He swims over and holds on to my feet, pretending he is going to pull me in, but I know he won’t.
“How personal?” he asks.
“That will depend on who’s giving the gift.”
I hear the French door open. Marcus says, “Good morning, Kennedy.”
“Good morning,” Mother says. She walks over to where I’m sitting and combs her fingers through the hair I spent way too long straightening. “Did you rest well, honey?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Your hair looks pretty.”
“Thanks.”
“So, are you two ready to eat?”
“I am,” Marcus says.
“Sure,” I say.
“I’m taking orders. Do you want waffles or pancakes?”
“Pancakes,” Marcus answers.
“Pancakes are fine,” I say.
“Do you like pecans, Marcus?”
“Love ’em!”
“Okay, then. We’ll be out in a few minutes.”
Marcus pulls himself out of the pool and grabs his towel off the lounger. “I’m starving!”
“You’re always starving,” I say and smile, because I like his enthusiasm for good food. His enthusiasm for many good things is another of his excellent qualities.
“Your mom’s very pretty, isn’t she?” Marcus says, his eyes having followed her retreat into the house.
“I guess.”
“The first time I saw her, I knew you’d be gorgeous for a lo-o-o-ong time. My friends and I have been known to check mothers out for that very reason.”
“Oh, you have? Well, Dad made a contribution too, you know.”
“I don’t think of your dad as pretty.”
“Well, he is,” I say. “You two have that in common.” I cup water in my hand and toss it at him before getting up from the warm tiles and pulling a chair out from the table.
Mother returns carrying a large pewter tray with glasses, pitchers of milk and juice, butter, and syrup. “We’re almost ready!”
Marcus jumps up. “That looks heavy,” he says, taking the tray from her and setting it on the cart by the table.
“Thanks. It’s very heavy. Apparently I’ll do anything to save an extra trip.”
“Is there anything else I can do to help? Besides swimming laps and relaxing on the lounger, that is.”
“You can help next time. We like company in the kitchen. But this morning, we’ve got it covered,” she says, smiling at him. She has an endless supply of smiles.
Marcus can’t help himself—he has to smile back. He likes her.
Most people do.
All my friends love her, for goodness’ sake. They have since we started kindergarten; Jackie, since preschool. We were six the first time Jackie came to the house, but instead of playing with our baby dolls as we had planned, we spent most of the time in the kitchen with Mom, helping her make peanut butter cookies. I’m sure Jackie had started loving her when she was four years old and Mother volunteered at our preschool, but she fell head over heels that day in the kitchen. Mom told her she had been born during the Kennedy presidency. “If there was ever a man your gram loved, it was President John F. Kennedy,” she said, smiling at me while I pressed the cookies with the tines of the fork like she had shown me.
“Thus,” she said, turning her smile on Jackie, “she named me, her only child, Kennedy.” Then Mom leaned on the counter, face-to-face with Jackie, who sat perched on a stool across the bar from her. “And you, little miss, could be named after his First Lady, Jackie Kennedy. I’ve seen hundreds of pictures of her, and she was very classy.” Jackie looked at me, and I looked at her, like we had just learned the most glorious thing.
Jackie still loves Mom. She’d like to stay over here until the wedding—“all the better,” she said, “to do my maid-of-honor duties.”
“Sorry, girlfriend,” I told her, “we’ve got a full house.” And with Marcus here, it really is.
“What are you thinking about?” Marcus asks.
“About Gram naming Mother after John Kennedy. She loved him, you know. Someone’s probably naming a son or daughter Barack as we speak.”
“Was your mom’s dad a Kennedy fan too?”
“I wouldn’t know. He’s never been in the picture. He’s the great anti-father.”
“When did her parents get divorced?”
Have I not told him this?
“They didn’t,” I say. “They never got married. We don’t discuss him. Really, he’s a nonentity.”
