“Now, Susie, don’t you start in on me, too.”
“What’s the matter with you?” she said. She was bigger than herself. She was bright in the dimly lit room. “What business is it of yours where Jamal sleeps?”
“He’s my grandson. I try to do what’s right.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“Yeah. I do.”
Susan groaned.
“Please,” Zoe said. “Stop, everybody.”
“It’s okay, Susie,” their father said. “He’ll get over it.”
A silence passed. When Susan could speak, she said, “He won’t get over it. People don’t.”
Zoe could not be in the room any longer. She couldn’t find her own shape. She felt herself disappearing. She walked through the kitchen, out the back door. She thought she would go into the tent for a while. She’d hide there until she returned to herself. She waded into the grass but when she got close to the tent she heard them, Ben and Jamal, whispering. They were already inside.
1994/ Mary squeezed a final rose onto the cake, stepped back and squinted at it with a cold, hopeful eye. Yes, it looked all right. Happy Birthday Zoe, framed by butter-cream roses and lilies, leaves she had molded out of almond paste. The class in cake decorating had been a good idea. She knew what she was doing now. She had the solace of competence. The cake sat on the kitchen counter offering its petals and leaves, its pale blue scrollwork message, to the silence of the room. The sight of it filled Mary with a satisfaction so simple it seemed, fleetingly, that satisfaction was the fundamental human state, and all extremes of loss and emptiness aberrations.
She walked into the dining room, adjusted a tulip in the centerpiece. As Mary stood surveying her efforts—the napkins tightly rolled in their silver rings and the candles erect in their silver holders—her sense of satisfaction rose and then dropped away into a more complex but equally familiar muddle of happiness and dread. Here among the waiting flatware and crystal was a beauty all the more moving and frightening for its impermanence. It would have no life if the guests weren’t due to arrive shortly, and yet the guests, when they arrived, would spoil it. She had no complaints, nothing specific, about the people who would come at any time now. She regretted only the disorder, the using-up. In its pristine condition the table was a devotion, a flawless gesture. Mary had created a perfect party, and it was about to be spoiled by the guests.
Will and Harry arrived first, in Harry’s sports car. Will jumped out like a teenager, lifted Mary off her feet.
“Hi, gorgeous,” he said. His hair was beginning to gray.
Harry followed with a buff-colored canvas suitcase. “Hello, Mary,” he said. He kissed her cheek. He was a handsome man, deliberate in his movements, with a quirky and competent face and an aspect of potent, generous calm. At odd moments, Mary understood completely. She had imagined someone like this for herself.
“Come on in, you two,” she said. “You made good time.”
“No traffic at all,” Will told her. “Hey, the place looks great.”
“I try,” Mary said. She ignored the little panic, the urge to show them the dining room and then usher them out again with the admonition that it must be left untouched for the company. They are the company, she reminded herself. “I’ve got you both upstairs,” she said, “in Will’s old room. I hope Ben and Jamal will be all right down here in sleeping bags. We’re going to be a full house.”
“Do you need help with anything?” Will asked.
“No, thank you. It’s all set. Would you boys like something to drink?”
“I’m going to make some coffee, okay?” Will said. “We got up early, we could both use a little shot of caffeine.”
“I’ll get it,” Mary said.
“Relax. I know where everything is. I used to live here, remember?”
“Fine,” she said. She would let it be fine. Will seemed to like these little demonstrations of his claim, all the powers of territory and domestic critique his childhood had bought for him. All right, then. She would try to relinquish her own habits of propriety, at least for the weekend. She’d been alone in this big house too long.
She said, “Harry, why don’t I show you up to the room?”
“Mom,” Will said, “Harry’s been here before. He knows exactly where the room is. Sit down, relax. I know what you’ve been doing. You made three birthday cakes, and threw the first two away. You went to seventy-five different stores looking for Zoe’s presents. Am I right?”
“Oh, I’ve given all that up in my old age,” she said. “These days, people just have to take me as they find me.”
“Right,” Will said. “Go. Sit. Make conversation.”
