Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  “I don’t understand what the Motts do think, frankly.” Ursula sighed. “What they plan to do. I wish I knew.”

  “I could ask Gilda,” said Ian, infuriating his mother with his offhand lack of personal involvement in the unfolding drama of decisions about life and death.

  “…I don’t think they have a cook,” Ursula was musing. “I think their person does a lot of the cooking, and Amy does some…” Ian realized with a start he had tuned his mother out.

  The Wednesday of the awkward dinner arrived in due course. Gilda seemed pleased but not excited, seemed to think it was perfectly normal that Ursula and Ian would be coming to dinner at her parents’—weren’t they now all connected in this surprising way? She asked what she should wear, an interest Amy noted was very uncharacteristic. “My same clothes? I haven’t changed sizes at all,” Gilda said.

  Ian drove his mother in her car—her respectable Mercedes—down the leafy lanes of Woodside; Ursula was bringing some chocolates, regretting the banality of this offering but couldn’t think of anything else for people who had everything. She instructed Ian to hand them to Amy. When they pulled in, Carla came out of the kitchen back door to wave them to where they should park, making them wonder if this was to be a dinner party with more people. Then she led them around to the front door and inside—at least not through the garage entrance. She took their jackets and the chocolates.

  Amy, Ran, and Gilda were in the living room, whose understated opulence—custom sofas, low glass tables, an important Jawlensky over the fireplace—Ursula had seen before but now noted with more interest. The living room opened into a garden room—they called it a lanai, in Hawaiian fashion—which in turn opened onto the garden. This was at a peak of bloom, a mass of hydrangeas and late poppies, roses, scents of basil and lavender reaching them in waves on the light breeze. Gilda was actually lovely, Ursula decided, like an illustration in a book of fairy tales. She had radiance—women often did when pregnant; that was it. Pregnancy could explain the faint chubbiness, or was it the normal chubbiness early teens often had? The late-afternoon sun behind her strange silver hair lit a corona around her head.

  “Come outside,” Amy invited. “We have peonies, they’re incredible this year.” Amy was proud of her peonies, which were not meant to do well in climate zone 9; the gardener, Mr. Nakamura, was a genius.

  “What will you drink?” Ran asked. Though it was a habit of Amy’s, learned from her French sojourn, to serve champagne before dinner, Ran had nixed it as too celebratory. Ian asked for a beer, and Ursula a scotch and soda. Carla went off to make the drinks.

  He is a wonderful-looking boy, Amy admitted to herself. Ran shuddered at the young man’s athletic body and pretty face, blond, with a shadow of gold whisker over his chin. The party trod a garden path or two, admiring the peonies, with Gilda hanging back to bring up the drinks Carla was concocting at the bamboo-bar affair in the lanai. Ian tried to catch Gilda’s eye, to give her a smile of sympathy and fellowship. She avoided his gaze. She didn’t look any fatter; she just looked the same.

  The Motts’ round dining table was a little too large for just five people. Ursula wondered how the family sat when just the three of them were eating together. As it was, five people seemed far from one another, increasing the Waspy, distant tone of the occasion: Ian and Gilda sat on one side, Ursula around next, Ran and Amy yet farther around, so that Amy and Ian were in a sense next to each other but still separated by a vast stretch of the table’s perimeter. There was a hot starter of scallops and grapes in hollandaise in individual shells, brought in by Carla, and a platter of chicken and a bowl of salad waiting on the sideboard. No extraordinary effort had gone into this, Ursula judged: a family meal. Was that good or bad?

  “One of Carla’s specialities,” Amy said of the scallops.

  “Wonderful,” Ursula said. In fact, eating the delicious substance, her mouth had begun to feel puckery. Was there something wrong with it? She reached for bread from the basket on the table; maybe some bread would stop the strange, warm tingling that coursed through her lips and tongue.

  “Do you follow the Forty-Niners? Stanford?” Ran was asking Ian, searching for something apart from saying, So you fucked my underage daughter.

