Much Ado About Mother

by Bonaduce, Celia

  They found the baggage carousel and Suzanna stationed herself at the yawning cavern that spat out bags. As the bags started to tumble out, Suzanna made happy sounds as she pointed at each one and asked Lizzy, “What’s that? What’s that, Lizzy?”

  “Suuuuuucaaaaaa,” Lizzy said.

  “That’s right!” Suzanna said, beaming at her mother. “Did you hear that, Grammy? She knows the word suitcase!”

  “Isn’t that something?” Virginia said self-consciously. “Isn’t that something, Piquant?”

  Suzanna looked at her mother thoughtfully.

  “Suitcase is a very advanced word for a two-year-old.”

  “No doubt!”

  “What does your bag look like?” asked Suzanna, turning back toward the bags hurtling earthward.

  “Bags . . . bags plural,” Virginia said. “I didn’t know how long I was going to stay, so I packed for every conceivable occasion.”

  Suzanna laughed. “We don’t have many occasions that require more than sweats or jeans. There’s a lot of baby slobber going on at our house.”

  Virginia snuck a quick peek at Suzanna’s lower extremities to see if she had chosen sweats or jeans for the occasion of picking up her mother, whom she had not seen in almost eight months.

  “I saw that, Mom,” Suzanna said, turning away from her mother. “I saw you check out my butt. I know I’ve gained a little weight, but I just had a baby!”

  “Dear, I was only—” Virginia saw one of her suitcases slide down the chute and changed the subject. “There’s one of my suitcases now.”

  “Suuuucaaaaa,” Lizzy said.

  Virginia melted. She had forgotten the sheer joy of watching the evolution of a new human being. She made a mental note to cut Suzanna some slack. New motherhood was certainly not easy. Virginia remembered that when she was a brand-new mother she seemed to call her own mother on a daily basis for advice. Once, when Erinn was just born, Virginia called home in tears.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she had sobbed. “I just can’t seem to get the baby to stop crying.”

  Virginia’s mother had offered her some sage advice: “Make sure she isn’t hungry, tired, or wet. Then leave your dignity at the door—make faces; soft, funny sounds; blow wet kisses on her belly. Trust me, you’ll distract her.”

  It had been many years since Virginia had done this, but she was ready to give it another go. Lizzy was such an advanced two-year-old. Virginia looked at Piquant. Maybe she should have tried this with the dog. She watched Suzanna, baby on her hip, drag one huge suitcase and then the other off the luggage carousel. She realized that her daughter very rarely called for motherly advice. Well, she was here now and that would all change soon enough!

  Each of them pulling the handle of a large suitcase, they made their way to the curb.

  “Eric is driving a hybrid SUV,” Suzanna said.

  Of course he is.

  “It’s bright yellow. You can’t miss it.”

  Virginia looked down the row of cars, packed not like sardines in orderly rows, but more like panties at a Victoria’s Secret sale: brightly colored shapes heaped on top of each other and sticking out at precarious angles. Virginia wondered how this could be one of the busiest airports in the world. It just seemed so disorganized. She spotted a large, yellow, truck-looking vehicle.

  “I think I see him,” Virginia said and started waving.

  “Mom,” Suzanna said. “That’s a minivan. We have an SUV. A hybrid.”

  Virginia put her arm down. Suzanna seemed very tense and judgmental, almost a throwback to her teenage years. Well, thought Virginia, hormones then, hormones now. Then she stopped herself. She knew better than to even THINK about hormones around her girls, especially Erinn. You could not even mention hormones to Erinn; they were a political hotbed.

  “Men use PMS to keep women in their place,” Erinn used to pronounce, not seeming to notice the irony that she was a top-selling young Broadway playwright. No one was keeping her anyplace but on the Great White Way.

  “So . . . what then?” Virginia had ventured. “We pretend it doesn’t exist?”

  “Yes,” Erinn said. “Exactly! No preteen hormonal crying jags, no PMS, no change-of-life histrionics. We just ignore them.”

