Chapter 4 HERE’S MOMMY
Chapter 4
H ERE ’ S M OMMY
Every time Charli makes the drive out to the Cape, she spends part of it pondering why she still stays in touch with her mother, let alone visits her. It’s a duty, fed by this guilt that drives her mad, this guilt that makes her feel like her mother, in all her failures, is somehow Charli’s responsibility.
Another reason propels her today, though. She wants to know more about her mother’s side of the family. It’s been two days since she spoke with Frances, and Charli can’t shake the idea that she should consider the trip to Costa Rica. It’s lunacy, really, but Charli’s desperate. Seeing her father decline, hearing him talking about selling the Beneteau. Her own instability. Something must be done, and she’s running out of time.
Her mother’s place on the water is a masterpiece, four thousand square feet of perfection steps away from a private beach. In the summer, the gardens wrapping around the house evoke Versailles, but only because one of her exes pays for the landscaping—among other things.
Her mother, Georgina, greets her at the door, and Charli can tell she’s already been drinking. It’s not even lunchtime on Saturday. “I thought you were coming earlier,” she says.
Charli swallows a snarky response. Here less than a minute, and her mother is already showing her claws. Georgina is dressed like she’s still in her thirties, a tight turquoise sheath showing off her tiny waist, a constant reminder of her mother’s abstemious efforts to avoid food at all costs. She has a tan that has no business on a woman in New England; it’s from the tanning bed she bought a year ago on a credit card that still needs to be paid off. She wears a gaudy pearl necklace around her neck. Her puffy lips are enough to keep Charli away from getting work done for the rest of her life. Same with her mother’s oversize implants and stretched face.
“Where’s the dog?” Georgina asks. Charli often thinks of her mother as Georgina because she feels more like an evil stepmother than a mom.
“I left him at doggie day care,” Charli says. “I didn’t want him upsetting you again.” Last time Charli visited, Tiny knocked over a lamp, and her mother threw a tantrum.
“Hopefully they’re training him,” Georgina quips.
Charli already regrets coming here. There is no lower blow in Charli’s world than to insult Tiny.
“I brought you a book,” Charli says, offering an advance reader copy of a Gabrielle Zevin novel that arrived as Charli was wrestling with the decision of whether to go forward with the bookstore. She never did get a chance to order actual copies of that one, as she’d let her dream go long before its publication date. What she should have done is bring her mother a self-help book, but such a gift would not go over well.
“This one was great, Mom. You’ll devour it.”
“I still haven’t read the last one you brought me. Where do you get all this time to read?”
Charli shrugs. “I make the time.”
They go into the living room, which feels cold with its modern decor. Charli remembers when her mother had replaced the furniture a few years ago, putting the new purchases on yet another credit card. Then she’d begged her second husband, Steven, to help bail her out of the payments. Charli looks through one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that face the sea. Waves are crashing hard over the beach. The water looks as frigid as her mother’s blood.
“You want a glass of wine?” Georgina asks.
Charli sits in a chair with barely any give, noticing how clean the living room looks. Clearly someone is still paying for the weekly housekeeper too. “No. And haven’t you had enough?”
Her mother ignores her as she goes into the kitchen and comes back with a generously poured glass of white, probably her standard pinot grigio. She sits across from Charli on the edge of a couch that looks like it was plucked out of MoMA.
“So ... did you talk to your father?”
“About the money? No. He gets your messages, Georgina. He doesn’t have any money.”
She blows out a blast of air. “Asshole.”
“Why don’t you get a job? Or sell this place? You don’t need all of it.”
“This is my home, Charli. Why don’t you give Tiny away?” Her mother makes no sense, makes the worst arguments.
Charli promises herself to resist a war between them. “I don’t even know why I come out here. Can’t you be nice for once?”
“Can’t you be nice for once?” her mother mimics before knocking back a gulp of wine. She’s lonely and sad like her dad. Behind all that makeup and plastic surgery lies a woman that hasn’t matured past her fourteen-year-old self, the age she was when her father put a shotgun into his mouth and left the mess for his daughters to scrub from the floor.
Somehow Charli is able to muster enough sympathy to visit her mother because Georgina has no one else. After her third divorce, she’s alone in a way that few people could truly know. Her hollowness is a monster that is days away from swallowing her whole.
After they chat for a while, mostly arguing about Charli’s direction in life, her mom says, “Let’s not forget I told you not to open the bookstore. You’re not good in that way, Charli. Trust me. Some people aren’t cut out to be entrepreneurs.”
Charli wonders what it means exactly to have her mother’s blood, to be dangling from this rotten family tree that’s somehow still standing.
She ignores her mother’s deep insult about the bookstore and asks, “Mom, do you ever wonder why your side of the family is so screwed up?”
Her mom looks up, as if to say, How dare you .
“Seriously,” Charli says. “I’m really asking. Is there something that happened in the past? I mean, before your father killed himself. Do you remember your parents ever saying anything?”
“What in the fuck are you talking about, Charli?”
Charli rests her elbows on her thighs and exhales. “I’m talking about your family. What happened? I’m just trying to break the cycle, Mom.”
“Break what cycle? God, you kids are so existential and think you have some mission in life. You all exhaust me.” She says it like she’s been forced to drink water instead of wine. And Charli is twenty-nine, a long way from a kid.
Aware that she is about to throw gasoline on a fire, Charli tells Georgina about the Costa Rica trip. She hacks her way through a vague description of the therapy as Georgina’s wine disappears like sand in an hourglass. She’s looking at Charli as if she has described last night’s alien abduction.
