| |
I’D FIRST HEARD about West Hollywood’s yearly Gay Pride parade somewhere in my teens, but this particular march was a new phenomenon. The LGBTQ community had organized it on the heels of the election. The organizers were calling it the Gay Survival Parade. And with Mike Pence topping off the toxic gingerbread house with his attempts to divert HIV/AIDS funding to conversion treatment—i.e. electroconvulsive shock therapy—survival might actually be at stake for some of the participants.
I’d promised Sammie I’d go with her. She’d been Skyping daily with Amira and told me she’d feel like a hypocrite if she didn’t go. “I don’t know what it means to be a lesbian besides loving a woman, but I think I’d better find out.”
It felt odd to me when she put it like that. What did it mean not to be a lesbian besides loving men? But I’d promised I’d join her the next day.
When I shared both my question and our plan, Adam burst out, “I don’t think you should go.” To my raised eyebrow, he responded, “What it means to be a lesbian right now is that you’re a sitting duck for psychos, right alongside Muslims, Hispanics, blacks, and Jews. You saw that photo in the LA Times of the sign near the LA art museum: ‘No Niggers.’ What about people on the Metro Rail tearing off women’s hijabs? Swastikas painted on school walls? There was an article just a few days ago in the New York Times about nearly a thousand acts of verbal and physical harassment of gays and lesbians since the election.”
I replied with equal heat, “Well then Sammie and I will be in good company at this parade.”
“Endangered company.”
“You mean like Makeda and the girls? Dhani? Ignacio? Sammie on two counts—don’t forget her dad was Jewish.”
Adam ran a hand through his hair, a sure sign of frustration. “Fleur, this parade isn’t like Gay Pride. It’s political.”
“Weren’t you the one who told me the political is personal?”
“Yes, and I’m also the father of your daughter.”
“So people who have children shouldn’t take a public stand?”
“Not expressly to be provocative. No.”
“So the fact that I’ve had tomatoes thrown at me at press conferences by Father’s Cacklers and been insulted by social media stalkers and had our livelihood threatened innumerable times by Congress doesn’t suggest that our work is constantly exposing us to crazies? What about that guy who kept sending me letters that I’d soon be roasting in hell?”
“He was locked up in prison.”
“For stalking another scientist with a gun in his backpack,” I shot back. “Did we stop our research after that?”
Adam took a step away and heaved a great sigh. “You’re right. I’m an asshole.”
“Ha! I thought that was my job.” I came up to him and took hold of his hand. “What is it, love? This isn’t like you.”
“I’m fucking scared, is what. Scared that I can’t protect you or the little Monkey. It’s bad enough that a lunatic’s going to be running this country now. But you at personal risk? Man, I can’t stand it.”
“I know,” I said. And I did. No one I knew had yet found a way to tolerate the election results. I wasn’t the only one who’d complained of feeling gut punched. Engineering the movement of human beings from one place to another through Dreamization sounded like a piece of cake compared to the challenge of weathering four years listening to a man captive to a particularly toxic void. I knew from firsthand experience that a human can tolerate only a certain degree of emptiness before erupting.
There was even a citizen’s initiative for our state to secede. People were bandying about the phrase, “The United State of California,” despite it having about as much of a chance as the proverbial snowball in hell.
The organizers had changed the title from parade to march to emphasize the seriousness of the situation. They’d suggested that people forgo the gaudy costumes associated with the Pride Parade, along with the disco and trance music, and had urged everyone to exchange any hint of nudity for mourning attire. I’d actually dragged out the black Sacha Drake dress that I’d worn to Nana’s funeral, though I could barely pull it over my milk-engorged breasts and still pooched out belly. I knew that vanity should be the last thing I should be thinking about right now, but I hated how I looked in it. Shakespeare may never have actually penned the truism, “Vanity, thy name is woman”—Hamlet’s lament actually referring to “frailty”—but it tended to be true, nonetheless. Which was why I was at least partly relieved when Sammie called at 10 p.m. to say she doubted she’d be well enough to get out of bed the next day. “It’s either the stomach flu or food poisoning. It’s amazing I got far enough from the loo to find my cell to call you.”
“Sweetie, I’m so sorry. Sounds pretty bad.”
“Can’t keep a thing down. And it burns! I actually had prawn vindaloo for lunch. Terrible timing.”
I could only imagine how that was going down. Or coming up. Ear to cell phone, I’d just entered the kitchen for a late night snack. My appetite vanished.
“Can I do anything?”
“Just kill me.”
“Not likely,” I replied. “Is Aadita coming over?”
“Already here,” she said, then screamed, “Mum!” and hung up abruptly, presumably to hasten to the toilet.
