Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (18 page)

Chapter 19
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

I
t is
dark by the time I get to my mother's house, even though it is only five o'clock. I walk down the driveway and let myself in the back. My mother is standing in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher, and she gives a little scream when I open the door.

“Emilia,” she says. “My God, you scared the life out of me.”

“Hi,” I say. Then I start to cry.

There is a photograph in our family room of my mother when she was a girl. It used to hang in my grandmother's house, but when she died my mother took it and put it on the wall over our television, with the other family pictures. She did not change the frame, however, so unlike those other pictures it is not in a Lucite box. The black-and-white picture of my mother riding on a Shetland pony is in a gilded wood frame, the kind that has once again become fashionable. My mother's family was not the pony-owning kind, and neither was she a typical horse-loving girl, although she did try to claim this affinity when Allison was going through her jockey phase. My mother sat on the pony for the purpose of this photograph only, as evidenced by her smocked white dress, black Mary Janes, and folded white socks—hardly riding clothes. My mother was only about seven years old when this picture was taken, but she had already acquired the worried smile and the faintly servile expression that I have spent so much of my life trying to charm, shake, and wipe off of her plump and pretty face.

“Honey bun!” my mother says, and hugs me. We are exactly the same height so I must bend over to bury my face in her soft and springy bosom. We waddle together, hugging, across the kitchen to the old sofa under the bay window. Sofas in my mother's house have always followed a migratory pattern. A sofa begins its life in the living room, then, once it is too worn for company, it moves to the family room. When it is really beat all to hell it lives out its final days in the kitchen. This last one has been here since before my parents' divorce, and when we sink into it I think that it is probably the last kitchen sofa my mother will own. A single woman does not wear out a sofa like a family of five. A single woman probably can't wear out a sofa at all.

I tell my mother about Carolyn and she comforts me, using all the right words. My mother knows that I need her to hate Carolyn, and while my mother has never hated anyone—not her stepdaughters, not the husband who left her for a lap dancer—she pretends to hate Jack's ex-wife for my sake.

My mother says, “She's just trying to manipulate him. I'm surprised at Jack, I really am. I would think he'd see right through this.”

“He never sees through anything. It's like she's got him in some kind of perpetual mind fuck.”

My mother hugs me tightly, but she does not say anything. She does not even nod her head. She's too smart for this. She knows that in a little while I will stop crying, that in a few hours I will remember that Jack does, in fact, usually see through his wife's games and manipulations, and that it is only around the issue of his son that he is sometimes blind to the point of foolishness. She knows that it is far better not to be on record as having criticized him.

“Is she getting married, at least?” my mother asks. “I always used to pray that Annabeth would get married and be happy. Just so that I would not have to
think
about her anymore.”

“I don't know,” I say. I've been hoping for the same thing; that Carolyn would fall in love and marry, that all her jealousy and bitterness would be swept away by a new and thrilling passion, and that my guilt could thus follow suit. How typical of this woman to torture me with a baby but begrudge me the relief her marriage would have provided.

After a while I realize that I am no longer crying—I am making noises like a person who is in tears, but my eyes are dry. I sit up.

“Well,” I say. “I'm hungry.”

“Shall I make us dinner?” my mother says. “I was going to broil some salmon. I can run up to the market and get another filet or two.”

“Do you still have that crepe pan you bought me in high school? We can make salmon crepes, then we'd just need the one filet. And we can make dessert crepes, too. I saw some Nutella in the pantry last week.”

I put a Joni Mitchell CD on the stereo. I bought my mother both the CD and the stereo for her first birthday after the divorce. My father left her all the furniture in the house, every photograph, including the ones of his own children, even the TV set. But he took the Bang & Olufson sound system.

My mother and I listen to Joni Mitchell bemoan the paving of paradise while we mix crepe batter, doing our best to sing along. We cook well together. Long ago I graduated from sous chef to equal partner in the kitchen, but today I let my mother order me around. I dip the pan in batter when I am told to, I allow her to slide the pancake off the Teflon with a twist of the rubber spatula, her motions still smooth and practiced even though we have not made crepes since 1992. She stirs up a simple tarragon sauce for the salmon and we each eat three crepes. When it is time for dessert I leave her with the crepe maker while I drive to the market and buy a pint of whipping cream and some salted hazelnuts. When I get home I whip the cream with just a pinch or two of sugar, crush the nuts, and we eat dessert with our fingers, smearing Nutella down our chins and smiling at each other with chocolate-covered teeth.

While we are loading the dishwasher my mother says, “It puts a terrible strain on a marriage, dealing with an ex-wife.”

“No kidding.”

“Sometimes I wonder if your father's and my problems didn't have an awful lot to do with Annabeth.”

I pause while I'm wiping off the crepe maker. “Your problems had an awful lot to do with Daddy being an asshole.”

She doesn't reply for a moment; instead she takes her time rinsing the suds out of the sink. “She used to write letters to the girls, telling them she was going to take them for the day, or for Christmas vacation. It would break my heart to see them get so excited, packing their little overnight bags. More often than not she wouldn't even come to pick them up, or she'd just take them for a couple of hours when she'd promised them a whole week. The girls would be so sad. Lucy would cry for days, and Allison would get that horrible little scowl, you remember the one, with her chin all thrust out?”

“Yes.”

