“Hi,” she said, as casually as she would if we had known each other ever since the day she gave birth to me. “Mom said you would be coming home about now. She says you’re very prompt, unlike me, who never knew there were hands on a clock.”
She laughed. It was a short laugh, the laugh of someone who really didn’t mind the criticism rained down upon her. She would snap open her umbrella of indifference, making it seem she was proud of her faults and was mocking the criticism. She pounded her cigarette on the railing and then flipped it into the yard.
I just stood there looking at her, struggling to decide how I should react. The way she was smiling at me and holding herself in a relaxed posture, her arms loosely folded over her breasts, could indicate that she was thinking that the time that had passed since she had deserted me or her indifference to my growing up all these years was nothing important. That certainly didn’t help me to feel good about finally meeting her. On the other hand, perhaps she was just trying to carve away the awkwardness as quickly as she could so we could get to know each other.
“I usually help with dinner,” I said, pausing at the foot of the short stairway.
“I bet. Mom never let me have an idle moment. What’s that saying she chants? ‘The devil finds mischief for idle hands.’ God, how all those sayings still haunt me.”
I couldn’t help staring at the makeup on her face. Her lipstick was a shade too brightly red, I thought. When I saw behind her sunglasses, I saw she had lavender eye shadow and black mascara. I didn’t notice until I was closer, but when she turned her head a little to the left, I saw a tiny silver dot in her pierced nostril.
“I’m surprised she lets you go off by yourself to draw pictures in the woods and at the lake. I used to love being at that lake,” she said, nodding in its direction. “I had many great nights there. Moonlit nights,” she added, with a smile that obviously drew up some passionate memories.
She seemed to be waiting for my reaction, but I was still quite in shock. Seemingly, she had just popped out of a dream. Was I imagining her? She certainly didn’t look the way I always envisioned her. Would she disappear as quickly as she had appeared?
“You’re very pretty, prettier than I was at your age.” A tone of surprise was in her voice.
“Thank you.”
“My father told me they named you Elle. Where did that come from? Is it short for Eleanor or something?”
“No. Grandmother Myra said it meant God’s promise, hope. She said she and Grandfather Prescott named me that to make it easier to raise me.”
“She would say something like that. They broke the mold after they made my mother.”
I continued up the stairs and stopped when we were inches apart.
“Let me help you with that,” she said, reaching for the easel. “You know, I used to draw, too.”
“Grandfather told me.”
“My mother thought it was a waste of time. She called it doodling. I’m glad she’s softened.” She leaned toward me and whispered, “She’s still almost catatonic about seeing me, but that doesn’t compare to my surprise at knowing you were here and then seeing you. I never imagined that they would keep you and raise you.”
She said it so casually that I didn’t know how to react or what to say. It didn’t make me feel good to learn that she was surprised my grandparents hadn’t put me in some orphanage and completely disowned me.
She laughed that laugh again and put her free hand on my shoulder. “Don’t look so surprised at my surprise. They weren’t exactly happy to learn I was pregnant, especially after they learned how I became pregnant.”
My first thought was, Is she kidding? Not happy to know she was pregnant and the circumstances? If there was any sentence that could be an understatement, hers was it. I wanted to say, I have just spent fifteen years having that thought driven into me, into my very soul.
Before I could think of a response, Grandmother Myra came to the doorway. I could see the rage in her face, which probably had come when my mother appeared and remained. It had brought the blood to the surface, reddening her cheeks and inflaming her eyes. Her shoulders were hoisted like those of someone who was anticipating a blow or had just had a terrible chill draping her spine in ice. Her rage seemed to have aged her by years in minutes.
“Why are you standing out there, Elle? Are you wet again?”
“No, Grandmother.”
“Then come in. As you can see, we have unexpected guests.”
“Guests?” I looked at my mother.
“My husband, Carlos, is with me,” she said. “We’re on our honeymoon, and I thought it would be a kick to stop by and see my parents. It was a kick, all right, a kick in my rear end. As I said, I didn’t know you would be here, but my mother made sure that was the first thing she told me.”
My grandmother grunted and stepped back so I would follow her command.
I moved quickly through the door, my mother following.
“Put those things in your room,” Grandmother Myra ordered.
