading to him, eating dinner with him, sleeping on the sofa next to his bed. The months that shaped the man he became.
You don’t forget watching someone die. The gradual frailty that creeps through him until one day the protrusion of his clavicle catches your eye in a certain, devastating light. The long hours of his daytime sleeping, his slow breathing that suddenly stops and then starts again, giving you a glimpse of the inevitable moment when the next breath will be the last one. The delightful waves of lucidity that come when you most need them to, when the old self sparkles in his eyes again and he makes you laugh like he used to and you say to yourself, “Remember this, remember this.” Because soon he will sleep again and when he wakes it won’t be the same. Harry was a boy when he saw all that.
But Rebecca saw all of that too and probably much more. And we’re mothers, so I know that she shielded Harry from the worst indignities of his father’s disintegration. I know she made sure his memories weren’t tainted with his father’s dependence and helplessness, that she took care of all the intimate hardships that come with caring for the dying when Harry was at school, or asleep or doing homework so that he wouldn’t see. That’s why he can talk about that time like that, love his father like that.
I check my phone again. Nothing. I know things were hard for Rebecca too. I know that, in her way, she was a good mother; in all the ways that she thinks that I’m not. Well, I’ve proven her right today. And I know she didn’t say it out loud when she saw Harry and he handed over the kids, but she didn’t have to. He already knows.
Ascot, January 2015
The terrine is going to be a problem. Every time we come here for lunch there’s some kind of food I’ve never seen before and out of politeness I put it on my plate. So Rebecca called this thing a terrine. What’s it made of? Lamb liver, calf hearts, strawberry ice cream—all three? Because that’s what it looks like—liver ice-cream cake.
I shift in my chair and I hear the plastic crinkle underneath me. Rebecca covered Johnny’s seat in a clear plastic tarp. Fair enough, it’s an antique chair and he’s six and I get it. She also covered the floor under his chair with a piece of plastic, because OK, it’s light carpeting, overkill maybe, but I understand. Interesting, though, that the
plastic under his seat was extended to include the carpeting under my chair as well.
“Jeej, Jeej—what is that?”
Johnny’s whisper is as subtle as a bulldozer, but I just say quietly, “It’s a terrine, buddy. It’s a…French. Keep coloring, that’s a great picture.” Johnny had already eaten his ham sandwich and was coloring at the table. At least Rebecca understood what children ate, and the coloring was a small concession that I appreciated.
Johnny whispered whenever he was here. The house, with its high ceilings and antiques, signaled to him that it was like a library or a church. But it was also Damon. Johnny stayed close and very quiet whenever he was around.
Damon is Rebecca’s third husband. He’s 6'5", as big as a moving van, and wears an eye patch which no one has explained and which we’re not allowed to ask about. He played rugby for Gloucester in his youth, which is impressive for some reason, but I don’t understand enough about it to know why and when I asked he didn’t answer. He’s semi-retired, in his seventies, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of racehorses. He watches rugby. He drinks whiskey. This is all I know about him. He’s said about eleven words to me since we met because a) I’m a woman and b) I’m not a horse.
Despite his surliness he’s sweet with Rebecca. She has rules about where people sit for meals but he never observes them. Rebecca sits at the head and he always sits next to her instead of at the other end of the table. She loves this because when we come over Harry sits on her other side and then she’s flanked by her two faithful men. This leaves me and Johnny on the periphery on Damon’s other side and he always sits at an angle with his back to me to give more of himself to her. I can’t see past him to Rebecca’s end so I don’t participate in the conversation directly. But maybe that’s best for everyone.
When I Ran Away Page 10