Parachutes and Kisses (51 page)

“Better,” he said. “I'm going to a yoga workshop next month in Colorado, and then next summer—after Mandy comes to stay with me, I'm going off to a Zen retreat in the Caribbean with Wendy.”

Isadora saw red. The blood heated up behind her eyeballs and her heart began to pound. Here was a man who turned his back on almost every opportunity to take care of his kid financially, who pleaded poverty at every opportunity, yet who seemed to be spending his life at a series of retreats—in every sense of the word.

“I thought you were totally broke,” Isadora said, as calmly as she could. (She remembered that he hated this. One of the things he always assailed her with when they lived as man and wife was her ability to keep her voice low and soft even when she was agitated and angry. He always wanted to goad her to throw tea-cups and fling food, as if such violence were the proof of involvement.)

“Well—I'm just about scraping by with help from my parents and Wendy, but ...”

“But you always seem to have money to indulge yourself,” she snapped.

Oh, why had she said this? She had promised herself to drop the issue, to let him be a wimp if he wished to be, to let him grow up or not grow up in relation to Mandy—not to assume the maternal role with him, not to fall into the trap of saying judgmental things.

“There you go again—hocking me,” he said, getting up to leave.

They hadn't even ordered yet (all that stood on the table was ice water) and here he was: leaving. She felt cheated by his refusal to confront her on it. She would have liked to have it out once and for all. The discharge of feeling would at least be salutary for both of them, but he wouldn't deal with it.

“I'd better be going,” he said.

She panicked. Just a moment ago, he had been sitting down with her, about to break bread, and here he was already getting up to leave. The repetition of the leaving yet again was so unbearable that she did what she had never done before in her entire life: she picked up her glass of ice water and flung the contents in his face.

He looked shocked, then contemptful, then mocking. Their neighbors sat there all around them gawking at them. A few drops of ice water hung from Josh's beard, a drop of water from the tip of his nose.

“Good-bye, Isadora,” he said, and walked out—clearly the victor in this round.
She
was the one who had lost her dignity.
She
was the one who looked like an idiot.
She
was the one who had vowed not to be angry, not to assail him, not to make demands on him—and she had failed.

As he put on his ski parka and walked out, she buried her head in her hands on the table and openly wept, not really giving a damn who saw or heard.

Then she got up and ran out of the restaurant.

She found QUlM and began to drive like a maniac, the tears blinding her, the unexpressed longings (to hold him, to love him, to protect him, to win him back, to maim him, to kill him, to drive a stake through his heart and bury him) rising up in her chest like an indigestible meal. She was still in a welter of confused and conflicted emotions. Eight months was not long enough to make the psychological separation from someone you had loved that deeply, shared pregnancy with, animals with, births and deaths of every sort.

Isadora blamed herself for still being on a roller coaster of emotions, yet she also knew that she should be good to herself, give herself more time. She
wanted
the mourning time to be over, but it just wasn't yet. She wanted to be completely forgiving and understanding and then to get on with her life, but she was still furious with Josh for having left her and left Amanda. When he moved out she had thought he would shape up and come to appreciate her the more; all he had done was slide deeper and deeper into self-indulgence. She could not believe that she was no longer her husband's keeper. She was the keeper of her own soul now.

As she drove, she suddenly remembered something she hadn't thought of for the longest time—Mandy's siege of terror during the spring before she and Josh split. It was as if the child (and the animals) acknowledged something she and Josh could not yet acknowledge: that their whole world was falling apart.

It was just after Josh had returned from that Zen monastery in Kyoto and just before Cicely-the-Naked-Nanny ran over Chekarf. Mandy was two and a half. With no apparent warning she began to be terrified of bugs—invisible bugs, bugs that weren't there, bugs that seemed to be projections of her parents' impending split.

At that point the baby—they still called her “the baby”—slept in a bright red youthbed with removable sides. She would wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, screaming, “Bugs! Bugs!”

Terrified, Josh and Isadora would run upstairs to her room. They would find her face contorted in fear, her mouth open like a black tunnel in an Edvard Munch painting of a screaming child. Her body shook as if she were going into a seizure. Her face was white with fear.

“Bugs!” she would scream. “Bugs!”

“Where? Where?” Daddy asked.

“There aren't any bugs,” Mommy affirmed.

“Bugs!” the child would scream.

At first they denied that the bugs were there. That did no good. The child still screamed their existence to the very rafters. She still shook and trembled.

Then they thought up a new stratagem: participate in the child's fantasy.

“I'm going to get a broom and kill all the bugs,” Mommy said.

“Yes, yes!” said Daddy.

Mommy ran downstairs to get a battered straw broom. Like a deranged old witch, she flung it about the room.

“Bugs!” she screamed, whacking the corners of the nursery. “I'm killing the bugs. Oh—there goes another one ...”

“I got him!”

“There goes the last of them.”

The child would usually be convinced for about a minute and then she would begin to scream again in terror.

“There, Mandy,
you
kill the bugs,” Mommy said, taking the toddler out of her bed and giving her the broom.

Mandy seized it and began to go after the bugs herself, whacking them, screaming at them, chasing them. The two parents urged her on with apparent enthusiasm, as if they were fans at a baseball game and their little offspring had just hit repeated home runs. But in their hearts they were deeply troubled—as only parents can be troubled when they think they have done irreparable harm to their little one and they do not know how on earth to remedy it. Finally, the child would collapse with exhaustion.

“All the bugs are gone now,” Mommy said, picking Mandy up and putting her into bed.

“Bugs,” the child would mutter sleepily, dropping off. “Bugs,” she would mutter, conking out.

