Sympathy for the Devil

by Christine Pope

  After that she went into a panegyric about the benefits of yoga and encouraged me to take it up. Now, I had to admit that my mother looked fabulous, and if yoga helped her to achieve her current tone, then kudos and all that. But yoga scared me a bit; I worried that I would get myself twisted up into some sort of human pretzel shape and wouldn’t be able to get out of it.

  I made some sound of demurral, and then she said, “And I just participated in a croning ceremony, and it was the most empowering — ”

  “A what?”

  “A croning ceremony, to celebrate reaching the third stage of life and achieving a certain wisdom.”

  Abandoning all attempts to finish off my pesto and buckwheat monstrosity, I laid down my fork and stared at her. A crone? My vital, still-attractive mother? Oh, I knew she’d said she wasn’t interested in pursuing any further relationships, that she was done with that part of her life, but I just figured it was because of the hurt resulting from the divorce and that eventually she’d get back into the dating scene. Women her age and older got remarried every day.

  “Don’t you think you’re a little young to be calling yourself a crone?” I asked at last, trying not to sound overly incredulous.

  “Some of the women in my group are as young as forty-nine,” she replied. “It’s just an acknowledgment that we’ve moved beyond the mothering stage and are ready to become active wise women.”

  “Moved beyond the mothering stage”? What, did that mean she was finally going to kick Jeff out of the house and tell him to shape up?

  I opened my mouth to ask the question and then shut it with a mental sigh. That was between her and Jeff; I’d been out of the house pretty much since I was eighteen and left to attend UCLA. Maybe the “mothering” she’d referred to was simply being of an age to have children.

  “I’m glad it’s working out for you,” I said finally. It seemed to me the path she’d chosen was one of personal exploration, and if that was what she wanted, then I’d just have to support her. Despite my current difficulties, I couldn’t imagine not wanting to have a man in my life, but maybe during the past five years she’d come to an understanding of her own strengths and abilities, and had realized she would enjoy going it alone from here. Telling her that she was too young to call herself a crone or that she should just get some highlights and sign up with a dating service would only let her know I didn’t understand or approve of her choices.

  She smiled at me, and I returned the smile. I wanted to pat myself on the back for being so mature about the situation, but oddly enough, I just felt tired. And I still had to deal with my father and the dreaded Traci later that afternoon.

  It was closer to six than five when I finally dropped my mother back home and then got on the road once more to head into Newport Beach. During our lunch the rain had tapered off, and she’d wanted to take me shopping amongst the various boutiques and trendy little stores that filled Laguna’s downtown area. Since garnets were my birthstone, she bought me a beautiful silver necklace and a pair of earrings set with the wine-colored gems as a belated present. I also spied a truly awesome embroidered black suede jacket in one of the stores, but I decided to pass it by, since I knew any gushing over it would have earned me another lecture about the cruelty of wearing real leather or suede. Maybe that was true, but my feet hated shoes made out of synthetics, and so far comfort had won out over scruple every time.

  My father lived in a pseudo-Mediterranean McMansion about half a mile from the ocean. The house had a gorgeous view from the backyard, a black-bottom swimming pool, and about four thousand square feet of pretentious living space. I still shuddered to think what it must have cost.

  When I pulled into the driveway, I saw Traci’s white Escalade sitting there as well. Don’t ask me why she felt the need to leave it outside when they had a perfectly good three-car garage. Actually, do ask me — I knew it was because she wanted everyone to see her new piece of automotive extravagance. The point of a Cadillac SUV eluded me anyway; it wasn’t as if she was ever going to take the damned thing off-road.

  I went up to the front door and rang the bell. My father answered it almost immediately, since I’d called as I was getting on the freeway to let him know I was about fifteen minutes away. He looked good, with a fresh Hawaiian tan. Or maybe he’d just gotten a spray tan so he could have the look without the sun damage.

