Her Mother's Daughter (62 page)

But if I'd thought I was among the living walking talking dead when I was married to Brad, where was I now? At least when I was married I'd gone out occasionally to a movie or a play, to dinner. I'd seen people in the evenings. Even if I didn't like them, they were a change from myself. Even hating Brad took my mind outside myself. Now there was only the children, the children, all the time. I was narrowing myself to a circle of three. They were all I had to care about; they were all I had to think about. Except myself. And the last person on earth I wanted to think about was myself.

Hopeless, hopeless. I kept wiping my hand across my face. I drank so much coffee I felt ill, so I switched to rye until I fell ill with that as well. I never did eat. I didn't feel like opening a can of soup for Christmas dinner. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. At some point, I caught myself hunched over in my armchair by the window, in the dark. I hadn't yet turned on the lights. I knew who I resembled. I pulled myself up and shook myself. I went into the bathroom and washed my face. I went into the kitchen and munched on some Saltines. I went to my desk and pulled open the picture file that stood beside it.

I'd been taking pictures, if less and less often (film is expensive), during free afternoons. I decided that day that I would experiment in a methodical serious way, with different cameras, lenses, films, lights, angles. I would begin to keep records of my experiments, teach myself photography in a scientific way. That decision sufficed to pull me together at least enough to embrace my cranky babies when they came home, to give them a sandwich and put them to bed lovingly. It kept me from tears. It even kept me going for some months. But it was a decision made in despair and I knew it. It was a stopgap. I was doing make-work. I, who had joked contemptuously at ladies' needlepointing, knitting, crocheting. Make-work for the idle, I'd snorted. Yes.

It was in April, about eight months after my overnight flight to Mexico for a quickie divorce, that I went on my first date. I was still feeling dead in my body. I didn't go out for sex, only for company. I was dying, drying up, craving adult companionship. The guy I went out with had worked at the
Herald
years ago, and had been hired by the
Daily News;
by
Herald
standards, he had made it. He lived in Lynbrook, in a big old white house with wonderful gardens. His wife had died of breast cancer some months ago; his beautiful gardens had gone to seed and overgrown; he had started to drink a bit, and taken to hanging around with his old cronies at the
Herald
office.

He was nice-looking, in his forties, and the drink didn't yet show. It might be a temporary aberration. I heard all the gossip, in my central position in the foyer of the newsroom. By now, I had a “rep” here too: only here I was the ice queen. That's what they called me. They liked me though; and I liked them, the guys in the newsroom. Since I wouldn't go out with any of them, no one had a special gripe against me. I was a good guy, one of the boys, just frigid. But I'd see Jimmy Hanna once in a while, sloping in to seek out company for a liquid lunch. I don't know what was happening with his job—maybe he was on a leave. He'd always stop and chat with me, and despite his depression and his habits, he still had an erect posture, a tight body, and he wore his hat at a jaunty angle. But he had a mournful look about him that captured something in me (oh, mother!), he acted sweet and yearny, and I have to admit, I was drawn to him.

One morning, as I was cleaning up my desk preparing to leave, he stopped to chat, and asked me if I'd have dinner with him that evening. I looked at him for a moment, then heard myself say yes. I kept looking at him: I was sending him a message. But he didn't receive it, because a few minutes later, when I already had my hat and coat on, I heard a great howl go up in the newsroom, and the lunch crowd came out slapping Jimmy on the back, and looking over at me with leers. I was so cross I turned my back on them and left the office without a word, and I thought about canceling the date with Jimmy. I even called his house a few times that afternoon to do so. But there was no answer, and when the evening arrived, I found myself thinking that it would be really nice to go out to dinner. I hadn't been out to a restaurant in nearly a year. So instead of continuing to call him, I went down and asked Pani Nowak—that was what I called her now, to her enormous delight—to come up and sit with the kids that evening.

She folded her hands against her chest and rocked them back and forth—a gesture my mother made also, kind of a prayer crossed with a football cheer—and smiled. “You go out, eh? Is good! Young girl should go out. Get a better husband, hah?”

