Blue Mercy: A Novel. (20 page)

"I'll have to clean up."

"You're not to."

"Star, if I don't, we'll have vermin." I picked up a broken, stale cookie from the floor and a glass with a white circle of stale milk turning green. "You're not supposed to eat up here, remember?"

"Jesus, Mom, can't you drop the nagging, like, ever? Even when I'm just about to leave?"

"I may have to do some fumigation, that's all I'm saying."

"And I'm saying --"

"Okay, okay.
 
I'll keep it to a minimum. You're right, let's not fight."

We picked up a suitcase each and walked out into the hallway and she stopped and took a key from her pocket and locked the door.

"Star."

"I can't trust you," she said, sticking the key back into her jeans.

"The place will be crawling by mid-term if you leave it like that."

"We
are
leaving it just like that."

I gave up. At the door, I put my arms around her. One thing about loving a fat person, they're so nice to hug. I sank into her and, of course, broke the vow I'd made and started to cry.

"Mom, don't."

"Sorry." I let her go, blew my nose. "I'll miss you darling. Write me as soon as you land, won't..." The sentence wilted into her turning towards the door.
 

She was acting especially cold today. Had she overheard what I had shared with Marsha the night before: that I looked forward to coming home in the evening to peace and tranquility after work, instead of another unnecessary drama? That I wasn't sure whether I'd miss her more once she was away than I had for the past years while she was right there under my roof? Did she know that I was only in part, really in quite a small part, crying for what was ahead? That it was mainly for the loss of all we'd already missed, all those years we'd never get back?
 

I followed her out to where she was waiting beside the passenger door of the car. The morning sun was shining at us through the tree in our neighbor's front yard, throwing our shadows in front of us, Star's all spiky-headed and bulky and serrated along the leafy ground, mine barely there beside her.

Calling all mothers! Some advice for you. If you have a little girl, don't be the kind of mother who says: "All I want is for her to be happy." No, no, no. Want her to be top of her class. Want her to become Chairman of the Board. Want her to marry a millionaire. Want something negotiable, so she has room to rebel. If all you want is for her to be happy, all she can do to separate from you is be miserable. Tortured even.

The doctor said that I had to turn my attention from Star's life to my own. Worry might be the mother's lot, but it was not to be indulged and my fretting was bad for us both. I resolved to take myself in hand. Inspired by WB and his circle, mainly by Iseult Gonne, I decided I was going to become a writer. "Words alone are certain good," as the poet put it. I could sign up for that, I decided.

But of course woman cannot live on words alone and I still needed a day job. Weary of working for others, Marsha and I took a leap into business together and opened a little coffee house down near the boardwalk, which we called Better World Café.

The name and the concept was Marsha's. The café would be a hub, a place from where we would encourage what she called "meaningful and creative connections" as well as good food. Our coffee would be imported directly from a non-profit project run by a friend of hers on an ex-plantation in Kenya. Our food would be mostly vegetarian, without announcing itself so. Our staff would be valued with a share of our profits. Our tables would be dressed in (recycled) paper tablecloths with a big light-bulb outline in the middle labeled "Big Thoughts and Ideas" to write within. Our napkins would be smaller versions of the same, labeled "Neat Thoughts and Ideas."

We'd provide colored pens and pencils and cover our walls with thought-provoking and inspiring pictures and quotes. We'd also provide, twice a month, a cultural event: a poetry reading, or music, or storytelling. "The great thing about being on the boardwalk," Marsha enthused, "is that we won't just attract the converted. People will drop in, all unknowing, just for a cup of coffee and leave with more than that."

I look back now on our audacity and smile. We hadn't a clue what we were getting ourselves into. Over that first year, we had so many crises, especially with staff, but eventually we settled down with Stella on the floor supporting me, and Mercedes in the kitchen, helping Marsha turn out her delicious breads and cakes and soups and salads.

