Ms. Taken Identity (15 page)

My hands are actually sweating, so I stuff them down into the sides of the chair cushion.

“When your mother and I got married, all I wanted was a happy family. That’s why I let your mom take the lead in raising you
children, bring you up Catholic. Because she was the smart one, the cultured one, and I wanted her fingerprints all over your
growing-up years. And those early years were good, Mitch. They were wonderful. You have to believe that. But your sister’s
death…
changed
things. Your mother and I didn’t cope well, we showed our worst colors to each other, and she had the affair, and even though
we stayed together and tried to do the right thing, we were dead to each other. She didn’t love me anymore. And somewhere
along the line, Scott turned against me. He hated me, Mitch, you know that. And just like that, everything I’d loved and cared
about was gone. Except you. You were the relationship I could be proud of. My youngest son. And then it was the summer you
turned ten, and you and I’d been working on your baseball swing all spring, and I was planning to coach your team…”

He doesn’t need to complete his thought. “And I went away to Oxford.”

My mom’s prep school had given her a professional grant to study for two months at Oxford, and she wanted to take Scott and
me with her, enroll us in the young scholars program. Up till then, my parents had done a good job keeping a lid on the tension
in the house—a raised voice here or there, an occasional too-quiet dinner—but all hell broke loose over that. There were nasty
fights, tooth-and-nail drag downs, and it always came back to this: my dad didn’t want his boys gone for two months; my mom
said it was his own damned fault he couldn’t get vacation time to go with us and why ruin a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
just so he could take us to the park a couple times a week for baseball. Of course, they had no idea we heard all that—they
thought we were outside or listening to music or sleeping—and ultimately left the decision up to us. My brother had his bags
packed in an hour, but I wasn’t so sure. After all, I was the one who’d begged my dad to help me with my swing—which he had—and
to coach my team—which he said he would. I felt guilty about that. And I also felt sorry for him, the way my mom had ripped
into him in all their arguments. But what about England, and the chance to walk the streets of Sherlock Holmes’s London?

In the end, I rode a plane to England.

Something in my father’s old face crumbles, and his eyes go dark, like it’s happening again right now. “I can’t explain it,
Mitch, not in a way that won’t make me sound like a pathetic old man. You were a happy-go-lucky kid going to a brand-new world,
because what kid wouldn’t? But it felt like you’d made some fundamental choice. Like you’d crossed over to the other side,
to a place where your mom and Scott were, a place where I couldn’t reach you anymore. You were gone. She’d won. I’d lost all
of you.”

I try to imagine those two months for my father, passing by Scott’s bedroom, already closed off to him, passing by mine, empty
now, too, waking up in a bed that’d been loveless for years—going through every motion of his day—and doing it all alone.
I see him out in the family room, paging through our photo album, coming across pictures of Emily when she was alive, those
“golden years” of our family; glancing at pictures of himself as a boy, those black-and-white prints of him at his father’s
tailor shop, when he was still young and wide-eyed and had all his life ahead of him. And now this was his life, and the only
company he had was himself and the echoes of a family no longer there. Funny, but you always think of a kid needing his father.
But what about a father needing his kids?

“The three of you were on cloud nine when you came back. Brimming with stories and inside jokes and souvenirs and laughter,
and I wanted to take joy in all your excitement. I really did. But God help me, the happier all of you were, the sicker it
made me feel. Because that wasn’t my world, Mitch. The walls had gone up and the gate was closed and I was standing outside.
And I knew that’s where I’d always be. And I wanted to believe that there was still some bit of happiness out there for me,
somewhere. So I left.” His voice catches on that last part, and for a long time the only sign of life in the room is the hum
of the overhead fan. Finally, he clears his throat. “I’m not proud of the way I handled it, Mitch. None of it, but especially
after the divorce. But I didn’t think you cared. You just shrugged a lot and said you were fine, and I left it at that. And
by the time I realized there was so much more than indifference in those shrugs, it was too late: you’d learned to get along
without me, and to hate me. And you were better off.”

