I must look stunned, because he says, "Don't you know anything? Don't you know that when you're gone, they decide things, and now they've decided to get a baby to live with us? They didn't even ask you, did they?"
I look over at the goats, little furry things in the distance, leading their simple goat lives. "I knew about the baby..." I start slowly.
"Did you say okay?" he asks me, furiously.
"It's not... well, it's not something I could say okay to... it's not up to me..."
"Well, I said no! I told Daddy I don't like it, and he said it was okay to be mad, but I'd get used to it and that I would always be his first baby. AND I AM NOT A BABY AND I DON'T WANT A BABY!"
People are beginning to look over at our car. Even one of the goats in the pen seems to be concerned. Simon is crying hard now. I've been sitting in the backseat with him, but now I get out and tell him that we'll go home and talk about everything. I'll explain to him what's happening, I say. Damn it, I should have told him before, not just assumed that Dana would keep quiet until I felt the time was right. It's just that it was so early. Why does she have to do this stuff?
"Come on, honey. We'll go home, and I'll tell you everything. It'll be all right."
"It won't ever be all right!" he says, and then he starts sobbing. I sit back down, take him out of his seat belt, and bring him onto my lap. He slumps up against me and I sing him songs while he cries and cries and cries.
***
Not surprisingly, I'm shakier than usual when I get to work that night. Simon has clung to me in the driveway, begging me not to go—to the point where I almost considered either bringing him with me or calling in sick. What will happen, I wonder, if I ever can't come in? Do they have a backup plan? Dolores Hunter forgot to mention that, and I haven't thought to ask Alex, either.
Finally, with Simon wailing for me to stay, Teddy comes outside and picks him up very gently and carries him back inside—but the last view I have of my child is his tear-streaked face and outstretched arms as I pull out of the driveway. I call home as soon as I get in, and Teddy says everything is fine. Simon is upstairs with Dana, taking a bath. And yes, he's stopped crying.
"You guys shouldn't have told him," I say. "This was something we should have talked about together."
"Yeah, I know. But Dana just blurted it out because she's so excited. Either way, it'll all work out. He'll get used to the idea."
Who are you? I want to say to him. But it's time to go on the air. Luckily, the callers' questions jog me out of my funk. It's good to see that this job takes over the part of my brain that might otherwise be worrying and fretting all night. People seem to be asking interesting, but not terribly difficult, questions tonight, and I'm taking plenty of deep breaths.
From the control booth, Alex, wearing headphones for the telephone, smiles and holds up a sign for the next caller. It says, BOYFRIEND NOT PAYING ATTENTION. CINDY FROM HAMDEN. I listen carefully while a woman details all the romantic crimes that have been perpetrated on her. I advise her to tell her boyfriend how she feels. Then Alex writes: STAY-AT-HOME WIFE BORED WITH LIFE. BRAD FROM WOODBRIDGE, and I'm off, explaining to a well-meaning but clueless husband the difficulties of child-tending.
FAMILY MEMBER QUESTIONING LIFE CHOICES. ISABEL FROM BRANFORD, Alex's sign reads. I feel the vein in my temple pulse slightly.
"Isabel, you're on the air," I say.
"Hi, I'm a twenty-eight-year-old woman who's just moved back here after many years," begins the caller in a false, singsongy, almost taunting voice. I wish to God I had waved off this call, gone to a musical interlude instead. It's Dana. She's disguised her voice and is using our mother's name instead of her own. I look up at Alex and lick my dry lips. There is no way he knew my mother's name was Isabel.
"Anyway," Dana/Isabel is saying, "here's the thing: I kinda sorta fell in love with my sister's ex-husband, whom she does not love... and now that he and I are so happy and are going to have a baby..."
I look up at Alex, desperately. He shakes his head and closes his eyes. We're just going to have to barrel through.
The question turns out to be: How can you convince family members you're doing the right thing when they're mad at you?
