All We Know of Love (17 page)

W
e decide to go out for dinner, my mother and I, even though I am beat. I am dead tired. But in Florida you can go to dinner really early and it saves you money.

But first I have to call my dad and tell him where I am. Truthfully.

This is really hard.

I have to call from my mom’s house since my cell phone is now completely dead. She leaves the room to give me some privacy. I have all these awful fantasies as I dial the number. He’s called the police. The bus company. He’s talked to Sarah’s parents. The school. My God, he called Adam.

None of which turn out to be true.

“How are you, sweetie?” my dad says. “How’s the snow up there?”

“Dad, I’ve got to tell you something.”

So I tell him. Dads really are better than moms in a lot of important ways. They don’t overreact, usually. Maybe that’s what turned out to be the worse thing for my mom, a guy who didn’t have big responses. A guy that pretty much left her to do what she needed to do, as long as it didn’t cost him any money. Discretion is the better part of valor, he used to say. Maybe she wanted more than that.

Maybe that was hard for her.

But for me it pays off.

My dad just wants to know I’m OK. How and when I’m getting home.

“Mom says she’s going to look into buying me a plane ticket and she says she can take me to the airport here,” I tell him.

At dinner, my mother has all the questions, but she asks them slowly, one at a time, like she is savoring the answers or she is afraid there is a quota. I notice she stays away from any subject that might directly involve her, like the house, the garden. Her belongings, her car, which is still sitting in the garage. She doesn’t ask about Dad’s personal life.

“How’s Sarah?” she asks me.

“Well, she’s fine.”

“But what?” my mother says.

“But nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to.”

I do miss my mother.

“Well, I haven’t been a very good friend,” I say.

“Does Sarah feel that way or just you?” She has to put on glasses to read the menu. I don’t remember that either.

“Both,” I tell her.

“Sarah’s a good friend. I bet she’s not judging you as harshly as you may think. As you judge yourself . . .” Then suddenly she stops.

She tells me that she works in an office. She’s lucky she can walk to work, because she doesn’t have a car. She’s bought everything in her apartment at tag sales, even her bedsheets.

“Gross,” I say.

She laughs.

My mother tells me she goes to a therapist twice a week, but only since she’s gotten health insurance at her new job. And she’s on medication, but I don’t want to hear about that.

Is she happy?

“I think it’s a mistake to look for happiness,” my mother says. “I think it was my mistake, anyway. I have moments when I am happy. Few. But enough.”

I want to ask her if she is ever going to come back. Was she ever going to see me again? How could she sleep at night? How can she look at herself in the mirror knowing what she did?

But I can’t.

So I begin again. “You were telling me something that night.”

“Yes, you said that. . . . I don’t remember.”

“I do,” I say.

“Tell me.”

“You told me you wanted to tell me something.” I can hear the water running in the sink. I can see her thin, soapy hands. “Something Nana had told you . . . but you said it was the wrong advice.”

I can see the pantry. The package of oatmeal cookies sticking up out of the garbage.

“You wanted me to know something,” I say. “About love.”

My mother is sitting across the table from me, shaking her head slowly. “I’m so sorry, Natty. I just don’t remember that at all. My mother, I mean, Nana, she told me a lot of stupid things.”

“Like what?”

“I really don’t. I mean, I could make something up. I could tell you a million things about love. But I’m probably the worst person to do that.”

Somehow, I am not surprised by this. I have come all this way, these thousand miles, to find out what my mother was going to tell me. To hear what she was going to say about love so that I could understand it. So I could figure out how to
get
love and how to
be
loved. And how to
give
love, without giving myself away.

And now I know this is never going to happen.

But I also know it wasn’t really what I was looking for anyway.

Walking back to my mother’s apartment from the restaurant, I catch our reflections in a storefront window. It is a car dealership, and behind the glass sit five or six brand-new cars, shiny and parked at various angles as if they are just moments away from screeching out of the showroom.

I am taller than my mother. When did this happen? It almost takes me another glance to realize it is really me, walking beside this woman.

It
is
me. I have long brown hair that, when I wear it loose and the weather’s been rainy or a little humid, curls and separates into long twists. It drives me crazy, but I hear some grown women spend hundreds of dollars to get their hair to do that. My body is tall and thin. The curves and widening thighs that used to make me uncomfortable and self-conscious are part of who I am. I grew into them.

It is me.

And I am not a little girl.

So what has my mother missed? My twelfth birthday? Thirteenth? She was not around to witness them, and yet they took place anyway. My fourteenth? My fifteenth and now what?

No, I didn’t deserve this, but then again, who is she to dole out exemptions? Only I can do that. And first, I have to forgive myself for something I had nothing to do with. And second, I have to pay attention to the here and now. Because it goes so fast, and I’ve got a feeling I’ve got plenty more mistakes of my own to make.

In her apartment, my mother says she is going to pull out the couch in her living room, but then she realizes she doesn’t have any sheets for it.

“Don’t worry. I’ll sleep on it like this,” I say. I pat the top cushion.

“No, no. You take my bed. I can sleep on the couch.”

“No.” I am firm about this, but still, I am asking. “I want to sleep here. Please. I just need a blanket.”

She nods. “I understand,” she says.

There is that kind of deep sleep that comes after having stayed awake too long, after having been overloaded by images and feelings and thoughts. The kind of sleep that comes immediately, so that you can’t even remember laying your head down on the pillow, or pulling up the covers, or even closing your eyes. This is how I fall asleep that night, to the sound of the air conditioner and nothing more. To the stories I’ve heard and the stories I’ve told.

