by Sally Koslow
“Do you think you’ll see him again?” The second question her mother tended to ask, early and often.
I hope so, she thought, while she aimed for insouciance. “I doubt it. He’s there and I’m not and med students get no time off.”
“Which is why you’re blushing,” Luey pointed out, though her usual bite wasn’t on display. “You like him.”
“He’s a friend, and after a few even Harvard guys act like horny Boy Scouts,” though this didn’t apply to Michael T. He was old school, and Nicola’s only disappointment was that she’d blown things years ago. When she left—one of his friends drove her back to New York—he promised he’d call. But now Michael T. remained in Cambridge, where more than half of the med students appeared to be not-entirely-unfortunate-looking women eager to compare notes on rotations and matches. Nicola didn’t want to push too hard, fearing that he’d see her as a gold digger—as if in this century, marrying a doctor other than a heart surgeon, sports medicine physician, cosmetic dermatologist, or concierge internist was a fast track to anything but debt.
“Your New Year’s, how was it?” she asked, looking at Luey. “As eventful as Mother’s?”
Her sister took longer than necessary to offer up, “I was . . .” and nothing more until, a bit too eager to change the subject, she added, “That’s sweet about Clementine and the condolences.”
“Clementine has blond hair down to her butt, right?” Luey says.
“Not anymore,” I say, picturing the androgynous sylph I met in my kitchen.
“She parked cars at the beach and worked at the tennis club. I like her.”
Luey sucks the tip of a curly tendril of hair and then wanders off. How unhinged have I become to want to ask, Did your father know Clementine, too? Were they ever together—together-together?
Did I imagine the look of shock and upset on Clementine’s face when I mentioned Ben’s death? No, something that day in the kitchen was off. I am sure of it. Could Ben have seduced this sheltered girl? What was worse, to think of my husband betraying me, or to imagine that he took advantage of a woman who is really a child?
I force myself back on autopilot, as I start cleaning up after our dinner, loading the dishwasher and vigorously wiping the counters, determined to put the same effort into scraping away the foul image I’ve conjured of Clementine and Ben. I try to see Ben not as a philanderer—or more hideous, a pedophile—his arm around a girl as young as his daughters, but as an ordinary father and husband, watching football until bedtime, Nicola and Luey feigning interest beside him. But today the television is switched off, as is the benign quadrant of my imagination.
“Mother, I’d like an answer.” Nicola’s voice is shrill.
“Excuse me?” I ask.
“It’s time for resolutions,” she says. “I asked twice.”
New Year’s resolutions, a Ben-spawned tradition. Do anything twice and my daughter, ripped from her native land, calls it a family custom, which she will adhere to as strongly as if she were raised in a fascist state. Cola is the child who insists on red velvet cupcakes for her birthday breakfast, decided to hide Valentines like Easter eggs, and wears white lace underwear on first dates. At eleven, when she read that Korean grannies believed you’d grow tall if you cut your hair, she gave herself a Joan of Arc cut. She flatlined at the height of five foot five, and now her hair, as lustrous as enamel, swings below her shoulders.
“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll pass on the resolutions.” I cock my head toward the cupboards. “Chores.”
“I’ll help you later. This is what we do. Don’t be a buzz kill.”
“It’s my party and I’ll be a buzz kill if I want to,” I bitch loud enough to be annoying, especially to myself. Nicola tosses the sponge in the sink and leads me by the elbow to the living room couch, where she’s arranged pads of paper and three freshly sharpened pencils.
“Luey!” she shouts. “Resolutions!”
Her sister skids into the room more like a sports fan than a person who fourteen hours ago was moaning on a hospital bed. I hold my breath as she seats herself on the couch and leans back, her bare feet propped on the coffee table. They are my mother’s feet—impossibly narrow, irritatingly elegant, and impeccably pedicured by her own hand. My own polish-free, peasant-sturdy pair is hidden in cotton socks.
“Who wants to start?” Nicola asks.
“Me, me, me.” Luey scribbles quickly. She looks up and recites, “I, Louisa Silver-Waltz, resolve not to watch more than three hours of television a day.” With elaborate indifference she lays her paper on the table.
