Olivia was on the road to Provincetown by five in the morning.
Once she’d made the decision to visit her mother, she had to make a second decision: Drive the whole distance or take a train to the ferry? Driving, she would feel less trapped; at any point on the way to Cape Cod, she could change her mind and turn around. And at any point during the weekend, she could leave.
For most of the trip, she kept SiriusXM tuned to talk radio, keeping her mind occupied. But on a narrow stretch of highway framed by lush green fields, wind turbines spinning in the distance, she found herself struck by a mental montage of idyllic beach scenes with her mother. The two of them could have been played by Meryl Streep and Emma Stone, the vignettes directed by Nancy Meyers. This was dangerous thinking.
How many times over the years had she looked forward to spending time with her mother only to be disappointed? The dinners that were interrupted with urgent work calls. The planned shopping excursions (bonding time) that ended up with her mother giving her a credit card number and telling her to order whatever she wanted online. The college visits that were canceled because her mother had to fly to Manhattan or LA for the company. There was always some fire to put out. Olivia had heard the term rain check in her life more times than she’d experienced actual rain. On Olivia’s twenty-first birthday, Ruth had canceled her planned visit. She told Olivia that one of her friends needed her, but of course she was lying. It was always work. There was nothing her mother wouldn’t do to be at work—get divorced. Give up physical custody of her daughter. Lie.
The lowest point had come during Olivia’s senior year at Vassar. On one of the worst days of Olivia’s life, the day she’d lost her nana—her father’s mother, Elaine—Ruth was out of reach, in Milan. Olivia remembered sobbing at the cemetery, watching her father enact the ritual of tossing dirt onto the casket after it was lowered into the ground, feeling not only the loss of her grandmother but the acute, endless absence of her mother.
It was impossible not to fantasize, to imagine something different. The previous winter, in the months leading up to her best friend Julie’s wedding, at which she was the maid of honor, she’d spent weekend after weekend with Julie and Julie’s mother shopping for dresses, dealing with the registry, picking out flowers. It was agonizing, not because Olivia wanted to get married—she did not—but because she knew that if she ever did, it would be yet another milestone in her life when she’d feel a void instead of a guiding hand. Of course, she had friends who had actually lost a parent. Maybe this should have helped Olivia put her relationship in perspective. But it didn’t. Having a mother and yet not having her around created its own kind of suffering. Still, she thought as she drove, she had to admit the long weekend had come at a good time.
She’d felt shaky at work ever since that disastrous post for April Hollis. The whole experience rattled her confidence about making her move. She found herself waking up every morning at four or five, gripped with anxiety. Olivia was not one to agonize over things. She prided herself on her decisiveness. But this was a setback.
By the time she turned onto the main street in Provincetown, she had almost accepted the idea of just going where the weekend took her. A few years earlier, during a particularly stressful time at work during which she’d suffered from crippling back pain, Olivia had consulted a “mindfulness coach.” The woman, who had an Indian name that belied her WASPy appearance, urged her not to be so focused on outcomes all the time. She thought, too, of her father’s words: “Your mother is just not the nurturing kind,” he’d said. “But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you.” People had their limitations. Olivia was old enough to know that. She certainly had her own. Her mother was a smart businesswoman. She just wasn’t a caretaker, and maybe it was time Olivia stopped taking that personally.
Getting my affairs in order.
Her mother was still relatively young, but her sister had already battled cancer. Olivia couldn’t take for granted that she had all the time in the world to come to terms with her mother. Her father had been right to give her the push she needed to make the trip.
At least the town was cute. Even with her phone’s GPS, she took a wrong turn too far down Commercial Street, overshooting her mother’s address. She followed the narrow road, waiting for a place to turn around, and found herself distracted by the colorful shops and restaurants all jammed side by side, the strolling couples, dogs on leashes, and one shirtless man dressed in billowing American-flag-pattern pants with a matching top hat on his head. Interesting.
A pink pedicab wheeled past her. There weren’t any traffic lights, or at least none that she could see, and cars moved slowly. She started to grow impatient. But maybe the delay wasn’t the worst thing; she was very early. She hadn’t told her mother she wasn’t taking the ferry, and now she considered for the first time if her mother might be out running errands or walking on the beach or doing whatever it was people did midmorning in this town. Olivia decided that if her mother was not at the house, she’d walk back to this main street and get breakfast.
