Little Earthquakes (31 page)

She cleared her throat. Steve looked up. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she said back, fastening Lemon’s leash. “How’d he do?”

“Half of the rice stuff, two bites of prune glop,” Steve reported, sliding the high chair’s tray off and carrying it to the sink.

“Good,” she said, “I’m going to…” Her heart stopped as Oliver leaned forward. “Steve!” she screamed, and started forward. Not fast enough. The baby tumbled, face first, onto the floor. There was an audible thud and a second of silence. Then Kelly scooped the baby into her arms, and Oliver opened his mouth and started howling.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” Kelly said.

“Is he okay?” Steve asked, looking stricken.

“I don’t know!” Kelly shouted over the baby’s wails. “Why wasn’t he strapped in?”

“I forgot!” Steve said. “Is he okay?”

Kelly gave him a scathing look and carried the baby past him to the kitchen to get the telephone, noticing on her way that Lemon had, indeed, peed on the floor again. She dialed the doctor’s phone number that was written on the refrigerator, hitting 1 and 1 and 1 again until she was connected with the nurse on call. “Hi, this is Kelly Day. My baby is Oliver. He’s five months old, and he just fell out of his high chair…”

Steve tapped her shoulder. “What can I do?” he whispered. “Does he need ice or something? Should we call an ambulance?”

Kelly pushed him aside. She knew that if she looked at his face for even a second longer someone in their house would need an ambulance, and it wouldn’t be Oliver.

“Calm down,” said the nurse. “Any baby who can scream like that doesn’t sound too badly hurt. Did he fall on a hardwood floor?”

“No,” Kelly said.

“And he didn’t lose consciousness or stop breathing? Is he bleeding?”

“No,” she said. Her knees had started to shake. She leaned against the wall. Oliver sobbed and buried his face in her neck. “He just fell. My husband didn’t fasten the straps.”

“These things happen,” the nurse said. “And most of the time, the babies are just fine. If he’s crying like that, and he didn’t pass out or vomit, chances are he’s fine. Try not to beat yourself up. Or your husband. Just keep an eye on him for the next few hours, and call us if anything changes.”

“Okay,” said Kelly. “Thank you.” She hung up the phone and cradled the baby in her arms, saying, “Shhh, shhh,” as she rocked him. “Poor guy, poor guy,” she said, carrying him to the rocker, where she pulled up her shirt and guided his face to her breast. Oliver stared up at her, his lashes still heavy with tears, looking miserable and betrayed, then gave a resigned sigh and started nursing.

Steve reappeared. “He looks okay,” he said.

Kelly ignored him.

“But we should take him to the doctor, right?”

Kelly said nothing.

“I’m really, really sorry…”

“You’re sorry,” she repeated. “Why wasn’t he strapped in?”

“I told you, I forgot!”

“Yeah,” she sneered. The dam broke, and the poison came pouring out. “Just like you forgot your deadline. Just like you forgot to run the dishwasher. Just like you forget to put on your goddamn pants unless I remind you.”

Kelly adjusted her shirt and got to her feet, shoving past her husband, who stood as if paralyzed in the doorway. “I’ve got to take the dog out.”

“I’ll walk him.”

“Don’t do me any favors!” she said, plopping a once-more wailing Oliver into his stroller, buckling his straps with broad gestures, hitching Lemon to his leash, and hurrying the three of them into the elevator and onto the street.

She was halfway down the block when Steve caught up, looking sheepish and scared.

“Go away,” she said, picking up her pace.

“I just thought you might need this,” Steve said. He showed her the diaper bag that she’d forgotten. “I put a bottle in, just in case.”

“Thanks,” she said. She pushed the stroller to the corner and stopped at the red light.

“Let me walk with you. Please? I feel awful.”

Kelly didn’t tell him that he shouldn’t, but she did move over enough to give him room to stand beside her. Steve stowed the diaper bag underneath the stroller and stepped behind the handlebars. When the light turned green, he started to push, and they walked for three blocks in silence. “So what was that survey about?”

The lie she’d told the reporter came slamming back into her brain. “Oh, nothing much,” Kelly said, hoping that he wouldn’t see her blushing in the darkness. “You know, what kinds of articles do I find interesting, and have I bought a new car in the last twelve months.”

“Sorry I woke you up for that,” Steve said. “Listen, if you need to get some work done, you can head home. I can walk him. I can watch him when we get home.”