Mary paused, full of love and a steady, relentless anger that made her think of ants invading a house. Here was her grown son; here was all he’d become. Here he was with his mate, beginning to treat her like a childish and eccentric figure, someone too old to fear. By accepting him she had lost much of her power, and she saw that she would not be able to get it back even if she wanted to. He’d moved beyond the reach of her disapproval. She had released him. She was in a sense no longer quite his parent. Since his infancy she’d been able to follow the logic of his emotions, more easily than she could follow Susan’s or Zoe’s, and she could follow him here. She knew about the urge to be free of a mother. She knew about the love of men. She recognized her son, did not hate him, though she was periodically invaded by this low-grade anger, this stream of ants. She loved him both more and less for what he’d proven to be. She felt related to him in ways she did not feel with either of her daughters.
“Let’s go sit in the living room, Harry,” she said. “Will, honey, you’re in charge.”
She led Harry into the living room, gestured him toward the wing chair. She sat near him, on the sofa, with her hands folded over one knee.
“So,” she said. “How’s everything?”
“Pretty good,” he said. “Everything’s more or less all right. Busy.”
“I can just imagine. Heart patients, what a terrible responsibility it must be.”
“To tell you the truth, most of it’s pretty undramatic. Every now and then, you save somebody who would have died if it hadn’t been for you. We all like to play that angle up. But mostly, people are going to live or they’re not going to live, and you’re a mechanic, and as long as you don’t make any really stupid mistakes, the people who were going to live anyway live, and the people who were going to die, die.”
“Well, it still sounds pretty dramatic to me,” Mary said. “Speaking as a housekeeper and a saleslady.”
“How’s work?”
“Not bad. I’m actually a pretty good saleslady, I know what women are afraid of when they go shopping.”
“Afraid?”
“They’re afraid of looking dowdy and they’re afraid of looking like fools, and there’s just a narrow little space between the two. I sort of help them find their balance.”
“Sounds tricky,” Harry said.
“It is, a little. Frankly I wish I’d had somebody like me to wait on me when I was younger. Someone sort of, I don’t know, sisterly. I grew up in a house full of boys.”
“Hard, huh? Being the only girl.”
“Well, it has its advantages, too. But when you grow up, and you’re trying to put yourself together, it’s hard to know, because you can’t really see yourself no matter how long and hard you look in the mirror. And I think sometimes about how much I’d have appreciated a saleslady who wouldn’t lie to me. Because, you know, women sabatoge one another, and you can get so nervous. Just trying not to look like a clown. This must sound awfully silly to you.”
“Actually, no,” he said. “I don’t worry much about clothes myself, but I think I understand it.”
“Women are judged differently.”
“I know. Gay guys are, too. People suddenly think they can take you less seriously.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Mary said.
Harry stretched
his legs. Mary could hear the cracking of his knee joints. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s a long drive in that little car.”
He was gray-eyed, clear-skinned, beginning to wrinkle. He did not dislike Mary but did not need to be loved by her. Sometimes, with unexpected intensity, she regretted the absence of a daughter-in-law. One of the reasons a woman raises a son, she thought, is to see what kind of woman he’ll choose. Harry was charming but he was another son. She could not take any credit for him. She could not conquer him.
“I think your little car is adorable,” Mary said.
“You’ve never been in it, have you?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“I’ll take you for a spin later, if you want. You can drive.”
“Oh, no, I’d love to go for a ride with you, but I couldn’t drive a car like that.”
“Sure you could. There’s nothing to it.”
“You know,” Mary said, “I forgot to tell Will about this new coffeemaker I bought, if you fill it too full it leaks all over the counter. Excuse me a minute, all right?”
“Sure,” he said.
He seemed to listen to her, to take her seriously. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
In the kitchen, Will stood looking at the cake. When Mary came in he turned to her with a startled, apologetic expression, as if she’d caught him at some minor indiscretion.
“The cake’s beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you. And I didn’t throw two of them away.”
One. She’d thrown one away.
“Zoe’s thirty-eight,” Will said.
“I know.”
