Tales From the Crib (32 page)

“Do you?” she shot back.

“What the hell are you saying?” Jack came to my defense.

“I’m saying that Lucy has never forgiven herself for losing the pregnancies. Intellectually, she knows that she didn’t cause them, but emotionally, she blames herself. Since the two are incongruous, she puts it on you, Jack. She says
you
must be the one who blames her. She feels blame coming from somewhere so she assumes it must be from you. She accuses you of blaming. And although you’re furious at her for a variety of other reasons, and probably blame her for a dozen other things, you deny it. She gets mad because she knows you’re angry about something. You get mad because now you have to assure her you’re not mad at her about this, and you don’t get to express what you really are upset about.”

“This is all very confusing,” I said.

“I agree,” Jack said.

I smiled. “I think I may actually blame
you
now, Dr. Rosenblatt. We were happy a few weeks ago.” She knew I was kidding, and the truth was that our marriage felt like sand bags were being tossed from a hot-air balloon.

We began scheduling double sessions at 10:00 A.M., then ran to Pizza Hut starved for food and a continuation of our discussion. I was amazed at how the past ten years of our marriage had been consumed by mundane details like buying paper towels, paying bills, and filling the gas tank. Jack and I had stopped getting to know each other. As we ate pizza together, I listened to Jack’s stories from his early life and was rapt by his observations about how they related to our present. It occurred to me for the first time that Jack was an insightful guy. I don’t know if this was a new thing, or if he always was insightful and I was just noticing it. But as I listened to him between chomps of his deep-dish pepperoni pizza, I realized that I was pretty lucky to have a man like this.

Chapter 38

Anjoli’s Thanksgiving dinner was an intimate gathering of friends, including Anjoli’s new boyfriend, Miguel, a former defender for the Mexican soccer team and now a high school coach. He was a mere six years her junior and single! On her honeymoon, Kimmy met Steve, an attorney for Planned Parenthood, who she’d been dating for six weeks. I had to refrain from making jokes about Kimmy’s need for Planned Parenthood services now that she was married to herself. The usual suspects, Alfie and Kiki, were there, along with their friends George and Chris. As Alfie brought the carved turkey to the table, he suggested we go around the table and say what we were thankful for this year. I knew Jack cringed at these forced “go ʼrounds,” but he looked surprisingly unfettered by the suggestion.

“What a splendid idea, darling!” Anjoli claimed. “It will put us in gratitude consciousness.”

“A good place to be on Thanksgiving,” George teased. Anjoli dismissed him with a wave of her hand.

“I should start since I’m the hostess,” she said, then held her hands out for her flankers to hold. This was our cue that the circle of gratitude would serve as our evening grace. “After I ran away from home, I was fortunate enough to find myself adopted by the beautiful and elegant Miss Dorothy at the Joffrey Ballet Company, who spotted my gift on the very first day of class.” A few incredulous looks were exchanged by newcomers, wondering if my mother was kidding or not.

“Anjoli, love,” Alfie interrupted. “Your life has been so charmed. Let’s keep the gratitude about this year, shall we?”

“I was doing that!” she protested. “I was about to say that without that experience, I would never have had the opportunity to work with the wonderful people at the Drama Queen, like you, Alfie!” It was going to be a long night. “I am blessed with an abundance of beautiful, creative people like my daughter, Lucy, and her family.”
Huh?
“The new bride, Kimmy. Miguel.” She did not elaborate on him any more, but the tone of her voice suggested it was a torrid romance. “My oldest and dearest friends, Kiki and Alfie, and now our new friends, George and Chris. Oh yes, and I’m thrilled to be off to Findhorn in Scotland in the spring to teach Selfless Nongrieving. I know it’s going to be the next big thing!”

She glanced at Miguel beside her, who with a smoldering simplicity said, “I am grateful for the love.” George said he was grateful for being among new friends—and that he landed a part in Anjoli’s latest production,
The Queen and I.

Jack said that this year he got two second chances at life. “Car accident,” I explained to the newcomers.

“We had our first child, and I remarried my first wife,” he added with an openness he’d never before possessed. Jack made me blush. Pardon me,
I
felt flushed when Jack made this comment.

