Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel (14 page)

I look down, pretending to finish up the hospital paperwork.

“And while we’re on the topic of bad news,” she casually says, “your mother is flying in as we speak.”

“Why?” I ask, and instantly regret it. It’s not that I don’t want my mother to come stay with us. It’s just that I don’t want my mother to come stay with us.

“Because I fell and lost consciousness for a few minutes. So the hospital called her,” she says, sliding her legs off the hospital bed and standing up. She smoothes out her dress, and then walks over to a medicine cabinet to check her reflection in the glass. “And now that I’m fine, it’s too late, because she’s already on a private jet on her way.”

“I was sitting right there,” I say. “I had the situation perfectly under control.”

“Maybe they didn’t trust a thirty-something-year-old woman who has a fourteen-year-old as her date,” my grandmother says, her blue eyes twinkling. Tonight they look ice blue.

“Very funny,” I say. “Men don’t like funny.”

“You’re learning,” she says, pointing a perfectly manicured nail in my direction with a wink.

“I realized tonight that I’m actually old enough to be Hunter’s mom.”

“Would that be so bad?” she asks.

“For Hunter to be my kid?”

“To be a mom,” she says.

“No,” I say. “It wouldn’t be bad at all. Actually, I think I’d be a great mom. I certainly couldn’t be any worse than my own mother.”

“Here we go again,” my grandmother says, looking over her shoulder to face me. “You hate your mother. Old news.”

“I don’t
hate
her,” I explain. “She’s just not very motherly.”

“You know,” she says, “I like to think that you spend time with me not to spite your mother, but because I’m so wonderful that you like to be with me.”

“I’m not here to spite my mother,” I say, sounding more like a petulant child than I mean to. “I spend time with you because I love you. I love being with you.”

“Then give your mother a break, would you?” she says. “For me. She’s doing the best she can. When did you become so hard on people?”

“I’m not hard on people,” I say, and my grandmother laughs in response. She turns and floats down the hallway. I follow close behind, pausing only briefly to hand the paperwork back to one of the nurses. My grandmother walks into the waiting room, where dozens of anxious eyes look up at her. The crowd instantly goes silent.

“The band is paid up until one a.m.,” my grandmother says, hands on her hips. “Let’s get back to the party. I’ll be damned if I let those noise permits go to waste.”

Twenty

“I didn’t
eat
them, darling,” my grandmother says to Hunter, “I simply outlived them.”

We are in Rhett Butler’s car, on our way to the Islip airport to pick up my mother. It’s actually a limo, but I’ve learned that in Southampton, everyone calls anything on four wheels a car. Even a chauffeured limousine.

When Rhett came to the house this morning, my grandmother casually introduced him to me as “my first husband.” He took my hand and kissed it gently. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at the theatrics and instead took the opportunity to look at his hands: pale and soft, without a hangnail in sight.

Hunter ran up our driveway at the last minute, so he ended up coming along for the ride, too. He’s now regaling my grandmother with his knowledge of black widow spiders.

“That’s actually a myth,” Hunter says. “But there was a movie in the eighties where the Black Widow character killed all of her husbands.”

“I hope you’re not saying that I
killed
all of my husbands,” she says, amused by this back and forth with Hunter.

“No,” he says, “I’m just pointing out that there are lots of misconceptions about black widows. Some perpetuated by Hollywood.”

“You’re a very interesting young man, Hunter,” my grandmother says. “Did anyone ever tell you that?”

“Yes,” Hunter says. That he answers her so seriously and so unself-consciously makes the edges of my mouth turn up. And then, turning to me, he says: “I have an idea for a movie, you know.”

“You do?” I ask. “Let’s hear it.”

“Well, I don’t actually have the whole thing worked out,” he explains, and my grandmother and Rhett have already lost interest in the conversation. They are leaning into each other, whispering. They are so transfixed by their conversation that they don’t even notice me glaring at them. None of this dulls Hunter’s excitement for his story, though. “And then, it turns out that she didn’t know it, but Chloe is actually her daughter.”

“What?” I say, pretending I’d been listening all along.

