I stopped for cigarettes and a bottle of rye on the way home. Checking my email in the driveway, I received a reminder from the Brown summer program and realized I hadn’t written Edwina’s recommendation letters. I marched myself to the desk and stayed until ten finishing them. It was pleasurable, letting my mind rest on her—an exceptional student, proactive, hungry, curious, charismatic. Her mother was from Saint Lucia, her father Italian American, from Staten Island. She had been raised religiously, but spaciously, always with the room for her mind to grow—in her teenage years she had fallen in with the right Catholics, the liberal ones whose thought verged on the esoteric, who were interested in mysticism and symbolism. She came here on a full scholarship and was constantly worried that she had made the wrong choice not going to the Ivy League school she had been accepted to, extortion-level student debt be damned.
In general, I am very distant from the admission process of our school, but I know from the stress on the faces of the students that year after year becomes more visible, like transparencies of strain that lie on top of each other until they solidify into a mask of perpetual anxiety, that it is not the same as when I went to college. I was a good student, I put in effort, I studied and was neat and tried hard on my tests, but I didn’t tear myself apart like the students and parents of today.
I knew college was the way out of my home, which I mainly remember as rooms my father strayed in and out of, with the occasional quiet woman sitting at the breakfast table uncomfortably, waiting for the coffee to brew, made sheepish by my sweeping presence as I imperiously picked up and put things down around her. I had been sent to live with my father because, unlike my two older sisters, it was thought that I showed academic promise, and he was the health-and-safety coordinator for a boarding school where I could go for free. At the time I was indifferent to this leg up. At first I was upset that I couldn’t stay back in Texas with my sisters and their boyfriends and the desultory life of cars and dates and marijuana and minimum-wage jobs. Later I resented that I couldn’t board with the other girls at the school, and thus was never able to permeate the boundaries of their exclusive world.
Yes, I had academic aptitude, but I never knew my efforts as stress (that didn’t come until graduate school). I was excited to do well, and to be petted like a pretty cat who moves with assurance, and I was passionate—so passionate about the books I read and the way they made me feel. I loved that the complexities of my emotions were understood by authors writing hundreds of years ago, I loved looking at their texts and trying to understand what they were aiming to do, to pull my own meaning from them, to point out what others didn’t see or notice—the repetition of blue imagery, the recapitulation of motifs of separation. I was good at that. I love and have always loved typing—my fingers traveling and pressing like a musician’s, first against the big, resistant keys of the typewriter, then the light, bulky plastic of the word processor, and eventually the smooth, soft clicks of a laptop.
In college I met real mentors who taught me to write and pushed me into academia. I wanted to go there—I didn’t want to be in the world, around all those people who didn’t read books, who didn’t think they were important. I worked hard, I think. I remember falling asleep in the library, waking up once to a teacher (who was probably fifty but at the time seemed ancient, eighty years old at least) stroking my hair with psychotic restraint. But I also felt that I was, as they say, on a track—I was a figurine in an animatronic Christmas display, being whipped around from one end of the window to another. I can see my half-blind pursuit of an academic career only as a blessing. It was merely due to my lack of imagination that I scurried on to my master’s and PhD.
Five minutes after I submitted my letters, Edwina sent an email thanking me and asking if she could take me out for coffee the next day. And there it was, that rightness, that ability to not only make the correct and courteous gesture but to do it quickly. This was one of the many qualities that set Edwina apart and would ensure her success. I saw how speed wore on my students—sending some into a brittle and constant state of worry, some into torpor, others into paralysis. If something was not dealt with in a few days, it felt to them like a completely forsaken cause. They viewed lives, roles, opinions, stations as things that got taken from them if they didn’t act fast enough. Where was the time for thinking? For consideration? For not thinking? For failure? When I was in college the way to waste time was movies and friends and alcohol and drugs and sex and music. Activities that for the most part we agree now are essentially enriching. They waste time on their little boxes. And they don’t want to, they hate themselves for it. But the boxes are there and they are their schoolwork and their social life and their entertainment and their sin and their virtue all in one. God help them.
My gut was thudding with excitement when I made my way down to the backyard—a tumbler of rye in one hand and the pack of cigarettes in the other. I had not smoked in twenty years, after I quit for a bad hacking cough. They had been my master for so long—my friends, my saviors, my trusty companions, my escapes, my rebellion, my illicit yet effective method of weight control—that when I was finally able to excise them from my life, I was too scared to ever go back.
The man’s comment in the park upset me. It was always that—a man could always make me feel worse than anything any woman could ever say to me. He could always make me despise myself, make me feel fundamentally self-conscious about my idiotic femininity and my pathetic peevishness, make me understand I was no match for the real power he possessed. In Texas, in Connecticut, in France, in New York, in Missouri, in Mexico City, in my kitchen, bathroom, living room, basement, bedroom, I could click mentally from slide to slide each time a man, with a well-aimed put-down, has made me feel essentially worthless. That bottomed-out feeling, combined with the intense longing stirred awake by Vladimir, the taxing encounters with John, the meeting with Cynthia that had both excited and depressed me, had weakened my defenses. Cigarettes are best when they are accompanied by intense moods—happiness, anger, defeat. No cigarette is better than the one that follows a torrential cry. I had a friend who used to call them “emotion suppressors” but it’s more like they complement emotions, like a good wine complements a meal.
