The place is immaculate, which worries me. (Has Jane applied her misery to the house? To cleanliness? Has Simon hired a cleaning woman in my absence?) I trot upstairs with a springiness I haven’t felt since we moved in and the house was new to us, then experience the disappointment of empty bedrooms. My own bed looks untouched, as if it belongs in a hotel room. The bathrooms are spotless, the only evidence of life being in the children’s—toothbrushes lying unrinsed on the sink, Jane’s Aladdin nightgown hanging on the doorknob.
The nightgown’s enough to make me stop, perch on the fuzzy blue toilet seat, take stock. A week ago, I would have cried at this moment. But now crying is out of the question. Nothing should halt the progression, should get in the way of the imminent. I have brought my first love to my home. Come what will.
I listen to the messages on our machine. One from Jane to her father about when to pick her up today. One from Isaac explaining he’ll be home for dinner, which, I figure, means in a couple of hours. Then one from Kirsten, telling me that she’ll bring Jane back at six. The smoothness in her voice tells me I’ve given everyone license to see things to their proper outcome, to do what comes most naturally, i.e., sleep with people they aren’t married to. I marvel at my discomfort with this. The last message is from an unenthused, eerily familiar voice:
“Leigh Adelman? Is that your son speaking? Your husband? Or have you had a sex change? Have you had any sex at all? God, is this a drag or what? I’m a total hausfrau. It’s Pam calling from Newport, shock of shocks. I haven’t met anyone I like in years. Will you call me?”
Then the number, which I frantically scribble on some junk mail of Simon’s.
I call Fowler right away.
“Pam Tillinghast?” he says. “Is that so shocking?”
“Well, considering that I haven’t spoken to her in seven or eight years, yes, it is shocking. I don’t believe it!”
The ease of his recollection of her unnerves me. But I enjoy the relief her message offers from the gravity of our mission here.
“You haven’t spoken to her in that long?” he muses.
“No!” I sound angry, which I am for some reason. “Why is that so strange? Have you?”
“I’ve run into her a couple of times.”
I stand in the center of the living room, wild with confusion.
“You have?” I say. “You’ve run into Pam? Why would you have run into Pam?”
I sink to crosslegs, and Daisy drags her megablock bag over to me.
“Leigh, honey,” Fowler says.
This is how he used to talk to me, how he talked to me in the car that night outside the clinic, with that posture of weary deference tinged with condescension.
“Why did you see her?”
The seconds of his inability to answer expand, hurt. Even Daisy is still.
“She showed up at a screening at Lincoln Center. I had a long talk with her afterward. We kept up, in a way.”
This is worse for me than the thing I’ve constructed, with help, between Simon and Kirsten.
“You did?”
I straighten my back, lift my head. What would be the most unendurable right now: to buckle under the discovery of another betrayal on his part.
“Tell me one thing,” I say. “What has this got to do with Isaac?”
“Meaning.”
“Pam told people at Hastings I was pregnant. Remember? Do you have any recollection of that?”
“Of course I do.”
I continue unfazed, like a prosecutor. “I never understood why she did that, why she deliberately made my life and yours a living hell.”
“She was jealous, I suppose. She was unused to being passed over.”
This has the hollow ring of theory.
“Was she?”
“Was she what?”
“Passed over.”
“Well, obviously!” he says cheerfully, too relieved for my comfort.
I can’t let it go. “Was she passed over?”
“Leigh, really. Let’s move on here.”
“Was she passed over. I want to know.”
“Ultimately, yes. She was passed over.”
“Define ‘ultimately.’ ”
“Please, Leigh. I don’t want to invent suffering. We don’t need to do that.”
For a minute I wait, willing a gentleness between us, a new past.
“Too late,” I tell him.
I hang up. I am a fool to have expected anything different from Fowler. I will always be a fool, and he will always betray me. When he dies he will betray me again. I wander into the kitchen.
