Unforgettable (22 page)

“We only have an hour and I really —” Angel leaned down to gently bite Rett’s lower lip. “I really would like to make good use of it.”

“Give me the abstract, professor, and we’ll go over the whole paper later.”

Angel laughed. “She was a lot younger than I was. We met while she was finishing her master’s — friends introduced us. She went into a Ph.D. program that was grueling, and I tried every way I knew to be supportive, to encourage her. I fucked it up. She took my encouragement as patronizing and felt that I still saw her as an inexperienced grad student while I was the big kahuna with the National Science Award. I knew we had problems. She’d stopped talking to me. When I suggested therapy she fell apart. I never realized she felt that way until she was screaming it at me. The more successful I was the more she felt she could never catch up. I would always have more degrees, more awards, more published papers, more money. I didn’t mean to make her feel that way. I know a lot of it was her problem to work on. When I met you that night you were so fabulous on stage. It was so obvious you knew what your talents were and had confidence in them. There was no competitive subtext —”

“What subtext? We screwed our brains out.”

Angel’s smile finally reached her eyes. “It was so easy to be with you. It still is. I wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible.”

“We have a lot to talk about,” Rett said softly. “You intimidate me sometimes —”

“I intimidate you?”

Rett used her near-perfect recall. ” ‘Meiotic recombination can result in the separation of two markers originally on the same chromosome.’ ” Angel blinked. “I read it but I don’t understand a word of it. Wait, that’s wrong. I understand all the words with three letters or less.”

Angel put a finger on Rett’s lips. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

“I’m trying hard these days not to. But it’s intimidating.”

Angel looked caught between laughter and tears. “Are you crazy?” Her lips trembled and Rett wanted very badly to kiss her.

“I try not to be —”

“Listen.” Angel took a deep breath and sang a note. It started at D-flat and ended somewhere around C, but it had no intrinsic musicality. Rett did her best to hide her inner cringing. “Voila!” Angel ran her hands through her hair. “There you have every bit of my musical talent. I come from a family of musical people and I can’t sing or play a note. And there you are — every word you say sounds like music to me. I hear music and it sounds pleasant, but that fabulous mind of yours hears music as a language. I can’t even conceive of what that must be like. And when you sing, it just melts my bones. And I intimidate you?”

Rett was trembling with emotion — it was pleasure and amazement churning with desire and that pounding in her heart that had started last night and she couldn’t name. Not yet. “Is that something that is written on your genes? Bone-melting?”

“I’ll give you my diagnosis later. We have fifty-three minutes left and if you don’t kiss me right now —”

Rett sat in bed after the door closed behind a freshly showered and redressed Angel.

I intimidate her, Rett thought. Who would have thought it? Who would have guessed that mutual intimidation would transform into mutual respect? She hugged herself, feeling complete for one perfect moment.

She glanced at herself in the mirror, then was sorry she had. Adult voice reminded her she’d made a promise to herself. You have to do it today or face the fact that part of you is still a frightened teenager.

“You’re not a frightened teenager,” she said to her reflection. “She has no power over you anymore. So why not get it over with? What could be so bad?”

She knew that a day had not passed without a severe judgment or screaming demand from her mother for Rett to do something right for once in her life. Her memory was perfectly clear. Her mother had never stirred herself to come to any of Rett’s school performances, citing endless weariness from waiting tables in bars. She had never heard Rett sing in public. When Rett had had the temerity to ask if she would come to the school play, her mother had taken a long drag on her always lit cigarette and shrugged.

“Why bother? The radio’s better and I can put my feet up.”

At the time she’d been furious and crushed, and after all these years the hurt was still there. It was incomprehensible and that, she told herself, is why you have to go. As an adult, you just might understand it.

She took a shower and blinked back tears the whole while. I will not cry. She’d quit crying twenty-three years ago. I’m a grown woman now. One way or another, it was time to let it go.