  “How’s the birthday girl?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I replied. I didn’t bother to remind him that my birthday was days ago. With everyone’s crazy schedules, my birthday had somehow bloated into a birth-week.

  “Starving?” His eyes twinkled. He’d had to suffer a few of my mother’s macrobiotic experiments over the years as well. I wondered if that was part of the reason why he finally cleared out.

  “Not quite, but probably I will be in a half-hour or so.”

  “Well, I made early reservations, since I figured you wouldn’t want to wait.”

  “Sounds great,” I said, following him into the family room.

  Traci was in there, lounging on one of the leather sofas. She had the 60-inch flat-screen tuned to some reality show featuring a bunch of equally plastic-looking people, but she picked up the remote and clicked it off when she saw us enter.

  “Hi, Christa!” she chirped.

  “Hi,” I said, sounding distinctly lackluster. Probably I should have tried to muster at least a modicum of false enthusiasm, but both the spirit and the flesh were weak at that moment.

  “So are Lisa and Nathan meeting us at the restaurant?” Traci inquired, standing up and brushing at her close-fitting taupe suede trousers. No scruples over animal cruelty in this household, that was for sure.

  “Oh, are they coming, too?” I wished I’d known that. I always had to mentally prepare myself for extended periods in my sister’s presence.

  For a second my father looked a little uncomfortable. “Well, she wanted to be part of your birthday dinner, too, so I thought it would be good for all of us to get together.”

  This was just getting better and better. But I knew any sort of protest would make me sound like I was a bad sport, so I mustered a smile and said, “It’ll be good to see them. Lisa and I always talk about getting together, but our schedules, you know — ” I waved a hand, hoping he’d bought the lie. Frankly, Lisa and I talked maybe four or five times a year, if that, and mainly to plan holidays or family birthdays.

  Luckily, though, my father didn’t seem to be paying me that much attention. He smiled and nodded, then went and fetched a coat for Traci, since going upstairs to get it herself seemed to be out of the question. She looked tanned as well, her mid-brown hair streaked liberally with blonde. Her French manicure was almost blinding.

  “So how was Hawaii?” I asked, praying that my father wouldn’t take too long.

  “Great, really great. We found this fabulous new restaurant in Kona — ”

  I let her natter away, not really listening, until my father returned and we all piled into the Escalade to go to the restaurant. Of course I had to get in the back seat, which was all right; at least I could just stare out the window at the lights of Newport sliding by and try to ignore the inane chatter in the front seat as to whether they should listen to the jazz station or talk radio.

  Some days I really wondered why my father ever bothered to marry that woman. Oh, she was decorative enough, if in a typical sort of way, and supposedly she was a fairly successful interior designer before the two of them got together and she took up her current life of hard-core shopping and travel, but I had yet to hear her string two intelligent words together.

  Of course, I might have been a little biased.

  Tutto Mare was located at the edge of Newport Center, yet another Southern California homage to commerce. The restaurant was modern yet somehow still warm, its airy spaces and clean lines offset by expanses of burnished copper and smooth travertine. My sister and her husband Nathan already waited for us there, and we exchanged the obligatory greetings and
hugs before the hostess gathered us all up and seated us at a large table at the far end of the main dining room.

  We settled ourselves with my father at the head of the table, Nathan at the foot, and my sister and I sharing one side while Traci had the other to herself. My stomach was beginning to tell me it was not happy with the nuts and twigs it had received earlier, so I decided a nice big swordfish steak was probably the way to go. The waiter came and took our drink orders; as much as I would have liked a glass of wine, I had a long drive home after this and decided to stick with mineral water.

  Finally we all had our beverages, and the talk around the table quieted down a bit. My father cleared his throat and said, “We’re here for Christa’s birthday” — and he raised his glass toward me — “but I also have some very important news for you all.”

  I shot a mystified look at Lisa, and she raised her shoulders. At least she didn’t know anything more than I did.

  For some reason my father reached over and took Traci’s hand in his. “I just wanted you here so I could tell all of you the happy news.” Grinning, he announced, “Traci and I are going to have a baby.”

