Breakdown Lane, The (29 page)

“You’re never going to get a girl anyhow,” I said.

“I know.”

“Come on, mope,” I said. “I meant, you have to learn to dance.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“No, I have my shot tomorrow, and then I’ll be soup for a day at least, so tonight I’m going to teach you to dance.”

“Nothing…no way, Mom. I can dance enough for practical purposes.”

“Can you swing dance? I know people do it again now. I see it on TV.”

“Please, God, don’t make me do this.”

“Dance!” Rory cried, cranking up the CD player to about five hundred decibels. Gabe strode across the room and grabbed her. I followed them, and rifled through my CDs until I found something I’d grabbed in a coffee store, I had to crack the thing open on the edge of the kitchen counter.

“Watch it!” Gabe cried. “You know, we don’t own this place!”

We started the music and Gabe stood, helpless and embarrassed, while we octopus-armed each other until we had the approximation of a couple’s stance. “Now, listen, everything else you do is based on this: one side, one side, back, front. That’s it. Do it.” Of course, he couldn’t do it. “Come
on,
Gabe. A chimp could do this. One side, one side, back, front.” Rory was already in the rhythm, bouncing up and down in her footie pajamas. I don’t know what the song was, some updated forties jive, though I guess I should have remembered it, given everything. He finally got it, and we did a tentative few minutes on the basics. “Okay, next, you’re going to spin me,
not too fast,
and then we just go arms out straight, then side, side, back, and front, again. Okay?”

“Okay,” Gabe said, half laughing. I hit the button again, and was just coming out of the turn when I noticed that Rory had opened the door and was standing in the front hall with a tall, dark-haired man in an olive trenchcoat.

“What? Rory! Hasn’t Mommy told you never, ever to open the door!”

“But he knocked! You didn’t hear him,” Rory said mournfully. She ran to me, tucked her thumb into her mouth, and hid behind the wide panels of my trousers. I pushed my hair up from my sweaty brow.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“This has to be one of the most charming things I’ve ever seen,” said the tall man, who had masses of wrinkles around his wide, greenish eyes, but beautiful thick, dark hair. I crossed the room, glad Gabe was there beside me. The guy was taller than Gabe. Gabe was six-two.

“Listen,” I said, “whatever you’re selling—”

“Julieanne,” he said, “I’m Matthew. I’m Matt MacDougall.”

“But…you grew!” I said like a damned fool.

“Well, I’ve had thirty years!” He leaned down and hugged me lightly.

“Well,” I said, “you didn’t…you didn’t tell me you were coming.”

“I left three messages on your machine.”

“Mom?” Gabe asked.

“Oh, Gabe, this is my old friend from New York. My boyfriend from eighth grade. Seventh grade?”

“Maybe a little of both. Maybe neither.”

“This is Matt. Matt, this is my son, Gabriel Steiner, and my daughter, Aurora Steiner.”

“Gabe Gillis,” Gabe said, taking Matt’s hand to shake. My mouth opened to protest, but I shut it.

“Well, I didn’t make anything for you to eat or plan anything. I didn’t even wash my hair. Can’t you come back tomorrow?”

“Sure,” he said, “why not?”

“But you drove all the way from your conference?”

“I can drive all the way back.”

“Well, you want a cup of coffee?”

“I brought a bottle of champagne.” He’d brought Cristal! I wanted it desperately.

“I’m allowed, like, a half of one glass. Like a little girl at Christmas,” I told him. “How about coffee?”

“Mom,” Gabe said urgently, “can we turn down the music?”

“Gosh, yes, sure,” I thought of how I must look, my already spiky hair peaked by sweat, my mascara running from sweat and laughter, one of Leo’s old dress shirts hanging over a pair of baggy khakis, bare feet. Well, it wasn’t as though he has come a-courtin’. He has come…from curiosity. And now I recognized him. He had a dimple in his right cheek. He’d been able to draw horses. He drew horses all the time.

“Do you have any horses?” I asked him.

“Two. Why?”

