But best of all?
Not only did she say “mama,” but she also said “dada.” So what if, as the book suggested, she was still doing it indiscriminately? So what if “mama” was sometimes the fuzzy bunny and “dada” was sometimes Christopher? Whenever she said the “dada” thing to Tolkien, I could see that it made his heart sing as much as mine.
July, the seventh month
My mother was coming for a visit.
She’d called early that Saturday morning, saying she wanted to stop by. To realize how strange this was, you have to know that in all the years I’d been living here, she’d never once said she wanted to stop by. If she asked to see me at all, it was always at some neutral zone, like David’s restaurant, where we could take up our opposite corners and come out fighting, where there would be other people standing by should the need to “break it up” arise. But she’d certainly never granted me home advantage before. Could it be that she wanted to talk some more with me about her relationship with Vic?
But that wasn’t it at all.
She came in like a whirlwind of motherhood, thrusting a wrapped package at me “for that baby,” sniffing at my decorating choices and demanding to use the bathroom right away.
When she emerged, every champagne tinted hair in place, a sapphire-blue summer frock pulled down neatly over her hips, it was apparent that whatever else she’d been doing in there—flush!—she’d also managed to take the time to note evidence of Tolkien: the second toothbrush, the shaving things, his bathing trunks drying over the shower rod.
“Who…?” she asked, not needing to say anything else.
“Tolkien,” I answered, not wanting to say more.
It was all too new, Tolkien moving in with me. I felt that were I to say too much about it to anyone, were I to betray my eagerness for this to the world, it would somehow jinx my dream.
“Is he…?” she asked.
“Not officially, at least we haven’t said anything formal about it yet, but he keeps a lot of his things here.”
And then she asked a strange thing; for my mother, that is. “And you’re happy about this?”
It seemed important to get the answer right. “I’m happy that he’s here,” I said. “I’m very happy about that.”
“I’ll never understand your life, Jane,” she said, and I could see where she would feel that way. Despite the way the rest of the world was currently spinning, I was the first Taylor woman to live with a man she wasn’t married to, living first with Trevor; and now, sort of, with Tolkien. Okay, so maybe Mum was living with Vic on the weekends, sometimes at his place and sometimes at hers, but I was the first Taylor woman to live with a man more or less full-time that she wasn’t married to.
I heard Emma stirring from her nap.
I went to get her, brought her out, got her something to drink, and rubbed her back until she burped.
“Can I get you something?” I called out to my mother from the kitchen, going through the cupboard to see what I had. “Raisins, perhaps?”
“Er, no, Jane, thank you.”
Emma shrugged. I shrugged.
“The baby’s gotten a lot bigger,” my mother observed, as Emma and I returned to the living room.
“Babies do that.”
“Here,” she said, picking up the present she’d brought from where I’d laid it down. “Open it,” she instructed Emma.
“She’s a bit young to be opening her own presents,” I pointed out. I moved to hand Emma plus bottle to my mother. “Why don’t you take her and I’ll open it?”
My mother drew back. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
But when my mother finally took her, she was all awkwardness. The way she was holding her, Emma’s feet were higher than her head.
“Here,” I said, adjusting Emma more properly on my mother’s lap. Then I looked at her. “Are you sure you’ve done this before?”
“Yes,” my mother replied icily. “With Sophie. And with you.”
“No matter,” I shrugged, noting that Emma had settled down. “Babies are incredibly forgiving creatures.”
“It’s only when they grow up to be people,” she pointed out, “that they suddenly remember every wrong you’ve ever done them and won’t let you forget.”
I knew that was meant for me, but I chose to ignore it. Why go down the road of recriminations now?
I tore open the wrapping on the box. “Look, Em! Look what Mum’s mummy brought you!” Of course, I hadn’t seen what was actually inside the box yet.
Inside the box were three items: a frilly dress big enough for a four-year-old; a doll that came with a tag clearly marked Warning! Small parts! Not for children under age 3; and a five-pound note, with a hand-scribbled note on it, “For ice cream.”
It took all of my will to hide my exasperation. I suppose she had tried her best. “She’ll enjoy these things when she gets older. Thanks.”
“Do you really think she’ll still be here then?” my mother asked.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s just that, I don’t think it pays to get your hopes up. I know from talking to Sophie that they’re still searching for her real mother.”
“Emma and I like to think I’m her real mother.”
“Yes, but…”
My mother was so stiff with Emma that I could see Emma starting to fuss. Quickly, I got the fuzzy bunny and offered it to my mother.
“Here,” I offered, smiling, “give this to her. She’ll be your best friend for life.”
My mother listened to me, for once, and like the magic that it always was the fuzzy bunny made Emma happy. In fact, Emma was so happy with my mother that she looked right at her, smiled and clapped.
“You never did say,” I asked my mother, “why is it you wanted to come see me today?”
But my mother wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Emma.
“Do I need an excuse?” she said. “I came because I wanted to see my granddaughter.”
Dodo was nervous about being interviewed by Stephen Triplecorn. She was so nervous, in fact, that she was wearing red—the color of power—to overcompensate.
