Seat Mates

Chapter 20

I don’t start to cry until I’m in my room. And then, big, wet, choking sobs take over. They wrack my body as I lie in my bed, in the middle of the clothes strewn carelessly about the room. I press my face into a cool feather pillow to muffle the ugly sounds that I’m afraid Charlie will hear from next door if he’s in there. Between the fallout with my mom and Charlie’s revelation, I feel like I’m drowning. Underwater, too deep even to see the surface, holding air in my lungs for as long as I can before I’m forced to release it and see the last bubbles of oxygen rise into the black, out of reach. Alone, no life raft in sight.

I grasp my purse with trembling hands and call the only person I have left. The person who has picked me up a million times and who I trust like no one else in the world.

She answers on the first ring. “Daisy?” she says with concern. I never call without texting first. We only talk on the phone when there’s a story too big to tell with our fingers.

“Cara,” I say through gulps of air, “I need to tell you something.”

Cara listens patiently on the other end of the line as I unload about the whole weekend.

I tell her about Charlie, about how we met and the spark, and the fake date, and then the real date, and how something was happening between us, and then everything was happening all at once. I tell her about my mom. The prank on Walter and how she flipped out on me, and the way that Charlie was by my side when I finally stood up to her. I tell her about Charlie’s omission. What he hid from me and how much it hurt to hear those words from James’s lips, and how badly I wanted to just brush it under the rug and tell him that it was fine. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t this time.

When I’m finished, Cara is silent. In the background, I hear her mother’s voice saying something. I didn’t even ask her if now is a good time to talk. I didn’t even bother to ask her how her grandmother is doing. But Cara listened anyway. Like she always does.

“Give me a second,” she says. The sound of a door opening and then closing comes through the line.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m alone. I didn’t want to talk about this in front of my family.”

“Oh my God, Cara,” I gasp over a sniffle, “I’m so sorry. How’s your Nana?”

“She was discharged yesterday. She’s fine.”

I nod. “Okay. I’m glad.”

“First,” Cara says, “I just want to tell you how proud I am of you for standing up to Diane. I know that wasn’t easy for you.”

“Thanks,” I say in a small voice.

“And it was a long time coming, Daisy. Maybe doing it this weekend didn’t feel like the ideal time to you, but it needed to happen.”

I nod even though she can’t see me.

“So, you met this guy, and you really liked him, and I’m guessing you slept together?” she asks.

I nod into the phone again, and she takes my silence as assent. “And it turns out he was lying to you.”

“Yeah. Or… I mean, not lying, exactly. But he didn’t tell me this really important thing. And I told him about the Matchless Mountain project. I told him that it was something I personally had worked on. He could have told me a million different times. He kept talking about how he feels shitty about the work he does and how he wants to do something better. He could have just come clean, and I think… I would have been okay with that. If he had just told me.”

“As far as I’m concerned, Daisy, him withholding that information is as good as lying. Especially if things got far enough for you to sleep together. If things were that serious and intense, he definitely should have told you. So, to me, that’s a big red flag.”

I sigh into the phone.

“And I think you have enough on your plate as it is. You just went through what might have been the most stressful weekend of your life. And you had this blowup with your mom that you’re trying to process. You don’t need to give more emotional energy to someone who didn’t respect your right to know all the facts before he took you to bed.”

From out in the hallway, I hear a door swing shut, and I wonder if Charlie is on the other side of the wall now. Just feet away from me.

“You don’t think I overreacted?” I ask.

“It doesn’t sound like it to me. You were emotionally fragile already, and then this happens. You don’t owe him anything, Daisy.”

The concept of obligations is a recurring theme this weekend… and, it seems, in my life. The problem I have is that my entire sense of obligation and entitlement is so warped that I don’t know how to navigate them on my own. But Cara confirms everything I was feeling. I can’t ignore my instincts just because it’s easier not to.

When I’m off the phone, I start picking up my room. If I lie down, I’ll just cry, and I don’t want to cry anymore. I pick up all the T-shirts and fold them and lay them flat in my suitcase. I start collecting underwear and sort them, putting the dirty ones in a little linen bag, and place the clean ones in the side pocket of my suitcase. I sort out my makeup and put it away, because I won’t need it again on this trip. There aren’t any more events.