“The leading lady finds out that the baby is hers. That’s the hook—the big catch of the whole story—turns out the baby was hers all along. I’m really into Hitchcock right now.”

“How could she not know the baby was hers?” I ask.

“Whaddya mean how could she not know?” Hunter says. “That’s the catch ending.”

“Yes,” I say, “but the woman’s the one who actually gives birth. How could she not know she had a child?”

“Oh. Right,” Hunter says, and looks out the window. He taps his fingers on the glass. “We’re here.”

The limo pulls up onto the tarmac. Limos aren’t allowed on the tarmac, but my grandmother pulled down her window and batted her eyelashes at the appropriate person, so we get to sit in the car while my mother makes her dramatic entrance.

Gray Goodman always makes a dramatic entrance.

She’s caught a ride on a private plane and three other people get off before her. She walks down the steps and onto the tarmac slowly, as if she’s taking everything in. I’ve given up on trying to get my mother to move more quickly—when she gets like this, it’s best to just let her take her time. She’s probably framing shots in her head as she walks toward us. As much as I complain about the Hamptons, one thing I’ll say about eastern Long Island is that it really is beautiful.

I see annoyed passengers behind her, but Gray doesn’t even notice. Far be it from her to act like a normal person and acknowledge that other people want to get off the plane. She’s too busy being an artist to realize that actual life is going on around her. But no one complains. It’s as if once you breathe in some of the Long Island air, your manners go into hyperdrive. It happens to everyone. Except my mother.

Rhett jumps out of the car to help my mother with her bag. It disturbs me when I see that I’ve learned how to pack from my mother—she, too, has all of her worldly possessions packed into a tiny little tote, even though she presumably has no idea how long she’ll be staying. I guess that’s something I learned from her: always be ready to pick up and go in a moment’s notice. Don’t take too much baggage, don’t gather too many things that you’ll miss when you leave them behind.

“Grace,” my grandmother says, and kisses my mother hello on both cheeks. “It’s so wonderful to have you here, darling. This is Adan Brushard.”

“Charmed,” he says, and takes my mother’s hand. His accent is much thicker than my grandmother’s, which at this point could only be referred to as a trace, and I can see how a woman could find it quite dazzling. From the look on my mother’s face, it is clear that she is not one of those women.

She doesn’t say a word. Far be it for my mother to participate in the small talk that other people take for granted. My mother refuses to follow societal norms, and instead prefers to simply stare at people when she should just be saying something on autopilot.

In striking contrast to my grandmother, who lives her life by a code of good manners. She always knows the right thing to say and the right way to act in any situation, a fact that has always comforted me. My grandmother believes that graciousness is next to godliness. My mother does not.

“Adan,” my grandmother says, filling the silence, “this is my daughter, Grace.”

Surely at the mention of his name, my mother knows who she’s being introduced to, that she is staring into the face of her mother’s first husband. The only man who came before her father, my grandfather. But her face stays expressionless. I suppose a lifetime of photographing wars and public figures has taught her never to let her emotions betray her.

“I’m a Gray, not a Grace,” my mother says. “Call me Gray.” (“I was never a Grace,” my mother once told me. “Even as a baby, that name never quite fit me.”)

“Both beautiful names,” Rhett says, and guides my mother to the car.

My mother looks back at Rhett, smiles tightly at him, and then makes sure to sit on the other side of the limo, near Hunter and me. Hunter begins telling her about his movie idea. Trying to impress the mother. Seems Hunter the third taught his son well.

“But Hannah said there’d be no way she wouldn’t know that the kid is hers, so I’ve got to rework that part.”

“Hannah said that?” my mother asks, eyeing me disapprovingly. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t do what you want to do. And don’t ever change your art just to please others.”

“Already?” I say. “Here we go.”

“Already what?” my mother says. “Already you are slaying this poor child’s artist within? Yes.”

“I’m fourteen,” Hunter says. “Anyway, I think I can still make it work.”

“Of
course
it can work,” my mother says.

“How would a woman be unaware that she’d had a baby?” I say. “You can’t
not
know that you had a baby.”

