Just Like Other Daughters

by Colleen Faulkner

  I said nothing to Chloe.

  I said nothing, as if the idea would just go away. Like it had when she first brought up getting married a year ago, when she met Thomas. It’s a trick I learned from her. If she broke a water glass, she wouldn’t clean it up and throw the pieces away, she’d just leave it there on the floor, as if she thought it would magically go away. As if I would, magically, not notice the broken pieces of glass all over the floor. And if I asked her to do something she didn’t want to do, like take a shower, or pick up the markers she left all over the kitchen counter, she’d just ignore me.

  I was hoping for magic. I thought that if I ignored Thomas and his wish, he would forget about it. I hoped we’d all forget until it was as if the words had never been spoken.

  I misjudged Thomas. I still didn’t know him well, so that’s understandable, but how did I misjudge Chloe so badly? I know my daughter. I know how stubborn she can be, how determined, once she gets something in her head.

  It’s a March morning, a few weeks after Chloe’s twenty-sixth birthday. We’re still in our pj’s. The kitchen is warm and cozy, and I’ve made cinnamon oatmeal with raisins for us. I’m enjoying my second cup of coffee, reading my paper, when Chloe, with a mouth full of oatmeal, speaks.

  “Mom?”

  I don’t look up from the paper. “Yes?”

  “I wanted to tell you.” She slurps her hot chocolate, washing down the oatmeal. She’s speaking very clearly these days, enunciating well. It takes her longer to say something, though, because she’s concentrating so hard. “Mom?”

  “Tell me.” I sip my coffee; it’s just the right temperature, the right sweetness, the right creaminess. There’s nothing like the perfect cup of coffee.

  “I want to tell you. Me and Thomas. We’re getting married.”

  I lower the paper. My heart is beating a little fast for eight thirty in the morning. “Who says you’re getting married?”

  My daughter meets my gaze. She licks the marshmallow off her spoon. “Thomas says.”

  I feel a sense of immediate relief. “Oh. Well, Thomas says lots of things that aren’t true, sweetheart. Remember how he told you that he was going to get sled dogs and a train and the dogs were going to pull the train through the snow?”

  “Dogs can’t pull a train,” she says.

  “Indeed, they can’t.” My impulse is to raise the paper again and let it go at that, but something keeps me from doing it. Something about the look in her eyes tells me that the conversation is not over. Not for Chloe, at least.

  She spoons more oatmeal into her mouth. “I say we’re getting married.” Her emphasis is on I.

  For a moment, I don’t know how to respond. She rarely speaks this way to me. With tone. Chloe likes to please me. She’s a pleaser. Most Down syndrome people are. “You . . . you want to marry Thomas?”

  “He’s my boyfriend.”

  I conceded that point months ago. My daughter has a boyfriend. It’s healthy. She’s twenty-six. It’s okay for a twenty-six-year-old woman, even one with limitations, to have a boyfriend. I’m a modern woman. A modern mother. I’m willing to say it’s okay for Chloe to have a boyfriend.

  “He is your boyfriend,” I say. “But boyfriends and girlfriends don’t necessarily get married.”

  Of course, if couples stay together, they do marry . . . or at least cohabitate. Average couples. But Chloe and Thomas are not average. For all of Chloe’s advances, there’s still no way she could handle independent living. Perfect example:

  Last week, she cut her finger with a paring knife while trying to open a bag of chocolate chips. When she saw the tiny dot of blood, she started screaming. She didn’t blot it with a towel or run it under the faucet; she started screaming. From upstairs, I heard her screams. From the sound, I thought she might have cut her hand off. She’s cut herself before. She’s seen me cut myself far worse. We’ve talked about what to do in such an emergency. She just got overwhelmed. It happens sometimes. Tiny stumbling blocks become major events for Chloe for no good reason. But what if she’d had a true emergency? Would she be able to handle herself? I’m afraid she wouldn’t.

