Mea Culpa
On a Sunday morning, Nola is in her pajamas, just out of bed, and is looking out the kitchen window while Iris pores over recipes for her adult class coming up in a few days: Just Peachy. She wants a crisp or a crumble that uses peaches and ginger, although she’s also attracted to a peach pie that uses dulce de leche. Maddy has gone out to breakfast with her father in one last attempt to connect with him.
“This is the funniest rain,” Nola says. “It’s not like regular rain, it’s coming down in clumps.”
Iris looks up, and the child is right: the rain is like one of the options on her showerhead, a kind of pulsing, gloppy rain.
“It looks like it’s trying to learn how to rain,” Nola says. And then, “Can we go out in it?”
“Out in the rain?”
She nods.
Iris thinks about this. Why not? It’s warm again today; there are inviting puddles to splash in.
“Would your mom be okay with that?”
Nola says nothing at first. But then, “You are the mom now,” she says.
Iris crosses her arms and stares. Nola stares back.
“Oh, all right,” Iris says. “We’ll go out together, for just a little while. But let’s eat breakfast first. What would you like?”
“Something fast.”
“Granola and strawberries?”
“Strawberries and yogurt?” Nola asks. “Granola takes too long to chew.”
Iris prepares it for them both. She envies Nola for the way she is always in a rush to do everything, the way she rises so quickly to the possibility of joy. Most of all, she envies Nola her default setting of goodwill toward man, beast, or weather.
Iris gathers up towels and puts them on the porch for when they come in. Then, hand in hand, they go out in the street and begin splashing in the puddles. After a few minutes, Link comes out of his house in his swimming trunks, and Iris thinks she should go in and leave the children to play—though Link would object to being called a child, rather than the preteen that he is. Iris has grown awfully fond of Link, and he’s wonderful with Nola. He’s taught her about surface tension, about air pressure, about the number of muscles and bones in the human body. He’s shown her blood cells and salt crystals under his microscope, explained to her why people breathe, what a balance beam does for tightrope walkers. They watch YouTube animal videos together. Maddy is strict about the amount of time Nola is allowed to spend looking at screens, but she cuts her daughter some slack when it comes to watching things like puppies learning to walk down the stairs.
Iris walks up to the porch screen door and is just about to open it when she hears a voice calling her name. She turns around and sees John standing there, drenched. Over his jeans he’s wearing a white shirt, a worn sport coat that’s a bit short in the sleeves for him, and a wide, striped tie that looks about as natural on him as earrings on a crow.
She says nothing, and he walks over to her, smiles. “Are we destined to meet only in rain, then, do you think?”
She doesn’t smile.
“I came to apologize, Iris. I’m ashamed to tell you this, but I forgot it was Saturday. I didn’t know it was Saturday. I’ve since made myself a calendar, though, and I am happy to tell you that I know that today is Tuesday. And I found a day job clearing out a basement today, and I made a fair amount of money for my trouble, so now I can ask you to have dinner with me. On me.”
Nola hollers from the street, where she has been splashing in the gutters, “Who is that?”
He turns to her. “I’m John. That’s my name, John Loney.”
Nola brushes wet hair from her eyes. “You were supposed to come here and eat, but you didn’t come. We had eggplant lasagna, and I made cupcakes for you.”
“Ah, me. I’m sorry. Mea culpa.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘Mea culpa.’ Means my fault. But here’s what I’m wondering. Don’t you think you need a boat to float in all that water? Maybe a raft?”
“I have a bunch of Popsicle sticks,” Link says. “And some twine.”
“That will do,” John says, and starts walking toward the children.
“Hello?” Iris says.
He turns around.
“Did you mean dinner tonight?”
“Yes. If you’re willing.”
“All right,” Iris says. The words fall out of her mouth before she has quite made her decision. This is the way things seem to go with this man. To Nola, she says, “Only a few more minutes out there, all right?”
