Sing You Home (17 page)

“Well, what were you thinking, inviting my mom to come with
_us?”

“That she’s all alone on a Saturday night?”

“I’m forty, Vanessa—I don’t want to hang out with my mother!”

“You would if you couldn’t,” Vanessa says.

I look at her. In the dark, the reflection from the rearview mirror casts a yellow mask around her eyes. “If you miss your mother so much, you can have mine,” I say.

“I’m just saying you don’t have to be so mean.”

“Well, you don’t have to enable her, either. Did you seriously think her brick exercise was a good one?”

“Sure. I’d use it myself, except the kids would probably write the names of their teachers on the bricks they’re tossing, and that wouldn’t be very constructive.” She pulls up to a stop sign and turns to me. “You know, Zoe, my mother used to tell me the same story five times. Without fail. I was constantly saying,
Ma, yes, I know,
and rolling my eyes. And now—I can’t even really remember her voice. I think sometimes I’ve got it, in my head, but then it fades before I can ever really hear it. Sometimes, I put on old videotapes just so I don’t completely forget how she sounds, and I listen to her telling me to get a serving spoon for the potatoes, or singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Right now, I’d
kill
to have her tell me a story five times. I’d settle for even once.”

I know, halfway through her story, that I am going to cave in. “Is this what you do with the kids in school?” I sigh. “Make them see themselves for the petty, nasty people they really are?”

“If I think it’s going to work,” she says, smiling.

I turn on my cell phone. “I’ll tell my mother to meet us at the theater.”

“She’s already coming. That’s why I ran back into the house—to invite her.”

“Were you really so sure I’d change my mind?”

“Give me a break.” Vanessa laughs. “I even know what you’re going to order at the concession counter.”

She probably does. Vanessa is like that—if you say or do something once, it sticks in her memory so that she will be able to reference it the next time it’s necessary. Like how I once mentioned I don’t like olives, and then, a month later at a restaurant when we were given a basket of olive bread, she asked for crackers instead before I could even make a comment.

“Just for the record,” I say, “there’s still a lot about me you
don’t
know.”

“Popcorn, no butter,” Vanessa says. “Sprite.” She purses her lips. “And Goobers, because this is a romantic comedy and those are never quite as good without chocolate.”

She’s right. Down to the candy.

I think, not for the first time, that if Max had been even half as observant and attentive as Vanessa, I’d probably still be married.

When we pull up to the theater, I’m amazed to find a crowd. The movie has been out for a few weeks now—it’s a silly, fizzy romantic comedy. The other movie playing is an independent film called
July
that’s gotten a lot of press, because a very popular preteen singing sensation is starring in it, and because of the subject matter: instead of being a Romeo and Juliet tragedy . . . the love story is about Juliet and Juliet.

Vanessa spots my mother on the other side of the throng and waves her over. “Can you believe this?” she says, looking around.

I’ve seen a few articles written about the film and the controversy surrounding it. I begin to wonder if we should go see
that
movie instead, just based on its popular appeal. But as we get closer to the theater, I realize that the people milling around are not in the ticket line. They’re flanking it, and they’re carrying signs:

GOD HATES FAGS
GAY: GOD ABHORS YOU
ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE

They are not militant, crazy people. The protesters are calm and organized, and wearing black suits with skinny ties, or modest floral print dresses. They look like your neighbor, your grandmother, your history teacher. In this, I suppose, they have something in common with the people they are slandering.

Beside me, I feel Vanessa’s spine go rigid. “We can leave,” I murmur. “Let’s just rent a video and watch it at home.”

But before I can pull away, I hear my name being called. “Zoe?”

At first, I don’t recognize Max. The last time I saw him, after all, he was drunk and disheveled, and trying to explain to a judge why we should be granted a divorce. I’d heard that he started going to Reid and Liddy’s church, but I hadn’t quite expected a transformation this . . . radical.

Max is wearing a fitted dark suit with a charcoal tie. His hair has been trimmed neatly, and he’s clean-shaven. On the lapel of his suit is a pin: a small gold cross.

“Wow,” I say. “You look great, Max.”

