by Amy Bloom
I sat down across from him, poured us each a glass of bourbon, and lit a cigarette, which startled him. All the props said “Important Moment.”
“Let me say what I have to say and then you can tell me whatever you want to. Lion, I love you very much and I have felt blessed to be your mother and I’ve probably ruined that for both of us. Just sit still. What happened was not your fault; you were upset, you didn’t know…. Nothing would have happened if I had been my regular self. But anyway …” This was going so badly I just wanted to finish my cigarette and take the boy to the train station, whether he understood or not. “I think you’d feel a lot better and clearer if you had some time away, so I talked to Jeffrey—”
“No. No, goddammit, I am not leaving and I wasn’t upset—it was what I wanted. You can’t send me away. I’m not a kid anymore. You can leave me, but you can’t make me leave.” He was charging around the kitchen, bumping into the chairs, blind.
I just sat there. All of a sudden, he was finding his voice, the one I had always tried to nurture, to find a place for between his father’s roar and his brother’s contented hum. I was hearing his debut as a man, and now I had to keep him down and raise him up at the same time.
“How can it be so easy for you to send me away? Don’t you love me at all?”
I jumped up, glad to have a reason to move. “Not love you? It’s because I love you, because I want you to have a happy, normal life. I owe it to you and I owe it to your father.”
He folded his arms. “You don’t owe Pop anything…. He had everything he wanted, he had everything.” The words rained down like little blades.
I ignored what he said. “It can’t be, honey. You can’t stay.”
“I could if you wanted me to.”
He was right. Who would know? I could take my two boys to the movies, away for weekends, play tennis with my step son. I would be the object of a little pity and some admiration. Who would know? Who would have such monstrous thoughts, except Ruth, and she would never allow them to surface. I saw us together and saw it unfolding, leaves of shame and pity and anger, neither of us getting what we wanted. I wanted to hug him, console him for his loss.
“No, honey.”
I reached across the table but he shrugged me off, grabbing my keys and heading out the door.
I sat for a long time, sipping, watching the sunlight move around the kitchen. When it was almost five, I took the keys from Lionel’s side of the dresser and drove his van to soccer camp. Buster felt like being quiet, so we just held hands and listened to the radio. I offered to take him to Burger King, hoping the automated monkeys and video games would be a good substitute for a fully present and competent mother. He was happy, and we killed an hour and a half there. Three hours to bedtime.
We watched some TV, sitting on the couch, his feet in my lap. Every few minutes, I’d look at the clock on the mantel and then promise myself I wouldn’t look until the next commercial. Every time I started to move, I’d get tears in my eyes, so I concentrated on sitting very still, waiting for time to pass. Finally, I got Buster through his nightly routine and into bed, kissing his cupcake face, fluffing his Dr. J pillow.
“Where’s Lion? He said he’d kiss me good night.”
“Honey, he’s out. He’ll come in and kiss you while you’re sleeping.”
“Where is he?”
I dug my nails into my palms; with Buster, this could go on for half an hour. “He’s out with some friends, Bus. I promise he’ll kiss you in your sleep.”
“Okay. I’m glad he’s home, Mama.”
How had I managed to do so much harm so fast? “I know. Go to sleep, Gabriel Tyner Sampson.”
“G’night, Mama. Say my full name again.”
“Gabriel Tyner Sampson, beautiful name for a beautiful boy. ’Night.”
And I thought about the morning we named him, holding him in the delivery room, his boneless brown body covered with white goop and clots of blood, and Lionel tearing off his green mask to kiss me and then to kiss the baby, rubbing his face all over Gabriel’s little body.
I got into my kimono and sat in the rocking chair, waiting for Lion. I watched the guests on the talk shows, none of whom seemed like people I’d want to know. After a while, I turned off the sound but kept the picture on for company. I watered my plants, then realized I had just done it yesterday and watched as the water cascaded out of the pots onto the wood floor, drops bouncing onto the wall, streaking the white paint. I thought about giving away the plants, or maybe moving somewhere where people didn’t keep plants. Around here, it’s like a law. The mopping up took me about eight minutes, and I tried to think of something else to do. I looked for a dish to break.
