Summer 1985
CHANGE SEEMS TO HAVE A way of sneaking up from behind. You might get what you were looking for, only to find it’s not exactly what you want. I wanted freedom. I wanted to be an explorer, someone uncompromising and very brave. I wanted to engage with the world on my own terms. I wanted to leave everyone else behind.
I’m nearly fifty. Half a century. It’s not that old. Even so, I have a hard time remembering that I still have responsibilities. I run a used bookstore in Fairfax. I pay rent for the top half of a small, funky house on a hillside above the town. I am treasurer of the local chapter of NOW. I date a man named Lloyd a couple of times a week. I am Min’s mother.
Always that. Especially that. She will be twenty-two in October. She has been an adult for several years now. She is everything I wished to be. Yet increasingly I worry that I wasn’t a good mother. Certainly nothing I’ve done turned out the way I originally thought it would. Have I been too hard on her? Have I given her the guidance she needs? Did I love her enough? Too much? Could I have done better?
I never thought much about marriage and family life when I was a child and making plans for the future. Or, rather, I studiously ignored them. Now it seems that Min will probably never have her own children, even adopted ones. She’s young, but she has shown no sign of attachment to anyone, besides me and Laura. I try to let her find her own way. I try to be the parent I never had. But I want to tell her not to turn away from the unexpected. Maybe she’ll have to make compromises, risk being wrong. I want her to succeed where I failed. About my own life, I can’t stop feeling—I don’t know why—regret.
These days I wake up early. I don’t mind. I reach for my glasses and lean back to watch the world take on color outside my windows. I like the way the long gray-green leaves of the eucalyptus trees lean and flutter in the wind or hold still in the first grip of sunshine. I feel okay in the morning, when I haven’t woken up from nightmares. No headaches yet, no upset stomach. There are reasons I feel old.
I’ve begun to dream about Laura. I dream I’m looking for something I’ve misplaced, and I search everywhere. Sometimes I’m in my apartment, sometimes in the house in Mill Valley that Jonathan and Min and I lived in, sometimes in my parents’ house in Rhinebeck. I search with the growing panic that I used to feel when I was married, knowing something was wrong and having no idea how to fix it. If I am aware in the dream of what I’m looking for, I always forget when I wake up. When I’ve turned everything upside down and I can’t think where else to look, I turn around to find Laura standing beside me, waiting for me to recognize her. In the dream she turns out to be my daughter, the daughter I had forgotten about until now. We have a tearful reunion, full of long, fierce hugs. I am filled with relief, and more than that, joy that my family is complete at last. Then I wake up. After the first moments of disappointment that it isn’t true, I am appalled. In the dreams Min doesn’t exist.
I love my daughter. I know it makes no difference to me that Min is adopted. I know Min is my child. I have had to prove it time and again. When Min and Laura were children and the three of us would go out together, it was Laura that strangers assumed was my daughter, even though she looked nothing like me. My hair is dark, much closer to Min’s black hair than Laura’s straw blonde. Mine is curly, theirs is straight. Laura didn’t resemble me in the least. And Min already shared some of my mannerisms; we were becoming more alike as each year passed. What was wrong with those people that they couldn’t see that? And when I corrected them, how dare they answer with, “Well, you can see how I’d make that mistake.”
I know who my daughter is. I dread these dreams in which she has no part. I wake up sweating, asking myself, Why can’t I remember? What was the thing I was looking for that I lost?
This morning the same thing happens. I wake up disappointed that it was only a dream, that my joy isn’t real. And then I feel guilty, and my sweat turns cold. I am an unworthy mother.
I throw off the down comforter and dress quickly. The sun is peeking over the hill when I slide the glass door closed and hurry down the deck stairs to where the Rabbit is parked on the side of the narrow road. The car starts on the third try. I drive into town, where everything is quiet, and pull onto Sir Francis Drake toward Point Reyes. I want to get to the beach before anyone else arrives.
My driving is automatic, instinctive, even on the steep, winding roads. I don’t want to think. When I arrive, I slip off my Birkenstocks, reach for my sweatshirt on the back seat, lock the car, and follow the path down to the beach. There’s someone with his dog much farther down, taking a morning jog. I keep walking, straight to the water. It’s numbingly cold, and I feel the shock to my skin and then relief, the way I do putting ice on a sprained ankle. I stand letting the water lap at my feet. The wet sand buries my toes. I watch the waves build and break and roll back into the sea. I listen to their roar and hiss. I wonder if they would take me with them, or would they only spit me back out.