  Chapter Six

  An awful silence fell. My stomach, which had already been doing some interesting gyrations as it tried to digest the wood chips from my lunch earlier, flip-flopped. My father continued to grin, but Traci’s smile began to look a little pasted on.

  I blurted out the first thing that popped into my mind. “Aren’t you too old for that?”

  If I’d thought the silence that followed my father’s pronouncement was bad, the one that resulted from my ill-considered question was positively hideous.

  Finally Traci said, shooting me one of the most evil glares I’ve ever received, “I’m only thirty-nine.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.” Okay, she might only be thirty-nine, but my father was going to be fifty-seven in May, which meant he’d be the ripe old age of seventy-five when he got around to sending this kid off to college.

  “So when are you due?” my sister Lisa asked, in what I thought of as her sparkly real-estate agent’s voice. I could tell from a certain tautness in her jaw line that she wasn’t exactly thrilled with this particular piece of information, either, but unlike me Lisa hadn’t contracted a sudden case of foot-in-mouth disease.

  “The end of June,” Traci said promptly. “We wanted to wait until we were sure and that everything was progressing normally until we told everyone.”

  If it really had been that touch-and-go, I questioned the wisdom of their jetting off to Hawaii for the past ten days, but whatever. Maybe Traci had wanted to get in one last round of vacationing before she was stuck in Newport Beach with nothing to do but watch her waistline expand and drop large amounts of cash at trendy maternity boutiques.

  I wanted to ask, Does Mom know? but realized that question would be even less welcome than the whole age gaffe. Probably I should have realized that this particular disaster might occur at any given time, since Traci was so much younger than my father. Honestly, as the years went on and they never discussed having kids, I’d just assumed Traci didn’t want any.

  But obviously she had wanted them, or at least had gotten it into her head that a baby was the latest accessory she needed to make her life complete. I’d rather think that than consider the possibility of my father really wanting more kids. Because if that were the case, then I’d begin to wonder if there was something deficient in all of us, something he’d wanted from a child but hadn’t yet gotten. We were all bright and attractive (well, the jury was out on Jeff on the first part of that statement, even though he cleaned up pretty well), but none of us was exactly a genius or a prodigy. However, if my father had hoped that Traci’s genetic contribution would bring him a Nobel laureate or the next Bill Gates, I had a feeling he was going to be sadly disappointed.

  While all these thoughts were passing through my head, I found myself getting angrier and angrier. How dare they, anyway? Wasn’t this world over-populated enough? Had my father even stopped to think that he was the age where he should be expecting his first grandchild, not his fourth child? And bringing it up like this, at a dinner that was supposed to be for my birthday. Very nice. Thanks so much.

  “Do you know what you’re having?” Nathan asked. He shot a considering glance in my direction, as if he’d started to guess the reason for my continuing silence. Despite the fact that he was a mortgage broker, he was actually a fairly nice guy who displayed flashes of intuition I wouldn’t have thought possible in someone who’d been misguided enough to marry my sister.

  Traci gave a simpering little laugh. “Well, I had an amnio because, well, I am past thirty-five. But Stephen and I decided we wanted it to be a surprise, so we asked them not to share that part of the results with us.”

  “I suppose it’s more fun that way,” Lisa put in. Her smile was starting to look a little tight around the edges. I wondered suddenly whether she and Nathan had been trying to get pregnant as well, with no luck. She’d always said she didn’t want to start a family until she was at least thirty, but she’d hit the big three-oh this past October. If they really had been trying with no success, I could see why Lisa’s expression reminded me more of someone who was grimacing in pain than actually grinning.

  For the first time my father seemed to detect a notable lack of enthusiasm on my part. His gaze settled on me, his hazel eyes looking concerned. “You’re very quiet, Christa.”

  “Sorry,” I said, gulping at my mineral water. At that moment I really regretted not ordering a glass of wine. “I guess I was just thinking.”

