“Listen,” Lydia said. “It’s cool. I talked with Grandma earlier.”
“You talked to my mother?” Oona asked. “You talked to her and not me?”
“I know you told me not to. But she asked. She knew something was wrong. It’s her superpower. She just looked at me and knew.”
Oona could guess what her mother had to say. Growing up in this house, she’d been subsumed in all of her mother’s various theories on sex and the body: the intersection between female desire and male hegemony; the social origins of even the most innocent assumptions about beauty. When Linda Lovelace died, she heard for weeks about the deranged and implicit power structures of pornography—this even though, at the time, Oona was twenty-seven years old. As much as she joked with her mother about the book and its diagrams and its pink cover, this was the crucial thing about her mother: no matter how much social opprobrium she faced because of The Inseparables, no matter how many men approached her armed with something menacing to say, she had never backed away from her ideals. Second wave begat third wave and here, all the time, was Henrietta Olyphant, preaching the same sermon. Despite all of this, Oona had ignored most everything. This was the instinct, even if it wasn’t wise. The things your mother tells you about sex are not the things you want to hear or accept as gospel, even if those things are good and true and generally helpful.
“I think we probably need to have a frank talk,” Oona said, suddenly energized. “That’s what we should do.”
“A frank talk about what?” Lydia asked.
“Intercourse,” Oona said.
“Oh that’s a terrible idea.”
“Are you having intercourse? Were you? Is this Charlie person someone you loved? Were you being pressured or manipulated into intercourse when you didn’t want it?”
“Why suddenly do I feel like I’m on trial?”
“I know this is really uncomfortable. And probably very weird to have your mother asking you this stuff. But they’re important questions.”
“It’s been a long day already,” Lydia said. “I just don’t know if I have it in me to talk about intercourse with my mother. Or really even say the word ‘intercourse’ anymore.”
The urge to devolve the conversation into clinical terms was the doctor’s habit, surely. Oona had taken this tack all through Lydia’s early adolescence, eschewing the books and manuals and the low-grade banality of women’s magazines to explain sex and menstruation and the very basics of puberty. This was very likely her mother’s fault. With her mother, everything was frank. This is what happens when people fuck. Oona was eight, nine, maybe. There were French movies involved. By fourteen, she was well versed in all the various opinions about female orgasm bestowed upon the world by esteemed male sexologists. Having grown up amid the sharp fallout from The Inseparables, it was not a mystery why the cold language of medicine appealed to her so. Her childhood had caused in her not only a reflexively regressive idea of sex and an innate loathing of the libertine lifestyle, but a magnetic attraction to the clarity of science.
“I’m fine,” Lydia said. “Really. I can see that you’re worried. But I’m fine.”
Oona wanted to grab her. All I want to do is keep you safe.
“The picture was stupid,” Lydia said. “I accept that. One stupid thing. One part curiosity. One part vanity.”
“Vanity?”
“I’m a human,” Lydia said. “So, yes: vanity.”
“Maybe one part sexual peer pressure?”
Lydia shook her head. “I’m not sleeping with anyone,” she said. “Or making love. Or screwing. Or endeavoring to perform intercourse with other humans, or however you want to put it, Dr. Olyphant.”
“Do we need to talk about diseases or the best practices for contraception?”
“Certainly not any more than we are right this second,” said Lydia.
“I’m perfectly willing,” Oona said. “I’m always willing.”
“I think I remember the lectures and pamphlets,” Lydia said. “All the many dozens of them.”
“You can joke if you want, but I wanted to prepare you! For this!” Oona paced for a moment in the bathroom. “You have to understand, Lydia: you’re mine! I made you! Whatever happens to you happens to me! When you suffer, I suffer! Even when you don’t suffer, I suffer! Every moment you’re away from me, I suffer! There is always suffering!”
“I understand,” Lydia said quietly.
Oona said nothing. She could see Lydia testing the words, trying to see if they were true, or at least true enough. Oona could remember this. At fifteen, she was so flooded by doubt and vulnerability that she felt for the longest time as if confidence itself was a rare element, like lithium or radium, buried deep in some far-flung corner of the earth, available to only a lucky few.
