by Anna King
Elliot yelled, “Thanks!”
I shook my head, laughing.
Noah lightly padded across the second floor landing and into the kitchen. He wore voluminous flannel boxer shorts that flapped around his somewhat puny white legs. Not that I didn’t adore him, but his legs weren’t his best feature. That would have to be claimed by his hair. Blond and thick and curly, he wore it to below his shoulders, though usually pulled back into a ponytail. If I hadn’t seen and heard his prowess with the opposite sex, I’d think he was gay. My sons were proving to me that men were changing: finding their inner girl and still managing to screw the girls, apparently without any angst whatsoever.
He said, “I either need to take a nap or have a cup of coffee.”
I checked the digital clock on the stove. “I promised Alex to get there early, so that means we have to leave here in forty-five minutes.”
“Coffee.” He stared at my pod coffee-maker, obviously perplexed.
“I’ll do it.” I went through the ritual of heating up his mug, then plopping the coffee pod into the machine. “Tell me about your writing if you want to.”
He sat down at the kitchen table, his head turned to look out the window so I couldn’t see his face. “I had another story rejected at The New Yorker.”
“You know that’s a long shot.” I put the coffee in front of him and pushed the sugar bowl closer, then watched to see if he still used four teaspoons of sugar. To my surprise, he asked for artificial sweetener.
After he’d stirred his coffee ’round and ’round, he took a healthy slurp. “Yeah, I know.” He gave me a shy look, almost sheepish.
I shook a finger at him. “I told you what to do and you’re just being stubborn.”
“I know,” he said, grinning. “Write a novel.”
“Yup.”
“A lot of pages in a novel.”
I sat down at the table with a small plate of sliced apple, which I offered to him. He picked up a piece and took a crunchy bite.
“Psychologically, this is the moment for you to write a novel,” I said.
“What do you mean?” His dark eyes stared into mine.
“The fact that your mother was a novelist created an understandable block for you in trying to pursue the same thing. Now that I’m no longer a novelist, the way is open.” I smiled happily. “I’m preventing you from becoming a bartender, but I don’t think you want to be a bartender, do you?”
“You’re such a nut.”
I nodded. “I still don’t want you to marry a poet!”
The door from the bathroom opened and Elliot popped into the kitchen with a towel wrapped around his waist. He was large, like his father and, also like his father, already losing his hair. Until the year before, we’d teased him unmercifully about his incipient baldness, but after he’d invested ten thousand dollars in hair plugs, we decided the subject was way too sensitive. Oddly, he had no difficulty with hair sprouting elsewhere on his body. His dark chest hair still glinted with drops of water from the shower.
“You want a coffee?” I said.
He tossed one of the apple slices into his mouth and nodded vigorously. While I made another coffee, Noah asked him about the script rewrite job he was currently working on.
“It’s just the most terrible thing,” Elliot said. “Violent and utterly stupid,”
“So why are you wasting your time on it?” Noah said.
Elliot rubbed his fingers together. Money.
“How much do you get for a rewrite?” I asked.
“Depends on the project—this has been green-lighted and they’re very hot for it, so I’m getting fifty grand. Have to get it done very, very soon, though.”
Noah shook his head in disbelief.
“I keep telling you to come out to L.A.,” Elliot said.
“I may yet.”
“Okay, guys, we leave in twenty minutes,” I said. “I’m going to change. Can you bring the salmon casserole when you come downstairs? It’s in the ’fridge.”
“Sure, Mom,” Noah said.
I was heading down the stairs when Elliot shouted, “Why are you limping?”
“I fell down on my first bar tending gig,” I yelled back.
I heard Noah mutter, “Jesus,” under his breath and then Elliot’s laugh.
I sort of paddled around my bedroom, going easy on my ankle, while debating what one should wear to the going-away party for one’s ex-husband-about-to-become-a-monk party.
At that moment, Noah screamed down the stairs. “What do we wear to this shindig?”
