42
“Goddamn it, Mom.” It feels good to say it. The words roll around against the white noise of the engine and the rumble of the tires against the road. I clutch the steering wheel and say it again: “Goddamn it.” If she hadn’t stepped in all the time, he would have had to lean in a little. Pete and I were never going to make it. We’d still be getting divorced, but maybe if Pete had been pitching in all along, he’d know how to be there for Greer now, and I would still be heading north.
Tears are running down my face. I have two hands on the steering wheel and I’m gripping it so hard that I could break it. I am sinking into a deep well of sadness and anger, and I don’t know who else to blame. “It was my life. Not yours. And I know you wanted me so much and that you loved me so much, but that didn’t mean my life belonged to you. It was for me to walk through, and for me to figure out.”
Darling.
“Don’t darling me! I mean this, Mom. You knew it was all wrong. You had to have known. You could have just taken a step back and let me handle things. That marriage was going to end either way. I didn’t have to lose myself too.” Now I need to mop up my face because I’m having a hard time seeing the road.
I would have thrown my body onto a mountain of live grenades to protect you from pain.
All right, touché.
“This is really hard, Mom.”
“Have you been crying?” Greer asks when she gets in the car.
There’s no denying it. I’ve been ugly crying and talking to my mom for three hours. We actually worked a lot of stuff out. Halfway back to Beechwood, I felt the last threads of anger toward her loosen and give way. She was my mother. Of course she wanted to step in.
“A little,” I say. “I was just thinking about Fancy and remembering what it was like to be in your exact same spot.”
“It sucks,” she says. What I wouldn’t give to see my mom’s wide smile on her face today.
“It does. Have you had dinner?” I grab her hand, and she lets me.
“No.”
“Let’s go to Rockport for an early dinner. We can sit right on the water and eat lobster rolls.” I know enough to know that she wouldn’t want to be caught dead eating with her mother in town today.
“Okay,” she says, and gives me half a smile.
“I’m going to need to get gas.”
I am trying to be more even-keeled than my mom was in this situation. When this happened to me, we got through that first day, and then my mom immediately suggested I apply to private school. We didn’t have the money for private school, but she pretended we did; that’s how much she wanted to protect me from Jen Brizbane. I remember how scared it made me to see how upset she was, like she agreed this was the end of the world. As I sit across the table from Greer, who hasn’t touched her lobster roll, I can feel all of my mom’s feelings. I can feel the fury of a million mothers inside of me, and I want to roar my fiery mother breath on anyone who might steal a moment of my daughter’s happiness. I know I need to let her wade through this, but the truth is, if I could step in, I would. If I could snap my fingers and make those girls appear with balloons and apologies, I would. If I could prevent her from ever suffering another loss and growing from it, I might. And it’s in this moment that I understand my mother’s love for me. I can still feel the intensity of that love and the way she walked into my home, bright as the sun, and blinded me to all the shadows. How lucky I was to be loved like that.
In the end, I did not switch schools. In fact, the social tide shifted before any of the applications arrived in the mail. That’s the other part I need to remember—this will pass. My mother taught me how to create a cocoon for Greer, but inside of it I will allow her to feel how she feels.
“Put your phone away,” I say.
“What?” Greer looks at me like she’s never heard of such a thing.
“They’re not texting, right? Because they’re horrible seventh-grade girls. But this lobster is delicious and that seagull is eyeballing yours.”
She shoves her phone in her pocket and looks out at the water, like she just noticed where we are. “Can we move?” she asks.
“No.” I smile at her. My mom would have loved this idea.
“Rockport’s nice.”
“Middle school girls are awful in Rockport too,” I whisper. “It’s universal. It’s like anthropology or something; girls turning into women fight amongst their own to jockey for power. There’s actually a ton of learning that happens along the way.”
She’s not really buying this. “Name one thing you learned.”
“Well, I learned a lot about what I wanted. I mean at first I just wanted to be back in the group, but when they came around and I was suddenly cool again and Hillary Epstein was ostracized, I realized I didn’t want friends like that. I learned that I like people who make me feel safe.” I hear my own words in my chest, and I want Ethan to call me and tell me he’s never leaving.