I remember the beach of my earliest memories, on Long Island where my parents used to bring Robert and me in the summer, before Andy and Susie were born. I remember holding my mother’s hand as I considered the height of the waves, and I remember being afraid.
I look down the beach at the distant cliffs, their craggy faces unmoved by the smash of the sea. I realize, surprised, that this is the beach Andy and I walked on the last evening of his visit. I haven’t been here since. We walked on this beach, and we fought. I couldn’t forgive him for refusing to accept Min as my daughter. And then he died, in Maine, drowned by the sea.
Goddamn you, Andy, you’re wrong. Min is not a foreigner, not someone on loan for a while. She is more my family than anyone. Why won’t you see it?
I am so tired. I stand, staring out, feeling as numb as my feet in the ocean. If he were alive, he would be in his mid-forties. What kind of person would he have become? I can’t imagine him. My memories of him seem dusty, put away. I rarely think of him. He’s been gone too long.
I am mesmerized by the ocean, the way I am by flames in a fireplace. The waves roar and they whisper. They rush toward me, tumbling over themselves, and they slip away. I shudder. Then I remember what day it is. Andy died twenty-one years ago today.
It’s almost as long as he was alive.
The next morning I sleep late. As far as I know, I didn’t dream at all. I feel well-rested. I lie in bed for awhile, then drive into town to do my laundry, reading the Chronicle and sipping take-out coffee on a bench outside while I wait. When I return, Min and Laura have already arrived, tracking sand into my three small rooms and spilling stones and shells from their pockets onto the kitchen table. They sit together exactly as they did in fifth grade, when they first discovered each other, arranging their bits of the sea into swirling designs, calling me in to look when they are done. A month ago they discovered a cache of sand dollars washed up onto the beach. They harvested the ones that were still intact and came to show me, bearing dozens of them in the lap of their shirts as offerings. I saw how bright their faces were with the adventure of it, as though no one but the two of them had ever had such luck. At the time I thought they were breathless from the wind, giddy from the sun and salt air. It’s been so long since the mere presence of another person moved me, lifting me up.
I make apple pancakes. The three of us sit on wobbly plastic chairs out on the deck, our plates in our laps. I’m not very hungry, so I watch as they dig in. Min has piled extra dollops of stewed apples on top of her pancakes, then drenched it all with maple syrup. She chews slowly, with her eyes closed. Laura eats hunched over her plate, as though hoarding treasure. As always, her long, sun-lightened hair obscures her face, until she sweeps it behind her ear with her hand. It stays tucked there for a moment, then falls forward again. I can’t help smiling, watching her. The sun warms my shoulders. The neighbors’ cat slips through the fence to prowl through the tall grass in the garden below. I sip black coffee, content.
All summer, watching the two girls together, I have seen their pondering gazes when the other is turned away, how near they stand together; I have heard the edge of excitement behind every word they speak. Their long friendship has broken open, and something new is spilling out. When they visit me, they talk between themselves incessantly, leaning into each other. Or, as they used to do before Min became a lesbian and Laura went to college, they flop down, one’s head in the other’s lap, sprawling happily on my living room couch. I am sure they don’t have a sexual relationship. Min would never compromise their friendship. And Laura, from everything she has told me, loves men. This is instead a summer of held breath, a season of suspense. I’m relieved, actually, that Min is carrying on this harmless flirtation rather than jumping into bed with some woman she might meet at the dance clubs Laura says they’ve been going to. Sitting in my faded armchair by the window in the living room, or out here on the deck underneath the sun, my eyes keep returning to the girls, to the crackling of energy between them even when they’re not touching. They are a vortex, a black hole, a light pulling in every nearby moth.
I remember what it’s like. I never felt that excitement with another girl, but with boys—with Jonathan—I remember. I felt alive then, vigorous and powerful and full of my own daring. I think it’s different when you’re young, no matter how much experience you’ve had: the world is still an unfamiliar place. You discover your own allure with almost everyone you meet. Even repetition has its nuances, its exquisite variations. By the time you’re middle-aged, like me, those encounters tend to be dismaying. They lose their intensity, and you discover that can be a relief. Hope for the future takes too much out of you.
Min slumps in her chair, sliding her bottom forward and stretching out her legs. She rests her empty plate on her stomach.
“Mom, before I forget, it turns out I’m not going to be able to give you your massage for a few weeks. Laura and I are driving her friend’s car across the country.”