“Little Zoe. She was always so, I don’t know. She always seemed so young. She still does.”
“Mm-hm.”
Then nothing happened. Mary stood beside Will. They were alone together with the cake.
Susan pulled up two hours later. Mary stood in the doorway watching them all disembark, and the sight carried her, briefly, into a waking dream. From Susan’s cream-colored Volvo came Susan herself, pretty and smiling and rancorous in jeans and her beige linen jacket. Then came silent, handsome Ben. Then came Jamal, heavy-lipped, bristling. Then Cassandra, even thinner than Mary remembered, and finally Zoe, helped by Cassandra, her skin white and opaque as paper. It seemed to Mary that she had seen this procession before, or one like it, though it was familiar in the inchoate way of dreams, simultaneously known and profoundly, vertiginously foreign.
Mary did not hesitate long. She stepped out onto the lawn in her sandals, welcomed everyone in.
“Hi, gang. How was the drive?”
“Hi, Mom,” Susan said. “It was fine. We got here.”
Susan kissed Mary, and then Ben kissed her. Jamal, standing close to Ben, performed a singular snap of a dance, one quick snake-like movement that seemed to rise out of the driveway and shoot up into him through the soles of his feet.
“Zoe,” Mary said. “Happy birthday, darling.”
Zoe smiled distractedly. Cassandra held her hand.
“Nice place, Mary,” Cassandra said.
“Thank you, dear.”
“It’s Sleeping Beauty’s castle, isn’t it?” Cassandra said.
“It’s too big. I’ve been telling myself I should sell for years now.”
“I wouldn’t,” Cassandra said. “All this space, I can’t think of anything I’d like better.”
“It feels very empty at night sometimes,” Mary said. “I’ll be in the kitchen with just the kitchen lights on and I’ll feel like I’m sitting at a campfire deep in the woods somewhere.”
“But with no bugs,” Cassandra said. “Sounds like heaven to me.
Zoe stood silently beside Cassandra. For months Zoe had been quieting down, taking on the contemplative, dazed remove of the elderly. Like an old woman of a certain type, she was courteous and cautious and secretive. She conserved herself.
“Zoe,” Mary said. “Happy birthday. Oops, did I say that already?”
“Yes,” Zoe said. “But thank you, Momma.”
She had not called Mary ‘Momma’ since she was a little girl. She shifted her weight toward Cassandra.
“Shall we go in?” Mary said.
Zoe nodded, and did not move. Her eyes were full of a dark, astonished light.
She said, “Happy birthday to you, too, Momma.”
The afternoon passed. Harry gave Ben and Jamal driving lessons in the driveway. Will and Zoe sat on the front lawn, watching. Susan had invented an errand for herself in the basement, looking through old papers of hers for a journal she’d kept in high school. Cassandra, more subdued than Mary had ever seen her, had wrapped herself in a sheet and stretched out on the chaise on the back patio, her sharp, pale face exposed to the sun like that of an ancient society woman incubating at a spa. It was a warm afternoon in May, full of lush green rustlings and the smell of lilacs in their final days.
Mary kept busy in the kitchen, alone with her dinner preparations, a solitude she had insisted on and which she treasured and obscurely resented. She sautéed onions, set the potatoes to boil. It was her usual kitchen. She took a stick of butter from the refrigerator and glanced at the cake, which she’d set on the bottom shelf so Zoe wouldn’t see it. It was a lovely cake. It would be a nice dinner. She closed the refrigerator door and stood, just stood, with the stick of butter in her hand. The cake was in the refrigerator, perfect in the cold darkness. Mary found that she could not perform the next action; she could not touch anything in the kitchen. She watched it as if it were a replica of a kitchen on display behind glass in a museum. There was the wallpaper with its sheaves of wheat. There were the copper molds and the three-tiered wire basket full of Bartlett pears and Granny Smith apples. There were the potatoes hissing in the pan. It was a flawless representation of her kitchen and she felt as if something unspeakable would happen if she touched anything. She stood in the room but she was not of it. Carefully, she set the butter down on the countertop. From outside, Harry’s motor revved in the driveway and Jamal shouted, “Let me.”
