Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (19 page)

“Grief counseling doesn't help.”

“Well, this is hardly grief counseling, now is it? You'd just be walking in the park with other women and other families. It would be a kind of memorial to Isabel. It sounds lovely to me. It sounds very healing.”

I close my eyes under my mother's warm hand. She knows, I think, that despite my artfully contrived cynicism, it sounds lovely to me, too. To walk in the park with a group of people to whom no explanation is necessary, no excuses required. A group of women hollowed in the same way. To walk through the cold park, as the winter sky darkens and the branches are sketched black against the gray drifting clouds. To say Isabel's name with the name of so many other small gone things. It does sound lovely. It does sound healing.

“If I decide to go, will you come with me?” I say.

“Is that okay? Are grandparents invited?”

“I'm sure they are. I'm sure everyone is invited.”

“I'd love to go then. I'd be honored.”

“If I decide to go.”

“If you decide to go.”

Chapter 20
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

I
n the
morning, I call Jack on his cell phone. He and William are walking along Eighty-first Street toward Amsterdam Avenue. They are meeting friends for brunch at Sarabeth's. Scott and Ivy were friends of Carolyn and Jack's. Couple friends. The one time Jack and I tried to socialize with them was a complete disaster. Over the course of a single evening, Ivy made me recite my age in a dozen different ways. She asked me what year I graduated from high school, when I was at Harvard, if I was old enough to have voted against the first President Bush, if I was too young to have watched
Laverne and Shirley
in its first run. She and Scott exchanged meaningful glances over comments of mine that I had thought would be innocuous, and when either of them mentioned Carolyn's name they apologized profusely. Since that dinner Jack has played squash with Scott a few times and gone skiing with him once. I think they have lunch occasionally. I don't think Jack's ever taken William to see them, although I imagine William and Carolyn are regulars at Scott and Ivy's apartment in the Apthorpe. Now, when I am gone, Jack and William are jumping at the chance to hang out with Scott and Ivy.

“I'm going to stay here in New Jersey for a couple of days,” I say.

“A couple of
days
?” Jack says.

“Yeah.”

“But you don't have any clothes.”

That's not quite true. I found an old pair of underwear in my dresser. They are high-cut bikinis and look absurd with my low-rise jeans, but they are mine. Or were, in high school. I am wearing a Harvard Women's Law Association sweatshirt that I gave my father. When I found it in my mother's drawer this morning I said, “I cannot believe Daddy left this. I gave this to him. It was a present.” Still making excuses for him, my mother had murmured something about his expanding girth. When I was in college and law school I would buy my father aggressively feminist T-shirts and sweatshirts as a joke to which only I understood the punch line. He gamely wore a black T-shirt embroidered with a mountain crest and the words
ANNAPURNA
:
A WOMAN
'
S PLACE
and one that said
AMHERST LBQ
—
LESBIAN
,
BISEXUAL
,
QUESTIONING AND PROUD
. The only gift he ever turned down was a tank top I picked up at a pro-choice march on Washington. I argued with him, but my father refused even to go for a jog with the words
BUSH
,
OUT OF MINE
emblazoned across his chest.

Somehow my mother and I had forgotten to pack these shirts when she first threw him out, and when he had come to the house to retrieve the rest of his belongings he had not bothered with them, leaving them in the bottom drawer of the dresser that had once been his and that now was filled with my mother's off-season clothes.

Now I tell Jack, “I've got some old stuff here, and I can pick up anything I need.”

I wait for Jack to apologize for fighting with me. I think he is waiting for the same thing, because he doesn't say anything.

“Well, I'd better go,” I say. “See you in couple of days.”

“Come home, Emilia,” Jack says.

“I will,” I say. “I haven't left. I'm just in Glen Rock, visiting my mother.”

“Come home.”

“I will.”

My mother and I spend the day shopping. We go to Lord & Taylor, and I try to convince her not to buy another navy blue cardigan, or at least to buy one in cashmere rather than wool blend. She tells me that I have developed expensive tastes, and then when she sees that this upsets me she tries to buy the cashmere cardigan. I do not let her. I tell her it doesn't look good on her, that it makes her look fat. Then I buy it for her.

We go to the movies that night, in the next town over. My mother refers, sotto voce, to the people who live in this town as “the yuppies.” My mother always adopts these phrases eight or nine years after they have passed from the zeitgeist. We are in the car when she says this and I tell her she doesn't need to whisper; I promise that no one can hear her. My mother apologizes and this makes me feel so awful that I criticize her parallel parking. “Just pull into a spot,” I say. “Or let me do it. Pull over, and let me do it.”

My mother does not point out that I am a terrible driver, much worse than she is. She does not remind me that I failed my driving test twice, once because I could not parallel park, and that I have been in four car accidents, ranging from a fender bender in the parking lot of my apartment building in Cambridge to a major pile up on Route 4. The latter was not my fault. The other guy was drunk, and it is a miracle that nobody got hurt. The cop who called to tell my parents about the accident and to reassure them that I was unharmed, albeit hysterical and threatening to sue both the drunk and the city of Paramus, suggested to my father that he consider sending me to a defensive driving course. Or to anger management classes. Now my mother actually pulls the car over, ready to let me park it for her, but a space opens up and she noses in.

