“But two Daves,” I said. “It would be confusing. You know?”
Lowering her voice, she said, “There are things you need to know, and things I need to tell you.” She said she and the phone company were working on discovering who was listening in on her calls: someone was patching in. Abruptly she said, “How long do you think they’ll walk? How much time do we have?”
I said maybe they’d walk around the block, or maybe down to the canal. We worked on the dishes and she described, at great length, the trouble she had with dogs going to the bathroom in her yard. She’d put up a sign, but it had been stolen. Then she said, “What about the boys’ mother? Is she in the picture? Does she accept or reject you?”
Dave didn’t want me to tell this story. But I wanted to tell it. I wanted her closer to me, so much closer. If I told her Dave’s secrets, I felt we would have a real conversation, something meaningful we could exchange between us.
I said, “We should sit down.” I turned off the water.
“Uh-oh,” she said. She ran to the table and slung herself into her chair, leaned forward on her elbows. I sat across from her.
“He had to put the boys first, you have to understand, Mom. He would have never left his wife, their mom, if it wasn’t what was best for the kids.” I left out the two subsequent marriages. I wanted the story to knit us together, yes, but with comfortable, loose loops. We didn’t need to choke.
“I admire that,” she said, nodding seriously, stirring her cold coffee with her finger. “I like midwestern men. I really do.” She licked her finger. She held it there before her lips. “I’ve always thought death would be better for children than divorce.”
“She’s not dead,” I said.
My mother looked disappointed.
I told her everything I knew. Almost everything. Once I got started, I couldn’t stop. My mother leaned in, listened closely, nodded supportively. How Dave’s wife got sick after they got married, and worsened after the boys were born. The terrible episodes of psychosis the pregnancies had triggered, the hospitalizations, how hard it had been for her to care for the boys when she came home. I told how Dave found out her parents had known she’d had serious mental illness—chronic undifferentiated paranoid schizophrenia—and kept it from him.
“Oh, heavens,” Mom said. “They palmed her off!”
I said, “He really is a great guy.”
This was going well, for the most part, I thought. This was so much better than at Fred’s. I told her how Sarah was convinced that her mother had been buried alive. She set up camp at the graveside, certain she could hear her mother’s muffled screams; they’d take her away and she’d find her way back. She could not believe her mother was dead.
My mother was horrified and rapt, and I went on in great detail: the faith healers, the demon exorcism—how Sarah’s father, though a successful doctor, didn’t believe in mental illness or treatment or medication, because of the religion he and his people practiced. They were descendants of the nineteenth-century Dutch immigrants who’d founded a tiny Christian enclave a couple hours west of Detroit. In isolation is our strength was their motto. The joke was that they were the only group in the history of the world to flee religious tolerance.
I left out parts too. The custody battles and legal issues, the financial devastation, the trailer park fire. Dave had taken the boys to another town, then to his mother’s. I simply explained how good Dave was. He’d fought hard to raise the boys on his own, to keep them safe. Her family, it seemed, had consistently refused to believe anything was wrong with Sarah. They blamed Dave. He should go to church. He should not speak of mental illness.
“Almost cultlike!” Mom said. “Heather, by the way,” she said abruptly. “Can I get your help with ideas for window treatments? I am stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck!” She patted at her head with both hands. “I’d so wanted to have this addressed before you came down. Can I pay you for your advice? You are so good with these things. I think you should become a home decorator! I do!”
“Window treatments?”
“I’ll pay you. A consultant’s fee.” She grabbed her purse from the chair beside her and dug out her checkbook. “How much do ya charge?” she said, affecting a western cowgirl accent. “Name your price.”
I went over to the windows in the Florida room. Blankets were looped over the curtain rods. Blue calico curtains hung under the rods, and behind the curtains the windows were shuttered tight.
The boys came back. In her silvery “Company’s here!” voice my mother said if the boys helped dry dishes, we could have an ice cream party. I gave her a little hug and said thank you. She froze, grimaced.
I needed a little air.
