The Original 1982 (18 page)
M
om,” you say. “What do you think about
true love
?”
I'm deep into a beautiful story by Alice Munro and reluctantly put the book aside. “True love? I'm not sure what you're asking, honey.”
“Well, do you think that there is just one person that, you know, you're
meant
to be with?”
“I don't believe that, no,” I say.
“But I've heard you say that Gabriel is the only man
you've
ever really loved,” you say.
It probably
is
what I believe, mistakenly, for myself. Even so, I have no doubt that you will love again. You're asking me, of course, because your heart is hurting. The pain of ending a relationship is tricky, Minnow. It comes in waves. It's going to get worse before it gets better.
“I think if there
is
such a thing as true love, then being with that person would allow you to relax and be yourself,” I tell you. “Your true love would never ask you to become someone different from who you are.”
You're a smart girl and this makes sense to you. It doesn't take away the hurt, but I can see it gives you hope.
That's when it occurs to me that a change of scenery will do you good. When I tell you about Gabriel's invitation, it lifts your spirits instantly. “Can I call him right now?” you ask excitedly.
“Go ahead,” I say, trying to allow the prospect of your happiness to outweigh my fears. After you tell him, you hand the phone to me. “You'd better take good care of my girl,” I say to Gabriel.
“Don't
worry,
” he says, as if my worrying is only a nuisance.
G
abriel makes all the arrangements for your trip. He sends you a thousand dollars to buy a suitcase and some new clothes. We go shopping at Macy's without once having to worry about what everything costs. There's no time to send away for your passport, so we take the plane ticket downtown to the passport office and they put a rush on it.
On the day of the trip, you're too excited to sit still and pace back and forth from window to window. I place my hands on your shoulders to steady you, and we both breath a deep sigh. We're to meet him at JFK, where the two of you will fly together to Gabriel's country. I think about the first time I ever traveled internationally, also with your father. I remember sitting beside him on the plane to Athens. His ease and confidence were a comfort to me. I slept most of the way with my face buried against his chest. I felt like a child but he seemed like a man.
We hail a taxi on Sixth Avenue and, in just a few minutes, are on the FDR, heading out of town. Through the window I can see the ferries and tugboats on the East River, the buildings of Long Island City.
“What if it's weird, Mom?” you ask. “I've never spent a whole summer with him before. What if I get scared?”
“If it gets weird, or you get scared, or you don't want to be there for any reason, you can come home.”
“It might be a lot of fun, though,” you say. “Gabriel said I could go horseback riding, and working on his campaign is going to be cool.”
I'm more nervous than you are, so I try not to say too much. You've always loved meeting people, found them interesting and easy to talk to. You're fearless about new situations. I'm the one who's too often afraid. I look away from you so you won't see my eyes fill with tears. I feel like I'm handing you off to him so he can open the world up to you.
The taxi speeds along, going seventy miles per hour, and I send up a prayer for a traffic jam to slow us down. It's all going too fast. Time seems to be accelerating, rushing ahead, moving faster and faster. I want to stop it now, to roll it backward. I want to hold the baby you were in my arms, to feel your soft cheek against my lips, to see you raise yourself on chubby legs, to hear you learn to speak. I want to put off the moment, fast approaching, when we're going to have to say good-bye.
T
here's a heat wave that summer that seems to go on and on. The air feels liquid. It's uncomfortable to breathe. I wake up in the morning, feed the cat, the fish, and the guinea pigs, make the bed, and put on water for coffee. The quiet of being alone doesn't bother me. It's just strange, at first, not to hear you in the shower, rushing around to get ready, talking on the phone. In fifteen years we've never been apart longer than the ten days I opened for Charlotte Winter.
When I'm not working, I sit on the terrace and play the guitar, or fill the hours cleaning out closets and organizing cupboards. I wash the windows and the floors with white vinegar and hot water, the way Maria once taught me. I think of her whenever I do housework. I hear her accented voice saying, “Now,
she
knows how to clean.”
