The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (39 page)

Soapie is quiet a long time. Rosie watches her hands worrying with the fringe on her blanket, pulling and tugging at it. Finally she says, “I know it was bad to lie to you. But I wanted to protect you, I guess, and I couldn’t think up a better story. If I said she was sick, you’d want to know all about the disease, and if I said she got killed in a car accident, you’d be scared of cars always.”

“But a building,” Rosie says again.

Soapie’s voice is irritated now. “Oh, who cares about that? The point is that love can be so destructive. My beautiful, beautiful daughter gave up everything for that stupid boy she loved, a useless, careless boy, and look at the lives that one act wrecked. Look what he took from all of us! I hated him then, but now I guess I don’t have the energy to hate him anymore. I don’t even know if he’s alive. But I let him ruin our lives, Rosie.”

Rosie wraps her arms around her stomach, as if she needs to protect the baby from this.

She watches Soapie’s hands flutter up to her face. Rosie hears herself say, “It’s okay. You did what you needed to do,” but anyone could hear that she’s speaking from very far away.

No building fell. No piece of masonry. You can go back to feeling good about the laws of physics
.

No cruel trick of fate. No Coke with a friend in the city for a girls’ day out
.

Oh, but acceptance is going to be harder than this. She
knows that when she gets up and goes to the bathroom, when she forces herself to move her arms and legs. No, this is going to be hard knowledge to have. Her mother chose to die when she had Rosie to live for, to care for. It’s not the lie or the fact that love can hurt—she’s known that for some time. It’s that she, her three-year-old, innocent self, couldn’t save her mother; that Serena, who never showed up at any séance, never heeded any call, walked toward death on purpose. And how is Rosie supposed to live with that?

She stares at herself in the bathroom mirror, sees this new knowledge in her eyes that look almost smoky from the hurt they hold. It’s a different mother she holds inside herself now.

When she goes back to the living room, she watches Soapie’s hand, with its large veins, its thick nails yellowed in places, the liver spots thrown randomly across her mottled skin, trembling as it reaches for the glass of Coke. Just as she grasps the glass, there’s a little twitch of her nerves, and the glass falls on the carpet and spills Coke all over the place.

“How did she do it?” Rosie asks quietly as she’s scrubbing the carpet.

There’s such a long silence that she thinks Soapie didn’t really hear her. “Pills,” she says at last. “She swallowed a whole bottle of pills.”

“And where was I?”

“With me.”

“I wish I didn’t know. I wish you didn’t tell me.”

Soapie looks at her sadly. “I know. I wish I didn’t have to tell you either.”

“Maybe I should have never known. Why did you tell me now?”

“Sometimes we have to know things just because they’re
true. And you can handle it now. We both can. It had a hold on us long enough.”

Her grandmother sounds so tired, and it is so sad and dark in that room. Rosie gets up and turns on the lights and wraps her arms around herself. The snow has started outside now, and the heater hasn’t kicked on in a long time. She goes and turns up the thermostat. It’s good to keep moving. She notices that she keeps folding her arms across her chest.

She will have to stand off to the side of this story, where she’s stood for so many years now, the place where her mother is just a shadowy figure who doesn’t really, truly matter in any kind of daily, real way. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed, except that where your mother was one kind of victim, now you know she’s another, and it’s worse. You think your heart has broken, but it hasn’t really broken—not any more than it already was. You just notice it because it’s got one extra crack in it right now. But that’s so the light gets in. Somebody said that: the light comes through the broken places.

The last thing she wants is to go to the baby shower. What a stupid idea: a party on this of all nights.

But if she doesn’t go, she would have to make up some excuse. And then, worse, she would have to stay home with Soapie and George. So she drags herself upstairs and puts on her best red maternity dress. It looks like something you could buy at L.L. Bean and invite a family of four to move into with you, but she doesn’t care. It also probably brings out her reddened eyes. She doesn’t care about that either. She knots her hair up in a twist and sticks a sprig of holly in it, and then she practices her surprised face. She hopes it’s not going to be one of those parties when people jump out and yell, “Surprise!” That’s ridiculous. Who would jump out and scare a pregnant woman?