I am so unprepared for this that I assume at first she’s joking. It’s not at all funny. I blink. She can’t go. I am used to having her nearby, within reach on the phone, a mere hour’s drive away. But I see from her face that she is serious. She thinks nothing of going off with Laura and leaving me alone.
My heart has started thumping fast, the way it does when I am afraid. I sip my coffee. My hand shakes. “Thanks for giving me advance warning,” I say.
Min frowns and looks away.
Laura says, “We didn’t know ourselves until a couple of days ago. It’s a fluke kind of thing. A friend of mine from Kenyon drove out here and got food poisoning, and someone has to drive her car back.”
“What about your roommate?” I ask Min.
“His name’s Henry, Mom. You never remember.” She glares at me, then says, “He wants me to send postcards.”
“What about your clients?” I’m having difficulty adjusting to her news. How can it be so easy to pick up and leave her life, everyone in it?
“I’m letting them know. Mom, the only times I’ve ever been out of California were when we visited your parents in Poughkeepsie. I was a kid then.”
“It wasn’t Poughkeepsie, it was Rhinebeck.”
“Okay, Rhinebeck, who fucking cares? You—”
“I do, Min,” I snap back, “and don’t use that language around me.”
“Shit, you sound like some throwback to the fifties. I’m going on a trip across the country. You could at least be excited for me.”
Laura is watching us, bewildered. I try to take a breath from the bottom of my diaphragm, the way Min has shown me during the massages. It’s an effort. “I am excited for you, Min. I am. It’s just sudden.” My stomach isn’t feeling so great. I lean back, stretching out the way she has. The chair threatens to fall over backwards, so I give up.
In the air in front of me I see a speeding car veer off a highway and jolt into a ditch, rolling over and over. The vision is so real I wonder if it is a premonition. It fills me with pure, ice-cold fear. “What if you have an accident?” I demand of Min. “What if you lose control of the car and crash?” I can see the wreckage of the car strewn across the empty highway, fields of wheat like ocean waves stretching into the distance. I can picture clearly two bodies trapped inside the overturned car, crushed and bleeding. I shudder. “Don’t go, Min. For my sake, please don’t go.”
“Mom, we’re not going to have an accident. We’re going to have fun.”
Min is wearing overalls with the cuffs rolled up to below her knees, and a nondescript pullover shirt she probably found in a thrift store. Her hair’s too short: it sticks up from the top of her head and bristles at the back of her neck. With so little hair, Min’s face looks narrower than I think of it. Her eyebrows seem thicker, her cheekbones more prominent. She’s pretty, my daughter, though unfortunately I can’t take any credit for that. I focus on Min’s face, committing it to memory. I want to be prepared. “You’ve never been far away from me before. I’m afraid for you, Min. I’m afraid you won’t come back.”
She stares at me. Out of the corner of my eye I see Laura shift uncomfortably. Min says, “Mom, I don’t think this is about me. I don’t know what it is, but it’s too intense to be about me.”
I shake my head. “Yes, it is, Min.” I want her to understand, even though I’m not sure I do. “I promise you, it is.”
Instead of answering, Min leans forward, propelling herself to her feet. “Do you want more?” she asks Laura. She stands holding her own plate, all her weight on one hip, her palm out. How can I know what another mother would do? I don’t want to let her go. She takes Laura’s plate and leaves us, sliding the screen door wider open with her sneaker.
I force my gaze away from the door. I look around the deck, thinking I should cut back the wisteria. The lavender needs watering too.
“Catherine,” Laura says, “I’d love to meet Lloyd one of these days. How about inviting him over sometime when we’re here?”
“Lloyd?” I have no idea why she is asking. “What have I ever said about him?”
“Not very much,” Laura admits. “Min talks about him sometimes. The long-haired animal doctor. She’s curious.”
“Otherwise known as a vet. I used to work for him. What’s she curious about, whether we’re having a relationship?”
Laura pushes her hair behind her ears again, then sweeps it all back and piles it on top of her head, holding it there for my assessment. It makes her look older, but I don’t like it as a hairstyle. I scrunch up my face and shake my head, and she grins and lets it fall past her shoulders. “No, Min knows you have sex with him. I mean . . . you know, she figured . . .” She stops, her face turning a slow vermillion.
I raise my hand, waving her uncertainty away. “It’s okay, she happens to be right.”
