by Jamie Mason
“Don’t be surprised if Paul tries to get you to come work for him one day,” she’d said. “He’s got his eye on you because of this crazy idea he has that there’s some sort of premium pedigree for his shenanigans. He thinks that since he was looking for my uncle when he found me, it somehow works around, in his mind anyway, to believing that it’s in the blood.”
Paul had already approached me twice, once directly and once obliquely, but I’d ignored him both times all the way down to not even mentioning it to my mother.
“Nah, he wouldn’t want me,” I said. “I’m no good with languages.”
She studied me with a tight smile. “Right. Though I don’t recall you ever studying a language.”
“I took Latin.” I busied myself with straightening the salt and pepper shakers against the napkin holder.
“Right,” she said again. “Latin.”
“Besides, are you saying that I shouldn’t follow in your footsteps? What’s wrong with working for Paul? It seems to pay nicely, and no matter what happened, you were never in a serious hurry to leave it all behind.” I risked a quick look up to see if the conversation was still on the lighter side.
“Paul and I had a deal. After the Long Trip, I said I’d stay and I stayed. High jinks ensued,” she said with an admirably straight face. “Anyway, all I’m saying is that if you ever do go that way, don’t let them make you think it was your idea if it wasn’t. That you will resent. But don’t ask me how I know that. Anyway, I suppose there’s still plenty of time for you to learn some undead languages if you wanted to.” She winked at me.
• • •
Our little Vess cabal had always danced over and around the notion of marital commitment. My mother enjoyed male companionship, always presenting it as a positive thing without confusing the issue by defining it as a necessary pillar of permanence in our lives. She dissolved her every partnership over the years with firm kindness, until Simon and I learned not to attach more than mild friendship to each carefully vetted man who came and would eventually go.
She teased us, and her suitors, that she could never get married again, obviously, since her left hand was down by two fingers and there wasn’t any place to hang a ring. My resolve to persist with Patrick felt almost secessionist in my family’s established patterns. Mother didn’t. Simon didn’t. Then I went and did.
I’d thought of it as a character flaw in her, a rare inability. I saw it, like her hand, as a forgivable deformity through some injury that maybe our father had dealt her. I wondered if perhaps in her travels there might have been some hurts I didn’t know of, losses that had sentenced her romantic heart to solitary confinement.
I knew my mother didn’t trust love.
She’d kept the last name Vess but unmoored her life (and ours) from the man himself, Jonas Vess, when Simon was still a baby. She explained, when I was old enough, that she’d delivered an ultimatum and that he had wasted little time in trampling all over the line she’d put in the sand.
The rift had to do with his drinking, which in turn had something to do with his poorly managed dissatisfaction over being occasionally left at home as a househusband in a time when that sort of thing was less than fashionable and more than odd. My mother traveled much less once we were born, but still more than could go without notice from the nosier neighbors. She had trusted her husband’s discretion.
When she’d been confronted by the tipsy Tupperware lady at a block party with a smile and a nudge and a “What have you been up to, Mata Hari? Jonas says it’s all very hush-hush,” the match hit the kindling.
His intemperance was incompatible with her obligations, both her contractual need for control and her instinctive one. When she deemed me ready for the whole story, I took away a decidedly good-news/bad-news interpretation of the facts. My mother was extremely protective of us, and I basked in the safe perimeter of her fierce glow. On the other hand, I didn’t know the word intractable at the time, but I did know what it looked like: my mother, dry-eyed, rescinding her love and closing the door in my father’s defeated face. And never a tear shed over it, that I had ever seen.
We saw him only twice more before I started school and then nothing but the occasional letter after that. He did what divorced men did in those days. Starting over most often meant starting all the way over, as if the other life and the starter family hadn’t happened. I knew several kids who saw their dads on weekends and maybe for a few weeks in the summer, but I knew just as many whose fathers were a birthday card with cash in it and a single present in the mail at Christmas.
