Autobiography of Us (28 page)

“I must have sat there in the car forever,” she said. “Dressed up in my suit and heels like I was headed to some sort of meeting—the PTA, for God’s sake. Ladies’ Auxiliary of Greater Who the Hell Cares. All I could think about was that lima bean. I was nine weeks along and I kept trying to remember what it was: A potato? A turnip? It’s a vegetable, I kept telling myself. It’s just a goddamn vegetable. But it didn’t make me feel better. It made me so goddamn sad I wanted to die.”

I waited a moment. “So what will you do?”

“Do?” She gave herself a little shake. “I can’t leave him, if that’s what you’re implying. I wouldn’t get a red cent.”

“What about Alfred?”

“Alfred.”
She threw me a look.

I said it again: “What are you going to do?”

“Enough about me,” she said curtly. “Let’s talk about you.”

I looked down, pretending to scratch my forearm. “What about me?”

“Christ, you’re not going to make me say it, are you? Look,” she said, peering at me from under her lashes. “I’m not saying it doesn’t have its convenient moments. I’m not saying it isn’t cozy as hell most of the time. No one pawing at you under the covers, no shaving the legs every morning and tending to the dry spots, plucking the gray hairs. Or maybe you do all of that anyway. Maybe you’ve got your own little something on the side.”

“Shut up.” It came out as a whisper, my teeth clamped down. “Please, shut up.”

“I wonder,” she went on calmly. “Really, I’m genuinely curious. Does the female body even interest him? There are the boys, obviously, so unless they were both acts of immaculate conception, it must not be a matter of complete repulsion. But then the urge to spread the seed is purely evolutionary, I suppose. What I want to know is if he’s the tiniest bit intrigued. Does he feel
anything
for the womanly form? Or have these last few nights with the two of you shacked back up together been like, I don’t know, lying next to dead meat?”

I stood. “I’ll go see about that tea.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” She pulled at my hand. “I’m sorry. Please, let’s not fight. Pretty please with a cherry on top? I’m being a monster, and here you’ve been so lovely. I won’t say another word—I mean it. I’ll be quiet as a mouse.” I waited a moment, two, her expression as she stared up at me entreating. “Let’s sit a minute. Can’t we just sit here a minute?” I sat down reluctantly, and she beamed at me. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

We were both silent. I felt—as I so often did with her—that I had somehow disappointed her, that I had failed to recognize the significance of what she was saying, the words behind her words. I wanted desperately to say the right thing. Something comforting, something to smooth over everything she had revealed those past twenty-four hours, but everything that came to mind struck me as the most awful sort of platitude—words you might offer as consolation to someone you hardly knew.

“Eleanor’s going to have a cow,” she said finally. “She was always telling me to stop after the twins. Tie my tubes. She worried I’d take after her—dead babies, et cetera. Though sometimes I wonder if she isn’t angry I haven’t.”

“Haven’t what?”

“Had my dead baby,” she said. “Everyone has one, according to her.”

“So I’m in the club,” I said. “Lucky me.”

“Lucky you.” She smiled, a little sadly. “Lucky duck.”

I ran my hand along the edge of the pillow. “Do you think she was happy?”

“Eleanor? God, no,” she said. “Yours?”

“I find myself unwilling.” I shook my head. “Never mind. It’s just—I was wrong. I thought I was the one who kept letting her down. Proving a disappointment. But it was life that did it, wasn’t it? Capital
L
, like you said.”

“I said that?” She frowned. “Christ, I’ve turned into the most awful bore.”

“It isn’t easy, any of it.” I was horrified to feel tears sliding down my cheeks. “I’m sorry.” I wiped at my eyes. “I thought it would take at least a few months for it to sink in. A year wouldn’t have been too long. She’s my
mother
. But it already feels so normal.” My voice trembled on the last syllable. “That’s the worst part—how normal it all feels.”

“The difference between the sane man and the insane.” She gave me a wry smile. “The sane man thinks he’s crazy. The insane man thinks everyone else is. You’re in shock, darling. Perfectly understandable. A natural part of the grieving process—think of it as a form of protection. Takes you out of the indefensible present and deposits you somewhere nice and neutral.” She leaned forward and put her glass in my hand. “Now, drink that down like a good girl.”

