Authors: Richard Russo
“I know, I know,” her mother said, rubbing her temples. “But who lives like that? I mean, what if something happened to you, and I had to reach him?”
These were rhetorical questions, Sarah knew, and so felt no obligation to provide answers.
“Maybe Hal and I can drive up in October. He wants to go look at the leaves in Vermont, so maybe we can kill two birds with one stone.”
Sarah tried to imagine any part of this scenario actually happening: Harold abandoning the property an entire weekend, the two of them driving to Vermont and staying in some country inn, stopping in Thomaston to share their plans with her father. The last part simply defied imagination. There was no way her mother would ever allow him a good look at Harold Sundry with his big head and his special shoe. “October?” she said. “I can’t say anything until then?”
Her mother sighed. “That’s not fair, is it? Okay, then I’ll just have to tell him over the phone. I’ll call tomorrow night after you get back. He’ll be expecting me to call then anyway, to make sure you got back safe.”
Sarah shook her head. “No, it’ll be better if I tell him.”
“You really think so?” she said hopefully, and Sarah could tell this was how she wanted it. “Here’s another idea! Tell him I died in a car wreck!”
The pizza arrived then, but Sarah found that her mother’s failed attempt at humor had routed her appetite. The box looked like it contained the results of a head-on collision, the big lumps of Italian sausage now brain matter, the mushrooms various interior organs, the anchovies strips of flesh and skin. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was,” her mother said, digging in.
Suddenly energized, she explained how things would be.
Not that different,
she wanted to stress. Better, really. She’d be keeping her studio in town, she assured Sarah, as if this were weighing heavily on her mind. She conceded that Harold didn’t fully understand what she did for a living and would’ve preferred that they partner in the Sundry Arms and share its myriad duties, but in the end he didn’t want her to give up something she loved. He was proud that she’d been able to make a go of it all these years, and he could hire help at the Arms as he needed it, just like always. Of course, Sarah would still spend summers with them on the South Shore. There were always vacancies, and Harold promised to set aside the best apartment for the two of them every June, July and August.
And this year’s changes, she went on, would be nothing compared with next year’s, with Sarah graduating from high school and heading off to college. Okay, right this minute maybe Sarah felt like she was losing her mother to Harold Sundry, but it was more the other way around. If you really thought about it, it was her mother staring loss dead in the face. In no time Sarah would have a husband and family of her own, whereas she’d be alone in the world. It wasn’t that she regretted the freedom she’d found here these last few years. She’d needed that after Pencil Dick. No, she’d had
all kinds
of fun and didn’t regret
any
of it, but having fun wasn’t the same as having a future. You couldn’t count on fun to last, that was the thing. Sarah understood that you had to make plans, didn’t she? And, if you weren’t very good at making plans—and she allowed she wasn’t—then you had to rely on someone else to do it for you. Harold saw the future clearly, and he made excellent plans.
Sarah tried hard to focus on what she was saying, but it all came down to words. Her mother was using them, as she so often did, to create a plausible narrative, a story she could live with and embellish, but Sarah had never trusted them. While they’d waited for the pizza to arrive, her mother had shed the nice clothes she’d worn to the restaurant, taken off her makeup and slipped into her robe. In so doing she’d become the very woman in the drawing, and as she talked, the words piling up and running together, her daughter realized she’d been working on this narrative all summer long, all those nights spent pacing in the front room. She’d probably been working on it the morning Sarah had sketched her, catching on paper her sudden loss of confidence, the erosion of her courage, her sheer exhaustion. No wonder she’d felt violated. How cruel that drawing must have seemed. That her mother was at this moment its living embodiment seemed a poor, shabby excuse for what she’d done, and Sarah felt a fissure in herself that she hadn’t even known was there, but that was now widening further. She recalled, too, what her mother had told her that night about her one day becoming that woman herself, and she almost hoped this would come true, because she deserved it. How lonely her mother had been. How brave to keep up a strong front for so long. And how little Sarah had intuited of her fear of growing old and ending up alone.
Nor did the irony escape her. Wasn’t this searing intimacy exactly what she’d been hoping for this summer? For so many summers? Hadn’t she wanted her mother to tell her what she really thought and felt from the bottom of her heart? When she’d asked for advice about her own future, about whether her feelings for Lou were full and sufficient or somehow lacking, wasn’t this sort of soul baring what she’d had in mind, her mother’s hard-won acknowledgment that one thing was more important than another? Earlier that summer she’d brought up Bobby Marconi without really being able to articulate the question she wanted to ask, yet here her mother was answering it. Passion and independence, she seemed to be saying, were all fine and good, but ultimately not sustainable. In the end it came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise. Hadn’t Sarah known this all along? Suddenly she understood the question she’d really been trying to ask all summer. Which was more important: to love or be loved?
“Anyway,” her mother finally concluded. With very little help from Sarah, she’d reduced the pizza to a stack of thin edges in the middle of the greasy box, “if I’m wrong, I’m no worse off than I was, right? Please say yes, so I can go to sleep.”
That night, as sometimes happened when she had too much to think about, Sarah fell immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep, awaking with a guilty start at first light, the events of the previous day both surreal and immediate. Her
mother
was
marrying
Harold
Sundry
? This ending made the whole summer seem implausible, as did the fact that by late afternoon she’d be back in Thomaston living her other life. Her stomach knotted at the thought. Outside her mother’s bedroom window it was still gray, almost black. How long before the sun actually came up? They’d set the alarm for seven-thirty, still almost two hours away. She’d packed everything the night before, even her sketch pad. Her suitcases, portfolio and the bag containing gifts for her father and Lou and the other Lynches was sitting in the front room near the door. Sarah closed her eyes, feeling them spill over, and tried to imagine Ikey Lubin’s, telling herself she’d be there soon, soothed by both the store and the Lynches, but the image refused to form.
