Rebecca gets up to put a water jug on the table. She’s slender and taut. Her hair is chic and short, a honey-blond meticulous bob. She’s dressed in a tight ivory cashmere sweater set with a tailored gray wool pencil skirt and a string of real pearls, black stilettos, and nude fishnet stockings. Like what a seventy-year-old Claire Underwood might wear to a casual family lunch before she murders someone.
“How was the traffic? Was it awful?” Rebecca begins as I choke down the terrine. From the awful traffic, she moves on to the ghastly British weather and then the dreadful people in the papers.
Then Harry says, “The house looks marvellous, Mummy, really, and this terrine is lovely, really lovely,” trying to get her on to another topic, while I gulp wine and look away to stop the involuntary rolling of my eyes.
“Well, thank goodness for that. It was all very stressful, because I planned an entirely different menu that I had found in the Sunday Telegraph but when I went to Waitrose for the ingredients they had almost none in stock. Can you imagine? I had a word with the store manager. Surely Waitrose know that most of their customers are Telegraph readers? Shocking.”
I think about how “I planned an entirely different menu” is a sentence I have never said. I check out for a while, try not to taste anything and pretend to be occupied with Johnny. I run my fingers through his hair, pretty sure that I can see lice. Rebecca might have to be hospitalized if she finds out so I’ll just keep that to myself.
“…now, Eugenia, you must do something about your phone line. I called and it rang and rang the other day with no answer,” Rebecca huffs at me and so I snap back to attention.
I consider what she’s just said. You’re the only one who calls that number so I didn’t pick it up because I knew that in thirty seconds you would call my cell phone from your cell phone while calling my landline from your landline at the same time, which is exactly what you did. And it was ten o’clock at night. And why are you saying this to me when we both know it’s only Harry that you want to talk to. And stop calling me Eugenia is not the right answer, so I just say, “OK, I’ll look into it,” from behind the mass of Damon’s giant shoulder.
“You do look awfully thin and pale, Harry, darling, really you do. And Johnny has dark circles under his eyes. Is no one looking after you?” Rebecca asks Harry, the no one, obviously being me.
“I don’t need to be looked after, Mummy, I’m a grown man,” Harry says, sighing, looking at me for approval. But I wonder if there are many grown men who call their mothers “Mummy.” He adds, “And Johnny has no such thing, he’s perfectly fine.”
“Well, this is the curse of modern life, isn’t it, the family falls to pieces with no one there to look after it properly,” Rebecca says, very pointedly not looking at me.
“We look after each other, Mum, and we’re doing just fine. And Gigi is doing very well at work, aren’t you, darling?” He smiles at me, but he should know that this nod to gender equality will be too much for his mother.
Desperate to change the subject, I start to say, “So when’s the big horse race? It’s here in Ascot, right…” But it’s too late. It’s Rebecca’s Correct Opinion Time:
“Surely it must be better for Johnny to have his mother at home, given his…history. It’s very nice for Eugenia that she has something to do, but, especially once you have another child, that will have to change. Certainly the children come first, ahead of the mother’s…interests?” Rebecca sips water from a cut-crystal glass.
Jesus, Harry, why did you have to take her here? Working mothers. A No-Go Area with Rebecca along with women playing sports (undignified); Princess Diana (didn’t deserve all the fuss); immigrants (should stay where they belong); American actors playing British roles (inappropriate); “the gays” (meaning lesbians in particular, but rich gay men were OK as long as they were quiet about it); “the Blacks” (not white); “the Poles” (not really white); anything organic (idiotic); female, Indian or Russian doctors (can’t be trusted); Astroturf in back gardens (disgraceful); civil and human rights (an excuse for criminals and immigrants to take advantage of Britain) and finally, the European Union (full of Europeans).
I listen to Rebecca say that I’m not around enough for Johnny while I sit there and don’t say how the hell would she know anything about it since she sent Harry to boarding school at age nine and only saw him once every four months, which is why they talk to each other like they’re in a 1940s radio play.
