Time of My Life

by Allison Winn Scotch

  I don’t say any of this.

  Instead, I offer, “See, that’s the thing: I obviously don’t want her to hurt me again, and I’m not sure how I can move forward in any sort of relationship with her, knowing that.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s definitely the risk. But, I mean . . .” He pauses and considers exactly what he’s trying to say. “Isn’t that sometimes the point? No risk, no gain?” He clears his throat. “My dad is a math professor [I know!], and he’s always calculating the odds of things, what the odds are—real odds, not due to luck or fluke or anything like that—of say, a bus crashing into the car in front of it, or us getting to school on time when we left the house five minutes late if he drives forty-five miles per hour; you know, quantifiable stuff like that.”

  I nod my head. I’ve heard all of this before, mostly from Phil, Henry’s dad, who could spin nearly anything you say into a math problem, which led to many dreary and insufferable dinners and conversations. It also surely didn’t help nurture Henry’s softer, more compassionate gene. But I realize now, as I stare at my former husband and old love, that maybe his prodding and his niggling nagging about my mother was his way of watching over me. In the future, I took it as judgment, as his way to look down on, not out for, me. But I sense none of that today, only compassion.

  “So anyway,” he continues, “I mean, this one is harder because there’s emotion and all of that involved, and my dad would say it’s thus a flawed formula . . . but you have to weigh the odds and assess how likely it is that you’re risking more than you’re gaining.”

  I’m about to answer when Gene buzzes me again.

  “You’re late for the copy meeting,” he says flatly, then clicks off.

  “Oh crap, I have to run.” I stand and grab random documents strewn across my desk and in a pile on the floor.

  “No problem,” Henry says. “Hey, whatever happens, let me know, will you?” He pulls a card from his wallet and is about to place it on my desk but thinks otherwise, smartly recognizing that it might never be seen again. So he hands it to me directly. “Oh, and have a good Thanksgiving,” he says on his way to the door.

  “You, too.” I smile, then realize that technically, this should be our first Thanksgiving together and that I should be headed to his childhood home to meet Phil and Susan, his physics-professor mom.

  “Going home?” he asks.

  “To Jack’s,” I say with a shrug. “You?”

  “To Celeste’s,” he says, mirroring my posture, then forcing a grin. “You gotta do what you gotta do.” So I guess that wasn’t a euphemism for they broke up, after all. I’m punctured.

  “Have a good one,” he says again, lingering, in no hurry to move on. “And don’t forget the formula: risk or gain. Which one is more likely?”

  “I won’t forget,” I say, looking at him one last time just before I turn down the hall toward the conference room. “In fact, I’m thinking it over as we speak.”

  HENRY

  Henry first nudged me about my mother when Katie was seven and a half months. I remember it clearly because it was just after she started crawling, which changed the literal trajectory of my day. No more plopping her down while I ran into the kitchen for an iced tea. The first (and last) time I did that, I returned to the living room and she’d vanished. Panic spread through my veins, and I raced around shouting her name with hysteria for the longest minute of my lifetime, as if she could say, “Yes, Mama, I’m right here,” until I found her tucked under the piano bench, cooing softly and pawing the gold pedals.

  I don’t know why Henry started in with it—probably because he suspected that I might find motherhood more fulfilling if I came to peace with my own disrupted youth. He’d bring it up in small ways: Maybe he saw an older woman on the street whom he thought looked so much like me, maybe he’d mention an article he’d read in the New York Times about child rearing and how we pass along our own sins to our offspring, try as we might not to. Maybe he’d just casually mention her when I’d be smack in the middle of preparing dinner, asking, ever so nonchalantly, if my mom was a good cook or if I knew if she had an aversion to basil, if it made her gag reflux kick in, as it did mine.

  At first, I didn’t mind so much. At first, it just seemed like he was trying to peel off a layer and dig a little deeper into discovering more about his wife, and just about all of my magazines told me that this was a good thing for a marriage. Oh, to have a relationship in which your husband still finds you mysterious, they would sing! So he’d make his passing comment, and I’d try not to let the edges of my mouth curl under, and I’d instead smile pleasantly enough and shrug off his inquiries.

