In Spite of Everything (30 page)

“You’re a hell of a mother, Susie,” she whispered. “These little girls are so well loved, and they are going to be
fine
.” I looked at her and beamed. No metaphors: This was just
my
mother encouraging
her
granddaughters and
me
. I hugged her back. Fiercely.

W
hen we got back from Maine, I started to come out of isolation. Wonderful things began happening. Sometimes, said Truman Capote, there is a God. Every day, it seemed, was that sometimes.

My godmother called me. “Susie, dear,” she announced, “we are going out for lunch at Bergdorf’s.” Sitting there with my ragged hair, I ate the lobster salad with citrus vinaigrette. I smiled at my godmother. She smelled so marvelous, her signature eyeglasses were so chic, she sounded so wonderful.

One day, I called up my dear friend Judith. She didn’t know who it was at first. When I repeated myself, she laughed. Then she started sobbing. “Oh, Susie!” she cried. “I’m sorry—I’m just so happy to hear your voice!”

Ian began pinging me on g-chat several times a day, sending annoying greetings like “Hola!” and “Hey, big mama!” and directing me to stupid websites with videos of Japanese reality TV shows or telling me where to download old hardcore punk songs for free. I knew what he was doing. I love my brother.

My friend Barbara texted me: “I’m coming whether you like it or
not.” I couldn’t have her in that apartment, so I met her at the nearby Ikea. We took the escalator up to the living room area, plopped down on a couch in one of the demo rooms, and made ourselves comfortable. We hung out there all day, talking. People ambled through the room and smiled uncertainly at us. We welcomed them, as if into our home.

After the house sold—the day before the housing bubble burst and the markets collapsed in 2008—I took my share and invested it in a little house, in that same Brooklyn neighborhood that I was scared to visit just five years ago, but in a safer part of it. It was what I could afford, but it was a disaster, full of carbon monoxide leaks and lead drinking-water pipes. I slept on the floor on a mat and cried every night. It was two months before my children could stay overnight there. I had to book cheapo rooms at the Comfort Inn in Brooklyn via Priceline to spend the night with them, charging it to a credit card that I pushed to its five-digit limit.

One time, I said screw it, fun was in order. I booked a discounted room at the Hilton in Times Square for five nights. Zanny, Pru, and I were tourists in our own city. At the box office where
Young Frankenstein
, the musical, was playing, the manager looked at the kids and me and said, “Tell you what—if you come to the matinee, I’ll give you seventy-five percent off the tickets.” So we went to see it (I was counting on their not getting the blue humor, and they didn’t). We ate at the giant Dallas BBQ; the waiter gave us extra fries, on the house. That Sunday, we went to Saint John the Divine for the annual blessing of the animals. We took pictures as they trotted down the aisle: a donkey, a miniature camel, a wallaby. We ate Korean barbecue afterward and visited Columbia. “This is where Mama went to college,” I said. “If you want to go here, you’d better start studying now, friends!” We all giggled. We went on a tour of Butler Library, roamed through the stacks, peeked in on the students hunched over in their carrels. All those
books
. All that work being worked on. My babies.

By and by, the house was repaired for safety. It did not have a working stove or fridge; there was no dishwasher. On autopilot, I went to the salesman at the fancy kitchen appliance emporium whom I’d befriended during the last two renovations in Park Slope. When I walked in, the first thing Ira said was: “Look at you, blondie!” The second thing he said was: “So, what—moving
again? Another
Wolf range now?” For some reason, it was too much: the absurdity, the assumption, the sadness. When I broke down, he sat me down and presented me with a box of tissues.

“Listen to me, doll,” he said. “The same exact thing happened to me. Worst period of my life. But now, I’m happily remarried thirteen years—my kids have the best stepmother in the world!” He showed me his ring and then took hold of my hand. “You are going to be fine. Not for a while, but you are going to be
fine
.” Forget the Wolf range and the crazy expensive fridge—
please
, you don’t need that stuff—it’s the home that counts, he said; your home is going to be beautiful because you and your kids will be in it. Then he gifted me with a ridiculous deal and waved me out. “Better than
fine
—you’re not going to believe how great you’ll be!”

A woman I’d always chatted with in Park Slope, where she owned an upscale home furnishings and clothing boutique, turned out to live in my new neighborhood. One day, she came by unannounced with giant shopping bags full of fancy scented candles, lovely hand-painted curtain panels, and linen tea towels. “You need things like this to feel good,” she said in her fabulous Polish accent. After seeing the disaster afoot, she returned with stylish shelving and track lighting from her store. “You take them—they will look beautiful in your kitchen.”

I didn’t have anything to cook with. Cal had taken all the cookware and cookbooks with him, which was fair. But I had nothing, didn’t know anything, and had no money for takeout. I got a set of pots and pans from Ikea for thirty bucks, went online for recipes, and started cooking. Because I had next to no money, I established
two rules: (a) If it could be made, I would make it myself (meaning I made the bread, cereal, granola, cookies, cakes, cleaning products; no canned, presoftened beans, but dry ones that I soaked overnight; pizza, dough included; and so on); and (b) Dinner had to cost under ten dollars. We lived off the vegetables and herbs I planted in the garden. I did it. My children were amazed at first, but they came to expect it. Which pleased me beyond reason.