I hope that puts a period on the topic, at least for now, because my parents are coming through the doorway, laughing about something, happy as the daisies upstairs “gracing my windows,” as Mother used to say. Dad’s carrying a platter of bacon and another platter of steaming pancakes. Mother’s carrying a stack of plates with napkins and silverware stacked on top.
The topic of her miserable father seems to be blessedly forgotten when Marcus looks up and sees my parents and the platters of food.
Kendy
“Please say you’ll come to the shower early,” Jackie says when I pick up the kitchen phone. “Really, we could use your help. No one here can do bows.”
I hesitate, hardly knowing what to say.
Finally I sputter, “What do you mean, honey?”
Now Jackie seems to hesitate. “Maisey did invite you when she was home during spring break, didn’t she?”
“She must have forgotten. She had a caterer, a florist, and a photographer to worry about, if you recall.”
“Well, that is absolutely no excuse.”
I laugh and tell her that a personal shower seldom needs a mother present and that I’ll see her soon.
“Not soon enough!” she says.
We don’t stay on the phone long, and I take myself back into the living room, where I left the newspaper I had just started perusing. I open it randomly, and unfortunately, to the obituary section. I skim it and hope, given the way things are going, I’ll find no one I know there. I had been aiming for the opinion page, thinking it might be good this morning to invest a few minutes in someone else’s concerns.
Maisey has been home only twice since spring break, once for her graduation reception in May and once for her church wedding shower the second weekend of June. She did not mention the shower the girls are giving her today until we were eating breakfast this morning.
Luke and Marcus had left for the golf course right before Jackie called, and I can’t imagine a nicer way to spend the afternoon than attending the shower Jackie and Heidi are giving Maisey. I hear Maisey’s door click shut and her footsteps on the stairs. I look up and see her holding her car keys, looking absolutely beautiful in white linen cropped pants and a pink cotton sweater.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” she says, hair swinging as she heads for the door.
I fold the paper, slide it into the magazine holder next to my chair, and stand up. “Jackie called to ask if I could come to the shower early,” I say.
Maisey stops and begins riffling through her purse for something.
What I’ve said is remarkable. Ordinarily I would have let it go. I have come to cherish equilibrium.
“I thought it was a girl thing,” she says, still digging in her purse.
“She said you were supposed to invite me when you were home for spring break.”
“Oh, really? I don’t remember that. Do you want to go?”
Her question strikes me as far more complicated than it sounds, certainly more complicated than she intended. And poignant.
I stand looking at her, trying hard not to cry, not to look like I want to cry. I’ve had some practice in this area.
I wish I didn’t care about any perceived slight. I wish I didn’t want so much to share this unique time with girls I have loved since most of them were five years old, seventeen years now. I wish my daughter and I were laughing our way to her car, hoping she wasn’t about to unwrap a lacy red thong. I wish she were warning me on the drive over to Jackie
’s not to call my flip-flops thongs.
Maisey has finally located a package of gum in her purse and is opening it. She looks in my direction and asks again, “So, do you want to go?”
The answer comes to me effortlessly, in the form of another question: Don’t you want me to go, Maisey? But that is too honest, and honesty would make her uncomfortable—and late, and she should be neither when she walks into Jackie’s apartment for her personal shower.
“Sort of,” I say with a laugh. “But I’m not ready, and I have plenty to do here.”
The chicken enchilada casserole, already prepared, is sitting in the refrigerator awaiting dinner tonight. But, hey, I’ve got a book that needs reading around here somewhere.
“Tell the girls I’ll see them at the rehearsal Friday,” I say.
“They’re coming over to swim tomorrow morning, remember?”
Did I know that?
“Dad’s grilling hamburgers for lunch.”
“Is he? Well, that’s good,” I say.
She stands there as if needing to be dismissed.
“Well, have a good time. I hope you get six bottles of Happy.” She loves that fragrance. “And a red lace thong,” I add.
“Oh, Mother.”
And with that she rushes out the door to the apple green Jetta we bought her in May, when she graduated from college.
So anxious to leave.
Free at last.