Thank God for mothers, I thought, turning to head back upstairs to tell Adam I wouldn’t be going after all. Talk about relief—I knew he’d be thrilled. And truth be told, I relished the thought of a lazy day with him and Callay.
But my cell phone was ringing again. I checked Caller ID. It was Stanley. I tried heading him off at the pass. “Don’t worry, I’m not going.”
He laughed a little weakly. “Gwennie said I was wrong to try to stop you. She said somebody’s got to stand up for our rights. Obviously hinting that it should be yours truly.”
I hated getting in the middle of their brother-sister spats. “Give her my love, will you? I’ll try to make a quick run to your place tomorrow, maybe late afternoon? Dhani baked Gwen the most amazing cinnamon buns.”
“She’ll kill you. Says she’s gone straight from being chemo-induced anorexic to obese.”
“Well, that’s a lie.”
“I know,” Stanley replied with a happy chuckle. As much as I adored Gwen, I was well aware that for Stanley she was the sun and the moon, though he’d never tell her that himself. I knew how thrilled he was that she seemed to be beating her disease. We were all incredibly grateful. As if in agreement, my milk came down with an insistent, ballooning warmth.
But before I could exit the kitchen, I was stopped in my tracks by the phone sounding off yet again, this time with the custom ringtone I’d set up for Mother: Will.I.Am’s “I Got It from My Mama.” As I felt the wetness spread across the front of my blouse, I answered impatiently. “Yes, Mother?” Didn’t anyone bother these days with the custom of not calling after 10 p.m.?
“Listen, will you do me a favor, love? Could you and Sammie keep your eyes open for Cesar tomorrow? Fidel phoned to say he was intending to come back to town for the march.”
I sighed. “I’m not going. Sam’s sick.”
“Oh.” She sounded disconcerted. “Well, do you know anyone else who might be going?” The fact that Mother didn’t ask what was wrong with my friend spoke volumes.
“Isn’t Fidel going?”
“No. He’s afraid he’ll get deported.”
“For God’s sake, isn’t he legal?”
“It’s not a question you ask.” No, I supposed you didn’t. Especially not now. “Mother, you’ve tried with Cesar. You’ve got to let it be. With any luck, he’ll call you at some point. You obviously can’t force it.”
“I realize that, but I’m afraid I’m a bit of a basket case. It’s just that I never had to really worry about you, so I have no practice managing this kind of anxiety.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Not really.”
Speaking of feeling gut punched, I struggled to catch my breath. Adam must have wondered why I’d taken so long downstairs, as he entered the kitchen now, carrying Callay. He was staring at me with concern.
I kept my voice in a purposeful monotone. “When I was flapping and screaming and pinching myself? When you couldn’t find a school that would take me? When I got arrested in the middle of the night after the Boy Who Called Me Beautiful talked me into taking off my clothes in a stranger’s backyard?” Purposely ignoring Adam’s hand signals, I went on, my face feeling unusually hot. “When I had to have an abortion?”
There was a long pause. I saw Adam leave the room, throwing me a worried glance as he clasped Callay tightly to his chest. Mother still sounded unperturbed. “Please don’t think I’m stupid, but it’s true. I never really worried about you. Not deep down. Not to the point of sleeplessness. You had this lucky innocence, as if nothing could really touch you.”
I was so stunned that I sat down, grateful that there was a kitchen chair to catch me.
“What about when I gave that disastrous speech at the Nobel ceremony? Talking about Grandfather’s balls in front of the King of Sweden?”
“But that was funny.”
“Not for me. The press treated me like a fool. And the Cacklers had a field day with it.”
“But you just kept going. You’re so resilient.”
I stifled the temptation to pinch my inner thigh. I promised myself I’d never do it again after Callay was born. I couldn’t bear to set her such an awful example. What could I possibly say now? Mother had clearly perfected a way to protect herself from the kind of worry that had dogged me ever since I’d learned I was pregnant. She’d managed to blind herself to the fact that her young daughter had been perpetually gripped by a terror of the Everlasting Void of Eternal Emptiness.
I managed to get off the phone with the plea that I had to feed Callay, but the fact was, my milk had dried up during our conversation like an old sponge. I fetched a bottle from the fridge. Thank God for pumping.
My daughter was kind enough to sleep through that night, though the beneficial effect on my state of sleep deprivation was blunted by a series of nightmares involving Father, our truculent new president, and a knife-wielding, evil twin of Uncle Bob. I fed my little girl the next morning with great gratitude for her purity, then dozed off again until an unheard of 11:00 a.m.
