WE RETURNED TO Brooklyn after almost five years in Canada. Neil was on sabbatical, a leave he’d extended with the help of a visiting-professor position at Princeton. Though I was closer to my past in New York, and to my parents, I felt most at home in this city, the place that first gave me a glimpse of independence when I was a teenager and bought my train ticket away from Rockville Centre and smoked a cigarette on the platform, ascending the Penn Station escalator an hour later.
We rented the second floor of a house in East Williamsburg with a small community garden down the street, across from a Catholic church and school, and another couple of blocks away, a park with a playground and small dog run. The L train stop was right around the corner. Flowers managed to thrive in gated boxes on the sidewalk; garbage gently blew with the breeze, like dandelion seeds.
I began looking back at my childhood with a sense of remove, as if screening a Super 8 movie. Slightly out-of-focus sepia images flashed of birthday parties and car trips and watching my brothers’ baseball games from the bleachers, and the bad days, too, the angry voices and raised hands. That was my life then. I came to accept it, all of it. But accepting it didn’t mean I’d see them. The distance enabled me to reinvent myself, learn new ways of living, become the sort of mother I dreamed of being.
* * *
My parents used to say they wished for me a difficult child; they hoped I’d have a child like me. And Lucien is just like me. He’s creative and passionate and sensitive and strong-willed. Almost always we’re easy together. We start and end the day by snuggling in one of our beds. We read we play we discuss we walk we eat we hug we laugh. Some days, when I get frustrated, when I want him to listen and just do what I say without so many questions, I hear myself growing sharper and less patient. “Why are you being stern?” Lucien asks. As I close my eyes and breathe deep and struggle to regain my equilibrium, I can’t help but think about my father, and in those moments I find myself understanding how he let his anger fly. It’s easier to yell than to stop and breathe. And while I can’t imagine ever laying hands on my child, no matter what, I recognize the frustration and exhaustion and impatience and even anger, the close relatives of rage, that sometimes stir within me.
* * *
On an early-winter day twenty years after college graduation, I boarded the train from Grand Central to Poughkeepsie, listening to Billy Joel’s Summer, Highland Falls on repeat, and checked in at the Vassar Alumnae House. Walking around campus, I noticed, mostly, how incredibly close to one another all the buildings were. We only had to roll out of bed to be fed and educated and entertained. It was all there, handed to us. How very young we were, how beautifully innocent. (Never mind how we imagined ourselves worldly and jaded.) How privileged. Despite their problems, my parents had offered me a better life than they had.
Franny and I had a terrible, irreversible argument one Christmas in London several weeks after my miscarriage, when I needed her and felt she wasn’t there for me. Wrong or right, that’s the break I regret, the one it seems there’s no turning back from. All these years later and I’ve never run into her on a city street, never had the chance to place my son in her arms. To this day, I dream about her. I picture the two of us together, back at school and young again. We’re on a walk to the Vassar farm, studying at the library, or laughing in our dorm room. How fortunate I was to have those years with Franny. I ask about her when I stumble across a mutual acquaintance. Every year or two, I allow myself to check her Facebook page for clues to her life, though I don’t dare send a friend request. For a while she lived in the Yucatán and worked at an animal shelter, saving street dogs. She made art. Nowadays Franny and her artist husband live in upstate New York with their son. He’s just a couple of years younger than Lucien. How I long to pick up the phone, to send a letter, to show up on her doorstep. (Oh, to have our boys meet and play.) But I know I won’t. I’ve decided not to intrude, to let Franny go as my parents have let me go, to say a final and lasting goodbye. I know I’ll never have a friend like that again.
* * *
I’ve been back to Rockville Centre a couple of times, my heart pounding and my nerves firing like mad the whole way, even though my parents have long since moved. A few years ago, I went to a high school reunion, and once Neil and Lucien and I visited my childhood friend Karen and her husband and children when they were staying with Karen’s parents. Lots of my classmates live in or near town, but not my friends. We were the drama kids and the freaks and the nerds and assorted outcasts and rebels who wanted to get away and did.
Sometimes I bring Lucien to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and afterward we go to Bloomingdale’s for frozen yogurt. This, the same Manhattan store where my mother used to take me shopping on special occasions. The lingerie department where she bought her bras and underwear sits on the same floor as the café. When I was pregnant, I went there all the time for the chocolate frozen yogurt, and maybe for something more.