  Ian, relieved by the fraternal tone, said, “I’ll be transferring to Stanford in the fall, so I guess I’ll be a Stanford fan—I’m basically a soccer player, but…” Exclamations of commendation greeted his Stanford news.

  “Amy and I went to Stanford,” Ran said, and was about to say, “We hope Gilda will be going there,” before he remembered how unlikely that would be now. But at least Ian was going to Stanford. In a stretch of silence, Ian looked at his mother for some conversational cue, but now noticed that her lips had swollen up to a bizarre and unfamiliar Ubangi dimension. “Mother?”

  Ursula was speaking but continued to feel an odd tingling. “Isn’t it wonderful? We’re so pleased. It’s still a matter of him taking a few makeup courses, things he hadn’t taken at Brown, but still a relief to hear he got in.” Ursula continued to feel the odd sensations but had no sense of anything exterior. Though she could hear that her words were coming out oddly damped down, as if she were speaking through the screen of a confessional, and her tongue was clumsy.

  “Mother, are you all right?”

  Now Ran also noticed the very pronounced swelling of Ursula’s lips and half rose from his chair to lean closer. “Ursula? Are you allergic to something? We keep some epinephrine in case the bees—with all the fucking flowers, we have bees…”

  Ursula touched her lips and felt their unfamiliar size. She did feel somewhat short of breath, too. Her throat—something was wrong. Ran was on his feet and left the dining room, coming back in a minute to ask Gilda if she knew where the EpiPen was. Gilda went to find it in the kitchen drawer where they kept it, close to the garden.

  Ursula felt the increasing constriction of her throat. The Motts were all cool in medical emergencies, apparently, but Ursula began to panic, and Ian was trying to urge her out of her chair toward the other room. As she sagged against the sofa, Ran bounded in, pulled up her skirt, and jabbed her thigh through her stocking with the EpiPen. Almost immediately her throat began to feel more open and she could breathe. She tried to smile at the anxious company through her hugely swollen lips.

  Ran thought, randomly, what were the odds somebody would have an EpiPen? Did Amy know how many people were allergic to shellfish? What would have happened if they hadn’t had epinephrine? Could he even do a tracheostomy anymore if he had to? They needed to take her to an ER.

  “We’ll use the one in Redwood City,” Ran said, “there’ll be less traffic.”

  “There’s roadwork on Alameda de las Pulgas,” Gilda said, looking at her iPhone. “Stanford would be faster.” They half carried Ursula out to the driveway and into her own car, which was parked nearer than Ran’s. Ian got behind the wheel. Ran went to get his car. Ursula began to protest that she was fine, and that she hardly knew what had come over her. As they drove off, leaving Gilda and Amy in the driveway, Gilda took a picture with her cell phone of Ian’s mother’s strange countenance.

  “Seafood allergies can come on at any time,” said Amy to Gilda. They both had noticed when her skirt was pulled up that Ursula was wearing stockings instead of tights, and a garter belt of blue lace and little ribbons where it attached to her stockings. Such an apparatus was familiar to Amy from French shopwindows, but Gilda had never seen a garter, let alone those suspender things, on a living person, only in comic books to denote bad women. Why didn’t Mrs. Aymes wear pantyhose like normal women?

  “Will she die?” Gilda asked, assuming not, but it was good the way Ian acted fast, her father, too. She admired Ian more and more. What with her girls’ school and lack of neighborhood playmates, she didn’t know that many men and boys, actually, just her father and one or two teachers.

  * * *

/>   —

  As she lay across the backseat of her car, Ursula’s mind accelerated as from a shot of speed, maybe from the infusion of shellfish toxins. It whirred with the energy of an idea that had been floating up to her conscious mind each morning upon waking for a couple of weeks, but which then dissipated with the concerns of the day. Now it was almost as solid as a conch; it had the thick plasticity of a living starfish, with motile tentacles that could reach out in several directions at once: her idea was that Ian and Gilda must marry.

