Circle of Three (39 page)

Oh, great! I go, “Look, it’s none of my business what you do, you’re two consenting adults.” He smiled when I said that, “two consenting adults,” and I just kind of, I don’t know, I went mooshy inside. I liked him again, the same as before, and it was so totally annoying, like I was a pushover for anybody who thinks I’m funny or lovable or whatever, which I am. A pushover, I mean.

We drove around Orange for a while, but when he said do you want to get something to eat at the café, I said no thanks. Because this was not a social occasion. I turned around and started driving home on Route 15 because it’s faster.

He goes, “I’ve been thinking.” Tracer was sprawled across his lap and halfway out the window, tongue out, ears flying. I didn’t want to hear what Jess was thinking, and I almost turned on the radio, but that would’ve been incredibly rude, plus I didn’t have the nerve. He said, “I’ve been wondering how I’d have felt if my father loved someone after my mother died.” (Or before, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut.) He said he thought he’d have pretended to be glad for
his father, but inside it wouldn’t have made any sense to him, because his mother was the center of their lives, she was what made his family work.

So I said it’s not the same. I said my father wasn’t like that.

I hated admitting that to him. But he was trying to make some kind of a circle, some parallel story about his life, and it didn’t work. These days when I try to think about my dad, it’s strange, but I can only picture him in his study in the old place in Chicago, doing his work. I can’t see him anywhere else in the house, I can’t put him in the kitchen or the bathroom or the yard. I just see him sitting at his desk. He’s wearing his light green shirt with his tie undone, and he doesn’t look up when anybody comes in. He’s busy. He puts his left hand on his forehead to shield his eyes, and keeps writing.

I changed the subject, started talking about Mom and Chris’s new book, about a little duck named Schwartz who never cleans up his room so he can’t find his winning lottery ticket. I wasn’t interested in talking to Jess about my father. That’s private. All the way home he kept trying to get back to the point—his point—but I wouldn’t help him out. I admit I liked seeing him get more and more frustrated. But he didn’t press it, he didn’t put the screws on or anything.

When we got home, I turned the motor off and just sat there, didn’t jump right out and run off. I knew he wasn’t finished, and sure enough, he starts saying how those times when we went fishing or just walking around, the times I came over to see him, he really enjoyed himself and he didn’t have any, like, motive going on. He said, “I just liked being with you.” I’m thinking, now is the time I’m supposed to say, “I liked being with you, too,” and us to make up. I
wanted
to say it. But I didn’t. I just couldn’t. I sat there and played with the steering wheel.

We got out, and I figured he was going to come in the house with me. I even half wanted him to, so this could finally be over. But he didn’t, he climbed back in the truck. I
mumbled something like, “It doesn’t matter to me if you come in or not. I mean, don’t stay away on my account, because I just don’t give a damn.” That was so bad, I couldn’t look at him. Why couldn’t I be nice? I think it’s because it still feels disloyal—like being nice to Jess is cheating on my dad. It’s like giving in and being selfish, doing what I want to instead of what I ought to. Jess goes, How about if we take it really slow, and I go, Yeah, that sounds okay. And he says, “I love your mom. I wasn’t waiting for her before, because I never thought it would work out. But now I am, and it doesn’t matter how long.” I don’t know what I said. I was embarrassed. I mean, that was so personal.

So then he said, really quietly, “I love you, too.” I looked at him. “I do,” he said.

Well, I couldn’t talk. But it was kind of the last straw. He put his hand on the side of the truck, and that was like a touch on my hand or my arm. Then he started the engine up and drove away.

So who knows what will happen.

Or else it’s obvious.

Mom says we have to forgive each other for the things we do out of love. Oh, I guess. She forgave me for telling her I was sleeping on the street with derelicts. Did I do that out of love? I might have, but you have to go pretty far back to see it. And you’d have to really love the person to bother going back that far. Well, I will work on my forgiveness. Jess is cheating somehow, though; he’s making it too easy.

