Louisa Meets Bear (36 page)

“Would you like some coffee or tea?” I ask the girl.

“Coffee, please.”

“Milk and sugar?”

“Yes, please.”

I heat some milk in a pitcher in the microwave and bring the pitcher and the sugar bowl to the table. Nate and the girl are still standing, Nate with a hip against the counter, the girl shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.

“Sit.”

Nate gives me his dead-eyes look, his way of telling me that he refuses to engage and if I insist he will foil me by turning himself into a zombie. The girl perches gingerly on the edge of one of the kitchen chairs, stirring two spoons of sugar into the mug of coffee I've handed her. From the diamond studs in her ears, the cashmere cardigan, the Coach purse, it looks like she comes from an affluent family, but that she carries her privilege lightly, does not, as do some of the kids from Nate's school, think it makes her special. Our apartment, overlooking Morningside Park—when we first moved here a scary place littered with broken glass and discarded needles, now a haven with terraced esplanades and enormous weeping trees but still dangerous after dark so that I shudder wondering how she arrived here in the middle of the night—must seem foreign and bohemian: bookshelves overflowing with Paul's LP collection and my poetry volumes, walls covered with paintings done by artist friends, no lady decorator fabrics and fussy kitchen tiles.

I start to cut slices of cranberry bread, then, thinking of the condom wrapper, catch myself, leaving it to these two not-children. My son, who'd not served his own food until he was fourteen, waiting always for his father or me to place his plate in front of him until I'd had to tell him it was too babyish for a boy his age, cuts himself a large jagged slice.

“Take some,” I say to the girl.

She cuts a sliver, and for a moment I worry that she is one of those girls who are afraid of food, who won't eat in front of boys. She eats a forkful as though to be polite, gagging slightly from anxiety, it seems, and then takes a second bite with what I can see is real hunger.

“This is delicious. Nate told me you own a bakery in Harlem.”

“I do.”

“He told me that you were a poet and that you gave up poems to bake cakes.”

“I did.”

“I write poems,” she says. A funny sound comes from her throat, almost a burp.

She covers her mouth. “Excuse me. I'm sorry. I'm kind of nervous.”

“She won a Scholastic Gold Key for one of her poems last year,” Nate says.

“Congratulations.”

“And she went to the writing program at Skidmore last summer.”

I've run a business now for twelve years, but there are still moments like this, with these two kids, one my own flesh and blood, who've wronged me in ways I can't yet articulate—some twisted combination of putting themselves in danger and violating my home, sneaking behind my back and yet under my roof—when I can't seize control of a situation. The first summer I lived with you when we'd have a fight and you would raise your voice, I would burst into tears. Jesus Christ, Louisa, I recall you once saying, don't you know how to fight back? But I didn't. My mother had either endured my father's condescensions or taken revenge in her own subterranean ways.

I clear my throat and fold my hands on the table. “Okay, so what happened here?”

Nate peers at me. He's discarded the dead-eyes look. “Mom, you know what happened.”

“No, I don't.” I study the girl. For the first time, she looks directly at me, and again I feel a disturbing sense, a déjà vu but not exactly, of having somehow already met her. “Where do you go to school?” I ask.

She glances at Nate.

“What does that matter?” Nate answers for her.

“Listen, we're going to work together on this, or…” I pause, catching myself before I make some kind of wild threat—call the police, boarding school, roads Nate knows I would never take.

What I want to do is to call Corrine, who has come through the other side of some pretty awful experiences with her daughter, but I'm afraid that if I get up, even just to pee, Nate will quickly usher the girl out or, even worse, slither away with her to disappear into one of the teenage lairs these kids with their constant phone access to one another can always find.

What I want to ask Corrine is whether I need to call the girl's parents. Is that the stupid conventional course or the adult thing that I have to find the backbone to do?

“Chapin,” the girl says. “I'm in eleventh grade, like Nate.”

Nate cuts himself a second piece of cranberry bread, and a wave of ridiculous relief that at least he's eating washes over me. Over the summer, after we'd grounded him for the second drinking incident, he'd gone on a health kick, rejecting anything from my bakery, relishing the power of being in control of his own body after having been spoon-fed his entire life. When his stomach turned concave, I'd insisted he go to the pediatrician to be weighed. He'd lost twenty-three pounds. We'd spent a miserable two weeks in August in Italy while I anxiously registered every half-eaten panini, every meal at which he ordered only a salad, until finally, in Venice, he began to really eat again: first gelatos, then fried artichokes, then plates of spaghettini, his appetite slowly returning and a reasonable amount of the weight.

He yawns. What my son wants to do is go back to sleep.

The girl takes another bite. “This is so good,” she says, her voice a little too loud, as though she thinks if she just keeps filling the room with sound everything will be okay. “My mother hates to cook. Our housekeeper does all the cooking, but my dad doesn't like her food so we have a lot of takeout too.”

“Do I know your mother?”

The girl looks at Nate. He shrugs his shoulders. “I don't think so.”

Her voice drops in volume. “She's a therapist.”

I know that I am now on thin ice and that I have to quickly skate forward. “And what's your name?”

My son wipes the cranberry bread crumbs from his mouth. “Mom, what the fuck? Why are you going there?”

I put my hand over his. “Because I am going to call her parents, to let them know she's here. They have a right to know where their daughter is at six in the morning.”

Nate glares at me. Pure hatred. As a young child, he'd been so easy and reasonable, no storms of
I hate you
and
You're the worst mother on the entire planet
, neither of us was prepared for this past year when he's had to break away to become himself.

“I am not going to tell them the details. That's your business. I am just going to say that when I woke up this morning, she was here in our apartment.”