  But soon, it became clear that Henry’s comments were part of a larger plan, a bigger objective, the goal of which was to forge some sort of reconciliation between me and the woman who left me behind.

  “You never pushed me to do this before,” I said one night, my voice frigid with unexpressed anger because I just wanted him to shut his piehole about this fucking subject, a feeling I hoped was made clear by my refusal to turn around and face him while I was washing the dishes.

  “I just think it’s important,” he replied. “I think it’s important for Katie to know her grandmother, but I mostly think it’s important for you to get answers to all of your questions.”

  “I don’t have any questions,” I said flatly, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing this goddamn spot of grease that refused to relinquish its grip on my pot.

  “You have plenty of questions,” he said, not unkindly, though I didn’t see it this way at the time. “And they’re valid questions that deserve answers. I think,” he paused to consider his words, “that getting some answers might make you a happier person. Might, you know, help you figure things out.”

  “I don’t need to figure things out!” I seethed. “And I resent the insinuation that I’m confused or unsettled, that I’m not entirely fucking happy right now, with you and with Katie, and without that woman,” I spat out the words, “in my life.”

  I slammed down the pot, shook off my rubber gloves, and retreated to the nursery to check on Katie. I sat in her rocking chair, gliding back and forth and back again, with only the nightlight for illumination, until I heard Henry plod into our bedroom and retire.

  Who asked you? I thought. What gave you the fucking right? As if you think you have all the answers! I steamed.

  I rocked and I rocked, eventually sliding down onto myself and resting my feet on the ottoman and falling into a fitful slumber. Never once, not even for a moment, did it occur to me that my husband, he who truly loved me, even when he felt so far, so very, very far away, might be right.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Jack and I are on the train, tucked in the last passenger car, on our way to his parents’ house for Thanksgiving when my phone rings. The car is clogged with holiday travelers, all rushing to see loved (or not-so-loved) ones for the obligatory turkey feast, and our breaths collectively stifle the air, such that the windows drip with condensation and I nearly suffocate from my maroon wool scarf. My cell keeps buzzing, and I unwrap the scarf from my neck, tossing aside the work memos I was scouring, and scavenge through my overnight bag for my phone. Jack doesn’t glance up; he’s fully enmeshed in rereading the first five chapters of his novel. It’s as far as he’s gotten in the four months that I’ve been back here, but it’s progress, I suppose. He’s showing it to Vivian tonight, and even he admits that he’s more than a little queasy at the thought of doing so.

  “So don’t let her read it,” I suggest as we’re packing.

  “Of course I’m letting her read it,” he says, throwing five pairs of boxers in his suitcase and leaving me to wonder just how long he plans on staying or why he needs to change his underwear so often.

  “But it’s making you crazy. You’re so worried about her opinion that you’re barely concentrating on whether or not you’re happy with it.” I turn to retrieve a sweater from the closet, and I’m startled by how much I see my own s
elf in my words—how I was so busy trying to please Henry that I never stopped to consider my own happiness, or, just as important, whether or not he wanted to be pleased in such a way in the first place. I glance at myself in the closet mirror and see the surprise of the realization wash across me.

  Jack sighs. “Jill, look, this is just how it is. Please don’t get up in my face about it.”

  “Okay,” I say and drop my navy cable-knit into the bag. “Consider it dropped.” What’s the point in changing him? I tell myself, though a wiser part of me whispers that change is the point entirely.

  As my cell rings and rings and as a couple behind us debates the ethics of hanging chads, Jack chews on the cap of his pen, then makes a note in the manuscript, muttering to himself.

  “Yello,” I say over the din of the train’s engine, loudly enough to break Jack from his trance. He shoots me an annoyed glare, and I shrug.

  “I’m pregnant!” Meg screams on the other end of the line. “I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant!!”

  I press my finger into my free ear and turn into the window to afford a little privacy.

