Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  Hitting two or three times a week, she and Jason got better—enough better to be depressed or enraged when they were suddenly worse again. They never played games, only rallied, working together to keep the ball in play. Week by week, the light began to change, their shadows at the baseline stretching, the autumn-scented dusk arriving earlier. It was the driest and least foggy season of the year in Oakland, but she minded it less now that it meant consistently ideal tennis conditions. All over the state, reservoirs and wells were going dry, the taste and clarity of tap water worsening, farmers suffering, Northern Californians conserving while Orange County set new records for monthly consumption, but none of this mattered for the hour and a half that she was on the court with Jason.

  Finally there came a crisp blue afternoon, a Sunday, the day after Daylight Saving ended, when they met at the park at three o’clock and hit for so long that the light began to fail. Pip was in an absolute groove with her forehand, Jason was bounding around and achieving his own personal-best low error rate, and although her elbow had begun to ache she wanted never to stop. They had impossibly long rallies, back and forth, whack and whack, rallies so long that she was giggling with happiness by the end of them. The sun went down, the air was deliciously cool, and they kept hitting. The ball bouncing up in a low arc, her eyes latching on to it, being sure to see it, just see it, not think, and her body doing the rest without being asked to. That instant of connecting, the satisfaction of reversing the ball’s inertia, the sweetness of the sweet spot. For the first time since her early days at Los Volcanes she was experiencing perfect contentment. Yes, a kind of heaven: long rallies on an autumn evening, the exercise of skill in light still good enough to hit by, the faithful pock of a tennis ball. It was enough.

  In near-darkness afterward, outside the fence, she put her arms around Jason and her face to his chest. Choco stood by patiently, his mouth open, smiling.

  “OK,” she said, “OK.”

  “It’s about time,” he said.

  “I’ve got some things I have to tell you.”

  * * *

  The rain came three weeks later. Nothing made Pip more homesick for the San Lorenzo Valley than what passed for rain in the East Bay. Rain in Oakland was ordinary, seldom very heavy, always liable to yield to clear sky between the chaotic tentacles of Pacific storm cloud. Only up in the cloud-trapping Santa Cruz Mountains could the rain continue for days without a break, never less than moderately heavy and often coming down an inch per hour, all night, all day, the river rising to lap at the undersides of bridges, Highway 9 covered with sheets of muddy runoff and fallen boughs, power lines down everywhere, PG&E trucks flashing their lights in the torrential midday twilight. That was real rain. Back in the pre-drought years, six feet of it had fallen every winter.

  “I might need to go home to Felton for a while,” Pip said to Jason one evening while they were walking, under umbrellas, down the hill from the St. Agnes Home. She’d been visiting Ramón at the home every month or so, even though things had changed between them. He was wholly Marie’s adoptee now, not Stephen’s at all. He had new friends, including a “girlfriend,” and he took very seriously the janitorial duties he’d learned to perform. Pip had wanted Jason to meet him before she drifted out of his life altogether.

  “How long is a while?” Jason said.

  “I don’t know. Weeks maybe. Longer than I have days off for. I have a feeling my mom’s going to be difficult. I may have to quit my job.”

  “Can I come down and see you?”

  “No, I’ll come up. It’s a five-hundred-square-foot cabin. Plus I’m worried you’ll run for your life when you meet my mom. You’ll think I’ve been concealing the fact that I’m like her.”

  “Everybody’s embarrassed by their parents.”

  “But I have actual reason to be.”

  Pip was Jason’s newest enthusiasm but thankfully not his only one; she could get him off the subject of her virtues by mentioning math, tennis, TV shows, video games, writers. His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike himself in this regard. If she wanted something more, like visiting Ramón with her, he agreed to it enthusiastically. He had a way of making whatever they were doing the thing he most wanted to do. She’d watched him rapidly eat four generic vanilla-cream cookies and then stop and marvel at a fifth, holding it in front of his eyes and saying, “These are fantastic.”

