Circle of Three (22 page)

We were in a restaurant called the Purple Dog having lunch (grilled pita goat cheese pizza for me, turkey sandwich for Gram) and there was this lady in the booth across from us. By herself. About twenty-eight, I guessed, no older. She had long shiny black hair pulled back in a barrette, down to about her shoulder blades, just straight back, no bangs or anything. She had small silver cluster earrings and a ring, a thin silver band, on the middle finger of her left hand, and no other jewelry. She had on gray slacks, like boot pants, and a black sweater, maybe cashmere. Black two-inch platform shoes, not leather but the stretch fabric kind. She’d already eaten, so she was just having coffee. And she was reading a book, but I couldn’t see the title. A paperback with a really tasteful cover, not like a romance or anything. Once she pulled her sweater sleeve up, and I saw her bracelet tattoo. Tiny, just little blue links exactly like a delicate chain bracelet, all the way around her wrist. And when she got up, she put on a cloak, not a coat, with this graceful, floppy hood in back, and she had no purse, she just took money out of her pocket to pay.

She left. Gram said, “What’s wrong with you?” and I said, “Nothing,” but I don’t know, I had this feeling. Worse than just how pathetic my life is, worse than, Here I am in this totally cool restaurant in Georgetown with my grandmother. It was like, Well, I might as well be dead. I’ll never have what I want because I don’t even know what I want. I look out at
the people walking by on the sidewalk and think, Am I like her? Her? Who am I like and when will I know? When will I grow into myself? Ever? I love my new hat, but it’s just not enough. If I had everything the black-haired lady has, it wouldn’t be enough either. You have to know who you are on the inside before you can start decorating yourself, and in my case, there’s nobody home, just ghosts going, “Hello? Anything happening?” Nobody can even see me.

“How’s that boy you like? That Raven,” Gram said deliberately—trying to make up for the time she called him Herring. “Is he still in the picture?”

“He’s just a friend, Gram, I never said I
liked
him.” I didn’t mention he got suspended for three days last week for bringing his bull snake, Rocky Horror, to school. He said it was to show that the vast pet kingdom is wider than servile and obsequious dogs and cats, but I think it was just to scare girls.

“Oh, I see.” She looked like she didn’t believe me. Well, I don’t know if I was telling the truth or not, because I haven’t figured out what I think of Raven. I think if he’s ever going to he should’ve asked me out on a regular date by now. Does he think I go around kissing guys in graveyards all the time? Ever since it happened he’s been acting like it didn’t. Fine by me, it’s not like the earth moved or anything, I mean, big effing deal. I just think it’s stupid to pretend something didn’t happen when it did. It hurts people’s feelings. It makes people feel like they don’t exist.

“Want dessert?” Gram said. I hemmed and hawed a while, “Oh, I don’t know, do you?” until she called the waitress over and told her we’d have two mousse fudge brownie cakes with vanilla ice cream and one cup of coffee.

I studied Gram, trying to look at her through the eyes of a stranger. Like, did she look like my faculty advisor? I could be a Georgetown student and she could be my art history teacher or my Victorian lit professor. She was trying to get to know me better because I exhibited much promise in one so young. She didn’t have lunch on a Saturday with students
very often, in fact never, but she was making an exception in my case. She wanted me to cowrite an important scholarly article with her, and she was trying to charm me because she was afraid I might transfer to a superior department at Columbia University.

If it weren’t for her clothes, which are always too dressy and colorful and prissy, too Clayborne Women’s Club, Gram really could look like a college professor. She wears her gray hair pulled back in a loose bun, no part, no bangs, but it’s not as bad as it sounds, in fact it suits her. She’s getting saggy in the face, but she’s still pretty. Well, “handsome,” that’s a better word; she reminds me of a picture I saw at the museum by somebody, maybe Picasso, of Gertrude Stein, only Gram is thinner and grayer. But she still has that sort of rock solidness or something, like she can’t be moved. And she’s still got really good legs. She always says all three of us Danziger women, her, Mom, and me, have the same great legs. It’s sort of a family saying.

She signaled the waitress for our check. “Your mother tells me she’s been spending a little time over at Jess Deeping’s,” she said.

“A
little
. She’s over there constantly.”

“Is that right. How often?”

“At least one night a week, and always one weekend day, half day, I guess, morning or afternoon.” It didn’t sound like that much when I said it. It felt like much more.

