The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  I WENT home at the end of the quarter and immediately discovered that my father didn’t know the first thing about getting my mother back. He was hopeless. All you had to do was walk in the front door to see that. For one thing, the house smelled like raw onions, and I had to pick my way through dirty clothes to get to the kitchen, where the overflowing garbage can was stuffed with empty TV-dinner trays. And the curtains were closed. My father hadn’t even bothered to open them. How did he think he could get her back, if he wasn’t even going to do that much? Edie was a firm believer in such amenities as air fresheners and light. She was a minty-smelling dental receptionist, after all; her values involved brushing and flossing twice a day, keeping your room clean, eating fruit, doing homework, performing good deeds for other people. This was the woman whose singsongy “Good morning, Dr. Blandon’s office” was a deep comfort to dental patients all over the Valley. The truth was, my mother was a prize housewife, never once appearing bored with cooking and baking and cleaning and making little craft projects. She could do anything.

  For my whole childhood, my father went away every morning to work in a bank, and he came home tired and crabby. He had but one job around the house, and that was to clean the swimming pool and manage the required chemicals. He’d go outside in the afternoons after work, still wearing his suit pants and his undershirt, and first he’d put a sample of pool water into test tubes, glaring at the results. I loved watching him do that, although it scared me, too. He hated being watched. If he caught you, he’d say something like, “What are you staring at?” So I always had to pretend I was out there doing something else. Then, after he’d gotten the pH corrected and the disease-causing strains of whatever was in our pool eliminated, he’d stand there like somebody who was hypnotized, skimming the oleander leaves out of the deep end. I’d play hopscotch on the patio while he worked because I liked to keep an eye on him. You never knew when he was going to say something funny. He was mostly quiet and mad-looking, off in his own world, but sometimes he’d do something like make a mustache out of tree bark and do a whole Groucho Marx act, from out of nowhere. You had to watch him. Sometimes I could coax him into coming into the pool with me, but he didn’t really like to do things people asked him to do. He’d say he was too busy, but then when you weren’t asking, he’d suddenly fly out of the door in his swim trunks and jump in, flailing around like a crazy man, and spend the next hour letting you climb on his shoulders.

  My mother was always trying to get him to do things with us, like play board games, but he wasn’t having any of it. She was somebody who could play Monopoly and lose everything and never get mad, no matter how many of her hotels you took. But my father would play like it was life or death. If he wasn’t winning, you could see him getting grimmer and grimmer as the game went on, and one time when my mother had monopolies on Boardwalk and Park Place and had all the railroads, he got to his feet and pushed the entire board over and stalked out of the room, swearing at all of us. My brother and I sat there in stunned silence, trying to figure out whether or not we were going to cry. But my mother laughed and told us not to worry; it was just because he was a real banker, and he knew that life wasn’t as simple as the game made it seem. She got up and went into the kitchen and made him a banana daiquiri, and then she went out to the backyard, where he was skimming leaves out of the pool in the dark. She turned on the pool light, and the backyard lit up in an eerie aqua glow, and I saw her touching his arm and then pretending to withhold his daiquiri from him. Pretty soon they were laughing, and he was reaching around her, trying to get the drink she was holding back from him. This was, I told my brother, the way you knew people were very much in love. That kind of thing was fun for them.

  My mother and I talked about love and men all the time. “You see?” she said to me. “The way you handle men is you just have to palaver over them, make them think they’re the most important thing in your life. They’re so easy, really.”

  About boys, she said, “They don’t really know what the hell is going on, or how anybody feels—and so we have to help them along with that. We women,” she said, “are the ones responsible for how people feel.”

  When I told her that it seemed unfair we had to do all that, she laughed and said, “No, no, no! Oh no, honey. We got the best deal of all. Do you know how boring life is without feelings?” I must have been twelve then, and we were standing in the kitchen, and my father and brother were outside by the pool, staring silently in opposite directions. “Look at those poor saps. Wouldn’t know what to say to each other if the house was on fire! What do you suppose they’re thinking about?”

  “Well,” I said. “Daddy’s thinking about how many leaves are in the pool now compared to how many were there yesterday, and David is thinking about soccer.”

  She erupted in laughter. “Exactly!” she said. “See? Isn’t it fun? You can do it, too. You just have to read their minds, and then you can do anything you want with them.”

  She and my father went out every Saturday night to a club. But they put on a little show before leaving each time: my father grumpily knotting his tie and pretending he’d rather watch the basketball championships or the TV movie of the week, and my mother laughing and calling him a stick-in-the-mud—years and years of Saturday nights like this, with her pushing him out the front door, all for the amusement of David and me, who were lying on the floor watching TV. She’d always turn and wink at me as they left and make that little circle thumb-and-index finger sign that meant “okay.”

  Then, when I was thirteen years old, all the ladies in the neighborhood started up a consciousness-raising group, meeting every Thursday night just to talk. At first it seemed harmless, like more of the same visiting they’d done with each other around the swimming pools while we kids wore floaties and jumped into the deep end and they watched us. But as the years went on, the group seemed to get sort of strange. My father pointed out one time with an angry laugh that there had been three divorces in that group, and one woman had just left town without her family and didn’t even bother to get a divorce or write to them or anything.

