I sighed. “Sharon’s here. It doesn’t get much worse than that.”
“Oh stop, Jen. She’s not all that bad.” She laughed. “You did tell Dad about Will, didn’t you?” Her tone had changed so fast, from one of conspiratorial friend to one of a chiding, derisive schoolmarm, that it shocked me a little bit how one person could be two different things so quickly.
“Not exactly,” I said. I shook my head. “So don’t say anything tonight, okay?”
She threw her roostered hands up in the air. “When are you going to just grow up and start talking to him already?”
“Why do I have to talk to him?” I said, pulling a carrot from a vegetable tray and popping it into my mouth.
“He’s our father.” She shook the roosters at the sky, in a gesture that might have been comical if she hadn’t also looked so exasperated.
Beverly stepped into the kitchen. “Am I interrupting?”
Yes, I thought.
“No, of course not, Mother.”
I pinched her arm, slight enough for Beverly not to notice, but hard enough for her to squirm. She knew exactly what it was, what I was saying, so I didn’t even need to verbalize it. I can’t even believe you call her Mother now.
She shot me a warning look back, which said, Shut up. Don’t lecture me about parental relationships.
“Well, I thought you should know that Hannah is in the basement chewing on a Matchbox car.”
“Did you take it from her?” Kelly asked.
Beverly shrugged. “I asked her to give it to me, and she didn’t listen.”
Even I knew that one-year-olds didn’t know enough to listen to something like that. I rolled my eyes at Kelly, but if she noticed, she pretended not to. “Here.” She handed me the roosters. “Can you baste?” And then she ran off toward the basement, Beverly in tow.
The eight adults sat around Kelly’s dining room table, and the two older kids sat at the little wooden one Kelly usually had in her basement. Hannah was in the high chair, alternating between stuffing bite-sized pieces of turkey in her mouth and throwing globs of mashed potatoes on the floor. Every time she threw food, I watched Beverly grimace, watched the corners of her mouth turn down sharply, her eyes stare accusingly at Kelly, who was too busy running in and out of the kitchen, taking Jack to the bathroom, getting Caleb more apple juice, to actually notice. Beverly struck me as what Kat would call a woman who was not meant to be a mother, and I wondered how she’d managed to raise Dave and his sister to be somewhat normal and functioning adults.
My dad and Sharon sat across the table from us, next to Beverly and her husband, Stan. Dave sat on the other side of Will, and Kelly, when she managed to, sat down next to him.
I tried to eat my turkey quietly, tried not to meet anyone’s gaze, afraid they might talk to me directly. I chewed my food slowly, and sipped my wine too fast.
Will, who ignored the adults, made a silly face at Hannah, and she giggled, then spit out some turkey and giggled some more. “Don’t.” I nudged him. “She’s eating.”
He glared at me.
But this gave Sharon all the opening she needed. “Isn’t that sweet? Look, he’s good with her.” I looked up and forced a smile, but then I went right back to my glass of Merlot, finishing it off. She nudged my father. “What do you think, Donny, could be some more grandchildren in the works, eh?”
The table got silent. Until Will finally said, “Maybe. We’ll see.”
“What’s to see?” Sharon was talking with her mouth full now. Chewing the sweet potatoes messily and quickly, the way she’d just butted her big ugly nose into our business. “Jenny, you got quite a catch there. You’re married to a judge. Take advantage of those smart little swimmers.”
At the word judge, the room stopped. Even little Hannah seemed momentarily distracted from throwing her food. Dave had his fork suspended in midair, and Beverly looked mildly bewildered, as if a blood vessel had just silently erupted in her brain and had given her this odd moment of suspension, where everything in the room felt as if it were under water. But no, maybe that’s just how I was feeling.
“What did I say?” Sharon asked. She shook the ice cubes in her empty glass, and then sucked one up and started crunching it with her teeth. “Oh, Jennifer, are you infertile? That’s all you hear these days, bad eggs and in vitro fertilization. And oy, sexual diseases.”