"You can't convince anybody of anything," I say. "It's your actions that bring about changes in people. If you act honorably and honestly, then possibly you can repair the damage you've done to your family relationships."
Suddenly she giggles. "Hey, Lily, guess who—" she starts, but it's too late. Alex has cued the music, and we're out of there.
***
When I get home, she's standing at the kitchen sink drinking the last of a Coke. "Hey," she says. She's wearing a T-shirt and underpants. "Nice show tonight." Then she laughs. "So at what point did you know it was me?"
"Listen, that is not cool, calling me like that. And worse, what you did at the end..."
"He cut me off! That bastard didn't let me say who I was. I thought that would be so funny for the listeners, if they heard that part. It would humanize you, you know."
"I don't need humanizing. I need you not to call there anymore."
She puts her glass down hard and sighs. "What was it you said? Oh." She mimics me: "'If you act honestly and'—what else?—'oh, honorably, then possibly you can repair the damage." She laughs. "Fat chance of that working, though, right? That is so not happening. You'd rather hold a grudge, no matter what I do."
I don't know why, but I start patiently trying to explain all the ways that what she's doing isn't acting honorably. Telling Simon about the baby before we talked about it and decided how to proceed, making dates with my best friend and trying to exclude me—
I know she'll object. And sure enough, she starts loudly claiming that it's nice of her to try to be friends with Maggie; she's trying to be a part of the community she now lives in. And as for telling Simon—she thought he'd be excited. Kids love babies! It's just more of me trying to control everything. Why do I always have to take everything the wrong way? Even calling the radio station tonight: it wasn't malicious. She did it for fun. She thought I'd be amused by it.
There are footsteps, and then from the top of the stairs I hear Teddy's voice: "Guys, you might want to keep it down. You're being too loud."
I look at her. "Um. He's not... you're not having him sleep here, I trust."
"Oh, what is the big deal with everything with you? Yes, he's spending the night here! So what? It's not like it's a secret that we have sex. So is this now another thing I was supposed to ask your permission for? I can't take this."
And then she charges past me and marches upstairs. I hear them talking in low, intense voices at the top of the stairs, and then the bedroom door closes and that's that.
I stand there for a moment looking around the messy kitchen: the Coke bottle still out, a ring of spilled soda on the countertop, the dinner dishes still not washed. I inhale deeply. A little trail of sweat snakes down my back. And then my eye falls on something over by the glass door: a large brown paper bag with a hardware store logo on the side. I go over and look inside. There are two large gallons of paint and some rollers and brushes. The label on the paint says the color is Deep Marine Blue.
At first I'm confused, but then it all comes back to me. That night—the night we did my hair, Dana and Maggie and I—Dana said she wanted to paint the living room so it would look just like an aquarium. Wouldn't that be great, she said, to have a room that made you feel like you were underwater? So cool and refreshing.
And now, apparently, the time has come. Had I ever said that was a good idea? Did I ever act as though I could bear to live in a house with an aquarium-looking living room?
Quietly I slip out the sliding door. I don't know where I'm going. I just need some air. The next thing I know, I'm walking across the wet grass to Gracie's house, where there's one welcoming light glowing from her kitchen. When she opens the door, I fall into her arms, enveloped by the giant sleeves of her green kimono. She smells like talcum powder
and wine and comfort as she leads me inside.
32
We sit in her kitchen, drinking wine, and I cry harder than I've ever cried in my life. Harder than I cried when my parents died, or when Dana left, or when I knew that I didn't love Teddy enough to stay married and watch him make both of us unhappy. It's as though I've hit a bottomless well of tears and I'm unable to shut off the flow.
She just listens while I tell her all of it: about not only the pregnancy (which she already knew about, of course), but the untenable living arrangement, Dana's overexcited behavior, my new job, Simon's reaction, Maggie, Alex and the adrenaline addiction of making love to him—everything. Even the sorrow of not really knowing my mother, of being the only one not in on the family secret.
