The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (19 page)

Emma, lying on the floor of her own house after calling in sick three days in a row, feels as if she has fallen and can’t get up and needs one of those devices that are activated by the clap of two
hands that then alerts all the young and virile paramedics within a three-county radius.

These three days have given Emma more than enough time to obsess about the bad things in her life—its humiliations, transgressions, mistakes, longings and sacrifices. She is stuck on the melodrama of the Gilford family train wreck and Emma is unable to move forward.

This is what really angers her. Not moving forward. Because Emma has always managed to move forward. There were the ridiculous humiliations of childhood that everyone suffers—teasing on the playground; not being part of whatever group was cool that week; not realizing that you are supposed to pant after boys when several girls are already panting; a discussion about sex during a sleepover that totally mystifies you because you have no clue what your girlfriends are talking about; thinking that you have always heard a different drummer but have never quite been able to find the right set of sticks to make sure the music does not stop; the random notion that something was always going on inside the family that you did not know about and that they did not think you were smart or old enough to know about; that feeling of “maybe I should too” when someone leaves a job, changes college majors, drops out or suddenly disappears; lost loves; the simple notion that no one you are related to will ever consider you an adult; the more complex notion that you may never really want to be an adult; expectations unmet; and this tremendous, and always growing, conviction that someone is always going to need you and you will be busy with the needing so you will never ever be able to find the correct drumsticks anyway.

Emma has been depressed, but rarely so, and when it happens like this, as if a truck is barreling down the wrong lane of the freeway, she knows she is in for a long haul.

And now this long haul that is less than sixty hours long but has been a long, long time in coming.

And Marty’s four daughters have declared war on each other.

“HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT, if anything, Emma even did with this man?” Marty asked Debra during a phone conversation as she threw her clothes out of her suitcase hours before she confronted Emma.

“I saw her face,” Marty’s third daughter snorted.

“You still know nothing, Debra. Why in God’s name didn’t you stay and
ask
her?”

“I was angry and hurt.”

“Why? He was no longer your boyfriend, he was part of your past. You had no claim on him.”

“That’s not the point,” Debra snapped back.

“Help me out here, dear. What
is
the point? Is the point that this man liked your sister more than he liked you?”

Debra laughed. It was a kind of fake laugh that sounded like Glenn Close, acting as Cruella De Vil in
101 Dalmatians
, and suddenly that was exactly what Marty imagined, her daughter in a
clingy black evening gown, head tipped back, cigarette holder dangling off her ruby red bottom lip while little black and white doggies yipped at her heels.

“I’m sure, Mother. Give me a break.”

“You can be pretentious and snobby, darling, and if I haven’t mentioned it before you can also be a total pain in the ass.” Marty stood up and ignored the suitcase and the man who was in her shower. “Do you ever stop to think about how someone else feels? Or is it always about you?”

Marty could hear Debra suck in air as if she had been punched in the stomach with an implacable fist.

“Listen,” Marty went on, “in the world of love and romance, once you have discarded someone he is fair game for anyone else. And anyone includes your sister. If you stopped to think for three minutes, you would have realized years and years ago that Emma and Samuel always had a lot in common and were always attracted to each other.”

Debra had sunk back into her own couch and was trying to remember if she had ever hung up on her mother.

And what Marty wanted to add, and restrained herself from saying, was that Debra should have been whipped with something more than wet noodles a very long time ago. A long time ago when she treated her younger sister Emma like a contagious disease, paraded her professional credentials like a fifty-carat diamond and forgot about the things—like family and true love and honor and kindness—that really matter. Back when they were growing up and Marty felt more like a referee than a mother when all her girls were in the same room and Debra was all but wiping her nose on her sister’s pant legs when the entire time
she
was the big snot. Those years when it became apparent that Joy, Debra and the almost always absent Erika took baby sister Emma totally for granted.

But Marty said none of this. Her remarkable restraint
happened only because she felt that feminine hormonal-induced mothering phenomenon called guilt. Guilt because what she was about to say she should have said sooner, louder, longer and perhaps constantly until this seemingly grown daughter got it.

“Why wouldn’t she
tell
me?” Debra whined, oblivious to her mother’s inner turmoil.

“Think about it. You have not exactly been an open and loving book of tender forgiveness and understanding your whole life,” Marty explained. “Do you ever put anyone else first? Do you ever think about what you are doing and saying and how it might affect or hurt someone else? Don’t you realize yet that the world does not revolve around you?”

Another woman might stand humbled and speechless but not Debra Gilford Jasperson, which totally proved her mother’s loud point.

“Mother, what the hell happened to you on this trip that you never bothered to tell any of us about? You sound unleashed, for God’s sake.”

“Debra?” Marty asked, wishing she had never left the fabulous and very isolated island she had just come from, “I am going to hang up now and give you a chance to think about what you and your sisters should do next because I know you will call several of them the second I hang up. Bye, dear.”

