Things Unsaid: A Novel (20 page)

His mother sighed and looked out the window.

Andrew steeled himself as they pulled into the driveway at his house.
Here we go
, he thought.

“Oh, hello darlings,” his mother greeted the twins, some little gift in her hands for the two of them. Then she turned to Abigail—Andrew saw his wife wince. She wasn’t a fan of his mother.

“Here is some smoked salmon—your favorite. I even buy the wooden box kind. Much more expensive, you know. It has some kind of Indian—Inuit, perhaps—fish design on the box. Thought you’d like it. Reminds me of that godforsaken outpost you were stuck in, treating all those Indian brats.”

Andrew would save the box for Jules; he knew she loved them. That was the least he could do.

“Oh, Aida, how thoughtful of you,” Abigail said. “You shouldn’t have.” It looked to Andrew like her face hurt. Probably from all the forced smiling.

“And I know you can’t get the right kind of beauty supplies out here in this hick town—or should I call Shrewsbury by a nicer name? ‘Hamlet,’ perhaps? Anyway, I brought you a few cosmetics. Can’t have too many, I always say. Although I don’t expect you have much, if any at all.” She offered up a bag of her latest free samples from Clinique or Estee Lauder, some slightly used. “See, Abigail, these colors would look good on you. With your coloring, your blue eyes. Brighten up your skin. I just tried the red lipstick once. Just to see if it would be a good color for you.”

Andrew watched as his wife carefully accepted the gift, then exited the room. He knew she was depositing it under their bathroom sink, adding it to the stockpile of other free samples his mother had given her over the years.

They all plopped themselves down on the huge sectional couch in the living room. Andrew had bought it because it was large enough to accommodate their sons and their friends.

“Now, how long are you planning to stay this time?” Andrew asked.

His mother calmly stroked his face with her perfectly manicured red nails. “What kind of question is that? There isn’t some sort of deadline I don’t know about, is there? I don’t need an invitation, do I, to come for a visit?”

Andrew took a photo of all of them around the coffee table. To go along with all the other photos shoved in the attic. All those pictures of her standing next to him, beaming—the skin on her face so tight that her smile looked like the Joker’s.

Abigail always wanted the house to be spotless for guests, and the Christmas decorations she’d put up looked like they’d come straight from the cover of
Martha Stewart Living
. (They had, actually, Andrew realized as he thought about it. Abigail loved to order from the Martha Stewart website. Each year it became more excessive.)

His mother moved to hug Abigail and kiss her good night—then blushed as Abigail turned her back in a defensive block. Andrew couldn’t remember the last time his mother’s face had turned red
like that. Abigail hurried out of the room and came back with fresh towels—the kind reserved only for very special guests—while Andrew struggled with his parents’ two heavy suitcases, which he deposited in the hallway, to the side of the guest bathroom. Why did his mother have to pack so much for a few days’ stay? Their guest room was too small for anything but one queen-size bed and a small nightstand. Even the closet wouldn’t hold a standard drag-bag suitcase on the floor.

“My, the weather is frigid this time of year. And oh, my arthritis,” his mother said, rubbing the gnarls on her knuckles. “But nothing would keep me from seeing my ‘sun,’ my one and only son, the sunshine of my life. A mother’s love is always constant, you know. And soon my two grandsons will be off and about, not remembering me. How very sad. That’s why we must make our visits longer,” his mother said.

His father was quiet. Andrew was worried. He had followed his investment advice in the beginning and had lost everything. Now he left it to others—mutual fund companies. Once, he remembered, Jules—or was it Joanne?—had asked if their mom had her jewelry in a special place, just in case they had to find it. In an emergency, is the way whoever said it had put it. Well, their mother had just started yelling: “You can tear the house apart. Look in all the closets. Inside pots and pans, for all I care. When I’m
gone
!” That had been the end of broaching the subject of their parents’ assets.

It’s none of my business anyway
, Andrew thought. He had his own problems.