I watch until Maisey has turned her car onto the highway before confiscating a book from the bedroom and heading to the patio. But I find myself staring at an empty pool, completely ignoring the book in my lap. Not having purchased a great book to have on hand this week turns out to be a grave oversight. On the other hand, I doubt the best book ever written could compete with my musings today.
Maisey’s tenth Christmas has come to mind, antithesis to her flight to Jackie’s. Actually it is Christmas Eve that shines so brightly in my memory.
Luke had driven into Indy to work, though Maisey and I pleaded with him not to. Christmas Eve was one of the company’s best paid holidays as far as I was concerned. “Luke,” I had asked, hardly hiding my disgust, “how many others are working on Christmas Eve?”
He had answered with a question of his own. “How many others are going to be a partner by the time they’re forty?” I walked off without another word. I had wanted to push it, though. It was snowing, and we could have gone sledding if he had been home to make it happen; he would have had as much fun as Maisey and I.
But not to worry, we girls had grown used to such defections and had learned to embrace satisfying alternatives. I put on Christmas music, and Maisey and I made cookies and candy as the snow fell in enormous fairy-tale flakes outside the kitchen windows. We ate warm cookies and drank cold milk while sitting at the kitchen table, watching the heavens pile snow on the covered pool, the fenced yard, the field, and the woods beyond it.
“I don’t want to be a teenager, Mom,” she announced out of the blue.
“Well, my goodness, sweetie, why wouldn’t you want to be such a glorious thing?”
“I don’t want to not like you!”
I laughed at that.
She laughed too.
“But, Mom,” she said. “You should hear how some of the older kids talk about their parents!”
Part of me wished I could keep Maisey in the fifth grade forever.
“I wouldn’t worry about it, honey. Not liking each other just isn’t possible. Of this I am sure.”
“Did you ever not like Gram?”
“Well, that’s a different story, dear.”
“What do you mean?”
Luke called then, allowing me to postpone an explanation of my childhood, one quite different from Maisey’s. I was so glad for the interruption that I was only upset, not livid, when he said he’d be late for dinner, even though I could not fathom what could be so important on Christmas Eve.
“The roads must be getting worse by the minute,” I said. He told me not to worry—he wouldn’t be much longer and he had arranged for someone to put chains on his tires.
That evening, pleased that he was finally home and that we were going to have a spectacular white Christmas, the three of us ate chili in front of the fireplace, the ottoman our table, the finest the maitre d’ had to offer. Afterward we once again watched Jimmy Stewart’s epiphany in It’s a Wonderful Life, and then each of us opened one present, saving the rest for morning, a Laswell tradition. We had only one more day before I put the Christmas CDs away, so we turned out all the lights except for those twinkling on the tree and ended the evening by listening to the music we loved.
It was bedtime—in fact, Luke had fallen asleep on the couch—but Maisey and I hated to leave the fire, the tree, the moon shining on the snow heaped outside the windows, and the promise and peace of “O Holy Night.”
That refusal to give up the night provided me one of my sweetest memories. I sat snuggled with a soft throw in Luke’s big leather rocking recliner, and Maisey, a tiny thing even at ten, lay on the floor watching the fire. Looking over at me, she smiled, got up, climbed into my lap, and put her head on my shoulder. We didn’t say anything for the half hour we sat rocking, holding each other close.
There are some things for which there are no words.
CHAPTER FOUR
Maisey
I find a parking place and take a minute to observe the apartment complex where Jackie and Heidi have lived for a month now. It looks nice, quite nice.
Well, I’m here, Jackie, I think as I get out of the car and lock it. On Tuesday, just like you wanted. I had wanted the shower to be later in the week, but that didn’t suit her at all. Her text message made that clear: Good grief, so when do you plan to come home?!
She doesn’t think I’m home enough, and Marcus tends to agree. Ever since his boss gave him two weeks off, he’s been all about spending as much time here as possible before the wedding, but goodness, five days is a long time. Of course Sarah, the sole college representative in the wedding party, will arrive from Florida on Friday morning, and the Blair gang will arrive Friday afternoon. That leaves just two days to kill.
