The Inseparables (11 page)

Spencer's eyes shot open in surprise.

She tried to save the moment. “Not weeks. Did I say weeks? I meant months. She came at Christmas. Right? Months.”

His shoulders fell. “She came home a few weeks ago and she didn't tell me?”

When they were alone together finally, Oona pantomimed a picture frame with her hands. “We'll probably need to address the elephant in the room at some point,” she said.

Outside, snow peeled off the roof. Wind made the lights flicker. They were in the bathroom on the third floor. It was a large room with a claw-foot tub and a window that looked out on the icy driveway. Above the faucet hung a tiny red print of her child-size hand, preserved all this time like the cave paintings at Lascaux.

“I think calling them elephants is probably a bit generous, Mom.”

“Not funny, Lydia.”

“Baby elephants, then.”

“Still not humorous. Not even remotely.”

This thing with the picture was among her worst fears. Had Oona enumerated the things she worried most about as a mother, she would have put it near the top of the list. A fatal car accident. An abduction. A swift-moving tumor. Then this. At night lately she had found herself bargaining with God about Lydia's safety. She did this even though she was fairly sure she did not believe that anyone or anything was listening. “I will gladly suffer a car accident,” she thought some nights, “or a terrifying abduction or a tumor if you just keep her safe.” Alone in the bathroom, she watched her daughter. It was a simple thing, yet she could not say it aloud anymore: All I want to do is keep you safe. When Lydia was younger, Oona could say this without risk of earning her daughter's disdain.
Stay with me. Come hold my hand. Be where I can see you. Stay close to Mommy.
So often lately, Oona felt actual fear about what she could and could not say around Lydia. Nothing obliterated her confidence as a mother or, moreover, as a human as much as her daughter's withering contempt. Lydia's new teenage intellect operated like a heat-seeking gas, filling every available space with its energy. Out of nowhere, she had a full, facile command of ridicule. And it had happened so fast! Five years ago Lydia was a child! A girl in the fourth grade, learning about frogs, sleeping with a stuffed hippopotamus, crawling into bed with her on Sunday mornings to say the most preposterously kind things.
You are the best person that has ever lived.
Now Oona worried that anything she said would be the wrong thing to say.
Do you need help? Because I will help you. Here's a thought: how about you just stay here with me, every second, all the time, forever?
Oona had read so much about this—about being a mother to a teenager—and she had found nothing in her books to give her any optimism. Instead, she had found that parenting a fifteen-year-old daughter was not so different than the way her colleagues at the hospital treated cancer. By the end, every cell in your body will be destroyed. You may or may not live. Above all else, you will need a positive attitude, you will need resilience, but prepare yourself for failure.

“I can't talk about it,” Lydia said. “I can't. That's not ideal, I know. You like to talk things out.”

“I do,” Oona said. “Talking is healthy. Talking is therapeutic.”

“But therapy is so bourgeois, Mom.”

At first Oona wanted to let the comment go. This was the sort of thing she struggled with. Your child says ridiculous things and you need to answer. For fifteen years this was how it had gone, but not anymore. What Oona wanted to say was, “Bourgeois? That's actually genuinely very funny, since, you know, you chose to go to a boarding school that offers a class on the history of the BMW sedan.” But what Oona actually said to Lydia was, “I'm here if you want to talk. I'm here right now.”

“I already spoke to a therapist today,” Lydia said. “Several, actually. Sorry to say, it was not therapeutic.”

While Lydia sat on the bathroom vanity, Oona sat on the rim of the bathtub. Lydia avoided eye contact. At this, she was inordinately gifted.

“Are you okay, at least?” Oona asked.

“Am I okay?”

“Yes!” Oona cried. “Are you? Because I'm not. Not at all.”

“I'm sorry, Mom.”

“Can I hug you?” Oona asked.

Oona suspected that Lydia was readying something caustic, but she merely offered a shy, almost childish nod of her head. “Sure,” she said, walking across the room and grabbing on to her.