My father looked as if he hadn’t heard a word, as if I was not his concern, as if any grandchildren from me weren’t important enough for him to get involved. He quietly sliced his turkey, and then reached across the table for the gravy boat, all without looking up.
“Jen,” Kelly said. I glared at her. Not now, I said with my eyes. Let it go. She shook her head. And then I knew she was going to say it, that she was going to tell them. That’s the way it was with my sister. Everything was about controlling the situation with our father, doing what she thought was best without any regard for me or my feelings. Maybe she thought she was trying to help, but somehow she always made things worse.
She’d done the same thing after Will asked me to marry him. I’d asked her not to tell our father the details, not to tell him at all until I was ready, but a few days later, Sharon called me up and told me that they’d heard the news from Kelly.
I’m sorry, Kelly had said, when I’d called her to yell at her. But he’s our father. As if that meant more to her than us, than our relationship.
You don’t know, I’d told her. You don’t know everything about him.
Oh Jen, she’d sighed. Just grow up already.
But I didn’t want to watch her do it now, watch her act all high and mighty as she sold me out, so I stood up and walked into the kitchen. I heard Caleb’s voice behind me, “Where’s Auntie JJ going?” Sweet, sweet child. You cannot possibly understand what a bitch your mother is, I thought.
Then I heard Kelly’s voice, barely audible, a whisper. “… not a judge anymore … Daniels and Sons.” Sharon gasped, and as I stood there trying to fully grasp what had just happened, the noise from the other room became suddenly muted, the air still. Then I heard the sound of Sharon’s glass hitting the table, the ice cubes clinking so hard that they made a noise like shattering glass, or maybe the glass had hit the wood floor and actually shattered.
I smelled Will’s pine aftershave, then felt his hand on my shoulder. “You want to go?” he said, his voice sounding soft and calm and small, but not at all angry the way I’d thought it would be.
Seventeen
We drove in silence. The roads were slippery and dusted with snow that, as the sun began to set, had started to change to ice. Will gripped the steering wheel tensely, with both hands, staring straight ahead. I thought about him staring out of his office window, wanting to leave, wanting to escape. And that’s almost what it felt like we were doing now. “Do you want to stop and get some food?” he asked.
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m not very hungry. But if you want to …”
“No,” he said. “I’m fine.”
When he pulled into the garage and turned off the car, he turned toward me. I knew he was watching me carefully, even though I was still staring straight ahead.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry that you have to be ashamed of me. That—Oh, I don’t know. Fuck it.” He leaned his head against the steering wheel.
I turned toward him and put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m not ashamed,” I whispered. And I wasn’t. I was displaced, now floating around in the world with no purpose, no sense of who I was supposed to be. Not a real writer anymore. Not a fund-raiser. Not a friend. Not a lady of the club. Not a doubles tennis player. And not really even one half of the Levenworths—for all intents and purposes, the Levenworths ceased to exist and the two of us were just Will and Jen, not sure where to go or who to be, or how to be something together.
He leaned up. “Then why didn’t you just tell him?”
“I don’t tell him anything,” I said. It was impossible to explain, the way I
felt that every time I talked to my father there was an ocean roaring in my ears and obscuring every sound, making it impossible to really tell him anything or hear anything in return. It was impossible to explain that I didn’t feel love for my father, that I didn’t even really like my father, when I knew Will would’ve given anything to have his father back. It was impossible to explain the way I felt about Will right now, the way I felt this want, this need for him to make me feel the way he once had.
I leaned toward him, barely noticing the gearshift in my side, and I ran my finger along his smooth shaven cheek. He turned his head to look at me, and I kissed him. Not a quick kiss, not a little peck that we’d gotten used to giving each other as a formality, back and forth, the motion of emotion, without any real emotion at all. This was a long kiss, a slow kiss, a kiss that I felt pass with a tingly sensation down my legs. A sensation like the one I’d felt dreaming as Kat. This was the kind of kiss that made you feel warm, even when you were angry and scared and freezing cold.