As she rinsed shampoo out of her hair she found she could not hold her breath under the stream of water. She gasped for air and eased herself to her knees, recognizing the signs of hyperventilation. She’d done it once on stage and the lack of control was frightening. She put her head down and triggered her breathing exercises, but they didn’t help. She couldn’t calm herself.

Disoriented and dizzy, she knelt in the tub and tried to conquer her breathing. Was it fear? Did the idea of facing her mother frighten her this much?

Her hands were clenched into fists and she realized she was beating them on the wall of the tub. Anger … she shuddered all over. Yes, anger, she was so angry that it frightened her.

Let it go, she told herself. It’s a waste of energy. Breathe in… breathe out…

The water had long since turned cold when she felt she could sit up. She had to consciously unclench her fists. She finally made it to the bed with a towel wrapped around herself and huddled under the covers until the shivering subsided.

There had been a time when she’d thought about therapy, but by the time she could afford it she had felt she no longer needed it. Her mother had been far away and buried under a fog of time. Now that she was back in Woton, however, the fog had lifted. All the rage and hurt was still there. Carrying it around was exhausting.

There had to be an end and the end was today.

As she knew from her drive-by on Sunday, the house was unchanged. She couldn’t be certain her mother was home, but the chances were good. Unless she’d changed careers, her mother had always worked in one bar or another until two A.M. and slept in until noon. Rett always remembered arriving home from school to find her mother watching television and working on her third or fourth beer. An hour or so later her mother was off to work again. On school days when Rett stayed after for rehearsals they didn’t even see each other.

She got out of the car at the bottom of the oil-slicked, weed-choked driveway and noted that the mailbox bore only the name “Lorena Jamison.” Whenever some guy had moved in her mother had always gone to great pains to add his name to the mailbox. So she was living alone then. Rett didn’t know if she should be relieved. She pressed the doorbell before she remembered that only salespeople used doorbells in these parts.

The front door was snatched open. “I don’t want any — well, well, it’s you.” 

For a moment Rett thought she was looking in a mirror. The similarity between their faces stunned her. Same cheekbones, same nose, same eyes. The biggest difference was that her mother’s face was covered with a network of fine wrinkles — smoking had made her look older than sixty-two.

“I wondered if you’d find the time. I read about the reunion in the Weekly.” Her mother stepped back and held the screen open for Rett to come in.

The stench of stale cigarette smoke made her suddenly nauseous. God — she’d forgotten that she’d always felt sick when she was at home. It was the smell. Stale air and unrinsed empty bottles of beer. Her stomach threatened to heave.

“Have a seat if you’re going to stay.” Her mother settled into what had to be the same deeply indented recliner she’d always favored and lit a cigarette.

Canned applause blared from a game show and Rett crossed the room to turn the set off. She stood between her mother and the TV and could not think of a thing to say.

“I was watching that.”

Her mother’s indifference stung her into words. “There’s always reruns. It has been twenty-three years, after all.”

“You’ve always known where to find me.”

“I know. I’ve avoided the entire state like the plague to put off this moment.”

Her mother blew smoke into the air. “I’m not sure why you bothered. I think the last thing you said to me was that you were never coming back.”

“Twenty-three years is close to never.”

Her mother shrugged. Silence stretched for several minutes as she finished her cigarette. Finally, she said, “You want to say something to me or you wouldn’t be here — go ahead.”

What do you want, Rett? Why did you come here? She hasn’t changed, but you have. She swallowed back another wave of nausea. “I’m trying to understand you. I’m trying to figure out why you treated me the way you did.”

Her mother studied her through the smoke that curled from the tip of another cigarette. “What did I do that was so bad? From the look of you, I’d say you turned out pretty good.”

“No thanks to you, Mama.”

“I never knew where you got your ideas about life being a bed of roses. It never was for me and you weren’t going to turn out any different.”

“How did you know that for sure? I feel like I was raised in a dark room and you never once told me to look for the light.”

“I was busy putting food on the table. I taught you to stay on your feet when life kicked you.”

“Slapping me down every day was just preparing me for life? That’s a classic excuse for abuse.”

