Domestic Arrangements

by Norma Klein

  “Hi,” I said cheerfully, relieved in a crazy way that the moment was over.

  “Would you like a little tea, hon?” Mom said as I came into the kitchen. She and Simon had moved apart but in a natural way. “We’re just having some.”

  “Okay,” I said, “the mint kind.”

  “I think we may be out of it,” Mom said. “Si, could you look? It ought to be behind that cannister there.”

  “I hear you’re deciding about Lolita,” Simon said, handing Mom the tea.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I always thought it was kind of a dumb story,” Simon said.

  “Dumb?” Mom said. “In what way?”

  “I don’t know.” Simon pulled on his mustache. “Men like that who go after young kids seem kind of gross to me.”

  Mom laughed. “Gross!”

  He smiled. “Okay . . . just unappealing, somehow.”

  “I think so too,” I said. “Anyway, I can’t even sing.”

  “They can dub it, sweetie,” Mom said.

  “They often do . . . Audrey Hepburn couldn’t sing for My Fair Lady.”

  “That’s cheating,” Simon said, taking some brownies out of the refrigerator.

  “What a nest of moralists I live among!” Mom smiled. “Cheating?”

  “I know what he means,” I said. “It’s not real somehow.”

  “Either you sing or you don’t,” Simon said. “If you don’t, you don’t act in musicals.”

  I was glad Simon understood. We went into the living room and had our tea. I feel relaxed with Simon, despite the thing with Mom. Maybe it’s that I can’t take it seriously. I can’t imagine Mom actually being in love with someone six years younger than her. I can’t imagine her loving anyone but Daddy when it comes right down to it. But the way they were standing there together was so . . . intimate in a way. So quiet. I looked at Simon while he drank his tea. He’s never married, not even once. He told me once he lived with someone, but they broke up.

  After we had tea, Simon got up to leave. Mom went with him to the door. I was sitting so I couldn’t see them, but I heard him say, “Call me, darling, okay?” Darling! Mom murmured something I couldn’t hear. Then she walked back into the living room. She was wearing black jeans and a shirt with a big design of a parrot on it in black and white. “So,” she said, looking at me. She had a funny embarrassed expression.

  I reached for another cookie, just to have something to do.

  “Tat, I’m in love with Simon,” Mom said. “And he’s in love with me . . .”

  “Oh,” I said. I know that was a dumb thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything else. After a second I added, “Does Daddy know?”

  Mom frowned. “I don’t think so . . . do you?”

  I shook my head.

  Mom smiled at me. “You know, I’m glad you came in when you did today, Tat, I really am. I’d been thinking for such a long time about how to tell you, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t quite work up the courage.”

  “How come?”

  “I was so scared you’d be mad at me and I couldn’t stand that.” She looked at me with a kind of pleading expression.

  “Be mad at you?” I would never have thought of being mad at Mom for that.

  “I wanted to love Daddy forever,” Mom said, sort of sadly. “I really did. I thought I would. I just—this happened.”

  “So, are you and Daddy going to get divorced?”

  “I don’t know. I want to marry Simon, I want to live with him, I want to be with him, not just in snatches of time, but together, having tea together, all that. I’m not good at arrangements, at little adulterous things. It’s not my style, somehow. I know it’s hideous to say, but I love being married. I guess it’s never prevented me from doing things I wanted to do. I never got stuck in that victimy thing so many women do . . . but I feel so shitty about Lionel.”

  I thought about Daddy. “Well,” I started to say, but Mom interrupted.

  “If only I could find the perfect person for him! I’ve even thought of putting an ad in the New York Review of Books. You know, in those personal columns they have? ‘Soon to be ex-wife searches for female companion for spouse. Interviews between two and five’! I know just what Lionel needs.”

  “What?” I was sort of curious.

  “Well, he needs someone . . . lively, peppy, pretty, bright, not intellectual necessarily—”

  “I thought you said he liked intellectual women.”

  “No, not really . . . you know who’d be perfect for him, actually? Andrea Markson. She’s getting her doctorate in theater at Columbia but she used to act. She’s little and kind of perky . . . do you remember her, Tat?”

  “Is she blond and wears really bright colors?”

  “Right, and hats! She looks fantastic in hats. The only trouble is she’s seeing someone now and I think it’s serious . . . Poor Lionel. I just don’t want him to suffer. It’s not his fault. He can’t help his personality, and it isn’t even that his personality is bad. It’s just that he’s . . . oh, and I’m so afraid he’ll take it personally, first Dora, then me. He’ll think there’s something wrong with him, and there isn’t, not at all. I just know he’d make someone deliriously happy if she only—”

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about Daddy.” I told her about Abigail.

  Mom listened in fascination. When I was done her face lit up. “Abigail! How sweet. It’s perfect! It’s better than Andrea Markson. It’s perfect beyond belief. Young enough to fall for all the usual stuff, to be impressed, doting, in his field—they’ll have something to talk about. Oh, what a relief! My God, Tat, I can’t tell you.” She came over and hugged me. Her cheeks were bright pink.