He pulled back first, but he did not pull away, so I felt his breath against my cheek. Warm. “Jen,” he whispered. “Jen. I—”
I thought about Kat and Grant, about how easy it was for passion to slip away, to transform into something else, and I didn’t want this moment, our moment, to end. “Sssh,” I whispered, and I kissed him again. I felt his tongue, pushing into my mouth, sweetly at first, then more insistently, and I closed my eyes. Will. This was Will. Me and Will. What I knew. What I loved.
And then the annoying jingle of my cell phone broke into the moment, and Will pulled back. He stared so intensely that I couldn’t look away. “Are you going to get that?” he whispered.
“It’s probably just Kelly,” I said. But it kept on jingling. I sighed and rummaged through my purse until I found it. “It’s Kat,” I said. “I probably should get it.”
He hesitated, then said, “Go ahead. I’ll meet you inside.”
I watched him get out of the car and start to walk away before I picked up the phone. “I burned the fucking turkey,” Kat cried into my ear. I heard her, but I couldn’t erase the feeling of Will, the taste of him. “Jen, are you there? Are you eating? Oh shit, I’m interrupting your dinner.”
I cleared my throat. “No,” I said, thinking that if she weren’t so upset she would’ve noticed it, that something was different than it had been earlier, just from the sound of my voice. “I’m not eating. Tell me what happened.”
Twenty minutes of consoling her, and two calls to Boston Market later, Kat had calmed down and had located a precooked turkey. I went into the kitchen, where Will sat at the table, browsing through the gigantic pile of Black Friday ads. When I saw him sitting there, I felt nervous, the kind of nervous I’d felt the first time I saw him, sitting there in Il Romano, the glow of the candlelight washing across his face, telling me immediately that he was not just any blind date, he was someone special. “Everything all right?” he asked, not looking up from the paper.
“Kat burned the turkey.”
He nodded. “Still, not quite as bad as our dinner, though, huh?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. He nodded, and he distracted himself with the paper. I willed him to look up, to catch my eye, to remember kissing me. “You know it has nothing to do with you.”
“It is what it is, okay?” He looked up, but he wouldn’t quite meet my gaze.
“Will, I …” I wanted to say something about the kiss. No, that wasn’t exactly true. I wanted to actually kiss him again, wanted to feel that passion from him again, but when I saw the way he looked right now, saw the sadness and the disappointment in his face, I knew for sure that all we’d had in the car was a moment. And in the course of a marriage, one moment did not mean all that much.
He stood up and gave me a quick kiss on the forehead. “I’ll be in my study. Don’t wait up. Okay?” And then I watched him walk away, and thought about the way I used to watch him, the way I used to look at him in disbelief, with a sense of wonder: This man was mine. This man loved me. And now he was always walking away.
I made my way upstairs, slowly, this new sense of disappointment settling heavy in my chest. One passionate kiss did not fix a marriage, did not repair the damage that had broken in slow and winding slivers through the years. I told myself this, but still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, thinking about him.
I took my herbs and lay down in bed, and I wondered if I thought about kissing him, thought about being with him, if it would happen in my dream. If thinking about being in that passionate place would be enough to dream me back there. And if I dreamed it, maybe in the morning I would wake up, and it would feel real. But then, just as I drifted off to sleep, Kelly’s face popped into my head. The way she’d looked, looking at me, egging me on with her eyes. Tell him. Tell him.
Shit, I thought, I’m going to dream about her. And in the seconds before sleep, this annoyed me.
I was standing in Kelly’s kitchen. I opened the oven door with my hands, which were covered in roosters. Hideous potholders that Beverly gave me as a gift for my birthday last year. I saw them and I thought of you, she’d said. As if she knew anything about me. Anything at all.
“Can I help, dear?” Beverly asked from behind me. I closed my eyes and spun around. Her face was tight and smooth—too much Botox—I could tell from her voice she was frowning, but there was an absence of emotion on her face, except just right around her eyes.
