Live a Little (41 page)

My house is too quiet, with the kids at Phil’s. Everything that used to provide comfort—the kid-free master bath, my secret chocolate stash, the now-empty wicker bin for Phil’s newspapers—is a rebuke. Everything that used to be annoying—lights left on, muddy footprints on the rug, crap cluttering the foyer, phones warbling—I sorely miss. Frankly, if we get an offer for the house tomorrow, it will not be too soon. Why is it that the good chapters of our lives are woefully short and the bad ones so long and ponderous?

On the way to Ma’s, some chivalrous impulse prompts me to stop at Whole Foods for flowers and dessert. As I pull out of my parking spot with a bouquet of calla lilies and three pints of soy ice cream in the trunk, Mimi and Reggie LeMaitre’s Volvo slides into the adjacent slot. Mimi’s hand rises to the passenger window in a friendly wave before she remembers my pariah status and quickly morphs the gesture into urgent hair smoothing. I don’t see her face redden because I am already waiting at the light, my heart pounding along with the abrasive dance radio station I now listen to because it’s the best way to imagine the kids are in the car with me.

I arrive in Woodside without further mishap. Eliot answers the door. He is wearing fluorescent multicolored parachute pants like you see on steroid-freak bodybuilders and a skintight black T-shirt with girlish cap sleeves that looks suspiciously like one of Taylor’s.

“The Black Sheep’s here!” he hollers, presumably to Ma.

I give my stepfather a deliberate once-over. “Nobody told me Hulk Hogan donated his wardrobe to charity for the elderly.”

“Heh heh. That’s a good one,” he says.

For some reason whose source is as yet unclear, I find Eliot a lot less maddening than before. He’s still Eliot, but I have started to view his high-flying platitudes as mostly harmless. His comments about my appearance lack sting, and sometimes, when I’m not alert, I catch myself feeling something like happiness when I think of Ma having someone to spend her golden years with. Unlike me, she, at least, will not do the Elderhostel cruise circuit alone.

Ma hands me a ladle when I enter the kitchen. “Stir and simmer!” she commands me before jogging out of the room.

I lift up the pot lid and sniff. The chicken bourguignonne is weak, so I pour in a little more burgundy wine and a snifter of salt before Ma can come back and lecture me about Eliot’s sodium intake. One properly salted meal won’t kill him, but my mother’s cooking might.

While I stir and simmer, I reflect on my relationship with the older generation. It is on level ground at the moment, a position so unprecedented that I can only attribute it to the shock of my unmasking.

When I phoned Ma after the show taping to explain about the misdiagnosis, just one thing about her reaction was predictable.

“You really don’t have it?” she said.

“No. I’m so sorry, Ma. I tried—”

“What?”

“I tried to tell you, but”—all reasoning comes up short—“I tried to tell you,” I finished weakly.

Ma was silent for a moment, save the slight stressed panting that she sometimes does since she was diagnosed—for real— with early-stage atherosclerosis. I fantasized that she understood how I could have bungled this so severely, and was able to generate compassion.

“Oh,” she said. For Ma, gladness was measured in brevity; thus, she was beyond happy. Then: “Make sure you keep all those cancer research links up on your blog.”

Check.

Ma returns and takes over the stirring. “I almost forgot I had to tape Terry Gross. She’s interviewing Dean Ornish on
Fresh Air.
” Dean Ornish is Ma’s version of Brad Pitt. While other women find sexual fulfillment in replaying the bedroom scene in
Thelma & Louise
ad infinitum, Ma pores over low-fat menus and ruminates on the appeal of soy isoflavones, I’m sure with Dean hovering overhead in sinewy splendor.

I pour myself a glass of Ma’s crappy Bordeaux and sit down at the table. “I had another fight with Sue. It was my fault.”

“What happened?”

“I was bitchy and she was right.”

