After You (12 page)

22

M
y parents arrive with fanfare. A riotous mixture of cell-phone calls, e-mails, and texts; the blow by blow, in a flurry of technological innovation, as they check off each of their travel steps. When we’re all home, dotting the East Coast with theoretical pushpins, whole weeks will go by when I won’t hear from either one of my parents, both too busy and interested in their own lives to bother with my and my brother’s quibbles.

My father, a professor, occupies himself with his inexhaustible research on the Civil War, the aftermath of which he has devoted his entire adult professional life to analyzing. He never bores of Abe Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, the Free-Soilers and the Know-Nothings, the abolitionists, and his particular parcel of the puzzle, Reconstruction, a topic on which he has written five very large books printed by very small academic presses. I plan to read at least one all the way through before I die. My mother spends her days consumed by her patients and her nights fulfilling the romantic vision she has of her own life: She sits in a French bistro—she has managed to find one that covertly allows smoking in today’s smoke-free Manhattan—with a clove cigarette, of which she takes only an occasional drag, its purpose more for the billowing effect, a glass of red wine, a three-quarters-empty bottle on the table, and a yellow pad for her longhand notes on the Freudian novel she has been writing since I was a kid. It’s called
Oedipal, Shmedipal
.

Now that we are all together on this country-island, my parents liberated from the library and the couch, they suddenly change course and become communication junkies. The first call comes while they are still on the plane. They sound anxious and jittery, desperate to escape the indignity of modern airline travel. My phone rings when they clear customs, again when they flag a black cab. Check-in to the hotel goes without a hitch, another reason to call me, since they “thought I might be worried.” Not sure why I’d worry, seeing as both my parents are extensive travelers and surprisingly competent people.

My mother calls a fifth time, less than fifteen minutes before we are meeting for dinner, while I’m busy putting on mascara for the first time in months.

“Who are you and what have you done to my mother? You’re starting to freak me out,” I answer, when I see the caller ID.

“What do you mean, Eleanor?”

“In real life I hear from you, what, maybe every few weeks, and you’ve called a hundred times today. What’s up?”

“You do realize this is real life, right?” my mother asks. “Just because you’re far from home doesn’t mean this is not real life.”

“You’ve been here less than two hours and you’re already starting with the shrink talk? Amazing.”

“I am just saying that—”

“How about this? I am going to hang up and finish getting dressed and I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

“Wonderful. I like when you take control and say what you want. You used to be more passive-aggressive, like your father. Maybe England is doing you good.”

“Love you, Jane. Hanging up now.”

“Love you, too, sweetheart. Oh, and make sure to put on some lipstick. Studies show it’s one of the quickest ways to boost self-esteem.”

My dad has chosen the restaurant well, one of London’s new hat-tips to the idea of a culinary renaissance, a shameless citywide attempt to repair the crushing and well-earned reputation of British cuisine. Here, fish and chips and wet, mayonnaisey sandwiches have been upgraded to delicious panko-crusted ahi and spit-fire-roasted guinea fowl with sea salt. The restaurant hums and flickers, and we sit around a low dark-wood table in a high-backed brown leather booth; the effect is a familial cave. The high ceiling, with elaborate moldings skirting the edges, is the only reminder that we are eating in a converted house.

My parents sit next to each other and make an attractive pair. My mother’s muted graying hair hangs long and loose and wavy, probably too long for her age. Still, there is something girlish about her figure that makes it work. My father keeps his bright silver hair cropped short, and he wears his usual uniform—an old hunter-green corduroy sports coat and khaki pants.

“You look different,” Jane says, once we are seated and she has a wineglass in hand, giving me that critical mother stare known the world over. The one that calculates the addition of wrinkles and extra weight, as if any gains in either department count as demerits to them in some grand cosmic score. I wonder how many points she’d lose if I got divorced.

Lucy used to give me the same look when we hadn’t seen each other in a while. A literal sizing up.

“You look beautiful,” my dad says. “As always.”

“No, Christopher, she looks tired. And undergroomed. Is that dirt under your fingernails?”

“Please. Just stop,” I say. I’m exhausted from Sophie’s nightmares, from battling cold and fog and rain to walk a block despite the fact that it is almost July, and from the damn tube, which is cramped and muggy, regardless of the temperature outside. I’m exhausted from living in a place I don’t know or understand and from feeling incompetent because I have to ask an eight-year-old whether I’m supposed to tip the Chinese delivery guy and where to buy some new underwear. I’m exhausted from grief, from the uncertainty of my marriage, from having to get through another day without Lucy, a person I am wondering now if I’ve ever even met. I’m exhausted and don’t have the energy to defend myself against my mother, who happens to have this scary ability to always be right.

And I’m not being fair; my mother is not judging me for the cosmic tally. She’s never cared about what other people think of us. She gave that up years ago, when she embraced what she calls, in uncharacteristically un-PC terms, “native wear”—my mother, for some reason only understood by her, loves to wear kimonos, saris, grass skirts, the occasional kilt. She says the outfits are part of her quest to find her “authentic self” and untether herself from cultural expectations. Needless to say, as teenagers, Mikey and I found her style infinitely embarrassing. Now we are just amazed by her stubborn ability to keep it up.

Tonight my mother is mentioning my appearance not to be critical. She knows me. Knows that when I’m not looking all that great, chances are I’m not feeling all that great either. I do look tired. I do have dirt under my fingernails. And my eyebrows are long enough to braid or, if I were an edgier sort or really my mother’s daughter, twirl into dreadlocks.

“That cast. I get the whole ‘please-sign-my-cast’-so-you-feel-like-you-have-more-friends-than-you-do thing—in fact, I may recommend it to some patients—but, sweetheart, it’s a little … mangy.”

