Every Day

by Elizabeth Richards

  “It’s divine,” I say. “You’re divine.”

  “You’re mad,” he quips and grabs my wrist. “Now decide. Which burger to have. I don’t recommend anything with a topping. In fact, I don’t recommend ever saying the word ‘topping.’ Not at all comme il faut. And very dicey in terms of gastrointestinal goings-on.”

  Daisy dunks her fist into a glass of ice water, then smears her face with the cool of it.

  “Are we as smart as Mother?” Eliot asks her.

  “Much smarter,” I moan.

  Eliot scowls. “I see we’re very limited on the esteem front. I, for one, only love people who hate themselves, so it stands to reason that I’m having lunch with her.” All of this he directs at Daisy, about me. She stares, fascinated, by the rush of words and the à propos gesturing.

  “Anyway,” I throw in.

  We have a waitress. “Okay!” he exclaims. He orders for me.

  “I’m assuming herself will have the fries and chocolate milk.”

  I nod, laughing, losing all my stiffness to the thrill of him.

  “The point is,” he says, after the waitress leaves with a similar appreciation of him, “you’re here having burgers with a person who may learn to like you despite the fact that you’ve completely sacked your own life. And I think it is safe to say that your clone is rather enjoying herself. So.”

  “Do you always talk like this?” I say. “Or are you doing it for the baby.”

  “My dear girl,” he says, his voice sliding with disdain, as if I’ve been deprived of the only bit of knowledge that could possibly help me. “I refuse to miss opportunities. And my opportunity here, as I see it, is to tell you what I see. I see someone who is, frankly, scared and friendless. It’s not a state with which I’m unfamiliar. And don’t think I am so obtuse that I feature myself some sort of lifesaver. But I’m intrigued here. I feel I may be looking at a Bovary or a Karenina. Except you’re just smart enough to save yourself. At which point I’ll become dispensable. Another state not unfamiliar to moi.”

  I’m chilled. “Well.”

  “I thought you’d say that. Hey. Tell me your name.”

  I tell him through tears, “My name is Leigh Adelman.”

  “Mama ky?” Daisy says, patting my wet cheeks.

  “Mama do,” I say.

  Eliot takes my hand this time. “Mama a mess.”

  I tell him about leaving, about what I did with Fowler. I am not self-editing. I’m triumphant in not boring him, in providing a tale at least on a par with the ones he’s used to hearing. He takes Daisy on his lap so I can eat and reconstruct the error of my ways. He amuses her with finger games and peekaboo and smile faces on the corners of his placemat. I stop at now, at Mother’s with no idea of where to go next.

  “I see,” he says heavily.

  “What?” It’s torture. I’m on the cusp of being helped, I’m sure of it.

  “Seems to me . . .” he says. Freud himself. He’s good at accents.

  “What?”

  “Okay,” he says. “Here it is. You’ve thrown all your chips down and you’re standing at the table drooling over the loss. It’s unworthy of you, really, not at all dignified. I say go with what follows naturally. Blow the whole thing wide open, as they say in those idiotic movies. Introduce your son to his father before he dies. To his grandparents before they do. Let your kids know who you are. How can you hide from your own children?”

  I recognize this advice. It’s Catherine’s. In a way, it’s Liselotte’s, and it might be Pam’s. It’s advice that cuts worse than surgery, worse than anything, because it’s frightening and I know I have to follow it.

  “You can’t hide from your kids. Let them decide whether you’re forgivable. They’ll be honest. As for your husband, well, he has good reason to be miffed. You’re not supposed to do what you did. People hate that. But who am I to pretend to know what the proper sentencing is?”

  At one point in the movie, Catherine leads Jim, to whom she isn’t married, into the woods by her house. “Catch me,” she taunts. Indoors sits Jules, her husband, resigned.

  I don’t expect Simon to sit indoors, resigned. I didn’t give any thought to what I expected him to do.

  “In other words,” I venture, “I’m already losing, why not just throw all the chips in?”

