A Small Indiscretion (5 page)

“I’m sorry I pinched you, Mommy,” Polly whispered, sounding very sorry indeed.

“I’m the one who’s sorry,” I said.

Mothers can’t always be perfect, but they can be much better than I was last summer.

Y
OU RETURNED HOME
from your third year at Northwestern on June 9, our wedding anniversary, the day before the photo arrived. We’d planned a dual celebration in honor of our long marriage and the recent announcement that you’d been named a Northwestern STEM Scholar, making you eligible to spend your senior year studying at research institutions around the world that partnered with Northwestern. During the summer and fall, you’d be at Lawrence Berkeley working on an optical computing project. In January, you’d head to the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan, to work on space weather research, specifically solar wind. Then, for the grand finale, you hoped to find a project in the area that most interested you—light-source machines.

“Whatever those are,” I’d said to your father when we received the letter from the dean outlining the plan and informing us that tuition, travel and living expenses were to be provided through a STEM scholarship.

The girls had spent the day making a cake, elaborately frosted on one side with a
22
, for the number of years we’d been married—close enough, your father said to me, with a wink—and on the other side with a long green painted stem (they had not understood
STEM
was an acronym) topped with a real daisy they’d picked from the backyard.

“Did you know that the name of that flower is translated as ‘the day’s eye’ in Old English?” your father had said. “Because of the way it opens at dawn.”

“You’re full of fun facts, aren’t you?” I said.

“Can we watch it?” Polly asked. “Can we get up really early and go in the backyard and see?”

“Sure,” your father said. “Sure we can.”

I gave him a look. “Dawn? Really?”

“Why not? It’ll be fun.”

You’d allotted us only two nights, because your classes at Berkeley were beginning in a few days and you wanted to settle into the room you’d rented in a shared house off-campus. Over dinner, you told us you’d been lucky enough to secure a three-month stay, beginning in April, at a research institute in Oxfordshire, England, with a light-source machine.

“What is a light-source machine?” Clara wanted to know.

“It’s a synchrotron, technically,” you explained. “It generates infrared and ultraviolet light invisible to the naked human eye. Researchers use it to see unimaginably small things no other apparatus, much less the human eye, can see.”

“It can generate light ten billion times brighter than the sun,” your father added.

“Wow,” Clara said.

“Why do you know that?” I asked your father.

“Because I’m full of fun facts,” he said, smiling.

“Dad just knows about interesting stuff, Mom,” you said.

“Oh, really?”

You caught yourself. “Not to say that you don’t.”

But of course that was exactly what you were saying, and I felt the old tug of discomfort. Your father was trained as a doctor; you were a STEM Scholar; I didn’t even have a college degree. And the thing that concerned me—the lighting of homes—was trivial compared to the matters that preoccupied you and your father. You, science in its purest form. Your father, science as it applied to the health of the body. Never mind that my salary from the store contributed significantly to the family income. Never mind that it had helped support us, over the years, when the books your father edited and published—books on chronic disease, arthritis, diabetes, cancer—unexpectedly failed to sell, or cost too much to produce. Or when the book publishing business as a whole felt the reverberations of the changing economy.

“Looks like we’re both going to be in the business of making light,” you said, trying to appease me.

“But Mom’s lights aren’t brighter than the sun,” Clara said.

“And why do people want all kinds of lights made of junk, anyway?” Polly asked.

“Well, because it’s beautiful junk,” I said defensively. “And people need a little beauty now and then.”

“As long as it’s not form over function,” you said.

“What’s wrong with a little form over function?”

“Give her a break,” your father said. “Someone does need to put beauty in the world, and your mother does it very well.” He stood up and fished a box from a drawer in the hutch and handed it to me. “Speaking of beauty.”

“Jonathan,” I said, taken aback. “We said no gifts.”

“I know. But this is long overdue,” he said. “Open it.”

Polly pulled the box out of my hand. “Can I open it?”

“Sure,” I said.

She opened the box. Inside was a diamond wedding ring. I picked it up and slipped it on and held it up to the light.

