I gently close Travis’s door and go into my bedroom, sit on the bed for a long moment. Then I remove my wedding rings and put them in my jewelry box. So many others have done this. I am not the only one. I am not the only one. But here, I am the only one.
I go down the hall and into Lydia’s room, turn on her bedside light. It’s a comforting space: a white afghan folded over a chair, a hardback book with a faded blue cover lying on the footstool, bookmark in place. A faint smell of lilac. I look around, feeling only a little guilty. There are photographs on the dresser, gold and silver frames on a white-lace runner. I pick up one of Thomas, hold it under the lamplight to see it better. He must have been a very handsome man, in his prime. His eyes are still an arresting blue, his gaze steady and direct. His ears are large and they stick out just a little; probably they used to embarrass him, but they seem distinguished to me, senatorlike. I also like Thomas’s white mustache and the deep wrinkles in his forehead, reminding me of the beautiful lines you’ve seen from an airplane window, etched in the earth. It is such an intimate history I see here on Thomas’s forehead. This is worth something, isn’t it?
Maybe I should consider dating much older men. What’s it like to love an eighty-year-old? When Thomas and Lydia go to bed together—and I know they do—what’s it like? It must be so slow, it must be so exquisitely tender. I imagine a gentle old hand on my neck, sliding down my back, acknowledging each vertebra. I would not be bothered by any of his age spots; I would let in an older lover’s touch like sunshine on a winter day, yes I would. And with an old lover, I could feel so young! You’re so beautiful, he would say to me, oblivious of my recent need to hold small print away from myself. My darling, he would say. I pull Thomas’s photo closer, close my eyes, open them to the blurry sight of his smile. I kiss it. Then I sigh, wipe my marks off the glass, put the picture carefully back on Lydia’s dresser.
Oh, I envy Lydia her whole correct life: drinking tea out of her blue-and-white bone china cup every morning, dressed for the day in a wool skirt and white blouse, a pin with an elegant luster at her throat. She has a woman friend named Katherine who visits her regularly, who always wears a hat and gloves with her dark coat—button galoshes last time, too, defense against an early, thin layer of snow. She carries an old-fashioned purse and I love when she reaches in to get her hankie, or compact, or her candies in their flowered tin. I imagine a heavy fountain pen in that purse, the ink a peacock blue. I imagine an address book with gold-trimmed pages, each entry done in perfect Palmer script. A jeweled pillbox, a tortoiseshell comb. No Day-Timer. No Mace.
Katherine and Lydia have been friends for more than sixty years, Lydia told me, exchanging recipes and child care and patterns for padded-shoulder suits in their early years; now going to museums and flower shows, to downtown department stores to share sandwiches for lunch, and to hospitals to visit friends—or, occasionally, each other.
Outside, I see a vein of lightning stab the sky, and then I hear the low rumble of thunder. A wonderful sound when you are in bed with someone you love. I watch the rain come down, hear how the sound changes from tapping to drumming. The urgency! It should be snow; but for this freakish run of warm weather, it would be snow. I wish it were. I wish the season would change definitively. I slip off my shoes and lie down on Lydia’s bed, turn out the light, pull her beautiful rose-colored quilt over myself. I will sleep here, wrapped in the comfort of someone else’s life, far away from those rings I left behind me.
I lie still, my hands folded across my stomach, listening to the anchoring sound of my own breathing. Sheets of water cascade down the window. Inside this house now suddenly too big, my boy and I lie down in our separate places and give ourselves over to the quiet repair of sleep. Outside, the sky weeps and weeps. Or so it seems to me. Times like this, everything in the world becomes personal.
10
It takes me a few days to tell Rita what happened. And when I do, she is her usual Sagittarius self. “I can’t believe you made such a fool of yourself,” she says.
“Oh, I shouldn’t have told you. I knew I shouldn’t tell you. I don’t need recriminations now. I need support.”
“I can’t support you in something so stupid. What are you begging him for? Getting rid of him will be good for you!”
“Yeah, it’s been great so far.” I get out of bed, slide my feet into my slippers. “I have to go. I have to get dressed.”
“It’s noon there!”
“I’m well aware of that.”
“I thought you were getting dressed first thing, these days.”
“That didn’t last. Martha Stewart is crazy.”
“Well, we all know that. I don’t know why you would ever take a suggestion from her in the first place. Everything she tells people is just a set-up for failure. She’s a misanthrope.”
I open my closet, look for something to wear. “I don’t think Martha’s so bad. I think I want her for a friend instead of you. When I look at her magazine, I feel soothed. When I talk to you, I feel like hanging myself.”
“All right, listen. Listen to me. I would not be your friend if I didn’t say this to you: I don’t feel sorry for a victim who keeps choosing to be a victim. That’s what you’re doing. You’re not even trying. You’re just sinking deeper and deeper into feeling sorry for yourself.”
“No, I’m not!” Yes, I am.
“Have you looked for a job yet?”
“No.” Yes. I asked at the nursing home and they said they didn’t need anyone. Then I looked in the paper and everything was too hard.
