“Come to you! Are you kidding? It’s not like you’re —”
I might as well have slugged her. That was the look on her face, because she knew that I was about to compare her with Inez. It took a few beats, more than a few, but she recovered or pretended to. “That’s what you think, that you can’t depend on me.”
“You always thought the Ramones were a mess. Oh sure, you were polite to them. But you never really took them seriously. And why? Because Inez threw thrift store scarves over her lamps, smoked pot, and blasted Bonnie Tyler out the window while Honey cut her hair on the stoop where all the neighbors could see!”
“Oh, for god’s sake, Nicole, you don’t have to look down on someone to acknowledge that 8 a.m. is a bit early for ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’”
“I guess you would have been okay with Vivaldi.”
“Let’s stick to the topic.”
“All I know is that the day the two of them came home with that car you could hardly drag yourself out of the potato patch to give it a look. Too flashy, I suppose. Oh, and we owned ‘a living room suite’ while they were paying installments on a sofa from the Brick with a bunch of crap collecting under the cushions. You never took Inez Ramone seriously because she wasn’t like you. She was . . .”
She stayed silent, didn’t defend herself even though she knew that everything I accused her of was bullshit meant to distract from the nefarious issue at hand. Inez Ramone didn’t take herself seriously, that was the answer she could have used and we both knew it.
“Go on,” she said.
“She was . . . fun,” I said.
She slipped a hanky out of the pocket of my dad’s bathrobe. Who else used real hankies anymore, never mind bothered to iron them? She unfolded it, wiped her reading glasses, ready to get down to brass tacks I guess. “Yes, I know she was,” she said. “But mothers aren’t supposed to be fun.”
I didn’t say anything to that, but I didn’t have to. She looked into my eyes and read what I was thinking, especially since Honey came back: fun’s better.
She stared at her hands spread out over the tell-tale papers in front of her. And I found myself thinking that if only she’d broken through that therapeutic manner and tore a strip off me, really hauled my ass, I might have laid the whole thing out all in a rush, every detail about Honey, the blackmailing ex, the physical threats, and wound up acknowledging how wrong I’d been. I would have taken the battle on knowing I would lose it, but we’d be straight again, or clean, as Honey put it, and could go on.
Just then the wind gusted and the patio umbrella blew over. Here was my opening, or closing, in a way. I got up, stepped outside to right it, and continued down the steps and around the side of the house to the car.
* * *
No answer when I called Honey’s cell, so I sat on one of the empty concrete planters at the entranceway and waited. Not one window lit in the whole of Havenhurst that night.
By 9, I’d wandered the parking lot, strolled across the road to the grassy field pulsing with insect cries, took a tour of the abandoned golf course where a few tattered flags still snapped in the breeze, and wandered back to the entranceway again. At least the exercise kept the chill off.
The whole time I debated if I should return to the house and apologize right away or let another hour go by, slip into the house on the quiet, and address the whole mess in the morning. Or should I wait for Honey? But why would I? It’s not as if I planned on confiding in her on this particular matter. Why make her feel like shit too? And yet I couldn’t seem to get back in the car and drive away. It seemed that I was more desperate than ever for an hour of her banter and a good, stiff drink. I didn’t even care what she talked about. I’d just sit and watch her lips move. Where the hell was she?
I had just decided to return to the house when I saw the dust swirl up behind the Caddy and heard the strains of one of Inez’s old disco hits. Honey ignored the parking lot, swung around the loop, and lurched to a stop in front of the main door.
Of course she was puzzled at first, because I always called in advance, never did anything unexpected at all, except for that earlier thing. Reliable as a time signature, that was me. She wore a dark wool coat, the collar turned up against her cheek and a scarf that seemed coral beneath the soft light in the foyer. On our way up to the apartment she told me she’d had three martinis and still it hadn’t been enough to numb her against the chilling experience of a bank meeting and social event combined. She said she had been forced to prop her elbows on the table to keep from falling asleep and sliding to the floor.
“You know, Nic. I think I may have actually lost consciousness at one point. I remember two or three seconds of relief. But that might have been the gin kicking in. And then — wham — back again. Maybe I’ve developed that little trick the birds know. Where their claws automatically cling to the twig and keep them upright? My hands agree to hold up my head even while in a stupor.”
When we got into the apartment she apologized for bullshitting on and asked if everything was okay. “You look wrung out,” she said. I lied and told her all was well, that I just wanted to check in. She changed out of her work clothes and put on some coffee, but when she offered me a glass of wine I told her to bring it on. We sat on the sofa and I helped her fold the laundry into a basket between us. Now and then she took a break to rub her feet while I tried to pace myself with the wine. After we finished folding she dropped the basket on the floor and sat with her coffee cup on her knee, looking at me as if I were an inscrutable object of some sort, turning me this way and that in the half-light.
“Something’s going on,” she said. When I denied it, she smiled and reminded me how reluctant I’d always been to share my secrets.
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Even back in the day you were always a hell of a listener; I just rattled on about every stupid thing. When I think about how I must have bored you out of your skull on the phone late at night with yet another tale about some prick boyfriend . . . but not a peep from you.”