“Unacceptable,” Nicola says, since family shtick allows for resolution veto. “You try that every year and it lasts a week.” She tears the resolution in half. It’s a playful rip, but a rip just the same.
Ben and I weren’t the kind of parents who required our daughters to memorize Maus or even Horton Hears a Who. Luey was devoted to television—Muppet Babies, Pee-wee’s Playhouse reruns, Civil War documentaries, and police procedurals, all given equal time. That she earned higher grades than her older sister despite rushing through homework during the commercials brought on dependable filial distress. Who could blame Nicola? I would argue with Ben against the girls having TVs in their bedrooms. He’d laugh and offer Luey’s grades as a defense. Advantage, Ben.
“Luey, you think,” Nicola commands, then turns toward me. “Mother, you start.”
The Georgia strategy is to make resolutions too small to fail—doing fifty crunches before bedtime, eating my Omega-3’s, learning to make an orchid bloom again and again. These I have mastered. It was Ben who loved his resolutions in high-def. Once, he stopped smoking—cold turkey after two packs a day—and another year, learned Italian well enough to charm waitresses in Venice seven months later. Six years ago he resolved to run a marathon. Given how that turned out, you’d think my daughters would give us all a pass.
“I will go gray,” I say. Oh, the money I’ll save, and it will be easier than phoning the twenty-four-hour L’Oreal haircolor hotline while I scour stains off my white bathroom tile.
“You will not!” Luey shrieks. “Do better.”
“In that case, I will learn a new word every day,” I snap back.
“That was two years ago.”
She’s right. Into daily conversation, I wove internecine, dyspeptic, concupiscent, and the word that won the last game of Scrabble that Ben and I played: mingy. If only I’d recognized foreshadowing when it met me over a card table.
“Get personal, Mother,” Nicola says.
Personal is I will figure out what happened to our family’s finances and at least uncover the fate of that storied ring. More personal: I am determined to learn if my husband truly loved me. Most personal: I resolve to discover if there was another woman, a young mother half my age named Clementine, and how Ben could let his feelings for her muck up my and our daughters’ lives, and if he’s the father of her baby. I’m not sure I can accomplish any of those, so I dial back to, “I resolve to grow up” and wait for the inevitable override. But instead I hear Nicola asking, “How so?”
Indeed. “Every day I’ll do at least one thing out of my reach,” I say. As I try to reboot, is there a choice?
“Good one,” says Nicola, who avoids her sister’s eyes and announces, “And I’ll do the same.” After a dramatic pause she adds, “I resolve to get serious about work.” Let it not involve the unaffordable luxury of acquiring another degree she will use no more than the L.L.Bean wardrobe that she abandoned in Iowa a few years ago. I knew those black patent leather clogs would get kicked to the curb.
“Uncle Stephan wants to teach me the business. His assistant is returning, but he says I can stay as long as I want.” She looks pleased.
I have learned that my brother’s generosity may arrive with hidden tariffs, but I say, “Cola, I’m proud of you” and lean forward to give her a tight, lingering
hug.
“Excellent,” Luey adds. “Both of you.”
“Okay then. We’re done. Your turn.” Nicola’s subtext is, Top this.
“I resolve to be an excellent mother.”
Nicola laughs, not kindly. “To what?”
“I told you twenty minutes ago. You’re going to be an aunt.” She raps the wood table three times in Ben’s gesture. “In about seven months I’ll be big as a yurt.”
Nicola rolls her eyes as she did at fourteen and, for that matter, at four. “Go on. Get serious.”
“I am.” Her words surf on a whitecap of emotion. “Deal with it.”
Nicola stares at Luey as if she’s blinking green. “Are you certifiable?” she says, but I recognize curiosity embedded in the question.
“Maybe. But don’t worry, I might lose the baby. Would that make you happy-clappy?”
“Hey!” I find the voice that has forever defanged arguments between my honey-and-sardines daughters. “Have a little respect. We’re talking about a child,” who for the first time I am picturing, barely, as a bud on my family tree. I won’t suffer sarcasm or bitterness in earshot of this speck of life.
