“How do you make… ?”
“Zimsterne?” Caitlin laughed. She told her, enumerating the ingredients and describing the ritual rolling out of the dough with palpable nostalgia. It was after dark now, and as Portia had been some hours at the kitchen table, no other lights were on in the house. It felt a bit primitive, a bit over the river and through the woods. She found herself toying with the notion of being alone out here, out of sight of other houses, out of earshot from the road. How long would she last, left to her own negligibly self-reliant devices? Susannah had a habit of chopping her own wood, or at least helping out when she had people (neighbors, always neighbors) over to chop it. She also planted her own vegetables and made her own bread. Frieda was in charge of repairs around the house, and she’d even rigged solar panels for the south-facing roof. The weaver… Portia didn’t know what the weaver had contributed, but then again, she’d been a weaver. Skills didn’t come more elemental than that. Against such paragons of prairie womanhood, she felt a little pathetic. Portia could barely wield a plunger and was sufficiently wary of all things electrical that she called her handyman for the most minor incidents. She employed a moonlighting university janitor to clean her gutters and bought her occasionally organic food at the supermarket, like everybody else. At least she recycled the bags.
She wondered, as she listened to the girl, when Susannah was coming back and where Frieda had got to (Frieda had been sighted only briefly that morning). Susannah had not said a thing about dinner. Was Portia meant to cook? Were they going out? Restaurants were not exactly thick on the ground in Hartland, Vermont. Should she be investigating the food situation?
“Are you hungry?” she asked the girl.
“Always,” Caitlin said. “I’ve been hungry since the test came back positive.”
“No nausea, then?”
“Never. I know.” She shrugged. “Supposedly I’m really lucky. But if I get out of this without four extra chins, it’ll be a miracle.”
Portia smiled. “Did my mom say anything to you about dinner tonight? Do you know when she’s coming home?”
The girl nodded. “There’s a stew. It’s in the fridge. I’m supposed to put it in at six.”
They both turned to look at the kitchen clock over the stove. It was nearly six.
“I’ll do it,” said Portia. “If you want to go rest.”
“Oh yeah. I feel like I’m going to fall down. It’s weird. You’re fine. And then suddenly you just want to drop and sleep wherever you are. Do you have kids?”
Portia looked at her. She thought: I am the only child of the woman who says she intends to adopt your baby. Don’t you know the answer to that?
Caitlin, to her credit, didn’t take long to decide she’d made some sort of misstep. “Is it a personal question?” she said with real distress. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if you know anyone who’s LDS. Do you?”
Portia, now additionally perplexed by the non sequitur, shook her head.
“It’s just, everybody has kids. Lots of kids. And they start young. So you get to assume. I apologize. It’s totally different here. I never met anyone like your mom in my life.”
Portia nodded and even managed to smile. “She’s a force of nature.”
“I probably should be looking you over or something. I mean, you’re her only kid, right?”
“Far as I know,” Portia said with discernible sarcasm.
“You look like you turned out okay. You’re not, like, a drug addict or an ex-con, right?”
“Not yet,” said Portia. “There’s always time.”
“And don’t you work at a college?”
“I do,” she said. “Is that a measure of success?”
“Beats working at Wal-Mart.”
Portia heard her own laugh before she knew she was going to laugh. “That’s absolutely true. Not that I’ve ever had to find out. I’m sure it’s true.”
Caitlin rolled her eyes. “Oh, it’s true, you can trust me. Summer job, two years ago. So… you, like… she was a good mother, right?”