My cheeks flush and the room gets hot. I lean forward to try to say something that will get us off the subject of what a selfish mother I am, but Damon turns to me. He points a massive sausage finger at Johnny and puts his bear-paw hand on my shoulder. He says, “Have you put the boy down for rugby yet?” I brace myself. Damon’s moved us on to one of his three topics and I wish he’d chosen horses or whiskey instead.
“Well, Johnny tried it and it wasn’t a good fit, not right now, anyway,” I stammer, looking at Harry for help. The rugby trial class was a disaster. It was cold, Johnny fell in the mud, it started raining and the coach, who was as big as Damon and just as personable, yelled at him because he confused his left and right and started crying. “Sort yourself out, lad, c’mon,” he said, and for Johnny, who tries so hard to please, that kind of disapproval was like a punch in the face.
And then I made it worse. When I saw his tears I couldn’t help it and I said, “Hey, why don’t you lighten up, big guy. He’s just a kid,” but me getting angry just made Johnny cry harder. We had to leave. It was a scene. He’s finally gotten over it but now…
“A good fit?” Rebecca scoffs, her Dior-coated lips pursed in a little matte-rose knot.
“I don’t want to, Jeej, I don’t want to do rugby,” Johnny whispers to me, clutching my sleeve, and I can feel his little panic rising.
“It’s OK, you don’t have to,” I say to him and squeeze his knee under the table.
Damon says, “He’s scrawny. He needs it. You’re too soft on him.”
“I don’t want to, Jeej, I don’t want to!” Johnny’s little voice gets louder.
“It’s OK, baby, you don’t have to.”
I try to reassure him but Rebecca says, “Of course he has to. He has to do whatever you tell him to do.”
“No, no, I don’t want to! I don’t want to! I hate it, I hate it!” and he gives the high-pitched cry of a much younger child, embarrassing and unsettling. He struggles to get out of his chair but the legs are getting caught on the plastic tarp on the carpet.
“Johnny, what on earth do you think you’re…”
Rebecca stands and her voice goes up an octave, then Harry comes in: “Mum, just leave it, it’s been quite a tough transition for him, he’s been through a lot.”
And as Harry gets up to come to us, Johnny, in his fight with the chair legs, bumps against the table, tipping over my wine glass, red wine seeping into the tablecloth where the plastic cover doesn’t reach.
“The salt, go and get the salt, Damon, for God’s sake!” Rebecca shouts, more concerned about her table linen than my son. “I cannot understand why you cannot keep him under control,” she snaps at me, but I can’t think about her now.
“Johnny, it’s OK, it’s OK.” I try to put my arms around him but he elbows me in the chin as he struggles out of my grasp.
“Gigi, let me take him.”
Harry tries to help but Johnny screams, “Noooo! You’re hurting me! I said no!” I’m not hurting him and he knows that. He knows it’s a defense to say that, a way to get grown-up hands off of him. But I have no choice now and I pick him up with my whole body, pin his arms and try to carry him while he kicks at my shins, hard, and screams.
“Baby boy, you’ve got to stop, you’ve got to stop now.” I try to keep my voice level as Harry helps me get Johnny out of the dining room and upstairs. But I know that he can’t hear me. Just
like the time outside PizzaExpress when he thrashed around on the sidewalk for half an hour because I tried to tie his loose shoelace. And the time in Sainsbury’s when I said we weren’t buying the chocolate milk because we already had some at home and he tipped over the shopping cart and store security had to come over.
I can handle the stares and judgments of strangers. But Rebecca’s eyes burning a hole in my back while Damon pretends nothing is happening as he pours salt on the wine stain—fuck, I really wish Johnny hadn’t done this in front of her. I wish that coach hadn’t been such an asshole. I wish I knew how to help him when his screams burst my eardrums, when his face gets red and when I can hear in his voice the anguish of the small and powerless; that pain he doesn’t have the words for.