Gram pursed her lips and shook her head. “Ridiculous.”

“I know, it’s so ridiculous!”

“I don’t know what she’s thinking.”

“I know! It was okay when she was making the stupid flower arrangements, at least she was home, but now she’s
never
home.”

“It’s irresponsible.” She blotted her lips with her napkin and said casually, “Has she had any more evenings out with Brian?”

“
No
, Gram.” We agreed on everything about the ark, how dumb and embarrassing it was, but we didn’t agree on Mr.
Wright. When I told her Mom went out on a date with him, she was
glad
. I couldn’t believe it!

“Does she talk about him? What does she say?”

“Nothing, Gram, she doesn’t say anything. She used to, but not anymore.” Not since their date. She’s probably in love with him and doesn’t want me to know. Nah, but there must be some reason she hardly says his name anymore. “She likes Chris a lot,” I said. “They’re getting to be pretty good friends.”

“Mm,” Gram said, not interested.

I switched back to the subject we were together on. “I just don’t get these animals, you know? There’s so many things Mom could be doing around the house. Like the downstairs powder room, she’s been saying forever that that’s the next project, and after that, redoing the side porch. Doesn’t charity begin at home?”

Gram laughed, as if I’d said something funny—like I was a child and I’d said something inappropriate but almost grown-up. Well,
doesn’t
charity begin at home? I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect your widowed mother to stay herself for a decent length of time, her same
old
self. That seems like common sense to me, regular human decency. You don’t rock the boat, you don’t go out and change your whole life, no, you try to provide stability for your loved ones. I.e., me.

So what did Mom do that afternoon while she was out with her old college pal? She got her hair cut! It looked okay, it looked pretty good, actually, after I got over the shock of how short it was, but I couldn’t help wondering if she’d done it for Mr. Wright. I’m not saying she has to be single the rest of her life. She’s not that old. I don’t mind if she gets married again someday, like five or ten years from now or so. Everybody needs companionship, and anyway, by then I’ll be long gone.

That night we had dinner in a Vietnamese restaurant near the hotel. I thought it would be a good time to ask Gram what everybody in our family died of. You have to put that
down on medical forms when you go to the doctor, for one thing, plus it’s just good to know your genetic predispositions. Krystal says heredity is way overrated, and I’m sure that’s true. Still, you should know what’s behind you so you can be prepared for what might be ahead of you.

Turns out we’re riddled with diseases and conditions, especially on the Danziger side. On the Van Allen side, Dad’s father had a heart attack, which was news to me, but his mother was killed in a car accident when he was eight, so only one disease there, and afterward he went to live with his grandparents, who were old even then, and they died of old age when he was about twenty. So that side’s not too bad. But Mom’s side, God, they had everything. Gram’s father, my Great Grandfather O’Hara, who I never met, had diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver, Grandmother O’Hara had a stroke, Gram’s brother Ralph had phlebitis, glaucoma, gout, and sciatica, and she thinks he died of blood poisoning, and her brother Walter had eczema and an ulcer and died of pneumonia. Meanwhile my grandfather’s father had prostate cancer and his mother had lung cancer from smoking since she was thirteen. His brother, my great uncle Edgar, had epilepsy and a stroke, and his sister Fan is still alive but she has anemia and cataracts.

God! I mean, it’s a wonder the ones who are left have the nerve to go outside! Right now I myself have a sore knee, for example, plus I have motes in my eyes. (Not always; sometimes.) I’m not saying it’s rheumatoid arthritis, and I’m not saying it’s macular degeneration. But it could be, it’s certainly possible, and I just think it pays to be aware and take precautions. Sometimes my heart beats too slowly, I can hardly feel my pulse, it’s like it’s disappearing. Do I do nothing? No. Do I do something? Yes, I take arjuna, 500 milligrams two times a day—Krystal gives me a discount—and I do the “thumb walk” every night on the ball of my left foot, which is the reflex point for heart disease. So at least I have some peace of mind. Because you can be going along thinking all’s well, that little cough is just a cold, and
whammo
,
turns out your immune system’s breaking down. You’ve got AIDS, you’ve got leukemia, you’ve got Lou Gehrig’s disease. My dad—he felt fine until all of a sudden. Because he had no idea. He wasn’t thinking. We can control a lot of things with our minds, but first we have to
know
. That’s the trick. We have to be aware.

