Waiting to Vanish

by Ann Hood

  “The freedom.” Cal lifted her head, thought of that lovely black-haired woman dressed in glittering blue, a blue that twinkled like stars in the spotlight and ice. That woman had stood alone on the clean ice, her skates scratching as she swooped around and her hair blowing in the gentle breeze. And then she had lifted one leg, and held her arms above her head as she turned, faster and faster, a swirl of shiny, sparkling blue.

  “The skater’s freedom,” Alexander said, and looked up.

  “Did Mackenzie think that too? That I was distant?”

  Alexander laughed. “Mackenzie thinks that you are the greatest mother that ever lived.”

  “And you think otherwise.”

  “I know that you love us,” he’d said quickly.

  She’d tried to act casual. Inside, though, she was shaking. She had been found out, exposed,

  “Nowadays, everyone wonders about these things,” she’d said. She’d tried to pour more wine and it splattered on the tablecloth. “Should I have children? Be a working mother? Can I have it all?”

  “I always sensed a distance,” Alexander had said.

  Their eyes met. In that instant she’d known that she could tell him everything. She had thought too of Guatemala, of the bird that can’t live in captivity.

  But she’d only smiled at him, waved her hand between them as if she were erasing a blackboard.

  “Are you saying I was a bad mother? Like Cinderella’s?”

  “That was her stepmother.”

  “All right. Like Cinderella’s stepmother.”

  He’d smiled too, but hesitatingly.

  “You were,” he’d said, “the model mother. Brownie leader, PTA chairman, gourmet cook—”

  “Enough,” Cal had said. “Enough.”

  Now she found herself wishing she had told him the truth that day. For years, she should have said, I planned escapes. From your father, that house, all of it.

  She remembered how, when she had been pregnant with Alexander, she had felt the trap closing, snapping shut on her. Missy had been pregnant too. She would show Cal charts of her baby’s movements. “He’s very nocturnal,” she’d told Cal proudly. Missy used to call her every day, with questions. Do you have nausea? Fatigue? Cravings? While Cal, for months, denied it all. No, no, no, she’d told Missy. I have nothing.

  The night she went into labor, she had sat and watched Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, pretending for as long as she could that there was no pain, no baby. Her mother and Jams had packed her overnight bag, a round, pale blue Samsonite filled with new nightgowns. Coral silk trimmed in lace, a blue flannel with tiny pink flowers, a yellow with a matching robe. All with color coordinated slippers. “Let’s go,” Jams had kept saying as her mother held up New Yorkers, their covers flashing in front of Cal. Children sledding. A teapot on lace. “Have you read this one?” her mother asked each time. “There’s a good Cheever.”

  All the while, Cal had ignored them both. She’d concentrated instead on the dancing dogs on the television. Poodles with tutus and party hats. Until finally she’d had to go.

  In the hospital she’d shared a room with a woman named Connie. They’d sat in bed, both in new nightgowns. Connie reading movie magazines, sharing the stars’ secrets with Cal, who stared straight ahead at the spotted green hospital wall, the New Yorkers stacked beside her.

  “What are you naming him?” Connie asked her every day as they each fed their sons.

  Cal never answered. She would stare at this little pink baby, count his fingers and toes, and wait for her maternal instinct to come, the way Connie’s had and Missy’s had. “I watch her all night,” Missy had told her. “I watch her breathe. And say her name. Kathy. Kathy. Kathy. Like a song. You’ll see what I mean soon enough.” But she didn’t.

  “Here we are,” Connie had said their last morning there. “Two nameless babies.”

  Cal had looked down at her sleeping son. He was bald, which meant, according to Missy, that he would be blonde. Vivvie had sent a bottle of champagne from Persia. At the bottom of the card she’d written in Arabic, the lines unfamiliar and complex.

  “He’s Alexander,” Cal had said.

  “Great.” Connie had told her. “I’ll name mine Alexander too. I’ve been thinking of Cary. Like Cary Grant. But this is better. Alexander the Great. An emperor, right? A ruler?”