“Of course you could not know,” my mother says. “Maybe she has amnesia, or short-term memory loss, or … or she was brainwashed.”

“I like brainwashed,” Hunter says.

“Or maybe the doctors told her that her baby died,” my mother continues, “but that was a lie.”

“I like brainwashed,” Hunter says.

“Interesting,” I say.

*   *   *

“I’m just saying that you should grow a child’s creativity,” my mother says later that evening, after an extravagant five-course dinner, dumping the contents of her tote bag on the bed and then sorting everything out. “It wasn’t an indictment of you. You always take everything as such an attack.”

“It
was
an attack,” I say, fluffing a pillow on the bed. “You were telling me that I was crushing his spirit.”

“I was just pointing out the fact that it’s important to inspire creativity in children.”

“He’s not a child,” I say. “He’s fourteen.”

“You don’t think fourteen is a child?” she asks, furrowing her brow.

“Since when are you so big on teaching others how to be a good mother?” I ask.

“You love pointing out what a bad mom I was,” she says, putting down the shirt she was folding and regarding me. “I wasn’t a bad mom. I just wasn’t what most mothers were.”

“You weren’t what
any
mothers were,” I point out.

“I’d say that depends on who you’re comparing me to,” she says.

“The other mothers,” I say. “That’s what I’m comparing you to. The norm.”

What I wanted to say, what I should have said, was that she had no idea how difficult my childhood was for me. I wanted so desperately to be like everyone else. To have a life like everyone else. A place to go at the end of the day that was home. Somewhere with family pictures on the wall and laughter in the halls and food warming up in the oven for dinner. A mother who was there waiting for me. A dad.

“What other person do you know as well traveled as you? Has seen as much of the world? Of other cultures? Does
average
get you any of that? Any of the good stuff?”

“Well, maybe that’s not what a little girl needs when she’s growing up.”

“And what
does
a little girl need?”

“Normal,” I say. “To be like everyone around her. To have what everyone else has.”

“I tried to teach you that there was a big, wonderful world out there,” she says. “And I showed it to you. I taught you that you didn’t have to be average. You were special.”

“But all I ever really wanted was a more conventional life.”

“You think your grandmother is conventional?” my mother asks with a throaty laugh. “Is that why you’re always clinging to her?”

“I’m not clinging to her,” I say, “but yes, she is like everybody else.”

“No, she is not. And she’s not at all grandmotherly, so I don’t want to hear a speech about how wonderful she is. About how ordinary she is.”

“She may not have been sitting around her kitchen baking cookies from scratch for me, but she is very grandmotherly in other ways.”

“I just don’t understand this obsession you have with being average. There’s nothing wrong with being different.”

“Of course you’d say that,” I say.

“Tell me one thing, Hannah,” she says, looking me dead in the eye. “What’s so great about being average?”

“Why are you so allergic to being normal?” I ask. I walk out of her room and down the hall to mine, but I can swear that I feel her glaring at me through the walls. This house, all six thousand square feet of it, is apparently too small for the two of us. I decide to spend the night at the guest house.

*   *   *

Once I walk into the guest house, I realize that in my rush, I forgot to bring anything with me. Even as lightly as I tend to pack, there are still a few things that I’ll need if I’m going to sleep here. A toothbrush, for one, and also the special face soap that my grandmother has gotten me addicted to. (“Never underestimate the power of a clear complexion,” my grandmother says.) There’s no way that I’m going back to the house—my mother will see that as a tiny but glorious victory over me. So I forget the toothbrush and just go upstairs to choose my bedroom for the night.

The master seems too large, so I decide between the other two guest rooms. I end up in the pink room, the one with a bathroom attached to it. Not only is the bed bigger in the pink room, but it’s also got a claw-foot tub in its bathroom, and I just can’t resist.

I open the medicine cabinet in the pink room’s bathroom—an antique piece with a delicately painted mirror—and see that there is a spare toothbrush, still in its wrapping, toothpaste, and that soap I’ve become addicted to. Another life skill my grandmother considers crucial for a woman to have: the ability to make a comfortable home.