The first thing I noticed was a mug of peppermint tea emitting steam. The sweet smell went straight to my belly, igniting a nauseating hunger. I sat up. The sun was yellow, poisonous. A line of sweat was cooling at the neck of my pajamas. Reaching for my phone, I hit a wicker tissue-box cover. I never bought tissues; my roommates and I used toilet paper. Furthermore, had I gone to the trouble of purchasing tissues, I would be hard-pressed to imagine the state of mind required for me to own a tissue-box cover. I lay back down, exhausted. From the distance came the echoing sounds of dishes being unloaded from a dishwasher, first the clatter of plates, then the hollow plink of bowls nesting inside one another, and finally the metallic clanging of silverware, a domestic rhythm I had internalized from the time I was a collection of cells. That’s when the tissue-box holder made sense and I remembered: I was in Florida at my mother’s.
After I’d gone downstairs, and she’d finished unloading the dishwasher and offered me an egg-white omelet, and I’d declined and taken out Boris’s carton of ice cream and a spoon, and she’d said what kind of thing is that to eat in the morning, and I’d said, Mom, leave it, and then had submitted to a brief lecture on the health benefits of egg whites, after that we didn’t talk about what happened—not about me losing my job at Apogee, or the meltdown at the Nationals stadium, or about Mal picking me up, or how Mal had called my mother and my mother had called me and told me to come home, that she’d found a flight for me that same night, and I’d surprised myself by saying yes, and Mal took me to the airport.
We stood together at the kitchen island in her big tropical house. She had two dishwashers and a leather sofa that looked virginal; shortly after marrying Boris, she had adopted the bourgeois attitude that furniture wasn’t for sitting on. Out the window, a lizard climbed the garden wall in the sun. I dug into the carton of chocolate ice cream, scraping the sides with my spoon, and watched my mother’s lower jaw make a series of nearly imperceptible twitches, which I knew from years of experience meant that she wanted to tell me to use a bowl and was expending significant effort to restrain herself.
“Are you still hungry?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“But you’re eating a lot of ice cream.”
“It tastes good.”
She smoothed down her sherbet-colored tunic. She would never eat sherbet, but she wasn’t opposed to wearing it. “You didn’t used to like ice cream,” she said.
I waved my spoon. “Dad bought a brand from this local place that had wild flavors like ricotta raspberry and avocado salted caramel. We’d eat it for breakfast.”
“Your father was always impulsive,” she said. “When we first met, he showed up at my apartment in the middle of the night, just to play me a Van Morrison song he loved. Did I ever tell you that story?” My mother opened the cabinet and took down a small glass bowl. She put it on the counter without looking at me.
“Nope.”
“There’s a downside to impulsivity.”
“Which song?” I scraped a sweet mound of chocolate from the carton. My mouth puckered. We need a bigger size in dressing room 4.
“I can’t remember,” she said.
“ ‘Astral Weeks’?”
“Maybe.”
“ ‘Into the Mystic’?”
“I don’t know, sweetie.”
“Clearly it didn’t make a big impression on you.”
She shook her head disapprovingly. “I remember it was two or three in the morning. Your father pounded on the door and rushed in with a record under his arm. He looked wild and drunk, but he swore he hadn’t been drinking. I remember his expression when the needle hit the record and the song began—it was like pure joy.”
“But what song was it?”
“What does it matter what song?”
“Because he could have shared it with anyone and he chose you.”
My mother rested her hand on the counter. A chunky turquoise bracelet slipped down her arm and came to rest on her wrist. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “Do you think your father would have remembered this story?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I don’t think he would.” She picked a crumb off the counter with one finger and reached under the sink to put it in the garbage. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m going to work out.”
I put the ice cream carton back in the freezer. My mom poked her head around the doorway. “By the way, I left a box of your stuff in the living room. Can you go through it and decide what you want to keep? Boris and I are decluttering. We need more space for the humidifiers we bought for his deviated septum.”
