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There is something about an exchange at a bar that hits so much deeper. Probably it’s because of the alcohol.
—Velvet Rope Diaries, New York, New York
6:00 p.m.
“Hey!” Nina was at a corner table in my local bar.
“Hey!” I hugged her. I hadn’t been in for a while. It seemed different. I didn’t know what it was exactly—new lighting? Furniture arrangement? —but it disoriented me as I slipped off my jacket and hung it over the chair back.
She was dressed in a smart pencil skirt and a white blazer. Nina had to look like that for the law firm where she worked as a paralegal. On the table, she had the manuscript of tomorrow’s column, which I’d emailed to her.
“It’s great.”
When Nina was polite, I worried. “What?”
She gathered her lips into a tight squiggle.
“Jesus! What?”
“Well, is everything okay?” she asked.
“Of course!” I lied.
“Is everything okay with David?”
“He’s perfect!” I went on to list traits that proved this on paper, though not to me. “He’s a gentleman, gorgeous, rich, generous. Perfect!” This was a third-grade book report, not a person, and I knew it.
“I’m not gonna push if you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Now what’s your news?”
She sipped her water, and said, clear as day, “I told Bernard I’m obsessed with getting married.”
“What?”
“I blurt out to him, ‘I’m sitting here, trying to smile with only my top teeth showing, like my mom told me looks best,’—I really said that—and then I said, ‘I’m wondering if I’m wasting my time again? Because I can’t do this for another freaking second.’”
“What do you mean you told him about your obsession?” I thought you were supposed to bury your fears deep down and only ever retrieve them when they were literally going to kill you.
“Anna, I don’t know. We had just returned from dinner at that cheap Italian place in the East Village, and it had been such a great night. I ate something called ‘Priest Stranglers,’ and we couldn’t stop laughing over that—that I was the kind of girl who’d order the Priest Stranglers.”
She laughed now, remembering it. “But inside I felt this crazy pressure. I just kept thinking, when is it going to happen? When? I was thining if it’s not going to happen, that what’s the point of this right now? And why should I enjoy this joke and start to appreciate his characteristics that didn’t show in the beginning? And why am I trying to act interested in the Jets or Giants or whichever basketball team it is he likes? And am I going to have to do this again with someone else in a month?”
“Those are football teams,” I said, stupidly, because I didn’t know what to say. I realized the normal response and changed tack. “Whoa. That’s tough. So what happened?”
“He was pretty shocked at first. Of course he was, I’d never said a thing, and then all of a sudden I tell him I can’t take it if I don’t know whether he’s going to marry me and that I have all these cake shops listed on my computer, and the guest list and the dress is ready to be ordered, and all I have to do is press ‘send’. At first he didn’t say a word. Just blinked. A lot.” The waiter strolled over and Nina stopped to order herself a cobb salad and a Coke, rather calmly.
I asked for the same, minus egg. She continued. “Then he started to smile. Then he starts cracking up. And I start to get mad, thinking I’m just going to go and call you to get a giant wallow-in-it ice cream at that place with the pink awning, you know. But he takes my hands and says, ‘Hey, everyone’s got quirks.’”
It was nice to see that glint in her eye, that smirk of contentment. I was stunned into silence.
“Whoa,” I finally said.
“I know. Anna, I was just as shocked. He kissed me, and then, well, we had awesome sex.”
“Okay, too much information,” I said, covering my ears.
She steamrolled on. “And after, he told me that he hopes he can make all those dreams come true.”
I nearly spit out my Coke. “Martini please!” I yelled to the waiter.
Nina grinned. “Partially, I owe this to you. If you hadn’t tried to overcome your guilt about our dad, face your fears, be honest with yourself . . . “
I rolled my eyes, the world’s worst compliment taker.
“No, really. I don’t think I’d have had the courage to come clean, to make the effort.”
“All right, all right, I get the picture. You owe me your firstborn.” I cut her off, maybe because I didn’t know if I was being very inspirational at the moment.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
I smiled toothily, unconvincingly, and lied. “Perfect.”