As I clean, and my room becomes tidy again, I think everything through, filing each event into its own space in my mind. My relationship with Rob, and now also Gabby, goes on a shelf, like a house plant that was on the verge of wilting but has been tended to and just needs some time. My relationship with my mother is placed on a workbench. It’s in disrepair, but I’m not finished with it yet. And Charlie. My heart aches when I think about him, as I fold slacks and blue jeans and zip up garment bags. Charlie, whose face I’d learned to read, who thinks my nose is perfect, and who held me up when I wasn’t sure I could stand. I don’t know where to put him. He lingers, floating in my head space, taking it all up.

I turn on my television set and turn it way up, afraid of hearing anything from his side of the wall. Even the sound of him watching TV would rip me apart. As The Real Housewives of Atlanta fight it out on screen, I pace. My room is clean. My bag is mostly packed. I relive the last six days over and over again. The airport incident that feels like it happened years ago. The first time I noticed the color of his eyes. His hand on my back. His face when he saw me in the red dress. His lips on mine. And the sex. God, the sex. And, more important than anything else—the way he supported me, when he didn’t have to do anything at all.

I go to my door and grab the handle a thousand times, ready to cross to the other side of the wall and talk to him. To hear what he has to say, and to forgive him, and to beg him to forgive me for my reaction. I let go of the handle a thousand times more. Cara’s voice is in my ear, reminding me that I don’t owe him any more of my emotional bandwidth. I sit on my bed with my crochet blanket in front of me, chewing my lip, hoping that Charlie might knock, hoping that he won’t.

By nine o’clock I’m exhausted. I’m sitting on my bed in my pajamas working on a green stripe in the baby blanket, and there’s a tap on the door.

I spring to my feet, and then freeze. Maybe I won’t open it. I stare at the door in frozen silence, and there’s another tap. A little bit harder this time. I take a deep breath and steel myself, and walk across the room.

I open the door slowly, and find my mother standing on the other side, looking small and contrite. My heart drops.

“Mom,” I say, my voice breaking on the word.

“Daisy?” Her eyebrows tilt up with concern. “What is it?”

Tears fall down my cheeks at the sight of her, and memories of my mom holding me as a child come rushing back. Without asking, she wraps her arms around me and pulls me into her. Her perfume surrounds us in a cloud.

She pulls back. “I came to talk things out,” she says.

“We need to do that,” I agree. “But right now, can you just be my mom?”

I’m exhausted. I’m too overwhelmed to have this conversation with her right now, and if I’m really being honest with myself, I want her here, despite everything.

“Oh, Buttercup. Of course I can.”

She sits down on the bed, and I rest my head in her lap while she strokes my hair. “Did something happen with Charlie?” she asks.

I nod my head. “I don’t really want to talk about it.” I brace myself for some sort of reprimand. Some suggestion that I did something wrong, but it doesn’t come.

“Okay.”

Eventually, we move so that she’s sitting next to me, leaning against the mountain of pillows. I let my head fall sideways on her shoulder, and we watch bad reality television, of which she does not approve, until finally I pick up the remote and switch it off.

She turns and looks at me. “You’re ready?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s talk.”

She scoots up so that she’s sitting straight up, against the headboard of my bed, and I turn to face her, laying the remote on the side table next to me.

This is a conversation I’ve had with my mother countless times. And it usually goes like this:

My mom apologizes that I’m upset. It’s a classic sorry not sorry . And then we go over the events that brought us to that moment, and my mother explains to me why whatever it was wasn’t her fault, and she often suggests that some of it is, in fact, my responsibility. And then I end up apologizing to her. Or we agree to forget the whole thing. And finally, when that’s done, we move on, like nothing ever happened.

But that’s not how it’s going to go this time. I won’t let it, so I brace myself.

My mom looks at me. Maybe it’s because it’s obvious that I’ve spent the evening in tears, but her face isn’t as hard as I was expecting. “I’m very hurt, Daisy. Maybe I overreacted, but I think, given the circumstances, that it wasn’t too unreasonable for me to simply ask for an apology from you.”

She waits for me to answer. Waits for me to tell her that I was the one who was wrong. I hold myself still, gripping a pillow in my lap. My mouth itches with the urge to placate her. I grit my teeth against the words fighting to come out.