* * *
We were at our kitchen table in Brooklyn, eating oatmeal with honey and banana slices.
“Mommy, do you have a mommy?” Lucien, then five, got up the nerve to ask me again. “Where is your mommy? Who is your mommy’s mommy?”
I answered the best I could. Honestly, breezily. Maybe that alone was a lie. “My grandmother’s name was Kay. She died years ago. My mother lives part-time in Queens and part-time in Florida.”
Lucien said he wanted to meet them.
“Not all mommies and daddies are nice, babe,” I explained, an oversimplification that I hoped would satisfy him. “Most are, almost always. But sometimes, unfortunately, there are mean mommies and mean daddies. Like in Cinderella. Or Hansel and Gretel. That’s the kind I had. But now I have you and Daddy.”
The questions faded. Life resumed: the morning rush on the subway to school, afternoon pickups and playgrounds, library visits and trampoline class and chorus, bath time and stories and bedtime, Sundays in Prospect Park, a few summertime weeks in the country. I made plans with old and new friends and arranged playdates for Lucien and sat on park benches talking to the other moms and dads after school. I lingered when Neil and I hugged in the kitchen. I wanted Lucien to understand that we were a part of something and that we were loved.
Each year the questions returned with more sophistication, and I dared to tell him more of the truth, to allow him to see some of my sadness. He’d soak in the bathtub while Neil cooked, Lucien playing with pirate ships and swooshing around a striped washcloth and asking me question after question about my parents. I sat on the bath mat next to my beautiful boy, dispensing soap and fielding his inquiries, hoping to strike the right balance between tenderness and truth.
One thing. He knows how wrong it is to hit or call someone bad names. Another: He knows I have rules—wash your hands when you get home, clean your room, put your dishes in the sink, no video games, in bed reading long before lights out—but that I try not to ever yell. Lucien knows, of course, that no matter what, I would never leave him.
* * *
Sometimes I let myself think about what the estrangement must be like for my parents. For my mother, who has missed so much of her daughter’s life and has never met her grandchild. For my father, who, despite the good he did for me, has to be reminded daily of his long-ago mistakes. How horrific and unfair my decision must seem to them. How miserly and capricious and mean they must find me.
And yet. After all these years, I feel settled with my decision to remain estranged from my parents. I don’t crave a last-minute reunion, nor will I attempt a last-ditch effort at reconciliation before they die. The peace I make with my parents and brothers is a quiet, interior, personal one. Remembering my mother’s fingernails scratching my back, my father saying how proud he was of me. How my brothers protected me in their room during the fighting. How they once drove all the way from college in St. Louis to see me in a school play. The books my mother read to me under her sunflower-gold comforter, the drives my father took me on. The way he’d caress my cheek with the back of his hand. When Lucien is older, I’ll tell him about those times, too.
* * *
When Lucien was seven, we moved one last time, to Maine. We traded in our cozy but cramped rental apartment in Brooklyn and bought an infinitely more affordable nineteenth-century farmhouse in town. A house with a barn and a shaded porch and a wooden swing tied to a pine tree in a picture-postcard backyard, close to the liberal arts college where Neil would chair the sociology department. I would have a room of my own to write in, and Lucien would get to grow up a nature boy. Until our move-in day, we’d stay at a small summer cottage we’d rented in the woods, a ten-minute walk through the forest to a private dock on the lake.
When we arrived at the cabin after stopping to see friends along the way that weekend in Connecticut and Boston, it was hot and late. Neil said he’d get dinner started. Lucien and I put on bathing suits and bug spray and ran down to the water with Salem right behind us. The lake was cool and too beautiful and calm not to jump in. Lucien stripped down and skinny-dipped by the dock. Salem made her runs between forest woods and dusky water and back. Lucien and I swam together, laughing, submerged to our shoulders. Soon it would be bedtime, and we had dinner to eat and teeth to brush and faces to wash and books to read, but we stayed in the water as the sun went down. We floated on our blue dollar-store noodles arranged like personal boats supporting our arms and knees and backs, feeling safe and happy and free.