March 16th, 2009
JerryAnn, again
Thirty hours, nine stops, 3 red vine packs, six energy drinks, and 1500 miles later, I pull into Mom’s driveway a little after 3 a.m. Afraid to wake anyone, I sit in Mathilda in the posh neighborhood and fall asleep for what feels like minutes when I’m woken by a knock on the window. My eyes open, the sun is shining into the filthy glass of my windows, and a skinny tan guy in running shorts glares at me from the driver’s side.
I open the door, and the Florida warmth envelops me. Unraveling my stiff joints from the car is awkward, but I stand and stretch, and the little angry guy’s expression changes. “JerryAnn?” It’s Charles, Mom’s husband, the anesthesiologist. He didn’t recognize my face, but he recognized my height.
“Nice to finally meet you in person, Charles.” We shake hands, but Charles is wary, like I’m here to upset the delicate balance that is my mother. “Is Mom home?”
He nods but steps between me and his front door. “It’s six o’clock in the morning. She’s home, but she hasn’t slept well the last few nights. Something you said upset her.”
Something I said upset her? She left when I was little and has barely been part of my life. Who is this guy? Mr. Sensitivity in tiny yellow running shorts? I’m not proud of it, but I lean into the guy, like Dad does, intimidation in my stance. “Well, I need to talk with her.” I’m tired, hungry, confused, and frustrated. Charles is not stopping my momentum. I narrow my eyes and point my finger at his chest. “She’s had a long break from me, a dozen years. I’m asking for a few minutes. Do you think she can handle me for a few minutes?”
Charles clears his throat, closes his mouth, and swallows hard. “Yeah, okay.” He leads me into the house, quietly. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling in the entryway. Mirrors hang on the walls and a painting of Mom, Hallee, and Charles sits over the mantle. He leads me down the hall. “Please, don’t wake up Hallee. She needs at least nine hours of sleep.”
I nod. He opens a set of French doors, and we step into a master suite straight out of a magazine. The walls are gray and mauve and the only rumple in the décor is Mom’s body tucked into a king-sized four-poster bed, her arms slipping out of the silk sheets. Charles nods, walks out of the room, and shuts the door behind him.
Thirty hours with spotty radio gave me a lot of time to prepare a speech, but Mom lies peacefully, looking much younger than Dad, and my speech, which was supposed to focus on how her leaving ruined me and turned me into an insecure, emotionless robot incapable of love, goes hazy in my mind.
She stirs. I clear my throat, and she peers up at me through half-closed eyes. “Hey, Mom.” She sits bolt upright in bed and surveys the room. Her gaze lands on my hands and stays there like she’s looking for a weapon, but I’m empty-handed so she returns to my face.
She jumps out of bed. “JerryAnn, you’re here!”
She’s wearing a long slinky nightgown, and I can’t figure out how with the silky sheets and nightgown, she doesn’t slip out of her bed every night.
She hugs me. “Let me get dressed, and then I’ll take you out sightseeing. I’ve wanted you to visit for so long.” She bounces on the pads of her bare feet. “We can go out to breakfast and go shopping while Hallee is with her tutors.” She hugs me again. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
I put my hands on her arms and gently push her back down to her bed. “I’m not here to sightsee.”
Mom’s expression changes from excited to terrified.
My speech has boiled down to one question. “Why did you leave me?”
Mom sighs, and her giddiness slips from her like the silk sheets. She pats her hand on the bed beside her. I sit down, feet on the floor, back straight. I plan to get the truth out of her and drive home. It shouldn’t take long, maybe five minutes.
Mom falls back into her pillows. “Do you know how old I was when I got married?” Parents are always old. Mom adjusts the pillows and leans back. “Your Dad moved to Albuquerque when I was a senior in high school. He coached at UNM and at my high school, where I was head cheerleader and prom queen. Every girl wanted him. He was a big NFL player who had traveled and lived. He was a real man, and I was tired of high school boys. He was nearly twice my age, but I flirted with him relentlessly. He never reciprocated, but I kept flirting and reminding him how close I was to graduation. I thought I was being so grown up, so mature.”
Mom pats the pillow beside her, inviting me to lean back. I lean back as far from her as possible on the bed, letting my shoes fall to the floor before I pull my legs up.
“On graduation day, I didn’t think of James. I went to commencement, met up with a bunch of friends afterward, and headed to my car. We were all going to some unofficial senior party, but when I got to my car there was James, sitting on the hood of my car with a dozen roses.” She sighs. “He stood when I got close. My friends squealed, and I was screaming on the inside. This was James, the guy everyone wanted, and he was waiting for me with roses. He said, ‘Hey,’ when I got close and handed me the roses, and I was thrilled. Instead of going to the senior party, I went out with James. I was eighteen.” Mom gets wistful and then jumps straight to panicky. “Oh, goodness, JerryAnn, I have such morning breath. I am so sorry. I’ll be right back.”