“You didn’t need to do this,” I said.

“You’re crying,” Clara said.

“It’s all right if she cries a little,” your father said.

“I’m crying because … it’s beautiful.”

It was the diamond from your father’s grandmother’s ring, he explained, and the three smaller stones in the setting were to represent each of you. He’d had it made to replace the cubic zirconium he’d bought me when we were first married, which in turn replaced the gumball-machine ring he’d slipped onto my finger when he proposed.

“I wasn’t sure whether you’d like gold or white gold,” your father said. “I figured you could have it reset if you wanted something different.”

I stood up and kissed him.

“I don’t want something different,” I said, and I meant it. And not just about the ring, but about our twenty-one years of marriage. The people we’d made. The life we’d shaped together, exactly the life I wanted. I had no reason to suspect, standing there, that the very next day, I would begin to act not as if I wanted to give that life away, but as if I wanted something different to go along with it.

A
FTER DINNER, WE
all played charades. Then you read the girls a bedtime story, and your father promised to wake them up early so they could try to watch the daisies open. You slept in your old room.

“I changed the sheets,” I said, pulling the covers back.

“Gee, thanks, Mom. ’Cause I’m not used to sleeping on dirty sheets.”

“I know, I know.”

“I brought my laundry.”

“That was collegiate of you.”

“If you don’t have time, it’s no biggie.”

“I have time.”

I threw a load in right away. It gave me pleasure to wash all those dark T-shirts and dark sweatshirts and dark jeans that smelled of aftershave and outdoors. Some of it, I guessed, had not been washed since I’d laundered it at Christmas. Thinking of it now, I can’t help remembering the clothes you were wearing when the car flipped. The clothes they cut off you, which I washed and kept, because I could not bear to throw them away.

B
Y THE TIME
I woke up, the girls had been watching TV since six, and you and your father had taken the dogs and your mountain bikes to Mount Tam. A wig of fog had overtaken the city in the night, and apparently the daisies had not known it was dawn, and remained closed. Your sisters were disappointed, and overtired from waking so early, and now they were arguing over what to watch on TV. I turned the television off and made pancakes, then set the girls up at the counter to make lemonade from lemons a neighbor had brought over the day before. Polly spilled half a bag of sugar on the floor, and I pressed my fingers over my eyelids and sighed.

“You’re sighing,” Polly cried out. “You said for us to tell you when you were sighing.”

Clara nodded. “You said you were giving up sighing for Lent.”

“That was just kind of a joke,” I said. “And anyway, Lent’s over, and I can sigh from time to time if I want to.”

When the lemonade was made, I poured the girls each a cup and
we went outside. The sun battled through the fog, and the girls sat on the swing on the front porch, and I sat on the top step with my coffee and pulled my knees up to my chin. It was an ordinary morning. An ordinary day in the life of an ordinary family. The last of its kind, for us. But I didn’t know that then.

You and your father pulled up in your truck, your muddy bikes and the dogs in back. It was your father who’d insisted on two dogs, so they could keep each other company. The breed was his idea, too—German shepherds—the same as he’d grown up with. He got out of the truck and took off his cleats and sat down on the step next to me. The dogs waited, their tails wagging wildly, until your father called them. Then they jumped out of the truck and ran toward us. He snapped his fingers and pointed, and they dropped to the ground.

“If only you could control children as well as you can control dogs,” I said.

“Who says I can’t?”

“I say you can’t.”

He flung his arm over my shoulder.

“You’re muddy and smelly,” I said.

He pulled me toward him and kissed me hard on the mouth. “You love it,” he said. “Admit it.”

You stood in your shorts and cleats, pushing the girls on the swing. You seemed rugged and healthy in your biking gear, your calves caked with mud, your back and shoulders and legs strong like your father’s, but stretched over a six-foot-three-inch frame. We were a family made up not of averages but of absolutes: you and Clara large-boned and tall; Polly so small and slight even Clara could still lift her up. Watching you together—your hair and eyes, your flesh and bone, your three bodies so frank and solid in the world—gave me immeasurable pleasure. It was pleasure derived not from parental pride, but from gratitude. We had been blessed by
the existence on this earth of our three particular children, and we had been assigned a blessed task in keeping you all safe in the world.

