Chapter II #2
I went to my mother’s in Phoenix. I was there five months.
Strange to say, under the circumstances, but it was a beautiful time with her.
My last long uninterrupted time with her before she died.
She did not once question my decisions. I needed help and she gave it to me without hesitation.
She found the agency and sat with me on their loveseat as we looked through three-ring binders of people without names or addresses, just professions, personal statements, and photographs.
I chose the couple looking at each other, not at the camera.
She did the classes with me. I didn’t want the drugs.
When I went into labor, the only place I could look was in her eyes.
‘You are going to be okay,’ she said to me, over and over.
When the baby finally came, it was my mother who said, ‘Oh sweetie, it’s a girl.
’ We had an hour with her, then a proper goodbye.
She was never mine. I always knew that. I could not keep her.
In my head I call her Daisy.
Sometimes she comes to me, more a feeling than a vision, a warmth, not a regret. I worry about many things, but I never worry about Daisy. Somehow I know she is well.
We sit on the porch with our beers.
‘You have a real life here, don’t you?’
‘I do. I imagine you have a real life, too.’
‘I don’t.’ You look down and rub your jeans.
It makes me remember this cassette tape I had of Faulkner reading As I Lay Dying.
We listened to it in your car a lot. Anse keeps on rubbing his knees.
That was our favorite line. The Deep South cadence created a strong drumbeat.
Anse keeps on rubbing his knees. We repeated it randomly for months.
For a moment I think you’re going to say it, and maybe you are, but Silas comes up the driveway.
He’s been on a run. He often runs after work. Somehow I’d forgotten this.
He’s flushed and a little sweaty. He comes up the steps two at a time and normally we’d do some hugging and kissing and he’d try to mush me against his damp T-shirt and I’d pretend to be grossed out, but now we are self-conscious in front of you.
I go for a kiss and he a hug, and my jaw hits his ear.
The two of you shake hands. You sit back down and Silas leans against the railing and asks about your drive up from Logan, and who you’re going to see up the coast.
I say I have to start dinner, and flee.
I was in grad school in Pennsylvania three years later when the phone rang late one night. ‘Ivan died,’ you said.
He had died that morning. It was impossible to hang up. I listened. Ivan had gotten an infection that tore through his intestines in a few weeks. You and Sam had been there in the hospital with him the whole time. At the end you took turns reading him Joyce. Shakespeare. Dylan Thomas.
We talked for three hours. At some point you started reading me some of those passages that you’d read to Ivan.
Then you read something that made you think of me, you said.
It was from Journey to the End of the Night by Céline.
The narrator was remembering a goodbye he’d had with a girl named Molly at a train station.
He hadn’t said goodbye properly, he hadn’t appreciated what they’d had together.
It was beautiful. Full of regret. There was a line about how he’d kissed her but not as he should have.
I’ve tried to find that passage in that book so many times but I never have.
You read me those lines, but you didn’t say more about them, and I didn’t ask you to. We did not speak of what blew us apart. I did not tell you about our child or that I could not write a story in grad school without a baby in it.
You called a few more times that winter.
You asked if we could see each other in the spring and I said no.
Oh, how I wanted to see you, that lonely winter in Pennsylvania.
Those calls reawakened all the love and all the wounds.
I couldn’t trust you again with my heart. I was glad when you didn’t call back.
The next year I got a poem in the mail. A poem by D. H. Lawrence copied out in blue ballpoint on yellow legal paper.
‘The elephant, the huge old beast,’ it began, ‘is slow to mate.’ They wait ‘for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse.’
I wasn’t an elephant. My heart had never been slow. I tore it up.
You and Silas stay on the porch. I’m glad to have the kitchen to myself, glad for a break from your unsound observations.
The Breach was fussy, grandmotherly, frozen in 1957.
Our house full of children and animals is nothing like that.
Silas is laughing. He’ll be indifferent to your scrutiny of him.
He might notice it, but he won’t take interest in the verdict.
Once, as we were leaving the house after dinner with a couple we didn’t know well, we heard one of them say through an open window, ‘Well, what’d you think of that?
’ I slowed to hear the response, and Silas tugged me down the driveway. He did not want to know.
Your conversation sounds animated, from what reaches me through the screen door.