The girl looks at me with horror, as though I have told her that in three minutes she will be executed.

“Sarah,” she whispers. “Sarah Callahan.”

My eyes open wide and my hand clamps my mouth, muffling a gasp. Unable to stop myself, I stare at your daughter with her gorgeous red hair, her ballet flats outside my front door, the beauty mark on her collarbone that you bathed or perhaps you did not do the baths, that her mother bathed, covered by the blouse your wife bought her or you gave her a credit card to buy herself, seated now at my kitchen table, eating the cranberry bread from the bakery I run with Corrine, who you hated because you thought she was too wild and loose.

Your daughter is crying. “My father will kill me,” she says. “You don't know him. He'll ground me for the rest of my life.”

“I do know him. William Callahan.” I do not say,
Yes, he will ground you for the rest of your life
.

“How did you know that?” Nate demands. “Her father's first name?”

“We went to college together.”

Your daughter rests her arms on the table and lays her face on top of them. She cries into the pillow of her folded arms. I open her purse and take out her cell phone. I scroll through her recent calls until I see “Home.”

My son touches your daughter's heaving shoulder. He rubs her back. I am glad he is kind to her.

*   *   *

I lie on my bed with your daughter's phone in its hot pink case on my chest, your face across that table twenty-two years ago as clear in my mind as if it were last night.

I wonder what you look like now, if you have lost your thick hair, if you have a gut.

A lifetime ago, you told me that you could imagine me at fifty. “You'll still be beautiful,” you said, and it was the nicest compliment anyone had ever given me, your faith that time would treat me well. This, though, had been the heart of the sickness between us that I did not understand until the afternoon in the bar with you, filled with excitement at the strength of your desire for me but with enough distance after our four years apart to be able to recognize that there was a higher order of love. I had fallen in love with how you made me feel about myself more than with you. Yes, I loved your determination, the way you catapulted yourself from your plumber father's two-family house in Cincinnati to Princeton, the way you'd insisted on forging your own way, escaping the dull grind of your father's work, the smashed dreams of your hockey player brother-in-law, the deprivations of your sister's life. And yes, I loved your exuberance, your enormous joie de vivre—but mostly, if I was honest, I loved the way you made me feel: like an exquisite prize, not the overlooked afterthought I'd always been for my father, too peripheral from my mother's deepest dramas to keep her from driving her car through a guardrail and down an embankment.

Not until I met Paul had I understood what it means to love someone for himself, to love him independently of what he does for me—where he takes me, to use Corrine's phrase from our girlhood together, from before Lily died, after which, in order to survive, Corrine had to become a grown-up, which I understand now very few people do. With your daughter here, crying in my kitchen, I can see why you came to hate me—I was using you, using you to feel better about myself—and why you had to get away from me. Your love for me left you feeling degraded, and you dug me out of you, in those months after Lily's death, like a dog scratching out a tick.

I push the call button on your daughter's phone, listen to the ring on your home line. I do not know what I will say if your wife picks up.

“Sarah,” you mumble, reading your daughter's name on your caller ID, the alarm seeping into your sleep voice by the second syllable of her name. I see your mussed hair, your deer's eyes that you gave your daughter, and in that moment I know that you are a good father even if you react more with your heart than your head, so that it will be my one task with you, what I owe your daughter for my son having snuck her into his bed, to slow you down enough to think about how to respond to your child.

“It's me.”

I think back thirty-four years to the night we met, you trying to smell me through the Princeton drizzle, my cousin Lizzy pregnant with the baby she named Brianna and then let go, before I met Andrew or found him in bed with Cat-Sue, before Lily or your parents died, before I understood that jaguars don't kiss horses or you became rich or Corrine and I opened our bakery.

“Louisa?”

I see you swinging your runner's legs over the side of the bed, sitting up, your tiny psychologist wife who doesn't know how to cook curled at your side.

I see my husband asleep in his childhood bed, his silenced cell phone next to the notebook he keeps with his clients' names and the addresses of their damaged homes printed in block letters, his father sleepless in his hospital bed, his mother awake by now, poking through her cabinets as she decides what she'll bake for her husband's return home today.

“Louisa? Is that you?”

I inhale deeply before I speak, taking stock of the gifts in my life and the soil of sadness out of which each has grown.

“Bear,” I whisper.

“Oh, Bear.”

 

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the editors of
Agni
,
Confrontation
,
Kansas Quarterly
,
The Ledge
,
The Massachusetts Review
,
Prairie Schooner
, and
Slice
, where earlier versions of eight of these stories first appeared; to the editors of
Glimmer Train
and the Summer Literary Seminars for awards granted to “Barberini Princess”; and to the editors of the
Best American Short Stories
for the selection of “Instructions to Participant” as a Distinguished Story of the Year.

Again, thank you to my sage literary agent, Geri Thoma, who found this collection its home, and to my brilliant editor, Sarah Crichton, and her über-competent assistant, Marsha Sasmor, who brought it to life.

These stories stretch back many years, and were generously supported by many friends and teachers including: Mickey Appleman, Peter Carey, E. L. Doctorow, Terry Eicher, Mark Epstein, Claire Flavigny, Alejandro Gomez, Amy Kaplan, Christina Baker Kline, Philip Lopate, Jenny McPhee, Shira Nayman, Jane Pollock, Caran Ruga, Arlene Shechet, Jill Smolowe, Ana Sousa, Nancy Star, Barbara Weisberg, Mary Kay Zuravleff, and the talented and bighearted women of the Montclair Writers Group.

Finally, my gratitude to my extended family of Gornicks and Hollenbecks, to my husband, Ken, who knows these stories from the inside, and to my sons, Zack and Damon, for whom my love has no horizon.

 

A Note About the Author