Once upon a time . . .
I texted my brother in our shorthand. Our mother had started all of her adventure stories like that, but over the years once upon a time had come to mean a summons to the pub over on Carver Street. When the phrase was hers, she would toss it into a lull in the conversation at the dinner table by way of encouragement for us to tell her about what sort of day we’d had. For Simon and me, though, our tales had always been tamer than hers by a mile. He had kept the little intro alive more than I had, made it his own, and once upon a time between us was now just an invitation to buy each other an equal number of drinks instead of simply splitting the check down the middle as would make better sense.
I can be there by 6, he wrote back.
I’ll save you a seat, I typed.
Simon tugged my hair twice, and I looked up from the newsfeed I’d been scrolling through on my phone, checking the headlines and looking at the pictures, but not reading the articles.
“Hey,” he said as he took the barstool next to mine.
“Hey, yourself.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I’m just on my own for dinner and I didn’t feel like being all by myself.”
“It doesn’t look like you feel like having dinner, either. That’s just french fries.”
“And they’re really good.” I nudged the plate toward him.
The conversation slid through the slots and chutes of what was new in only the most surface of ways: what books we’d read, and what movies we’d seen, who was an asshole at work.
“Hey, now I’m going to get nosy,” I said. “Are you thinking about quitting? I mean, doing something else, now that there’s a little money in the bank?”
“Nah. For all the bitching I do, I actually like my job. I help people. Don’t make that face. I do! I like it. Besides, it’s really not that much money, is it?” Simon looked to the ceiling toward a heaven that our mother had never believed in. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, Ma! It’s great! And thanks. Amen.”
“Mmmmm. I’d do it, I think. Quit my job, I mean. I could go for finding something else to do. Not that information logistics isn’t riveting . . . I would do it, except that it would give Patrick a stroke.”
“He’d stroke out if you spent your own money?” Simon had a special cranky tone reserved just for the topic of Patrick’s shortcomings. I both courted it and resented it at turns.
“Don’t say that! What are you, the devil? It’s not only my money. Good Lord. I just had this conversation. It didn’t go well. I’m treading very carefully these days.”
“If you say so. I obviously know so much about being married. There. I said it before you could.”
“Ha ha.” I stuck my tongue out at him. “Seriously though, he’s been really hypersensitive lately.”
“My guess? He’s still way pissed about the pill thing.”
“Among other things, that would be a good guess.”
“It was a pretty boneheaded thing to do, Dee.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours—always and obviously.” Simon double-dipped into the ketchup. “And still it was a pretty boneheaded thing to do.”
“I don’t know how else to say I’m sorry about it. I’ve apologized to Patrick a hundred times. I’ve even apologized to you, just because you had to know about it. I’ve said it and said it. I just wasn’t ready to have a baby. I know I went about it the wrong way, but then I can’t do anything right. I’ve given him a hell of a wide margin of error, because I know he’s upset. And he even gets mad about that. I tiptoe around all the time and make special dinners . . .”
“Do you ever think that maybe it’s ruined?”
“Can’t you just ever be that friend who thinks Patrick is great when I think he’s great and calls him a rat bastard when I don’t?”
“No.”
Simon stared into my scowl until it unraveled and we both laughed.
“So what are you saying? My marriage is ruined?” I continued my new trend of not telling Simon everything. I couldn’t yet face his reaction to the Angela episode.
“Yeah. Maybe.” Simon shrugged.
“Really? You’re just going to blurt it out? Just like that?”
“What’s the point of not saying it? Things get ruined. It happens. You guys were always kind of a weird match. And I wasn’t even all that surprised about the baby stuff. I remember how you played with dolls—giving them Mohawks and seeing if you could make parachutes out of garbage bags. Very maternal.”
“You’re horrible.” I pulled the plate of my french fries out of his reach.
