Masters of Illusions (21 page)

Martha went into discourse as she wielded her chopsticks like she’d been born holding them. And who the hell taught her that?
“There’s just one reason a woman leaves a man who loves her. Or who doesn’t love her, for that matter. Because she doesn’t
love
him.
” Martha paused, but then changed her mind. She wouldn’t give her mother a chance to say something about Italians. “That’s
not to say she didn’t once love him. A whole lot, even.” She practically swallowed a shrimp whole.

“Chew, Martha!”

“I’m chewing. You don’t owe somebody just because he loves you. Since love should never be demanding—I learned that in a class
about Hindu philosophy”—Margie thought, Yale!——there’s no need to feel that you owe someone. Now I know that’s not what you
believe, not being a Hindi, but we’re talking here about owing someone your whole life. See, sometimes the picture gets too
big, and you can’t see a damn thing.”

Then Martha was the second person after Palma to say the word
divorce.
Martha went ahead and slipped it in. “I’ll tell you, Mom, it’s really incredibly fascinating when couples are getting divorced.
If a man loves a woman who doesn’t love him anymore, he fights to make her love him. He’ll berate her, bully her, or keep
telling her how much he’s done for her, or accuse her of being out of her mind, and he just won’t give up until she comes
back to him, or until she’s no longer there, at which time he goes on berating anyone who will listen. Of course, if she does
give in, and comes back—defeated, I’d have to call it, or maybe exhausted—he’ll insist everything’s just fine again, and think
he’s wonderful for keeping the marriage together. Men think that if a woman isn’t yelling and screaming, she’s happy as a
clam. So on top of not loving him anymore the woman who goes back loses all respect for her husband because he’s so content
to be happy with an empty marriage.”

“That’s not how Dad would act.”

“Mom, I’m just giving you the average scenario so you’ll have something to compare your own to. So listen, when the woman
is tough, and leaves, the husband always needs so much help. Those guys are pathetic. But guess what?”

“What?”

“The unhappy, suicide-talking little fellas marry someone else before a year’s up. It’s easy to find another woman to berate,
apparently.

‘But Mom, when it’s the other way around—when the man leaves—when a woman still loves a man who doesn’t love her anymore,
she’ll be just as kind and as sweet as she can be, figuring if she acts like a good girl, he’ll realize how wonderful she
is and take her back. And let me tell you, if you’re a lawyer, that translates to a refusal on the wife’s part to fight for
what belongs to her. So not only does she end up with no husband, she ends up destitute. So now she comes back to her lawyer,
a year later, too late, naturally. She’s trying to pay for home and hearth while her ex-husband is at the Guadaloupe Club
Med with some bimbo. She still can’t understand why he went through with the divorce—after all, she’d been so nice—but now
it hits her that he’s also completely ripped her off. She’s there with all the bills and he’s got his C-card—too stupid to
know that he’s not young enough to be a yuppie.”

“What’s a C-card?”

“Certification to have your tanks filled.”

“What tanks?”

Martha laughed. “I’m teasing you, Ma. Scuba tanks.”

“Oh.”

“You can never trust a man with a C-card. He spends more time blow-drying his hair than you do.”

“I can’t imagine Jacques Cousteau blow-drying his hair.”

“We’re not talking about
real
divers, here, Ma.”

“What
are
we talking about?”

“Something that hurts too much to talk about.” Martha sighed. “Where’s the waiter?” Two more beers arrived, the waiter only
a second behind them for this next round. “Mom, you and Dad aren’t a couple of jerks. Maybe I’m telling you about the typical
divorce so that you’ll know that… so you’ll know that… Oh, shit, I don’t know.”

Margie watched her daughter struggle not to be stern. Margie said, “You know so much, baby. You really do.”

“No, I don’t.” Martha wiped a finger across her empty plate and licked off the soy-sauce drippings. “It’s just that I’ve got
this streak of blarney I must have inherited from that famous shit of all times, my evil Irish grandfather.”

“God I wish that man had died a hell of a lot sooner.”

“At Dad’s birth, for example?”

“Exactly.”

“You blame him for Dad’s obsession?”

