Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  “You gonna take all day?” Fanny asks with her smoker’s rasp as she watches Avi ponder his letters. She shows him no mercy simply because he’s five. The only concession she makes to his youth is that she leaves her ever-present cigarettes in the house.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “I’ve been waiting.”

  They adore each other, and Isabelle is grateful that Mrs. H has slipped into the grandma role without ever being asked.

  Amazingly, her own mother showed up on her doorstep, unannounced, over a year ago, on July 28, the day of Avi’s fourth birthday, her apologetic father alongside, holding their suitcases.

  “Maybe we should have called” are the first words out of his mouth.

  Isabelle is dumbfounded, blindsided. She has a large group of four-year-olds and their parents showing up any minute for Avi’s party, and here are her parents, the last people in the world she expected, or wants, to see.

  Her mother, amazingly, looks exactly the same: elegant, beautiful, imperious. She seems never to age. But the same can’t be said for her father. His shoulders appear more stooped. He’s lost some more hair, and he’s wearing glasses now. Looking at the two of them standing side by side, it’s hard not to conclude that Ruth has somehow been siphoning off youth and vitality from her husband for her own purposes.

  “It’s Avi’s birthday, isn’t it.” This from her mother—a declarative sentence, not a question. A challenge. Certainly not the apology for four-plus years of the silent treatment Isabelle would have liked. “So we’re here,” Ruth says as she pushes past Isabelle and into the small living room. “Where’s the birthday boy?”

  “Dad,” Isabelle says quietly, “you couldn’t have let me know?”

  “Your mother made me promise not to.” He shrugs. “You know your mother.” Then: “She was afraid you wouldn’t let her come.” And Eli puts down the suitcases and reaches for his daughter, bringing her into a warm, much-longed-for hug. “I’ve missed you,” he says, a whisper into her hair. But Isabelle hears him. She’s missed him, too.

  In the living room, grandmother and grandson are staring at each other. Finally Ruth speaks: “You look like my side of the family,” claiming him because he’s an adorable boy, and choosing to ignore the fact that he takes after Isabelle and has the Rothman genes.

  “Is that good?” Avi asks.

  “Well, yes, of course. Who wouldn’t want to look like the Abramowiczes? They’re handsome people, all of them.”

  “I want to look like myself.”

  “And that you do,” Isabelle says, coming in from the front porch with Eli trailing behind her, ever helpful, having picked up the suitcases once again. “You look like Avi Arthur Mendenhall and nobody else,” she tells her son. “Unique. One of a kind. Very special. And today the birthday boy!” All of this said as a reassurance to her son and a rebuke to her mother, who takes it as such.

  Isabelle can see the hurt pinch her mother’s face—oh, that look, she’s seen it a thousand times, as if Ruth has eaten something that’s disagreed with her. Well, this has started off badly, and Isabelle finds herself rushing to rescue the moment, against her better judgment, contrary to the years of resolve she thought she had built against her mother.

  “Avi, you are so special that your grandpa and grandma flew all the way across the country to celebrate your birthday with you,” Isabelle tells him.

  “Lady Momma,” Ruth says.

  “What?”

  “I want Avi to call me Lady Momma. Grandma makes me sound ancient…which I am not!”

  Isabelle is nonplussed again. How could she have forgotten her mother’s overreaching vanity?

  “Lady Momma?” Isabelle’s voice rises with incredulity and a bubble of laughter.

  “And I’m your grandpa”—from Eli as he walks over to Avi, bends forward at the waist like a marionette, and extends his hand to the little boy. They shake hands solemnly.

  “This is weird,” Avi says, searching Isabelle’s face for confirmation.

  “Yes,” she agrees, “it is. This is very weird.”

  Her parents stay for two days, two long and difficult days, and by the end of the visit Isabelle has managed to work herself into a serious, inexorable headache that sits right behind her eyes and pounds her with its unrelenting message—This is a mistake, this is a mistake—because her mother and father have managed to work themselves back into her life, and Avi’s.

  —

  AS ISABELLE SKIRTS SAN FRANCISCO BAY, along I-80 and then U.S. 101, she rehearses what she will say to Casey. All her life her nerve has failed her at crucial moments, so she doesn’t trust herself. The only hope she has is to rehearse. And oftentimes even that doesn’t work.

  She grins to herself in the speeding car as she remembers that day at Chandler when she walked across the entire campus from her apartment to Daniel’s office mumbling like a deranged street person over and over, “It would be better if I worked with another professor…it would be better…it would be better…” And even then, when she was standing before Daniel’s substantial presence, she was unable to get the words out.

  Well, that worked out fine, though, didn’t it? It brought her Daniel.

  Over the past two years, their e-mail correspondence has ranged far from their initial topic of conversation—her writing. They no longer discuss that, because Isabelle no longer writes.

  In the beginning, after Isabelle explained why she rarely, if ever, wrote anymore—“I no longer believe I can”—Daniel would periodically raise the subject again, as if she’d never answered his question, and Isabelle would ignore him. Then he would ask again. Then again, until finally one day she shot back angrily, “Are you writing?” And Daniel wrote back one word, “Yes,” and the answer took her breath away.

