The next day, after I had finished my class, I ran into Vladimir. He walked me up to my office and stayed for almost a half an hour, leaning against my door frame. The National Book Award finalists had been announced and we discussed which books we had read and whether we considered the awardees worthy. I sat on the edge of my desk, a position I never sit in, and even pulled one knee up, leaning my chin on it as we spoke. He held the door frame around where the lock was with his right hand, and lifted his left hand over his head, grabbing the frame and stretching his body, like a nymph at a fountain. He was wearing a T-shirt (the heat had been accidentally turned on in our office and it was abominably hot) and I could see both the damp of his armpit and a tuft of his underarm hair peeking through his short, crumpled sleeve. I was overcaffeinated and felt as though I was talking too fast, losing the thread of the conversation. He, however, seemed just as interested in speaking, and we chirped at each other like two frantic birds until the department admin walked over to the doorway, smiled, and walked away, a clear gesture to let us know we were being too loud.
I was elated by our run-in, our conversation. His body, when he was standing in my door frame in his figure skater’s pose, seemed to beg for me to come and grab it around the middle. Did he do this with everyone—this sensual display of his corporeal beauty? “Your body was very flirtatious,” my college friend said to me when I called her crying after she left a bar without me and I was pushed in an alley and groped by an angry local. At the time, I remember thinking she was right. My body had been offering an invitation, if not a promise. Did Vladimir know that he was communicating with me? Did he think me to be younger than I was? Or did he find me attractive no matter? Was I actually, as my daughter’s drunken episode the previous night had suggested, so well-preserved that I was still mistakable for a student? But it couldn’t be. He was humoring me, this maternal woman, probably so outdated in her views and opinions, with lines in places I had yet to realize.
After work I picked up Sidney and she and I went to our favorite diner. It was one of the only boxcar diners left in our area, and the family who had taken it over in the nineties had mercifully left its menu alone, except for the occasional portobello-mushroom wrap sandwich posted on the specials. The parents had emigrated from Armenia and borne four daughters and a son, all of whom they homeschooled for religious purposes, all of whom were extremely attractive and reserved, all of whom worked at the restaurant. The daughter who sat us at our booth was chipper but blank, she called us “honey” incessantly but without any force or affection behind it, like she was a telemarketer reading a call script.
Sidney looked awful. Her eyes were bloodshot and her skin was a greenish-gray and there was a pimple on each side of her mouth. She ordered like she wanted to eat the world—everything fried and dripping with cheese and a milkshake. I ordered a Greek omelet, with a salad instead of potatoes and no toast.
“Don’t go too crazy, Mom.” Sidney rubbed her eyes hard, as though she was weary that I existed.
“What?”
“Would the potatoes kill you?”
“If you had the digestive system I have, you might argue yes.”
She dropped the subject with a wave of her hand, dismissing me. I didn’t mind. I was too happy that we were speaking again to let her annoyance feel like anything other than the feeble blows that daughters lob against their mothers to make sure they’ll still be loved, even at their most peevish.
I watched as Sid took the crayons that they kept on each table in a juice cup and flipped the paper place mat over to the kid’s menu side and began to color. It had been the same picture for nearly twenty years, a crowded jungle scene with tigers and snakes and baboons, and she always colored it the same way—blue tigers, green snakes, red baboons, yellow foliage.
I gradually dredged out the information that she had slept until noon, and then sat with John and watched The Deer Hunter. She and John shared a love for long seventies-era films with big character journeys that left them feeling cozily wrung out at the end. When she was in high school I would feel slightly left out to find them on a Sunday afternoon in the dark of the den watching Apocalypse Now, M*A*S*H, The Godfather Part I or II, drinking chocolate milk and eating bag after bag of butter-soaked microwave popcorn. I loved all those movies once, but they were so long, and I was so busy that even when I tried to sit and sink inside of them I kept popping up, remembering to water a plant or fold a load of laundry, until I was told by my husband and child that my fussing presence was not welcome.
The waitress served us big brown plastic cups of water. I pushed a cup toward Sidney, telling her she needed to hydrate, and she scowled and continued coloring. Gently, my breath calibrated to avoid annoying her, I put my finger on the place mat she was coloring, so that her crayon ran over my finger. She began coloring in a new spot and I put my finger there. I did it a few more times until her guarded grimness cracked a bit, and she grabbed my hand and colored my fingernail in mock fury.
I took her hand in both of mine and asked, “How long are you staying?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and started to cry.
“Can I sit next to you?” I asked her. In an effort to teach her about the independence of her own body, I had, from the time she was a small child, asked her whenever I wanted to kiss her or lift her up or give her a hug. My mother and sisters had put their hands all over me, I was their little pet to poke and prod at. I didn’t ever want Sidney to feel that way—to feel as though her body belonged to me, or to anyone.
She nodded and I slid next to her, holding her in my arms as she sobbed into my chest.
“Tell me what happened.” I smoothed the falling strands of hair away from her face. A different waitress daughter came and put Sidney’s milkshake down. I mouthed the word breakup and winked at her and her face drooped into a little puffy-lipped frown of sympathy.
