Glitter and Glue (20 page)

After he’s told me enough about his Bette, we drift into the
population problem, and that leads us to his best mate’s widow, a former activist named Dove. He worries about her something terrible. “She’s all alone.” I tell him he should take her out for lunch, and he laughs and says Ellie used to say the same thing. We talk about the Olympics, cricket, and U.S. football. He can’t remember what our big contest is—the Super Cup?—and I say, Close: Super
Bowl
. I tell him how Eugenia Brown fired me. We talk about tennis and hiking in the Blue Mountains and how I almost had to be brought out on a stretcher and I say I really need to do some Jazzercise.

“Ellie used to do that jumping around. She and all the ladies around town,” he says, shaking his head, imagining his daughter and her girlfriends grapevining. “She had so many leotards. I must’ve washed one every day.”

“Kept you busy—”

“Kept herself busy is right,” he says, not quite hearing me. “Always up to something.”

“Did she work?”

“No. Not in a job.”

“My mom liked to say she never knew a woman who didn’t work
all damn day
,” I reply, yoking my mom to his daughter, and not for the first time.

We talk about his recliner; it doesn’t work anymore. I tell him my plan to dye my clothes and he says he’ll find me a bucket, he thinks they have a tub in the garage, but we keep sliding back to his daughter. He’s got another picture to show me. He’s going to go get it.

I top off my wine.

What a terrible mistake I’ve made, leaving Pop in his room to rest himself to death while I sat in this house “alone.” He could have been my guide. He would have told me anything,
everything. I need to write Libby and Slug more, and visit them as soon as I get home.

“Here it is!” he says from inside his room.

I head in, crossing into his space. “Show me.”

He turns his head. “This is Ellen with her mum.”

“Look at those two.”

“Look at those two is right!” he says, putting his hand on my shoulder.

“Wait. I found a picture of you and Ellen—” I leave him for a moment while I dash into the living room. “Here!” I call. “How about this one?” I hand it to him in the hallway, where we meet.

“Ah, oh, yes.” He has tears in his voice. “That’s her exactly. That’s my girl,” he says, using my father’s phrasing.

After letting Pop live in that image for another moment, I say, “I hope I’ve done an all-right job around here.”

“I’ll tell you one thing. This is the happiest Evan’s been in a long time.” Old people and their hyper-calibrated radar. They can’t hear a word, and they can barely get out of their chairs, but they’ve got six or seven other senses, scanning, collecting, decoding.

“Oh, wow, okay, that’s good.”

“Well, dear,” he says, looking from his clean plate to his watch, “I’m out past curfew.”

“Of course. I’m so glad we did this.”

He kisses me on the forehead. “Me, too, dearie.”

I go into my room and drop onto the bed and before I know what’s happening, I’m crying. I’m crying because up until the other night, I half thought I’d misread the Evan thing, or made it all up, and now I understand that it’s been real and palpable the whole time and I made someone happier than he’s been
in a
long time
, and that feels giant, epic. And I cry because I wish I could have given this family more than I have, something meaningful and lasting, more than just walking with them through Wonderland, the Blue Mountains, the Avoca Caravan Park, more than just letting them show me pictures and tell me stories, something as big and important as what they’ve given me. I fall back on my bed, thinking about my mom and the things we have and have not been able to give each other, yet, and I hug my pillow like I used to hug hers, the one that smelled just like her, a heady mix of face powder, Final Net, and hand cream.

Big date with Evan today. I’m trying to make myself look decent, but Milly borrowed my good horsehair brush that I spent a day’s pay on, and I haven’t seen it since. I look through all my stuff, out back near the pool, in the loo.

“Milly—” I call. “Milly, have you seen my hairbrush?” She comes to my door, the picture of anxiety. “I need to dry my hair. See how bad it looks.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Do you know where it might be?”

“No. Why don’t you wear your pretty cap?” she suggests, pointing to the sequined elephant hat I bought in Thailand.

“Maybe.” While I pull on the madras pants I bought at the Glebe Markets with my newly lavender sweatshirt that matches perfectly, Milly disappears and returns, announcing that she JUST SAW the hairbrush. In my bathroom, of all places. “Where are you going, anyway?”

“Uh, out with Evan. To run errands.”

Eventually, Evan shows up wearing his jeans with a button-down shirt you’d buy at a camping store, the fast-drying kind you can wash in a river, and holding three roses.

“Hi, Ev. Doesn’t Keely look very special in her purple clothes?” Milly says, making nice.

“She does.”

“Hey, Milly, I think Ev brought you flowers,” I preempt, looking to Evan apologetically.

“Oh, thank you!” she says in a
Who … me?
voice, accepting the tiny bouquet like a Broadway diva.

Evan grins. “You’re welcome.”

As we head down the street to the train station, Evan says he saw my jeans on the line, and he thinks they turned out well.

“Me, too. I feel like I have a whole new wardrobe. Did you see I turned Pop’s skivvies pink?”

“He showed me.”

“I felt awful. I rinsed everything in the bucket like ten times before I put it in the dryer. Was he mad?”

Evan laughs. “No. Not after your dinner together.”

“Yeah, well, we’re dating now.”

“Ha! I knew he was moving in.”

“So, I finally got a picture from home of my family.” I slide it out of my pocket and hand it over. He smiles.

“Classic. You guys are so American,” Evan says, referring to some defining feature evident even in this wide-shot photo.

“Really?” We can go as far away as we want—as far as we can get—and an outsider can take one look at us and know our originating longitude and latitude. “Definitely. Look at those choppers: totally American.”