Nina went quiet, then suddenly scrunched her brows into angry caterpillars. “I just want to tell you, it’s a whole different thing being in a relationship with someone who really knows you.”
“I have to go,” I said before I could fall apart. I calmly tossed a twenty on the table, and kissed her goodbye. “Happy Thanksgiving. I love you, and I’m very happy for you.”
If I stayed another second, I’d break apart into a thousand Humpty Dumpty pieces, and I didn’t have the luxury of that right now. Mom would be arriving shortly.
9:00 p.m.
My apartment was messy. Ray had left for his parents’ house directly from work, and around our place lay clues of his rushed packing job. He’d left a blue plastic travel soap container on the sink. There were a couple of pairs of sneakers he’d decided against next to the hall closet. And his toothbrush was wrapped in tinfoil on the coffee table. I picked up his UCONN sweatshirt and held it, thoughtful.
“I bet you have tartar,” I said into the phone, sitting on his vacant bed. I called to wish Ray a happy holiday and found it was easier to communicate now we were in different states.
“You know I love it when you talk dirty to me, Anna.” I was struck with a sudden idea: maybe he’d had a change of heart, or I’d only imagined the whole thing between us.
“You left your toothbrush, you know,” I said, feeling at least I could make this one thing clear.
Ray’s parents lived in New Jersey, in a beautiful little house, with his sister who’d just moved back in from her own house down the block, which she’d left to her husband in the divorce. I could hear them yelling in the background.
“I don’t know what I’ll do.” He sniffed unconvincingly, like he was crying.
“Ready for the old high school reunion?” Though we grew up in different places, there was the same Thanksgiving tradition: Go out with all the people you hated all 364 other days of the year and get too drunk and say stuff like, “Why did we ever lose touch?”
“Can’t wait,” he said.
“Ditto. I’m famous now, so it should be pleasantly ego conflating.” What I was really thinking was that I could drink myself into a stupor and then pass out so I wouldn’t stay up thinking about my dad all night.
“Hey, just be strong, okay? You’re doing really great. You really have a lot to be thankful for this year—Fenprick and all of that.”
“Thanks, Hallmark.” I wondered whether this return to normalcy between us was temporary, or if maybe we’d finally found our footing along some new path.
Mom liked to listen to Christmas music from October through January, and it was on inside her SUV when I sluggishly opened the door.
“Anna!” She was always thrilled to see me. Her bangle bracelets jingled familiarly as she hugged me too tightly across the front seat. “An angel laughing,” she said was responsible for the sound. I’d been a dreamy child and fixated on that; it affected me still.
“Mom!” I used my best effort to match her excitement; I knew she spent nights worrying over my lack of enthusiasm for life.
She kissed my cheek, squeezing my head, and I felt my eyes burn. I hated that I’d let guilt stand in the way of our relationship. I hated the look on her face. I tried to gaze right into it, rather than convince myself it was all okay. My chest tingled with discomfort.
She made sure I buckled up, and then we headed for the Midtown Tunnel. My mother drove like a race car champion in Manhattan. She edged out taxi, crossed three lanes in one fell swoop, her right hand gripping the bottom of the wheel, her left resting on her thigh.
Already my hands were in tight balls. We lost the music in the tunnel, and she asked, “So, when do we get to meet this David, huh?”
One problem with writing about your personal life in a newspaper is that your mother knows too much about it.
I wondered if my mother would like David. He was very Manhattan. He grew up there, and only knew Manhattan and international people. Not one person he knew used the word mint as an adjective in high school. He didn’t eat fast food or macaroni and cheese from a box. He was spending Thanksgiving in St. Martin, with Susan and their parents and a couple of cousins. He had surprised me with a ticket. And though I was normally the one waving everyone off and wondering when it would be my turn, I knew I needed to go home.
For one thing, it meant the world to Mom, and for another, Fenwick insisted facing my fears was the heart and soul of this therapy, he said. It was imperative to my success at it that I go, especially now, when everything was so good. “You’ve got to get past this velvet rope,” he said in our last session. Probably, he would have been a better writer than me.