Silence rings like an icy bell and I realize that I, Georgia, have performed my first grown-up act of the year. My daughters’ faces show remorse, which triggers a boundless love in me for both of them, for the possibility of a baby, and—before it dissolves like sugar into batter—for Ben, poor man, who is missing all of this. Ben, I need you to be my partner in parenthood, to help both our daughters finish the job of growing up, to meet our grandchild. Ben, you’ve been cheated and so have all of us.
“I’m sorry.” Nicola’s whisper floats in my direction as she clutches Luey’s hand. “Tell me everything,” she says. “Is the father—”
Luey wriggles away, puts her finger to her own lips and nods.
More than anything, Nicola wants to be closer to Luey than her younger sister will ever allow, not that Cola has any idea of how to make that happen. And certainly, every part of me needs to know more, wants to know more.
I’d like to say that biology counts for little, something I was sure I believed the moment Nicola was placed in my arms. But I’d be lying if I pretended I haven’t been praying that the man who blessed my first grandchild with his DNA was at least a sweet, guileless junior high school biology teacher, not a drifter whom Luey met online or picked up at a NASCAR rally. I can’t say I don’t hope the father of her baby loves her, and I want him to present himself—the sooner the better—bearing gifts and ardor. I’m afraid, however, to trespass further into Luey’s clandestine inner terrain. For now.
“This calls for a toast,” to a decision that Luey may still have to make, to a new year, and to the snake dance that is my family’s life.
“No alcohol for Luey,” Nicola says.
“Now you’re the superintendent of pregnancy?” her sister asks.
“Just saying.”
I fill three tall glasses of pomegranate juice, two spiked with yesterday’s flat champagne, call it a cocktail, and set them down on a tray in front of my daughters.
“To Luey!” I say.
“To you, Ma, and all of us,” she answers, clicking her glass to mine and Nicola’s.
“To all of us,” Cola echoes. “Mother, Luey, baby.”
We sip, soundlessly, as my phone rings. I lift it up and squint at the name it flashes. Chip Sharkey. Real estate can wait; I don’t answer. But the mute phone taunts me. Calling Wally has been on my radar. I’ve waited for him to reach out and when he hasn’t, I’ve thought about him every fifteen minutes and sent him daily emails. Painting a kitchen by myself—the job I’ve told myself I will start tomorrow—or, say, scaling Kilimanjaro has struck me as infinitely easier than continuing to find the path that might or might not lead us out of Ben’s quagmire, and might or might not start with what Wally can discover.
I dial Wally before my bubble of courage bursts. He answers as I am ready to click off on the fifth ring. “Georgia!” he says, as if there is a particular reason to be aloft with joy. The connection is strong and clear.
“Happy New Year,” I say.
“To you, too, and the girls.” I refuse to fill the long pause that follows. “You’ve been on my mind,” he says, finally.
I’m not sure I believe that. “Because?”
I know he can hear my anticipation, broadcast like reveille. “No news, I’m afraid.”
“Are you back soon?” You better be. “I need to get cracking.”
“Here’s the thing. Not for another week. Sciatica. Doc’s orders.”
Another week of nothing is a delay I can ill afford is what my mother would sniff, not politely. “Sorry to hear that, Wally, but I can’t wait.” I am not sure if the voice coming out of me is mine or Camille’s, but so it won’t disappear, I speak as if I’m running a race—which perhaps I am. “I assume you’ve got all of Ben’s records by now, yes?” I don’t wait for the answer. “Tomorrow, have your office send them—credit card bills, phone bills, bank statements”—financial minutia Ben must have kept elsewhere, because I’ve already looked at what is here.
Dead air hangs between New York and wherever Wally Fleigelman has parked his ample rump. “You there?” I ask.
“I’m losing you,” he says.
Perhaps, but I refuse to self-destruct.
“Georgia?”
“Of course I’m here.”
“Georgia?”
The connection breaks. I curse the phone, holding it responsible for every hot, exposed wire of anger and frustration.