Laura looks relieved. She nods slightly, contemplating me while pretending not to. It’s one of those moments I’ve become more frequently aware of, when two people are having a conversation but what they’re noticing as they listen to each other is something very different. I think Laura is trying to imagine me as a sexual person. I bite my lip, wanting to smile. Her best friend’s mother. After my divorce from Jonathan, she met only one of the handful of men I’ve dated, and I’m sure he didn’t inspire fantasies of torrid sex.
“Anything else you want to know?” I ask. It’s a beautiful day, and she’s so easy to be with.
“Yeah, there is. Do you think he might be the love of your life?”
She’s so earnest, it’s a little painful. I remember some of the boys she has confided in me about. My old therapist would say she needs to work through her pattern of choosing selfish men. But does she really believe everyone will find Mr. Right? “I don’t think I’m going to have a love of my life,” I tell her gently, but I can see from the way her eyebrows pull together that it’s not what she wants to hear.
“Well, what about Jonathan?”
I can’t lie to her. “Jonathan and I were very compatible for a while, but that’s a different thing. At least it is in my experience.”
“Maybe you’ve already met the love of your life,” Laura says. “Maybe you’re just not letting him in.”
I hear the scrape of the screen door sliding shut. Min returns with their full plates. Laura smiles up at Min, and her hand brushes Min’s as if by accident. Min grins back. What does the love of your life mean, exactly? Perhaps it’s simply the person in your life you end up loving the most. If so, she’s right here, sitting down cross-legged, wedging her sneakers between the arms of her chair. And for Laura?
“So when are we going to meet Lloyd?” Laura asks me, cutting up her stack of pancakes.
I turn to contemplate the garden with its overgrown hydrangea bushes, the lantana and jade plants running wild, the unpruned lemon tree in the corner by the fence. I’ve been meaning to do something about the garden. Somehow I never get around to it. Instead I sit on the deck, dragging my chair around to where the sun is and reading the books I take home from the bookstore. I get up when my coffee cup needs refilling or the light fades. I can see that the garden was well-tended once; someone put a lot of work into choosing these bushes, these flowers, nourishing them as they grew. Even now, left alone, the plants thrive in their straggly way.
What I am witnessing is simple: the girls are courting each other, after so long a time apart. They are once again getting used to being central in each other’s lives. They are re-establishing their roles as best friends. There were times when Laura was at college that I felt I was the bridge between them, reporting to my daughter the news from Laura’s letters, writing back to Laura when I had lunch in the city with Min, keeping their interest up. I have no doubt that nothing will come of this flirtation. They are merely infatuated again, as they were when they first met in elementary school, many years ago now.
There is something else. I don’t want them to bring sex into my house as casually as they spill the shells they find on the beach. Min thinks the way I feel about sex is old-fashioned. I think it’s a private thing, clearly bounded. I don’t flaunt my relationship, such as it is, with Lloyd. I don’t have him here the mornings they arrive for brunch, or when Min comes to give me my massage. She has only met him twice, both times in town: once he was outside the animal hospital crouching on the pavement in front of a Doberman, its head between his hands; the other time he was coming out of the Good Earth, grocery bags in his arms. Even if his hands had been free, he wouldn’t have touched me then, asserting his claim on me.
I can’t imagine Lloyd sitting here with the three of us. But I answer Laura, “Whenever you like. He wants to meet you. Both of you,” I add, but when I look at her, Min is savoring her pancakes, chewing slowly, eyes closed.
It was Jonathan who first noticed the sheen of buried sensuality on the girls’ friendship, when they were in sixth or seventh grade. “Don’t you think Min and her friend Laura are a little in love with each other?” he asked one night as we lay in bed, not touching but still talking, like kids in separate bunk beds at sleepaway camp, or like my child and her friend in the room down the hall. “The way they get giggly, and look at each other, and the cryptic references they make,” he added. “As though they’re trying to impress each other.”
I lay staring at the rain trickling down the skylight above our bed, listening to its rataplan on our roof. I thought about what he had said, but by then I was having trouble trusting that what he said was what he meant. Or rather, I had become uncertain of my own ability to translate his meaning. “I don’t know,” I said, “I think that’s normal for children their age.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t normal, Catherine, I was merely remarking on it.” His voice came from somewhere beside me, as if not attached to a person at all. Did he think it was normal? Why was he paying so much attention to the two girls? What was he trying to tell me about us? I turned my head and looked at the cardboard Calder mobile revolving over the door. I watched the shadowy silhouette of a triangle with rounded corners as it waned to a thin line and waxed to two dimensions again.
“Neither of them has a lot of friends,” I said after a moment. “I like Laura. I’m glad they found each other.”