Now the crises have all dissolved and it's the accomplishments and the daily small sensations that remain. I lean back at my desk in Doolough and by closing my eyes, I can smell again Marsha's mushroom soup, my favorite, bubbling in the urn. See again the glint of a good Merlot in one of our lovely glasses. Hear the sound of our customers talking and laughing, in what was for many of them the happiest hour of their day. Small moments that I used to rest in, that helped me believe that yes, everything would be fine, everything was fine already, before being thrown again by a brainwave flitting up to the surface, cutting through my peace with worries about Star and how she was getting on in her new life and why I couldn't settle down into mine.

Stop, I would admonish myself. Return to the sunlit murmur of now, the clink of two classes, the froth on a coffee mug, the shine of dressing on the salad you're serving... Beware the voice in your head. Don't live by it. Be careful. Pick up that finished plate. Smile at Stella. Tidy up the newspapers into the rack. There, that's better.

We only seem to be planted in time. Wherever you are now, stop what you're doing and look around. Observe those people not so far away. Know that no matter how intact and how present they seem, just behind the face, there's a fissure, a separation filled with the crackle and fizz of regretted pasts and anticipated futures.

Clearing up. Sometimes, most times, a satisfactory winding down ritual to the working day, but when you're tired, it can be hard to face. At Better World Café each evening, two members of staff -- one front-of-house, one back -- stayed behind to leave the place spotless for the early start next day. Marsha and I have made it a maxim not to ask them to do anything we don't do ourselves.

Tonight is one of the nights in three that she and I worked together after everyone else has gone home. Mopping out the floor, dusting the shelves and ornaments and pictures, emptying the vases of old flowers, clearing out the newspaper tray. We ticked off the routine tasks between us without needing to discuss anything. Our habitual, silent minuet.

The ceiling fan whirred a song of secret loss. Marsha was about to sound me out. I knew it, she knew it, though all our talk so far was about takings and stock and the day's doings. We both knew that soon we sat down opposite each other at our favourite table down the back, cup of tea or glass of wine in hand, that this time it would be my turn to talk and hers to listen.

That's what we did and, in the middle of talking about how worried I was about Star, who hadn't called for over a week, I surprised myself by saying that I really needed a break. To go away for a while.
 

"Why don't you?" she said. "Go to Europe again."

"I couldn't, Marsha. We've only just got on our feet. How would you manage here?"

"We're doing fine now, you know that. We can hire someone to fill in. How long would it be? A year? Six months?"

"Oh, six months would be enough. More than enough."

"Well then."

"It would bring our profits back down."

"We've plenty of profit, Mercy. What's it for, if it doesn't let us do the things we want? No point in just stacking it up."

"You're serious."

"Why not?"

We both knew the only reason was Star. Which wasn't a real reason, now she was in college. Now I had no excuse not to, I had to ask myself was this really what I wanted?
 

I searched myself.
 

It seemed that it was.

"So long as you don't go staying over there. Leaving us for some sexy Frenchman," Marsha said.

"
Mais non
!" I indulged my atrocious French accent. "
Je te promets
."

"And you have to send me a postcard from everywhere you go. I'll put them up where all the customers can see them."

She made it sound so easy.

"Are you sure, Marsha? I can't help feeling it isn't fair."

"It wouldn't be fair
not
to. I'm going to want to head off myself some day soon. Do it, so I can have my turn."

That was the clincher, as she knew it would be.
 

"Will you go to Ireland?"

"Oh yes."
 

"See your father?"

"No. This time I'd like to do it just for me. No daughter, no father, no family visits, just experience the places I'd like to see." I was getting excited as they came spilling out, all these wants I hardly knew I had.

She had a gift for true friendship, Marsha, for knowing what you needed and helping you to get it. I hadn't expected, in my mid-thirties, to make a new, true friend and, in all my life, before or since, friendship was never mine so thoroughly again. We make so much of love and not enough of friendship. So I'd like to put it on record here that Marsha has meant as much to me as any lover, Zach included. And far more than my (admittedly hopeless) husband.

Marsha is always saying "I love you" to me, but I am Irish and of a certain age, and we don't say such things face-to-face, not easily. I hope I've said it enough in other ways but, just in case I haven't, Marsha, let me say it here.

