Raising Hope (14 page)

“I am not saying one word about Daddy,” she replied crossly, “and I don’t appreciate you trying to put a guilt trip on me.”

Guilt trip? I wasn’t trying to take her on any kind of a trip; I was only trying to see where on earth she had put her mind.

She didn’t do a blessed thing when she came home. Wasn’t interested, she said. Needed a rest. Well, she didn’t
have
to work, that was for certain. But still, couldn’t she have found some volunteer project to keep her occupied? I suggested she work down at the hospital as a greeter. “You might meet a nice doctor,” I told her.

“I don’t want to meet a nice doctor,” she said. “You think finding a husband solves every little problem. Well, it doesn’t.”

“Who said anything about getting married?” I asked her. “I’m just talking about going out in the evenings, getting out of the house for a little enjoyment.”

“Well, mind your own business,” she said.

“Sara Lynn!” I gasped. She had never spoken to me so freshly before.

“Sorry, Mama,” she replied, “but you’re driving me crazy.”

There was nobody on this earth with whom I could discuss my only child’s erratic behavior. I had prided myself on raising a perfect daughter. Through the years, my friends had marveled at Sara Lynn’s accomplishments. She’d always had top grades and played flawless pieces in the yearly piano recitals. She was so pretty, too, with her long blond hair and her sweet smile she flashed on everyone who came to the house.

“She’s such an angel, Aimee,” my friends would say longingly. “I wish mine could be like her.”

I must admit I had preened under their praise. But pride goeth before a fall, and there I was, rubbing my skinned knees.

“We’re so happy she’s home,” I told my friends cheerfully. “They worked her to the bone at that law firm. It was, well, a bit dull for her as well. She’s so creative, you know.”

“What will she do now?” they’d ask me. “Whatever is she going to do now?”

I was so used to having something to tell them about what Sara Lynn was up to—whether it was winning the state essay contest on why she was proud to be an American or where she was going to college or how she was planning on being a lawyer—that I was at a loss as to how to respond. “She’s thinking over her options,” I told them. “She has so many that it takes time to think them through.”

She overheard me once on the telephone having just this conversation, and she rushed into my bedroom after I’d hung up the phone, hissing, “Stop talking about me! Why can’t you let me lead my own life without always shaping it to be what you want?”

“I’m just saving your face,” I told her, my patience wearing thin. “What would you have me tell them?”

“Tell them the truth,” she said. “Tell them you don’t know the first thing about me.”

Now, wasn’t that a crazy thing to say! She grew inside me for nine months, and then out she came. I fed her and loved her and kept her clothed and warm and happy for the whole of her life, giving her absolutely everything she wanted. I didn’t know the first thing about her? I knew everything about her. I knew things she didn’t know about herself.

I referred to her behavior obliquely once to Mary Teller, who’d been my cleaning lady forever. “Mary,” I said, “do you find that things can get, well, testy with your adult children?” Mary had a girl just Sara Lynn’s age and two older boys. They were always in trouble, and I suppose I wanted to hear about how horrid they were so as to put my own little problem into perspective.

Mary threw her dust cloth onto the table and howled with laughter. “We’re certainly not the Waltons,” she said. “You have no idea.” She picked up her cloth and started dusting again, and I stood at the dining room entryway, fiddling with my pearls, a nervous habit of mine.

“Why?” Mary asked. “Is Sara Lynn going through a hard time just now?”

“No, no,” I protested, twisting those pearls. “She’s just seeking her independence, and I’m having a hard time letting go.”

Mary laughed again. “The grass is always greener,” she said. “Here I am trying to get mine out from underfoot. They could use a little more independence. Always asking me for money and whining to me about this and that.”

“Ma, stop complaining about us.” Mary’s daughter, Ruth, poked her head in from the hallway. Ruth had been helping her mother clean since she graduated from high school with Sara Lynn.

“I’ll do as I like,” Mary replied, laughing.

“You always have,” Ruth told her.

Those two cackled like a couple of geese and then went on with their work. I felt alone in my own house, and I went up to my room to read a bit and try to put Sara Lynn out of my mind.

Then came the night she went out to O’Malley’s, where no respectable lady ever would think to go.

“I’m going out,” she said. “I’m as bored as anything in this house.”