Sidney told me about how Alexis, whom she had been in a relationship with for three years and living with for one, had, in the spring, broached the topic of having a baby. Alexis was thirty-five and had recently learned the term geriatric pregnancy, which made her want to start discussions about a plan, if not the plan itself. Sidney, in the meantime, was reeling from the news about her father, and from the shattering of her perception of her parents’ perfect love. She had always clung fast to images and beliefs and traditions. At ten she had been inordinately devastated by the news that Santa Claus didn’t exist. She felt as though she couldn’t possibly discuss the making of a new family while hers was crumbling to the ground.
Alexis, a self-described Urban Black Woman who was raised in Queens by a single mother, with a father who had long ago moved to Florida and become the head of a family that she had no place within, had little sympathy for her. “You were given everything,” she said to her. “They love you. They’re grown-up people. Let them live their lives.”
They were both lawyers. Alexis worked for a large firm at an average of sixty-five hours a week. It was drudgery, but very well remunerated. Every time I visited their lovely, high-ceilinged apartment I saw the evidence of reckless online-shopping benders piled in cardboard columns in the doorway. The money to buy the stuff without the time to even unwrap it. Sidney’s job was more rewarding but paid half as much with nearly as many hours. The last thing they wanted to do during their precious Saturday-night dinners or Sunday brunches was to talk about their problems. So, like the two only children they were, they retreated from the discussions, with the silent understanding between them that when things “calmed down,” they might see a therapist.
Two burly men came into the diner. One of them leered at Sidney and me, sitting on the same side of the booth. Did he think we were a couple? I met his eyes and held them until he turned and sat on a counter stool, his pants pulling down and his shirt pulling up to reveal a hairy plumber’s crack.
“What is it?” Sidney asked, sensing that my attention was elsewhere. I shook my head, and she continued:
“So at work there was a big case that came up for us, a lawsuit about wrongful termination, and I was given some support staff to help me. It was summer so I had this law student from NYU, and, well, she was very, um—”
She paused and drank her milkshake.
“Beautiful, very tall and, um, fun to be around and passionate and smart, and we were working very long hours—”
She trailed off.
“And somehow Alexis found out,” I finished for her.
“She had a summer Friday and was bringing dinner by for me as a surprise. There was nobody else in the office and we were—” She hesitated, and I held up my hand to let her know that she didn’t need to elaborate on any further details. She rubbed her eyes roughly, as if to wipe off the memory. “So we talked through it, and I said I would end it, and then our team won the case and went out for drinks and it happened again, and I was trying to be good so I told her, and she said, three strikes, you know, and then one night—this woman, you see, I couldn’t, it was like a spell, she was so beautiful and so tall and so—”
“Young?”
“No. No, she was my age. Before she went to law school she was an actress. A real one, commercials and Broadway. I don’t know. Being with her was like shooting something into my veins. I tried to resist, and then one night it was two in the morning and she texted me that she was at a bar outside our apartment and I just—left. Just hoped Alexis wouldn’t notice I was gone. But of course she did notice I was gone, she’s—I don’t know what I was thinking—I don’t think Alexis has slept through the night since middle school. So I ruined it. She’ll never take me back now.”
She rested her head in her palms again and sobbed. Our plates arrived and I moved back to my seat. I felt cold. Sid shoveled food into her face, hardly chewing, choking down her milkshake between bites.
“Now you’re judging me.”
“I like Alexis.”
“You of all people should not be judging me.”
“I might argue I am exactly the person who should be judging you. I’m your mother.”
“Look at what you and Dad did.”
“We had an understanding.”
“You had an understanding about him power raping women?”
She was loud, with an ugly, stretched look on her face. The man with the butt crack and his buddy looked over toward us with amused expressions. I was reminded of Dante’s Inferno, when Virgil rebukes Dante for watching two souls argue with each other, telling him it is wrong to ogle two beings who are embroiled in their own suffering. I told her to quiet down. She looked at me like she wished me dead, though when she next spoke, her voice was lowered.
“How could you not be sympathetic to me?”
“Of course I’m sympathetic to you.”
“I messed up. She should give me another chance.”
“She might.”
“We were going to go all the way.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You know, all the way. A kid, a house. A life.”
“But it seems like you didn’t want that.”
“I just wanted time.”
“It seems to me like you wanted to act in some way—to sabotage it. Because you weren’t ready.”
“Never mind.”
She slammed her cup onto the table and got up as if to leave. I asked her where she expected to go. She sat back down and asked me not to psychoanalyze her, that she needed a listener. I apologized, blamed my upbringing, and sat quietly until I saw her posture soften.
“Are you taking the week off work?” I asked her tentatively.
“No, that’s another thing.” After all her adolescent histrionics, her face took on the fatigue of a grown-up person, and I finally could imagine her sitting at a desk and being trusted with a task.
“You got fired?”
“No, I didn’t get fired,” she snapped. “But Charlie—”
“The other woman?” I clarified.
