The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

  It was a bit of a shock to see Tegan in her sixties. She looked as though she’d been out in the sun for years, and her hair was in a sensible short style. The more Mom and Tegan aged the more they looked like butch farmers, in a way. Except Tegan wore feminine earrings. If I’d passed the two of them in public, I’d have assumed they were regular older ladies, heading to a book club, instead of women who used to organize magic mushroom weekends where women looked at their vaginas with hand mirrors and sang Joan Baez songs under a full moon. But they looked like they did not give a fuck about men anymore.

  “So how’s Andy? Looking forward to meeting him this weekend,” my mom said.

  “I don’t think he can make it, actually.”

  “Oh no, that’s too bad!” Tegan said, giving Mom the side-eye. “I have to say, Missy, you seem happier without Navid. I never liked him.”

  “That is such a lie, you loved him!” I said.

  “All right, I loved him. He was very handsome. But you do seem calmer now, more peaceful, grounded. I always noticed how you were very different people.”

  I settled my mom and Larry in the guest room. Tegan was going to stay in the RV. Then I went to the market in town to buy fresh vegetables. I filled the trunk with herbs, apples to make a pie, an array of meats and cheeses. I sat in the parking lot, taking a moment to try to get myself together. I couldn’t stop thinking about how Andy and I had planned so much of this weekend together, and now he was suddenly absent. I felt mad, and moreover, let down. And then I wondered if I had a right to feel so let down. I felt like I was dating two different people, the one who literally couldn’t stand to be away from me for even ten minutes and the one who stayed away for days on end and had just evaporated in front of me earlier today at the diner. We’d been dating long enough for me to realize we had a pattern, but bailing on the party felt like a new level. I didn’t understand the rules anymore. I decided that when I got back to the city, I would tell Andy that I couldn’t deal anymore. It was making me crazy and it was depleting my self-esteem. Go be single, and then figure out what you want, and if it’s me, you can let me know. I imagined saying it in such a self-assured, confident way and then walking away. Even though I couldn’t even say it to myself in my head without crying.

  I drove the five miles back up the hill to the cottage, and when I got there, Andy’s car was in the driveway. I looked in the window and saw him holding Penny and chatting amiably with my mom. He was charming her. When I stepped inside, I tried to not look as surprised as I felt, and realized that in the time I’d been gone, he’d already made some salads and taken Penelope on a walk. He had put cut flowers in vases around the house and stocked the wine rack with fresh bottles. He even had Bob Dylan’s greatest hits playing in the background. Wow, he was really working it. And the older ladies were enamoured.

  We all made dinner. While chopping veggies for a salad, Andy grilled chicken breasts and tofu patties for my mom and Tegan.

  We built a fire in the fireplace and stayed up talking, Andy telling stories about Harlon’s latest daycare adventures and my mom and Tegan reminiscing about the Sunflower days.

  “I cannot picture Missy as a tomboy,” said Andy, laughing. “Now, that’s something I would like to see!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, beginning to clear our glasses. My mom got up to join me. I tried to shoo her away, she looked so tired, but she insisted. In the kitchen, she leaned in and said in a low voice, “He’s so right for you.”

  “We’re taking it slow,” I said, though that was hardly true. I was happy she wasn’t being weird about him being trans. I’d let her know ahead of time to thwart any potential issues so it wouldn’t impact Andy at all. But they were all being cool. Tegan’s wife, Karen, had a non-binary grandkid and she was prone to talking about it too enthusiastically around Andy, but that was it.

  “I can tell he makes you happy. He’s just so thoughtful, so sweet,” she said. She rarely offered many opinions about my life, and it was a bit startling to hear her be so definitive on Andy.

  “Mom, are you sure you’re okay? You seem—I don’t know—you seem kind of off.”

  “Just the wine, honey,” she said, “but I was thinking that it might be time to tell you about why I left.”

