Indecision (7 page)

Now I stopped jogging, caught my breath, and realized that Charlotte Bell’s was the buzzer to push, since mom had reclaimed her maiden name. I leaned on her buzzer while fixing my hair, so much like hers, in the reflection in the window in the heavy wooden door.

“Excellent tofurkey, mom,” I’d said back at Thanksgiving, and really it wasn’t so bad.

“I hope it was a
free-range
tofurkey,” the ex-preacher said, and sipped his wine like it savored of his wit.

“I think humor is good for the Church,” Alice said so dryly that except maybe to me she seemed in earnest.

Everyone wanted to show Dr. Hajar how we didn’t have anything against Arabs, especially if they were wealthy physicians, and the former preacher asked him delicately how things had been since . . . over the last few . . .

“Oh not terribly bad. I’m still being allowed to live in a tall building.”

The Episcopalians looked uncertain over whether it wasn’t too soon for jokes. I tried to help them out and keep things solemn by expressing the hope that Dr. Hajar, who was wearing a bandage over the bridge of his nose, hadn’t been roughed up by some patriotic Turtle Bay thugs.

“Dwight,” mom said sharply.

Dr. Hajar chuckled. “No no. It was simply my sinuses that had begun to overwhelm me.”

“Felix is a very sensitive man,” mom assured everybody. “We cried so much after the— And that can’t have helped.”

“Crying frees the sinuses in fact,” he said. “If I could have continued crying things would have been fine. That wasn’t the trouble. At any rate my daughter is now accusing me of having gotten a Lebanectomy—as she calls it.”

Alice smirked. “A Lebanectomy . . . Isn’t that what the Israelis tried to do?”

“Yes. Well . . . With local assistance.” He swished his wine kind of ruefully.

“The Middle East seems
so
troubled . . .” Mrs. Ex-Archbishop said.

“But we mean to help them,” her husband said.

“Yes,” Dr. Hajar said. “I feel that in coming years each side will help the other to be more as it wants to be.”

“Right,” Alice said. “Terrorism as a form of flattery. It’s the sincerest form of flattery. ‘See?
that’s
how free and good we are.’ ”

Mom didn’t like this. I was confused. The ex-archbishop and his wife were looking deep into their tofurkey. Mom said, “What I propose is that we go around in a circle and each say what we’re thankful for in America. I know for one thing that we’re all thankful to have people like Alice to keep us honest.”

Now I heard Alice and mom trotting indistinguishably down the stairs. Formerly Alice hadn’t trotted very much or generally moved around our old Lakeville house in any way implying that she consented to live there, and it had been a regular feature of the old days for mom to scold her for being
on the warpath.
But these days mom was very gentle with all animals including humans, and didn’t scold much. Now she got along fine with Alice, who lived just a few blocks uptown. Relations were less warm with dad, who mom and Al blamed in the divorce. My own sympathies were more with him, if only because in deserving them less he obviously needed them more.

It was good mornings and cheek kisses all around and then the three of us went heading off toward the Church of the Ascension. “Dwight’s looking a little green around the gills, don’t you think?”

“Bristly too.” Alice brushed her hand against my cheek.

“You wouldn’t want to go to church without sins,” I said.

“We’re not
Cath
olics, Dwight.”

Alice took my hand and we began swinging our shared fist in time with our stride. This was something that despite its cutesiness I still liked doing—even if any physical touch from Alice put into my mind the fear that the obscure pact between us would be lifelong, and end up with our comforting each other in some mutually lonely old age of unmarried Wilmerdings.

Mom, looking very nice in a pale green suit with a light iridescence and some sharp angles to it, greeted people as we walked into the church and started down the nave with the organ going full bore in its somber/joyous registration. Alice was dressed more simply in a light yellow dress, and looked very bridesmaid. Unfortunately the days were gone when she’d worn the awesome costume of a dog collar, black leather pants, and a pink Izod polo shirt with an angry ball of shirtfront stuffed under the fly. “What
are
you trying to dress like?” mom had asked. “Um . . . a punk WASP bitch?” It was one of their more notorious exchanges. I’d just stood on the sidelines, half in love with crazy Al and actually, physically clapping.