  I asked my mother what the group was for. “What do you do there?” I said.

  They talked, she said.

  “But what do you talk about?” I was lying on her bed on my stomach with my knees bent, swinging my legs back and forth like a metronome underneath the ceiling fan.

  “Well,” she said, “we talk about our power. Something you’re going to have to think about in your own life.”

  “You mean … how women know about all the feelings?”

  She laughed. “Uh, no. We’re all a little bit sick of having to be the ones who are responsible for taking care of all the feelings,” she said. I sat up on the bed, suddenly interested. Hadn’t I been the one to point out that this was too great a burden for women to bear? And hadn’t she been the one to declare that we were the lucky ones?

  She came and sat down beside me. “Women have been responsible for all the wrong things for too long,” she said. “By the way, do you know everything you need to know about sex?”

  I put my head underneath her pillow, and she laughed.

  “Forget it, I’m not going to embarrass you,” she said. “It’s just that women have to take back their sexuality. We’ve let men dictate the terms for way too long. Look, did you ever wonder why I’m always telling you that boys are out for only one thing, and that you mustn’t give in to them, because they just want to use you?”

  “Yeah,” I said in a small voice, thinking, Oh, God, not this again.

  “Now I want to tell you something else: you are a sexual being yourself, and you, as a woman, have a need for sexual expression, too, and you have a right to experience that. Sex is just creative energy. It’s beautiful, and it’s there for all of us, not just men! And you know something? Your generation is the one that’s going to have it all. The work and the respect and the feelings and all that, too.” She gathered me up in a hug. “I am so lucky to have a daught
er like you, so I can watch this all happen. You’ll go to college and get a degree in something you really care about—something you can support yourself with so you won’t have to depend on some man to see you through life. And don’t you come to me telling me that you met a really nice guy and he’s going to be the one to go to work and you’re just going to drop out of school and stay home and make lots and lots of babies and keep him happy. Okay?” She was holding me and staring into my eyes. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And if you want orgasms, multiple ones even, you shall have them.”

  “Stop it,” I said, and wriggled away from her. “I’m begging you.”

  MY MOTHER was living by herself in a tiny studio apartment furnished with stuff she bought in thrift shops, objects my straitlaced father would never have put up with: huge, overstuffed pillows, scarves, scented candles, and purple filmy curtains with stars on them. Most surprising of all was a water bed with a black velour bedspread.

  “Come on!” she said. “This is the best bed in the world! You’ve got to feel it! Come on, touch it. Run your hand over this cover. Isn’t that something?”

  I went over and sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed and looked around. From there I could see the corner of the room that served as a kitchen, with its coffeepot and two-burner stove and dorm-sized refrigerator. And right in the middle of everything was a card table spread with all her arts and crafts. My father had always referred to her projects as “arts and craps,” but now they clearly had top billing.

  I looked down and felt inexplicably dizzy. The Joy of Sex was lying on the floor, and there was a man’s leather sandal right by my foot. So the stud wore sandals. My toes curled up in embarrassment.

  “You love it here, don’t you?” my mother was saying. “I knew you would. It’s our kind of place. A woman’s place.” I swallowed hard and nodded. She went to the tiny refrigerator and took out two Cokes and handed me one. She was smiling with all her teeth showing. “I knew you’d get it. I mean, I know it’s small, but do you realize this is the first place in my life that has been just mine, all mine?”

  I sighed. This wasn’t going to be so easy, getting her to go back home to my father, not if she was willing to live here. She didn’t even look the same as she used to. Her dark hair was longer, and she wasn’t wearing it in a chignon anymore. It was down around her shoulders, loose and curly in a perm, and parted in the middle. She had on lots of eyeliner and blush. And she was wearing tight blue jeans and a hot pink shirt that didn’t button up as far as it might have. She looked mind-blowingly young, even though, by my quick calculation, she was forty-two, and therefore ancient.

  She saw me looking at her and did a little twirl. “Do you like my hair?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “It’s long,” she said. “I’ve always loved it long, but your father wanted me to wear it short or else in a bun, because that’s how his mother wore her hair.” She rolled her eyes. “All my life with this trying to measure up to his sainted mother.” She bounced on the bed again and grinned at me. “But Dmitri likes it long.”

  She launched into a whole story about Dmitri the art teacher, and how he was handsome and free-spirited and beloved by all the women in the class—but it was my mother whom he’d identified with the most. He was empowering her to truly express her deep feelings, she said. Who could believe that there were men in the world who truly respected women and wanted the best for them, who didn’t think of them strictly as sex objects, and yet because of that were the best lovers?

  “Oh, Mom,” I said.