And how is it that it feels as though her mother died just today? But it does. She has to shake out everything she’s ever known, touch all those objects once again, think of this woman whose life had become so unbearable that she took a bottle of pills.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Tony says on the way over to the party, which is in Branford by the water. Who would have thought that Goldie would live by the water? She seems like somebody who would live in the sort of village-y neighborhood where people danced outside in the square and brought each other covered dishes.

“That’s because I look like Clifford, the Big Red Dog. My dress speaks volumes tonight, so I don’t have to.”

“Wow. A child’s toy reference. Somebody’s been studying for parenthood, I see.”

“Tony. I think everybody who’s conscious knows Clifford.”

He turns into the condo complex, where there’s hardly anyplace left to park. “Are you going to look really surprised?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Let me see.”

She makes her mouth go round.

“No, that’s like rigor mortis.” He gazes at her, and she thinks that if he didn’t have such good manners, he might tell her she looks tired or weepy or whatever she looks like, which she knows is not good. But he doesn’t. He says, “You look pretty tonight. Although you also look like you might burst into tears.” She almost tells him then, but she doesn’t. He looks at her for a long moment and then says, “I’m looking forward to this party. I haven’t been to a party in ages—unless you count Thanksgiving.”

“I just hope I don’t fall asleep on the rug,” she says.
Or start weeping into the punch bowl
.

And then she doesn’t, of course. The place is filled up with people she knows and loves—all her students and then her usual friends, all of whom look perfectly happy to be there and non-shocked that she’s walking in with a non-Jonathan man. Perhaps Joe and Greta have warned them that Tony is her handler these days. That’s what Greta called him the last time they spoke about the Lamaze classes: “Oh, well, Tony can be your temporary handler.”

There are bright lights and a punch bowl with red punch, and music playing. There is an endearing pile of presents wrapped in pink wrapping paper—all for her. There are a
lot of people she doesn’t know, too—Goldie’s sons and their wives, and her single daughter, Alessandra, and Alessandra’s friends—and some folks from the condo. The music is loud, and everybody is dressed up and dancing. It’s the kind of party where the food is everywhere, so people cluster in all kinds of spots.

She dances—first with Leo, her dapper older student, and then with Joe, who tells her that this time next year her new child will be teething and crawling about. Then he looks stricken and says, “Oh my God, but it’s hitting me. Greta and I won’t be there to see her, will we? She’s going to grow up a California girl,” and she feels a pang. But it’s just one pang, and she adds it to the pile of pangs she’s already experienced today. The pile is getting quite large.

Head up. Keep smiling
.

Greta moves over to her side. “Okay, so what’s wrong?” she says.

Her eyes fill with tears.

“Oh, I know. Moving away, Soapie, all your students being so kind, the fact that you’re going to miss me so bad you can’t even fathom it …”

“Worse.”

Greta steers her into the bathroom and closes the door and hands her a wad of tissues from the vanity. “Tell me.”

“It—it’s the worst. My mother killed herself. Soapie told me today.”

“Oh, baby! Oh, honey!” Greta wraps her arms around her and sways with her, but Rosie can’t get comfortable, really, with her belly in between them, and she pulls herself loose.

“All those times, Greta! All those séances we did, remember that? And the times we wanted to
be
her, and then she had just left me that way! Just threw me away, like I was
nothing. How did she think I was going to turn out okay after that?”

“Oh, baby, it wasn’t about you. I don’t know the facts, but I know that she wasn’t thinking when she did that. She must have been so depressed, so unhappy to … to do that.”

“But I was her baby!”

Greta’s eyes are black with shock, but then she does what she has always done: she shifts gears into social worker mode, and takes Rosie by the arm over to the sink and runs cold water and gives her a wet washcloth. “Here, wash your eyes. And then listen to me, because this is important. This doesn’t change anything about your life. Not really.”

“But it does!”

“No. You’re grown up. You’re not that child anymore. Your parents were of a time when the whole world felt crazy. There was a war on, and there was all this political upheaval and turmoil, and so few options for people who didn’t believe in the war. And your father got caught in that, and he did what he needed to do to save himself. And maybe he did or maybe he didn’t love your mother enough. But whatever, it doesn’t matter. Because you are fine. You grew up, and now you’re going to have your own baby, and you’re going to mother yourself in the process.”