Listening patiently and (wisely) without commentary to my rant about Mother, Adam offered to scrape me up some breakfast. I lumbered out of bed. Leaning against the marble bathroom sink counter, I stared at my sleep-swollen face in the mirror. Extracting a strand of dental floss, I went at my gums with a little too much force. As I rinsed my bloody mouth, I wondered what made for a good mother, really. Nana had been like a mother to me in my early days. She had a grip like a Mack truck and the vocabulary of a marine, but I knew I was safe with her. Gwennie had a generous heart, but she always held back just a bit, as if she were afraid of intruding; she felt more like an auntie than a mother. So many of us humans had been forced to make do without the intimate claiming that I’d seen between Dhani and Angelina, Aadita and Sam. Adam himself had had no mother at all, yet he was the most tender man on the planet. Next to Grandfather, of course. And then there was Stanley—as odd duckish as could be, but profoundly protective of me. It occurred to me that I’d gotten some of my sweetest love from men. But male and female alike—Grandfather, Nana, Adam, Gwennie, and Stanley: I knew that each of them had at times felt worried sick about me. Unless you had the equanimity of the Buddha himself, wasn’t that part of the deal?
As if to corroborate that line of thought, I heard Adam running up the stairs shouting loudly enough to wake the dead. I hurried into the hallway, and Makeda did, too, ordering the girls back to their bedroom.
“Oh Jesus, Fleur!” Adam cried. “Thank God you didn’t go!”
I managed to wrest from my distraught husband the news that someone had driven his car straight into the middle of the march. CNN was showing videos of bodies flying everywhere and one particularly nauseating photograph of a baby stroller upended on the sidewalk of Santa Monica Boulevard. Hunkered together in front of the TV, Adam, Makeda, and I learned that at least ten people had died, with many more wounded, and that the driver had been apprehended hiding in the bushes behind an apartment building on Kings Road. A previous mugshot showed an exceptionally pale man with a Swastika tattooed on his neck and a look in his hazel eyes that spelled nothing but trouble. I found myself wondering what kind of a mother he’d had.
It would later be reported that Dustin Eagleton had been a follower of a man named Craig Cobb, who’d splintered off from something called the Creativity Movement to establish an enclave in North Dakota he’d dubbed Creativity Trump, two misnomers that fairly took the breath away. Cobb had evidently gained some local media attention for his claims that the word “gay” had been created by Jews to distract white people from the perfidy of homosexuals. Well, maybe the guy was creative after all: he’d managed to defame two birds with one stone.
The phone, needless to say, was ringing off the hook. In a kind of daze, I listened consecutively to a sobbing Sammie, a ranting Gwennie, and an uncharacteristically confused Stanley H. Fiske.
When Adam finally flicked off the TV in disgust, a moist-eyed Makeda sat silently for a moment, as if gathering herself. Muttering that she’d promised the girls a late breakfast of enqulala tibs with spiced butter, she made for the stairway. Soon enough, the smells of grilled onions and jalapeños and cardamom wafted up to the second floor. Adam and I stared at each other wordlessly for what felt like eons before the baby monitor signaled that our Monkey was fussing. He went to fetch her as I woke from my trance enough to check on the older girls.
The air felt understandably tense. In the furthest corner of the room, seated with her back against the wall with her legs splayed in front of her, Sofiya wrapped her plump arms around her less robust younger sister. Melesse’s bunna eyes were as wide as saucers. I managed to coax them toward one of their unmade beds and navigate them both onto my lap—well, as good as—to tell them that something had happened, but not to anyone we knew, and not to worry; everything would be okay. I wondered how many generations of adults had made such hollow promises to their children. Was that one more requirement of motherhood, a mastery of the lie?
As if to prove my point, Makeda appeared at the doorway, an unconvincing smile plastered onto her face. Taking it all in, she said resolutely, “You need to eat first, then we will talk.” Her words sounded harsh to my ears, perhaps to theirs, too. Sliding from my lap to the floor, they looked from one of us to the other with questioning expressions.
“Darlings,” I found myself saying, “sometimes we grownups get scared, too. Bad things do happen occasionally, and we don’t like that, either. But I really can promise you this: I know that your enat and Adam and I will do everything in our power to make sure you are safe.” Makeda and I locked eyes, and she gave a slight nod. I could sense, if not actually hear, all of us breathing a bit more deeply. Lord knew that in acknowledging that awful things could happen, I wasn’t telling these girls anything they didn’t already know. But I’d just discovered something myself: it was our commitment to each other that somehow made even the darkest void more bearable. Why hadn’t I recognized that before? Wasn’t it how I’d first fallen in love with Adam?
As the girls slid down the banister to get their food and my own mouth watered a little, reminding me I hadn’t eaten, I sought out my husband. I found him in Callay’s room, where he was changing her diaper. “Who’s my little stinka?” he said cheerily, folding up a diaper containing what had to be the smelliest poo on the planet into a tight ball and sticking it into the bin by the side of the changing table. I made a mental note to empty it very, very soon. We’d both marveled more than once that such a small being could poop so frequently and with a volume and odor that rivaled one of the larger carnivores.