And let him fall again? Or get run over by a truck?
Kelly thought. No way. She’d have to make something up to explain why she’d missed the conference call she’d scheduled with Elizabeth and a new client. A cold, a sprained ankle, female trouble. Something that pertained to her, and not the baby, because Elizabeth had made her feelings about the baby very clear.

“No, I’ve got it.”

“Kelly, you’re exhausted. Let me help,” Steve said.

She shook her head wearily, wordlessly, and followed Steve as he pushed the baby back home.

My mother got to Mas before I did, and when I arrived she was already sitting at the table, facing the door. She carried a boxy black pocketbook, big enough for her to take home a class’s worth of tests. It was sitting in front of her, between her fork and knife where the plate should have been, and her hands were curled around its handles, as if any minute she might pick it up and swing it at me. Or at someone. Swing it, and then run.

“Lisa.” She sounded almost shy. Worried, too. She cleared her throat. “You look…” I could hear our history teetering in the balance of that pause.
You’re not going out of the house like that. Take off that lipstick. Put on a coat.
I licked my lips, remembering the two weeks’ worth of silence after I’d streaked my hair blond when I was thirteen—I’d buried the bottle of peroxide deep in the trash can in the garage and told her that lemon juice and sun had done the trick. I’d buried the receipts for every cosmetic purchase there, too, after my mother had
tsk-tsked
over a bottle of Chanel foundation and told me it must be nice to have money to throw around on nonsense. “You look well,” she finally said, fiddling with her purse handles. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

She looked around the dining room: sixteen tables, half of them full. “Is this where you work?”

“Yes,” I said and sat down. I’d already figured out what we were going to eat. On Sunday afternoons, Mas served high tea, with chili-pepper scones, cinnamon-dusted chocolates, finger sandwiches with curried shrimp, egg salad, cucumber, and butter. I’d made up the tray myself, and I’d brewed a pot of plum-ginger tea. “Mostly in the kitchen. It turns out I’m not a very good waitress.”

Her hands gripped the purse handles more tightly. I poured her a cup of tea, which she ignored. “I’ve been talking to your husband,” she told me.

I almost dropped the teapot. “Sam?”

She nodded. “We’ve been talking for a few weeks.”

“What…” I swallowed and licked my dry lips. “What did he say?”

Her face was expressionless. “Well, initially he was very surprised to learn that I was alive.”

Oh, dear.

“He wants to know if you’re coming home,” she said. She took a single sip of tea and went back to holding her handbag. “He sounds like a nice young man.”

Was it my imagination, or did she actually sound wistful? I set the teapot down carefully and wiped my hands on my napkin. “What did you tell him?”

“What could I tell him? What do I know?” she asked. Her back was ruler-straight; her words were clear and precise. She could have been talking to a class of fifth-graders instead of me. “I don’t think you’re all right. I don’t know if you’re coming home.”

“But…” I shook my head. I’d arranged this meeting, I’d planned everything I was going to say to her, and now she’d turned the tables. “You knew I was married?”

“Lisa. I’m your mother. And I’m not stupid. You haven’t exactly been invisible, you know.”

I stared down at my plate. I thought I had been invisible, as far as my mother was concerned. She never went to movies, and I’d never been in anything that had appeared on ABC, so how could she know? Had she actually seen any of the direct-to-video movies I’d made? Or the infomercial that only aired in the wee hours of the morning, for a quote-unquote revolutionary hair-removal system? I’d been Girl with Moustache. Fake, of course, but Sam had never quite let me live it down.

“So you knew I was married.”

“Lia Lane,” she said. Her lips—with the lipstick already starting to wander up past her lipline—curved upward. “It sounds like a superhero. Much better than Lia Frederick.”

“And you know about Caleb.”

She swallowed hard. Once. Twice. When she spoke again, her voice sounded fragile and cracked as an antique mirror. “I didn’t know his name.”

I reached into my purse. They took pictures of all the babies in the hospital nursery, and one of the nurses had handed me Caleb’s snapshot when we were on our way home. I’d tucked it into the diaper bag and forgotten about it until I came to Philadelphia and had found it again. Or it had found me. It was the only thing I’d never intended to give away; the one thing I couldn’t let go. Caleb’s face was tomatoey red in the picture, wrinkled and cross looking. He was wrapped in a hospital blanket, and he wore a pink-and-blue-
striped cap.

I pulled it out, smoothed the edges, and passed it across the table into my mother’s hand.

