Waltzing at Midnight (20 page)

Bradley’s Christmas letter, posted from Madrid, was taped to the refrigerator.

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Merry Christmas to everyone. I’ve just arrived here from Barcelona.

I miss you all very much, especially because it’s this time of year and
we’ve never been apart before. But Spain is going to be an interesting
place to spend Christmas. I’m going to a Catholic Mass tomorrow. I’m
excited about that. Don’t worry. I’m not converting. I’m just trying to
immerse myself in everything. It will be a Latin Mass, you know, which
will be moving, I expect.

My landlady has made wreaths for all of the doors, so there’s a
pine scent that greets me every time I come in and swing the door open,
which is sort of homey. I understand from Amy that you’re getting an
artificial tree this year. I’m sure it’s practical and an economically-sound
choice, but perhaps a couple of boughs from the tree in the McCord’s
yard would be worth bringing inside. There’s nothing like a scent to
evoke a whole flood of good feelings. At least it’s doing that for me. In
particular, it frequently reminds me of that one winter we drove up to
the mountains to cut a fresh tree, and while we were carrying it back to
the car and tying it on, Amy was playing with the sappy stump. By the
time Mom noticed, she had covered her face and hair with it and pine
needles were stuck all over her head. She looked like a porcupine. I wish
I had that photo right now. It would give me a laugh, I know.

Amy had dug the photo out of a family album and taped it on the refrigerator next to the letter, as if any of us could forget it.

She was only four years old at the time, sitting on the ground in a dense forest in a bright pink jacket, covered with pine needles, just as Bradley remembered. All you could see of her was a round pink blob topped with green and straw-colored needles, jutting out at all angles, her eyes peering out and her mouth open because she was crying in earnest by the time the photo was taken. I was in the picture too, kneeling beside that screaming child, lifting pine needles one by one off her sappy face. I smiled at the photo and then returned to the letter.

Even though I’m missing you guys, I’m so thankful I’ve made this
trip. I’ve become a different person since I’ve been traveling. It’s helped
me know myself. I think it has to do with getting out of the environment
you’re used to, off where no one knows you and everything you see is
unfamiliar. You don’t have a context for anything so you respond to it
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naturally, with your real senses. You begin to understand what you like
and don’t like, what you’re afraid of, what things matter to you.

The other day I was walking through Barcelona by myself. I didn’t
have a destination, was just soaking in the atmosphere. I couldn’t
communicate with the people, at least the ones who didn’t speak English,
but I pretended none of them did. I pretended I was isolated. Every face
I saw was a stranger, every word I heard was meaningless, every sight
was new. That morning walk was the most incredibly free experience
I think I’ve ever had. I know I’m not making much sense. But I’m
having a good time. I wonder if you will recognize me. I think I’ve
matured tremendously on this trip. Thanks so much, Mom and Dad,
for helping me out with this.

I read Bradley’s letter twice. His experiences in Europe seemed remotely like my own at home, new and evocative experiences with the power to liberate. He was discovering himself in foreign territory. So was I. But I’d been on the planet forty years, almost twice as long as he had, and I still didn’t know what I liked and didn’t like, what I was afraid of, what mattered to me. It had all been too easy for me up until now. There had been no challenges.

I’d been home only a few minutes before Jerry arrived, and I was still feeling out of synch with my environment.

“Hi, hon,” he said, giving me a peck on the cheek. “How was your trip?”

“Okay,” I said. “There’s a new letter from Bradley. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.”

“No, I haven’t. Amy must have printed it while I was out.

I just ran down to the hardware store to get a couple of PVC

fittings.” He held up a small plastic bag. “Got a broken pipe. I was hoping it would rain again, but I think I’m going to have to water the lawn after all, so I guess I need to fix it.”

He was looking right at me, but didn’t seem to notice anything unusual. The change, as dramatic as it felt, was not visible, apparently. Perhaps things would be easier if it was visible, I thought, a flashing neon sign over my head or a scarlet letter on my chest, an “L,” of course. Or maybe an “A” would be just as 14

appropriate.

Jerry chuckled at the photo of Amy as he approached the refrigerator to read the letter.

“Well,” Jerry said when he had finished, “no one can complain that Bradley writes ‘How are you, I am fine’ postcards.”

That was true. And it worried me a little that my extremely serious young son reported that he had “matured tremendously.”

At this rate, he would come home to me an old man. It would have been a sort of relief to get one of those “How are you, I am fine” postcards from him. He should be having fun, but fun wasn’t something that just descended on you. It had to come out of you. Perhaps he was experiencing his particular brand of fun after all.

My longing to be with Rosie gradually gave way to an overwhelming sense of grief as I tried to step back into my life.

That first day was nearly intolerable. The ornaments Amy laid out on the dining room table were enough all by themselves to annihilate any thoughts I had of breaking with my past. They represented a steady twenty-two year timeline of my life, a string of Hallmark moments. There was the orb proclaiming Bradley’s first Christmas and the black Scotty dog with its red collar that Amy had made for me in first grade. These objects marched forward through time with the certainty of perpetuity.

And then Amy insisted on the three of us watching
A Christmas
Story
together Sunday night.

“I don’t really feel like it,” I said.

“But we have to watch it,” she said. “We always watch it.”

“That’s not a very good reason.”

“Sure it is,” Jerry said, grabbing Amy around the waist, twirling her right off her feet. Both of them fell onto the sofa.

“Right,” Amy said, sitting up and grabbing the remote. “It’s tradition.”

Jerry smiled at her as she turned on the TV. “Come on, Jeannie. Humor us.”

I sat with them to watch, for about the twelfth time, how Ralphie longs for a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. As usual, 150

when appropriate, we all three joined in with the movie to chant,

“You’ll shoot your eye out.” And every time, Amy and Jerry laughed in joyful collusion.

