I pick it up.
“Drop it, Elissa,” my mother says, shaking her head. “You’re a lady. Not for you.”
I look at them: My father is wearing a dark gray pinstriped suit, a striped tie, and brown horn-rimmed glasses. His initials are embroidered on his shirt cuffs in block letters. My mother, who won’t return to work for another year, is dressed in brown suede lace-front hip-hugger bell-bottoms bought when we were in Monterey a few years earlier. Her silk blouse is gathered at the bottom and tied into a knot just above her navel. She is wearing heavy carved Mexican silver earrings. Her broken mood ring. Thick, opaque makeup. She sighs and shakes her head. The weight of the universe is kneeling on her shoulders. There is screaming; I stick my fingers in my ears. I make out the words undertaker and whore. Spatula, clock, floor.
“You are not a boy,” my mother says to me. “Go back to your room and change into the clothes I bought you. Take off that suit—and enough with the briefcase.”
“But—” I start.
“Now—”
I go back to my bedroom and start over. I lay the suit over the back of my desk chair. I take out black tights, a short flowered dress, tan suede cork-bottomed platform sandals. Like an apparition, I lean against my dresser and watch myself put the outfit on: first the tights, one leg and then the other, and then the dress. I buckle my sandals, which my mother says will give me a little height.
“Just look at you,” she says, waving to me as I head down the hallway to the elevator with my father. “Beautiful! Walk in with your right foot!”
I climb the steps of the school bus with my books and my lunchbox. Our neighborhood flashes by in a blur: grocery store, bank, laundromat. When we arrive at school, my best friend nudges me.
“We’re here,” she says. “Let’s go.”
* * *
—
On a recent Saturday afternoon while my mother is having her hair done at Vidal Sassoon, my father and I step out of La Côte Basque, where I have been introduced to Coquilles Saint-Jacques and Sole Meunière. During lunch, he has instructed the waiter to bring me an empty shot glass into which he pours a drop of Burgundy, which burns the back of my throat. Most Saturdays of my childhood, this is what we do, in different restaurants all over Manhattan. Le Pavillon, La Grenouille, Le Périgord, the Praha. This is our time, and I wait for it all week. He teaches me about pleasure and flavor and sustenance. Just between us, he says. A clandestine adventure, a secret culinary affair that will end with my father flicking crumbs off my outfit with a glove compartment lint roller so that my mother, who believes that food is fuel and wants neither a fat husband nor a fat child, will never know where we’ve been.
My father and I leave La Côte Basque to find that the temperature has plunged thirty degrees. We walk three long, frigid blocks to Saks Fifth Avenue. We ride the escalator to the boys’ department, where my father buys me a wool-lined Burberry-style trench coat that grazes my ankles. He has the clerk remove the tags—a frisson of danger ripples through me—flips up the broad tan gabardine collar, and buttons the scratchy neck guard across my throat.
“Just like Ingrid Bergman,” he says as he ties my belt, bent down on one knee.
My mother sees me through the glass window of the salon where we pick her up. She smiles and waves like a starlet in the Rose Parade. We smile and wave back. We get closer and she sees my new coat. Her face drops as though she’s had a stroke.
We ride home in silence. She slams their bedroom door so hard that yellow paint chips fly off the frame and through the air like confetti.
The following Monday, my mother picks me up from school, which she never does unless someone has died. I step out of the building and there she is, waiting outside, straining to find me. She spots me coming down the steps and waves.
“Who died?” I ask.
“We’re going shopping today, sweetheart.”
“Why?”
“Because you need some new things.”
We ride the subway to the Fifty-Ninth Street basement station at Bloomingdale’s. My mother chooses a pile of jewel-toned shirred cotton tube tops and a selection of transparent voile blouses to wear over them. My back turned to my mother, I stand in a dressing room in Levi’s and Pro Keds and my Teenform bra. I step into a tube top the color of burnt sienna, first one foot then the other. I pull it over my hips like a sausage casing.
“Over your head,” my mother groans, “but you have to take off your bra first. What is wrong with you?”
I turn my back to her. My breasts are almost as large as hers.
She rolls her eyes. Forgoddsake. How is it possible, she wonders, that this girl—this daughter of a model, of a television star—doesn’t know how to dress? How is it possible that this child is even related to her?
“Can you maybe at least smile?” she asks. “Can you just do that for me?”
I stare blankly into the mirror. I grin.
“Let’s stop here—I need a mascara,” she says on our way out of the store, slowing down in front of a wall of makeup mirrors. The crowd bustles around me; a perfume hawker sprays me with Charlie.
“Can I help you?” a tall, dark-haired clerk says.
“A makeover,” my mother says, giving me a gentle nudge forward. “My daughter needs a little help.”
The clerk looks down at me. I stand still, frozen, my hands stuffed into my jeans pockets.
“It’ll be fun, honey—” my mother says. She is beaming; she is happy.
A makeover: to take what exists and make it over. A do-over. The fixing of a mistake.
The clerk comes out from behind the counter, bends down, and tells me to close my eyes. She applies three layers of shadow—a smoky gray for allure, she says; navy blue mascara and pink frosted lipstick, which matches the welts that erupt in a line along my jaw and down my neck. She turns me around to face my mother.
