Be Mine (3 page)

Still, this dress is gorgeous, with or without my body in it. A sensuous memory, a slow song, a beautiful immoral thought turned into something wearable, buyable ($198!). Something you can bring home on a hanger, gather in your arms, accessorize with heels and a handbag—weightless, feminine, eternal, mine.

N
OTHING
like spring yet, but only one more week until Chad comes home for his spring break. This morning we woke to more snow—a long cold carpet of it on the lawn, curtains of it blowing in fat flakes sideways in a hard wind. While Jon was still sleeping in the bed behind me, I stood at the window for a while, and watched it, and I started to cry.

Why?

The snow?

Or maybe the realization that it was only one more week until Chad would be home, and how excited I've been now, since he went back to California after New Year's, for my boy to come back. And, because I couldn't help but wonder—is this what it will be like from now on?

From now on will I count off the days of my life in black check marks between Chad's vacations?

Season to season. Holiday to holiday.

I could, I suppose, move through them just as I always have—buying the appropriate cards, sending them out at the usual times, putting up the Christmas wreath, taking it down, planting bulbs in the fall, seeds in the spring. But will I do all of it emptily, waiting for Chad?

And, after a few more years off at college, how often will he even come home?

There will be, I suppose, some summer backpacking through Europe. A spring break with his friends in Mexico. Soon, he'll start calling in November to tell me, "Mom, I'll only be staying a few days this year around Christmas, because—"

Then what?

Is
this
the empty nest?

Is that what I was crying about at the window, watching the snow?

At Christmas, Brenda went on and on about it:

So, how is it having Chad off at school? What do you do with yourself? Is it like getting to know yourself and Jon all over again, after eighteen years of motherhood?

She and her partner eyed me smugly from their superior positions on the love seat, childless lesbians with books and Welsh corgis and endowed chairs at a fancy college as I followed Chad around their town house with my eyes. They'd been waiting for years, I thought, to see me crash and burn when my "career" of being Chad's mother came to an end.

Was
this
—the snow and the tears at the window—what they had in mind for me?

Sue predicted it, too. From
her
secure position as the harried mother of nine-year-old twins, she kept making sad eyes at me in the hallways when school started again in August. But I kept saying, believing it to be true, "Of course I'm going to miss him, but all I ever wanted was for my child to be healthy and to grow up, to be a happy young man, so how can I begrudge it now that it's happened by being sad?"

"Because," Sue said. "Because it's so fucking sad."

"Maybe a little," I said. Something like a button or a cotton ball—one of those things you always fear your child will swallow—felt lodged in my throat then, and I wanted to sob it up. But, instead, I smiled.

I
CE ON
everything this morning. Jon chipped it off my windshield before he left for work. I watched him from the bedroom window as he did it. Beyond him, in the backyard, the neighbor's spaniel (named Kujo by their grandson) was dragging something dead around in the scrubbrush. A raccoon, I think—although he once brought the long slender leg of a deer into the yard and spent hours gnawing it, wild with it, giddy with it, dragging the bloody thing around in the snow as if he were in love before losing interest and leaving it there for Jon to take away.

But this morning Kujo was going about his work, whatever it was, with grim determination, it seemed, rather than joy.

I left about an hour later, and drove slowly. Black ice. I don't even know what black ice
is,
exactly, except that you can't see it, and before you know it you're spinning off the road.

I wore the new dress. Ridiculous in this weather, but I couldn't resist. I wore it with a black sweater, black tights, and boots, and still the wind in the parking lot cut straight through it. I felt silly, but when I stepped into the office, Robert Z looked up from some papers he was grading and shouted, "Now there's a woman knocking hard on the door of spring. Good for you, Sherry Seymour. Brava for you in your beautiful dress!"

I checked and double-checked my mailbox for anonymous notes:

Nothing.

Surprised to find myself so disappointed.

T
ODAY
in the hallway between classes, I ran into Chad's best third-grade friend, Garrett Thompson.

I hadn't seen Garrett except from a distance (graduation) for—how long?

