“Perhaps you don’t value it now, but as you get older money becomes more important,” said his mother. She was sitting in the breakfast nook with her tea, looking out at the bird feeder. James too was looking out at the garden, standing at the sliding doors. Anyone who talked in the kitchen did so while looking at the garden.
“I’m sure that’s true, but you see, believe it or not, I’m hoping to make money from my writing, eventually. I know that seems ridiculous to you and Dad.” He waited for her to contradict him. “Some people actually make a great deal of money from what I … the kind of writing I’m trying to do. I’m talking to some people about a documentary, about my music column, it could be a book, it could …” He clenched his jaw shut. He felt helpless. “It could be the kind of book that would sell outside this little … anyway. Yes, it’s a bigger risk, yes, but actually it could pay off very well, if you do something successful. So actually I’m being more ambitious than you and Dad were.”
“I guess it’s just the risk I worry about.”
It was no longer surprising that this conversation came up, even that it came up on the Sunday afternoons of his visits, that it came up just as simultaneous relief and tension about the trip back to the city were growing with a mental hum, ripening in him, in his nervous and circulatory systems like some slowly developing and ultimately convulsive disease, just as they were all about to begin the bargaining about which parent in which car would drive him to the bus station and dump him in its stained limbo air and promise of metamorphosis, this was so familiar it was no longer surprising; what was surprising was how unfailingly and deeply it seared him with a fine painful clear sense of abandonment, as would some long penetrating parental angioscopic device, every time, and made him think, every time, that perhaps now, this time, was the time it would all come out, it would come clear exactly what it was about what he did that so disappointed her, and why her disappointment so irritated — no, worse, let’s be honest — so hurt him. He said quickly, “And you worry about my lifestyle, that I’m not married and —”
“I don’t care that you’re not married, if you’re happy.”
“Yes you do. Don’t pretend you don’t. Of course you do. You’d like me to be married and have kids and a minivan and come over on Sundays and talk about eavestroughing with Dad.”
“I don’t think you could handle kids,” said his mother with the restrained tone of someone producing an ace.
“No, I couldn’t,” said James.
She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “But when you do have children, you’ll want to be able to provide for them, and I think you should think of that now.”
He turned to her and said gently, “Mom, what would you say if I told you I might never have children? Do you think there’s something wrong with that?”
She was silent again. She twirled a strand of hair around a finger, which meant that she was agitated. She would never sit down for so long in mid-morning unless she was upset. The tea in her cup was getting cold.
“You think that’s somehow morally wrong, not to have children, don’t you?” said James. He felt merciless; he felt this was the time to get it all out.
“No,” she said quickly, “not at all. It’s you I’m thinking of. I just think that you would be happier with children. Having children … it takes you out of yourself. You would stop chasing after every girl you met and —”
“What if I don’t want to stop chasing after every girl I meet? You seem to feel that I have to at a certain point, because everybody does. Why? What if it makes me happy?”
“It won’t make you happy forever.”
“Will children?”
She was silent again. “Look, all I know is that all this tension in your life, all that awful time you had with Alison and that girl in the city when they wouldn’t speak to each other and —”
“Yes,” said James, “I know, go on.”
“All that wouldn’t happen if you had a family. You wouldn’t have time for it. And all I know is that when you have a child, that’s the most important thing. If your child is happy, then you’re happy, it’s as simple as that. And you’re — what is it that Joanne Winterson always said? You’re only as happy as your most unhappy child. It’s true.” She took quick sips at her tea, which by now was surely cold.
“Sounds terrific.” He puffed out his cheeks. “Just remind me again why this is a better system?”
“Oh, don’t be so snooty. You’re so arrogant.”
“What? Sorry. I’m not following you.”
“Yes you are. You know exactly what I mean. You’re so condescending.”
James turned back to the garden. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But he did. He made an effort to make an effort to think about trying to be nicer. He said, “I don’t mean to be nasty about anyone’s choices. As long as you make choices.”
“What about Jennifer? Doesn’t she want children?”
James took a deep breath. “Well, not right now she doesn’t. She’s trying to get her own career going, she’s in the same boat as me. We have more …” He stopped himself. He said, “She’s just too busy, and she doesn’t have the money or the stability in her life for it. She doesn’t want kids right now.”
“Well, she’s over thirty now. She doesn’t have much time left.”
“So maybe she won’t. Maybe she won’t have time. I’m not sure, because we haven’t talked about it a lot, but I think that right now at least she isn’t too worried about it. She’s thinking about herself, about her career. Like me.”
“Oh! But …” His mother leaned over the table to pour more tea. She spilled the tea and said, “Bother.” She was frowning and biting her lip; she really was agitated and maybe about to cry. He wasn’t sure what it was all about and he got agitated too. He handed her a cloth. At least they were getting somewhere.