She took the picture and suddenly every part of her was shaking—her hands, her lips, the loose skin of her neck. “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh.”

I bent my head. My eyes were brimming. I thought I’d been ready for anything—her anger, her scorn, her cold dismissiveness, her eye-rolling questions of “What kind of drama did you get yourself into now?” But these little hurt baby-bird noises coming from her throat? No. “Mom. Hey, Mom, cut it out. It’s okay.”

Her grip on the picture was getting tighter. I could hear the paper start to crumple.

“Mom!”

I reached across the table, but she was too fast for me. She lifted the picture in the air. And then she started crying. The people at the table next to ours quickly averted their eyes. One of the other waiters showed up and looked at me.
Napkins,
I mouthed. He nodded and hurried back with a fresh stack of them.

My mother wiped her eyes with a napkin, her shoulders shaking as she cried without making a sound. When her grip loosened enough, I eased the picture out of her hands and put it back in my purse.

She looked at me. Her eyes red and watery, and her lips were trembling. I wondered if she’d ever tried to call me. I wondered what I would have said to her if she had.

“I wish I knew,” she said. Her words were swallowed by a sob.

“Knew what?”

“I wish I knew what I’d done that made you hate me so much.”

I felt the air rush out of me. “You hated me first,” I told her.
Because he loved me more than he loved you,
I thought.

She blinked at me. “Is that really what you think?”

I shrugged, feeling suddenly uncertain. I had believed that, the way…well, the way a kid would believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. It was the story I’d told myself, the one I’d constructed as a teenager and had never questioned in all the years I’d been away. And I’d called her and invited her here determined to forgive her, to open my hand and move forward. But…the possibility spun in my mind, like a leaf caught in a drain. What if I’d been wrong? What if there was nothing for me to forgive? What if I turned out to be just as much to blame as she was?

My mother pressed her lips together, speaking slowly, as if every word pained her. “I remember when you were a baby. I was the one who did the feedings, I was the one who changed your diaper, and rocked you, and sang you to sleep, but when your father came through the door…” She shut her eyes, shaking her head a little. “Your face would just light up. It was hard for me, a little. I loved you so much, but it felt like you only smiled for him.”

No, I thought. Oh, no. I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to think about it, I don’t want to remember…but I couldn’t help myself. The pictures were coming, unbidden—me in the rocker in a stained nightgown, rocking and rocking while Caleb shrieked. Me wearing Sam’s sweatpants because none of my prepregnancy clothes fit and I couldn’t bear to pull on the maternity ones again, marching the too-short hall like a prisoner, back and forth, back and forth, as the hours piled on top of each other, all night long. Me holding Caleb as he screamed in the bathtub, me holding Caleb as he screamed on the changing table…and Sam taking Caleb in his arms for five minutes at the end of the night, lifting him into the air and singing him “Sweet Baby James,” and Caleb not screaming at all.

“I forgave him a lot because you loved him so much.”

“Forgave him what?”

She sighed again without meeting my eyes. “It’s water under the bridge,” she said. “It was so long ago.”

I turned all of my memories of my father over in my mind—the zoo and the flower shows, the restaurant lunches and the ice-cream cones in the park. I wasn’t much liking what I saw on their flip sides. When I was eight and nine and ten, some days I’d come home from school and he would be there. We’d sneak out of the house to matinees and fill up on licorice and fast-food hamburgers afterward. “Don’t tell your mother,” he’d say, smiling a conspirator’s smile as he slid a twenty-dollar bill out of her wallet and into his own. “This is our secret.” It had never occurred to me, at that age, to think about why he was home all the time, but now, I wondered.

And there’d been more. Sometimes there would be a woman who’d join us at the movies or at McDonald’s or Friendly’s or Nifty Fifties afterward. “This is Susan,” he’d say. Or Jean or Vicki or Raquel. His hand would linger on the small of her back. “A friend of mine from work.” Susan or Jean or Vicki or Raquel was always younger than my mother and prettier. Jean had had platinum-blond hair and a breathy giggle. Vicki had given me a lipstick that came in a ridged gold tube. Had I known what they were back then? Had I known all along? Had she?

“He had girlfriends,” I said. I waited for her to say no, but she didn’t say anything.

Her sigh moved across the table like a cold wind. “I hoped you didn’t know that,” she said. “I hoped he’d at least have the sense not to tell you.”