  “To my way of thinking,” Eliot smiles. “Now take this,” he says, meaning Daisy, “and I can do violence to my GI tract with our meal here.”

  I’ve eaten all of my burger and he’s had none of his, devoting himself entirely to my cause. I put some fries aside for Daisy.

  “Babba,” she says. Ketchup.

  “It’s too good!” he says after swallowing.

  “What would the French say?” I revert to my need to be bleak.

  “They would be horrified,” Eliot asserts, “which is why I adore them.”

  We establish our shared Francophilia during the rest of the gauche meal.

  “I think you might consider taking a hint from the French,” Eliot muses.

  As if I haven’t already.

  On and on about lives spent in service to matters of the heart. Where does one draw the line? One is who one is, one can’t help this, but is this an excuse? Am I a female Don Juan or a married woman who does the thing that doesn’t get talked about: what she feels like doing?

  I pay for his burger, as I said I would.

  Outside, in perfectly punishing heat, he tells me I am to pass Go and collect $200. He says he must abandon me before he turns into butter at my feet. I get a pen out of the diaper bag to write on my hand.

  “If you’re going to be saving my life,” I say, “I’ll need your phone number.”

  Which he gives me, thank the Lord.

  • • •

  Early the next afternoon I’m back on the train, sporting the new summer slacks and one of Mother’s creased white blouses and a straw bag. I called Fowler this morning and told him of my plan to arrive at the camp at dismissal and talk to Jane and Isaac before Simon takes them home. “You’ll be all right,” he said vaguely, under something. Fear, I guessed, of what is happening to him. “You’ll be fine. I know you.”

  I’ve brought work, but there is no doing it. There is no doing anything but planning my speech, which a few hours’ sleep and Eliot’s perspective have primed me for, a sort of mea culpa without the self-loathing that Eliot finds so repugnant. I will tell Isaac that I am compelled to bring him and Fowler together despite Fowler’s grim news. Mother will have none of this compulsion.

  “I suppose it’s got more to do with your father’s side of things,” she said at the breakfast table. “That driving connection of the blood. The WASPs are so much quicker to allow a lapse, to forget about troublesome relations. But he spends half his life moaning about his rotten brother and how Mae died of disappointment in him. It goes above and beyond.”

  She was referring, on her side, to some cousins who left the city to go and live on one of the Thousand Islands at the Canadian border. They never invited a soul up to visit after they moved, and this was regarded as hateful by my grandmother, who never bothered about them again once it was generally acknowledged that they’d fallen from whatever height we were all nailed to by virtue of our breeding. “They didn’t amount to much,” was the only thing I ever heard my grandmother Pussy say about them. This was what she said when she was pushed to the outer limits of her patience: so-and-so doesn’t amount to much. With her on the one hand tamping down all emotion into such packed statements and my father’s mother, Mae, on the other hand, forever threatening to die any minute, her tone a shade deeper than wistful, I developed a battery of excuses for my own confusion over things. These grandmothers—Mae, who fulfilled her threat years ago, and Pussy, whose voice I can still hear although she is three years gone (how she’d have reveled in Daisy! How horribly I miss her when we gather, anxiously, on Christmas Eve, hoping for smooth sailing through the next day, for joy over the commercial festivities)—advise me alternately:
Stiff upper lip! Rage! Draw yourself up to your full height! Tell them what you want!

  “Grandma Mae would endorse the view that Fowler and Isaac should meet,” I ventured.

  “Grandma Mae would have hired someone to take care of Fowler centuries ago,” Mother said, in an unusually light moment for this week.

  “And Pussy?” I squeaked.

  “Don’t mention them on the same day!”

  We were having fun.

  “Just go and see them,” she advised. “Forget the agenda. Jane sounds so troubled. I want her here with me.”

  She didn’t mention Isaac, although I heard her talking to him. She sounded very official, as I imagine he did. I told her about Eliot, the lunch Daisy and I had with him.