The funny thing was, I’d expressed to David how important it was for me to be home for Thanksgiving way before he gave me the tickets. But when he gave them to me, he said, “It would be good for you to get away,” as if he hadn’t paid heed to what I’d said about going home because he knew better. Still, saying no was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. All I had to do was compare the idea of lobster and pink cocktails and ninety-two-degree weather to a night at McSullivan’s with the Kellmore class of ’94, and I was nearly in tears.
He had bought me a thoughtful Thanksgiving Day gift, too: a long, delicate gold chain with three antique-styled keys looped through it. I hadn’t even known about the Thanksgiving Day gift. I was wearing it right now. I showed it to Mom.
“That is so beautiful! Wow. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s antique-y looking and yet modern. He has good taste. You didn’t say that in the column—about the taste.”
I wouldn’t dare mention St. Martin. If I did, she wouldn’t like him. Period. People stayed home for holidays. She’d said that plenty. “Yes, he has wonderful taste,” I said and looked out to a bunch of construction cones blocking off the left lane.
There is a distinct smell inside my childhood house. It’s probably just a cleanser Mom uses, but to me it triggers such complex emotions that every time that every time I open the front door, I have to will my breath and heart to calm down. So far, I’d made it through therapy improving each step of the way, but this—here—was different. It was easier to avoid this when I didn’t have to breathe that smell or eat those cookies, all the things that went along with this place, where the hurt had lingered.
They rebuilt the house entirely after the fire. Mom and I lived in a little trailer in the yard where we shared a springy bed and cooked lots of grilled cheese with tomato on the miniature gas range. We missed my father. We kept saying stuff like, “He hated tomato,” and “Dad loved the theme to Three’s Company.” There wasn’t one picture of him that hadn’t burned in the fire.
It was early fall and still warm, and after school I’d sit with cookies and a glass of ice-cold milk and watch the men demolish the blackened bits of our house. And then, as the temperature dipped, I watched them build it back up again like magic. When we first entered our new house, I missed the trailer, the same way I’d missed our original house when we moved to the trailer. It would be a couple of years still until I realized the full extent of what I’d done.
Roger was one of the construction workers who rebuilt the house. He’d sit with me sometimes and watch the same way I did. He didn’t say much, mainly he was just there, twisting a twig in his fingers. That’s just how it was to this day.
Mom nudged him to say things sometimes. “Roger, why don’t you tell Anna about that fried of herse you saw in the supermarket?” But I understood Roger’s silent affections. Still, we indulged my mother because she liked to feel like she’d helped, done something to make everything better—such as mend a broken family.
At dinner, which, the night before Thanksgiving, was always from a Chinese restaurant around the block, I was slurping a lo mein noodle, when my mother said, “Roger, why don’t you tell Anna what you said about her column?”
Roger turned purple. Sometimes I thought it was crazy that I wasn’t really his daughter, we were so alike. His lips pulled into a tight line, and then he said, “It’s real good.”
I started to thank him, but his word economy, his face, it all got me laughing, and this got Roger laughing, and then Mom, too. Then things loosened up some.
It was difficult being there. But I tried something Fenwick advised: I imagined my worst anxieties were 100 percent true, that I had killed my father, that I didn’t deserve any of this happiness. But the most important thing to do was to keep doing whatever I was doing anyway, to ignore my feelings and soldier on. This procedure left me in a fuzzy haze, numb, but functioning—able to put fork to mouth, ask for iced tea, clear the dishes—rather than sitting in my room convincing myself to be here, promising myself as soon as I was convinced I’d go out and join everyone, but never getting unstuck, and missing life altogether. Now I was free to enjoy the grainy iced tea, the sweet duck sauce over oily lo mein.
After dinner, I helped Mom prepare the cornbread stuffing. We mixed dry ingredients and then the eggs and butter and molasses. We toasted two trays of bread. She seemed amazed I hadn’t spent the time in my room and talked so much it seemed she was trying to fit in everything we hadn’t had time to discuss before.