“Ope?” Daisy says, of the refrigerator. I open it and rummage, get us out an apple and some cheese, and cut it all up on a plate.
• • •
Jane is dropped off by her father, who keeps the car running on the perimeter of the front lawn and waves to her several times from behind the wheel before easing away. I race downstairs from my perch at the landing window, where I have been sitting for a half hour, Liselotte’s truth open in my lap. I haven’t read ten words. Instead I’ve dreamt a victorious reunion, the happiest of scenarios: weeping admissions of love and need on both our parts, Jane’s mature acceptance of her lot, hints of a future unfettered by dysfunction.
But there’s a weariness about her. She walks heavily, her gym bag slung over her shoulder, her gaze on the bricks. Something has been established in my absence, and my being here threatens it, and it has just driven away and left her here, unsafe. Things are even more different than they were on Saturday at Dad’s when I made my entreaty to be heard and loved despite my indiscretions.
chapter seven
I’ll have no need of advice or scolding from anyone else ever again. Jane will provide me with all I require in these departments. Gillette I will work for. My parents I’ll depend on for the occasional bed and breakfast. Eliot I will call for help and venting, Fowler to satisfy wantonness and vain pursuit. Liselotte can pontificate into the future to Catherine, who will laugh back through the centuries at such earnestness as glorious men chase her through the fields of Provence. I am now seen to. I have a daughter who knows everything and will not be cowed by tawdriness.
“Mom, we have to talk.”
She stands dead center in the living room, full face to the culprit, with ample room for gesture on all sides, of which she makes good use. She and Daisy have recovered from their squealing reunion, and I have sunk into the cushions, trying to summon the hard edge I’ve been cultivating during my days away. It’s the sound of their unknowing love that undoes me, the sound of their unbreakable love.
“Isaac and Dad and I are really mad at you, Mom,” she declares. “We don’t understand how you can do what you did. And neither does anyone else.”
I don’t know why, but I look for vestiges of laughter, a smirk, an indication that she knows this speech is somehow the wrong one.
“Who else?” I ask.
“Only everyone. Adrienne, Kirsten, the kids at camp, the counselors, Grandpa, Grandma. God, Mom, it’s horrible.”
“What’s horrible?” I need to know what she knows.
“What you did!”
“What did I do?”
“You slept with that man. Which means you’re a slut. That’s what a slut does, Mom.”
She takes no delight in assigning me this term, although I do note her pride in knowing it. It’s the pride one takes in a new authority, one that has been earned.
I wait a minute, for our minds to leap over details.
“Do you know who the man is?”
“Yes, I know who the man is,” she spits, in vicious mimicry. “He’s Isaac’s dad, and because of him, my dad has to stay in a hotel and Isaac isn’t going to live here anymore.”
It is frightening to me that she doesn’t think to cry as she announces these things, that she’s resigned to them. I keep calm for her, and for Daisy, who’s begging Jane, arms outstretched, for more relief from the floor.
“Where is Isaac going
to live?” I ask.
“Like you care!” she shouts, at the same time shielding Daisy’s ears from the volume.
“I do care, Jane. Now tell me where he’s gone.”
“He went to stay with a guy from camp, another counselor. He says he doesn’t want to see you anymore.”
“Do you know the counselor’s name?”
“Of course I know his name. I have to know his name. He’s my counselor! But why should I tell you? You decided to go live with someone else too. Why shouldn’t Isaac?”
“I was staying at Grandma’s, Jane,” I say, “except for one night when I didn’t. When I was a slut, as you would say.”
“Only one night? Did he dump you too?”
I know who’s talking here. It’s not my daughter. It’s Adrienne. I have never been able to understand how a mouthy kid like Adrienne could be the product of a dullard like Ted and the heretofore subtle and respectable Kirsten.
“Would you care to tell me anything else that Adrienne has decided about me?”