  What had happened to all of them? Cal wondered. To Missy and Kathy and the other Alexander? She herself had gone home and watched Alexander sleep, repeated his name like a litany, waited for rapture. He had been right, her adult son. She had wanted to be someplace else, someone else. The skater in shining blue. The mistress of a Portuguese fisherman. And the more she wanted it, the more she’d baked and thrown birthday parties and invited other mothers over for coffee. Look at me, she’d been saying, I want to be here. I do.

  The sky was darker. The clouds tumbled across it, low and gray. Her chest felt heavy as she watched the storm approach. Alexander’s death, she thought with horror, has freed me. The guilt she’d felt all her life rose in her and filled her until she thought she might burst. And then, as if she did burst, she cried like she had never cried before, in loud, heavy sobs. And the tears that had seemed a part of her for so long left her. Left her, finally.

  It rained all night. Cal heard it, dancing on the roof, against the windows. She lay in her bed in the cabin and imagined the rain waltzing, at first lightly, then shifting to a noisy tango. When the pounding became frantic, she gave up on sleep and went to make a cup of tea. She sat on the couch that smelled of the woods and of mothballs. Cal thought of her children, dancing along with go-go dancers on TV. The dancers hung in suspended cages, and did dances called the jerk, the swim, the watusi.

  Cal wondered what time it was. She imagined Mackenzie, just a few hours away in San Francisco. Had she been to Iris’s yet and read the note? It hadn’t been until she got here that Cal realized she had not even signed it with Love, Mom. Or signed it at all. She thought again of her children dancing, their arms flailing. Mackenzie’s hair, long and blonde, falling in her face as she moved. Alexander would tease her, call her The Thing, a furry creature from a television show. At the end of one dance, the swim, Mackenzie and Alexander would hold their noses and slowly sink to the floor, like swimmers, imitating the miniskirted caged dancers in their white go-go boots.

  A yellow-gray light filled the window. Dawn. She wished it were forty years earlier, and she was sitting in Vivvie’s apartment in Boston, leaning against the overstuffed pillows covered in brightly striped Haitian cotton. What did they used to talk about then, hour after hour? Men, usually. Films. Poetry. They would create scenarios—a trek together across the Himalayas. Or to the Taj Mahal, the monument to love.

  “We have to be extraordinary,” Vivvie used to say. “There’s too damned much ordinariness in the world already.”

  They’d giggle about friends’ weddings.

  “How tired are you of hearing about color schemes and china patterns?” they’d ask each other. Their closets filled with taffeta and crinoline bridesmaid’s dresses in shades called huckleberry, indigo, and saffron.

  How had she gone from extraordinary to ordinary so quickly? Cal wondered. It seemed she rose from Vivvie’s bright pillows and incense-filled apartment and had gone directly to her own country club wedding, whose details sometimes blurred with those of other weddings where she’d been a bridesmaid. The chicken breasts stuffed with wild rice, the string beans almondine and pale sorbets. Hope stood in a sea-foam-green ruffled gown. In all of the photographs, Cal looked stunned, out of place in the layers of white satin and lace. A child whose name she could no longer remember held her train, daintily, between pudgy fingers.

  The ceiling in the cabin began to leak in three places, the raindrops falling through in syncopated time. Do Re Mi. Do Re Mi. Cal put pots and pans under the leaks, the musical drops sounding tinny, Caribbean.

  She and Vivvie hardly spoke anymore. It was not that they were any less close, but their l
ives rotated around such different worlds. When they did talk, it was still like it used to be. Cal would hear Vivvie smoking on the other end, inhaling sharply.

  Cal had to look up Vivvie’s phone number, it had been so long since she’d called her. She imagined her in her Vermont house as the phone rang. It was, Cal knew, littered casually with items from all over the world. Rugs and paintings and dusty vases.

  A man answered, his voice muddled and British.

  “Yes,” he said, as if answering a question. “Yes.”

  “Yes,” Cal said too. Then, “Is Vivvie there?”

  There was movement, bed springs creaking and the phone scraping.

