Authors: Nancy Thayer
It was not that she had actively planned to seduce Gary Moyer away from Pam; never that. It was simply that she had waited. The day that Gary told her about Ron’s death, and later about Ron’s difficulties with the rec center money, he had told her that he would take care of her, and she had taken him at his word. She had spent her entire adult life constructing her world so that she would receive envy from the people she lived among, not pity. When she left her house to go to the grocery store or the lawyer’s or the post office, people could not seem to pass her on the street without expressing their pity. Even if they did not speak, it was in their eyes. She hated all that pity, it fell on her like a blow. She was all right on the inside, she was a fine quiet void on the inside, blank and still, smoothed out by pills. But all that pity coming toward her hit her, shocked her, ate into her. She hated it. She preferred to stay at home. She preferred to wait.
Each morning after life was back to normal—after the funeral, and Cynthia’s return to college, when the phone calls and drop-ins from well-meaning acquaintances had died down—Judy would rise, shower, and dress in something nice, something expensive, a cashmere sweater or a suede skirt. She would fix herself a proper breakfast, complete with cloth napkins and a tea cozy over the teapot, and she’d clean up the dishes. Then she’d just sit in her living room, admiring her furniture. Sometimes she would clean house; sometimes she dozed sitting up. Her waiting had a secretive and industrious function. She was like a woman growing a baby inside her, who appears to be doing nothing on the surface, or like a spider silently creating the chemicals that will become the filaments of a web.
And in time Gary had become her lover, and now he was filing for divorce from Pam so that he could marry her. It would not be too much longer before her life would reach some kind of attractive normality again. She had always liked Gary, and she was pleased that he was a lawyer. That was definitely a step up from a contractor. She liked his suits. He went all the way to Boston to buy them. They would have a good life together, an elegant life. She would always be grateful to him, because he had saved her—saved her in so many ways—from disaster. And he would always be grateful to her because he liked being a hero. That was why he had chosen the law, to enforce the execution of justice in the world, and now he could do it personally, which was more satisfying because it was so clear-cut. He was saving her life.
They had discussed Pam, of course, and agreed that although their divorce might cause her some temporary anger and discomfort, ultimately it would make her happy, too. Now that her children were growing up, Pam seemed to find the outside world more interesting than her home, and with Gary out of the way, she would be free to do whatever she wanted. She was that kind of woman. Now Judy looked across the aisle and up a few rows at Pam, who sat chatting to her children as they waited for the wedding to begin. It seemed to Judy that a shade of unhappiness lay beneath Pam’s eyes, like a pale bruise. Of course this would be a difficult morning for her. She would be forced to remember her wedding to Gary as she sat here anticipating Mandy’s wedding to Michael. She did not have another wedding of her own to dream toward, but then, Judy thought, Pam was not the sort who needed weddings or even dreams. She would be all right.
It was Johnny who worried Judy the most now. She would never understand why he had run off with Liza Howard, and she knew in her heart she would never forgive him. But that did not mean that she wanted him to be unhappy for the rest of his life. He was still her son. She had devoted her life to the raising of her children; she had done everything in her power to help them grow into well-adjusted, successful people. If he failed to become what she hoped, then all those years—all her life!—would have been a waste. And that would be intolerable.
No one ever told the truth about motherhood, Judy thought. The first year of Johnny’s life had been difficult and demanding. She had been exhausted with the tending and washing and feeding and carrying, but in spite of the hard work it had seemed a reasonable task. But when Johnny began to walk, and at eighteen months was reeling through the house, creating chaos with his every step, drinking Ivory soap from under the
sink, pulling dishes off the table, plugging the toilet with tissue, climbing up in the cupboard to find and eat aspirin, Judy realized that she, like all new mothers, had underestimated her job. What she had to do with one individual in the space of a few short years was nothing short of what the force of evolution did with a species over billions of years: she had to transform this wild, uncivilized animal into a functioning human being.