There’s a photo of me on my First Communion, when I’m eight, and I’m standing with my mom and Scott and all my Catholic relatives,
and my hands are stuffed with rosaries and prayer books and everyone’s smiling and laughing, arms draped around each other
like some kind of celebratory rugby scrum. My father’s in the picture, too, but barely. He’s off to the side, not part of
the group, with some space between him and the rest of us, and he has an uncomfortable look on his face:
Should I be in this one or am I intruding?
And that’s how he must have felt, all those years, but especially near the end: the outsider, a stranger in his own home,
in his own life, and always believing that you could take a pair of scissors and cut him out—cleanly—without affecting anybody
else in the picture. He didn’t know how wrong he was.

The back door swings open and there’s commotion in the kitchen. Leah’s come in.

“Hey, Dad,” I whisper, making a wiping motion with my hands to my eyes. “If Leah sees those, she’ll kill me.”

He dabs at his tears, unaware they were there.

Leah glides in a minute later, to a smiling father and son, no hint of anything amiss.

“Can I get you anything else?” she asks me, nodding to my glass.

“Uh, no. No thanks.” I get up. “Actually, I was just heading out.”

I go over to where my father’s sitting on the sofa. We look at each for a long time, just stare into those eyes we’ve kept
hidden from each other for what feels like a hundred years. Part of me wants to strangle him for what he did, tell him he’s
a stupid fucking old man who can go to hell. The other part of me just wants to cry.

“You comfortable with that pillow?” I ask.

He nods. “I’m fine.”

“Good.” Before I realize what I’m doing, I bend down toward him, but I know it’s not going to be a hug, so I put my hands
on his shoulders, and he lifts his hands to mine, and we wind up in something that almost looks like a wrestling hold. But
the two of us know that’s not what it is.

“Rest easy, Dad,” I say. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Goodbye, son.”

And then I walk through the front door of my father’s home and into the yard, where the sun feels good on my face.

There are no famous faces at our lesson Thursday night, no Shandi or Tony or winners of
Dancing with the Stars
or
So You Think You Can Dance?
who we can sit around and discuss whether we’d like to star-fuck. Just the usual crowd. We have our group lesson, then Adonis
works with Marie and me, then it’s just Marie and I changing our shoes. That’s when she blindsides me.

“Fran told us what you did for her. I think it was great. We all do.”

We all do?
Shit. Fran and her big mouth. “Hmm. Well, that kit was just lying around my place, collecting dust. She did me a favor by
taking it off my hands.”

“And the book? That was just lying around?”

I nod happily. “Yes, actually. At least my copy. All I had to do was go to the bookstore and pull another one off the shelf.
I didn’t even have to reach.”

She gives me a look.

“I didn’t. I swear.” And I didn’t. “Okay, look. She did something nice for me, I returned the favor.
Quid pro quo
. Scratch my back, I scratch yours. It’s no big deal.”

“But it
is
a big deal,” she insists. “She’s done something nice for all of us. I have some potholders and an apron because she knows
I like to cook. Rosie has a poncho, with scissors and roses on it. And all she got from us was thank-you cards. You actually
gave her a gift, something she could enjoy.” Her look, combined with her tone, makes me very uncomfortable. “Do you know how
thoughtful that is?”

And the answer to that is
No
. I don’t. Honestly. Because buying books for grandmas who knit me things, and dancing, and putting gas in a car, and writing
a book called
Catwalk Mama
that I don’t hate, and eating popcorn with Sno-Caps and Milk Duds and Whoppers, and having a friend named Rosie, it’s all
new to me. I’m in uncharted territory. My GPS device is scratching its head, trying to figure out exactly where the hell I
am. And the problem is, I need to get my bearings,
quick
, because if I don’t, if I keep going around giving away possessions and books that could be traced to Mitch, and doing other
things for reasons I don’t quite understand, I’m going to find myself in a place I
know
I don’t want to be: Disasterville.