  “Hello. Hello,” Vivvie said loudly. She was a traveler, and was used to calls at all hours, from people who didn’t stop to think about time zones before they called her.

  “It’s me,” Cal said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Point Reyes,” she said. “You told me once it was purifying here.”

  “Did I?” Vivvie laughed. “So is the Ganges, some people say.”

  A new leak started, somewhere close to Cal.

  “You’ve left him,” Vivvie said. It was what she always said.

  “Yes.”

  “Not for a Portuguese fisherman? Or was he Italian?”

  “Portuguese.”

  “And you’re what? Miserable?”

  “I was wondering,” Cal said, “whatever became of Missy.”

  “Missy? She moved to LA, I think. Or San Diego.”

  “And her daughter? Kathy?”

  “I don’t have any idea. There were two daughters, weren’t there? Wasn’t there a Kim?”

  Cal listened to Vivvie inhale on a cigarette.

  “Who answered the phone?” Cal asked.

  Vivvie laughed. “Are we avoiding the issue here?”

  “There is no issue,” Cal said. “I don’t even miss him,” she added softly.

  “I miss you,” Vivvie said. “I miss our grand notions. So few of my students have them. They want to make money. Work for a Fortune 500 company. Buy a Porsche. They think literature and art are a waste of time. A curse. Worse than locusts.”

  Cal looked for the new leak.

  “Did you hear about Isaac?” Vivvie asked.

  “Isaac? No.” Cal thought of him, naked, stretched out beside her, his skin like yellow marble.

  “He killed himself. Up in Montana or Wyoming. Wherever he lived.”

  Cal waited, for sadness or regret, but felt neither. She had an image of him dipping shreds of pita bread into putty-colored humus and feeding it slowly to her.

  “How did he do it?” she asked Vivvie.

  “How gruesome. I don’t know the details.”

  “You know,” Cal said. “Alexander had drinks with him once. He called to tell me he’d had to entertain a moody minor poet from Montana.”

  “Did you tell him you knew that minor poet intimately?”

  “No.”

  Cal thought of her own poems, imagined them in print, her name below them. She thought of the rhythms of them, the flow. Isaac had accused her of many things—of being fearful, sheltered, and the writer of overly romantic poetry. “You don’t face up to things,” he had said once. “You run from harsh realities.” She couldn’t help but wonder how he had faced up to the harsh reality of his death. Had he put a gun to his head? Hung a noose? There had been times when she had contemplated suicide, thought it might be easier than facing the dullness of her life every day, easier than realizing that she was not even a little extraordinary.

  “Actually,” Vivvie said. “I think it was pills.”

  “Pills,” Cal said. She thought of all the things, the common everyday things that brought death. Pills and childbirth and bolts of lightning.

  “What next?” Vivvie was asking.

  For a moment, Cal felt confused. Next? After what?

  “You mean since I left Jams?” she said.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Life,” Cal said.

  “I’m going to stay out here,” Cal said. “In San Francisco.”

  She heard Jams’s breath, slow and even. She imagined it traveling across the miles of the country, through the telephone wires, to her.

  “I thought so,” he said, “when I got your postcard.”

  In that instant, she faltered. Behind her, cars sped south, toward San Francisco, Carmel, San Diego. He knows me so well, she thought. What am I doing? Since Alexander had died, Cal had been consumed by the wasted parts of her life. It had forced her to face the things she had tried to hide from.

  But now, standing at this pay phone on a California highway, her husband’s voice, which had lately seemed irritating, sounded soothing and comforting in its familiarity. She thought of his arms around her, and she moved against the phone booth as if that would move her closer to him.

  “Your voice,” he said, “it sounds so good.”

  “Yours too.” At first, when she had called Jams at home, she had been startled when an unfamiliar woman had answered the phone, telling her that Jams no longer lived there. She’d given Cal his number at Oakdale and Cal had felt relieved that he was being taken care of, helped.

  “There have been times before,” Jams said, “when I thought I was losing you. One summer at the Cape. You actually went away for a day or two.”