We do an awkward dance, where we move toward each other for a kiss on the cheek, but then I pull away, and he pulls away, and we both look down at the ground.

“So do you,” he says.

He is wearing a walking cast. “What happened?” I ask. It seems crazy that I wouldn’t know. That Max would have gotten hurt, and no one relayed the message to me.

“It’s nothing. An accident,” Max says.

I wonder who took care of him, when he was first hurt.

Behind me, I am incredibly conscious of my mother and Vanessa. I can feel their presence like heat thrown from a fireplace. Someone in the front of the line buys a ticket to
July,
and the protest starts up in earnest, with chanting and yelling and sign waving. “I heard you were part of Eternal Glory, now,” I say.

“Actually, it’s a part of
me
,” Max replies. “I let Jesus into my heart.”

He says this with a brilliant white smile, the same way he’d say,
I got my car waxed this afternoon
or
I think I’ll have Chinese food for dinner
—as if this is part of normal everyday conversation instead of a statement that might give you pause. I wait for Max to snicker—we used to make fun of Reid and Liddy sometimes for the glory-be snippets that fell out of their mouths—but he doesn’t.

“Have you been drinking again?” I ask, the only explanation I can come up with to reconcile the man I know with the one standing in front of me.

“No,” Max says. “Not a drop.”

Maybe not of alcohol, but it’s pretty clear to me that Max has been chugging whatever Kool-Aid the Eternal Glory Church is offering. There’s something just
off
about him—something Stepford-like. I preferred Max with all his complicated imperfections. I preferred Max when we used to make fun of Liddy for saying “Jeezum Crow” when she was frustrated, for being gullible enough to believe him when he told her that Rick Warren was mounting a presidential campaign.

Full disclosure: I’m not a religious person. I don’t begrudge people the right to believe in whatever they believe, but I don’t like having those same beliefs forced on me. So when Max says, “I’ve been praying for you, Zoe,” I have absolutely no idea what to say. I mean, it’s nice to be prayed for, I suppose, even if I’ve never asked for it.

But do I really want to be prayed for by a bunch of people who are using God to camouflage a message of hate? There are beautiful, wholesome teenage girls standing in front of the ticket booth handing out flyers that say:
I WAS BORN BLOND. YOU CHOOSE TO BE GAY
. Their clean-cut attentiveness, their claim of being “Good Christians” are the icing, I realize, on a cake that’s laced with arsenic. “Why would you want to do this kind of thing?” I ask Max. “Why does a movie even matter to you?”

“Perhaps I can answer that,” a man says. He has a cascade of white hair and stands nearly six inches taller than Max; I think I recognize him from news clips as the pastor of this church. “We wouldn’t be here if the homosexuals weren’t promoting their own agenda, their own activism. If we sit back, who’s going to speak for the rights of the traditional family? If we sit back, who’s going to make sure our great country doesn’t become a place where Johnny has two mommies and where marriage is as God intended it to be—between a man and woman?” His voice has escalated. “Brothers and sisters—we are here because Christians have
become
the minority! Homosexuals claim they have a right to be heard? Well,
so do Christians!”

There is a roar from his congregants, who push their placards higher in the air.

“Max,” the pastor says, tossing him a set of keys, “we need another box of pamphlets from the van.”

Max nods and then turns to me. “I’m really glad you’re doing well,” he says, and for the first time since we’ve started talking I believe him.

“I’m glad you’re doing well, too.” I mean it, even if he’s on a road I’d never walk myself. But in a way, this is the ultimate vindication for me, the proof that our relationship could never have been mended. If this is where Max was headed, it was not somewhere I’d ever have wanted to go.

“You’re not going to see
July,
I hope?” Max says, and he offers up that half smile that made me fall in love with him.

“No. The Sandra Bullock movie.”

“Wise choice,” Max replies. Impulsively, he leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. I breathe in the scent of his shampoo and am viscerally hit with an image of the bottle in the shower, with its blue cap and its little sticker about tea tree oil and its health properties. “I think about you every day . . . ,” Max says.

Drawing back, I am suddenly dizzy; I wonder if this is the ghost of old love.

