by Jeanne Ray
“No, it’s not so bad.”
A thin young boy who should have been in school himself loaded the bags back in the basket for me, and we pushed them off toward the electric door and the cold bright day outside. Sarah was walking as slowly as was humanly possible, and I slowed down further and further to stay beside her. And then I did something I cannot explain. I turned the cart around and marched right up to the information desk.
“I want to buy a lottery ticket,” I said.
“How many?” The woman behind the counter was writing out some numbers on a piece of paper. She did not look up at me.
“Just one.” I turned around and looked at Sarah, and she was beaming. Light was practically radiating from her head. “Just one,” I said to her. “Do you understand me? One last ticket, and you don’t tell anyone. After this, it’s over. I won’t break down again, okay? This one ticket, then we turn the whole thing off for good.”
“Okay.” She wrapped her arms around my waist and buried her face in my stomach, squeezing me with all of the love she contained. I knew that what I was doing was wrong, but it had been a long day, and a single dollar had given both of us a much-needed bounce toward joy.
“What do you want?” the woman said.
“Mass Millions,” I told her. “Quick pick.”
Sarah looked up at me with a puzzled expression.
“It’s time for a change,” I said, remembering that Sandy had declared a Fatwa against the Mega Millions.
When we were in the car, Sarah put the ticket in her shoe. “This is all I needed,” she said, and pulled her laces snug again. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“And you’re never going to tell.”
“I’m never going to tell,” she said. “Unless it’s the winning ticket. If it is the winning ticket, then I’m going to want to tell Mommy.”
“I think that’s fair.”
We stopped off at CVS and picked up the prethreaded floss picks for Romeo, and while we were at it, we got three packs of baseball bubble gum cards for Little Tony and a box of Hot Tamales for Big Tony and a bottle of Whisper Pink nail polish that Sarah picked out for her mother. After that, we drove home in glory. We had every last thing that everybody wanted. We were rich.
Chapter Ten
FOR THE FIRST FEW DAYS OF NORA’S BED REST, every time Alex came to visit, he lugged in another box of things that she simply could not do without. He brought over a very practical little desk on wheels that looked exactly like those things that nurses put hospital trays on to conveniently suspend them over the bed, except this one was made out of cherrywood or teak and Nora quickly covered it with papers from the various boxes. She sat with the bed positioned upright, a headset plugged into her cell phone, her laptop computer plugged into the wall, and continued to run her empire from my living room in Somerville.
“The property in north Cambridge is perfect for them,” she was saying as I tried to the best of my ability to pass unnoticed up the stairs, but Nora never missed me. She started snapping. Snap, snap, snap. I took a deep breath and turned to face her. She was pointing to a file box on the floor. Snap and point, snap, snap, point. I pointed to myself, then to the box, and she nodded with enormous exasperation.
“One minute,” she said. “My girl is bringing me the file now.” She covered the speaking wand with her hand and said, a bit too sharply, “Jackson!”
Now really, if she could cover the mouthpiece to say Jackson, couldn’t she cover it long enough to say, “Mother, could you hand me the Jackson file in that box?” It wasn’t as if I was looking for “please.” But she had already thrown up twice this morning and I knew this was trying for her as well, so I picked up the file and handed it to her. She did not look up.
“I know they want four bathrooms, but that’s what closets are for. The downstairs closet is absolutely begging to become a half bath. There’s the answer.”
If Sarah and Little Tony weren’t so thoughtlessly engaged in their elementary education during the day, they would have been the ones doing the fetching. Both children, it seemed, longed for nothing in this world but to be personal assistants, and they were training at the elbow of the master CEO.
Nora demanded that they do their homework the same way she demanded they bring her another cup of herbal tea, check the printer cable, and fold, stamp, and seal all documents before taking them out to the mailbox. She checked their spelling and math problems between calls. She let them type up the poems they wrote for English class on her computer while sitting beside her in the bed, each waiting for the other to complete his or her turn. She let Tony play Hangman on her Palm Pilot while she let Sarah watch her daily dose of Wonka, and if Sarah wished that she had the Palm and Tony wanted to put on a different movie, neither of them made a peep about it. Nora did not tolerate one word of bickering. Bickering in any form got on her nerves and resulted in the immediate banishment of both parties from the living room, no matter who had instigated said bickering. Nora ran a very tight ship.
I suppose I should have admired her, the way she never stopped. But Nora’s industriousness and decisiveness made Sandy and me feel like a couple of blind moles searching our way through pudding. It was frankly impossible for me to believe that Nora’s cervix, or any other part of Nora’s being, was incompetent. The tornados she spun out from the stillness of her bed only made me tired.
In a way, I was coming to understand my formerly ill-behaved, formerly teenaged daughter: She just had too much energy. Even back then, she had wanted to rule the world. Until she found real estate as a means of channeling her powers, she was simply too much to bear.
She snapped at me again, and my eyes came back into focus. I had simply been standing there. She handed me the Jackson file, still talking a million miles a minute.
“Do they really think that Greenspan is going to keep the interest rates at Nixon administration levels much longer? The time to move is now!”