So anyway, I guess that’s it for items that are on my mind and strategies to deal with them over the summer. It’s been a…I don’t know what. A some kind of a year. It’s been the kind of year I’m not going to understand for a few more years. Like the year when I was twelve and I first got my period and we moved from Chicago to here—I can see now how interesting that year was, but at the time it just felt like one stupid thing after another.

This is the year my father died. I turned into a different person. I am forever changed. The problem here is, I didn’t
know what kind of a person I was before, so how am I supposed to know who I turned into? Time, I guess. “Time will tell” is a true saying. Nevertheless, one of these days I would very much like to understand things about myself
while they’re happening
.

I read somewhere that grief is all about the griever, hardly at all about the person you’ve lost. Thinking over this past year, I can see how true that is.

Okay. Well, that’s it.

EXCEPT! No. 9.
There is this guy.
His name is Robbie Warriner, and he’s Chris’s next-door neighbor and also a year ahead of me at school, a total computer freak, and a major babe. (I think. Becky says no, he’s a tool, but she likes Jason Bellinger, so what does she know.) He’s so nice, he comes over to Chris’s and helps Andy, her kid, with his new computer and teaches him games and stuff. So of course sometimes when I go over there to see Mom, he’s there. He’s going to study computers and virtual reality in college, he’s already decided. I told him I’d like to learn how to do spreadsheets, since I might take statistics next year, and now he’s teaching me! He has red hair, but it’s dark red, not orange, and he doesn’t have freckles. He’s taller than me. He has long, graceful fingers and this really intense face, and when he hunches over the keyboard and stares into the monitor at a pie chart it’s like watching Van Cliburn or somebody. He chews Dentyne. Sometimes he sits behind me to show me cell formulas or fields or whatever. I smell that peppery-cinnamon smell and forget what I’m doing. According to Chris he’s not going out with anybody. I think the guy being a year and a half older than the girl is exactly right. Mom likes him a lot. Not that that matters.

R
UTH SAID YES.

I couldn’t believe how easy it was. I’d phrased my question very casually: “I was thinking I might drive out to Daddy’s grave, clean it up, put some fresh flowers. It’s such a beautiful day. But you’re probably busy, you wouldn’t want to come with me. Only for an hour. I just thought since it’s so pretty.”

“Sure, Mom. I’ll drive.”

But just as we were leaving, Mama pulled up in her new car, a sporty red compact with a sunroof. “Where’re you going?” she yelled out the window, spotting us on the sidewalk. I told her. “Great, I’ll go with you. Get in, this car rides like a dream. Ruth honey, you want to drive?”

And that was that. I seethed all the way to Hill Haven. My mother might be bossy, but she wasn’t blind, was she? Surely she could see that this particular mother-daughter foray was tricky enough already, fraught with pitfalls, a minefield of possible disasters. Maybe she thought a third party might ease the way, but honestly, couldn’t she see that the whole
point
was the intimacy, the privacy—the mother-daughter part?

No. As it turned out, she
was
blind, but I didn’t learn why until later. All I knew then was that she was in a rotten mood and she wanted company.

After a week of stifling heat and humidity, it was a mild, gorgeous day, the sky a puffy cloud-filled azure blue that made my chest ache. Ruth said it felt more like Chicago in spring than Virginia in July. Along with a clutch of zinnias and rudbeckia, the freshest flowers left in my neglected, baking-hot garden, I’d also brought along a blanket and a Thermos of lemonade. I’d had a hopeful but naive vision of Ruth and me sitting hip-to-hip on the blanket, sharing confidences along with the single cup. The fantasy didn’t fit three. Neither did the blanket; Mama plopped down on it heavily, tucking her skirt around her calves, perspiring from the short climb from the paved path, while Ruth stood apart and looked off in the distance, hands on her hips, long legs too tan under her black shorts in spite of my incessant sunscreen carping. With a sigh for lost opportunities, I sat down next to my mother.