“So why did you stay with him? Why did you stay, if you knew?”

She tightened her fingers on the handle of her purse. “It’s different when you have a child.” I thought about Ayinde and Richard and saw how that could be true, how a baby could make you forgive even the worst transgressions. “I didn’t want to divorce him because I knew that if I did you’d never see him again. He’d just pick up and start all over someplace else, with someone else, and he’d tell you he’d visit, but he wouldn’t. I knew him well enough to know that.”

“But that’s what happened.”

“One of his girlfriends gave him an ultimatum,” she said. Her voice was low and toneless. “Me or your wife. He…” She licked her lips and took another sip of tea. “Well. You know what he chose.”

Not me,
I thought. He hadn’t chosen me. I remembered, with a hot flush of shame, how after Sam and I got married, I’d gone to a fancy stationery shop on Rodeo Drive that was known for its hand-calligraphied wedding invitations. They’d made me a proof, but I never went back to place my order. One was all I wanted. There was only one person I wanted to receive a piece of cream-colored paper announcing that Lia and Sam had become man and wife. I’d sent it to the last address I had for my father: an apartment complex in Arizona. Three weeks later, I’d gotten a letter in return, a note, really, on a ripped-out page of a legal pad.
Congratulations,
it read in his familiar back-slanting handwriting.
And now that you are a “big success” in Hollywood, maybe you can spare something for your “Old Man.”
I’d never told Sam about it. I’d never told anyone.
Well, that’s that,
I had thought, and I’d tucked the note away. That’s that.

“He loved you, in his way. Probably better than he ever loved anyone else.” She gave me a small smile. “You were his girl. Remember how he used to say that? He’d come home…”

“…home from work and swing me in the air,” I said. My voice sounded like it was coming from the end of a tunnel. “You’re my girl.”

“Well, work,” my mother said. “Sometimes it was work, and sometimes…” Her voice faded. Her hands fluttered in the air. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to learn this about him. I’m sorry about your…” She tripped over the words. “Your son.”

“What about the quilt?”

She looked at me, her eyebrows drawn in puzzlement. It was the least of my questions, the least of what lay between us, but it was all I could think to ask her about.

“That quilt. The Strawberry Shortcake quilt. The one you wouldn’t buy me. And then he got it for me and he left and you never got me a new one. You said we couldn’t afford it.”

She looked down at her hands, and in her face I could see the outline of how she’d look when she was an old lady. It was probably the way I’d end up looking, too. “That quilt was the only thing he ever gave you,” she said. “I wanted you to keep it so you could remember your dad.”

“That’s not true. He gave me lots of things. My Barbie dolls…my tea set…my roller skates…”

My mother was shaking her head.

“But…but…” Oh, this hurt. I was remembering my father leaning over me as I lay in bed, setting a bag or a box beside my pillow, whispering, “Look what Daddy bought his number-one girl!”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wanted him to be a better father—a better man, really—and when he couldn’t, I guess I didn’t see the harm in pretending. So I’d buy things for him to give you, and I’d wrap them up, and I was just happy to know that you liked them. I wanted to give you everything you wanted. Every mother wants that, I think.” She wiped her eyes with her napkin. “I wanted to give you a better father, most of all, and when I couldn’t give you that…”

I didn’t know what to say to her. I didn’t know if I could say anything.

“All those plays,” I finally said. “All those plays in high school.
Bye Bye Birdie
and
Mame
and
Gypsy.
You never came…”

“You didn’t want me to,” she said. She smiled a little. “I believe your exact words were that you’d kill yourself if you saw my face in the audience.”

I shrugged and managed a smile of my own. “Well, I was an actress.” I remembered those fights. “Don’t come,” I’d told her, slamming my flimsy bedroom door. “Don’t come, I don’t want you there!”

“So you never saw my face. But I was there.” My mother loosened her grip on her pocketbook long enough to reach inside. She pulled out a manila folder I’d have just bet she’d stolen from some supply closet at her school. She slid it across the table. I opened it and found a crumpled flyer, a leaflet for the first comedy troupe I’d joined. It was ten years old and had been folded and refolded, and the paper felt as soft as linen in my hands. “Where did you find this?”

“On eBay,” she said. Underneath the flyer was a page cut out of
TV Guide.
It was a story about a series set in high school that had aired for half a season seven years ago. I’d been a featured extra, which meant you could see me in every episode that had aired. In the picture you could see the side of my face.