“This boy,” Lydia said softly. “He’s the only boy I’ve kissed. Not at school, not this year—ever. In history.” Lydia put up her hand and begged for mercy. “Which I feel really terrific admitting. Not because having kissed a lot of boys means anything important, but maybe because there are boys I’ve wanted to kiss that I haven’t. And maybe because the only boy I’ve kissed is the same boy who stole a picture of my body and sent it around to all his buddies. Can we discuss something else? Anything more comfortable? Like cancer? Or the Middle East peace process? Or nuclear warfare?”
Oona hugged her. Lydia let her. What else was there to do but try to hold on?
Out on the meadow, there were tire grooves in the frozen mud. This was the fault of the moving trucks, but it may as well have been the ambulance. When she was young, her father had her memorize every species of plant here. Great Solomon’s Seal. Hooker’s Orchid. River Beauty. They were the only plants she knew. Beyond the water, church steeples decorated the valley in Aveline. In the spring, you could see the red roof on the house where her father had been a boy. Down below, directly below, on the hill, the walkway lay bare. She had helped her mother dispose of the flagstone.
“This house creeps me out,” Lydia said, stepping away from the window. “I mean, he fell and died right there.” She pointed. “Every time I come here, I just stare at that spot.”
After the funeral, Oona put the flagstone in the back of her car and took it to the house in Crestview. Her mother needed it gone, and Oona obliged. Blood was not supposed to bother her. She was around it every day. Blood was a companion of her workday. She knew the feel of blood on her fingers, kept up to date on the recent hematological research, knew what the whizzing circuitry of blood looked like beneath a microscope. Even so, she’d needed to ask Spencer to clean her father’s blood from the stone. He’d found her in the backyard with the garden hose, shaking. Death in her profession so often was a clinical state. She had been present in the emergency room for enough death that she had become numb to the holiness of the act. Even now, the reality of her father being gone had not settled in. How could it be? And to go the way he had? Hitting his head? Her sweet dad? Her dad out in the barn, nursing a calf with a bottle; her dad in the kitchen, whipping egg whites into meringue; her dad here, dancing with her mother to the worst music, to Billy Joel and Elton John? Her strong father falling and dying at home? How was that ever going to make any sense?
“Do you think he knew?” Lydia asked. “Like, when he fell. Do you think he knew that it was the end? I would hope that I knew. If it was happening to me, I would want to know.”
Although Oona had not been there to see it, she knew exactly what would have happened. In the hospital she had seen it with others. The last moments of lucidity. The slow loss of consciousness. The gradual leak of life. She lied to Lydia.
“I don’t know if he knew or not,” she said.
Lydia looked unexpectedly close to tears. Oona put her arm around her and kissed the top of her head. This simple thing brought her back, one kiss to her daughter’s hairline, something she’d done so many thousands of times when Lydia was a baby, on the futon in their apartment on 103rd Street. She and Spencer would take turns h
olding her, passing her back and forth so that one of them could sleep, and this was what they did, over and over, delirious with amazement. At the funeral, she’d done this, too, holding Lydia’s hand, keeping her near her at all times. Lydia had never known anybody who’d died before, and at the cemetery, she was viscerally bothered by the actualities of burying someone: the turned-up earth, the dirt, the shovels. Lydia had not been close to her grandfather, which was something Oona blamed herself for. It was the old story. She was too busy. There were too many surgeries. She was always away.
“The last time I was here it was the same thing,” Lydia said. “It just feels awful in this house. How can you be here all the time?”
Oona wanted to make her daughter think of something else. “Did you know that I was born in the room right next to us?” she asked, knocking on the door to the adjoining bedroom.
Lydia looked at the door in disbelief. “Did I know that?”
“I don’t know,” Oona said, smiling. “You know a lot of things now.”
“You were born there? Like, right here, in this house? In that room?”
Oona nodded. “In the bed.”
“Same bed?”
“The same bed.”
“That’s nuts,” Lydia said.