  If she became a rich person—and she could already feel herself becoming one; was sensing the mentally deformative weight of the word heir—Jason would be the last boy who’d liked her when she was still nobody. He did admit that her interning with Andreas Wolf had “confirmed” his assessment of her intelligence, but he swore it hadn’t had anything to do with his breakup. “It was just you,” he said. “You behind the counter at Peet’s.” She trusted Jason in a way that might well prove to be unique, but she didn’t want him to know this. She was aware of how easily she could blow things with him, and she was even more aware, thanks to Tom’s memoir, of the hazards of love. She felt herself wanting to bury herself in Jason, to pour her trust into him, even though she had evidence that self-burial and crazy trust levels could result in toxicity. She was therefore allowing herself to be heedless in sex only. This was probably hazardous, too, but she couldn’t help it.

  They had more sex as soon as they got back to Jason’s apartment. Starting to fall in love with a person made it bigger, almost metaphysical; a John Donne poem she’d studied in college and failed to appreciate, a poem about the Extasie and how it doth unperplex, was making sense to her now. But in the wake of the Extasie she became anxious again.

  “I think I’d better call my mom,” she said. “I can’t postpone it any longer.”

  “Do it.”

  “Can you just keep lying there like that while I do? With your arm there? I need you to hold me in case I feel like I’m getting sucked in.”

  “I’m picturing somebody getting sucked out of a blown-open airplane,” Jason said. “They say it’s surprisingly hard to hold on to a person when that happens. Or maybe not so surprising when you consider the air-pressure differentials that keep a hundred-ton plane aloft.”

  “Do your best,” she said, reaching for her phone.

  She loved having a body now that Jason loved her having it. She was clutching his arm when her mother answered.

  “Hi, Mom.” She braced herself for a Pussycat!

  “Yes,” her mother said.

  “So, I’m sorry I haven’t called in so long, but I’m thinking I might come down and see you.”

  “All right.”

  “Mom?”

  “You come and go as you please. If you want to come, come. Obviously I can’t stop you. Obviously I’ll be here.”

  “Mom, I’m really sorry.”

  There was a click, a cessation.

  “Holy shit,” Pip said. “She hung up on me.”

  “Uh oh.”

  It hadn’t occurred to her that her mother might be angry at her; that even their extreme case of moral hazard might have limits. But now that she thought about it, her mother’s entire story, in Tom’s memoir, was one of serial abandonment and betrayal, followed by scorching moral judgment. Pip had always been safe from this judgment, but she could tell, from the fact that Tom still seemed afraid of it, even after twenty-five years, that it was awful to experience. She felt afraid of it herself now, and closer to Tom.

  The next day, she gave notice at Peet’s and called Mr. Navarre to tell him she was going to have the conversation with her mother, and to ask him for five thousand dollars. Mr. Navarre could have been judgmental or teasing about the money, but apparently he was impressed that she’d waited four and a half months to ask for any. She enjoyed the feeling that she’d passed some test, exceeded some norm.

  Microclimates of the San Lorenzo: the pavement at the Santa Cruz bus station wa
s nearly dry, but just two miles away, at the top of Graham Hill Road, the driver had to put his wipers on. Winter night had fallen. Pip’s mother’s lane was spongy with redwood needles dislodged and sodden with the rain, the sound of which surrounded her polyrhythmically, a steady background patter, heavier drippings, hiccuping gurgles. The musty wood-soak smell of Valley wetness overwhelmed her with sense-memory.

  The cabin was dark. Inside it was the sound of her childhood, the patter of rain on a roof that consisted only of shingle and bare boards, no insulation or ceiling. She associated the sound with her mother’s love, which had been as reliable as the rain in its season. Waking up in the night and hearing the rain still pattering the same way it had when she’d fallen asleep, hearing it night after night, had felt so much like being loved that the rain might have been love itself. Rain pattering at dinner. Rain pattering while she did her homework. Rain pattering while her mother knitted. Rain pattering on Christmas with the sad little tree that you could get for free on Christmas Eve. Rain pattering while she opened presents that her mother had put aside money for all fall.