“Well, get a job!”
“What can I do? Who’s going to hire a forty-two-year-old woman whose only job experience is singing in a band?”
“A lot of people would.”
“I have to go. I’m late for a lunch.”
“You are?”
“Don’t get excited. It’s with my mother.”
“Oh, great, that’ll help you right out.”
“Well, Louise called. She told me Mom sounded like a wreck when she talked to her last week. She wants me to check up on her—I’ve been kind of ignoring her.”
“Why doesn’t Louise check up on her?”
“Let’s see now. Could it be that I live in Massachusetts and Louise lives in Montana?”
“Well, don’t stay there long. She’ll make you crazier.”
“I suppose.”
“Call me later tonight.”
“What for?”
“Just do.”
“You call me. I don’t want to spend the money.”
“David is still supporting you.”
“I know, but I don’t want to take any more money from him than I have to.”
“Well, there you are! That’s the kind of thinking you need to be doing!”
I hang up, go into the bathroom to wash my face. I feel like I just got a fake A. I’m not interested in saving David money. I’m interested in being mean to Rita.
“Honey,” my mother says sadly, “look at you.”
We are sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, chicken salad sandwiches before us that have been cut into fours and anchored together with confetti-topped toothpicks. She is objecting to my unwashed hair and my outfit: a pajama top over gray sweatpants. She herself is wearing a sheer white blouse tucked into black-and-white checked pants, and a red cardigan sweater. Earrings that are cherries.
“I’ll change before Travis gets home; don’t worry about it. I just worked out.”
She doesn’t bother to call me a liar. I bite into my sandwich, pull a grape out of my mouth, and fling it onto the plate.
“What are you doing?” she asks, frowning.
“I don’t like grapes in chicken salad.”
“Well. It happens to be good.”
“You know, all through school, you put butter on my meat sandwiches. And I told you I didn’t like butter on my meat sandwiches. But you did it anyway. I didn’t like butter on meat sandwiches, and I don’t like grapes in my chicke
n salad!”
“Well, I’ll tell you what. You just call up Good Housekeeping and you tell them that they don’t know what they’re doing. I’ll bet they’d appreciate that. They’d probably give you a free subscription.”
“They probably would.”
Silence.
Then I say, “Listen, how are you, Ma? Louise is worried about you.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I have no idea why. You’re the one she should be worried about!”
“She said she thought you were depressed.”
“She should know better than that. I don’t get depressed. I’m absolutely fine.”
I sit back in my chair. “Oh, why not? Why don’t you get depressed?”
She stares at me, wide-eyed.
“Why don’t you? I mean, everybody does, once in a while. Everybody should, once in a while. It can be good for you to feel bad.”
She takes a bite of her sandwich. “This is delicious.”
“You know? Seriously, Ma.”
She puts down her sandwich, looks at me. “You want to know why I don’t get depressed? I’ll tell you why. I never saw the point of it, Sam. I don’t delve into things too deeply. It’s better that way.”
“How would you know? You don’t have any means of comparison. You glide along like … You never even … When did you ever let anyone get close to you? I mean really close, to the real you.”
She looks at me, a long-lasting thing that makes me feel as though I’m being slowly drunk. Finally, “I don’t know how you can say that, Sam,” she says quietly.
“Well, it’s true! You have this … It’s impenetrable, your constant, crazy cheerfulness. It’s an insult! It keeps people from you.”
She nods, slowly. Then there is the ridiculous sound of the kitchen cuckoo clock, signaling the half hour. I look at my watch. “I have to go. Oh, Ma, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said that. I’m just … I don’t know, I guess I needed to yell at someone. I’m sorry.” I stand, reach for my coat.
She takes our plates to the sink, starts running water.
“I’m really sorry. I’m a jerk.”
“It’s all right. You’ve got a lot on your mind. I know you’re not yourself.”
I stand watching her. I don’t know what to do. I’ve got to go.
“I’ll see you later.”
“Sam?” She shuts off the water, turns to face me. “You’ll find this out when Travis gets older. But your children never really grow up for you.”
I start to say something, then stop.
“You protect your children. You must always protect them.”
“From what, Ma?”
“From everything that’s sad, or wrong, or scary. I mean, you try. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“But … That’s not what I believe. I believe children are entitled to the truth.”
“How much truth, Sam?”
I don’t answer. What is the answer?
“I know I embarrass you, I’ve always known that. But I have to get through life in my own way. It pleases me to be happy. And it pleases plenty of other people, too. Yes, it does. Louise, for example.”
“Are you serious?”
“Louise does not have a problem with me. She loves me very much. She may not tell you that, but she does.” I stare at my mother’s carefully made-up face, and suddenly I see that same face many years ago, shortly after my father died, when she came out of the bathroom after having been in there for a very long time. “Now!” she said. I was sitting in the hall, spinning jacks, and I looked up at her. “I think this style is much better, don’t you?” She showed me some modification she’d made to her hairdo, and I nodded, then returned to my jacks.