Sitting down next to the Christmas tree—that year the Martha Stewart colors were white and gold—Aida seemed to Andrew to be displaying a general sort of weakness, the kind he remembered his grandmother sometimes experiencing under stress. She reached out for her son’s arm, to steady herself, to avoid tumbling over. Abigail offered her hand instead, but she pushed it aside and fell back into the overstuffed wing chair.

“My mother said my life would be easy if I married a good provider. ‘Become a doctor’s wife,’ she said. Well, if she had lived to see me now.
My troubles
began
when I got married.” She paused and looked at Andrew. “I didn’t mean for your father and me to be such party poopers. We can talk about this later. No need to ruin our visit. And Abigail, you needn’t get involved with our petty personal problems. That’s just for family to deal with, you know.” She smiled at her daughter-in-law—a fake smile, Andrew thought. He knew Abigail would never be family to his mother. “Have you been busy with that Spiegel seed catalogue again, honey? That’s where you do most of your shopping, isn’t it? A regular farm girl.”

Abigail fingered the buckle on the strap of her overalls. “No, these are from Sears, down in Manchester,” she said. Her tone didn’t hold the slightest trace of offense, but Andrew knew better. “Andrew likes me in overalls. Says there’s no place for fancy clothes and makeup in Vermont.”

“Andrew’s so handsome, you know,” his mother went on as if Abigail hadn’t even spoken. “I would be worried, if I were you.”

Ouch
, Andrew thought, belching a baby-burp-up taste.

“He’s such a looker. We had to fight the girls off, throwing themselves at him in high school. He favors me, you know. Same dark chestnut hair, Italian lover eyes.” His mother laughed and girlishly tossed her dyed locks.

His first serious girlfriend, Carrie, had been his college sweetheart at Wooster College. How his mother had loathed her. Nearly fifteen years earlier, before he had met Abigail, he had taken Carrie to Wong’s Chinese restaurant, the only decent restaurant in Akron, to meet his parents, announce their intended engagement, and celebrate his father’s birthday. Wong’s was considered very exotic for northern Ohio, a region of the state not known for “ethnic” anything—clothing, food, residents—outside of Cleveland, that is, which was an ethnic mishmash that the Whitmans found unnerving at that time. They felt safer back in their own white enclave.

At Wong’s, white waitresses dressed in tight, gold-and-red-embroidered, Suzy Wong–style dresses. The bar was very popular; Andrew always felt he was in some exciting country in Asia—or at least on a Hollywood set—when he was there. Definitely not in Akron, anyway.

Andrew had insisted that Carrie, his soon-to-be fiancée, be invited to celebrate his father’s birthday. Halfway through the evening, his mother stood up in a silvery satin cocktail dress and toasted her husband with her Tsingtao beer. His sisters, Jules’s husband, Mike, and Carrie—all dressed in jeans—raised their beer mugs, too.

“To my dear husband, whom I saved myself for, not giving away the ranch before we got married,” his mother said, speech slurred, staring down at Carrie. He saw a few drops from his mother’s mug sprinkle the top of Carrie’s head.

“What!? You weren’t a virgin and you goddamn well know it. And I didn’t find out about it until our wedding night!” His father sounded exasperated, a little bit bitter, even after all that time. Andrew thought how amazing it was that some feelings didn’t die out. Maybe even got stronger.

“Well, you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference anyway,” his mother said. “I wasn’t going to die guessing.”

Andrew looked at Carrie, and his heart went out to her. Virginity was still an ideal in the Midwest—among everyone, including parents who obviously hadn’t practiced what they preached.

“Wow, and in the 1940s, no less … I guess you could say you were ahead of your time,” Jules had laughed—trying to lighten the mood, Andrew thought. He had always thought she had a freakish grin, like someone in pain. He wondered if she knew what her face looked like when she was around their mother. Come to think of it, what did his own face look like? he wondered.