“Just look at you,” my mother gasps.
She stands behind me and beams. She taps her chin—Hold your head up, it means—and hands me a mirror. I stare back at this small stranger, her eyes encircled by a mottling of dark color, like she’s been in a street fight.
“This is how you should look,” she squeals. “Can’t you even see yourself? What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see the difference? Everyone says we look the same!”
“Like sisters!” says the salesgirl.
I gaze at the mirror. A round, spotty face gazes back at me, unrecognizable. It is expressionless. It feels embalmed, fake, like a made-up corpse. It appears to be wearing my hair.
My mother emits joy like a beam from a lighthouse. I have become a smaller version of her. On this school day afternoon in Manhattan in the midseventies, the things that give meaning and order to her life might now be mine too. She believes she has captivated and caught me, like a fish with a baited hook. I, her young daughter, will finally understand her. Love exists, pure and primal, but the affection between us, fleeting as a breeze, will finally be ours.
“Just look at you,” she cries. “Look—”
She pulls me to her chest and hugs me tightly; she kisses the top of my head, stands back, and tips my chin up. My heart cracks open with joy.
3
SUSAN AND I ARE DRAWN to the fury and the calm of Maine, to the granite beach and the metal sky, and the straight-lined vernacular of assurance.
After my parents’ divorce, my father and I spent our vacations together in rural Vermont. When he died in 2002, I began to search for him where we’d stayed so many years earlier, as though his essence might still exist in the places he loved. This seemed natural; the healing aspect of the Vermont hills drew me back, and Susan and I lived for a few weeks each autumn in a small, rustic cabin on Lake Dunmore outside Middlebury. It was our dog’s vacation, we would tell people, and she would be wet and stinking from lake water from sunup to sundown. We would do litt
le else but read, hike, cook, make love.
When Susan’s mother died a few days before her ninety-fifth birthday, we shifted our gaze even farther north, to where the water was colder, the residents more taciturn, and life more challenging. This shift happened organically; it was not something we discussed. Her mother had been a difficult but generous-hearted woman, devoutly Catholic and deeply suspicious of anyone who wasn’t. Prone to severe anxiety, she was the daughter of a subsistence farmer and a stalwart, chary New Englander morally opposed to frivolity or excess of any kind.
I love you like my own, she said to me when I cooked for her one late winter afternoon, after she’d gotten sick. It came out flat and hard, a statement of fact, cool as steel, without physical contact. Our relationship had at turns been difficult and good, black and white, hot and cold, a dance of patience and reticence. I had recently taken to calling her in the afternoons on breaks from my work, to share with her good news or bad, to talk about Susan and our garden, our successes and our failures. After surviving cancer twice two decades apart, her heart had begun to slow. Where she had once spent afternoons on a step ladder trimming an eight-foot hemlock hedge, she could now barely water her flowers. I drove up one day to make her a roast chicken; I cooked it in her old cast-iron Griswold skillet, which had belonged to her late mother.
I love you like my own.
My knees weakened. She went to put a log on her fire.
In the same way Vermont comforted me when my father died, Maine offered solace in the familiar when we lost Helen; its contradictions of harshness and relief seemed recognizable. We shake with joy, we shake with grief, What a time they have, these two, housed as they are in the same body, wrote Mary Oliver, and we came to Maine in part for this reason: The beautiful and the dangerous—the gingerbread cottages; the deadly undertow—exist side by side.
One is not readily accepted in Maine, where people are politely designated as being either locals or from away. It can take generations of dwelling full-time in this formidable place—the literal ends of the earth that jut out into the violent north Atlantic like a hat hanging from a hook—before one is considered a native, and it is this fact that keeps us returning year after year: consistency breeds hope. Come back, this place welcomes you, our local friends say, in an invitation to community that is as sweet as honey. Susan and I look at real estate. We study coastal maps. We read Thoreau’s The Maine Woods and the stories of Robert Tristram Coffin. A tide chart is folded into the small brown leather pocket notebook I carry everywhere, and although I have never been a sailor and grow ill at the first hint of choppy water, I learn to read it for reasons that have more to do with safety than affect. Artifice, perhaps, but we don’t want to be caught off guard, unprepared. Susan and I, together almost two decades and peering over the edge of the third part of our lives, return to Maine for increasingly longer periods.
As we get older, our compass is pointing north.
* * *
• • •
WE FIRST SET EYES ON each other in the spring of 1986, but Susan and I would not meet for another fourteen years. It was after work on a warm day in the middle of Heckscher Field in the heart of Central Park when I first saw her: She had a long braid so inky black that in the right light it looked blue, pulled through the plastic adjusting tab on her baseball cap. She wore massive round, red English schoolboy glasses and a heavy neoprene pad encasing each knee, both of which had been injured over the years. While her teammates laughed and caroused around her, she stood in a ready position, waiting for the ball, all business, wanting no surprises. The six softball fields backed up onto each other; one team’s infield was another’s outfield. Players were regularly hit by stray fly balls. It was nervous-making and distracting, but Susan was focused, calm, and completely unfazed by the activity; her stillness in a sea of mayhem made her stand out, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
“Don’t hit to her,” the captain of our team warned, but I did, and this woman in the ridiculous knee pads and funky glasses threw me out seconds after my feet left home plate.