  “A confirmed bachelor,” she said. I hadn’t mentioned that I thought he was gay, but somehow she knew. This is what mothers do, I thought, know our lives in advance of our knowing them. These last few days I’d lost my knack for this sort of ESP. It was the sleep loss, the wicked distance, the total fear of being apart from Jane and Isaac. I suddenly knew the horror of what was facing me—the fact of their growing up and away from me, regardless of my behavior.

  “He’s a divine man,” I said of Eliot. I sounded just like Mother, just like Pussy.

  “I’m sure he is,” Mother said earnestly. “My dearest friend in the whole world, Vernon, was the same way. We drank martinis and stayed up all night and never stopped talking. I’d never loved anyone so much in my life.”

  “Ma!” The outpouring stunned me. “When was this?”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “Way back. Way, way back. He was an awful lot of fun. Pussy didn’t think he amounted to much. I brought him up for the weekend once. Dad thought he was light on his feet, and Pussy just wore her endurance smile. I was terribly disappointed.”

  “Ma!” I said again, idiotically. “How colorful!”

  She looked at me. “Don’t think you’ve cornered the market on the bizarre, Leigh. It’s a big world, always has been. All manner of folk pass in and out of one’s life. I just happened to love Vernon. And when he took up with a young man from Spain, the most beautiful creature you’d ever seen, sick, of course, not long for the world, I lost Vernon to a dying man.”

  She got up and started doing the dishes. She was in tears. I shuddered, wondering if I’d be saying something similar to Daisy years hence: I lost your father to a tragedy in the making.

  I’d been treating Fowler, in my impossible mind, to the luxury of health, to a comfortable seat slightly to one side of my patient family. I had some revising to do, Mother was pointing out.

  Stages of city disappearing—skyscrapers, intermittent low buildings, then the trees that hide the houses of the wealthy in Riverdale, then bald lawns sloping to river. I count the minutes before arrival time, count out singles for a cab to the high school, happy that I’ll be there before the 2:30 dismissal. I ache for the moment of contact, the promise of forgiveness, any vestige of their love. It’s impossible not to anticipate: a tall boy, fists jammed into jeans pockets, leaning against something, a wall, a tree, one knee up, and his sister, half his height but as demanding a presence, trying on moroseness or abandon or giddiness, as the mood strikes.

  I get off the train with a rare energy, one that I gained during my interview with Eliot. I must find a way to stop hurting them.

  • • •

  I make the error of telling the cabdriver the quickest route to the high school, which he takes as an indication of hubris on my part. He is fat, with hair in a ponytail, and he sighs often. He makes turns with an energy that isn’t merited, sawing at the steering wheel. He is ominous, and he sours me on my mission: I’m wrong to have come. This wasn’t meant to be.

  So I skimp on the tip—cause for more graceless gesture and sighing. I stand at the school entrance, two brick pillars and a plaque, beset by queasiness, thinking I shouldn’t be here, this is no longer my place. How much I have erred in coming begins to be revealed when I spot Jane, a flutter of color in her pale blue-and-yellow shorts set, jumping up and down to emphasize something to Adrienne, in whom I’m sure she’s confided everything. They’re at the breezeway among some other boys and girls with neon lunchboxes and gym bags.

  I start over, heart pounding, but stop just shy of the faculty parking lot where I see Kirsten’s Grand Cherokee. Simon is sitting in it, reading the paper, oblivious to our daughter.

  I wander over.

  “Oh,” he says. “Hi.”

  “I came to talk to the children,” I say.

  “You’ll get no argument from me,” he says, looking over, noticing, finally, that Jane is waiting for him.

  “What kind of talk is that?” I ask him. He smirks, as if I’m insane.

  “That’s neutral talk,” he answers. “It’s the only kind I trust myself with these days.”

  That he and Kirsten are keeping some sort of company is apparent enough from his choice of vehicle, but the idea of their conferring about arrangements for my children is unnerving, to say the least.

  “What has happened to our cars?” I ask him.

  He slaps the paper down on the passenger seat. “Our cars?” he pleads. “Our cars?”

  “You’re driving someone else’s car,” I whine.

  “You’re fucking another man,” he says, and he pushes the door open, hitting my shoulder, and slams it shut.

