Chapter 18
She’d be very nice to Claire today. Even if Claire wasn’t nice. And Claire was almost never nice.
That promise to herself made Anne say as she stepped into Claire’s small, poorly-lit office, “I like what you’ve done with the place.”
She didn’t. Besides a colorful rug and a couple of David Hockney prints on the walls, the office didn’t have much of Claire in it—unlike her apartment, which Anne preferred not to visit, given the presence of Claire’s dog. Sarah Jessica Barker was both a jumper and a drooler.
For the most part, Claire saved her decorating sensibilities for clothes, not that Anne always approved of the results.
Today, she wore a satin electric-blue suit that didn’t clash too terribly with that bright hair of hers, which had a blue-and-yellow Hermes scarf tied into it.
The overall effect was loud but admittedly striking.
Claire looked up and braced her elbows on her desk, lacing her fingers under her chin. “Do I need to get my hearing checked? Was that a compliment? From my mother, who thinks other peoples’ design choices are a personal challenge to fault-find?”
“The rug’s pretty,” Anne said with as much sincerity as she could muster. “Although you might want to rethink these chairs.” She pointed to the two in front of Claire’s desk. “Leather really doesn’t work for small seating.”
“Oh, thank God it’s still you in there. I was beginning to get worried.
” Claire gestured at Anne to take one of the chairs.
“Hey, Brooke texted and said the two of you are collaborating on the Mother’s Day party?
That you don’t have a theme, you’re just going for something—fun?
” She said it like the word had been invented five minutes ago.
“That’s the plan.” They’d talked on the phone yesterday, and when Brooke suggested heart-shaped waffles, Anne had successfully controlled her instinctive response, which was to say are we aiming for the aesthetic of a Nevada brothel?
She was very proud of herself. “Did she tell you about the quarter-sized pancake stacks?”
“For every ten tiny pancakes I make,” Claire said, sitting back in her chair, “I get to use Maverick’s slingshot to fire one tiny pancake at Bee’s head. We negotiated. Originally, it was fifteen.”
Maybe one day Anne would begin to understand her daughters’ relationship. “Raspberry garnish not included, I take it.”
“Oh, how little you know me: Raspberry garnish tossed separately into Bee’s mouth like I’m playing Skee-Ball.
” Clare tented her fingers. “So, since the last time you dropped by my office I was a teenage sales associate at Urban Outfitters, I’m guessing you’re not here to talk brunch.
Is this about whatever the hell’s happening with you and Sadie? ”
“Something like that.” Anne’s mouth went dry.
“You know, Brooke’s been acting weird since Monday.
She says she doesn’t know anything, but she’s the worst liar in the world, and whenever I ask her what’s going on, she tries to change the subject to ask about my love life.
She hasn’t cared about that since we were in high school and I was dating the one guy at Crossroads who thought I was prettier than she was. ”
Anne sat down, brushing invisible lint off her slacks in the process. “Claire, I came here because I need to talk to you about something. Something important. About myself.”
“O-kay,” Claire said cautiously. “That sounds pretty serious.”
“It is serious. I mean, it’s not all that serious, it’s just—” Oh God, why was she so nervous? She’d been able to blurt it out to Brooke, but now the words stuck in her throat like they were coated with epoxy.
Claire had asked pointed questions about Sadie at their lunch; Claire’s comments had been pointed, too.
What Anne had to say probably wouldn’t shock her eldest daughter.
But Claire might laugh or roll her eyes at how dense Anne had been about all of it.
Claire might think Anne was rushing into this announcement, just like Brooke did.
Even worse, what if Anne’s revelation was too intimate? What if this information somehow destroyed the shaky mother-daughter relationship they’d managed to create, one built on shared competence, sharp tongues, and nothing more personal than a mutual hatred of sweet potatoes?
They were two people who’d shared a body and agreed never to do it again.
“I’m so sorry,” Anne whispered. “Give—give me a minute, all right?”
She fished for a tissue in the purse on her lap and found one, touching it to the tender skin below the inner corner of her left eye, and then the right.
Claire was still quiet.
I spent sixty years trying to convince myself that survival and happiness were the same, Anne could say, and then she might have to listen as Claire told her, Yeah, no shit, Mom. You’re talking to one of the things you survived.
The tears were falling in earnest. She couldn’t move the tissue quickly enough to blot all of them.