So that’s what I’m doing, just trying to be aware of everything. Like, sometimes a little muscle under my eye twitches. It could be an early sign of a brain tumor, or it could be Parkinson’s. Or it could be nothing. Time will tell. The important thing is that I know about it, it can’t sneak up on me. Because I am vigilant.

“Y
OUR DAUGHTER WANTS
a tattoo.”

“I know. Is she asleep?”

“Just about.” Mama closed the outer of the two doors to the bedroom and padded over in her bedroom slippers. “With her eyes open. What does she write in that journal? I went to kiss her good night, and she covered it up like it was the atom bomb formula.”

What was it I said the other day that had gotten such a disgusted rise out of Ruth? I couldn’t remember; some outdated expression, though, like “atom bomb formula.” Her scorn had known no bounds. I’d felt her hate—there was really no other word. It hurt me, probably too much. I knew, I really did understand that for Ruth right now I was the target, the designated punching bag, if only because there was no one else for her to hit out at. But it still hurt. Had I given my mother pain like that? I must have. Not in the same way, I didn’t think, not with such undisguised callousness. I’d hidden my adolescent contempt more cleverly than Ruth did. More charitably? Probably just more fearfully.

Mama groaned under her breath and lowered herself onto the sofa, putting her feet up on the coffee table. “She wants a silver ring and a cloak, too, she’s decided. She wants to start
drinking coffee. When did you start drinking coffee?”

“I don’t remember. College, I think. She loves her new hat—thank you for buying that for her, Mama.”

“She looks adorable in it. You’re going to have trouble with this tattoo thing, though.” She leaned over to massage the toes of her right foot. “She’s even trying to get me on her side. Fat chance. Of all the tacky fads!”

“I just want her to get through high school without having anything pierced, burned, or branded.”

“Lots of luck. See if there’s some juice in the refrigerator, will you? I don’t know why, but I feel weakish.”

“You shouldn’t have let her run you around like that,” I said guiltily. I found a bottle of orange juice and poured it in a glass. “Here. Want some peanuts?”

“She didn’t run me around, not one bit. She was an absolute angel. Carrie, I can’t get over your hair. I guess it suits you, but it’s so
different
.”

“I know.” I leaned over to see myself in the mirror behind the couch. “I don’t know why I did it—I wasn’t planning on it. Pure impulse.”

“And with a complete unknown, that’s what gets me. You could’ve been scalped!”

I could’ve been. But Mr. Harold had done right by me—I hoped. “I’m too old for long hair,” I’d told him, hoping he would disagree. He had, but only politely, then he’d proceeded to whack off my hair—which I’d been wearing in a braid down my back—to about collar length. “Volume,” he kept saying, “you need more volume. More spatial extension.” Now I couldn’t stop looking at myself. I felt naked and fascinating. Voluminous.

“What possessed you? I didn’t even know you were thinking about cutting it.”

“Do you hate it?”

“No, it’s cute. Really. Makes you look young.”

That’s what Ruth had said, only with a suspicious glint in her eye. “I guess it was seeing Barbara today,” I told Mama, sitting down again, putting my feet up next to hers. “She’s
even older than I am, half a year or something, but she looks terrific. You should see her.”

“Have I ever met Barbara?”

“She came home with me in junior year for spring break. Blonde hair, really attractive? She had a boyfriend who called late every night—”

“Oh, I remember. He was a law student at Georgetown. Did she marry him?”

“No.”

“Too bad.”

“She married a doctor.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“But they split up.
Then
she married a lawyer.”

“Oh.” Doctors and lawyers were good; divorce was bad. Mama tapped her lips, in a quandary.

“Now she has three kids and a rich husband, a house in Chevy Chase, and a cleaning lady. And a golf habit.”

“You envy her.”

“Well, not the golf habit. Maybe the cleaning lady.” I laughed, but she just looked at me. “Well, sure, Mama, in a way. Her husband’s alive. Her youngest child is four and a half, so he still needs her. He even still
likes
her.”

She patted me on the hand. “You’re still in mourning for Stephen, that’s all that’s wrong with your life. Things will get better, it just takes time. It does, I can’t help it if that’s a cliché. And you’ve got a good job now, interesting work, new friends.”

“I know, I’m all right—I didn’t mean to sound like I’m miserable. I’m not.”

“You still have to go through the process, that’s all. You can’t skip steps when you’re grieving, much as you might like to.”