He carefully fit her little limbs inside her lion-patterned onesie and was about to pass her to me when I heard the familiar strains of “I Got It from My Mama.”
“Grand fucking central,” I muttered, aiming for my phone.
“He’s safe!” Mother’s voice exulted. “He texted from Guatemala. He’s found his mother, and he’s staying with her an extra week or so. He wanted to reassure me that he hadn’t gone to the march, that he hadn’t come back to LA after all. Oh, Fleur, he’s okay!”
“Yes, Mother,” I replied, my voice less than enthusiastic. I found myself taking some pleasure in adding, “But a lot of people aren’t.”
Mother sounded embarrassed. “Of course. I’m such an idiot. But, Fleur, you understand, don’t you? I’m just so relieved. Wasn’t it kind of him to call?”
I realized that my voice sounded as dry as dust as I responded, “Mmm. Very kind.” I couldn’t resist the final jab, “You realize Sammie and I could have been there if she hadn’t gotten sick.” I didn’t even let her reply before I cut the connection.
Adam, who’d been listening, raised an eyebrow. “You know, the Green-eyed Monster comes in many shapes and sizes.”
“Don’t,” I said, putting up a hand. “The last thing I need right now is a lecture on what a jerk I am.”
I was so disoriented that I ignored my promise to spend some quality time with Adam. Instead, I began packing up Callay’s gear, thrusting a diaper bag and Dhani’s cinnamon buns into her stroller, and announced I wanted to take a walk with her to Stanley and Gwennie’s. Adam looked hurt, but he let me go without remonstration, only reminding me to take care at intersections, as I was understandably distracted. I assumed he’d return to the TV as soon as he shut the door.
It was a warm day, and I began to sweat after a couple of blocks. I stopped to admire a lavender bush spilling over someone’s perfectly painted picket fence. I tugged off a fuzzy, purple-flowered sprig of it and held it my nose, unaccountably reminded, not of my own garden or of Mother’s, but of Father’s Main Line estate—its vast invisible beds of roses and its lavender bushes tended with loving care by Ignacio in the days he competed with Father for Dhani’s affections. It struck me that, if he were still alive, my father would have been one of the people fulminating against the recent successes of the LGBTQ movement. I flung the lavender away and resumed pushing the stroller.
The baby woke just as a flock of wild parrots flew in irregular formation overhead, making their inevitable racket. I knew that the question of how SoCal came to be home to so many species of this non-indigenous bird family was subject to some dispute. SoCal had seen a certain amount of illegal bird importation in the ’40s and ’50s and then again in the ’80s, with smugglers tending to release their contraband when they feared getting caught. But some old timers claimed that the preponderance of wild parrots was either the result of the Bel Air brush fire of 1961, where people released their pet yellow-heads to save them from the conflagration, or the similarly released seven hundred or so birds who’d been kept at Simpson’s Garden Town in east Pasadena before their own disastrous fire. Others insisted that they were the collateral damage of the closure of Van Nuys’ Busch Gardens Theme Park, where some birds escaped in the transfer to new facilities and others were consciously released.
Whatever their roots, they were a hardy bunch; their transformation from domestication to the urban wild was solid. And brazen. I recalled seeing a particularly beautiful lilac-crowned parrot land on Mother’s pool decking to have a nice drink on a sizzling June day while she and I sat within arm’s distance, laughing with delight on our chaise lounges. I couldn’t wait to talk to Callay about such things, but for now I had to be content with the languages of touch and smell and nonsense syllables.
No one answered when I rang the Fiskes’ bell, so I used my key to let us in. Gwennie was just walking toward the front door as I struggled to get the stroller over the threshold. Its back wheels went all hinky on me, wanting to aim straight for the door. I smiled apologetically after a crankily muttered, “Get in there, you fucker,” slipped out of my mouth.
Gwen’s head was turbaned in a thick white towel. She was grinning broadly, a living testimony to the human body’s ability to spring back from near disaster.
“You’re walking!” I exclaimed.
“I know. Isn’t it a hoot?” But Gwen wasn’t wasting any time. She flung the towel from her head, damp strands from the shower she’d obviously just taken forming a pixie parade across her forehead. Eagerly reaching into the stroller’s cavern to lift out Callay, her joy was palpable. She’d only seen videos of the little Monkey. Now that she held her in her broad arms, it looked as if she’d never let her go.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that, in setting out for this visit, I was going to offer Gwennie such pleasure. Asshole that I was, I’d thought only that she and Stanley might be a comfort to me.
As it happens, Stanley had gone off to the lab to distract himself from the awful news, so Gwennie had Callay all to herself. I headed for the kitchen, heated up the oven for the cinnamon buns, and put the kettle on for tea.