“. . . I think of how much happier you could be, if you let the Lord in,” Max finishes.

And just like that, I am firmly rooted in reality again. “Who
are
you?” I murmur, but Max has already turned his back, headed to the parking lot to do his pastor’s bidding.

The bar is called Atlantis and is tragically hip, set in a new boutique hotel in Providence. On the walls a projector ripples color, to simulate being under the sea. The drinks are all served in cobalt glassware, and the booths are carved out of fake coral, with cushions fashioned to look like bright sea anemone. The centerpiece of the room is a huge water tank, where tropical fish swim with a woman squeezed into a silicone mermaid tail and shell bra.

Fortunately, my mother has decided to go home after the movie, leaving Vanessa and me to have a drink by ourselves. I am fascinated by the woman in the tank. “How does she breathe?” I ask out loud, and then see her surreptitiously sneak a gulp of oxygen from a scubalike device that she’s concealing in her hand, which is attached to an apparatus at the top of the tank.

“I stand corrected,” Vanessa says. “There
is
a career path for women who dreamed of being mermaids when they were girls.”

A waitress brings us our drinks and nuts served, predictably, in a large shell. “I could see where this would get old very fast,” I say.

“I don’t know. I was reading about how, in China, theme restaurants are all the rage right now. There’s one that serves only TV dinners. And another that only has medieval food, plus you have to eat with your hands.” She looks up at me. “The one I’m itching to go to, though, is the prehistoric restaurant. They serve raw meat.”

“Do you have to kill it yourself?”

Vanessa laughs. “Maybe. Imagine being the hostess: ‘Uh, miss, we reserved a table with the hunters, but we were seated with the gatherers instead.’” She lifts her drink—a dirty martini, which tastes like paint thinner to me (when I told Vanessa this, she said, “When did you last drink paint thinner?”), and toasts. “To Eternal Glory. May they one day succeed in separating Church and Hate.”

I lift my glass, too, but I don’t drink from it. I’m thinking about Max.

“I don’t understand people who complain about the mysterious ‘homosexual agenda,’” Vanessa muses. “You know what’s on that agenda, for my gay friends? To spend time with family, to pay their bills, and to buy milk on the way home from work.”

“Max was an alcoholic,” I say abruptly. “He had to drop out of college because of his drinking. He used to surf whenever the conditions were right. We’d fight because he was supposed to be running a business, and then I’d find out that he ditched his clients for the day because of some ten-foot swells.”

Vanessa sets down her drink and looks at me.

“My point is,” I continue, “that he wasn’t always like this. Even that suit . . . I don’t think he owned more than a sports jacket the entire time we were married.”

“He looked a little like a CIA operative,” Vanessa says.

My lips twitch. “All he needs is an earpiece.”

“I’m pretty sure the hotline to God is wireless.”

“People must see through all that rhetoric,” I say. “Does anyone really take Clive Lincoln seriously?”

Vanessa runs her finger around the lip of her martini glass. “I was at the grocery store yesterday and there was a bumper sticker on the pickup truck next to my car. It said,
SAVE A DEER
. . .
SHOOT A QUEER
.” She glances up. “So yeah. I think some people take him seriously.”

“But I never expected Max to be one of them.” I hesitate. “Do you think this is my fault?”

I expect Vanessa to immediately dismiss the idea, but instead, she thinks for a moment. “If you hadn’t been pulling yourself together after you lost the baby, then maybe you would have been able to help Max when he needed it. Sounds to me, though, like Max was already broken when you met him. And if that’s the case, no matter how much you patched him up, sooner or later he was going to fall apart again.” She picks up her glass and drains it. “You know what you need? You need to let go.”

“Of what?”

“Max, obviously.”

I can feel my cheeks burn. “I’m not holding on to him.”

“Hey, I get it. It’s only natural, since you two—”

“He wasn’t even my type,” I blurt out, and I realize after I say it that it is true. “Max was—well, he was just completely different from the kinds of guys who were usually interested in me.”

“You mean big and brawny and sexy?”

“You think?” I ask, surprised.

“Just because I don’t hang modern art in my house doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it,” Vanessa says.