Greer doesn’t say anything, so I go on. “So when you’re back with them or when you find a new crew and everything’s going your way, you need to remember this and decide who you want to be. You’ll have a chance to do this to someone else, and that’s when you find out who you are.”
“A joke,” she says under her breath, like it had to come out, but she didn’t know where to direct it.
“A joke? What’s a joke?”
She’s dismantled her lobster roll without having taken a bite and is now picking at the coleslaw. “Me, Mom.”
“Greer.” I say her name like a prayer, like it’s an affirmation that will steady her. “You are not a joke.”
Then she’s crying again, and it all comes out. “I just keep thinking of them getting my texts when they’re all together and then laughing about it. It’s so humiliating. And Fancy’s gone. And no one even notices what’s happening in my life, and Dad—he only cares about us when we’re playing soccer. It’s like I’m going to wake up one day and every single thing will be gone. No Fancy, no parents, no friends.”
“Of course you still have Dad. And you definitely have me.”
She rolls her eyes. “Barely.”
“What does that mean?”
She’s going to say something but doesn’t. She forks a piece of lobster and stares at it. “You’re here. And you’re happier lately, but for a while it was like you were gone,” she says.
This hits me in the chest. “Since Fancy died?” I ask. Because, sort of.
“Well for sure since then. And then Dad left and I thought you’d be sad or angry but you weren’t. Like you agreed with him that we weren’t worth staying for. And now—” She puts her fork down and looks me right in the eye. “I’m with Dad a lot, and I’m sort of seeing how he is. He talks about you like you’re a problem. Like you’re a joke. And I think that’s how he’s always talked to you, and you just took it.” Big thick fresh tears pour down her face, like her mother being a doormat is the actual thing that’s breaking her heart.
I reach for her hand and she pulls it away. “That’s between Dad and me, and I agree I was too quiet for too long. But that’s not for you to be sad about.”
“Well now that it’s my turn to be treated like a joke, I guess I’ll just take it. That’s what we do, right?” There’s an angry bite to this that I’ve never heard in her voice before. I am horrified to think how long it’s been waiting to get out.
“It’s not,” I say.
There’s more, and the words keep pouring out. They confirm every suspicion I’ve had about how she’s been hurting and how deeply I’ve let her down—including my never setting Pete straight and allowing him to be so absent all these years. I was so worried about what Ethan might think seeing the way Pete treated me. He wasn’t the one I should have been worried about.
“Oh, Greer,” is all I can say. I want to roar my fiery mother breath on myself.
She mops up her face and takes a bite of her lobster roll. As if releasing that demon has freed up her appetite. I want to believe that the tirade is over, but there’s still tension in her face that tells me it’s not. What else?
“What else?” I ask. “I swear I can take it.”
“This summer has been nice, with the house and the flowers and everything. You seem more like you, like the person I think of as my mom.”
“Yes,” I say. “I do feel more like myself.”
“But this thing with Scooter.”
It comes out of nowhere, and his name feels like a blow. “What about him?”
“Iris and I both think you have a crush on him. She doesn’t really care, but I do. He’s not staying, Mom. Just like Dad, just like Fancy. It’s going to be the same thing again.” She’s wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Her soccer ball charm is wet. “I don’t want you to disappear again.”
And just like that, in the way only our children can, she has held up a mirror to my biggest fears—that I’ve set myself up to fall apart again. Ethan is going to be gone and I am going to be in my sweatpants watching the paper pile grow out of the sink. I’m going to let my kids down.
I have been dancing on the edge of this cliff, just a breath away—or eight days, to be exact—from a huge fall. It was a fall I was warned about, big orange cones marking the danger. I climbed up anyway.
“It’s been a great summer,” I say. “And it’s been fun getting to know Scooter, learning to skateboard.” The word catches in my throat, and I don’t know why. I take a sip of my water to buy myself a second. It’s been a summer of learning to take risks and trusting myself not to crash and burn. And yet, as they say, here we are in the flames. “But fall’s coming, and I promise you’re going to get through this—with or without these girls.”
Greer blows her nose into her napkin. “You think I’ll have friends again?”
“One hundred percent guarantee,” I say. “And, Greer, I promise I am here and I’m not going anywhere. Neither of us is a joke.” She smiles at me, the smallest smile, and I see my mom for a second. I am flooded with the relief that comes from forgiveness, both the giving and the receiving. And I know that if I had to choose between the love of my life or the well-being of my kids, I would always choose this.