Then she snapped and pointed to the box where the file should be returned. Had she been a child, I would have whacked her over the head with the file—not hard enough actually to hurt her, but hard enough to startle her into a clear realization of what it meant to snap at one’s mother. But she was pregnant, and it wasn’t good to whack one’s pregnant daughter, even with a paper file, no matter how badly one wanted to.
I carefully put the file back into its correct slot and looked again to Nora, but she only pointed to the phone. The phone that she perhaps thought I hadn’t noticed before. She wanted to tell me that she was very busy, and I should go.
I do not remember my mother ever assuming the role of handmaid in my life, not even for an instant. That is not to say that she didn’t take care of me and my brother. The food was good and the house was clean and the budget was sufficiently tight and fair so that we always had enough but never too much.
But my mother and father lived in what I thought of as the adult world while my brother and I lived in the children’s world, and while those two planets could peacefully coexist, they had a very specific order of gravity. The children revolved around the parents, never the other way around. When I was nine years old, I could no more imagine my mother sitting on the floor with us to play a game of Monopoly than I could imagine getting out of bed to join one of their cocktail parties and being greeted with a cigarette and a Manhattan. I was there to set the table and hang out the laundry and do whatever little things my mother was too busy to attend to. I was a child, and my duty was to be of service to the world of adults. My brother used to say my parents had children because they didn’t want to have to pay anybody to work in the shop. No one ever questioned that or even felt bad about it, that’s just the way life was.
Even when I was a grown woman with children of my own, I still felt that I was somehow less than adult when in the presence of my very adult mother. Had I been smart, I would have realized that one can only truly feel like an adult in relationship to one’s own children.
But I wasn’t smart
. I was a tenderhearted sap who wanted to be close to my girls and make sure they never suffered a moment’s alienation. So instead of marching them off to their room at the first sign of bad behavior, I learned to use the hula hoop. I let them stay up late on weekends and fall asleep in our bed watching movies. I gave them my lipstick and attended all of their basketball games and gave them every opportunity to be open and honest with their accessible mom, and what happened? They still managed to seal themselves off on another planet. The difference was that their planet did not revolve around mine.
Long after I had completely lost control of the situation, it occurred to me that my mother had been right after all. If you spend too much time trying to be somebody’s pal, you’ll only wind up getting snapped at down the line.
I went upstairs to check on Romeo, dreaming of the days when I had nothing to do but strip thorns off roses for hours at a time.
My handsome fellow was sitting up in a chair reading a magazine. He was wearing jeans and a polo shirt. He was wearing shoes. His hair was wet and neatly parted, and when I walked into the room and gaped at him with frank amazement, he smiled.
“Ta-da!” he said, opening his arms.
“Did you take a shower?”
“I did.”
I went over and knelt beside him, resting my hands lightly on his knees. “Romeo, you shouldn’t do that. Nobody was upstairs. You could have killed yourself.”
“Do I look dead?”
“Actually, you look very clean.”
“I’m really getting better. I’m going to go down those stairs tonight.”
“No.” I felt a great, unaccountable sob rise up in my throat. He couldn’t leave me here alone like this. “You’re not ready.”
“I think I might be ready. I’m feeling good. Do you know what I’ve been thinking about all morning?”
You’ve been thinking about not leaving me. You’ve been thinking about the fact that you never want to spend another night away from me again. “What?”
“I’m going to paint your ceiling.”
“No,” I said weakly. “No.”
“Seriously, you have some water stains. They’re faint, but I’ve had plenty of time to think about them. I don’t want you to think I’m sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong, but I really think we should paint the whole room. Find a new color, lighten the place up.”
“The water stains are old. Ten years old. There was a little leak and I had to put a new roof on and there just wasn’t the money to paint. To tell you the truth, I just got used to them.” My voice cracked a little at the end of the sentence.
Romeo put his hand on my head. “Are you upset about the paint? We don’t have to paint. It’s a great room. The color is fine.”
“No, I’m just a little tired, that’s all. We can paint it someday.”
“But that’s how I know I’m really better. I feel like painting it now. I’ve been very focused on this.”
“Well, not tonight, okay?”
“Not tonight.” He touched my cheek. “How’s Nora?”
“She’s taking me down to a pulp,” I said.
He scooted over in his chair. “Come here.” He patted the tiny sliver of fabric beside him, a sliver that represented approximately one-eighth of the space I would comfortably need to wedge myself into that chair.
“Romeo.”
“Come here,” he said, and his voice was dreamy and low, and I just fell into it.
I was a woman who needed to be held, a woman who needed to be kissed. I was sick and tired of playing nurse without having any opportunity to play doctor. I pulled my stiffening knees out of the lock position. I straightened up, balanced precariously on the arm of the chair, and leaned over. I was very careful to come at him straight on. “Hold still,” I whispered. I kissed him with sincerity and lust.