“But what?” He sat down at the table.
She wiped the table with furious speed. “What she wants, what you want,” she said, shaking her head. “You people — it’s always what you want. You just think you can play around and have fun forever.”
“Yes. Perhaps we do. What should we do instead?” His heart was beating fast.
She didn’t answer.
“What is it, exactly, Mom, that upsets you? That I don’t have enough responsibilities in life? Is that it?”
There was a long silence and then she said in a faint voice, “Yes.”
“I have too much fun. I don’t have enough to tie me down.”
“James, if your father and I had felt like you,” she said urgently, looking at him, “then you wouldn’t even be here!”
“Right.” James rubbed his face with his hands. “The logic of this is growing too much for me.” He sighed. “Mom. You don’t understand what I’m … Look at it this way. Imagine you had never had me. Or Kurt. Then you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t feel a responsibility to us, right? Because we wouldn’t —”
“I can’t imagine that,” she said in a higher voice, her indignant voice. “Lucky for you, I couldn’t imagine that.”
“That’s my point, Mom. That you’re not imagining what I’m —”
“You think,” she said rapidly, “that you can just live this student life forever, have no —”
“Why not? Why can’t I —”
“But it’s not all fun. At a certain point you have to pay the piper. At a certain point you just have to stop fooling around and accept your responsibilities.”
James looked at her. She was fidgeting with a doily. “What responsibilities? My family responsibilities?”
“Yes.”
“Mom, this is what I’m trying to get at. Think about it. If I don’t have a wife or kids then who do I have a responsibility to?”
There was a long silence. She was fingering the doily on the tray that held the salt and pepper shakers and the bowl of sugar and the tiny antique silver spoons from the ancestral Germany that was unknown to them all, moving her eyes from the doily out to the bird feeder where there were no birds and back again.
“What is it?” he said more gently. “Is it that you think I have a responsibility to Jennifer, or maybe to you?”
“No, no, not to me, certainly.”
“Is it just that you feel I have a responsibility to have kids? So that I can feel a responsibility to them? This is what I mean about logical —”
“No, no, I’m not saying that. I’m not saying you have to.”
He waited. She did not go on. “I don’t have to.”
“No.”
“Okay, so what — why —”
“I don’t know.” Her voice sounded weak now. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure — I don’t know what I mean.” She played with the doily.
James thought about this. He looked at the doily, which she had inherited from her mother who had crocheted in it Portage la Prairie, a place he had never been, and wondered for some reason how old she had been when it had been crocheted. He had a black-and-white picture of his mother in a rather Chanel-like tweed suit, leaning against the hood of a large American car, against an unblemished sky and a flat wheaty horizon of laughably pure rural nowhere. He wondered how old she had been in that photograph; probably younger, yes, much younger than him. “Are you saying, Mom, maybe that … maybe it’s just that you, when you were young, I mean younger, you felt you didn’t …” He stopped himself. He wanted to say, You didn’t have a choice.
“Oh, we didn’t even think about it. Everyone had children. It was all — it was what we wanted.”
“Right.” He paused. He had to go very carefully here. “But have you ever thought about how, about how things might have … about what you might have done if you hadn’t” — he took a deep breath — “had me and Kurt.”
She stood up abruptly and stood in the window, while James thought, She never does that, never takes a moment to stare at the garden without a vacuum cleaner or a duster in her hand. Her arms were folded and her shoulders hunched. She said, “You sound as if you want me to think about that.”
“No.” He didn’t know what she was getting at, but the safe answer was no. “No, no. I just, I’m thinking of me, in my case —”
“If I hadn’t got married? Is that what you mean?”
“I don’t know. Was it impossible to get married and not have children? Not that I’m saying that’s what you should —”
“Well, I suppose it wasn’t impossible. But I wanted children. Your dad wanted children. And, you know, Jamie” — she gave a small laugh — “I was very flattered, you know, that Hans wanted to marry me. He was, I knew he was going to be very successful. You didn’t turn down opportunity, in those days.”
James laughed, too. As the refrigerator began to hum unevenly, he became aware of a cloud of worry too vague to describe, forming over his head. “It meant your problems were solved.”
“Sure. And he wanted children too, you know, it wasn’t just my idea.”
“Yes. Okay. But what, I guess I mean to ask, what if you hadn’t got married?”
“I suppose I would have had to get some kind of job.”
James asked slowly, “Did you want … to do that?”
“No. I suppose not.” She paused. “I don’t know.”
He held himself very still. Her voice had gone small as she had said it. His worry buzzed and shifted overhead. He didn’t know what was approaching them here, but it was something grey and tight. He thought of the bus station, its cigarette air.
“I guess you don’t respect at all what I did,” she said in a wavering voice. “Bringing you two boys up.”