“Do you think you’ll stay at this job? Is this your ultimate goal?” she asked, looking years younger, her pretty brown eyes alive, her bracelets tinkling vitally. We talked about ordinary things . . . an extraordinary feat for us. We spoke to Nina and Ray, and what we might want for Christmas—though we’d never really get each other the mirror she spoke of or the CD I mentioned. We exchanged what we thought the other person should have—what we wanted for them, big enormous gifts, to take the place of what we really wanted but could never have.
“Mom?” I asked, shaky with the fear of bringing it up, “Did Dad go crazy over Christmas the way you do? I mean, he was Jewish after all.”
She was at the sink, facing the window. Her hand stopped scrubbing. Her head lifted. I could see her back expand with a great breath. “You know,” she began, her back still to me then turned and smiled meaningfully. “He loved it. Said Chanukah was boring, and he wanted you to have a tree every year. ‘None of that Chanukah bush crap,’ he said.” She tread carefully onto this uncharted territory. “He would have gotten a kick out of us observing his shiva like that . . . ”
At eleven, I got ready to go to McSullivan’s. I wore one of the cool outfits from Theresa and arranged my hair the way they’d taught me at Mumble & Mumble. I was me, but stylish.
Karen picked me up at eleven thirty in a brand new BMW.
“Holy moly! I didn’t know you won the lottery!” I didn’t know anyone, besides David, who owned a nice car.
“I did. His name’s Jonathon Silverman. And he’s a lawyer.” She smirked and then turned to me for the first time. Karen and Jonathon were marrying in the summer. They’d been going out for a couple of years. Jonathon was a dork back in high school, but all of that changes when you stay in the same town as adults. When you leave, people remember you as you were. You don’t get a chance to change.
In high school, I was so consumed with my guilt that I never put in enough effort to make As or cheerleader or the most popular circle. Amazingly, though, I still had a few good friends, and that aloofness actually gave me that sage reputation. Often at parties, people would approach me, sloppily baring secrets and lifting weights off their chests.
Karen rarely came into Manhattan. We were Kellmore friends and only got together when I was in town. Tonight, it was the greatest relief to see her.
Amelia was sitting on the curb outside of her parents’ house, smoking. She lived in northern California now. “Bitches,” she addressed us, stubbing out her cigarette and sliding into the backseat.
“And a happy Thanksgiving to you,” I said.
“It’s freaking freezing,” she complained.
“Yeah,” Karen said. “So what’s new?”
“Oh, only . . . THIS!” She slammed her hand over the front seat, and I turned to see a huge diamond engagement ring.
“Oh my god! Congratulations!” Karen and I yelled in unison, like extras in a bad movie. Was everyone getting married? Had everyone figured their lives out long ago and left me behind? What happened to the torment that used to bind us all?
“We’re getting married in five months—right on the vineyard.” Her fiancé, Keith, was a vintner, from a winemaking family. It sounded dreamy, the way she described it—something that just might save you.
McSullivan’s was exactly as I remembered it—smelly pint glasses of watered-down beer, a sticky floor, torn Killian’s Red posters tacked to the walls. Every person was familiar, or vaguely so.
“Hey, Anna,” Thomas Peterson called as I approached the bar. I’d crushed on him hardcore from sixth to eighth grades, and then we’d dated on and off through ninth and tenth. We hooked up every Thanksgiving. I was sort of hoping, in the same way, I always do, that I’d see him. He still had longish hair, to his shoulders, and too much facial hair. He was still nicely built and smelled like a mixture of pot and oranges.
“Thomas.” I kissed him on the cheek.
“Annaby,” he said. “I saw you looking for me.” He was the only person I knew who said exactly what they thought.
“Ah, well, you know.”
“What are you drinking, Miss Velvet Rope Swinger?”
“Stella,” I said. You didn’t order anything but beer here. Everything else tasted like crap—literally.
“Karen, Amelia,” he addressed them as they approached with their own pints.