  And Erinn’s words became law, which Virginia found secretly hilarious since it was Virginia’s generation, not Erinn’s, who had done the heavy lifting. But she was thankful that Erinn took feminism so seriously so she held her tongue. But when Virginia went through The Change, she kept her hot flashes and night sweats to herself.

  Erinn is so intense; it’s no wonder she never married, Virginia thought, then felt instantly guilty for having thought it. Surely there was a man out there who was as equally sensitive to women’s issues, political issues, environmental issues . . . issues in general. There was that nice younger man . . . what was his name? . . . Jude . . . yes, that was it. But that romance went nowhere. Although Virginia was very sketchy on the details of the dying embers of that romance. Erinn was not big on sharing.

  She had forgotten how she had to dodge and weave with both her girls at different stages of their lives. This was going to take some getting used to again. She spotted another large yellow thing in the traffic. This one had a rack on the roof of some kind—surely this was an SUV. Was an SUV a car or a truck? It was a sports utility vehicle.

  “What about that yellow vehicle over there?” Virginia pointed.

  “That’s another minivan.”

  “Sorry, dear,” Virginia said. “I don’t really interact with cars much in New York.”

  Suzanna looked down the line of trucks and cars and suddenly started waving.

  “There he is,” she said. “Eric! Errrriiiiiiic! Over here!”

  A bright yellow vehicle (that looked exactly like the previous two bright yellow minivans) pulled smoothly to the curb. Eric got out of the car and hugged Virginia.

  “Hello, mother-in-law,” he said. “We have been counting the days.”

  She believed him. Eric had always been a great kid and had become a wonderful man, husband, and father. When Suzanna told her that she and Eric were getting married, Virginia couldn’t believe it. She had always harbored a soft spot for Eric, having known him since he and Suzanna were both kids in Napa Valley. She’d always hoped they’d get together, but as the years dragged on without either of them making a move, even though they worked elbow to elbow at the Rollicking Bun, the dream gradually faded. But now they were making up for lost time: marriage and baby happened very quickly. Considering how uptight Suzanna seemed to be, Virginia hoped not too quickly.

  Eric swung the suitcases into the back and came around to help Virginia into the front seat.

  “I’m fine, Eric,” she said as she tried to leap into the passenger seat. It really was ridiculously high. “I can still take care of myself.”

  “At least let me hold the dog,” he said, reaching for Piquant.

  “Oh, careful; he isn’t very friend—” Virginia said, then stopped herself as Piquant went pliantly to Eric. She felt the tiniest prick of jealousy but called herself on it. These were strange new waters she was wading in.

  Once Suzanna had gotten Lizzy strapped into her baby seat, a complicated, new age affair that looked like it could drive the car if it were so inclined, Eric swung into traffic and they were on their way to Venice. Virginia found herself ill at ease with this new family, a family that was hers and yet wasn’t. For the life of her, she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “I’m sorry Erinn isn’t in town, Mom,” Suzanna said, laying a consoling hand on Virginia’s shoulder. “She got a job up the coast for a few days, and you know how that goes.”

  Virginia didn’t know the first thing about Erinn’s recent line of work, just that there never seemed to be enough of it. All she knew right now was that her daughter was conveniently out of town and conveniently had rented out her guesthouse just before Virginia’s arrival. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not. But pretty damn convenient.


  CHAPTER 7

  SUZANNA

  Why am I so rude to my mother?

  Suzanna knew she was out of sorts due to the potential Rio sightings but that was no excuse. It was like plucking the petals off a daisy: “It’s Rio,” “It’s not Rio,” “It’s Rio,” “It’s not Rio.” She had seen the mysterious man a couple of times now, sometimes skating, sometimes jogging, always in motion. But he never was within identification range. Each time she saw him, a jolt went through her. Not the jolt one always read about in romance novels but the jolt from an open wire. Searing and painful, it was the kind of sensation that made you understand to the soles of your feet that you should never, ever go near an open wire again.

  Even if it were Rio, Suzanna had left that world far behind her; she was now a happy if slightly out-of-shape wife and mother. Part of her wanted Rio to see her . . . see what he was missing. And a part of her wanted to make sure he didn’t see her. . . . The out-of-shape part was really sinking in. But that was no excuse for being so short with her mother at the airport.

