CHAPTER 3 #2
“Is that even possible? It can’t be that long.
Eddie was so good at his job. I can remember being at publishing functions over the years when his name would come up, someone saying they had worked with Eddie Triplett and what a good editor he was.
Of course none of those people knew that we’d been married, and I wasn’t going to say anything.
I don’t think they would have believed me anyway.
Eddie Triplett. Do you think you’ll see him again? ”
“I do,” I said.
“Will you tell him hello for me?”
I sat down on the couch. All this time I’d been standing, looking out the window into my backyard in Bronxville, and now I felt such a need to sit down. “Mom,” I said. “What the hell?”
My mother was quiet, and over in Winchester, I had a feeling that she had sat down on her couch as well. “What?” she said.
“You’re not mad at him?”
“Well,” she said, “forty-four years is a long time.”
And then I said something to my mother that I had never said to her before, at least not since the car accident. I told her she needed to help me understand.
She thought about it for a minute and then told me to come up tomorrow. “Tomorrow would be good,” she said.
“I hate having a job,” Leda said when I told her I was going.
“You love your job.”
“I love my job, but I’d like to be in the room for this one. I want to hear what she has to say firsthand.”
“Henry could see your patients, couldn’t he?” I had a great deal of confidence in my nephew.
“He’s wise,” my sister said of her son. “New York isn’t full of seventeen-year-old boys who could cover your therapy practice for you. Still, I think the licensing would be an issue. Call me the minute you leave the house.”
“Why did we never ask her before?” I couldn’t remember anymore.
“Because we weren’t thinking about Eddie. We forgot about him,” Leda said.
Maybe that was the question I should ask our mother: How had we forgotten about Eddie?
I called Jonathan next.
“Why are you going to your mother’s?” he asked. “Why not go to Leda’s if you’re lonely?”
“I’m not lonely. I need to talk to her, that’s all.
Anyway, if I go while you’re in Wisconsin, she won’t get her feelings hurt.
” Jonathan was always the one my mother wanted to see.
I believed it had to do with the misalignments in our ages: her husband was now too old for her, and my husband was quite a bit older than me, which meant that my husband could have reasonably been my mother’s younger man.
Jonathan would have fainted dead had I told him this theory.
“Well,” he said, “if that’s the case, I hope you go and see your mother. Have a wonderful time.”
“How’s the clean-out coming along?”
“We found an entire second house’s worth of crap in the attic: boxes, toys, furniture.
I’m amazed the ceiling on the second floor never caved in.
We’ve been so proud of the progress we’ve made, cleaning out closets and kitchen drawers, but we haven’t done anything.
The attic, the basement, the garage—that’s where the problems are. ”
“Are you ever coming home?”
“Someday,” he said. “After you visit your mother, you might want to think about taking a bus to Wisconsin.”
Jonathan had gotten the job in Manhattan six months after we started dating, but it took me another year to decide that I should be with him, which was stupid.
I loved him, and he wanted me there, and Buddy was dead and nothing was keeping me in Boston.
In the year of our commuting relationship, I lived in Newton and taught at Newton South, a good public high school, but I had no seniority, so there was nothing to give up.
On weekends I took the bus to New York because the bus was cheaper, and I lived on a schoolteacher’s salary with the load of credit card debt I’d acquired while taking care of my father.
Every week I brought a tote bag full of student papers with me on the bus and marked them up over the length of Connecticut.
Round trip, I had nearly eight uninterrupted hours of grading and class-preparation time, which meant that during the week I was never behind.
Jonathan hated the thought of me on a bus, mostly because it meant I started and ended my trips in bus stations.
He was forever offering to buy me a train ticket, but in those days my feminist standards were such that the idea of letting the man I was sleeping with pay for my train ticket so I could go and sleep with him in a different state seemed tantamount to signing away my freedom.
(Jonathan might have ridden a school bus when he was a child, and once or twice the 72nd Street crosstown bus, but he had never taken an interstate bus in his life.
He never came back to Boston to see me after he left, which had to do with his busy new job and my depressing efficiency apartment.) Every time I waited in line to board the bus, some young woman, usually a college student, would attach herself to me.
