The Price of Silence (17 page)

She wiped at her lap with a napkin. “She’ll help with your Spanish.” Her face stayed as cold as those metal walls.

After that, not much got said that meant anything in the situation. Mom drank three cups of coffee while I finished my toast.The rest of her food stayed on her plate. I should never have told her about Soledad. It made it look like Dad didn’t want her back.“Mrs. Ricklin said Soledad needed to make a few extra dollars to help pay for her son’s col-lege,”— not true but why not?—“so Dad thought why not help her and help us? I mean when you come back she’ll stay if you want her to.You know, it was just . . . why not?”

Mom paid the check, put on her jacket, flashed me a half smile.“I’m glad someone is helping.” She walked me to the subway station on 14th Street.“Thanks for coming.” I got a hug.“Next Sunday?”

So what happened to “a few days”? I wanted to ask, but didn’t.“Sure. Next Sunday.”

That was the start of our routine. She called a couple of times a week, always on my cell, then on Sunday, brunch.

Greenwich Village became our meeting place.“The halfway point,” she called it, which could mean two things: the halfway point between Brooklyn and the Upper West Side or the point where two opposing sides meet for truce talks.

During those brunches I wanted to ask Mom,“Is it great to be with An-ling? Is that why you’re not coming home?

Is she naked a lot?” I wanted to tell her how jealous I was, how I thought about An-ling every night. Instead I told her about the school principal sliding on a pretzel bag in the hallway and breaking his ankle, about Soledad ironing my T-shirts even after I’d asked her not to and earning me more dork points with the girls, about how Max had hired the trio for his own birthday party.How I was planning a series of portraits of my fish for photography class: The Fishtank Family Gallery.

She didn’t offer much from her end. No touchy-feely conversations between us like:
I miss you. Do you miss me?

Will you ever forgive me? I really do love you. I love you, but I also
love her. I want you both; it’s killing me.Tell me you understand.

I would have said, “Sure Mom, I understand, but what about Dad? What about Dad’s favorite mantra: self-absorption is the scourge of modern-day youth? What’s your take on that, Mom? What’s the age limit on youth?”

“How is your mother?” Dad always asked when I got home, his face looking like he was trying to loosen a really tight screw.There was always some written thing on his lap, like he was searching for a formula, some economic law that was going to balance things out again.

“She’s good.” It had to be good.Why else stay away?

A few days before Thanksgiving the phone rang while Dad and I were in the kitchen digging through Soledad’s tamales. Dad picked up, listened. By the sharp set of his jaw I knew it was Mom. I started to leave, but Dad tapped my shoulder. He cradled the phone against his chest.

“Your mother wants to come home to cook Thanksgiving dinner for us. It doesn’t mean she’s going to stay.”

“Did she say that?”

Dad’s eyes turned soapy like he’d suddenly gone blind. It was up to me.

“Sure. Sounds good.”Awful—a couple of hours chomping on food together, then the bell rings, family session’s over and it’s just me and Dad again. Hell on Dad.

“Fine,” Dad said to the phone in his no-nonsense-tolerated voice.“What do you want me to buy?” He reached for the pad. I handed him a pencil. Then a long pause during which he turned his back to me, phone clamped tight against his ear.

“No,” he said and hung up. He sat down, picked up his fork.“We’ll go out for Thanksgiving. Some inn out of the city.The fresh air will do us good.”

Mom wasn’t invited, that much I knew, and I also knew not to ask what had happened. The unspoken is the M.O. around here and I’ve gotten to be an ace at reading the silence. Most of the time. The blade in Dad’s voice only came out if An-ling was mentioned. Mom must have asked if she could bring her along.

For my fourteenth birthday, Mom suggested lunch—the three of us. Dad said he couldn’t make it, which was just fine.

The two of them faking nice on my birthday, no thanks.

December 6, a Saturday with lots of sun. Mom and I celebrated by eating great pasta at Lupa in the Village. She gave me a gift certificate for Drummer’s World. I nearly choked on a fettuccini when I saw how much it was for. After lunch we sat on a park bench in Washington Square Park.

“Dad’s taking me to Pittsburgh for Christmas,” I said. In the dog run, a black-and-white terrier was trying to mount a panting Lab.