  Had her mother suddenly become irritating? Suzanna didn’t think so. So what if Virginia couldn’t tell a minivan from an SUV? Was that a sin? So what if she had a dog the size of a mouse? There were worse flaws. Suzanna was also annoyed with Erinn for being out of town. Erinn always managed to be the sister who skated away from all responsibility when Suzanna wore the tag of “good daughter,” and nothing had changed! Erinn was off doing God Knows What while Suzanna was clearing out a room in their apartment for their mother. Typical!

  When they got back from the airport to the Bun, Suzanna found herself having a hard time getting her mother up to the apartment; several of the tea-shop regulars had hung around and were waiting to greet her. Piquant seemed to be causing quite a stir among the customers, too, although Suzanna noticed that the dog didn’t seem to particularly crave the attention—something she could not say for her mother. Virginia had been to the shop many times over the years and was always a hit with the clientele. Apparently, the years in New York had done nothing to dim her allure. Suzanna felt the sting of remorse at her own behavior as she watched her mother interact (elegantly was the only word for it) with the tea-shop guests. Virginia hadn’t seen many of the Bun customers since Suzanna’s wedding almost three years ago, but she appeared to remember each and every name.

  Eric took Lizzy up to the Huge Apartment, while Suzanna hovered in the background as her mother held court on the front porch of the Bun. Looking out toward the ocean, she felt a gentle calm until a tidal wave of emotion nearly flattened her. She held her breath as if she were underwater as the man whom she had decided was not Rio came running up the Beach Walk.

  The glistening man with TV-worthy hair continued in her direction. She tried not to stare; the sun was not her friend and it blinded her. She started to squint, but realized if it were indeed Rio, her scrunched-up face was not what she intended to present. She tried to calm her heart as well as her facial features as he drew closer and closer.

  Feet on the ground, feet on the ground, feet on the ground!

  The sun went behind a cloud as the man was almost upon her. Whoever he was, it almost hurt her to see that his hair, jet black and wild as the wind, whipped across his face, and he had to keep tossing it back like a stallion in a storm. She had wild hair herself and when it was being blown around by the wind she looked like a circus clown. When she shook it out of her face she wound up trying to spit out the curl that ended up in her mouth.

  Life could be so unfair.

  As she turned back to the sanctuary of the tea shop, she felt a hand on her arm. Frozen in place, staring at the sweat-soaked hand, tanned against her pink, freckled forearm, she heard him speak before she saw him.

  “Hello, Suzanna,” Rio said. The soft Spanish accent was as silky as ever.

  Suzanna berated herself. Why hadn’t she rehearsed a stinging rebuke? On the one hand “Hello, Suzanna” didn’t really lend itself to a haughty retort, but she should have been prepared. She met his eyes and prayed for something to come to her.

  “Hello, Rio,” she said.

  Not exactly what she had in mind. She willed herself to look into his eyes. When she took a breath to try again, her strawberry-blond curls leaped into her mouth and almost gagged her. She tried to flick a saliva-covered strand out of her mouth and it snapped against her cheek with such force she was sure it left a welt.

  “I thought it might be you,” Rio said.

  Oh? Imagine the odds of that—a woman who looks just like me standing in front of my own tea shop, she thought. But she said, “You cut your hair.”

  Hell.

  A shadow of a melancholy smile passed over his handsome face. He continued to look into her eyes.

  “Yes. My mother, she always cut my hair. When she died, I could not stand the thought of someone else cutting it. It would be as if . . . as if I lost her twice. After five years my hair was so long, I was sitting on it. So I had to cut it,” he said and shrugged. “Life goes on, you know?”

  Suzanna was stunned. She thought back to the days of her passionate crush. There was a day when he came into the tea shop and was showing pictures of his mother to one of the waitresses. Suzanna had thought it was a come-on strategy. She realized now that his mother was already dead and he was probably reaching out to anyone who would listen. She was so blinded by jealousy that he was paying attention to the waitress that she had never asked either one of them about it.

