Mating for Life (16 page)

“The truth. Come on. You have to tell someone the truth about yourself, and since you won't go to my therapist—”

“It would be too weird to share a dermatologist
and
a therapist.”

“Oh, who cares? But either way, you have to talk. There's got to be more to this. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you're being a little irrational, and it has to be coming from somewhere. Husbands have secrets. At least he didn't cheat on you.” Something about the way Jane said this made Fiona think that perhaps Jane's husband, a lawyer with a receding hairline, a Maserati, and an entitled attitude, had.

“Okay. Fine. The truth. There's something about me no one knows. No one in the world except my mother.” Fiona's heart started to pound, fast, but it wasn't an unpleasant sensation. She felt like she was driving a race car around a corner. If she slammed on the brakes now, she would spin out. “Tim, and Ilsa and Liane, too—everyone has always believed that Helen just didn't know who my father was. But my mother
did
know. When I was in my late teens, and graduating from high school, she had this falling-out with her best girlfriend. Aunt Edie.” Fiona paused. It still stung. It probably always would.
“I overheard them arguing. They kept saying the name
Nate,
and then
my
name, always in lowered voices. And I figured it out. This man was my father, and Edie was somehow about to marry him, and Helen was livid. I was angry, too, when I realized Helen had kept his identity a secret from me my whole life.” Fiona could still hear her own voice, shouting at Helen: “Why did you lie about this? What is the matter with you?”

“Because I didn't think we needed him,” Helen had said. “Because I wanted to protect you from ever feeling rejected, the way I did. The way I
do
.”

“Who is he?” Fiona had asked.

And Helen had said the name of a guitarist in a band that had grown popular in the seventies and had never lost momentum. Fiona had been rendered momentarily speechless. “Holy,” Jane breathed when Fiona said his name to her.

“After Helen told me, I said I was going to contact him,” Fiona said to Jane. “Helen told me not to do it. She said he was selfish and always had been and that I needed to be prepared for the fact that he might not acknowledge me. She said . . . she was afraid I would get hurt. But Edie was like a mother to me, too, sometimes more than Helen. I couldn't imagine she would marry a man who wouldn't want me. I even envisioned . . . well, I even envisioned this whole other life, with him, and Edie, and . . .” Fiona started to blink quickly.
No. I won't go there.

“But it didn't turn out that way. And your mother knew what would happen, and that's why she kept it a secret.”

“Is
that
how you see it? I never did. I think it was Helen's own pride.
She
was used to blowing men off, not the other way around.” Still, Jane's words had given Fiona pause. Wouldn't Fiona want to protect her children from the same kind of pain?
I would never put my children in that position in the first place, though.
“Anyway, I was sure he'd want to know me. First I sent a handwritten letter, and then another, and then, finally, I delivered a written entreaty to his assistant.” Fiona had memorized the reply,
but not on purpose. “The assistant wrote back:
Please, stop contacting him. This comes directly from the man himself.
So I contacted Edie. She asked me to have coffee. She told me that I should just let it all go, not try to force myself on him, understand who he was. I asked her to talk to him for me and she—she said no. She said he was a very particular kind of man, and that I shouldn't think he was a bad person; I should just try to understand that I needed to let it go. She suggested she and I remain close, in secret. I never saw her again after that. She sent a few letters. I ignored them.”

“I'm sorry,” Jane said. “That must have been awful. And this happening with Tim has brought all those old wounds to the surface, right? Plus, Tim is acting exactly the way you probably wished your own father would have acted.”

“It's just so
fucking
dramatic.” Even Fiona was surprised by her own harsh wording. “Do you see? Do you see why I can't stand this? Why I never wanted my life to even remotely resemble the soap opera of my youth?”

“Was your mother in love with him?”

“No, I don't think so. Helen had so many ‘loves of her life.' She went through men like they were handkerchiefs. She once referred to all our fathers as ‘the sperm donors.' As though she had no clue that they were actual people who were going to have an effect on us no matter what sort of brave new world she thought she was trying to create.” She shook her head. “I just wish she would have been more responsible.”