  “She has Kerim, though,” I said.

  “Kerim?”

  “Her little boy . . . he’s just six.”

  “Six! Oh dear. Poor Lionel.”

  “You said he always wanted a son.”

  “True, but my goodness, at fifty . . . living with a six-year-old? Is he terribly quiet and bookish?”

  “Not really.”

  “Still . . . no matter. I mean it’s perfect, really. They’ll manage. They just need a big apartment and help. Oh, I pray she’ll marry him. Lionel is so tediously monogamous.” She looked thoughtful. “Maybe I should call her up. I could give him a fantastic recommendation. He’s a pretty good cook, limited, but good. His omelets are great. He’s a decent father, don’t you think, sweetie?”

  “Sure.”

  Mom looked wistful. “He’s a darling, really. She’s lucky to get him. Good men are hard to find.”

  I ate another cookie. I was just eating cookies mostly out of nervousness, but they were also really good cookies from William Greenberg. “If Daddy’s such a darling, why do you want to divorce him?”

  Mom reached for a cookie too. “Tat, I just fell madly and crazily in love with Simon. I mean, it happens, even at thirty-nine. Lionel is just so . . . serious. He doesn’t have a sense of fun, really. And I think fun is important.” She looked grave. “I think fun is just about the single most important thing in life, when you come down to it. What do you think, sweetie? Will you like Simon as a stepfather?”

  “Sure, he seems nice.”

  “He adores you and Deel. He says you’re the brightest, most terrific kids he’s ever seen.”

  “Deel’ll feel bad because of Daddy.”

  “I know! Poor Deel! But she likes Simon. He’s such a darling, really. He’s just irresistible.”

  “Did you like him right from the beginning?”

  Mom gulped down the rest of her tea. “Horribly, and he liked me. But the thing is, sweetie, when you’re married, you, well, you try not to be attracted to people because, well, if you are, this is what happens! We really both fought it off for ages. We just used to go to the movies together and not even touch! It was just indescribably frustrating.”

  “And then what happened?”

 
; “Well, then, you know, one day you feel—what the hell! I mean, you only live once and all that. And then you think: Well, it’ll just be a one-night stand, we’ll get it out of our system and before you even know where you are, whammo! You’re totally, wildly, in love.”

  I hesitated. “That’s how I feel about Joshua,” I said shyly.

  Mom beamed. “I know . . . Isn’t it a nice feeling?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It really is.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Mom decided to have Simon tell Deel. I guess she chickened out. I don’t blame her. Simon and Deel went out one Saturday afternoon to a play and then they had dinner. The next morning I asked her how it had gone.

  “You know about it, huh?” she said.

  I nodded. I told her about walking in on them the week before.

  “What’s weird,” Deel said, “is that he actually wants to marry her.”

  “Why is that so weird?” I said.

  “Mom?”

  “You’re just prejudiced against her. She’s really pretty and nice.”

  “Listen, I don’t care . . . let them do what they want.”

  “Do you still want to live with Daddy?”

  Deel looked horrified. “With some little six-year-old kid rampaging around the house? You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “How did you know about Abigail?” I was really surprised.

  “What do you mean, how did I know? They’ve been at it for years.”

  “What?”

  Deel grinned. “Sure . . . you could tell a mile away.”

  “Tell what?”

  “That she had a mad crush on him and—”

  “But, how could you tell Daddy liked her?”

  “Oh, Daddy’s pretty transparent in an opaque kind of way,” Deel said.

  Deel is so smart. I remember how one of her teachers once wrote in a report that she was “terrifyingly perceptive.” Imagine figuring all that out! “Do you think she made that dirty phone call?” I said, suddenly remembering.

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like something she’d do, exactly.”

  Daddy was coming back that night from a trip. Mom had said she wanted that time to talk to him. “Poor Daddy,” I said. “He’s the last to know.”

  “Oh, he probably knows,” Deel said. “He’s not so dumb.”

  “How could he?” I said. “You mean they’ve been pretending all along?”

  “Pretending what?”

  “Pretending to be happily married when they weren’t.”

  “They weren’t pretending anything . . . they were happy, more or less. They just happened to fall in love with other people.”

  I guess what I can’t get over is how blasé Deel sounds. Maybe being in love with Neil has made the whole thing less important to her. “I might actually live with Neil,” she said. “He’s thinking of buying a loft with this friend in Soho.”

  “Mom and Daddy’ll kill you!” I exclaimed.

  “What do you mean? They’ll be delighted. She’ll want to be alone to cuddle up with Simon and Daddy’ll be getting it all together with Abigail. They don’t need us.”

  That made me feel awful. “We’re still their children.”

  “I’m not a child,” Deel said haughtily. “And neither are you.”

  “Well, I still want to live with them.”

  “With which of them?”

  I thought a minute. “Maybe I could live part time with both.”

  Deel looked thoughtful. “Listen, let me give you one piece of advice. Take weekends with Mom and weekdays with Daddy.”

  “Why?”

  “If you take weekends with Daddy, you’ll be stuck babysitting for Kerim.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “Simon said Mom’s keeping the apartment.”