“You used to draw them in art class.”

“Huh. You remember that.”

“So, I was thinking, I’d take Rory to the Culver’s Custard and drop by Gram’s,” Gabe broke in. I thought for a moment he was trying to leave me alone with Matthew. But then I remembered. He hadn’t had a chance to drive his car.

“Well,” I said, with a shrug, “she doesn’t have school tomorrow. And you don’t. So, okay. But don’t be long. And put her long coat on over her—”

“I know how to do this, Mom,” Gabe said, already swooshing Rory’s parka over her head.

“And don’t forget her booster seat!”

“Mom!”

“New car,” I explained to Matthew. “Sixteenth birthday.”

“Nothing like it.” He smiled, and the wrinkles deepened. He looked older than I did, but not, somehow, in a ruined way. As if he’d spent far more time in the sun. As if it didn’t much matter to him.

Gabe gave me a kiss. “I’ll stop at all the lights. Full stop. I’ll put Rory in the back.”

“Go on,” I told him, and turned to the stranger on my hall rug. “Can I take your coat? Is it snowing or anything? Do you care if I go and wash my face?”

“I don’t care,” he said easily, with a Boston accent, removing his coat carefully and folding it over his arm. “I can hang up my own coat, and I’ve nowhere else to go.”

There was nothing to do about the state of my face that wouldn’t require a half hour of repeal and repair. So I rubbed colored moisturizer onto my face and wet my hair even more, scooping out a dab of Gabe’s hair pomade. I took the mascara off with cream and put on some new stuff, a few strokes. I rolled up the sleeves of my shirt. All this seemed to take hours, as I didn’t want to smear the stuff all over my face. After a few minutes, he called, “I know how to make coffee. I even have the same machine. Just tell me where you keep it.”

“The freezer,” I called. “And the grinder is in the cabinet above the machine.”

The last thing I did was put a cold washcloth between my breasts and force myself to breathe deeply. I looked in the mirror. I looked like a very flushed Cyndi Lauper with my apple steroid cheeks. What the hell, I thought. I heard Matthew humming as he flipped through the CDs. When I came back out into the living room, he had just pressed the button to close the machine, and punched up, of course, “God Only Knows.”

“Look. Wanna dance?” he asked, his blush, if possible, more savage than my own.

“Well, you’re taller than I am now,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, and I can lead, too,” he said.

Afterward, we sat at my kitchen table and talked, about old acquaintances and what had become of them. His sister had been in my sister Jane’s class, as had Suzie, his wife. Nothing more than a sidelong glance betrayed him as he described what he considered the single worst moment of his life, waiting in the hospital mortuary for a curtain to be drawn up so he could identify the side of his young wife’s face that had not encountered the steering column, while upstairs, surgeons worked on his little daughter’s collapsed lung and broken jaw. “You go mad for a moment thinking that maybe it isn’t her; maybe a friend of hers was driving Kelly somewhere; maybe it’s all been a mix-up. And then they raise the curtain. I’ll never forget that sound, so authoritative. And she was lying there, covered to the chest by a sheet. They had brushed back her hair and washed off her face, and the young patrolman with me held my elbow so I would not fall. I said, “Suze?” As if she would answer me. She was a fourth-year nursing student, and I was an intern. Everyone we knew was the same couple we were, a nurse and an intern. I’d been in dermatology. I wanted more kids; I wanted a predictable life. But I switched to surgery the next week and took a specialty in rebuilding faces, after I watched how long it took to rebuild Kelly’s jaw and palate, feeding her through a straw, her crying and asking why Mommy would let people hurt her.”

“Is she okay?” I asked then. “Does she have lasting…?”

“Scars? No. She was two. She doesn’t remember. She has an impression of the crash, but she’s not sure if it’s a memory or a dream. One of our horses is a jumper. That’s her passion. She’s after me to take a semester off because she thinks she could try for the American team, and from what they tell me, she could. I’m leery, though. I think school has to come first. She knows that.” A semester off to try to make the Olympic team as an equestrian. I wondered what he’d think of Gabe, sixteen-year-old ex–tenth grader.