“Hey, I’m not the one throwing babies over railings.” He reached across me and slid the plate back between us. “But seriously, if it is screwed up that bad, there’s no point in taking forever to admit it. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not even the end of you, you know?”
“You just have it all worked out, don’t you? A marriage is a process, Simon. Not a fixed thing that never changes. And it’s not about ‘matching.’ People are too complicated to expect anyone else to be like them. It’s more about . . . I think it’s a decision, and then the handling and care of the life you want to have. Bottom line, it’s not like I haven’t forgiven him for things over the years.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if all that is actually ‘forgiveness.’ I think it might be part of the same problem: you not handling things head-on. Look, I’m not being hard on you. You’re awesome. You know I think you’re awesome. But I know you have this picture in your mind of what things are supposed to look like . . .” Simon let the conclusion drift in on its own. “I mean, what do you think Mom would say about all this?”
“I know what she would say. She knew.”
My mother had known of the pill game from its first days. In the early weeks after she came to live with Patrick and me, there had been a scare, a missed cycle, and I’d run straight for the doctor. Except that my doctor was out of town and it wasn’t the sort of worry I was willing to wait more than a week to unknot. I didn’t trust the drugstore tests. I wanted blood drawn and an expert telling me to my face that I wasn’t pregnant. I landed at the family planning clinic, waiting hours with a brain blanked by dread. When they called me back to speak with the doctor, my wool skirt was picked clean of fuzz and a small mountain of frayed lint was the only proof I had that I hadn’t sat motionless the whole time. I would have sworn on a stack of holy books that I hadn’t moved.
Once they’d reassured me I wasn’t pregnant this time, they offered me birth control.
I actually soothed myself for quite some time with the deflection that it hadn’t been my idea. They offered. I accepted. Simple. Unplanned and undevious.
That night, having not said a thing to Patrick about the worry or its solution, I imagined I could still feel the dry, little pill on the back of my throat. I checked in on my mother before I went to bed. She was, as she almost always was in those months, propped on a mountain of pillows, book in hand, nerd glasses somehow invisible under her eagle brows that arched over the frames. But she was smiling, too. I was stabbed straight through in that moment, washed in a preview of how much I would miss her looking up from her reading, distracted at my interruption, but warming up instantly to become all the way mine whenever I walked through the door. I often went through those days in a fog of sleepiness for how often our “good-night” turned into hours of talking. But I didn’t mind.
I confessed the whole day to my mother—the bargaining with God, the frenzy, the pills, the secret. The whole time she was with us, my mother was sharpest at night. She was often foggy during the days, warm and sweet and subtly soft around the edges, but as she was dying, her glinting clarity rose with the moon. Are you allergic to babies or just Patrick’s babies? We talked it through in hushed voices late into the night, behind the closed door, and only managed to clean and polish the obvious: my little, off-white lie wasn’t a sturdy barge pole to push off with. It wasn’t going to get me very far from my concerns.
“So did you give her a ration of shit like you’re giving me?” Simon asked.
“To be fair, she was a lot smoother than you are.” I stirred my drink.
“She always was.”
Which, of course, steered us onto the rocks of our mother as a topic of conversation, her life and times, and what secrets she took to the grave.
“What’s really bothering you, Dee?”
“What do you mean? I don’t have an agenda. I just wonder, that’s all.”
“No. No, you don’t. That’s not all. You never wonder about her work, not out loud anyway, unless something else is bothering you. What is it? What’s going on? Whenever you itch, you scratch it with that. Why?”
“I don’t know that I do that,” I said, fluttering the sweetener packets in their white china holder.
“Do I have eyes? Do I have ears?”
“Do you have a big, obnoxious mouth?” I hit him on the shoulder and shut him down with a burst of horseplay until his beer got knocked over.
Our two identical checks came and went. I hugged my brother hard, then went home to a stiffly apologetic husband and an hour’s stint at the computer with Google and my mother’s name, and Paul Rowland’s, and now Brian Menary’s.