CHAPTER 3 #7
I shook my head, eating my omelet with satisfaction. Breelyn had a semester abroad in Spain. The relationship, from what I was told, did not survive the distance. “They did not.”
“Everyone shuffled through relationships with several other people, perhaps many other people?”
“To the best of my knowledge,” I said. “But my knowledge only extends to the end of college. I never got into this business of looking people up. It seems like such a depressing habit.”
“I’m sure it is,” he said. “It’s a luxury not to know what happened to the people you were once in love with. Unfortunately, it was not a luxury I was afforded. Which leads me to an unpleasant question.”
“Shoot.”
“The Hotallings have invited us to brunch on Saturday, in Darien.”
“Both of us?”
Eddie nodded. “Polly said if I had a daughter, then I needed to bring her to the house.”
It was the first time I saw a possible downside to this door that had opened, because while I was happy to dig around in the past with Eddie or Leda or my mother, I had no interest in digging around with the Hotallings. None at all. “Is there a tactful way around this?”
“For you, of course. For me, alas, no.”
“Let me think about it,” I said, even though I had already thought about it. The question wasn’t whether or not I might enjoy it, but if I’d be able to stand it in the name of familial duty. “I’ll let you know.”
“May I ask you another question then, something that’s absolutely none of my business?”
“May I have a banner made that says ‘Absolutely None of My Business’?” I asked. “We could sit beneath it all day, catching up.”
“Why didn’t you have children?”
That was a question my father had asked me before he died, and my mother had asked me until I told her to stop.
Random people asked until I reached the age when no one bothered anymore.
It had been a while since another person had shown interest in my reproductive choices, but Eddie had been gone a long time.
“Jonathan has two daughters,” I said. “His first wife died. Being a stepmother was plenty.”
Eddie had another sip of my wine, then tipped the glass in my direction. “And the other answer?”
I took the glass from his hand. The wine was warm but still good, still capable of doing the job. “I didn’t have a happy childhood. There was one part that I liked very much—” I handed back the glass. “The rest of it, not so much.”
“I see,” he said.
“I didn’t want to do that to someone else.”
“Do what?”
“Childhood,” I said.
In 1992, while I was having sex with Fred Bowen underneath the sink of the men’s locker room at Amherst, Candy Fuller was in treatment for metastatic melanoma.
Of course I never met Candy, though I have lived with her memory, her photographs, her china, her sofa, her husband, her paintings of rabbits.
Candy Fuller collected paintings of rabbits, and while I know that sounds terrible, it wasn’t.
In her short life she curated a truly remarkable group of rabbit paintings, most all of them small, rabbit-sized.
She had a genius eye. Jonathan said that he was never allowed to give them to her.
With one exception, all the paintings she had she’d found herself.
A rabbit hung in nearly every room of our house in Bronxville—rabbits in a meadow, in a hutch, in several cases a single rabbit looking straight at the viewer.
There was one tiny pencil sketch done by Beatrix Potter herself.
While people noticed them individually, complimenting one painting or another, no one had ever caught onto the theme because there weren’t too many of them.
I believed, as Candy must have, that on some subliminal level the rabbits held the house together.
We’d asked the girls a hundred times if they wanted the paintings, and they always said later, eventually, not now, which was fine with me. I was attached to them.
Candy had been dead five years when I met her husband in the hospital where my father was dying.
The two Fuller daughters, Sydney and Rachel, were both in college then.
I didn’t meet the girls for some time. Jonathan said he didn’t want me to meet them until we knew if we were serious, and I agreed with that.
No daughter ever born needed to meet her father’s casual girlfriend.
Sydney had been sixteen when her mother died, her sister, Rachel, fourteen.
I had a particular sympathy for those ages, though children, siblings, and all manner of loss inflicted on children were matters close to my heart.
The death of the mother upended the daughters’ lives, and what they had left was each other and a father who loved them.
The fact that they were older when I came along, in college, didn’t matter. I didn’t want them to feel threatened.
I was a good stepmother before I’d even met them, respecting these young women I didn’t know by not disrupting their lives.
When Jonathan moved to New York, I would come to see him (via bus) on the weekends, unless it turned out to be a weekend when one of the girls decided to come home.
Home! Jonathan had bought a house in Bronxville instead of an apartment in the city so that they would both have their own bedrooms, so their boxes of childhood memories could be safely stored in the attic, so there would be plenty of closet space for old prom dresses and winter coats, so there would be a yard the way there had always been a yard at home.
I lined the kitchen cabinets of the new house, stacked up their mother’s plates.
I helped their father hang the rabbit paintings before taking the bus back to Boston.
My invisibility was the proof of my deference as I lurked past the edge of their peripheral vision.
I was so good that they didn’t see me at all.
It had always been my plan to do right by Jonathan’s girls, to be a helpful and supportive person in the family who did not try to take the place of their mother and did not take their father away, but I didn’t foresee the doom in my enterprise.
First and first and first, I was too young.
When finally the four of us sat down at a restaurant, I appeared to have been seated on the wrong side of the table.
I should have been on the daughter side.
They would not forgive me my age. Nor were they pleased to find out we’d already been seeing each other for a year.
“Not seriously,” Jonathan said, trying to roll back his announcement.
I looked at him, the three of us did. “I mean, we’re serious now,” he said. Damned if he did or if he did not.
We were not a catastrophe, Sydney and Rachel and I.
We were all decent people, smart people.
They loved their father and wanted his happiness.
They only wished that happiness had been found with someone his own age, and that maybe it could have come a little later, when they felt more securely launched.
Sydney was starting medical school in the fall.
Rachel was working on her undergraduate degree in environmental science.
Rachel had specific ideas about wind turbines.
These were STEM girls, girls of the future.
I was never going to win them over with talk of Thomas Hardy.
Many times I wanted to tell them they should love me for not having children of my own.
They should love me for not wanting to have children with their father.
I was still young in those days—I could have pushed for it, thus throwing a permanent wrench into the family happiness.
But I didn’t ask for a closet or a desk, much less a child.
When finally I came to Bronxville, I brought less than a graduate student moving into a furnished apartment: no furniture, no rugs, no paintings to compete with the rabbits.
I had my clothes, some bedding, a cast-iron Dutch oven that had been my father’s—Buddy made many a glorious cioppino back in the day.
When Rachel eventually found that heavy pot on the back shelf of the pantry, she sat down on the floor and quietly wept over the disruption to her memories, even though this was not the house she’d grown up in.
“I’m sorry,” she said, covering her face with her hands. “I know it’s stupid, but everything makes me sad.”
You make me sad, was what she was saying. You who aren’t supposed to be here.
“The pot was my father’s.” I stood beside her in the pantry.
“Doesn’t he want it back?” she asked. Couldn’t it still be made to go away?
My stepdaughters did not know my father was dead. They didn’t know my parents had divorced, making me, like everyone else on the planet, a person with my own sad past. I’d been so careful to not impose myself on them, and as a result I had told them nothing at all.
And so Rachel and I began a conversation in the kitchen pantry, well over a year after we first met. Talking to Sydney was easier the next time she was home because Rachel had already filled her in.
Our best times came later, when both girls were home and Leda came up on the train, leaving Steve in charge of making dinner for their three small children and getting everyone to bed.
On those nights I sent Jonathan away, and the two sets of sisters made popcorn and drank beers and watched a movie.
Rachel put nutritional yeast on the popcorn, which Sydney regarded as old news and Leda and I embraced as a revelation.
That was when the tide began to turn. I believed we had Leda to thank for that.
Even when she didn’t appear to be using her therapeutic toolbox to move us forward, I knew she was.