What occurs to me, now, is that what my mother had been doing all that time was weeping. With astonishing quiet. And that when she was done, she’d washed her face, fixed her hair, put on lipstick, and then gone out to the kitchen. She turned the radio on low and made dinner so that it would be ready when it always was. And then she smiled and chatted empty-headedly or fussed at her daughters all during dinner, preempting any kind of real conversation, preempting any questions, and then she put her daughters to bed, still smiling, still dispensing random advice about this and that, and her daughters squirmed and rolled their eyes and felt their love lessen year by year, eroded by embarrassment, by a terrible, defeating kind of resignation that told them she would never be different. But what did Veronica do after she put us to bed? I wonder now. And I imagine a mother who took a mask off her face, then pushed hard into a pillow to weep for the loss of her husband, for the loss of the life she was supposed to have, for the only man she ever—I actually gasp, thinking this now—loved. And it comes all at once to me, it comes at this instant, that my mother simply lost too much and repaired herself in the only way she was able; that, in fact, she is continuing to repair herself, hour by hour, the pendulum of the cuckoo clock swinging in the light and the dark of all the days that have passed since my father died at this same brown wooden kitchen table.
“Ma,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what, honey?” There it is, the vacant brightness in her eyes, evidence of the invisible amputation that I have missed forever, until now. She comes over and hugs me. “Don’t be sorry. I’m just fine. You tell Louise that, all right?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll tell her.” And then, “Want to come to dinner tomorrow night?”
“Not tomorrow. I’ve got a date with a new fellow.” She makes a giddap sound. “A Charlton Heston look-alike and I’m not kidding. It’s his son that I want you to meet, by the way.”
“Okay.”
She blinks. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I … He is divorced, honey, a couple of times. Well, three. But he doesn’t have any children. And he—”
“It’s all right. I’ll meet him.”
I slide my coat on. My arms feel unreal to me, sewn on. At the door, my mother says, “His name is Jonathan. J-O-N-athan, that kind. I’ll have him call you.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t rush anything, now. This is just for fun.”
“Ma …” My mother waits, expectantly. One eyebrow has been drawn in slightly lower than the other, and it is nearly more than I can bear. “I won’t rush,” I say. “Don’t worry.”
As I am stepping into the car, my mother leans out the door to call, “How about if I come for dinner Thursday night?”
“Fine,” I call back, realizing I forgot I asked her.
11
I am standing at the living-room window, watching for King’s car. He is taking me to the employment agency he works for. “You don’t need any experience for lots of these jobs,” he’d said. “Alive and ambulatory, you’re in their A-plus bracket.”
Lydia, who is on the sofa with a large-print novel, sighs and puts her book down.
“What,” I say.
“Are you grinding your teeth? Is that the noise I’m hearing?”
“I’m not grinding my teeth.”
“I could have sworn.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Are you nervous?”
“No!” I cross my arms tightly over my chest.
“It’s hard, I know. But you’ll be all right.”
I go to sit beside her. “It’s just, I’ve never felt so … I mean, I think about getting a job at McDonald’s, and I worry that I won’t be able to work the cash register.”
“Oh, I think you could probably manage that.”
I check my watch, get up to look out the window again.
“He’s not due quite yet,” Lydia says. “Don’t worry. He won’t be late. He’s not the type.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he cares. He pays attention. He’s not the type to disappoint.”
“Right. As opposed to the type I married.”
Lydia hesitates, then says, “I wonder if I might ask you something.”
/> I turn to face her. “Of course.”
“Did you think life would be easy all the time?”
“No!”
“Are you sure?”
A horn honks, and I jump up. “Here he is! I’ll see you later.”
“Good luck. And take your time, I’ll be here when Travis gets home. I’ll have him help me make dinner—he’s quite good at making meatballs.”
“Thank you. And Lydia?”
“Yes?”
“I really didn’t think it would be easy all the time. I just didn’t know how weak I was.”
“Well. That’s where you’re wrong.” She pulls her cardigan up higher over her shoulders, resettles her glasses on her nose. “You’ll see.”
Kings waits for me while I fill out the application and have an interview. Then he takes me to a diner. He orders coffee; I order the cheeseburger platter deluxe.
“So?” he says.
“So, it was easy!” I shed my coat, toss it into the corner of the booth. I feel good. I feel great.
“I told you.”
“The woman who interviewed me looked like she was twelve.”
“Ah. The senior staff member, then.”
“They said they’d call as soon as tomorrow.”
“They could.”
“Maybe we’ll get a job doing something together!”
“I’m moving mattresses tomorrow. Warehouse.”
“Oh. Never mind.”
My burger is delivered, and I take a bite, then say around it, “I told my mother I’d go out with someone she knows.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. I wanted to do something for her.”
“What about you? Is it something you want to do?”
I salt my french fries, eat one. Two. “Not really.”
“You might have a good time.”
I shrug, offer a fry to him, which he refuses. I wonder if he’s dieting. If he lost weight, he’d be a very attractive man. But I would miss something. I’ve grown accustomed to his size. It’s comforting to me.
“Your husband was an asshole,” King says suddenly.