Glitter and Glue (7 page)

Whatever her reasons, my dad was not told about the Sears episode. He could still run around town waving my flag, bragging about his “Lovey,” his “superstar” who played lacrosse in the spring and field hockey in the fall. Only my mother knew I hated sports and worse, much much worse, that I was morally defective. Because only she could handle it.

The morning after Kings Cross, Tracy and I are so hungover we keep my room pitch-black all morning, only letting light in when we leave to use the toilet and take some Tylenol. I’d give up a month of my life for two Alka-Seltzer.

Around one, I pull myself out of bed and stretch, feeling like I’m fifty years old. I can hear John out back, sanding. Evan and Pop are wherever Evan and Pop usually are. Tracy’s in the TV room, reading about the election back home. Apparently, the governor of Arkansas just won a primary, but nobody takes him seriously. I mean, he’s from Arkansas.

Things are churning and spoiling inside me and my head aches for hydration. Milly, who seems able to see my hangover, is jamming
Beauty and the Beast
into the video player.

“Need some help?” I ask, wincing at the sounds.

“No.”

She turns to make sure I’m looking when the tape is sucked into the plastic mouth of the machine. Not for the first time, Milly reminds me of my mom, who likes to do things the way she does them, often ass-backwards.
Oh, wait till you get old
, my mother warns when I start to
interfere
. But it’s hard to watch someone struggle with a testy machine, a sticky door, a heavy suitcase, much less listen to them cough or cry. People want to help, and the more we’ve seen and heard and done, the more useful we are, and this is why even the tiniest show of stoicism, in little girls and grown women, makes me mad. It makes us useless to each other.

Martin pops up and pats the cushion. “Sit here, Keely.”

The seat is warm. Martin climbs into my lap with the dingy blanket that he loves and a lumpy pillow that he knuckles the corners of. I don’t remember ever watching a movie in my mom’s lap. Snuggling is not her speed, and
Tell me, who has time to sit?
Personally, I can think of nothing better, nothing more curative, than tangling up with a kid.

Milly settles into her seat while Tracy brews a pot of coffee in the kitchen. “You all right in there, Kel?”

“My head—”

“Are you sick?” Martin asks.

Milly turns to look at me.

I stop myself from saying what I’ve said about a hundred hangovers before—my head is killing me.

As the movie begins, Martin turns around and kisses me on the lips.

“Oh!” I say, overcome.

Milly rolls her eyes. I see her point. I can’t imagine, now or as a kid, kissing any woman other than my mother, especially on the lips: now because it seems the exclusive right of the woman who raised you, then because it would have been gross.
I send off a silent apology to Ellen Tanner. Though I suppose if she can see us, it’s possible that she doesn’t mind. In fact, maybe she’s euphoric, crying with relief that her son isn’t hiding under his bed in the fetal position waiting for her—only her—to coax him back out into the world. Maybe Milly’s resistance is what undoes her.

Tracy and I are happily staying in tonight with the kids because John has “plans,” unspecified, as usual. Maybe, if Ev hears John’s car pull away, he’ll come in.

Milly and Martin are on the floor, gluing ripped bits of paper into horses, pigs, and flowers.

“Pretty rose, Milly,” I say.

“It’s a tree,” she says.

“See!” Martin points to the anorexic trunk.

“Oh, right, duh.” I comb through Martin’s hair with my fingers. “Hey, big news: We’re making grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner.”

“What are that?”

I explain that they are PB&Js, just grilled.

“P P and J?”

I lead the kids into the kitchen, and Tracy and I describe each step as if we’re hosting a cooking segment on morning television.

Now, Kelly, tell me what you have here
.

Well, Tracy, we start with a nice thick pat of butter, maybe two, like so …

I press the sandwich down with a spatula like a short-order cook, and the peanut butter oozes from the sides. A masterpiece. I wish Evan were here.

I slide the sandwich onto a cutting board and quarter it.

“Keely, Tracy Tuttle!” Martin says after his first bite. “This—this is magnificent!”

Milly will not join Martin’s chorus, but she finishes every bite and accidentally lets out an
mmm
that I pretend not to relish.

Night comes and turns the sliding glass doors into blocks of glossy black. I go back to the kids’ room to deliver the bad news: bedtime. Martin folds easily enough. Milly looks mutinous but pushing back would require engagement. As my mother liked to remind me after going fifteen rounds over mascara or red fingernail polish,
You have to care to fight
.

“Night, Keely,” Martin calls out. “Good night, Tracy Tuttle!”

I squeeze his foot through his blanket and flip on Milly’s daisy night-light. I’m getting the hang of them.

Tracy and I stay up late playing Rummy 500 on the kitchen table and whispering about the kids. Tracy goes over on three aces, which means she gets the bed and I’m on the floor. I settle in with my Walkman, listening to a George Winston tape from college, staring at the skylight, which is framing the moon like a piece of art. This is as good as I have felt in this house. I flip through the headlines of my day, looking for the source—no Evan, no outings, barely a breath of fresh air—until I get there:
Milly said “mmm.”
I made Milly Tanner a tiny bit happy.

The next day, Milly opens the mailbox and pulls out a stack of junk mail, much of which is addressed to Ellen Tanner. I wonder what it feels like to see her mother’s name so often, though it’s clear to me now that you hardly need a pile of catalogs to keep your mother on your mind.

“Anything good?” I ask, sitting on the stoop, watching her spread out the mail on the porch.

She holds up a letter from the U.S. “Look! It’s from your mum! Open it!” Milly says, presenting the envelope to me as if it’s a FedEx from an enchanted forest.