And Marty had hung up, leaving Debra sitting in stunned silence because her mother had actually hung up first. Then Marty
raised her hand in a lovely salute to the retired attorney who was now standing behind a very small towel in her bathroom and immediately dialed Emma.

Emma did not pick up.

Marty dialed again.

No pickup.

Marty knew that if she persisted Emma would eventually answer. She knew Emma was home because she had seen her car in the driveway on the ride home from the airport and she knew—she knew because she knew
her
Emma.

“Mother.” Emma picked up the phone sounding as if someone with a tiny bow and arrow had stood on her tongue and drilled it full of metal arrows.

And that was all it took.

Marty could tell with just that one word that her beloved Emma was in trouble.

“I heard about Samuel,” Marty admitted calmly while the retired attorney put away groceries and started a load of wash.

“How in the hell do you know about Samuel?”

“How do you think?”

“Debra is a selfish woman who thinks she’s the center of the universe. I did not and do not owe her an explanation.”

“Maybe not,” Marty offered. “But …”

“But what?”

“She’s your sister. You can practically see her roof from your kitchen. Think about how you would feel if this situation was reversed. It’s new information and Debra just needs some time to absorb it. No one committed a crime.”

This softened Emma for just a moment until she blurted out, “He’s called more than once.”

Marty asked what that meant, got part of the story, all that she needed to know to realize that Emma loved this wandering jackass
of a man, and that she was hurting like she had never hurt before, and yet Marty says something that does not seem to make sense to Emma.

“What did you expect from him?”

“Some kind of explanation about why he went away. Why he never came back. Something to settle my heart, Mother. I feel like a damned fool.”

Marty has to pause to slow her own breath and to keep her seventy-eight-year-old heart beating just the way it needs to keep beating so everything stays in place. The wonderment of motherhood never ceases to amaze her even as she accepts the fact that most of what she has done, does, and will always do is a huge crap-shoot because like every other mother, she has absolutely no idea if she is ever doing or saying the right thing.

This is when the words
kittens
and
beer
come flying out of Marty’s mouth and when Emma wonders why in the world she’d bothered to pick up her telephone.

“Mother, that is not nice,” Emma wails.

“Well, what did you think would happen? Did you think the man would show up on your doorstep after all these years with roses or something? Life is not always like that, honey. And I’m not the one who is going to lie and tell you so. And why have you never talked about this? Why has it been such a
secret?”

Emma thinks it should be fairly obvious that she has been embarrassed by the depth of her love for a man who had been her sister’s boyfriend, love for a man who chose the jungle over her. But that is not all of it. Not at all.

“There’s not much of what I have that is just mine,” she admits, quietly and very carefully. “We have a family of communal emotions and happenings and events. I wanted something—one thing—that was mine. Just mine.”

Marty is sitting on the side of her bed that faces the curtainless
window that overlooks the simple but elegant flower garden Emma has planted and partially maintains for her. Emma started the garden, which had fallen into total disrepair, not too long after Marty’s husband died and it had been a salvation for both Emma and Marty and the beginnings of Emma’s passion for her beloved plants. Emma doesn’t know that her mother spent hours sitting in this very same spot watching her daughter dig and plant and lose herself to the earth. Hours imagining what her life and Emma’s life might have been like if Louis had not gotten so sick and died. Hours watching her daughter mimic the movements of her father without once ever acknowledging to Emma how similar they were, how emotionally alike, how tied in soul and spirit.

Those had been the hardest and the loveliest days of Marty’s life. Days when she could cry uncontrollably in the same room where her husband had died, days when she could muffle her sorrow under the knowledge that she still had the children—
their
children—and this one amazing daughter still at home who was so much like her father that Marty’s heart often stopped simply when she looked at Emma.

Marty asks herself now why she has never told Emma about those days and more about her father and the similarities that have bonded Marty to her last child in a way that has sometimes seemed almost desperate. Her own secret about this rises up until an uncontrollable cry seeps past her throat and erupts, without warning, into the phone.

“Mom, are you okay?” Emma asks with a hint of panic in her own voice.

“Yes,” Marty whispers softly. “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry? Oh, Mom, it’s okay. I know you said what you did to slap me back into reality. I
was
expecting kittens and free beer.”

“That’s not what I was talking about, sweetheart.” Marty’s
trying to imagine how she can say the rest of it, what she should have said a long time ago, what she feels she must now say in order to keep on breathing herself and to help her daughter through this very hard long haul.

“Mom, did something bad happen to you? Are you okay?”

This question pushes Marty over the edge because it is so Emma-like and so like her father, so much like Louis Harold Gilford, a man who always put everyone else first, a man whom Marty loved so desperately that she knows without hesitation that she would have answered his phone call on the first ring. A man who she often thinks saved his best for this last child, this gem of a woman, his baby daughter Emma. And all this, Marty realizes now, she has never shared with her daughter. All of this and more, so much more.