Mary went upstairs to her bedroom. She would wait this out. She would freshen her makeup and come back downstairs and finish dinner. In her room she paced for a while, uncertain about where to settle. Everything was impossible. Leaf shadows fell from the window onto the snowy flowers of her bedspread. The bed stood again, bisected, at an oblique angle, in her dressing-table mirror.
Mary sat at her dressing table. There was her face in the mirror. She watched herself and she thought of how it would feel to not finish dinner, to remain here in her room. To refuse all comfort. On the glass-topped table before her, perfume bottles and a white leather jewelry box were precise, solitary, permanent. She watched those things. She did nothing else.
She could not decide how much time had passed before someone knocked at the door. Go away, Mary thought. She waited. There was another knock, and Cassandra’s voice.
“Mary?” Cassandra said. “Are you in there?”
Mary did not answer. She did not move.
Cassandra knocked again. “Honey, I’m going to come in, all right?”
No, Mary thought.
Cassandra opened the door.
“You all right?” she said. “Sorry to barge in like this.”
Mary nodded. “I’m fine,” she said.
“I went into the kitchen for a glass of water,” Cassandra said, “and I saw the potatoes just about boiled dry. And I thought, Mary Stassos is not the kind of woman who neglects her potatoes unless something really big comes up. So I came looking for you.”
“I’m all right,” Mary said. “Thank you.”
She assumed Cassandra would murmur something polite, and close the door.
Cassandra came into the room and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“It sucks, doesn’t it?” she said.
Mary didn’t answer. She turned back to the mirror, saw herself and Cassandra there. Cassandra was nearly bald now. As her hair and her flesh diminished, her eyes seemed to increase.
Mary could see that Cassandra’s eyes were set in the sockets of her skull; she could see that Cassandra spoke to her from inside a skull.
Cassandra sighed, and looked around the room with the mild curiosity of a tourist. “This is a nice bedroom,” she said.
“Thank you,” Mary answered.
“I used to dream about a house like this.”
“Please don’t make fun of me,” Mary said. “Not right now.”
“I’m not. I couldn’t be more serious. When I was a little boy I used to fantasize about getting married and having a house with a big bedroom like this. It wasn’t an especially practical fantasy, but why would you want a practical fantasy?”
“I should sell the house,” Mary said. “It’s too big, I just rattle around in here.”“Mm.”
“You see,” Mary told her. “It’s just that. I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“This,” she said. “Any of it. I don’t think I can have this party.”
“Of course you can. It’s a nice little party. Easiest thing in the world to have, a party like this one.”
“I’ve worked so hard,” Mary said. “I don’t want to spoil it.”
“A quick little nervous breakdown isn’t going to spoil it. I have them all the time.”
“It seemed. It seemed like we could, I don’t know. Before everybody came I was just here, by myself, and everything seemed so perfect.”
“I know all about that,” Cassandra said.
“Maybe it would be better if I was alone for a little while.”
Cassandra said, “I don’t want to tell you how many hours I spend putting my drag together. What with shopping and, well, other forms of procurement, and doing my makeup, and my hair, and putting it all together. I sit in my apartment for hours and then finally, ta-da, there I am. You haven’t seen me at my best, I can be quite a splendid sight. Or could be, back in my prime. I once wrapped a wig around a birdcage and wore a live canary on my head, it was my homage to Madame Pompadour. And you know, there’s always a moment, when I’m all finished and I’ve exceeded even my own expectations, and I’m alone in my apartment, well, there’s always a moment when I feel unbelievably good. Invincible, like a member of a new, improved species. And of course I’m looking forward like crazy to getting out there and showing it off, that’s the point, imagine how depressing it would be to put all that stuff on, stand around in front of the mirror, then take it all off again and go to bed. No, I adore strutting around in front of the multitudes, but there’s something about standing there by myself, about to go out, that’s perfect, in its way. I don’t know if I’d say it’s better than going out and showing off, because, honey, I was born for display. But I do know about how fabulous your drag can feel right before anybody sees it.”