by Mad Dash
Andrew leans over with his hands up, palms out, making a barrier between us and Dr. Fogelman. “I didn’t know you felt guilty. It never even occurred to me. Because you were as close to the perfect daughter as anybody could be.”
“No, I could’ve done so much better.”
“How? You were the light of her life. Don’t you know that?”
“I’m having trouble hearing you,” Dr. Fogelman complains.
“Andrew thinks I was a good daughter,” I relay.
“And have you forgotten, you did invite her to move up here, and she said no.”
“I should’ve insisted.”
“She didn’t want to leave her friends and come north.”
“No, she didn’t want to be a burden.”
“Dash.”
“I should’ve called her more often.”
“You called her all the time. You sent photos, wrote letters, you e-mailed. No daughter could’ve been more devoted.”
This feels like balm on my sore heart. I want Andrew to keep talking, I could listen all night, but Dr. Fogelman starts saying something about how guilt is subjective and the point is that I feel it, not that I necessarily deserve it. There are 1,440 minutes in a day, he says, and it’s up to us how many of them we’re going to fill with negative emotion. The opposite of “evil” is “live.”
“Arlene was a wonderful mother, and you were lucky to have her,” Andrew goes on in the same soothing, urgent undertone, “but she was lucky, too. She used to say it all the time, how blessed she was.”
“Guilt, of course, is a great motivator. And often overlooked as a—”
“You’re a good mother, too. As Chloe would gladly testify.”
“Oh,” I say, hanging my head in modesty. I want to sit on Andrew’s lap.
“Probably because your mother was such a good role model.”
“Well, if that’s true, it makes the fact that you’re one of the world’s best fathers even more amazing,” I say warmly. “Andrew’s father was terrible, Dr. Fogelman. But he inherited nothing from him, thank God, not a single trait. Edward’s mean, Andrew’s kind; Edward’s narrow, Andrew’s generous and tolerant and open. Comparatively. Chloe adores him—everybody does. He’s universally liked. He’s been asked to be the chairman of his department.”
Dr. Fogelman can’t get any more out of us after that. What’s left of our fifty minutes we spend lobbing softballs to each other in the House of Love’s backyard. Our homework assignment is to write down three things that annoy us or we don’t understand about the other, then be prepared to reverse roles and defend the irritating behavior.
We lean against each other in the elevator, smiling at our reflection in the closed doors. I take Andrew’s wrist in both hands and squeeze the bones affectionately. “You know, Andrew, you can either be part of the problem or you can be part of the solution.”
“Too true. It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”
Out on the sidewalk, we look up and down K Street, happy to be out in the fresh air. We decide to have dinner, since neither of us has eaten. We’re not far from Andrew’s old law school. “Remember that corner?” he says, pointing across the street.
“Which one?” Washington Circle is a maze.
“You don’t remember?” He takes my hand and we walk toward the lot where we left his car. (Why take two, he said, when we’re leaving from the same place, practically? Why pay for parking twice?) “The most important turning point in my life, and you don’t remember it?” He shakes his head in mock disappointment.
“Which corner?”
“The ultimate proof, if any more were needed, that you were the woman I should marry.”
I crane my neck, looking behind us. Pennsylvania and Twenty-third? New Hampshire and Twenty-second?
“A hot summer night. We were hungry. And broke.” Andrew sighs, as if the last clue pains him, it’s so obvious. “You had some guy’s guitar.”
“Oh!” I laugh, remembering. “That was the turning point in your life?”
“Most certainly.”
Hot and hungry, that I remember, and broke as usual, we were heading somewhere, me carrying the twelve-string guitar a guy in the band had been trying to teach me to play. We had about five dollars between us. “Let’s see something,” I said, and sent Andrew away to stand by the Walk/Don’t Walk sign. I got out the guitar and began to play the only song I knew, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” singing at the top of my lungs to be heard over the traffic. Lo, people hurrying by threw actual money in the open guitar case! That this was a significant moment for Andrew in our relationship surprises me, because I distinctly remember him pretending he didn’t know me.