  “Well, since it’s a co-op . . .”

  “That’ll be good,” Deel said. “I can keep all my junk here.”

  I stayed over with Shellie that night since Mom had said she wanted to be alone with Daddy. Shellie was understanding and good. Of course, her parents have been divorced and remarried for ages so it doesn’t seem so strange to her. “Yours stuck it out pretty long,” she said, impressed. “A lot longer than most.”

  “I think they were happy,” I said. “I think they really loved each other.”

  “Probably they did,” Shellie said. “They usually do in the beginning.”

  When Deel and I got home Sunday night, everything looked just the same as usual. Daddy was in the living room, listening to music. But for some weird reason when I saw him, I burst into tears.

  “Darling,” he said hugging me. “Don’t . . . it’s going to be fine. Don’t worry.”

  He said all this stuff about how he and Mom had stayed together because they loved Deel and me so much and wanted us to have a happy home, but now that we were older, it just didn’t seem possible anymore.

  “Will you live way down in the Village?” I said.

  “Definitely not,” he said. “We’ll look for something right around here.”

  There were so many things I felt like asking him, like whether he and Abigail had liked each other a long time, like Deel said, but I didn’t know if I should. “Did Abigail send you that valentine, Daddy, the one I thought was addressed to me?”

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  “Did she make the dirty phone call, too?”

  “No,” Daddy said. “I don’t know who that was. It will remain one of life’s many unsolved mysteries.”

  I know this is awful, but I feel a little bit jealous of Daddy having another child, even if it is a boy. “Are you going to have more children?” I said.

  Daddy sighed. “I think Kerim is going to be enough for me, at my age,” he said.

  “I’ll help you with him,” I said. “I think he’s cute.”

  “That’s nice of you, Tat.” He beamed at me affectionately.

  “Daddy, what if Mom hadn’t fallen in love with Simon and wanted to marry him? What would you have done?”

  “I wanted us to stay together,” he said. “For you and Cordelia. I wanted you to have a solid base, something that would be there always.”

  “But what about Abigail?”

  He reddened. “What do you mean?”

  “What would you have done about her? I mean, aren’t you in love with her?”

  “Well, people work these things out,” Daddy said, tapping his fingertips together. “There are many ways—”

  “No, what I mean is, wouldn’t you have felt funny? Being in love with one person and being married to another person?”

  Daddy sighed. “Darling, all of this is much more complicated than it seems. People start out in marriage naturally expecting that, well, they’ll be in love forever, but inevitably—”

  “Inevitably?”

  “Maybe not inevitably, but often something happens and . . . well, one can’t just walk out like that. There are children, there’s a home. People fall in and out of love all the time. But it’s irresponsible to use that as an excuse to dissolve a marriage.”

  “Do you think Mom is being irresponsible?”

  He hesitated. “I didn’t say that.”

  But I could tell that’s what he thought.

  Poor Mom and Daddy! I feel so sorry for them. I remember how Deel and I used to worry about how they’d manage once we were both out of the house and in college. It’s true, they have jobs and interests and things like that, but it does seem like they spend an awful lot of time worrying about us and planning things around us. We were terribly afraid they’d both go moping forlornly around the house, totally at loose ends, like those people Deel read about in Passages. Now at least that won’t happen.

  I hope they know what they’re doing, though. I hope they’ll be happy. It’s funny. All these years they kept giving me advice about what to do and I took it because I thought they knew everything about everything. Now I’m not so sure. I don’t blame either of them. I wouldn’t have liked it
if they’d stayed together just for me and Deel, being in love with other people. I don’t care what Daddy says, that sounds awful to me. Well, I know one thing. When I grow up, I’m going to do it differently. I’m not going to marry until I find someone I know I can love forever. Even if that means waiting till I’m forty or never marrying at all! And if I have children, I’m going to be completely honest with them about everything. I won’t pretend to give advice, if I don’t know what I’m doing myself. I won’t put on a false front.

  When I got home from school the next day, I found Mom in the bedroom, just staring out the window. It’s rare for Mom to just sit. She’s a very active kind of person. When I came in, she jumped. “Oh, hi, Tat.”

  Ever since they said they were getting divorced, I have the feeling that Mom and Daddy have been avoiding each other. At least, they’re hardly ever both at home together. I went over and sat down beside her. I kissed her on the tip of her nose. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure.” She smiled, but it was a sad smile. “I just hope I’m doing the right thing. Do you think I am, sweetie? Tell me honestly.”

  “You mean about Simon?”

  She nodded.

  “Sure, I mean, if you love him . . .”

  “But, his being younger—”

  “I don’t think age matters . . . anyway, I think Daddy’s wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, he says you should have stayed together even if you loved other people. But that sounds awful to me.”

  “I couldn’t live like that,” Mom said. “Maybe men can, more easily . . . What else did Lionel say?”

  “Oh, stuff about sex, like he always does.”

  Mom laughed. “What stuff?”

  “I just think he wishes Joshua and me would stop fucking. He kept talking about how great celibacy is.”