I tipped the glass back and did my best not to choke. “I am present,” I declared, my throat on fire. “I am in the here and now.”

“The question becomes where.” She tapped her fingers against her knees. “And how. Where is the here and now. How the hell did we get here.”

“Do you think they knew?” My mind had begun to whirl. “The mothers. Ours. Do you think they knew it would be like this?”

She sighed. “Everybody knows, dummy—it’s a matter of who says what. Or doesn’t. Which is the point, really. No one says a goddamn word.”

“But what did they do?” My voice sounded desperate even to my own ears. “How did they make it, in the end?”

“God knows.” She looked at me curiously. “Of course, there
are
the lucky ones. Your mother, for instance.”

“Lucky?”

“I don’t know that everyone gets one, that’s all.”

“One what?”

She spread her arms wide. “Great love. The love to end all other loves. I always admired that about your parents.”

“Oh.” I looked down at the carpet, prodding it with my toe. “Except she didn’t—that is, I don’t know that Mother thought of him quite like that.”

“Ah,” she said knowingly. “But
she
was
his
.”

“It takes two.” I was having trouble focusing. “Doesn’t it? Two great loves. Two people believing it’s a great love, I mean.”

Alex’s mouth was cool, chilled by ice. She pressed her lips against mine and moved back, her face barely an inch away. “That depends
,
” she said. “What do you believe?”

* * *

Paul was gone by the time I woke up the next morning, the sheets on his side pulled taut, the pillowcase smoothed. I could tell by the silence of the apartment that I’d slept late, Gladys already come and gone to deposit Matt and Lucas at school, breakfast long served and cleared. I slipped a pair of slacks on and pulled a sweater over my head and then I went into the bathroom, splashing cold water on my face.

“You’re fine,” I told my reflection. I might have been fifteen again the way I stared, my palms damp against the countertop, my forehead beginning to perspire. “You are present and accounted for.”

Embarrassing to say now how my heart pounded as I stepped out into the hallway, my throat dry long before I reached the living room and found it empty, the pillows placed just so. In the kitchen, the morning sun shifted through half-drawn shades, the paperwhites on the counter bluish under the lights. I must have known long before I spotted the envelope on the kitchen counter that she was gone.

“Hello?” My voice echoed back at me. I picked up the envelope and crossed the room toward the guest bedroom, edging the door open with my foot. The linens were stripped and stacked at the foot of the bed, the blankets pulled flat, tucked beneath the pillows.

The Mr. & Mrs.
, the words slanted upward across the envelope.

Thank you
, the card read.
I had a lovely time. Come visit us in Pasadena! Love to the boys.
There was no mention of the early departure, the missing hours gone unexplained, only that card—signed with a series of little black
X
’s, her name with that familiar flourish to the
A
.
Alex
.

November 12, 1973

Dear Alex,

It was never my intention to send any of these. I don’t believe I would have even if I’d had your address. What would you have written in reply? Exactly what you said. That I have been a fool all these years. That I turned a blind eye and now, I suppose, I am paying the price.

You would be correct, of course: I chose to look the other way. But if I landed myself into this mess, I ought to be able to get out. Only—to be honest—I don’t know what
out
is anymore. What it looks like. In what direction it might lie. Sometimes I stand here in the middle of the mess, the toys and the dirty socks and the jackets, the discarded pants, the dirty spoons, the lone shoe, and it seems to me that my body is mere accident. That I might inhabit it by sheer coincidence. I may be no more than cardboard, I mean, a trick of paper and shadows. One of those dioramas Matthew brings home from school—you know the kind: Indians on Covered Wagon. Pilgrims Landing on Plymouth Rock.

I would call this Woman Stranded in Manhattan, or Woman, Stranded. Or maybe just Woman.

You understand, don’t you?

