Ordinary Life (19 page)

“I don’t know, I don’t know. I wanted things to be different this year. I always want things to be different. And they never are.”

“What were you looking for?” he asks. “What did you expect?”

“I expected exactly what I got,” I say, and I can taste how I feel. “But I was looking for … I was looking for him to say he can’t
stand
how proud he is of me! That he held me as a baby and nearly burst inside! That he knows who I am, and he’s glad about it!”

“And he has never done that.”

“No!”

“And Kate, he never will.” I start to cry again, and he sits on the toilet seat and pulls me onto his lap. He wipes my face off with toilet paper. He holds it up to my nose and says, “Blow,” and I start to laugh. “Do you know who Clyde Tombaugh is?” he asks and I shake my head no. “He’s the guy who discovered Pluto. He discovered Pluto, and then he walked down the hall to tell his boss, and then went to the movies.
The Virginian
. Gary Cooper.”

“And?” I say.

“And nothing. That’s all.”

I
tsk
, get up off his lap. “Why did you tell me that? What’s your point?”

He gets up and looks at himself in the mirror, plays with his hair a bit. “My point,” he says, turning around to face me, “is that it seems we all of us return to what’s familiar to us, no matter what. Even if it’s not so wonderful, it’s what we know. And it … I don’t know, it sustains us.” He puffs up his cheeks with air, lets it out, shrugs, and says, “See you in there. Better hurry up or all the gravy will be gone. And God, it’s good.”

He closes the door behind him. I sit down on the floor, my back against the wall. I am remembering a Christmas that was bitter cold, when my father took me with him to feed the ducks. He does this every Christmas Day, brings a sack of cracked corn to the lake and feeds the ducks. I don’t know why I came that year, no one ever went with him. I was six. I sat in the car with the heater on and watched. I remember asking if the ducks’ feet hurt—no boots; such cold, blue ice; such deep snow. My father
said no, they were used to it. And then he stood at the edge of the water, throwing out handfuls of corn. There was one duck, a female, who hung back from the others, and as a result got no food. There was something the matter with her—one wing lay at an odd angle against her. My father kept trying to reach her, but she wouldn’t come close enough to get anything. He edged out carefully onto the lake. I saw his breath as he spoke to her. Suddenly, his foot went through the ice. The water was deep enough to soak a good ways up his leg. He looked down, then simply crashed through with the other foot. Then he leaned over to dump the rest of the bag before the duck, who finally got some corn. When he got back in the car, I stared at his legs for a while. Then I said, “You got all wet.” He shrugged, stared straight ahead. “Are you cold?” I asked.

“No,” he said, though clearly he was. He backed the car up and started for home. “Your mother will have dinner ready by now,” he said. “I want you to wash up as soon as we get in.”

I open the bathroom door and go out to the table. “Rats! I guess this means I can’t have your pie,” Annie says.

“Hey, Mom, did you fall in?” Josh asks. “We thought you were a goner!”

“No,” I say. “I had to do some things.” I sit at the chair that has been left empty, next to my father. I see his arm moving, see him passing the rolls toward me. I understand that he is made up of working cells, just like me—crowded and confused pieces of genius that have been tampered with and now, wounded, go along in the way that they are able. I move a little closer to him. “Pass the gravy, please,” I say.

He hands it to me. “Here. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” I say back, and I mean it.

I was in the middle of making dinner when Laurence called. He told me he wanted me to meet his mother, who was in the hospital. Laurence is gay, his mother had a stroke, and he naturally assumed the two were inexorably linked. He wanted to pretend he’d had a major catharsis and was going straight. He said he was sorry he’d ever come out to her. It didn’t work. It only broke her heart. And now look, he said, now she’s had a stroke and maybe she’ll die. “And she’s just—well, she’s so nice,” he said. “I never told you much about her. She’s so innocent! Like once we were watching a thing on TV about crack addicts and she got really sad and said, ‘Why don’t they just go get an ice cream soda? What do they need with all this stuff?’ She was serious! Oh, I don’t know, she’s batty, I guess. But she’s so
sweet
!” He was nearly hysterical and I was trying to get the lasagna in the oven.