“I think it’s adorable. Look at that. Who drew all the flowers? Sophie?” my dad asks, pointing to a signature near my wrist.

“Yeah, all of these are from her.”

“How lovely! Isn’t that what the Brits say,
lovely?
And
cheers
.”

“Yes, dear,” Jane says, and pats my father’s arm. The gesture is warm and loving. She has started humoring him. She never used to do that. “How are they, by the way? Sophie and Greg.”

“You know, not bad. They’re okay. I mean, I guess they’re hanging in there.”

“Listen, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad before about the way you look, love. See, that’s British,
love
. I’m just worried about you, Eleanor. This moving-to-London thing doesn’t seem very well thought out,” my mother says.

“That’s because it’s not. But maybe that’s not a bad thing. Who says everything has to be thought out? Haven’t you two ever done anything that wasn’t well thought out but you couldn’t help yourselves?”

My parents look at each other, a blush starting on my mother’s cheeks and making its way over to my father’s, like the wave at a baseball game.

From the guilty look on their faces, I’m pretty sure that sometime in the last ten hours, my parents joined the mile-high club.

* * *

We retire to the pub next door for a nightcap. My father is still recovering from the bill he offered to pay long before we sat down to eat. “How often do I get to take my two favorite girls out?” he had said; “it will be my pleasure,” he had said, an extravagance he now clearly regrets.

“I don’t understand it,” he says, holding up a dollar bill to the minimal light—a votive candle in a glass holder—to get a better look. “How can something that once was worth something be worth nothing? And they can track it. Isn’t that amazing? Every single day, every single minute, this dollar I have in my hand changes value relative to the pound.” My dad is a lot like Sophie, I realize now. He’s never outgrown his curiosity about the world. Because of Google, tomorrow my mother will be forced to endure a two-hour lecture on currency fluctuation, a subject he will become an expert on overnight and take to with the conviction of a Scientologist.

“Everything in life is like that. Nothing is constant,” Jane says, with a small smile, an acknowledgment of her own fickleness.

“Yeah, you never know what’s going to happen. You can be alive today and then dead tomorrow. Just like that.” I’m thinking back to that Thursday, when I taught a class, picked up the dry cleaning, and then learned that I had lost my best friend. Alive. Dead. Nothing to Google there. Wikipedia has no explanations for what is simultaneously clear and unfathomable.

“Actually, not a great example, Ellie. Because you can’t be dead today, alive tomorrow,” my father says, unmoved by my foray into the morbid and, unlike most men his age, comfortable approaching the subject of the inevitability of death. He finds his colleagues’ shameless bids for immortality through scholarship embarrassing. Instead, my father is a process man and harbors no delusions about the lasting impact of his work or his life. He is here for this one circle ride, not even turning to Mikey and me as a form of legacy; for him, this go-around—his go-around—is sufficient.

“Yup, you’re right. Alive. Then dead. No going back. It’s a fucking one-way ticket.”

“Eleanor,” Jane says.

“What?” I snap.

“Nothing.” She shoots a look at my father, the same one she used to give him years ago at the every-other-weekend handoff, when I was sixteen and as difficult as any other teenager. An
oy vey
look, which I know right now I fully deserve. After playing parent to Sophie, it somehow feels a little too natural to regress around my own.

The waitress brings over our drinks, three honey-colored pints, whatever was on tap, since my parents were excited to use that word:
pint
. No doubt we’ll be eating bangers and mash tomorrow, just for the novelty of the words.

I am not sure why I’m suddenly sullen and uncooperative. I want to claw at my parents for comfort, turn to them the way Sophie and I have been turning to
The Secret Garden
, for soothing and for refuge. Of course, my parents would be horrified; for my family, or at least for my mother, independence is sacrosanct. I am thirty-five, almost midlife, and for some reason I want my parents to tell me what to do and then complain about them being overbearing. I want to be tucked in, the way Phillip used to do it, locking the blanket over my shoulders, like a swaddle, a kiss first on my forehead, then my lips.

Even more, I want someone to promise me that there is no evil in the world, that people we love do not get murdered on the daily school run. And I want the daily aftershocks to stop, that horrible way my back stiffens and my stomach drops every time I think about the face of the man on the cover of the
Daily Mail
. When I think of Lucy
choosing
to leave Sophie behind.

Mikey arrives a few minutes later, saving us from the awkwardness I have unnecessarily created. I want to apologize, give them a
don’t mind me, just having a rough go of things
. I will be lightness and accommodation from here on out. This trip is a vacation for them, after all.

“Michael!” my mother says.

“Mikey!” my father and I say in unison.

“Hey, guys,” my brother says, and circles around the table, giving us each a kiss on the cheek, a bemused expression on his face when he notices our parents are holding hands under the table.

“So, how was the date?” my mother asks, saving me from having to pry. I’m dying to know if he and Claire hit it off.

“Um, great, actually. I mean …” He pauses, as if he is looking for the exact right thing to say. “Okay, I hope I’m not jinxing anything here, but I think I just had the best date of my life. She’s amazing. And smart. Beautiful. And she’s a closet sci-fi nerd, can you believe it? She has all the
Next Generation
DVDs. We’re going out again tomorrow.”

“When can we meet her?”

“Don’t rush him,” I say, remembering the first time my mother met Phillip. She called him “a bland foot soldier on the wrong side of the war against materialism.” All because he was wearing a Tag Heuer watch that his father had given him as a college graduation present. It took me months—long after she had grown to appreciate his intellect and charm and, better yet, the way he treated me—to confess that he wasn’t a director of a nonprofit, as I had originally told her, but an investment banker.