Cal didn’t want the couches we had bought together, and they literally did not fit through the door to my tiny new house. But shortly after the house was ready for move-in, my mother called to say that my grandmother’s house in Virginia needed to be cleared out. Nana, who had been staying in an assisted living home near my mother, was ninety-three, and it was time. None of the cousins wanted the furniture. Did I? That Thanksgiving, a year to the date of Cal’s and my separation, I collected the furniture from my grandparents’ three-hundred-year-old house in Middleburg, Virginia, where I had spent every Christmas after my parents divorced. Back in Brooklyn, our couches were the Victorian settees that once sat diplomats and heads of state in my great-grandparents’ palatial apartment in Washington, D.C.; the Federal grandfather clock chimed every hour, just as it had in my grandparents’ parlor; the quilts on our beds were stitched by my great-great-grandmothers and maiden aunts from Louisville, Kentucky. I made my children’s room comfy and bedecked it with fairy lights and books. But the artwork was still the artwork, and my father’s painting went center stage on the main wall. We moved in with our dog, parrot, four hamsters, and two hermit crabs. Zanny said to me, “You know what I love about our house? It’s so
cozy
, even though it’s usually messy. And when you don’t look out the window, you feel as if you’re in the forest.”

In the forest
. For the first year in that house, I would wake up in the middle of the night at least three times a week and not know where I was. Zanny and Pru, as if answering a beacon, would often groggily appear at my doorway and crawl into bed with me, and we would all fall back to sleep in a snuggly tangle.

W
hen Cal and I agreed on a divorce settlement, we signed the papers in a Park Slope mediator’s office. We had not disagreed about anything. We wanted joint custody, wanted the kids to stay as close to each of us as they always had been, wanted to talk regularly about the kids to keep each other up to date. We walked out of the office and onto the street. He was wearing a coat I’d never seen before. I looked at him. He looked past me. “Well,” he said. “I guess that’s that—take care of yourself, Susie.” We shook hands. He got into his car, I got into my car.

A few minutes later, I broke down. I called him, sobbing: What
happened
? It was inevitable, he said. He should have known it that first year, when I moved to Washington. It was such an obvious sign. Cal chuckled caustically. Look, Susie, he said. I’ve obviously been doing a lot of thinking about everything, and I’ve come to the conclusion that everything we used to say about our souls being connected, that there was something written in the universe—that was all bullshit. It was something we said to rationalize why we were still together when we obviously shouldn’t have been. We stayed together out of fear. If we had really paid attention to all those signs, we would have become friends a lot sooner and saved ourselves a lot of time that we ended up wasting. But we have the babies—and that’s what counts.

Really? I said. You
really
mean that? Yes, he said. I do.

T
he first Christmas was a horror. The tree was too small, Zanny and Pru wailed. I knew it; I couldn’t afford a bigger one. I had less than ten dollars in my bank account after buying it. I downloaded some free Christmas songs into my music player, perched it in its speaker apparatus, and brought up the Christmas ornaments and stockings from the basement. Zanny’s stocking was nowhere to be found. I sat down on the couch.

“You know what?” I said. “I’m going to give you mine—the one I had as a little girl.” Zanny took it, and I could see that she was happy to have it because it was special. But then she burst into tears.

“What are
you
going to use, Mama?” I would use the one that we’d gotten for Uncle Ian when he used to spend Christmases with us. I
liked
that one; it had bobolinks on it, which reminded me of Granddad.

“But it’s not
yours
!” she cried. She lurched upstairs, sobbing. Pru and I stood in the living room, surrounded by the dusty cardboard boxes of ornaments.

“Are we still going to decorate the tree?” Pru asked. The instrumental theme to
A Charlie Brown Christmas
was playing. I looked at Pru. I shut my eyes for a beat, and then opened them. Little baby mammal. I smiled: Yes, we were
definitely
going to decorate the tree, but how about a little hot chocolate first?

“Yay!” cheered Pru. I poured cocoa into my grandmother’s tea-cups; we sipped.

“Do you feel like this is a hard Christmas because things are so different?” I asked. Pru nodded, spooning around her drink. “I feel that way, too,” I said.

“We already decorated our tree at Daddy’s,” she said. “It’s
really
big—it’s so beautiful, Mama.” I asked her to tell me about it, and she described it in her widened-eyed, grand-gesturing, “magical world” way.

“It sounds
beautiful
, love,” I said. “I bet it was so much fun to decorate it.” She nodded that it was. “Our tree at Mama’s will be beautiful, too, just different,” she observed, shrugging. “It’s okay that it’s small—it doesn’t mind with me.” I snuggled her.

“Thank you, my rabbit,” I said. “I think you’re pretty amazing to see things that way, even though it’s hard.” Even though I wasn’t sure that she would feel that way a day from now, and it was certainly not how she would always feel. Even though she was young enough not to be as hard-hit as Zanny. Whom I needed to check on
now. I asked Pru if she would like to be the first tree decorator. She jumped at it, and I climbed the stairs.

Zanny was slumped on her bed, head down on the mattress. I sat next to her.

“It’s hard, poodle,” I said finally. Zanny raised her head and glared at me.

“I
hate
this Christmas! It’s so terrible! I thought it would be fun, but it
isn’t
! Our Christmas music isn’t even the same!” I nodded.

“When we go downstairs, we can put on the music that you’re used to,” I said, praying that I could find it on some free download site. She jerked upright, wiping her face.

“It’s not just
that
,” she spat. “
Nothing
is the same—we can’t even find my stocking! I don’t know why everything has to
be
like this—it’s so
hard
!” I felt a black bolt rip from my head into my gut. I scooped her up, held her, and then stroked her hair.

“This Christmas
is
really hard. It is hard for you guys, it is hard for me, and it is hard for Daddy,” I said. “This will be the hardest one because everything is so different and strange. It doesn’t seem like it now, but every year will get easier.”

“Why is it hard for
you
?” Zanny howled. “
You’re
the one who wanted things like this.” That was more than I could bear.
Nobody
had wanted this, I said, my voice trembling—nobody would
ever
want this. This was the
last
thing Daddy and I ever wanted to happen, and we were
both
incredibly sad, especially because of how much it hurt her and her sister, but also because we had been best friends for almost
twenty
years. Then why, she cried, did we
do
it?