  “Mom, you don’t have to . . . I already know, mostly. You explained it when Ruth died.” I wanted to stop her, the words coming from her mouth. I just couldn’t take another confrontation today.

  “I didn’t do a good job of it back then. But you know, women today have far more choices than my generation had, than my mother’s generation had. A woman deciding to leave her child, that’s not something a lot of people will be on board for, but it was the only choice I could make at the time.”

  “Or you could have made the choice to stay. That’s a choice,” I said, my voice wavering as I tried to tamp down the anger. Not now. Not now.

  “Not really,” she said. “Remember how my dad and mom died? Driving in a car? My dad held anger and he didn’t know what to do with it. He had run out of choices, so driving off in that car was the choice he made when he couldn’t see anything else clearly.”

  “So staying would mean killing yourself?”

  “Not exactly. But then, I don’t know. I had hit bottom, Missy. We had a very complicated life at Sunflower. You probably didn’t understand it, but there were a lot of complicated relationships and fractures. When you get pregnant and you’re not ready, you have to roll with it, or decide, as you did, that it isn’t the right time. You know what that feels like, to make the right decision. Sometimes I wasn’t sure I made the right decision, frankly. But I loved you. I always loved you.”

  I was speechless. The grown-up me understood this intellectually; the kid part of me wanted to stamp my feet.

  “Missy.”

  The tears were streaming down my face now.

  “What? What do you want?” I said.

  “More than anything,” she said, “I want you to know how much I love you. How much it hurt to leave you. Even though it didn’t feel like a choice—I actually thought I was saving you somehow by leaving, saving you from me—I still loved you. And I do now. I’m so proud of you, of who you’ve become, the life you’ve built, the music . . .”

  “The life I’ve built? I’m a divorced ex–rock star with geriatric ovaries! It’s not exactly the stuff of storybooks. I’m in love with someone who sometimes loves me back and sometimes looks at me like I’m an irritant, and I never know what I’m going to get, you know? Remember when I left Navid, how sure I was that I wanted a baby? Sometimes I still want that.”

  “Well, you can do that. You can leave. I didn’t mean to cheerlead too hard for Andy if you can’t work out your issues. But I do think every couple has issues, and you just have to love each other enough to want to figure them out.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, Mom. I’m really, really tired. It’s been a long day.”

  “Okay, so good night, then,” she said, leaning over and kissing me gently on the cheek, lingering.

  I went through the house turning off lights, then went to the bedroom. Andy was already in bed. I curled up beside him, and he put his head against my breasts and began to cry. I held him close and asked why he was upset.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, but kept crying.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said, soothing him until he fell asleep.

  I woke up early, before anyone else, and I took Penny for a walk, trying to turn over everything my mom had said to me the night before. If anyone else had told me those things, I’d have sympathized. But with my mom . . . I don’t know, I still couldn’t get past her selfishness. How could she make her leaving about me? She had to leave to save me? When all I needed was her? We all make choices to stay or to go. I knew I had to make one about Andy. It wasn’t hard to leave Navid and we had been married for years. Why was this harder? I bent over and bagged Penny’s last offerings, then headed for home.

  The party was wonderful, there was
no way else to describe it. When my aunt Marie showed up, my mom burst out in tears. “You’re here! You’re actually here, you’re all here!” she kept saying, hugging and kissing us all. It was pretty awesome. My heart was full, more than I’d felt it in a long time. Tom and his kids had driven down, and Agatha, Finch, and Emily as well. All of our people were here, gathered. I’d been so consumed with the practical details of shopping, cooking, and arranging everyone’s sleeping situations that I had nearly forgotten what we were celebrating.

  Andy remained by me the whole night, taking every opportunity to squeeze my arm, compliment me, kiss my cheek. He was, once again, the perfect boyfriend.

  When I was clearing the plates after dessert, Tegan joined me in the kitchen, filling up the sink with soapy water.

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said.

