She said, “I think you should live with me for a while and work until we can both earn enough money to send you back to college. I see that I’ve made a mistake not having you live with me instead of being chief cook and bottle-washer for your father and brother. That would be enough to make anyone rush into a premature marriage.”
“That is not it at all.”
“You and I could join forces, you know. We’ll both work and do art together. I’ll make jewelry and you can help, and we’ll go around to swap meets and crafts shows. And when we have enough money, we won’t have to depend upon some man to—”
“How could that ever work? You live in one room, and you have a guy who comes to sleep over. How can you even think that I should live there, too? It would be awful.”
She laughed. “Well, we’d have to find a bigger place, of course. But we could do that.”
The waitress came over to the table. “I’ll have a chef’s salad,” I said. My mother ordered a hamburger and fries, and then as soon as the waitress left, she started talking about empowerment again, and a meeting she’d gone to where the women had all vowed to support the sisterhood. And that led to her telling me about a woman who had a crush on Dmitri and how hard this was for my mother, who was, of course, his girlfriend. How could my mother be any guy’s girlfriend?
She didn’t seem to notice that I’d gone catatonic as a way of discouraging her from speaking. She kept drawing little circles in the puddle left by her water glass, and staring down at the table. “You know, it’s good, really, to explore all of society’s expectations about relationships. I mean, I was certainly not put on this earth to make Dmitri happy, nor he to make me happy. So if we find something good between us, then it doesn’t make any sense to insist that we always have to do it. You see, that’s what kills love—those expectations.”
She looked at me, and I was obviously supposed to say something, so I nodded.
“You know what Dmitri told me? He said love is like a butterfly—”
“I know. And if you try to hold on to it, then you squash it,” I said in my most bored tone of voice.
She looked surprised. “Yes! That’s what he said. You already knew that. It’s so … interesting to see things that way, isn’t it? Really opens your eyes.”
I nodded and waited a few beats. Then I said, “So. Just to recap, I’m in love, I’m getting married, and I’m moving to New York.”
She looked at me. “Now who is this boy again?” she said. “Is this that Jay somebody? The sexy one?”
I gave her the rundown on the facts: he was not Jay, he was Grant McKay, and he was twenty-five and a labor historian, born and raised in New Hampshire, normal parents (here I gave her a pointed look), a farmer’s kid, responsible, genuine, met him at school, new job at Columbia, loves me, I love him. What else?
“Is he a Republican at least?” she said.
“No, and neither am I.”
“Well, that’s too bad. That means he won’t be making any money. Democrats don’t care about money.”
“Mom, Daddy’s the only real Republican in the family. You’re basically a Democrat, too, and you know it. You just don’t want to admit it. You’re even in favor of legalizing drugs.”
She fixed one of her stares on me. “What I want to know is why you can’t just sleep with him for a while until you get him out of your system. I don’t see why you think you have to get married. You’re not nearly old enough. Hell, I’m not old enough.”
“Because I want to get married to him. And he asked me. He wants to get married before he moves to New York.”
“Well, sure he does. But what is the possible advantage to you? Do you know that statistically, when a couple divorces, except for the financial problems women typically experience, a woman thrives emotionally and moves on with her life, while men just crumble up into a mess? Do you know what that says?”
“I’m not going to get divorced from him.”
“Oh, hell. How do you know that? You can’t know that. Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Look at me!”
“But I’m not you.” I looked at her coolly. “And anyway, you and Dad are both doing fine now. You both got over this whole breakup thing in record time.”
She laughed. “Yeah, because he found some other woman who’ll completely submerge her life in his.”
“This has nothing to do with me.”
“Well, it should. If you love Grant, don’t get oppressed by him. Just enjoy him for who he is, and then when you’ve had enough, you can walk away.”
“I don’t want to walk away,” I told her. “Just because you made a big mistake doesn’t mean I’m making one, too. This is it for me.”
“Think of it. The rest of your life,” she said. “Married to this guy.”
“Mom, it’s going to be fine.”
“Is he good in bed, at least?”
“He’s fine.”
“Do not settle for fine.”
“What do you want me to say? Okay, he’s stupendous. He’s a physical gymnast, he was the secret ghostwriter of The Joy of Sex, and women everywhere are jealous of me for landing such a stud muffin and sex machine.”
She laughed. At least she had the grace to laugh. But then she looked off into the distance and bit her lip. “Oh, you poor, poor deluded baby.”
DESPITE HER protests about my getting married, my mother still insisted on putting together a wedding with as much fanfare as a person could gather in a month’s time. It was as though in her mind the wedding was something separate from the act of marriage, and she was programmed to do it up just right, in a certain way. A church, a bouquet, a white dress, something old and new and borrowed and blue, the whole bit. I drew the line at bridesmaids and ushers and also at the idea that I was to wear her Empire-waisted wedding dress, which she’d kept under her bed all these many years, but I was powerless against the Edie Bennett machine once it was rolling and insisting on a rented hall, pleated pink napkins, and white doves released during the ceremony. Oh, and shrimp-wrapped-in-bacon appetizers, served to the guests by young women carrying trays and wearing flowered sundresses. I invited Magda to be the best woman—I refused to call her the maid of honor—and even though she was blown away by the idea of my getting married when we were both far too young, as she put it, she agreed to come as long as she didn’t have to wear a dress with a back bow and matching shoes.