I took the easel from my mother and quickly went to my room. My heart was racing. I felt the air around me was full of electricity, with thin, short streaks of lightning snapping around my face, my neck, and my shoulders. My mother, my actual mother, was here? It wasn’t a dream.
“You kept her in that room?” I heard my mother ask. She and my grandmother were standing in the hallway, watching me.
“Why would that or anything else about her concern you now?” Grandmother Myra replied, and walked away.
My mother looked at me, realizing, I imagined, that there was no door on my room. She shook her head and followed Grandmother Myra.
I put everything away neatly. I turned and hurried out when I heard a man’s loud laugh. They were all in the living room now. I paused in the living-room doorway. Grandfather Prescott was in his usual chair. Grandmother Myra was standing beside him, her posture straight and as firm as a soldier’s. My mother had sat on the sofa next to her husband, Carlos.
He had wavy ebony hair, a caramel complexion, and strikingly blue eyes. He didn’t look much taller than my mother, if at all. He was slim, in a dark blue sports jacket, a white shirt opened at the collar, and a pair of jeans, with soft-looking blue loafers and no socks. I didn’t think he was terribly handsome, despite his eyes. His nose looked a little too long, and his lips dipped on the right side in an unattractive way.
Now that she was seated beside him and her appearance was a little less shocking, I took a closer look at my mother, searching for resemblances between us. We had the same eyes, but I thought my lips were fuller and my nose more diminutive. She resembled my grandfather more than my grandmother. I had no idea what sort of life she had been leading, of course, but I thought she was still very young-looking. In fact, I could easily imagine anyone who didn’t know us thinking that we were sisters rather than mother and daughter.
“She’s really beautiful,” Carlos suddenly said, gazing at me. “Just like you, Debbie.” I saw my grandmother tense up.
“This is Carlos Fuentes, my husband,” my mother said. “He’s a drummer in the Eduardo Casanova band. They call themselves the Lovers.” She laughed. Carlos widened his smile and pretended to tap on a drum. She laughed again. “He’s always doing that after someone, especially me, says something significant.”
“What was so significant about that?” Grandmother Myra asked.
“Casanova? Lovers?” She waited, but Grandmother Myra didn’t smile. “It happens to be a very successful band, Mom. If you watched something besides the Discovery Channel or one of those religious networks, you’d have heard of them.”
“We watch other things, Deborah,” my grandfather said.
“Not that I remember,” she retorted. “Anyway, we’re booked into Melvyn’s Night Club in Atlantic City all next month. You ought to take a vacation and come see us.”
“We? Us? Are you in the band, too?” Grandfather Prescott asked.
“I sing a little,” she said. “You might remember that, Dad.”
“Oh, I remember. Elle’s going to sing in the school chorus,” he told her, and looked at me proudly.
“Really?” She looked up at me. “I’m glad I passed something good on to you.”
“Little else,” Grandmother Myra muttered.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” my mother said, winking at me.
She couldn’t have said anything more damaging, as far as I was concerned. Grandmother Myra turned to me, as if she could suddenly see something evil coming to the surface. I lowered my eyes.
“Let’s not fight,” my mother said. “Carlos and I would like to take you three to dinner. There has to be one good restaurant around here.”
“I have dinner prepared,” my grandmother said.
“Oh, can’t you just put it in the freezer? We’re not staying in Lake Hurley tonight. We’re just passing through.”
“That’s good,” Grandmother Myra said.
“I thought you would be pleased that I asked Carlos to stop.”
Grandmother Myra stared at her. “‘Pleased’ doesn’t quite cover it, Deborah. You’ve been gone more than fifteen years. I’d say ‘stunned’ was a more appropriate word.”
“Staying away and out of touch wasn’t my choice, as you very well know,” my mother shot back. Then she smiled again. “Let’s not get into that.” She turned to me and widened her smile. “I didn’t expect to see my daughter here, but now that I have, I’d like to spend some time talking to her alone.”
“Why?”
“Why? She’s my daughter. I’d like to get to know her.”
“If you hadn’t stopped, you’d never have known she was here.”
“I didn’t expect it. I told you that. Now I know it. So now I’d like to get to know her. Can’t you let up for a few moments, if not hours?”
“Take it easy,” Grandfather Prescott said. “I’m sure we have enough for two more plates, Myra. We’ll eat here.”