Gracie hands me tissues, rubs my back, pours more wine, gets me a cold cloth for my head—and then, when I'm winding down, she says, "Can I show you something?"
"Sure," I say, thinking she's going to produce something that is going to lead me back to sanity. My heart sinks when instead she hands me a picture of my mother when she first moved here. My mother, young and slim and blond, with such a look on her face it makes me almost draw back. She looks full of the devil, as though she's realized she needs something different from what she's just signed on for with my father, and she's going to get it, no matter what.
"Thank you," I say, and push the picture away. "She's not exactly the role model I'm aspiring to right now."
She laughs. "You know, over the years I have thought that if a truck hadn't come and killed your mother, I would have had to do it myself," she says. "I say this to you with all respect, since I know this is your mother we're talking about. You probably wish she wasn't killed the first time, much less thought about it happening a second time."
"Don't worry, I think I understand," I say.
"Well," she says. She looks down at the photograph, and the look of love and longing on her face is so naked that I have to look away. "She could be difficult, that was for sure, although she didn't see herself that way. She was—she was like somebody who just knows she's on earth for all the right reasons, for love and for poetry and for dancing and music."
"She was certainly a good cook," I say dully, and we both laugh at how faint that praise seems. But, really, it's all I can come up with. "Listen, she went into her studio and shut the door and didn't want me around. I don't see her as having the most perfect set of priorities."
Gracie laughs. "No. I suppose motherhood wasn't her thing." Then she sighs, still staring at the picture, and I know she's seeing something there that I can't possibly see. Her voice is dazed. "Being reliable wasn't her thing, either. She never once did what she said she'd do. Something would always come up. Every time we were going to be together—oops, sorry, can't do it after all."
I do not want to hear this, and can't for the life of me think of how it is relevant to my situation next door, but I'm too tired to do anything but sit and listen. She tells me about all the times she sat at home looking out her window at our house next door—all lit up and ringing with music and children's voices, the smells of cooking wafting out onto the lawn—and how all she could do was wait.
"It's so pathetic, but sometimes I'd sit at the window in the dark so nobody could see me, and I'd watch what was going on, trying to piece together what was happening over there," she says.
"What are you talking about? In my memory, you were right there with us."
"Well, not always," she says. "There were times I'd actually grow something resembling a spine, and I'd decide I was going to lead my own life, not just be a hanger-on in your mother's life. And that's when I'd miss her the most: just seeing little glimpses of your family life in the windows." She turns suddenly and looks at me. "So I'd always go back."
She's looking at the photograph again, and her eyes are blurry. "And then one day your mother came over to my house and told me that she was pregnant. She said it in the most casual way you can imagine, as if it was something I should have seen coming, maybe even congratulate her about," she says. "Believe me, I had no idea, silly me, that she and your father were still intimate, much less that they were trying to expand the family. That's how naïve I was back then." She laughs and shakes her head. "I thought that when you loved somebody that you couldn't also love somebody else at the same time." She takes a big sip of her wine. I'm aware suddenly of how old she looks. "So I was pretty much devastated. It was just one more reminder that while I was at home writing my little poems in the evening and preparing my little lessons, she was involved in a whole rich life, with sex and laughter and children and whatever else she wanted. Plenty of money, a man who loved her enough to let her have her outside playtime, a chance to do her art, the respect of the community, two beautiful children—and me to be her lifetime secret soul mate."
She sets down the glass and looks at me steadily. "I don't think it would have occurred to anyone to say to me, 'Gracie, you're wasting your time loving this woman. Get out and find yourself somebody else, somebody who will give back to you what you deserve.' But that's what I needed to hear, and that's what I'm saying to you: Get out and find somebody else."
"But you don't understand. I don't love Teddy," I say. "That's not my situation."
"You don't love Teddy per se," she says. "But there's something about this situation that you love. Maybe it's that you love it that Teddy needs you and depends on you. Maybe you love it that you get to sacrifice your life to make sure other people live the right way. I don't know. I've been trying to figure you out for a while now. But what I do know is that when I look at you, I see somebody who's wasting away from the same waiting disease I had. And so I say to you: Get out. Take a break. Go on a vacation. Let people handle their own lives for a while. Get the hell out."
