The Gretchen Question

by Jessica Treadway

  This time I definitely heard ice cubes dropping into a drink. “I love you, Bert,” my sister said, and then, as she always does even though I’ve asked her not to, she disconnected before I could say it back.

  It wouldn’t have mattered so much, Will not being home, if I could have gone to Grettie and Jack’s house as I usually did. But this year they’d flown over to visit Jack’s brother in Galway. They’d had a fight about it, Grettie said, when she called to tell me that we were going to have to change our plans. I felt bad hearing about their fight, but worse when I realized that the end of the story was that I would be alone. It was a family thing, she explained to me. Well, I understand like everyone else does that family is code for more important. Jack’s brother was going through a divorce, he needed his family to be with him and his children for this first holiday without their mother.

  I understand, I told her. Of course I do. But of course I didn’t! Jack’s brother and his kids have many more Christmases ahead of them; this one would probably be my last. But Grettie knew that. She knew, too, that it was the anniversary of my mother’s death. But she assumed that Will would be coming home, that he and I would spend the day together.

  After my sister hung up on me, I watched two episodes of Grettie’s British crime drama. It wasn’t quite my cup of tea, but she loved it, so I decided to stick with it. I’d just started a third episode after heating up some soup when Will called from Sosi’s house to wish me a Merry Christmas. I asked if he’d gotten the box of homemade cookies I’d sent to school during final exams. He said yes, but they’d put the cookies out for everyone, because he and Sosi were taking a month off from sugar and they didn’t want them to get stale.

  “You’re taking a month off from sugar at Christmastime?” I said, trying not to let on that I felt hurt.

  A pause on the other end. “I’ve been having a little trouble with my stomach,” he said—or at least I think he said, his voice sounded a little faint. “I was hoping going off sugar might help.”

  Of course I would have asked him what kind of trouble, but before I could, he said it was almost time for “the family dinner.” That gave me a punch to the gut, I don’t mind saying. He was the second person to hang up on me that day. I stood at the window and looked out at the big tree. I am just a biological organism, I told myself, but it didn’t work any better for me than it had for him, back when I was so fixed on curing his emetophobia. Why had I thought it might work?

  The soup was cold by the time I got back to it, but I ate it anyway. It didn’t make any difference.

  When Grettie returned from the trip and called to ask how our Christmas had been with just the two of us, I told her Will had spent the holiday with Sosi’s family, and that he would be going straight back to school from there. I could tell from her silence that she was shocked.

  Did she also feel bad for abandoning me? Of course she hadn’t abandoned me, but that’s what it felt like, as silly as it is to admit. “Oh, for God’s sake, Bert,” she said, and I didn’t know whether she was referring to my having spent the holiday alone, my son’s absence, or the news—still relatively fresh for both of us—that my cancer had returned. Probably all of it. “I’ll be right over,” she said, and then that was a good day.

  Standing in the parking lot I’d pulled into on the way to the therapist’s, dismayed to find that the smell of garbage was getting worse instead of better, I stabbed at my phone: almost two-thirty. Was it possible for me to dash home, change clothes, and still make it to my appointment on time? Well, there was no choice—I had to try.

  I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid feeling the way I felt as I sped toward my house. And though of course I didn’t have the time for it, at the last minute before I would have passed the garden stand offering Fay’s Fresh Flowers! I pulled over, kicked my door open, and huffed up to the mixed bouquets, where I grabbed one and slapped down a twenty. Without waiting for change, I huffed back to the car and tossed the flowers on the seat beside me, hoping the scent would attach itself to me and in even the smallest way mask the terrible smell.

  I screeched into my driveway, made it inside as fast as I could, peeled off my blouse, and grabbed the first thing I could find, a tee-shirt that said I’m a Nurse, What’s Your Superpower? (I guess this was false advertising, but it was a freebie from the hospital.) Not at all elegant, and not the way I’d wanted to look when I saw the therapist, but I didn’t have time to search for something else.

  Scout looked nervous, lifting his head to watch me from his bed in the living room. “It’s okay, boy,” I told him. “It’s okay, I’ll be back soon.”

  Outside again, pitching myself at the car, I found Pascal standing in my way. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Can I do anything?” She must have heard my car pull up fast, and watched me bolt into my house. Fleetingly, it occurred to me to wonder whether she’d heard about my recurrence. Hard to imagine she’d known about it and hadn’t approached me, but, then, maybe she figured I wouldn’t have wanted her to.

  “No!” I hadn’t exactly meant to shout, but that’s how it came out.

  “If you need to get somewhere, I could drive you.” She almost looked as if she might grab the keys out of my hand, but I shouted “No” again and pushed by her to get into the car. Backing out, I tried to wave to let her know I appreciated her offer, but the wheel got away from me and I had to yank at it with both hands to steer myself onto the road.

  Our encounter had lasted no longer than a minute, but I could see that she still felt hurt. I never told her that it was Will’s idea, not mine, to exclude her in the invitation to his graduation last year. It’s a sacrifice I decided to make, to let her think I didn’t want her there, to save her the pain of knowing it was actually him. In the end it didn’t matter because the commencement didn’t happen, but at the time it felt like a big deal.