“Cola?” I say, as I gather my coat, Sadie, and her leash. “You’ll be painting the kitchen. You can start in the morning.” Paint strips dropped off by Daniel wait in a folder. To my eye they all look rank-and-file beige. “Luey, no painting for you—but make yourself useful. Start by shoveling out your room.” Dear God, the mess.
Luey and Nicola look at me as if I’ve asked them to capture and dissect a rabid raccoon. When I return to the apartment, however, after a long outing with Sadie, Luey is on her laptop, reading aloud from a DIY Web site. “Listen to this. ‘A coat of paint,’” she intones, “‘can rearrange your reality.’”
“What do you think?” Nicola asks as she waves a handful of paint samples. “Stingray or Ionic Column?”
Luey frowns. “Ugh. Too lemony. Looks like piss. This is the one.” She holds up a third sample. “Grege Avenue?”
I leave them. Two of the glasses on the tray are empty. I gulp from the one that remains, savoring the sharp taste. I have my own reality to rearrange.
The phone rings again. Chip Sharkey, refusing to give up.
“Chip,” I say.
“It’s Nat. Nat Ross. I didn’t have your number and borrowed Chip’s phone. I’ve been worried about you. How’s your friend in the hospital?” The words rat-a-tat-tat in nervous staccato.
It feels as if Nat’s party was weeks ago, not last night, and even if I wanted to explain about Luey, I’m not sure I could.
“False alarm,” I say.
“Glad to hear it. Sorry you had to rush out.” He pauses. “I’m hoping you’ll join me for dinner. One of my customers is the chef as a restaurant I’ve wanted to try. Some sort of Mexican-Turkish fusion.”
Were I a newly minted widower, the brisket brigade would be lined up around the block, and if I were discussing Nat with female friends, they would insist that I give him a rush. Nat’s never had kids—no baggage—and been divorced for five years, which puts him safely beyond rebound. He’s a recovering stockbroker who owns two bookstores, one in the Village, the other in Park Slope, as charming an occupation as any. But I am no more ready to have a real rom-com date than I am to run for public office.
I wish I could produce a florid, believable lie, worthy of the gentleman Nat Ross appears to be, but all I can offer is, “Tha
nks, but I’m not up to that right now,” as if I am a stroke victim who needs to be retaught how to hold a knife and fork. In my head, Camille prompts me to let down a suitor while magically beguiling him to call again, and shakes her lacquered brown bouffant at my bungled rejection.
“Another time, okay?” I ask. “Please.”
“Maybe another time,” Nat says. And he is gone.
21.
@notanarcmarc DM @feralkitty I may take the job.
@feralkitty DM @notanarcmarc Y?
@notanarcmarc DM @feralklitty U miss 100% of shots U never take
@feralkitty DM @notanarcmarc Quoting Life’s Little Instruction Book, R U?
@notanarcmarc DM @feralkitty Wayne Gretzky, retard
@feralkitty DM @notanarcmarc Who u calling retard? I no Wayne is a great golfer
@notanarcmarc DM @feralkitty I may take the f-ing job
@feralkitty DM @notanarcmarc Heard u the 1st time
@notanarcmarc to @feralkitty Well?????
Luey put down her phone. Since Marc had tweeted her Happy New Year the previous evening, they’d been in constant contact, though she stopped at accepting his Facebook invitation. He didn’t need to know she was at Stanford majoring in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, spoke Mandarin (badly), had 1633 friends, posted quotes from Dr. Seuss (“If you haven’t then you should. It is fun and fun is good.”), and at high school graduation had hair that matched her royal blue robe. Her FB status remained without an update for the past three weeks, since she realized that if she answered “What’s on your mind?” with even 1 percent honesty, she’d be revealing too much. Luey would be deactivating her Facebook account if it didn’t remain a way to hear from Buffalo Bob.
At Planned Parenthood, she’d melted into slobber before an employee who may have been an NYU student who’d once played on her fifth-grade soccer team. In Luey’s dark heart, as soon as she started her interview, she realized that she’d have been better off if she’d brought someone with her for moral support. The person who came to mind, as she ran down the street, was Nicola.