Presently Ruth dropped to her knees and began to pull back the dry, dead grass from around Stephen’s bronze burial plaque. She’d cut her hair for the summer, shorter than mine, a sun-streaked cap of soft, springy curls. I loved it, loved to touch it, even though it made her jerk away and say, “
Mom
.” She’d be sixteen next month. I remembered very well what getting my driver’s license had meant to me—freedom, independence, the glorious beginning of my real life. But for a mother it only meant one thing: the beginning of the end.

“Carrie, you look tired.” Mama poured half a cup of lemonade from the Thermos and drank it. She sounded peevish. “Ruth honey, doesn’t your mother look tired?”

Ruth looked up, narrowed her eyes at me. “No. I think she looks pretty.” She shrugged and went back to pulling grass.

“Thanks,” I said after a startled second. How long had it been since she’d given me a compliment? Resentments were beginning to crumble, maybe from old age, maybe only to make way for new ones, but I loved our truce and didn’t care what motivated it. Ruth liking me, being nice to me again—I hadn’t known how much I’d missed that.

“Hey,” she said, “look.”

“Don’t point,” Mama said severely. “We see them.”

“What?” I exchanged a look with Ruth—
What is with her?
—and glanced over my shoulder. “Oh.” A funeral service, above us, forty yards away on top of the hill the cemetery was named for. There weren’t many mourners. They stood out in black silhouette against the sky, a very old woman in a long-sleeved dress—she must be stifling—two older men, a young woman, and a boy. A minister was reading from a prayer book, and a word or two drifted down on the shifting breeze,
Almighty Lord…beloved…we ask…

Ruth put her dirty hands on her thighs and stared. “You never know, do you. It looks like an ordinary funeral, the guy’s dead and she’s the widow, those are the kids and the grandkids, everybody’s sad. But it could be something completely different. It could be anything.”

My hand paused on the way to the Thermos. Was that a shot? Ruth’s way of implying that my grief at Stephen’s funeral had been disingenuous? A lie?

“I mean, the old lady could be the mother instead of the widow, and one of those guys could be the husband of the dead person. Or they could be brothers, the two guys, and they’ve lost their sister. You know. It could be anything.”

“Oh.” Relief. “It’s true,” I said, “we do make assumptions about people based on—”

“Stereotypes,” Ruth finished. “Everybody jumps to conclusions about people. It’s what causes racism and sexism and religious intolerance. I think it’s better to not think
any-
thing about people. Just try to keep an open mind at all times.”

I nodded thoughtfully.
Native Son
, I recalled, was on her summer reading list. I closed my eyes for a few seconds. I had a sensation of rising, floating, hovering over all the graves in the cemetery, all the graves in the round, blue and green world. Millions and billions of the dead and the living,
countless people standing over the stones of their loved ones, praying and wishing, weeping, grieving.

“George lied.”

I opened my eyes. “What, Mama?”

“Your father has reneged on his promise.” She yanked up a tuft of crabgrass and flung it sideways. “I should’ve known, I should’ve seen this coming a mile off.”

“What happened?” I looked at Ruth, who kept her head down; she crouched over the plaque, blowing on it, rubbing it with the hem of her T-shirt.
She knows
, I thought. Whatever this is, she already knows about it.

“We’re not going on our trip,” Mama said flatly.

“Oh, no. Why not? I thought Pop finished his book.” He had finished it, Ruth had told me so the night before last. As soon as it was done—the book he’d been collaborating on for the better part of two years—he and Mama were supposed to go away together. Only to the Bahamas, and only for a week, but it would be the first vacation they’d taken together in—fifteen years, she claimed, but that seemed impossible, she had to be exaggerating.

“Oh, he finished it all right. He finished it months ago, if you ask me, and all this so-called
editing
is just dicking around.”

Dicking around? Ruth did look up at that, doll-eyed.

