The Unknowns (20 page)

I wanted to rent a car at the airport, in case I need to get out of the house at some point, but my mom insisted on picking me up. The last time I came she met me at the gate, but now you can’t get through security without a boarding pass. Irrationally I look for my name on the hand-lettered signs held by the limo drivers, but no, there’s my mother, standing off to the side and waving shyly. She looks older than she did when I was twelve, a development that still surprises me. I bend down to hug her and she throws her arms around my neck.

“Well!” she says. “How was your flight? Are you thirsty? Did you drink water on the plane?” (The dehydration that results from air travel is one of my mom’s preoccupations.) She is impressed that all my stuff fits into a carry-on, although I’m only here for two nights.

She leads me through the parking lot to her SUV. I offered to buy her a car, but she refused; the house was enough, and not having to make mortgage payments enabled her to trade her hatchback for this hideous Nissan. “I’m so glad you could come!” she says once we’ve pulled onto the freeway. “You must be so busy these days!” The fact that I have millions of dollars and no job makes my mom uncomfortable: she doesn’t know what I do all day. Nor do I, really.

“I’m just sorry I missed your real birthday,” I say. (It happened three days ago; tomorrow’s the party.) The dull clouds emit biblical shafts of light, reminding me how much I hate Denver’s melodramatic weather.

“How are things with Maya?” she says. I’ve only told her a little, but apparently she can tell it’s serious.

“Everything’s great,” I tell her. It’s true, if you filter out all the stuff I don’t want to think about right now and couldn’t tell my mom even if I did. But I have the urge to say something more, to tell everyone how important Maya is. The newspapers are printing the wrong headlines, focusing on the inconclusive reports of weapons inspectors and intelligence agencies when they should be describing her sense of humor and beautiful little breasts. “I’m kind of totally in love with her,” I say, because it’s also true.

Mom glances at me nervously before her eyes flicker back to the highway. “You will make sure she signs something, right?” she says.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, although I can feel understanding blooming like a rain cloud.

“Oh, I shouldn’t say anything,” she says. “And I’m sure if you’ve picked her she must be a wonderful girl. It’s really wonderful, Eric—I’m so happy for you! I just mean, well, you’ve worked so hard, and it would be terrible to lose all that. I know something about how women can be.”

To the west the mountains look tapped out, as though the last minerals have been extracted and there’s nothing left but piles of dust. I calculate the number of hours until I get back to San Francisco and see Maya again, away from my mother and her anxiety: forty-three. No, it’s an hour later here: forty-four.

“Mom, I’ve been seeing her for six weeks,” I say. “We’re not getting married for a while.”

Mom turns off the highway and heads toward the subdivision in which she chose her new home, a freestanding manse surrounded by identical siblings, all painted the same lilac with purple trim, out in the windy grassless plains to the south of the city. I haven’t been here since the closing, when my mom wept and one thin strand of my life’s accumulated fear and guilt was severed. I asked her if she wouldn’t prefer something closer to town, something cozier, something that’s not identical to every other visible structure. She talked
about the absence of noise and crime and dirt, but I suspect the property’s true appeal was less tangible. My mother fears hotel beds and used clothes and public swimming pools, objects with a history of occupancy by strangers. Moving into a
new-construction home
, as the developer’s literature put it, was like an exorcism.

I follow her inside and swing the surprisingly light front door shut behind me. The hall, with its elevated ceiling and pretentiously sweeping staircase, looks almost exactly as it did when we came here with the talkative woman from the sales office. My mother spent her life in houses that were too small, and the idea that she might finally have enough room made her giddy and scattered.

She heads straight into the kitchen without offering me a tour, and, unprompted, begins to make grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, a meal I have always loved. I want to sit at the kitchen table, from which I have watched her cook thousands of meals, but there isn’t one: the table is in the dining room now. Does she usually eat there, or does she take her food into the living room and watch TV? The stainless steel refrigerator is decorated with magnets in the shape of pumpkins, but there’s nothing for the magnets to pin up. As she greases and flips the sandwiches, we talk about her work, about that jerk Wade, about the party tomorrow. Neither of us wants to talk about Maya anymore, which means there’s not much to say about my life.