“You mean like the one you dumped because he lost his license and you needed a guy with a car?” I said.
“Ouch. I forgot what an unforgiving memory you have.” She got up and poured herself a glass of wine. “You were never as heartless as me, never would have used someone and tossed them aside when you were through with them. If only I could have been more like you. But we’re stuck with ourselves it seems.”
“I didn’t do any tossing because there was nothing to toss. I pounded away on the Baldwin and hung around with you, and that’s it. I had nothing to report that you didn’t witness firsthand. No secrets, as I’ve said. I’m entirely devoid of mystery.”
She laughed. “Only someone as wildly enigmatic as you would make such a claim. Everybody has secrets, Nic. That’s one thing I’ve learned at least.”
“Well, then you know more than me.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said. I could see her consider carrying on the conversation until she got a rise out of me or until I broke down and told her what was going on. But she let it go.
“I just remembered something,” she said and set her glass down. “I found a little something that’ll delight both of us, in our own way.”
She splashed a few more inches of wine in my glass then disappeared into the bedroom and returned with a box — a piano keyboard inside. She said she found it at the thrift store. “Where else, right? It’s probably just a piece of shit. I meant to save it for Christmas,” she said, “but as if I could wait.” She set it up on the dining room table and plugged it in, a decent little Yamaha. Finding one at a pawn shop would have been lucky, never mind a store full of junk. She pulled two chairs up and told me to get going because she needed a pick-me-up after what the bank had put her through that evening. “And don’t be stingy with the crooning either, because I sense in you the need f
or a little self-expression.”
I took another sip of wine, sat down beside her, did that whole theatrical stretching of the fingers thing. Honey laughed and reminded me of that cheesy Charles Aznavour tune that my father would sing for my mother on her birthday every year — the one about maybe she’s the beauty or maybe she’s the beast, but it really doesn’t matter because he’d follow her anywhere . . . and blah blah blah — and how we’d snicker and roll our eyes, right there in front of him. But in spite of my father’s overcooked delivery he always got unbearably sincere for the last eight bars, so we’d counter our embarrassment by offering up a bunch of wild, sarcastic applause.
I knocked out a bit of “All of Me” to calm my nerves and take away some of the physical edge. I noodled a bit, a little boogie-woogie, a smattering of ragtime, some “Moonlight Sonata.” But when she insisted on a song I surprised myself by returning to the Aznavour tune. At first I hammed it up just like the old man. But then somehow, halfway through I — how can I put it? — the singer’s façade broke down, then outright betrayed me, and I did the unthinkable: I got sincere in spite of myself. The distance between me and the lyric closed, the melody took over, took me away. The tips of my fingers seemed to sense every nuance in the keys, even the hairline crack in the bass G. Any hope of going back, goofing my way through, fell away, along with a kind of numbness that I hadn’t realized had enveloped me until that moment. I closed my eyes, the only defense I had left, and didn’t open them again until the song ended.
In the distance all was dark except for the odd cluster of lights out toward the small towns of Blythe and Travers in the east and then that golden light from the street, worn away to candlelight by the time it reached us from below. I must have known long before the song was over, years before, what was going to happen, that my fingers would move from the keyboard to the front of her shirt, a man’s white shirt, but casual, half undone. A pearl on a gold chain rested in that little hollow at the base of her throat, as if it had formed there. We both watched my fingers move from the pearl to the remaining buttons on her shirt as if we were dreaming. But then she woke, pressed her hands against my shoulders, and asked if this was really what I wanted. I tried to begin again, but she made my eyes meet hers. She insisted on hearing my answer because what we were about to do would change everything, she said, and who knew how? But who cared, with her sitting there like that, or sitting any way at all.
This wasn’t about words, or intent, or reason — it was the way things were meant to go from the start. Later, I remembered how as children one of our favorite games was to imagine what impossible ability we might give up a year of our lives for: the thrill of being a bird, instead of a dull human? An owl on the hunt? That’s how I felt sitting beside her that night, the pearl at her throat, her shirt falling away — and soon, her mouth on mine, the weight of her naked body pressing down on me. She was the impossible thing that, all my life, I was bound to trade myself away for.
9.
I hardly recognized myself after leaving Honey’s bed the next morning, and afternoon, and again in early evening. I stood in her bathroom doing a bit of inventory on that woman in the mirror — whoever she was. The glazed look from lack of sleep (which had never felt so dreamy), the mark on my neck, the agonizing recollection of how she put it there. My mouth looked a bit swollen, it seemed to me, the inside of my lips chafed from her kisses. And those hands, her fingertips, her . . . range. It seemed to me that she was the true prodigy. Sexually speaking she could have sat down and played “Rhapsody in Blue” without thinking. Certain other intimacies, when remembered, caused me to avoid my own eyes in the mirror. I had never felt so weak, or more certain that I could accomplish almost anything.