We didn’t say a word to each other. When the game was over and we all went out to drink at Dublin House, an Irish bar near Broadway, Susan went home to Brooklyn, where she was living in a long-term relationship with a woman, a Gestalt therapist she’d met years earlier. I was living on the Upper West Side with my mother and Ben, her second husband, a furrier, whom I loved. I went home to where he was likely still in his Hermès tie and work trousers, stretched out on the den sofa in front of the television with a Scotch in his hand. My mother, I imagine, stood over him, shouting about something—his children? money? dinner plans?—that the glow of alcohol would dull and soften, like a pillow over his head. A new canister of black fishnet stockings might have been waiting for me on the marble entryway table, and she might have pointed it out as I dropped my bags and took off my jacket.
We needed them, darling, so I bought a bunch, she might have said to me, taking a drag from her cigarette.
* * *
• • •
TWO DECADES LATER, WHILE SITTING on her couch, Susan will show me an old picture of herself during her softball days.
You’re her, I said.
Susan’s face had stayed with me all those years: the quiet woman in the field, focused and calm in the midst of trouble.
We met on a bitterly cold afternoon at the end of January 2000, the first month of the new millennium and the predicted apocalypse. Y2K had stopped neither time nor traffic, and we emailed back and forth for three months. Single for years, I had come to a fork in the road; I wrote a personal ad and put it up on an AOL message board. Susan answered it, one of two hundred responders. My finger hung over the Delete key for a full minute before I decided to open and read her note. On our first date, we ate Boeuf Bourguignon at a small country French restaurant in Greenwich Village and drank a bottle of rustic red wine. We shared our concerns: We lived two hours apart, and there would be commuting. She was ten years older than I, and that worried her. Her cell phone vibrated three times in the few hours we’d been together; I guessed, and I was right, that it was a girlfriend unconvinced that their relationship had ended two years earlier. Susan was very quiet, she said, and nobody seemed to like that much.
We talked about her mother’s anxiety disorder so severe that she would spend her life never venturing more than twenty miles from her northern Connecticut home, and expecting Susan to do the same. My mother could be charming and tempestuous in a flash—predictable in her unpredictability—and had never known me as part of a couple nor ever seen me in love. I had been alone for a decade.
She’s a problem, I said.
So is mine, Susan answered.
We went our separate ways for the night and met again the next day; we spent four hours eating brunch at a Polish restaurant in the East Village—butter-fried pierogi stuffed with potatoes and onions the color of mahogany; a long rope of gamy boiled kielbasa and spicy mustard that made me sneeze and my eyes run; scrambled eggs as soft as pillows—before Susan reached across the table out of a long silence, moved a black plastic basket of rolls aside, and touched a tiny scar on my right hand.
I was in the sixth grade and accidentally put my hand through an interior door window at school. My mother, who had recently gone back to work, couldn’t be found. When I passed out in the school principal’s office from blood loss—although the wound was very small, I had managed to nick an artery—there was no one to call. I waited in the nurse’s office until the end of the day and, gray and wobbly, was sent home on the school bus with my friends. I came down the stairs at our bus stop with my bandaged hand stuffed deep in my coat so as not to upset Gaga, my grandmother, who was waiting for me in my mother’s stead.
“How did you notice it?” I asked.
“How could I not?” Susan said.
A week later, the train trip to her tiny house in rural norther
n Connecticut took hours. We collapsed into each other’s arms and made love for three days, stopping only to let her dog out. We called our mothers by cell and lied: away on business, an emergency project. We fell asleep wrapped around each other. I woke early and watched her.
* * *
—
I measure the accretion of time by the age of the baby we never had, the number of older people we’ve lost, the cancer scares, the boxes of inherited photos stacked up in our closet, the flutter I get in my heart when I look across the table at her.
Nineteen years; long enough for us to have a child in college.
Nineteen years; I still wake before she does.
I take stock of her: the way her hair, once prematurely salt-and-pepper, has now gone white in spots, and how quiet her dreams are. When we’re in Maine, our place of peace and paradox, I watch her in the quiet of the early mornings before my mother calls, before our day begins, afraid of losing this love.
4
SEVEN EIGHTEEN A.M.; THE PHONE RINGS.
“What’s doin’, honey,” she says, chewing something. “How’s your hair?”
“Still attached,” I say, flipping through her stack of business envelopes like a deck of playing cards. They are addressed to her, sent to my care.
“Is it big and beautiful?”
“It’s fine, Ma—”
I take a sip of coffee.
* * *
—
She needs to be needed, a therapist friend once said.
Years ago, grasping for a shred of intimacy, I had told her the truth: My hair, heavy and curly and so thick it was often impossible to brush, suddenly seemed to be falling out in clumps. After I moved home from college and into her apartment, a cortisol overload—a rush of daily anxiety that flowed hot and angry like a geyser from the center of my belly—kept me awake morning and night.
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