“In the smallest way, it was like that when I was waiting to hear what was wrong with…with me,” I said.

“And Leo. That sounds like it was rough, and so bizarre that people probably get lost in the bizarre part and forget that, really, you’re someone whose marriage is breaking up and you’re just hurting, like anyone would. Even I suffered just the absence of the woman I was with, Suzie, and I wanted it to end. But you come across something she’d owned, or hear a song…”

“It’s like that,” I said. “I have my rage to keep me warm, though.”

“Do you think you ever get over it, if you’ve been happy?”

“Look, Matthew, you’d know more about that than I would.”

“I think I have.”

“I think I will.”

“Speaking of warm, let me look outside.” Matt opened the door and roared, a man used to allowing himself laughter without cynicism. “I hope you have a Holiday Inn around the corner. Look.” There were eighteen inches of snow on the ground. “It’s November second, Julieanne. Are you people crazy to live here?”

“Come on! I’ve never had a normal flight out of Boston. The fog there is permanent. It’s just lake-effect snow,” I told him, reaching past him to pick up a handful of it. It was as insubstantial as cotton. “It will be gone by morning. Wait,” I said then, and I grabbed the telephone, glancing at the clock. It was nine-thirty. “Hannah,” I breathed gratefully into the phone when she picked up, “I know Gabe is there with Rory. Will you let them stay? I don’t want him driving her in this.”

“Of course,” Hannah said briefly, something just off in her tone of voice. “They’re here.”

“What, Hannah?” I thought perhaps Gabe had said something about Matthew, and she was reacting to our being here alone. “Hannah, Cathy will be home from her rehearsal in a little while. Abby’s sleeping over at her grandma’s.”

“It’s not that, Julie. It’s…they’re all here. Caroline, too. She…wants to talk to you.” I caught my breath, and realized it was attempting to stay caught. Finally, I was able to gasp, “Not now. I can’t handle that right now.”

“She’s here with this boy.”

“I see.”

“Leo lets him sleep with her.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to,” I said, my brain cartwheeling. Caroline, fifteen years old, with a live-in lover. My little daughter, little in every sense, little feet, breasts, a waist I could almost still span with my hands. “How long has she been there?” I asked.

“Two days. He’s sleeping on the sofa. Decent boy. I mean, he says please and thank you. But Julieanne, I can’t and Gabe can’t stand this….”

“Of course not. Is…Gabe, my Gabe, okay?”

“He’s watching TV with Papa in the den. They didn’t say two words.”

“Well, maybe he should bring Rory home then.”

“Rory’s all over her. She couldn’t be happier.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s nothing I can’t deal with in the morning. If I can get my car out.”

“Okay,” Hannah said tentatively. She was seventy-eight years old. This was even more alien land for her than for me.

“It’s all right,” I told her. “I’ll come first thing.”

I put the phone down and turned back to Matt. “There’s a Quality Inn in the next few blocks, but you can stay here. I’ll make up Gabe’s bed with clean sheets.”

“Let me try to shovel a little. So you can get your car out tomorrow. Where’s your shovel?” I told him where to find it. Then I heard him laughing out there as I picked up Gabe’s socks and opened the window a little to get rid of the wet-dog smell of a teenage boy. I looked out, and the snow was feathering down.

“It weighs nothing,” he called over to me when I rapped on the window. “I haven’t shoveled snow in years. It’s fun. I feel as if I’m in a Frank Capra movie.”

“You have snow in Boston,” I said, handing him a towel as he came back inside.

“I have a long driveway. A guy plows. I have to get out of there early in the morning for surgery.” The moisture had turned his hair to ringlets. He was so…conventionally handsome. Just a big, cheerful New England guy. It had been so long. I had forgotten the oxygen a man takes up in a house.

“Do you mind if I shower?”

“No,” I said. “Do you mind if I do?”

I gave him a few towels and one of Gabe’s clean robes. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you pajamas. Leo’s would have been sizes too small, and I’m afraid I don’t have them anymore.”