Gwennie appeared at the doorway, murmuring, “You know, I think you’d better take her. She’s a bit heavier than I might have suspected.”
“Oh my God, of course!” I swept over and relieved her, took the baby back to the stroller—where she seemed content to repose with wide-open eyes—and backed it behind me right up to the kitchen door. I wasn’t even going to try to navigate the damned thing over that narrower threshold.
I pulled out a chair for Gwennie, who was standing over the stroller with wet eyes. “You’re barely up and walking, and I shove a baby into your arms.”
Gwennie sat down, panting just a little, replying dryly, “You didn’t shove anything except that giant stroller, and I grabbed her myself, so enough with the guilt trip. How are you doing? I can’t believe you and Sammie could have—”
“Don’t,” I said, lifting the kettle to pour boiling water into two orange and white Caltech mugs. “We weren’t, thank God.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Or goddess.”
I grinned. Gwennie was the most spiritual agnostic I knew.
The room was beginning to smell like heaven. I pulled the buns out of the oven and placed them on a serving plate, then set down forks, dishes, and napkins in no little haste. I realized I’d eaten nothing so far. I was ravenous.
Later, the two of us reclined comfortably on the old sofa with Callay at my breast and a down pillow under Gwennie’s head. A little hesitantly, I broached the topic of her miraculous rebound.
“Honestly, I didn’t think I was going to make it,” she confessed.
“I was a little worried, too,” I admitted.
“I think it was Robert Frost who wrote about the afternoon knowing what the morning never conceived of. Or something like that, anyway.”
“What do you think he meant?”
“That time and age bring surprises you’d never have imagined.” She paused, a hard glint in her eye. “Like Herr Drumph.”
“Oh no, let’s don’t. My milk’ll dry up.” We both laughed, but it took discipline to avoid that dark alley. “I think he was talking about wisdom.”
“Oh, I’m not very wise. Not like you guys. Just got the one BA from UCLA all those years ago. Never got further than clerical jobs, really. Glorified ones—working for worthy non-profits and such, but clerical jobs, nonetheless.”
“You don’t have to have a PhD to have wisdom.”
“Well, Miss Scientist, I think Stanley would ask you to explain how wisdom is different from knowledge.”
“Wisdom is knowledge of the heart.”
Gwen cocked an eyebrow. “Deep.” I shrugged. “My heart’s pretty rusty, Fleur. Didn’t have many boyfriends after Jack Green.” She gave a wry grin. “As in one. So I don’t know how much wisdom my heart has accrued.”
“Romantic love isn’t the only path of the heart.”
Gwennie’s chuckling seemed to delight the baby. Pulling away from my nipple, Callay gave a series of coos. Gwen rubbed a finger against her cheek and then kissed her stockinged foot. Sitting back again, she said, “Fleur, you’re too kind. I know that being a spinster might have a certain cachet in literary and scientific circles. Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, Louisa May Alcott, Rosalind Franklin, Rachel Carson. Even your Jane Goodall fits the bill these days, though she’s technically a divorcee. But they each had something fine and precious to recommend her. Me—my biggest claim to fame is serving as caretaker of my brother Stanley’s home life and being a kind of mascot to the physics team. As I age, I find it annoying that so many clichés come true. Older women, particularly if we’re not accomplished, are pretty much invisible. When I walk down the street, nobody notices me. I’m just a plain woman in a doughy box of a body.”
“Oh, Gwennie. Don’t be so cruel to yourself.”
“It’s not cruel. It’s true.” She added shyly, “But never mind, I’ve had my Bach and Wagner, Baez and Seeger, all the jazz greats to mirror my joy. And Beethoven, of course. Nothing like a deaf musician to cheer a woman going deaf herself. But here’s the thing—another cliché, I fear—an absence in one area really can lead to a gain in another. One door closing and another opening, and all that. I think I’ve become a pretty astute observer of human nature over the years.”
“Well, that’s definitely part of wisdom—”
But she interrupted me. “For example, I’d like to know—really—why you paid me this particular visit.”
There was no point putting up a fuss. Callay had fallen asleep across my chest, and I rose carefully to place her inside the stroller without waking her, tucking her elephant-patterned blanket around her as the room felt suddenly rather chilly. I grabbed a frayed red throw from the back of Stanley’s favorite chair and offered it to Gwen, who shook her head. Instead, I wrapped it around myself like a shawl. Settling back onto the sofa with my knees tucked under me, I confided in her about Cesar. Perhaps because of a reluctance to out him, and perhaps because of our own awkwardness, Mother and I had had an unspoken agreement not to mention what we’d witnessed in Fidel’s back yard that day, passing off our incursion as only an idle curiosity about her neighbor’s back garden, based on the exoticism of the front, and ascribing Mother’s concussion to a trip over a fallen branch in the driveway. I’d told Adam and Sammie, of course, but then I told them pretty much everything.