“She got a job there. I mean, of course she did, she’s brilliant. I asked to take leave. I think I have to find something else. It’s going to be too complicated, and Alexis will never take me back if she’s working there.”
“You love your job.”
“I can get another job I love. I think. If I don’t expect to get paid well for it.”
“This woman ruined your life.”
“It’s not her fault. Or it is, I don’t know. But it’s not like I can prevent her from getting hired. My ass would get sued every way but straight.” Every way but straight—one of John’s phrases. Sid laughed. She loved the old Texan/Midwestern expressions John and I traded. She used them to contrast with the rest of her overeducated liberalese. In high school she was fascinated when she learned that Bob Dylan lyrics were cited by judges to elaborate on obscure laws in court filings. The folksiness blended with the officiousness delighted her. More than doing good, and to my great pride, she was a do-gooder, far more than her father or I were or would ever be, she loved the language and jargon of the law. She loved the way phrases could become solid, and then could have their solidity stripped from them, all by interpretation, all by language, language, and more language. Fighting with words, she would call it when she participated in Lincoln-Douglas debates in high school. She was so awkward then, so homely and horse-ish, with bad makeup, poorly fitting clothes, and a sawing, toneless laugh. But when she stepped onto the debate stage her tongue was loose and her mind was quick and precise. She could find and dissect holes in the arguments of her competitors nearly instantaneously. It was when I saw her there at that podium that I knew, despite everything, despite all my weakness and guilt, that she had something in her she could use to take care of herself.
I, of course, was thrilled when she told me she was dating a woman. What a relief, I thought, to free oneself from the heterosexual prison. Straightness: the predictable container in which all possible outcomes seemed already etched into stone—happiness, unhappiness, complacency, strife—a life in which we were all operating inside of a story already told, even as we sought to live an authentic existence. Even as we tried to say to ourselves that it wasn’t who we mated with but the quality of the thoughts in our brain that made us radical, we knew that the patterns of our life were the patterns of our parents, were the patterns of all the dim, sorrel-chomping sheep living unexamined existences in all the homes all over this thoughtless, anti-intellectual country. We knew that the stuff of our lives was the stuff of normalcy, and how normalcy and its trappings and expectations were always there. There would always be couple friends who were a bit more square than you, who you would have to play some hetero game with. There would always be family who would ask the women to do the dishes while the men played chess. How fortunate for her, I thought, to be able to evade all that. She told us she was queer, attracted to men still, and that she would appreciate if we didn’t label her one way or another. She was Sid. Fine, fine, fine. As long as whatever she chose, she wouldn’t have to take on the identity of the anxious woman who got dinner on the table while the men sat on the porch. As long as she didn’t have to act the part of the schoolmarm to a good-natured rascal of a partner who did whatever he liked and was loved more because of it. And if she did choose to cook or clean or worry, at least she could maybe do all those things for a woman who understood, not a man who, by virtue of being born with a thing between his legs, had absorbed from an early age that it was all right to sit back and enjoy being served.
“How are you, Mom?”
She swung her attention to me abruptly. It was clear from the question that she had something to say about how I was, or how she thought I should be. Immediately I felt my face lengthen, my eyebrows lift and a frown form at the sides of my mouth.
“Fine,” I told her. I caught the eye of one of the Armenian daughters—she made a questioning gesture about the check and I nodded. “Let’s go on a walk. You should get some outside time today—you’ll feel better tomorrow.” Sid acquiesced. It was a joke in the family that I thought everything could be solved by exercise and fresh air, but over the years I had gotten Sid to share my view—she ran cross-country in high school after I told her she needed a sport for college and ran the marathon a couple of years ago. I could tell she was doing well when she spoke of running. She was compulsive, she needed replacements. When she wasn’t running she was probably drinking too much, or screwing too many interns, apparently.
I was leaving the tip when her eyes caught the remnants left on my plate.
“You didn’t eat your omelet.”
“I ate half of it.”
“You look thin.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t mean it as a compliment.”
“I’m not hungry.” Panic bumped up against the edge of my voice.
“You need to take care of—”
“Sidney, let’s go. I’m old. My metabolism is so slow. You eat less when you’re old, it’s just a fact. You need less. You want to talk? Let’s GO.”
And once again, the bumpkin at the counter, shirt riding up and pants riding down, his face greasy from his burger, with little white shreds of napkin stuck in the stubble of his mustache, looked over at us. He smirked or smiled, I couldn’t tell which. I gestured for Sid to go ahead of me and she walked out of the diner. He watched her pass, looking ostentatiously at her rear as she exited. A power move, performed to assert himself and to warn me. The look was to let me know that no matter how androgynous she may come across, he could still find a hole to stick his dick in if he so chose. As I mentioned, it was an old boxcar diner, and so the exit was extremely narrow. I spent some time pretending to count change in the plastic check tray, then after Sid had fully exited I took an unused straw from our table and, as I squeezed past the man, took the opportunity to plant it directly in the exposed darkened crevice between his left and right buttocks, so it stuck out from his flesh like an erect tail.