Stupid, inconsiderate boy. Around now, his father would have been pacing, threatening to beat him senseless when he walked in, and I would have been calming Lionel down, trying to get him to come to bed.
At about three, when I was thinking of calling the hospital, I heard my car coming up the street slowly. I looked out the kitchen window and saw him pull into the drive, minus the right front fender.
He came inside quietly, pale gray around his mouth and eyes. There was blood on his shirt, but he was walking okay. I grabbed him by the shoulders and he winced and I dug my hands into him in the dark of the hallway.
“What is wrong with you? I don’t have enough to contend with? Do you know it’s three o’clock in the morning? There were no phones where you were, or what? It was too inconvenient to call home, to tell me you weren’t lying dead somewhere? Am I talking to myself, goddammit?”
I was shaking him hard, wanting him to talk back so I could slap his face, and he was crying, turning his face away from me. I pulled him into the light of the kitchen and saw the purple bruise, the shiny puff of skin above his right eyebrow. There was a cut in his upper lip, making it lift and twist like a harelip.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“I got into a little fight at the Navigator and then I had sort of an accident, nothing serious. I just hit a little tree and bumped my head.”
“You are an asshole.”
“I know, Ma, I’m sorry. I’ll pay you back for the car so your insurance won’t go up. I’m really sorry.”
I put my hands in my pockets and waited for my adrenaline to subside.
I steered him into the bathroom and sat him down on the toilet while I got some ice cubes and wrapped them in a dish towel; that year I was always making compresses for Buster’s skinned knees, busted lips, black eyes. Lion sat there holding the ice to his forehead. The lip was too far gone.
I wasn’t angry anymore and I said so. He smiled lopsidedly and leaned against me for a second. I moved away and told him to wash up.
“All right, I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Take your time.”
I sat on the couch, thinking about his going away and whether or not Jeffrey would be good company for him. Lion came out of the bathroom without his bloody shirt, the dish towel in his hand. He stood in the middle of the room, like he didn’t know where to sit, and then he eased down onto the couch, tossing the towel from hand to hand.
“Don’t send me away. I don’t want to go away from you and Grandma and Buster. I just can’t leave home this summer. Please, Ma, it won’t—what happened won’t happen again. Please let me stay home.” He kept looking at his hands, smoothing the towel over his knees and then balling it up.
How could I do that to him?
“All right, let’s not talk about it any more tonight.”
He put his head back on the couch and sighed, sliding over so his cheek was on my shoulder. I patted his good cheek and went to sit in the brown chair.
I started to say more, to explain to him how it was going to be, but then I thought I shouldn’t. I would tell him that we were looking at wreckage and he would not want to know.
I said good night and went to my bedroom. He was still on the couch in the morning.
We tried for a few weeks, but toward
the end of the summer Lion got so obnoxious I could barely speak to him. Ruth kept an uncertain peace for the first two weeks and then blew up at him. “Where have your manners gone, young man? After all she did for you, this is the thanks she gets? And Julia, when did you get so mush-mouthed that you can’t tell him to behave himself?” Lion and I looked at our plates, and Ruth stared at us, puzzled and cross. I came home from work on a Friday and found a note on the kitchen table: Friends called with a housepainting job in Nantucket. Will call before I go to Paris. Will still do junior year abroad, if that’s okay. L. “If that’s okay” meant that he wanted me to foot the bill, and I did. I would have done more if I had known how.
It’s almost summer again. Buster and I do pretty well, and we have dinner every Sunday with Ruth, and more often than not, we drive her over to bingo on Thursday evenings and play a few games ourselves. I see my husband everywhere; in the deft hands of the man handing out the bingo cards, in the black-olive eyes of the boy sitting next to me on the bench, in the thick, curved back of the man moving my new piano. I am starting to play again and I’m teaching Buster.