“Well…” she says after a moment, “you’re not going to say anything?”

I blink a few times. “I know you’re upset,” I say carefully, “And I’m sorry that you’re upset. I’m also sorry for how I said things. But the truth is, I didn’t say anything that I don’t, in fact, feel.”

Something comes over her face now. A shadow passes behind her eyes, and then vanishes. She tips her head to one side. “All of it?” she asks.

I nod.

She takes a deep breath, looking down into her lap, as she thinks back to this morning. “You said you feel I treat you as an accessory and… an emotional support animal?”

“That’s right,” I say.

She sighs heavily. “I don’t think you’re a showpiece, Daisy, and I wasn’t precisely sure what an emotional support animal is, but I did google it, and I would venture to say that I don’t think of you as one of those either.”

In other circumstances, the thought of my mom googling emotional support animals would be rather funny. But not right now. I chew my lip. I don’t want this to turn into an argument. I want to actually talk with her. I want to get to the bottom of our relationship so that we can start repairing it.

“You might not be aware that you treat me like those things, but you do. You’ve told me you don’t like the choices I’ve made regarding my career. You’re always worried about the impression I’ll leave on your social circle. You don’t like my clothes or my job or even the place where I live, Mom. You never take responsibility when you do something that hurts me, but you always expect me to be there for you when you’re the one who’s feeling bad.”

I see her face start to close when I say these things, and I get worried about where this is heading. Soon accusations will be levied, and she will storm off.

“You’ve never told me any of this before today,” she says in a small voice.

I swallow and twist my hands into the fabric of the pillow. “I guess I was just afraid to.”

“You felt afraid to talk to me?” She appears taken aback by this.

“I didn’t want you to be upset that I was angry. When I was growing up, you always said that it was just me and you, and I, I don’t know… I felt like I had to make sure you weren’t upset. You’re my mom, but I’m your best friend. It’s what we do for each other.”

At this, her face crumples. “Oh, Daisy,” she says in a voice I’m not sure I’ve ever heard before. She sighs heavily. “I didn’t realize it was this bad between us.”

“Mom—”

“Wait.” She cuts me off, and then sighs deeply, as though giving in to something. “I think there are some things about my life that I need to tell you.”

I frown while she takes a deep breath, her hands clasped together in front of her, like she’s steadying her nerves, or praying, and she starts from the very beginning.

“When I was a little girl, my family was very poor.”

I nod. I know this already.

“I don’t mean, we buy our clothes at Goodwill poor. I mean, real, hard, rural poverty. We didn’t have running water. The electricity was on and off. My mom didn’t know how to read because her parents didn’t send her to school.”

This I did not know. My grandparents are both dead. I never met them, and my mother has no relationship with any of her living relatives.

“We lived in a holler in West Virginia that I’ve never taken you to, because going back feels…” She thinks, pursing her lips. “Impossible. I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

I’ve never once in my life heard my mother use the word “holler” in a sentence. But when she says it, it doesn’t sound alien on her tongue.

“One winter, it got so cold that my brother got hypothermia and my parents resorted to building a fire in the middle of our living room. But my dad was… he wasn’t a good father, let’s just say. Or husband. And my mom couldn’t leave, because she had nowhere to go.”

“Mom, why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?” I say, astonished.

“I’m not telling you this because I’m looking for sympathy. But I think it will help you to understand some things about me.”

I nod, waiting for her to go on.

“Unlike your grandmother, I was sent to school as a child. I walked.” She smiles a little at me. “And I know what you’re going to say. ‘Was it uphill both ways?’ And the answer is, of course not. But it might as well have been, because education wasn’t taken seriously in our household. I often had to argue my way into going. My dad was a very suspicious man, and he didn’t think book learning served much purpose in life.

“But I took it seriously, because I knew it was the only way I was ever going to get out of there, and I was terrified that I would end up like my mother—desperate and exhausted and hopeless, and completely trapped. Sometimes, I would steal a copy of Vogue from the corner store when my dad sent me to pick up cigarettes. I would slide it up my shirt and stick it into the waistband of my blue jeans. I suspect Mr. Byrd knew what I was doing, but he felt sorry for me. Everyone in town knew I was one of the Thomas kids. We had holes in the bottoms of our shoes, and our dad spent five out of seven nights stumbling drunk.”