“I don’t sleep in them, anyhow,” Matt said, and I felt another alien thrill, a thrum in my abdomen.

We both emerged half an hour later. Vain unto the end, I’d put on more mascara after drying my hair.

“Now, there you are,” Matt said, “the same girl I knew.”

“Hardly,” I told him. “But that’s nice.”

There was nothing left to do but for him to kiss me. I leaned deeply into the kiss, knowing there would be nothing but this, and perhaps only this for a very long time, perhaps always. As if it were a natural thing to do, he reached down and, with one movement, undid the belt on my robe.

“Not,” I said. “No.”

“Don’t worry,” said Matthew. He let his hand trail down my cheek to my neck and the outer edge of my breast, from my hip to the small of my back. “That’s all. I’m not going to ravage a snowbound woman.” He could have, then, and I would have let him.

But we both went off to our respective beds then, and cool as it was in the house, I kicked the covers off and stroked my own neck, which had already committed that touch to memory.

The telephone rang two mornings after Matthew’s visit. I hadn’t gone to Hannah’s to see Caroline after all, since Gabe had shown up within five minutes of Matt’s pulling out of the drive. Though nothing had happened, I had stripped all the beds and was washing sheets, and settling in with Cathy for a bout of good girl gossip. It was a few hours before I’d take my shot. Rory wanted to put on her bat costume, as she had every day for two weeks, and it was a good half hour before I could tell Gabe it had been fun talking to my old friend, how about that snow…and, by the way, how was your sister?

“She’s going to call,” he said, just as the phone went. “Let her tell you.” I picked up.

“Mom,” said a small, shy voice.

“Caroline,” I answered softly, my eyes spilling.

“I want to come and see you. I want you to meet the guy I’m living with, Dominico,” she said. “Is that okay?”

“Which part?” I asked. “Your coming to see me? Or your living with a boy. You’re just fifteen, Caro.”

“Cat,” she said.

“Sex is not for people who are fifteen, Cat,” I said.

“Mom, it’s natural. And Dad and Joy understand that,” she said.

“Come and see me by yourself. Ask Gramp to drive you. I have to take my shot and then we’ll have a cup of tea. Herbal, I promise. And we’ll talk, woman to woman.” There was a muffled series of squeaks and rustlings on the other end.

“Dominico says that if you can’t accept him, you can’t accept me,” Caroline said finally.

“I can accept him as your friend, and you’re my child. I’ll always accept you. But no, I can’t accept you as a person who’s making such a risky choice,” I said, holding the receiver with both hands to steady it. “First of all, are you using protection? And secondly, do you know how many other girls he’s…?”

“You can’t just come out and ask someone that, Mom,” Caroline said.

“Yes, you can. And you have to. You can get a virus just from fooling around, without having intercourse. You can get a virus that could hurt your baby if you ever have a baby, or hurt your brain. Human papilloma virus can lead to cancer of the cervix. This could have consequences that can last the rest of your life,” I told her.

“I know about all that.”

“Your emotions are way ahead of what your mind and body are ready for, Caro. I know that the desire is real—”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m one of your letter writers, Mom,” she said.

“I’m talking to you like a mother,” I said.

“Dad discussed all that with Dominico.”

“Oh. And Dad gave him your hand, huh?”

“Duh. So can we come?”

She was reaching out for me, my precious, my girl. My daughter whose first party dress and baby book were bound with a ribbon in a cedar box in my closet. The child who’d asked for an egg every morning of her life for five years, and who had once said to me that she loved me as much as “sunny-up” egg. Yes, she’d been Leo’s girl, more than mine. But she
was
mine! We’d washed angora sweaters one day, and Caroline, perhaps eight years old and trying to be Mommy’s helper, had dried them in the dryer. Even the zippers had shrunk. We couldn’t have fit them on her doll. If I didn’t see her, she’d be angry. She was a passionate kid. On the other hand, it would imply approval. Anxiety coursed through me like an electrical charge. “I wouldn’t do what you’re doing. It’s irresponsible,” I said, thinking of Matt’s long and yet carefully un-explicit caress down my naked body. “Even at my age, it would be irresponsible.” I watched Cath’s eyes for guidance, watched them fill with tears as she nodded. “This can’t be a long-term relationship, Caroline. You’ve been gone for only six months. Sex is for people who are committed to each other….”