Gwennie looked gobsmacked. “Oh my. It really does take time to catch up with social change, doesn’t it? I feel rather foolish saying it, but he always struck me as a very masculine sort of boy.”
“I know. The same for me. Sammie says it doesn’t matter. It’s how they ... how we feel on the inside.”
“Well, of course, that’s true.” She giggled. “Actually, on the inside I’m Twiggy.”
“Who’s Twiggy?”
Gwennie stared at me for a long while, then shook her head. “I really am old, aren’t I? She was an English model who tortured all us girls with how adorable and skinny she looked. Like a twig.” It took me a minute. Gwen sighed. “I guess you had to be there.” And then, “So how is Cesar doing?”
“Sounds like he’s doing just fine. He evidently tracked down his mother again.”
But Gwen was, as she’d said, an astute observer of human nature. Her expression softened. “And you? How are you with all this?”
It was as if pressure had been building in the magma chamber of a volcano. I blurted out, “I don’t give a damn what kind of makeup he wears, how sluttishly he dresses, or whether he ends up a he or a she. I don’t even care that he blames me for all of it. It’s Mother. She obsesses about him. All the time. And then has the nerve to say she never worried like this about me.” Realizing how emphatically I’d spoken, I slid a guilty glance toward the stroller, but nary a peep from that quarter. I prayed I hadn’t given her bad dreams.
“Oh dear.” Gwen sat up and leaned over to gather me toward her ample bosom. I let myself collapse into the warmth of her body, in between sobs taking in the richness of what smelled like a combination of peaches, perspiration, and fresh mint. She spoke so softly, I had to ask her to repeat herself. “She’s forgotten, you know. “
“Forgotten what?”
“That she used to call Stanley and me all the time. Wanting to know how you were settling in. Whether you were making friends at school.” She paused. “Whether you missed her.”
I sat up, wiping my snotty nose against my sleeve like a child. “Miss her? I didn’t. At least nothing like how I missed Grandfather.” I shrugged. “But Mother—I never thought much about it. I guess I was born missing her. Sort of like having blue eyes or dirty blond hair. It was just what was.”
Gwennie’s eyes filled. “Alcoholism’s really the devil, isn’t it?”
I spat out reactively, “She wasn’t much more available after she got sober. It was all about her Bill W’s.”
“Oh love, alcoholics don’t get sober so quickly. Not really. Not so as they can access their feelings very well. It takes time to be able to bear them without smoothing them out with booze, or some substitute for booze.”
I went inside and thought about that one, sniffing around the dark crannies and back cupboards of my mind. “Sort of like numbing yourself out in case you’re tempted to pinch and whirl?”
A faint smile turned up the corners of Gwennie’s lips. “Something like that.”
“What a boob I am. I feel like a three-year old.”
“No matter. I feel like I’m ninety-nine.”
We burst into giggles.
I loved how she gave herself over to her laughter. It spilled messily out of her, punctuated by a doggish snort or two.
“May I ask you something? Would you mind terribly if I called you ‘Aunt Gwen?’”
Her voice was matter-of-fact, but her eyes gave her away. They looked all melty, the way Grandfather’s did when I’d reach out to hold his hand while we sat watching our tree. “Not at all. I’d quite like that,” she replied.
The walk back home felt about twice as long as it took to get to the Fiskes’. By the time I yanked the stroller over the threshold, Callay was screaming and my back ached from having to push the stroller most of way while holding my daughter to my shoulder, a stench stronger than horse shit just inches from my nose. I hurried with her upstairs to change her diaper, calling out, “Adam! We’re home!” only to be greeted by Mother, staring at me solemnly from the top of the stairs. A pit forming in my belly, I cried, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just—”
“Where’s Adam?”
“He went to play golf with Tom and Amir.”
“Golf?” He never played golf. Said it reminded him too much of his father and his cronies from the Senate.
Mother stretched forward to take the baby from me when I reached the landing, but I merely plowed on toward Callay’s bedroom with Mother hurrying to keep up with me. “Evidently a couple of wealthy physics alumni offered to take them out to Brookside, and Stanley told them it would be impolitic of them to say no. ”
I set the baby down on her changing table, girding myself for the mess and muttering, “They’d better not be associated with the oil lobby, or I’ll kill them.”
Mother made a face. “Forget that, this little girl’s poo just might kill us.”
I couldn’t help but grin. But then I forced myself to focus on the task at hand. The little Monkey had ceased crying, as if relieved that she herself was about to be spared the smell. Mother took the rolled up diaper and soiled wipes from me and left the room. We both knew that no diaper pail could sufficiently contain this intensity of Eau d’Excrément de Callay.
