“You can live in New York,” I told her, “as long as you live at least twenty blocks away. I can’t have you on top of me or I’ll suffocate.” I never would have been so straightforward in the past, but this was the new, empowered me. I said it firmly, and she didn’t argue. In fact, she said it was fine; she preferred further downtown anyway—Hell’s Kitchen, in particular, an “up-and-coming area,” as she put it, which also happened to be where Flanagan lived. Not that she had agreed to go out with him; he was at death’s door. But she would help him keep his place straightened up, do his grocery shopping, and get him a new wardrobe. Other than that, he was on his own.
Anyway, there she was on my couch one day looking like the cat that swallowed the canary. It’s not the sort of phrase I would usually use, but I now understand why someone coined it; that’s exactly how she looked.
“I ran into a friend of yours while I was doing your laundry this morning,” she finally said.
I had been wondering why I had so much clean underwear in my drawer, and now the mystery was solved. She had been doing my laundry. Again, in the past, this would have sent me into a state, but the new me wasn’t going to let the fact that my mother was foraging around in my dirty underwear get me angry. Soon she would be living in Hell’s Kitchen and doing Flanagan’s laundry. So I let it pass and instead concentrated on the other part of her statement. What friend could she possibly have run into in the basement laundry room? I would have assumed it was one of the playground mothers, but they all had washer/dryers installed in their apartments in flagrant violation of building regulations—this was the Upper West Side, where breaking the rules was more or less expected, especially if you could be self-righteous about it. Pauline had led the washer/dryer battalion: “You can’t be schlepping down to the basement every time you have to do the laundry,” she had expounded to the play group one morning. “Let them haul me away to prison if they want. I have a child to keep clean.”
“So who was this friend of mine you ran into?” I prompted my mother, as she intended I do.
“Stephen,” my mother said, as though it was obvious.
“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” I lied.
“Of course you do, dear. Stephen Danziger. He was at your birthday party. He’s a math teacher at one of the magnet schools in the boroughs. He’s thirty-five years old, never been married but with one long-term relationship that didn’t work out because the girl had cats. Dogs are fine; he likes dogs and takes care of his sister’s occasionally, but he’s allergic to cats—though that wasn’t the real problem. She was hysterical and far too attached to her mother.”
“Well, thank God that’s not a problem for me,” I noted. “You learned a lot about him in a wash cycle.”
“Yes, I did,” said my mother proudly. “By the way, how can you wear that underwear that gets into the crack of your behind? It’s not sanitary.”
I let this pass.
“He’s a very pleasant young man,” my mother continued, “though he’s not related to the kosher foods people. He likes you.”
“I don’t know him,” I said. “Besides, he has a girlfriend.”
“No, he doesn’t,” declared my mother.
“How do you know?” I have to admit that I was interested in the answer. Stephen Danziger had for some months now loomed as emblematic of my tendency to miss what was there right in front of my nose, just like the guy in the Henry James story. I assumed that by now he and the blond woman whom he had accompanied to Race for the Cure were working side by side in various soup kitchens and, in the interim, planning their wedding, a modest affair at which all the food would be organic and gifts would be donations to their favorite charities.
“I know because I asked him,” replied my mother. “Pedro told me he thought he had a girlfriend, too—a tall blond that Pedro said was a knockout—but I like to get things from the horse’s mouth.”
“And what did the horse’s mouth tell you?” I asked with some trepidation.
“That he doesn’t. The tall blond was his sister. They’ve been tending to their mother during her illness. She was on hospice at his sister’s apartment until she died last month. You see why it’s always important to ask questions.”
His sister—the blond at Starbucks and Race for the Cure! It was a plot point out of a bad novel. But in life, I figured, sometimes you have to settle for a bad novel, especially if it turns up something you want. I wasn’t going to let my sense of weak plotting—i.e., mistaking a sister for a girlfriend— get in the way of another chance with Stephen Danziger. My heart leapt up at my mother’s words, though, of course, I didn’t let her see this.
But she wasn’t paying attention anyway: “He asked how you were doing, and I told him you had had breast cancer, but had successfully finished treatment and were now as good as new.”
“Thank God you filled him in on that.”
“Of course I did. You want him to know the worst up front, so he doesn’t get scared away by too many surprises. It didn’t matter, though; he seemed to know about the cancer. He saw you at the Race for the Cure. He was there with his sister after his mom passed away last month. Even before that, he said he figured you were getting chemo, since you were wearing a wig when he saw you in the elevator.”
I had to acknowledge that this showed unusual perceptiveness for a man.
“I asked him if he’d like to come over after dinner tonight. For dessert. Maybe an after-dinner liqueur.”
I had thought my mother had backed off in the meddling department, but obviously she had not. “I don’t drink after-dinner liqueurs,” I said peevishly, though I wasn’t as annoyed as I sounded. I was still processing the delightful discovery that the tall blond with Stephen Danziger had been his sister. “I don’t even drink aperitifs,” I added as a reminder to myself.