The girls will take up most of the day tomorrow, and maybe I can talk Marcus into going to Indy on Thursday.
I arrive at the door of my friends’ apartment and ring the bell.
The door flies open, and Jackie shouts, “Get in here!” She must have taken lessons from Marcus.
“My goodness,” I say as she pulls me into their living room, “I do believe I’ve materialized in Pier 1 Imports.”
“All but,” Jackie says, taking my purse and throwing it in the coat closet. “Did the giraffe give it away?”
“He’s quite chic,” I say, looking with approval in his direction.
“It’s pretty much all Pier 1, at least in the living area and kitchen. Our parents bought Heidi and me dishes, a lamp, several throw pillows, and a few indispensable accessories for graduation—not a cute little car, Spoiley Girl.” Heidi has walked into the living room while Jackie is carrying on and is nodding her head in agreement.
They are so exaggerating. Their apartment is too cute, thanks to the collaborative efforts of their generous parents.
“I wish you guys could see the place Gram found Marcus and me,” I say. “I’m going for the Pottery Barn look—the real thing if my parents and grandparents are buying, a knockoff otherwise.”
“Didn’t we tell you? We’re coming to see it the minute you get back from your honeymoon,” Jackie says. “Hey,” she adds, as though she’s just thought of something far more important than apartments and upcoming visits, “I thought I told you to invite your mom to this little party!”
“Sorry,” I say, placating her as best I can with a shrug and a smile. “I guess I forgot.”
Jackie is not placated. “I should have called myself.”
“You can see her tomorrow.”
“Yes, I can. Meanwhile, tell her I love her so much, I’m going to gobble her
up. Can you remember that?”
Oh brother. With that comment, I ask her to point me in the direction of a bathroom.
Jackie was referring to one of Mother’s and her oldest sayings, dating back to preschool. On the days Mother volunteered, she read to us while we ate the cookies she had brought, and then she did anything else our teacher wanted her to do. And our teacher wanted most of all for Mother to monitor our fifteen-minute recess.
We were running to the merry-go-round one spring morning when Mother shouted to Jackie, “I love you so much, I’m going to gobble you up!”
Jackie screamed and ran faster, yelling, “I’ll beat you off with a stick!”
No chance of that, of course. Most of the class would not be sitting on a colorful slice of merry-go-round, holding on to a handle for dear life, if my mother hadn’t been out there pushing it.
“Harder, harder!” the kids called.
And she pushed harder, but not much. We were only four, and she would never have put us in danger, which was considerate for a child-eater.
As I walk back down the hall, hoping the subject of Mother is dropped, the doorbell begins to ring nonstop, and the apartment quickly fills up with girls whom I’m so excited to see.
We spend the first hour chatting and eating and drinking, and then I open presents from friends who have been extremely generous. There are three bottles of Happy and several ooh-la-la things from Victoria’s Secret. When everything is unwrapped and stacked neatly on the side-by-side cubes Jackie uses as a coffee table, I hear yet another reference to my mother.
“Your mom would be so proud of us,” Heidi says.
“She most certainly would be!” Jackie said.
For a minute I think someone might ask for a moment of silence.
Yet it’s true; Mother probably would be proud. Except for one outrageous exception, good taste ruled. Mother will be glad to know I received several bottles of Happy, forever my favorite fragrance. I’ve splashed it on even when the name on the bottle was just wishful thinking.
I wait around until everyone is gone before I thank Jackie and Heidi for the third or fourth time and rush to the car to begin my double-checking, which I’ve scheduled for after the shower. I stop by the caterer’s and the photographer’s and then drive to the florist’s. I’m listening to tunes, rather glad I chose a florist so far away; I’m counting on Dad and Marcus being back from their golf game before I return to the house.
Things Worth Remembering Page 3