The four of us head to Colchester’s Friday night for my blind date, and I can tell straightaway she’s the perfect girl for
me. Her name’s Trista and she’s tall and lean and her jeans fit great, and she’s a poet who’s read both Brownings, and we
talk about Donne and Milton and structuralism and postmodernism, and I don’t ask but I can tell she knows it’s “12 items or
fewer
,” not “less,” at the grocery store checkout, and if we got married and sent out holiday cards, she wouldn’t put “Happy Holidays
from the Samuel’s” when all you need is the simple plural (
Samuels
), and, of course, she loves that I’m a writer and loves to hear me talk about what I’ve written, especially
Henley Farm
, and she gets all the themes and symbols and allusions that I’ve subtly woven in. In other words, she’s a computer-generated,
virtual-reality perfect match, but she’s real, and I don’t have to wear any hi-tech goofball visor glasses to see her.

Only I’ve dated this girl before. Her name is Hannah, or Stephanie, or Kristen, and she’s always this way, or a version of
it: cute, funny, polite, on the quiet side, intelligent, grammatically and academically impeccable. And guess what? It’s never
worked. And the reason it’s never worked, I realize for the very first time tonight, as I listen to what I say, and the way
I say it, as Mitch,
not
Jason, has nothing to do with them. It’s me. Like Narcissus staring into a pool of water to get his own reflection, I’ve
always chosen women who let me be exactly how I want to be—dismissive at times, maybe a bit condescending—which, if you think
about it, aren’t the most admirable traits. And while I think it’s good that I’ve found women who accept me as I am—you shouldn’t
go into a relationship thinking you have to swap out every part of yourself: that’s a recipe for disaster—it’s also made me
lazy and indulgent, and I haven’t been asked to extend myself or evolve or improve.

A good relationship—love, frankly—should be a bit like manure. It should take something that’s basically healthy and good
and make it blossom and grow tall and strong and smell nice and have vibrant colors and bear lots of fruit. Love should make
us bigger in all the right ways (and let’s keep our minds out of the gutter; I don’t just mean down
there
). It should be like the Grinch when he hears the Whos of Whoville singing and his heart grows three times its normal size
and he lifts up the whole sleigh, dog with fake reindeer antlers and all. It should give us ripped muscles where they need
to be ripped—generosity, compassion, good deeds—because if it doesn’t, if it just leaves us in our same flabby old skin, why
bother?

So…

I have a nice evening with Trista at the pub, but since I don’t see us getting much beyond our mutual affinity for the Metaphysical
Poets and other things grammatical and literary—my fault entirely—I mention that maybe the
four
of us can get together again, which, I believe, is the proper way of intimating that the
two
of us, Trista and I, won’t be. Bradley shoots me a glance like “You gotta be kidding me,” but I just shrug. How would I explain?
He doesn’t even like the Grinch.

I
call Katharine Longwell on Saturday morning. I’m prepared to trot out a parade of details to jog her memory—St. Louis, Starbucks,
cousin named Bradley, you gave me your card, your boobs were huge—but I barely get past my name when she cuts me off and says
of course
, she remembers me. She was hoping I’d call. I tell her Bradley has a hundred pages of a manuscript she’d love for Katharine
to read, but she’s too shy to ask, delicate creature that she is—an Emily Dickinson in that way, and no good with criticism—so
I’m calling on her behalf, as her agent. Katharine’s reply is breathtakingly swift: Absolutely, send it, she’d
love
to read it! This is a good week for her; she’s in Chicago, not much on her plate. So I pack it all, take it to the post office,
and just like that,
Catwalk Mama
is strutting her way to Chicago, to get the once-over from Katharine Longwell. In other words,
holy fuck
.

The winery crew meets at the studio lot at seven o’clock. We pile into three cars, having established who, by evening’s end,
will be in no condition to drive—Rosie, Dave, Gina—who will be perfectly sober—Fran, Steve, Vicky—and who will be somewhere
in between—the rest of us. It’s one of those scenic drives, over the river and through the woods, and the last mile or so
is on a dirt road, and when we get there, the main house is ancient and bare-bones and really nothing more than a shack to
order your wine. Where’s the wine-making equipment? The bathrooms? But the outdoor patio looks better than fine, with lantern
lights strung overhead and plenty of space, and a band is setting up.

There are twelve of us total, so we pull a couple tables together and start hauling our goodies out, since it’s the kind of
place that lets you bring picnic baskets as long as you buy their wine. I went simple, Brie and crackers, but Marie lays out
a plate of pastries that look far more sophisticated.