In the driveway, breathing in the scent of jasmine, camellias, grass, my head cleared. I felt like I was inside a bottle of perfume: small, romantic, and good. Fred’s house was another land. Mom’s house was better. Mom was okay. Barefoot, I walked down to the street.
It was a lot for her. I’d fast-forwarded my life, collecting a man with older children. She hadn’t had time to get used to things. Tomorrow would be smoother: we’d all be used to each other.
At the canal, I sat on the cement wall. The purple-green water sparkled in the starlight and streetlight. It felt cooling and soothing on my feet. I’d never been afraid of snakes or gators or dark water. I lowered my legs, up to my knees. It felt as though I were erasing, dissolving, inch by inch. It felt fabulous.
When I got back to my mother’s, Dave was standing at the edge of her driveway, furrowing, looking up and down the street for me. I ran up and hugged him, hard. I whispered, “I just needed air. Sorry. Everything okay?”
Dave said there’d been a change in plans, that I shouldn’t get upset.
I looked at the car and saw the backs of the boys’ heads in the backseat. “Where is she?” I said. “What’s going on?”
My mom appeared on the stoop under the yellow lightbulb, apron on, arms crossed. She looked bigger somehow—not just bones and air, like before, but as though there was metal in her, rods. Two words popped into my head: mean streak.
She said, “Dave, could I have just a moment alone with my daughter?”
“Of course,” he said, at the same instant I said, “No.” We walked up to the stoop. We were back where we started.
Dave made a stiff, partial bow. He jangled the car keys. My mother drew back, pressed herself against the front door.
I grabbed Dave’s hand. “You can talk to both of us.”
“Heather,” my mother said. She stood as she had been, arms crossed, fierce, steady.
“Mother,” I said.
“Before,” she said, “I could look the other way. You understand. But now that there are children involved, I’m not going to be able to condone your lifestyle anymore.”
“He’s standing right here!” I said.
Dave put his arms around me and whispered into my ear, “I’m going to go ahead and sit in the car, sweetheart, while you and your mother talk, and it’s okay, okay, it’s all okay.” He squeezed my arm. He told my mother it was very nice to meet her and she thanked him for understanding, as though the two of them were together on a higher plane.
I’d been gone for, what, ten minutes? What had happened in there?
“I told Dave I will pay for a room at the Jamaica Palms,” my mother was saying. “Can’t we just have a nice time together? Please? I have looked forward to your coming for so long! But honey, I can’t have your lifestyle in my house. I wasn’t raised like that. I didn’t raise you to flaunt—”
The Jamaica Palms motel was next to the razed gas station. The rooms were rented by the hour, had been for years. The pool was filled with trash bags and broken glass.
“I told them you wanted to be a grandma. I told them you love kids.”
“I wish people would stop using that word!” She clasped her gray, veiny hands to her ears. “I can’t take this!”
Dave drove us to another gas station. He sent the boys in
for candy. The two of us agreed that Dave should take the boys back to Michigan. I cried. I wasn’t sad the boys were leaving; I was glad of that; it didn’t seem safe here for them. It was that I’d been so wrong, so profoundly confused.
We found rooms near the airport, at a brand-new hotel. It smelled acrid, like a cheap new toy. The boys spent half an hour going back and forth between our adjoining rooms, locking and unlocking the inner doors, then they headed for the pool with their dad, who took two tall beers and no towels. We’d all go to Disney in the morning. They would then fly home. I’d do my speech.
When they came in, I woke up but pretended to be sound asleep.
“You’re playing possum, honey, but that’s okay, you get your rest,” Dave whispered in my ear. “Go to sleep now. It’s safe and good here.” He stroked my back in long soothing stripes, using both hands. Sometimes, when I slept in a bed not my own, I woke up screaming, unsure of who I was, where I was, what had just happened. Now I rolled over and curved into him. I could feel his heart beating, his good breath.
In the morning, the boys didn’t want to wake up. Disney was for much younger children. Did they have to go? Yes, I said. We needed to do one fun thing while we were here, or I’d feel too awful. Dave shaved, showered, and ironed his pants. He ironed for all occasions.
