Surprise Me (24 page)

I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you. I seem to be doing that more and more lately. My parents are scandalized by my life or lack of life. I don’t talk to my mother. My father calls to tell me how worried he is about me. My son’s father feels most alive when he isn’t here.

Only Avi finds me worthy of his attention. So maybe what I was always meant to be is a mother and not a writer.

I.

Isabelle,

Damn it, you’re infuriating!!!!!

D.

—

SITTING ON HER HIGH STOOL
behind the front counter of Noah’s Ark, Isabelle smiles.
Oh, Daniel.
How glad she is that she’s found him again.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

F
anny Hershfeld has been teaching Avi to play Scrabble. Even though he is only five, he got the hang of it immediately. From the time he was two, courtesy of
Sesame Street,
letters, and then words, have been his constant companions. When he was three, he would call from the backseat of the Jeep, safely strapped into his car seat, “Mommy, do we ‘got milk’?” pointing to the billboard with the bright blue Cookie Monster surrounded by a hill of chocolate chip cookies and looking forlornly around for his milk. And Isabelle would reassure her son, their eyes meeting in the rearview mirror, that, yes, they had milk in the fridge. “Let’s get more!” Avi would chortle, because he had been burned several times by Isabelle’s unreliable memory, and she would always answer, “Okay, on the way home,” because she couldn’t swear that a carton would be waiting for them when they got there.

By the time he was four, Avi was reading simple Dr. Seuss books by himself—
The Cat in the Hat, Yertle the Turtle,
and
Green Eggs and Ham,
a particular favorite because he thought it was hysterical when that strange creature called himself “Sam-I-Am.” So when he passed his fifth birthday, Fanny felt he was ready for Scrabble.

Now they have their routine. They meet in the backyard at the wrought-iron table under the persimmon tree—“a neutral zone,” as Fanny calls it, for there is no mistaking that each time they sit down to play, they are embarking on a Scrabble battle. Once Avi understood the basic rules, he wanted no more help from Mrs. H, as he prefers to call her. “I can do it myself,” he told her, a refrain Isabelle hears every day about most everything, from making his bed to riding his two-wheeler.

Q
is often a problem for him because he doesn’t know how to spell any words with
q
in them, except
quiet,
but that is a minor issue, since there is only one
q
in the letter box.

Fanny has agreed to an epic Scrabble game while Isabelle drives to the San Francisco airport to pick up Casey, home from Cambodia, where he has been attending to victims of the overflowing Mekong River. It’s October, Halloween is little more than a week away, and the weather is starting to be nippy. Isabelle brings a sweatshirt out to Avi when she tells him she’s leaving. He takes it but stashes it on his lap, doesn’t even look up, too intent on rearranging his little tiles, trying to find a word. His father’s frequent comings and goings no longer occupy his world. They are a given, a fact of life, and he doesn’t ask to go to the airport anymore for the send-off or the return. There’ll just be another one soon, and if he’s doing something compelling, as he almost always is, he has no interest in a long ride to the San Francisco airport.

Isabelle made sure she wouldn’t have him with her this time, because she isn’t bringing Casey back to their house. It’s taken her six years and endless discussions with Deepti to have the conviction to say,
This isn’t the way I want to live
. She is done with the suddenness of Casey’s departures, with no continuity in their lives, with the distinct realization that her needs, Avi’s needs, pale in comparison to Casey’s need to save the world. Now she has to gather whatever courage she can locate to tell him all this on the drive home. Now she has to deposit him at Art and Louisa’s and not look back. Can she do it? She has no idea, but she knows she has to try, and having Avi with her would make that impossible.

“You gonna take all day?” Fanny asks with her smoker’s rasp as she watches Avi ponder his letters. She shows him no mercy simply because he’s five. The only concession she makes to his youth is that she leaves her ever-present cigarettes in the house.

“Wait a minute.”

“I’ve been waiting.”

They adore each other, and Isabelle is grateful that Mrs. H has slipped into the grandma role without ever being asked.

Amazingly, her own mother showed up on her doorstep, unannounced, over a year ago, on July 28, the day of Avi’s fourth birthday, her apologetic father alongside, holding their suitcases.