Oona watched as Lydia opened the door to the bedroom and peered inside.
“It’s like you’re a woman from olden times,” Lydia said. “Being born at home. It’s so ancient. Had electricity even been invented then? Or antibiotics?”
“Hilarious,” Oona said. She enjoyed the fleeting moment of victory as Lydia laughed.
So much had changed in her daughter these past six months. In half a year, something like the first evidence of her adult identity had begun to show itself. Even since the last time she’d seen her, for that quick stopover last month, things felt different. An increasing slyness in the way she smiled. Evidence of an expanding cynicism. A vanishing of her early teenage gawkiness. The new sharp refinement of her clavicle. The things that had reminded Oona of Spencer when Lydia was young—the lips, the subtle Hebraic profile—had shifted just enough for Oona to see the beginnings of something Spencer did not possess: a hatching elegance, cool grace in the slow way she ran her hands through her hair. The color in her cheeks gave the impression of good humor. Oona reached to hug her again and felt something hard against the waistline of her pants.
“It’s nothing,” Lydia said, protesting.
“I hope it’s something,” Oona said. “And that you’re not suffering from some sort of awful rectangular growth.”
“Mom,” Lydia whined.
“Give it over.”
Lydia handed over one of the new pristine copies of The Inseparables. Oona still could not believe it was being republished. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she flipped through the pages, smiling, pausing to linger over her favorite diagrams.
Lydia started to say, “The combination of my grandmother having written this and my picture floating around at school—”
“You do know you can’t talk to her about this book,” Oona said. “Right?”
“I don’t understand,” Lydia said. “You get to talk with her about it.”
“I can joke with her about it. That’s about it. I can’t talk to her seriously about it. I’ve never really been able to. Not with any substance, at least. It took me a long time even to get to the point where I could joke. That’s a very recent development.”
“How recent?”
Oona shrugged. “Six months ago.”
Lydia leaned over to look at the page Oona had open, which had on it an illustration of two centaurs fornicating in a jungle. “Yikes,” Lydia said.
“Exactly,” Oona said.
“My favorite is the photograph of Grandma on the back,” Lydia said, pointing.
Oona turned the book over. “Magnificent, right?”
“That can’t be the same person,” Lydia said. “Pushing butterscotch on me. Cooking microwavable pizzas. How is this the same woman?”
Her mother was younger in this picture than Oona was now. With all her jewelry and her big overfed cat and the jodhpurs, it was easy to laugh at the picture, which was exactly what Oona had done when she was Lydia’s age. To see it now, however, reminded her of what those first years must have been like here in Aveline, exiled from Manhattan, striving for a fashionable or intellectual existence in a cow town, and ending up looking less like a rustic Gloria Steinem and more like an extra in a Sergio Leone movie.
Lydia took the book back. Fifteen was probably the right age to read a book like her mother’s, even if Oona had read it earlier, far too early, had devoured it, really, had taken it to bed with her and pored over the diagrams with a flashlight. She had, just like Lydia, suffered the indignity of having boys taunt her about it in the hallways of her junior high school. Do you know what your mom thinks about manual stimulation? Every boy she met, everywhere, had the same quip about hot-air balloons. Been in any balloons lately? Oona found it outrageous that her mother even knew this stuff, let alone that she had deigned to tell everyone about it. For years afterward, Oona had detested her mother for the book, for its scandalousness, its awfulness, for the terrible drawings of hairy men that her classmates would sketch on her notebooks during school. Every time she read the book, though, she was startled by how tame it was, how prim and modest the urges were, how simple the hunger was that existed at the center of the characters. In reality, the book’s premise was simple—women, too, should enjoy sex—which made the public shame her mother had suffered even more heartbreaking. The truth of it was that the sex in The Inseparables was boring. Getting fucked in a hot-air balloon didn’t mean exactly the same thing as being fucked well in a hot-air balloon. This was the thing about sex: it took a great amount of skill to make it interesting. If Lydia wanted to keep reading the book, at least she should know this.
“She’s wearing so much jewelry,” Lydia said.