  And as far as Thomas being independent? Margaret dresses him. She shaves him. I know the life we lead as mothers of mentally challenged children. She probably helps him with other, more personal, things in the bathroom. Margaret has just now begun to allow Thomas to walk from their front door to the curb to get their newspaper—and she watches from the window. Thomas looks more normal than Chloe, but from what I’ve observed in the last year, he probably has a lower IQ than she does. Though he’s able to read a little, he’s not able to think through simple tasks like how to get his pants right side out or how to fit pretzel sticks into a Ziploc bag. He’s very impulsive and he has rituals that if he can’t complete, he’ll have a meltdown. Literally. He’ll crumple into a sobbing mess on the floor. Margaret’s son isn’t any more capable of independent living than my daughter is.

  I lay down my newspaper. “Chloe, I don’t know that getting married to Thomas is a good idea,” I say carefully.

  She scrapes her bowl with her spoon. She’s not listening to me. “I love him. He’s my honey. I’m his baby.” She giggles.

  She’s been saying this for months and I’ve been dismissing it. About loving Thomas. How can she possibly understand the complicated concept of love between a man and a woman? I can’t think of a way to explain that, though. I take a different tack. “Married people live in their own house. They don’t live with their parents. They go to work. You and Thomas don’t go to work.”

  She thinks for a moment. “We go to Miss Minnie’s.”

  I nod. “But that’s not work, Chloe. No one gives you money to go to Miss Minnie’s. I give Miss Minnie money so you can go there. I work so I can pay for Miss Minnie’s and for our house. So we can buy groceries.”

  “You buy movies,” she points out. “Nemo broke and you bought me a new Nemo.” She thinks for a second. “The box is different,” she adds.

  “Right. I bought you a new Finding Nemo with money from my job at the university.”

  She licks her spoon and then looks at me with utter seriousness. “I can’t get a job because I got Down’s.”

  The way she says it breaks my heart. I nod. “We’ve talked about this, right? We all have things we can do and things we can’t do. I don’t think you could go to work, Chloe.”

  “I can’t teach college. I’m not smart.”

  I press my lips together before I speak, to control the emotion in my voice. “You couldn’t teach college.”

  Again, she thinks. My daughter, with her limited capacity for thinking, thinks hard. “Thomas,” she declares. “He could work. He could buy movies.”

  “Thomas can’t go to work. Remember, Miss Margaret said he worked at the library in Ohio, but he didn’t like it and he left the library by himself, one day, and the police had to find him?”

  “He didn’t like the library.” She frowns and thrusts out her lower lip. “They were meanie heads. They said he had to put books on the cart. I like the library. I get books and I put them in my bag.” She stands up, taking her bowl with her.

  “Hon,” I say gently. “I don’t think either of you could work.”

  “We don’t have to work!”

  “Chloe, have you talked to someone about this? Did someone say you and Thomas should get married?” I wonder if Margaret put them up to it. Margaret, who pretends her son isn’t mentally challenged.

  “We say. Me and Thomas. We’re getting married. We’re big enough.” She shuffles in her slippers to the kitchen sink and begins to rinse her bowl. “We’re allowed,” she says, starting to take on a stubborn tone.

  I’m not sure how to respond. Luckily, I’m saved by a knock on the back door. I’m halfway to the mudroom before I realize who it must be. I see Mark’s smiling face through the window in the door. He comes in the back door now. He’s become a back door friend.

  “You forgot I was coming,” he
says when I open the door. “I can come back.”

  I look down at my flannel pj’s. The top and bottom match. They’re clean. They’re actually kind of cute. And I brushed my hair and my teeth before I came down. I open the door wider and wave him in. “You’ve seen me look worse than this.”

  “I did see you that time Chloe stopped up the drain in the tub and the water poured through the ceiling onto your head.”

  “Maybe you can’t come in,” I say, but I’m still motioning for him to come in.

  “I got that part for the garbage disposal.” He sets down his big red toolbox on the floor and wipes his feet. He’s constantly in and out, trying to hold my plumbing system together. We’ve actually joked that I need to put him on retainer.

  I head for the kitchen. “Coffee’s made.”

  “I don’t want to bother you.” He hangs up his coat in the mudroom. It’s green corduroy with a fluffy cream-colored lining. It looks good on him. Rugged. It reminds me of something a modern-day cowboy would wear out West.