She gives her head a shake, as though to slough off the memories.

“Anyway, I looked at all these pages of glamorous women, living glamorous lives that were so different from mine, they might as well have been living in an entirely different country. But it was enough to know that there was something else out there, and that maybe I could have it.

“When I got to New York I decided that I wasn’t going to go back. Not ever. And then I decided that if I was going to have a completely different life, I was going to be like one of those women from the magazines. I had already gotten myself so far. I was at a good university on scholarship, far away from the mountains. I had a job at the university bookstore, and it was enough to keep me in shoes that didn’t have holes in the bottoms. That alone was a big deal. Transforming myself one more time didn’t seem like that much further to go. I had done the hard part, I thought, so why not reach for the brass ring?

“I decided to study art history because I thought that was what society girls studied, and I worked on my accent until it was all but gone. And then I met your father, and he was just like the man I always imagined I’d like to marry. His family was wealthy, and he wore the best clothes and drove a gorgeous car that he had a parking spot for, right in the middle of Manhattan. His family vacationed in the Hamptons, and he never had to worry about money at all. He spent money like money didn’t even exist for him. Like everything in the world was free for the taking. It was so different from anything I had ever known, and I wanted to be a part of that world. Part of a world that just seemed completely free from struggle, and fear.”

I’m listening with rapt attention. I’ve never asked detailed questions about my father. I’ve only ever dismissed him as the man who rejected us.

“I fell in love with him so fast, and he said he loved me too. He liked the fact that I still had a little bit of my dialect. He said it was cute. We couldn’t get enough of each other. But, your dad was also a little bit of an alcoholic, I think. And he was spontaneous, and one night, after he’d been doing cocaine at a party—it was a different era—” she says with a sideways glance, “he asked me to marry him and of course I said yes. The alcohol and drugs didn’t seem like a problem. Not compared to what I had seen in my life, at least. I hadn’t even met his family.”

She sighs. “So, we had a quickie marriage and I moved into his apartment, and then I found out I was pregnant with you. I’d only just finished my degree. At that point, it became necessary for Erik to introduce me to his parents, and when his mother met me and heard the way I spoke and noticed all the little things that gave me away as not being from their set, she was horrified. And in the end, your father chose them.”

I grit my teeth against the force of the anger that hits me when she says this. I knew we had been unwanted, but hearing her say it, and seeing the look on her face as she does, is truly a gut punch. The pain is still raw for her.

“My saving grace was the marriage, and the fact that he had already come into his inheritance. I was about to be alone with a baby and a degree that, unless you’re well-connected, isn’t very helpful for getting a job. Despite all my experience with poverty, I was very na?ve, and I had no real sense of who I was. All I knew was who I wasn’t. I wasn’t a hillbilly from the holler anymore, and I wasn’t good enough to be in your father’s club of people. So, who was I?”

She looks at me now with tears sparkling in her eyes, like she’s really asking me. But then she says again, “I was your mother. That’s who I was. I was your mother, Daisy. You were my little savior.”

I swallow hard. “But I can’t save you, Mom. I was just your kid.”

She nods. “I did know that. But I suppose what I’m trying to say is that you were my only sense of identity. I couldn’t seem to find another.”

“Is that why we moved around so much?” I ask.

“Maybe. For whatever reason—and believe me, I’ve asked myself why more times than I can count—I couldn’t settle down. Every time I started to put roots down, I got antsy and nervous, and so I moved us again.”

“Why do you think you got antsy?” I ask. I’ve completely forgotten about the argument we had earlier. My mother has never bared her soul to me like this before.

She sniffs and pulls a tissue from the box next to the lamp. “I’ve spent my life asking myself that question. All I know is that for years I couldn’t forget the way your dad rejected me… and you. The way he just… threw us away. Nothing ever felt right after that, and I never felt right. I felt… like I was just never going to be good enough. That anyone who really got to know me would reject me.”

For the first time in my life, I think I’m starting to understand my mother. Her restlessness, her obsession with what other people might think of her, her incredible need for me to be there for her, no matter what. Even when she’s the one who fucks up. She needs the love from me to be beyond unconditional. She cannot tolerate criticism.