  “Sweetie, that’s amazing!” I hear myself say, though I feel as if I’m saying so from inside a tunnel, so far removed from the actual words. I’m frantically spinning backward, confirming that no—I shake my head slightly—she wasn’t pregnant at Thanksgiving last time around. I would have remembered that. Surely, I would have paid attention to that. My mind flips back and forth, like a children’s picture book, as I search for any sign that this is new news, not new old news.

  No, I think firmly. Last time around, Henry and I drove to D.C., stopping at a TCBY on the side of the road for snacks, even though it was sleeting outside, and singing along to country music as we went. Henry, I learned on the trip, was tone-deaf, but this didn’t stop him from singing to virtually every twang-filled, crooning, heartsick tune that floated from the car radio.

  “I’m just a misplaced country boy,” he said to me sheepishly at one point.

  “An off-tune one, be that as it may,” I said, smiling.

  “Well, you found my first flaw.” He winked, and then turned back toward the road.

  Eventually, as our ardor eroded, I grew weary of his country music, and he listened to it only when alone. Truth told, I have no idea if he still sang along, and if not, if he stopped because of me.

  But certainly, as we careened down the highway toward his parents’ house on that Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Meg never called to announce pregnancy number two.

  So now, on the train to Vivian and Bentley’s, this was certainly good news to behold. Since I’d come back from seven years forward I’ve too often suspected that I’d set off a destructive chain of events that would never have occurred, shouldn’t have occurred, were it not for my return. It’s easy to feel this way: I do, after all, have a map of the previous course of events, so any deviation from someone else’s designated path is, no dodging it, directly my fault. I wanted to come back to change my life, my history, but I never contemplated how that might tweak the outcome for so many others. Like Josie and Bart. Like Henry and Celeste.

  But now, there was Megan and Tyler, and as she confides that she’s only five weeks along, so let’s not get our hopes up, but she’s feeling positive and no morning sickness yet, but she’s certain she’ll be barfing any day now, I can’t help but feel like things are exactly as they should be.

  Outside, the world rushes by me. I stare out of the train window, and pine trees blur into other pine trees, and deadened fields, crusty from the winter, flow into other browned and deserted grasses. I watch it all whiz by and think that my coming back has changed things, sure, but sometimes, change is exactly what you need. As Henry might have once sung, some change is going to do you good.

  THIS IS MY FIRST Thanksgiving with the Turnhill clan. The year before, I’d joined my father, Linda, and Andy in Florida, and the year prior to that, Jack and I hadn’t been serious enough to merit a discussion on where to spend the holidays. So, while I’ve burrowed myself into his family tree, thanks to that sparkler on my finger, and Vivian has certainly extended her (formerly clamped-shut, never-to-be-pried-open) arms, still, I feel off balance.

  I have tried, however, to come prepared. While my preference would be to slum it in jeans and a T-shirt, I am demurely dressed like a Connecticut prep-school graduate, complete with a honey-colored cashmere crew, a tweed pencil skirt and peep-toe lizard-skin shoes. Peep-toe shoes! I think as I slide them on. Who wears heels to dinner in their own home?

  Vivian did, is the answer, and thus, so did I—though I’m alarmed to remember how often I wore heels to dinner in my old life: how Henry would burst through the door, and an apron-clad, exquisite wife, complete with a piping hot dinner, would be waiting.

  I descend from the stairs into the living room, and Leigh catches a glimpse of me.

  “Oh my God.” She laughs. “You look like one of them!” She gestures her elbow toward the library, where her two sisters and mother huddle in front of the fireplace. Leigh, I notice, is in pressed black pants, a matching turtleneck, and flats with a shiny silver emblem on the toe. The balls of my feet practically cry out in envy.

  “Just trying to do my part.” I shrug.

  “More like ‘just trying to play your part,’ ” Leigh says, and though the words could be piercing, they actually burst with sympathy. She smiles at me kindly. “Come on, let’s get a drink. This can be a long evening.”

  Two bourbons later, I am helping Vivian reheat the (catered, preordered) stuffing (that she doesn’t cook), when she blindsides me from behind.