  He looks thin, but healthy. She must be feeding him well. She’s a terrific cook, I’m sick to admit.

  “You’re fucking my best friend,” I hazard.

  He stares at me in a way I’ve never seen, as if he’s trying to figure out how I could exist and be so unjust at the same time.

  “Your best friend has nothing to do with this,” he says.

  “You’re driving her car,” I repeat.

  “Why are you here?” he demands. “Why?”

  “I’m looking for Jane and Isaac,” I explain, appalled.

  “One foot in, one foot out,” he says.

  I look over at the breezeway, for Jane. I don’t see her. I start to run, panicked, sure that she’s taken off, having witnessed the argument. I throw open the glass door and dash down the hallway, figuring she and Adrienne are hiding in the girls’ rest room. But they aren’t, and I don’t know where they’ve gone. I stop to catch my breath. It is the most terrible moment of wanting I have ever known, and I sink to the linoleum in a heap, tears and sweat falling onto Mother’s blouse. I think of finding Isaac, begging him to call Jane back from wherever she’s gone, but my own despair exhausts me and I can’t move. I can’t go out into that blazing light until he is gone, until he’s collected them and taken them to her house and shown them what terrible things he can do. I will stay here, I promise myself, until there is no possibility of my seeing any of them. And then I will call a cab and take myself back to Mother’s.

  • • •

  Soon after Mother has shut her door for the evening I go in and lie down on the sofa bed by Daisy’s crib. The heat has turned to rain, cooling, heavenly rain. Everything is so far from what it was when I left here this morning. I drift in and out of longing and fury and terrible need. I am afraid to sleep. I am afraid of joining the ranks of those who know scandal, create it, hope to live through it, live through it. I am totally afraid.

  chapter six

  My father, because of his poor Polish ancestry, will brook no cost-cutting when it comes to the food for our Saturday brunches. He scowls over Mother’s contribution. On his gleaming dining room table (Mother can’t abide a certain preciousness he has about his furniture: “What true Marxist cares about the decorative arts?” she quips), she has set down two store-bought coffee rings.

  “At least take them out of the boxes,” he says to her.

  To me he says, “So where are the others?”

  I tell him Simon will be dropping them off.

  “He’s going to shul?”

  Dad skips a beat sometimes. I have to fill in: he’s surprised that Si
mon won’t be joining us and covers his concern with the obviously wrong assumption that Simon, a nonpracticing Jew, would be busy at temple on a Saturday morning. Professorship has given my father a lifetime of this sort of license. His students must feel they’re in the presence of genius—or lunacy—when he omits logical connections in his lectures.

  “He’s going to do his own thing,” I toss off.

  “Good,” Dad says, obviously hurt. “He should have some time to himself.”

  Mother had taken her usual seat in Dad’s immaculate parlor, just off the dining room, where splendid sunlight dapples the Oriental rug he took from their apartment.

  “Leigh has some news,” she tells him. Then, apologetically to me, “Really, dear, were you going to let it go?”

  “Let what go,” he says. “What?”

  “I’m staying with Mother for a while,” I stumble. “Daisy and I. We’ve been there all week.”

  Dad stops arranging the glasses and platters of food, bagels, lox, onions, tomatoes. “Tell me the rest,” he says calmly.

  “There’s been an interruption,” Mother says ominously.

  Dad gives her a stern look. “You’ll let Leigh tell the story please, Marion.”

  I see no sense in holding out. “I saw Fowler,” I say.

  Dad takes a second, then walks to the center of his sitting room so that he is directly in front of me, not six inches away. He looks into my eyes like an eye doctor would, with some idea of what he’s looking for but in need of a missing detail.

  “You saw that man?” he begs. “You saw such a man and you let him have an effect on you? After all that has gone on? Please, Leigh, tell me what I’m looking at here.”

  A fool, I know he wants me to say.

  Daisy screams just then from the hallway. I find her flat on her tummy after a fall over the molding. I bring her back into the parlor, where Dad sits opposite Mother in a matching chair.