“Okay if I sit with you?” she’d say, and I’d tell her yes.
If my seatmate got off in New Haven, some other girl who was already on the bus would dart over to take her place.
I never understood it, until one Sunday night going home, a girl told me her mother had instructed her to identify the safest-looking person on the bus and ask if she could sit with her. “That’s you,” the girl said to me.
“How can you tell?”
She laughed. “Look around.”
And when I did, I could see that she was right. I was a little older. I was grading papers. I was always going to be the safest-looking person on the bus.
I used to daydream about the train in those days.
I thought of how, in some mythical future where there was nothing but money, I would buy a ticket on the Acela, which was the fast train.
Then I would pay extra to sit in the quiet car.
Those luxuries meant so much when you couldn’t afford them.
Two days after the Hotallings’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, I took the Acela to Boston, booking my ticket for the quiet car, and while I meant to read, I spent most of the time staring out the window, thinking the whole thing through.
Lucas and Abigail Ekker had stayed in Winchester, a suburb that offered both the small rental house we had lived in when I was a child, as well as the stately spreads where they had raised their sons.
My mother had been enthralled with the grander side of town back when she was broke, so once she had money, she knew exactly what she wanted.
She wanted to be able to walk to the Boat Club for lunch.
In this way we were not dissimilar: she set her sights on the five-bedroom foursquare, and I wanted a train ticket on the express.
They had moved through Winchester strategically over the years—my mother quietly improving their circumstances through knowing when to sell and when to buy.
She had worked for a real estate company back when she and Buddy were married, typing up the offers and the contracts, then writing the offers and the contracts because she was better at it than the agents.
This was before she landed her job in publishing.
I had never lived in the house she and Lucas lived in now, nor had I lived in the two houses before it.
This one was the apex of her real estate dreams.
“We have to think about downsizing,” my mother said when she picked me up at the station. “We’re rattling around in there, and we need a main-floor bedroom suite. Lucas going up and down the stairs scares me to death.” At seventy-six, my mother was still taking Pilates twice a week.
“I’m all in favor of a simpler life,” I said, thinking of my husband and his sister going through the attic in Wisconsin. Sydney, his daughter, had given up on the project and gone home.
“You need to be thinking about downsizing yourself,” my mother informed me.
I shrugged. “We have the rare Bronxville ranch, all on one floor.”
“Is it?” she asked.
“It was this morning.” Surely she wasn’t doubting my memory on this one.
“I told Lucas we were going to the market,” she said. “Is there anyplace you want to go?”
“I’m happy to go to the market.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been already. I just don’t want to walk in the door having some big conversation about Eddie. Nobody wants to hear their wife talking about her ex-husband.”
“Lucas knows about Eddie, doesn’t he?” Anything was possible.
“I was briefly married to an editor who took a good job in New York City when I didn’t want to live in New York City. I wanted to raise my girls in the suburbs. Just one of those things.”
“You could have raised us in Bronxville or Maplewood.”
“Eddie was adamant about living in the city,” she said.
“That’s what you told Lucas?”
“He knew about your father, of course, I had the two of you girls to show for that one, but we never talked much about Eddie. If you don’t have children with someone, the marriage doesn’t count.”
“Jonathan and I don’t have children.”
“I’m not talking about you and Jonathan,” she said. “I’m talking about Eddie and me.”
“The raspberry farm,” I said.
“What about it?”
“I want to go to the raspberry farm.” It had come on me like divine inspiration.
My mother turned her big sunglasses in my direction. “You’re kidding me.”
“It’s a quiet place to talk,” I said. “And anyway, I’ve never seen it in good weather.”
“I’ve never seen it at all,” my mother said.
“You never went up there?”
“Why would I?”
“I don’t know. Eddie and I could have died there. We didn’t die there. Leda loves raspberries. That makes it a seminal location in our family history.”
My mother shook her head. “You didn’t almost die. You got a cut.”
I leaned back into the Audi’s comfortable leather seat, regretting everything. “Raspberry farm, please.”
My mother did not agree, but at the next light she turned the silver sports sedan and started in the direction of High Street.