  I’m pretty sure it wasn’t personal, this decision on his part. It was just that with his birthday coming up—the birthday he’d been looking forward to because he thought he would finally find out who his father was—he didn’t need three mothers coming to watch him graduate. Maybe he didn’t even want one.

  That’s how he used to put it, that he had “three mothers and zero fathers.” There was me, of course. Then Grettie, whom we call his godmother even though it’s nothing religious or official. She and Jack would have become his guardians if I’d died before he turned eighteen—or maybe it’s twenty-one if he’s in college, it might still apply. I keep forgetting to look that up.

  Pascal moved into the condo across from us when Will was in preschool. She was single, too, though with no children, and we hit it off immediately, becoming friends in that way you do when it seems a foregone conclusion. The way Grettie and I had, those first days after I moved in. “Pascal,” I said, when she introduced herself, “Are you French?”

  No, she said. And added that if she’d known how many times she would be asked that, she would have chosen a different name.

  Chosen? My ears perked up. I was intrigued by the idea of someone choosing a new name—what was wrong with the old one?

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, it was boring. Patty. I never liked it, my mother named me after Patty Duke. Every Patty I ever knew, there wasn’t much to them.”

  Though no other Pattys sprang to mind, I gave my murmuring sound so she’d think I knew what she meant.

  Going from Patty to Pascal seemed like a bold move to me—or did it not seem quite bold enough? I couldn’t tell, I didn’t know my own mind. But if you’re going to go to the trouble of changing your name you should like what you end up with, and she seemed to like having become Pascal.

  I told her she was the tallest woman I’d ever met. She shrugged again. “I get that a lot, too. Also ‘the most mannish.’”

  “Well, that’s not very nice.”

  “I know. I can’t help it. I’m going to grow my hair out
, though. Coming here’s a fresh start for me, a new leaf. I’m going to join one of those online dating sites. Have you ever tried that?”

  I said No, I hadn’t, but then, I was busy with my son.

  Pascal told me she loved kids, and she began spending a lot of time with Will, taking him out for ice cream or to the playground or the Lego store, each week a new adventure. I told her I didn’t want her to spend too much money, but she could probably tell that I was secretly glad she was able to buy him things I couldn’t afford myself—Transformers, Nintendo games. Her job as a freelance auditor was more lucrative than mine and more flexible, too, because even though I worked from home, I still had to be logged in at the computer eight hours a day. She asked if we could arrange a regular day each week for her to pick him up from school and keep him at her house through a pizza dinner, so we settled on Tuesdays. I tried not to be jealous when, after a few weeks, Will told me that Tuesday was his favorite day. He always came home with some new art project she’d helped him with, a pinecone wreath or a fort made of Popsicle sticks. The few times I went on dates, Pascal babysat for him. He could go back and forth between our houses without a grownup holding his hand. We were a little family. It was wonderful, for a while. For a few years there, I stopped missing Grettie so much.

  But when he was in third grade, Pascal and I had a falling-out, and as uncomfortable as it is to admit, we’ve never quite recovered the friendship we had before. It was over such a small thing (I saw in retrospect) that I hesitate to mention it, but why not, I’m admitting everything now. I mean, if not now, when?

  Will had a habit back then of telling stories. Well, lies, if you want to call them that. At first I didn’t realize, because they were so innocuous—he’d tell me the dessert for lunch in the cafeteria had been butterscotch pudding, when really it was apple crisp; he’d tell me there’d been a substitute teacher at school that day, when there hadn’t been; he’d tell me they’d done a ropes course in gym, when he and the other kids had only played dodgeball.

  At first I thought it was just a phase he’d grow out of, like everything else. I also thought it was something he just did with me.

  But it didn’t stop, and I found out that it happened with everyone, including Pascal and people at school. I discovered this only when I went to pick him up one day and another mother said how exciting it was that I was pregnant, and asked when I was due.

  I had a conference with his teacher, because she said Will’s lies—she used that word—were becoming bolder, more obvious. He told other kids he’d gone to Egypt over winter vacation (they’d been studying the pyramids and the Sphinx); beyond that, he told them he’d been allowed to sit in the cockpit with the pilot on the plane that took us there.

  He told them his father was the president of a chocolate factory. (You can guess what book I had been reading to him at night.)

  I knew why he’d told people I was going to have another baby. He’d begged me for a little brother, though he said a sister would be “not bad,” too. I remember how excited I was when my own sister was born, and how much I loved having a little person to take care of. I suppose that’s why it felt familiar and not foreign when I held Will close to me, after they cleaned him up and took his measurements and laid him on my chest in those first moments I was actually a mother.

  Some studies show that kids who lie are highly intelligent and creative, the teacher conceded when we had our talk.

  I interrupted her to say that yes, Will was both those things. As an example I told her that the other day he’d said to me, “Mom, I just figured out that life isn’t a movie, because it never comes to the end.”

  It never comes to the end! How it hurts, thinking of that now. There’s only so much remembering a person can take.

