The Inseparables (12 page)

Although Oona had not been there to see it, she knew exactly what would have happened. In the hospital she had seen it with others. The last moments of lucidity. The slow loss of consciousness. The gradual leak of life. She lied to Lydia.

“I don't know if he knew or not,” she said.

Lydia looked unexpectedly close to tears. Oona put her arm around her and kissed the top of her head. This simple thing brought her back, one kiss to her daughter's hairline, something she'd done so many thousands of times when Lydia was a baby, on the futon in their apartment on 103rd Street. She and Spencer would take turns holding her, passing her back and forth so that one of them could sleep, and this was what they did, over and over, delirious with amazement. At the funeral, she'd done this, too, holding Lydia's hand, keeping her near her at all times. Lydia had never known anybody who'd died before, and at the cemetery, she was viscerally bothered by the actualities of burying someone: the turned-up earth, the dirt, the shovels. Lydia had not been close to her grandfather, which was something Oona blamed herself for. It was the old story. She was too busy. There were too many surgeries. She was always away.

“The last time I was here it was the same thing,” Lydia said. “It just feels awful in this house. How can you be here all the time?”

Oona wanted to make her daughter think of something else. “Did you know that I was born in the room right next to us?” she asked, knocking on the door to the adjoining bedroom.

Lydia looked at the door in disbelief. “Did I know that?”

“I don't know,” Oona said, smiling. “You know a lot of things now.”

“You were born there? Like, right here, in this house? In that room?”

Oona nodded. “In the bed.”

“Same bed?”

“The same bed.”

“That's nuts,” Lydia said.

Oona watched as Lydia opened the door to the bedroom and peered inside.

“It's like you're a woman from olden times,” Lydia said. “Being born at home. It's so ancient. Had electricity even been invented then? Or antibiotics?”

“Hilarious,” Oona said. She enjoyed the fleeting moment of victory as Lydia laughed.

So much had changed in her daughter these past six months. In half a year, something like the first evidence of her adult identity had begun to show itself. Even since the last time she'd seen her, for that quick stopover last month, things felt different. An increasing slyness in the way she smiled. Evidence of an expanding cynicism. A vanishing of her early teenage gawkiness. The new sharp refinement of her clavicle. The things that had reminded Oona of Spencer when Lydia was young—the lips, the subtle Hebraic profile—had shifted just enough for Oona to see the beginnings of something Spencer did not possess: a hatching elegance, cool grace in the slow way she ran her hands through her hair. The color in her cheeks gave the impression of good humor. Oona reached to hug her again and felt something hard against the waistline of her pants.

“It's nothing,” Lydia said, protesting.

“I hope it's something,” Oona said. “And that you're not suffering from some sort of awful rectangular growth.”

“Mom,” Lydia whined.

“Give it over.”

Lydia handed over one of the new pristine copies of
The Inseparables.
Oona still could not believe it was being republished. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she flipped through the pages, smiling, pausing to linger over her favorite diagrams.

Lydia started to say, “The combination of my grandmother having written this and my picture floating around at school—”

“You do know you can't talk to her about this book,” Oona said. “Right?”

“I don't understand,” Lydia said. “You get to talk with her about it.”

“I can joke with her about it. That's about it. I can't talk to her seriously about it. I've never really been able to. Not with any substance, at least. It took me a long time even to get to the point where I could joke. That's a very recent development.”

“How recent?”

Oona shrugged. “Six months ago.”

Lydia leaned over to look at the page Oona had open, which had on it an illustration of two centaurs fornicating in a jungle. “Yikes,” Lydia said.

“Exactly,” Oona said.

“My favorite is the photograph of Grandma on the back,” Lydia said, pointing.

Oona turned the book over. “Magnificent, right?”

“That can't be the same person,” Lydia said. “Pushing butterscotch on me. Cooking microwavable pizzas. How is this the same woman?”

Her mother was younger in this picture than Oona was now. With all her jewelry and her big overfed cat and the jodhpurs, it was easy to laugh at the picture, which was exactly what Oona had done when she was Lydia's age. To see it now, however, reminded her of what those first years must have been like here in Aveline, exiled from Manhattan, striving for a fashionable or intellectual existence in a cow town, and ending up looking less like a rustic Gloria Steinem and more like an extra in a Sergio Leone movie.