“There’s no need to be so literal about it. It was just something to tack onto an invitation.”
“No one asked you to invite him.”
“I told him that you found him very attractive.”
“I never said that!”
“So what? It will pique his interest.”
My mother, let me pause to explain, has always had a tendency to say things that mortify me. This has been going on for as long as I can remember. There was the time in sixth grade, for example, when she called out in the middle of the mall, “Is that the boy you like, Suzanne?” And the time she told my eighth-grade gym teacher to order a medium-sized tee shirt for me because she was sure my breast size would increase by the middle of the year.
In short, my mother had a long history of embarrassing me, but I have to admit that she wasn’t getting to me the way she used to. I’d stared death in the face, and it had changed my perspective. One thing about being dead: you won’t get to be embarrassed anymore, which makes being embarrassed look pretty good.
So there you have it. My mother had obviously said things to Stephen that I would previously have found embarrassing but which I could shrug off now that I had the enlarged perspective provided by my pretty good cancer. If anything, I felt grateful to her for having spoken to Stephen, cleared up the sister-girlfriend confusion, and invited him over for a drink.
“When,” I therefore asked calmly, “is this individual, whom I presumably find so attractive, expected to drop by?”
“I told him to come around eight,” she said. “But I explained that it didn’t really matter, since you were always around and he shouldn’t stand on ceremony.”
I thanked her for making my availability so clear.
“When he comes you can serve him some of that strudel your weird friend dropped off. I took it out of the freezer so it would be ready.”
I had no idea that my mother had actually frozen Roy’s strudel, but I should never underestimate her determination to freeze things that “might come in handy.” As I said, I wasn’t really angry at my mother for much of anything, but I didn’t feel it would be a good precedent to admit it. You can’t let
people like her entirely off the hook or you don’t know where it will lead—she was already doing my laundry, for God’s sake.
“I don’t see why I should serve him anything,” I said huffily. “You can serve him something if you’re so hot for him.”
“Unfortunately, I won’t be here,” she announced. “I have agility class with Wordsworth tonight.”
I may have neglected to note that my mother had more or less taken over the life of that dog, as she had once taken over my life. Eleanor did not seem to mind; she had met someone in her Partners of White Collar Felons support group.
“You’ll have to entertain Stephen yourself,” my mother added blithely.
“I don’t know him, so I don’t see why I should entertain him,” I said, maintaining my huffiness.
“So don’t let him in,” she shrugged.
“I’m not going to be rude. The point is, I didn’t ask you to invite him.”
“And if I waited for you to ask, you’d never meet anyone. You should be thanking me instead of making me feel guilty about inviting an eligible young man who happens to be interested in you to drop by.”
“He’s not interested in me. He was probably just being polite.”
“Then you can get him interested in you.”
“I don’t want him to be interested in me,” I lied.
“For God’s sake, just feed him some strudel and be done with it. You don’t have to make it into such a big thing.”
“I’m not making it into such a big thing. But I’m certainly not going to go to any trouble.”
It was the old pattern. Except that it wasn’t. We were going through the motions, but our hearts weren’t in it.
“I’m not going to wear my wig,” I announced petulantly.
My mother opened her mouth to protest, then thought better of it and changed course. “Go right ahead,” she said. “He knows you’re bald anyway, and he probably likes you enough not to care.”
STEPHEN DANZIGER RANG the bell a little before eight, which told me one thing: he had the confidence to be early. He was standing with his hands in his pockets. I had looked at him more closely during those encounters in the elevator and the mailroom over the past few months and found that there was much to recommend him beyond the fact that he was less wispy than I originally thought. Now I looked at him again and found additional points in his favor. He was, for example, taller than I remembered, or perhaps he was just standing up straighter, though he was still pretty hunched. He was thin, which I had noticed before, but this added to his tallness to create an impression of unthreatening authority—two things that are pretty nice to find together. He had a fairly wide mouth, a substantial but not overly obtrusive nose, and blond hair that, as noted earlier, was thinning but neatly combed. He was wearing khaki pants and a light blue sweater that brought out the blue-grey of his eyes. Once again, I was struck by the fact that they were the color of my father’s and equally kind.
“Hey,” he said. “Your mother asked me to drop by for dessert.”
“I know,” I replied, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’m afraid all I have is half-frozen strudel. I know she said something about liqueur.”
“I didn’t take her literally,” he said, then looked around curiously. “Isn’t she here?”
“No, she stood you up.”
It generally takes men a few seconds to get used to my delivery, but he laughed right away—a good sign.
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
It wasn’t the most original statement, but it would do.
“I like that you’ve given up the wig,” he added, which earned him more points, both in broaching the unavoidable fact of my baldness directly and in implying that he didn’t mind the way I looked.
“I wore a turban for a while,” I explained.
“My mother went through that phase,” he noted, “but she finally said to hell with it, too.” He paused, then added: “Your mom probably told you that she didn’t make it, but then, they caught the cancer late and she was stage four. I’m told your prognosis is good.”