Maria and Hector are living in a town called Shirley, now, on eastern Long Island, close to her son and his family. She hasn't recovered from her stroke the way her doctor said she might. It's been a long time since I've seen her, but she is often on my mind.
Outside, I hear the roar of a motorcycle and look down to the street to see Carl waving up at me from his bike. My boyfriend, that summer, is a twenty-two-year-old, Harley-riding, English busboy, a beautiful lad I met at a bar, out for a drink one night with the girls from my office.
“Hi,” I call to him through the window. The heat is so thick that it wiggles the air. “Want to come up?”
“Come for a ride,” he calls, and holds out the helmet he's brought for me. I'm afraid of motorcycles, but tell him I'll throw on a pair of jeans and be right down.
Gracefully, we weave through traffic, the eyes of drivers and pedestrians upon us. Carl is the sort you trust at the wheel. He can build an engine from a pile of nuts and bolts. He's also good with a pool cue. I hold on to him and feel the oblique muscles along his sides, the bones of his back and rib cage. He's tall and lean, with curly reddish hair already beginning to thin at the crown. His skin is white and softly freckled. He thinks he's in love with me.
We don't speak as the wind whistles through our helmets. There's no way to hear a thing over the roar of the Harley. But even later, on the quiet City Island dock, which is where he takes me, our attempts at conversation seem to miss. He's just a boy, and I don't give him half a chance. He's someone to have fun with, to sleep with, but too willing and gentle to be more.
He pours some water, from a plastic bottle in his backpack, onto a handkerchief, and presses it against my neck, shoulders, face, and chest. Even the breeze off the Hudson River feels hot as breath.
His lips are full and soft beneath my own. His tongue darts in and out. “You make me so horny,” he says.
“Don't say that,” I scold him. “It makes you sound fourteen.”
“Oh, pardon me, Grandma,” he says, unhooking my bra with one hand and cupping my breast with the other.
Marry him,
the breeze whispers. But I break his heart instead.
Many years later, when the Internet is reconnecting every old lover and classmate, I get an e-mail from Carl. He's become a professional kickboxer in Thailand, he writes. I can still feel his wound in the way he phrases the greeting, as if offering up his throat to be cut or kissed.
He pushes me back on the hard dock now, licks my breasts, and gently blows on my nipples. “How does that feel?”
“Don't ask,” I say. “Just do it.”
He undoes his pants and pushes his way inside me, roughly, the way I like it. He'd prefer to be gentle, to whisper tender words, but he wants to please me. The moment of penetration, of being entered, is like forgetting. It always takes me by surprise.
Later, we go to an East Village bar full of restaurant workers and English boys. He challenges one to a game of pool. We drink a couple of shots, a pitcher of beer, and then another round. Too drunk to walk, I attempt to crawl to the restroom on my hands and knees. Carl pulls me to my feet, laughing. He can hold his liquor. He reaches into the pockets of my jeans looking for another twenty.
“Wait.” My words slur. “I think I need to go home.”
“Just one more,” says Carl. He holds me upright with one arm and opens the ladies' room door with the other.
In the morning the phone rings ten times before it wakes me. My head is splitting, my mouth full of cotton. The night before is a mixed-up blur. I have a vague memory of pushing Carl out the door while he begged me to stay. “Food poisoning,” I tell Arnie, my boss. He's called to ask where the hell I am. My ten o'clock is waiting.
My hangover feels like the flu, and I'm sick for a day and a half, but by the weekend Carl is outside, calling up to me, and we do the whole thing again. We do it so often that summer; it becomes routine.
E
very day when I get home, I listen for the sound of your voice on the answering machine. I play your messages over and over. Finally, a letter arrives from you, just after the Fourth of July.
Dear Mom,
How are you?
Today we visited Coiba, an island that once was a prison for politicos, but now is known for its luxury resort. The prison is still here although there aren't many prisoners left. They sweep the beach for the tourists.
