Getting Over Jack Wagner (28 page)

“I think it might be ready,” I chirped.

Mom said nothing. She stuffed her hands into a pair of oven mitts thick and shiny as boxing gloves and slid the casserole onto the stove to cool. Then she busied herself at the counter: checking pots, pouring drinks, slicing the cantaloupe into tidy half-moons.

“Can I help or something?”

“I've got it,” Mom said. “Why don't you just go relax.”

Relaxing was the last thing I was capable of, but I grabbed the opportunity to slink away and hide. In the dining room, I perched in a high-backed wooden chair, grateful to be alone. I soon realized, though, that without the rest of the Sunday dinner crew the dining room was immense. The ceiling was too high, the windows too small, the table about eight miles too long. Two places were set directly across from each other, face-off style.

I started to panic. How would we ever make it through this dinner? How would we fill so much space with so little to say? Suddenly I longed for Camilla modeling her napkin animals (they really were clever, if you thought about it) or Scott telling his fraternity stories (that crazy whippersnapper!) or thick, kind, hairy Harv sitting at the head of the table—he wouldn't even have to speak—just sharing the burden of all this empty air.

Mom came in with the casserole in her mitted hands, saying, “You can bring in the salad if you wa—” as I went leaping from my chair. We managed to stir up a brief commotion involving creamed corn—even shared a tense joke about salad versus dessert forks, heh heh—but inside of three minutes, we were seated. Silent. Served. The cantaloupe grinned up at us, smirking orange mouths.

Usually, this was the part when everybody started complimenting everything. Camilla would be gushing, Scott kissing butt, Harv mumbling something indistinguishable and punctuated with “dear” or “darling,” and my mother blushing like a teenager through the whole event. Tonight, the only sound was Sue slurping at her paws. When Mom bit a carrot, it echoed.

I tasted a bite of casserole and, almost against my will, admitted, “This is really good.” And I wasn't just feeling obligated. As a tuna connoisseur, I could say this with a fair amount of expertise. “What's that funny flavor?”

“Maybe the roasted cashews?”

“Cashews?” This was shocking. My recipe never mentioned cashews.

“Or else the mandarin oranges…”

“Oranges?”

“Chow mein noodles?”

“Chow? Maine? Noodles?” I blinked. After so many years of making casseroles, accepting the concept of combining tuna and oranges was like rejecting my entire belief system. I took another bite, feeling a pang of guilt when I thought of my own recipe sitting naively at home, featuring ingredients more along the lines of: potato chips (crushed).

Chewing, I said, “I've never heard of chow mein noodles in a tuna casserole.”

And instead of correcting my tuna ignorance and/or table manners, Mom said: “If you want, I can give you the recipe.”

It was surreal. An hour ago, I was the “don't even think about sitting with me” chick in black clothes with no cuticles scowling on the outbound train. Now I was a woman who came to visit with her mother, who swapped casserole recipes and kindnesses.

Then Mom set her fork down, too carefully: obviously a prelude to the “talk.” I felt myself tense up all over again. In the midst of the scandalous tuna-and-fruit episode, I'd almost managed to forget the lingering possibility of Lou being back in our lives. Thirty minutes ago, I'd been ready for this news. I had wanted it, depended on it. Now, I wasn't so sure. I needed just a few minutes more of not knowing. Maybe a little more recipe swapping. We were doing strangely well with the recipe swapping.

Give me meatloaf!

Pork chops!

Shepherd's pie!

“Well,” Mom began, over the shouts of poultry clamoring in my ears, “you already know there's something I wanted to talk to you about.” Her voice was strangely toneless, as if she'd rehearsed this speech before. I fixed my eyes on the soupy vat of creamed corn.

“This isn't easy for me to say, so I'm just going to say it.” I glanced up to see her mouth silently open, close, and open again, like a fish gulping for water. “I've been seeing a therapist.”

Like a cartoon, her lips clamped shut and her eyes bulged wide, as if recoiling from the impact of letting the words loose. I didn't know what to say. Honestly, for the last two hours, I'd been so prepared for the Lou announcement that this news struck me as relatively harmless.

“That's it?” I blurted.

This was not the wisest move. When Mom looked hurt, I quickly amended: “I mean, who is he? This therapist?”

“It's a she,” Mom replied, toying with the edges of her linen napkin. “Her name is Lola.”

By some act of God, I managed to keep my mouth shut as Kinks lyrics threatened to eat me alive.

“She has an office downtown, near Broad and Walnut…you know, where we used to see
The Nutcracker?”
She brushed a hand in front of her face, flicking the thought away like a hair that had strayed out of line. “What am I saying, of course you know—that's your neck of the woods now, isn't it?” She laughed a loud, shaky laugh, then abruptly sobered up. “Anyway. That's where Lola's office is. I've been seeing her for about ten years.”

Whoa there. Ten years? This information was more unsettling. Not the concept of therapy itself. Therapy itself I could handle—this was the year 2000, the age of
Frasier
and
Good Will Hunting,
besides which I'd been considering myself Hannah's unofficial patient for about fifteen years—it was the combination of therapy and my mother. There just couldn't be a therapist in my mother's life. I
knew
my mother's life. I had her down to a science. She was the woman who got her roots done by a girl named Lorelei the first Wednesday of every month. She fretted over Harv's cholesterol levels. She got excited about things like self-cleaning ovens and save-a-step lasagnas. This was not a woman who had been seeing a Center City therapist for the past ten years. Besides, ten years ago, I was living in this house. I spent every summer here during college. The possibility that my mother had been carrying on any sort of private life under my nose—much less seeing a therapist, much less in Center City, much less for
ten years
—was simply not realistic.

Mom cleared her throat. “Lola thinks it would be a good idea if we talked about this.”

“We?”