“I’m sorry about your mother.”
“She handled it well, all things considered. The day of your party was the day she went into hospice. It was as good an ending as we could have hoped for. She died a month later.”
“I saw you at the Race for the Cure,” I said.
“I saw you, too. But you were busy. Good picture in the Post.”
We both laughed.
I went into the kitchen to bring in the strudel, and he sat down on the afghan-draped sofa. The atmosphere was surprisingly relaxed. We concentrated on cutting the strudel, which was still pretty frozen, and he said he was used to eating semi-defrosted food. I told him a little bit about working for the air-conditioning engineers. He told me about teaching high-school math. Soon—I can’t tell you when, exactly— I began to feel very happy.
“What?” He stopped in the middle of explaining how much the test scores in his school had gone up in the past year. I must have been staring at him.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just that I don’t know why I didn’t notice you at book club that first time.”
“I hear you went out with Derek for a while.”
“I’m not sure what I was thinking.”
“I have to admit that he didn’t seem right for you.”
“I didn’t even notice you at the Doggie Meet and Greet,” I added. “I mean I noticed you, but I didn’t really notice.”
“You were busy with the gay guy.”
“You could tell?”
“Of course. It was obvious.”
“Oh God,” I said. “Why would you have even wanted to come over? OK, I know my mother asked you, and she can be hard to turn down, so maybe you were scared. But still …”
He laughed. He said he knew I was a sensitive person by the way I’d reacted when Pauline scolded me for coming late to book club the first time. And that I was funny— he could tell—and he liked funny. Also, he liked my face, which, I guess, was an original way of saying that he thought I wasn’t ugly.
Then he told me how my mother had looked at his laundry and evaluated his underwear in the basement that morning. “They’re polyester boxers. She told me to replace them right away with 100 percent cotton.”
“She doesn’t approve of my underwear either.”
“I know,” he said—which meant that my mother must have discussed my thongs, maybe even exhibited them for his appraisal—it was the sort of thing she would do. Yet somehow it didn’t evoke the expected mortification. I felt comfortable with Stephen Danziger—or perhaps it was that my mother had examined his underwear too and found it wanting, so we were in the same boat.
We went on like this for a while in what can only be referred to as flirtatious self-deprecation. When he finished the strudel, I even offered him liqueur—I actually had some ancient crème de menthe under the sink—but he said he had to get up early the next day; it was the semifinals for the math league and he had a bunch of eleventh and twelfth graders to drive upstate for the meet. But he asked me out to dinner Friday evening. The meet would be over by then, and he hoped I could make it.
That’s when I said, “I’m going to have to go on tamoxifen.”
He barely paused. “That’s good,” he said. “It means your cancer is less aggressive and more likely to be cured.” Then: “You can always adopt children, you know, if you want to have them, which maybe you don’t. Not that you should totally rule out having your own. But the whole ‘having your own’ thing, as I see it, is overrated.”
I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about that character in the Henry James story, The Beast in the Jungle, and how he could have used a mother like mine to help him out, poor guy.
WHEN MY MOTHER called that evening, it was to announce that Wordsworth had placed second in agility but really to pump me on Stephen Danziger.
“Well?” she said, “did he drop by?”
I couldn’t lie. “Yes
,” I said. “And he was very nice.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“What do you want me to say? That I’m madly in love with him, that I owe it all to you, and that we’re getting married next week?”
“Not next week,” said my mother. “I want your hair to grow back, and I want a nice temple wedding.”
“Mom, I’m kidding.”
“Mark my words,” she said. “You’re going to marry that man. Have I ever been wrong before?” All the time, I thought.
But this time she wasn’t. I did marry Stephen Danziger— though I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion so that everyone can be free to fix their own. That is more or less a direct quote from Jane Austen—the end of Mansfield Park, to be precise, a novel that happens to have something in common with my story: the heroine needed to get a life and finally got one without leaving home, which is also the case for me. This might mean that my life is like a Jane Austen novel, although Mansfield Park is considered the least Jane Austen-like of her novels and, of course, I’m not—I repeat, not—pretending to have anything resembling Jane Austen’s insight, eloquence, or wit. I am saying this explicitly so you won’t run off and write nasty things about me on the Internet accusing me of pretending to have any of these qualities.
So that’s it; end of story—though I will say, since some of you like to know this sort of thing, that Stephen and I ended up being married in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden because Flanagan had an old ’Nam buddy who worked there and got us a discount, and Eleanor covered the photography as her wedding gift, and Stephen’s sister, the tall blonde, who works in advertising, found us this awesome caterer who managed to make kosher food (for the Kaplan side of the family) edible, and my hair did grow back, though it was not more manageable than before, and after a good deal of fighting, my mother and I did find a dress that we both liked since, although I told her continually that it was my wedding, there was no way she wasn’t going to think of it as hers too.
Suzanne Davis gets a life Page 19
