Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (15 page)

“I love you, too,” she said, reaching inside for the Abby he knew, and almost, but not quite, finding her. “See you soon.”

She ended the call and sat down on the back steps, looking at her mother's throne.

•   •   •

ABBY COULD STILL REMEMBER
meeting Bob in college, the absolute luxury of finding someone who saw the world as she did, who took care of her in the way she took care of everything else. Bob was her match, her equal—something she could not have said for the boys she had known in high school, who always needed to borrow her class notes, or help them get over the girl before her. And Bob didn't care that she was his equal—a rarity, really, even in the 1970s, when everyone was supposed to be liberated.

Abby's brother, Rory, had commented early on that Bob was like their father. In private, Abby was willing to concede that there were some similarities in drive and ability. Abby was not her mother, however, and therein lay the difference.

“But is he any fun?” Lucy had asked. “I mean, how's the sex?”

A discussion Abby did not enter into with her younger sister, who had seemed to view sex as a grown-up version of finger-painting, sensual and delightfully messy, and perhaps—although Abby only suspected this—best done as a group activity. Abby, on the other hand, who had taken enough biology classes to know the failure rate of every contraceptive on the market, had never considered the idea of sex with anyone who was not strong potential father material. And thus Bob was the first, something she did not disclose to her sister, but the reality was that sex with an equal was something startling and exciting in a way that Lucy had certainly never described. Bob met Abby's eyes and held them.

They had waited until Abby's medical practice was established to have a baby, and even afterward had made sure to keep the romance of their relationship alive. Date night, every week—and not some talk-about-our-child kind of dinner, like so many of their friends. Abby and Bob made an occasion of their evenings together. They got a regular babysitter for Rory early on, a matronly woman in her sixties, expensive, but it was worth it to have evenings that didn't start with a screaming baby. They found restaurants that served unusual dishes, dressed for dinner, kept up on the news, stayed interesting for each other.

And at the end of the evening, they would go home to bed, and Bob would look in her eyes and the connection was so powerful in its clarity that she knew, without a doubt, that she was loved. When her friends told her of their husbands admitting to affairs, of their shock and surprise, she could only surmise they must have sex with their eyes closed. If Bob ever cheated on her, Abby would need only one look to know.

No, Abby thought, she was not her mother's daughter. Nor her father's.

•   •   •

ABBY WALKED BACK
in the house and saw her mother talking on the phone in her bedroom, smiling. Then Isabelle laid the receiver on the nightstand and wandered off down the hallway. Abby went over and picked up the phone with a sigh.

“Rory?” Abby heard her sister on the phone, the crackle of static. “Hey little brother, that was quick. How're you doing? Is Captain Abby driving you crazy?” Lucy laughed.

“Yes,” Abby said. “I believe she is.”

“Oh, geez, Abs. I'm sorry.” The laugh again.

“How are you, Lucy?” Abby asked.

“Terrific.” Lucy changed the subject effortlessly. “The kids are great. The grandkids are great. I wish I could just put Mom on a plane and get her here so she could meet them all.”

When Abby was taking psychology classes in college, she had often thought of personalities as things children tried on in utero, choosing traits that fit them out of the closet of parental options. Lucy seemed to have taken only from their mother. Full of imagination, unconcerned about what the neighbors thought—in many ways, she would be the better caretaker. The house would still be full of junk ten years after their mother died, of course, but everybody would be oh so happy.

Why couldn't I be like that? Abby wondered; but that wasn't how it worked. Somebody had to be serious. Families were like puzzles; in the end, there were only so many shapes, and so many places to put them in. Otherwise you just had a bunch of pieces.

“That would be nice, Lucy.”

“Abby, honey, you need to relax. Are you doing that yoga tape I sent you?”

Abby did Pilates three times a week. She had donated Lucy's tape to the library, slipping it through the drop slot with a mixed feeling of contrition and virtuousness that it was, after all, not the trash can.

“Sure,” Abby said.

“You're breathing from your diaphragm?”

“Of course.”

“And you're visualizing a healthy mind for Mom?”

