A Place at the Table (30 page)

“What do you mean do I know Gail Ferguson? She’s been our next-door neighbor for eighteen years.”

“Well, this afternoon Parrin ran into her at Alpen Pantry, and, well, she pretty much collided into Gail as she was racing into the bathroom, because, well—”

“Oh my God. Taffy Two is pregnant,” I say.

“Who?” he asks.

“Your girlfriend—God, what is her name? Peyton? Peyton is pregnant. And she had to throw up at lunch, and she ran into Gail Ferguson in the process, and Gail guessed what’s going on, so now you have to tell me. I’m right, aren’t I?”

“
Parrin
, her name is
Parrin
. For Christsakes, Amelia, you need to learn her name. And yes, you are right. Parrin is pregnant.”

He looks distinctly disappointed that I guessed his news, that I did not allow him to luxuriate fully in the drama of his revelation.

“Did Gail already call you?” he asks.

“No. But I know you.”

He looks at me for a moment, his eyes holding mine, and I am
remembering the first time we made love, how quickly he came, how embarrassed he was afterward and how I reassured him that we were going to have a lifetime to practice, to learn each other.

And then we are back in the present and he cannot see me.

“It’s terrible timing, I know,” he says, his eyes bright and happy again, now that he is once more in control of the news. “And it wasn’t planned, I promise you that. Parrin didn’t even think she could get pregnant again. They had to do all sorts of test-tube stuff to get those twins, so she just figured she wasn’t capable of having a baby au naturel. Honestly, it’s kind of a miracle that this happened.”

I can’t say anything.

He is looking at me with this shit-eating grin on his face, like he wants me to agree with him, like he wants me to celebrate that he and his girlfriend beat the fertility odds.

“So she’s going to have an abortion?” I ask, knowing she is not. Only saying it to make him spell out his plan, to make him—he who has always chosen the path of least resistance—take some responsibility for the choice he is making.

He smiles inwardly, as if remembering a joke that he and Parrin shared. “Look, it’s really crazy timing, I know. But I hope you can see this is a good thing, Amelia. I want us both to be happy in our next stage of life, and I’m really excited about being a dad again. You know, I could have done it better the first time around. I could have been more present. I know that now. And I’m going to try and do right by this baby, I really am.”

I am filled with rage, yet speechless. I want to rain down condemnation, but I find myself having a hard time putting the words together. Nothing makes sense. This thing with Taffy Two, it was supposed to be a dalliance, a temporary acting-out. Now he is linked to her forever.
My God.
Cam was never one for cleaning up messes, was he? And now he’s made another before the divorce papers are even drawn. And he expects me to be happy about it. And the thing
is, he’s got me trapped. I can’t wish ill on this baby who is about to be born. I can’t wish anything but for them to have a healthy baby and to raise it well, because any other desire would poison me, would turn my insides black and bitter. There is a baby on the way. Everything has changed. My revved-up fury sputters into exhaustion. Suddenly, I am so exhausted.

•  •  •

I don’t break down until after Cam leaves. And then I wilt. Just wilt. I am aware of a great sorrow rooted deep within me. I am aware that I only have access to a tiny bit of it. God, it’s going to hurt when I pull it out. God, am I broken. I cry fiercely for about fifteen minutes, and then the tears subside. I walk gingerly to the kitchen, afraid the crying will catch up with me once more. I need to not cry anymore tonight. I need a drink. I need twenty drinks. I need to leave this house. I quickly pour myself another glass of the Taittinger. How nice and dry and cold it is, how perfectly delicious.

After finishing the bottle of Champagne, I decide to take the train into Manhattan after all. For where else but among the tumult of New York might my own heartache, my own sorrow, seem small compared to the rest of the great, wide world?

•  •  •

Sitting in a window seat, my head leaned back, a steady vibration underfoot as the train zips along the track, I try to remember driving from the house to the station. I can’t. It’s a short distance, less than a mile, and I imagine I drove slowly, but oh God, I shouldn’t have driven. Shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have. So many things I shouldn’t have done. I feel dizzy beneath my closed lids. I drank too much. The night is only beginning and I drank too much, as if I’m a freshman in college, getting drunk to work up the nerve to go to a party.