“I'm worried about you,” Oona said, trying out the words tentatively. “I know this is hard for you to talk about. But this is worrying. All of this.” She let go but then, changing her mind, hugged Lydia once more, even though Lydia began to squirm in her arms. This, too, was something that had been easier when Lydia was younger: the permission to hold her child. Lydia used to allow herself to be hugged close for the longest time. In a crowded aisle at the Natick Mall, Oona could scoop Lydia into her arms, hold her for hours. At Fenway Park, when Lydia was five or six, she would gladly sit in Oona's lap for the entire game. Lately, though, Oona had found herself growing nervous about whether she could still do this—hug her daughter—or whether she needed to ask ahead of time.

“I'm trying to keep perspective,” Lydia said. “I don't have tuberculosis. I'm not starving. My village hasn't just been firebombed. I'm just humiliated. I realize that is a very low bar.”

“People have been awful at school?” Oona said. “I thought these were the best students in America.”

“I showed you the phone,” Lydia said. “They're all princes and gentlemen.”

“How many of those messages have you gotten?”

“Enough,” said Lydia, crossing the room. “We're talking about it. I told you I didn't want to talk about it.”

“But why would you even take the picture in the first place?” Oona asked. “Did somebody make you? Or was it your idea?”

“This sounds suspiciously like you're about to say it's my fault,” Lydia said.

Oona felt her shoulders tightening. She hadn't seen the picture, but she imagined it as best as she could: the dingy bathroom tile, lime scale on the hot-water knob, evidence of blond hair dye on her daughter's roots, probably a string of pimples across her chest, even more probably a knowing glare on her face borrowed from a porn actress. At the least she hoped for a terrifying lack of life in her daughter's eyes. Those eyes, which were her own eyes, and her father's eyes. Those eyes—she needed to imagine that there was nothing in the expression. She needed to think that there was a deep vacancy of the soul evident in the photograph, because that was the only way Oona could understand its existence to be true.

“Listen,” Lydia said. “It's cool. I talked with Grandma earlier.”

“You talked to my mother?” Oona asked. “You talked to her and not me?”

“I know you told me not to. But she asked. She knew something was wrong. It's her superpower. She just looked at me and
knew.
”

Oona could guess what her mother had to say. Growing up in this house, she'd been subsumed in all of her mother's various theories on sex and the body: the intersection between female desire and male hegemony; the social origins of even the most innocent assumptions about beauty. When Linda Lovelace died, she heard for weeks about the deranged and implicit power structures of pornography—this even though, at the time, Oona was twenty-seven years old. As much as she joked with her mother about the book and its diagrams and its pink cover, this was the crucial thing about her mother: no matter how much social opprobrium she faced because of
The Inseparables,
no matter how many men approached her armed with something menacing to say, she had never backed away from her ideals. Second wave begat third wave and here, all the time, was Henrietta Olyphant, preaching the same sermon. Despite all of this, Oona had ignored most everything. This was the instinct, even if it wasn't wise. The things your mother tells you about sex are not the things you want to hear or accept as gospel, even if those things are good and true and generally helpful.

“I think we probably need to have a frank talk,” Oona said, suddenly energized. “That's what we should do.”

“A frank talk about what?” Lydia asked.

“Intercourse,” Oona said.

“Oh that's a terrible idea.”

“Are you having intercourse? Were you? Is this Charlie person someone you loved? Were you being pressured or manipulated into intercourse when you didn't want it?”

“Why suddenly do I feel like I'm on trial?”

“I know this is really uncomfortable. And probably very weird to have your mother asking you this stuff. But they're important questions.”

“It's been a long day already,” Lydia said. “I just don't know if I have it in me to talk about intercourse with my mother. Or really even say the word ‘intercourse' anymore.”

The urge to devolve the conversation into clinical terms was the doctor's habit, surely. Oona had taken this tack all through Lydia's early adolescence, eschewing the books and manuals and the low-grade banality of women's magazines to explain sex and menstruation and the very basics of puberty. This was very likely her mother's fault. With her mother, everything was frank.
This is what happens when people fuck.
Oona was eight, nine, maybe. There were French movies involved. By fourteen, she was well versed in all the various opinions about female orgasm bestowed upon the world by esteemed male sexologists. Having grown up amid the sharp fallout from
The Inseparables,
it was not a mystery why the cold language of medicine appealed to her so. Her childhood had caused in her not only a reflexively regressive idea of sex and an innate loathing of the libertine lifestyle, but a magnetic attraction to the clarity of science.