“Can I call you back?” I asked. “I need to grate the Parmesan. If I do it on the phone everything gets too shaky.”

“Just say yes,” he said. “Say you’ll meet her and tell her you’re my girlfriend.”

“Your girlfriend! I am a married woman—with a child. She’ll see that right away.”

“Well, for God’s sake, don’t wear your ring!”

“Listen, Laurence. A woman can just tell if another woman has children. You get these changes. It’s like you can’t make good gravy until you have children, and then suddenly you can.”

“I can make good gravy,” Laurence said, defensively.

“Not mother kind,” I said. “You make fancy wine kind. You can’t make mother kind. Anyway, what I mean is that your mother will sense right away that I have a kid, and then she’ll know you’re lying.”

“Just because you have a child doesn’t mean I’m lying! Why can’t you be a single-mother girlfriend?”

“And what happened to my husband?”

“I don’t know. Left you for another man.”

“I’m sure.” I stretched out the phone cord to look at myself in the glass door of the oven.

“Oh, come on. Please do it?”

I stared at the cheese and the grater. I wanted to get going. “For God’s sake, Laurence, don’t be so guilty all the time. You didn’t make your mother have a stroke! You came out to her over ten years ago! Why don’t you just think about this some more? Believe me, it’s not a good idea. Too Lucy-and-Ethel.”

“I can’t believe you’re letting me down on this. I’ve got nobody else I can ask! Please do it.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Did you dream that you should do this or something?”

“Yes! Well, sort of. A daydream.”

“They don’t count.”

“I know. But I did have a night dream that I gave her a gift. And
then she died. Peacefully.” There was a pause and then he added desperately, “I’m her only child.”

“Oh, all right!”

“Great! I’ll be there at seven. Fifteen minutes, that’s all we’ll be there. I promise. Remember not to wear your ring.”

After dinner, my daughter, who thought Laurence’s idea was terrific, who was acting like I’d been chosen to be on television, wanted to help me pick out something to wear. She thought I should look sexy. But then, she was twelve and temporarily tasteless. “You don’t wear something sexy to meet your boyfriend’s mother,” I told her. “Especially when she’s in the hospital. Remember that when you start dating.”

“Laurence is trying to convince her that he likes women, right?” Her excitement was barely containable. I thought, Why don’t
you
pretend to be his girlfriend if you think this is such a swell idea?

“Right.”

She blew a huge orange bubble and then popped it. “So you should look sexy.”

This is really too adult for her, I thought. Why isn’t she in her room making a doll walk around and talking for her? Why doesn’t she color anymore? Still, maybe she was right. I called down for advice to my husband, who was sitting in his armchair sighing over the newspaper. “How do I look sexiest?” I asked.

“T-shirt, no bra—why?” he yelled. There was a moment of silence, and then he asked, “Is Lynie with you?”

“Yes,” she yelled back, “and I heard you. ‘T-shirt, no bra.’ That’s disgusting.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I can’t wear a T-shirt anyway. Let’s go for the nice girl look.” I held up a pink dress with a tiny white collar. “How’s this?”

“Where’d you get that?” she asked. “It’s pretty.”

“From Grandma. She always wants me to wear stuff like this.” I looked at myself when I was dressed. Not too bad. Conservative, but not Republican. The image of a woman who might still pray. I realized suddenly how much I didn’t want to do this. I sat on the bed, frowning. Lyn sat beside me.

“All ready?”

I’m nervous.”

“Why? Laurence is your best friend.”

“I know, but I don’t want to meet his stupid mother and pretend I’m his girlfriend. This is too much to ask!”

“What about that time he sat for me when you and Daddy went away for the whole weekend?”

“He’s forgotten all about that.”

“Well, he still did it.”