I’m sitting too far away to notice her morning breath and can’t help but think Mom is stalling. She slips into a door off the bedroom with a sink I can see from the bed. Her fancy toothbrush motor hums as I take in the room. It smells of laundry detergent and gleams like everything’s been thrown in the washing machine and then meticulously ironed.
The toothbrush stops. A few minutes pass, then Mom steps out of the bathroom in tight jeans and a pink fitted T-shirt with a designer name plastered across the front. She plops down on the bed. “Are you sure you don’t want to go out?”
“I’m sure.”
She fidgets with her pants and her shirt, above the covers. This conversation isn’t ending in five minutes. Finally, she shrugs. “I never thought you’d ask.” She adjusts her pillows, again. “I prepared for years to answer why I left, but you never asked, and my mind is a jumble, and I don’t know what to say.” She’s silent for a minute, then faces me. “James and I were inseparable, all over each other that summer. He was such a big, strong man, and a great kisser.”
Yeah, I don’t want to know that.
She shifts on the bed. “My parents told me to break up with him, that he was too old and I was too young, but the more they told me to stay away, the more I wanted to stay with him. I had a cheer scholarship to Arizona State, but when summer ended, I couldn’t leave James.”
She swings her legs off the bed. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”
I grab Mom’s arm before she stands and hold it tight. “No.” I am hungry, but I want to get this over with. “Please, just tell me why you left.”
Mom plops her legs back on the bed, pouting like a petulant child. “I thought getting married was the mature thing, the better thing, and I loved that my friends were jealous. I loved that James and I were together despite the opposition from my parents, my teachers, and my friend’s parents. Everywhere I went people told me to dump James and go to college.” Mom pulls a blanket from the foot of the bed and wraps it tightly around herself. “We got married in September, just after my eighteenth birthday.” She faces me. “Are you sure you don’t want some fruit?”
I shake my head, no.
Mom continues. “I loved playing house in our little apartment. I decorated and cooked and learned to sew. Your dad worked full-time at the college and then coached high school in the evenings, and I lived to please him, waited for him to come home, tried out new recipes on him, dressed to impress him, and he came home, sat down in front of the TV, and watched sports, every day.”
Mom swings her legs off the bed, but this time she’s out before I can stop her. “You know, I’ve got a tickle in my throat. Let me just run and get a glass of water from the kitchen. I’ll be right back.”
Mom returns with a big glass filled with ice water and a coaster. She puts the coaster on her nightstand, takes a few swallows, and sets down the glass. “Do you want some water?” I am thirsty, but I shake my head, and Mom is back in bed. “Growing up, I was an only child. I was my parents’ world, and I had been successful at everything I had ever done. I got good grades in school, was cheer captain, prom queen, and always the center of attention, but things were different with your dad. He didn’t notice my clothes, didn’t care about my sewing projects or how I decorated our home, and he pretended to like my cooking, but all he ever wanted was a slab of meat.”
I smirk. Sounds like Dad.
Mom’s front door opens. “Oh, good, Charles is home.” She grabs her phone off the nightstand. “Do you want a smoothie?”
I roll my eyes and nod. “Sure, I’ll drink a smoothie if it means you’ll answer my question.”
“Good, Charles makes the best smoothies.” She sends a text, gets an immediate response, and sets down her phone. Mom climbs back onto the bed. The blender churns in the kitchen, and I’m pretty confident Hallee will wake up and I’ll turn thirty before Mom finishes. “I ordered us smoothies: strawberry banana with coconut milk, spinach, and chia. You’ll love it.” Charles enters a few seconds later with two big cups on a silver tray and a bed stand.
Mom reaches for her glass. “Thanks, honey. How was your run?”
He smiles at Mom and ignores me. “It was great. I beat my time from last week.” He swings open the bed stand and sets the tray on top in a seamless motion as if he does this often. Then he leans over Mom and whispers. “Are you okay?” As if I can’t hear him.
“Yes, dear.” Mom kisses him on the cheek. “We’re not going anywhere, if you need to shower.”
Charles glares at me, mistrust in his expression, but then his look softens. “I’ll shower. Let me know if you need anything.”
Mom smiles, and Charles walks into another door connected to the master suite.
“You each have your own bathroom?” I ask.
“Yeah, it’s great.” She beams and then goes off on all the features of her home, from skylights and solar panels to his-and-hers bathrooms, crystal chandeliers, and marble countertops.
I can’t take it anymore. She’s in the middle of explaining the details of Hallee’s room when I turn, grab Mom’s face gently with my hands, and make her look at me. “Why did you leave?” The question has been buried deep for years, unanswered, unimportant, but now it spins in my mind with the intensity of Charles’s blender, and if she doesn’t answer, I’ll explode.