* * *
—
Johnny pulls away from me, out of breath and exhausted as he throws himself on the bed in Harry’s room, face-first. He cries into the duvet, his shoulders shaking with every intake of breath. I hold in my tears and rub his back until his sobs slow down. Harry quietly pulls out the old trunk of his toys that Rebecca saved and lays them out on the floor. After a while, Johnny looks up and sniffles, “What’s that?”
“Oh,” Harry says, “these are just some of my old things, I thought you might like them. This one’s called Crossbows and Catapults. Do you want to see how it works? There are toy soldiers and some Lego too,” and Johnny slowly peels himself off the bed, wipes his nose on his sleeve and joins Harry on the floor, crisis over as abruptly as it began. Harry and I look at each other knowing we have a lot to talk about later.
I lay back on the bed while Harry and Johnny play, making my way through a box of Entenmann’s chocolate-chip cookies that Danielle sent me from home. I always bring a stash of comfort food to Rebecca’s. I look around the imposing bedroom of burgundy embossed wallpaper and gilded mirrors, bedside tables with ornately carved legs. I feel a longing, almost a craving, for our old apartment in Brooklyn.
“Jeej, I won, I won,” Johnny says, and crawls up on the bed to me; his face is still tearstained and swollen, but the hurt look has gone away.
“I’d better go down now and smooth things over,” Harry says, kissing me on the forehead.
“Yeah, you better make sure her tablecloth’s alright,” I say.
“Look, I know she’s not easy to deal with,” he says, sitting on the bed.
“No, she’s not. And could you tell her to stop calling me Eugenia?”
“She’s just formal, you know that. At least she didn’t call you fat this time,” he said, elbowing me, trying to make me laugh, remembering the time that she had said I looked “well” three times in five minutes, “well” being the middle-class code word for fat. But I didn’t find it funny today.
Harry’s going to go down there and she’s going to drink sherry and Damon’s going to drink port and Harry’s going to nod and agree with all her criticisms and find the words to appease her. He’ll validate her concerns about the wine stain and notice that she won’t ask whether Johnny’s OK but he won’t point that out. He’ll assure her that she’s right about everything and that her constant phone calls are no bother. Mothers and sons. I wonder what I’ll be like when Johnny brings someone home. I wonder if refusing to share your son and hating his partner are an inevitable part of aging, like cataracts and cellulite. Well, there’s no way I’m going down there. Wish I could sneak some wine up here.
I turn to Johnny to say, “Are you alright, baby boy?” but he’s fallen asleep. I pull the covers around him, kiss his closed eyes and find myself exhausted and wired at the same time. I snoop around the room. I open the desk drawers and the closet, I examine the shelves, “looking for something to read,” but also because I’m hoping I find some secret shit that I can judge Rebecca for. Like a drawer full of expired psych meds or proof she kept of her second husband’s affair.
Instead, on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, wedged next to an ancient encyclopedia, I find the photo album, the old photos stuck in with black corners. Harry as a two-year-old covered in mud. Rebecca and Richard, Harry’s dad, young and gorgeous in their wedding photo. Rebecca in an all-white tennis outfit looking like a British Jane Fonda. Richard, in a lab coat, with baby Harry on his knee holding a fat science book upside down, pretending to read. Rebecca, holding Harry on a smooth, slim hip, all big sunglasses and Charlie’s Angels waves.
Richard was a scientist who made a lot of money from inventing a special lens for telescopes. He didn’t inherit his money, he earned it, which at that time was rare for a rich man in England. Harry told me that he worked constantly and wasn’t interested in any of the stuff that came with the money—cars, holidays abroad, tailored clothes, black-tie dinners, the races, the theater. Nothing, that is, except Rebecca. You could see in the photos that she was the kind of rich and beautiful girl who knew that rich men wanted to possess her and so she made herself easy to possess; it was probably her best, maybe only, option. And she was good at it. She still is. She did it today as she served the family lunch in stilettos and full makeup. She does it when she calls on a Sunday morning or Friday night when we just sat down to dinner, when she knows that it’s our time with Harry. Appearing delicate and frail, knowing how to look like she needs protection because in her world men don’t stick around unless you make them feel like they can rescue you.