She closed her eyes, pressed her lips together. I felt a little swish of satisfaction that I’d surprised her, that she didn’t like the news. “We’re visiting one of his college buddies, Sam somebody and his family.You know him?”The Lab sat down and put an end to the love affair.

“I was going to take you to a restaurant where you could order all the lobster Fra Diavolo you wanted.”

My favorite food.“With An-ling, too?”

“No, just you and me. And Dad if he wanted to. I’ll miss you.”

I kicked a stone real hard and almost hit a passerby.“No, you won’t!” I limped down the walkway,my toe killing me.

I heard her running.

She tugged at my arm.“Josh, come back. Sit down, please.”

“I got a headache.” I kept on walking.

“All right, it’s my fault,” she yelled. “All of it. I’m a terrible wife, a terrible mother and I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” She didn’t follow me, which was fine with me.When I ducked into a sidestreet I called Max, but he wasn’t at his place and there was no way I was going home early to face Dad.

I ended up walking real slow on Sixth Avenue, then hitting Broadway at 34th Street and taking it all the way home, about a hundred blocks in all, my sore toe screaming at me the whole time, which somehow made me feel heroic.

Along the way I made up my mind that if Mom wanted to see me, she’d have to come home.

The following Sunday she was smiling and I was eating Lobster Fra Diavolo and telling her about how
The Tale of
Two Cities
was a boring book.

“Why doesn’t An-ling ever come with you?” I asked.

“This is our special time, just you and me.”

“I’ll go back with you. I want to see where you live.”

“Maybe when you come back from Pittsburgh.”

In bed at night I imagined the place she’d gone to: a humongous white cave full of light, like the lofts I’d seen in the movies. They would never lose sight of each other:

Mom reading or correcting papers at one end of the place, An-ling painting at the other end.They could wave to each other, shout to be heard. At night they could curl up in bed and listen to each other breathing and never be scared of being alone. I’d see An-ling getting up in the middle of the night: She’s naked and the light from the street shines on her body as she walks toward me across the floor. She continues to walk, getting bigger and bigger until I came in my hand.

The Sunday before Christmas it was real cold and Mom took me to a crowded Italian coffee shop on MacDougal Street after our brunch. She started telling me how coming down to Greenwich Village was the
it
thing to do when she was at Queens College, how she and her girlfriends would sit in this same coffee shop and order espresso after espresso until their hands trembled from the caffeine.

“We were trying so hard to be sophisticated Manhattanites.” She spread out her hands and started pinching her fingers.The windows were all steamed up from the heat in the place, but she kept her gloves on, which meant we weren’t going to stay for long. A quick bite, a coffee for her and then we’d head for my subway on Christopher Street and she’d go back to Sixth Avenue to get the F train— I’d studied the route on a subway map—back to An-ling.

“Now I can only drink decaf,” she said.

“What about your friends?”

“I lost touch when I got married.”

“Let’s go to the loft, Mom.”

She shook her head, the smile stuck on her face like a bubble-gum balloon that had popped before she could get it back into her mouth. “Everything is still a mess. After Christmas.”

Inside me, it felt like the wind had just died. I watched her pinch her thumb, forefinger, middle finger, down the line of one hand, down the other hand and back again.

She was never going to take me.

“Did I tell you I’ll be coming in on Saturday mornings?”

The smile got unstuck and swooped across her lips. “I start teaching extra classes after the Christmas holidays. Saturdays, nine to one. If you’d like,we could meet for lunch both days.”

I told her Saturday was my day with Dad, which was more or less true.

The day she’d left us, Columbus Day, she’d come downstairs to the basement and sat on a trunk. I kept playing because what could I say?
Bye Mom, have a good time. Don’t
forget to send a postcard.

“Call me whenever you want. If you want to talk or see me. Really, Josh, I mean it. Call me about anything.” She slipped a note in my shirt pocket. “That’s An-ling’s phone number, but my cell’s best. She doesn’t have an answering machine.”

“You call,” I said.“On my cell.”

She stood there while I played.We’d already gotten the “I love yous” out of the way earlier. I didn’t know what she wanted now. Her eyes were red and mushy, but why was beyond me, since she was doing what I thought she wanted.

I wasn’t going to feel sorry for her. I wasn’t going to beg her to stay.

I lost the beat at some point.“It’s okay, Mom,” I said. She didn’t budge. “I’ll call you.”