When Mother returned to the room, I’d already snuggled under Gwennie’s childhood quilt, and my little Monkey was sucking at my nipple like there was no tomorrow. Mother sat hesitantly at the foot of the bed as if I might kick her off if she settled her whole bum onto it.
“Where’re Makeda and the girls?”
“At a birthday party for a boy named Hector.” Mother’s face flushed as if she’d just realized that was the name of the boy who’d first gotten me pregnant. She hurried to add defensively, “Life goes on even in the midst of disasters.”
Looking down at Callay, I replied, “It certainly does.”
But Mother clearly mistook my meaning. “I never meant to hurt you. When Adam called me, I—”
“Adam called you?”
“Well, yes, he said that you were very upset, so I—”
I really was going to kill him when he got home. “Listen, Mother, I’m exhausted. Now’s not a good time. I really think Callay and I need a nap after she finishes feeding. It’s been a long day.”
Mother’s eyes widened. “Of course. Forgive me.” She stooped to plant a quick kiss on the baby’s forehead, accidentally brushing her lips across the tip of my nose. I said nothing.
Contrary to what I’d said to Mother, once the baby finished her feed, I was wide awake. I thought of texting Adam to see when he’d be home, but instead tiptoed downstairs and curled up opposite the fireplace. It was too warm to light a fire, but it was soothing to just sit there, admiring the artistry of its Spanish tile work. Buster arose from the outer hearth and leapt onto my lap. His motor thrummed loudly, as it always did, and I stroked his sleek black coat in a kind of ecstasy. Jillily had been a great purrer, too, and her tuxedo markings had been similar to Buster’s but for the white dot beneath her nose. But there was a delicacy to her that contrasted sharply with the powerful muscles under Buster’s fur. There was no way this animal on my lap was anything but male. What was it, I wondered, that made us humans vulnerable to disconnecting from our birth gender? It was a question, of course, that had no answer. Each species—and each era—seemed to have its own ways of dealing with the void.
I found myself speculating what it would be like for the dog we chose for our experiment to dematerialize and—please God—come back again. Would such a remarkable experience fill its void for the rest of its days?
Buster butted his nose against my cheek. I stroked him more vigorously. He stretched out a paw and plied his nails against my chest, careful to retract them before pulling them back. I knew he loved me. I knew that animals feel love, even for us confused humans who struggle so fruitlessly to be at peace inside our own skins.
I noticed a tiny spider making its way across the nubby fabric of one of the cream colored throw cushions at my elbow. Its skinny legs worked hard to make it over each little hill. I prayed Buster wouldn’t notice it and lap it up with one quick flick of his tongue. There it was again. Life eating life. To survive, yes, but also out of boredom. Life playing with life as a kind of practice. Cruelty. I had it in myself, as well.
I lifted the cat and put him down on the sofa, where he instantly commenced an elaborate grooming ritual, beginning with his apron of soft, white fur. I strode over to the landline that reposed beside a rather somber picture of a young Grandfather on a small side table, his walrus mustache still dark and imposing. My mother picked up after the first ring. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was terrible to you. I wanted to make you feel bad. It hurt my feelings when you said you didn’t worry about me.”
She paused, and I was afraid she’d hung up.
But when she finally spoke it was clear she was fighting tears. “I did worry about you. That was a lie.”
“So why say it? “
“I wanted you to think that I have confidence in you.”
I picked at the dry skin on my lower lip. “Are you telling me that everything you said was untrue?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t believe her. “What else did you worry about?”
“That your experience with your father would warp your relationship with men. That being with a sick grandfather all the time would give you a grim view of life. That you were lonely, but I couldn’t find anyone to play with you. That the boy at the pond had done something worse than you could find the words for. That you would never be socialized. That you got too many colds. That your pelvic pain meant you’d never be able to have children. That you would be victimized. That I’d scarred you. That you’d hate me for the rest of your life.”
Hate her? How could she not know? I’d been haunted from the beginning of memory by her tantalizing presence behind her locked bedroom door, behind her wine glass and her eternally uneaten plates of food, by the absence of her graceful, velvet hands—which I’d so longed to feel enclosing my own. I’d idolized to the point of pain her perfectly proportioned body fitting perfectly into her impeccable Chanel suits. Her pearls and her Infra Rouge lipstick and her No. 5 perfume. Her cherished Austin roses in their invisible beds. Her multi-syllabic words; her half-smiles, hinting at something too delicious to be spoken; the quick flash of fire in her eyes when Father spoke rudely about her own father. When he used all those nasty names for me. I’d adored her the way one adores a brilliant sunset. The way we wished upon the first star in the night sky. She’d been my beautiful, unattainable queen.