Jonas Vess died of lung cancer before the surge of the Internet. The absence of his digital footprint made him seem less real to me than even the vagueness of my impressions of him: the cactus scratch of his bearded face against my cheek, the taste of red rope licorice that he bought for me in the grocery store, his pitch-perfect whistling in the garage, in the yard, in the kitchen . . .
When she had told me that she’d struck a deal with Paul Rowland to stay on as both his hammer and nail, I knew it had something to do with Aunt Marie. My mother had seemed resolved to be rid of Paul and his erratic, wall-dinging business when she first returned from the Long Trip. She avoided him when she could and firmly distanced herself with the coldest of shoulders when she couldn’t. But I overheard hints of tears and snippets of conversation in her first weeks back, on the telephone or in the living room with her sister, until ultimately, my mother wedged herself between Marie and whatever had happened while my mother was away.
Paul and Marie played house during those months that my mother was gone, while Simon and I were quasi-in-her-care. At first, Paul had come over regularly to deliver messages from our mother. He brought news and assurances of her safety in the days that turned into weeks and months. Eventually, he sort of never left.
Aunt Marie was the pretty one. Annette was the younger sister and was certainly no mountain troll, but Marie had every physical gift that my mother owned, only slightly Snow White–er. At the crossroads of our need and her availability, when my mother was called away, Marie was divorced with a son in college, who had fallen estranged by the law of tough love.
My cousin, Justin, had found that he was even better at being the life of the party than he was at chemistry and biology. The funds for his tuition and books burned like straw in pursuit of beer to chug and white powder to whisk up his nose. And he was generous with his vices to an extra fault. His no-account friends warmed their party at the bonfire of Justin’s money and good sense, and the situation went from a concern to a disaster in record time. Marie had cut him off financially, and he never called her except to wheedle her into a change of heart and out of some cash, only to break that heart with the vow to never call her again when she said no.
At the time of my mother’s Long Trip, Marie was depressed and anxious—and also anxious over being depressed, because the most basic things in her life weren’t getting done when she couldn’t find a reason to get out of bed in the mornings. Her sick leave from work dried up, her checking-account balance fell to overdrawn, and her pantry was full of out-of-date condiments and not much to eat.
Then my mother needed her in a flurry of dramatic emergency and hasty exit, and Paul, the standard-bearer of my mother’s much more glamorous troubles, was an intriguing distraction for Marie.
His attraction to her was both nuanced and obvious. Even at thirteen years old, I saw that Paul’s control over my mother had its gaps, and that those unbridgeable ravines bothered him. If he looked at it sideways, sex and affection with Annette’s look-alike could rough in a more complete illusion that he owned full jurisdiction over his protégé’s kingdom.
And all of that might not have been a fair appraisal of Paul’s motives and Marie’s weaknesses, even though it was probably the state of things. Whatever else it was, it could still have been true love also.
Either way, my mother wasn’t having it.
Aunt Marie had lived only a few miles away from our house.
For the duration of my mother’s trip, she stayed most of the nights with us, but she never technically moved in. She launched her workdays from her own place, getting ready for the office from her own shower and closet after seeing Simon and me off on the bus.
I knew that Paul had a key to Marie’s house. He also had the good sense not to make a habit of being in my mother’s bed when Simon and I woke up. But there were signs he’d stayed over, sneaking in after our bedtime and ducking out before dawn. There were double glasses in the sink, or too many cigarettes in the ashtray, and often a sheltered dry patch on the driveway that would have been dew-soaked if a car hadn’t been parked there all night.
Marie lightened and brightened with purpose into the stretch of my mother’s absence. I wanted not to know why, but two obedient and well-groomed children to roll out as evidence of her decency and capability went a far ways to soothe her fear that she couldn’t do anything right. And a world-traveled lover to round out that picture, an image of achievement to cover over the hole of failure that she’d been staring into, was plenty reason enough to cradle the hope that it would last, if not forever, than for longer than the reach of her old melancholy. I’m sure Aunt Marie was relieved when we would get news of her sister that served as proof of life, but she wasn’t on fire to have my mother back either.