Mom is forty-three, and with the Botox and the intense nature of her beauty regimen, she looks at least ten years younger. With her face in my hands, her soft flawless skin against my rough, basketball-worn fingers, she is more like a teenage girl. I picture her standing at the altar, marrying Dad, then waiting at home for him to notice her, love her, and acknowledge her. Her eyes are filled with vulnerability. My hands drop.
“I was jealous.”
My eyebrows scrunch up. Of what? What could make Mom so jealous she would leave me ? Dad wasn’t having an affair. He had a hard enough time communicating with one woman.
“From the moment you were born, all the love I’d longed to have showered on me, he showered on you.” I let this sink in while Mom cries. She sniffles. “It was like I didn’t exist anymore—if I’d ever existed at all to James. The moment you were born you became his world. Everything you did and said was a miracle. He revolved around you.”
I think about the past—Mom flirting with other men, ignoring me, always threatening to leave.
“I was still a teenager when you were born, but your dad wanted a baby so badly, and I thought if I gave him a son, Jerry Rice, like the football player, I thought if I gave him exactly what he wanted he’d be happier with me, love me, pay more attention to me.”
Her crying intensifies as the shower in Charles’s bathroom runs. Mom sniffles and wipes her nose with tissue from the nightstand behind her glass of water. “I had the baby blues, and you were a ten-and-a-half-pound baby. I was a size three. You tore me up so badly, I couldn’t walk for weeks, and James took care of everything while I rested. I cried a lot, and he didn’t know what to do with me, so he left me alone. I thought I was lonely before you were born, but after you were born, I had no one, and I didn’t want to ask for help. Admitting my misery would be like acknowledging everyone was right—that I’d gotten married too young to a man who was too old, that I had thrown my future away by not going to college.”
Mom takes a few swallows of her smoothie, then hands me mine. I swallow slowly without noticing how good it is until I’m halfway through, the coconut, strawberry, and a hint of banana slithering across my taste buds.
“In hindsight, I had postpartum depression, but I was angry at everyone and everything for years. I blamed your father for not being a good husband. I blamed his career for him being gone so long. I blamed ESPN and all their affiliated stations for having so many sports to watch all the time. The only person I didn’t blame was myself. James was a great dad, and I was a teenage girl who didn’t know what I was doing, who had never babysat growing up, and who lived a self-absorbed life. For a decade, I stuck with your dad, but I was a dead weight in our family while James made you happy. He adored you, and I offered nothing.”
I take a few more swallows and digest the information. Mom is wiping her eyes with a tissue from her nightstand. The glass is perched on my lip, but I stop swallowing and let the cool glass rest there. I feel a shift, and for the first time in my life, I question the truth I’ve clung to for the past twelve years. “You left because you were unhappy with yourself and your marriage?” I whisper, the smoothie in my hand slowly moving downward.
Mom nods.
“Not because you didn’t love me and you were disappointed in me?” My throat catches with the last few words. I can’t look at her as I rub my fingers across the silk sheets.
Mom’s eyes go wide. She sets her drink down on a coaster. “Not love you? Disappointed in you? How could I not love you? How could I be disappointed in you?” She sits up in bed and faces me, this time grabbing my face in her little hands. “I will always love you and be proud of you.”
Thousands of rubber bands have been tightly bound around my heart for years, and suddenly, one snaps. A tear falls from my eye, and the sensation is foreign and familiar and terrible and wonderful all at once. Another rubber band breaks, and I let out this weird guttural groan. Mom grabs the smoothie from my hand and sets it next to hers. Snap . My single tear gives birth to several more, and my whimper turns into sobs. Snap . Snot comes pouring from my nose. Snap, snap, snap . My face falls into my hands.
Mom scoots over to me in the bed, pulls my hands from my face, and forces my head onto her shoulder so I’m lying awkwardly. Snap, snap, snap . Every rubber band holding my emotions intact ruptures within me, and I sob onto Mom’s shirt until it’s soaked.
Charles walks out of the bathroom, and I lift my awkwardly craning neck as steam wafts around him in a halo from his overly hot shower. He stops toweling off his head, and his eyes go wide. “What happened? Are you okay? Did someone die?”
Mom laugh-cries. “We’re fine. Just talking.” Charles shuffles out of the room slowly, and the bedroom door closes.
As soon as Charles is gone, Mom continues, “The truth is, it wasn’t even your dad’s fault, but it took me a long time to understand we just weren’t compatible. I didn’t know this about myself until I met Charles, but I’m a high-maintenance woman.”
A burst of laughter escapes my throat until I realize she’s not joking. “How could you not know you’re high-maintenance?”
