Invisible Boy (28 page)

“Both, I think.”

If I wanted to confront her about Pierce I knew that this next hour would be the time to do it, but everything was so twisted
up with my obligation and her generosity and all the thousand-tendriled vines of nuance that snaked around and between us.

It would be so much easier just to go for the kind of light chatter she liked best—ask her about Larry and why she’d decided
to get married a fourth time all of a sudden, and maybe joke around about how long the line of her initials would be now for
any sort of monogram.

We’d all been through this “Mom’s new guy” shit before. She’d be lost to us for at least a year, busied with stroking some
male ego, pretending she couldn’t open jars for herself and that she’d never held a political opinion. Or maybe not even pretending,
but actually not
remembering
.

Of course it wouldn’t be as bad as when we were kids. We wouldn’t have to live with the guy, first of all. We wouldn’t have
to shift places around our own dinner table—again—to accommodate his preferred mealtime location, or eat whatever fucked-up
health food he was into, or learn which seemingly innocuous conversational topics would end up bringing on scattered showers
of Y-chromosome petulance
this
time.

And we wouldn’t have to watch our mother’s loyalty grow paler with every challenge, withering with atrophy like my arm in
its cast. At least not every day.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, “you want to come sit in the living room for a minute?”

I
sat with my back against one arm of the sofa, cast resting on a pillow in my lap, cross-legged and barefoot.

Mom was perched at the other end. “Would you like me to put on a little music?”

“I want to ask you about something,” I said.

Her right hand gripped the wineglass, half-empty now. “Maybe a bit of opera? Or that nice classical station?”

“How ’bout
The Weavers at Carnegie Hall
?” I said, needing some cozy old McCarthy-can-kiss-my-blacklisted-pinko-ass solidarity.

Mom’s left thumb sneaked beneath her middle and index fingers to fiddle with the new engagement ring. “Wonderful.”

“It should be in that pile of CDs,” I said. “Next to the stereo.”

“What’s your opinion of Larry?” she asked.

“He’s pro-nuke
and
thinks a forest without Boise Cascade is like a day without sunshine.
Mazel tov
.”

“He’s very kind,” said Mom. “Do I just press Eject?”

“Push Power first,” I said. “Hey, the man obviously
adores
you. And it was lovely of him to spring for the big shpendy lunch.”

She nodded. “He was nervous about making a good impression.”

“Refreshing and much appreciated. I give it six months.”

“Six months until what?”

“You’re bored enough to bolt or he turns out to be a flaming

asshole.”

Mom sat back down.

“Pagan says you won’t make Thanksgiving, by the way,” I continued. “Though of course if it’s ‘B: asshole,’ we both give it
five years.”

“Well, after five years I’ve heard all their
stories
,” she said.

“We know.”

She stood up. “That water’s probably boiling by now.”

“Angel hair takes three minutes.”

“So should I go start it now?”

“Turn off the stove and come back.”

Mom stopped fiddling with her ring and clutched a fistful of sweater, rubbing the side of her thumb back and forth against
the wool.

We figured this tic had been spawned when her parents endorsed a brief 1939 fad for encasing babies’ elbows in tiny plaster
casts to deny them the comfort of thumb-sucking.

“I’m tired of sitting,” she said. “I’ve been in the car all day.”

“We need to talk,” I said. “About Pierce.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Madeline, why do you
always
want to drag up old shit?”

“This is actually
new
shit. At least to me.”

“Over and done with.”

“It isn’t, Mom.”

“Don’t be
ridiculous
.”

“Look,” I said, “I didn’t know he’d molested Pagan. She told me last week. Because of the little boy I found.”

Mom’s thumb moved faster, almost a blur.

“She also told me that you don’t believe her,” I said.

“I asked Pierce about it.”

“Oh, gee, let me guess what he said—why did you even bother?”

“It was only fair to hear both sides.”

“No, Mom,” I said, “it’s only fair to believe your
daughter
.”

“I’m sure the truth is somewhere between their two versions.”

“We’ll just say Pagan’s
partially
lying about having been dry-humped repeatedly by your sack-of-shit boyfriend back when she was ten years old?”

Mom’s mouth went grim and tight, giving her an uncanny resemblance to her dead father.

“Which I guess would mean you’re only
partially
betraying her,” I said. “I mean, at the very least, ask yourself, why would she make it up if it didn’t happen? What
possible
purpose could that serve?”

“I am
not
betraying Pagan. Or anyone.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s why you can’t
wait
to tell us what a good time you’ve had seeing Pierce every time you go back to California.”

“Pierce is my friend. So is his wife.”

“And does his wife have any daughters, Mom?”

“One.”

“How old?”

Mom shrugged. “She’s a troublemaker. They sent her to live with the father a couple of years ago.”

“How old?”

“I don’t know… thirteen? Why the hell does it possibly matter?”

I covered my eyes with my left hand.