I lit one using a lighter (lighting by a match, unless it’s an easy-strike match, ruins the first drag). While I wanted to enjoy it more than I did—the smoke felt abrasive and thick in my throat—the transgression against my better judgment was beautiful. My head lightened immediately and sensation was sparkling through my body when I heard footsteps on the driveway coming toward me. Thinking it was John, I kept my gaze fixed forward, as though I hadn’t noticed.
“So now you come to his house?”
My daughter’s voice rang out of the darkness—I turned to see her at the back gate, illuminated by the motion sensor light that hung over the garage.
“Sid?” I called to her but she didn’t hear me. She was fumbling with the gate, pushing at the latch, which had to be turned and then lifted to be released. I rose to walk over and open it for her, when, in her rage, she kicked the door down entirely.
“Don’t you walk toward me, skank,” she yelled at me. “You come to his house? He lives here with his fucking wife who is my fucking mother, you little skank.”
It is always—funny is not the right word, but maybe interesting—how the exceedingly drunk are truly the most repetitive people in the world. I remember John getting blotto one night in the city (he vomited in the cab and I paid the cabdriver the last fifty dollars we had in apology) saying, while he was in this compromised state, “I Goddamn love you. Do you know that? I Goddamn love you” on repeat. It was uncharacteristic, and I remember feeling pleased for a bit, then tired, then disgusted.
It took me a moment, however, to realize that because I was in near-complete darkness, and Sidney was so very drunk, she didn’t recognize who I was. She dropped her attaché and shrugged off her European hiker’s backpack like a townie barfly readying himself for a brawl. I said her name again, but before I could tell her that I was her mother, and not her father’s paramour, she stumbled toward me and grabbed me by the shoulders with her strong grip. She smelled like a distillery, and her eyes were steely and distant and red-rimmed—waking consciousness buried deep within her. “I’m going to fuck you up, skank.” She lost her balance slightly and hugged me into a kind of boxer’s clinch. She was taller than me, and far sturdier, and she staggered against me, pushing me so that I stumbled backward.
“Sid, it’s your mother, it’s Mommy.”
I felt her soften for a moment and take in my face. “Oh Mommy,” she said, but instead of releasing me she pulled me into a tighter embrace.
Our nighttime sprinklers went off, spritzing her, and she recoiled out of instinct. Still gripping me, she tripped on the hose that was attached to the sprinkler, and, in trying to regain her footing she veered us to the right. I told her to watch out, but she and I collided with the outdoor trunk in which we kept the cushions and the pool toys. Then, like a physical comedian from an old movie, she dragged us away from the trunk and, in doing so, put her foot inside the inner tube Phee had used that was still sitting inflated by the side of the pool. In her attempt to shake it off—it seemed she mistook it for an animal—she, now with one strong arm hooked around my waist, hopped and kicked her leg wildly, hysterically. Knowing there was only one thing that could possibly help I struggled against her, dragging her closer and closer to the edge of the deep end of the pool until I used all my strength to jump into the frigid water, bringing her, who held me as tightly as a raccoon holds a piece of foil in a trap, with me.
It had been cool the past week, so the water was a terrific and icy shock. Sidney let go of me immediately and waved her arms wildly to get to the surface. Before I rose to help her, I allowed myself one gorgeous contemplative moment underwater. Even though she was drunk, and it was very dark, it was still true that my own daughter had mistaken me for a student.
I climbed out of the pool immediately, but Sidney stayed in, whipping her head back and forth, shaking off the water.
“Mommy,” she wailed.
“Get out of the pool, honey.”
“Mommy, I need you.”
“Okay, my sweetheart, just get out of the pool. Use the shallow end. That’s it.”
She climbed out and lay her body down on the concrete next to the pool and stared up into the sky. Cold to the point of pain but unwilling to leave her, I stripped my drenched clothes and underwear and wrapped myself in a leftover towel that hung on one of the pool chairs and hadn’t been taken in from the weekend. It might even had been Vladimir’s towel, I let myself think, as I wrapped it around my naked, goose-pimpled body.
I shimmied beneath her and rested her head in my lap. She turned to the side, snuggling against me.