  She reached over and ruffled my hair a little. “Aw, I suppose it seems strange to you. You’re seeing me in a whole new way, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged, not knowing what to say. Tears sprang to my eyes, and she hugged me. “Oh, my sweet, sweet angel girl,” she said. “You’ve always been the one who understood me the best. Even when you were a baby, I could tell by those big hazel eyes of yours that followed me around the room that you truly saw me.”

  I burst into tears. She came and held me, and I had a thought that everything would turn out all right after all.

  “Come on, come on, stop crying.” She dabbed at my cheeks. “Look at me. I’m happy! I’m doing paintings again, and making jewelry. I’m finding parts of myself that I didn’t even know existed.”

  I cried harder.

  “Why, who knows what’s still lurking around in this crazy brain of mine?” she said, smiling real big. “Maybe I’ll turn out to be a doctor, or an architect. Or maybe some kind of sex therapist!”

  Oh, God, I thought. Don’t start talking to me about sex. Could we please be like normal mothers and daughters, who don’t talk about such things?

  She reached over and tucked some of my crazier curls behind my ear. “How’s your father, speaking of sex therapists? That, by the way, is a joke.”

  “He says he’s fine.”

  “Well, then he probably is fine. In his worldview, at least,” she said.

  The phone rang then, and she went over to answer it. Obviously it was Dmitri; I could tell from the way she curled her entire body around the phone receiver, holding it up to her face as if it were a beloved object. I stared down at the sandal on the floor as if it were a snake.

  When she got off the phone, we went to a diner that we’d gone to a million times with my father and brother, a place where we’d often had breakfast on weekend mornings.

  She leaned forward on her elbows and smiled brightly at me. “For starters, tell me all about the men in your life.”

  “Well,” I said slowly, “I broke up with Jay three times and got back together with him only twice, which is for the best.”

  “Jay … Jay,” she said, frowning. “He’s the guy in your band? The sexy one?”

  I couldn’t remember ever describing him to her as sexy, but I said, “Yeah.” Then, for the sake of accuracy, I added, “Well, he’s good-looking. But he’s not really that good for me.”

  “You know, even the not-so-good ones have something to teach us,” she said.

  I fiddled with the enormous maroon menu. Nothing in it sounded very good. My mother winked and said she was having a hamburger, to keep her strength up. I finally ordered a bowl of chicken noodle soup.

  “I’m actually seeing someone else,” I said, meaning Grant. He and I had been talking on the telephone at night now that I was here—long, drifty conversations about the meaning of life and how we both felt we were living our lives right now in reaction to other people. He was waiting to hear about teaching jobs, and I was waiting to see what was going to happen with my family. We both felt powerless. That’s what we whispered to each other over the phone line, like it was a secret linking us together.

  My mother beamed at me for realizing that I needed to break up with Jay. “You see? That’s great,” she said. “One isn’t right, and so you move on. Pause, reflect, and get a new lover.”

  I wondered what she would have said if she’d really known. Before I came to LA, I’d been living at Grant’s apartment for five weeks, and he didn’t make a move on me until three days before I left. He’d given me his single bed while he slept on the floor on an egg crate foam mattress, first in the living room and then, because it was too cluttered in there with all the furniture, he’d moved chastely to the bedroom floor. We didn’t even kiss. He was polite and respectful, what my mother—my old mother, at least—would have called “the perfect gentleman.” Then one night he had simply come into the bedroom and sat down on the egg crate thingie and cleared his throat and said, “You know, I’m kind of that way about you.”

  That way. It thrilled me, that understatement. I’d watched as his Adam’s apple went up and down and up and down, powered by nervousness, and I was already a little in love with him just from the way he snored softly at night and how, when my artwork was on display at the student center, he showed up there in a tie and stood for a long, long time looking at my paintings, and then took me out
for coffee and told me that he wanted to understand every single squiggle on those canvases. I loved the cheerful tone of voice he had when he said “Good morning” to me each day, and also how he made sure to take all the hairs out of the shower drain and the way he tiptoed if I was studying for a test. He was the nicest guy I’d ever known.

  He said quietly, “You don’t have to have feelings for me. That’s not what I’m asking for …” and I got up and went over and kissed him on the lips and pulled him down on the bed. We made love, and maybe because of all the restraint we’d shown up until then, or maybe because we were already in love with each other, or maybe because, underneath everything, Grant really does have a very high opinion of loving—well, it was just fine. Way better than with Jay. And then after three days of repeat performances, the quarter was over, summer had come, and I packed up my car and moved back to LA, because I had promised myself I would, and also because I had to save my family.

  Which is why I was there, sitting across from my mother. I licked my lips. “So I have to ask you something,” I said.

  “Anything,” she said. “Ask me anything at all!” She took out a pack of cigarettes and held one out to me with a questioning look. I shook my head, and she shrugged and lit it up and took a long, glamorous drag on it. I couldn’t believe she was smoking. “In fact,” she said, “I have all kinds of things I’m dying to discuss with you, too. Things that I would have died before ever talking about with my mother. But first let me just ask you this. Have you ever seen your own vagina?”

  She said this in a conversational voice, didn’t even lean forward and whisper. I choked on a sip of coffee.