Olivia followed Bradford to Bangs Street, made a right back onto Commercial, then turned into the white-gravel driveway in front of the house. The driveway had a tall fence and a hedgerow along one side, so she couldn’t just walk directly across the lawn. Bag in hand, she backtracked to the sidewalk, unlatched the fence gate, and followed a red-brick path to the house.
She stood on the porch a minute, collecting herself. Somewhere nearby, an owl hooted. In the distance, a foghorn. The house stood silent, indifferent to the reunion about to take place.
Olivia rang the bell. It took maybe half a minute for her mother to open the door.
Ruth was dressed in pale yellow pleated shorts and a white polo shirt. Her ash-blond hair was held back by an Hermès scarf. She appeared overheated, her face shiny, but her trademark matte-red lipstick (named Joan, after her own mother) was flawless.
She looked good. Her mother always looked good. It was difficult to believe anything could be wrong with her, but as Olivia braced herself for their usual awkward greeting, she was reminded of why she had made the trip in the first place. Getting my affairs in order.
“Welcome! I wasn’t expecting you for a few hours…”
“I changed my mind and drove,” Olivia said, stepping inside. The entrance hall was painted a deep eggplant; there were winding stairs directly in front, and, at the far end of the room, a floor-to-ceiling mirror topped with stained glass.
“Oh, well, I’m just delighted you’re here, Liv,” her mother said.
She had always been Liv to her mother, a nickname that she’d had since her first memory and that had lasted until she was in seventh grade, the year her mother moved to Center City and her father moved back into the Cherry Hill house. The first weekend her mother had visited, she’d rolled up in her Mercedes and said, “I’ve missed you, Liv,” and Olivia said the one thing her wounded heart could think of: “It’s Olivia.”
Her mother realized her mistake the moment the name slipped from her mouth and promptly apologized. Olivia didn’t say anything. She followed her into a spacious, sun-drenched living room. The walls were white, each one featuring a vivid oil painting of either stark color blocks or a beach scene. A fireplace was topped with an antique-looking mirror. The stone-colored couch was accented with purple throw pillows and a purple, orange, and pink crocheted throw. The wicker coffee table held a pile of books and a bowl filled with shells.
“Is this place yours?” Olivia asked.
“I’m just renting, unfortunately. I would love to buy it but I don’t think the owners will consider selling.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to convince them, Mother. You always do.”
Ruth looked at her and seemed about to reply but did not. Instead, she redirected with “How was the drive?”
“It felt long but I guess I made good time so I can’t complain.”
“Do you want to see your room and get settled?”
“I’m pretty hungry. Maybe we can go somewhere to eat?”
Her mother hesitated, looked at her watch. “Sure. I need to take care of one thing first.”
“All right, then, I might as well put my stuff in the bedroom.”
Her mother led the way up two flights of stairs to a narrow hallway with a small bathroom on one end and a bedroom on the other. The ceilings were slanted and the bathroom ceiling low-beamed. It was like inhabiting a space that wasn’t quite real, like a stage set. The bedroom was quaint with modest furniture and a blue and yellow color scheme. The dresser was decorated with a few Diptyque Baies candles; there were fresh flowers on the bedside table.
“I hope you’ll be comfortable up here,” her mother said.
“Of course,” Olivia said. They stood awkwardly for a few seconds until a sharp sound cut through the silence. Was that…a baby crying?
“Excuse me for a minute,” her mother said, turning pale.
What on earth? Olivia looked after her, incredulous. Ruth disappeared down the stairs, and Olivia waited just a few seconds before following the sounds of the escalating wailing.
Down one flight of stairs, on the second floor, Olivia found her mother in an office with a bassinet. She held a small baby swaddled in a pink blanket. “Whose is that?” Olivia said.
“It’s a long story,” Ruth said. “I’m helping out. She was going to be with someone else by the time you got here, but then you arrived early…”
“You’re helping out with a baby?” Olivia couldn’t help feeling irritated by this turn of events—triggered, frankly. Her mother had never had time for anyone but herself, and now suddenly she was Mary Poppins?
“I’m going to drop her off somewhere on our way to lunch,” Ruth said. “It’s not an issue.”
But it was an issue—at least for Olivia. Her mother had moved to a strange town and was taking care of a little girl when for so long she had not taken care of her own.