Portia made herself wait. She made herself think how important this question was, and how complex. It would not be right, for example, to tell this confused and distressed young person that it was insane to think of a sixty-eight-year-old woman—even an apparently healthy one—as an appropriate caregiver for her unborn child, or that Susannah had been making the outrageous assumption that Caitlin did not know her own mind, had not thought through her own dilemma and reached her own conclusion. But what could she get away with here? Basic big-sisterly support? A reminder that there was still plenty of time to think this through? A caution that the problem at hand concerned a few others besides herself and required, just possibly, a less spontaneous plan? But none of these came to her in time. Instead, Portia found herself making reassuring noises. Yes, Susannah had been a wonderful mother. Yes, she had had everything she needed, much of what she wanted. No, she had never been beaten or insulted. No, she had never wanted for food or shelter or been left alone with dangerous people. There had been books and ideas in the home. There had been modern dance and soccer practice and guitar lessons. There had been regular checkups and even braces when they were required. And Portia had indeed, as Caitlin had pointed out, turned out okay.
“I am sort of tired,” Caitlin said. “You mind if I go upstairs?”
Portia didn’t mind. She was, she discovered, a tiny bit buoyant as a result of this, their first conversation. And in fact, only now that it was over did she understand that she’d been dreading this for weeks, or ever since Susannah had announced her grand plans for the baby. Setting her mother’s stew on the rack in the warming oven, listening to the girl clomp up the stairs to her bedroom, Portia found that she’d been oddly reassured by Caitlin, and in particular by her evident refusal to be cowed by what was happening to her, though why it should matter to Portia at all wasn’t entirely clear. Because the baby, it now appeared, had half a chance of coming out articulate, intelligent? Because Caitlin didn’t look like her idea of a knocked-up teenager, but was more like an earnest, not overly competitive Princeton applicant from a low-performing school?
She rummaged in the fridge and turned up greens of some description. These she washed and chopped while the olive oil heated. At her mother’s house, she ate well by default and always had, though the purity of Susannah’s larder had, when she was much younger, given her a rabid fascination with junk food—convenience store pastries, Pepperidge Farm cookies, the most secret and shameful affinity for Burger King Whoppers—so wrong, in so many ways. The discovery of SpaghettiOs (at a friend’s house at the age of thirteen) had been so transformative that Portia soon developed a full-blown addiction, sneaking out to Cumberland Farms with a can opener and a spoon, downing the entire can in the bushes, and disinfecting her mouth with slugs of Listerine before returning home. During her Dartmouth years, she had been ill equipped to resist the ready availability of so many heretofore forbidden foods (the soft ice cream machine in Thayer Hall alone had dominated her diet most of freshman year), but by now Portia had more or less migrated back to the food of her childhood. It had been years since she’d tasted the high-fructose corn syrup rush of canned pasta or the oddly metallic hit of soft vanilla ice cream. Though hardly the purist her mother remained, she did her best to evade anything with a bar code. And at least she knew what to do with greens.
How this would change now, with Mark gone, was one of the ways she was beginning to test the reality of the breakup: one tiny piece at a time, rather than letting the enormity of it overwhelm her. The bed linens. The joint checking account. The friends. The annual invitation to the faculty award dinner. (This was an endowed event, prescribed in such a way that some extraordinary amount of money had to be spent each year on the food and wine—and often on use-it-up items like caviar, truffles, and excellent vintages. The dinner invitations were extended only to heads of department and their partners. It was a fabled event at the university and, according to Rachel, w
ho had attended once when a colleague of David’s was honored, completely spectacular. This year, with Mark ensconced as interim head and finally destined for an invite, they had both been looking forward to the dinner. Well, she had. And, Portia thought bitterly, chopping the greens with displaced vigor, he had, too. And what a petty thing to be fixating on, anyway, with her life in mid-upheaval.)