We were still very much in the game. We hadn’t been on the bench so long that we’d lost our confidence. Romeo slipped a hand beneath my sweater, kissing, kissing while his fingers tapped up my ribs and lightly touched the underwire of my bra. That was the moment, that was the hopeful place we were at, when the door swung open.
Who knows what combination of factors come together to create an accident? Was it the kiss, the door, the slender arm of the chair? Was it simply the surprise of three startled adults that sent me straight back, hitting the floor first with my shoulder, then my head?
The sound of the crack alone would have been enough to make me faint, and for an instant I did go out, either from pain or disappointment or simple exhaustion. I closed my eyes and gave myself over to the darkness studded with stars. My feet stayed straight up in the air and rested on the chair arm where once I sat.
“Dad! Don’t get up!” I heard a voice say from very far away. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Had Romeo fallen as well? Had the whole chair tipped back? I tried to find words from deep in the recesses of my mind. I wanted to comfort this stranger in my darkness, to tell him, no, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.
But I didn’t have to. Romeo answered instead. “No,” he said, “I’m okay. Julie? Are you okay?”
Did they notice I was suddenly missing? Did they hear the explosion that was my head hitting the wood floor?
“Julie?”
Someone lowered my legs onto the floor and straightened me out. Should they move me? Was that right?
“That was a fall, all right,” Big Tony said. “Open up.”
I opened my eyes and looked at him. Where was the panic, the concern?
“You really got the wind knocked out of you. Do you want to stand up?”
“Julie?” Romeo said. “Are you okay down there?”
“Dad, really, she’s fine. Don’t get up. You’re going to hurt your back again.”
“Sure,” I said, “I’m fine. Just give me a second.”
I saw Big Tony’s feet walk away, and a minute later he was pulling me up to sip a glass of water. It was how the Cacciamanis comforted those in pain.
“Drink it slow,” he said, and helped me hold the glass. “You know, I should go to medical school just so I can look after the people in this house. I could go into neurology, obstetrics, orthopedics, pediatrics”—he looked at me and smiled—“trauma.”
“That’s funny,” I said, and handed back the glass. There was a huge pain in my shoulder and a hot throbbing in the back of my head. “I’m just going to stretch out for a second.” I was not feeling so great. I just lay back on the floor and felt enormously comforted by its stillness. I closed my eyes.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Romeo said.
“Sure,” I said drowsily.
They waited for a minute, gave a single beat of silence in my honor, and dove right into their conversation.
“I’m serious, Dad. I’ve been thinking it over. I want to go to medical school.”
“Well,” Romeo said.
“I know it. I’m almost thirty-seven and I don’t have any money and I have Sandy and the kids to think about. But what about the future? It’s a huge risk, I know, but I’d be making an investment in myself, an investment that I think would pay off for all of us in the long run.”
“That’s true, but you have to—”
“There’s a lot to think about.” Tony sighed and stretched out his legs. Tony liked to sit on the floor. I think it must have been all those years he spent in the Peace Corps, then the World Health Organization, working in countries so third-world that they didn’t have stools. “For one thing, we’d have to stay here for at least another five years, and that’s not what Sandy and I want. No offense to you, Julie, you’ve been great, but everybody needs their own space.”
Everybody but you, Julie, is what he meant. Doesn’t anybody ask? Doesn’t anybody stop to wonder how I would feel about another five years living like the Ingalls family, all together in the little prairie house?
“What does Sandy think?” Romeo asked.
“She wants me to be happy. She says she wouldn�
��t care if I drove the delivery truck for the rest of my life, and she doesn’t care if we have to struggle through medical school. She just wants me to not feel like I’ve missed my chance in life.”
My daughter, I thought, was both wise and kind.
“Then we’re with Sandy,” Romeo said. “I just wish I had the money to send you.”
Tony laughed, and I heard him clap his father on the leg. “Nobody expects their parents to send them through medical school. I just wanted to talk to you about it, so if you thought I was crazy, you’d have the chance to stop me.”
“I don’t want to stop you,” Romeo said.
And then, just in case anyone was looking for a sign from God or a sign from the AMA, Dominic and Father Al walked into the bedroom. Not only did they no longer ring the doorbell, they had ceased to make any sound when coming up the stairs. I suppose I should feel lucky that Tony put the kibosh on our tryst when he did.
“This is an interesting exchange,” the doctor said. “One of you looks considerably better and one of you looks considerably worse.”
“Romeo’s better, and I’m resting,” I said. I had no interest in trying to open my eyes.
“Julie fell off the chair,” Romeo said.
“Oh Julie!” said Father Al, and he knelt beside me and took my hand. It was extremely endearing.
“Let’s take a look at you,” Dominic said.
“She said she was okay,” Tony said, as if he might be accused of some sort of negligence on the very day he announced his interest in the profession.
Al and Dominic pulled me up to a seated position and I can honestly say I wish they hadn’t. My head was throbbing almost as badly as my shoulder. Dominic dug around in his bag of tricks and pulled out a penlight, which he shined in my eyes just long enough to bother me, then he started hunting around in my hair.
“What?” Tony asked.
“Well, she’s got a little cut. There’s some blood back here.”