Most nights, after I have gone to bed, I find myself in the living room or standing on the porch in the cold night air. I tell myself that I am not waiting, it’s just that I’m not yet awake.
NIGHT VISION
For fifteen years, I saw my stepmother only in my dreams.
After my father got sick in the spring of my sophomore year, dying fast and ugly in the middle of June, I went to Paris to recover, to become someone else, un homme du monde, an expert in international maritime law, nothing like the college boy who slept with his step mother the day after his father’s funeral. We grieved apart after that night, and I left Julia to raise my little brother, Buster, and pay all the bills, including mine. Buster shuttled back and forth for holidays, even as a grown man, calm and affectionate with us both, bringing me Deaf Smith County peanut butter from my mother for Christmas morning, carrying home jars of Fauchon jam from me, packed in three of his sweat socks. My mother’s letters came on the first of every month for fifteen years, news of home, of my soccer coach’s retirement, newspaper clippings about maritime law and French shipping lines, her new address in Massachusetts, a collection of her essays on jazz. I turned the book over and learned that her hair had turned gray.
“You gotta come home, Lionel,” my brother said last time, his wife sprawled beside him on my couch, her long, pretty feet resting on his crotch.
“I don’t think so.”
“She misses you. You know that. You should go see her.”
Jewelle nodded, digging her feet a little further, and Buster grinned hugely and closed his eyes.
“You guys,” I said.
My brother married someone more beautiful and wild than I would have chosen. They had terrible, flying-dishes fights and passionate reconciliations every few months, and they managed to divorce and remarry in one year, without even embarrassing themselves. Jewelle loved Buster to death and told me she only left when he needed leaving, and my brother would say in her defense that it was nothing less than the truth. He never said what he had done that would deserve leaving, and I can’t think that it was anything very bad. There is no bad even in the depths of Buster’s soul, and when I am sick of him, his undaunted, fat-and-sassy younger-brotherness, I think that there are no depths.
When Buster and Jewelle were together (usually Columbus Day through July Fourth weekend), happiness poured out of them. Buster showed slides of Jewelle’s artwork, thickly layered slashes of dark paint, and Jewelle cooked platters of fried chicken and bragged on his triumphs as a public defender. When they were apart, they both lost weight and shine and acted like people in the final stage of terminal heartbreak. Since Jewelle’s arrival in Buster’s life, I have had a whole secondhand love affair and passionate marriage, and in return Buster got use of my apartment in New York and six consecutive Labor Days in Paris.
“Ma misses you,” he said again. He held Jewelle’s feet in one hand. “You know she does. She’s getting old.”
“I definitely don’t believe that. She’s fifty, fifty-five. That’s not old. We’ll be there ourselves in no time.”
My mother, my stepmother, my only mother, is fifty-four and I am thirty-four and it has comforted me over the years to picture myself in what I expect to be a pretty vigorous middle age and to contemplate poor Julia tottering along, nylon knee-highs sloshing around her ankles, chin hairs and dewlaps flapping in the breeze.
“Fine. She’s a spring chicken.” Buster cut four inches of Brie and chewed on it. “She’s not a real young fifty-five. What did she do so wrong, Lionel? Tell me. I know she loves you, I know she loves me. She loved Pop; she saved his life as far as I can tell. Jesus, she took care of Grammy Ruth for three years when anyone else would’ve put a pillow over the woman’s face. Ma is really a good person, and whatever has pissed you off, you could let it go now. You know, she can’t help being white.”
Jewelle, of whom we could say the same thing, pulled her feet out of his hand and curled her toes over his waistband, under his round belly.
“If she died tomorrow, how sorry would you be?” she said.
Buster and I stared at her, brothers again, because in our family you did not say things like that, not even with good intentions.
I poured wine for us all and passed around the fat green olives Jewelle liked.
“Well. Color is not the issue. You can tell her I’ll come in June.”
Buster went into my bedroom. “I’m calling Ma,” he said. “I’m telling her June.”