  “I remember.” Forty years, she thought, is a very long time. She had, after all, spent her life with this man. She wanted to tell him that their time together wasn’t really bad. That it was something in her that had made it worse. She could still recall happy times, she thought.

  “One night,” she said, “we walked together on the beach. The moonlight was so bright it cast a white glow on everything. The ocean reflected in it like jewels.”

  This time it was his turn to say it. “I remember.”

  She thought of how that night they’d made love in the sand, in that incredible moonlight, and for a time she’d thought everything would be all right. Her life, and their life together. They’d rolled, gently, into the water, and she’d watched his body move on top of hers through a film of saltwater, the waves licking them, foamy and cool. Later, back in the crowded rented cottage, with the sounds of everyone breathing all around them, he’d combed the sand from her hair, and licked the salt from her body.

  “Perhaps,” Jams was saying, “you should have left a long time ago.”

  “Or you should have tried harder to keep me.”

  But she knew as she said it that it wasn’t in him to keep her. No matter how many moments of love she could recall, they didn’t add up to enough. They were just. flashes over the years.

  “Sometimes,” Jams said, “I find myself thinking I should call Alexander. I think, I haven’t talked to my son in a very long while.”

  “I don’t let myself think,” she said.

  “The detective told me that there was probably no pain. That it was all over very quickly.”

  Cal thought, Yes, it was over too quickly. All of it. The way he was taken, in a split second.

  “Sam was here,” Jams continued. “With Mackenzie.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No. But, Cal, he looks so much like Alexander that it hurt to look at him.”

  The image of her son as a small boy came rushing to her. Memories she’d fought all these months. She had, over the years, punished herself for her ambivalence about her life, had felt recently that losing Alexander was perhaps her ultimate punishment. But she knew as she stood here with the Pacific Ocean somewhere behind her and the smell of redwoods in the air, that despite that ambivalence, ultimately she had loved her children, and had done the best she could do with them.

  “Jams,” she said. Her voice was choked with tears. “I loved him. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  Again, his breathing filled the silence. Cal pressed her head against the cool metal of the phone. Before she’d called him, she had ta
ken all the silly souvenirs that she’d accumulated over this trip and had thrown them away, emptying the trunk completely. In San Francisco she would sell the car.

  “I thought,” she said finally, “that I’d open a bookstore in the city. Maybe have a little coffee shop in it too. Have poetry readings there. And good books. And espresso.”

  “You would like that,” he said.

  “Maybe I’ll call it Porter’s.”

  “Cal’s,” he said.

  “I gave myself that nickname, you know.”

  “No,” he said, “you never told me.”

  “I was ten. I thought Caroline was such an ordinary name. I never felt like a Caroline. One day I read in a book about a young girl named Cal. She had a magical horse and together they rode around the world and had adventures.”

  She hesitated. “The horse’s name was Alexander,” she said. “I announced at breakfast the next day that I wanted to be called Cal. My mother said she’d do no such thing. Caroline, she said, was a perfectly good name. But eventually they came around to my way of thinking.”

  “You never told me,” he said again.

  “Well.”

  “The renters,” he said, “at the house. They want to buy it.”

  She nodded. This was it.

  “They have,” Jams said, “two little girls.”

  She thought of two girls growing up there, carving their names in a beam in the attic, their growth being marked off on the doorframe of the master bedroom.

  “Tell them where our names are,” she said, “mine and Hope’s. Tell them not to paint over those names.”

  “I will,” he said. “Cal?”

  “Yes?”

  “Cal,” he said, “did you ever love me at all?”

  She felt like he was an old friend, someone she’d known for a long time, a long time ago. Then she thought again of that night on the beach, and the way he’d looked in the moonlight.

  “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

  Hope looked out the window, then at her watch.

  “Five more minutes, John-Glenn,” she said.

  She used the window for a mirror, put on more lipstick, fluffed her hair. She had on her wedding suit, white wool with gold buttons. A Chanel suit her mother had bought her long ago.