Lydia took the book back. Fifteen was probably the right age to read a book like her mother's, even if Oona had read it earlier, far too early, had devoured it, really, had taken it to bed with her and pored over the diagrams with a flashlight. She had, just like Lydia, suffered the indignity of having boys taunt her about it in the hallways of her junior high school.
Do you know what your mom thinks about manual stimulation?
Every boy she met, everywhere, had the same quip about hot-air balloons.
Been in any balloons lately?
Oona found it outrageous that her mother even knew this stuff, let alone that she had deigned to tell everyone about it. For years afterward, Oona had detested her mother for the book, for its scandalousness, its awfulness, for the terrible drawings of hairy men that her classmates would sketch on her notebooks during school. Every time she read the book, though, she was startled by how tame it was, how prim and modest the urges were, how simple the hunger was that existed at the center of the characters. In reality, the book's premise was simple—women, too, should enjoy sex—which made the public shame her mother had suffered even more heartbreaking. The truth of it was that the sex in
The Inseparables
was boring. Getting fucked in a hot-air balloon didn't mean exactly the same thing as being fucked well in a hot-air balloon. This was the thing about sex: it took a great amount of skill to make it interesting. If Lydia wanted to keep reading the book, at least she should know this.

“She's wearing so much jewelry,” Lydia said.

“Nobody wore a half dozen amulets quite like my mother. It's like she's the female Mr. T.”

“I know!” Lydia cried out before stopping to ask, “Wait. Who is Mr. T?”

“Oh,” Oona said, laughing. “He's an African American actor who liked to wear a lot of necklaces.”

Oona liked this: joking with her daughter. Motherhood—the real job of motherhood—had never made her feel competent the way the parenting books had claimed it would. Instead, she'd constantly found herself at a distance, wondering at times whether the experience for her might not just turn out to be one long stretch of anticipated estrangement. Mothers and daughters: she saw them fighting in shopping malls, in the waiting rooms of her hospital wing, a daughter in a restaurant throwing a grape soda at her mother's blouse. Those incremental separations that thrilled other mothers—walking, talking, swimming without flotation devices—were just evidence of what she was afraid would come eventually: she and Lydia seeing each other only at holidays, flanked by stepparents or poorly chosen spouses. It had been like this with her own mother until six months ago. Now the simplest thing made her mother so unreasonably happy. Just the two of them drinking coffee side by side on a Saturday morning, on the white sofas in the front room, Van Morrison playing, neither of them talking.
This is nice,
her mother would say.
You being here. Us being here.
The message felt clear to Oona. Stop trying too hard. It's not all that hard to be happy. Your misery, your cantankerous attitude, your anxiety—it's all a choice. But life interfered, she had thought to argue all this time. It was not a deficit of love or appreciation that had kept Oona away or made her unhappy. It was everything else. Marriage, motherhood, credit card debt, fucking up in surgery, having a husband who couldn't stop getting high—life.

While they talked, Oona ran a bath.

“You're going to be a divorcée,” Lydia said.

“I don't like the sound of that. It's haggardly.”

“Is it? I think it's hot. The word ‘divorcée' sounds alluring to me.”

“Unless you're a geriatric man, or an adulterer, I don't think anyone would possibly agree.”

Lydia stood in front of the big magnifying mirror, inspecting her skin. “Maybe we should have a frank discussion about intercourse and proper contraception practices.”

Oona allowed herself to laugh.

“Look at you, though,” Lydia said. “You're fit. You're sexy. You'll be the most popular divorcée in the suburbs.”

“Being almost a divorcée is many things,” Oona said. “It's a legal headache. It's depressing. It's surprisingly expensive. And it's a mark against my ability to, you know, grow and age alongside someone I love.”

“I guess I was thinking of what happens after this part,” Lydia said. “You know: when you reemerge into the world all reborn and carefree.”

“Is that what happens next? My anxieties vanish? I become a beautiful butterfly? That sounds wonderful.”