We drove out to Disney. The highway out there passed a trailer park where I’d once lived with my dad, then a duplex of cement blocks, painted brown, that we’d rented for a while, and my old junior high. I kept quiet about these places. I pretended I didn’t recognize anything. I stopped saying everything had changed. This part of town hadn’t at all.
“Heather. Now, here’s how you make a fist,” Jacob said out of the blue. “No. No. That’s a terrible fist.”
I tried again. I tucked my fingers into themselves, and rolled them into my palm tightly, so I was clawing myself inside my fist.
“You are going to end up with broken hands.” Jacob’s massive hands curled into themselves. He unpeeled my fingers. “You are not protected at all. You’re very vulnerable.” He handed back my hand. He leaned over the seat, hung there, looking at me hard. “Do you want to die?”
“No,” I said. “I must live.”
An hour later, Jacob and I were draped on a bench across from the long, snaking line of people outside of what he called The Swamp Ride, hot, sweaty, tired, and cranky. Dave and Junior were in line for Space Mountain, or maybe by now riding it: Who knew? Jacob hated rides. Dave hated how costly the food was. Junior hated the lines. The whole place was for six-year-olds, he said.
“Do you read me?” Jacob said into his walkie-talkie. Feedback bristled into the echo. His leg hairs grazed my leg.
“Ten-four,” I said. “Over.” We were wasting the batteries big-time. We were burning up time and battery power and we were melting.
“Dad really is a ninja,” he said, out of the blue, confidently robotic. And I agreed. Dad was a crafty, sly ninja.
Disney was ten degrees hotter than Orlando, and everything had changed. The flower shop where I’d worked was gone completely. Toys and Dolls, where I’d stocked Madame Alexanders and giant Poohs, was now high-end electronics.
“You’re breaking up,” Jacob said. “You’re breaking up. I’m going! Down!” He plunged from the bench to the red concrete and seized up, lying on his back, flailing on the concrete. He did this sometimes, as a joke. He was ten. It was hard to remember, because he was so tall and his hands and feet were so enormous. The Dutch were a big people. “Wha-a-a-z-zup!” he chortled on the sidewalk, convulsing in a dying way.
A group of pale wide tourists approached with a phalanx of strollers. Jacob didn’t move. He lay at my feet and the stroller babies peered down at him, agape, drooling, like he was the most glorious aspect of Disney thus far.
The largest man, in a Tigger ball cap, said, “Can we ask your mom to take our picture, buddy?”
Jacob shrugged and closed his eyes. “Whaz-z-u-u-p.” He waggled his tongue and shook his hands, thumb and pinkie out, loose fists, crazy. The tourists waggled away and still Jacob didn’t get up off the sidewalk. “It’s going to take the rest of the day to find our car again. Don’t we have to get to the airport like kind of soonish?”
I gave him five bucks to get a Coke.
And that’s when I lost him. He didn’t come back. I waited for fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour. It seemed endless. And then I did everything wrong. I left the scene. I did not make a grid. I wept. I worried and I walked in circles, spotting one Jacob after another—none of whom recognized me—while an endless loop of “It’s a Small World” played in my head.
I needed to regroup. Then I’d make my way to security and fill out the forms. I’d guided weepy, terror-stricken people through the Lost Child Process many times, when I’d worked here. A man was sitting on a bench in Tomorrowland, in the one spot of shade in all the Magic Kingdom. There looked to be plenty of room for me.
I tried the boys again on the walkie-talkie.
“Hey, sweetheart,” the man on the bench said. “There you are.”
I jumped back, dropped the radio.
It was Dave. I yelled at him. Where had he gone? I had lost Jacob! He pulled me to him. Everything was fine.
“We’re up here,” Junior said, and there they both were, Junior and Jacob, hanging like giant zoo animals in the fake tree above our heads.
Dave hugged me, hard. He smelled like sun and peaches.