“You are such a fucking
idiot
,” I said. “Jesus Christ.”

Mom was silent for a long beat.

When she spoke again, her voice was appallingly perky: “I’m going to cook dinner now. Before all that water boils away.”

Just after Mom left the next day, I discovered two more vintage gifts arranged sweetly atop my bed: an embroidered cashmere
cardigan and a Luneville luncheon plate.

She’d folded the sweater’s arms inward at each elbow, to look as though some shyly invisible two-dimensional friend were offering
up the French-porcelain artifact, hoping for my approval.

I stared down at the bed. This was no hastily assembled peace offering, but something my mother had thought up well ahead
of her long drive down from Maine: sweater a perfect fit and the exact green of my eyes, plate’s cottage-nosegay motif my
favorite since early childhood.

Having too little money for last-minute extravagance, Mom kept us ever in mind, scouting out small treasures to bestow on
each of her children, sweetening our way through the world.

Nothing between us was simple, or ever had been.

Two days later I got my stitches out. Then they rebroke my arm.

I
made Pagan pay me the hundred bucks on Thanksgiving Day. It’s not like she could really argue.

We were in Maine, after all, at Larry’s house.

Taped to his icebox was a group shot Mom had cut out of the
Carmel Pine Cone
, the newspaper we’d grown up with in California.

Mom was standing between Pierce and his wife at a party, and all three of them were laughing.

W
hat do you
mean
, wives can’t come to the Christmas party?” I asked.

It was a Sunday in mid-December and Dean and I were out in New Jersey, ostensibly taking care of some paperwork in his office.

I’d been surprised by the building Christoph housed his business in. It was right next to a weed-choked set of railroad tracks,
your basic bad-sixties plantation homage: cheap fake bricks with a pair of two-story white columns framing the entrance:
Gone With Bad Taste.

“
Spouses
aren’t invited,” said Dean. “Don’t ask me why.”

I perched on the edge of his desk. “Why?”

He ignored me, raising his thousand-page Xerox of an incompre-

hensibly Swiss-German biological-oxygen-demand-quantification-device-

thingie repair manual higher between us.

I nudged the pages with my still-plaster-encased arm. “Like, so your colleagues can get all the secretaries drunk enough to
fuck out in the parking lot?”

A choking sound emanated from behind my husband’s Teutonic-pulp rampart.

“Duh,” I said.

No response.

I swung my legs, making syncopated heel-thuds against the kettle drum of his file drawer.

“Will there be tons of coke,” I continued, “or just grain alcohol in the punch?”

“Bunny, I
have
to finish this.”

“So maybe I’ll crash it. With Astrid. I should have this thing off my arm by then.”

More choking.

“We could jump out of a giant cake wearing fishnets or something,” I continued. “Freak the shit out of everyone.”

Dean lowered his reading matter. “If I buy you lunch will you stop
talking
?”

“Briefly,” I said, leaning over to stroke his hair, left-handed.

“Give me ten minutes.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“All what girls?” asked a man’s voice from behind me, husky and debauch-battered.

I turned to find Captain Kangaroo’s evil twin lounging against the door frame: thick-wristed, broken-nosed, and in no kind
of hurry to raise his eyes from my tits despite the sling and cast that framed them.

My pectoral equipage rated a slow nod of approval. He loosened the knot of his tie, tongue-tip sliding across his front teeth
in pink salute.

I got the feeling he’d been standing there long enough to have overheard my drunk-secretarial-parking-lot-sex comment. And
that he was less a drunk-secretarial-sex-in-the-parking-lot than a drunk-secretarial-blowjob-in-the-men’s-room-stall kind
of guy.

“You must be Mrs. Bauer,” he said, his voice a wooden spoon dragged through pea-gravel.

“It’s Dare, actually.” I slid off the desk and stepped toward him, left hand stuck out in front of me. “Madeline.”

Captain K had one of those slow, crawly handshakes—like he was asking Helen Keller if she knew the one about the salesman
and the farmer’s daughter.

He shot my husband a smirk, not letting me go. “Jesus, Dean, you married a feminazi?”

I smiled sweetly. “Beats a Republicunt.”

He dropped my hand and I smiled wider.

Dick
.

“Got a hell of a mouth on her,” he said, squinting back at me.

Dean shrugged. “You know these debutantes…”

“Oh, right. She’s
Astrid’s
friend.”

“Bunny,” said Dean, “this is Vincent Taliaferro. My boss.”

“Bunny?” That rated another smirk.

“So,
Vinnie
,” I said, “you had lunch yet?”

Right when Taliaferro was locking up out front, Christoph drove into the office parking lot, Astrid riding shotgun beside
him.

Because the patriarchy didn’t already suck
enough
.

From across the restaurant table Taliaferro pointed his butter-smeared knife at me.

“Why the hell do you care what a bunch of moolies get up to?” he said through a mouthful of dinner roll.