Back in the house, Iris stands at the window and dries herself and her hair off. She mutters, “Idiot!” meaning herself. But she doesn’t feel like an idiot. She feels like Nola, face-to-face with an opportunity for joy. Why not take it? Why not?
She sees John kneel in the grass to help the children finish constructing the raft. Then the three of them stand together watching as it sails off, spinning and spinning in the current. Nola and Link laugh and splash and look up at the sky with their heads back and their mouths open and their arms held out. As for John, he seems impervious to both the rain and the successful launch. He stands unmoving, with his hands in his pockets. It unnerves her, in a way, but it also widens a stubborn V in her heart. She shivers, then grows warm. In a little while, she’ll invite him in.
Maddy leaves The Chicken or the Egg, the restaurant where she just had breakfast with her father. She feels that trying to talk to him was awful, nearly useless. And yet they made plans for breakfast next month, should she still be here then. She told him she was thinking about moving her family back to Mason, and her father nodded. And that was all. Didn’t say, “That would be nice.” Didn’t say, “I hope you do,” or, “Maybe that’s not such a good idea.” Didn’t say anything. He smiled and then looked at his watch. And then Maddy said, “Well, I’ll let you know.” And her father said, “Good.” He cleared his throat and said it again: “Good.” When they parted, he patted her back in a way that had her suddenly tear up, though she was careful not to let him see.
She isn’t ready to get in the car and go home. She decides to walk a little. She’s gone a few blocks when she sees a familiar figure coming toward her. Is it…? It is. Nola’s father, the man who abandoned her years ago. She hasn’t seen him since before Nola was born. He’s older, of course, but otherwise unchanged, still well built, still awfully good-looking. She stands still for a second, then keeps walking. He nods when he gets to her, starts to go past, then stops. “Maddy?”
“Hello, Anderson.”
“Wow. Haven’t seen you for a while!”
“About eight years.”
He rubs the top of his head. “That right?” He’s wearing a wedding ring.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I heard you were living in New York City.”
“Right.”
“Huh. I’m moving, too, but not there. Wouldn’t live there for a million bucks.”
“Yes, well, it’s not for everyone.”
“I’m going to Florida. Me and the wife. She got some fancy job there, so…we got two more days here and that’s it.”
“I hope you’ll be happy there.”
“Leastwise it will be warm in the winter. You know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So…you kept the kid, right?”
She laughs. “Yeah. I kept the kid.”
He nods. “Okay, well…”
She smiles. “Goodbye, Anderson.”
“Maddy. Listen, I’m sorry I…Well, I’m sorry.”
“It worked out all right. Good luck to you.” Funny. She means it.
She walks on and begins to feel a lifting inside, a hope that maybe all she needs to do is ask Matthew, and he will agree to move back. They will move back, she will begin a kind of work on herself in earnest, and everything will get better and better. She turns around to go and get her car. She’ll call Matthew, then drive home.
He answers the phone with a curt “Yeah.”
“…Matthew?”
“Yeah!”
“Well, hi! How are you?”
“All right. You?”
“I just had breakfast with my dad. That went about as well as you might think.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What about you? What have you been doing?”
“Nothing much. Went to Roberto’s for pizza last night with Nick and Betsy. Then I went to Brooklyn Bowl for a concert. It was great. I met some people there, and afterward we went to a bar that just opened and got a drink called Erupting Volcano. Very cool drink. How’s Nola?”
“She’s great. She misses you.”
“I miss her, too.”
“Matthew? I—”
“Listen, Maddy, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go down to the laundry room and get my clothes out of the dryer. You know how everybody gets all pissed off if you hog the dryer.”
“Oh, yeah, of course! We can talk later.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow sometime. Kiss Nola.”
He hangs up.
I met some people there….Who did he meet?
Maddy rests her head on the steering wheel, then starts the car.
When Maddy opens the front door, she sees her daughter from the hallway. She’s in the kitchen, standing on a chair stationed before Lucille’s venerable old KitchenAid mixer, adding chocolate chips to whatever she’s making. Nola sees her, and, over the noise of the mixer, shouts, “These are cookies you don’t even have to bake! And they are chocolate-chip and peanut butter and oatmeal all together!”