My mother smiled. “Thanks, Dad. By the way, I spoke to Uncle Brett the day before yesterday. He’s going to drop by when we’re in Atlantic City and jam with the Lovers one night.”
Grandfather Prescott nodded, almost smiling.
“He’s been doing just fine,” my mother added. She looked at my grandmother. “Not that you care, I know.”
The way my grandmother was staring back at her would turn me to stone. It was as if she could drill her rage from her eyes and into my mother’s eyes. I saw the way my mother avoided her gaze. She looked at me.
“Can we go for a little walk and talk? As I said, I’d like to get to know you.”
“What for?” my grandmother asked.
“I keep saying that I never expected to find her here, Mom,” she said, her lips tight. “Figure it out.”
“If you called or came back, you would have known. And don’t blame that all on us.”
“Well, I didn’t. Now I’m here. Can I talk to my daughter?”
“It’s all right, Myra,” Grandfather Prescott said.
“Why is it all right?”
“I’m not going to poison her mind,” my mother said.
“How could you help it?” Grandmother Myra said. “I warn you. We’ve devoted our lives to giving her a good, moral upbringing.”
“I’m sure you have, but I couldn’t ruin that with one conversation, could I?” my mother countered.
“Satan had only one conversation with Eve.”
My mother laughed and nodded at me, then raised her arms and looked about the house. “I wouldn’t say she’s living in Eden.”
Grandmother Myra looked as if her face would explode.
My grandfather reached for her hand. “Don’t prolong this,” he told her. “It won’t do either of you any good.”
She shook herself like a dog shaking off water or someone who had just suffered a chill. “I’m not going to waste time debating good and evil with you, Deborah. I lost that battle long ago. I’ve got to prepare dinner,” she said. She looked at me. “You have to set the table before you do anything with her.”
I nodded.
Carlos told Grandfather Prescott that he had a very special aperitif from Mexico that he’d like to share with him.
“I’ll just get it from the car,” he said.
“We don’t drink alcoholic beverages,” Grandmother Myra said.
“Oh, you can just taste it. You don’t drink much of it before dinner,” Carlos said.
She looked at Grandfather Prescott, expecting him to agree, but he didn’t. “Do what you want,” she snapped at him. “I have work.”
She glanced at me, and we went into the kitchen. I was actually trembling with the possibility of a private conversation with my mother. It was something I often had fantasized, and here it was about to happen. I was afraid I would drop a plate or silverware when I set the table. I did it quickly and then went out to the living room. My mother had been talking to my grandfather. Carlos had gone out to the car and was still there. They looked up at me.
“Where should we walk? In the woods or on the road?”
I looked at Grandfather Prescott.
“Better just walk a little on the road, Deborah,” he said.
She stood up and held out her hand. “C’mon,” she said.
I looked back toward the kitchen to see if Grandmother Myra had changed her mind and would pop out to forbid it. She didn’t, so I moved quickly to take my mother’s hand. We went out and paused on the front porch as Carlos was hurrying back from the car.
“I forgot we buried it under all that luggage and stuff,” he said.
“Get my mother to drink some, and I’ll give you a medal,” she told him. “She could sure use something to loosen her up.”
He laughed and went into the house. We started toward the road.
“Which direction do you prefer?” she asked.
I remembered what Mason had told me about walking to his house and said we should go right. For a few long moments, she didn’t speak. She just walked beside me, her arms folded, her head down. I was afraid that might be all we would actually do, but she finally laughed. I paused.
“Sorry,” she said, “but I’m having trouble believing they kept you. Never once during these years did I ever consider that a possibility,” she said, and described how they had reacted to her being pregnant.
“They were always so concerned about their reputation in the community. Mom never let Dad go to work in his factory without wearing a jacket and tie, even in the very warm months. She scrutinized every employee they had with a magnifying glass. The CIA probably doesn’t check its applicants as thoroughly as my mother checked theirs. By the time I was twelve and starting to look more like a girl than a boy, I couldn’t appear at the factory unless I was . . .” She raised her hands and with two fingers of each hand drew quotes in the air. “‘Properly dressed.’ Heaven forbid I had a button on my blouse undone. I imagine it hasn’t been much different for you. Probably, it’s been worse. Am I right?”
I nodded. I didn’t want her to stop telling me about herself and how my grandparents were as parents.
