Then Came You (21 page)

“If you want to talk about it . . .” He looked sweet and hopeful, even cute, if you could ignore the glasses, but all I wanted was to be alone.

“I don’t,” I said. He handed me the water. Then he set his hands on my shoulders. Surprised, I stumbled backward, catching my heel on the curb. I would have fallen if he hadn’t been holding me . . . but, of course, if he hadn’t been holding me I wouldn’t have tripped in the first place. Then, just like that, his lips were on mine, warm and gentle, and he’d pulled my body against his so that we were chest to chest, hip to hip. In that instant, I wasn’t hot, wasn’t tired, wasn’t irritated at the way the night had gone or worried about how exhausted I’d be the next day. I wanted to keep kissing him, to have him keep kissing me, even though I’d never approved of couples who kissed on the street. Then, as suddenly as he’d started, he stopped, releasing my shoulders, stepping back onto the sidewalk. “Betsy,” he said.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Tina?”

“Family only.”

“Betts?”

“Only if I get to call you Dare.”

He grinned, tipped an imaginary hat, and set off in the direction of the subway, hands in his pockets, whistling.

Upstairs, I got out of my clothes and into the shower and stood there, letting the cool water wash over me. It was almost three in the morning, and I’d met with nothing but frustration as I’d tried to make my family see the absurdity of what my father and India were attempting ... but still I fell asleep with a smile.

The following weekend I went to the one person I thought would see the gravity of the situation; I made my first trip ever to my mother’s ashram. I booked a ticket to New Mexico and flew out from LaGuardia on Saturday morning. I rented a car at the airport and followed the GPS’s directions through forty-five miles of blasted-looking desert interrupted by gas stations, the occasional casino, and clusters of Native Americans selling blankets by the side of the road.

The Baba had done well for himself. The parking lot was paved, the grounds of the Enlightenment Center beautifully landscaped, oases of jewel-green grass accented with fountains and manicured beds of flowers. I sat for forty-five minutes on a stone bench in the cool, tiled lobby of a little adobe building that I refused to call a yurt, listening to the tinkling of water into a basin, sipping tea that tasted like boiled twigs, and glaring at a young woman in a white linen caftan who answered the telephone in an annoyingly mellifluous voice. “Love, light, fulfillment,” she would singsong. When I pulled out my iPhone she used the same dopey voice to say that electronic devices were not permitted (“They disrupt your aura”).

Eventually, my mother glided in, dressed in white robes of rough linen, her familiar musky, sandalwood-and-patchouli scent filling the air. I felt my eyes burning, and I looked away, blinking, not wanting to let her see how much I still missed her, how jealous I was of the people who had their mothers there to help them
through their twenties. A mother could help you choose and furnish your first apartment; she could listen to however much you chose to tell her about your love life; she could offer a loan or a sympathetic ear or even just a night when you could go back to the place you’d grown up in, sit in the kitchen while she made your favorite meal, and be a child again. All of that had been denied me, thanks to her selfishness, and to the Baba.

I clamped down on my fury as she led me to an empty yoga studio and handed me a buckwheat-filled bolster to perch on, explaining, as she arranged her own body, the importance of opening our hips. I sat cross-legged, awkward in my skirt and heels and sleeveless silk blouse (I’d taken off my jacket and left it in the car). My mother laid a woven Indian blanket over my lap, then looked me over with a tolerant and utterly infuriating smile.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s just that we don’t see many women dressed like you are.”

I looked down at my clothing, my Ferragamo pumps, and didn’t answer, thinking that she used to dress this way, too, that I was just as she’d made me, which gave her no right to judge.

My mother took my hands in hers. “What’s troubling you?” Her voice, once a combination of broad midwestern and New York City lockjaw, had become as syrupy and singsongy as the girl’s behind the counter had been. Her silvery-gray hair, which she’d been wearing in ridiculous Pocahontas braids before she’d left, was clipped short now, almost a buzz cut that exposed the oval shape of her skull and her elfin ears. Her pale-blue eyes looked enormous in her face. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and her skin was freckled and rosy from the sun. There were no earrings in her ears, no rings on her fingers, not a single bracelet or bangle, and she was barefoot underneath her robe, her toenails unpainted, her small feet calloused and tanned.

