three

In our kitchen, my mother looks up deviled eggs in The Art of Simple Food.

“Stuffed eggs,” she says with her finger on the recipe index. “Stuffed eggs.”

She rubs the grease off the side of her nose, a sign of worry.

I know them well, the signs. Driving with both hands on the wheel, buying a new plant at the nursery, eating chips out of a pretty ceramic bowl, loading the dishwasher before we’ve finished dessert, dog-earing furniture catalogues, looking up a recipe she’s made a hundred times. My mother is a coping machine. And despite her efforts to keep it together, my job is to try and pull her apart like a pack of frozen chicken breasts. I used to justify it as a way of reminding my mother she was human, but now it feels like I’m pounding her just because I can.

“Miriam. Come here.”

She turns the faucet on with her wrists, to wash off any raw egg, and instructs me to sit down on one of the mismatched chairs around our kitchen table. I choose the yellow one with the teetering leg.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“So?”

“So.”

“What happened?” she says.

The controlled tone would be scary if I didn’t know this technique. It feels familiar and safe. I sink back to my role in our game.

“I was late.”

She’s using a needle to poke one hole on the bottom of each eggshell. She waits until she’s finished to look up. Good. She’s going to play.

“Why were you late?” she says.

“I kind of got lost.”

“On the Mall?”

“Yes.”

A variety of herbs are laid out on a clear cutting board: basil, parsley, chives. They come from little pots on the kitchen windowsill. It’s usually my job to pick them. When I was a kid, if I gave her the wrong one, Mom would put it in my pocket so I could smell it all day until I knew the difference between cilantro and parsley, lavender and rosemary. I was also a sort of prodigy in the produce section. More than once, I remember sticking my face in a green plastic bag and, with great confidence, declaring the name of an obscure vegetable.

“Adam said you were sick,” she says.

She rolls the basil up into little green cigarettes, preparing to slice them and let the magic out of the leaves. Once I got old enough to use a knife, that was my favorite part. I teeter back and forth on the yellow chair’s lame leg. Adam must’ve called her after the bus.

“Adam doesn’t know.”

“Doesn’t know what?”

“Doesn’t know anything.”

“Doesn’t know anything?”

“Doesn’t know why.”

“Why what?”

“Why I was late.”

“You said you got lost.”

“Yes.”

The timer rings eight minutes, and she dips a slotted spoon in the pot, fishes out an egg, and drops it carefully in a bowl of cold water. Six times.

“He was worried,” she says.

“I know. He worries.”

“So, were you sick or were you lost?”

Normally, before Elliot, this is when I would give up and remember my mother’s heart is painfully accurate, most of the time. And I would join her at the sink, help peel the eggs and drop my guns. I would tell her what happened, how I’m feeling, who said what at school and why they shouldn’t have, and how we read this great story and someone made a stupid comment, and I can’t wait to get out of high school etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And she would nod and laugh her deep strong laugh and remind me that everyone is different, Miriam, but we all deserve the same respect. But I would know, instinctively, what that actually means: that she thinks I’m smarter than everyone else, and so I should oblige.

Before Elliot, this is when I would spill.

Today I can’t. Today I keep quiet about the carousel and Picasso and Paloma, because this feels like my problem, like it’s more than what she could possibly understand. Something separates her life from mine. Maybe this is what happens after you fall in love.

When you start out, if you’re lucky, your parents are the closest thing you have to yourself. They’re your safe spot, your personal believers. Then, if you’re lucky again, you meet a guy who makes you feel like you might be different than what you imagined, more … like everything in your body has a purpose and that purpose comes to life when he’s around. Only when he’s around.

All of a sudden, he’s the only one in the entire world who knows you, so nothing is ever the same. You come home, and your parents kiss you in that spot on your head where they’ve always kissed you, but they don’t know. They sit at the same table and make the same jokes, but they don’t know what’s in your head. They don’t know your laugh and who it’s for. Not anymore. It’s not your hands they’re holding, your face they’re kissing, your voice they’re listening to. They are loving a memory.

Only you know the present tense, the stuff that makes your blood move and your lungs work. All of that belongs to the person you just said goodbye to, the guy who you can still smell on your shirt. And you don’t recover from that. Even after the guy drops you. They still can’t know you anymore.

Mom peels off the shells and dumps them into the disposal on her own, and I get chills from the sound of them crick-cracking into egg dust.

“I heard there’s a Winogrand exhibit at the Gallery,” she says, before I can make my escape.

“Really?”

“Really. Is that where you were, Miriam?”

“Yes,” I say, grateful for an honorable way out. Of course that’s where I was.

“You lost track of time at the Gallery?”

“Yes,” I say, pretending to give in, sort of soft and dejected, the best kind of fake.

You got me, Mom. I was actually looking at photographs, just like you would’ve been, just like you do every day. I was studying the masters. I got lost in the art. It was that good.

“It was the 1964 photos, right?” she asks as she scoops out the yolks and leaves twelve little rowboats wiggling on the board.

I can tell she’s struggling to rein in her excitement. Only a genius skips the field trip to gaze at modern art. And everybody wants a genius, no matter how deviant.

“Yes. It was amazing. They had all the best pictures, the white sands picnic and everything.”

“No?”

“Yes,” I sputter like a faucet that’s been turned off for too long, my lies the brown muck. “The Daley Plaza, the lady with the pink headband … ”

“The woman in the garage.”

“Exactly. The woman in the garage, with the baby. That one is gorgeous.”

There’s a word you don’t hear every day at the Feldmans’. Certainly never to describe a photograph. Mom should smell this one, but she stays quiet.

“Where’s the mayo?” I ask, all puffed up from my perfect fib.

“I’m doing olive oil tonight,” she says. “I’m glad you liked it so much—the exhibit. You should’ve told me the truth though, Miriam … ”

I nearly choke on my own spit.

“It’s important,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with going to see art, but you should’ve been on time, and you should’ve told me the truth.”

I breathe out.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry. He’s my favorite, you know. I got caught up.”

“Lange is your favorite,” she says.

Then she flips her palm, drops all the green bits into the yolks and starts stirring, never lifting her head from the bowl, waiting for me to rescue myself. My silence always wins, though, because she’s the mother, and I’m her baby, and she’s the one who’s left with the worry. All my mother can do is rip a page out of her cookbook and shove it under the wooden leg of my chair.

“There,” she says.

And, for a minute, I feel sad the chair is the only thing we can get straight in this house. Sad for my mother, not for me.