  She wanted to ask, What are you writing? How did you start? Are you happy with it? Can you show me some of it? But she didn’t. Without any credentials on her part, she felt she had no right to question him. Instead she wrote back, “Good,” and they went on to other topics.

  Daniel tells her about his very small town, Winnock. And his daughter across the meadow who refuses to have anything to do with him. And his class and the women who have come to seem like good friends. And about Bev, who owns the bakery in town, makes heavenly cinnamon buns, and provides him with the Internet connection that makes their correspondence possible.

  Isabelle writes to him at first about Avi and how much unexpected joy being his mother has brought her. But then, as they grow bolder with each other, she begins to write about her regret, about how she’s spent a lifetime feeling stuck. All but the five months she spent with Daniel. How was he able to make her believe in the future, in her ability to get there?

  What was it? she asks him in an e-mail composed late one night, when it feels like she’s the only person awake on the planet. Fanny’s side of the house is dark. Rain patters gently on the roof and slides down her living room window in slow rivulets. It must be close to 3 a.m., because all the windows of all the houses she can see up and down her street are dark, and mist clings to the streetlights like cotton candy. Then she is able to write, What was it that happened between us that made every hope and dream seem possible?

  Isabelle, he writes back, we fell a little bit in love with each other.

  —

  SHE AND DEEPTI HAVE DISCUSSED LOVE a lot. What is it worth? How much should one give up for it? How does one know it for sure? These conversations often take place in hushed voices on the porch of Isabelle’s duplex, with Avi tucked safely in bed. In the winter they bundle up in heavy sweaters and sip the aromatic chai tea that Deepti brews in Isabelle’s kitchen.

  The tiny front porch feels like their private space, designed for just the two of them, Isabelle in her rocker, Deepti in her wicker chair. But one night, well after midnight, Isabelle sees the light from the television go off in Fanny’s living room and then hears her neighbor’s front door open and there is Fanny, out on her porch, wearing her old chenille ba
throbe with a faded rose across the back.

  “Fanny, are you all right?”

  “What are you drinking? It smells like spice.”

  “Chai tea, Mrs. H,” Deepti says. “I could easily make you a cup.”

  “Well…” Fanny equivocates, but Isabelle can tell she’d like an invitation to their porch discussion and so she brings out another chair and an extra blanket, and now it’s the three women discussing love in the damp night air.

  “I loved my husband, I did,” Fanny says with deep regret in her voice, “but what did it get me?”

  “Do you wish you hadn’t?” Isabelle asks.

  “Sure—why ask for pain? I was in pain a lot longer than I was in love. Not a good tradeoff.”

  The young women look at each other as Fanny stares off into the space of her own past. What’s there to say to that? It’s hard to argue with the conclusion, and yet neither Isabelle nor Deepti would like to grow old like Mrs. H—solitary, embittered, holding grudges. Deepti especially does not want to live with regret.

  “But what else is there that matters?” Isabelle asks finally, after the silence between them has grown into a gulf.

  Fanny shrugs. “Who knows?”

  —

  IN THE PAST YEAR, HOWEVER, Deepti and Isabelle have had to continue their ongoing conversation on the telephone, very late at night for Deepti, who is at Johns Hopkins Hospital doing her three-year pediatric residency.

  The women miss each other with a real ache, but Deepti has promised Isabelle that she will be back. When all her training is done, she plans to practice in the Bay Area. Of all the places she’s been in America, that is where she feels most at home.

  “Loving Casey is the easy part,” Isabelle tells Deepti on the phone one night in the summer as she struggles with what to do when he comes home.

  “Yes.” Deepti sighs over the phone. “It’s everything else.”

  “Exactly! Everything else gets in the way.” And then, after a pause in which neither woman needs to speak and both are thinking the same thought, Isabelle adds, “Well, you know exactly what I mean.”

  “Yes,” Deepti says again, quietly.

  It is not necessary for either of them to bring up the great sadness in Deepti’s life: Sadhil, the “perfect” one, buckled to his parents’ pressure and went home to India for a more or less arranged marriage, leaving Deepti to mourn quietly, as is her way, for years. Now Deepti has grown more skeptical.

  “You’ve reverted to your Indian roots,” Isabelle keeps telling her.

  “Perhaps,” Deepti allows, but she no longer believes in falling in love and living happily ever after. It is an American fairy tale that she let herself believe once and now has turned against with absolute finality. Perhaps she will never marry. Certainly she will never again expect to fall in love. She understands more and more the expediency of an arranged marriage.

  So it is Deepti who keeps asking Isabelle the practical questions: “How do you want to live?” “What would make you happy?” and “Can you take the part of Casey he brings home to you and Avi and be content?”

  At first Isabelle said yes vehemently and often to that last question, because in those early years, when Avi was just a baby, she was guarding closely her secret hope that Casey would change his ways, change his mind. She never said as much to Deepti, but her friend understood anyway.

  Deepti would see the look on Isabelle’s face when Casey walked into a room, when he put an arm around her shoulders and she leaned into him and melted. She would watch Isabelle’s face relax into pure happiness when Casey put his head back and laughed. So Deepti never believed that the little bit of Casey that Isabelle had access to would be enough in the long run.