It was like, she thought, that fable about the blind men describing the elephant, one with his hand on the elephant’s leg, another at the elephant’s ear, a third at the tusk. The enormity of the elephant escaped them all in the immediate details: rough edged, smooth, and hard, flapping in the breeze. And here I am, Portia thought, worrying about dinner invitations and phone bills (because she would not, would not, pay for his calls to Oxford that summer, that spring, the previous winter, however long it had been going on), and the rosemary plant in their kitchen that would now obviously die, because he was the one who could keep it alive (unless it simply disappeared with him, to bloom and perfume his new kitchen and life), and their series at McCarter Theatre, the same pair of seats, row J, on the aisle, for the past four years, right next to that older couple, the great translator of Rimbaud and Hugo, and his wife, who found them so charming and young. Here I am, thought Portia, not quite divorced because I was never quite married, not a parent because I never quite had children, not even an aunt or a cousin or a sibling, not tied, not rooted, not amused, and certainly not reassured, and also far from home, because this—she glanced around at the kitchen, its severe table and stiff wooden chairs, shelves of spices in glass jars or plastic bags, stacks of remaindered Bennington Pottery plates and bowls—is certainly not my home. And yet here I am: chopping greens in Vermont while Rome burns. Or Princeton burns. Or something.
A car cruised up the drive, crunching snow as it turned before the house, sending its headlights through the window and around the room in a sweep. Susannah, thought Portia, newly irritated. At last. She opened the oven door and pulled out the rack with an oven-mitted hand, giving the stew a self-righteous stir. But when she straightened up, she saw that it wasn’t her mother’s Subaru at all. It was Frieda’s van, a relic that refused to die, and Frieda herself reaching for the kitchen door.
“Oh, hi,” said Portia. “I thought you were Mom.”
“She isn’t home?” said Frieda. “Meeting must be running late.”
“She hasn’t called.”
“No.”
Frieda set an armload of mail on the kitchen table, catalogs spilling over magazines: Ladyslipper, Gaia, Alternative Medicine, Newsweek.
“Wow,” said Portia. “You guys must be on every list.”
“This is all your mom,” said Frieda. “I’ve been getting mine at a P.O. box downtown.”
“Oh?”
“But you’re right. There’s way too much. I mean, it gets recycled, but I wish she’d cut down. Call some of these people. Tell them to stop sending. It’s so excessive.”
Frieda went out to the van and retrieved her guitar case and a portable amp. These she took past Portia and up the stairs, where they landed directly overhead in the room where Portia had slept. When she came back downstairs, she had changed from her gray turtleneck sweater to another sweater, light blue but otherwise identical.
“Sorry I woke you up this morning,” she said, taking a seat at the table.
“Oh, that’s okay,” said Portia, though it had been a particularly unpleasant way to wake up, after waiting so long for sleep.
“I have to be honest, I’d completely forgotten that you were going to be in there.”
Portia, who’d suspected as much at the time, said nothing.
“You always stay in the guest room. I just wasn’t thinking.”
Her posture, Portia saw, was peculiarly tense: fingers interwoven, arms straight. She sat so stiffly that her back did not meet the back of the chair. She was a wiry woman, thin and hard, with a lined face and darting blue eyes. Her hair, after cancer—or, more accurately, chemotherapy—had grown in steel gray, and she wore it very short, as if reluctant to become too attached to it again. She looked… not unwell, Portia thought, but not at ease. And though it was hard to tell beneath the sweater, Portia wondered if she might not be a bit too thin. More than anything, she looked like a woman with something on her mind.
“We’re having… actually, I’m not sure what it is. For dinner. Something with lentils? Actually it smells pretty good. And kale. I think it’s kale.”
“No, I’m not staying,” Frieda said shortly. “I’ve got plans.”
“Oh.” Portia frowned. “I’m sorry.”
She seemed to be waiting, Portia thought.
“Something fun?”
“I’m meeting friends in Strafford. At Stone Soup.”
“Oh, I love that restaurant.”
Frieda’s fingers, Portia noted, were drumming the tabletop. They tapped lightly, quietly, but in a rhythm.
It took a moment, but eventually she understood that she was supposed to sit down. This was important, apparently. She took the seat opposite. “How’s it going?” she said.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come. I need to talk to you about Susannah.”
Portia thought right away about Burlington, the appointment. Was it Susannah? Was Susannah sick?
“Is she okay? What is it?”
