by Nancy Rue
“It might be saving my sanity,” I told him, “but that’s all I’m willing to concede right now.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “We’ll wait.”
“You and who else?” I said.
He just gave me his grin and melted me down another ounce.
I did nothing for Christmas except buy a gallon jug of extra-virgin olive oil for Max, a goldfish in a bowl for Mother, and a sweatshirt with the word Blaze on it for Sam. He gave me a leather-bound copy of the Pensées by Pascal and taught me to pronounce it to rhyme with “Chauncy.”
Hopewell had a bash Christmas Day, complete with several sets of carolers from various churches, a visit from Santa Claus—who turned out to be Ponytail in a very bad fake beard—and a dinner that I had to admit even Max would have eaten. Mother poured gravy over her entire plate and then ate nothing, and she didn’t seem to know what to do with the wrapped gift from Hopewell, which was put in her lap. But she did watch the goldfish I brought her with more attention than I’d seen her give anything else in a while.
“I know it’s not your koi pond,” I said to her, “but its as close as I could get. Just promise me you won’t pull it out and try to dissect it, okay?”
I went to see her every day, and from all accounts there were no more nighttime house calls to other patients. Frosty—whose name was actually Emily Murphy—said every time they checked on Mother, she was either sleeping, sitting in her chair staring out the window, or watching her goldfish. She advised me not to leave the fish food in her room, lest the poor little thing should bloat up and explode.
Sam and I continued our lively debates, and many of them sprang from what I was reading in Pensées.
“Pascal was a freak,” I told Sam on one occasion. “That whole ‘night of fire’ thing—do you think that really happened to him?”
“Nobody can know that for sure.”
“I didn’t ask if anybody knows. I’m asking if you think it did.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah, I think it did.”
“But it’s never happened to you.”
“Not that exact experience, no. It’s different for everybody. C. S. Lewis said that the day he climbed into the sidecar on his brother’s motorcycle, he was still an atheist. When he climbed out at the end of the ride, he was a believer.”
“Must have been some ride.”
“It’s definitely a ride, no matter how it happens.” He looked at me, eyes twinkling. “Don’t you feel like you’re on a ride?”
“Yeah, on a roller coaster, which can stop anytime now, thank you.”
“Nah, you don’t want it to stop.”
“The heck I don’t!”
“No, you’d miss the best part.”
“And this is about to come.”
“It comes to everybody who seeks God, and you’re seeking. It comes in different ways, like I said, but a seeker always eventually feels the joy—and the tears—and it becomes concrete, specific.” He was molding his fingers around an invisible shape. “You will have an experience where what you’ve been skirting around and questioning and doubting will become definite. It’ll be a different experience of Christ—the living God—but it’ll be the same Christ.”
Another night I told him, with disgust, that I had come to the “licking the earth” section in Pensées.
“According to Blaze Senior—” I said.
“I’m Blaze Junior now?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Just checking. Go on.”
“According to him, we’re supposed to despise ourselves. No, thank you.”
“You didn’t read the whole thing. Let me see your copy.”
I looked at him across the table at the Rose and Crown. “I don’t carry it around with me.”
“Okay, lemme see if I can remember—”
It was times like that, when his Chicago blue-collar upbringing slipped into his speech, that I loved him the most. He was so very real.
“I think it goes, ‘We are to despise ourselves because we have chosen not to fulfill our capacity for good, but we are not to despise our souls which have that capacity.’”
“You’re saying if we listened to our souls instead of ourselves, we’d be better people,” I said.
“Right. Better people who are better able to make good choices.”
“But that’s only if there’s a difference between our souls and ourselves.”
“Good.”
“Thank you. So which is which?”
“Let’s use your mother as an example. We can all see that her ‘self’ is virtually gone—the self you knew because that was the self she chose to show.”
“I’m with you so far,” I said.
“But the jury is still out, at least in your mind, on whether she’s left with a soul that can still feel and intuit and know things like love and respect.”
“So if there is a soul that goes beyond death and dementia, blah, blah, blah, that’s what it is.”
“Right.”
“So it would behoove me to treat her with love and respect, as part of my taking the wager.”
He grinned, but the grin faded as he watched my face.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
I pushed my club soda away from me. “I don’t think I know how to treat her with love and respect. I never did before.”
“Come on, of course you did. I saw you that night I was over at the house. You treated her with the utmost respect.”
“No, that was fear,” I said. “The only two emotions I have ever felt toward my mother are fear and anger. I never showed her disrespect because I was scared to death of her. And then I’d go away completely livid with myself for being afraid of her.”
“That’s what your self felt,” Sam said. “Now you can look at what your soul felt. Deep down in there, what did you want to feel for your mother?”
I pulled the club soda back to me and stirred it with the straw. “I get the picture. We don’t have to pursue this.”