After middle school he was never one of the boys sitting around our kitchen table on summer afternoons eating cereal (Trix, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs—all that starry-dry and empty sweetness) straight out of the box by the handful while the sun turned the air over their heads to dusty halos.

Still, Chad mentioned Garrett now and then. Something he'd said or done in the cafeteria line or on the bus on the way home from school. Garrett, who'd been so much a part of our lives for years, still seemed like family, still seemed like a distant part of our lives.

He recognized me before I recognized him—and when I finally did realize who he was, it was because he looked so much like his father, Bill, who's now been dead for a decade.

Bill Thompson used to change the oil in my car at the Standard station, and we always talked, laughed together, because we had the boys in common. He was handsome—dark, dimpled, the kind of mechanic you'd find on a beefcake calendar: Mr. February. Shirtless, shining with muscle, provocatively holding a wrench in one hand.

And we'd had plenty of time to get to know each other at Cub Scouts, hovering over some project made of marshmallows and pipe cleaners. We'd wound up together at Camp Williwama a couple of times, too, when Jon couldn't get out of work to go with Chad. It fell upon Bill to teach Chad, then, how to shoot a bow and arrow. I was clueless, hopeless, couldn't even string the arrow in the bow. One night around a campfire while the Wolf Pack whooped and howled in the dark, he'd passed a little flask of whiskey to me, and, sipping at it, I felt almost as if we'd shared some kind of illicit kiss—the whiskey tracing a warm sash of Bill Thompson down my throat, spreading across my chest.

But of course it was nothing illicit. We were parents, surrounded by parents, and by ten o'clock our boys were exhausted and we'd all retreated to our separate tents, and then he died.

For a year or two after his death, I'd overhear Garrett say to Chad in the living room, on their knees, moving little men around on the rugs, "My dad's got a motorcycle in heaven now." Or, when Jon came home from work and said hello to the boys before going upstairs to take off his suit, Garrett would say, "You're lucky that your dad is here instead of in heaven." I'd go downstairs and cry a little into a laundered towel, or step outside on the front porch until I'd managed to swallow the sadness down.

"Mrs. Seymour!" Garrett called out.

"Garrett. My goodness.
Garrett;
"

I touched his shoulder. He smiled.

He asked about Chad. About Berkeley. About Mr. Seymour. He said he was taking auto mechanics at the college, and wondered if he could take an English class with me, knock off a requirement, but it wasn't his best subject.

"Of course," I said. "I'd love to have you in class. Sign up for fall."

But then he said he didn't know if he'd still be in school in the fall. He was thinking about the Marines.

I said, "Oh, no, Garrett, you should stay in school. You don't want to—"

"I feel like I owe my country," Garrett said.

"What does your mother say about it?" I asked.

He said, "Mrs. Seymour, my mother's dead."

Dead?

I took a step backward.

We live in a small town. How could his mother have died, and I didn't know it? "Garrett, when?"

"At Christmas," he said. "She'd gone down to Florida with my stepdad for the winter. The trailer they were staying in had some kind of problem. Carbon monoxide. They went to sleep and never woke up."

"Garrett," I said. "Oh my god. I'm so—sorry. Did you—was there a funeral?"

"No," he said. "My aunt went down there and had her cremated. I've got the ashes."

The ashes.

Garrett had his mother's ashes.

He had, I remembered, like Chad, no brothers or sisters. Now, it was just Garrett, I guessed, home alone with his mother's ashes.

Marie?

I couldn't recall her face. We'd only spoken maybe a dozen times, and always in passing, in parking lots, driveways, hallways, maybe once or twice at the grocery store. I suspected she drank. Now, I can't remember why I thought it, but I usually insisted that Garrett come to our house when he and Chad wanted to play. I was afraid she'd drive the boys around in her banged-up car. Maybe I thought I smelled it on her one afternoon waiting for the boys after school. His father drank, we all knew that, because it had caused the accident that killed him.

I put my hand on Garrett's arm. I kept it there until I could find a voice to speak in again, and then I told him that Chad was coming home on Sunday, and would he come to dinner if he wasn't busy?

