Chapter 21
A couple of days after the party, I woke up very early, which wasn’t like me, and walked downstairs.
“Mom?” I called.
She didn’t answer. I heard the water running on the second floor, my father in his morning shower.
I called again. I sometimes had dreams like this, dreams in which I walked the house, gradually checking the rooms where she most often sat—the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom—calling her name over and over again, louder, waiting for her annoyed answer of Yes, I’m in here.
But the yes never came, and I kept calling her name until at last, I accepted that she was dead and woke up.
I looked out the window. On the front steps of the house, she sat with her coffee, staring into space. She wore a large denim jacket over her ankle-length nightgown. I opened the heavy front door and sat down on the stone step beside her. Neither of us wore shoes, the stone rough beneath our feet.
The sun was rising out of sight, beyond the trees that lined our block.
Miniature pink clouds skipped across the sky above us, against a backdrop of fuzzy blue.
Grass covered most of our front yard, though great flowering bushes lined the left and right perimeters of the property, almost completely obscuring the metal fence meant to divide the house from its neighbors.
“Those were only shrubs when we moved here,” my mom said in a wistful voice.
I nodded, this being one of the statements about the house she made to me at least once or twice a year.
Part of being an adult seemed to be the desire to repeat sentiments.
This kind of repetition often roused my impatience.
That morning, it made me tender. The tall plants created a sense of enclosure.
I tipped my head onto her shoulder. I looked at her hands, her gold wedding and engagement bands, the watch with a gold face and brown leather strap on her wrist that she also wore every day. She turned and kissed my hair.
“I thought it would take you longer to start making trouble,” she said.
“I feel like it took me a while,” I responded.
“You’re not very old.”
“But I haven’t ever made very much trouble either.”
“You’ve made trouble,” she said, and pressed the ceramic mug into her cheek.
The steam from the coffee rose into her hair.
“It scared me—already you’re sneaking out into the night to kiss someone.
You’re sleeping somewhere other than where I thought you were.
I thought you were in a specific bed, a couple of blocks away, where you’ve slept since you were six, but instead you were out in the world, exposed. ”
I could understand why that would be frightening. I remembered my mother’s seeming indifference to the height of my emotion when we fought. Hearing how she’d really felt, even if I hadn’t seen it at the time, the estrangement between us eased.
“I was okay, though,” I said. Then I asked what I hadn’t known I’d been waiting to ask. “Does it bother you that it’s Eleanor?”
She drank some of her coffee and waited until she knew what she wanted to say.
Her habitual and unapologetic slowness asserted that she was not obligated to understand herself right away or to answer to others on their clock.
I often strained against it. In this moment, I felt suspense, but I also felt a higher order of trust in her wisdom that shielded me from really fearing her reply.
“No,” she said finally. “It doesn’t bother me that it’s Eleanor.
She’s been a wonderful friend to you. It’s hard for me to understand her mother’s sense of security, but Eleanor does inspire confidence in her ultimate well-being.
You can’t help but believe that she knows what she’s doing, except that she’s still so young—as young as you are.
It’s unsettling at times for adults. Well, adults who notice that sort of thing.
Though I thought she was like Margaret to you. ”
“So did I,” I said.
“But they’re not the same.”
“No. They’re not the same.”
“I’ve been amazed your whole life about you and Margaret.
I remember when you met, I didn’t know you could talk so much.
I think Nancy knew Margaret could talk that much, but she said she’d never seen Margaret want someone so badly as a friend.
” This was a story I’d heard before that I was glad to hear again.
“After you met,” she went on, “Margaret ran around the house asking her about everything, toys and clothes and dinner, Does Mina like this? Nancy said, I don’t know.
You have to invite her over and ask to find out.
When I saw you and Margaret together, I felt like I had a better idea of the person you were going to turn out to be.
It made me proud to be your mom, even though at times I was taken aback by your closeness.
I didn’t have a friend like Margaret growing up.
I don’t have any friends like that now.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yes, it’s sad,” she said, her voice even.