“You’re scared.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Then there’s some other reason you’re slopping your drink all over the table.” He took the straw out of my hand. “It’s your soul that’s scared. Look at it. It’s terrified that you’re going to lose your mother completely because you love her.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “I’ve heard people say, ‘I love my parents because they’re my parents, but I don’t like them.’ I don’t buy that. If I didn’t like my mother—which I didn’t—how could I possibly love her? She molded me and shaped me into what she wanted me to be. Then when I showed any deviation from her design, she criticized me into wanting to be anything but what she wanted me to be. And as a result, I’m just like her. Hey, so I guess old Blaze was right—I do despise myself.”
“And your mother’s self.”
“Yeah.”
“But not your soul—and not hers.” Sam put his hand on the back of my neck and pulled me closer to him. “So deal with her soul to soul,” he said. “Treat her the way you always wanted to when you were a kid.”
“Sit in her lap?”
“She wouldn’t let you do that when you were little?”
“No,” I said. “Not that I can remember.”
He let go of me and watched me closely. “What else?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“You irritating man!”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s me all over. Come on, spill your guts.”
That was just the point. It was like spilling my guts—bringing up the stuff that had been festering and fermenting in me since I was six years old. Bringing it out would be like throwing up, and I hated to throw up. I would rather suffer the stomachache of the century for hours than upchuck once and get it over with. My mother had told me every time I was nauseous that if I would just let it go, I would feel better.
“I wanted her to let me brush her hair,” I said. “She has great hair and all
I wanted to do was brush it while we were practicing my French verb conjugations.”
“French verb conjugations?” Sam said. “How old were you?”
“I was about seven when I stopped asking her.”
“And she never let you.”
“No. Nor did she want me ‘hanging all over her in public, licking her ice cream cone—excuse me, frozen yogurt—or giggling when I crawled in bed with her. It wasn’t long before she didn’t want me crawling in bed with her at all.”
I stopped and looked at Sam.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I don’t want a pity party, Blaze. Nor do I want any, ‘Then no wonder you’re a cold fish—”’
“Stop it,” he said.
I did, because his voice was sharp.
“You are anything but a cold fish,” he said. “I couldn’t love a woman who didn’t have a soul that burned into mine.”
“Why, Blaze,” I said, “how poetic of you.”
It came out without the sarcasm, and I was glad.
Tabitha—and the rest of the students—returned to campus a few days after New Year’s. She popped into my office the first day of classes to bemoan the fact that she wasn’t taking a course from me that quarter.
“That’s because I’m not teaching one this quarter,” I said.
“And because I’m not taking any math this quarter.”
“Bad choice,” I said. “You should be taking courses in your major every quarter.”
“Math’s not my major anymore.”
Every freckle was shining.
“What about your parents?” I said.
“They’re letting me be undeclared until next fall so I can, you know, explore other possibilities.”
If I had had freckles, mine would have been glowing, too.
“I’m impressed,” I said. “How did you swing that?”
“After that talk you and I had, over at your mom’s house that one day, I prayed about it a lot and then when I got home I just sat down with them and I go, ‘I’m not happy in math and I don’t think that’s where God wants me.’ They were, like, still kind of ‘We don’t think so,’ but then when I told them about what you said—”
“Time out,” I said. “You were quoting me? To your Christian parents?”
“Yeah. Anyway, when I was telling them about you and your mom and how you were still helping me even though you already had so much to deal with, and that you weren’t just helping me with math, but with, like, life decisions, that’s what got them. They said you were sent by God.”
I steeled myself for the laughter that was sure to come roaring out of my throat and the sarcastic remark that would follow, but all I said was, “Pretty hard to believe.”
“Believe it,” she said. “So I don’t have to take any more math, and I’m already happier. The only thing is, I won’t see you. I mean, there’s no reason for you to tutor me, so…”
She looked so glum, I did laugh. “You totally crack me up, Tabitha,” I said. “First you moan and groan like somebody’s torturing you because you need tutoring. Now you’re pouting because you don’t.”
“I’ll miss you,” she said.
“I’ll be right here. You can stop in.”
“Oh, like I’m gonna stop in when you barely had time to see me before when you had to.”
“Actually,” I said, “I never had to. I could have pawned you off on a second- or third-year grad student.”
She did that back-and-forth thing with her head that she always did when she was halfway embarrassed.
“I tell you what,” I said. “I do want you to come over to the house, maybe one night this week. There’s somebody I think you should meet. Come for dinner.”
“Really?” she said.
“Yeah, come tomorrow night. Do you like Italian food?”
“So I’m having this little dinner party,” I told my mother that evening as I sat in her room, brushing her hair while she stared out the window. “Interesting combination of people. You always liked to do that at your dinner parties—put unlikely people next to each other and watch the sparks fly. Anyway, I’m having Max, of course. Like I’m going to cook? And Sam—he’s the guy I told you about. And Tabitha Lane. You used to eat her chips, remember? I want Max to hear her play the piano. You’d love it. Remember that Rachmaninoff piece I was trying to learn my senior year—that C-minor thing that sounded like aluminum cans going around in the dryer when I played it? She plays it and it’s exquisite.”