“I know you think I’m a basket case,” Charli says, “but I’m considering going. To figure out if something is lingering in our family history. I read about this experiment they did with mice. They trained them to fear the color red by showing them something red and then shocking them afterward. When the mice had babies, they showed the same fear of red. It’s passed through their genetics—and quite possibly through other ways as well. I’m wondering if that could be the case with us.” She stops before adding, It might actually make me love you a little more.
Georgina gives a wretched look that Charli is all too familiar with. She might as well scream, How did you come out of me?
“You’re crazy, Charli. No, nothing happened in our family. We’re as messed up as all the rest. Even if it did, what in the world are you going to do about it?”
“I know you think it’s stupid. Shocker there. But please, humor me. Why did your dad kill himself? And my uncle, why was he so messed up? What about my great-grandparents? Do you remember them?”
“Of course I remember them.” Georgina looks toward the still ceiling fan. “Henry and Susannah left Boston to help my mother with Kay and me after my father was gone. Moved about two minutes away.”
“What were they like?”
“Our dad was dead. Their son was dead. We were all trying to get by.”
“How about on your mom’s side?”
“Sip and Eunice,” Georgina says. “They were ... normal.”
Snickering inside at Georgina’s surely skewed definition of normal , Charli does her best to get more information, but her mother is a dry well. All the hard years on her body and mind have impaired her memory.
Eventually Georgina sits up and addresses Charli in what seems like her best attempt to be a mom. “You’re not going to find some reason that the world you’re living in is terrible. Look around you. There are no answers to find. You live, you struggle, you screw up, you maybe have a good day or two, and then you die. Wash, rinse, repeat.”
“I get it,” Charli responds, reminded of the origins of her own bleak interpretation of life.
Georgina takes on a proud look, like she’s done well just now, with her mothering. “These are the things we learn as we get older. At least it doesn’t hurt as much once you know.”
“Always there with the tough love,” Charli says.
Georgina gives a plastic smile.
Charli shifts gears. “Did Dad tell you he’s selling the boat?”
Georgina makes a face of disgust anytime Charli’s father comes up. “No. Don’t tell me he’s still trying to pretend like he’s broke.”
“It worries me,” Charli says, ignoring the money comment. “I think about your father taking his life, and I—”
“William is too much of a coward to kill himself.”
Charli looks at the woman, incredulous that she came out of her womb.
Thirty minutes later, Charli races away from the Cape with a heaviness coming down all over her. She can feel the pain of her family in her blood. She can taste the disgust she feels for herself and the rest of her family. A part of her can see the appeal of swinging her steering wheel hard to the right and seeing what happens, finding some peace for once.
And yet she does want to break the cycle. She wants to find a way toward happiness. Maybe she hasn’t done anything with her life. Maybe her mother is right, that life is awful anyway. But she wants to believe there is a way to escape the dark cloud that hovers over all of them.
She’s known for a long time that the best thing she can do for this world is to make sure the family line stops with her. Never will she allow herself to get pregnant. There you go, she is doing something to contribute.
At a stoplight, she finds Frances’s name in her phone and calls her. “I’d like to figure out going down to Costa Rica ...”
“Guess what, Charli,” Frances replies. “I was saving you that spot.”
February is a nightmare. Georgina won’t stop harassing William about more money, claiming he’s sitting on millions. He’s listed the boat for sale. Every Thursday visit gets sadder and sadder. Charli encourages him to find a therapist, but he’s not interested. And she gets it; her therapist hasn’t done that much for her. Work is eating at Charli’s soul. She’s not much happier than her dad.
But she’s finally mustered up the courage to ask her boss for a few days off so that she can go to Costa Rica. Just her luck, the two-day constellation session she’s attending is during the week. A weekend thing would have been so much easier.
Marvin’s office is a mess, coffee stains everywhere. Wadded-up tissues. “What kind of headache did you bring in today?” he asks, while he keeps his eyes fixed on his computer monitor.
Charli sits across from him. “I know I just started and don’t have vacation time until next year, but I wanted to see if you’d make an exception. My mother’s having surgery, and she has no one, and I was hoping I could go spend some time with her on the Cape. Take care of her.”
“Flipping Friday,” he says. “Everyone’s got a reason to skip work, don’t they? What if I said yes to all of you? We’d be out of business.”
Charli places a hand on his desk, which causes him to look at her. She taps into her best acting chops. “She’s having her ovaries taken out, and she’s all alone.”
“Your mom is not my problem,” he says.
Her urge to quit is so incredibly strong, but she reminds herself of her salary and potential for quarterly bonuses. She raises her hands to her face and starts to sob. It’s fake at first but turns real, a release she had no idea was coming. She cries for all the bad stirring around in her world, all the pain she feels, the loneliness. She has her shell of a father and her toxic mother, and that feels like having no one at all. Viv is distracted with a new case, and she hasn’t even seen her since that night after Patrick ended things. All she has is Tiny.
Marvin sighs with his own flair for drama. “Oh my, you’re good. Just when I thought I didn’t have a heart, you’re getting to me. Please, please stop the crying.”
Charli opens her eyes and drops her hands. “It’s four or five days,” she says. “While she recovers.”
He pinches his nose, clearly considering his options, and then decides he better get something out of it. Please don’t ask me for a date. Instead, he says, “Give me fifty hours every week until you leave, and you can have your vacation. But I want you available if I need you.”
Charli feels like she’s won something for the first time in years. “No problem. Thank you.”