Mom scowls and straightens her back, offended, but then shrugs her shoulders. “Your dad isn’t exactly the kind of man equipped to handle a high-maintenance wife.”
“That’s an understatement.” Famished, I reach over Mom and grab my smoothie. “He’s changed. Natalie is good for him.”
“Good.” Mom grabs her smoothie too and drinks, then she leans over to me and whispers. “Charles is high maintenance. He has everything ironed.” She looks around as if to make sure he can’t hear. “And he’s OCD about everything, and he’s a power walker, and he takes it so seriously, but I pretend to be asleep when he goes out so I don’t have to be seen with him. It’s hilarious. His hips shake and everything.” She leans back. “But we are perfect for each other.”
I finish my smoothie, which has filled in all the nutritional gaps left by my road trip food choices, and Mom grabs the empty glass and places it on the tray. Like a good server, Charles returns to take the tray and says, “I have to head to the hospital. Do you need me to wake Hallee before I go?”
Mom hops out of bed, smacks a kiss on Charles’ cheek then taps him on the butt. “Thanks, babe, but we’re good. I’ll wake up Hallee in a few. JerryAnn and I are going to get caught up.”
After Charles leaves, sleep deprivation, Mom’s presence, a comfortable bed, and a full tummy lull me into talking and crying. I tell her how we waited for her to come home for months, and she tells me how she waited for us. I spill about every failed relationship I’ve had and tell her about my visit with Dr. Reese because I thought I was autistic, which she finds hilarious for some reason. I tell her about my injury and my fear that I’ll never be as good at basketball again, and then I tell her about coaching middle school basketball with Toby.
“It sounds like you and Toby are close.” Mom grabs my hand. “Is Toby a serious person?”
“What do you mean?” Until now, Mom’s been quiet, letting me spill.
“JerryAnn, I love you, but you need a man in your life who doesn’t take everything so seriously.” My shoulders stiffen and my eyes narrow. I’m about to defend myself, and she knows it. She pats my leg. “That’s not to say you’re without a sense of humor, but how many people you know decided what they wanted to be at age ten and never wavered from that goal? You are intensely serious about things, and you need someone to help you lighten up.”
Mom’s words instigate a full-on sob. She’s right. Toby lightens things up for me, makes me laugh, and balances me out. “Toby’s engaged.”
Mom pulls me close, and I soak her shirt until her bedroom door swings open. I pull away from Mom to see Hallee standing in front of the bed, hands out dramatically. “Mom, I’m late for school.” Her blonde hair is dyed red, and a wild mess of unnatural curls rests on top of her head. “JerryAnn?” She jumps on the bed, crawls between her Mom, and me, and grabs my face between her hands. “I thought you’d never come. I always wanted a sister, even if you are huge.” Hallee’s nose crinkles and her face puckers. “You stink.”
I haven’t showered in days, so I’ve got Mathilda all over me, salmon and lemon, plus fast-food and greasy hair.
Mom jumps out of bed. “Hallee, let’s get you ready for your tutors, and don’t forget you have rehearsal tonight.” She turns to me. “Hallee is playing Annie in a local theater. She’s almost good enough for Broadway. JerryAnn, you shower and I’ll put a towel and nightdress on the counter for you to wear while I get your clothes washed.” The clothes should probably be burned. Mom jumps out of bed, dragging Hallee behind her. “I’ll be back in a half-hour.”
Hallee asks as she’s pulled out of the room, “Why is everyone crying?”
Mom’s shower is luxurious, with jets shooting from the top, front, and two sides. I pretend like I’m not crying, it’s just water flowing down my face, but a lifetime of emotions have piled up, and I let them out all at once. Dad had been addressing Mom that day when he told her she was so emotional, but in my child’s mind, I thought being emotional was bad. I thought Dad didn’t love Mom because she was too emotional, and if I was emotional, he’d leave me.
By the time the shower is finished, I’m out of tears and the room is as steamy as Charles’s bathroom was after his shower. I throw on Mom’s silky nightdress—even though it’s far too short and several sizes too small—and slip between the silk sheets to wait for Mom, but in a matter of minutes, I’m asleep.
I dream that I’m stuck inside a Chinese finger trap, but instead of my fingers, my whole body from the chest down is in the trap and my arms are flailing to grab grass, roots, anything I can get my hands on. I know how those traps work. If I merely relax and push inward, toward my feet, the trap will loosen and I’ll be free, but in the dream, Toby is on the opposite side of the trap. He’s reaching with his arms. Rose is holding him tight, pulling him outward with her little hands in his big ones, and the harder she pulls, the more stuck we become. I want to yell at myself and at Toby, tell us to move closer together, but my voice doesn’t work, so I kick.
I land with a thud on the ground beside Mom’s bed. I’m back asleep in seconds.