I stopped and crouched beside my mother to see her face. For a flash of a moment, something bright flickered through her eyes, and something unexpected flickered through my mind.
“Is God in there, Mother?” I said.
She didn’t answer that. But she didn’t say no.
I didn’t tell Tabitha who Max was, nor did I tell Max about her talent. I just let him think he was cooking dinner as usual, only there would be two extra people. Of course, “dinner as usual” for Max meant tortellini filled with Swiss chard for the first course, roasted lamb with juniper berries for the second, and glazed semolina pudding for dessert.
From the look on Tabitha’s face when she sat down at the table, I was pretty sure they didn’t eat like that in Idaho. She did it justice, however, in spite of the fact that she was sitting across from Sam, who made her blush about every two minutes just by grinning at her. I had resisted the temptation to tell him she had a crush on him. It had, in fact, been a semi-shock to me when I realized that I didn’t want to betray her trust.
We took our coffee—espresso so rich both Tabitha and I loaded it up with cream—into the living room. I lifted Tabitha’s cup from her hand and said, “Would you play something for us?”
Her eyes went immediately to Sam. “Does anybody really want to hear me play?”
“Absolutely!” Sam said to her. “Don’t I go nuts every time you play the Pharaoh Boogie or whatever that thing is?”
She darted to the piano as if she were going to plunk out said “Boogie,” but I said quickly, “Play that Rachmaninoff piece you played for me a while back.”
“Oh,” she said. This time she looked doubtfully at Max. “I don’t know if you’ll like it. It’s kind of, like, you know, heavy and dramatic.”
Max was sitting up slowly in his chair.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Max is into heavy and dramatic.”
Tabitha played the piece for us, and just as before, the moment her fingers touched the keys she was poised, in control, self-confident. I glanced at Max a few times and saw that he had the same expression as he used to when he and my mother would spend an evening listening to Puccini’s Turandot and moaning at intervals in some kind of ethereal angst. But most of the time my eyes were still on Tabitha. Even more than before, there was passion in the chords that crashed under her fingertips, as if she herself were being transformed by playing them.
We’re seeing her soul, I thought.
It was a thought against type, and I looked inward to scoff at it. But all I saw in myself was a deep appreciation for something beautiful that I didn’t want to chase away with my sarcasm. I closed my eyes and listened to her play.
No one said anything when she was finished—not until Max got to his feet as if he were at the Met and shouted, “Bravo!” as he clapped. That nearly did poor Tabitha in. She turned red down to the quicks of her fingernails. Max polished her off by saying, “Why aren’t you in the music school, my dear? With a gift like that, how dare you hide it? This must be honed!”
He went on ad nauseam while Sam and I exchanged proud looks. For a moment there, I felt positively parental.
The relative peace in my personal life—relative only to the few preceding months—was not duplicated in my academic world. It was ironic that it seemed more separate from the rest of my life now than it had ever been when I was trying to keep it apart. The sense of separation had nothing to do with any time-management skill or mental compartmentalizing on my part. It was simply that the wor
ld of math seemed to have no connection to anything else.
Jacoboni returned from winter break with renewed confidence in his own charm. That always happened when he spent any significant time with his “Muthah” down in Tennessee. The first day I saw him, he pulled me into a bear hug, and I had to wrestle to break free. He wasn’t cowed, however, and proceeded to tell me how much work he’d gotten done at home in spite of the many young women who just couldn’t seem to leave him alone.
“I needed to get back here so I’d stop partying so much,” he said.
“Are you still in your grandfather’s will?” I said.
“Of course.”
“Then you didn’t party that much.”
I sat down to check my e-mail and was all the way to “You have mail” before I realized he was still staring at me.
“What?” I said.
“Something’s different,” he said. “Did you do something to your hair? No, that’s not it. Different makeup? No, you don’t even wear makeup.”
“Doing a full inventory, Jacoboni?” I said.
He put one hand in his pocket and gestured with the other one, trying to illustrate some concept he couldn’t quite grasp. “I don’t know. I think it’s your voice.”
“You did party too much. Go get some coffee.”
“No, that’s definitely it, darlin. Your voice is different. I think it’s softer.”
“I’ll tell you what’s softer,” I said. “Your brain. Go get some coffee, and get me some, too, would you?”
He left still convincing himself that I’d had a laryngeal transplant over winter break.
Later that day I had my first meeting with Nigel in several weeks. I’d made some progress over break, but nothing like the quantum leap I’d assured him was going to happen. When I sat down across from him, he looked at me over the top of the progress report and frowned.
“You still have a long way to go,” he said.
“I know. But now that I have my mother settled into a…well, now that my personal life isn’t quite so chaotic, I can focus more. Not having any other responsibilities here this quarter, I should be able to make better progress.”