They say we become our mothers as we age. Following in her footsteps, I merely replied, “Well, I don’t. Hate you.”
“Really?” she asked, her voice tremulous.
When Adam finally came home, I wanted to berate him for being so late. Instead, I turned off the breast pump and removed the flanges from my nipples, scooping up all the fussy pieces to take downstairs to wash and store. Adam gave my shoulder a squeeze before I left the bedroom.
When I came back up, he was standing naked by the window, absent-mindedly scratching his chest. All anger fled me as I stood at the doorway, rendered speechless by his still taut muscles, the angular flare of his hipbones from his waist, the cleave along his spine that I loved to trace with my hands, his slightly corkscrewed left leg with its calf larger than the right for the harder work it had to do. Despite his limp, he’d stayed as fit as he’d been the first night we’d spent together at Shutters. He’d surprised me back then, insisting we detour to Santa Monica Beach on our way home from Ethiopia, grabbing me tightly to him as we bobbed and screamed in the wild waves. The beauty of him now took me by surprise all over again.
But when he turned around, he said, “We have to talk.” I tested his tone, replaying it in my mind. Not angry, but resolute. I tensed. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“For being so late?”
“Huh? No. For asking you to not go to the march.”
I frowned. This was not what I’d been expecting. “But you were right. I shouldn’t have gone. Look what happened.”
He shook his head. “Yes, it was bad. Very bad. The fucking worst. But I should have realized it was your call.” He walked over to the bed and sat, patting the duvet beside him. I joined him, and he took my hand, gazing searchingly into my eyes. “I’ve been driving around for a couple of hours, trying to sort this out. I was trying to control you. Wanting you to save me from my own fear. Which—really—is what that loser was doing when he drove into the crowd.”
I rolled that one around in my head. It had a certain clarity to it. Something like what you’d expect from a quantum physicist who’d actually made the effort to push his feelings aside for a moment to make room for thought.
I loosened my hand from his and stroked his chest and shoulders, feeling teary. “This is why I love you.”
He laughed. “Because I own my shit?”
“Well,” I said, letting my hand drift down to his member. “That and a few other things.”
“No. Wait. I think you have a part in this, too.” I pulled back my hand, aware that my heart was beating a bit faster. “I know it’s a cliché for new dads, but I’m feeling a little taken for granted.”
“What do you mean?” I asked defensively. You may have noticed that one of us was exhibiting more of a gift for self-reflection than the other.
“Well, take today. You went out without any acknowledgment that we’d planned on hanging out together. Taking Monkey with you as if she belonged to you. I have something to do with her being here, too, you know. I knew you were upset, but you could have turned to me.”
I flushed. “Don’t pretend you’re the victim here. You were just fine. Went golfing, for God’s sake. I hope you aren’t going to turn into your father.”
Adam stood up, his neck muscles working. “Wow. That was a low blow. I wouldn’t have expected it of you.”
I felt mortified, but when you’re digging yourself a grave, why not just jump in? “I wouldn’t have expected you to rat out on me to my mother. To beg her to apologize to me.”
He licked his lip and looked a bit red in the face himself. “Maybe I shouldn’t have called her, but at least I was trying to help. Your comment about my dad, though ... and I didn’t beg her to do anything. Just told her you were hurt.”
We stared at each other. Adam broke eye contact and strode over to the dresser, his foot dragging a bit more than usual. He yanked open the bottom door to retrieve his plaid pajama bottoms, pulling them up as if he didn’t want to be naked in front of me. I wanted to jump out of my own skin and had to stifle the impulse to pinch my upper arm.
I knew I should apologize, but I couldn’t seem to force the words out of my mouth. Instead, I said, “Did you enjoy yourself golfing? Whom did you go with?”
“That simply won’t do, Fleur.” His tone reminded me that he’d once been my tutor. And in more than philosophy and physics. How revolutionary it had been at the time to hear him urge me, Use your words, Fleur.
As if in response, I said, “I’m embarrassed.” I saw he was waiting for more. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was a low blow. I was angry that you’d tried to tell me what to do the way my father would have done.” Still, Adam said nothing. “But you’re not him.” It was a relief to recognize it. I really had been a bit possessed. “If anything, I’ve been acting like him myself, judging Cesar for being a freak. As if he’s any more of a freak than I am.” Adam frowned. “Oh, okay. We’re all freaks.”
Adam snorted. Thank God. It was as if a demon had squeezed all the love out of us for a while. Well, to be fair: out of me, anyway. As he took me in his arms and I felt the void recede, I murmured into his shoulder, “I guess that was why Father liked to hate me so much. It relieved him of feeling his own freakishness.”
“His own humanness,” Adam murmured back.
“That, too,” I replied.