“Oh no, you guys aren’t going to hook up again, are you?” Karen said.
“Hopefully,” Thomas hiked his eyebrows twice. I elbowed him, telling myself I wasn’t interested in Thomas, in the way we’d escaped through each other all those times. I was beyond that, and in a proper adult relationship, where both people felt good about the time they spent together, not as if they sought to blame the other for all their problems, said, “fuck you,” too much, and wound up half-unbuttoned and not having used protection in a damp basement bedroom.
Abruptly, I was struck with the unwelcome idea that I hadn’t been against the idea because of David himself. Which led me to realize that I didn’t exactly miss David. I tried to concentrate on the way he looked, tried to work out whether I felt sad at not sharing the holiday with him, tried to imagine it was him, and not Thomas, sitting her palming my thigh. David was perfect. And I should miss him. I thought, sort of longingly of his slightly thinning “Jack Nicholsons” as he called his balding spots.
Thomas settled in closer on our side of the booth and brought up old times, trying to rile me up. Maybe I did want to punish myself more. Maybe the idea of that would always be irresistible.
“Anna, don’t try to deny it. You and I both know. We’ve got nothing. Holidays fucking suck.” He rested his head against the torn upholstery and considered the ceiling fan, swirling cigarette smoke around the room. “Nearly thirty, and what have we got?” He left without an answer and came back with two tequila shots. “Nothing,” he said, then drank it in a long gulp and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
At two in the morning, I was drunk and so was he. Karen and Amelia were no better. And so we had no way home. The four of us decided to walk the five blocks to the diner.
“Whose fucking idea was this?” Thomas asked incessantly along the way.
“Aaaay!” A table of our fellow ’94 grads must have had the same idea.
The hostess sat us at the opposite end of the dining room. I ordered a plate of fries and two Cokes. I knew they put too much ice in the drinks.
“This is so much fun!” Amelia exclaimed. “We should do this more often. Why don’t we do this more often?” This is the same thing we say every year.
“We don’t do it more often because that would be pathetic,” I said.
“Cheers,” Karen said, lifting her mai tai, which she’d ordered off the paper placemat drink menu.
Thomas was quiet next to me and seemed to be turning more morose. “You should do this more,” he said, missing the joke. He moved his body in closer and I could feel my heart speed up. It would be so easy to slide in and crook my arm and be safely escaped into Thomas-ville for a while. I tried to think through the spins: David, David. Inexplicably, I couldn’t remember what he looked like. I tried to think whether his eyes were brown or blue, or maybe green? I tried to remember that pulsing in my body when we were in the town car. Three months before all this, I would have given my life for someone like David. And now I seemed to be on the verge of carelessly snubbing him. What exactly was going on here?
We called a local car service to take us home after the dinner and smoked a couple of cigarettes while we waited outside, freezing. Karen was falling asleep in surprised jerks on my left shoulder, and Amelia was doing an old cheerleader routine at the bottom of the steps. “Give me an A,” she yelled.
Thomas and I moaned back pathetically, “A.”
A car drove by and someone yelled, “Shut up!”
Our laughs were hard, then faded to moans that died in the cold as sighs.
Amelia kept on through the letters of an indecipherable word, and Thomas asked, “Annaby, are you coming back to my place?” He kissed behind my ear, his lips slightly weather-beaten. He was sad and beautiful as ever, his left eye crinkling with thought. How many times had I held onto him—liquored tears wetting his flannel pillow?
“That’s the best offer I’ve heard all night,” I said, “but I’ve got to help Mom start the turkey at like six in the morning.” And I’ve got a boyfriend, I thought. But I didn’t say it. He took my hand, and our eyes locked, and for some reason, I still didn’t say it. I escaped by the skin of my teeth. I knew two minutes more and his hand would have been desperately searching beneath my shirt, under the wire of my bra, in all the painfully comforting places we’d traveled before.