I stood up. She stood up. I leaned over my drum kit and gave her a half-assed hug. She could have walked around the drums and wrapped her arms around me. I guess I could have done that too.

“It’s just for a few days, Josh.” She stood there for the longest time. I went back to my drums.

It never entered my head that maybe she was waiting for me to stop her.

Emma

I lay on a mattress on the floor, hidden by a screen made of four tall canvases An-ling had hinged together, on which she had painted branches laden with pomegranates as red and round as Christmas balls. Their bright color was meant to bring happiness. A rectangle of cold white light from the window rested on the lower part of my legs, reminding me of Nonna’s crocheted blanket lying at the end of Josh’s bed. Outside the window, a sky without limits, still a shock to my eyes after years of seeing walls outside my bedroom. In this loft I felt like a pioneer who had moved out west and discovered vast open spaces.

It was Christmas, a day to celebrate the birth of a son, a day that has always filled me with the dread of its unmet expectations. My eyes to the window, I let my mind reel back to the skylight above our bedroom in Westchester. Back then in the mornings I would listen, through the intercom, to Josh gurgling safely in his crib, and look up at that quadrant of sky and feel that, if I lifted my arm, I could touch it.

From behind the screen, An-ling’s voice surprised me. “Half the morning is gone.”

She had a talent for silent movement.After two months I was often still surprised to turn and find her at my elbow. I would look up from reading, expecting her to be sitting across from me, only to find her at the far end of the room. Josh and Tom announced their comings and goings from a distance, scuffling feet, jiggling keys, whistling, calling out for clean clothes, food, a missing sock. An-ling came and went on ghost feet and asked for nothing.

“Good morning, An-ling.”

“Christmas is a lousy day!” She stayed behind the screen.

“Why is that?”

“Because you’re sad. Invite Josh to visit. Call him now.

Tell him I’ll cook Millionaire’s Chicken for him and next year he’ll become fabulously rich.” An arm sheathed in red curved around the end of the screen. My cell phone dropped between my feet.

I sat up.“Let me see you.” She slipped around the screen on all fours and sat on her haunches in the rectangle of white light at the end of the mattress. Her hair was neatly gathered in a ponytail. Her knees peered at me from behind the careful fraying of her jeans. Over the jeans she wore her new red fleece shirt. Following Nonna’s tradition of keeping Christmas Day free of material thoughts,we had opened our presents on Christmas Eve.

An-ling picked up the cell phone and held it out to me.

“Call Josh.”

“He’s in Pittsburgh with Tom.” I missed him terribly.

“Call him in Pittsburgh. He’ll come when he’s back.”

I had called him the night before. Our conversation wasn’t long. I think Tom was in the room. Josh was having a good time, but didn’t enter into specifics. I managed to tell him I missed him, but when I tried to say, “I love you,” shame stuffed my mouth. I ended up mumbling that I’d love to hear from him as soon as he got home.With my real family I had lost the ability to act on love. I needed lessons on demonstration techniques.

“Josh can’t come here,” I said. An-ling’s warmth seeped into the blanket. “Tom threatens to file for divorce if I let Josh visit.” He had written me a note at school after he had refused my attempt at a Thanksgiving reunion, the four of us. I didn’t add that, in Tom’s mind, she was the one Josh could have no part of.

“Tom is mean.”

“He’s angry. I’ve broken his rules.”

“You’re going to leave me soon, aren’t you? All this is just for a little while, right? Until the clock strikes midnight or something like that.”

“It doesn’t mean I’ll stop seeing you.” Part of me wanted to extend this irresponsible interlude until the day An-ling slipped out the door, chasing a wish across the street, the river, the country. Another part wanted Josh.And Tom.The parts were at constant war.Tom and Josh were going to win, but I wasn’t ready to leave yet. I was still too angry with Tom to walk back, too involved with An-ling. Dumbly, I still hoped I could keep all three in my life.

“It
is
a perfectly lousy day,” An-ling said.

“How about throwing a New Year’s Eve party?” I suggested while we finished the previous night’s leftovers for lunch. We’d decided to treat this day like any other. I was preparing lesson plans and An-ling was lining up rows of the different-shaped bottles that it had taken us weeks to collect for a new series of paintings.“Invite all your friends. I’ll help.”