Travis jumps up when I come into his room. “See?” he says, pointing. “I have a bunk bed here.”
“That’s great.” Am I getting a cold? I feel like I’m getting a cold.
“Want to sit on it?”
“Well, of course.”
“Top or bottom?”
“I don’t know. What do you recommend?”
“Top, definitely, top. Sit up there.”
I climb the ladder, crawl out onto the bed, sit at the edge. I see David from the corner of my eye, standing just outside the room. Why does he do that? Why doesn’t he come in here? Must he so continually tell me he’s no longer a part of us?
I look down at Travis, at his excited face. “It’s so high,” I tell him.
“Right!”
“Is this the standard height?” I ask David.
“Don’t worry. He won’t fall out.”
“I wasn’t worried about that,” I say, though the truth is I was envisioning Travis lying still on the carpet below, his neck at a terrible odd angle.
“Come have some coffee with me,” David says, and Travis and I both hear the real message.
“I’ll just … be in here,” Travis says, turning on his television.
In the kitchen, David pulls a chair out for me, then sits down himself. “Do you want some coffee?”
“No,” I say. “Thanks.” I cross my legs, widen my eyes, force a smile. “So!”
He smiles back, a little embarrassed, and I want to touch his wrist, to reassure him. I still feel something for him. I still want to take care of him; it is a reflex.
We sit quietly for a moment. A car starts outside, drives away.
“I’m fine,” I say, finally, “if that’s what you want to know. I’m doing just fine. Really.”
He nods. “Good. And you’re sure you have enough money?”
“Yes, David. We worked it all out, remember?”
“Well, Travis said you were going to get another roommate.”
“That’s right. Lydia is moving out.”
“Ah. Well. That didn’t last long.”
“It wasn’t because she didn’t like living there,” I say, too quickly.
“I know,” he says, also too quickly.
Silence again. The phone rings, and David makes no move to answer it. And I cannot answer it, and this realization picks up my insides and drops them back down. Divorce is a series of internal earthquakes, that’s what it is, one after the other.
“You know, David, this is so …”
“I know.”
“Well. The main thing is, do you think Travis is all right?”
“Yes. Do you?”
“I guess. Although …”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. I mean, I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell you anymore, David. Do we talk about all the little things? Or just … you know, major things.”
“What do you mean by ‘major things’? Did something happen?”
“No. Not really.” I had thought to tell him about Travis and his friend calling that little girl. But why?
The phone rings again.
“Your phone,” I say.
“Yes, I hear it. They’ll leave a message.”
They’ll. Why doesn’t he just say “she”?
I shift in my chair. Something hurts in my back. I’m getting pneumonia, maybe that’s it.
“Travis said you had a date,” David says, looking past me, out the window.
“Yes. And Travis said you have a girlfriend.”
Now he looks at me, contrite. “Yes. I’ve wanted to tell you. But I didn’t know what to say, really.”
And my skin feels warm to me. My hands, holding each other, they feel warm. I must be getting a fever. One hundred and one, one hundred and two. Three. “You know, I don’t feel too well, David. I think I’d better be getting home.”
“You’re sick?”
What phony concern. I nearly laugh out loud. I want to tell him not to bother. I want to slap his face. I want him to embrace me and beg forgiveness and come home with me and stop this! Doesn’t he understand that if he doesn’t stop this it will be too late?
Oh, but it is too late. It is too late.
I stand up. “I don’t know if I’m sick. But what if I was? You have Travis, so I wouldn’t have to worry about him. We’re all set. I’ll take care of myself. I’m fine. I really am.” I zip up my jacket, manage a smile, though all I can see is the girlfriend’s silk robe, hanging on the back of David’s bathroom door. I’m sure it’s there. I’m sure it’s silk. I’m sure it smells like perfume. And like David.
“Well. You have a nice apartment, here.”
“It’s … you know. For now. It is nice. Thank you.”
I go into Travis’s room to say good-bye. He is lying on the top bunk, listening to his Walkman. “What’s wrong?” he asks, when he sees me. He takes off his headphones.
