After You (20 page)

37

W
hen I get back to the house, Sophie and a woman I don’t recognize at first are sitting cross-legged on the floor around the coffee table, chatting about yesterday’s birthday party. Sophie is still in her pajamas, her head hidden under the tall black magician’s hat Phillip sent. The woman has her graying hair pulled back in a messy ponytail and is dressed head to toe in sweats; both the matching pants and top are decorated with a large and absurd decal of the Union Jack. She wears no makeup, and her face—defeated and lined—reminds me of a desert photo, all scorched earth and fine intersecting lines. Unyielding terrain, tired and dried up.

Upon seeing me, her features reorganize into a smile, blood flows into her cheeks, and she now almost looks like my mother. If my mother wasn’t a beatnik New Yorker who loves tunics and saris but a Midwestern tourist who forgot her fanny pack and Nikon. I am frightened by this approximation.

“Jane? What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in Peru? And what the hell are you wearing?”

“Nice to see you, too, Eleanor.”

I draw my mother into a forceful hug, a gesture that surprises her even more than it does me. Though she looks too different, like someone I used to know but have lost touch with, I am relieved just at the sight of her. My mom is here to rescue me.

“She lost her luggage in Lima,” Sophie says, apparently already up to speed on my mother’s resurfacing. “And instead of taking a flight back to New York after the ashram, she wanted to see you. So she thought, why not? You only live once. Next thing she knows she’s hailing a black cab outside Heathrow.”

I love when Sophie parrots back adultspeak. She gets the intonation spot-on, a mirrored reflection of your own verbal tics, like hearing your voice on an answering machine. My mother’s
why not? You only live once
. Her
next thing I know
filtered through the mechanics of a little girl.

Jane looks me up and down, paying special attention to my chest. My boobs haven’t gotten bigger already, have they? She takes in my hair, frizzy from the humidity, my jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, hastily thrown on this morning, the new lines on my face, the younger version of hers.

“Sweetheart, are you okay?” she asks, her surprise betraying her agenda. She is not here to rescue me—she didn’t know I needed rescuing; how could she?—she is here for me to rescue her. “You look, um, terrible.”

“I know. So do you. You okay?”

She shrugs. “Been better.”

“Hey, Soph, why don’t you go upstairs and start that Harry Potter I got you?”

A pout.

“We need some grown-up time,” I say, and smile at her, though she still stomps off. I’ve been here long enough now that it doesn’t break my heart.

“So it seems both of us are at a crossroads,” my mother says once Sophie is out of earshot and the two of us have settled on the couch. We are leaning into each other as we talk, the way Lucy and I used to at fourteen when we’d gossip about boys. “You’re getting a divorce. And I’m supposed to be getting married in two months.”

“Your invitation is beautiful, by the way.”

“The invitation?”

“Are you serious? Did you really not know Dad sent out the invitations?”

“I didn’t even know he’d picked them out. I’m so screwed,” my mother says, and slouches like a boy unsure of how to deal with his growth spurt.

“Or you could just go back and marry Dad and get it over and done with already. Stop messing up both your lives.”

“Or I could do that.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” I say, as if it is as simple as my mother getting on a plane, and perhaps it is.

“So what’s going on with you? I don’t think you’ve hugged me that hard since I bought you that beat-up station wagon on your sixteenth birthday.”

“I think I may be pregnant.”

“But you don’t know?”

“Haven’t had a chance to take the test. But I’ve been throwing up and moody, and my boobs kill, and I’ve been here before. With Oliver, this is what it felt like. Except then I was happy about it. Until I wasn’t.”

“The father?” No judgment in the question.

“Phillip.”

“Huh.”

“Yup.”

“Well, I guess that’s what you get for having sex with your husband,” my mother says, and laughs too hard at her own joke.

“Funny, Jane.”

“We sure are messed up, aren’t we?” She now rests her head on my shoulder, as if she is too tired to keep it lifted.

“We sure are.” And then we both close our eyes—my mother’s head on my shoulder, my head on top of hers—and let ourselves take that accidental fall into sleep.

“Did you know I proposed to your father?” she says later, when we are back in the pharmacy, shopping for a new stick for me to pee on and prenatal vitamins,
just in case
. Before we headed to Boots, my mother forced me to stop at the nearest eyebrow waxer. Apparently she couldn’t stand me looking like, as she put it, “one of those hairy wolf boys from the Mexican circus.”

“You proposed this time or the first time?” I ask.

“This time.”

“Seriously?” I stop walking and face her straight on. She looks nonplussed.

“Seriously. I have this client; she’s a couple of years younger than you. Anyhow, she had an amazing boyfriend, and as soon as she sensed he was about to propose, what did she do? She dumped him. So I’m listening to her tell the story, and it’s so obvious that she has all these commitment issues because she lost her mother at a young age and she’s still a kid herself in so many ways—so textbook, it’s ridiculous, right? But it suddenly hits me that I need to grow up, too, you know? How can I tell this girl to get some balls already if I don’t have a pair of my own? You know what I mean? I’m sixty years old, for God’s sake.”

“Yeah. I hate to remind you, but Grandma’s still alive. So what’s your excuse?”

“I dunno. My dad was a rampant philanderer. Does that count?”

“Maybe. I always forget that about Grandpa. He always seemed like such a nice guy.”

“He
was
a nice guy
and
a rampant philanderer. Apparently you can be more than one thing.”

I read the back of the pregnancy test. I can have results in as quickly as two minutes.

“Anyhow, I have this major realization that I need to change the way I’m living my life. So that night I took the shuttle up to Boston, surprised your dad, and proposed. Out in the garden in the gazebo. Right where you and Phillip got married, come to think of it. And guess what? Want to hear the hilarious part? He said no.”

“Go Dad.”