  “You don’t want to bother me? Mark, we’re practically best friends, you’re here so often.”

  He chuckles with me and lets me pour him a cup of coffee. As I slide the mug across the counter, I notice that he didn’t shave this morning. He looks good with just a little beard stubble. He’s a good-looking guy. I wonder how things are going with the new woman he’s been dating: Tracie. From the plumbing supplies store. But I don’t ask; at this moment I’m a little jealous that Tracie is dating my handsome, nice-guy plumber. My dating life is tanking. I haven’t been able to make myself go on another first date in months.

  “Good morning, Chloe,” Mark says.

  Chloe turns around from the sink, her lower lip thrust out. She looks at me and then directly at Mark. She’s definitely annoyed with me now. Her eyes are squinty. “Me and Thomas, we’re getting married,” she announces. Then she marches out of the kitchen. “On Wednesday!” she hollers over her shoulder as she disappears down the hall.

  I’m surprised I’m not embarrassed. I prefer keeping family matters private, but I suppose what I said was true. Mark really has become a friend. It started out that he was just our friendly neighborhood plumber . . . but now he’s a friend. He comes by some mornings without his toolbox. This is the fourth cup of coffee we’ll have shared together in the last two weeks.

  He sits down on the bar stool at the counter. He raises the mug to his mouth and takes a sip. I suppose if I don’t say anything about Chloe’s announcement, he’s not going to say anything. But how can I not say something?

  I walk over to the table and get my mug and come back to the counter. “She’s not getting married,” I say.

  He nods.

  “I mean . . . how could she? You see her. You know what she can and can’t do. She’s not capable of being in a relationship with someone, living with someone.”

  Mark frowns good-naturedly. “Apparently a lot of us aren’t.”

  I don’t know why, but I laugh. I’m still laughing when I start to speak, but by the end, my voice is cracking. “She wants to get married. She wants to get married. What am I going to do?”

  “You think she’s serious, or do you think it will blow over?” He takes another sip of coffee. I like the way he talks. He takes his time, thinking. His manner is very casual. Unlike mine. When I hear myself speak, I don’t like it. I always sound like I’m in overdrive. It’s who I am, but it still makes me cringe sometimes.

  Being with Mark makes me slow down a little. I think he makes me a better listener.

  “I mean, is this the first time you’ve heard the idea?” he says.

  I exhale and reach for the substitute-sugar bowl. “Noooo.” I draw the vowel out. “When she first met him, she told me they were getting married. I don’t think she was serious. She just said it in the excitement of the moment, her first boyfriend and all. But then, a few weeks ago, when we were at Thomas’s, he made a wish. On the anniversary cake candles.” I cut my eyes at him. “He told us his wish was that he and Chloe get married.”

  Mark makes a face like he’s cringing. “So, she might be serious now.”

  I hear the front door open, then close. Then Jin’s footsteps—always as light and silky smooth as a dancer’s. I get another coffee mug out. I have the sickest feeling in the pit of my stomach. “She might be serious.”

  Mark’s quiet again. “You talk to his mom?”

  “You think I should?”

  Jin walks into the kitchen. She’s dressed for work, which looks very similar to being dressed to go to the grocery store or the mall. She’s wearing jeans, a cute, filmy blouse over a cami, and an artsy scarf I know she dyed herself because she gave me one for Christmas.

  Jin stops, looks at me, then Mark, then me again. “What’s up?”

  I pour coffee for her. When Mark comes for coffee, Jin comes. I swear, I think she smells him. (He smells good, but not like cologne, like . . . soap and guy good.) Or maybe she just sees him through her kitchen window. If she isn’t a lesbian, I might be worried that she was trying to home in on my handsome plumber.

  Jin accepts the mug I pass to her. She likes hers black. “Does Mark think you should . . . what?” she asks. She parks her skinny bottom on the bar stool next to him.

  I want to bang my forehead on the granite countertop. I don’t want to talk to Margaret about why Chloe and Thomas aren’t getting married. I don’t want to talk to Mark and Jin about it. I don’t even want to talk to myself about it.