“I sometimes feel very sad about it. You can’t know how important and rare a friendship like that is.
Your father wanted to move a couple of years ago, somewhere closer to his office, and I said we couldn’t.
We couldn’t move you away from Margaret.
You had to be able to walk to her house.
It’s unusual in life to live in walking distance of anyone you love. ”
I must have looked horrified, because she said, “I know,” and stood up, her nightgown rustling at her ankles.
She gazed out onto the street while she stretched, pushing her shoulders back and down and her chest up.
I saw her close her eyes as she felt her body’s extension.
Then she turned around to face me again and continued.
“I don’t dislike that it’s Eleanor, but I worry about you because you’re a tender heart.
You were an extraordinarily honest child.
It disarmed me, and your father. Even now, you have hardly any guile, whereas Eleanor, she understands how to conceal herself.
That’s not a criticism, and I’m not suggesting you learn to lie.
Never have. But now, watching you become vulnerable like this—the way you have to, if you want to ask someone to love you—I’m reminded why other parents make other choices.
I wish you had a little more armor, though I’m not sure where I expected you to get it. ”
I stood up to join her. We walked back into the house through the front door, which I’d left open.
I followed her into the kitchen, where she emptied the remainder of her coffee into the sink, pulled the faucet head from its stem, and rinsed the trail of dark liquid down the drain.
Then she put the mug in the dishwasher. I sat at the kitchen table, not in my usual seat because we weren’t about to eat a meal.
Instead, I sat in my father’s seat, which faced the hallway toward the stairs.
“Eleanor,” I began. I had to be careful.
“She won’t talk about being together.” My mom considered this.
She made a thinking noise. Now that we were in the kitchen, she began collecting miscellaneous dishes from the counters, which I tolerated.
But when she made as though to wash one of them, I asked, “Do you really have to do that while we’re talking? ”
“No,” she said, and walked away from the sink. She sat in the table’s fourth seat, the one we left empty unless we had a guest, because that was the chair next to me. “You’ve tried to talk to Eleanor about having a romantic relationship, and she ended the conversation?”
“I mean,” I said, “I’ve texted her. I’ve heavily implied.” Had I left room for interpretation? I’d deleted everything. I remembered the strength of my sentiments but not the actual words I’d used.
“Eleanor might be afraid of changing the dynamic between the three of you.”
“I thought so too, but she told Margaret about kissing me.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
“Well.”
“I agree, it means something.”
She paused before replying. “You don’t usually want me to speculate on the meaning of your friends’ behavior,” she said. This was true. I typically found whatever opinions she expressed upsetting. However, these were special circumstances.
“I don’t have Margaret,” I admitted, “to talk things through.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t tell her about kissing Eleanor.”
She gave me a look that meant she was finding something out about who I was as a person, and I flinched.
“I should have told her,” I said.
“No, Mina,” she replied, surprising me. “You don’t owe your secrets to anybody. Margaret isn’t the only person you’re allowed to love. It’s just unusual for you not to want to tell Margaret about something that happened to you, especially something good.”
I put my chin in my hand, my elbow on the table.
“I told you, and it went badly.”
I didn’t know how to explain the effect of that first conversation.
Eleanor had only very slightly kissed me.
Then I learned that what happened between us could be made to feel even less by another person.
The meaning of any event includes every time you’ve ever said it aloud.
I couldn’t risk putting the kiss into words again, not until I better understood what it meant between me and Eleanor, not until I believed in it enough to sequester the memory from other people’s reactions.
“Mini,” my mom said, which was what she called me when I was small. “I’m sorry how I reacted made you afraid.”
I nodded. “I thought I would tell Margaret once I’d talked to Eleanor,” I said, “once I knew for sure what was happening, but Eleanor—she never really acted like it was real.”
My mother interlaced her fingers, her hands on the table, then asked, “Did that make you feel ashamed?” Who but your own mother can be so thoroughly unimpeded by your discomfort, so soberly discerning of your reality?