“How much did we make?”
“Twelve bucks and change,” he answers promptly, “in just over fifteen minutes.” I start to tease him about only wanting me for my money, but he goes on. “I’d never known anyone like you. I looked at you and thought, She’s irreplaceable.”
“Irreplaceable.” That’s a funny word.
“You had on torn jeans and sandals, and silver earrings. And a red scarf around your head. Gypsy girl. You took my breath away.”
I remember the scarf. I used to throw it over my bedside lamp to make the room look romantic.
Andrew puts his arm around me. “Let’s have dinner at home,” he suggests.
“Oh yes, let’s.”
Dinner is only a pretext, of course, a necessary detour on the way to the bedroom. We barely taste our scrambled eggs before we’re hurrying up the stairs, Andrew behind me with his hand on the small of my back, not that I need any urging. I wasn’t completely candid when I told Dr. Fogelman the problem wasn’t in the bedroom. I didn’t want to say it, though, in case Andrew didn’t know. But he probably knows. Since my mother died, it’s been hard for me to get in the mood. I never say no, but I’m not always there. And sometimes at the end, I pretend.
None of that is going on now, though. I can hardly wait. Everything is uncannily natural, I’m even laughing as we stand on opposite sides of the bed to take off our clothes. I do a little striptease at the end. It feels exactly as if I’m drunk.
Then we crawl toward each other across the bed, embrace, and fall over, and it’s just right, no wrong moves. We’re like acrobats slipping into a favorite routine we’ve done a thousand times—strong man on the bottom, gaudy woman on top. It’s so lovely to kiss. What an intimacy; it’s almost deeper than the lovemaking. I’ve thought of this since we separated, imagined how it would go; I was afraid we’d be self-conscious, too much in our heads, add all sorts of meaning. But no. I’m slippery and glad, Andrew is dear and familiar, and we’re just our old selves. What made me think I didn’t miss this?
Afterward we’re languid and tender, making up for our one-track-mindedness before. We don’t talk about what we just did. What is there to say? It was simple and it happened, no analysis necessary.
“Okay, now I’m starving,” I tell Andrew, and we get up, put on bathrobes, and go downstairs. Hobbes, huddled in his bed by the refrigerator, struggles under all his blankets and finally pokes his head out. Crouching, I kiss him on the nose, sweet old boy. His breath is unbelievable. “Good thing Sock’s not here,” I tell him, “she’d never give you any peace. All she wants to do is play and play.”
“Where is Sock?” Andrew asks.
“Greta took her for me. I’m supposed to pick her up on my way home.” It’s already ten o’clock. I open my mouth to say, “I should go,” but what’s the point? He’d talk me out of it so easily, why even start?
I call Greta instead, tell her I got “held up” and ask if I can pick the dog up at her house tomorrow, since neither of us is going in to the studio. She knows everything, I can tell, but she only says, “Sure, Dash, no problem. See you in the morning.”
“I love that girl.” I move Andrew away from the stove with my hip before he burns the eggs he’s trying to reheat in the skillet. “Did I tell you how well she did with her f
irst shoot? The teenager?” Andrew says I told him. “She’s redesigning my whole website. ‘Primitive,’ she called it. Now it’s got pop-ups. Andrew, why is there no food in the refrigerator except eggs, capers, and ice cream? What do you eat for breakfast?”
“Eggs with capers.”
“Seriously, go to the store and buy some healthy food. You of all people. And why is it so cold in here?” And why am I being so bossy and territorial? Habit, I guess, but I should be wary of sending the wrong message. I’m not here for long.
“I keep the thermostat low if I’m at work all day. Want me to turn it up?”
“No, let’s just go back to bed.”
The house looks as if nobody lives here. I pause at the bottom of the stairs to survey the pristine living room, every throw pillow in place. “Wow” is all I can say. So this is how he’s wanted it to look all these years.
We eat our eggs in bed, and for dessert Andrew pours us little glasses of cognac. He takes the words out of my mouth: “To Dr. Fogelman.” Then he adds, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” I can’t think of a good riposte. We snuggle against each other.