“What are you nervous about?” I asked her. “I can understand why you’d have been nervous about Constance and Minerva, and we’ll still need to get through Stan and Louise down the road, but why ever would you be nervous about talking to him yourself? Surely, you must not have any worries that you’ll have to stop yourself from saying the wrong thing.”
“But that’s just it,” she fretted. “With the others, I have my radar up. I know some of them have it in for you—or, in Constance’s case, she’s just plain whacky and unpredictable and likely to put her foot wrong without there even being any malice whatsoever. When they’re involved, I don’t even think about it. I just play defense. They say something stupid, or something purposely destructive, and I deflect it. Sort of like Wimbledon without the net.”
“But how is this any different?”
“Because he’ll be asking me direct questions. You know me…if someone asks me a direct question, I can’t lie.”
“What will you do then?”
But Dodo had already stumbled on her solution. I could tell this by the sudden brightness of her eyes.
“I’ll ask him out on a date,” she said.
“A date?” Boy, that came out of the blue.
“Yes. I’ll invite him over to my place for dinner. Surely, even Social Services workers have to eat sometime.”
Tolkien, Emma and I were going to Tolkien’s parents’ house for a party.
Tolkien had finally told his parents that we were seeing each other again, that we were kind of living together, and that I now had a baby, which was technically true: he never said I’d had a baby, which would have been a lie, but simply that I now had a baby, as though I were a doll who’d suddenly been accessorized: “Get the Crazy Jane Doll! Now with real live baby!” He’d also told them the baby wasn’t his. His parents, bein
g the people they were, had said not a single judgmental thing to him, one way or the other. Of course, this was the first time I’d be seeing them since before Tolkien and I had broken up and I was naturally nervous about how they’d receive me, the woman who had broken their son’s heart once already—plus, this was the first time they’d be meeting Em.
Back in their hippie days, Tolkien’s parents had been known as Elrond and Galadriel. Since then, they’d made a fortune in the bond market and retired from it, and they now went by their original names of Ron and Claire John. While Tolkien had originally been Donald John, just because his parents had switched, they’d seen no reason to expect their grown son to change his name back, so he was still Tolkien Donald.
Got that? And see? I told you before not to ask.
I’d been to their estate once before, when Tolkien and I had been dating the first time around. At the time, I hadn’t seen much other than the entry way, the study where they’d served us drinks, the bathroom when I’d needed to pee. Now, for the first time, I got to see the rolling grounds of their estate up close.
There was a lot of rolling, I must say.
Tolkien had informed me that this was their annual Fourth of July party.
Not knowing how to put my question delicately, and failing, I’d asked, “Isn’t that, um, quirky?”
“That’s them all over,” he smiled. “Quirks.”
“But they’re British. Isn’t it strange to be celebrating America’s Independence?”
He shrugged. “Not to them it isn’t. They’ve got this thing about being good sports whenever you lose. They set off firecrackers at night and everything.”
“Do a lot of people come to these parties?”
“Oh, masses. Their friends are used to them, not that they agree with the principle, mind you, but it’s a fun time and the drinks are free.”
By the time we pulled up, the party was already in full swing. Everything—the grounds and the people—was rolling. And everyone was so…white.
Oh, I don’t mean they had no tans. I mean that, among the three hundred people there, Emma was the only one of a substantially different color.
It gave me an inkling of what might lie ahead in her future. I remembered being the only white person at Mary Sr.’s funeral and how odd that had felt. True, since I’d had Emma, there were the few times I’d had family and friends over, and Emma had been the only black person those times, too. But somehow, I hadn’t noticed it then. Maybe because it was our place, the place I shared with her, and so it was home. Maybe it was because it was fewer than a dozen people each time, and all of them were, if not necessarily close, people I was familiar with.
But this, this felt so outnumbered. And, growing up with me, with rare exception, it would always be like this for Emma.
Despite the midsummer heat I felt a chill and moved closer to Tolkien. But I didn’t have long to dwell on Emma’s future or the peculiarity of feeling cold in July, because…
“Jane! Tolkien! Baby!”
It was Claire, her hennaed hair in a chignon, floating at us through the separation in the crowd, looking like she wasn’t even attached to the ground. Ron was at her side, white hair flowing, moving the same way.
I was never quite sure whether the way they moved in such a moony, floaty way was some kind of holdover from their days of smoking too much dope or whether it was the acquired physical quirks of noblesse oblige in the nouveau riche, as if they’d gone to the moneyed people’s version of dog-grooming school or something…
“Baby! Tolkien! Jane!” said Ron.
“We’re so glad you could come,” Claire said.
It looked like I needn’t have worried about how they’d receive me. They were clearly tickled to see us all together.
“Oh, what a beautiful hobbit you have there,” said Ron, referring to Emma.
“Does she have furry feet?” Claire smiled.
Do you see what I mean about these people? “No, she—”
“We’re kidding, of course,” laughed Ron.