When she’s made two grilled cheeses for me and a half sandwich for herself, we carry the plates and soup bowls into the dining room. I return for paper towels and silverware and we sit down on opposite sides of the table, smiling at the familiar situation and the unfamiliar setting. She blows on a spoonful of soup and says, “Well, your dad called.”

“You talked to him?” As far as I know, my parents hadn’t spoken in seven years. “How was that?”

“Honestly, it was hard,” she says. She sets the spoon back in her
bowl without tasting the soup. “He had his friendly manner, and he asked how I was doing, and I didn’t know what to tell him. And then he asked if I’d been in touch with you! As though you were a friend from school or something like that.”

“Did he say anything about having dinner with me?”

“He said that he had offered you this job—
pitched you
, was the way he said it—and that you had turned it down, and that you were making a big mistake and I should talk to you about it. He said here was your big opportunity for lightning to strike twice, and you were about to miss it.”

“Did you tell him to go fuck himself?”

Mom frowns at the language. “No, I didn’t,” she says. “But I told him you were smarter than both of your parents combined and you could make your own decisions.”

I make a noise that attempts to thank her without endorsing the insult to her own intelligence. “If he bothers you again, tell him to call me,” I say. “There’s no reason you should get dragged into this crap.”

“I’ll be fine,” she says. “I’m not scared of your dad.”

After dinner I check out the rest of the house—too many surfaces, not enough objects to rest or hang on them—and retire to the guest bedroom. I’m almost certain I’m the first person to stay in this room. On the verge of sleep, my mind snags on Mom’s frightened admonition about a prenuptial agreement. I know she’s trying to prevent my life from being sabotaged the way hers was. But I have to believe it won’t be that way when Maya and I divorce. We will be reasonable, sympathetic, adult. I wish I could be certain. Will we be trapped by bitterness and regret? Will we be able to find one another through the thicket of hostility, to reach out and clasp hands and say,
Here I am, I loved you once
?

Victoria, who works with my mom, is the first to arrive. She brings her son Carlos, aged ten months, fleshy and grumpy. We sit in the
living room in front of the big picture window, and my mom fetches a bag of Tostitos and a bowl of salsa. (I worry that Victoria will feel patronized by the quasi-Mexican snack, but she dips happily.) When the doorbell rings again, my mom is bouncing Carlos on her lap, so I volunteer to answer it.

Stacey Oberfell is standing in the doorway. “Look at you!” she says. “The prodigal son returns!” The adjective seems uncalled for. “So let me see you,” she says, stepping inside and appraising the effects of eight years on my physiognomy. “Well, you’re looking more and more like your dad.”

In the living room, Mom and Stacey embrace, and Stacey meets Victoria, and we all sit down on the big matching couches and armchairs. “Here we are,” Stacey says. “The house that Eric built. Or bought, anyway.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know how to build it,” I say. “So how are things, Stacey? How’s the family?”

“Everyone’s great. Bronwen and Pete were so jealous when I told them I was going to see you. Bronwen’s training to be a nurse, we’re all real proud of her.” I would like to learn whether she has a boyfriend and if she ever mentions me, but I don’t ask. “Pete graduated college last year, and now he’s in officer candidate school, if you can believe that.”

The thought of fearful nine-year-old Pete in uniform is hard to accept, especially with troops massing in Kuwait. “And what about Gary?” I say, as if Gary and I were peers or buddies. A sudden worry: Have they divorced? Did I hear about it and forget?

“Oh, he’s great,” she says. “His practice is doing real well, and we moved to a place in Aurora Hills, a real nice place. Not as nice as this place, obviously”—she gestures at the huge empty space above our heads—“but still real nice.”

I had thought that membership in a twelve-step program guaranteed a crowd at your birthday party, but there is no sign of a
sponsor or any fellow addicts-in-recovery. I imagine my mom at a meeting, sitting alone at the back of the room, next to a big urn of coffee. It’s strange to be the only man here, a feeling compounded by the fact that Victoria is probably a few years younger than me. I am aware of some subtle pressure of expectations, as though I’m supposed to produce something. The conversation seems lost in the massive house—or maybe it’s the disconnectedness of the guests: Victoria from work, Stacey from long ago, me from biology.