“I will,” I say, underplaying it as best I can. I can see how curious she is.

“Now!” She hovers by my shoulder. I can smell her primal jealousy. I hand her a catalog and tell her to pick out a top she likes, but she won’t be distracted. “Read it!” Her interest in my mother elevates my own, like when you see someone staring into the distance and you automatically turn to see the object of their attention.

“All right, but find a cool outfit,” I say, tapping the catalog.

The letter’s nothing special. They watched
Crocodile Dundee
in my honor. They think Paul Hogan is Mel Gibson. My dad backed over the mailbox with the car again. Why won’t he use the rearview mirror? The orange daylilies by the driveway have bloomed. I shake my head as I read.

“What?” She wants to know what’s making me grin.

“My mom is telling me about her flowers.”

Toward the end, my mom discloses that she’s concerned about John, like maybe he’s going to sneak into my room at night and force himself on me.
John!
Some prig at the club probably made a crack about Joey Buttafuoco, and now my mom’s up at night, picking off her fingernail polish. The letter ends with my mom’s
strong suggestion
that I lock my door at night.

“What?” Milly asks, dying to know what made my expression darken.

“You know, sometimes, my mother is just—” I don’t know how to end the sentence. I don’t know what I can tell her.

“What?” She wants to daughter vicariously.

“I don’t know what she’s talking about. She doesn’t always make sense.”

The thing about mothers, I want to say, is that once the containment ends and one becomes two, you don’t always fit together so neatly. They don’t get you like you want them to, like you think they should, they could, if only they would pay closer attention. They agonize over all the wrong things, cycling through one inane idea after another: seat belts, flossing, the Golden Rule. The living mother-daughter relationship, you learn over and over again, is a constant choice between adaptation and acceptance.

The only mothers who never embarrass, harass, dismiss, discount, deceive, distort, neglect, baffle, appall, inhibit, incite, insult, or age poorly are dead mothers, perfectly contained in photographs, pressed into two dimensions like a golden autumn leaf. That’s your consolation prize, Milly Tanner. Your mother will never be caught sunbathing in the driveway in her bra or
cheapened by too much drink. She’ll never be overheard bitching to the phone company or seen slamming her bedroom door in fury. Your mother will always be perfect.

But who would say such things to a girl so electric with envy?

John has loads to review with me before he leaves town. Outgoing mail, including a bill that has to be paid but not until tomorrow, a note for Mr. Graham that I’m eager to deliver. Emergency contacts. Pizza money. Directions. Martin needs this, Milly likes that, check on Pop if you haven’t seen him by eleven
A.M.
, Evan doesn’t need anything, John explains, like a zookeeper handing out care-and-feeding instructions for all the animals, the ones he’s cared for since birth and the ones that came with the park.

He looks commanding in his pressed Qantas blues, more like a pilot than a flight attendant. I bet this is what he was wearing the day he met Ellen. Maybe they crossed paths in the Sydney airport, waiting for a morning flight—John self-assured among his colleagues, talking twin engines and load factors; Ellen impressed by his manly knowledge. Playing the wingman, his workmate asks Ellen where she lives … does she travel often … with her husband? When she says she’s divorced, John steps in, buys her a cup of tea, a cranberry scone. His crew is summoned over the PA but John hangs back, asks if he can ring her sometime. She blushes while she writes out her phone number on a paper coaster. She watches him walk away, wondering if he might be someone important to her someday, someone to have and hold until death do them part.

“Remember,” John says to me, “the next-door neighbor’s number is on the pad in the kitchen if you need anything.”

“Yeah, and I have Evan.” He raises his eyebrows like I’m counting on the town drunk. Never mind that I’ve been taking showers and blow-drying my hair every morning for that bum.

“I’ve left some money on the counter for pizza or groceries.”

“Yup. Thanks.”

After John leaves, I close the front door and head back to the living room with my book. I have three hours until I pick up the kids.

My Ántonia
is set in Nebraska around the time that train travel was taking off. It’s one giant flashback, narrated by Jim, a grown man recalling his memories of a hardworking bohemian girl he knew when he was young. We learn in the prologue that they lost touch when he went east for college, but she never left his mind. He thinks of her often, probably more than a married man should, and when he does, she’s bathed in sunlight, running across a prairie in a homemade sundress. It’s all very romantic and nostalgic, and I love it straight off. But my mother? She doesn’t go for
a lot of golden-light nonsense
.

Or so I thought. What do I know?

I know that my mother loves sauerkraut and anchovies and pearl onions. I know she prefers mashed potatoes from a box, and when she wants to, she can peel an orange in one go. I know she likes her first drink to be vodka—one full jigger, over ice, with a lemon rind—and then she downgrades to Chardonnay, which she pours into the same glass over the same ice with the same piece of lemon floating on top,
one less dish to wash
. I know her favorite movie is either
Gone with the Wind
or
Pretty Woman
, whichever comes to mind first. She considers house pets and clothes you can’t wash in a machine and changing lip colors
with the seasons
ridiculous
. I know she doesn’t think fathers need to know every single thing about their children. She feels her best on her knees after Communion and thinks too many people treat church like a fashion show or a social outing, and she has no words for the Christmas and Easter Catholics except
That’s between them and the good Lord above
. I know she has an old silver rosary under her pillow, where she can find it in the night when she starts fretting about something that wouldn’t have a chance against her in the light of day, and next to her rosary is her
huffa-puffa
, for her asthma, which gets worse in the summer and when she worries.