We settled into our pews. The doors shut and the light withdrew. And now the rector and the other ones, the acolytes and choristers, strode down the aisle in their whispering vestments and carrying those colorful heraldic pennants they all have. I do feel that the Episcopalians put on a good show. And as always I was enjoying the borrowed solemnity of sitting in church. You could feel like the wood itself had grown dark through meditation and that even sunlight became semithoughtful sliding through colored glass into the incense-marbled air.

The sermon began but I didn’t pay any attention. Although it was not impossible to fool me, I had never believed for a second in God. So I thought not about Him and his Son but about Abulinix. And yet in listening without listening to Reverend Withrow I adopted the look of pious and unhungover contemplation his voice encouraged among more earnest-type congregants, and before long I found myself actually praying.
May I discover,
so I prayed,
or otherwise locate, during this, my limited time only, and even ideally in the next few weeks, before my high school reunion—and with or without the aid of pharmaceuticals—such clarity and justice and stillness of heart as have so far eluded me during my dark but not uncomfortable sojourn here, while I wasn’t looking for them, at least under those exact names, though I mean to embark, very soon, on the pilgrimage of starting to.
Then I realized that praying for stillness of heart wasn’t such a good idea. I added,
May my gist nevertheless be made plain.

When the time came mom got up to take communion, and I watched her walk away in her fancy suit, with her neat, bobbed hair. “Mom looks swank,” I said.

“Dwight do you realize what’s going on?”

“I’m sure in part I do.”

“Our mother has become a de
vout
Episcopalian—she’s an Episcopal nun.”

“But I thought there weren’t any—”

“Exactly. Charlie”—dad called mom Charlie, and so did Alice—“Charlie’s a sect of one.”

“That’s not good? It sounds kind of good.”

“Why do you think she’s so careful to be pretty?”

Al had been mad at me for a while and I wanted to say whatever she wanted to hear. “Um, because we live in a superficial media-driven culture? All of whose products are converging toward a pornographic norm?”

“Shut up. She dresses like that in order to assure herself that
celibacy is her choice.
”

“I don’t know, Al.”

“Well if you thought about it you’d know.”

Whether my own mother ought to be having sex, and how often, and who with, and in what positions, employing what toys or lubricants, really wasn’t something I wanted to think about. But Alice is a brave person unencumbered by politeness or most taboos.

She said, “We have got to get mom eating meat again.”

“What are you saying?” Because it was Alice’s sullen anemic picking at even the cruelty-free portions of our family dinners, while the rest of us scarfed up dead flesh, that had probably struck the first blow against the omnivorous patriarchy run by dad. “You always used to complain you could never convince them of anything, and now that mom is veggie . . . You should be happy, Al. You and the animals should be happy.”

“Mom has become an
ascetic.
That’s why she’s vegetarian, okay?
I
have nothing against pleasure.”

“Like which particular ones don’t you have anything against?”

But she just glared and shook her head a tiny little bit.

To wrap things up churchwise a hymn was sung—“Morning Has Broken,” as immortalized by Cat Stevens—and when mom returned to our pew I stood up to add my wobbly tenor to the unmistakably white-person chorus. I couldn’t help wondering whether this song had been a suggestion of mom’s and thus another device to trick kids like Al and me, weaned on classic rock and known to include vegetarians, back into the fold. She’d always tried to keep from losing us by dabbling in our interests. She was all right with books but not so much with the music. A few months after Kurt Cobain had died his epochal death her first comment—or momment, Al would say—was, “I saw a photograph of the poor young man. He seems to have had just
terrible
posture.”

At the time Al and I were creeping out of our classic rock ghetto, had semi-grungified ourselves, and therefore wanted to defend the musical genius of our own best substitute for the rock-and-roll casualties of the parental era. Alice in the passenger seat had turned to mom as we drove to the supermarket: “Kurt Cobain was like a Beatle-and-a-half, Charlie. He wrote
masterpieces.
”

I remember the foliage had turned, and everything was decked out thrillingly in tragic colors.

“All right, Alice. What might be a song to start with?”

“ ‘Rape Me,’ ” Alice said, and indeed it was in my opinion the last album’s most exciting song.