“We are, Mom. He’s not seeing anyone else, anymore.”

“Please come and talk to me, Caroline. I love you. I want to see you.”

“I’ll only come with Dominico.”

“Then,” I said, fighting to keep the fracture of hurt from my voice, “you’d better not come this time. When are you leaving? Think about it. You could change your mind.”

“I won’t change my mind. This is why I left. You can’t understand anything that doesn’t go along with all your little rules. Neither can Gram or Gramp, and Gabe wouldn’t even shake hands with Dominico. You think you know all the answers, Mom.”

“No, I don’t! I just know that what you’re doing is wrong. It’s wrong by anyone’s standards. It’s…how old is Dominico?”

“Eighteen,” she said smugly.

“Then it’s also illegal.”

“I so care.”

“Well, I wouldn’t expect you to care. But he’s taking advantage of you. Your father is a lawyer, Caroline. He’s served as a guardian ad litem. Does he have shit for brains? You’re just a kid, Caro.”

“Thanks for always being so understanding, Mom,” Caroline said. “You always come through for me.”

“Caro…I mean, Cat, wait. Let me talk to both of you. You and Dominico.”

“We don’t need a newspaper writer who thinks she’s a therapist, Mom. If you hadn’t been so…so conceited about everything, Dad might have never left you in the first place.”

“Stop that! This has nothing to do with your father and me.”

“And now he has to work six days a week, Mom, because of you. Because you’re so poor and sick, and Gabe is such a helpless nerd. His whole life is turning out to be just what he never wanted, Mom. He’s doing
house closings,
and court-appointed defenses. All to make enough money so that you can still have your Kenneth Cole shoes…”

I couldn’t even wear my Kenneth Cole shoes anymore. The heels were so high I felt as though I were walking on tiny and torturous skyscrapers. “That’s wrong and cruel and you know it! Your dad has a responsibility to Rory, just as much as to you and…Amos and…what’s the baby’s name?”

“Scarlett.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“What, not WASPy enough for you, Mom?” Caro sneered. “What would you have named her? Gertrude or Matilda? You think everyone had to come over on the
Mayflower,
Mom.”

“You know I’m not like that. Nobody in my family came over on the
Mayflower,
” I said. This was a lie. My mother’s family roots were that deep in New England. “I’m not a snob. But even you said, when Rory was born, what’s with the name? Don’t you remember?”

“Well, I was wrong then. Rory? God. You changed her name and didn’t even tell Dad.”

“Uh, Dad had a baby and didn’t even tell me.”

“You’re so small-minded.”

“I can’t let you talk to me this way.”

“You can’t stand to hear the truth.”

“Maybe. Maybe I was small-minded. Maybe I didn’t see how badly your father wanted a change. Don’t you think I’ve thought about that thousands upon thousands of times? But I’m not small-minded. I’m being practical, Caroline.”

“That’s another thing I hate about you. It’s all, like, beige for you, Mom. Beige and little stationery with edges on it and thank-you notes and stockings that match your shoes.”

“Stop that. Nothing about this was my fault.”

“You can’t admit it was.”

“I could, if it were.” Could I? I thought. Should I have followed Leo to that place in the clearing he’d wanted, at first, for all of us? Given up my job and learned to put up preserves? Would that have spared the shattering of my family, Gabe’s bitterness, Rory’s fears and confusion? My own anguishing doubts?

“You could have had everything we have if you weren’t so uptight and, just, old-fashioned.”

“Maybe,” I said again, sadly. “But maybe I wouldn’t want what you have. Maybe I would never have been good at it. There’s only so much you can give up, Caroline, even for your marriage.”