“Thank you. For the nice things you said about me and my mother.”
“Same to you, for the nice things you said about me and my father.”
“Do you think Fogelman knows what he’s doing?”
“No.”
“Maybe he does. What if he brings couples together by making them laugh at him? There’s probably some German word for it.”
“I suppose he could be an idiot savant.”
We start to fool around. But we’re so intent on taking our time this time, we fall asleep in the middle. “Old folks,” I mumble, waking up enough to get untangled from Andrew and straighten out the bedclothes. “We’re so far over the hill, we can’t see it anymore.”
“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” he whispers against my neck, spooning me.
A few hours later I wake up and get a glass of water, but then I can’t fall back to sleep. I’m thinking about my mother again. Andrew says I have nothing to feel guilty about, but he doesn’t know. I never told him this.
What grade was I in, eighth again? Somewhere in there, thirteen, fourteen years old. One day I came home from school and Mama’s boss, a man named Mr. Dreessen, was there, sitting beside her on the couch in the living room. That was strange—he never came to the house—but I figured he’d come to pick up some work or give her some work she had to do fast for the paint supply company. She only worked part-time, though; only while I was at school. I was never a latchkey kid.
I’d never thought a thing about Mr. Dreessen until that day. Or just that he was old (probably my age now), with reddish hair and wide-spaced eyes, and rather attractive acne scars on his cheeks. The most interesting thing to me was his voice, gruff and raspy from a freak childhood accident: His little brother shot him in the neck with a bow and arrow.
He looked at me in an unusually aware way that day, and tried to get me to talk to him—as if he’d never thought a thing about me until then, either. But I was short with him, almost rude. I certainly wasn’t a rude child—I was as amazed by my behavior as Mama was, who frowned at me and told me to go in the kitchen and get a snack. I remember what I was doing—making a cottage cheese sandwich—when it hit me. What was wrong with this picture.
My mother had on perfume.
She was a beautiful woman, and not just to me. People were forever telling her she was, it was simply a fact, I grew up knowing it as surely as I knew she had heavy, wavy hair the color of rich coffee, and deep, heavy-lashed gray eyes that could look straight into yours and see all the things that were fine in you, nothing that was small or stingy. She favored flowing, unstructured clothes she made herself—she made all my clothes, too—and she had as little vanity as any woman I’ve ever known.
She never wore perfume.
She told me about Mr. Dreessen’s marriage proposal while we made dinner together, our nightly ritual. I didn’t say anything. I don’t know what I was thinking, I can’t bring my state of mind into clear focus now, but I know I didn’t say anything. Nothing. And little by little, she stopped talking, too.
I couldn’t leave her, though. I didn’t want her out of my sight, or maybe it was me out of hers. After dinner, instead of starting homework or calling a friend or turning on the TV, I stayed with Mama. She always sewed in the evenings—her second job; she “took in sewing,” an old-fashioned term even then. I helped pin a pattern for her that night, I pulled the basting out of curtain hems, I rearranged her thread box, neatened her stacks and rolls of material. Mostly I watched her, mesmerized by the deft, half-magical way her fingers flew, guiding a line of flawless stitches under the machine’s presser foot. She liked to tell the story of her aunt Janna, who once sewed her own index finger, straight through the nail, to a pair of Grampa Josef’s dungarees. I could never watch my mother sew without thinking of that story, and worrying about her. It’s the reason I’ve never touched a sewing machine in my life.
I knew she was waiting for me to say something—marry Mr. Dreessen, don’t marry him, are you in love with him, would he make you happy, something. But I didn’t. As long as I kept quiet, didn’t weigh in on either side of the issue, it didn’t exist. Having an opinion—and I certainly had an opinion—would make it real, and then some kind of next step would have to be taken. I felt frightened—I felt powerful. I kept my mouth shut.
When I couldn’t keep my eyes open another minute, I kissed Mama good night and went to bed.