“I swear,” she said, “half the things I did, I did just to annoy her. The more she said no to something, the more I wanted to do it. Is that the way you feel?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t tell me she’s done a better brainwashing job on you than she did on me. Actually, I’m sure she did. They were afraid of you,” she added, and described the day I was born, how they had prayed and looked at me, expecting to see some sign of Satan.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” she continued as we walked. “I wanted and expected that they would arrange for an abortion. I was betting on their concern for their precious pure reputation. How could they tolerate an unmarried daughter walking about pregnant in this small town, but they solved that.”
“How?”
“They practically kept me prisoner in that house,” she said. She looked at me. I nodded, and she saw that was something I understood. “That’s how they’ve kept you,” she said, concluding quickly. “Do you go to school?” she asked immediately, sounding like a detective reaching a conclusion.
“Not yet. This fall.”
“So she . . . what do they call it? Homeschooled you?”
“Yes.”
“She got away with that this long?”
“I take periodic exams. She was a teacher. I always do well.”
“I know she was a teacher. She never let me forget it. Every poor grade I brought home was like another nail in my coffin. How could I, the daughter of a teacher, be such a bad student? Don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t that bad, just bad in her terms. I was better than average, good enough to get into the state university. So what do you like? I know you like art, and you sing.”
“I like reading. I don’t mind math, and I really like science.”
She nodded. “You’re more like her than I am.”
“No, I’m not,” I said quickly. It made her smile.
“Maybe you aren’t. She’s kept you from knowing who you are, I’m sure. You probably have had no chance to have a boyfriend, even secretly.”
I didn’t say anything, but that just widened her eyes.
“Do you?”
“No,” I said. I was afraid she would mention Mason at dinner. “I dream,” I told her, and she laughed and nodded.
“Yes, that’s what you do in my mother’s house, dream, dream of getting out. I think that urge drove me more than anything to flee. I would have ended up on my face if it weren’t for my uncle Brett. He took me in and got me a job on a cruise ship he was booked on with his band. Later, he got me a job in one of the dance clubs he played in, and once in a while, I sang with his band. I was married for a while, a short while, to another musician before Carlos. He had wandering eyes. Carlos is more stable. I hope.”
She paused.
“You’re no child, but I’ll bet you don’t know any more about sex than the average ten-year-old.”
I felt myself blush but not with shyness, more with anger. “I know more than a ten-year-old. I read. I . . .”
“My point is, she hasn’t been much help in that area, I’m sure. I don’t know what kind of sex my parents had.” She told me the joke about the hole in the sheet. I tried not to look astonished that she would talk about her own parents that way. “Don’t worry about it,” she added as we continued walking. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out when you have to. It comes natural.”
I paused when Mason and Claudine’s summerhouse came into view. I was afraid they would see me and come out.
“Maybe we should turn back,” I said.
“Okay. If I knew you were here, I would have brought you something, something decent to wear, for sure, not that she would permit it. She might even cut it up at night or something. She did that to many of the things I bought on my own. We were constantly at each other. Dad tried to referee, but he was outgunned.”
I nodded and smiled, picturing what it must have been like.
“There’s something about you that tells me you’re going to be all right. I think you have enough of me in you to survive.”
Enough of you, I thought. What about what I had of my biological father?
“Can you tell me what happened? I mean . . .”
“How I got pregnant? I’m sure she told you I was raped. I was,” she added quickly. “It wasn’t one of those rapes where someone breaks in and attacks you or anything. I was drugged, the famous rape drug, at a party.”
“Was he ever caught?”
“No. I mean, I knew who he was. I wasn’t that out of it.”
“How did it happen?”
“He was one of a group of local Albany boys, Sean Barrett. His father owned a bar and restaurant on Greene Street. My girlfriends and I hung out there with him and his friends. We could get whatever we wanted to drink. I mean, they weren’t even college guys. College guys were too immature for us. These guys were dangerous, cruder, but hip, if you know what I mean.”
I shook my head.
“Yeah, right. How would you know? Anyway, for us, it was like playing with fire. Maybe I got too close, but that didn’t give him the right to do what he did. Smile or turn your shoulder flirtatiously at a boy, and he’ll think he owns you. Take my word for it. Unless,” she said, smiling, “you want him to think he owns you. Nothing wrong with that.