  Mark doesn’t say anything.

  “What?” Jin asks.

  I add cream to my second cup of coffee. Lots of cream. “I was asking Mark how long he thought it would be before you admitted you’re dating your ex.”

  Mark looks into his coffee cup, but I can tell he’s smiling. On the inside, at least.

  Jin looks at me. “You didn’t say anything to Huan, did you? I don’t want to confuse him. I don’t want him to get his hopes up.”

  Something about the way she says it makes me think Jin doesn’t want to get her own hopes up. I make a mental note to revisit this topic when we’re alone with a bottle of wine.

  I speak quietly, either because I don’t want Chloe to hear me, or because I’m still hoping the whole thing will magically go away . . . if I don’t say it too loudly. “Chloe told me, then Mark, that she and Thomas are getting married.”

  When Jin speaks, she takes on a Tiger-practically-God-Mom tone. “You need to call his mother.”

  “A moment, Alicia?”

  I look up from my desk, startled, to see Randall standing in the open doorway of my office. If I’m not with a student or a colleague, I always leave my door open, so students know I’m available. Sometimes I think they find me a little standoffish, so I do what I can to appear more accessible.

  “Um . . . sure.” I put my pen down and slide the student’s paper to the side of my desk. A lot of professors like papers electronically submitted. They like to grade them right on the computer, but I still like to see the essays. I like to write on them with my favorite gel roller pen.

  Randall walks in and closes the door behind him.

  Suddenly, I feel uncomfortable. “Am I getting fired or something?” I say, only half-joking.

  “You’re tenured. It would take a lot to fire you. Like a sex scandal or something.” He’s not joking.

  I fight the inexplicable urge to laugh. Me and a sex scandal. Now, that’s funny. It’s been so long since I had sex that I can’t even remember—I push the thought from my head and gesture to the chair in front of my desk. It’s a comfy leather chair I found at a yard sale years ago.

  He tugs at his pants at the knees and sits. An affectation that annoys me. Who does that? Men haven’t had to pull on their pants in order to sit down in decades. Did he see it in a movie? I always want to ask, but it never seems like the right time. Now is definitely not the right time.

  “I’ll get right to the point, Alicia.”

  I’m still not sure if this
is a personal or professional visit. I wait.

  “There’s been talk in the department about your lack of academic publication.”

  Of all the things I thought Randall might be here to talk about, this subject was the furthest from my mind. I shift closer to my desk, folding my hands on the calendar ink blotter. “Thomas Stone University doesn’t require publication by their professors. It’s part of our image: small class size, a limited number of teaching assistants, professors teaching their own classes. No research or publishing required. It was one of the things that drew me here to begin with. The same with you.”

  His face is completely devoid of emotion. What’s happened to the passionate man I fell for all those years ago? The man who could talk passionately about the Brontë sisters for hours, then make passionate love to his grad assistant? I have a crazy urge to do something: throw my lukewarm mug of coffee at him, hit him between the eyes with my new gel pen. I want to wake him from this sleep he seems to have fallen into, a sleep that’s alienated him from all that he once loved, including me and Chloe. Instead, I just sit there and wait for him to respond.

  “Publishing is not a requirement of your employment, but times are tough with small, expensive liberal arts colleges in this new economy. We have to find new ways to attract students.”

  “You want me to write a paper for publication? Maybe a book? How about a textbook? Randall, do you hear yourself?” I’m starting to get warmed up now. “Do you not know the responsibilities I have at home? What it takes for me to take care of your daughter? Your daughter, who wants to kiss boys and go to the mall alone with mentally handicapped girls from church?”

  “It’s not necessary for you to raise your voice,” he says, coming to his feet. “I just wanted to make you aware of what your colleagues are saying.”

  “Your check is late, again,” I respond. I know I shouldn’t bring personal stuff into this conversation, but I can’t help it. How can this not be personal? This man took advantage of me when I was twenty-three years old. I had just lost my mother. I was young and impressionable and he was older and . . . and only semi-separated from his wife. He was a professor, for God’s sake! He shouldn’t have seduced me. I shouldn’t have let it happen, but he shouldn’t have done it.