“Wow,” Maddy says. She comes into the kitchen and stops in her tracks. Link is sitting at the kitchen table, poring over a book of experiments, and opposite him is a stranger, a man dressed in Iris’s beautiful lavender silk robe, drinking coffee.
“Oh. Hey,” Maddy says.
“Hi, Maddy,” says Link, not looking up from his book.
The man rises. Then, looking down at the robe, “Oh. I got drenched in the rain. My clothes are in the dryer.”
“I see,” Maddy says, though she does not. “I’ll be right back,” she says, but she has no intention of coming right back. She wants to go to her bedroom and be alone.
But as soon as she’s closed the bedroom door and moved to sit at the edge of the bed, she hears a light knock at the door, the uneven rapping that Nola does.
“Come in!” Maddy says, trying to make her voice happy and bright.
But there’s no fooling Nola. The child is wise beyond her years; she always has been.
“What’s wrong?” she asks her mother.
Maddy smiles.
“Are you sad?” she asks.
“I guess I am, a little.”
“Why?”
Oh, what to say. That she’s worried she’s lost her marriage? That being with her father for barely an hour seems to have dismantled the frail scaffolding of self-confidence she worked so hard to build? That she doesn’t know where she belongs, both in the specific and in the general senses of the word?
Don’t rely on your child to save you.
“You know what, honey? It’s just a weird sort of mood. Like a cloud in the sky. Do you ever have that happen?”
Nola plays with the doorknob and considers this. “I guess so. But when it happens, I just go do something else.”
“That’s very smart. I’ll be down in just a minute. I’m dying to taste those cookies!”
“I’ll put them on your favorite plate.”
“Good.”
Nola starts to skip out, then turns around. “Wait. Is it the one with the little violets?”
“Nope. The one with the little roses.”
“Oh, yeah. Okay, see you down there!”
Nola clatters down the stairs and Maddy sighs, clasps her hands together, and hangs her head. When she was pregnant with Nola and living here with Arthur and Lucille, Arthur once came upon her curled up in a corner of her room, lost in misery the way she is now. “Mind if I sit here?” he asked, indicating the bed where she had cocooned herself in a quilt. She shrugged, which was as much of a yes as she could offer in those days. She was friendless, abandoned by both her father and her horrible boyfriend, and she was pregnant with a child she was determined to keep, even though she was scared to death about the idea.
“Lucille’s making fish for supper,” Arthur told her. He wrinkled his nose, which seemed to make his ears stick out more. He was wearing a white shirt that day, blue old-man pants, cinched high at the waist and shiny from over-ironing, and red suspenders. His thin hair stood up in the back from having taken his beloved hat off; Arthur was a man who believed a gentleman didn’t wear a hat in the house. “She made me go and buy fish.”
Maddy said nothing.
“You like fish?” he asked.
“Not really,” she answered.
“Me, neither,” said Arthur. “Fishing I like, ’long as I don’t catch anything. Oh, it’s wonderful to fish. All the sounds the water makes, why, it’s like a language. That long green and yellow grass swaying underwater like a hula dance, the way the boat rocks just a little bit, like it’s saying, ‘There now, there now.’ I guess we all of us like to be soothed, no matter how old we are—isn’t that so?”
Again, Maddy said nothing.
“I go out in the boat with my fishing rod, but I don’t put any bait on it.”
“Why do you even go fishing if you don’t want to catch fish?” Maddy asked. Her tone was crueler than she meant it to be.
“Well, that’s a fair question and here’s the answer. I like the peace that comes with fishing. If I went out and just lay on the riverbank, I’d feel guilty, thinking of what else I should be doing. All the things that needed doing. But with my fishing pole, everybody thinks I am doing something!”
“Why does everybody care so much about what other people think?” Maddy asked, and the bitterness in her voice was plain.