“Yeah, then I spend the better part of three months trying to convince him to say yes, and you know what happens as soon as he does?”

“You run like hell.”

“Exactly.”

“Mom, what do I do if the test is positive?” For perhaps the first time in my life, my mother doesn’t correct me and ask that I call her Jane. Instead, she puts her arms around me and draws me into our second hug of the day. A daily record for us.

“You know what you’ll do, Eleanor.”

“I do? Take care of the problem?”

Another ugly euphemism, and my voice catches as I use it. She gives me a look that speaks a full sentence without saying a word:
You are thirty-five, financially solvent, and this may be your last shot; I am not even going to waste my time having that discussion
.

“I know: We’ll move in with you.” I am joking, but as soon as I say it, I feel shaken by my own use of
we
so quickly, so naturally. I have already co-opted this seed—which may not be a seed at all—into a
we
.

My mother smiles. She won’t even let my father, her fiancé, move in; their long-term plan was a long-distance marriage. Me and Hypothetical Baby are not welcome in the small two-bedroom in the West Village.

“Nope. You’re gonna do what you do best.”

“What’s that?”

“My dear Eleanor, you’re going to grow a pair.”

We spend the one-hundred-twenty-second wait time playing charades. My mother goes first. Two words. A movie. She gets into it: starts gesturing wildly, fake-punching herself in the face, falling to the floor of the three-by-five bathroom, and closing her eyes.

“Punching. Um, hitting. Knocked out.”

She points at me and then at the ceiling.

“Heaven. Sky. Up,” I guess.

She smiles and points again. Gestures for me to put the two words together.

“Knocked Up!”
My voice triumphant for a moment, before I get her joke. My mother has always had a bitchy sense of humor, an amazing ability to crack me up only to discover, twenty seconds too late to be angry, that I am laughing at myself.

The cell phone beeps time.

My mother looks at the stick, hands it over, still in mute charades mode, and just points at me and smiles.

And then she motions her hands in a big round arch over her belly.

I breathe in and out of one of Sophie’s old lunch bags, which smells like ham, whenever I need a break from crying. I’m not taking this like an adult. I’ve mastered guilt and nostalgia and grief; we’ve all been friends for years. Fear, though, bone-shattering and stomach-cramping visceral fear, renders me unprepared and trembling. I feel like I’ve just strapped on the dynamite backpack for a suicide mission.

“Do you know why I’ve always asked that you and Michael call me Jane?” my mother asks, apropos of nothing. We have not communicated much since I passed my big test with a plus sign. She just sits next to me on the couch, rubbing my back and keeping an eye out for Sophie and Greg, who went for ice cream a while ago.

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want you or anyone else to see me
only
as a mother. I didn’t want to be
only
your father’s wife. I thought it would be good for you to see me as a whole person. Jane, not Mom.”

“That’s stupid. That’s not what I’m afraid of. This isn’t an identity crisis.”

“It’s not?” she asks. “Then why is this such a tragedy?”

I look at her, amazed that my own mother—a psychologist, no less—doesn’t get it. She assumes everyone else approaches their own life with the same amount of self-absorption.

“I never said this was a tragedy.”

“Okay, then, what’s the problem?”

“What’s the problem? Are you seriously asking me what’s the fucking problem?” I put my forehead against the cool glass of the coffee table, take a deep breath. I know my mother happens to be the closest target, but I can’t keep myself from showering her with stray bullets. With Lucy gone and Phillip opting out, I feel so lonely, it’s almost an out-of-body experience. One Ellie floating above, watching the proceedings with interest, another going through the motions of sitting on this couch, hyperventilating, inappropriately cursing at her mother.

“Yes, I’m seriously asking you what’s the fucking problem. You’re pushing forty, you’ve always wanted to be a mother. You’ve been screwing up everything good in your own life lately. The way I see it, this is the best thing that has ever happened to you.”

Blunt-force trauma to the head.

“First of all, I’m not pushing forty. Not yet, anyway. And putting aside for a moment the fact that the father of this future baby is filing for divorce, and, you know, I’m here to take care of Sophie—putting those eensy-weensy matters aside for just one second—do I have to remind you of what happened last time? How that turned out? I can’t go through that again. I can’t. I won’t.” I start to cry again, but this time the tears are full and loose, a total body release.

“What if I promise that everything will be okay? That this baby will be perfect and healthy?”

“But you can’t. You can’t promise that.”

“But what if I could?”

“But you can’t. That’s the whole point. You just can’t.”

“You won’t lose two babies. I know it in my soul. I do.” She takes my hand and looks into my bloodshot, brimming eyes. My mother, despite her ridiculous dress sense, tends not to use words like
soul
, or
universe
. I guess a couple of weeks on an ashram in the mountains of Peru could infect anyone’s vocabulary. Or maybe she has lost her clinical distance, and her daughter is sitting next to her on the couch, and she wants to make it all okay.

“Your soul, seriously? I am supposed to relax and trust your soul? Oliver died, Mom. Inside me. And then Lucy died, walking down the street. You can’t promise me everything is going to be okay. You just can’t. Sometimes things are not okay. Life isn’t like a movie.”

My mother lets me cry a little bit more, rubs my back in the concentric circles of my childhood. I give in to the sensation, spiral down into the last pool of comfort, the fatigue finally overriding my adrenaline.

“But sometimes they are, Eleanor. Sometimes things do turn out okay. Can you at least accept that? That sometimes things do work out in the end?”

“What, like you and Dad?”

She meets my sarcasm, my glare, first with her own secret smile, the one she uses with her patients, the one that says,
Fine, I’ll humor you
, and then it switches, the smile turns real and wide, her eyes filling with tears to match. Her face plays out her realization, much like Sophie’s, the thoughts pulsating so loudly they broadcast without anyone saying a word.