“Maybe we should have called” are the first words out of his mouth.

Isabelle is dumbfounded, blindsided. She has a large group of four-year-olds and their parents showing up any minute for Avi’s party, and here are her parents, the last people in the world she expected, or wants, to see.

Her mother, amazingly, looks exactly the same: elegant, beautiful, imperious. She seems never to age. But the same can’t be said for her father. His shoulders appear more stooped. He’s lost some more hair, and he’s wearing glasses now. Looking at the two of them standing side by side, it’s hard not to conclude that Ruth has somehow been siphoning off youth and vitality from her husband for her own purposes.

“It’s Avi’s birthday, isn’t it.” This from her mother—a declarative sentence, not a question. A challenge. Certainly not the apology for four-plus years of the silent treatment Isabelle would have liked. “So we’re here,” Ruth says as she pushes past Isabelle and into the small living room. “Where’s the birthday boy?”

“Dad,” Isabelle says quietly, “you couldn’t have let me know?”

“Your mother made me promise not to.” He shrugs. “You know your mother.” Then: “She was afraid you wouldn’t let her come.” And Eli puts down the suitcases and reaches for his daughter, bringing her into a warm, much-longed-for hug. “I’ve missed you,” he says, a whisper into her hair. But Isabelle hears him. She’s missed him, too.

In the living room, grandmother and grandson are staring at each other. Finally Ruth speaks: “You look like my side of the family,” claiming him because he’s an adorable boy, and choosing to ignore the fact that he takes after Isabelle and has the Rothman genes.

“Is that good?” Avi asks.

“Well, yes, of course. Who wouldn’t want to look like the Abramowiczes? They’re handsome people, all of them.”

“I want to look like myself.”

“And that you do,” Isabelle says, coming in from the front porch with Eli trailing behind her, ever helpful, having picked up the suitcases once again. “You look like Avi Arthur Mendenhall and nobody else,” she tells her son. “Unique. One of a kind. Very special. And today the birthday boy!” All of this said as a reassurance to her son and a rebuke to her mother, who takes it as such.

Isabelle can see the hurt pinch her mother’s face—oh, that look, she’s seen it a thousand times, as if Ruth has eaten something that’s disagreed with her.
Well, this has started off badly,
and Isabelle finds herself rushing to rescue the moment, against her better judgment, contrary to the years of resolve she thought she had built against her mother.

“Avi, you are so special that your grandpa and grandma flew all the way across the country to celebrate your birthday with you,” Isabelle tells him.

“Lady Momma,” Ruth says.

“What?”

“I want Avi to call me Lady Momma. Grandma makes me sound ancient…which I am not!”

Isabelle is nonplussed again. How could she have forgotten her mother’s overreaching vanity?

“Lady Momma?” Isabelle’s voice rises with incredulity and a bubble of laughter.

“And I’m your grandpa”—from Eli as he walks over to Avi, bends forward at the waist like a marionette, and extends his hand to the little boy. They shake hands solemnly.

“This is weird,” Avi says, searching Isabelle’s face for confirmation.

“Yes,” she agrees, “it is. This is very weird.”

Her parents stay for two days, two long and difficult days, and by the end of the visit Isabelle has managed to work herself into a serious, inexorable headache that sits right behind her eyes and pounds her with its unrelenting message—
This is a mistake, this is a mistake
—because her mother and father have managed to work themselves back into her life, and Avi’s.

—

AS ISABELLE SKIRTS SAN FRANCISCO BAY,
along I-80 and then U.S. 101, she rehearses what she will say to Casey. All her life her nerve has failed her at crucial moments, so she doesn’t trust herself. The only hope she has is to rehearse. And oftentimes even that doesn’t work.

She grins to herself in the speeding car as she remembers that day at Chandler when she walked across the entire campus from her apartment to Daniel’s office mumbling like a deranged street person over and over, “It would be better if I worked with another professor…it would be better…it would be better…” And even then, when she was standing before Daniel’s substantial presence, she was unable to get the words out.