“Nothing! I just wanted to say good-bye.”
“Were you crying?”
“No! I’m just tired, you know? I’m going to go home and take a long soak in the tub and then read a big fat book and eat a big fat candy bar. I’m actually pretty excited.”
“What kind of candy bar?”
“I thought I’d stop at CVS and scope it out.”
“Yeah. They have a good selection.”
“I think I’ll get the killer-size Snickers.”
“Boring.”
“Well.” I kiss his forehead. “I like them. And if I were eating one right now, you would want a bite.”
“I know. But they’re still boring.”
“I’ll see you. Eat a lot of turkey. Put gravy all over everything, even the cranberry sauce.”
“I will. Mom? Are you making pumpkin pie?”
“Well, of course I’m making pumpkin pie. I’ll save some for you.”
“Okay. Shut my door on your way out?”
I shut his door, head slowly down the hallway. Travis has never had a Thanksgiving without me. But he seems all right. He does. He seems all right. I don’t know whether to be relieved or depressed.
David accompanies me to the front door. “Take care of yourself,” he says.
“I will.” No one else to do it. I start to open the door, then turn back suddenly. “You know what, David? I still don’t know what you wanted. I just don’t know what you wanted.”
“I … We’re just different,” he says softly.
I swallow hugely.
“Look, I want you to know that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, Sam. But the way we lived together, it wasn’t what I wanted. Sometimes I feel like there’s this fire in my belly that I need to feed all the time. And it wasn’t being fed.”
Fire in his belly? Fire in his belly? That needs to be fed? Oh, I can’t wait to tell Rita that he actually said such a thing. This is great. A white couch, and a sudden transformation into Robert Bly. This must be his girlfriend’s influence. Probably they’re taking a New Age communication class together, holding hands every night and checking in with each other before they fly off to the land of dreams, which they record in their journals and share with each other over breakfast.
As though sensing my thoughts, David shifts his shoulders, his old, familiar sign of discomfort. “That sounded stupid, I know. But I don’t know how else to say it. What I mean is I feel like I was always … yearning, whereas you were so happy with everything the way it was. And it started making me crazy. I don’t accuse you, Sam. I don’t fault you. We just never really connected. I mean, you don’t think we did, do you?”
“No!”
He smiles. “Well. So.”
“Tell Travis to call anytime he wants to. Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Same,” he says, and closes the door softly after me.
I walk down the hall, smell something with curry cooking. (A neighbor, sticking her head out of her door and into the hall, a wave of blond hair over one eye: Oh, David! Hello! I thought I heard you out ther
e! Want to share a little something with me tonight? Again?) I push the button for the elevator, wait a second, then head quickly for the stairs. It is too big, what I’m feeling. I have to keep moving. I still … what is it? Love him? Is that it? Need him? Want him?
I miss him; I love how he looks, how he dresses, how he smells.
I get into the car, look into the rearview mirror and see, for one split second, Veronica. This is all her fault. At the heart of things, I am my mother’s daughter, always making too much out of too little, really liking the scent of country-fresh furniture polish and the sight of a clean bathroom. I am a prisoner of genes wearing aprons.
But it was enough for me, the way our family lived. Maybe that was wrong; maybe I should have wanted more. But I didn’t. I knew things were far from perfect, but I was content sitting outside with my coffee on spring mornings, admiring the daffodils Travis and I planted, thinking about what to make for dinner that night. I liked attending school conferences with David and listening to dressed-up teachers talk about our son. I liked going to the hardware store every Saturday, all of us in jeans and T-shirts; and I liked watching videos every Sunday night while we ate takeout Chinese from the cartons. I would actually wake up on Sunday mornings a little excited about doing it, even though we did it every week. Perhaps because we did it every week. It was enough, to light a fire in the winter so that we could all toast marshmallows, to look out the window in the summer at David mowing the lawn and Travis riding his bike around in self-absorbed circles, a half-moon of dirt above each elbow. When I got up in the morning and set the table for breakfast and smelled the first whiff of French roast and unrolled the newspaper to lay it flat on the kitchen table by David’s place (the comics by Travis’s), that was enough for me. What is the matter with me, that this was enough?