  With marriage, all the problems would be surmounted and it needn’t be forever, and it needn’t ruin the lives of the young people or deter their education, but it had to be. An amicable bond would unite her and Ian with the Motts: their mutual grandchild would be named Aymes. Make a note to inform Pud Aymes, wherever he was, that Ian was going to be a father. It was all clear to her. No sense in beating around the bush among the parents, she would put it to Ran and Amy directly. She and the Motts, mostly the Motts, she hoped, would support the young couple while necessary. The child would live with the Motts, but Ursula would be there a lot, an active grandmother.

  She felt better and tried to sit up a little. She touched her lips, which had begun to subside with prickly tingles, as when you sat on your foot too long. The certitude of the recent moments subsided, too, though she retained the sense of what had seemed so clear to her moments ago and realized there would be a better time to bring up marriage. She may have fainted a little; she had no sense of how long they had been in the car.

  Looking around, she now saw that she was at a hospital, or the annex of some clinic, people in cots around the walls but no medical personnel in sight, no paper sheet under her. No, here was a paper sheet, bunched up under her bottom. A few feet away, there were Ran Mott and her son, Ian. Had she been close to death or something? She remembered the ride, the sense of speed and emergency, and her brilliant solution to the problem facing them all.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It happened so fast.”

  “Scallops,” Ran said. “You’ve eaten your last seafood salad, for sure. Have you been allergic before? It only gets worse with time, you have to be clear about that.” His voice had assumed a doctorly neutrality. “Once you’re sensitized, you have to stay away from them like the plague. No oysters. Stay away from shellfish generally.” The relief of seeing Ursula’s color return, and that she was sentient, made him suddenly remember his night with her.

  37

  The past has lessons for us, though we may not like to dredge them up.

  Ran’s lunch with his former wife Lorna had been fixed for a Tuesday, kind of a nuisance as it was a day he had a dinner later at the Bohemian Club, and he liked to keep social engagements down to one a day. Also, he dreaded it. Lorna had not impacted his life in the twenty years they’d been divorced, why now when he had so much else to worry about? He suggested they lunch at Greens, an upscale vegetarian restaurant on the Bay, run by Buddhists; they had liked it back when they were married. Lorna was touched by this sentimental gesture. Or the choice might reflect his belief that she was still kind of a vegetarian hippie—her tendency during their marriage—though she had long since graduated to boeuf en daube and magret de canard.

  They were both prompt people and came in on the dot of one, thereby running into each other by the giant tree in the foyer, and were shown together to a table near the window, which looked out on sailing boats at the pier, glamorous tall masts like birches rocking against the yellow mist. Refracted in the sunshine, everything inside glowed providentially.

  “You look well,” Ran said. “The years have been kind to you.” He made an apologetic patting gesture toward his practically nonexistent paunch. “How is—uh—Armand?”

  “Fine,” Lorna said, noticing that he had repeated the line about the years being kind—maybe his usual compliment to people getting older? “Much stouter now.” They quickly moved on to a safe topic, the children. Lorna asked if Ran ever saw their former son-in-law Dick Willover.

  “At the Grove.”

  “I always liked him. I’d love to see him, but the feeling isn’t mutual, and Peggy would be upset if I called him, I suppose.”

  “He sees Peggy from time to time. His love affair with the man is over, I gather,” Ran said. She noted his equable, nonjudgmental tone, probably the influence of his younger wife. Back when she and he were married, he would have said something about pansies.

  Lorna sometimes found herself reflecting on subjects like the transience of human love—things you’d rather not think about. Such thoughts came to her now, to think of Dick Willover no longer loving poor Tommy, of Armand-Loup, and of the empty astonishment she’d felt on seeing Ran today; to think of how in love she had been with both of them, them with her, too, perhaps, and how hard her heart had become, thinking only of lecture dates or the children’s mortgages. When she tried experimentally to think of being in love, however ridiculous at this time of life, only the image of Reverend Train floated before her, in his college incarnation, his handsome legs in hiking shorts. Now not Ran and certainly not Armand, but, alas, not Phil Train, either.