Mom repeated the title as a scandalized question and said, “I think that’s terrible.”

“But it’s a protest song.”

Even from the backseat I could detect mom’s sharp cross-examining smile. “And what is he protesting darling?”

“The culture,” Alice said.

Mom’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah,” I said, “the whole culture.”

“And what don’t you guys like about our . . . culture?”

“We’re exposed to so much violence,” I speculated.

Alice said, “We hate the blasé cynicism.”

Poor mom! I always wanted her to have some other, better kid. But I wasn’t willing to become that kid myself or capable of convincing Alice that she should do it. Alice was an excellent student who didn’t, however, get very high marks in the attitude department, whereas my geniality, while genial enough in itself, was also pretty transparently an attempt to ingratiate myself with parents who would otherwise punish me for the underexploitation of my alleged mental resources. Mom was never able to secure a single ally in her bid to reform us. We’d given up sibling rivalry early on, committing ourselves to mutual defense, while dad had contented himself as a parental figure with this separation of powers whereby he took part in legislative decisions regarding Al’s and my conduct but played virtually no executive role in the distribution of demerits or awards. Plus he regarded us as unreformable, same as he did everyone else, including himself.

Yet mom wasn’t asking that much of us, especially Alice, who she only wanted to be happy and heterosexual, and to dress like a happy heterosexual too. Instead Alice had instituted her punk-preppy style, she’d made remarks such as “So I sleep with girls and boys. So what?” and when the Cold War finally ended, and it stopped seeming like we’d been brought into the world only to be incinerated here, Alice still continued fulminating, becoming a Marxist right around ’91 and reassuring dad that while she felt that socialism should be tried
one last time,
she had no intention, when the revolution came, of executing him personally or encouraging her New Haven comrades to do so.

“Come on, Alice,” dad growled. “Show some spine. A diffident revolutionary is no good. I’m a commodities trader. If you don’t kill me, who will you?”

This was one of the rare things that made Alice cry. She’d spared his life, and he mocked her. Then she swore off meat and therefore game hunting with dad. Not that there wasn’t still the horned head of a taxidermied ibex from their last trip to Africa—really, an
ibex
—mounted above the bed in her apartment. In fact the creature seemed to bear some kind of glass-eyed witness to some aspect of family relations which it might be painful to picture any more clearly.

We had followed mom through the receiving line and come to Reverend Withrow. The nervous pink-faced glad-hander slapped me on the back with vacant gameshow host affability, and told me how pleased he was that my sister and I were showing a renewed interest in the Church.

I was barely sustaining myself on stale Jiggy Juice fumes as we escorted mom back to the apartment. She mentioned again how she was seriously thinking of going to div. school and getting ordained. “The last thing I’d like to become is one of those aging Village ladies tottering around with their grocery carts in between going to the latest what-have-you. Creaky bohemia is not my cup of tea. Don’t you think, Dwight”—she turned to me on the street—“that in New York you can become more inert than you notice. You can mistake the city’s commotion for your own.”

“Yeah,” I said in order to seem like someone who participated in conversations and responded thoughtfully to questions. “I wouldn’t want to become one of those like balding solo guys walking around in tight jeans and a leather jacket with a cute little dog poking out.”

“It’s like I said mom. Dwight is gay. It explains everything.”

Mom wouldn’t have it—she has a
need
for grandkids. “Dwight is very masculine,” she told Alice.

In accidental confirmation of her thesis I let loose a ripping burp.

Mom groaned. “The Episcopal disease.”

I felt bad. The likelihood of my seeing mom and of my being hungover were both markedly higher on Sundays—a meaningless statistical convergence that nonetheless could create a false impression. I said, “If I really drank too much I wouldn’t be hungover now, mom. In fact I’m a lightweight. I should really drink more—or at least more steadily.”

On the north side of Eleventh Alice and I kissed and hugged mom and said our see you soons. I looked for a moment into mom’s splintered blue eyes and saw there that love was so strong in her that she feared the thing. I think she guessed accurately enough what it was like to be somebody else (such as her husband or one of her kids) that the guess freaked her out and so she kept from making it. In fact I could see how one might do just that, avoiding sympathy out of an excess of it. “Love you,” we said to each other and let go.