And the subject never came up again. Soon afterward, she quit her job with Mr. Dreessen and went to work keeping the books for a husband-and-wife insurance company downtown. Mr. Dreessen faded out of my life and out of my mind, and my mother and I stayed at the center of each other’s universe. Just the way I wanted it.
Windless mornings in Virginia are so quiet, sometimes the silence sounds like noise. Awakened by nothing, I’ll lie in bed and listen as closely as if the stillness were some complicated symphony, alert for a sound coming from anything besides me, my breath, the slide of my skin on the sheet, my hair crackling on the pillowcase. In spring there will be birdsong around the cabin every morning, but now there’s nothing. Nothing.
Unlike here.
Andrew singing in the shower isn’t what woke me. It wasn’t the dogs barking in the alley, or the sound of applause on the Today show coming through the wall from Mrs. Melman’s bedroom. Two brick walls, some lath, some plaster, that’s all that separates these old row houses. Relatively speaking, we paid nothing for ours twenty years ago—although it took everything we had and we’re still paying—but prices have gone insane since then, and today it’s far and away our biggest asset. If we sold it and moved to Dolley, Virginia, we’d be the Rockefellers.
What woke me up was the paperboy yelling to whoever he yells to every morning, his newspaper supplier, his kid brother, who the hell knows. I’ve called the Washington Post circulation department and complained, I’ve thrown open the window and shouted, “Quiet!” He’s probably not even yelling, he’s probably talking in a loud voice, but two unbroken rows of three-story brick town houses across one narrow strip of asphalt produce the acoustics of a rock canyon in Colorado. I’m a completely nonviolent person, and I’ve lain here dozens of mornings plotting revenge involving BB guns, deep trenches lined with upright bayonets, piano wire. It’s not good for me.
I have to pee, but Andrew is still gargling, swishing, and spitting in the sink. The music of morning continues. I see I didn’t miss it much.
I locate a clean blouse in the closet and put it on with yesterday’s skirt. I don’t like this blouse, that’s why I left it here, but it’ll put a smidgen of doubt in Greta’s mind about where I spent the night. Not that it makes the least bit of difference.
Andrew appears in a cloud of steam, piney-smelling, wet hair slicked back. We exchange good-morning pecks in the bathroom doorway. Last night’s urgency is over
, and I wonder if he’s thinking what I am, that maybe passion is simply uncertainty, not knowing if the other is a sure thing or not, and once you feel safe, it flies away. Then he’s off down the stairs to take Hobbes out for his morning walk.
Chloe’s room is depressingly neat and tidy. I miss the mess. What am I supposed to do with this room now? Make it a guest room, a gym, a sewing room, a present-wrapping room—the other abandoned mothers of my acquaintance have done all of those. It’s so incredibly sad. It’s pathetic. Why not a bomb-making room, or a chapel? God. We don’t need another room; what we need is our children back.
On the bed are a couple of cardboard boxes holding all my mother’s correspondence. I haven’t had the heart to go through it yet. One box is nothing but my letters to her. She saved every one.
I have a little cry, but it’s not too bad. Talking about her last night must have helped.
Hobbes is so slow, and he has to sniff every single blade of grass along their four-block route, so I’m washed, combed, and trying to figure out what’s for breakfast before he and Andrew get back. They don’t arrive alone; they picked up Wolfie somewhere en route, who bustles inside with them like he lives here. He greets me as if I’ve never been away—“Yo, you got any hot chocolate?”—and climbs into a chair at the kitchen table. He always keeps his coat on. We’ve been pals since the day he fell off his bike practically at my feet—I was planting petunias in the strip of grass by the sidewalk—and I took him inside and doctored him with Bactine and Band-Aids. Afterward I made him some cocoa, which is now the ritual refreshment, summer or winter, whenever he drops by.
“I’ve got some, but it’ll have to be with water. Ditto the pancakes.” There’s food around here if you dig deep enough, including a box of frozen strawberries behind all the containers of ice cream. I could make strawberry pancakes.
“Where’s your dog?” Wolfie asks. “You really name it Sock?”
