CHAPTER 2
I looked at my watch. Five o’clock. I told my sister I had to go.
Leda, who had sunk into the couch while listening, sat up. “You can’t leave. You’ve only told me the part of the story I already knew.”
“I’m sorry. I had to start at the beginning.”
“So you start at the beginning, so what? This isn’t a therapy session. You have plenty of time.”
“I don’t. I promised Jonathan I’d be home. He’s leaving town in the morning. We were going to have a day together and then we ran into Eddie and then I wanted to come and talk to you. I need to go home for dinner. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be gone.”
“Where’s Jonathan going?”
“Wisconsin. He and his sister are cleaning out their mother’s house.
There’s a lot that needs to be done before they can get it on the market.
” Jonathan and Bea’s mother had died six months before, at the age of ninety-six.
The enormous force of her will, combined with Bea’s tireless service, had kept her in her own house right up to the end.
“But his sister lives there. Can’t she do it?”
I shook my head. “Bea gets stuck with everything. She did all the caretaking because Jonathan was working, and now that he’s not working ...”
“... he needs to clean out some closets. Okay, I get that, but I still want to hear about the accident.”
“We’ll do the rest of it later, I promise.”
Leda pushed her feet beneath my thigh. “I feel like I’ve been waiting forty-four years for this one, and now I’m impatient.”
I put down my emotional support pillow and stretched my arms overhead. “What if I give you the punch line?”
“What’s the punch line?” my sister asked.
“We lived.”
The late-afternoon light was soft and the leaves on the trees were new and everything in me wanted to walk along the edge of the park but time was short so I took the stairs down to the subway.
Even then, I wouldn’t make it to Grand Central for the Metro-North 5:38, which should have been my train.
I had once dreaded peak service, but remote work had changed everything in New York, including opening up more seats on trains.
The people I’d commuted beside for years were probably living in Montana now.
I’d text Jonathan and tell him to meet me at the restaurant, knowing full well that he would be standing on the platform when the train pulled in.
There were things that Jonathan understood that few men had ever considered, including the comfort of seeing your spouse on the station platform instead of searching the parking lot for your car.
On the subway to the train, my head was full of things I hadn’t said or thought about in decades.
I’d been interested in my own childhood when I was a child, but Eddie wasn’t the one who’d knocked childhood out of me.
My mother’s third husband, Lucas Ekker, got the credit for that, and it wasn’t even Lucas as a person as much as it was Lucas as a concept who brought about that end.
The first two husbands had left me so completely (until they came back) that when the third candidate for fatherhood arrived, I had reached my limit—no more, not interested.
I was twelve, and my mother had abandoned the mythology of the Greeks in favor of a book called Name Your Baby.
She gave birth first to Christopher and then Matthew.
Lucas was a Methodist and so she converted from nothing to something, another dividing gulf we failed to cross as a family.
She had the opportunity to start again from scratch, and good for her, and good for all the Ekkers, but it left Leda and me adrift in different ways.
Leda grew up and sought the training to dig into other people’s childhoods so that she could sort them out, and I committed myself to reading and locked the rest away.
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” First Corinthians, basic even for the nonbelievers.
I did not become a man, but that was part of the problem.
First Corinthians did not properly account for the experiences of women.
I couldn’t say exactly where childhood ends, but dealing with your pregnant mother at the age of thirteen was as good a place as any to wrap it up.
Lucas Ekker had been my mother’s author at Houghton Mifflin.
She saw the sales potential in his first book, Positivity!
, where her colleagues saw only gifty nonsense.
Thanks to her vision, he stayed on the New York Times list longer than Dale Carnegie.
My mother went on the road with Lucas whenever possible, leaving Leda and me with neighbors, cousins, school friends, and, later, Eddie.
This was back in the days of local television, local newspapers, stand-alone Sunday book sections.
Every city could be a love-fest, a media-fest. If Lucas hadn’t invented positive thinking, he surely knew how to pitch it, and people ate it up.
Smile for no reason in two-minute intervals.
Hum in the car—the vibration of the larynx encouraged endorphins.
Affix gratitude lists on the refrigerator with a rainbow magnet, one for each member of the family.
When my mother married him, two years after divorcing Eddie, I had my own gratitude list to fill in on the refrigerator.
It wasn’t child abuse I suffered, but it was certainly child estrangement.
The success of Positivity! was followed by a rehash called Positively Positive!
Then came The Positivity Workbook! Positively Christmas!
American Positivity! The Positivity Pop!
and Positive Every Day!, which offered 365 platitudes in a tear-off format.
They bought a big house on the other side of Winchester, where, despite the ample number of bedrooms, Leda and I continued to sleep side by side in our twin beds, the lamp with the dotted swiss shade between us. We created our own continuity.
It was the AIDS epidemic that ultimately crushed the Ekker empire, a blow that came later than it should have.
No one wanted to be positive anymore. As bitter as Lucas was, and as unable to imagine his empire with a different brand, there was plenty of money to see them through.
My mother was a numbers person and Lucas was not.
To his credit, he had left all the financial decisions to her.
She told him he could have the gold Rolex or the Porsche or the boat, but not the gold Rolex and the Porsche and the boat.
He went for the car, and all four of us went through college free of debt.
I came up from the tunnel beneath 42nd Street and crossed through the terminal of Grand Central at a good clip, glancing up to see the blue arch of the ceiling painted with stars.
Who wouldn’t be distracted by stars? Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had made the ultimate sacrifice for her country and still found the energy to save this beautiful train station, a living testament to not being defeated by one’s past. Jackie was also a book editor, I remembered that now. I wondered if Eddie had ever met her.
I checked the board and then rushed to track nine, slipping through the doors at the last possible minute. As I suspected, I had no trouble finding a seat. On the 6:23, I finally got the thing I needed, thirty quiet minutes to look out the window and explain myself to no one.
When I saw Jonathan waiting on the platform in his jeans and white dress shirt (he had yet to master the art of dressing for retirement), I thought that I might miss him if he stayed in Wisconsin too long.
I remembered how Leda hadn’t been in favor of our marriage at the time.
“Your absent father dies and you immediately take up with the hospital administrator who’s seventeen years older than you?
I don’t think you need a professional to identify the problem with that.
” But that was twenty years ago. Now she loved Jonathan. Everyone loved Jonathan.
“I got sushi,” he said, giving me a squeeze. “I thought this was a night best spent at home.”
Home. Oh, home would be better than anything. I hadn’t thought of that. There was still plenty of light. We could sit in the backyard and look at the peonies having their moment, take off our shoes and sink our feet into grass. I felt like I’d been in the city for a semester.
He walked me to the car and opened my door, then waited for me to settle myself in. “I can’t imagine how tired you must be,” he said.
I smiled up at him, thinking he might reach over to fasten my seat belt for me. “It was a day, for sure.”
“Did Leda help you get things sorted out?”
“We talked about it. I’m not exactly sure what sorting it out would have entailed.”
Jonathan got in. “I wish you’d come with me,” he said, looking over his shoulder as he backed out the car. “I know you don’t want to, but it’s pretty this time of year and Bea would die to see you.”
“You know I’m not going to Wisconsin.”
“But you could at least consider it for a minute, couldn’t you?”