So I set off on my multi-layered pilgrimage to Europe.
 
London, Edinburgh, Stratford-on-Avon, York. Dublin, Sligo, Coole Park, Thoor Ballylee.
 
Paris, Étaples, Paris-Plage, Colleville-sur-Mer. Ypres. The Somme. Passchendale.
 

It was during this time that I also launched myself upon another journey, writing about my life as if it were a novel. Instead of telling readers what happened, what made me, I'd just let them see and hear and taste and touch and feel what happened for themselves, I decided. Just! From a series of hotel rooms, with their desks turned to face the window, I launched myself, uncertainly, at the task. Blindly, I took wrong turnings as I followed any hunch that might help the reader to understand. Slowly, over the weeks, as I travelled around Britain first, then Ireland, then France, idea and facts yielded to a world into which a reader might sink.

That was my grand tour of Europe: the mornings wrestling with words; the afternoons, after a short nap, spent in streets and bars and cafes, museums and theaters and art galleries in the cities. Or else into the woods and sea shores and mountains. I'd grown fast during my college course but I have never felt such an explosion in capacity and possibility as I did in those days, shuttling between memory in the mornings and aware presence in the afternoons.
 

Every meal and every excursion, every sunrise and sunset, every art gallery and performance, every lake and tree, seemed significant. I pitied the poor day trippers and bus tourists who would only come and stand in the Tower of London or The Portrait Gallery for minutes before moving on, with only a postcard souvenier of their brief visit. I had all the days I wanted. I could return to any venue every day for a week if I wished. Had I traveled more earlier in life, I might not have been so intensely moved by it all. Being alone was also part of it, the attention I had time to give from a position of solitude. I can recognize that, now I'm alone again.
 

Those were the ups of my trip. I had downs too. When thoughts of my failed relationships -- with Brendan, with Zach, with Star -- assailed me. When past and future both looked broken and nothing seemed worth the energy it demanded. Then I'd accept the attention of somebody in whatever hotel I was in, even though sex-to-go was too much trouble for too little reward, and the ones who wanted more were worse.

Those were the days before email and easy transatlantic calls. To keep in touch with home, I wrote letters, supplemented with a weekly call to Star from noisy hotel lobbies or freezing phone booths. It was one such, in Paris, that Star told me her big news, her voice bouncing out of the telephone receiver. "Mom, I have to tell you. I've met someone."

The words took hold of my insides and squeezed it.
Don't love him
, hissed the inside of my head.
You are mortgaging your life. He will hurt you.

"That's wonderful, darling."

"Isn't it? Oh, Mom..."

Normally our weekly conversations entailed me describing what I'd seen or experienced, feeling that
 
without my babbling, the conversation would collapse.
 
"Well, well," I said. "Tell me all."

"His name is Shando."

"Mmmm. That's unusual."

"He's a Buddhist."

"Oh."

"What else? He's twenty-six --" (Twenty-six? But, my child, you're only nineteen.) " -- and he's a yoga teacher." (Yoga? How could he expect to support a wife and family with yoga?)

"We met a good while ago, before you left for Europe, but I didn't want to say anything till..."

"Are you..." My voice was as casual as I could make it. "Em... seeing a lot of each other?"

Tadpoles of rain swam in wavy lines across the glass of the booth.

"I guess."

So she was sleeping with him, this twenty-six-year-old. This father figure. This stranger was now intimate with her body. Just thinking about that -- not going so far as to imagine it, I couldn't even imagine imagining it -- brought on a glut of panic. Oh my Star, be careful.

"I don't know what else to tell you, Mom. He's a really sweet guy."

"That's wonderful, darling." It didn't sound any more convincing the second time.

There was a silence, in which I felt like I could hear her eyebrows draw together. I took a deep breath.

"I hope he's not making you neglect your studies."

"Oh, Mom, for goodness' sake! But listen, guess what, I've lost weight. I don't even know how. He's always cooking."