Odd advice coming from Mama, even if she’d just read it in a women’s magazine. What was her motive in telling me I wasn’t through grieving for Stephen? “Ruth said something that struck me the other day,” I said deliberately. “She said
that life without her father isn’t that different from the way it was before we lost him.”

“Oh, I can’t believe she meant that. Not that way. What did you say?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe I didn’t say anything.”

“Well, it isn’t true, of course.”

“It is, though.” For once, I wasn’t going to let her tell me what my life was like. “It is, in a way. Our family—Stephen was the shadowy one. He was barely there, Mama. The
family
was Ruth and me, we were the—the noisiest or something. We did everything and he…observed and critiqued. That’s it. He observed and critiqued.”

“Oh, but he loved both of you very much.”

“Well.” Something else it was time to set straight. “He loved us as much as he could.”

“Yes. Yes, he did.” She set her glass down with a sharp click.

“It’s true, I miss him sometimes, I feel forsaken and hurt and lonely, but—the thing is, Mama, I felt that way before I lost him.”

She stood up. “Everybody’s lonely,” she said shortly, and walked out of the room.

Well, well, so much for candor. Press the wrong button and your frank mother-daughter conversation flew out the window. And yet I was
sure
one of the reasons she’d suggested this weekend was so that we could talk, really try to be close again. I wanted it, too, but my expectations were more modest. I knew my mother: she wanted our old, easy friendship back, but only on her terms. She wanted everything to be the way it was twenty-five years ago. When I was her best friend. Before I went away to college and got all those ideas that didn’t agree with hers. The good old days.

Barbara had talked a lot about her mother this afternoon. I remembered Mrs. Cavanaugh well, a vivacious, red-haired widow, wild about golf, youthful, full of life. At twenty, I
was envious because Barbara’s mother was so young and cool. “I’ve lost my best friend,” she told me today, teary-eyed over the second glass of wine. “I miss her every day, Carrie. I could tell her things I couldn’t tell anyone else in the world.” I could hardly imagine it. “Not that she didn’t drive me absolutely crazy,” she said, “in fact, nobody did it better. The funny part is, I’m getting more like her every day. Isn’t that a good joke? If we live long enough, we turn into the person who gave us the most grief, the one we tried so hard to separate from. I just think that’s hilarious.”

Oh, yeah, delicious, hilarious irony. While we shuddered in horror, we drew closer and closer to the object of our revulsion, finally fated to understand her. To
be
her. The punishment and the reward all in one.

The toilet flushed; water ran. Mama came out of the bathroom and crossed the room to where her suitcase lay open on the floor beside the sofa. She squatted over it and pulled out her nightgown.

I started to get up. “I didn’t think it was so late. You’re probably exhau—”

“Stay, sit, sit, I’m not tired. I just want to get out of this dress.”

I’d forgotten her trick of taking off or putting on clothes without showing any skin. The dress was unzipped and pulled off the shoulders, bra modestly removed with the back turned, flannel nightgown donned over the head, then dress, half-slip, girdle, and stockings pulled down from underneath. The brief flash of my mother’s pale, fleshy back, soft and sagging where it used to be firm, gave me a tender, hollow feeling. Protective. I didn’t want life to teach her any more hard lessons. If it meant she was happy, I wanted her to stay exactly as willful, overbearing, and controlling as she was right now. How long would that resolve last, though? Another five minutes?

She sat down beside me, opened a jar of cold cream—Jergens; the flowery scent smelled as old as time—and began to
smear it over her cheeks. “I’m not so sure I should’ve told Ruth about her great-grandfather,” she said.

I knew what she meant, but I said, “Told her what about her great-grandfather? Which one?”

“My father.”

“Oh—you mean about the cirrhosis?”

“She probably can’t make the connection now, but she will eventually. Between liver disease and alcoholism,” she explained, a little testily, when I continued to look blank. “You know your grandfather was a drunk.”

“Well.” I did and I didn’t. Mama had never said it like that before:
a drunk
. But I had speculated. I’d known something wasn’t right about Grampa O’Hara—whom we never went to see, although he only lived an hour away in Nelson County. On a farm. Some sort of tenant farm, apparently, that she could never mention, and so she rarely did, without a visible tremor of disgust. The fact that she was saying these things now put me on the alert.

“And he wasn’t the only one. Ralph drank, too, and Walter was heading that way before he died.”

“I didn’t know that. Did I ever meet Uncle Ralph?”