Well, that worked out fine, though, didn’t it? It brought her Daniel.

Over the past two years, their e-mail correspondence has ranged far from their initial topic of conversation—her writing. They no longer discuss that, because Isabelle no longer writes.

In the beginning, after Isabelle explained why she rarely, if ever, wrote anymore—“I no longer believe I can”—Daniel would periodically raise the subject again, as if she’d never answered his question, and Isabelle would ignore him. Then he would ask again. Then again, until finally one day she shot back angrily, “Are
you
writing?” And Daniel wrote back one word, “Yes,” and the answer took her breath away.

She wanted to ask,
What are you writing? How did you start? Are you happy with it? Can you show me some of it?
But she didn’t. Without any credentials on her part, she felt she had no right to question him. Instead she wrote back, “Good,” and they went on to other topics.

Daniel tells her about his very small town, Winnock. And his daughter across the meadow who refuses to have anything to do with him. And his class and the women who have come to seem like good friends. And about Bev, who owns the bakery in town, makes heavenly cinnamon buns, and provides him with the Internet connection that makes their correspondence possible.

Isabelle writes to him at first about Avi and how much unexpected joy being his mother has brought her. But then, as they grow bolder with each other, she begins to write about her regret, about how she’s spent a lifetime feeling stuck. All but the five months she spent with Daniel. How was he able to make her believe in the future, in her ability to get there?

What was it?
she asks him in an e-mail composed late one night, when it feels like she’s the only person awake on the planet. Fanny’s side of the house is dark. Rain patters gently on the roof and slides down her living room window in slow rivulets. It must be close to 3 a.m., because all the windows of all the houses she can see up and down her street are dark, and mist clings to the streetlights like cotton candy. Then she is able to write,
What was it that happened between us that made every hope and dream seem possible?

Isabelle,
he writes back,
we fell a little bit in love with each other.

—

SHE AND DEEPTI HAVE DISCUSSED LOVE
a lot. What is it worth? How much should one give up for it? How does one know it for sure? These conversations often take place in hushed voices on the porch of Isabelle’s duplex, with Avi tucked safely in bed. In the winter they bundle up in heavy sweaters and sip the aromatic chai tea that Deepti brews in Isabelle’s kitchen.

The tiny front porch feels like their private space, designed for just the two of them, Isabelle in her rocker, Deepti in her wicker chair. But one night, well after midnight, Isabelle sees the light from the television go off in Fanny’s living room and then hears her neighbor’s front door open and there is Fanny, out on her porch, wearing her old chenille bathrobe with a faded rose across the back.

“Fanny, are you all right?”

“What are you drinking? It smells like spice.”

“Chai tea, Mrs. H,” Deepti says. “I could easily make you a cup.”

“Well…” Fanny equivocates, but Isabelle can tell she’d like an invitation to their porch discussion and so she brings out another chair and an extra blanket, and now it’s the three women discussing love in the damp night air.

“I loved my husband, I did,” Fanny says with deep regret in her voice, “but what did it get me?”

“Do you wish you hadn’t?” Isabelle asks.

“Sure—why ask for pain? I was in pain a lot longer than I was in love. Not a good tradeoff.”

The young women look at each other as Fanny stares off into the space of her own past. What’s there to say to that? It’s hard to argue with the conclusion, and yet neither Isabelle nor Deepti would like to grow old like Mrs. H—solitary, embittered, holding grudges. Deepti especially does not want to live with regret.

“But what else is there that matters?” Isabelle asks finally, after the silence between them has grown into a gulf.

Fanny shrugs. “Who knows?”

—

IN THE PAST YEAR, HOWEVER,
Deepti and Isabelle have had to continue their ongoing conversation on the telephone, very late at night for Deepti, who is at Johns Hopkins Hospital doing her three-year pediatric residency.

The women miss each other with a real ache, but Deepti has promised Isabelle that she will be back. When all her training is done, she plans to practice in the Bay Area. Of all the places she’s been in America, that is where she feels most at home.

“Loving Casey is the easy part,” Isabelle tells Deepti on the phone one night in the summer as she struggles with what to do when he comes home.