I'm having a wonderful time. Mi abuela, Nora, is very funny. Even though she's divorced from Gabriel Sr., she keeps a chair for him at the table. He comes to dinner almost every night. He likes to tell outlandish stories. Gabriel says not to believe a word he says. I have so many relatives here, aunts and uncles and cousins. Many of them have the same names, which is confusing! They all talk and ask questions at the same time, but my Spanish is getting better! Maria would be very proud of me.
Everywhere we go it's like being in a parade. People surround Gabriel and want to shake his hand. He stops and talks to every one of them, old man, housewife, or pretty girl. He never gets tired of it. There's a lot of excitement about the election, and I think he's going to win.
How are Tiger, Z, Cinnamon, and Goldy? I miss you all very much.
Love & xoxoxoxoxox,
Minnow
Y
our daughter is a lesbian,” Gabriel says. He's called before nine in the morning.
“Yeah, so what?” I'm hungover and in no mood for his crap.
“So what is, let's hope the newspapers don't get ahold of it. Illegitimate, lesbian daughter of candidate Gabriel Luna!”
“Oh, relax,” I tell him. “How did you find out, anyway?”
“She told me,” he says. “I told her she was too young to know
what
she is. I told her it was
your
fault. I think you raised her to be a man-hater.” He starts to lecture me about
his
mother and grandmother, who were good role models and made him the man he is today. I'm too tired to argue, and he can feel it. He's called looking for a fight and is disappointed. “Hey, what's wrong with
you
? You sound like the living dead.”
Without you, Minnow, I've lost my bearings. I'm rudderless in high winds, adrift at sea, shipwrecked on a lonely island.
On a Saturday evening, I follow behind a family on Sixth Avenue, two parents and three children. The husband and wife hold hands. The kids race one another to the corner. As I watch them, it strikes me that this is the real treasure of life, walking home with your own family on a summer night.
Approaching the apartment, I see Carl waiting for me with a six-pack of Guinness under his arm. He stands back while I open the door and follows me upstairs. How strange it is, I think, to be spending my days and nights with strangers: real estate clients and a boy too young to understand anything. Why haven't I made a safe nest for us the way everyone else seems to? Even Alan, my faithful holdout, has plans to marry his girlfriend in the spring.
Carl and I drink the Guinness until it's gone. “Want to shoot some pool?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say, and so we head over to the East Village bar.
There are so many nights like this, they blend into one. A hot summer hallucination of Harley rides, playing pool, and making love on sweat-soaked sheets, stinking of alcohol.
Late that summer, a girl at the office talks me into going to an AA meeting, and I follow her down two flights of stairs into a large basement under a Gothic church in SoHo. I spot Charlotte Winter sitting in the front row, in a room of about a hundred people. She waves and signals for me to take the seat beside her, so I do. I scan her expression to see if she's making fun of me, or if there's any condescension or malice in her smile, but she seems to be genuinely glad to see me.
At the head of the room, there's a long table, with a folding chair behind it. A man speaks into a microphone. “Testing, testing,” he says. “Can you hear me?”
There's joviality in the rush of responses.
“Yup.”
“Yeah.”
“Uh-huh, we can hear you.”
“Loud and clear.”
These people can't be alcoholics, I think to myself. They're too happy.
A speaker is introduced and proceeds to tell a story. I've never heard anything so honest in my life. He doesn't hide the ugly parts, the way I've always thought you had to. He talks about how from the time he was a kid he always felt uncomfortable in his own skin. He describes getting into a car accident that put his best friend in a coma. He says he was a disappointment to everyone who loved him, and that everything he tried to do failed, or fell apart. But since he stopped drinking all that has changed.
“AA has given me a new life,” he says.
I don't know if I have a drinking problem, but I like being in that room. I want to hear other stories. I have the sense that belonging to AA may help tether me to the world, and I'm desperate to be thrown a rope that summer. It seems like a long time since I've had anything to hold on to.
So I get sober. I break it off with Carl, and Charlotte becomes my sponsor. I tell her that I think I drink so much because I miss you, but she says that that's just an excuse and the reason I drink so much is because I'm an alcoholic.
When you get home at the end of the summer, I take you with me to a meeting.
“I'm proud of you, Mom,” you say.