“Mom,” I say, and though I should be too dehydrated at this point to form more tears, it seems I’m not, because I’m hugging her and, yet again, I’m crying.

“I’m so sorry, Daisy,” she says as she wipes her nose. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you any of this, but I think, on some level, I thought I was protecting you from it.”

“Mom, you should have told me,” I say. “I never understood what was happening when I was a kid, and why we had to keep picking up and leaving every time some place started to feel like home.”

“You were just a little girl, Daisy. You couldn’t have understood. And I didn’t even understand myself, not then. It’s taken so much therapy for me to realize it.”

“You see a therapist?” I say in shock.

“I do,” she says, nodding and laughing a little bit at my astonished expression. “Her name is Jeanine. I started seeing her after the affair with Michael came out. He convinced me to do it.”

I’m stunned.

“Jeanine thinks that I have a hard time taking responsibility for things. And that I don’t have enough self-worth and I try to get it from other people.” My mom looks at me with large, vulnerable eyes. “And it seems she’s right.”

I feel my resolve begin to crumble. Seeing her vulnerable like this is overwhelmingly difficult. I begin to reach for her but she stops me.

“I don’t see you as an accessory, Daisy. And I don’t expect you to make me happy all the time. I understand that you believe that about me. But I want you to know it’s not true.”

I think for a moment that she’s reverting to denying my feelings, but she continues, “Daisy, all I want for you is happiness, and for you and me to be okay. And if my issues from my past have gotten in the way of that, then I am truly, from the very bottom of my heart, sorry. And, perhaps most importantly, I want you to know how sorry I am for what happened with Michael. But I can tell you one thing—it was never about you. I wasn’t trying to steal something from you, or wreck your life, or wreak havoc.”

The pain in my heart at everything my mom has just shared with me is so acute it feels like it’s been pierced.

“I never really thought you did anything to intentionally hurt me, Mom,” I say. “What burned so badly was the fact that you seemed not to care. You just… dismissed it.”

She’s shaking her head, wiping tears away from her eyes. Her makeup is a mess. “I think I understand that now. I’m so sorry, Buttercup. I love you. I promise you I only want the best for you. The thing about your career… it wasn’t about appearances. Not really. It was just about wanting you to make a decent living. I don’t want you to struggle. You refuse to accept any of the money from your father. And excuse my language, but your salary is crap.”

I laugh through the crying. “It is, Mom. It is crap.”

We wrap our arms around one another. She pulls me in to her, holding me against her chest, kissing my hair. “You’re my baby girl. I never thought you were supposed to be taking care of me. I’m sorry if I treated you like that was your job.”

Forgiveness. Real, honest, sorrowful forgiveness washes over me. Everything she’s said—my new understanding of her, her heartfelt, meaningful apology, all of it—makes it possible for me to finally, tell my mom that it’s okay, and for once, to actually mean it.

“I love you, Mom,” I say. “I should have explained all of this to you a long time ago. I shouldn’t have spent so much time resenting you.” We cling to each other and cry together, so that we are both snotting on each other’s shoulders.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t let you be who you want to be, Buttercup. I’m so sorry I let my shame and insecurity get in the way of being your mother. And I’m so sorry you feel like you have to parent me. I know you’re not the parent. And I promise I’m going to try to be better, okay?

I’m nodding, wiping my nose.

“Okay, Mom.”

We take turns apologizing to each other—me, for never being honest with her about how I felt, her for being obtuse enough not to see it when I was hurting. Layers of misunderstanding are peeled away. Mom isn’t a bad person. She’s not even a bad mother. She’s just a human.

Somehow, we end up lying down next to each other, and I tell her my favorite thing about each city we ever lived in. She tells me she didn’t want me to go to school in Colorado because she hates the mountains and has done ever since she moved away from them.

As we talk, I can feel the exhaustion of the weekend settling over me, and my eyes start to drift closed.

My mom kisses my cheek, and her tennis bracelet grazes my skin, just like when I was a child. Her perfume lingers in the sheets around me.

“Goodnight, sweetheart,” she says. “I love you. So much.”

“I love you too, Mom.”

She switches off the lamp, and goes out through the door, and I fall asleep.