Eliot and I were listening to Mozart on the record player, and I was needlepointing while he read some new case law. We looked up at her, startled. It was ten at night, for heaven’s sake.

“Where are you going?” I asked, and I ignored the look Eliot was giving me. He believed Sara Lynn was an adult woman who needed time and space to find her own way in the world. “Time and space”—that’s exactly what he said. He was getting to be as new agey as Sara Lynn herself. I half expected him to tell me I was putting a “guilt trip” on him next time I asked him to take out the trash.

“Out,” she said. She was wearing jeans with a tight-fitting top she must have bought down in Boston, because I knew I hadn’t bought it for her when she lived in this house.

“Where?” I persisted.

“Now, Aimee,” Eliot said.

“O’Malley’s,” she said.

“O’Malley’s?” Eliot asked, surprised. Ha! I thought. What do you think of that, Mr. Liberal Thinker?

“Oh, Daddy,” she said, turning on all her charm for him. My hands shook with anger as I kept poking that needle into my canvas again and again. “All the girls go there. It’s the place to go to meet other people. There’s nothing else to do in this town. I’m just going in to have a drink, see who’s there, and then come home.”

“Have a drink?” I asked, my voice sounding like acid corroding metal.

“I’m of age, Mama,” Sara Lynn replied, enunciating the words as if I were dull-normal in the head. “You’re always telling me to make friends, and then when I take one little step toward doing so, you want to hold me back. It’s always been like this.”

“Just what is that supposed to mean?” I asked, throwing down my needlepoint and glaring at her. She’d lately been insinuating that she’d had a terrible childhood at my ignorant hands, and I wanted to stop all this dancing around and just get it out on the table.

“I never had real friends like other children,” she said, her eyes snapping at me. “I always had to take music lessons and dance lessons and win writing contests and make the best grades in school. You wanted me to be perfect. A little dancing bear.”

I looked at her as if she were changing into a stranger before my eyes. “That is not true,” I replied. “You loved your lessons and you loved winning things and you loved being perfect.”

“You loved me being perfect!” Her voice was mean and accusing.

“Now, hold on,” said Eliot. “What’s all this ‘perfect’ talk? Sara Lynn is a lovely girl, but she’s not the risen Christ.”

“Sacrilegious!” I snapped at him. I turned to Sara Lynn, truly puzzled as to where her ideas were coming from. “You think I pushed you into doing well at things? I only tried to encourage you, to show you I was interested in whatever you were doing.”

She sighed. “Fine, Mama. Just forget I said anything. Can I go now?”

“
May
I go,” I corrected automatically.

“See?” she said, appealing to her father. “See? This is what she has been like since the day I was born.”

“Go along, honey,” Eliot told her without even a reprimand about hurting her mother like she was doing. “Have fun and be careful.”

“Thanks, Daddy,” she said to him. To me she said nothing at all.

When she shut the door and we heard her car back out of the driveway, I picked up my needlepoint and started stabbing the needle into the canvas again. I could hardly see straight, and I said, “Well, thank you very much, Mr. Concerned Father. Thank you for helping to turn my own daughter against me.”

“Aimee,” he said in his lawyer’s voice that told me I was a hysterical woman who needed calming, “be reasonable.”

“That’s right,” I said, needlepointing away furiously. “I’m not reasonable at all. It’s a good thing you and Sara Lynn are back living together in this house again so that you can commiserate about how reasonable you two are and how horrible I am.”

“We just need to give her a little rope.”

“Why, so she can hang herself?” I slid my needle into the canvas to store it and rolled up the silly needlework—a rooster, it was; I was needlepointing a rooster while my life was falling apart. I stood up and said, “What I like is how you remained utterly uninvolved all throughout her growing-up years and only now have decided to give me the benefit of your parenting expertise. Why don’t you write a book, Dr. Spock?”

I stormed upstairs, ran myself a hot bath, and soaked in it for a good half hour. Then I read a bit before Eliot came upstairs. When I heard his footsteps, I shut off the light and pretended I was asleep. Sara Lynn wasn’t home yet, and I knew I wouldn’t be getting any rest until she saw fit to grace us with her presence once again.

Oh, that was a horrible time in our lives. I don’t know, truly, whether or not we’ve ever recovered from it.