  She sat in the cold and dark for a while, at the kitchen table, listening to the rain and feeling sentimental. Then she turned on a light and opened a bottle and made a fire in the woodstove. The rain fell and fell.

  The person who was both her mother and Anabel Laird came home at nine fifteen with a canvas bag of groceries. She stood in the front doorway and looked at Pip without speaking. Underneath her rain parka she was wearing an old dress that Pip loved and, indeed, coveted. It was a snug and faded brown cotton dress with long sleeves and many buttons, a kind of Soviet worker-woman’s dress. Back in the day, her mother would probably have given her the dress if she’d asked for it, but her mother had so few covetable possessions that depriving her of even one of them was unthinkable.

  “So I came home,” Pip said.

  “I see that.”

  “I know you don’t like to drink, but this might be a good night for an exception.”

  “No, thank you.”

  The person who was both her mother and Anabel left the parka and groceries by the door and went to the back of the cabin. Pip heard the bathroom door close. It was ten minutes before she realized that her mother was hiding in the bathroom, not intending to come out.

  She went and knocked on the door, which was just boards held together with crossboards. “Mom?”

  There was no answer, but her mother hadn’t used the hook that served as a lock. Pip went in and found her mother sitting on the concrete floor of the tiny shower, staring straight ahead, her knees drawn up to her chin.

  “Don’t be sitting there,” Pip said.

  She crouched down and touched her mother’s arm. Her mother jerked her arm away.

  “You know what?” Pip said. “I’m mad at you, too. So don’t be thinking being mad at me is going to get you out of this.”

  Her mother was mouth-breathing, staring. “I’m not angry with you,” she said. “I am…” She shook her head. “I knew this would happen. No matter how careful I was, I knew that someday this would happen.”

  “That what would happen? That I’d come home and want to talk to you, and be honest, and be part of the two of us again? Because that’s what I’m doing.”

  “I knew it the way I know my own name.”

  “What is your name? Maybe let’s start with that. Will you come sit in the kitchen with me?”

  Her mother shook her head again. “I’m getting used to being alone. I’d forgotten how hard it is. It’s very hard, even harder this time, much harder—you brought me so much joy. But it’s not impossible to relinquish desire. I’m learning it again. I’m making progress.”

  “So, what, I’m supposed to leave now? That’s what you want?”

  “You already left.”

  “Yeah, well, hey, but I came back, too, didn’t I?”

  “Out of duty,” her mother said. “Or out of pity. Or because you’re angry. I’m not blaming you, Purity. I’m telling you that I will be all right without you. Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything. I had the joy of experiencing your goodness for a very long time. It was enough. I have no right to ask for more.”

  “Mom. Stop talking like that. I need you in my life. You’re the most important person in the world to me. I need you to stop being Buddhist and try to have an adult conversation with me.”

  “Or else what?” Her mother smiled faintly. “You’ll leave again?”

  “Or else, I don’t know, I’m going to pull your hair and scratch you.”

  Her mother’s failure to be amused was nothing new. “I’m no longer so afraid of you leaving,” she said. “For a long time, the prospect was like death to me. But it’s not death. At a certain point, trying to hold on to you became the real death.”

  Pip sighed. “OK, frankly—you calling me pussycat, me not being able to end a phone call with you, I’d be happy to retire all that. I’m a lot older than I used to be. You wouldn’t believe how much older. But don’t you want to know what I’m like now? Don’t you want to know the person I’ve turned into? It’s the same old me but also not. I mean, aren’t I interesting to you? You’re still interesting to me.”

  Her mother turned her head and gave her an empty look. “What kind of person are you now?”

  “I don’t know. I have a real boyfriend—that’s one thing. I’m kind of in love with him.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “OK, another thing. A big thing. I know what your real name is.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “Will you say it for me?”