“I don’t know!”
I settled on a long gypsy skirt in a vibrant Indian print covered with shiny sequins paired with a tight emerald green leotard top. In my bathroom downstairs, I pulled my curly red hair into a ponytail and then twisted it, like I was wringing it out in the wash, and pinning it high off my neck. I did the make-up thing meant to look like I wore no make-up. I think I was fairly successful, although I could be seriously deluding myself. Clunky gold earrings. A veritable hippie girl of indeterminate age. Right.
The boys didn’t say anything about my outfit, but I hadn’t expected commentary. Instead, Noah guided my arm through the crook of his as we walked to the car. I leaned on him slightly, enjoying the touch of his body and that he’d thought to offer me support. It was a fairly new occurrence for my kids to be sensitive to me, though I’m not suggesting that they were spoiled or thoughtless. It just seemed that while they were still in college, they’d tended to forget that their parents were, well, for want of a better term, human beings.
“What do you hear from your Dad?” I asked. It was decidedly odd that of all my husbands, Trevor was my least favorite even though he’d been the father of my wonderful children and the one I was married to the longest.
The reason I counted him as my least favorite was because he didn’t like me. Basically, I’d come to the sad conclusion that he’d never really liked me at all. It’s not that I didn’t consider myself immensely likable. I truly believed that I had a delightful personality. After all, I did get three men to marry me, all of them accomplished and presentable in quite unique ways. So, yes, I was delightful.
I wasn’t altogether sure, however, that I was lovable.
Trevor made this rather clear when he became a workaholic during our marriage, and a total wastrel almost immediately after we separated. I took some solace from the possibility that the institution of marriage caused him grief, but then he remarried a very unattractive woman who was actually eight years his senior, and he stayed a wastrel. Luckily, his hardworking years with me insured that he’d tucked away quite a nest egg, so the kids had college tuition more than covered. And now, for example, Noah was being carried for this trial year of writing. Nevertheless, Trevor made me feel wildly inadequate as a woman.
“He’s reminding me of Isaac, if you can believe it.” Noah held the front passenger door open for me, then climbed into the back seat. Elliot was driving because he always drove everywhere.
“You can’t mention Trevor and Isaac in the same sentence. There’s zero correlation between them,” I said.
Noah reached for the seat belt and touched my shoulder at the same time. “Oh yeah?”
The car roared to life. Elliot said, “Dad’s getting that good ’ole time religion.”
I figured they were joking. Trevor was a man who could be at his own mother’s funeral and busy with writing advertising copy in his head. He’d been a writer, too, but his writing was in the service of selling. Now, years later, I had to admit that my writing was also in the service of selling. Which was, perhaps, one of the reasons I’d tossed it in favor of serving alcohol at a bar.
I said, “You’re kidding.”
Noah said, “We’re not completely sure what he’s up to, but he keeps forwarding us this New Age crapola about chakras and auras and stuff.
“Maybe it’s Genevieve’s influence,” I said. Genevieve was the new wife.
Elliot shook his head. “Nope�
��I called Dad last week and she was the only one home. She thinks it’s bull.”
“She is a scientist.
“Genevieve is a high school biology teacher,” Noah said.
“That’s a scientist.”
He patted my shoulder again, in such a way that I felt like a small, hopelessly out of touch, idiot. That’s another thing kids are good at doing: turning our roles upside down just as quickly as possible, so that we become the child, and they the parent.
Not that I particularly cared about remaining a parent. The tricky thing was segueing from parent to whatever-else. It wasn’t a transition I made smoothly with my own mother and father. I could remember being crushed after Mom read my first novel and told me that she thought I would never succeed as a novelist.
“Why do you say that?” I’d asked her. As usual, I was trying to be a good sport.