“Yes. I blame him for abusing your father and his other children. If emotional abuse is what led to Dad’s obsession, then
that’s what I blame him for.”

“Why do you suppose Uncle Mike and Uncle Frank aren’t obsessive?”

“Martha, is obsession what we’re dealing with here? Dad’s not really obsessive. I mean, he certainly isn’t about anything
else.”

“I suppose. But then again, how would we know that? He doesn’t do anything else.”

“Yes he does. He does what men do. He watches TV, he goes to firemen parties, he reads the paper, we go see a movie.”

Martha sighed again. “Well, let’s face it, Mom. Maybe you’re just bored.”

“Why would you say such a thing, Martha?”

“I’m sorry. I got frustrated with you.”

“You’re never bored when you’re with someone you love. Sometimes I sit and just watch him watch TV. He’s a good person. He’s
good to me. He’s always been good to you.”

“I know that. But so what? What’s that got to do with what we’re here for? You’ve gone along with his very weird behavior
and you don’t want to do that anymore. No more denial, Ma. Let’s deal with that instead of love.”

“Deal with the hurting part?”

“That’s right. You’ve changed into a different person than what you were when you first got married. You feel like starting
up again—trying something different. There’s just nothing you can do about the fact that he isn’t.” Martha picked up her beer
glass and put it down again. “I need tea.” The pot arrived. She said to her mother, “Of course, you could talk to him.”

Margie poured her own tea. Martha’s attempt had left more tea on the table than in her cup. Margie did no better. “Believe
it or not, I have talked to him. A little. I’m not going to change him. But Martha, the obsession thing was part of him when
I met him. I married him for better or worse. How could I change my mind about the worse part?”

“You can change your mind because you’d just turned eighteen when you made that ridiculous promise. You didn’t know what worse
might be. You couldn’t predict how you’d be when you grew up. People change. People need to renegotiate their marriage every
few years.”

“What’s that? The party line?”

“Yeah.” She grinned. That grin in court would someday put juries in her back pocket. Margie didn’t say that, though.

“Want some more tea, Martha?”

Martha’s grin dissolved. “Why now, Mom?” She waited a little longer than usual to see if Margie would respond. She knew her
mother would need time. So after a few moments, Margie filled in the pause.

“Martha, Miss Foss was right. She just didn’t use the right words on me.”

Martha said, “Miss
who
?”

“My high school guidance counselor. I didn’t go to college because she didn’t tell me the truth. She was mean-spirited.”

“What was the truth?”

“That I was already smart enough to know that the horseradish was no place to be. That the problem was that I wouldn’t admit
it.”

“Jesus, Mom, fill in, okay?”

Margie filled in. Then she said, “She could have helped me face the truth.”

“Miss Foss was probably the only counselor for the senior class.”

“No. For all the girls at Hartford High.”

“Then she didn’t have time. That and the fact that she was frustrated with you. So she had to hand you the party line.”

“Martha, what do you think educated people end up with that I don’t have?”

Martha thought. She had no ready answer this time. Then she said, “My friends who didn’t go to college stayed eighteen. They
stopped in their tracks. Not going to college is a safety net. You get to stay a kid. You get to be lazy; you don’t have to
think anymore. It’s a crutch, not being educated. If you go and make a mistake in your life, everyone will say, ‘What did
she know? She got married right out of high school.’ The more you learn, the more mature you’re expected to act.”

“Is that what happened to me, then? To my life?”

“Yes, that’s what happened. But it’s not necessarily a permanent condition.” She waited. Margie said nothing. “Mom, your batteries
are charging up. Probably because your life is half over. You want the second half to be different. Happens all the time.
The chief cause of divorce in the middle-aged.”

“But Martha, I’m not completely uneducated. I read so much. I read all the time. I love to read. I’ve learned a lot.”

“You read for entertainment.
War and Peace
is not the same as your kill-the-baby books.”

“
When the Bough Breaks,
you mean?”

Martha laughed at her mother. “Exactly. Actually, I envy you. You’ve got the right attitude. I’ll bet Tolstoy just wanted
to entertain us.”

“Martha, I want to stay serious.”

“Sorry. Listen, Mom, do you ever think about what an author is trying to say to you about human nature?”