Okay, that was enough.

Abby closed the bedroom door. “Lucy, you do
not
get to sit out there on your never-ending walkabout and ask me if I'm visualizing a healthy mind for Mom.”

“Maybe you should try it.”

“I'm a doctor. I don't visualize; I heal.”

“No, I mean a walkabout.”

“Lucy, I've got people to take care of here. Our mother, for one.”

“Abby—” And now Lucy sounded her age, and sad. “There's a difference between taking care of and caring for. That's something I learned on my silly little walkabout, actually. Think about it.”

•   •   •

“RORY.”
Abby walked up to her son, who was sitting with Isabelle on the couch. “Time to go.”

“Seriously?” Rory checked his watch. “I mean, the plane's not for three hours yet.”

“Traffic,” said Abby. “And we have to return the rental car.”

“Okay.” Rory shrugged. Abby thought she caught him rolling his eyes as he reached over and kissed his grandmother on the cheek, but it was probably just the light. She'd been meaning to get her vision checked for distance glasses. The ability to read expressions was important when you were a doctor, the way a parent's face could tell you more about a child's condition than any thermometer or blood test ever would.

Isabelle started to get to her feet.

“Don't get up, Mom,” Abby said, bending down. “I'm sorry,” she said, as she hugged her mother. “I have to go.”

“I know,” Isabelle replied.

“Ready to go, Mom?” Rory came up next to Abby, his backpack slung over his shoulder.

•   •   •

SITTING IN THE RENTAL CAR
in her mother's driveway, Abby took a deep breath. The day was over. She'd made it. The jubilation of being out of the house pulsed through her—followed by immediate, horrified shame at her relief, and the unsettling realization that she'd done it again.

Every time, it was like this—as if the very act of entering her mother's house was a Pavlovian stimulus that caused her to shed all her best years in a rapid-fire return to aggravated adolescence. It was only after she left that she could pick those good years back up and put them on, grateful for the warmth of some, the spine-strengthening experience of others. The grown-up Abby would shake her head and swear it wouldn't happen next time, knowing of course it would.

But it was too late to do anything about it this time, she told herself, and with one turn of the key in the ignition, she would be on her way home, where there would be whole beans waiting to be ground into coffee in the morning, San Francisco out her window, and appointments ticking off like dominoes falling through the day. Even though the children she saw in her pediatric practice were hardly orderly, their emotional baggage was still of the carry-on variety, their needs simple—a brightly colored Band-Aid after the prick of a needle, a splash of affection to hurry along the effects of an antibiotic or a pain reliever. And her own son, while he wasn't always perfect (look at all that sugar he had given his grandmother; did Abby really have to wait until his prefrontal cortex kicked in at twenty-five before she could expect reasonable adult behavior from him?), he was hers, the road map of their interactions well traveled, the route chosen long ago.

Key in hand, she could feel herself yearning toward the bright and seductive busyness that was her normal life. Going to her mother's house always felt like shifting into second gear while she was still traveling at sixty-five miles an hour. Abby had watched Lillian and Isabelle washing the dishes this afternoon, drifting about the kitchen like lazy underwater creatures, and it was all she could do not to grab the plates right out of their hands. If only they had let her, she could have had it all done in five minutes. Without breakage.

She couldn't wait to be home, to let loose the unused energy that had been building all day. She smiled at the thought of all she would get done when she let it free. She could feel her chin rising, her mouth relaxing, grown-up Abby returning to the world. She could almost look in the rearview mirror without worrying that a teenager would be staring back at her.

Which was a good thing, because her own adolescent was fidgeting in the seat next to her.

“Mom?” Rory said. “Did you forget something?”

Abby looked at her son, checking for irony in his words, detecting only an edge of frustration. She shouldn't have dragged him up here; it must be awful to be around a grandmother who didn't even recognize him. She should have put his needs first; she should have said he couldn't come when Chloe called, all excited about that ridiculous ritual. Abby was already planning her mother's eightieth, anyway. She had a guest list almost fifty people long, and she could make it longer—she might even get Lucy to bring her brood. She'd heard the Westin hotel did an excellent salmon dinner.