Ma nods. “You always had such conviction about things, even as a child. And backbone. And stubborn?
Oy vey iz mir.
I once had to force you to apologize to Paige Clark’s mother for telling her you wouldn’t walk to school with Paige because she was too vain to wear her glasses and you didn’t want to get run over by a car just because Paige was a stupid fathead. You were very strong-willed. I think you viewed changing your mind about anything as a weakness.”

Leave it to my mother to paint her kids’ character flaws as virtues. If I turned out to be a serial killer, Ma would have proudly recounted my filleting abilities.

Ma gives the stew another stir and sits down. Her forehead is damp with steam. She takes my hand and rubs it between her strong, squat ones. She can’t stop touching me since she found out I’m okay. It’s like she was storing up all the handholds she wanted to give me when I was sick, and now they’re overflowing.

“Make up with Susie,” she says. “Make up with her right away. After we eat, I’ll get El out of the office, and you can use his phone.”

The subtext is clear: Life is too short to sweat the small stuff. I wonder if she is going to tell me to make up with Phil next. That one is going to be a lot harder.

She attacks from the left flank, so I don’t see it coming. “Your father and I split up once.”

“What?” I have zero memory of this.

“It was the spring of 1968. I know that because Laurie missed the cutoff for kindergarten that year, and I had to get a babysitter so I could go back to work part-time. Stu didn’t want me to work. That was a big part of it. I was so angry. At the time it seemed like he represented everything traditional and paternalistic about men that we were fighting against. I couldn’t understand why what he wanted should trump what I wanted. Things were different then.”

I try to recast my gentle, patient, loving father with the marauding misogynist Ma is painting, and fail miserably. “What happened?” I ask.

“Well, I went to my parents’ for a week, and Grandma Adele came in to cook and clean for him.” Ma shakes her head. “She never liked me. She wanted Stuey to marry Joanie Weinberg.”

I take a sip of wine. “Would you seriously have left him, or—not to make light of it or anything—was it more a dramatic gesture on your part?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t have left Stu over something like that. Work? Feh. I just needed to be angry about something. The sex, maybe. But work? With two beautiful girls to raise? Not a chance. I just wanted him to know that he could take his positions, but there were going to be consequences.”

The sex. Ugh. But how bad could it be? They
had
managed to conceive two children.

“What was the, uh, problem?” Delicacy: hopefully contagious.

“Your father, bless his heart, was a bit of a nonstarter in the sex department, I’m afraid.” Ma gets up to fluff the brown rice, which she buys at a natural-food store and has the fibrous, swollen texture of a rattan chair thrown into the sea.

“Oh. Okay.” In spite of my own recent attempts at sexual escapades, I think we all know I am a stolid traditionalist at heart (for sure when it comes to knowledge of my own parents’ mating rituals).

“He had other qualities,” Ma continues. “God knows there’s more to marriage than the sex. He was great with you girls. Very hands-on for his time. And a good provider. And smart! We did the crossword together every Sunday. He always got the hard ones. Stuey was good with cars, though not handy generally. And he understood how to balance work and family. So many men at that time never took vacations. But we went somewhere every year, plus the holidays. We had wonderful family trips. Remember the time we went to Rosarita? And stayed in that wonderful casita on the beach?” Ma’s almond eyes are warm. I don’t remember Rosarita, but it doesn’t matter, because seeing Ma melt at a memory of Dad gives me goose bumps. The good kind.

“Eliot knows how to please me,” she tacks on with surprising firmness.

“Um . . .” My comfort zone is receding into the distance, like a city skyline viewed through a jet-plane window.

Ma looks me straight in the eye. “One thing you learn when you’re an oldster like me is, things aren’t as either/or as you used to think. It
is
possible to love people in different ways. To love them
as much
without loving them the same way or for the same reasons. The young have an obsession with equity. When you age, you come to terms with a different—in a way, clearer—sort of justice. You’re all in the same boat, so you don’t have the urge to split hairs over what are essentially unimportant things or things you can’t control.”

I let that sink in. “Are you talking about Dad and Eliot or me and Laurie?”

“What do you think?”