“You sound like you're talking about a daughter, not a mother.”

“That's what it felt like, growing up. I hated it.”

“So, what are you going to do? About Tim? You don't really want it to be over, do you? Spouses do lie to each other, sometimes even keep secrets from each other.” Jane gave Fiona a meaningful look. “It doesn't have to be the end of the world.”

“My secret's different.”

“How?”

“It's not a betrayal. It's about me, my past, nothing that could come back to haunt him.”

“Except now it is, because it's informing your behavior—but he has no way of knowing why you're reacting this way. Fiona, the man made a mistake.”

“I never wanted to be married to a man who made mistakes.” Fiona looked down at the table, at her still-full coffee cup, the leaf pattern the barista had made for her melting into the foam. “And anyway, I don't think we can turn back from this path we're on. He said what he said, about us being over. He also said we should see a mediator and figure out how to be apart, since clearly we can't be together.”

• • •

Later, Fiona drove toward home and saw a sign at a market advertising Thanksgiving turkeys.
IT'S NOT TOO LATE
,
the sign read
.
She slowed. Thanksgiving. She had actually forgotten. Nothing like this had ever happened to Fiona before. She normally ordered an organic, grain-fed turkey from a local farm months in advance and planned a complicated dinner with all the trimmings.

The sign had said
IT'S NOT TOO LATE
, though. She could still get a turkey. She gripped the steering wheel and pressed her foot on the gas. She would have Thanksgiving, if not for her, if not for Tim, then for the boys. Their lives had been in disarray for months, and Fiona knew no amount of pretending could conceal this. The summer had been especially hard. Normally Fiona loved packing up and heading to Tim's family's summerhouse in Maine, where they stayed for the month of August, Tim working from there and flying back and forth to meetings. She always greeted the change in routine with great anticipation, happily packing for herself and for Tim, and for the boys; eagerly planning meals and guests and activities and maintenance projects, day trips, small projects.

Almost none of that had happened this year. She had hardly socialized, had approached every task with a sense of dread, even shopping and cooking. Was it because of this that the boys had seemed so distant, so wrapped up in their own lives, or was this just a normal teenage phase? For the first time, neither of the twins worked at Stott's Marina. Instead, they had taken jobs as busboys at a nearby restaurant. “You're
fourteen,
” she'd protested. “You can't work at a
bar
.” But it wasn't a bar, they told her. It was a restaurant. And they were going to make more money than they did at the marina because they were going to be included in something called a “tip-out” every night. She had still said, “No, no, you'll work at Stott's like always,” but then Beck had told her that Tim had already given them his permission. Which had started yet another fight she and her husband never finished.

The twins working at the restaurant had, as far as Fiona was concerned, effectively finished off the ruination of a summer that was already ruined to begin with. It had thrown Eliot off because his brothers weren't home at night and slept most of the days away, and it had thrown Fiona off because she was used to a different routine. Plus, she worried about them when they came in late. She couldn't sleep. She bought over-the-counter sleeping pills, but they didn't work.

At a stoplight, she caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror. The furrows were still there and she was pretty sure she saw the beginnings of a bruise. She moaned, and was surprised by how desperate it sounded. Had it come from her, or was there an animal trapped in the car?

“This is not a marriage.”
He
had said that to
her
.

• • •

At home, she poured a glass of Pinot Grigio, even though the doctor had suggested that it might be wise to avoid alcohol for twenty-four hours because of the blood-thinning effects.
She plunked in an ice cube, thinking briefly of the way Tim, the vinophile, always disapproved of this. She added another cube and held the glass against her forehead. Then she went upstairs and took one of her pills, which had been happening so frequently lately she had had to visit her doctor to ask for a prescription refill. “We've been traveling a lot,” she had explained. “And you know me, my fear of flying . . .” In truth, Fiona wasn't afraid of planes at all. It was life that terrified her, especially now.