Her clothes sagged and weighed on her. She was wearing her out-of-work uniform, her standard apparel of a dark hooded sweatshirt over her white oxford shirt, under which she wore both a white T-shirt and tank to minimize her already small breasts, dark selvage jeans, and boots that looked like they belonged to a naturalist in the early twentieth century. She would regret getting the boots wet in the morning—she was as persnickety about the neatness of her clothes as any man (it is my experience that while women love clothes and fashion, there is no one as interested in the preservation of the like-new state of their vestments as a preening man). She made a decent salary, she lived with her partner, and I paid her student loans, and so though she dressed simply, she had a weakness for expensive boutiques that specialized in hand-crafted apparel with clean lines and high-quality materials.
“Mommy, Alexis kicked me out.”
Sidney’s voice had the forlorn neediness that she had as a child, when she would wake up in the middle of the night with a bad dream, or itching from bug bites, or in pain from a mysterious fever. It was so easy for me to comfort her in those moments, to pull her to my chest and soothe her and let her sleep on me all night. She was never a clinging child, independent and sensitive and usually interested in shrugging me off, and so I cherished those moments, when hurt made her needy, and she clung to me as though I was the only one who could help.
I stroked her wet hair. Like many gay young women, she had the undersides of her head shaved up past the ears, and her light reddish bob flopped a little past her chin when dry. I ran my fingers along the shaved part, the bristles smooth on the way down and textured the way up. It was barely 60 degrees, we would both be shivering in a moment, but I felt a poetic charge in the tableau of us, soaked, our hearts as open and seeping as popped blisters—a sordid and suburban pietà. It reminded me of twenty years ago, when my colleague David didn’t show up at our meeting place, and I realized that he’d decided he wouldn’t run away with me to Berlin after all, and I lay down on the bare, cold earth of the graveyard (our ridiculous choice for our rendezvous) and let a stray cat sniff, and then walk over, my body.
“She left me, Mommy,” she repeated.
“My sweet girl, I’m so sorry.”
“I thought you were one of Dad’s—” She didn’t finish the sentence.
“It’s okay, sweetness. But you shouldn’t get so drunk, at least not when you’re by yourself.”
“I took a bottle of rum on the train with me.”
“That’ll do it.”
“Then we were delayed in Albany for an extra hour so I got some beer.”
“How’d you get here?”
“I walked.”
“Oh my sweetheart. You’re safe at home now.”
“I think I fucked a man in the train bathroom.”
“You think?”
“No, I did.”
“Willingly?”
“Basically.”
“Basically?”
“Yes. Willingly.”
“God, Sid, how do you feel about that?”
“Oh, fine. I wanted to. It was fine.”
She was fully shivering now, and I took my towel off and wrapped her in it and helped her to stand.
“Let’s get you warm and talk about it inside, okay? I want to hear.”
“I don’t want to talk. Can you make me some food?”
“Yes.”
“Can I stay here tonight?”
“It’s your home.”
“You’re not mad at me?”
“I was never mad at you. You were mad at me.”
“Look at those stars.”
It was clear out, and they were so dense they seemed connected at the tips.
“I was just thinking about how when you were a little girl you told us that nature was so boring, because all anyone did in nature was tell other people to look at things.”
“Were you smoking?”
I didn’t answer. She and I took a hot shower together in the big shower, like when she was little. I dressed her in John’s sweats and sat her on the couch with a large glass of water, then put on a robe and started in the kitchen. I decided to make her stovetop spaghetti carbonara pie, an old specialty of mine she loved—a sauce made of bacon, tomato, olive, and anchovy (I add olives and anchovies to all tomato sauce because tomato sauce is always better with olives and anchovies) simmered on the stove, to which one adds al dente spaghetti, then cracks eggs into little craters in the mixture, cooking them until they are just set, after which an obscene amount of parmesan is grated over the entire thing and the skillet (oven safe) is put under the broiler for three minutes to crisp the top. The dish is an ambush of calories; it would be good for all that alcohol sloshing around her insides.
I was about to strain the pasta and add it to the sauce that was simmering on the stove when I heard Sidney staggering toward the downstairs bathroom. I turned off the burners, ran into the bathroom, held her hair from her face and rubbed her back as she vomited torrents. After several rounds, in which she alternated vomiting with lying on the cold tile floor, she seemed to have nothing left in her. She brushed her teeth and I tucked her into the guest bedroom, pulling the covers up to her chin and kissing her hair. Next I cleaned up the vomit that had escaped her before she had reached the toilet, a line from the couch to the bathroom, and put the sauce in a storage container. I threw out the pasta, which had been sitting unstrained in the hot water and now looked like a pot of floating dandelion wisps. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, performed my skin regimen of toner, retinol serum, massage, under-eye cream, and moisturizer. I would sleep with Sidney to keep watch over her during the night.
She had kicked all the covers away and pulled her sweatshirt off. I covered her back up with the sheet and lay down beside her, staring up at the ceiling. I must not have slept very soundly, because at 3 a.m. I heard noises below and then John’s recognizable footsteps climbing the stairs. He stood at the doorway and looked at me, and I gave him a slight wave before turning my head. I had failed to notice that he hadn’t come home.