“She thinks it might be good for us.”

“What does Lola know about us?”

“Well, I talk to her, Eliza. That's why people go to therapists. I tell her things.”

“What things?”

Mom raised her shoulders, then froze them midshrug.

“Things going on in my life.” The shoulders huddled by her head like earmuffs. “Things that are important to me. And you, believe it or not, are one of them.”

“Believe it or not”? Who was this woman? Since when did she do sarcasm? My heart started thudding in my temples. I wanted my old mom back. The one who snapped and ridiculed and nitpicked. The one who never failed to demand where I was going and who I was going with and what I was piercing when I got there. Hearing her talk about her relationship with this Lola person made me feel, not for the first time in my life, abandoned.

“I know this must be a lot to take in at once,” Mom said, a line surely prepped in advance by the all-knowing Lola. “So if there's anything you want to ask me…”

Yeah, there might be a thing or two. Like: why did you see this Lola behind my back? Does “she look like a woman and talk like a man”? What kinds of things did you tell her about me? Where's the part where you say my father's back in town and can't wait to see me? And who the hell ever heard of putting mandarin oranges in a tuna casserole?

But all that came out was: “Why did you start going?”

Mom pushed her plate forward and knotted her hands on the table. They were clenched so tightly the knuckles looked like they were about to leap through her skin. “It was when I first met Harv. He's the one who encouraged me to see someone.”

First the concept of citrus tuna, then the therapist named for a Kinks song. Now I was supposed to believe Harv was a sensitive, quiche-eating '90s guy? The only subjects I'd ever heard transpire between Mom and Harv were concrete things, household things, things that needed either fixing or eating: the leaking radiator, clogging sink drain, leftover chop suey in the fridge. Was no one in my life who they seemed to be?

“Things were difficult for me then,” Mom admitted. At this, her hands sprang apart and began fussing needlessly with the sweating casserole lid. “After your father left, raising you girls alone”—her hands flitted to the serving spoon quietly drowning in the corn—“and talking to Harv let me open up about some things.” She rescued the spoon and deposited it, dripping, on a trivet shaped like a cow. “Things I didn't even know I was feeling.”

“Things about me?”

“Some of them.” She glanced at me and I looked quickly away, my eyes landing on one of those smug cantaloupe bastards. I wanted to punch him in the jaw. “I was always worried I was a bad mother. Nothing I ever did seemed right. I didn't feel like I was doing a good job with you two. Especially you.”

At this point my ears had started ringing, like I was trapped inside a giant seashell. My mouth was dry. My fingertips were inexplicably numb. This wasn't the ending I had planned on. It was never supposed to be about
my
mother. It was supposed to be about the other mothers, the rock stars' mothers, the ones who fussed and ferreted and crashed soph hops. The ones who demystified their sons with a pinch on the cheek or a plate of cheese or an embarrassing old home video. The ones who never failed to expose their children for what they really were.

“Why are you telling me this now?”

Mom looked at her plate, picked up her fork, tidily speared a pea, then quipped: “I heard you haven't been going to work.”

All at once my timid voice was buoyed by a wave of outrage. “Is there anyone out there who
doesn't
know every detail of my private life?”

Mom gave me a sorry shrug, as if to say, probably not.

“Who told you?”

“It doesn't matter who—”

“It does matter! It matters to me!”

Mom sighed, but it wasn't her usual exasperated-mother-from-a-'50s-sitcom sigh. This sigh was thin, tired. Real. She laid her forked pea on the rim of her plate. “Andrew called,” she said, and by the preteen blush climbing her cheeks I knew it had to be true. “Last night, after he got back from your apartment. He's just worried about you, that's all.”

I guess I couldn't blame him for that. Nothing Andrew had seen at my apartment—my unwashed clothes, my all-cookie diet, my declining taste in TV, not to mention my unprovoked sexual assault—was particularly confidence inspiring.

“And so am I,” Mom added. “All I could think of last night, all night long, was the time in my life when I started to—”

I cringed.

“—‘shut down,' was how Andrew put it. Years ago, after your father left, I could barely leave the house. You must remember that.”

“Kind of,” I murmured, though I remembered every glazed look and canned sitcom and thawed dinner care of Chef Boyardee, every night I crept down the hall to peek into my mother's room and make sure she was still there.

“When I think about those years…” Mom drew a shaky breath, but her voice remained amazingly steady. “There are lots of things I regret. But my biggest regret is that I never taught you girls how to face reality. Not to avoid it, like I did.”

It was probably the most painfully honest and emotionally healthy moment that had ever passed between us. Naturally, I panicked and regressed: sibling rivalry.

“So does Camilla know?” I pounced. “About Lola?”

Mom shook her head. For some reason, being the first to know—in effect, the first to be worrisome enough to
require
knowing—gave me a twisted sense of pride. “I'll tell her soon, though,” Mom said. “To be honest, I wish I'd done it long ago.”

I felt a prickle of envy. There was only room for one worrisome daughter in this family and, historically, it had been me.

“Sometimes I think Camilla takes after me, that she doesn't face her life either.” As she spoke, Mom folded her napkin into smaller and smaller triangles. “Not that she doesn't stay active. I know she throws herself into her job and her marriage and her classes…what are they? Origami?” Apparently, the technical term for her neurotic napkin folding had managed to escape her. “She's always kept busy like that. I just wonder if she ever stops to ask herself if she's happy doing it.”

She let the napkin go limp on the table and stared at it, as if expecting the linen to stand and speak.

“But Eliza, on the other hand.” Her voice sounded suddenly light, detached, as if musing out loud to an empty room. She began to smile a little, and looked nostalgic, as if remembering someone we both used to know. “Eliza always knew just what she wanted. Even when she was a little girl. She was always so independent…more like her father.”