I wished I had my camera, so I could capture her, in this moment, with this exact nonexpression on her face, that still somehow to me conveyed disdain, disappointment. Dave never believed that I saw it there, never could see it the way I did. Maybe a picture would prove it to him.
“My mother loves you,” he always said. “Just like you were her own daughter.” No, not true. Her own daughter, Kathleen, could do no wrong, even when she did, even when she drank herself into a stupor and collapsed on the couch for an entire weekend. Even then, I’d never seen the look on Beverly’s face that I saw when she looked at me.
“No,” I told her. “I have everything under control. And Jen is bringing the pies.”
“Jen is coming? “
“Of course,” I said, “Jen always comes.” Beverly rarely did. Beverly liked to spend the holidays with her daughter and her real grandchildren, my two little twin terror nieces. Who could blame them? If I had a mother like Kathleen, I’d probably try to set the kitchen curtains on fire, too. Or throw the contents of the sandbox down the toilet. Or any of their other various indiscretions since they’d been born five years ago.
“She’s not bringing that man with her? Is she?”
“Her husband, Will?” I said, though I was positive she knew his name.
“You won’t let him around the children?”
“Beverly, Jen says he’s innocent. And there’s nothing wrong with letting him around the children. He’s not a child molester or something.”
“Kelly, how many times do I have to tell you to call me Mother?” She sounded vaguely annoyed.
I nodded. “Sorry. I—I will.” Mother, you are not my fucking mother. Mother. When I closed my eyes, I could see her, standing right there in front of me, her hair up in a bun, wearing the string of pearls myfather-in-law bought her for some anniversary, telling me that whatever is meant to be will be.
“And I still wouldn’t want him around the children if I were you. You have to teach them good values, Kelly. Morals.” She waved her hand in the air.
“Yes, Mother. You’re right,” I said. I swallowed back the lump in my throat. As if she would know anything about morals, wearing a dead animal around her shoulders.
When I woke up the next morning, Will was already gone, and there were four voice mail messages on my cell. Three from Kelly, which all basically said, We need to talk. Call me back. I thought about my dream, about the way Beverly got under Kelly’s skin—and instead of feeling sorry for her, I felt even madder. She’d sold me out last night, for what, for her mother-in-law? For Dave?
I didn’t call her back.
The fourth message was from my father, with Sharon’s whiny voice echoing in the background. He said they were flying back to Florida this afternoon, and Sharon thought it might be nice if we got lunch and … talked.
I was sure if I went to lunch with them he would be frowning while she would be swilling her rum and Coke, and telling me, with absolute certainty, that I should indeed not have Will’s baby, that his swimmers were probably little schemers, just like him, and that I should leave him.
So I deleted all four messages, and went off to take a shower.
Once I stopped talking to Kelly, I couldn’t stop dreaming about her. I had two dreams about her the week after Thanksgiving. I remembered only pieces of them when I woke up in the morning, but what I did remember, I wrote in my reporter’s notebook.
Beverly was insisting on Caleb going to private school next year. I wanted him in public school. Dave threw his hands up in the air. If she wants to pay for it, just send him to private school, he said.
That’s not the point, I said. I was angry, so mad that my insides wanted to boil over, that I wanted to slap Dave.
Then, the next night, I was Kelly lying in bed, alone, staring at the clock. I felt this intense sense of loneliness that threatened to suffocate me. Dave came in at ten-thirty. I heard the sound of his footsteps, and then felt his breath on my neck, felt the wash of relief swarm over my body. “Sorry I’m so late,” he whispered. I leaned into him.
She called me a few more times, but I still didn’t return her calls.
“You’re going to have to talk to her eventually,” Will said one night, when she called during dinner.
I heard Beverly’s voice. You can’t let Will around the children. And I felt the anger that welled up inside Kelly when she and Dave fought about his mother. “It’s not that,” I said to Will. “I just don’t feel like talking to her right now.”
The Transformation of Things Page 11
