Charley's Web

by Joy Fielding

  “What? Can I see?”

  “I’m going to be a writer when I grow up,” Franny announced.

  It was Charley’s turn to get teary-eyed.

  “Do you have something in your eye, too?” James asked, his own eyes narrowing.

  “A writer is a wonderful thing to be,” Elizabeth Webb said.

  “I’m going to be a writer, too,” James agreed. “And a nightclub owner.”

  “What happened to the chef?” Charley asked.

  “What’s happening to my mashed potatoes?” Elizabeth cried out in mock dismay.

  “Uh-oh.” James raced back into the kitchen, followed more slowly by Franny.

  “Mom,” Charley whispered. “I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right.”

  “Tough afternoon?” her mother asked, tucking a few stray hairs into the soft bun at the nape of her neck.

  “That’s no excuse.”

  Her mother smiled, although the smile was bracketed by tiny frown lines that brought a slight tremble to her lips. “I love you, Charley,” she said simply. “I’ve always loved you. I hope you know that.”

  Charley nodded, although what she was thinking was, If you loved me, why did you leave me? How could you just walk out the way you did? I know it wasn’t easy, living with my father, but how could you make your escape and leave your children behind? What kind of mother does that? I could no more abandon Franny and James than I could cut out my heart. Do you really think that all you have to do is show up twenty years later and cook chicken and mashed potatoes, and all will be forgiven? Is that what you think? That love is that easy?

  “I could use a hug,” her mother said, taking a tentative step forward.

  Instinctively Charley took a step back.

  “Grandma!” James shouted from the kitchen. “Where are you?”

  “Coming,” Elizabeth said, her eyes still on Charley.

  The two women stood looking at each other for several more seconds, neither moving.

  “Grandma!”

  “You better go,” Charley told her, a dull throb filling her chest, as her mother turned and left the room.

  “So what was it like, being with another woman?” Charley asked her mother after the children were asleep, and the two women relaxed in the living room, finishing off the last of an inexpensive bottle of Bordeaux. Charley sat on the floor, her back against a chair, her legs stretched out carelessly in front of her, while her mother perched at the end of the couch, legs crossed primly at the ankles beneath her long pleated skirt.

  Charley waited for her mother to push back her shoulders indignantly and change the subject, but instead Elizabeth Webb took another sip of her wine and responded, “It was a little strange at first. But then it was rather nice.”

  “Rather nice?”

  “How can I put this?” The question was directed more at herself than at Charley. Several long seconds passed with no answer.

  “You don’t have to worry,” Charley told her, misinterpreting her silence. “This conversation is strictly off the record.”

  “I’m not worried about that at all. Feel free to reproduce it verbatim, if you’d like.”

  Could she write about it? Charley wondered. My mother, the lesbian. Or how about, My mother, the switch-hitter? That ought to be good for a few testy e-mails.

  “What is it exactly you want to know?” her mother asked.

  “I’m not sure, exactly.”

  “Are you asking what it was like, physically?”

  Dear God. Was she? “I guess that’s part of it.”

  “Physically, it’s strange. At least, at first,” her mother answered with disarming candor. “I mean, you have to adjust to a whole new variety of shapes and smells and tastes. It takes a bit of getting used to. It’s easier to be on the receiving end, I have to admit. Much easier to just lie there, close your eyes, and enjoy. But that’s rather selfish, and eventually you have to become proactive, as it were. Then it turns into something of an adventure. But it’s hard to separate the physical from the emotional. One thing just kind of flows into the other. It’s not as if I was born that way.” She stopped for a sip of wine. “I know that isn’t exactly the politically correct thing to say, but in my case—and I can only speak for me and from my own experience—I never considered myself a lesbian. Still don’t. On the contrary, I was always—and still am—very interested in men. I’ve always enjoyed sex with men, even your father. He was actually quite an accomplished lover. Surprisingly.” She smiled at Charley. “Are you all right, darling? You’re looking a little pale.”

  Charley took a long sip of her wine and tried to picture her parents making love. But it was impossible to think of her father being passionate about anything.

  “Unfortunately, being a good lover wasn’t nearly enough,” her mother continued. “Although for a time, it was. At any rate, I was so busy popping out babies, I never really stopped to think about how unhappy I was. We hardly spoke at all outside the bedroom, and eventually nothing was happening there either. Maybe it was me. I don’t know. It just seemed as if I couldn’t do anything right. Your father was very demanding, as you know, very much a perfectionist about everything, and I was such a slob.” As if on cue, she wiped a bit of wine from the bottom of her glass, and brushed several bread crumbs from the elastic front of her white peasant blouse. “Well, it’s hard to be anything else when you’re looking after four small children, but he didn’t understand that. He was always at me about something. So critical. Nothing I did was ever right; nothing was ever good enough. Not my cooking, not my housekeeping. Certainly not my parenting skills. He disapproved of my friends, the books I read, the movies I wanted to see. Not that I’m making excuses for myself—or maybe I am,” she amended quickly. “I was just so lonely.” She picked up the bottle of wine, emptied what was left of it into her glass. “There’s nothing lonelier than an unhappy marriage.”