Carrie had looked down at her lap. Her eyes grew shiny, and seconds later two tears, barely detectible, slid down the inner corner of her right eye. She looked up at him, waiting to be rescued or at least supported. Given a smile, perhaps. But he offered nothing.

“You’re absolutely gross,” Jules had said to their mother quietly, shuddering.

Andrew watched as their father stood up quietly, walked over, and tapped Carrie gently on the shoulder before marching stiffly back to his seat.

Andrew had felt embarrassed for her, but not moved to action. Jules, though—she seemed to feel a sisterhood, a solidarity, with Carrie that
he couldn’t imagine. She had guts—perhaps to the point of recklessness—and knew her mother’s dark side as well as any of them.

Their mother looked alternatively oblivious and defensive, triumphant and chastened. He was no match for her. He wanted to be, but he hated making things worse. He just wanted to be more like his father.

No one ever saw Carrie again after that night. After their breakup, Andrew didn’t mention her anymore, although he tried to Google her for years after his marriage to Abigail and the birth of his boys. All four of them.

“Oh, Aida,” Abigail said, interrupting Andrew’s reverie. He blinked. It surprised him that he was thinking of Carrie after all this time. His wife was a different story: a Carrie killer. He had met her on the rebound, six months after Carrie broke up with him. At a dental conference in Cleveland. As in almost everything, Abigail won out.

She was the only daughter of the dean of humanities at the University of Denver, and every humanities professor on campus dreaded having her as a student, because they knew her opinion counted far more than peer reviews or lists of publications. She was an “opinion leader.” And in Andrew’s mother’s defense, she did look like she would rather plant squash and fava bean seeds than look at a copy of
Vogue
. Her hair was untamed. She didn’t toss her head and try to make her hair swing. His mother said it was because her hair was dirty and she didn’t care. But Andrew liked that about her.

She made no exceptions for Andrew’s mother, no matter how aggressive she became. Despite continuous protestations to call her “Mom” or “Mother,” Andrew had never heard his wife address her mother-in-law as anything but Aida. Jules couldn’t—or wouldn’t—call their mother “Mom” either. She also wore overalls—but that was where the similarity between the two women ended.

“Maybe I was a bit hasty with Carrie,” Andrew’s mother had said to him when the twins were babies. “She was stunning, the way I was at her age. She was no match for me, you understand—but she was pretty. Still, Abigail is certainly a small price to pay for being with my one and only son and my twin grandsons.”

And now they had a third child—Ethan, an angelic, Raphael-like cupid with blond hair, blue eyes, and very fair skin. Their newest little
blessing from heaven; another Whitman to add to the burgeoning family tree.

“Don’t you want a little girl, so you could have one of each flavor?” his mother had asked before the baby was born.

“Whatever God wills is always welcomed,” Abigail had replied sweetly. Andrew envied her seemingly effortless ability to render their mother speechless. Abigail would not shed a tear over anything his mother said. She was the only one who would never react to her criticism. How he wanted to learn that!

“But surely after the fatigue and demands of twin boys, in your heart you want a baby girl,” his mother had pressed on, her voice rising at the end of her sentence.

But Abigail had been unruffled, unblinking. “My heart matches God’s—only he knows what will truly make us happy,” she said.

His mother, as in most of her conversations with Abigail—was finally silenced. She had confessed to Andrew once that Abigail seemed like some other species, but she didn’t quite know why. So unrelated—like she’d come from a gene pool of unknown provenance.

Now, his mother moved in for a closer look at her grandbaby, and Abigail pulled the infant towards her breast. Arms outstretched, his mother’s jowls drooped, and she shivered a bit as she let her arms sink down to her side, deflating.

“Oh my, he’s different,” she observed, staring into the baby’s ice-blue eyes. “He
is
a cute little guy, so freshly baked.” She lip-printed his soft cheek while Abigail still cradled him.

“If you want to touch him, wash your hands,” Abigail instructed, elbowing her mother-in-law away. “I usually don’t let smokers touch Ethan, you know. But you two are exceptions, of course.”