A car outside honked three times. “There he is,” I said. Lyn ran down to meet him. She was crazy about Laurence. He called himself her fairy godfather. When she was born, he’d visited me in the hospital and brought her a Judy Garland tape. She listened to it every night, lay in her crib wide eyed and content, sucking her thumb to “The Man That Got Away.” Their tastes had been aligned ever since. Laurence took her to museums, to concerts, even out to dinner. He came into the living room and hugged her, then waved to John. “How’s it going?” he asked in the huskier-than-usual voice he reserved for my husband and members of the police force.

“Okay, Laurence, and you?”

“Okay.” This was the usual length and caliber of their conversations. They didn’t understand each other, but they tolerated each other with an excruciating kind of courtesy. When Laurence came to a family dinner, everyone was exhausted after an hour.

“You look nice,” I told him when we got into the car. He was wearing his gray linen blazer and an imported cotton striped shirt, open at his tanned neck.

He waved my compliment away. “I’m a nervous wreck. I just thought maybe she’d feel better if she believed I’d have five Catholic children after she died. That’s how many she and my father figured they’d have. But then he went and died on her.”

“What? I have to be Catholic, too?”

“No, just raise our five kids to be.”

“What makes you think she’s going to die, anyway?”

“I don’t know. She looks bad. Got all this junk on her.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “They like to play with all their equipment.”

“I don’t think she’s going to make it,” he said. I looked over at his serious profile and didn’t say anything. I thought, Maybe this is a good idea.

The hospital room was a private. There were bouquets lined up on the windowsill and two cards, both featuring monster-type nurses, taped to the wall. There was a commode in the corner, covered by a blanket that served only to accentuate its presence. Laurence’s mother was sitting up in bed watching television. When she saw us, she gasped and shut it off.

Laurence hugged her and said, “Hi, Ma. Look who I brought to meet you.”

“Hello, Mrs. Davis,” I said, and shook her hand.

“Oh, please … 
Maureen
.” She gave me a discrete once-over. I actually felt myself holding in my stomach. “It is such a pleasure to meet you, Susan. Laurence told me he’d met a very nice woman. How many children do you have?”

I looked at Laurence triumphantly, then said, “One.”

“Uh-huh. Boy?”

“No, a girl. Her name is Lyn—she’s twelve.”

She smiled, “So. Larry tells me you’re getting married soon.” She straightened the transparent green tubing delivering oxygen through her nose.

I stared at Laurence while I said, “Oh, did he tell you that?” He stared back, his eyes wide and pleading. “Well, yes … some happy day,” I said.

“When?”

“When?” I laughed a little. “Well, you know … we’re sort of in the planning phase.”

She took my hand and patted it. Then she looked over at Laurence, who had found something mesmerizing out the window. She leaned toward me, whispered, “I knew he never meant it. I knew he only had to find the right girl.” There was a small clicking sound when she talked—loose dentures, I imagined. She had nice eyes, blue and clear, and curly white hair. I thought she looked fine. I didn’t see a thing wrong with her. Then I wondered if something were hidden by the covers and felt guilty. She was looking at me expectantly.

“Yes, we’re … very happy. Very excited,” I said.

“Larry is a wonderful boy.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Very sensitive.”

“Oh, yes.”

She sighed, let go of my hand. “Of course, I hate for you to meet me under circumstances such as these! When I get home, you must come to dinner.”

“Well, I’d … love to.”

She turned toward Laurence. “Will you bring her to dinner next weekend?”

He turned around, and there was, I noted with satisfaction, a residual blush on his face. “Ma, you don’t know when you’re going home.”

“Sure I do. In two days.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, Dr. Abrahms told me today. It was a very small stroke, Larry—I’m fine. I was very lucky. I just have to take this medicine—to thin my blood, you know. I’m going home Friday.”

“Well” He looked at me. “Isn’t that great news! I wasn’t expecting that!”

She chuckled. “He always underestimates me. He worries too much. He’s very sensitive.”