Jewelle gently spat olive pits into her hand and shaped them into a neat pyramid on the coffee table.
I flew home with my new girlfriend, Claudine, and her little girl, Mirabelle. Claudine had business and a father in Boston, and a small hotel and me in Paris. She was lean as a boy and treated me with wry Parisian affection, as if all kisses were mildly amusing if one gave it any thought. Claudine’s consistent, insouciant aridity was easy on me; I’d come to prefer my lack of intimacy straight up. Mirabelle was my true sweetheart. I loved her orange cartoon curls, her red glasses, and her welterweight swagger. She was Ma Poupée and I was her Bel Homme.
Claudine’s father left a new black Crown Victoria for us at Logan, with chocolates and a Tintin comic on the backseat and Joan Sutherland in the CD player. Claudine folded up her black travel sweater and hung a white linen jacket on the back hook. There was five hundred dollars in the glove compartment, and I was apparently the only one who thought that if you were lucky enough to have a father, you might reasonably expect him to meet you at the airport after a two-year separation. My father would have been at that gate, drunk or sober. Mirabelle kicked the back of the driver’s seat all the way from the airport, singing what the little boy from Dallas had taught her on the flight over: “I’m gonna kick you. I’m gonna kick you. I’m gonna kick you. I’m gonna kick you, right in your big old heinie.” Claudine watched out the window until I pulled onto the turnpike, and then she closed her eyes. Anything in English was my department.
I recognized the new house right away. My mother had dreamed and sketched its front porch and its swing a hundred times during my childhood, on every telephone-book cover and notepad we ever had. For years my father talked big about a glass-and-steel house on the water, recording studio overlooking the ocean, wrap around deck for major partying and jam sessions, and for years I sat next to him on the couch while he read the paper and I read the funnies and we listened to my mother tuck my brother in: “Once upon a time, there were two handsome princes, Prince Fric, who was a little older, and Prince Frac, who was a little younger. They lived with their parents, the King and Queen, in a beautiful little cottage with a beautiful front porch looking out over the River Wilde. They lived in the little cottage because a big old castle with a wraparound deck and a million windows is simply more trouble than it’s worth.”
Julia stood before us on the porch, both arms upraised, her body pal
e and square in front of an old willow, its branches pooling on the lawn. Claudine pulled off her sunglasses and said, “You don’t resemble her,” and I explained, as I thought I had several times between rue de Birague and the Massachusetts border, that this was my stepmother, that my real mother had died when I was five and Julia had married my father and adopted me. “Ah,” said Claudine, “not your real mother.”
Mirabelle said, “Qu’est-ce que c’est, ca?”
“Tire swing,” I said.
Claudine said, “May I smoke?”
“I don’t know. She used to smoke.”
“Did she stop?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if she smokes or not, Claudine.”
She reached for her jacket. “Does your mother know I’m coming?”
“Here we are, Poupée,” I said to Mirabelle.
I stood by the car and watched my mother make a fuss over Mirabelle’s red hair (speaking pretty good French, which I had never heard) and turn Claudine around to admire the crispness of her jacket. She shepherded us up the steps, thanking us for the gigantic and unimaginative bottle of toilet water. Claudine went into the bathroom; Mirabelle went out to the swing. My mother and I stood in her big white kitchen. She hadn’t touched me.
“Bourbon?” she said.
“It’s midnight in Paris, too late for me.”
“Right,” my mother said. “Gin and tonic?”
We were just clinking our glasses when Claudine came out and asked for water and an ashtray.
“No smoking in the house, Claudine. I’m sorry.”
Claudine shrugged in that contemptuous way Parisians do, so wildly disdainful you have to laugh or hit them. She went outside, lighting up before she was through the door. We touched glasses again.
“Maybe you didn’t know I was bringing a friend?” I said.
My mother smiled. “Buster didn’t mention it.”
“Do you mind?”
“I don’t mind. You might have been bringing her to meet me. I don’t think you did, but you might have. And a very cute kid. Really adorable.”