When the movie was over, I went to my room, laid down with my face on a pillow, and sobbed quietly into it, listening to Amy and Jerry laughing in the other room. While under Rosie’s spell, I hadn’t realized how hard this was going to be. All I knew while I was with her was that it was absolutely blissful to be with her. But to really be with her, I would have to give up everything I knew and everything I had been for the last twenty years. I would have to become something that was a total mystery to me.

I had no idea how to do that.

Monday afternoon, she called and asked, “How are you?”

“Torn,” I said, and thought to myself that the word was too mild. I was feeling shattered, shredded. “I’m actually pretty messed up. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

“Did you know who you were before, Jean?”

I didn’t need to answer that. I knew her opinion of that, and she was probably right, but at least I had words for who I was before. I was Jerry’s wife, Amy and Bradley’s mother, my parents’

daughter. I realized as I thought this that the only way I had to describe myself were through my relationships with other people.

I didn’t know if this was a bad thing. If I left this life for Rosie, then I would be her lover, and maybe still Amy and Bradley’s mother, and I didn’t see how that was any different. There had to be some other way to describe myself.

“You’re feeling confused right now,” Rosie said. “It’s probably the worst possible time for this dilemma to come at you because of the holidays.”

“Yes, probably. But I don’t regret it. It was absolutely wonderful. No doubt about that, Rosie. I loved every second of it.” “So did I.” Her voice was sincere.

She was, perhaps, thinking of asking to see me again. After the last forty-eight hours, I knew I couldn’t face that. The huge emotional see-saw I was on was breaking my heart.

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“I need to think things through,” I said. “This is just too hard.

I can’t describe to you what it’s like here.”

“Yes,” she said. “I understand.”

“I want to see you, of course. I just can’t. Not now. Do you really understand?”

“Yes, I do. You’re right. You need to be alone to work it out.

It’s a complicated situation.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I do love you, Rosie. And I’m incredibly grateful.”

“Try not to beat yourself up too much, Jean.”

I didn’t talk to Rosie again before Christmas, but she did e-mail me to tell me that she was going to Portland to visit her sister. She said I could call her on her cell phone while she was gone if I wanted to.

I did want to, but I didn’t. I lapsed into a paralyzing depression instead. Bradley’s absence wounded me deeply. It would have been so much better if we had all been together this year as a family. Jerry and Amy both noticed that my state of mind was troubled and my behavior was unpredictable. Jerry asked me what was wrong more than once. I found myself snapping at him, frequently, in irritation, because I was blaming him for my unhappiness, for standing in the way of what I wanted. Even though he didn’t understand it, he had started snapping back. It was a natural response.

We spent Christmas Day with my parents, eating turkey and wobbly, can-shaped cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes with marshmallows melted on top, the same thing we ate every Christmas Day since I can remember anything. “It’s too bad Bradley isn’t here,” my mother said more than once. “Where is he now?”

“He’s in Madrid,” Jerry said. “Boy, is he going to have some great memories from this trip. I wish I’d done something like that when I was young.”

“You could have gone to Europe later,” I said. “Maybe not for six months, but for a couple of weeks. We could have done it together.”

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Jerry glared at me. Must be my tone of voice, I reasoned.

Maybe that was a resentful statement.

“We went to England once,” Dad said. “I’ve got a little silver spoon with a Union Jack on the handle to prove it.”

I saw my mother watching me, looking concerned. What, I thought. Everybody looks at me like I’m giving them the heebie-jeebies. Amy was mostly silent throughout the ordeal. She was sulking because she didn’t get to bring Norman, her current boyfriend. He was with his own parents, and I had refused to allow her to spend the day with them. I had no idea what had happened to Tommy. One day she was saying, “I’m going to the mall with Tommy,” and the next day, “I’m going to the mall with Norman,” without the slightest indication that anything had happened or that she had suffered in any way.

When the kids get married, I thought, holidays will become terribly complicated, what with the in-laws wanting their fair share of children and grandchildren. And then I remembered my own complicated situation and became disconsolate. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it, just to resign myself to the life I’d made, to make a rule that you had to live with your original choices, even if you weren’t happy. Happiness was selfish, anyway.

But happiness wasn’t such a neat package that could be accepted or rejected intact. Since falling in love with Rosie, I’d become less and less content with Jerry, and had been seeing him, unfairly, as the source of all of my unhappiness. It came out…

often, in a lot of little ways. Our marriage was falling apart. Even if I recommitted myself to him now, I didn’t think I could repair the damage. You can’t go back to the time before enlightenment, to innocence. So, really, turning away from your own happiness was almost a guarantee of misery for the people around you.

I felt so completely alone. There was no one I could talk to. I had nothing to counsel me but clichés. You made your bed, girl, now lie in it. Or maybe poetry, and the only poem I had ever bothered to memorize, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,”

was startlingly apt.

That poem had seemed quaint to me in high school, a nice 153

little observation about life’s choices. But it was my youth that had reduced it to that, I realized. It seemed so much more now.

I was standing at an ominous crossroad. One direction was well-worn and safe. The other was a total mystery. That path beyond the bend, that void of the unknown, no matter how hard I kept peering down it, its potential dangers and delights remained impenetrable.

And like the poem said, it was extremely unlikely that I would ever be here again, facing this same choice. There would be no second chance to take that road less traveled. Looked at in a certain light, in the light of my quandary, it was a dark and oppressive poem after all. There was no signpost. There was no guide. You just had to have the guts to do it, to venture forth, not look back, and take whatever came your way.

“What’s wrong with you today?” my mother asked as we stood side by side in the kitchen washing dishes.