THOSE next few weeks felt interminable. Every time the phone rang, I jumped up from where I was sitting and dropped whatever book or magazine I’d been pretending to read, sometimes moving so quickly I answered before the second ring. I was more foolish in those days than I have ever cared to admit. I thought everything had changed, you see. That to wake up after a night like that was to wake up to a world made new, that from that day forward my life would bristle with that odd electricity I thought of as hers and hers alone. I thought myself on the brink of—what? Revolution. Disaster.
Something.
But days went by and it was never her on the other end. A week passed, two, the silence agonizing; after that second week had come and gone, I tried the number she’d given me—once, then twice, three times, half a dozen, dialing each time with a little shiver of trepidation—but the phone simply rang and rang, until I gave up and put the receiver back down.

Three weeks went by before she finally called, her voice when I picked up breathless. She’d been busy as anything, she said. She was sorry, but, gosh, all hell had broken loose while she was gone. Wasn’t it something trying to get kids to sleep at night at a regular time? Did I follow Dr. So-and-So’s advice about schedules? Did I have anything to say about teeth, the losing of? Ears, infections in? I sank down into the armchair beside the phone and rested my head against my knees. No, I said, bedtime wasn’t easy. Yes, the cold had really settled in now. We’d been to the playground that day and Matthew had climbed the monkey bars. When we hung up, I went straight to my bedroom and locked the door behind me, ignoring the racket of Lucas’s small fists pummeling the wood. I sat down on the bed and pressed my palm against my teeth so hard they left a row of indentations in the flesh. Perhaps you already guessed that her visit would come to nothing, that anything she said or did should never have been taken as a promise. And yet I’d taken it as exactly that. The smallness of my life a thing I had allowed myself to think I might not have to encounter again.

We began speaking regularly after that first call, falling into a schedule with an ease I was grateful to observe—I called Monday and Wednesday evenings at ten, she took Tuesdays and Thursdays at the same time. The weekends we left mostly alone, though more often than not one of us ended up calling the other at some point—Saturday night after the children were in bed, or Sunday morning, early, before anyone else was awake. I came to rely on those talks more than I can explain. They were the spot of light my day bent itself toward, like a plant seeking out the sun. Despite the fact that our conversations continued to orbit the everyday subjects of child care and housekeeping, despite the events of her visit going unmentioned, the topics of Bertrand and Paul left more or less untouched—despite, in other words, the relative mundaneness of our conversations—it still sent a little chill down my spine every time I picked up the phone and heard her voice on the other end. I would have agreed to an hour of silence if those had been the terms.

I can’t say for sure when I began to tell the other stories, the ones I made up because I knew instinctively they would please her—the candlelit dinners with some handsome lover (my something on the side) we both knew perfectly well never took place, the operas Paul never took me to, the charity balls I had long stopped attending, gala events where women wore dresses that glowed in the evening light like beaten gold. I know only that no sooner had I begun telling my stories than she fell silent, prompting me when I paused for too long.

“And then what?” she’d say immediately. “What happened next?”

I don’t know what proved the stranger part of my new role as a Scheherazade, the fact that she seemed content to listen to my lies or the fact that I never ran out of things to tell her. All I knew for certain at the time was that as each new story came to a close, I could simply start over again from the beginning and she would never say a word, that I could continue to tell her lie after lie without so much as a word of protest. In retrospect, I see I should hardly have been surprised. The truth, I mean, never having been the point of any of it.

* * *

The heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped later that winter—February, I believe it was. The day the story broke, her face stared up from the front page of every newspaper on the stands wearing an expression of mild consternation, as though surprised to find itself so prominently displayed. I bought a
Times
on my way home from the store, drawn in by the headline:
GRANDDAUGHTER OF HEARST ABDUCTED BY 3.
The article said that Patty Hearst and her fiancé had been beaten. Witnesses had seen her body carried off and stuffed into an unmarked car. Later that same day, I would hear on the news that a band of radical soldiers from a group called the Symbionese Liberation Army were claiming responsibility, demanding millions of dollars in ransom be paid to the needy from Santa Rosa all the way to Los Angeles. Of course, it was even bigger news in California—the entire state, according to Alex, in an uproar.