“But what if I’m crazy, too? I think I am. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You’re not. You’re as solid as they come. You’re going to go and live with Jonathan and have your life now. It’s all okay.”

But that’s so easy for Greta to say, Greta who has a perfectly good, sane mother who stuck around and helped her kids in every way she could. And then Greta, armed with all that unconditional love, grew up and married a nice man who also stuck around and made babies with her. How
can she ever understand what it means to have this hole inside, this huge shadow that is suddenly gaining on Rosie and threatening to swallow all the light that’s near her?

Someone knocks at the bathroom door. “Is Rosie in there? Somebody says it’s time to open the gifts.”

“Just one sec,” Greta calls. “Here, dry your eyes. We’ll talk about this later, okay? I think your public is getting restless. Come on. We have to do this.” She opens the door, and they reenter the fray, making their way through the smiling people, to the pile of gifts.

The presents are awesome—a stroller, lots of baby onesies and bibs, blankets, a kit of baby equipment. When she sees the tiny clothes, she laughs and holds them up. Somebody calls out, “All those years of buying those for everybody else—and now they’re yours!”

She finds that she can smile. There is going to be a baby, and it is going to be a little girl … and somehow her mother killed herself and will never know about this. But somehow, maybe there’s something of her left inside Rosie, something strong, even though Serena didn’t have that strength herself. But how could that be? Goldie materializes at her side, clearing away all the wrapping paper, and she just wants to turn and bury her head in Goldie’s shoulder.

Instead, someone turns on the music, and Tomas takes her hand and pulls her out into the middle of the living room, and even though she feels very far away from her real self, she does a salsa dance she remembers from two years ago when Carmen taught them all to dance one winter afternoon in class. Someone hands her a glass of nonalcoholic red punch, making a big deal about how she can’t drink, and she finds herself in a conversation about winter weather, and whether Johnny Mathis is overrated, and then that conversation leads to one about snowfall amounts and
the time that she needed rescuing by her students when her car wouldn’t start—and then she’s watching herself dance again, and it’s been forty-five minutes since she’s remembered that her mother committed suicide, and then she goes to the bathroom, where for a moment she thinks she’ll cry again, but she doesn’t, and when she comes out, she sees that Tony is dancing a slow dance with Alessandra, Goldie’s beautiful ringlet-haired daughter, and that’s when the world goes black.

She might be broken after all.

She goes over to the punch bowl and pours herself a glass of punch, with a shaky hand. So stupid! Then the song ends, and instead of just walking away from each other, Tony and Alessandra stand there in the center of the room, talking, and he takes her hand and then he leads her over to the table toward where Rosie is standing, and so of course she has to leave before they get there. She goes, awkwardly, to the other side of the room, where she sees him pour the two of them a glass of red punch. And they continue to stand there. Looking at each other. He tilts his head back and laughs at something Alessandra is saying. She shifts her weight to her other hip. It’s a slim hip, too; there’s not an inch of fat on her. And by the way, there is no earthly reason that a woman like her should be hanging out at her mom’s house on a Friday night in the first place. She should have like a million dates.

Rosie can’t breathe right, which is the thing that makes her the maddest of all. Tony’s laugh rings out across the room. She hears him mention something about Milo.
Milo—he’s telling this woman about his son?
Then she gets hold of herself. This is good, actually. He needs somebody, he does. And wouldn’t that be ironic—if he ends up married to the daughter of one of Rosie’s favorite students. But then she remembers that she won’t have either Goldie or Tony in her
life, and certainly not Alessandra. Nothing that happens is in her control or even any of her business.

She wishes she could just go into labor right this minute and be whisked out of here, preferably by an ambulance. And then it occurs to her: she could actually just leave, even without an ambulance. She’s opened the presents, after all; she’s been social and has let herself be overwhelmed with love and hugs and good wishes. She’s lamented the fact that she has to move to California; she’s filled everybody in on all the tellable details of her pregnancy and health. And now, as a pregnant person, she can just … leave.