  When Avi turned four and Isabelle’s parents moved back into her life, her mother was never shy to voice every criticism of Casey that flitted through her brain—“He missed Avi’s birthday again!” “He’s been gone for three months already?” “Why can’t he tell you when he’s coming home—does he expect you to just sit there and wait?” And Deepti saw Isabelle’s dissatisfaction with the arrangement she had with Casey bubble over.

  In the past year, Isabelle questioned Casey before every trip, finally laying out what she has come to truly understand: “This is a choice, Casey. There will always be disasters.”

  And Casey answered simply, without anger or rancor, “And I will always try to help,” leaving Isabelle feeling small and wickedly selfish.

  Didn’t she used to admire that unwavering commitment Casey had always proclaimed to his work, his mission in life? He hasn’t changed, Isabelle admits with an honesty she struggles mightily to find. But she has, and probably not for the better, she feels. She’s become less tolerant, more prosaic, less benevolent…Well, of course, she is the unremarkable, conventional person her mother has always known her to be, and she stupidly wants the adventurer who is Casey to join her in the less than exciting, mundane world she inhabits.

  “But that’s what you want, Isabelle,” Deepti reminded her over the phone this past week. “It isn’t wrong—it’s what you need. It’s what you think Avi needs,” she said, to add weight to her argument. “Aren’t you tired of being unhappy?”

  “Oh, yes—exhausted.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Yes, well, then.”

  —

  WHEN SHE CATCHES SIGHT OF CASEY’S blond head rising above the crowd of people striding rapidly toward the luggage carousels at San Francisco airport, Isabelle’s heart seizes with anticipation, heedless of her resolution to stay calm. Oh, it’s Casey! He’s smiling, so happy to see her! He puts his arms around her, and instantly every cell in her body meets his long-limbed body in perfect harmony. They hold on to each other. This may be the last time explodes into Isabelle’s brain even as her body hangs on to his. Guilt overwhelms her.

  “Wow, it’s good to be home!” are the first words out of Casey’s mouth, and with his arm around her, keeping her close, he threads through the crowd and steers them both out to the parking area. He never has any checked baggage, only his backpack and a duffel bag which he carries on. No matter how long he’s gone.

  And he’s talking nonstop. This is how Casey decompresses from his trips. He tells Isabelle about them in exhausting detail, and then he’s done. He never mentions his time away again. When he’s home, he’s home.

  Isabelle only half listens. “There was nothing but water, to the horizon line. And here and there you could see the tops of these big old trees poking out. And sometimes you’d see cattle swimming for land, all wild-eyed and frantic, or the carcasses of those who didn’t make it floating by, bloated, you know.”

  The freeway is easy going, thankfully, and Isabelle keeps her eyes on the road, interjecting a “Really?” or “That sounds awful” when appropriate. But she’s been with Casey long enough to know that all he needs right now is to talk.

  “Everyone was getting around by boats, I mean, there was no other way except these small, handmade boats because nothing bigger could really navigate the river. Under all that water were houses and trees and villages even. All gone. Destroyed by the water.”

  “Terrible,” she murmurs, without taking her eyes off the road.

  “The rice fields were completely flooded, of course, and we estimated that, like, probably five hundred thousand people were starving, so what we basically did is hand out as much rice as we could. That was it—feed as many people as humanly possible.”

  Isabelle nods, but she’s trying to figure out how to begin her discussion while Casey continues nonstop. “And then the first cases of cholera were diagnosed and they had to bring in the medical team before it got…”

  And as she half listens to how many people were affected and what medicines they had or didn’t have, she’s reaching for the courage to say what she needs to say. It’s only when she misses their customary exit off the I-80 that Casey stops talking.

  “Babe, where are you going?”

  “To your parents’.”<
br />
  “Is Avi there? Are we picking him up?”

  “No.”

  Casey turns in his seat and really looks at her for the first time. “What’s going on?”

  Isabelle shakes her head, then pulls off the freeway at the next off ramp and parks the car on a street of auto body repair shops and empty, trash-strewn lots, a desolate part of Berkeley she almost never sees. She can’t have this discussion while she’s driving.

  She turns the engine off and stares straight ahead, through her windshield. Casey waits for her, silent. It’s one of the things she’s always loved about him—his ability to be quiet, to leave her some space. Now it only serves to make what she has to say harder.

  “I think you should stay at your parents’.”

  “Because?”

  A good question. “Because” what? Isabelle searches for the words that will answer his question. All the rehearsing in the world hasn’t helped. She wants Casey and she can’t have him. She still—stupidly, insanely she knows—clings to some vestige of hope that he might change. She’s resolved that she can’t keep living like this; she’s too unhappy. But that doesn’t stop the desire to swallow her words and sleep next to him just one more night, feel the warmth of him against her, open herself to his body one more time.

  And yet she has to say what she believes to be true. All those conflicting needs swirl around and silence her tongue.

  “Have you met someone else?” is what Casey finally says.

  “God, no, that’s not it.”

  And Casey relaxes, leans back against the closed door, immediately relieved. “Okay. Then everything else is fixable.”