I shiver, put my hand to my forehead. Where is the fever? Where is that damn fever? I need it. I need it bad, as Travis would say.
He is still my son. No matter where he is, he is still mine.
17
At two o’clock on Thanksgiving Day, I am looking at a fashion magazine I brought home from the drugstore. I also got eleven other magazines, three tabloids, a Snickers bar, a box of chocolate-covered cherries, four colors of eye shadow, three lipsticks, bubble bath, a party-size bag of Chee-tos, floral-scented furniture wax, and a designer razor—very nice, made to fit precisely into the hand. Well, into the designer’s hand. I lick my fingers and turn the magazine pages by the lower right-hand corner, slowly. Louise used to read magazines like that, me sitting beside her on the sofa. It seemed a queenly ritual. I had always wanted to turn the pages too, but Louise wouldn’t let me. Well, look how far I’ve come. My very own stack of magazines. They have helped me not to think about Travis eating dinner with David and his girlfriend. A little.
Most of the clothes in the magazine look like a kind of joke to me. And if the style isn’t, the price is. But here is a perfume sample—free. I tear it out, rub it on my wrist, inhale deeply. Not bad. I’ll buy some, if ever in my life there comes a time to wear perfume again.
A twenty-one-pound turkey is in the oven. Janis Joplin’s “Ball and Chain” is on the stereo. I have always loved this song. When I was in the band, the guys and I used to gather in the basement bedroom of the keyboard player, where our equipment was kept; and we would play albums through the band’s huge speakers. Not just Janis; we played Monk, and Vivaldi, Hank Williams and Keith Jarrett. We played Earl “Fatha” Hines and Dinah Washington. James Brown, Howlin’ Wolf. Sometimes I would look around the room, at the way the guys’ appreciation looked less like joy than anguish. Every nuance in the music was played out in their faces—you could see it in the movement of their eyebrows, the shape of their mouths, the rhythm of their nodding. Fingers tapped on knees, feet were often going, too. Their eyes were closed; I would have said they were not exactly on the planet Earth. One night after a gig when we were eating cheeseburgers at an all-night diner, the guys all agreed that they’d rather be blind than deaf. I said no; if it came to that, I’d want to see. But often, when I was onstage and deep into a song, I could feel it too, that singular lift, that sense of being filled up and taken over. Complete, and wanting nothing else.
I was good; I was a very good singer. I was once approached by a man from a well-known talent agency who wanted to back me as a solo act. He told me he’d bankroll everything, down to my wardrobe. “I’d need to bring the band,” I said, and the man said no, I didn’t need them. I said I wouldn’t be interested, then. “Are you crazy?” the man said. “I’ll get you a record contract! You get out on the road for me for six months and I guarantee I’ll get you a hell of a contract.” I still remember every detail of this—the guy leaning forward in the red leather booth of the club where we were playing that night, his cigarette burning low. He pushed his Scotch off angrily to the side, yanked up his sweater sleeves. He was wearing an expensive gold watch. He was a handsome man, balding, but handsome. “I don’t think so,” I said, and the man said I’d better be sure, he wouldn’t ask again. “I’m sure,” I said, and the guy sat back, blinked. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Do you have any idea what you’re turning down, here?” I stared at my hands, shrugged. “What,” he said, “are you sleeping with one of them?” I looked up quickly, denied it. But I was. I was sleeping with the lead guitarist—Stevie, we called him. And I wouldn’t leave him. Later, when I told him what I’d turned down, he told me I was crazy. Which hurt my feelings. “I didn’t want to do it without you,” I said, and Stevie said, “Sam, I’d have taken a deal like that in a second.” Of course he would have. He was already interested in someone else, though I didn’t know it until a few weeks later.