Back home in St. Louis, when I was young, Mama had a beautiful platter with a blue-and-white design of a bridge and trees and people walking. How she loved that platter! She cried and cried when Brother accidentally broke it from playing ball in the kitchen with Baby Caroline. “Silly!” she kept saying, wiping her eyes and trying to smile at us. “Silly of me to make such a fuss over a platter!”

Julia Rae patted Mama’s shoulders, saying, “Don’t worry. Aimee has steady fingers, and she and I’ll put it back together again.” Then she shooed everyone out of the kitchen except me, and she sat me down at the table. She bent down and found every last piece of the platter and placed them before me with some glue. “Now, Sister,” she said, “you just glue these pieces back together the best you can. We’ll save Mama’s platter. Make it as good as new.”

I glued and glued, fitting each piece together like I was doing a jigsaw puzzle, Julia Rae beside me, saying, “That piece doesn’t go there; better try this one.” We worked together for close to an hour, and when it was done we let it dry, calling Mama in to look at it.

“My girls!” she said, putting her hand to her chest in amazement. “It looks beautiful!”

“Let it dry overnight, Mama,” said Julia Rae. “Then nobody will ever know.”

I always knew, though. Whenever I looked at that platter, my eyes followed the minuscule cracks that broke up the picture of the people and the bridge and the trees. I never saw it whole again, never was able to look at it sitting on the shelf without my breath catching for fear it would disintegrate into little bits.

That’s how I feel about Sara Lynn and me. We broke something between us, and on the surface it looks mended. But we both can see the cracks, and we know not to push too hard on the bond between us, lest it give way and the whole thing fall to the ground in pieces.

Chapter 10

S
hit on a stick, I think I’m pregnant. I’m careful as careful can be, and still I’m up shit’s creek without a paddle here. Dammit, dammit, dammit. Well, Ma always said she was like a rabbit—just had to look at my father and along we all came. So I’m following right along in the Teller tradition.

Now, I’m not like Sara Lynn. I’ve seen the calendar she keeps on the kitchen desk, and I know she keeps a perfect record of the dates her period comes. No reason—she probably just likes to know that every cycle of the moon her body’s going to do what it’s supposed to. Every twenty-eight days, there’s a little circle around the date’s number. “Hello, friend,” she probably says with a smile as she draws her circle. I’m surprised she doesn’t color-code it in red ink.

I don’t keep any sort of track. It comes when it comes, the achy cramps and the disposition from hell, and I’m damned if I could tell you when it last was here. It’s been a while, though. Longer than usual. Shit.

I’m finishing up the last of the lunches here at the diner, and I’ve finally got a second to think. I’ll drive to the drugstore and get one of those pregnancy tests, that’s what I’ll do. Can’t get it here in town—that blabbermouth Mary Beth Casey will tell everyone. Anyone who buys personal items from Casey’s Pharmacy is crazy, with that busybody running the place. I’ll drive over to Hadley, where nobody knows me.

“Chet, I’m leaving a little early today,” I say, glancing at the clock. Two-thirty. I don’t want to face Jack again today. I locked myself in his bathroom this morning and did the Q-tip test—stuck a Q-tip inside me to check for any blood that might be a little sluggish up there. Nothing. Not one speck of red. I must’ve looked like I’d seen a ghost when I came out of that bathroom. I numbly said my good-byes and got myself to work, where I wouldn’t have to think. “Just tell Jack I had something I had to do.” I pick up my purse and sling it over my shoulder as I’m leaving.

“You okay, Ruth?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. See you tomorrow.”

I step into the heat and my stomach sort of turns over. I haven’t been feeling great lately. Tired and . . . off. Food tastes funny to me. I sigh and hop into my shitbox car. Hotter than hell. I pump the gas a few times to get the damn thing to start, and my stomach turns over again. It’s flipping and flopping inside me, and I swallow a few times. Could just be the heat. Not likely, though, not with my luck. I wish Ma were here. Dammit, I miss that old witch something awful sometimes. Know what I’d ask her if she were here? I’d ask her if I was worth it.

“Worth what?” she’d say.

Worth having. Worth keeping and raising. “Look,” I’d say, “you’ve only told me about a million times how I was a big surprise—but did you want me after you had me? Did you love me right when you saw me, or did I sort of grow on you?”