Carlos begins to cry, and Mom passes him back to Victoria with a flustered look, as though she must have done something wrong. Victoria casually takes out her breast and attaches Carlos to it while I stare at the floor. “So tell me about your life,” Stacey says. “Any more million-dollar companies? You’ve got to tell us about the next one so we can invest!”

“Uh, no, I’m not really working on anything commercial right now,” I say. “I’m still doing some programming, but it’s mostly open source.”

Stacey smiles and nods to convey that she has no idea what I mean and doesn’t want me to explain. “Well, we’re all real proud of you,” she says. “I said to my kids,
See, I told you you should be learning computers
.”

“It sounds like they’re doing good, though,” I say. “I mean, there’s a big nursing shortage, right?”

“Oh, sure,” Stacey says, bored. “So Margo—how does it feel to be the big five-oh?”

“Well, I feel…,” my mom says, and then takes a pause that stretches out like the blank terrain visible through the window. Then she remembers her lines: “I’m just so grateful to be here. There have been so many hard things, and now,” smiling at me, “I’m here in this beautiful house, and I’m back at work, and I haven’t taken a drink or a pill in one year, four months, and six days, and thanks to you guys and God I’m on the right path.” By the end of this litany she sounds cheerful.

“We can all celebrate
that
, right?” Stacey says, as though distinguishing it from something else. The moment seems to call for a toast, but only Victoria and I have glasses, both of them filled with Diet Coke.

“So is it time for the presents?” says Victoria. “And is there maybe some kind of cake?” She gives me a twinkly smile, and I realize too late that I’m here as a host rather than a guest, responsible for the apparatus of the festivities.

“Uh, no, I, uh, I didn’t get a cake,” I say. Stacey’s face takes on a look of private hopes borne out. I can’t look at my mom.

“We’ve got presents, anyway,” says Victoria. Long ago it was decided that my mother liked pumpkins, and that gifts for her should involve pumpkin iconography: her kitchen clock is in the shape of a pumpkin, and her apron is decorated with pumpkins. I suspect that, for my mom, the pumpkin theme’s chief function is to minimize the amount of time other people spend thinking about what she might enjoy. Victoria has brought a ceramic jack-o’-lantern whose black eyes and mouth are cute rather than scary. As a child I felt strongly that jack-o’-lanterns were a corruption of the pumpkin idea, belonging to Halloween rather than to my mother’s birthday, but I don’t remember Mom expressing any feelings on the issue. She is more affected by Victoria’s card, which bears a printed poem titled “To a Woman I Admire.”

Stacey’s gift is a framed print, a painting of children making sand castles, that calls attention to the house’s acres of barren wall. Every minute or so I reexamine the knot of bad feeling at the back of my head and remember the cake thing. My hope is that my gift will redeem me, at least in part: a gold and topaz brooch, more expensive than anything else my mom wears but not so ostentatious as to be out of place. She extracts it from the little square box. “Oh, Eric,” she says. “Oh, it’s so pretty!” She affixes it to her sweater carefully, squeezing the pin between threads. “It’s the most beautiful thing I
own.” She is trying to make me feel better about the cake, and I appreciate the attempt, although it only makes my failure more vivid.

Nothing has been planned for the rest of the afternoon. Was this my responsibility too? Drinks at some nearby Applebee’s is out. If I could leave for half an hour I could get a cake at the supermarket and then stop at Blockbuster and pick up a movie about four middle-aged women who learn to build fulfilling lives without men. Everyone works to find neutral subjects and eats chips and salsa until all the chips large enough to convey salsa are gone.

“So your mom’s been telling us all about your new girlfriend,” Victoria says, giving me a look that is like flirting but with everything sexual or romantic stripped out. Young mothers do this sometimes, mechanically recapitulating the forms of a ritual they’ve outgrown.

“Nothing too personal, I hope,” I say.

“Oh, she just says you’re
madly in love
,” Victoria says, drawing out the last three words wickedly. I dodge the topic with an embarrassed shrug, out of fear that my filial affection will seem inadequate by comparison. If it were Maya’s birthday I’d have made sure there was a cake.