“You didn’t even try! Dad’s told me! How hard he worked to make you see how stupid the life we had was!”

“I don’t think it was a stupid life. It just wasn’t the life he wanted. But, look, Caroline, it was the life he wanted once. He helped create it. He chose it.”

“Only because you never let him do anything the way he wanted. Everything had to be Julie’s way.”

“Caroline, just come and talk to me. Or, or meet me at the coffee place. We’ll sit together—” I was talking to a dead phone.

And I had been, all along.

Caroline needed to know she’d at least made the effort to see her poor, benighted mother. I don’t think she’d meant to come to my house at all. She just wanted to show off for her friends that she was a fully fledged sexual being. I put my face in my hands.

“Do you have an ouchie? Baby Bat will fix you,” Rory said to me, prying my fingers from the grate they’d made over my eyes. I pulled her onto my lap. She felt so fragile, as if her bones were hollow, just as Caroline had felt, all sticks and knobs.

“Mommy loves her Baby Bat,” I said to Rory.

“Is she coming?” Gabe asked from the door of my room.

“No.”

“Bet she wanted to bring the excellent hippie. He can’t string two words together without saying, ‘You see where I am, man?’ He’s a horse’s ass. I’m glad she’s not coming,” Gabe said.

“Gabe, that’s your sister. And she’s not the only person in the world ever to have made a lousy choice. Go look in the mirror.” Gabe made a parody of firing a gun, with his thumb and index finger.

“Bingo! Well, Ma, all I can tell you is, get ready to be a grandma. I wouldn’t have minded Caroline coming here, but him?”

“What?”

“I’d have killed him,” Gabe said. “He’s a slob and a user. He smells. Caroline must have inherited her taste in men—”

“Watch it,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I still love your father,” I said. “I don’t regret that we had you guys, and there was a lot we had going for us, once, Gabe.”

“Or so you thought.”

“Or so I thought.”

The phone rang again, and it was Matthew. This time, I picked up when I heard his voice on the recorder.

“Julieanne!” he said, “I have to scrub in, in about five minutes, but I had to ask you, are you avoiding me? Did I step out of line?”

“No, you were the perfect gentleman, in a sense,” I said. “I just don’t know if I can have feelings for anyone but Leo. At least, not yet.”

“So you still have feelings for Leo?”

“Don’t you still have feelings for the woman you loved just a little while back? And Suzie?”

“I have feelings about the time we spent together. Not about them, as individuals. That’s what I came up with last night, after we talked. That chapter is closed. You can’t make your whole life a shrine to the past, Julie.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Well.”

“I’m glad you called.”

“But you don’t want to see me again. Really see me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Not now.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “That would depend on what your expectations were.”

“That would depend on what you wanted me to hope for,” Matt said. “Julie, I have to go. But I wanted to ask you, do you know you were the first girl I ever kissed? When you were elected class president?” I’d forgotten. But now, I thought I could remember. Sweet, Doublemint-smelling breath. Tightly closed lips. My back against the wall of the library extension at school.

“I remember, now,” I said.

“Well, I waited twenty-five years to do it again, Julie. All through high school. All through college. Until I met Suzie…”

“Do you think you’re just wishing yourself back to a time when you didn’t know that all good things, all innocent things, are spoiled in the end?”

“But that isn’t true, Julie!” he said, and I heard him tell someone he’d be right with her. “Not all things that stay with you all your life, and my memory of you stayed with me all my life, are just because you were a kid and foolish. Sometimes they stay with you because they mattered.”

“You’re a romantic. You have to pardon me if I can’t be one right now.”

“Julie, let me come and see you again….”

“I don’t know if that’s such a hot idea.”

“Let me come and then we’ll decide. No pressure.” Cathy was nodding. Yes. Shrugging. Why not?

“Even your asking to come is pressure,” I said.

“Well, okay, then.”

I heard myself say, “Well, okay then.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, come and see me. When? After Christmas?”

“I was thinking, ah, Saturday,” he said.