“The last time Annabeth saw them,” my mother says, turning around and leaning against the kitchen sink while she dries her plump hands on a dish towel, “when you were about three or four years old, she had them all worked up over a trip to California, to Disneyland. I told your father to speak to them, to warn them that she'd probably back out, like she had before, but he wouldn't. He claimed that not even Annabeth would be so cruel as to renege on a promise like Disneyland. Well, of course, when the big day came, she was nowhere to be found. A few days later she came by with one of her boyfriends and took the girls up to the Catskill Game Farm for the afternoon.”

I pause while I am pushing the chairs neatly under the kitchen table, the legs squeaking across the tile floor. “I remember that. I remember when they went to the Catskill Game Farm. I was so jealous.”

“You remember that? Really? You were so little.”

“They brought home water pistols. And Allison got a stuffed pink frog.”

“Did she? I don't recall. What I remember is that the next day at breakfast the girls were even more obnoxious than usual. It got so bad that I tried to send Allison to her room, but she kicked up a fuss, shouting about how she wasn't going to listen to me, not after I'd refused to let her and Lucy go to Disneyland with their mother.”

“What?” I sit on the table, drawing my knees up under my chin. My mother so rarely tells these stories about my older sisters, about how badly they treated her, how poorly behaved they were. Neither does she complain overmuch about her predecessor; even now that she has joined her in my father's past. This is a rare and unaccustomed treat.

“Annabeth had told them that it was
my
fault, that she had been planning on the trip, but that I had canceled it.”

“She did not.”

“She did.”

“Oh my God! What a bitch. And they believed her?”

“Of course they believed her. Or at least they decided to believe her. The alternative, that their mother was lying to them, would have been intolerable.”

“What did you do? Did you tell them the truth? Did you make Daddy tell them the truth?”

“Oh, we tried, but it didn't do much good.” My mother gives a funny little half smile. “Still, I got my own back.”

“What do you mean? What did you do?”

The back of my mother's head is reflected in the window over the kitchen sink. The collar of her pink blouse is folded up and now she smoothes it down. “Well, you know my old mink coat with the sable collar and cuffs?”

“Of course. I'm counting on inheriting that one day.”

“Would you like to know where I got it?”

“Tell me,” I say, a trill of excitement in my voice.

She leans forward conspiratorially, as though Annabeth Giskin herself might be lurking nearby and eavesdropping on our conversation. “A few months after the Disneyland fiasco, in the autumn, I got a rather strange telephone call from a pleasant older gentleman who owned a fur storage vault in Paramus. He had called Daddy's office first, but had asked for Mrs. Greenleaf. The receptionist, a new girl, gave him the home number. The man from the fur storage vault was calling all his customers to let them know that he was going out of business. Poor thing, his son, who was in business with him, had died, of leukemia, I think. He just didn't have the heart to continue. He and his wife were retiring to Florida.”

“And?”

“And he asked me to pick up my mink-and-sable coat.”

“And?”

“And I did. Paying, by the way, nearly six years in back storage fees, which cost me a pretty penny, I'll have you know.” She gives the kitchen a once-over with a practiced eye and then begins to head out the door.

“So?” I say, insistently.

She pauses and smiles over her shoulder. “It's a nice coat, don't you think?”

“It's a beautiful coat, Mom. I mean, you know, if you don't mind the whole massacre of small mammals thing.”

“So that's how I punished Annabeth.”

“Wait a second. It was
her
coat?”

She winks.

“Oh my
God
! You stole her sable coat!”

“I did not steal it. The woman left it in storage for years without even bothering to pay the fees. I merely redeemed it. And it's not sable. It's mink, with a sable collar and cuffs.”

I am giggling now, agog with newfound respect for my mother's audacity. This is a woman who never asserts her dominion over anything, who spends her life making sure other people are happy, comfortable, well fed. Her life is a constant bustle of organizing others' needs and desires—the precise brand of ibuprofen they prefer, a Primaloft pillow if they are allergic to down, violin lessons if they show an inclination toward the musical, a basket containing chocolate chip muffins, a gift certificate for the dry cleaner, and a bouquet of pink and yellow gerbera daisies if they are newly moved to the neighborhood. This is the very first time I have ever heard of her taking something for herself, and it is a calf-length mink-and-sable coat.

“Wait a second,” I say. “Didn't Daddy notice that you were wearing his ex-wife's fur?”

“No,” she says, flicking off the lights in the kitchen and leading me up the stairs. “Funnily enough, he never did. I always imagined that he probably recalled buying the fur, but simply forgot which wife he bought it for.”

As my mother is tucking me into bed I say, “I don't think I've had such a nice night since Isabel died.”

She kisses me on the forehead. “You know, sweetie, I'd like a photograph of Isabel, if you've got one.”

I stiffen under my worn comforter and dig my toes into the bed, feeling the quilted bumps of the mattress. To distract her from the picture I cannot yet give her, I tell my mother about the Walk to Remember.

“Mindy asked me to go with her, before she got pregnant.”

“Hmm.” She smoothes my hair away from my face.

“I am so relieved that she isn't making me go.”

“Are you?”

“The whole thing smacks of vacant sentiment. Wandering around Central Park at dusk with a bunch of other families whose babies have died. It's ridiculous.”

“Why ridiculous, Emilia? Don't you think it might be comforting to be in the company of people who understand what you're going through?”