I knew she meant well, but it crossed my mind that there was little to choose between the newsmen's lascivious assumptions and her economic ones: for marriage preeminently meant financial security to women like Pani Nowak.

“I go out, yes,” I laughed. “But not to find a husband.”

She nodded sagely. “Yes, yes, I know.” She didn't believe a word of it. “I come, sure. We watch the Howdy-Doody together, hah?”

Jimmy had said we'd go to the Arbor Inn. I have to admit that had been half the attraction. The Arbor Inn had been a hangout for the boys and girls in the Christian clique when I was in high school. Their parents ate there; they drank there. I'd never been there. It was a pretty little place south of Merrick Road, and it had seemed to me in those days something like what the Waldorf meant to my young mother—something stylish and rich and far beyond me.

He appeared at the dot of seven-thirty. I'd fed the kids a little early and cleaned up the remains of the canned spaghetti Boyardee which was one of their favorite meals, and thrown out the homemade salad they left, and washed the dishes, and dressed up in a skirt and sweater which was one of the only decent outfits I owned. The children were agitated—a little excited with interest at this new development of Mommy's, and a little disapproving, a little resentful. They both fixed themselves firmly on the living room floor, where they were sitting in front of the television set prepared to swivel to examine whoever would walk through the door.

You'd never have guessed Jimmy had spent his lunch hours drinking. He must have spent the afternoon sleeping it off, because his face was as fresh and pink as a boy's, and he held his hat in a humble manner as he walked in. His eyebrows went up when he saw me in a skirt, and his mouth pursed, and I thought for an instant, with sinking heart, that he was going to whistle. But he turned his head toward the children and his eyebrows went up farther, and his mouth opened:

“What are you doing, watching television? What about your homework!”

The children just stared at him without answering. They couldn't believe he was talking to them. I had been going to remind them of their homework, which they always started at eight o'clock, when the adult television programs began, but I didn't. I walked toward them, bent, and kissed them.

“I won't be late,” I said, loudly enough for Jimmy to hear. “Be good, now, okay?”

“Bye, Mom,” they both said and turned back to the television set, not granting Jimmy so much as hello or good-bye. Nor did I prompt them. I didn't even introduce him. We walked down the stairs together.

“You leave them alone?” he asked disapprovingly.

I just looked at him coldly, and knocked at Pani Nowak's door when we got downstairs. Her head poked out and gazed not at me but at Jimmy, examined him from head to foot.

“I'm leaving now, Pani.”

She beamed at me. Jimmy had passed inspection. “I go up just now.”

We walked out of the house and Jimmy held my arm as we descended the steps to the sidewalk. At that point I wanted to ram him with my elbow, but simmered silently instead. He opened the car door for me, and closed it after I had slid in.

“So!” he said in a hearty voice as we set out. “Nice-looking kids.”

“Um-hum.”

He glanced at me. “I can tell you're a good mother.” That, I presumed, was his form of apology for imagining I would leave them alone and reproving me for it.

“You have children?”

He had two. He hadn't learned that pompous bossiness at the office, not in his line of work.

“Yeah, two, great kids!” His voice was hollow. “Both at college now, the house is empty.” His voice caught a little at the end of that phrase.

I know you, I thought. Heavy drinker, scolds wife and kids, demands perfection from them, is never home, wife dies, and suddenly he realizes how much he depended on her, something he never knew before. Thinks of himself as one of the guys, good buddy, always ready for a laugh. Now full of self-pity, wants to talk about his suffering. I wondered how I could sit over a meal with someone I hated as much as I hated him at that moment. I sat silent, debating what to do. Finally I opened my mouth, and my voice creaked, as if I hadn't used it in years and it was rusty.

“Look, Jimmy, I think you'd better take me back home. This was a mistake. I don't want to go to dinner with you. I'm sorry.”

He didn't seem surprised. “Yeah, it seems we got off on the wrong foot. I don't know how.” He turned his head and looked at me appealingly, innocently.

