The Best American Short Stories 2013 (46 page)

During that day, and right afterward, Rebecca thought that maybe the divorce was a mistake, and that she and Steve would get back together. But it turned out to be like the illness of Anna Karenina: a kind of temporary exalted goodwill, a glimpse of how lovely things might have been if everybody hadn’t felt the way they actually did feel.

She went out and bought
People
magazine, and a copy of
Diana: Her True Story
. Every day she read to Harriet, who lay in bed with tubes coming out of her nose, and puffy boots automatically inflating and deflating around her legs at intervals, to prevent blood clots. “She tried to kill herself with a
lemon slicer?
” Harriet said. “What’s a lemon slicer? Do they mean a peeler? She tried to peel herself to death?” The two of them sat there in the dark hospital room, laughing. Whenever the surgeon came in, Rebecca hid the book and the magazine in the nightstand, because Harriet didn’t want him to think she was the kind of woman who read trash.

Harriet would later say of that time, “It was a nightmare.” Rebecca, who, partly in reaction to her mother’s hyperbolic way of putting things, tends toward understatement, would say, “It was tough.” But while it was going on, it was, in some bizarre way, also wonderful. They liked being together, for the first time in years. One afternoon, a couple of days after the surgery, Harriet needed a blood transfusion. The drip was still running when someone, mistakenly, brought in a dinner tray. Harriet was not allowed to have anything by mouth, and so Rebecca told the aide: “We don’t need that.”

“Oh, you’ve eaten already?” the aide said.

Harriet, lying on her back with the blood still dripping into her arm, raised her hands and curved them into little bat claws and said, in what Rebecca somehow understood was meant to be a Transylvanian accent, “I’m still eating.”

Rebecca laughed, and her eyes filled with tears at the valiancy of it, the surprise of that sudden little flash of wit.

It was before Rebecca started the bookstore; she was teaching high school English then, so she had the summer off. She went to the hospital every day and stayed there all day.

Then Harriet went through her year of chemotherapy. Rebecca was teaching again, but she went down to Connecticut on a lot of weekends. The pope got colon cancer. They watched the networks grappling with the delicate challenge of reporting on a pontiff’s gastrointestinal system: lots of disembodied scientific diagrams juxtaposed with footage of worried-looking nuns praying in St. Peter’s Square.

“What do you think the nurses are saying to him right now?” Harriet said, lying on the couch and looking at a shot of the outside of the hospital where the pope had been operated on earlier that week.

“Okay, Your Holiness, scoot your hiney over to the edge of the bed,” Rebecca said.

Harriet laughed and laughed. Then she threw up.

So here’s the glib psychological explanation: Harriet had always craved attention and now, made vulnerable by illness, needed more; Rebecca had failed at her marriage and needed to feel like a hero.

All of which was true. But it was more that they both discovered, almost shyly, that they liked each other. That they were having, in the middle of all this dire stuff, a good time together.

It was also, Rebecca knew, that her mother was dying. She sometimes lay in bed at night and cried, alone, or with Peter Bigelow, who taught architectural history at Harvard and whose two children—he was divorced—went to the school where Rebecca taught. He held her and listened while she talked about how hard it was to be finding her mother and losing her at the same time.

But, Peter said, it sounds like the knowledge that you’re losing her has been part of what allowed you to find her.

Oh, he was a nice man, Peter. Back then, her romance with him felt too new, too green and slight to bear the weight of everything Rebecca was feeling, about her divorce, about Harriet. Poor guy, she had thought, looking at Peter’s kind, earnest face, his sandy rumpled hair, his open trusting bare chest, his hand resting on the sleeve of her flannel nightgown.

Are you sure you don’t mind, if we don’t, tonight?

Of course not.

I’m sorry, I thought I wanted to, but—

Rebecca. Don’t worry. It’s fine.

She might have been suspicious of his tenderness, seen it as his own need for heroism, or as a ploy to hook her before revealing his true selfish self (remember, she was just wrapping up a divorce). But she’d seen him for years with his kids. He was nice, period. He took her out to dinner and to concerts, talked to her about his work enthusiastically and not at all pompously (he was writing a book on H. H. Richardson), listened while she talked about wanting to quit teaching to open a bookstore, and was frank and relaxed in bed.