  But—the teacher continued—she worried that the lying was affecting Will’s abilities to “integrate socially,” to “relate effectively to his peers.” She asked me to have a talk with him about it. Maybe together, he and I could turn the lies into a book—I could write down the stories he told, and he could draw illustrations. This was a possible “strategy” for turning around a “negative behavior” that none of us wanted to see “become a liability.”

  I can quote her verbatim because I was making notes at the time, it’s the kind of mother I was. Am.

  I’ll talk to him, I promised the teacher.

  But I didn’t get to it before the next time he had an afternoon with Pascal. When she brought him home that night, I could see that she felt stricken. “Roberta,” she said (she’d never been comfortable addressing me as Bert, though I invited her to), “what happened?”

  “What do you mean?” Beside her, Will looked confused. No, not confused, I realized after a moment—he looked guilty. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He said he wanted to check on Scout and left us to go to his room, where the dog slept at the foot of the big-boy bed. He closed the door behind them, which he hardly ever did.

  “He told me you were going to die,” Pascal said in an urgent whisper.

  I admit that it took a few moments for her words to sink in. Then I said, “Well, we’re all going to die. I’m sure that’s what he meant. We had to have that conversation about Scout.”

  “That’s not what he meant. He didn’t mean someday. He said you’d gone to the doctor and they’d told you you had a lump, and it was going to kill you.”

  Oh. That was dumb of me, I’d told him when he asked why he didn’t have a grandma that she’d had a lump, and that it had killed her.

  “I don’t have a lump,” I told Pascal, and I explained about the stories.

  Was it denying cancer that made it come for me, all those years later? I know that’s ridiculous, but it’s the way my mind works, sometimes.

  The next night when I tucked Will into bed, I asked him why he’d told Pascal I was going to die. “Because then I’d get to meet my father! I’d have to live with him!” he said, flipping over to turn his back to me. I knew I should touch his shoulder and have a conversation, but instead I turned the light out and shut the door behind me.

  I told Pascal that I thought the “stories” weren’t that big a deal. She said, “Roberta, you can’t just let something like this go. With kids, it’s better to nip these things in the bud.”

  I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask her how she could say a thing like that, since she didn’t have any children herself. I knew how painful a fact this was to her—not to be married, and not to have a child.

  She’d told me when she moved in that she’d chosen this town, a family town, hoping that by doing so, she would attract the family she wanted. A kind of “If you build it, they will come” attitude, only I could tell that it was less an actual attitude than a craving, a desire it hurt her to speak about. It made me think of what the therapist had told me once, quoting William James. As with the half-smile, if you act as if you feel the way you want to feel, chances are you will start feeling that way.

  “But wouldn’t I just be fooling myself?” I’d asked him, even though I knew I risked sounding stupid. I worried about that a lot, with the therapist. “Wouldn’t that make everything a delusion?” He told me No, not a delusion—it was more of a strategy to get my mind to believe something that might not be true yet but that could be true, especially the more I believed it.

  It didn’t make sense to me at the time, though I pretended to understand what he was saying. But since then, I’ve come to see the value in acting as if. I probably do it more than I do anything else now, if you want to know the truth.

  Pascal told me that what she felt about not having a child was grief. It was her confessing this, as much as the discussion about Will’s habit of telling stories, that was really the undoing of our friendship, although I’m not sure she realizes it to this day. She let me know how much she wanted, and how much she needed me. That was your mistake, I had the impulse to t
ell her. You shouldn’t show that to people, it only makes things worse. They hate you for being vulnerable. I kind of hated her for it, though of course I didn’t say so. And it didn’t last, though afterward there was always a smudge between us, a gray mark, a thumbprint she’d put there that couldn’t be rubbed out.

  So I knew that Will was a kind of surrogate for something Pascal always thought she would have and desperately wanted. I knew, during our phone conversation, that there was no good to come of doing anything other than thanking her for the suggestion to nip things in the bud, and telling her I would take it into account when I talked to Will about his storytelling habit.

  But even though I knew all these things, I said it anyway. “No offense, Pascal, but you’re not his mother.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the phone before she said, “I know that, Roberta. I know that very well.” Her tone was one of hurt; I would have preferred it to be angry. Angry would have been easier.

  I was sorry for my words even as I was saying them. Over my desk I keep a quote from Emerson: “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day.” Sometimes, the quote helps me forgive myself for things like the dig I had just taken at my friend—the blunders and absurdities I regret but can’t take back. Other times, like this one, it helps not at all. What I’d said to Pascal was not a blunder, it was not an absurdity. It was just plain cruel, and no pretty quote from a poet or anyone else was going to make me feel better about it, which was only right.

  We didn’t mention the argument again. At some point, of course, the weekly visits stopped, because Will didn’t need to be picked up from school anymore and because he began taking tai chi. The three of us got together for dinner every so often, at our house or hers. She still gave him presents every Christmas and birthday, and despite not being invited to graduation, she left a card with a check for two hundred dollars in our mailbox. In return, he left a thank-you note in her box without my reminding him to do so—I brought him up right. Since then, though, and especially since he left for college, Pascal and I haven’t had much contact.