Claire chimed in, “It’s just that we remember when our Tolkien was just a little hobbit and we start to get all…”
“There, there,” said Ron. “Don’t cry, my dear. Our little hobbit has his own hobbit now and everything’s as it should be. Come on,” he added, “might as well meet the masses.”
It was an odd assortment of human beings, to say the least. Apparently, Ron and Claire, no matter where they’d gone in life, had never seen fit to discard anyone afterwards. Thus, there was their old hippie crowd, who were all themselves still hippies, though Claire and Ron no longer technically were, like the long-haired middle-aged women in all the tie-dye and the man they all referred to as Acid (“babies are like little human beings—way cool!”); there was the investment-days crowd, the men in suits, the women in summer dresses, spectator pumps and hats, as though waiting for the Queen’s garden party to start (“Do you think Emma’ll be a Cambridge or Oxford girl?”); there were the neighbors from their second home in Barcelona (“Niña habla espanol?”); and the extended John family, who repeatedly commented, one and all, “She doesn’t look much like Jane, but I do see a lot of Tolkien in her.”
This last perplexed me so much that with each repetition, I felt the exasperation inside me growing at an unreasonable rate, until finally, Ron said to one of the uncles, “I know. She has Tolkien’s ears,” to which I responded:
“What is wrong with you people? You do realize she’s black, don’t you?” Apparently, I shouted it loud enough to stop all the noise and the chatter and the band.
It just made me so crazy for some reason. In my world, with my family and friends—well, except for David and Christopher—Emma’s color was the first thing anyone ever remarked upon. But here, with these people, where there was only one of her and so many of them, they talked right around it, as if it didn’t exist. It was too confusing. Couldn’t the world make up its mind?
Claire looked at me, perplexed, as did everyone else, I might add.
“Of course we realize that,” she said, head slightly tilted to one side. “But what does it matter?”
“She’s your baby,” added Ron. “And you are with Tolkien…” He shrugged.
Everybody shrugged.
I felt like a complete arse.
“And she really does look more like Tolkien than you,” Claire pointed out. “Oh, not the coloring. After all, you have dark hair and his is much lighter.”
“It’s in the way she looks at people,” said Ron. “She looks at people in the same way that Tolkien looks at people.”
And somehow I knew exactly what he meant. What’s more, I knew that he was right.
Several hours later, while the fireworks exploded overhead, Tolkien kissed me as we sat on a blanket on his parents’ rolling lawn. They had pink fireworks and blue fireworks and green fireworks and they even had a fireworks of America’s Old Glory, which would have been odd on anyone else’s lawn and yet seemed perfectly right on theirs. I supposed they must be breaking all sorts of laws, and what laws they weren’t breaking, Acid was. But there was a cop on the premises and he didn’t seem to mind a bit.
He was too busy kissing me.
I had yet to talk to the author of Untitled.
For the past few weeks, I’d been deep into the editing of the work, making extensive revision notes against the day I might actually get to communicate my ideas with the author.
It’s not like Untitled was bad per se. I mean, I’d seen worse, which may sound like faint praise but went a long way towards making me feel not completely awful that we’d spent so much money on the book. And since we’d spent so much on it, we’d need to spend a ton of money to promote it, no matter how well or poorly written it was.
Now I’d reached the point where I simply couldn’t do any more work on it without a live body.
Feeling a bit frustrated, I phoned Simon Smock, hoping he’d be willing to finally set up a meet for me with the author, whose name I still
didn’t know. Even though I’d seen the signed contracts, the author’s signature looked like “Cake” to me and I was fairly certain that couldn’t be it.
Lucky for me, or so I thought, Simon was in. Although once I’d posed my request, his answer was a resounding “No.”
“No?”
“Is it the N you’re having trouble with or the O, Jane? No, I’m sorry but the author is not ready to meet with you yet. She has good cause to be shy of editors and she’s been working on her own revisions preparatory to any meetings.”
Great. Now the author was editing herself. Just what the hell had I been doing here these past few weeks?
“Oh,” was the best I could come up with.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Hmm?”
“Before, when you were first stumbling through your request, why did you keep referring to the author as ‘Cake’?”
Apparently, I’d been wrong. Grateful for the phone, I was glad he couldn’t see me blushing.
“Because the signature looked like that’s what it said?” Well, it had looked like that.
I heard him chuckle.
“Yes,” he said, “I can see where you might read it that way. Tell you what.”
“What?”
“She’s finally come up with a title for it.”
“She has?” We were finally making progress! “Great!”
“Yes.” Now I thought I heard a devilish smile. “She’s made an acronym from the names of the four main characters.”
I reviewed the four names from Untitled, which was soon to be titled, in my head: Layla, Ipanema, Sara and Twinkle. She’d named them all, I’d learned from Simon during a previous discussion, from women in song. Layla and Sara I could understand. But Ipanema struck me as sad: apparently, Anonymous didn’t get that the girl was from there; she thought she was Ipanema. As for Twinkle as in Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, that was easy to understand as well, for even I couldn’t think of a female name beginning with T that had been celebrated in song. But then, why hadn’t she just named her a name beginning with another letter, like Angie or Delilah?
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