Taffy Two is pregnant. My God. Taffy Two is pregnant with Cam’s child.
Please, please, please, please, God, don’t let them send out Christmas cards with pictures of the new baby or, even worse, little inky footprints.
Before Cam left the house this evening he told me that the baby is due in August.
Oh God, make it be a hot summer. Make it one of those drippy, claustrophobic, heat-wave summers during which people in New England rethink their decision not to have air-conditioning. And make Taffy Two’s ankles swell.

So we’re not a whole family after all. I wanted that for my girls (my girls, my girls, we are going to have to tell the girls), wanted us to be a complete unit, wanted us to be the type of family that takes no explaining, just Mommy, Daddy, and the kids. So different from the fractured family I grew up with, Mother in a state of perennial grief over her firstborn son, Daddy first emotionally absent and then literally gone.

But surely at one point there was something good between Mother and Daddy. Surely at one point they shared something sweet. Mother spoke most fondly of their brief courtship, before their courthouse marriage. Daddy used to have Mother over to his little garage apartment in New Haven, where he would cook for her. Mother said she had never known a man to cook, other than barbecuing on the grill or serving burnt scrambled eggs on Mother’s Day like her own father used to do. But Daddy said in Italy there was no shame in a man cooking. And he was good at it, and he enjoyed it, so he cooked for Mother, and then when I came along he cooked for all of us: bread every Sunday, tomato sauce from the garden, which he canned for the winter. Wonderful tarts filled with fruit from the pick-your-own orchard down the street. Roasts and braises and lasagnas on weekends when Aunt Kate and Jack came up, before everything fell apart between Daddy and them.

But he never taught me. He never showed me his tricks. He never let me lay hands on the springy, elastic bread dough, never let me
punch it down after it had risen. I have tried to make bread myself, but it never tastes as good as my father’s. It occurs to me that with every loaf I bake, I’m searching for him.

He never shows.

And as I press my forehead against the train’s cold glass windowpane, passing through the desolate landscape of a Connecticut winter, I find myself tearing up again and I feel the sorrow that is in me burgeon, like a hardy seed planted in deep, rich dirt, exploding open, pushing through. The dirt rolls and crumbles as the devastating flower of my disappointment pushes up, catching in my throat, making it tighten and ache. I am not thinking of my husband and the life he has gone on to have without me. I will grieve that more, I know, but for now Cam’s choices seem . . . almost irrelevant. He is gone, and on some deep level I know that this is as it should be. It is an older desertion I am thinking of. That cold, reticent man who only showed his love through the loaves of bread he baked for us each week. I try to believe it was enough, but in the end, it was only crumbs.

(New York City, 1990)

I
haven’t seen Aunt Kate since things blew up between Cam and me, almost six months ago. I didn’t even see her over the Christmas holidays, when I, quite frankly, fled, taking Lucy and Mandy down to one of those all-inclusive resorts in the Bahamas with vague promises that their father would try to join us, and then feigned disappointment when I reported he got tied up with work, and then a teary New Year’s Eve confession that actually, we had separated, which did not come as news to my daughters at all.

“It’s been pretty obvious,” said Lucy, pulling on her lower lip with her pinky, same as she did when she was a girl.

Over the past six months Aunt Kate and I
have
spoken on the phone, briefly, but never about anything more significant than which courses Lucy plans to take during her spring semester at Emory, or the fact that Mandy is dating a senior at Hotchkiss, or the cute thing Lulu, Kate’s fluffy little lapdog of a mutt, did that morning.

Ever since I phoned Kate, after that first terrible night with Cam, I’ve carried around a stone of resentment toward her, resentment that she wasn’t able to really listen to me when I needed her most, resentment that she made me feel that if I didn’t end my marriage that very morning, I was an idiot, deserving of abuse. But maybe that’s not what she said at all. Maybe I wasn’t able to hear what she was really saying because I wasn’t yet ready to hear the truth.