He advised her to pace herself, with Harriet. Her friends were saying the same thing, especially the ones who’d had sick parents. Go easy, take time for yourself, don’t let this take over your whole life. But her mother was dying, and Rebecca wanted to cram in as much as she could. In some unexpected way she and Harriet had fallen in love.

Incredibly, Harriet didn’t die. Her cancer never came back. She kept having more surgeries: to insert a catheter for the chemo drugs under her chest wall, to remove it again because of recurrent infections, to remove scar tissue in her abdomen, to remove more scar tissue. Rebecca kept driving down and spending time with her mother.

The glow wore off.

What a disconcerting thing to feel, to acknowledge! It wasn’t that she was sorry Harriet was still alive. It was more that she couldn’t keep it up: the attention, the rapport, the camaraderie, the aimless joy of just hanging around with her mother, watching the news. She had burned herself out, just as Peter and her friends had warned she might; but looking back at the time when Harriet had seemed to be dying, she couldn’t imagine having managed it any other way.

Harriet started feeling that Rebecca wasn’t visiting often enough. It was true, she was coming down less often. But oh, that “enough.” That tricky guilt-laden word that doesn’t even need to be spoken between a mother and daughter because both of them can see it lying there between them, injured and whimpering, a big throbbing violent-colored bruise of a word.

“What about Easter?” Harriet asked—plaintively? coldly? in a resolutely plucky way that emphasized how admirably she was refraining from trying to make Rebecca feel guilty? It could have been any of those ways of asking, or any of a number of others, all of which did make Rebecca feel guilty, and angry, and confused. The burnout took the form of an almost frantic protectiveness of her own time whenever Harriet wasn’t sick. If her mother needed her, she dropped everything and went; but if her mother didn’t need her, she wanted to feel free to say no.

Harriet, on the other hand, seemed to feel that the time Rebecca spent caring for her didn’t count. Hurting, drugged, frightened, throwing up—that’s not what Harriet called spending time with her daughter. (The watching-the-news part was engrossing, and sometimes fun, but it was more like a jailhouse party, a desperate entertainment concocted by people who have very little to work with.) Harriet wanted to travel with Rebecca—to go on a cruise to Alaska or the Panama Canal. Or see Moscow and St. Petersburg, for heaven’s sake—all those mythical places that you could now, suddenly, actually go to.

Rebecca had no desire to travel with Harriet, and she was getting ready to start her bookstore, looking for space, making a business plan, applying for loans. “A
bookstore?
” Harriet said. “With your education you want to start a store, and one that doesn’t even have a hope of making money?”

“It’s what I care about,” Rebecca said.

“I worry about you,” Harriet said. “What is your life adding up to?”

Rebecca was hurt, furious. What did a life, anyone’s life, add up to? Why did Harriet feel she had a right to say things like that? (In her head, Rebecca wrote the script for what a mother should say in this situation: “That’s wonderful.”) They had one of their old fights, made worse by the fact that Rebecca hadn’t realized these old fights were still possible. The recent long entente around Harriet’s illness had lulled Rebecca into a false sense of safety. She felt ambushed.

Then Harriet sent Rebecca a check, for quite a lot of money.
To help with the bookstore
, she wrote on the card.

“You can’t afford this,” Rebecca said.

“It’s what I want to do,” Harriet said.

Then she got sick again.

Pneumonia—not life-threatening, but it took a long time to get over. Rebecca drove down and made Harriet chicken soup and vanilla custard, and lay across the foot of Harriet’s bed, watching the vigil outside the Fifth Avenue apartment building where Jacqueline Onassis was dying. They watched while John Kennedy Jr. came out and told the reporters that his mother was dead.

“Poor Jackie,” Rebecca said.

She was remembering how much her mother had admired and pitied Jackie, in the years after JFK’s assassination, when Rebecca was growing up.

But “What’s poor about her?” Harriet said. “She’s been living with another woman’s husband.”