Concentrate,
she told herself. You know it. You know everything about it. Where the register is and the meat counter, too, and the big coolers full of milk and beer along the back wall, though she was arguing with herself in words and could feel the panic rising in her chest until, in the next room, she heard her mother stir. Had she fallen asleep?
Rolling over, she saw a crease of light beneath the bedroom door. Was there a lamp on in the front room? Then a sound like the page of a book turning, except louder. And finally she knew what her mother was doing.
“These are wonderful!” she said when Sarah sat down beside her on the sofa she’d apparently not bothered to unfold that night. All of Sarah’s recent drawings and watercolors lay spread out on the coffee table. The sheer volume would have been impressive enough; in just the last few weeks she’d doubled her entire output, and this no doubt contributed to her mother’s stunned disbelief. But what she was really responding to, Sarah understood, was the quality. These most recent efforts represented a quantum leap forward, every single one better, far better, than the very best ones from earlier in the summer. “My God, they’re
all
wonderful.” She was studying Sarah now, with an expression that was almost fearful, as if she suspected that her daughter had made a pact with the devil. “Weren’t you going to show them to me?”
She’d meant to, of course, when they returned from dinner last night, or maybe this morning before they headed into the city, when there’d be less time for questions, for explanations. A miscalculation, she now saw. Maybe someone who didn’t know any better wouldn’t intuit the questions this new work raised, but her mother
did
know better, and she also knew there were reasons for such quantum leaps, even if the artist herself couldn’t explain them. While Sarah could pretend not to understand what had happened, at the very least her mother would want to know why she’d been so secretive about work as good as this, when normally she was so open. “I don’t understand,” she said now, scrutinizing Sarah so closely that her cheeks began to burn with an emotion that seemed equal parts pride and embarrassment.
“I know,” she whispered.
“Tell me,” her mother said, taking her hand. “How did this happen?”
Her portfolio was leaning up against the coffee table, so Sarah unzipped the inner sleeve and took out the drawing of Bobby she’d finally done back in early August. Feeling guilty in advance, she’d allowed herself just half an hour for his portrait, though she hadn’t needed even that long. It was as if the boy already existed on the blank page of her sketchbook and had been patiently waiting there for her pen to locate him. He’d appeared before her so quickly, so effortlessly, that she was almost as startled as she would’ve been to look up and find him standing there in the flesh. She’d immediately hidden the sketch away in the zippered compartment where she knew her mother wouldn’t look, nor would she look at it herself. That was the promise she made and then broke, time and again, slipping it out whenever she had a private moment to study what she’d done, trying to account for what had happened. Had the magic been in her hand or in the subject? There was no telling. What she did know was this: her drawing of Bobby Marconi affected everything she did thereafter. It was as if, having been liberated from the blank page, he now had partial control of her pen.
This part her mother understood at a glance, and she took her daughter in her arms, kissing her feverish forehead with cool lips. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
A
T
G
RAND
C
ENTRAL
her mother almost succeeded in cheering her up. They’d boarded the train early, loading her suitcases and the bag of gifts overhead, then sat in facing seats, her mother clutching the portfolio and Sarah wishing she’d put it up with the rest of her stuff, out of sight.
“Sweetie, don’t you know what this means? It means you have the gift.”
“What if I don’t want it?”
“You do. You know you do. Don’t lie.”
But how could she not, since neither statement—I
do
want the gift, I
don’t
want it—was completely true. She wanted the gift on her own terms and didn’t need her mother to tell her that this wasn’t how such gifts were offered. “Will it make me happy?”
“Oh, sweetie…”
“Does it make
you
happy?” Because if it did, what need would she have of Harold Sundry?
Her mother looked like she might cry. “You
don’t
understand, do you?”
Sarah shook her head, panic again rising.
“I
don’t
have it. Oh, I have some talent. Enough to get by. More than most. But it’s not the same as yours. What you have comes from some other place.”
Sarah’s next question was a whisper, so low she wasn’t sure she’d spoken. “What about Lou?” Meaning, was her affection for him a lie? Meaning, how could she love him and draw Bobby? Meaning, could she have her gift and Lou, too?
Her mother opened her mouth, then shut it again. “Oh, Lord,” she finally said. “I was about to say follow your heart, but I did that and married your father.”
Sarah forced a smile. “Five yards.”
“Not fifteen?”
She shook her head. She was through giving her mother big penalties.
When the train was at last in motion, it occurred to Sarah that she’d left Thomaston with one secret and was returning with two. Was this how things would go from now on, secrets piling on top of secrets? Was this adult life, or simply the natural consequence of going away in the body of a girl and returning in that of a woman? Would she get used to deceit, like the husband she’d seen coming out of Sundry Gardens with his new girlfriend and her daughter, his face innocent of all misfortune and wrongdoing?
B
Y ALBANY,
Sarah had decided it was time to focus on the task soon to be at hand: putting her father’s life back in order. Though she wasn’t there to witness them, she knew what his long summer days were like. According to the neighbors, who both awoke and fell asleep to the sound of his typewriter clacking away, she knew he was at his desk at least fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. With Sarah away and no one to please but himself, he did so by dispensing with all social niceties. Rising, he put on a bathrobe to work in, and at night he took it off to go to bed; since he owned two he’d wear one until it was stiff with perspiration before taking it to the cleaners and donning the other. He quit shaving and let his hair grow wild. Last summer, Lou had run into him coming out of Powell’s stationery, where he’d gone to replace his typewriter ribbon, and hadn’t even recognized him. He looked like Ben Gunn, he told Sarah; he’d half expected the man to ask him for a piece of cheese.