The Grief of Others (19 page)

At ten in Nyack it was seven in Berkeley. Jess’s father would have just left for work; Deena would be awake but not yet in her backyard studio. They never talked long. They said the same things: sorry, mostly. How are you feeling? Fine. Do you have morning sickness? No. When are you coming home? Soon. Do you have enough money? Yes. The banality of the exchanges soothed and irritated Jess.

But this morning, when Jess was once again vague about her return, Deena, unable to let it go, had fished. “Do you think you’re getting whatever it is you went out there to find?”

“I didn’t come to ‘find’ anything. This isn’t a coming-of-age novel, Mom.This isn’t the Oxygen network.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

Jess sighed. “A cable station, Mom.You’ve watched it.”

“I’m wondering if I should call John, speak with him directly.”

“No.You should not.”

“Why?”

“For starters, because I told them you kicked me out and want nothing to do with me.”

A silence and then: “Why would you do that?” Deena sounded as though she’d been pricked by a hot needle. She sounded like the vortex of all pain. Jess was reminded of the morning in the parking lot, her mother’s wet tissues and swollen eyes, her sense of injury, the tedium of it. “I can’t believe you would do that.”

“I’m just kidding.”

“Jessica.”

“What? Sorry.”

“Do you think they feel put-upon?”

“What do you mean? No.”

“You don’t think you’re outstaying your welcome?”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t be defensive. It’s just, they have those two little children. And I don’t know how the wife feels about you there. I don’t want—”

“The kids aren’t little. And Ricky likes me. She gave me her mandolin.”

“But are you—oh honey, are you getting what you want from this visit, what you hoped for?”

“Mom. Yes. Whatever.” Deena would be happy, Jess thought, with nothing short of a full renunciation of any interest whatever in the Ryries. “I don’t hope for anything.”

“Well,” said Deena. “I hope that isn’t true.”

After they hung up a fretful melancholy set in. The way the call had ended. Jess shuffled over to the counter and began, almost without noticing, her third breakfast: the remains of the cake she’d brought back yesterday from the bakery in town. She liked to surprise the Ryries with little gifts, things. She picked at the remaining wedge with a fork. It had been left out on the counter in its cardboard box overnight and the edges had grown hard.

She did hope for something. She only didn’t know what.

She’d loved the Ryries since that summer in her teens when she went camping with them. The fact that she’d narrowly missed being a full-fledged member of the family enhanced its allure, as did the fact that she’d had only minimal contact since. But her impressions of them, as well preserved and as limited in scope as the single roll of photographs she’d taken that summer on a disposable camera from the Cabruda Lake drugstore, did not mesh with what she’d found.

Back then John and Ricky had struck her as excitingly in love, a couple almost at the mercy of their own passion. They had been far more physical with each other than her own parents ever were, making them somehow seem at once more sophisticated and more innocent. Her memories of Biscuit were a toddlerish blur, but Paul had left a distinct impression: a slender stalk of a boy with white-gold hair and teeth like so many mini-Chiclets. She remembered him always moving, full of vigor and light.

The disconnect between these memories and the Ryries as they appeared now was disquieting. People changed, of course—but this was like a different family. It was like being a loyal fan, president of the fan club, and finally meeting the object of your adulation only to have your attentions dismissed. No, that was wrong—no one had dismissed her. It was more like finally meeting your favorite star only to find him flatter, more ordinary, than he appeared on screen. At least they had been kind, invited her to stay. Ricky of all people had been the warmest, shown the most overt interest. She’d made up the bed for Jess, had given her the bottle of prenatal vitamins, had offered, on the second day, use of her mandolin.

“It’s gorgeous,” Jess had breathed, sitting on the end of Ricky and John’s bed and examining the instrument, running her fingers lightly over its bowl-shaped back, its mother-of-pearl inlays. She tried out some guitar fingering, then lightly stroked the neck. Looking up, she saw Ricky watching her with keen, almost hungry, interest. “Are you sure you don’t mind me playing it? It looks brand-new.”

“It is,” Ricky answered. “John gave it to me for my birthday.” And she pulled a little face, as if Jess ought to agree this made him somewhat ridiculous.