So this has been going on for years. Harriet ailing and rallying. Rebecca showing up and withdrawing. Living her life between interruptions—which, she herself knows, is not really a fair or accurate way to characterize it. Harriet has been sick a lot, needed her a lot; but most of the time she has not been sick or needy. Most of the time, Rebecca is relatively free. Maybe, then, it’s that Rebecca doesn’t feel that she’s done much with her freedom. That each interruption points up how little has happened since the last one.

She runs her bookstore quite successfully. She tried opening a second store in a nearby suburb, which did not do well; the experiment was stressful, but not disastrous; after a year she closed the new store, paid back the loans, and felt relieved.

She’s been seeing Peter for a long time. They enjoy each other. They trust each other. They spend a few nights together most weeks, but both of them like having their own apartments. His kids went away to college; his ex-wife remarried, and so did Steve.

Early on—a couple of years into their relationship—Peter asked Rebecca how she would feel about getting married. That was how he did it: not a proposal, but an introduction of a topic for discussion. She said she wasn’t sure. The truth was that when he said it, she got a cold, sick feeling in her stomach. This lovely, good, thoughtful man: what was the matter with her? She was nervous, and also miffed that he seemed so equable about the whole thing, that he wasn’t made desperate by her ambivalence, that he wasn’t knocking her over with forceful demands that she belong to him. On the other hand, she wasn’t knocking him over either.

Then his book on Richardson was finished, and published. He brought over a copy one night, and she had a bottle of champagne waiting. “Peter, I’m so happy for you,” and she kissed him, and they smiled at each other and drank, and she kept touching the cover of the book, a very beautiful photograph of the Stoughton House on Brattle Street. “
Peter
,” she said, and he smiled at her. Then he went into her kitchen to carve the chicken, and she began to flip through the book. She turned to the acknowledgments page, and her own name jumped out at her: “. . . and to Rebecca Hunt, who has given me so many pleasant hours.”

It was understatement, wasn’t it? The kind of understatement that can exist between two people who understand each other? (The kind she was always wishing for, and never getting, from Harriet.)

What did she want: a dedication that said, “For Rebecca, whom I adore and would die for”?

Here was something she suddenly saw and deplored in herself, something she seemed to have in common with Harriet: a raw belief that love had to be declared and proved, baldly, loudly, explicitly.

She saw the danger, the wrongness, of this; yet when Peter came in from the kitchen, carrying the chicken over to the table Rebecca had set in front of the fireplace, she said, “Pleasant? Is that what I’ve given you—many pleasant hours?”

“Some unpleasant ones too,” he said, humorously, nervously—he saw, suddenly, what was coming, and he was trying to head it off.

What came, though, that night, turned out to be not so bad. Rebecca was able to rein it in; she didn’t need to harangue him, or freeze him, although they talked less at dinner than usual. Peter said, “You know, I’m not sure what made me choose that word, but it was probably not the right one.”

“That’s okay,” Rebecca said, and it was, really. What they had together
was
pleasant.

But still the word continued to bother her whenever she thought of it. The fact that it appeared to be lauding, but the thing that it praised was a limitation. Thanks for not getting too close to me. Thanks for not getting too deeply under my skin. Peter had disowned it somewhat, said it might not have been the right word—but Rebecca thought that it was probably not so much an aberration as it was a revelation: one of those sudden, sometimes accidental instances when everything is brightly lit and you see where you are. Long ago, Rebecca had had a friend named Mary; they’d been close for a couple of years when they’d both been trying to keep sinking marriages afloat. One night they had sat on the front steps of Rebecca’s apartment building, talking about their husbands, and Mary had said, “You know those things in the beginning of the relationship—the things that bother you and you tell yourself, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter’? I’m realizing now: all of it matters.”

Rebecca and Peter, of course, aren’t at the beginning of their relationship. They’re more than ten years in. And isn’t that the problem really—that they are so far in, and yet not far in at all?

“Where do things stand these days with Peter?” Harriet is always asking. She means: Why don’t you marry him? Or, if you don’t love him enough to marry him, why don’t you move on and find someone else? (Both questions are unspoken; but the second, nevertheless, carries all the buried force of an ultimatum: if you’re too stupid to appreciate Peter, give him up, and
then
you’ll be sorry.)