“Figuratively,” I explained. “We never got divorced, in the legal sense, at least.” Who was this man who was open to couples counseling, sharing with strangers, and painting upbeat, almost pop-art-style paintings these days?

Then it was my turn. “Well, to be perfectly honest, it was a tough year and I’m grateful to have it behind me,” I began. Anjoli dropped her hands from the clasps of others and urged me not to bring down the group with sad stories. “I’m not going to tell sad stories, Anjoli. I was just being honest. It’s been a difficult year with Jack’s accident, and well, changes in the family.”

“Oh, but there have been some real hoots too, Lucy!” Anjoli reminded me. “Tell about how the news crew showed up right after you gave birth to Adam. Or how ʼbout when drunk Barney showed up at that breastfeeding party?” I could practically see the thought bubbles over people’s heads, wondering what a breastfeeding party was.

I flashed back to a dozen afternoons on Etta’s couch, where she asked me what my role in the family was. I told her I didn’t know. I told her my family was too small for us to have roles. I told her I was Kimmy’s understudy. Until that moment at the Thanksgiving dinner table, I hadn’t realized that I had forever been the court jester in Anjoli’s queendom, amusing her with anecdotes about our lives. I remembered sitting at this very table, hearing her ask me to tell her and Kimmy one more story. To do one more imitation of her friends or an actor we saw in a show. It was my job to keep everyone happy. And in my home, happy meant laughing.

“Half the people here weren’t at Kimmy’s wedding to herself!” Anjoli suggested, glancing around the table for support. “You should hear Lucy’s dead-on impression of the minister. She’s got a piece about the wedding coming out in January
Glamour,”
she said, this time specifically to Chris. “She’s a writer, but she could’ve been an actress.”

“Mother! You said I was too chubby to be an actress.”

“A comedienne, then,” she said, annoyed. I’d just broken the unwritten rule. I was never to portray her in anything less than a mega-bright pink spotlight of flattery—even if it was the truth. No one wanted to think of the fabulous Anjoli contributing to her daughter’s body issues.

I had always told my friends about how spectacularly adventurous my mother was when she disappeared to Monaco for ten days while I was in high school. I knew she was safe because she left a note and a few hundred dollars on the dining room table. I never mentioned that it was the weekend of my junior prom and that the limo driver took pictures of my date and me in front of the house. The story about my mother trotting off to the Cannes Film Festival is weighted down by the pesky reality that she left while I had a dangerously high fever. She left Kimmy in charge with the telephone number of her Reiki master, herbalist, and naturopath. When she had an audience, she characterized my father’s death as “the tragic demise of an enormously talented musician,” seemingly disconnected to the fact that my dead father was attached to that catch phrase. Often, she asked me to sing a few bars of his song that went platinum immediately after she mentioned his ever-so-hip heroin overdose. That night at Thanksgiving, Anjoli bragged to Chris that I was a writer. What she failed to mention was that I was also the family editor.

“Mother, there was nothing funny about my year,” I said. “Okay, the bleeding drunk Barney and film crew were funny. And Kimmy’s wedding to herself was too, but poor Aunt Rita dropped dead at Red Lobster in Florida where Aunt Bernice is now channeling her sister’s spirit and threatening to jump off her balcony and into the Intracoastal. Meanwhile, my best friend, Zoe, will probably be there to video the whole thing for a new reality suicide show since
Real Confessions
went down in flames. None of this is the least bit amusing!” I paused. “I am so unbelievably grateful that my son survived gestation and my husband survived a car accident that should’ve killed him. That’s not funny, Mother, but that’s what I’m grateful for. That and the fact that we reconciled our marriage after a virtual divorce, where we lived under the same roof while Jack dated a worthless twit who’d dump a guy the second he went into a coma, and I screwed half-wits in car washes. Well, just one car wash. One half-wit.”

“You had sex with someone?” Jack asked. I confirmed with a nod.

“I’m grateful that we actually started acting as if we might someday move in the direction of leaving Caldwell and start the arts community we’ve talked about since we met,” I said. “Sorry if this isn’t funny, Mother, but it’s my life and it’s what I’m grateful for.”

“Kids!” Anjoli said to Miguel. “Tell them they’re talented enough to be a comedienne and they flip out. Some people don’t know how to be happy. The mother is to blame for everything, darling,” she said as she smiled at her guests, trying to lighten the moment. I laughed. My mother was not perfect by anyone’s measure, but she was not the cause of all that held me back in life. Just knowing that doubled my love for her, and myself.