"Funny, that's kind of what Leon said," I say slowly.
"Yeah, he would say that. He's seen a lot, that Leon."
We sit quietly for a while. "You're right," I say after a while. "I can't go back and live in my house with Dana and Teddy. I'm so filled with hate and rage right now, it kind of scares me."
"That's a pretty good sign that you can't go back."
"Why do I have to be the one who leaves? Why can't they be the ones who have to go?"
"I don't know," she says softly. "That's just the way it is."
I'm thinking aloud. "All right. I can't very well go to Maggie's house," I say slowly. "She's all crazy working out things with Mark. And I can't come here, because you have bookshelves where other people have stoves... and... maybe I should go to a hotel." I think a minute. "How long do I have to stay gone, do you think? Forever? Should I rent an apartment?"
"Maybe that's what it's going to come to, but I don't think you have to go out and sign a lease right away. Who knows how long you have to stay gone? You just go and then you figure it out. You'll find yourself knowing. Things change. That's the good part."
I look down at the photograph of my mother on the table. "She wouldn't have been agonizing like this," I say. And then I'm crying again. "I just... I just... wish I could have been what she wanted. I wish she had liked me."
Gracie says, "She loved you very much. Here, let me show you something else." She gets up and rummages through a box.
"Ack! Not another picture. Puhleeze."
"Just one more." This one is of my mother and me sitting on the beach, right in the spot, I realize, where I dug all those holes. She's holding me and smiling at me. Not at the camera, at me. I must be about three. I have plump sunburned arms, and my hair is up in two carefully formed pigtails sticking out from the sides of my head. My mother's touching my nose with her index finger and laughing, and the way she's looking at me is just about enough to knock me sideways. She is actually gazing at me with an expression that looks like love. This could be a poster for motherhood, even.
"So she was also a hell of an actress when the camera was pointed at her," I say.
"No. Don't be that way. She loved you a lot. She really, really did
. You know what her motherhood problem was? I think she was afraid of all those feelings of need and dependency. She didn't like attachment. Kind of like Dana, come to think of it. They both just jump into things and then think them through later."
"You know what? I really do have to get out of this place," I say. "Look at that beach. I've been looking at that little stretch of dirt my whole life." I stand up. "I have to go." The adrenaline starts coursing through me again. "I'm going to Alex's house."
"You are? Tomorrow?"
"No, now." I look at her clock. It's one thirty in the morning. I don't want to spend the night at home. Mostly I don't want to have to wake up in the morning and have to playact my way through a whole little domestic scene—breakfast around the table, just the four of us. And I really don't want to see Simon's confused look when Teddy is clearly Dana's partner and not Mommy's. "You know something?" I say. "I'm going to go pack up the car and get Simon and just leave."
She looks a little concerned. "Oh, my lord. What have I done?" she says.
"Nothing." I kiss her on the nose. "Can I use your phone? I want to tell Alex I'm coming."
"What if he's sleeping? What if he says no?"
"He's not, and he won't," I say. I've never been more sure of anything in my life.
33
I never knew how exciting it is to pack and leave in the night, to stuff duffel bags with your clothing as though you were your own worst nightmare: a cat burglar making off with your possessions in the dark. I tiptoe around, working quickly and quietly. I get all my clothes together—jeans and slacks and shirts and shoes—and then flit into Simon's room and put his toys in a big garbage bag and fill his Barney suitcase with enough clothes to last him for a few days. In the bathroom, I open the cosmetics drawer and empty the entire box of creams and lotions into my old backpack. Who knows how long we'll be gone? If it's longer than a few days, I can always come back and get more.
The important thing is, we're getting out of here. My heart is jumping around like it's the last day of school or something.
A Piece Of Normal Page 29