“Of course I do, Mom. Of course I do. I know how much work it is, how hard —”
“No you don’t.”
It was James’s turn to be silent.
She said, in a voice that fluttered and broke, “There was a time when people thought it was valuable, to run a house and sew and clean and cook for two boys and a man, and educate the boys, the way I read to you —”
“Mom,” said James, agitated, “of course I value that. Of course I respect —”
“No you don’t. You don’t think it meant — it’s not important to you. You think if it’s not some big career it’s not difficult and it’s, it’s some kind of cop-out.”
“No,” said James.
“I’ve heard you say it. When you found out Alison had a child you said it was a cop-out.”
James opened his mouth and closed it. It was true, not only that he had said it, but that he believed it. It was a cop-out.
“The work of about twenty-two years. A cop-out.”
He looked at the doily, her moving hands.
“And you’re not the only one,” she said quietly. “I can tell people laugh at me. The younger wives at Dad’s firm.”
James went cold. “No they don’t. They wouldn’t.”
“They think we’re ridiculous, me and Joanne and … all of my friends. I can tell. And maybe they’re right.”
“Oh, Mom, don’t be —”
“You know, Jamie, I was thinking about this last week. I was trying to remember all the jobs I’ve had in my life. All the paying jobs.” She counted on her fingers. “I used to babysit, as a teenager. I must have earned less than a dollar an hour. And I was in a nursing course when I met Dad, but I worked in an office in the summers. So that was two summers, about four months’ total. And then I worked at the kindergarten, where you and Kurt went, for about two years, part-time, for a little extra cash, when we were just starting out.”
James listened to the anxious fridge.
“So,” she said, “I counted it all up. All the money I’ve ever earned. Myself. And I figured it came to a total of about three thousand five hundred dollars. In my whole life. That’s all I’ve ever earned myself. I never thought about it, until now. I guess, I guess that’s all the young women see. The other things we did, what we did, it’s not important to anyone any more. I guess.”
The refrigerator grunted, shuddered and stopped humming. The kitchen was silent.
He said as gently as he could, “Yes it is, Mom. I don’t think the money’s important. I do think it was a disappointing choice for Alison, because she had her music, and her …” He trailed off. He did not want to imply that his mother had had nothing else to do. But it was true. “She gave up her music. But you, there were fewer opportunities at that —”
“And I didn’t have anything I could have done? Is that what you mean? And Alison shouldn’t have done the most important thing in the world?” She balled her little hand into a fist and made to punch his shoulder, but of course she didn’t. “You’re all so selfish.” Her voice wavered again.
“What?” said James, alarmed. “Who is? Alison?”
“It’s just that … you’re all so arrogant about everything. It’s just not very … it’s not very nice.” Her voice cracked and he realized she was in tears.
He stood behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. His worry was gone, and in its place he had a pure, liquid anguish, a sense that the air itself was sad, over the silent garden, that forces were moving all around him like invisible rain. He said, “What isn’t nice, Mom? Tell me.”
“I can’t explain it. It’s just that …” She sniffled. “Nice people …” She paused and coughed. Then she said, loud and cracking, as if in physical distress, “Nice people don’t do things for themselves.”
She was really sobbing.
He felt as if the floor of his stomach had opened, and there was darkness below it.
He patted her shoulder. She sobbed and shook. There was nothing else to do but pat her shoulder. He looked around the immaculate kitchen, the slate-tiled floor, the island and the overhead wrought-iron pot hooks she had campaigned so hard to have his father put in. The sandy wall, the pristine counters. The pot lids were stacked in the pot-lid rack; the utensils hung from hooks over the island. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “You’re nice.”
He tried a laugh and she giggled, too, a sniffling giggle as if she was embarrassed, and wiped her eyes and blew her nose. He exhaled in relief, for if she was blowing her nose already, the whole thing was okay. He glanced at his watch: there was a bus back to the city at 3:15.
He put his arm around her shoulder and they looked at the empty garden, the wrought-iron chairs. He wondered what she was going to do that afternoon, after he got back on his bus. His dad had had to go into the office. And Kurt was gone, probably gone for good now, even when he got back from Whistler he would be looking for a job in the city. James wondered for a second if he should stay, maybe take her out to the craft shops. He thought of the drive through the industrial park, the deserted highways, the hot little shops. He thought of the hand-made towel racks and calico quilts and apple dolls they would look at. The photo frames in amusing shapes. If they drove out of town, they would have to stop and buy corn and squash, for it was that time, which would go into soups and preserves and pie fillings which only his dad would eat.
He stared at the garden. There were no birds at the bird feeder. The house was dead quiet; the whole neighbourhood was silent as a tomb. And he knew then that he wasn’t nice, he wasn’t a nice person, because all he wanted to do was get out, get the hell out of there.