When we’re home, we watch Auntie Mame under the yellow blanket and eat popcorn. I have no idea why that movie is so soothing.
Greer seems to feel better for having unloaded her painful thoughts. Greer feeling better goes a long way toward making me feel better, but I am now the keeper of Greer’s painful thoughts. Phyllis has always told me that Dr. Phil says that I am the primary role model for my same-sex children. So, in addition to staying off crystal meth and not being catfished, I am supposed to be showing my girls how to be strong women. Instead, I have shown them how to let life take you by the tail and swing you around until one day you wake up with four boxes of cornstarch and a husband who belittles you in front of your children. I can’t even think about what Cliffy is learning about being a man.
I get into bed that night and text Ethan: I’m upset because this is going to be over.
I erase it and try again: Why are we doing this if you’re just leaving as soon as you sell the house?
I don’t send that either. I finally text: I’ve seen you naked
Ethan: Wait is this phone sex? Because I don’t really get how that works
I smile the saddest smile. It feels like it’s my very last one. I call him. “You told me you’d never move here. You told me from the very beginning. But I jumped into this anyway, the way you go ahead and get a dog even though you know it’s going to die. You hide from the reality of it, because you really want a dog. I really wanted to believe this was going to last more than another few weeks.”
“I’m not going to argue the dog thing with you. Plus they live like sixteen years. I know you’re scared. I am too, but we can figure this out. I’m a problem solver, remember? Would you ever come live up here?”
“Ethan, I have kids.”
He’s quiet for a second. “I kinda do too.”
“I know,” I say. “And I’ve seen it. You’ve got kids and friends and clients and a dog parade. In Devon you’re the person you’re meant to be. If you walked away from that you’d lose yourself. And you’d resent me.” As soon as I say this, I know it’s true. He’d walk away from his life and resent me the way I resented Pete all those years.
“So that’s just it? We’re giving up? We’re the architects of our own experience, for chrissake.”
I’m quiet on the phone. That stupid speech. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Tell me what you want. Really.”
“I want you,” I say.
“Done.”
“I want two of you. I want you to be a person with no past so that you can be the person you are in Devon in Beechwood. I want you to pick up your entire community and bring them here so that I can go to sleep next to you every single night. I want all of it. That’s the problem.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do,” he says.
“Come on.”
“If you give up, you’re going to break my heart. You promised, Ali.”
“This isn’t going to work.” Quiet tears are running down my face.
“Of course it’s going to work. We’ll figure it out.”
“Tell me you’re willing to leave Devon.”
He’s quiet on the phone.
I can hear him breathing. I picture him standing by the window, looking at the tops of the trees. I imagine Barb downstairs, comforted by the sound of his feet. He’s exactly where he should be.
“I drove six hours today. This is actually impossible. We need to stop.” My heart is racing like I lit a match under my curtains and I am waiting for my whole house to go up in flames.
“No. Absolutely not. Is this about dogs dying?”
Yes. It’s exactly that. “This was great. You’re great. Let’s just cut our losses.” This is too flippant, and I know I’m hurting him. There’s no way out of this without a world of hurt.
“Who are you? You don’t even sound like you right now.”
I don’t say anything. I’m a mom. And a joke and a terrible role model. I have a daughter who’s never seen her mother stick up for herself. “I’m sorry. I think I’ve been living in a fantasy where the summer would never end.”
He doesn’t say anything. He always says something. “This is ridiculous,” he says finally. “I can make this work.”
“This isn’t a problem you can solve. To make this work, you’d have to alter the whole space-time continuum.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do,” he says.
And I want to tell him to grow up. You can’t just have what you want all the time. This was fun and easy for the summer. Now it’s painful and hard.
“It’s not going to work,” I say. “It was a summer romance, and it’s run its course. Maybe I’ll see you when you come to close on the house.”
He doesn’t say anything. My chest aches like I’m tied to train tracks and someone’s placed a boulder on me. We sit in silence for a few beats. I can hear him breathe and I want to go back to yesterday. I want to go back to any time before this.
“Don’t do this, Ali,” he says, and I hang up.