“Anyway, I didn’t even see it coming. I should have realized how deep I was in. I wasn’t about to get too involved with him or any of them. I still had high hopes, not for the life my mother had planned for me but a better life. You know, fall in love with someone rich as easily as you do with someone poor or average like Sean Barrett. I didn’t have a chance to fall in love anyway.
“Afterward,” she continued, “I was too embarrassed about it and didn’t even tell some of my closer friends. I never thought I was pregnant, so that was an even bigger shock. I was so ashamed about it that I didn’t tell anyone, especially my parents. I was in denial, you see. Months passed, and I knew I was pregnant, but I wouldn’t face up to it. When I started to show, I got on a bus and came home from college.”
She paused and looked toward our house.
“You know how when you’re a little girl, and you cut yourself or something, and you run home to Mommy or Daddy, who you expect will fix it and make you feel better and comfort you? Well, that was how I was when I stepped off that bus and walked to that house. I was coming home so my parents would make me feel better and fix it, but not my mother. It was almost as if she was waiting for something like that to happen, just so she could drive home a lesson she had been teaching me all my life. She was determined to make me pay.”
“But you were drugged and then raped.”
“No difference to her. I’m sure she will be the same with you if something bad happens to you. It will be your fault somehow. You put yourself in that place. If I hadn’t gone to that party, if I wasn’t drinking and flirting with riff-raff, bad things wouldn’t happen to me. See?”
“Yes.”
She brushed my hair with her left hand. “When I look at you now, I’m very happy that she wanted me to suffer.”
“Do I look like him?” I asked, and held my breath.
“I don’t even remember what he looked like anymore,” she replied. “I see only me in your face.”
She sounded just the way I had imagined her in my dream, making me feel like I was some kind of immaculate conception.
“Well, I can’t make these fifteen years up to you overnight, but I promise I will stay in contact with you now. Someday we’ll spend some real quality time together. When you break out of the chains and you can be on your own, you’ll come to me. Not that I have accumulated great wisdom,” she said. “I’ve knocked around, and some of what I’ve learned might help you survive out there. Speaking of that, has Uncle Brett been here much? He doesn’t like talking about them, so I don’t ask. I haven’t seen him in a few years now.”
“No. I’ve never met him,” I said. “I only heard about him a few times. I saw pictures of him, but they were taken when he was much younger. I don’t recall him ever calling.”
“Mom’s probably his most disliked person. She wouldn’t welcome him and let him know it whenever she could. As I said, he helped me survive when I ran off, gave me money, helped me find work. I told him what had happened to me and what they had done. He was very angry and promised he would never tell them where I was or what I was doing.” She thought a moment. “It would be just like him to keep the fact that you were living here a secret from me. He thought that would be painful for me, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know what to tell you about him. As I said, I don’t remember them talking about him except what he was like years ago.”
She thought about it a moment and then smiled. “I bet he doesn’t know you’re here. It would be just like my mother to make sure my father never told him.”
She laughed.
“Isn’t he going to be surprised? I think he went on the road at an early age to escape his family as much as for any other reason. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. Many people I know have little to do with their relatives, but I promise,” she added quickly, “I’ll have more to do with you. If you want me to, of course, but I can’t take you with me,” she quickly added. “I couldn’t weigh down my new marriage with the responsibility for a teenage girl just yet. Maybe later you can come to spend some time with us.”
In fantasies, I saw myself finally living with my mother, but her coldly realistic view of it was like having ice-cold water thrown on me while dreaming.
“Yes,” I said, with a neutral tone in my voice.
She smiled and hugged me. “Later, when my mother cross-examines you about our conversation, you should tell her that all I did was complain about how miserable my life really is. That way, she’ll feel better.”
“What?”
She held her smile, and then something happened that I never expected.
We both laughed simultaneously, as if we had been best friends for years and years and knew secrets we wouldn’t share with anyone else in the world.
Despite the reality she had inserted into our conversation, it was as if one of my dreams really had come true. For a few moments, at least, we were like a mother and a daughter.
But I knew that dreams pop like bubbles in the morning, and stone reality beats them down so deeply sometimes that you lose them forever.
It’s like watching something precious sink in deep water. You reach frantically but can only watch helplessly as it goes into the darkness and becomes as lost as an opportunity you had failed to grasp.
Maybe all of this was already drowned and gone.