“Another good question that I’ve thought about myself. To tell you the truth, I think it’s a design flaw. There are quite a few design flaws in us humans, you know. More than in animals and plants. And I guess we have to cope with them. Don’t have to like them, just have to cope with them.”
From downstairs came the voice of Lucille yelling up at them. “Do I have to spell it out? It’s D-I-N-N-E-R-T-I-M-E!” Maddy knew just how she’d look: flush-faced, her hand gripping the knob on the stair rail, a dishtowel tucked into her waist, one sneakered foot on the tread to help her lean in and holler better.
Arthur leaned forward. “Coming!” he shouted, and his voice cracked like a teenager’s. And then to Maddy: “We gotta go. She says your baby needs fish because it’s brain food and by God she’s going to feed you fish. So here’s what you do. She’s making catfish in cornmeal batter and the batter is real good. So when you take a bite of fish, you tell your brain, ‘My, this batter is good,’ and then you quick eat some mashed potatoes, and you know nobody makes better mashed potatoes than Lucille. And then quick eat another bite of fish and then some green beans—they’re good, too. Like that. Alternate. Am I right? You’re going to have the bad but you sure enough are going to have the good, too. You just concentrate on that cornmeal batter.”
He pulled a small gift wrapped in yellow paper from his pocket. “I got this for the baby today, at a garage sale. Ten cents.”
“What is it?” Maddy asked.
“Do I have to come up there and drag you two down?” they heard.
“Open it quick,” Arthur said, “and then come down before she has a stroke.” He looked at her and smiled. “Listen to me. You know what? You’re the top.”
“The top of what?”
“Oh, my. Cole Porter?”
She looked blankly at him.
“We’ll have some fun later,” Arthur said. “I’ll play you a record you’ll love!” With one finger wagging in the air, he sang, “You’re the top! / You’re Mahatma Gandhi!”
He went out into the hall. “Sure smells good!” he called down to Lucille.
Maddy opened the package. A tiny book about fish. And weren’t they beautiful. Their round, clear eyes, their fan-dance tails, the rainbow colors of their shiny scales. They were beautiful.
Now Maddy closes her eyes for the briefest second. A sealing-in of memory, a benediction, a wish that she could once again be under Arthur’s care. “Truluv,” she called him. He was that. True love. She is so happy to be staying in his room. It’s almost as though he’s still taking care of her.
But now she is a mother and responsible for someone else’s care. And here before her is Miss Cornmeal Batter herself; Nola has come up to get her.
“Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
Maddy pats her lap. “Come here.”
Nola climbs onto her lap and Maddy pushes the girl’s hair behind her ears and says, “I was just up here thinking about you.”
“You were?”
“Yup.”
The girl’s voice grows small. “And it made you sad?”
“Oh, no!” Maddy says, laughing. “You make me happy! I was just thinking of how you are growing and changing, and you know what? I wish I could be just like you.”
“You do?”
“Yes. I just love you so much.”
“I love you, too.”
“Nola, who is that man down there wearing Iris’s robe?”
“Oh, that’s John. He’s the man who didn’t come to dinner. He’s fun! He helped us build a raft to sail in the gutter. And he’s taking Iris out for dinner tonight. She told me. After his clothes get all dry, they’re going to buy some seed and then they’re going to plant stuff and then they’re going out to dinner. They invited me to help plant, but I’m going to help Link. I’m his assistant. Like a magician’s assistant, only I am a science assistant.”
“Where are they planting the seeds?” She hopes it’s not in Arthur’s garden. She wants Arthur’s garden to stay the same.
Nola offers an elaborate shrug and hops off her mother’s lap. “I don’t know. I think in his garden. But you should come down, because your cookies are ready and also, guess what Link is going to show us? How to make invisible ink. And how to make a cloud in a jar.”
“You’re kidding!”
“See?” Nola says. “Better come and be with us, now.”
Maddy rises gratefully up to follow her daughter downstairs. You can’t ask your children to save you. But they do it anyway.