It had puzzled Judy that no one had ever told her about this side of motherhood, for the violence, the vigilance, the forceful channeling away from beasthood was certainly as much a part of her daily life as was the cuddling and rocking and stroking. Johnny was not even hyperactive. He was simply a healthy, strong, curious child. He would have happily broken every dish and glass in the house for the sheer joy of throwing, hearing china crash, watching things spatter. He did not know the value of things. When placed in a room with another child his age, it seemed to him a perfectly natural act to hit that child over the head with a plastic hammer. Children were brutes by nature, and the job of the mother was to transform them into human beings.
When Johnny was three, Judy had taken him to the public library for an afternoon’s Children’s Hour. All the children were asked to sit on little swatches of rug in a cluster in front of a smiling librarian. The mothers were given small wooden chairs to sit on at the back of the room, where they could observe their children but not interact. Judy watched, holding her breath, while Johnny sat through an entire story; at home she read to him often, but he tended to become restless quickly, and would slide off her lap and start tossing his toys about. Then the librarian played a singing game with them called “Where Is Thumbkin?” The children put their hands behind their backs, and following the librarian’s lead, brought out their fists with the appropriate finger sticking up at the right spot in the song. It was at the fourth finger—“Where is Ring Man?”—that Johnny brought out his hands with his ring fingers sticking crookedly up. Judy watched, and as she did she felt tears streak her face. She was so relieved, so grateful. Her child was beginning to play the games of others. He was entering into the civilized world rather than disrupting it. He was going to be okay.
That was the turning point. She had told herself she would remember this moment always, and she was right. As the years passed and new challenges arose, she knew she could meet them because of that first small success. She did not demand unusual accomplishments from her children. She gave them piano lessons and skating lessons, but
she did not wish they would excel, win medals, take part in competitions, that sort of thing. In fact, she shied away from children and parents who were competitive in sports or academics; they seemed so intense, almost vulgar, so blatantly
attempting
things, going about their learning so earnestly. No, she wished overall, unobtrusive, serene success for her children. And they had been good children, they had made her so very proud of them—until Liza Howard came along.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand why you ran off like that,” she had said to Johnny the day he came back. They were sitting formally in the living room; Judy was wearing a blue-checked shirtwaist. Gary had discreetly dropped Johnny at the door and left the two of them alone. Johnny was so handsome, tanned, filled-out, manly-looking, that Judy wanted to embrace him with joy:
my handsome son
. But she was so furious at him for what he had done that she also wanted to slap him, to rail and curse at him. These two violent emotions seemed to cancel each other out, and of course she had taken some Valium so as not to make too much of a scene, so that she sat in a blue velvet chair, cool and quiet, staring at her son as if he were some sort of specimen, a human curiosity, which actually he was to her.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain it to you,” Johnny replied.
“Don’t you feel obligated even to try?” Judy asked.
How could you have done this to me?
she wanted to shriek.
“Oh,
Mom
,” Johnny said impatiently. “I’m twenty-four years old. I’m a grownup.”
“I know,” Judy said. “I’m well aware of your age. I’m also well aware that you were engaged to Sarah Stafford. You had commitments here. And you just walked out, without a word.”
“I’m sorry, Mom, I really am,” Johnny said, but as he spoke, Judy could see that he was not sorry. He was glad. He was strong and proud from his rebellion; he was like some fancy stud horse who had jumped the fences and galloped away. Now, captured and brought back home, he could not help tossing his head in admiration of himself. And of course it was sex at the source; after all her devoted work, bestiality had triumphed again.
“You could have called,” Judy said. “You could have done that much.”
“If I had called, you would have convinced me to come home,” Johnny said. “You would have been angry. I was too happy. Mom, I’ve always been so
good
all my
life …”
“You make ‘good’ sound distasteful,” Judy said.
“Well, I suppose it is distasteful to me,” Johnny said. “Being
good
the way I was, well, it was almost the same thing as being
dead
.”