The day after that, I gathered a few wits about me and left my mother a message. When I didn’t hear back I dropped by the house. She wasn’t there. That wasn’t odd; she had taken to walking into town for her last few physical therapy appointments and then having lunch at Blink’s. Still, when your own mother doesn’t return your calls, you know you’re in for it. But I’d planned how I might mend things: put a payment plan together, get another job, and work at paying off the loan myself while Honey paid the loan back to me. And then grovel like hell. Everything suddenly seemed so straightforward, though I wasn’t sure about spilling the whole truth about the prodigal and the ex. And what about new . . . developments between Honey and me? My mother might have been ready for that revelation, but that didn’t mean I was.
A few more days went by and then, filled with a combination of euphoria and anxiety, I realized it was time to head home and face the music. The weather report warned of an Arctic front moving toward us from the northeast, and on my way back to the house the sky went wide and white, the sun nothing but a candle underneath. I had just pulled into the driveway when the real weather began, snowflakes spinning down and settling on the lawns up and down Montague Street — the sound of a thousand old clocks lost among the leaves.
Once in the house, I dropped my keys on the table and called out. No answer. Honey had given me her sweater and I drew it around me and checked the hall thermostat, inched it up, waited for the furnace to kick in, then continued down the hall. She wasn’t in the kitchen, but what did I think — that she’d sat there frozen in time waiting for me to return, take responsibility, wind up the conversation?
No sign of her in the library or the living room. I called out again. No reply. How angry she must be, but who could blame her? I collected a few plates, glasses, napkins, and dropped them in the kitchen sink. The roses sat in the vase next to the banking information. I checked her office, then went upstairs.
The curtains lofted high in the wind over her bedroom window. A crystal vase had fallen from the ledge, its collection of feathers scattered over the rug — owl, raven, and blue jay feathers, mostly, that she had gathered in the backyard over the years. I heard her moan but didn’t see her until I came around the bed. She lay on the floor next to her bureau, the comforter half off and twisted around her legs, my father’s bathrobe splayed around her. Blood from the gash in her forehead stained the rug next to the dresser. I took her in my arms and tried to unravel the mess, get everything in place again — her in a chair by the bed, the comforter tucked around her. Next I’d bandage her head and make tea, the right way. All would be well. Nothing would be bad. It couldn’t be. She was my mother, after all. The whole time I could hear a radio playing distantly, as if it was left under a pillow or something, a voice mumbling away. As I settled her into the chair I caught sight of myself in the bureau mirror and realized the voice was mine. I sounded like a player in one of those overwrought dramas my mother would have suggested I switch off in favor of something “less frantic.” I knelt and looked into her eyes, expecting her to say just that. Wishing for it.
And then I called 9-1-1.
* * *
After my mother’s stroke Honey drove me out to Crystal Lake and back almost every night, just like the old days. We’d sit and stare at the water together, her arm around my shoulder. Sometimes she’d sip from her flask and talk about bank bullshit, just to get my mind off things. On the way home I’d often sink right down and rest my cheek on her knee as she drove, her arm resting on my shoulder, my hand tucked under her thigh. Sometimes I even fell asleep, what with the soft light from the dashboard and a few tunes turned down low. Later I’d think about how I could have died right then, during one of those drives, and been fine with it.
After we got my mother settled into the care home, I dropped by several times each day. I was familiar with the place because I’d played piano for the patients now and then in the years after Honey had left. My mother had recommended it in order to get my mind off things. What would she have suggested I do under the circumstances?
Honey and I discussed how we’d handle things, whatever happened, although there was only so much you could say. Other sorts of illnesses or accidents seemed to lend themselves to involv
ed discussion: Jesus, she fell off the ladder and broke her arm in three places. She’ll be in a cast for months. Or, can you imagine the nasty scar after that burn heals? Even a bullet can be dug out and stitched over, depending. But a debilitating stroke and there’s nothing to foretell the carnage inside. Everything that existed before seemed gone; her strong gardener’s hands at rest in her lap, her unshakeable poise enforced forever.
Some visits I brought Scrabble and set it up between us in her room. I probably entertained some desperate notion that whatever had happened in her brain, her outrageous fanaticism would return, like someone whose hands go on understanding the guitar even though they can’t remember their own address. She’d sneak in and seize some sort of victory over that lousy situation after all. But instead it was as if she’d taken a page out of Honey’s book and come up with a whole set of new and garbled rules, a kind of incoherent game with no winners. I picked through the letters, spelled out sorry on the board, and waited. A sense of dissonance coursed through me, as though the tips of my fingers sought melody and meaning in all the wrong keys.
“Please come back,” I demanded. “I’ll play this shitty, stupid game with you every day if you do. I’ll throw a damn party each time you win. Balloons, clowns, streamers — the whole nine yards.” I got up, thinking to bolt the hell out of there. But then I sat back down and held her hand — and when was the last time I’d done something like that, or even touched her at all, aside from the day I found her in the bedroom? “I’m awful, it’s true. A rotten daughter. You deserve better. But you know that was all b.s. about preferring Honey’s mother over you. You know that was just crap, right?”
I lingered another hour, gathered up the Scrabble game, and kissed her goodbye. Then I drove around to the dumpsters at the rear of the hospital and rattled it into one of them — a final good riddance to that asinine, mind-numbing board game that was only fit for days with so few options that there was nothing in the world to do but sit there shuffling cold, hard vowels.
Honey Page 9