“She looked right at me. She looked right at me,” Jacob said. “I was all like, ‘Follow me,’ and you saw, Heather. You looked right at me. You were right with me!”
“I didn’t see,” I said.
I changed clothes for my talk in the parking lot. I crouched behind the dumpster and slipped on my fuchsia floral Betsey Johnson skirt, the most expensive skirt I’d ever bought: three figures and not on sale. I saved it just for giving readings. It had a lace-trimmed flounce around the hem and an easy elastic waist. The skirt sashayed from adorably sexy to comfortable and forgiving in one fell swoosh.
I would like to have been, as a person, more like this skirt.
I put on eye shadow and bright pink lipstick, then brushed my hair in the side-view mirror, pulling wild front hunks back with a barrette and blanketing the unruly rear central zone with a swath of straighter, more compliant front-zone hair.
As I stood up and hitched my skirt and pressed the top to my skin, I suddenly had a strange sinking feeling that the clothes weren’t going to stay on. They felt slippery, see-through.
Up sailed a perfectly manicured woman with a cap of sleek ash hair. Lula Mae was on her large name tag, perfectly positioned on the breast of a crisp green linen suit. Lula Mae was a manicured lawn.
“Hey, Heather!” Lula Mae called, as though we were on opposite shores, and Estelle, name-tagged, leggy, a strong kind of pretty, sailed up right next to us. “Hey, girl, you made it!” Estelle handed me an envelope, my check. I loved conferences, festivals of labeled strangers
“You are our most requested speaker ever,” Lula Mae said as we scooted across the lawn.
“Last year you were so great,” Estelle said. “Just so great. Are you going to get frisky up there again?”
I didn’t know if this was a warning or a request. I confided that the reason I was late was my mom. I wasn’t sure how much longer she could live on her own.
“It can come on fast,” Estelle said. We paused, and she took my arm and held it gently, like you would a small wildcat. I let my arm be in her arms.
“We just put my mom in a place,” Lula Mae said. “Hardest day of my life. Hardest day of my entire life, let me tell you.”
“What place?” I said. She said she’d give me the numbers: her lawyer, the place, a great social worker.
“And here’s your friend Joe,” Estelle said. “I’ll let you say hello.”
Joe gave me a good clean hug.
“Is your hair different?” I asked him. He said no. “Is something different?” I noti
ced my southern accent had returned.
Joe ushered me into the auditorium. A tiny white-haired woman who looked exactly like my mother—white pants, blue linen shirt—scooted down the corridor, looking scared and eager to please and polite. It was my mother. I couldn’t believe she’d found out about the speech. I was happy to see her, and terrified too. Perhaps she’d gone through my briefcase. She often said, “I’m not one to go through people’s things!” It made me think, the way she said it, that she went through people’s things all the time.
I braced myself to introduce her to Joe, but she walked right on past us. It was not my mother. I could tell from the way she walked away: she had my mother’s head, but not her back or her gait. A group of other women welcomed her into their circle in the back of the room, by the coffee station, breaking instantly into a wave of warm kind laughter. She was a sturdier woman than my mother had ever been, with wide shoulders, with friends.
I read from one of the stories in my new book.
When I’d first written and published the stories, I told everyone they were autobiographical. The mother was difficult and overbearing, the daughter clever and thwarted, bent on rescuing the troubled brother. And until this moment, on this day in Winter Park, with Lula Mae smiling and nodding in the back by the doors, I’d thought this was true. As I read now, however, it seemed as though the story had been written by a different person, about people I never knew, people who were nothing like the parents I had just seen through the eyes of Dave and the boys. How could I have thought this was autobiographical? I ended the reading early, stopping in mid-paragraph after about ten minutes.
The first question was from a man at a front table.
“Are these stories autobiographical?” He’d stood up to speak and he remained standing. “I read a review that said this is autobiographical. And that’s the trend, I know. But these people—this strains at our belief. There are dysfunctional families. But there isn’t anything like this. This strains credibility.”
You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know Page 4