As for John, Jess saw how carefully he treated Ricky.

As for Biscuit, Jess saw how she hid things under her bed.

As for Paul, he might have been a changeling. Lumpen and darkly aloof, he’d barely said two words to her.

What she remembered of the Ryries, the memory she cherished above all of her time with them on that single summer holiday eight years ago, was how shiny she had appeared in their eyes, how good and honorable and clean.The happiness of those two weeks had been the happiness of having her worth gauged by strangers, of being seen fresh—it was her debut, after all, as an independent person, with no mother or father or teacher or friend to lend her context—and found estimable. She had not the least doubt about this, their regard.They’d expressed it amply, in ways both direct and indirect. Had she thought it would all come back so easily, that all she need do was show up, help herself to their kitchen and kettle, announce her condition, dissemble a little about her state of need, and be reinstated as precious, as prized in their eyes—is that what she’d hoped? Is that what she’d come for?

After hanging up the phone with her mother, after scraping up the dry last bit of cake, Jess had helped herself to a sweatshirt from the coatrack and taken her coffee out to the porch. The wisteria that grew up along the posts was winter-bare, its branches forming a gnarled proscenium. She’d stood at the edge of the top step, face tilted toward the thin bright sun, and took stock: she was twenty-three, two thousand miles from home, with a baby (and two bowls of cereal and a piece of cake) inside her. What did any of that mean, bode? The April air cut like scissors, the light spooling across the grass, and she stood on a kind of brink, a lip, pressing forward into the morning, but the park stood empty, the street stood empty, there was no one to see her: the world was blind.

So Jess had abandoned her mug on the shady porch and crossed over into the sunlight of the park, removing her clogs as she stepped onto the grass. And there she’d lain this past half-hour, at first feeling weighed by real misery, but eventually sliding into half-pleasurable, even improbably cheering, suicidal reveries. Now she propped herself on her elbows. The grass spread all around: new, slim-bladed, palest green. She thought of Walt Whitman, leaning and loafing, observing his spear of summer grass. She thought of her father as a young man, loafing in the grass with the very copy of Whitman he’d passed along to her. He was mysterious to her in this vision, someone she’d not guessed at. She could drum up, barely, wisps of memory: herself as a child in the grass with him, her father instructing her in the art of tying shoelaces, calmly batting away a wasp.Then another wisp, this one not memory but projection: herself loafing in the grass with her own child years hence, the two of them observing the green strands together, the intensity of the grass doubled. Whitman had a line about that, too, didn’t he? Where had she come across it,Topeka? St. Louis? About a child fetching a handful of grass, displaying it as treasure. That was the silver lining, then, the sweet surprise of pregnancy: at best, it seemed to promise an antidote to loneliness. Someone else to witness the particularities up close, to share with her her vision, her singular perspectives and thoughts. It was a doubling, the prospect of an imaginary friend who would become, in a matter of time, incarnate. (Though there was a part of her that did not believe it at all. Was she fatter? Did she feel any different? Sleepy, yes, but nothing more. She wanted proof. She wanted kicking.)

Down the slope from where she sat, hidden from sight by shrubbery, younger-than-school-age children were frisking in the little playground. She listened to their high, purposeful voices registering thrill, and the countering voices of their caregivers, bent, from the sound of it, on squashing thrill. “Get down from there, Connor!” a woman ordered. “You know you can’t go that high!” Jess smiled: evidently Connor could. One thing she knew for sure—if there really was a baby inside her, if she really was about to become a mother, she would never sound like
that
.

She knew who she hoped to sound like: her friend Annie. Annie had no kids, but she had a dog, a rescued greyhound she called Brokedown Palace, and Annie was great with her dog. Jess had met her at Conefucius, the ice cream parlor where they’d both scooped their way through college, and where Brokedown hung out during Annie’s shifts, mostly out on the sidewalk, cadging the ends of people’s cones, snapping lazily at bees, dozing in the shade of a fan palm. Once a customer had asked, “Is that your dog out front?”

Annie, looking up slowly from under the brim of her omnipresent Stetson, had given one of her slow grins. “Nope, she’s her own dog.”