  Perhaps he had been in mourning. His mother would have been dead at least a few years by then. Latin men could be so attached to their mothers—so sweet.

  Perhaps I judged him too harshly.

  “You look well, Suzanna,” Rio said.

  She felt herself melting. OK, so it wasn’t “You look beautiful” or even “Lookin’ good,” but it was a start!

  “Hey, you too! You’re looking very well, extremely well.”

  And she was telling the truth; he looked irresistible. Which was a problem, because she was going to have to resist him. Plus, she reminded herself that he’d been a total tool to her!

  She admitted the demise of what Erinn called their “pathetic little romance” had certainly not been all his fault. She had set her sights on him and went after him with everything she could muster. She knew that he was a dance instructor with a roster of female students practically two-stepping over one another to get his attention. She had deluded herself into thinking that she meant more to him than his other students. Well, that’s one of the qualities of a great instructor, isn’t it? Make every paying female feel special?

  With every possible justification stripped away, the bare truth was she had thrown herself at him. In hindsight, he really hadn’t paid much attention to her at all, had he? A few misguided gropings that she had practically insisted upon; she was more to blame than he was for the pain he’d caused her.

  Rio leaned in, still holding her arm.

  “Suzanna,” he said. “I must speak to you alone.”

  Her feet left the ground. She tried to control her breathing but there was nothing she could do: A full-blown stress float was upon her. Because Rio had her by the arm she thankfully couldn’t float out to sea, but she was floating horizontal to him, her feet in the air. She kept her eyes locked on his to make sure he didn’t notice and, if he did, he seemed too overcome with some sort of urgent emotion to be aware of it.

  “Suzanna?” said a voice from the patio.

  POW! Suzanna was back on the ground.

  Rio and Suzanna turned toward the voice. It was her mother, carrying the quaking Piquant and walking toward them. Suzanna tried to remain calm. After all, Virginia knew nothing about Rio. But mothers had a sixth sense, Suzanna knew, and she hoped her mother’s own intuition was just a little rusty from being in New York for so long.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Virginia said. “But some of the ladies were wondering if we could get tea.”

  “Oh! Sure, Mom!” she said, relieved
that she still had the power of speech.

  “This is your mother?” Rio asked, pushing his hair back and looking at Virginia in that sexy, bored way of his. Had she imagined his urgency at needing to see her?

  “Yes,” Suzanna said. “Mom, this is Rio. Rio, Mom. I mean Virginia. Virginia Wolf.”

  Suzanna studied her mother as Virginia took in the glory that was Rio. Suzanna wasn’t sure what she expected: her mother to burst into flames at the sight of such magnificence? She only saw her mother’s defenses go up and then lower as she realized there was not going to be a Virginia Woolf joke. Virginia Woolf jokes were definitely not Rio’s style. As a matter of fact, no joke was Rio’s style. Virginia offered her hand and Rio finally let go of Suzanna’s arm to shake it. She tapped the ground lightly to make sure she was going to stay put.

  “I am pleased to meet you,” Rio said, his accent sounding like a hand stroking the nap of velvet. Smooth, smooth, smooth.

  If a hand stroking velvet had a sound.

  “And I, you,” said Virginia, the relentless university professor.

  Suzanna felt the smallest flash of irritated déjà vu. She had forgotten how annoying her family could be with their off-putting perfect grammar. She might be able to nag her sister into speaking more casually, but her mother was a different story. Suzanna worried that Rio might think her mother was stuck-up. She tried to shake off the adolescent embarrassment; she was a mother herself now. Besides, what did she care what Rio, the consummate jerk, thought of her mother? When she tuned back into the conversation, she realized her mother was speaking in Spanish.

  Mom speaks Spanish?

  Having no idea what the two of them were saying, Suzanna plastered on her “I’ll pretend that I know what’s going on” face, looking first to her mother and then to Rio as they conversed, lifting her eyebrows and nodding as the conversation appeared to warrant. It was a trick she’d picked up years ago. Her family was very intellectually inclined, and she found it much easier to look learned than actually learn a bunch of stuff. It turned out that nobody was fooled, but she fell back on old habits from time to time—like now.