Long after my mother went to sleep that night, I lay on the sofa, the ceiling fan ruffling my hair. Nothing in this house smelled like her. It smelled of the lemony furniture polish, the tropical foliage that crept up the side of the house, the success of a middle-aged man in a prestigious, lucrative field. Boris was right now in Tennessee, delivering the keynote lecture at a conference of allergists. I tented one hand over my eyes. Through my fingers I made out his medical tomes crowding the bookcase, evidence of his big science brain prominently displayed, except for the bottom shelf near the floor, which held a row of my mother’s paperback thrillers. I felt angry that her possessions were minimized, laid out barely above the ground, but quickly this dissolved into cool sadness and recognition, because of course Dr. Gettleman wouldn’t have arranged the bookcase in this way. It would have been her own doing. My mother had always felt it necessary to suck up to men. Even her obsession with barely eating and with constant exercise—her very body—I saw as a way to do this.
I got off the sofa and crawled over to the bookcase to look at what she had read. There were crime dramas, thrillers, romance novels, what my father had called “junk books.” I ran my fingers over their cracked spines, the dusty frill of pages she had read. Beside the bookcase was the cardboard box of things my mother had packed up for me. Below faded cards and letters, and a piggy bank that clanked with nineties-era coins, was my father’s first book of poems, the one that contained “The Catch.” I knew it wasn’t my copy, since I had mine in D.C. I flipped it open and saw an inscription on the title page in my dad’s handwriting.
For my darling Rachel and our little tie rack.
I was so startled that I let go, and the book fell to the floor pages-first. “Mom?” I climbed to my feet and took a dozen unsteady steps across the hushed living room. “Mom? Mom?” I opened her bedroom door.
“Ah!” she bolted upright. “You scared me, Ellie.”
“Look at this.” I pushed the book into her lap.
“What?” She switched on her bedside lamp. “Hand me my glasses.”
I plopped down and leaned against the headboard beside her. “Where did you find this?” she said.
“You put it in the cardboard box. Look at the inscription.”
She opened the book. “Oh. The tie rack.” She smiled. “That’s you.”
“Me?” My heart sped up.
She let the book close. “I had totally forgotten. That was a nickname he had for you when I was pregnant.”
“But you said you didn’t know why Dad had left me a tie rack in his will.”
Her face fell. “You’re right. I did say that. I think when you told me your father left you the tie rack I kept focusing on the gingerbread part. Not the tie rack part. Like, why did he leave Ellie something having to do with gingerbread? Also, I guess I don’t like to think about that time in my life. And honestly, it was just so long ago.”
“Why did you call me…tie rack?”
“Oh, it’s a long story,” she said. She seemed casual about the whole thing, not understanding how much I needed this from her. “It wasn’t that you were an accident exactly. I mean, this is probably TMI, as you kids say, but your father and I couldn’t stay away from each other. And those diaphragms back then were so annoying.”
“Yeah, that’s definitely TMI.”
“Well, all I’m saying, Ellie, is that I wasn’t too surprised when Dr. Goldfarb told me I was ‘with child.’ He actually said that. But your father was shocked. And he wasn’t happy. At first,” she added quickly, her finger in the air. “When I told him I was pregnant, he said, ‘I don’t want this, I don’t need this, I swear to God, Rachel, it’s like when you’re given a tie rack for your birthday and you have to be, like, Why, thank you! But I don’t want this tie rack.’ Then he ran out of our apartment, and I sat there crying for hours. Or what felt like hours. Finally he came back with a bunch of wilting flowers. It was all that the store had that late at night, he said. And I remember he held them out and he said something like, ‘Rachel, I’m sorry. I will love our tie rack. I will love it and love it and love it.’ And you know what, he absolutely did love you.”
By now I was crying, though I didn’t want her to see, because then maybe she would stop talking. And I didn’t want her to stop talking.