  “No. Never.”

  “You have to say it. You have to tell me everything, because I’m your daughter and I can’t be in the same room with you if all we do is lie.”

  Her mother stood up gracefully, with her Endeavor-perfected limberness, but her head hit the shampoo basket and knocked a bottle to the shower floor. She threw herself angrily out of the stall, stumbled on Pip, and ran from the bathroom.

  “Mom!” Pip said, chasing her.

  “I want nothing to do with that part of you.”

  “Which part of me?”

  Her mother spun around. Her face was pure torment. “Get out! Get out! Leave me alone! Both of you! For the love of God, please just leave me alone!”

  Pip watched, horrified, as the person who now seemed entirely Anabel fell onto her bed and yanked the comforter over her head and lay there rocking herself, crying full-throatedly in pain. Pip had expected difficulty, but this was extreme by any measure. She went to the kitchen and knocked back a glass of wine. Then she returned to the bed and pulled the comforter away, lay down behind her mother and put her arms around her. She buried her face in her mother’s thick hair and breathed in her smell, the most distinct of all smells, the smell that there was nothing like. The brown dress’s cotton was soft from a hundred washings. Slowly her mother’s crying subsided into whimpers. Rain pattered on the sleeping-porch roof.

  “I’m sorry,” Pip said. “I’m sorry I can’t just leave, I know it’s hard. But you created me and now you have to deal with me. That’s my purpose. I’m your reality.”

  Her mother said nothing.

  Both of you?

  Pip lowered her voice to a whisper. “Do you still love him?”

  She felt her mother stiffen.

  “I think he still loves you.”

  Her mother took a sharp breath and didn’t let it out.

  “So there’s got to be a way to move on,” Pip said. “There’s got to be a way to forgive and move on. I’m not leaving until you do.”

  * * *

  How she got the story out of her mother, the next morning, was by letting her believe that Tom had told her his version of it; she figured, correctly, that her mother would find this intolerable. Her mother omitted the details of her conception, saying only that it had occurred the very last time she’d seen Tom, but she was surprisingly calm and articulate about other det
ails. Pip’s actual birthday was February 24, not July 11. She’d been delivered naturally, by a midwife, in a safe house in Riverside, California. Until she was two, she and her mother had lived in Bakersfield, where her mother cleaned hotel rooms for a living. Then, by bad luck (because Bakersfield was really nowhere), her mother ran into a college friend who asked too many questions. A new friend from the women’s shelter knew of a cabin for rent in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and there they moved.

  “I heard terrible stories in the shelters and safe houses,” her mother said. “So many women who were punching bags. So many stories of men whose idea of love was stalking and stabbing their ex-wives. I should have felt guilty about misrepresenting myself, but I didn’t. Men’s emotional cruelty can be every bit as painful as physical abuse. My father was cruel and my husband was crueler.”

  “Really,” Pip said.

  “Yes, really. I told him it would kill me if he ever took money from my father, and he did it. Did it specifically to hurt me. He slept with my best friend to hurt me. He took my advice and encouragement and used it to make a career for himself, and then, when I was struggling with my own career, he abandoned me. You’re only young once, and I gave him my youth because I believed his promises, and then, when I wasn’t young anymore, he broke his promises. And I knew it all along. I knew he would betray me. I told him all along, but it didn’t stop him from making promises to me, which I believed because I was weak. I really was like the other women in the shelters.”

  Pip crossed her arms prosecutorially. “And so it seemed OK to you to have his baby without telling him. That seemed like the morally right thing to do.”

  “He knew I wanted a baby.”

  “But why his? Why not some random sperm donor’s?”

  “Because I keep my promises. I promised him I’d be his forever. He could break his promise, but I wasn’t going to break mine. We were meant to have a baby, and we did. And then, right away, you were everything to me. You have to believe me that I stopped caring who your father was.”