We share a popcorn, a package of Twizzlers, some Raisinettes, and a large Diet Coke. The movie is a romantic comedy, and it makes me so depressed that I want to scream. I chose this movie because I knew it would have no babies in it, the actors were all too young to play parents, but sitting in the theater, two rows behind us, is a couple with an infant. Since when, I would like to ask them, is it considered acceptable to impose one's squalling brat on an entire theater of paying customers, all of whom are seeking an escape from the real world, some of whom have surely paid money for a babysitter to watch their own children? But in fact, this baby is incredibly quiet and had I not turned around to see if the theater was sold out, I would never have noticed him. He does not make a peep. I make more noise than he does, shifting in my seat and blowing my nose.

“Are you all right?” says my mother. “Do you need another tissue?”

“I'm fine,” I say. I stare at the screen and tell myself I am crying because I am so worried that the main characters of the movie will never realize that the antipathy they think they feel is really an undercurrent of irresistible sexual tension.

After the movie is finally finished, after I have forced my mother to wait for the credits to roll and the baby to leave, we get up. My mother gathers the wrappers and boxes from our candy and soda, as well as those left behind by our neighbors.

“You don't have to do that, Mom. They pay people to do that. They'll sweep the whole place up after we leave.”

“You saw the little dancing boxes, Emilia.”

“They don't really expect anybody to pay attention to the little dancing boxes. Everybody throws their candy wrappers on the floor in the movies.”

“I don't, and neither should you. It's rude.”

I sigh. She's right. It is rude.

While we are walking down the street to the car I feel something different about my mother. Her tread is somehow lighter than it has been. I am lethargic and heavy-footed but she is downright effervescent. Walking next to her, I feel like a child holding on to a helium balloon.

“What's with you?” I say.

“Hmm?”

“You seem happy.”

“Do I?” my mother smiles to herself.

“Yes, you do.” I didn't mean to sound so grouchy. I try again. “You seem really happy.” Not much of an improvement.

“Oh, I'm not. I mean,” she laughs, “I'm neither happy nor unhappy. I'm just myself. I liked that movie, though. Didn't you?”

“No.”

“Oh sweetie.” She rubs my arm and then squeezes it. “You'll feel better soon. It'll take time, but you'll feel better.”

“Why did you like the movie so much? It was a romance. I would have thought it would make you sad.” We have arrived at the car and I hold out my hand for the keys. She tosses them to me, lightly. She is springy, like one of her special holiday sponge cakes. “Wait a second, have you met someone? Are you dating someone? Do you have a
boyfriend
?” My mother has not been on a single date since I helped her throw my father out of the house. She has slept alone for four years.

“No, I haven't met anyone,” she says. She gets into the car and slams the door behind her.

I open the driver's side. I turn on the engine but do not pull out of the parking space. “So if you haven't met anyone why are you behaving so strangely? Why did that movie put you into such a good mood?”

“Oh Emilia!” my mother says. She is bursting with news. I realize suddenly that she has been like this all weekend, that underneath her patient concern there has been a little sizzle of excitement. “Emilia, you're not going to believe this, but your father and I spent some time together on Thursday evening.” There is something embarrassingly girlish about her laugh, it tinkles, twitters almost. “I guess you could say your father and I went out on our first date.”

“Did you fuck him?” I say. “Did you fuck on your first date, Mom, or did Dad kiss you good night and then go pick up a hooker?”

The thing about a helium balloon is that once you have driven a pin into the bright rubber, you cannot reinflate it and send it back up in the air to hover cheerfully above your head. Once it is popped, it can never be repaired.

My mother is quiet. She holds her hands in her lap, palms up. I can see her soft belly resting on her thighs through her heavy winter everyday coat, the full-length, quilted down coat she has been wearing for as long as I can remember.

“Mom.”

“It's okay, Emilia,” she says. “I know you didn't mean it.” She reaches her hand across the bucket seats and cups my cheek. I press her hand between my cheek and my shoulder and rub back and forth, like a cat.

“Mom,” I say. “It's just . . . I love Dad but he . . . he hasn't changed. What makes you think he's changed?”

“Oh, I don't think he's changed,” my mother says. She shakes her head ruefully. “There are things you don't understand, sweetie. Things about your dad and me, about our relationship, that you don't know.”

“Well then tell me. Help me understand why you would take him back after what he did to you.”

“I haven't taken him back. We haven't gotten anywhere close to that. We went on one date.” She takes her hand away from me and starts playing with her gloves. “It's only been one date. So far.”

I pull the car out of the parking space and start heading up the block. The street is full of restaurants, and despite the fact that it is almost ten o'clock and we are in the suburbs, the sidewalks are crowded. “Wasn't it hard not to think about what he did to you? I mean, didn't you keep thinking about how he cheated on you?”

My mother bites her lip. She is looking straight ahead, out the front window. “We talked about it. We talked about it all. Everything. He told me about everything he used to do. He . . . he showed me.”

“He
showed
you?”

My mother shakes her head. “You don't understand, Emilia. I don't understand myself, but hearing about it was . . . well, it was very exciting. Your father and I . . . well, that part of our relationship was always good, and even after the divorce I always had feelings for him. Hearing about it was . . . I don't know . . . It was very exciting. It made me very excited. Sexually.”

And that's as much as I can take. I make a sharp right, ignoring the four-way stop sign. I pull over at the taxi stand in front of the train station and jam the car into park. I heave open the car door and, ignoring my mother's cries, run across the pavement and jump into the back of a cab.

“Manhattan,” I say. “The Upper West Side.”