“I think . . .” What did I think? That Ma always favored Laurie and found me and my accomplishments wanting—and made it perfectly obvious. That it hurt. That, over the years, the hurt accumulated, filming over my innate good sense like a ripening cataract. That a dire fate can leave you feeling weirdly exultant. That although I’ve been right about some things lately, I’ve been wrong about a lot more.

Outside, the automatic sprinklers kick into gear, hitting the window every few seconds with a hushed
tat-tat-tat.
The drumroll sensation lends a sense of urgency to the current line of inquiry.

“Why were you always so damn hard on me?” I ask Ma. It is luxuriant, saying it out loud.

“Because you were worth it. Because you
are
worth it.”

“Laurie . . . it was like she could do no wrong. Like everything she did pleased you. And nothing I did.” Steamy anger pulses in my chest. It feels good. “It always felt like, to you, we were nothing more than our success, our performance in some game. And Laurie always won the game, because I never knew the rules exactly, or played by them well, in any case—”

Ma is shaking her head before I can even finish. “Laurie has certain gifts. You have other gifts. In a lot of ways, she’s not as tough as you. She cares more what people think. She has a more textbook definition of what it is to be successful. You’re more like me. Independent. Eccentric. A questioner. A risk-taker.”

I laugh. “I’m the most dependent, risk-averse person I’ve ever known! I can’t even go to the bathroom at my high school reunion without taking a friend with me.”

“I’m talking about emotional risks, Rachel,” Ma says. She waves her hand dismissively. “Do you think I give a damn if you jump out of airplanes or ski down mountains? Your bun-gee cord’s not going to make you chicken soup when you’re sick! The biggest pile of fan mail in the world is no substitute for a family who loves you, for kids who trust and rely on you, for a husband who wants to be your equal partner in this big, hard, messy life of yours. I’m saying that you are capable of deep relationships that challenge you, because you are willing to give a lot of yourself. You open yourself up for a million little hurts, but they’re worth it, don’t you see? Where do you think your talent comes from, your left toe? It’s empathy. It’s humor. It’s
heart.
Do you think Micah would have told you he was gay if you didn’t have the emotional depth, the strength, to help him cope?”

“He didn’t exactly tell me.” My heart fibrillates at the memory.

“That’s not the issue.”

Hmm. I see holes here, but
. . .

“Let Ren go.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“But I don’t—”

“—carry a torch for Ren White. Yes, I know. That’s why you’ve been holding back with Phil all these years, sabotaging your marriage with unrealistic expectations, with visions of romantic perfection in case Ren snaps out of it and realizes he chose the wrong sister.”

“Ma . . .” This is one matter on which I never sought Ma’s counsel. It was too dangerous, too fraught. Besides, I used to like hanging on to—what did she call it?—unrealistic expectations and visions of romantic perfection. It had a nice ring to it, sort of like “grilled cheese sandwich with ranch dressing.”

“Ma, I think I’m over it.” Boy, saying it feels fantastic. And true. True!

Ma peers at me over the moons of her glasses. “Feh. I never understood what you saw in Loren, anyway. He’s like those shiksa goddesses in the movies. All blond fluff and social clubs where everyone’s got a terminal case of verbal constipation. Redford leading Barbra around by her
yentls.
Corncobs up their hoo-haws. He’s a good man, of course he is. He’s been very devoted to Laurie. But he was never right for you. You need someone who can stand up to you when you’re out of line. Ren’s essentially nonconfrontational. He likes things simple, clean. You need a real man. A man who can get his hands dirty. A man with a mouth on him. You need a mensch.”

An image of Phil sprawled in our bed after our last round of separated sex fills my mind. His usual postcoital slumber had overtaken him an astonishing eight minutes after the act (compared to the usual four). In the interim, my ex(tracurricular)-husband had managed to don a pair of hideous orange and maroon plaid pajamas and enlighten me as to several points of putting interest from the annals of a three-year-old
Golf Digest.
Oh, and he also gave me a pretty outstanding ass massage. Phil, I can see with the painful clarity of tardy awareness, is
it:
the one, the only, the end of the line, the über-mensch.