I heard my mother telling her friends on the phone that it was hilarious that while most people’s kids refused to get married anymore—they were all shacking up with each other—she, discovering in herself all the elements of new radicalism, instead had to contend with a daughter who insisted on getting married.
Despite this, she told my father that we had to work on family togetherness. This was a time to come together for my sake. All three of my surviving grandparents were coming from across the country, and they were to remain secure in their belief that my parents were still living together. Why hurt the innocent, after all?
“This seems to come from a primitive place in her brain,” I explained to Grant. I was standing on his feet, and we were swaying together. “The tribal wedding lobe, up there near the frontal lobe, I think. She actually wants to invite all the uncles and aunts and all her friends and everybody I went to high school with. And she wants ice swans.”
He wrinkled his nose and leaned down to kiss me. “Can’t we just elope? No fanfare.”
“Apparently that would be unforgivable.”
He grimaced. “Well, then count me in. I don’t want to do anything unforgivable right off the bat.”
I wasn’t completely sure he was going to be able to stand up to the whole Southern California social experience. He might as well have come from another planet. Even my parents were charmed by him in a sociological kind of way—a genuine New Englander flailing around in our brutal celebrity sun culture, the land of swimming pools, adultery, and divorce. It was as if a Puritan had fallen out of the smoggy sky and landed there, cha
rming them with his quaint ways. My father flung his arm around Grant’s shoulder and took him to meet his bookie and all the guys at the convenience store, sort of a baffling introduction to what men needed to know to thrive in our world. My mother, who was hanging around the house more and more, introduced him to homemade tacos and burritos and then sat up late, soulfully discussing his parents’ staid and faithful marriage with him far into the night, and ended up weeping over the fact that she had never had the opportunity to be supported by such a steady, church-going, God-fearing community.
“Do you know what a difference that would have made? To have had that kind of centeredness?” she said, and, watching her dab her eyes with a tissue as Grant melted, I had to get up and exit the discussion.
Then, two weeks before the wedding, without any warning at all, she moved back home. At first she told me it was only because all the grandparents were coming, as well as Grant’s married and stable parents, and she needed to make our lives look a little less haphazard. She needed to create a united front, make a good impression, she said.
I was relieved. I didn’t want us to come off looking as unraveled as we were. I didn’t know Grant’s parents since there hadn’t been time for us to go to New Hampshire to introduce me, but it was unthinkable that his mother had ever gone to meetings to publicly look at her lady parts. My mother moved into my bedroom and declared we were like girlfriends having sleepovers. At night, in the dark, she told me she was disappointed with Dmitri after all, and that her theory was that a person’s wedding set the tone for the entire marriage, and maybe that’s why she and my father hadn’t been as happy as they’d deserved to be: their wedding had been a quick ceremony at the justice of the peace because nobody had enough money to make a big wedding. What did I think of that theory, hmm? That’s why she was personally making sure that my wedding would not be to blame if my marriage didn’t make it. This was practically a scientific experiment, to see if a perfect wedding would lead to a perfect marriage.
Truthfully, all this prenuptial stuff was beginning to feel a little show-offy and over the top. Much to David’s and my amusement, Edie had turned the dining room into a wedding headquarters, managing the nuptials like a business enterprise, shuffling piles of folders and papers, invitations, placards, and RSVP lists. She barked orders into the phone, yelling at florists and photographers and people who rented folding tables. The wedding presents arrived daily by mail, and were opened, catalogued, and then piled along the walls and under the table, awaiting their thank-you notes.
Living at home was really all for show, she had said gaily when she moved back in, but then we all noticed that it wasn’t. She and my father, who had been chilly to each other at first, began spending more and more time together. Soon she was cooking dinner as she always had, and bringing my father drinks while he was skimming the leaves out of the pool. The woman across the street stopped issuing hot-tub invitations. There was no word from the mysterious Dmitri. After a few days, my mother said it was too cramped living with me in my bedroom, and she complained that I came to bed too late and then made noises in my sleep and got up to use the bathroom too much, so she might as well just move back into the master bedroom. Just to make things simple, she said. Besides, she didn’t want her mother to be suspicious when everybody came to town.
By the time all the grandparents arrived for the nuptials, along with Mr. and Mrs. McKay from New Hampshire, my parents could have gotten an Academy Award in the category of Impersonating a Happily Married Couple. David and I were fascinated.
“Edie and Howard have now reached the limit, the absolute limit. This is it. The limit has been reached,” I said to him one evening.
“And then some,” he agreed, and we both started laughing. We were indulging in what we were calling the “Last Brother and Sister Reefer Smoke Fest” out by the pool. David had been pressed into service as the best man since Grant’s friends from home couldn’t make the trip, and so the two of them had spent a certain amount of time together. Being measured for the tuxes, for instance. David called Grant the nicest guy he’d ever met in his whole life and then he said, “But do you think he even has one fraction of a clue?” and we laughed.