Whatever final terms my mother put on the table when she learned of their relationship, Paul chose them over Marie, who, of course, never forgave my mother. Marie remarried within a year after a whirlwind romance, then relocated to the West Coast with her new husband, who was little more than a stranger to her, and died with him at her side behind the wheel in a drunken confrontation with a hundred-year-old oak tree without ever reconciling with her sister or her son.
With Paul, after Marie left, my mother’s methods became both harder and more gentle. She teased him less, but thanked him more. The field had leveled in some way that made them more colleagues than what they had been before—more allies afterward than the conductor with his first-chair musician. For the rest of her life, Paul asked instead of ordered, and my mother briefed him in lieu of what had always been dutiful reporting.
When the call came in of Marie’s accident, my mother laid her head on her crossed arms atop her desk. She was there, motionless and silent, for so long that Simon and I, knowing somehow not to ask her yet what had happened, slipped from the room in perplexed unease.
She was still there more than an hour later when I peeked in. I felt her awake in the room and tested the air for an invitation to talk, but there was none.
I busied myself in the kitchen, thawing out leftover soup and making grilled cheese for our supper. Simon and I were done eating when she finally came in. She had showered and dressed in pajamas. We never saw her that way except on the occasional lazy Sunday morning and Christmas.
She opened a bottle of wine and poured a half glass and, much to my teenaged surprise, set it front of me. Then she poured another, smaller serving for Simon, and another glass that she drank deeply from and topped off immediately.
I will tell you this, my darlings, the very worst regrets are the things you couldn’t have handled any other way.
7
After graduation and our wedding, we had a quick year’s lease in an argument-size apartment. Then Patrick and I bought a sweet whitewash-over-brick bungalow in a transitional tract of houses at the cheaper end of the trendy part of town. In that stretch of road you could get away with being anything you cared to be. American dream as-you-like-it, custom-tailored and eclectic. And all judgments were kept on the down-low, behind closed doors. We were all friendly on the street side of our thresholds.
Our neighbors on the left, one yard closer to the artsy West End bustle, were a middle-aged couple too gorgeous and sophisticated not to have been invented by a screenwriter. He drove an electric car. She bicycled everywhere she couldn’t walk. They harvested rain in an artisanal-crafted barrel with a tree-of-life motif carved into its side. They watered their lawn from its bounty, and if we’d had enough weather and the barrel was full, they washed, too, their oversize roller skate with air bags and bucket seats. With sulfate-free soap, of course.
On the right we had a harried young couple with a cocker spaniel, a fat, smiling, squealing toddler, and another baby on the way. Down the street, one of the houses was painted purple. Across from the purple house was a gay couple, who played the best music. They ran it through their elaborate patio speakers loud enough that they might have drawn complaints if they hadn’t been so talented with their mixes. Every sunny day was brighter for their ear, and rain was scored with the perfect melancholy.
Patrick and I set about being average until we decided which way to play it. We got settled in, assigned our sides of the bed, and got used to the background noise of the other. We were home. Patrick worked long hours, angling for a quick rise to account manager in the country’s third-largest peddler of GPS technology. He pulled in nice bonuses and we spent them. Fun funds, we called it. I put bits of my good education to use in a midlevel position with a burgeoning firm that developed diet and fitness-management software. The bills were paid and we spent as we liked, sparing little thought to, and less action on, staking down what we already had.
“Want to go play house?” Patrick had said to me just after nudging the wedding band over my finger, smiling down at me. The minister had laughed. Everyone did. It sounded like a sitcom. The black lapels of his tuxedo lay smooth and crisp on his chest. He looked good. Very good. He’d rehearsed the line in the mirror. I could just imagine him doing it. He looked that day exactly as he’d decided a groom should look. The canned line was inorganic and scripted, but it was sweet, too. And it stuck.