It was the kind of thing that made Jess both admire Annie and want to crack her over the head. No wonder, in that land of anarchic shop owners, ice-cream-fed greyhounds, and cowboyhatted girls, Jess got termed “eminently practical.” Could that be the reason she’d gotten pregnant in the first place, the reason she’d quarreled with her mother, bought that epic bus ticket, and delivered herself so rashly into the house of her not real family, her alternative-reality family? In order to repudiate the designation?

Maybe. In part. Jess was at once too clear-sighted not to consider the possibility and too smart to fall sway to the kind of reductive thinking that would make it the whole answer.

It was Annie’s younger brother, Seth, who was the father. Now there was a designation to make Jess snort. Better simply to say he was the one who’d gotten her pregnant—not that he knew or ever would. He was still in college—a sophomore, for God’s sake—undeclared but leaning toward environmental studies, a lanky, unstudied heartthrob who wore an ancient Chinese coin on a cord around his neck. In her mind’s eye he could be found eternally playing Hacky Sack in Sproul Plaza, his dirty-blond hair bouncing on his shoulders, his long, tapered torso naked and tanned, frayed cargo shorts hanging low off his waist. They’d met at a house party last fall; he’d filched Annie’s Stetson off her head and settled it on his own, where, Jess thought, it showed to better effect. In fact, it had been the hat that caused her to approach him, the odd draw of a familiar object radically transformed by virtue of its placement in a strange context. Much the effect Jess hoped to gain for herself by coming here.

Jess, herself at that point six months out of Berkeley with a degree in English and no real clue of what was next, had been chatting him up with what she’d thought was big-sisterly interest, asking him about his classes and profs. It was two or three in the morning by then, the air sweet with pot and sleepy bodies. No one was dancing anymore. Someone had taken off Kanye West and put on Leonard Cohen. Seth was in the midst of some genial riff involving the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and fair-trade coffee, when “Suzanne” came on and he interrupted himself first to listen, and then to sing, “And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China.” But privately, unshowily, it had seemed to Jess at the time. Doing that thing men do with their eyebrows when they’re straining to reach the high notes.

Then he’d shot her an embarrassed grin—it was almost the same grin as Annie’s, though his was crazy sexy—and, shrugging, confessed, “My dad loves this song.”

Who ever knew what it would take? It was always unexpected, she was learning, the thing that smote your heart, always something untranslatable, irreducible, something that refused to come through in the retelling, so that you felt the absurdity of it increase each time you tried to parse it.The moment that caused your chest to expand, the moment your shortness of breath let you know you had fallen for somebody new. Seth and Jess had fucked on and off then for the next couple of months in a sweet, blasé way—almost childlike, almost puppylike, their lightly pleasurable tumblings—each knowing there was no future in it, Jess sternly trying to keep her heart and hopes in line, to remind herself this was how it went with her generation; indeed, it was the very rubric of her generation. She knew no one her age who was in a long-term relationship, no one who seemed even to wish to end up with the person they were sleeping with.

By the time Jess realized she was pregnant, she’d neither seen nor spoken with Seth in five weeks, obviating the need to break it to him, or for that matter, break up with him. By then, neither she nor Annie worked at Conefucius anymore. Annie (improbably) had begun studying for the LSAT, and Jess (ironically) had taken a job in the career placement office on campus, assisting students with the very process that, in her own life, most baffled her.

Could
that
be the reason she’d gotten pregnant? In order to saddle herself with something she had to do, thereby precluding the need to figure out what it was she wanted to do?

All at once she heard panting near her ear, felt pungent breath on her face.

“No!” scolded a man’s voice. “Come away from there! You dunce.”

She propped herself on her elbows and squinted across the park. Already the apparent culprit, an enormous dog, had moved off. A slight red-haired man in a plaid jacket threw a stick for it.The dog caught it in midair with a hard snap of tooth on wood, then lumbered slowly back toward the man, slower, slower, before coming to a halt some distance away. It lowered its head suggestively. The man approached with stealth. The tail wagged. The man drew nearer. Nearer. At the last moment, just as he lunged, the dog bounded away, its entire massive body seeming to radiate laughter.