“Mom?” Claire asked abruptly. “Maybe I could say something first. While you’re”—her hand gestured in Anne’s direction—“you know, moistened.”
Anne nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“Do you remember a woman named Nancy? I don’t know her last name. She was one of Dad’s agents when we were kids. Short hair, no makeup, suits and ties. Dead ringer for a young k.d. lang.”
Oh yes, Anne remembered. She nodded again, sniffing, and the prickle of memory that ran up her spine told her where Claire was going next.
“I met her the first time you let me come with you to the office Christmas party. I was ten and extremely hot shit in my bedazzled denim midi dress. And you looked like a cross between a Desperate Housewife and a Republican politician. So, per usual, none of the people in that room could take their eyes off you. Including Nancy.”
Anne remembered that, too.
“Nancy was the only person at that party who actually bothered to talk to me. She was cool, you know? She said ‘fuck,’ which is amazing when you’re ten, and she let me taste a teensy bit of her Scotch when no one else was looking.
But then, at some point, you pulled me into a corner so you could make me feel like shit about my hair.
And then you jabbed your finger in Nancy’s direction, and you said, ‘Let that woman be a lesson to you, Claire. Everyone in this room feels sorry for her. You can always control whether or not other people feel sorry for you.’”
Anne felt nauseous. “I said that?”
“Yeah. Yeah, you did. And then you said—I remember it like it was yesterday—you said, ‘Why would a woman ever choose to look like that?’ But the way you said it, it was like there couldn’t possibly be a good answer. That fucked me up, you know. For a really, really long time.”
Nancy had pulled the wrong kind of attention, or she’d pulled attention that Anne didn’t like because it felt wrong to her.
Unnerving. She hadn’t meant to stare or be rude, but she’d never seen a woman dressed in a suit exactly like a man.
Not a feminine getup, but a three-piece, slim-fit navy suit with narrow lapels that might’ve been just as at home on James.
Except James didn’t have obvious breasts that lifted the front of his jacket, or hips and an ass that couldn’t be fully hidden from view, even under all that tailored cloth.
Or eyes like Nancy’s, sharp and knowing as they’d caught Anne’s stare and held her, trembling, on a strange, hot hook without a name.
Slowly, Claire said, “I was thinking about Nancy after lunch on Sunday. I was thinking about Nancy a lot, actually. And me. And you. And what you said about her. To be specific, I was thinking about why you, my mother—a woman who’d just told me she couldn’t live without her best friend—would say something so cruel.
And then I thought, well, maybe you weren’t trying to be mean.
Maybe you saw something that scared you.
Or”—she paused—“or maybe you saw something you liked. I don’t know; it might’ve been both. ”
Anne wasn’t sure what distressed her more: the way her daughter had exposed her in just a few words, or her overpowering shame.
“Claire, I—I shouldn’t have said that about Nancy, and I especially shouldn’t have said it to you.
I’m so sorry. The person I was back then, she was, she was cruel, she was—angry and, and mean and hurting and—”
“Gay?” Claire asked quietly.
The breath rushed from Anne’s lungs in a single stunned gasp, and then an unplanned sob jerked out of her throat, and then another, until she was crying in earnest.
She couldn’t bring herself to look directly at Claire. Claire hated it when people cried. She’d never had any tolerance for human frailty. Anne knew exactly where she’d gotten it from.
“I need—” Anne flailed her hand over the desk, tears blurring her vision. By some miracle, she managed to find a box of tissues and yanked one out, hard. “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m really, I’m fine, I’ll be—”
Claire’s chair scraped against the wooden floor.
For a good ten seconds, Anne was convinced her daughter would walk right out of the room and leave Anne alone until she calmed back down. That might be the least embarrassing option out of a series of incredibly mortifying possibilities.
Just as she took a deep breath, she felt Claire’s hand cup her shoulder.
“Mom.” The name was gentled down into softness, nearly unrecognizable. “Hey. Mom. It’s okay. I got you.”
And then she bent down and put her arms around Anne.
Anne was too shocked to move. Claire had spent her childhood struggling away from physical affection until Anne, angry and embarrassed, had stopped trying at all. They never hugged, except on those rare occasions when dire circumstances or Christmas morning made Claire impulsively affectionate.
This didn’t feel anything like an impulse. Claire held Anne so firmly, so intentionally, as if the two of them needed the exact same thing.