“You were too little to remember. We only took you out there to see them once.” The way she said
them
—it was the way she always spoke of her family, coldly, unsympathetically. “I couldn’t wait to get out of that house.”

“You left when you were eighteen.” I knew this story. She’d gotten a job at an auto repair shop on Ridge Street in Clayborne. Pop was a student at Remington. They courted for two years, and married each other a week after he got his part-time instructor appointment.

“Seventeen. I’ve always said eighteen. Doesn’t sound as tacky.” She took a wad of clean tissues out of her robe pocket and began to wipe cold cream off her face. Softening, wrinkling old face, skin drooping at the strong jaws. She didn’t look as sure of everything as she used to. The thing I disliked most about my mother was her bossiness, but if she
lost that, who would she be? A diminished woman, not a new one. I didn’t want that. I didn’t know what I wanted.

“Seventeen?” I laughed. “You never told me that.”

“I never told you my father and my brothers were moonshiners, either. And if you ever tell that to another living soul, I’ll skin you alive.”

“Mama!”

“Hush, you’ll wake up Ruth.”

I stared. “Moonshiners,” I said in a thrilled whisper.

“Not even good ones. They drank up most of the product before they could sell it. We were dirt poor. I hated everything about my life. Nobody abused me—nothing like that, that’s not what I mean. But they were nasty, loud, dirty men, wild men, and my mama just took it. She had about as much backbone as a crawfish. I got out. I got out and made something of myself.”

I almost smiled, amazing as these revelations were. She didn’t look very fierce in the old pink quilted robe, her face stripped of makeup. She didn’t look very self-made. What she looked like—I’d have died before telling her—was the woman in old photographs of Grandma O’Hara.

“What do you mean, they were wild men?”

“Not abusive,” she said again, “not in a physical way. They yelled all the time, drunk or sober. Everything revolved around them, they were the kings and my mama was their servant. So was I till I got out. I can tell you I never looked back.”

“So you came to the big city, and Pop swept you off your feet.”

“Swept me off my feet.” She snorted. She closed the cold cream jar, wiped her hands with the last tissue, set everything aside on the coffee table. “I wanted a man who couldn’t hurt me or change me. I wanted marriage because I thought it would keep me safe, but the last thing I wanted in a husband was gumption.”

Gumption? She hadn’t said anything I didn’t know, but
still, I felt defensive on Pop’s behalf. “So you never really loved him?” I wanted a hot, stinging denial—I didn’t care if it was true or not.

“I admired him. I loved it that he wasn’t a country boy. He was a scholar—
that
swept me off my feet. He was probably poorer than I was in those days, but he always wore a suit and a tie. You could never, ever understand what that meant to me.”

“So you never—”

“I
learned
to love him. Your father is a fine man, he has plenty of good qualities, he most certainly does. A solid marriage comes along when both parties know what they want and aren’t blinded by—”She waved her hand dismissively. “Extraneous things.”

“Like what?”

“Unimportant details. Things that don’t last.”

Excitement, sex, chemistry, good looks—was that what she meant? What if she meant love? And I had an idea what this conversation was really about. Jess.

“You said you were lonely,” she went on, fastening the top button of her robe. “I’m saying I just don’t think it’s that rare, that remarkable. Everybody’s lonely. A man can’t make you happy.”

“I know that.”

“You have to make your own happiness after you’ve picked as wisely as you can. You have to weigh things like compatibility, good blood, having the same goals—”

“Good blood?”

“Nobody has a perfect marriage, honey. Yours and Stephen’s was as good as most.”

“How do you know?”

“I observed. And mother knows best,” she said, laughing quickly, making it a joke. “Never forget that.”

I smiled back grimly. “Did you know I used to see a therapist when we lived in Chicago?” Of course she didn’t know, I’d never told her. “One time he said to me, ‘All my
women clients come to me to talk about Mommy. But do you know, after a while it almost always turns out she’s not the problem. It’s Daddy.’”

We watched each other.

“About a year ago, Ruth said something. Just a casual remark, but it struck me. Stephen was in his study with the door closed—as usual. She wanted to tell him something, show him something, I don’t remember anymore, and she was complaining to me because he wasn’t available. She called him ‘the Invisible Man.’ And I remembered—that’s what I used to call Pop when I was a kid. To myself. I’d seen the movie, I guess, and that’s what I started to call him. The Invisible Man.”