4:30 a.m., Thursday, November 24
The funny thing is, whenever I’d come home I’d always think of Thomas. I’d think, well, I'll have to deal with that basement fire torture, but then he could save me from it all. I’d try to lose myself in his smell and his thick eyelashes, his dark Roger Waters music, and the way he whispered, “Annaby,” like I was the tragic heroine to his stormy hero. I knew what the inside of his basement bedroom looked like well enough. I knew the relief of being in there rather than in my own home.
But tonight I hadn’t run away.
Now I stumbled up the stairs to my bedroom with a huge glass of water and tried to step out of my clothing and into one of the huge nightshirts I wore here. This was always the scariest part—being here alone while everyone was asleep. I checked my phone, and there were no messages from David. I didn’t know if they were on a different time zone there, so I didn’t blame him. Plus, I hadn’t called him, either. I wasn’t sure what was going on with me, but I didn’t think now was the time for figuring it out what with the way I could stand up without holding onto something for support.
I took a tour of my room and stopped at something new. Mom had framed, in curly-cue-wire, a picture of Ray and me at our college graduation. Ray looked so much younger! He was still muscular, but much thinner. And I wouldn’t tell him this, but it looked like he had more hair than he does now. Still, I’d know that face anywhere. And that shirt! I remember he wore that all the time. It was just a black collared shirt, but he thought he looked so good in it. For a while, he was wearing it every Friday night out. With a heavy ache that traveled from my knees to my heart, I missed him now. It was the only thing I’d been sure of the whole night.
His cell phone rang twice.
“Anna!” I had to hold the phone away, he spoke so loudly. I could hear a couple of guys reciting Bruce Springsteen in the background. “What’s up?”
“Ah, you know.” I could hear myself slurring.
“Good night?”
“Yeah,” I said, realizing it was true, mostly. “Went to McSullivan’s got loaded, ate fries, nearly hooked up with Thomas Peterson . . . “I turned off the light and curled up under the covers, the phone to my ear.
“You didn’t hook up with Thomas Peterson? Isn’t that a Thanksgiving tradition, like stuffing, or eating too much turkey and passing out in front of the football?”
“You might remember someone named David Levy . . . “
“Never liked him.”
“Ray, you never like anyone.”
“I like you,” he said, in a funny way. I didn’t understand my reaction to it—a mix of gratitude and excitement and anger—and didn’t know how to respond. It occurred to me, embarrassingly, that I might have been, on some level, enjoying this jealousy Ray had been displaying toward David. The would make me a bad person. Finally, I said the worst thing I probably could have. “No, you love me.”
Silence. The strangest silence. We may or may not have bypassed the point where this could be turned into a joke.
“Ray?” I couldn’t wait to find out any longer.
“Yes, beautiful?” I thought I heard him exhale cigarette smoke. I guessed it was a high school reunion thing no matter where you were from. The funny image of the way he never really inhaled brought be momentarily onto more familiar footing.
“My mom framed a graduation photo of us, and I keep thinking about that black shirt of yours.”
“Wish I still had that shirt. I was hot in that shirt.” He went quiet, then, “How come we never got together?”
“The friendship.”
“Right, the friendship.”
“Ray?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m gonna go to sleep now,” I said, too tired, and becoming aware that I was definitely too drunk for any more of this right now.
“I just wanted to tell you something, Anna,” he slurred a bit, sniffled, probably outside in the cold. “I’m really proud of how you’re handling yourself. You’re . . . well, you’re becoming the person you were always meant to be. I think.”
It was the best compliment I ever had. “Why, thank you. You’re not so bad yourself at present.”
“Can I say something else?” his tone hurled me back onto shaky ground.
“Of course, anything.”
“I don’t think David’s the right guy for you.”
“Point taken.” We were going too far, too fast. “Good night Ray, enjoy the Garden State Thanksgiving.”
“And you enjoy Strong Island.”
Thankfully, I passed out immediately.
6:00 a.m., Thanksgiving Day
Unfortunately, I woke with a papery, dry mouth that required water. I tried to will myself back to sleep, but lay there wide awake and terrified, and finally gave in. I descended the stairs quietly. Roger’s snores were audible even down in the kitchen—a horror movie soundtrack, it sounded like to me.