She does what any eight-year-old forty-year-old would do in response to a threat. She tromps upstairs and slams her door behind her. Daisy howls.
I pick her up and offer standard solace: “It’s all right. Jane’s just mad at Mommy.”
“Yes,” Daisy sobs.
We end up at Jane’s door, gently knocking, getting obstinate silence from within. I ply her with questions:
“Did Daddy say where he’d be tonight?”
“Should I try him over at Kirsten’s?”
“Are you all right?”
“Do you want some dinner?”
“Can I come in?”
Then I hear the weeping. Deep sniffs, a high, faint whine in between. And I just barge. I’m allowed. I’m her mother. I’m allowed to do what I’ve always done to help her through whatever. I say this to Jane.
“But you did it!” she moans. “You made all of us so sad! We’re never going to be a family again!”
I’m on her bed with my back against a poster of Bon Jovi looking pained, practically eating the microphone. “That’s monstrous,” I tell her. “We’ll always be a family. Even when someone does something awful, they’re still part of a family, and the family has to know that.”
“But you can’t live here any more!” she wails.
I swallow this, unsure of its origin, hopeful that she has made it up in an attempt to order this chaos.
“I can too,” I counter. “And I will.”
“But where’s Daddy going to live?”
I hang on to her, all of us staring into the amazingly tidy center of her room, the only space of it that isn’t cluttered with something pink or black to wear, pack things in, or plug in.
“I can’t answer that,” I say. “Maybe here. But we don’t know until we see how everyone feels after a while. May I tell you some things that I do know?”
She nods permission. Daisy’s busy in the jewelry box, and the fact that Jane’s done nothing to stop her is proof positive that things have never been worse for her.
“Sometimes grown-ups get just as mad and bewildered and afraid and out of line as children. It’s not a good thing, but it happens. I’m not happy about what I did, but I did it, and I’ve got to keep on living despite it. I went and saw Isaac’s dad, and I realized I still love him a little.”
I stop here to wait for censure, screaming, excoriation. But she’s just looking at me. I’m relieved to know that the sound of my voice, when it’s level, blankets her, shields her from her own fury, and that when she lets this happen she has ceased to deny me.
“He left so soon after Isaac was born that I didn’t have time to know it was over, and it really wasn’t. And when I saw him I didn’t think very hard about what I was doing. I was so overwhelmed. He made such a big impression. It doesn’t have a lot to do with Daddy. It’s very old news.”
“Adrienne says you slept with him.”
I save what I have to say about Adrienne, except for “She’s right. I did.”
“That’s a bad thing to do when you’re already married, Mom.”
“Yes, it is.”
“So,” she says, shifting away from our close hold, “does this mean you don’t love Daddy anymore?”
“No,” I tell her. “It doesn’t mean that at all. It means that I have to do a lot of thinking to try and figure out how to resolve the problem I’ve created. Your dad’s very angry with me, and he has reason to be. But I think I must have been a little angry with him too. We haven’t paid too much attention to each other lately. That happens to people in families. You get so used to having everyone around you don’t think you have to worry about them any more, and I think that’s happened to us. I’ve stopped worrying about him, and he’s stopped worrying about me. And I was the more careless.”
“Where’s Isaac’s dad?”
“In an apartment in the city.”
“Are you going back there?”
“I don’t know. I’m not going to stay there, if that’s what you mean.”
“Is he coming to see Isaac?”
“I’ll have to talk to Isaac about that.”
She looks at her bedspread, pink and yellow diamonds laid edge to edge, hand-sewn by Simon’s mother.
“Do all families have things like this happen?” she begs to know.
I hold her hands. “No. But all families have things happen to them.”
This seems to satisfy Jane’s need for logic, and she agrees to dinner, so the three of us go downstairs. Daisy makes the preparations easy by asking to go in her travel crib. We fix a cheese and onion omelette. Jane cracks the eggs and grates the cheese, and I do the sautéing and tend to the omelette’s edges with a butter knife, then fold it when it’s firm and slide it onto a plate. Daisy has passed out in a sitting position in the corner of the travel crib. We set the table for two.