“Dad was in the hospital. He had a blocked artery. They gave him a stent.”

She sighed. “He has so much stress in his life. He needs to slow down.”

Whatever. “His new wife . . . I found out some things about her. Some bad things.”

She nodded again. At least she was looking at me and not at her guru, whose framed portrait beamed down from the front of the room. The Baba had grown his long hair even longer, and was sitting cross-legged, a beatific smile on his face, like a white Jimi Hendrix in a bathrobe.

“They want to have a baby.”

This, finally, got her attention. She cocked her head at a quizzical angle, eyes narrowed, jaw tight. I remembered that expression from when I’d come home to tell her that another girl had stolen my bookbag at lunch, and from the time she’d been ousted as head of the annual diabetes dance (this was the year after she’d insisted that the passed appetizers be vegan). I heard her take a deep breath, inhaling through her nose, before she said, “The Buddha instructs us to welcome new life in the spirit of gladness and joy.”

“Mother.”

“Satya,” she corrected, touching my knee beneath the blanket.

I felt my lips curl. “Satya. They’re paying some woman to donate her egg. They’re paying another woman to carry a baby for them. And this woman, Dad’s new wife, is seriously no good.”

She reached forward, placing her cool hands on mine. “Change is the only constant,” she intoned. “Sorrow is like a leaf in a stream. Sit on the banks. Watch it pass.”

“You may recall,” I said, with some asperity, “offering me slightly different advice before the Barneys sample sale.”

She smiled. Serenely. Indicating her plain robes, she said, “Suffering ends when craving ends,” like this was a message of
incredible profundity instead of something her guru had probably cribbed from a Starbucks cup. “I was lost to myself in New York. Now I’ve come home. So what about you, Bettina? What is it you crave? How can you find your way home?”

“I’ve got a ticket on the five-thirty flight to LaGuardia,” I said. It wasn’t like I could tell her that home was forever lost to me, because home was the five of us, together, the way we used to be. Nor did I mention that, hoping against hope, I’d bought a ticket for her, too.

She rose easily to her feet and walked me to another fountain, this one outdoors, a verdigris-green bowl into which water trickled from a sculpted flower. We sat there in silence, smelling sage and some flowers I didn’t recognize. “Be well,” she said. I knew it was a dismissal. She kissed my cheek and glided off to her chores.

It wasn’t until I’d dropped off the rental car and was flying back to New York that I figured out what else I wanted: my father’s safety, his happiness, an assurance that he would not get his heart broken again. These were perfectly reasonable things to desire. Trey was too wrapped up in Violet’s new teeth and soiled diapers to care; Tommy was too busy chasing women who thought it was witty when a man sang a heavy-metal cover of “Sunny Came Home”; my mother had renounced the world entirely; which meant that I would have to keep my father safe. If I did that, maybe I could keep India’s bony, grasping hands off our money ... and maybe I could have a chance at the thing I most missed and most wanted: my family back.

The Monday after my trip to New Mexico, I was down in the Crypt, wearing white cotton gloves, working with a Tensor lamp and a magnifying glass and tweezers to determine the value of an antique silver locket that was part of a new lot of jewelry. “These things are precious to me,” the woman who’d brought them in had said. “They were my mother’s.” I’d dug out a reference
book, trying to determine the age of the locket and whether the chain was original to the piece, when Darren Zucker called.

“Just checking in,” he said. “How was your trip?”

“Fine,” I said automatically.

“I was wondering what you decided to do.” His voice was high, a little nasal, the voice of a Woody Allen wannabe for whom the whole world was a joke.

“Are you billing me for this?” I asked.

“You have a suspicious and untrusting nature. But I respect that. And no, this isn’t business. I was just curious. It’s how I wound up in this line of work—being curious. And I was thinking you might want someone to talk to. You know, do the Franklin list.”

“Pardon?”

“Ben Franklin. Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper. List the pros and cons. We could have lunch.”