My limbs numb and wobbly from the drinking and smoking I struggled to pull a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water from the pitcher in the fridge. I refilled it after a long draught and meant to go right back upstairs, but instead, turned left, down toward the basement.
I left the lights off. I don’t think I could have borne them being on. I crept down four steps and then sat, my glass slippery in my hands and pinched between my bare knees. I wasn’t supposed to be down here, going through it all, trying to replay it until I was sure how it all went and that I wasn’t at fault, but I couldn’t help it. I saw him over in the far left corner, where his tools were hung neatly, on white pegboard. I had him listening to the radio, something mildly fatherly, such as Al Green. The flames, as I saw them, came quick, like wildfire, toward him, licking at him as he tried to make his way past it, to the staircase, to me. I tried to hear the scream, always my name. “Anna! Anna! Save me, Anna!” And always, cowardly me, with my too-tight braids and my novelty sneakers, running, endlessly running away. I tried, but couldn’t change the ending. And though I knew better now, knew I should accept the worst-case scenario, I found the urge irresistible.
Though I felt sated by my whitewashed version of the fire, I knew that indulging in it was a setback, but I told myself, as I pulled the thread quilt up to my chin, that later, I’d be okay.
11 a.m., Thanksgiving Day
“Anna, darling! You look like hell!” Mom was chipper beyond belief. Harry Connick Jr was singing about his heart finding Christmas through hidden speakers.
“Love you, too, Mom,” I said and hugged her. I looked out the window to the spot where I’d sat, watching Roger build our house, and I felt tears coming. I was hungover, even more confounded about David and Ray, and sitting at Ground Zero of my emotional problems, and I knew this type of depressing indulgence wouldn’t help. Mom pulled my head up to have a good look when she felt my body shake.
“Oh, honey.” She wiped tears and swallowed back her own. I knew she hated me having this legacy. I knew it hurt her more than it hurt me. I was all she had, and she wanted me to enjoy life. She’d indulged me that first year, let me play sick with a thermometer held to the light bulb so I could stay home and plant seeds or bake apple crisp with her, just the two of us here pretending that Dad would come walking in at the end of the day.
“Mom,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of cooking to do.” I mustered my best semblance of a smile. “Are you gonna make me some coffee or what?”
She didn’t move for a second, probably shocked that I wasn’t going to run upstairs and hide away until dinner, that I was going to be with her and do this. She blinked twice, started to tear up, then breathed it away. “Well, Miss Fancy Velvet Rope girl, Roger got something special for you this year.” She reached up into a cabinet and pulled out an authentic looking Italian cappuccino machine. “Now all we have to do is learn how to use it.”
We laughed, and at the same time called around to the den, “Roger!”
9:30 p.m., Friday, November 25
“So, how’d you like that party?” Roger asked, as we approached the tunnel. He’d been quiet in the car until then. The party was funny, with sort of familiar people, such as the mailman, the customer service woman from Waldbaum’s, the high school nurse, and others stopping by to congratulate me on my success.
“It was . . . well, it was very Mom.” I smiled and turned to see his reaction.
“It sure was. You know what, though? You are a celebrity over there. Those people hound your mom about you all the time. You should see them giving her the red carpet treatment. And don’t you think she doesn’t enjoy it.” He smiled. “People like to have a celebrity they can relate to.” I’d never heard him say so many things at once.
He drove me to my door, parked, hefted my bags out of the back, all the leftovers tucked into freezer-ready containers and the things Mom bought me every winter—socks and throw blankets and slippers and pajamas with feet on them—and carried them right up to my apartment.
“At the door, he said, “I’m real proud of you, Anna. And not just for the column. You’re doing really well.” It was nice to hear Roger say that, to think of the way we’d met and the way we’d sat on that log so many days, and to be here now.
“You’re a real good dad, Roger.” I’d never called him that before. He went purple and ran down the stairs before I could see how much it meant to him. Despite the setback, I considered myself very thankful this year.