  They continued with the subject of their children. Curt of course. The problem of Peggy’s life. Hams’s expected baby. Misty not doing too well.

  “Naturally they have no insurance,” Ran said.

  Lorna thought of the costs of a baby. Up to Ran, no doubt, or his wife. In France it would all be paid for.

  “How are they going to afford the maternity costs?”

  “Oh, I’ve paid,” Ran said. “You have to pay up front. Unless you show up on the day, in labor, I suppose then…”

  “Oh, good, Ran, thank heavens for you.” She’d always known he responded better to praise than to the idea of duty.

  Ran realized he found it satisfying to be with someone as interested as he in their mutual children and grandchildren, not the case with Amy, though she tried to be.

  “The person who could use some help is Donna. You could help there. She’d like to go to Thailand and look for Curt. I have a lot of time for Donna. How she sat there day after day after day by Curt’s bedside,” Ran said. “For instance if you stayed at her place and freed her up to go to Asia? She’d accept a grandmother staying with the twins a week or two. I’d ask Carla to give you a hand.”

  “Your wife gave them a huge sum of money! They could spring for a babysitter!” She heard how inappropriate this was as she said it. “Peggy is free. She should do it.”

  “Peggy isn’t close to Donna, no one is, actually. Grandmotherly moral support would do wonders. Just for a couple of weeks.”

  Lorna stared. A second of familiar rage stirred, to do with Ran, their marriage, all those years in the past, when he failed always to see that her work was important, that she couldn’t just drop it and move into someone’s house and look after small children, even grandchildren. She was giving a lecture in Ann Arbor in two weeks; he had never understood that.

  There was no point in mentioning it. “I’m afraid I have commitments,” she said. She thought of Phil Train, of how he understood her professionalism. “Send Peggy.”

  Evidently some of Ran’s memories covered the same territory. “Ah yes, you always have your work, so much more important.” She felt he was going to add “than the family.” That’s what he would have said when they were married. How easy, from here, to slide into the fight; they could still enact their basic fight by rote; you never forget your lines. Here she says he thinks women’s work is not important; he says she is a self-centered person. Repeat several times, with small paraphrases each time. He’s a bully, she is vain and—always—both are egotistic monsters.

  Today his accusation of self-centeredness had a fresh edge, like a newly sharpened knife she would test against her thumb at leisure and always draw blood. This time, instead of rejecting the accusation of self-centeredness—if only because it was
n’t said explicitly this time—she was afraid he might be right. So what? She held her defenses in reserve. The time was over when women had to be weaned away from too much self-sacrifice, which in turn had given them chronic headaches and unknown ailments, a time when “self-centeredness” was a term of reproach, to now when people talked about “me time” and encouraged people to look into their own hearts. Not that she believed in doing that, or in “me time”; she was too old for that.

  Now, instead of righteous indignation, she had an unfamiliar stab of ambivalence. Maybe she was a self-centered person, like you had to be to get anywhere; but where was she? Was her work really more important than helping out a poor abandoned young woman and her lively twins? Or spending some time with poor Misty? Was she giving herself airs? No and yes. What was the boundary between healthy ego and monstrous self-centeredness?

  Ran continued his attack, as if he too had a few things bottled up. “What are you doing back here anyway; career, whatever, at your age, is it sensible or even safe? You’ve obviously left the husband. Do you have any security? At your age, what are you expecting to happen? This is just plain silly.”

  Speechless, she reflected that he said “your age,” not “our age.” He, of course, had no worries. And men did not age. She held her tongue.

  The dangerous moment passed. “Peggy is the one who should go to Thailand,” she repeated finally, ignoring his diatribe. “She has nothing to do, so to speak, and she’s devoted to Curt. It would be good for her. She needs a cause, some new thing in her life.”