We were sitting out on the front porch of our Northampton row house. A deep cool shade from overgrown trees cut the hot summer day, but her words made the sweat run from both temples down my cheeks. My first marriage was in its divorce stage, and I had no way of knowing that other marriages, children, and many more novels were ahead of me.
Mom sipped her glass of iced tea and tapped the porch floor with one bare foot. I couldn’t hear the foot tapping, but I could see it. Funny to realize that she was about my age now.
“Your novel is as sweet as can be, you know that,” she said without an ounce of sweetness.
“Yeah.”
“But it’s not really interesting.”
I thought about my novel. When I’d been writing it, I’d found it interesting and even considered its theme rather unique. Publisher’s Weekly had called it, “A challenging, thought-provoking story that lurks beneath an entertaining surface.” I wondered if it was possible that my mother simply hadn’t gotten the underneath part, though that was unlikely given that her Ph.D. had been in Comparative Literature with an emphasis on Samuel Beckett. Presumably, she knew about how to judge a piece of writing.
It’s obvious to me now, but it wasn’t then, that she’d always intimidated me. She’d had glorious, prematurely white hair, which she wore in a thick single braid. Her sharp nose sprang from a tanned unwrinkled face and her large thin mouth curved downwards. That mouth frowned even when she smiled. You can see it in all the family photos. It was like a trick of nature, a waterfall that flowed up, a baby sucked back into the birth canal, blood refusing to clot. My mother’s frowning smile.
I remember sitting very still on the porch that day, not answering her. Feeling, well, devastated, and trying to pretend that I was cool with what she’d said. I could understand now, with my own kids, that I’d probably said or done something that triggered a defensive reaction. Maybe it had simply been the act of publishing a novel. Perhaps all parents feel the need to retaliate for their child’s audacity at growing up and threatening to surpass them. But I knew I was making excuses for my mother, probably because she’d died five years ago and I didn’t enjoy dissing her memory. Still, briefly, I could just imagine the expression on her face if she’d known I’d finally quit writing in order to become a bartender. Her smile might actually curve up.
13
ALEX’S APARTMENT IN JAMAICA Plain always made me think of her as a little girl because it carried the flavor of her as the ten-year-old who’d been obsessed with birds. She’d had nests and eggs, feathers and skeletons, scattered across every surface of her bedroom. Once, when I was changing the sheets on her bed, I’d found a sharp, curved object, about the size of fingernail. I started to toss it aside, but instead picked it up and saw that it was a tiny bird’s beak. Though her apartment was now more artfully arranged than that childhood bedroom, she still had nests and eggs, feathers and skeletons, on display. She’d painted a huge Amazon red-throated caracara on the wall above the sleek red couch and the green area rug had parrots fluttering across its expanse.
Both boys began whooping and clucking, trying to mimic birds, but sounding more like a fantasy animal of the earth rather than the sky. I hit Elliot and said to shut-up because I’d caught sight of a strange woman in Alex’s kitchen.
Alex grabbed my arm and whispered, “I followed your advice and wrote a Missed Connection about that woman I met at the party—remember?”
I nodded and tried not to show how pleased I was that I’d been capable of making a suggestion Alex deemed worthy enough to follow.
“She’s in the kitchen!”
“I’ll go introduce myself.” I headed off, only to feel Alex tugging at my arm.
Her eyes, puffy from lack of sleep, perhaps, or even tears, looked equal parts exhilarated and defeated. “I think she’s The One.”
I leaned forward and pressed my cheek against hers. “All right,” I whispered.
Noah was in the kitchen, sliding the salmon casserole into the oven. “Mom, this is Jane, Alex’s new squeeze.”
A tiny woman turned around from the sink and blushed. I almost said something about her rosy cheeks being so pretty, but managed to stop the words just in time. We said hello at the same moment and I found myself blushing because she was so small and, somehow, dear.
“I read one of your novels!” Jane said.
I bowed slightly from the waist. I’d never been good at handling any kind of acclaim for my writing. Or even attention, since I’d noticed that while many people might say something nondescript like, “I read one of your novels,” fewer actually said that they enjoyed the book or found it well-written.