“Maybe that's just what I hope happens next,” Lydia said. “That would be good, right? After all of this?”

They'd been trying for so long now. This was the official story. She and Spencer: trying. The animating verb of their last few years. Everyone had urged this of them—their friends, their neighbors in Crestview, the butchers at their local Whole Foods who'd had to endure their vicious arguments over whether to purchase lamb chops or pork chops. Before they split, Oona had booked them a prescriptive vacation to Jamaica. The idea was to force each other out of the darkness and into the glorious lemony sunshine. They could spend whole afternoons on the beach, or out at sea, snorkeling and diving and parasailing. They could hike up into the hills and look for rare birds and treat themselves to some trust-building exercises: a rope course, a fall from a ludicrous height where each would catch the other. She really believed all of this. One day in, the trip collapsed under the weight of all these expectations, or else because of all the freely available drugs. In retrospect, Jamaica, in particular, had been a poor choice. For days Spencer languished, sunburned and stoned, on the white sand, or else he lay in the bathtub of their $600-a-night hotel room, listening to Ornette Coleman, leafing catatonically through the same issue of
Scientific American
that he'd been reading and rereading for days. At dinner the last night, over rum punch and conch fritters, she had warned,
This is not my future. This bullshit. Your fucking weed. Your fucking bullshit avant-garde jazz. Your magazines about space.

Divorce had opened up some new darkness in her. She said this exact sentence in therapy. At night, she dreamed she was drowning, burning, falling, choking, tripping, dying. She wrote these words on index cards and brought them in during her last session with Spencer, spreading them across a coffee table, shocking him. This was an exercise their therapist had suggested. She didn't get to see his cards. He picked up hers, looking stricken. “What? Really?
Choking?
Is this a joke?” This was the end of therapy.

Her therapist's name was Paul Pomerantz. Once couples counseling was over, Paul became hers alone. This had felt like a victory of sorts. He chose her! A garden-variety talk therapist proud of his PhD, he had unmet aspirations of becoming a bona fide intellectual. His office was downtown, in a sleek mirrored-glass tower overlooking the harbor. From the waiting room you could see the whale watch boats hauling tourists out to sea. At first she went twice a week, confusing therapy with exercise. Surely double the effort might mean a better result, twice as fast. She hadn't gone in a month, though. During her last session, Paul had lost his concentration and looked up from his leather notebook to confess that he couldn't do this anymore, that her necklace was beautiful, and, more than that, her neck was kind of beautiful, too, and if she wasn't uncomfortable hearing it, her eyes were really beautiful.

She had sat, silent. He, also, had sat, silent. Beside her, on the carpet, a noise machine simulated the sound of rain on a window screen. She felt very conscious of her necklace, her neck, and her eyes. Then the session ended.

Apparently you could not simply date your patient. There were laws and professional codes of ethics. Time, she learned, needed to pass in order for Paul not to lose his license or, worse, be considered a sexual predator. Alone in her office at the hospital that night, she spent hours Googling. Most of her search terms were along the lines of:
How does transference really work?;
or,
Did Freud know what he was talking about or was he high all the time?;
or,
Is this really about my dead dad?;
or,
How bad is it to fuck your therapist?
Seeming to understand the gravity of what he'd suggested, Paul left her a message the next morning:
What I suggest is us taking a month to see whether our feelings remain.
She had found his use of the plural humorous. After all, she hadn't said a thing. He had merely begun rhapsodizing about her neck, and she'd received the information the same way she'd received all the variously vague things he'd been telling her these past few months. That the codependency of her marriage mirrored the equally codependent relationship she'd had with her mother. Or that the rigidly controlled life of a surgeon was a reflection of the loss of control she felt over how wayward and stoned a husband she had. It was clear now that Paul was not an especially astute therapist. A good deal of what came out of Paul's mouth during counseling struck her in retrospect as a canny way to finish off what was already dying. Lately there had been hints of what was to come. A small glance of his hand on hers as she was leaving his office. A Christmas card with a flirtatious salutation sent to her office. Small things that when put together added up to his gently putting down his notebook and talking about her neck.