“Nobody wore a half dozen amulets quite like my mother. It’s like she’s the female Mr. T.”
“I know!” Lydia cried out before stopping to ask, “Wait. Who is Mr. T?”
“Oh,” Oona said, laughing. “He’s an African American actor who liked to wear a lot of necklaces.”
Oona liked this: joking with her daughter. Motherhood—the real job of motherhood—had never made her feel competent the way the parenting books had claimed it would. Instead, she’d constantly found herself at a distance, wondering at times whether the experience for her might not just turn out to be one long stretch of anticipated estrangement. Mothers and daughters: she saw them fighting in shopping malls, in the waiting rooms of her hospital wing, a daughter in a restaurant throwing a grape soda at her mother’s blouse. Those incremental separations that thrilled other mothers—walking, talking, swimming without flotation devices—were just evidence of what she was afraid would come eventually: she and Lydia seeing each other only at holidays, flanked by stepparents or poorly chosen spouses. It had been like this with her own mother until six months ago. Now the simplest thing made her mother so unreasonably happy. Just the two of them drinking coffee side by side on a Saturday morning, on the white sofas in the front room, Van Morrison playing, neither of them talking. This is nice, her mother would say. You being here. Us being here. The message felt clear to Oona. Stop trying too hard. It’s not all that hard to be happy. Your misery, your cantankerous attitude, your anxiety—it’s all a choice. But life interfered, she had thought to argue all this time. It was not a deficit of love or appreciation that had kept Oona away or made her unhappy. It was everything else. Marriage, motherhood, credit card debt, fucking up in surgery, having a husband who couldn’t stop getting high—life.
While they talked, Oona ran a bath.
“You’re going to be a divorcée,” Lydia said.
“I don’t like the sound of that. It’s haggardly.”
“Is it? I think it’s hot. The word ‘divorcée’ sounds alluring to me.”
“Unless you’r
e a geriatric man, or an adulterer, I don’t think anyone would possibly agree.”
Lydia stood in front of the big magnifying mirror, inspecting her skin. “Maybe we should have a frank discussion about intercourse and proper contraception practices.”
Oona allowed herself to laugh.
“Look at you, though,” Lydia said. “You’re fit. You’re sexy. You’ll be the most popular divorcée in the suburbs.”
“Being almost a divorcée is many things,” Oona said. “It’s a legal headache. It’s depressing. It’s surprisingly expensive. And it’s a mark against my ability to, you know, grow and age alongside someone I love.”
“I guess I was thinking of what happens after this part,” Lydia said. “You know: when you reemerge into the world all reborn and carefree.”
“Is that what happens next? My anxieties vanish? I become a beautiful butterfly? That sounds wonderful.”
“Maybe that’s just what I hope happens next,” Lydia said. “That would be good, right? After all of this?”
They’d been trying for so long now. This was the official story. She and Spencer: trying. The animating verb of their last few years. Everyone had urged this of them—their friends, their neighbors in Crestview, the butchers at their local Whole Foods who’d had to endure their vicious arguments over whether to purchase lamb chops or pork chops. Before they split, Oona had booked them a prescriptive vacation to Jamaica. The idea was to force each other out of the darkness and into the glorious lemony sunshine. They could spend whole afternoons on the beach, or out at sea, snorkeling and diving and parasailing. They could hike up into the hills and look for rare birds and treat themselves to some trust-building exercises: a rope course, a fall from a ludicrous height where each would catch the other. She really believed all of this. One day in, the trip collapsed under the weight of all these expectations, or else because of all the freely available drugs. In retrospect, Jamaica, in particular, had been a poor choice. For days Spencer languished, sunburned and stoned, on the white sand, or else he lay in the bathtub of their $600-a-night hotel room, listening to Ornette Coleman, leafing catatonically through the same issue of Scientific American that he’d been reading and rereading for days. At dinner the last night, over rum punch and conch fritters, she had warned, This is not my future. This bullshit. Your fucking weed. Your fucking bullshit avant-garde jazz. Your magazines about space.
The Inseparables Page 11