  “When did you meet Sharon?” Charley heard herself ask.

  “It was about six months after Bram was born. I literally walked into her in the grocery store, ran my cart right over her foot, and promptly burst into tears. Imagine—she’s the one who’s injured, and I’m the one who’s crying. She was very sweet about it. We started talking. Something just clicked. She was from Australia, which was somewhere I’d always wanted to go. But your father wasn’t one for traveling. Anyway, she was spending the year in New Haven, working on her Ph.D. in anthropology. I thought she was fascinating. I used to love to listen to her talk. That wonderful Australian accent. And she was so passionate about everything. And so nonjudgmental. So unlike your father. I developed this little crush on her. There was nothing physical. At least, not in the beginning.

  “She was gay. I knew that. She made no secret of it. Said she’d been gay all her life, one of those people who’d known from a very early age she preferred women. I said I wasn’t, and she accepted that. We became very close friends. I just wanted to be around her. She made me feel safe.

  “And then, one night, I had a fight with your father about something trivial, and it escalated, as these things do, and next thing I knew I was sobbing on Sharon’s shoulder, and she was comforting me, kissing my hair and telling me everything would be all right, and then…I don’t know. It just happened.”

  “These things don’t just happen,” Charley said, with more conviction than she felt.

  “No, maybe they don’t,” her mother concurred with surprising ease. “Maybe I went over there knowing what would happen. I don’t know. I only know that for the first time in a long time, I felt loved. And it didn’t matter that Sharon was a woman. What mattered was the way she made me feel.”

  “And your children?” Charley asked coldly, the camaraderie of the evening instantly evaporating. “Didn’t they matter at all?”

  “I will regret leaving you until the day I die,” her mother said.

  At that moment, a key turned in the lock, and both women
’s heads snapped toward the sound. “Hello?” Charley called out, scrambling to her feet.

  “Hey, Charley, how’s it going?” her brother asked, his lanky body suddenly filling the doorway between the foyer and the living room. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize you had company.” He stared at the woman on the sofa, the realization of who she was slowly creeping into his psyche, and then hitting him, full force, like a bullet between the eyes. And then another bullet, this one aimed directly at his heart. Charley watched Bram’s skin turn ghostly white as his hand reached for his chest and his breathing stalled.

  “Bram,” Elizabeth Webb exclaimed, the word a sigh as she jumped to her feet and ran around the sofa toward him. “My sweet boy….”

  “Don’t,” he warned, his arm extended between them like a sword, his index finger pointed accusingly at her head. “Don’t you dare.” He shuffled back toward the door, then ran down the front walk to his car, which was parked directly behind their mother’s mauve Civic.

  “Bram,” Elizabeth called after him.

  Charley watched her brother pull the old MG away from the curb and disappear down the street in a cloud of exhaust. She watched her mother’s shoulders slump and her body sink to the floor, her brother’s name, more prayer now than sigh, still hovering on the tip of her tongue. Charley pictured herself walking toward her mother and taking her in her arms, kissing her hair, as Sharon had done all those years ago, and telling her everything would be all right.

  But instead she stayed rooted firmly to the spot, listening to her mother cry and wondering how it was that family members ever survived one another.

  CHAPTER 15

  Are you all right?”

  Charley stood facing her brother on the other side of his screen door. The screen was torn in several places and the duct tape that had been carelessly applied had come loose and now hung down in a series of ineffectual strips.

  Behind the screen, Bram appeared gray and grainy, like a character in an old black-and-white TV show. He kicked the door open with his bare foot. “I’m not hungover, if that’s what you’re asking. And I’m not stoned either,” he said, anticipating her next question, and tucking the bottom of his white T-shirt into his low-slung jeans.

  Charley stepped inside Bram’s airless, one-bedroom apartment. “God, it’s hot in here.”

  “It’s hot outside.”

  She surreptitiously sniffed at the air for any leftover scent of marijuana, and eyed the rectangular glass coffee table in the center of the room for half-filled glasses of booze. But all she smelled was the scent of freshly brewed coffee, and all she saw on the table was an empty mug and half a buttered bagel. She exhaled, realizing in that instant that she’d been holding her breath all morning, that she’d pretty much been holding it since her brother had fled her house the previous night. What had she been expecting? she wondered, trying to get a handle on the situation, to figure out what her brother was really feeling behind the placid exterior of his beautiful face. She’d lain awake all night, anticipating a call from the police informing her that her brother had been arrested for driving drunk. Or worse. That there’d been an accident on I-95, and they needed her to identify the body. Or that they’d found him lying in an alley, like yesterday’s garbage, a dirty needle still protruding from his outstretched arm. Had she driven down here this morning half-expecting to find him lying comatose in his bed, the victim of a fatal, self-administered overdose? “Don’t you have a fan?”

  “It’s in the bedroom.”

  “You could bring it in here.”

  “I could.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked again.

  “I’m fine.” He shrugged. The shrug said, not so fine. “How are you?”

  “Okay.”

  “Feel like a cup of coffee?”

  “Sounds good.”