“Have you ever thought about writing a book?” Chris asked me.

“I’ve been working on a novel for a year and a half,” I said with a defeated tone. “I have fifteen pages of trite, cliche bullshit about some French woman named Desdemona who gets pneumonia after standing out in the rain too long.”

“Why are you writing about that?” Chris asked, focusing her pale blue eyes on me.

“I don’t know what else I’d write about,” I said, shrugging.

“Why not this?” she offered.

“Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked densely.

“No, what you just told everyone here. About your marriage nearly breaking up while you had a baby, and all that other stuff.”

“Are you a writer?” I asked.

“An agent. Currently with two authors on the best seller list, for which I’m extremely grateful, thank you very much.” She turned to the others, who politely clapped. “It’s your call, but if you ever do decide to write it, I’d like to take a look.”

Jack placed his hand on my thigh and squeezed, remembering the days in grad school when I sent out twenty proposals to literary agents and promptly received twenty rejection form letters.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Chris is going to represent me when I write my selfless nongrieving book,” Anjoli said.

Chris furrowed her brow and reminded my mother that she mainly represented authors of fiction.

“Oh believe me, Chris, my mother writing about selflessness is fiction.”

“Such a smart-ass,” Anjoli teased.

“I hope I don’t sound too shallow,” Kiki chimed in. “I had an exceptional year with my investments and I’m very, very grateful for that because things were a little tight for the past few years.”

Why didn’t I invest in the stock market anymore? Why wasn’t I willing to move past page fifteen of a novel? Ten years ago, if a literary agent offered to look at a manuscript I hadn’t written, I would have been jotting my chapter outline on cocktail napkins right there at the table.

“You should invest in my workshops, Kiki!” Anjoli said. “Get in on the ground floor. You’ll have your best year ever,” she lilted.

“I used to invest,” I said aloud to no one in particular.

“What? “ Jack asked.

“Oh, excuse me,” I said to the other guests.

“Go ahead, say what you were about to say,” Chris encouraged.

“I said that I used to invest,” I said. “I don’t know why I gave it up. It’s how I paid for grad school.”

“Really?!” said Kimmy.

“No, not really, darling,” Anjoli corrected. “If you recall, the market crashed in 1987. Your portfolio was worthless. When I spoke to your broker, he told me the whole thing was worth something like nineteen thousand dollars, so I paid for your grad school.”

“You did? “ I asked, incredulously. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of quiet generosity?” she said smugly.

“Wow, I’m shocked. Thank you. I’m really touched, Mother.” Jack leaned in to whisper to me. “What?” I asked him.

“What happened to the stocks?” he asked. “Did she ever sell them?”

“Mother, did you sell the stocks?”

She looked at Miguel as if to say
she’s only half of my gene pool.
“I just told you, they were worthless.”

“So you didn’t sell them?” Jack asked excitedly.

“Jack, they were worthless,” Anjoli reminded him.

“Were
doesn’t mean still are, Anjoli!” he shouted. “What do your annual statements say they’re worth now?”

“Annual statements?” Anjoli asked.

“For taxes,” Jack explained.

Anjoli shook her head. “Never received a single one, darling.”

Jack pondered for a moment. “Have you ever received solicitations from brokerage houses?”

“Constantly,” she said.

“And let me guess, you throw them away without opening them?”

Anjoli confirmed. “Who has time for junk mail?”

“Where is Lucy’s portfolio?” Jack said, hurried.

“Oh, I don’t know, in the filing cabinet somewhere in her room,” she dismissed.

“Jack, it was all a bunch of worthless junk,” I reminded him. 

Adam began to rustle, waking before I’d expected. “Luce, keep an eye on the baby. I want to check this out. What’s the password to get onto your computer?”

“It’s
Jack,”
I said. “I never did change it.”

An hour later, as we were eating organic pumpkin pie, Jack shouted my name from my bedroom. My first thought was that the file cabinet toppled on him because he never closes one drawer before opening another. When he ran to the wooden rail and started shouting my name again, I was relieved he was all right. “Get up here, Lucy!” he called.