“I'm fine,” Lydia said. “Really. I can see that you're worried. But I'm fine.”

Oona wanted to grab her.
All I want to do is keep you safe.

“The picture was stupid,” Lydia said. “I accept that. One stupid thing. One part curiosity. One part vanity.”

“Vanity?”

“I'm a human,” Lydia said. “So, yes: vanity.”

“Maybe one part sexual peer pressure?”

Lydia shook her head. “I'm not sleeping with anyone,” she said. “Or making love. Or screwing. Or endeavoring to perform intercourse with other humans, or however you want to put it, Dr. Olyphant.”

“Do we need to talk about diseases or the best practices for contraception?”

“Certainly not any more than we are right this second,” said Lydia.

“I'm perfectly willing,” Oona said. “I'm always willing.”

“I think I remember the lectures and pamphlets,” Lydia said. “All the many dozens of them.”

“You can joke if you want, but I wanted to prepare you! For this!” Oona paced for a moment in the bathroom. “You have to understand, Lydia: you're mine! I made you! Whatever happens to you happens to me! When you suffer, I suffer! Even when you don't suffer, I suffer! Every moment you're away from me, I suffer! There is always suffering!”

“I understand,” Lydia said quietly.

Oona said nothing. She could see Lydia testing the words, trying to see if they were true, or at least true enough. Oona could remember this. At fifteen, she was so flooded by doubt and vulnerability that she felt for the longest time as if confidence itself was a rare element, like lithium or radium, buried deep in some far-flung corner of the earth, available to only a lucky few.

“This boy,” Lydia said softly. “He's the only boy I've kissed. Not at school, not this year—ever. In history.” Lydia put up her hand and begged for mercy. “Which I feel really terrific admitting. Not because having kissed a lot of boys means anything important, but maybe because there are boys I've wanted to kiss that I haven't. And maybe because the only boy I've kissed is the same boy who stole a picture of my body and sent it around to all his buddies. Can we discuss something else? Anything more comfortable? Like cancer? Or the Middle East peace process? Or nuclear warfare?”

Oona hugged her. Lydia let her. What else was there to do but try to hold on?

Out on the meadow, there were tire grooves in the frozen mud. This was the fault of the moving trucks, but it may as well have been the ambulance. When she was young, her father had her memorize every species of plant here. Great Solomon's Seal. Hooker's Orchid. River Beauty. They were the only plants she knew. Beyond the water, church steeples decorated the valley in Aveline. In the spring, you could see the red roof on the house where her father had been a boy. Down below, directly below, on the hill, the walkway lay bare. She had helped her mother dispose of the flagstone.

“This house creeps me out,” Lydia said, stepping away from the window. “I mean, he fell and died right there.” She pointed. “Every time I come here, I just stare at that spot.”

After the funeral, Oona put the flagstone in the back of her car and took it to the house in Crestview. Her mother needed it gone, and Oona obliged. Blood was not supposed to bother her. She was around it every day. Blood was a companion of her workday. She knew the feel of blood on her fingers, kept up to date on the recent hematological research, knew what the whizzing circuitry of blood looked like beneath a microscope. Even so, she'd needed to ask Spencer to clean her father's blood from the stone. He'd found her in the backyard with the garden hose, shaking. Death in her profession so often was a clinical state. She had been present in the emergency room for enough death that she had become numb to the holiness of the act. Even now, the reality of her father being gone had not settled in. How could it be? And to go the way he had? Hitting his head? Her sweet dad? Her dad out in the barn, nursing a calf with a bottle; her dad in the kitchen, whipping egg whites into meringue; her dad here, dancing with her mother to the worst music, to Billy Joel and Elton John? Her strong father falling and dying at home? How was that ever going to make any sense?

“Do you think he knew?” Lydia asked. “Like, when he fell. Do you think he knew that it was the end? I would hope that I knew. If it was happening to me, I would want to know.”