  “I want to,” she insisted. “You know, your mom and I, we were really young when we had you and Taylor. We didn’t always know what we were doing.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. She always talked like this when we were together. I think I was one of the few people in the world who had known Taylor so well that I could remember her down to the last detail. It gave us a bond, but sometimes I couldn’t handle it. Like tonight I was still reeling in the joy of the evening and I just didn’t want to go down that road.

  “This is so nice, what you did for your mom,” she said, handing me a plate to dry.

  “She seemed really happy,” I said.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “You know, she is so grateful for you. She has a hard time expressing it, but she’s working on it. And she really regrets leaving you.”

  “Really? She has never said that. She’s pretty much told me the opposite.”

  “Well, it’s complicated. I know you think she’s selfish, and we all are sometimes. But women are not selfish when they should be and they really screw themselves. So in a way, your mom was kind of ahead of her time. But listen, she didn’t tell you everything.”

  I really wanted out of that kitchen. I couldn’t handle Tegan’s vibe, and whatever my mom didn’t tell me, well, she probably had her reasons.

  “She had cancer,” Tegan said.

  “Cancer?”

  “Yeah, this past year. She’s in the clear now. Remission. Just fine. But she didn’t want to burden you. I thought you should know, though. Just so you take it easy on her. She’s still not one hundred percent.”

  The word cancer was still hanging in the air and I was no longer really hearing Tegan’s voice. None of this made sense.

  “I forgot I needed to go check on something,” I said, and dashed out. I charged angrily out to the garden. Everyone was sitting around the firepit and Andy was strumming the guitar, singing “Tangled Up in Blue.” Marie was harmonizing. My mom’s eyes were closed, dreamily. She was so beautiful, and so happy. Her bad haircut was pushed off her face and the reflection of the fire made her almost glow from within. I could see why so many women flocked to her for advice and comfort at the retreats, turned her into their personal guru. She had this magnetism and you just wanted to be around her, like she had all the answers. It was odd to realize how few answers she often had for herself.

  I sat down and tried to sing along. My mom’s eyes fluttered open and she looked over at me and smiled. She reached out a hand and I went over to sit next to her and she enveloped me under her arm. My heart, which had been too full earlier in the evening, was hurting now.

  At the end of the night, I walked her to bed. She was a bit wobbly and the pathway stones were unpredictable. As we walked she watched Andy with Tom’s youngest son, teaching him how to stoke the fire.

  “You should do it now. He’d be the perfect father.”

  We got to her room and I tucked her in, brought her a glass of water.

  “Have the baby now,” she repeated. “You’re not getting any younger.”

  She was right. I would be turning thirty-eight this year. I had to make a decision soon.

  “What if I’m just at a crossroads, and I’m reaching for meaning and it just looks like a baby?” I said.

  “So what? People do all sorts of things to find meaning. Especially have kids. There are worse reasons to have children.”

  “I feel like this is what Granny wanted all along, for me to have kids of my own. But I was never sure she was happy being a mother, so why did she think it was such a good idea for me?” The minute the words left my mouth I wanted to take them back.

  My mom looked at me hard. Then she said, “Even when mothers don’t seem happy being mothers, they still love their children. Most of the time. My mother didn’t seem very happy being a mother and I think she did love me and Marie very much. Your grandpa, God rest his soul, was not a nice man. Our mother was stuck with him. It was hard to grow up in that environment. She tried the best she could. She made mistakes. But we all do.”

  “I guess it’s hard thinking about being a mom when you aren’t sure you’ve learned how to do it right,” I said.

  “I can see that,” she said. After a pause she went on. “But you shouldn’t let it be an excuse. If you are afraid to do something, the fact that you are afraid you might not be good at it, or might not have a good model for it, shouldn’t hold you back.”

  I suddenly felt like I was in one of her seminars, but she wasn’t wrong all the same. And even though my mom was still talking about having babies, I was thinking about Andy. I wondered if I was letting our relationship keep me from getting what I wanted. And if I wasn’t going to get what I wanted from our relationship, was love enough?