She returned to the kitchen and sat at the table alone. She could hear the boys upstairs, but hadn't called out to them to tell them she was home. Instead, she sipped her wine and sat, looking past the kitchen, through the living room, and out the windows at the front of the house. There was something wrong about the windows, she thought, standing to top up her half-empty glass and trying to ignore how woozy she was feeling. It was probably the Botox.
The windows. They're too empty. That's the problem.

Right. I need to decorate. Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving.

When the boys were younger, they used to make construction-­paper cutouts to mark each season and paste them all over the main-floor windows of the house. It was a throwback to her days as a kindergarten teacher, and she did it even though she knew she could have purchased expensive decorations for every occasion.

In the winter, enormous snowflakes festooned the thick wavy-glassed windows in their heavy panes. In spring, flowers and butterflies and ladybugs. In summer, it was big orange suns and multicolored beach balls. Autumn was leaves, of course, orange and yellow and sometimes brown.

She sipped more wine and thought that perhaps the boys would like to work with her on a craft project.
It's been so long since we did something like this together.

She stood and went to the basement to gather supplies.
Scissors, paper, glue—everything she needed was still in the long-neglected craft cabinet.

“Beck, Cole, Eliot!” she called. They were supposed to have been doing something upstairs; she had given them instructions at some point, hadn't she?
Yes. Right, making beds.
They were supposed to have made their beds, and then, once they'd made their beds she had said she would allow them some extra “screen time.” Which meant video games, a poison she had been unable to keep from her house. She would perform the bed inspection later. (What this really consisted of was her remaking each bed in the proper way. At least they were trying, and that was the point to Fiona, that she would raise young men who would
at least try,
who would live in apartments where the sheets and duvets had been pulled up over the pillows, and the socks and underwear had been picked up off the floor and put away clean in drawers, perhaps not folded perfectly, but away. They would be more likely to find nice girls to marry if they did this. She wasn't sure why she believed this, but she did.)

Now she put down three pairs of scissors on the table.

“Time to help me make leaves for the windows!” she called. “Leaves! Autumn leaves! For the window!” She felt like a vendor at a baseball game. She sipped more of her wine. No answer from the boys. Fiona laid sheets of orange, red, yellow, and brown paper on the table, smoothed them with her hand, tried again. “Okay! It's officially leaf-making time!” she called.

“We're playing,” shouted Beckett.

“If you have something to say to me you can come downstairs and speak to me, not shout it down the stairs!” Fiona realized that she was breaking her own rule with her booming voice.
But tough. I'm the mom. I get to take some liberties. This is not a democracy.

“Um, Mom? We don't want to make leaves!” Eliot seconded.

“I have band practice soon anyway!” shouted Beck.

She opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of organic milk, one of dozens in returnable jugs that were delivered to her door weekly, then left on the porch to be returned and refilled. She liked lining them up on the porch. She had been pleased when a neighbor once said, “Your boys drink so much milk!” And it was a rainy day with a prewinter chill in the air. She had heard it was already snowing heavily farther upstate.
The perfect day for a warm drink.
She poured milk into a stainless steel, copper-bottomed saucepan and turned on the burner of her gas stove. Medium low, or the milk would form a skin. When it was hot enough, she opened her mouth to shout, then thought better of it, turned the milk way down, got the cocoa powder and organic cane sugar out of the cupboard, plus the cinnamon, which the boys had always enjoyed a pinch of in their hot chocolate, lined it all up on the counter, and climbed the stairs.

The boys were in the upstairs rec room, slumped in beanbag chairs, indeed playing video games. In addition to the cacophony of noise emanating from the screen, some sort of car-race game that seemed to rely on crashing, the boys were making
rrrr
-ing and
vrrrrrom
-ing and
eee-eeeeeeee-smaaaaaaaaaaaaaash
-ing noises with their mouths.