“I don’t think your father would think so,” Judy snapped; there, she had him. It only remained for her to remind him at a later point in their discussion that Ron had gone out looking for Johnny the night he died. If he had not had to go out in his car on that rainy night …
So her son was hers again. He behaved civilly. He took a job at a local men’s clothing shop, an exclusive shop that catered to wealthy clientele, and he spent the summer selling cotton slacks with whales or ducks on them to potbellied men from Connecticut. He gave his mother half his salary for rent and food, and put the other half in the bank. Or so he said. It seemed to Judy recently that he was spending a good bit of his money on alcohol. He always smelled like gin these days, or like the mints he sucked to hide the gin. He did not go out to drink. He did not go out at all. He stayed home watching television with his mother, or playing card games with her, or simply sitting outside on a summer night, staring. She knew he was not happy, and she was afraid that he was becoming an alcoholic, and she was not sure, after all, just what kind of victory she had won.
Carlos was a phony, Judy thought now, seeing him enter the church with Ursula. He could no more read palms than fly to the moon. He had promised her that nothing bad would happen to her again, and instead her entire life had been ruined. She had lost her husband, she had lost her son, and if her daughter was going to turn out like this, so unappealing and obsessed with books, then she might as well lose her daughter, too.
It made her feel very cold inside to know this. She thought if she did not have her Valium and her alcohol to act as buffers, the coldness of all this knowledge would sear through her body like dry ice.
But she did have her drugs, and she did have Gary. Because of his efforts, the rec center had been named after Ron, and, in a way, that honor publicly canceled out the dishonor of Johnny’s sordid episode. Because of Gary, she would soon have a center to her life again. She thought it was stupid of Johnny to scorn Gary, to hold the man in contempt because he was divorcing his wife to marry her. Couldn’t the boy see that Gary was giving him his freedom? Gary was handling the dissolution of Ron’s contracting
firm; Johnny would never have the interest to carry on his father’s business. When Gary and Judy married, she would no longer need Johnny for an escort, for company, or for financial reasons, and perhaps then she could let him go off again to be whatever it was he wanted, even if that thing was a bum, a playboy, a man who lived off a woman.
One day late in May she had casually looked out her bedroom window, and there Johnny had been, below, in the garden. Thinking he was completely unobserved, he had stood near a grouping of bearded iris. Tall-stemmed, elegant, delicately petaled, with a strip of fur at their mouths, the flowers stood, dazzling in their full bloom. As Judy watched, Johnny knelt down so that both knees were pressed firmly into the dirt, and he leaned forward and gently took a ruffled, flaring, peach-colored iris in both his hands, as a man might cradle a lover’s face. He bent down and kissed the long fragile petals; he slowly licked his tongue down into the flower’s core. Judy had shivered, watching him. She had never seen such reverence expressed before. Then her son let go of the flower and bent even further forward, so that his head was pushed onto his knees. He wrapped his arms around his head and his back shook. He was crying.
Judy turned away, unable to see any more. Could he love that terrible woman so much? In this case, love must surely mean only lust. She had spent her life protecting him from tempting dangers, from touching fire, from walking off high places into air; it is a mother’s job to say no. When he was a little boy, he had sobbed because she would not let him play with a strange and to her mind dangerous-looking dog. Surely this fierce sorrow of his was no deeper or more serious than that childish grief. He had never liked to be deprived.
And she had never meant to cause him such pain. He was her son.
But what would it look like to the town if she let him go off again? Good Lord, what if they came back together, the two of them, and lived in the Howard house? Surely they would not disgrace her so. She felt very strongly the need for Johnny to remain in her house, at her side, as if his presence were proof that he had not meant to run away, to disgrace her, that he really did love his mother and meant to live by the values she had worked to instill in him. And if this were all only superficially true, perhaps with time it would become wholly so; these things did happen. Surely with time this bizarre passion of Johnny’s would fade, and she would be proven right.