Her mother coughed into a tissue, then said raspily, “Don’t tell me I was abusive. You never had any idea what I gave up for you.”

“It seemed like very little. I don’t recall you ever going without what you wanted.” Rett took tiny breaths to avoid inhaling the stale air and felt the prickling of hyperventilation again. She could never breathe in this house.

“You never thought I might have had dreams.”

“Then why did you even have me?” There, she thought. That was the question she wanted answered. The answer was why she was here.  

“I got pregnant and had no idea how to find a back-alley abortion. Couldn’t have paid for it either.”

That was the answer she had expected, but still Rett had to sit down. She sank gingerly onto the sofa. “Why didn’t you give me up for adoption?” Her memories were accurate and she realized she had hoped they weren’t. She hadn’t imagined the antipathy. Her mother didn’t just not love her, she resented and blamed her as if Rett had had a choice about being born.

“I should have, for all the trouble you were.”

Rett rested her head on her knees. Why did you come here? “Are you trying to make me hate you?”

“You think I was a rotten mother. You always were judging me. I think you turned out okay anyway.”

It was praise. Meager and backhanded, yes, but still praise. “But what might I have been, Mama? It took me all these years to realize that not only could I succeed, but that I wanted to be more than mediocre. I have finally made a success of myself. One word of encouragement from you might have made it happen for me much sooner.”

“My mother told me I could be a star. I ended up here.”

“You’ve never mentioned your mother before.” She had asked about her grandparents, but her mother had refused to answer any questions. The past just didn’t matter, she’d said. Until she’d come back to Woton, Rett had believed that.

“I don’t need pity from you. I never needed anything from you. She and Daddy up and died one year from a flu epidemic. I was fourteen. I hated the relatives who took me in and I ran away finally, lived from place to place until I knew that that whole lie about dreaming big was nothing but smoke.” As if to illustrate, she blew a long stream of smoke into the air. “You might have wanted me to, but at least I didn’t die on you. You had a roof over your head. You could have had it worse.”

Rett felt an unwanted flicker of pity. Her mother had felt abandoned by her own mother and had passed on the pain to Rett. It didn’t make the pain any less, but at least Rett could begin to understand.

She had her breathing under control again, so she straightened up and steeled herself to look at the face that was unnervingly too like her own. “What kind of star were you going to be?”

“I was going to be a big singer, just like you. I hung out with beatniks, sang in a few clubs. Then I got pregnant, small wonder. Sex was like breathing in those days.” Her mother glanced at her then went back to studying the tip of her cigarette. “You can take that look off your face.”

“What look?” Rett felt so numb she would have thought her face devoid of expression.

“You’re no better than I am, I’ll bet. You like it as much as I ever did, I’m sure. You just don’t think your mama has a right to like sex.”

“You were always honest about that, I’ll give you that. I know you don’t have any idea who my father is.” Rett shrugged. It was a fact of life she had come to accept a long time ago. “I only objected to the men you brought into this house to knock the both of us around.”

Her mother angrily stubbed out the cigarette. “You know if any of them laid a hand on you I kicked them out.”

“When they hit you it was like they hit me.” 

“I never put up with it for long. Don’t tell me no one has ever popped you — you were always too lippy.”

Her mother’s unquestioning acceptance that relationships always included violence chilled Rett to the bone. “I shoved her face into the wall. I’ll admit I learned one thing from watching you — that no matter what I’d be nobody’s victim.”

“Her? Still muff-diving?”

The crudity of the remark made Rett’s stomach threaten to heave again. She could tell her mother from now to doomsday that the relationships she had with women had all been healthier and more supportive than any her mother had ever survived, and that included Trish. But what would be the point? Why did I come here? For validation from this bitter, hateful woman? So she had a rotten time — she didn’t have to dump it all on me. “What I do with my body doesn’t affect you at all. You don’t like my judging you, so why not let me off the hook, too?”

“Sure. Whatever you want. Are we done now? Wheel of Fortune is coming on and then I’ve got an early shift at the Glass Turtle.”