  It took only a handful of strides for Bram to reach the small space at the far end of the main room that served as a kitchen. It was perhaps twelve feet by three feet, and was separated from the living area by a high countertop, on which sat a small TV.

  Charley sank down on the brown corduroy sofa across from the television, dropping her purse to the floor. She noted that the apartment was clean and tidy, and that the beige-and-brown shag rug that covered most of the living room floor appeared to have been newly vacuumed. While the off-white walls could stand a fresh coat of paint, the colorful prints Bram had chosen to hang on them were bright and cheery. There was a Jim Dine lithograph of a series of pastel-colored bathrobes, another of an orange-and-yellow Calder mobile, and a poster from the Museum of Modern Art in New York of a Picasso nude, the woman’s body a series of sharp angles and intersecting arches. There were also three paintings Charley didn’t recognize. She pushed herself off the sofa to get a better look, her eyes searching the vibrant swirls for a signature.

  “Hope you like your coffee black,” her brother said, checking the refrigerator. “I seem to be out of cream and sugar.”

  “Black’s fine. Who did this painting?”

  Her brother came up behind her. “Like it?”

  “Very much. Where’d you get it?” She took the steaming cup of coffee from Bram’s hands.

  “I did it,” he said, plopping down on the sofa, clearly enjoying the surprised look on his sister’s face.

  “You painted this?”

  “Your son’s not the only one with artistic talent, you know.”

  “When did you do it?”

  “Last year. Another art course. I did those two as well.” He indicated an abstract, pink and green rendering of a landscape, and another painting of a seemingly chaotic bunch of bright red twisting lines that, upon closer inspection, settled quite neatly into the face of a clown.

  “These are wonderful, Bram.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t sound quite so surprised.”

  “Why haven’t I ever seen these before?”

  “Probably because I just got around to hanging them last night.”

  “Last night?”

  “I did some cleaning up. Part of the new me. Celebrating ten whole days of sobriety. I even decided to take a drive up to Palm Beach and visit my sister, tell her the good news.” He smiled ruefully. “Guess that’ll teach me to call in advance.”

  “It must have been quite a shock for you, seeing our mother like that.”

  “I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “How’d you know it was her? You haven’t seen her in…”

  “…twenty-two years?” Bram asked with a sardonic grin.

  “Yet you knew right away who she was.”

  “Yeah, I did. Is that what they call maternal instinct? Oh, wait. That’s what the mother is supposed to have.”

  “Bram…”

  “The funny thing is that when I saw that purple Civic parked outside your house, I thought to myself, What kind of person drives a purple car?”

  “She insists it’s mauve,” Charley said, returning to the sofa and sitting down beside Bram, taking a sip of her coffee. “This is delicious.”

  “Another one of my specialties.”

  “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

  “As are you. Driving down to Miami on a Thursday morning just to check on little old me. Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “You don’t think this is work?” Charley asked.

  “So how did the lady with the purple car react to the fleeting vision of her son?” Bram asked after a lengthy pause.

  “She was pretty shaken up.”

  “Bet she got over it pretty quick though, didn’t she?”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “I am.”

  “The last time she saw you, you were in diapers.”

  “Well, there you go. Haven’t changed a bit.”

  “She has.”

  “The only thing that’s changed is circumstance. She’s older now and all alone. The minute something—someone—better comes along, she’ll be out of here, and you know it.”
>
  “I don’t know it.”

  “Yes, you do. Why are you defending her?”

  “I’m not defending her.”

  “How can you even stand to be in the same room with her?”

  “She’s our mother.”

  “Bullshit! You were more of a mother to me than she ever was.”

  “She’s really sorry, Bram.”

  “She’s a selfish bitch. I don’t understand how you can just forgive and forget.”

  “Trust me, I haven’t forgotten.”

  “But you have managed to forgive?”

  “Yes. No,” she corrected immediately. “I don’t know,” she amended further. “I’m trying.”

  “Why?”

  “Because as angry as I was, as I still am, that’s how sorry she is, how much she wants to make things right.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s a few decades late for that.”

  “If you’d just see her, talk to her….”

  “The last thing I intend to do is talk to that woman.”

  “That woman is your mother.”

  “Yeah? Well, maybe I don’t need a mother anymore. I’ve gotten pretty used to life without one.”

  “If you’d just give her a chance. Give yourself a chance. You don’t have to love her. You don’t even have to like her.”

  “Good. ’Cause I hate her guts.” He laughed, the hollow sound chipping at the air, like a pick through a block of ice. “That sounded very mature, don’t you think?”

  “What I think doesn’t matter.”

  “What does?”

  “You do.”

  “You’re saying this is one of those ‘You can’t truly make plans for the future until you make peace with the past’ kind of deals?”

  “It’s not as trite as you make it sound.”

  “Yeah? ’Cause it does sound kind of trite.”

  “Bram…”

  “Look. I coped pretty well last night, didn’t I? I didn’t leave your house and head straight for the nearest bar. I didn’t call my friendly neighborhood dealer. You know who I did call? I called my sponsor,” he continued, then smiled shyly. “Did I forget to mention I joined AA?”

  Charley burst into a flood of grateful tears.