There’s a photo of Harry with Richard wrapped in big coats, cheeks flushed, holding a toboggan, the tree behind them weighed down with snow. He was Harry’s best friend, I can see it.
Johnny stirs in his sleep. I turn to the last page of the album and pull out a loose photo tucked in the back cover. Rebecca, looking serious and unamused at someone to her right. Someone we can’t see because they’ve been cut out of her photo. Or maybe she’s been cut out of theirs. There’s a crisp white cotton man’s shirt and a slip of forearm; a lock of unruly curly hair in the corner. And I feel a sudden stab of sadness when I realize what this is.
One night in Harry’s apartment in New York, I opened the drawer of his bedside table looking for a pen and I found a picture of Harry with Richard. It had the blue-green tinge that old pictures get as they fade. They were sitting on a wall with the beach behind them. The wind was whipping Richard’s unruly hair, which was kept short on the sides but that curled and waved all over the top of his head. He was in a white shirt with the top two buttons undone, the sleeves rolled up. His forearms and chest were those of a lean but chiseled man, that slim sculpted look that everyone’s parents had in the eighties from cigarettes and coffee.
Richard had a sideways smile that I recognized from my husband’s face. He was looking down at his son, little Harry, about eight years old, in super-short swimming trunks. Harry was laughing, a wide, happy, toothy laugh. Neither one was looking at the camera, immersed in some secret joke. A moment of happiness so true on both their faces I found myself grieving for the father that Harry had lost and the child that he once was.
I bought Harry a silver frame for his birthday. I thought that picture deserved a home. He took the photo out of the drawer and told me about his dad. Harry was thirty-six that day, the same age Richard was when he died. He took the back off the frame to slide the picture in and we looked at it for a long time, me holding on to his arm while he sat there feeling the age of the man in the photo and feeling sadness for the boy who didn’t know he’d lose him soon after this last trip to the seaside. Then he put the picture in its frame back in the drawer. That’s where he keeps it, even now.
Rebecca looks like she knows where the rest of this photo is, so beloved that Harry can barely look at it. Her arms crossed, a lit cigarette held near the crook of her elbow. A strapless sundress, tan shoulders, a tiny gold chain glinting on her collarbone. She isn’t laughing like Harry and Richard, on their side of the photo. She was left out of the joke. She has the look of a mother who’s been taken for granted; needed by her
child, but never preferred over Daddy.
Did she get up early and spend all morning packing for the trip, taking care of the details Richard never thought of? Did he make a joke about her, her cross expression, that had Harry in stitches and only confirmed that her new sundress went unnoticed? Did she dress up for lunch at a beachside hotel only for Richard to make her look humorless when he took them to the boardwalk for fish and chips wrapped in newspaper instead?
I wonder if she cut herself out of this picture because she didn’t like how she looked. Or if she cut herself out of this picture not thinking of herself at all, but so that her son could have a pure memory of his father. Or if she cut herself out of this picture because it’s hard to be the mother, the one who does all the mundane things that children need to have done—making sandwiches, packing raincoats, washing socks—but don’t notice because they’re infatuated with their father, his frivolity and laughter. Then Richard died young and everything about him was forever wonderful. But Rebecca had to keep doing the work that he never did, noticed even less now that his shadow was so much larger in death.
Johnny wakes up and as I go to put the album down, the cover comes loose, the bound pages falling to the floor. I dig some school glue out of Johnny’s pencil case and, as I squeeze it onto the binding, I realize that I’ve never seen Rebecca laugh. I’ve only ever seen her the way she looks in that picture—beautiful and distant. Wanting to be closer, but not knowing how.
When I Ran Away Page 11