I season the chicken legs and put them in under the broiler.
I trim the asparagus, drop them into the steamer.
I see you come in and go through the living room to the bathroom.
On your way out you stop in the doorway and ask if I need help.
I send you back to the porch with another beer.
Setting the table, I can hear you two talking about The Invisible Man.
You must have asked Silas what he was teaching in the fall.
I call to Silas to round up the boys from next door and you both go across the yard.
You come back all together ten minutes later, Harry and Jack explaining the rules of Crater to you.
‘But why can’t you go in and get the three rocks and win right at the start?’ you say.
‘Because only one side knows where the crater is.’
Your eyes widen. ‘The crater changes locations?’
‘Yes!’
‘And size?’
‘Yes!’
‘Genius,’ you say.
We sit at the table, you between the boys. Jack’s feet knock against his chair in excitement. He likes you.
‘Look at this feast,’ you say. ‘Do you get this every night?’
‘Yup,’ Harry says.
I had enough time while everyone was across the street to make some hollandaise.
Jack passes you the little bowl of it. ‘You have to try this. It’s really excellent.’
You smile at me for this praise. You know my sauces—I learned them all in Paris.
Without testing it, you pour the hollandaise over everything and that makes them all laugh.
You start cutting up your chicken and I know exactly how you’ll eat it, fork in your left hand, chicken, asparagus, and hollandaise all piled up on the back of it.
For a few minutes there’s only the scrape and clash of silverware on dinner plates. They all eat like jackals, not just you.
‘Why is there a photograph of Crested Butte in the bathroom?’ you ask. ‘Are you from there?’
Silas smiles and shakes his head.
‘Papa asked her on a date,’ Harry says, ‘but he drove to Crested Butte instead.’
‘Really?’
‘Then he sent her that postcard and she forgave him.’
‘All it took was a postcard?’
‘Yeah, and it’s mostly about a dog he saw in a store.’
‘Wow.’
‘Are you married?’ Jack asks.
‘No sir, I am not,’ you say.
‘Do you have a significant other?’ Harry asks, a term he’s just learned.
‘Not at this moment.’ You take another bite. ‘But do you know what happened to me on a date once?’
The boys shake their heads eagerly.
I can’t imagine what he’s about to tell them about a date.
‘Well. I went out with this perfectly nice lady. We had a very nice dinner, at the end of which I asked if she would like to visit the bookstore across the street—a large chain, not the kind of cozy bookshop you have in these parts. She was amenable and off we went. And right there as we entered the store was a display table with piles and piles of one book and beside these piles was a life-size poster of . . . Guess who?’ After a few seconds you tip your head my way.
‘Mumma?’ Harry says.
‘This is not a true story,’ I say.
‘It is a true story. You’d just won that prize. And my date says, “Oh, I loved that book.”’
‘Maybe there was a little photocopied flyer.’
‘Life-size poster.’
‘Did you tell her?’ Jack said.
‘That I knew your mother? No. I was speechless.’
‘Did you go out with her again?’
‘Never saw her after that night.’
‘Do you have a job?’ Harry asks.
‘Yes.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s very, very boring.’
They think this is very funny.
‘But what do you do?’
‘I litigate.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I spend months and years sometimes trying to prove in a court of law that one plus one equals two, and most of the time at the end of it all a judge will say, no, I’m sorry, one plus one equals three and a half.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s just the way the law works.’
‘We’re about to lose one of our best teachers to law school,’ Silas says. ‘Maybe you could come convince her that her lousy salary is actually a blessing in disguise?’
‘Gladly. Though law school was a blast. It’s what comes after it that’s unpleasant.’
When we’re finished, the boys clear the dishes and Silas gets out ice cream and a strawberry rhubarb pie he must have bought with the asparagus. The boys are surprised by the dessert. I smile at Silas. It’s a sweet, special-occasion gesture.
Harry eats his quickly. He likes to draw after dinner. It’s part of our ritual. Then Jack will choose a game.
You watch him across the table. ‘Clearly Harry’s going to be an artist.’ You turn to Jack. ‘What about you, peanut?’
‘Olympic athlete.’
‘Which event?’
‘I haven’t narrowed that down yet.’
You laugh at how he says this. ‘Well, you still have some time.’