No offers like that had ever come again. I sang until I got engaged to David; and then I stopped singing.
I pick up the CD cover, look into Janis’s eyes. She was a musical genius who never did find love. Never did. Janis had a beauty that men probably never appreciated. It was in how she felt things, not how she looked. Although there was a kind of hard beauty to the way she looked, too. It was there. But men came, and then just left her. All the time. At least she had something to do with her anguish—nobody sings pain like she does.
I look at my watch. Time to baste the turkey again. I love basting the turkey. Every time I open the oven, I eat some stuffing. Early this morning, just as the sun was starting to come up, I made stuffing the old-fashioned way, dipping slices of stale white bread into hot water, tearing it apart, seasoning it with fragrant leaves of sage, and onions sautéed in an ocean of butter. I made cranberry sauce, and when it was done put it into a dark blue bowl for the beautiful contrast. I was thinking, doing this, about the old ways of gratitude: Indians thanking the deer they’d slain, grace before supper, kneeling before bed. I was thinking that gratitude is too much absent in our lives now, and we need it back, even if it only takes the form of acknowledging the blue of a bowl against the red of cranberries.
I’m having baked sweet potatoes, and white mashed potatoes, and green beans, and a spinach/mushroom casserole, and pumpkin and mince and apple pies. A mixing bowl and beaters wait in the freezer for when it’s time to make the whipped cream.
I actually stood in the grocery store yesterday staring at a Cornish game hen for a long while before I came to my senses. So what if I’m alone? So what? I happen to be having a very good time, yes I am. I’m glad I lied to my mother, glad I refused Veronica’s invitation to have dinner with her and her boyfriend and told her I was eating with the neighbors.
I baste the turkey, eat a forkful of stuffing. Oh, it’s so good. I eat another forkful. One more.
Back in the family room, I stretch out on the sofa, close my eyes. I’m beginning to understand how being alone can be wonderful. You can do whatever you want! Travis and David both hate Janis Joplin, for instance. But now, I can blast her the whole live-long day. Which I very well might. I put on another one of her CDs, turn the volume up thrillingly high. I think of the boombox man
with a new understanding: if someone were to tell me to turn this down, I too would tell them to fuck themselves.
After the CD ends, I go into the dining room to lay out a white linen tablecloth. I set my place with my Tiffany’s china, put candles in the holders. And now I will get dressed for dinner. Another bath first, even though I was in the tub for an hour last night with the tabloids. I start the CD over, grab Vogue, and head upstairs.
I turn on the water, hot, hot; then sit on the edge of the tub and open the magazine. There is an advertisement featuring a model in gorgeous underwear: diaphanous blue, a pearl here, a bow there. I inspect the woman thoroughly. Well. She is a very lovely girl.
I am not a girl. I am a woman coming into middle age who has had the rug pulled out from under her. And I am trying to reorient myself and I haven’t yet. I walk around with ghosts ahead of me and behind me. Pieces of my old life. Pictures of how it used to be: David coming in the front door, home from work. Travis showing him his homework, leaning on the side of David’s chair. A movie on Friday night, someone to go with. This is my new life: I push pain away all day, and the moment I put my arms down it walks into me and has a seat.
I undress and stand before the full-length mirror for some time. Then I throw the magazine in the garbage, climb into the tub, lean back, and close my eyes. I take in a deep breath, breathe out. Breathe in again; and then let go. This is not the time in my life to try to look like a model. This is the time in my life to do other things. Janis sings in the family room below me, a song about trying harder.
All right: the red against the blue, the sound of the birds in the morning. The sugar smell in bakeries. The smoothness of fabric moving under my hands into the teeth of the sewing machine. The movement of the ocean, the break of light every morning, every morning.
“Hey,” I say softly, just to hear the sound of my own voice. I sit perfectly still, hear the tap drip, then drip again. “Hey!” I yell. “I’m here!”
I begin to soap my legs. And to sing, softly at first; then loudly. I feel a rush of power that is something like sex. Only better. I start to cry. But this crying, it’s so different.