“I can tell you how.” My voice was suddenly hot. It occurred to me that I had been so long out of male society that I had no idea how to behave anymore, and more than that, no idea about how I really felt. I knew I disliked him, but what was coming out of my voice now was pure fury. “You started by announcing our date to the entire newsroom, never considering how that would affect me. I have to work there, every day! You followed that up by presuming to reprimand my children, something you, a stranger, have absolutely no right to do, and never will! You polished it off by daring to judge my ways of caring for my children, when my instincts tell me
you
probably never took care of your
own
children for an hour in your entire life. That's how!”

He drove, his mouth twisting. His silence impelled me further on. How could I have been so furious?

“You are pompous, presumptuous, inconsiderate, and selfish, full of self-pity, and I made a mistake in agreeing to go out with you. My fault. I'm sorry.”

He turned to me wide-eyed. “How can you know me so well so quickly? It took my wife years to say things like that.”

“You were younger when she met you. It takes some years for things like that to show,” I said bitterly.

He considered. “Yeah. You're divorced, aren't you. He the same way?”

“Close enough. And he had lots of friends like you. Can we turn around now?”

But he didn't turn. We were nearly at the Arbor Inn. He hit the steering wheel with his open hand. “Look. I'm a clod. I haven't asked a woman to go out in twenty-two years, and I don't know how to behave. I seem to be acting like a cross between an adolescent ninny and a pompous ass. My wife always said I didn't know how to talk to the kids…. I hardly see them since she died….” He didn't choke up or let tears come into his voice, none of the expected tricks. He seemed really to be feeling bad about himself. His voice was resonant with sorrow. “It's like starting all over again, and I'm not good at it, but I want to learn, I want to try. Please just have dinner with me. You never have to see me again if you don't want to, but at least sit and talk to me and you can berate me all you like. Will you?” He turned to me a boy's face, large-eyed and feeling.

How could I say no?

The Arbor Inn turned out to be a nice enough steak house, a neighborhood place where people knew each other, with a very active bar. Nothing like the Waldorf, my mother's Waldorf. But fine. We both ordered steaks. And Jimmy proceeded to tell me his life's story: his authoritarian father and brutalized mother; his rebellion; his wife, who slowly dwindled as a person over the years, who complained about his absence, his drinking, his inability to show affection to his children, and who then stopped complaining and sank into pale pain and death. It wasn't until the end that he let himself cry. The evening was proceeding exactly as I had feared it would. It was his nickel, and he was going to have things his way. I picked at my steak, wondering which was better, sitting home alone or this? I had dropped a few remarks about myself along the way. I mentioned that I'd been a rebel too, and offered a few laughing comments on my adolescent self. He passed right by them, didn't hear them. He was deeply serious about his own rebellion; nothing in it seemed funny to him.

He looked up at me with the appealing boy's face and wiped his cheeks with his napkin. “I never realized how I depended on her. Just being there, listening to me when I got home, whether I was raving or furious about some stupidity perpetrated by that rag I work for…. I don't know. But now I'm so lonely, I could die.”

“You'll find someone else,” I said calmly. I refused to act moved by his story. I refused to show any compassion. If I felt any, it was for his dead wife.

He cheered up immediately. Maybe he expected compliments. “You think so?”

“Yes. Men can always find a woman to bandage their wounds.”

He blinked at that, at my tone, which was cool and distant. Maybe it occurred to him that he was being inconsiderate, selfish, full of self-pity…. “You been divorced long?”

“Not quite a year.”

He grinned lasciviously. “A looker like you, you'll be married in a year.”

“No.”

“Whaddya mean, no? Sure you will.”

I didn't feel like discussing with him my objections to marriage from the female point of view. So I just shrugged.

“Listen, I know it's tough, with two little kids and all. But some guy will fall head over heels, you watch, and he won't care if you have five kids.”

That took my breath away, so that what I said next came out all in a rush.

“Speaking of whom, I have to get home.” I looked at my watch. “I promised to be back by ten. Pani Nowak goes to bed at ten,” I lied.