Rory sighed. He was tired, Abby thought; they both were. It had been a long day. Abby remembered those months when her son was learning to walk, her hands perpetually outstretched to catch him if he fell, adrenaline shooting into her veins at the slightest sway of his toddler legs. She had forgotten what that felt like until today, watching her mother teeter her way through the world, every step, every carpet edge a trip hazard, every teapot a potential scalding incident.

“Mom,” Rory said, “can we go now?”

Abby started the car and backed out of her mother's driveway, heading for the airport, the first step of the trip back to her own family.

•   •   •

ABBY DROVE THE CAR
down the darkened street, past the lights in the neighboring houses. From her pediatric practice, Abby knew that people could be remarkably different than what they seemed when viewed from the outside—the professional mother who couldn't manage to remember to change a Band-Aid, which led to infection; the out-of-work dad, bringing his kids in for their annual appointments, the unstated and slightly guilty joy he got out of his proximity to their small lives. You just didn't know what was going on in people's houses. Or heads, Abby thought.

Her siblings, her mother, thought they knew her. But they didn't know. They didn't know her marriage, they didn't know who she was. They saw no-nonsense, no-sex Abby. Captain Abby, the Portable Planner
.
They saw what they needed to see, the big sister, the daughter who made their lives work, in concert or contrast. With her as a hub of the family wheel, Rory could run around the world, Lucy could be the sexy earth mother, Isabelle could hold on to that goddamn cabin until she died, always knowing that Abby would be answering the phone, loyal, capable, and deeply uninteresting.

Abby flicked on the turn indicator and headed right.

Well, she hadn't always been good. And she'd been tempted. Anybody who said they hadn't was either lying or had the sex life that Abby's siblings always assumed she did. But Abby had known better than to risk losing Bob for one of the adrenaline-fueled relationships of medical school or, later, the charmingly panicked eyes of a new father bringing his child to her office.

There was one time, though, a guy in college, a near miss as it were. She'd never told Bob and certainly not Lucy or Rory. Abby hadn't been going out with Bob long at that point—she had met him at the end of their freshman year, just a couple of weeks before summer vacation began, and then they had gone home to opposite sides of the country. Abby had spent the summer in Los Angeles with her parents and younger siblings, in a household that seemed ready to crack at the seams.

She had gotten a job at her father's office, answering phones. Work was clean, white, and simple. The phones rang; she answered them. Her father's secretary was helpful, treating her more like a daughter than an employee, taking her out to lunch that first day, giving her tips on dressing professionally, listening to Abby's plans for medical school.

It wasn't glamorous, but it was money for tuition and it got her out of the house, where her mother seemed to be whirling in increasingly smaller circles. Abby had read a short story in her mandatory college literature class about a crazy woman who crawled around a room, rubbing away the wallpaper with her shoulder. In the evenings that summer, when she got home from work, Abby would check the wallpaper in the dining room, but all she ever found were the marks she and her siblings had made where they leaned back in their chairs as children. Yet when Abby tried to have normal conversations with her mother, tell her stories about the real world, about how well Abby was doing and how helpful her father's secretary was, her mother just turned her back and ignored her, saying she had to make dinner.

It was so much better to be somewhere else, even if it was in her head. She and Bob spent the months of that summer apart, writing each other, their letters becoming increasingly passionate and explicit. She could almost feel his breath coming off the pages of his letters, sliding across her neck, up behind her ears. When an envelope appeared in the mailbox, she took it to her room and locked the door, her hands straying as she read the words, over and over. She wrote back, fantasies of dresses with too many buttons, the slide of a hand down the curve of a back. At night, when everyone else was asleep, she went outside and stood by the pool. The neighborhood was silent, all the windows dark. Above her, a few stars managed to burst their way into the sky above Los Angeles. Abby imagined taking off her clothes, lowering herself into the pool and pushing off the edge, the water, still warm from the afternoon sun, slipping over her as she swam.