“For a couple of months of my pregnancy,” my mother went on, “we joked about our little tie rack and how loved it was. And how necessary. And how loved and necessary you were. And are. I guess he figured, when he left it to you in the will, that eventually you would ask me about it and I would remember and tell you. I’m so sorry it took me so long.”
“Oh,” I said softly, holding the book close, wiping my face. I was a little tie rack. The littlest tie rack, which sounded like the name of a children’s book no one would ever read, except for three people: my parents and me. I was a tie rack; I was my father’s tie rack. My mother’s tie rack. I had belonged to both of them, back when they were a couple and we were a triple. Back in a time that no longer was.
She smiled. “It was a sweet time with your father. Before everything changed.”
I studied Dad’s author photo on the back flap. I’d looked at it hundreds of times, and I almost had it memorized—how he peered into the camera, his face broad with youth, his eyes full of love. He wasn’t any one thing, was he? No one ever is. Behind him to the left was a blur of green trees. I squinted at the photo and saw the text below: Author photo by Linda Tapscott.
Linda Tapscott. The lagoon woman. Romley Cass’s wife. Then I registered what my mother had said. Before everything changed.
“Wait, Mom, why does it say his author photo was taken by Linda Tapscott?”
She turned to study me. “You know who Linda Tapscott is?”
“No,” I said. “It can’t be.”
She nodded.
“Linda Tapscott?” I said. “I thought Dad had left Linda something in his will, but it turned out he hadn’t. I went to see her. She told me about the affair. I just assumed it was recent! I mean, Linda was crying at his funeral.”
“No,” my mother said. “Why did you think that?”
“I have no idea. Maybe because it all seemed so present.” I hadn’t lived long enough to have a history, as my father had. “I thought it must’ve happened when he was married to Colette. Linda talked about how hard it was on her marriage as though it happened yesterday.”
“I can imagine,” she said. “It was hard on me too.”
“He cheated on you with Linda?”
She sighed. “I knew early on your father was a seductive guy. My parents told me not to marry him, but I couldn’t resist.” She laughed a little. “Young love. Or lust. Other women couldn’t resist either. It was very hard to be with him, because he couldn’t help being alluring to other people. And by that time—it was 1988 when he had the affair with Linda—I was pregnant with you, and I wanted you to be charmed by him too. I just hoped he would never hurt you.”
“Mom, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Eleanor, how could I turn you against your father? How could I tell you that he was out gallivanting with other women while I was at home with morning sickness?” Her voice had no anger in it. For my mother, unlike for Linda, I realized, this wasn’t an open wound.
“I’m sorry you found out this way,” she said.
“You didn’t think about leaving him?”
“I wanted you to have a father. And he assured me the whole Linda fiasco was over.”
“Then when I was three—” I started.
“He left me.”
“Did he ever apologize?”
“He did, actually. After the divorce, he wrote me a long, heartfelt letter. It helped.”
That was something. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to reach out to Larry in his lifetime, but he’d tried to make amends with my mother. I turned my head to the pillow. It was warm, yeasty, edged with geranium face cream. Unlike the rest of the house, it smelled like my mother.
“I didn’t understand,” I said into the pillow. “I thought he was sort of disinheriting me, but instead he was being sentimental. And I guess he thought I’d feel sentimental about it too.”
We were quiet for a long time. Then I started to laugh.
“What?”
“This insane shaman Colette dragged me to. She said my mother would have all the answers.”
“I’ve always known I was an oracle,” she said sleepily, taking off her glasses.
“Since when do you wear glasses?” There had been a time when I could detect changes in her on a daily basis. Now months went by when I didn’t see her, and I was missing things.
“It’s been a while now. Old eyes.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I stay in your bed?”
She yawned again. “Neither of us will sleep well.”
“Just for a minute.”
She shut off the bedside lamp and lay back down.
“Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, my little tie rack.”
We laughed. I felt the words shiver down my arms. I wanted to hear him say that name too, but when I closed my eyes and heard it in my head, it was still my mother’s voice.