  “About?” It was his psychologist’s voice, neutral, gently probing.

  I really hated it when my father pulled that stuff on us. We were his kids, after all, not his clients, or the groupies who paid big bucks for the seminars he gave one weekend a month on personal growth and family dynamics. “So are you going to cut Mom off when the baby comes?”

  “I hardly think this is the time to discuss that, Christa. Your mother already knew the situation with Jeff couldn’t continue indefinitely.”

  Okay, maybe they’d already hashed through that particular point. I’d often thought to myself that my mother needed to give Jeff more of a push, make him realize he couldn’t live with her forever. However, now that it looked as if there might be a definite end point to the support my father was willing to pay for him, I found myself rushing to his defense. My brother, who lately had been a source of some impatience for me, suddenly seemed in definite need of a protector.

  “Who’s to say Jeff isn’t just acting out because his father took off to marry someone almost half his age?” I snapped, then realized I had gone way too far.

  “Christa!” my father and sister exclaimed almost at once.

  Lisa looked really angry. Now, she wasn’t a huge fan of Traci, although she was willing to make nice and play “happy family” just because that’s what people are supposed to do. But I had broken the cardinal rule. I had brought up the divorce when we’d all agreed to tiptoe around that point. Worse, I had made it quite clear that I thought the breakup of my parents’ marriage was mostly my father’s fault.

  Oddly, though, I didn’t feel guilty. I guess I should have — here we were supposed to be having a celebratory family dinner, and instead I’d turned it into a scene. Well, all right, not quite a scene. Most of the conversation had been carried on in normal tones, so unless the people around us were actively eavesdropping, they probably couldn’t hear what was being said. However, I flushed with righteous indignation. It felt good to have finally said what I thought instead of biting my lip and avoiding a confrontation.

  The weird thing was that Traci shot me a strangely triumphant look, as if my outburst was exactly what she wanted. Why? So I could alienate my father? Maybe she thought having him on the outs with his first family would give her more power in the relationship, power that could only be increased by having a baby. I knew she merely tolerated us, just as we only tolerated her
. We didn’t have anything in common, and no reason to like one another except that my father had decided — in a fit of insanity — to marry her.

  But as much as I would have liked to push the matter, the sad fact was that I really didn’t want to upset my father any more than I probably already had. Despite my continuing irritation with Traci and the feeling that something had gone subtly wrong with the universe ever since my parents split up, I really did love him. He’d been a good father, there for our concerts and plays and awards ceremonies, taking us to the park on the weekend, gamely trying to build a playhouse for us in the backyard even though he had less mechanical ability than I did.

  Sometimes things just don’t work out between people, I thought. That doesn’t necessarily make them bad.

  “I’m sorry,” I said at length, knowing they needed to hear the words even if I didn’t really mean them. “I guess you caught me by surprise.” And then, because my father still looked troubled, I added, “Probably just low blood sugar.”

  “Curse of the nuts and twigs,” he said, the beginnings of a smile lifting at his mouth.

  Lisa glanced from him to me, eyebrows pulled together in puzzlement, and then she gave a sudden relieved laugh. “Oh, lunch with Mom, right?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” I replied, and a little of the tension went out of the air.

  Nathan essayed a smile. Traci looked as if she could have cheerfully strangled the lot of us, but because we’d managed to avoid a meltdown, she had to shoehorn a cheerful expression onto her features. It was actually sort of funny to watch her twist her tight-skinned face — never capable of much movement at the best of times — into something approximating good humor.

  By way of an olive branch, I asked Traci which room they were considering converting into a nursery, and she was off and running. The second guest bedroom had already been selected, she informed me, and the painters were coming next week. As she went into details that mattered probably only to her and my father (and his interest was debatable; I thought I saw his eyes start to glaze over as she launched into a discussion of layette tables), I patted myself on the back for skillfully maneuvering the conversation into safer territory. Then the food came, and the rest of the meal passed without incident.