  Pressing close, too close to me, she says, “Jill, now that you’re going to be part of my family, I’d like you to consider calling me ‘Mom.’ ”

  I spin around. We’re now close enough that, were this a movie (and were she not my future mother-in-law), the audience would shift with anticipation in their seats, hoping that one of us might leap toward the other and burst the sexual bubble. As it was, I take a step back and nail my head into the oven door.

  “Oh, Vivian, I’m, uh, I’m really . . .”

  She smiles at me like a possessed Cheshire cat, and I’m suddenly reminded of Alice in Wonderland and how I bought Katie an original copy for her first birthday, knowing, of course, that she couldn’t yet read, but dripping with excitement to pass along the story of the girl who slides down the rabbit hole, all the same.

  “I’m sorry,” I say in a panic, squeezing out from between Vivian’s breath and the heat of the oven, and racing for the bathroom.

  I plunk on the toilet and try to gather the air that seems clotted in my lungs, try to stop my heart from nearly detonating in my chest. I run my clammy hands over my forehead and tug at the pearls around my neck. Everything feels like it’s closing in on me, and I exhale to try to will it away, but still, the claustrophobia persists.

  A small voice sounds through the door.

  “Aunt Jilly? You okay?”

  Allie, I think. “Fine, honey. I’ll be out in a minute.” My voice is an octave too high.

  “Hurry, I have something I want to show you.” Her footsteps fade as she runs with abandon down the hall.

  I stand, ignoring the sudden dizziness, and splash water across my cheeks, then peer closer into the mirror.

  Thanksgiving had long been my least favorite holiday, and for many years, it was all my family could do to suffer through it in stoic silence, pretending that nothing had changed, despite the absent place setting where my mother once sat. Our first Thanksgiving without her—just seven short weeks after she left—my father valiantly but ultimately fruitlessly toiled the day through in the kitchen, intent on crafting a homespun celebratory feast, as my mother had done with seeming ease for all the years I could remember. I’d stand in the kitchen door opening, my five-year-old self or seven-year-old self, and watch her move from oven to stovetop back to oven, checking on the turkey or the gravy or the stuffing, and she never once stopped mo
ving. As if nothing were more natural, as if she couldn’t have been more content.

  And then she was gone.

  And try as he did, my father’s turkey was too dry, and the gravy too salty, and the yams so lumpy I just pushed them around on my plate even though they used to be my favorite. But we smiled and smiled the dinner through, even though the tears that sat just behind the cusps of our eyes said more about our misery than our grins ever did.

  I stare into the mirror, now, in Vivian’s powder room, and muffle a cry. For my feet that are pressed achingly into my peep-toed heels when they’d so much rather be free. For my father who tried to shoehorn a rosy sense of familial happiness into our holidays when, surely, all he, too, wanted to do was scream. For my old self, who seemingly woke up one day as a country-club-ready, chipper-in-all-moments, shiny supermom, as if she crept in overnight like a zombie and seized my mind while leaving my body untouched. And for the me now, who, try as she might, felt hauntingly similar to that old self, the very one she was trying to outrun.

  I slide down the putty-colored wall onto the cold tiled floor and focus on my mother, on how she hummed under her breath while she toiled in the kitchen, so lost in herself that sometimes she didn’t even notice me watching. And then I remember how I used to do much the same: singing to myself while folding laundry, literally whistling while I worked around the house. But none of these musical musings filled me with any joy. If anything, they masked the more honest sounds, the guttural ones that I was too fearful to let escape.

  I lean against the wall and the radiator clicks on, emitting a sudden whoosh of heat. I sit there until time blends into itself, and as my back muscles spasm and Allie once again begs for my presence outside of the closed door, I’m struck with a sudden and immediate realization: that I might be able to hide from my mother, but it’s clear that I can’t outrun her, not when what I’m mostly sprinting from is not her memory alone, but the way that her memory has planted its roots inside of me and grows bigger with each passing year, until my sense of my mother is so intertwined with my own sense of self that I can’t tell which is which any longer.