I closed my book and gently replaced the necklace in its box. Darren Zucker was not my ideal confidant, but he’d been a good sport about our trip to Hoboken, and besides, I did need to eat. There were no windows in the Crypt, but when I’d arrived that morning the weather had been a beautiful day, the sky deep blue, a light breeze stirring the treetops. September in New York City always felt, to me, like the year’s true beginning. It made me think of the last days of summer, loading up the station wagon in Bridgehampton for the ride back to the city. We’d stay in the Hamptons as long as we could, wringing every last minute out of August. My parents would throw a barbecue on Labor Day, inviting anyone who was left: the neighbors, our staff, their kids, the lifeguards who’d watched us swimming all summer long. We’d eat chicken and ribs, potato chips and thick slices of watermelon on paper plates. Games of tag and Marco Polo and hide and seek would form, break up, and re-form, and, as it got
late, children would fall asleep all over the house, in beds, on couches, in nests of blankets and pillows on the floor.

As the night went on, the grown-ups would gather on the porch and the lawn, drinking vodka tonics or beers. On that night, instead of their usual jeans and chino shorts and tennis skirts, they’d get dressed up, the men in button-down shirts and jackets, and the women in Lilly Pulitzer skirts or sundresses that left their tanned arms and shoulders bare. Some of them still smoked back then, and I remembered looking at the lit cigarettes bobbing and darting like fireflies, music coming from a CD player plugged in on the porch, the sound of their laughter, and how I would think,
This is how I want it to be when I grow up.

Darren and I met at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. Where else, I thought wearily, would a committed hipster take a girl for lunch? He’d already staked out a bench when I arrived and was waving at me, wearing his glasses, khakis, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, checked blue-and-white, which looked like it had been swiped from some homeless man’s closet. I was in my usual office wear, an A-line black cotton skirt, a plum-colored boatneck sweater with three pearl buttons at each sleeve, low-heeled shoes, and a gold necklace. “Chocolate? Vanilla?” Darren asked, holding out two cups. “The line gets crazy, so I bought one of each.” He’d also gotten two cheeseburgers with everything and an order of fries.

He opened the paper sack, and we spread our lunch on our laps. Darren took a big bite of cheeseburger and sighed happily, the way a man with his mouth full of meat will, as I removed the lettuce and tomato from my own burger with my fingertips and set them aside before carefully peeling away the cheese.

“Oh, come on,” he said as I took a small bite. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those rabbit-food girls.”

I didn’t bother to respond. For years, I’d read those “Make
the Most of Your Figure!” articles, the ones that told you how to dress if you were a pear or an hourglass or an inverted triangle, and I’d used all the tips they’d recommend to try to balance my narrow shoulders and flat chest with my wide hips and heavy thighs, but I wasn’t sure whether any of it did much good. Nor did dieting help. I’d done the rounds with that in high school, two weeks of grapefruit and hard-boiled eggs, a stint on Weight Watchers sophomore year and another on Jenny Craig when I was a junior. When I started college I’d tried a few of my roommate Vanessa’s diet pills, but all they did was give me a permanent headache and make my mouth feel like it was crammed full of cotton. Each time I’d lose ten or fifteen pounds, but it never changed my essential imbalance, the way that my body looked like one woman’s torso grafted onto another woman’s bottom.

“I think you look fine,” said Darren, eyeing me slowly, up and down. His ridiculous glasses bobbled on his cheeks as he raised his eyebrows. “Nice gams.”

I yanked at my skirt. “Nice gams? What are you, Raymond Chandler?”

“I am a detective,” he said, and poked a straw through the top of a waxed-paper cup, sucking down his chocolate shake with a noise that sounded like a clogged toilet finally managing a flush.

“I just like to eat things one at a time,” I explained.

He looked at my lap, where I’d arrayed the burger, the bun, the cheese, the lettuce, and the tomato, each in its own place on the white waxed paper. “Is that, like, a condition?”

“Habit.” I took another bite of the burger, holding it carefully with the pads of my fingertips.

He wolfed down his own lunch in half a dozen jaw-distending bites while I looked him over. He was a rangy guy with broad shoulders and thick legs, full lips and a cleft chin and a surprisingly dainty nose. Thick eyebrows, light eyes, pale skin, and an unlined brow that made him look boyish, like he didn’t have a
care in the world as he reached into a battered canvas satchel at his feet and pulled out a legal pad and a pen. “Okay,” he said, writing
PROS
and
CONS
and dividing them with a line slashed down the center of the page. “I’ve got half an hour, but I bet we can solve this by then. Pro?”