The two parents, co-conspirators in making both the child and her problems, joined hands and tiptoed down the stairs. They each prayed silently for the extermination of the “bugs”—whatever they were. They each yearned for a house free of bugs. They each hoped that their child would sleep through the night and wake up in a world without bugs.

Remembering this siege, Isadora was comforted that she and Josh had not stayed together. Mandy was better off now—for all her problems in dealing with Daddy's absence. She was self-confident, spunky, free of imaginary insects. She cried for her daddy, missed her daddy—but her feelings and her fears were appropriate. She was sad when Daddy left, happy when he arrived. Though she felt torn between Mommy's house and Daddy's house, she did not see bugs where none existed. That in itself was a blessing.

And what of the infestation of imaginary insects? It had gone the way of their marriage. Oh, Isadora still loved Josh, still wanted to see him grow and change and come back to her a better man, a stronger man, but in some sense she had given up on him. She and Mandy had to get on with it. Better to be broken and stronger at the mended places than to live one's entire life in an impending fracture.

Stop crying, she said to herself finally. This is all for the best.

She glanced at her watch. It was almost time to get Mandy at the Blue Tree School.

Drat, she said to herself. I forgot the lamp at the restaurant.

She would go back and redeem it later, she thought. The lady with the lamp would have light again.

“Let there be light,” she said, driving to get her daughter.

Considering that, all hatred driven hence The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will; She can, though every face should scowl And every windy quarter howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

—W. B. YEATS
“A Prayer for My Daughter”

Whirl is king.

—ARISTOPHANES

SHE had been invited to California to speak at a convention of contemporary witches and goddess worshipers. They had gotten wind of her interest in the Mother Goddess and wanted her to address them—in lieu of the Goddess herself. If they couldn't have Ishtar in person (or Isis, or Persephone, or Demeter), they would take Isadora. Some bargain. The conference—called “Isis Emergent”—was to be held late in March, right after Isadora's fortieth birthday. It would take place outside San Francisco in the funky county of Marin (where Isis would surely emerge—were she
intent
on emerging in the U.S. in the early 1980s).

Isadora could hardly face such a junket alone. The Goddess herself only knew what nuts would accost her there. She had long ago vowed not to make these trips without a kindred spirit in tow. One was entirely too vulnerable otherwise—or at least she was. Alone in a strange hotel room, prey to the intrusions of whoever happened to knock and seek admittance, Isadora found conferences full of strangers a trial. She was not good at the unbridled rudeness or chilly hauteur required to keep lunatics at bay; she was too friendly, too accessible. So she tended to get swamped by ill-wishers. Her celebrity skills were lacking. After all these years she still tended to assume that most people were decent and well meaning—in spite of a host of experiences to the contrary. So she invited Hope to come along, but Hope was busy. Then she invited Kevin, but Kevin was to be with his kid that weekend. Finally, on a lark, she invited Bean; Bean delightedly accepted.

Up until the last minute, she wasn't even sure he would turn up at the airport—that was how unpredictable he always was about schedules.

But there he was, flashing his blue eyes at her from under the brim of the most boyish gray flannel cap. He looked like a kid, and here she was two days past her fortieth birthday. In truth, she had never felt younger. Her birthday had been a festival of spring. Baskets of flowers arrived from far-flung friends to adorn her house. Dozens of roses, balloon bouquets, cases of champagne all heralded her passage into her fifth decade. Once the day itself was in progress, forty seemed the best age in the world to be. It was only the day before forty that was bad. Once forty was actually there, it proved to be delicious. One could counter every trepidation, quiet every qualm with the knowledge that one's life might be half over. Better go for it, grab it, seize the day, savor the sweetness—who knew what decrepitude tomorrow might bring?

Isadora had given up on finding the perfect nanny and had invited Danae and family to live with her and Amanda. She had decided that her quest for Mary Poppins was an anachronism—some aberration picked up from reading too many old novels. There
were
no nannys in America in the eighties; there were only “arrangements.” Communal living was the answer. If you had a big house in an isolated spot, better to share it with people who could help you dig out in case of blizzards than to go on vainly pursuing the dream of perfect “help.” Nobody wanted to be help in America in the eighties—at least not for hire. With Danae in residence, Isadora could take off and do a lecture in California knowing that Mandy would be well (if erratically) looked after. It was much better than having Nurse Librium, zonked in front of the TV, or Cicely-the-Naked-Nanny in the hot tub with her boyfriend, or Olive-the-Scientologist forever on the phone, or Bertha-Belle busy padding the butcher's bill and talking to God—hallelujah.

When Isadora met Bean at the airport, she was blithe in the knowledge that Danae was with Amanda, that the house was full of kids coming and going, and that for all the chaos, there was camaraderie and laughter.

She and Bean astounded each other by traveling together as if they had always traveled together. They both kept expecting to wake up and find that the other one was a colossal pain in the ass, but it never happened. From the moment they embraced at the airport and boarded the plane, they were happy in each other's company—happy, easy, and unruffled. As for Isadora's terror of flying, it had long since turned to elation. She sometimes felt she was happier in the air than on the ground.

 

In California, the weather was glorious. Blue skies in Marin, the green hills humping off to nowhere, even the usually misty Golden Gate Bridge gleaming like a fairy-tale span leading to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

She and Bean checked in at the Stanford Court, where she had often stayed with Josh and even more often stayed alone. Everything seemed like an extension of her birthday. There was champagne waiting in their room, bags of sinsemilla sent by the organizers of the conference, another basket of flowers sent by a friend in California.

“To us,” Isadora said, toasting Bean in champagne.

“To us,” he said.