“Oh, healthwise, fine. I’m sorry if I worried you. She never gets sick at all, it’s very demoralizing to the rest of us,” Frieda said, making a small attempt at humor. “And her cholesterol is something disgusting, like one sixty. Without medication. But I’m worried about her because I think this thing with the girl—you know, the baby—it’s just crazy. I mean, don’t you think it’s crazy?”
Portia, who wanted to be quite sure what they were talking about before answering such a dangerous question, said: “Which part of it, exactly?”
“Which part?” Frieda said with notable irritation. “Jesus, all of it. I mean, okay, I think it’s fine that we’re putting her up. Her family obviously couldn’t deal with this. Did she tell you they’re Mormons?”
Portia nodded.
“So I can absolutely understand that she needed to find somewhere to go. I’m totally supportive of that. And she’s a nice girl. She’s dealing with something really hard. You know, I actually like her. But I was barely on board with her coming here when your mother told me she might actually end up raising the baby. I mean, Jesus Christ, Portia, she was thinking about raising the baby.”
“I know,” said Portia, motioning with her hand that the girl in question was upstairs and quite possibly within earshot. “But… she thinks Caitlin will change her mind when she sees the baby. She thinks Caitlin will end up keeping it.”
“Well, that may be. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time a mother has fallen in love with her child. But it’s a lot to stake on a ‘maybe,’ and this isn’t just about her. This is my life, too. And she didn’t ask me, Portia. She let me know. She kept me in the loop.”
“Okay.” She nodded.
“And she’s older than I am! Portia, what the fuck is she thinking?”
This last was said softly, but with a hiss of pure vitriol. Portia was momentarily taken aback.
“I guess what you’re telling me is that you don’t want to do this.”
Frieda sat back in her chair. She gave Portia a look of profound disgust. “I’m not doing it. And this is my house,” she said, visibly enraged.
“Well, Frieda, you’ve been here together for… what is it?”
“My house. I found it. I bought it. Carla and I were here since 1979, for fuck’s sake. When Susannah came, we did some financial maneuvering so we each owned a third. And then Carla left, so we did another transaction, and we changed the papers again. But she has no right to do this, even if it weren’t completely insane. And I’ve raised my kids, Portia. I have no intention of starting over again.”
“Have you told her?” Portia said, struggling to stay calm.
“
Have I told her? Every day. Every fucking day. I’m not doing it. I’m not staying for this.”
“Wait,” Portia said, readjusting, “you mean… are you telling me you’re going to kick her out?”
“I can’t,” she said unhappily. “I’ve looked into it, believe me. Legally, it would take years for one of us to oust the other. And a fortune—which, unlike your mother,” she said nastily, “I do not have. Plus I have no desire to spend however many years I have left in litigation. I’m sixty-five. There are other things I need to do. I want to do.”
“Of course,” said Portia. “You have to do what’s best for you. But…”
“What?” Frieda said combatively.
“Well, what are you going to do?”
“I’m moving to Boston. Carla’s been living in Somerville for the past couple of years. There’s an apartment in the house. Someone’s in it, but she can get them out with three months’ notice. Most of my drumming circle’s in Boston now.” She pushed up the sleeves of her blue sweater and laced her fingers together again. Then she sat for a long moment, clearly wrestling with how indelicate she ought to be. Portia, half-curious, half-afraid, waited for her to make up her mind.
“You know,” said Frieda at last, “I think… well, I’ve felt this for a long time, that Susannah’s just at loose ends.”
Portia, who had thought the same thing for most of her life, merely nodded.
“It’s a quiet place, Vermont. I mean, we’ve got things more or less in hand here, there aren’t so many battles left to fight, do you understand? It’s not like when we were all in Baltimore or Susannah was in Harlem, and women couldn’t get abortions or health care or child care. Even in Northampton, she was always running around, setting things up or keeping people on their toes. That clinic in Holyoke, we never would have got that moving if it wasn’t for her. And when Springfield tried to get rid of that lesbian teacher, do you remember that? That was Susannah in her element.”
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