“I’ll bet you can get him to turn his life around and start smoking dope with you,” he said.
“Oh, no, no, I’m quitting,” I said. “This is it for me.”
“Get out! You are not.”
“No, I am. I don’t really care about this.”
“You’re crazy. You won’t be able to quit.”
“Watch me. Last inhale. Here goes.”
He shook his head. “Okay. If you say so.”
“You could stand to cut back, too, you know.”
“To each his own.”
“David,” I said.
“What?”
I told him I loved him. What I meant to tell him was that those nights out by the pool with him had been the best. And that Grant and I would always love to have him come to New York to visit. “Just because I’m getting married doesn’t mean you and I can’t keep in touch,” I said.
And so, on the hot and gusty evening of August 7, with the Santa Ana winds blowing the palm trees all around and kicking up little dust eddies in the street, the wedding took place in a small stone church on Reseda Boulevard. The bougainvillea and oleander were in riotous bloom outside the church. I marched down the aisle, holding on to my father’s arm, and in front of everybody, a clergyman said to Grant, “Do you take this woman …?” and my brain just went on the fritz right then. Woman? Was he possibly referring to me? I almost couldn’t remember anything else about the ceremony, except that I promised a whole bunch of things, and Grant stood there blinking and blinking and promised a whole bunch of things back, and people threw rice at us, and then we released two doves, which flew in opposite directions. Later we danced and got drunk and Magda and my brother made toasts to us.
The next day we left to drive the three thousand miles to New York City, to begin our new life as married, upstanding, fully functional adults, inspired by the example of our four seemingly happily married parents, who stood in the street jumping up and down and flapping their arms and waving us off, screaming, “Good-bye! Good luck!”
When my mother hugged me good-bye, she whispered, “I’m sorry about all the mistakes I’ve made, and I just want to say that I think Grant is a wonderful guy. But promise me that you’ll stay true to yourself, even though you’re married. It’s not easy to do, but you have to try. Promise?”
I was getting pretty good at making promises that day, so I said yes to this one, too, and then felt my throat constrict and my eyes turn to liquid. My mother’s eyes filled up, and she shook her head and placed her fingers on my lips. “No, no, no, don’t cry now. You’re going to be okay,” she whispered. “I know you will. Just take care of you. Take care of Annabelle.”
By the time I joined Grant in the U-Haul truck, my throat hurt so much from unshed tears that I felt as though I’d swallowed glass, and I already missed my mother so much that I couldn’t breathe.
[seven]
2005
You forget how small a New York apartment can be. Sophie and Whit—well, not Whit so much these days, but Sophie lives in an apartment on Twenty-second Street, a beautiful place owned by Whit’s father, who is so wealthy and generous that he charges them nothing to live there. It has trees outside and an exposed brick wall inside, a black wrought-iron fence, a hedge (which now is merely sticks, of course), and an elevator that can make you remember all the upsetting things you ever learned about the law of gravity as it lurches and moans while hauling you up to the fourth floor.
But once you get there, you have a newfound gratitude for life, as Sophie once pointed out. You step out of the wire cage and you feel like kissing the carpet.
I get to New York City at about ten that night, and amazingly enough, find a parking spot right on her street, which, unlike New Hampshire roads these days, is not filled with snow. In fact, the air
feels almost balmy in comparison. I step out of the car and for a moment feel I’ve been transported back in time. We didn’t live specifically here, Grant and I, not in this neighborhood, but there’s a way in which all of New York is alike when compared with, say, New Hampshire.
Sophie’s friend from downstairs, Lori, buzzes me in, but Sophie comes running out from her bedroom and we stand there in the hall even though she should be in bed every single minute. I can’t stop hugging her. I had told myself I wouldn’t cry, but when I see her huge gray eyes filling with tears at the sight of me, I feel my eyes tearing up, too. We both dissolve into blubbering pitiable wrecks.
“Oh my God, today was so hard—I’m so glad to be here!” I say into her shoulder, and she clutches me and says, “Oh, Mom, I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you, thank you for coming to me.”
Is there anything more heart-wrenching than having your child weeping and thanking you for doing the very thing that you should do and want to be doing?
Lori smiles at us and pats us both, tells us to call her if we need anything, and then she slips out in the hallway with us both hollering thank-you’s after her. We are giddy with thank-you’s.
I stand back and get a good look at Sophie. Frankly, she looks as pale as I’ve ever seen a human being look, and besides that, she looks like a waif. This is perhaps because she’s wearing a big sweatshirt of Whit’s (“for luck, and so the baby will know him by osmosis, maybe”) and flowered pajama pants and big fluffy bunny slippers, and her blond hair is tied back in a ponytail. She’s such a combination of Grant and me; she’s tall and willowy the way he is, and she has my round face and big eyes but his coloring.
“Hey, let’s get you back in that bed,” I say. “Aren’t you supposed to be there full-time?”
“I know, I know. But I can’t stay in bed every single minute, and I just want to make sure you’re comfortable. Come on, let’s get your coat off. The closet is too full of stuff, so I’ve been storing coats on the kitchen chair. But if that’s too full, you can—”
The Stuff That Never Happened Page 9