Then Polly wanted more lemonade, and I said she’d had enough. She jumped off the swing in protest and began to cry. Your father picked her up and took her inside. You lifted Clara onto your shoulders and trotted into the backyard. I walked down the steps and retrieved the mail. I stood at the kitchen counter, flipping through the stack, dropping the junk mail in the garbage and making a pile of the bills. On the very bottom was an oversize white envelope. I slid my finger through the flap. I pulled out a smaller envelope and dropped the outer one in the trash. Inside the smaller envelope was a photograph—the White Cliffs, the chalk down, and a version of myself at roughly the age you are now, staring back. His name came into my head—
Patrick Ardghal
—and my breath caught in my chest. I fished the outer envelope from the trash, but the postmark was indecipherable.

Your father walked into the kitchen, and I slid the photograph under the stack of bills. I wanted time to think. I wanted a chance to confront the old longing that had so suddenly overtaken me. What was the nature of that longing? What was it I wanted, exactly? An explanation? An accounting? Perhaps. But also something wholly unbefitting a married woman of forty-one, mother to two young daughters and a nearly grown son: I wanted to see Patrick Ardghal again.

W
HEN
I
WAS
alone, I took the photo and the bills upstairs to the hall closet. I placed the photo in the heavy, round gold-foil hatbox that once held my wedding veil, and where I keep the important artifacts. Nine months later, when I could not reach you to tell you this
story and I began to let it bleed from my fingers instead, it was in the hatbox I was to hide this half-decipherable scrawl.

The longing to see Patrick Ardghal took the shape of obsession as the summer progressed, and my days became haunted with half-formed fantasies. Those fantasies shamed me, but I could not get rid of them. I spent many hours in the weeks after the photo arrived imagining him tracking me down, sending me the photograph, seeking me out. I wondered where he might be living. I searched the Internet, and checked my email many times each day, and wandered the rooms of the past. I ran headlong into memories, not just of Patrick but of Malcolm, too. I did not dwell on the memories of Malcolm—from our time together in London and Paris—because they were painful, and nonnegotiable. It was not Malcolm who appeared in my sleeping dreams last summer, but Patrick. One especially vivid dream was of Patrick stepping out of the fog and knocking on my front door and presenting me with a ring box, in which, instead of a ring, were a dozen old library cards—a symbol for love that could be borrowed, perhaps, but never kept. That dream, and others, came again and again, plaguing me all day after I woke up and flooding me with a useless, unsubstantiated longing—a colored emotional fluorescence with which the plain waking world could not compete.

At the same time, I was happy with your father. The heart is large, and there is more than one material in the bucket we call love. I loved your father. I loved the new ring—with its old stone and new stones—and I wore it proudly. I loved the laden, harried, unremarkable events that were our days. I loved the whole barely observed construction that was our life. But I also loved the way the idea of Patrick opened an ordinary day to the feeling that something out of the ordinary might happen to me at any moment. Perhaps I inherited that appetite from my father. Perhaps it was not shame at
all that kidnapped my father that summer day when I was nineteen and he backed his truck down the driveway and set off for Maine. Perhaps it was not regret, or remorse, my father felt as he looked for the last time at that rock-and-timber house. Perhaps it was the same cocktail of self-indulgence and abandon and want—and an unaccountable wish to be free, if only for a little while—I discovered in myself last summer.

I
T SEEMS ALMOST
impossible that less than a year has passed since that June day. I’ve noticed I don’t often sigh anymore, as I did making lemonade with your sisters that morning. There isn’t much room for impatience when real worry has claimed the day. And there isn’t much need for most of what you can find in the bucket of love at a time like this. Somebody said—some poet, I can’t remember which one—that unrequited love is the best kind. But I can tell you with certainty, Robbie, that the other kind of love, the kind I received from your father for more than two decades, is far more necessary.