Want to go play house? worked on many levels. It could be mumbled into the other’s ear with an ugh plugged in up front as the signal to start making our way toward the door of an event that had lost its shine. On the phone, matter-of-factly, it was Friday afternoon’s sign-off to the workweek. If it was said sadly with a sigh, we’d pack our swimsuits and shorts back into our suitcases and leave the beach for the real world.
Purred into the ear, it was surprising how sexy Wanna go play house? could sound. A silvery feather, warm breath and warm intent, would swirl a contrasting chill down my neck when Patrick would put the question on my skin. How could I say no? I always wanted to play house. I wanted that feather to tickle my mind quiet, only the sound of lips and sighs in the half-light, and murmurs of concentration completely divorced from thought.
But one day, it was a Saturday and raining, Patrick leaned in with a soft, intentioned mouth to give us something to do while we waited out the storm. He put his lips on the sweet spot at the turn of my jaw said, “Want to play house? I’ll be the daddy, you be the mommy.” I smirked into his kiss and found the tip of his tongue with mine. I didn’t answer him but my pulse banged in my ears.
Afterward, I pretended to doze while Patrick actually did.
The next day, we were at my mother’s. Patrick was cleaning her gutters. I was with her in the kitchen, layering berries over sponge cake in a trifle bowl.
“Hey.” I waited until she was turned away, busied at the far counter. “Did you always want to have kids?”
I heard her turn toward me, knowing that I looked too intent on getting the berries stacked in at just the right depth. “Is that where the talk is going these days?”
A quick, one-shouldered shrug let me keep working.
“Well, I don’t exactly know how to answer that. I wanted to have you, if that’s what you mean. You were planned down to the last detail. I had even decided that I’d be swinging with you, whoever you were, in the hammock in July.”
My birthday is July 19th.
My mother laughed. “I think I practically willed you into existence. Honestly, I don’t even know how much Jonas had to do with it. You were made of pure design and insistence. Simon, on the other hand, was a complete surprise. And with absolutely terrible timing. But what an adven
ture he turned out to be, yeah?”
“But you always knew you would have kids,” I said, instead of asking.
“I wouldn’t say that, no. What’s bothering you, Pluck?”
“Nothing.”
“Dee, are you and Patrick thinking about having a baby?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll tell you this, baby girl. Of course is the worst reason ever to have a baby. Better it be an accident then of course.”
• • •
For the longest time, nothing unusual or subtly sinister happened, and I found it much easier to enjoy my mother’s mysterious aura when I was well beyond its everyday reach. We grew close, she hemmed in as always by intrigue, and I in begonias and boxwood hedges, but we talked easily over our self-imposed fences.
A late-summer morning (it was a Sunday) in the month before Patrick’s and my sixth wedding anniversary, the phone rang as I was settling in with a crossword puzzle and a plate of fruit and sweet rolls. Patrick had left at dawn, much more serious about god-awful plaid pants and eighteen holes in the ground than he was about sleeping in late on the weekends.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Plucky. Do you have some time for me this morning?”
“Absolutely. When were you thinking of coming over?” Most of our visits went down on my turf, which was just the way I liked it.
“As it just happens, I’m in your driveway right now.”
I laughed and let her in. I didn’t laugh again for a long time. My mother had cancer chewing through her bones and drawing black scrawls over her lungs and liver. The doctors had set the line at a year, at the most. My mother had reset the line at whenever she felt her dignity slipping. She wanted me to be sure of her intent along with the news.
I begged instantly, and somewhat to my own surprise (and she relented far more easily than I expected), for her to sell her house and move in with us. We tended each other on the way to the end. I made sure she had no chores, no to-do lists. She retold me every story she’d ever shared. We redid the life we’d already had, with the same parameters except that I brought her food instead of the other way around. Once more, for old times’ sake, we traced over our steps, to put the memory of us closer to the front of the file. We rewound and fast-forwarded—mother and daughter, tale-teller and audience, teacher and student. And we included Patrick, almost always, brokenhearted and brave in the face of it as he tried to be.