“So am I.” His voice had a plaintiveness to it, as though he was hurt and trying to cover it up. I felt sorry then and wanted to reach out to touch him, but the space between us felt too vast. “That’s all I meant to say,” he added.
“You could have just said it.”
“There are different ways of communicating things, Catherine. Language is a versatile tool. It can convey many layers of meaning while appearing to be one thing, or it can put forth one very fundamental idea while appearing to be complex. I was trying to explore the quality of their friendship, not dissect it.”
I was silent. I didn’t believe him. Jonathan called language a tool, but he used it like a weapon. I had once loved that very intelligent and agile quality about him. We were still at a point of trying to understand what was going wrong with us, and I thought there must be clear rules that we could follow. Jonathan didn’t see it that way. I had grown tired of trying to pin him down.
Min opens her eyes, puts down her fork. “So, Mom, about this trip. Henry’s moving in with his girlfriend and I can’t look for a roommate until I get back. Could you help me cover the rent until I find someone?”
I wish she hadn’t brought up the trip again. My fear is there on the edge of my consciousness, hovering. I feel as though at any moment I might startle us all by losing control of myself. Fleetingly, I wonder if she’ll choose an Asian roommate again. “Min, I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of extra money right now. When will you get back?”
She shrugs. “Whenever. We’ll see how long the drive takes.”
“My friend Nancy wants the car back in Washington as soon as possible,” Laura adds.
“Well,” I say, knowing I’m stating the obvious, “the sooner you get back, the sooner you can find a roommate. But while you’re there, why don’t you look up your aunt Susie? She lives in DC now. I know she’d love to see you.”
“Mom, I don’t know her.” Min and Laura exchange a look.
“You don’t remember her from the time we visited in 1968?”
“No.”
The panic is getting worse. “Min, would you at least call me at regular intervals on this trip?”
She lowers her head, spears the last bit of pancake, but she doesn’t eat it right away.
“I will,” Laura says. Min looks up at her, frowning. “If you don’t want to,” she adds.
“I’ve got to check in at the store,” I say, glancing at my watch without reading it. “Don’t forget your pebbles, they’re still on the kitchen table.”
After the girls leave, I pile the dishes in the sink and gather my keys and purse. Last winter I hired a high school student, a young man named Mark, to unpack and shelve boxes of books from estate auctions and to mind the store for a few hours in the afternoons and all day on Saturdays. Most weekends I go in anyway. I like talking to my customers, and I like handling all those secondhand books, dog-eared and well-worn as they are.
By the time I’m out on the deck again, I realize I am thinking about Min. She has been my daughter for more than twenty-one years. In all that time I have been truly afraid of losing her only once, when I discovered her with that woman in my living room in Mill Valley. For a day and a half I was terrified she would disappear from my life altogether, that her anger would make her think she didn’t care, or that I didn’t. More than anything, I want to never allow that to happen again.
At the bottom of the stairs, I lean against the fence and look at the garden. It’s not much, just some overgrown bushes gone wild in a yard. But I want it to be beautiful some day. Laura sees this. She has offered more than once to help me weed and trim. Min couldn’t care less. “Mom, it’s fine the way it is,” she told me the last time she and Laura were here, when we ventured outside after a rain shower. She leaned over a tangled bush of wild roses, burying her face in their blossoms and breathing in to make her point. She straightened up, a fluid rolling motion like an unfurling, something she learned to do at massage school. “Actually, it’s gorgeous,” she added, her face wet from the rain. Then she opened her eyes.
But I want to impose order. I look at those roses, at the creeping vines and shaggy bushes, and know it can be my hand that shapes them. I want the edges to be neat, the design to be clear. I want to know that their particular beauty, their exuberant flowering, the direction of their growth, are all due to me. But I don’t have the energy to start.
Two or three times, while I’ve been in the garden calculating the work I know lies ahead, Laura has come to stand by my side and survey the wreckage with me. She has told me what she envisions. I’ve listened quietly, taking it in. I find Laura’s presence comforting. I have never felt this way about Min. Min has been a blessing in my life. She has been the object of my fiercest love, my deepest joy. She can be perceptive, sensitive, gentle, and rather brutally honest, but she has never been reassuring. She is someone to rely on, yes, but not to rest with. Even when she massages me, patiently rubbing my neck, my temples to help my headaches, I can never fully give myself into her hands. Maybe that’s normal. At least I try to believe it is. Maybe a mother must always be alert, keeping an eye out, even when her daughter is almost twenty-two.
The garden will have to wait for another day.