  “Ruth wanted you to have children, Missy, because she thought it would make you happy. I don’t think she had another agenda. Not really. Well, okay, maybe she also thought it might put you more on the straight and narrow.”

  “Straight and narrow! She should see me now,” I said.

  “She might have surprised you. But we’ll never know.”

  “I was so mad at Granny before she died. I thought we’d make up, and then she went and died on the trip.”

  “You know, she had a plan,” my mom said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She left your father a note. A suicide note. She left a note for you, too, but he didn’t want to give it to you. He probably still has it.”

  “You mean, I felt so guilty for so many years, and she always knew she was going to check out? She left us on purpose?”

  “Yes, she planned it. It was a last act of control.”

  “That’s so sad. It’s so sad she got to the end of her life and couldn’t rely on anyone to care for her.”

  “I don’t think she thought of it that way. I think it was kind of bold, for someone who always conformed, was always afraid of not seeming normal and perfect. Honestly it was probably the one thing she ever did that I admired. She wanted to free herself.”

  I lay down beside her, like we did at the farm when the wood stove would go out in the middle of the night.

  “While we are confessing things . . .” she said.

  “Oh god, what else,” I said.

  “I was sick,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, “Tegan just told me.”

  She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “You knew?”

  “But you’re okay now? It’s okay?”

  “I’m going to be okay, yes. I think so.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because,” she said, “I was trying to be a good mother!”

  She looked over at me and we both started laughing.

  Larry walked in. “What’s so funny, ladies?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” I said, leaving them for the night.

  The RV left two days later. My mom whispered, “I’ll fly out again for the birth. I’ll stay for the first few months, if it doesn’t work out with Andy, or even if it does.” I whispered a thanks and helped her up the stairs to the RV.

  I watched them drive away and then found Andy doing laps in the pool. I kicked o
ff my sandals, sat down, and dangled my feet in the water. As I watched him swim, I thought about how he made everything in life stop when he put his hand on my arm. That feeling had been there even in Las Vegas years ago. But I had been afraid of it. I was afraid of what it meant back then. I’d had so many superficial relationships with cis guys, all out of fear. Even though Andy was the only person I wanted to be with, I felt like he’d helped me understand my queerness. Even if we couldn’t be together, he’d helped me finally define myself, understand myself.

  Andy swam over and wrapped his arms around me, soaking my dress, making me squeal and laugh. Then he said, “I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I think we should get married.”

  The moment was all I had ever hoped for.

  “Don’t you think?” he breathed, pulling me into the pool.

  We kissed until I almost relented.

  “I want you to be a part of my family,” he said, and then I pulled away, splashed back, and hopped out of the pool, wringing the water from my dress.

  “It’s not going to work. If I say yes, do you know what will happen? It will be like one of those dumb rom-coms where the groom runs out of the church. You can’t just ditch me, and then show up, and then make promises and ditch me again. It’s been happening for months, and it hurts more every time.”

  “I’m sorry, I know. It’s complicated. I’m trying to figure out why I’m like that. It’s like I’m one of those dressers where one drawer can’t open if the other one is closed. Sometimes the bad drawer opens and I just can’t remember feeling the way I feel now about you, and then the other drawer opens and I can’t imagine feeling like I don’t want to be here. It’s unpredictable.”

  “Well, then I’m always waiting for you to drop out of sight. I know when it’s coming now, I can feel it. And I try to act like it’s cool, like I’m cooler than I really am, about being dropped like that. It’s like I’m walking on eggshells, waiting all the time. And maybe you’re supposed to be with someone who never prompts you to open the bad drawer? I want to marry you more than anything, but marriage is not a solution to a problem. It creates more problems, we both know that. I need things I’m never going to get with you. I feel like I’m standing on the shore and you go in and out and it drives me crazy.”