“I didn’t think authors were trying to tell me anything about human nature.”

“Oh, Mom.”

“Wait. Yes, I did. Once. I went to see
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I wrote to the playwright. I asked him if the play meant that God was dead. If George, the history professor, ate the telegram
that said the son was dead as a way to show the audience that the evidence was swallowed up by history. The son being the
son of God. So that nobody could really
prove
whether God was dead or not.” Margie grew animated. She loved to storytell. It had been a long time. “Then there were these
two other characters in the play—a science teacher and his dumb little wife. And I figured the dumb little wife was someone
like me, and that she wanted to have a baby and couldn’t so she put her faith in her husband instead of God—the husband being
science. Well, anyway, he wrote back and told me I was the only one who got his message.”

“Who wrote back?”

“Martha. The playwright.”

“Tommy Agee wrote you a letter?”

“Jesus, Martha. Tommy Agee was a baseball player.
Edward Albee
is the playwright.”

Then Margie laughed. They both laughed. So much beer. Margie said, “I get it, Martha. All those baseball games we took you
to. You never analyzed them, did you?”

“No.”

“But you enjoyed them.”

“Still do.”

“What does ERA stand for?”

Martha’s lips parted, she stopped herself, she smiled, and then she let herself say, “Equal Rights Amendment.”

Now they became hysterical. They laughed until they wept. The sushi chef behind the bar laughed, too. Martha did not point
out to her mother that this was the first time she’d heard her laugh out loud. Martha said, “I have a confession to make.”

“What?”

“I don’t know what ‘base on balls’ means.”

“What?”

“I said, I don’t know what ‘base on balls’ means.”

“Of course you do. You’re making a point, right?”

“I’m not! I mean, I’m making a point, but I still don’t know what ‘base on balls’ means.”

“It’s obvious what ‘base on balls’ means.”

“Not if you don’t feel like figuring it out. Not if you just want the romance of baseball without all the gobbledygook.”

“Martha! I demand that you think and figure out what ‘base on balls’ means.”

A plaintive look came over Martha’s face. “Please don’t make me. My head hurts. Just tell me, Mom, okay?”

“A base on balls is a walk.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. But then, shouldn’t it be: ‘base on four balls’?”

“That would be redundant.”

They started to laugh all over again, and then Martha reached over and took both her mother’s hands. She said, “Once in an
American Lit class, the final exam was the question, ‘Why was Moby Dick white?’ And I thought, If my mother were here she’d
write that Moby Dick’s father was white and his mother was white, too, that’s why he’s white. And then she’d walk out of the
room.”

“See? I
wasn’t
college material. That’s exactly what I would have done.” Margie looked down at their four hands. Then she looked back up
at Martha. “I wanted more children than just you. I let him do everything his way. A woman will do anything for a man if he’s
nice to her. Boys were never nice to me. They patronized me, which wasn’t the same thing.”

Martha had used up her tears laughing, so there was none that formed now. She said, “Oh, Mommy.”

“And I let him think everything, too. But now I want to do the thinking. As soon as I figure out what it is I want to do,
I’ll do it. But it’s too damn late, isn’t it? It is too late. What will I do?”

Martha had no answer for her mother, so she had to go with a brief. “Of course it isn’t too late. Find a route. If you look
for one, you’ll find one. If we have to switch the parent-child roles around for a while, I don’t mind. I’ll take care of
both of you while it happens. And Mom?”

“What, sweetheart?”

“I’m glad you didn’t have other children. I’d have had to share all the love.”

A
fter Martha, Margie went to talk to Chick. She wanted to see him alone, too. That meant more beer. She met him at Jack Potter’s
old haunt, the Brookside Tavern. First, all the patrons told Margie how sorry they were to hear about her Dad. She enjoyed
talking about him and thanking the old men for being his friend when he’d needed them, though she didn’t note that it was
only two times a year. Then Chick came in and he and Margie sipped their beers and chatted until he said to her, “You ready
to spill the beans yet, kiddo?”

She was. “How come no one ever told me that Aunt Annette and the girls were at the circus? And besides that, I’m wondering
what else no one’s ever told me.”