“My parents paid a lot of money for those teeth.”

He laughs and looks down at the photo again. “I always wondered what it would be like to have a totally normal life—with one family the whole time.”

“Oh—”

“No, I mean, it’s no big deal. Just, I wonder sometimes. Anyway, this museum is really cool. We can start with the Australian artists.”

In the first gallery, we walk through the super-modern work of John Olson, whose paintings look like they were done quickly with loud music playing. “Strings,” Evan suggests. The walls are so white, you can hardly make out the ceiling from the floor. Evan stands in the middle of it all, talking more than he ever has. This artist was a rebel, this one was a recluse, this one started a colony that’s still active today. Out of the house, on his own terms, with a girl he kissed for a long time in the kitchen, he seems like more than a boy who lost his mom. He seems like a whole person.

After the museum, we make our way to the royal gardens. We don’t hold hands, but every so often we brush against each other deliberately, by releasing our balance. We pass seniors on benches and young couples sitting close on blankets in the grass. I’m trying to figure out how to become one of them when Ev says, “I really wish you could meet her,” and I snap to, knowing immediately who he means by
her
, feeling her presence like a sudden wind.

“Me, too. I’ve thought about meeting her.” And then I blurt out, “I don’t know how you stand it, her being gone.”

We walk a few steps in silence before he explains that some times are worse than others. “Like the first time we played chess. And I saw an envelope addressed to your mum.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“No, no. Don’t be sorry. Everyone can’t be sorry for having a mum. That’s one thing I’ve sorted out.” We go a little farther. “Anyway, I just think you would’ve liked my mum. And she’d have really liked you.”

Although I can stop the tears from running down my face, I can’t stop them from filling my eyes, so I look down and so does he, and I’m sorry I don’t have the composure to ask him to
tell me everything he can remember about his mum for as long as it takes. But I think that’s all he needed to say.
She’d have really liked you
.

Over sausage rolls at the cake shop, he retreats from the tender ground of his mother to the nonsense of
Santa Barbara
. We have to wean ourselves,
pathetic the hours we’ve squandered
, but by the time we’re finished eating we decide we’re in too deep now, we must find out once and for all who did what to Eden. When Evan says he’s 100 percent sure it was the doctor, I can hear his disdain for the whole lot of them. He’s like Cruz that way.

As we leave the shop, Evan says, “Those rolls were good—nice and moist,” and I grimace.

“You can’t say that word. Everyone hates that word.”

He laughs so hard. “Any others?”

“I always thought
panties
was kinda creepy. You?”

“Panties?”

“NO! Words you don’t like.”

“Ah, no. I don’t think so. Well … brace yourself.”

“Hit me.”

“No, those are the words I hate.
Brace yourself
. I hate it when people say,
Brace yourself
. It’s like,
Why? Because that will make it better?
”

I promise him I will never say that, referring to the future, even though tomorrow this will all be over, and our knowing each other will begin the long slow process of calcification, Evan remembering it his way, me mine
—an American girl who lived with us … a boy I once knew
—just like in my book. Jim named his recollections of Ántonia “My Ántonia” not to show romantic possession, but because he understood that
his
Ántonia
was only one version of her and, at least partially, his creation.

“Let’s go to the pub. I’ll teach you to play Spit,” I say, relaxed by the fact of our futureless situation.

We find an open table at Jackson’s, and I pull a deck of cards out of my Thai backpack.

“That’s really cool.” Evan likes the way I shuffle.

“I’ve been trying to teach the kids. We played a lot of cards growing up. My mom’s a real shark.”

“You miss her?” he asks.

“Yeah, I do, a little.” It feels good to feel that, and I wonder if I can remember it once my mother and I are in the same country, town, kitchen.

After four pints each, we board the train for Lewiston. Sixty-four ounces of high-alcohol-content lager: That’s what it takes for Evan to put his arm around me as the train rattles along. After he steps off the train, he turns around and holds out his hand. I take it, and we don’t let go. When we can see the orange porch from a couple of houses away, he stops and kisses me and I kiss him back and we stand on the sidewalk doing that for a long time and it is totally fucking awesome.

Mothers are everywhere. Blame evolution. Or Freud. Or the network executives who can’t stop re-creating June Cleaver and the greeting-card executives who can’t stop promoting Mother’s Day. Blame mother-of-pearl, Mother May I?, or that camp song that starts “Hello Muddah.” Blame Disney’s stable of stepmothers and godmothers and dead mothers. Blame the Old Lady in the Shoe and her teeming brood or Joan Crawford or Madonna. Blame Mothers Goose and Hubbard, Superior and Teresa. Blame Mr. Mom or the Queen Mum. Blame the metaphor-makers for Mother Tongue, Mother Nature, Mother Lode, Mother Ship, Mother Earth. Pin it on whoever you want, but let me tell you, it’s not easy to get from sunup to sundown in this world without bumping up against a mother-something.

Except at the Tanners’. Apart from the other day with Martin and a few short conversations with Evan, here we steer clear of explicit mentions. In fact, I’ve sidestepped the word at every turn, even avoiding seemingly unrelated topics like kangaroos, because the minute you start talking kangaroos, someone mentions those cute little joeys riding around in mummy’s pouch, and
zzt
, you’ve tripped the wire. So after five months, I know only a touch more about their mother than I did on day one. She made soup from scratch and colored her hair, she had a failed marriage and two sets of children, she did Jazzercise and would have liked me.