Six months of distance. It occurs to me that I’ve gone much longer without seeing my father, and I could certainly go that long without seeing my own mother—and be none the worse for it. (Though duty forces me to Roxboro once a month to sip a tepid martini with Mother in the parlor while she goes over her litany of daily grievances: the neighbor who snubbed her, the repairman who overcharged.)

But Kate. I miss Kate. And then, as if she can hear my yearning from her office in Manhattan, she telephones to see if I might take the train into the city tonight, so she can take me to dinner at Café Andres, her old haunt that nearly went out of business in the early eighties, but was brought back to life by Bobby Banks, the energetic young chef from the South who took over the kitchen, introducing Upper East Siders to citified versions of corn grits and cheese biscuits and banana pudding. (I remember him, of course, as the sweet man who offered me a towel when I, in the middle of a Cam crisis, inadvertently interrupted some private event he was having.) I’m excited to go to the restaurant, to taste his cooking, and I’m even more excited to see Kate.

I agree to the dinner with childlike enthusiasm. “Yes, yes, please. Yes!”

•  •  •

God, I love the city. As I make my way up the escalator from the train terminal into the main hall of Grand Central Station, the good
mood I’ve been in all day only intensifies. Here is the bustle; here are the people! Rushing to their commuter trains, rushing to meet a friend, a relative, a loved one. Rushing away from someone they don’t want to see. Rushing, rushing, rushing—so many lives, set loose in this mighty space.

I move through the station with the crowd, happy not to be lugging a suitcase behind me, though it occurs to me that perhaps I should have brought one, as I might very well want to stay overnight at Kate’s. I feel like staying up late, talking. I feel like sharing a bottle of wine. I feel like not being alone.

•  •  •

Walking east on Fifty-first Street, toward the restaurant, I catch a glimpse of myself in a storefront window, but it is one of those moments when at first you don’t recognize
you
and think you are seeing someone else. Of that someone else I think:
I would like to be friends with her
. I am wearing a burgundy-colored wool dress that contains a touch of spandex in the fabric, with three-quarter-length sleeves and a hem that hits just above the knees. It is one of those dresses that looks simple but costs three hundred dollars because it is expertly tailored to hide belly fat and other imperfections. I have on textured stockings and a pair of shoes Lucy gave me for Christmas, Mary Janes with stacked heels, also burgundy, made sparkly with a little glitter. To be honest, they look a bit like what a stripper from the 1940s might have worn, certainly not anything Taffy Two would be caught dead in.

Well, good. Betty Page wouldn’t be caught dead in beige, either.

Over the dress, I wear Mother’s ancient cashmere coat, black with a fox fur collar. Even though it is February, I wear the coat open and unbuttoned, as I have worked up a sweat walking so fast. God forbid I run into a group of keyed-up animal rights activists while wearing this thing. But really, they should know better than to target
vintage fur. I mean, this coat has been around for forty years. This fox has been honored.

The woman I glimpsed in the window (me!) looked fierce with her fur collar and her wild head of curls. She did not look like someone coming into the city from a Connecticut outpost; she looked like someone who belongs here, someone who can walk right into a New York restaurant and assume she will be given a good table simply because of her style, her confidence. And indeed, once I make my way through the long entry hall and into the cavernous, baroque interior of the café, I am given a great table, the one in the rear corner that allows a view of everything and everyone. Granted, it’s not me who is given such a prime spot, but Kate, Kate who is already seated.

Kate rises to kiss me, European-style, a peck on each cheek, putting her hand on my shoulder while she does so. Though her hair color has changed from dark brown to silver and there are wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, to me Aunt Kate looks much the same as she did when she was a young woman and I was a girl. Probably because she is careful about what she eats or, rather, careful of the portions she consumes. She’ll order a steak anytime she wants but will eat only half of it, boxing up the remainder for lunch at her desk the next day. As always, she wears her hair parted down the middle in a blunt cut that hits just at her shoulders. She is dressed in a sort of kimono-like jacket, the color of poppies, which she wears over a pair of black wool trousers. Her shoes are narrow and sensible.

“I’m awfully glad to see you,” she says. “It’s a cliché to say, ‘It’s been too long,’ but for us, it really has.”