“What do you do, Jane?”
Noah moaned. “Mom, that is so unacceptable.”
“I’m not supposed to ask what someone does?”
“It’s insulting,” he said. “It’s like equating what someone does with who they are.”
“Isn’t who you are what you do?”
Jane said, “I’m a nurse.”
“But that’s not who you are, right?” Noah said.
“To be honest, it may be who I am. Nursing is important to me.”
I smiled triumphantly at Noah. “I win.”
He grinned back at me, always the most good-humored of the three kids. “Are we in some kind of competition?”
At that moment, as if she sensed things were getting tricky, Alex appeared in the open doorway to the kitchen. The apartment was structured in the shotgun style, with every room leading into the next. From the kitchen, you entered a bathroom, and through that, the bedroom.
Alex asked me to check that the bathroom and bedroom were tidy enough, which I took to mean that she was trying to get me away from Jane. Being a mother was, quite simply, difficult. Suddenly I yearned for my little house, without the boys, quiet and even lonely. I saw myself at the computer, checking my e-mail. I hadn’t heard back from Mr. Rabbitfish. A disappointment. I also hadn’t received a return call from Al, and the extent of his possible injury was bothering me. Maybe he hadn’t called because something serious had happened. Maybe he was hugely pissed at me.
I refolded the bathroom towels and used a wet washcloth to swipe out the sink. In Alex’s bedroom, I successfully avoided imagining the two of them under the covers, but I ripped the bed apart and remade it, tight and neat. Bed-making, unlike cooking, was one of my special skills. When I’d worked for the summer as a maid at a motel, I’d been trained to make a bed right. The trick was to do one whole side first, with a strenuous tucking in along that side. Then, when you got to the other side, you could pull hard against the tucked in part, and the result would be extremely sleek and wrinkle-free.
Noise echoed through the apartment. Isaac had probably arrived. I checked myself in the mirror and was pleased by the flush in my cheeks, almost as good as Jane’s. I knew that men were supposed to respond to pink cheeks because it signaled good health and, therefore, fertility. Nothing like looking fertile after menopause. Such a truly complex, challenging paradox.
Isaac was just inside the open door to the apartment. To my distress, I saw that his cheeks were as bright as min
e, signaling his own fertility. Ummm. He looked quite handsome, especially when I factored in that on Monday morning he would take up residence at a monastery. I flashed to the image of a single cot in a stone cell, with Isaac languishing for want of female attention. Made me momentarily hot. I was sure my cheeks got even redder with my suppressed fertility.
Two years of celibacy, after all. Spare me the lectures.
When I moved close to kiss him on the cheek, he shifted his head and I found myself touching his lips briefly with mine.
“I’m so glad to see you,” he murmured into my ear.
I patted his shoulder, feeling like he was a puppy dog.
Elliot, standing by the bay window that looked onto the street out front, held up a half-finished bottle of beer. “Three cheers for the once-and-future monk!”
“Hip, hip, hooray!” Noah yelled.
The rest of us joined in for another round of “Hip, hip, hooray!” at which point it occurred to me that we could all go home now.
As our cheers died down, a man appeared framed in the doorway behind Isaac. In his arms, he held Jen. I’d seen her carried up stairs, where there was no wheelchair access, many times and she’d always worn an expression of tolerance, mixed with boredom, on her face. Today, in what I could only assume was Tom’s arms, she looked thrilled and annoyed at the same time.
Isaac stepped aside and practically embraced Tom and Jen both. It was my turn next, but I knew Jen wanted to be put down before she started greeting everyone. I tugged at Tom’s arm. “Hi, I’m Jen’s very best friend, Rose.”
Tom smiled. He had warm brown cow eyes.
I said, “Why don’t you come in and make yourselves comfortable?” I stepped back and cleared a path.