“Our family’s getting smaller,” Jane remarks.
“I don’t know about that.” To me, the opposite seems to be true. People leaving for separate sleeping posts is something I grew up with, and our house is still standing, still central. And perhaps this thing with Fowler won’t do to us what convention would have us believe.
“I want you to meet Jim,” I say.
“Why? I don’t want to.”
“Because he’s Isaac’s father and part of who I am.”
I hate talking like this, particularly to Jane. Solid truth has a hollow ring sometimes, an unwelcome earnestness; like a candid expression of love, such truth is ill received by people who are sharp and looking for pretense, even when they’re children. But again she surprises me.
“Okay, Mom. Whatever you say. But if you ever make me choose who to live with, you or Daddy, I’m going with Daddy. Because he’s alone, and that’s not fair.”
I want to tell her that’s a choice she won’t have to make, that she’ll be with both of us. I want to tell her that I’m alone too, that Fowler is, as always, an impossibility lingering on the periphery. But these things, if said, will only lead to more argument.
“How’s your omelette?” I ask her.
“Fine. It’s not runny.”
After dinner we go driving. I have to find some more things out. Isaac would be proud of me now, if not for Fowler. I’ve “chilled,” as he’d say. I’m the sleek mother of three, wearing probable loss with considerable aplomb. The gas tank is full. Daisy’s got Cheese Nips for dinner in the back, and Jane’s wearing Adrienne’s Vuamets, a sympathy loan, to cover up signs of weeping. We’re cruising to Classic Rock, which is to say, the music of my generation. The girls like it, and so do I. My appreciation of this music, as I recall, is the first thing I horrified my father with. Mother just listened and understood it as another form of good-bye.
“We’re stopping at Adrienne’s,” I tell Jane. “Please stay in the car. I just want to ask her mom if she knows where Isaac is.”
“Okay,” says Jane, too taken with herself in sunglasses, with Clapton’s wailing, to object.
>
• • •
I park behind the Jeep at 7:30, a civilized hour for visiting in this community, as it is postprandial, a time when all has been shoved into the dishwasher and the older family members have a moment to inspect a troublesome corner of the garden or the editorial page. I find Kirsten and Ted sitting at the glass table outdoors, both reading the paper. Adrienne and her younger brother, Garrison, are visible through the bay window, immobile in front of the TV.
“Oh, hi there,” says Ted, springing up when he sees me.
We call him the Hidy-Ho Man at our house.
“You’re alone?” she says. He begins to fidget verbally about iced tea or a beer, or something stronger?
“Panic not,” I say. “The girls are in the car. We’re in search of the third. Any clues?”
“I heard from Adrienne,” Kirsten says, managing to sound bored even about this, “that he’s been hanging around with Garland, who’re terribly nice in the end. But Simon was beside himself about it, the sticky wicket being that Garland’s gay. He’s got a man living with him.”
“Do we know where he lives?” I ask.
“It’s on the camp list. A building over by the river. I wouldn’t worry. Adrienne says he’s a nursery school teacher during the year. She doesn’t think he’s after Isaac.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” I say, looking at Ted. He’s been bobbing up and down for some time now, stopping momentarily when the gay issue cropped up.
“I’ll get the camp list,” Ted says, and lopes inside.
“Are you all right?” Kirsten says. Weary, is what I’m getting from her. Not at all the demeanor of a woman in love.
“Fine. You?”
“The same. Drop over tomorrow. I just can’t concentrate at this hour. It’s been a wiggy week. I almost perished of overhearing Adrienne’s counsel to your daughter. How’s the little fatty?”
“Divine.”
Ted’s back with a Post-it bearing an address and phone number.
“Whatever we can do,” he says, attempting to be doleful.
Every Day Page 12