And sometimes, stories were repeated so often, I came to think I remembered them. Like the one about getting robbed while on vacation in Hawaii, on the garden island of Kauai. It was only my parents’ first anniversary, but of course, I was there, too, and I was already six months old. They could never prove it, but they later knew it was the overly friendly bellhop. He had brought my parents to their condo, he helped with their bags, he opened the wide doors to the balmy Hawaiian night air, and he left quickly. He must have known how tired they were; they had flown all the way from New York. And there had been a long delay. They hadn’t really slept in over twenty-four hours.

Of course — get some rest. Tomorrrow morning, you won’t believe how beautiful it is here in Hawaii. Breakfast is seven to ten thirty.
He held his hand out for the tip.

There were two bedrooms in this condo, but my parents set up the crib right beside their bed, pulled as close as could be, and laid me in it.

My dad took off his clothes immediately, washed up, and went to sleep.

But my mother decided to straighten some things up before she could lie down. She dragged all the suitcases into the other bedroom, which she decided had the bigger closet. She picked up the diaper bag and the scattered toys from the plane trip. And then, just before she got into bed herself, she took my father’s messy pile of clothes from the floor, folded them neatly, and laid them on the bed in the other room.

When everything looked as orderly as she could make it she, too, crawled into bed and fell fast asleep.

Our amateur thief didn’t venture into the room where we were sleeping, but lucky for him, the bag with all my mother’s jewelry and my dad’s wallet, still in his pant’s pocket, with over a thousand dollars in cash, were neatly laid out in the empty bedroom. He made out like a bandit, which is what he was.

But
you
were safe, my mother would tell me. Thank God, you were right next to us all night. Could you imagine if I had put you in the other room, too? But I loved you too much. I always wanted you near me, she would tell me, every time she told the story.

I loved you so much.

I haven’t heard that particular story in years.

I like the rusty sound of the air conditioner. I like the smell of my mother’s detergent. I am going home tomorrow. I have been here two days, and two nights. Tomorrow morning I have a flight home. My dad ended up making all the plans. I fly out of Jacksonville and change planes in Atlanta, Georgia, and then fly into White Plains Airport, where my dad will meet me. And the whole trip will take all of four hours and twenty minutes.

For two days I have not turned my cell phone on. It’s been charging in an outlet by the couch, but it has stayed off.

So on this, my last night in Florida, I give myself permission.

When I turn the power on, I see I have three new voice mails. They beep persistently. And despite my determination, my heart flips and stammers before I even listen to see who they are from.

Yes, the first one is from Adam.

“Hey, baby doll. I know you like to hear from me. So here it is. . . . Here’s my voice . . . my message to you. Na-ta-lie. You know you feed my heart and nourish . . . my body.” His voice is almost a whisper on my phone.

Is he serious?

He is.

In spite of this, I press nine to save.

The next message is from my dad.

“Hi, sweetie. It’s Dad. Just checking in. I’ll be waiting for you at baggage. If you have any problems, just call me. I’ll leave my cell on. See you tomorrow, sweetie.”

There is a pause and I can hear him breathing, like he doesn’t know how to press
END
, and eventually the message clicks off. I save this one, too.

The last message is from Sarah.

“Hey, punk-ass. Your dad told me where you are. You bitch. Why didn’t you tell me? God, Natty. I’m your best friend. I could have helped you, gave you money or something. God, I would have gone with you if you wanted. Well, nothing up here. It’s cold as shit. I wish you were here. No, I wish I was down there. Call me. Call me. Call me. I can’t believe what you did. Natty, I think it was really great. Fly home safe. Love you. Love you.”

Her message is cut off by static. I save it.

I listen to Adam’s phone message again. Two times. Funny, all I had to do was not call him for three days and look what happens.

I don’t want to make any decisions, but I’m not going to call Adam back tonight. Not that he asked me to. But I’m not anyway.

Just realizing that I
can
but that I’m
not
makes me feel pretty good. Knowing I could and don’t want to, don’t need to, makes me feel really good.

Better than I have in a long time.

My last night on my mother’s couch. She bought new sheets yesterday, a new blanket and a pillow. For when I come back to visit again, she told me.

I know I will.

Tonight, I don’t fall asleep as quickly. I can think a little. I can rest before I fall away. Before tomorrow comes, and I have to leave.

I know there are some things that can be taken from you while you sleep. Some things can be lost, or damaged, and never returned, like jewelry and money.

But there are also some things that are imprinted on your brain, even if you can’t remember them. They happen so early they become instinctual, even though they are not. A baby is born knowing how to suckle but not how to kiss. An infant can reach up, as if grabbing for a branch, when startled, but not know how to hug. There is much to learn, like a baby duckling coming out of his egg and connecting to the first moving object he sees.
That is my mother,
the duckling says to himself, and he begins to follow her, copy her, learn from her. She feeds him and protects him, and from her, he learns to hug and kiss. From her, he needs to learn to fly.

From her, he learns about love.

I watch as my mother’s shape grows smaller.

They let her ride the little shuttle bus out to the runway with me, although I am clearly old enough to fly on a plane by myself. And now she is heading back. Jacksonville is such a small airport they don’t have those long expandable gates. I actually walked outside and up these rickety rolling stairs into the plane. And I can watch the shuttle bus driving away with my mother inside. I can see her waving at the window until she and the bus are as small as toys against the long flat line that is the horizon.

That is one thing I noticed here in Florida. It is really flat, without the never-ending hills and mountains we have at home, and so the sky is bigger. You can see farther around and farther behind you. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Me, I want to look ahead.

The captain comes on and tells everyone to shut off all electronic devices. He gives us the estimated time of arrival and even the expected temperature. Then he makes a joke about the cold weather up north. The flight attendant tells us to fasten our seat belts. Seat backs and tray tables in their locked and upright positions.

I am going home.

Nobody is in the seat beside me.