Garrett smiled and nodded as if he were already planning on it, and I remembered that his mother didn't cook. The few times Chad spent an evening at Garrett's house he'd say they'd had Pop-Tarts for dinner. Sometimes he didn't remember eating anything at all. "I'll tell Chad to call you," I said. "Maybe Thursday?"

"Thursday sounds great," Garrett said.

I watched him walk away down the hallway.

Poor little boy,
I'd always thought—even before his father died. There was something so tenderly simple about Garrett—a credulousness about the world that Chad had gotten over early. Chad, ironic, already, at four, watching a fat Uncle Sam dance on stilts at a Fourth of July parade, had said, "That's pathetic." It was, I thought now—this fat Uncle Sam—the kind of thing a four-year-old Garrett would have liked.

Little Garrett.

I was surprised how happy I was to have seen him in the hallway. It had seemed to me since Chad left for college, I realized, that the whole part of my life that had really been
Chad's
life—his high school, his friends, his extracurricular activities—had been scissored out of the world. For the most part, his friends had left, too, in the fall. Pete to the University of Iowa. Joe and Kevin to Michigan State. Mike to Colby. Tyler to Northwestern. And the girls he'd known had scattered all over the country, too. Now, when I drove by the high school it was as if a ghostly fence had been erected around it.

No.

Now it was as if I, myself, had become the ghost—a ghost with eighteen years' worth of skills (Band-Aids, bike helmets, fund-raisers, cookies) passing through a world that had learned to get along quite well without me, which had never even noticed my departure, did not now note my absence in it at all.

But I'd forgotten that there were these others, like Garrett, who would stay behind. Towns like ours have kids like this—kids, who, like their parents, grew up here and will stay here. There are those of us who moved here because we liked the idea of a small town—the cornfields around it, the brick buildings downtown. We moved in from other places, crowded the place, brought our expensive coffee shops with us, pretended we were small-town people ourselves, raised our kids here, and then, having no roots, dispersed when those years were over.

But there was another part of the town that would always be here, and if Jon and I didn't buy that condo in the city, eventually I'd start seeing them at the grocery store, in the checkout lines, pushing their babies in strollers through the drugstore. Eventually they'd be the men changing my oil at the Standard station, the women who'll answer the phone at the dentist's office.

They'll ask about Chad.

They'll remember that I was his mother.

O
UTSIDE
, a half-frozen rain ticks against the windows. Inside, Mozart on the stereo, a glass of wine, a book about Virginia Woolf I already know I'll never finish reading. The words move around on the page when I try to focus. I've read two chapters already and remember nothing of them. Jon's nearly done with his shower. I can hear him rinse the soap off his back. It's a sound you wouldn't think could be so different from the sound of a man scrubbing his armpits, but after twenty years of listening, you can tell the difference. I can hear, too, the rain outside harden. The minute difference in the ratio of ice to water on the windowpanes changes the music completely if you listen closely.

Have I even spoken to Jon tonight? If I did, what did I say, and how did he respond? Dinner, we ate separately. I made chicken breasts and rice, ate mine at the kitchen table right after cooking it, then put his on a plate with plastic over it so he could microwave it when he got home—late from a meeting after I'd already gone to the gym. Without Chad to organize our days around, there's less to say.
How was your day? Did you like your chicken? Do you suppose this rain will freeze on the roads? Do you remember what it was like before we had a child, when it was only the two of us? What did we say to one another then? Do you recognize me? Yourself? Your life? This house in which we live?

Is it us?

Is it here?

Is it this?

A
NOTHER
note:

Sherry, Valentine's Day is over, I know, but I wanted you to know I'm still thinking of you. You are so beautiful that my thoughts of you melt even this frozen month for me...

I called Sue at home and read it to her. She said, "Sherry, you sound excited."

I said, "I'm not
excited,
"

She wanted to know who I thought it was. Robert Z? A janitor? The dean? A textbook salesman? One of the security guys? A computer tech? A student?