“But don’t you already have tickets and reservations and everything?” This was bad. I hadn’t been paying close attention to the minutiae of my mother’s life for the last month or so—too many other things on my mind—but I knew this trip meant more to her than a casual getaway. She’d been seeing it as a transition between past and future, her old and her new life—maybe. The beginning of something different, or at least the possibility of it, between her and Pop. “Oh, Mama, why can’t he go?”

“A symposium in Toronto. He gets to read a paper. Very prestigious, he says. They asked him at the last minute,” she said with sour triumph. Rolling sideways, she got up using
her hands, slapping vigorously at the back of her skirt. “I’m so mad I could spit.”

She walked away, keeping her back to us. She was getting old lady feet; one navy blue flat was worn down on the outside, the other on the inside, as if her feet were slowly collapsing on each other. She wore long-sleeved blouses no matter the weather—“My arms are ugly,” she claimed, “my elbows look like turkey wattles.” I hectored her about taking her calcium, but she was still losing height; after forty-two years, I was finally taller.

Ruth looked up, blank-faced, from the absorbing task of rubbing dirt from her fingernails. These days her loyalties were divided. I loved it when she came home from her sinecure of a summer job and reported snippets of conversations with her grandfather, Grampa said this, Grampa thinks this about that. She was finally getting to know him, even growing close to him, and I envied her for it. But the experience was naturally muddying what had always been clear and uncomplicated, the family line: Gram was fun, lively, and interesting, Grampa was pretty much not there. Grampa was a rumor.

My mother’s bowed head worried me. Surely she wasn’t crying. I strolled over to where she was running her hands over the pointed stakes of an old iron fence. “Mama?”

“I’m fine.”

“I know.”

“I’m just mad. I wanted to go. Damn it to hell, I wanted to go on that dumb trip.”

“I know you did.”

“I feel like going anyway. Not to have fun, just to spite him.” She smiled, grim humor returning. “I could ask Calvin Mintz to go with me. Bet he’s lonely without Helen to boss around anymore. What a pair we’d make, huh?”

The hard fence spike made a dent in the fleshy pad of the thumb I was pressing into it. For me the summer was passing in a haze, a kind of golden liquid balm, nothing remotely like it had ever happened to me before. I hadn’t lost myself
in love or lust, I was still me, I could see Jess’s flaws—moodiness, self-containment bordering on aloofness—and he could see mine—too numerous to mention. But we fit, we always had, and our time together was filling up places in me that had been empty for so long, years and years. We were still in the chemical dependency stage, addicted to each other. That wouldn’t last, but I even looked forward, with curiosity, not dread, to what came next. To leave him now would be like…a drought that begins again after one long, healing rain.

“I’ll go with you.”

“What? Oh, no.” Mama laughed self-consciously, dabbing at the perspiration under her nose with the edge of a tissue. In the slant of her downcast eyes, I could see the idea taking root.

“Why not? I haven’t been anywhere in ages. Ruth could stay with Pop part of the time, part of the time at Modean’s.”

“I can stay by myself,” Ruth called over. “
Jeez
.”

“You don’t need a trip right now,” Mama scoffed, striding away a few paces, pivoting, coming back. “You’re in the middle of all that business with Chris, you’ve got”—she flung her hand out—“things going on.” Jess, that meant. She’d all but reconciled herself to him. He was like arthritis in a new location, a psoriasis flare-up, one more old age-related affliction she had to accept with grace and dignity.

“Well, nothing’s going to collapse in a week. Come on, we’ll have fun.”

“Oh, shoo.” Still playing hard to get. “You don’t want to go on a vacation with your old mother.”

I did, though. I wanted to give her what she wanted, freely and for nothing. From the heart. For so long Mama had squeezed love out of me like toothpaste from a tube, and see where that had gotten us—at a prickly distance from each other, the hunter and the hunted, her starving, me scared of being eaten. Jess was mixed up in there, too. Loving him, choosing and acknowledging him—that was when I’d finally gotten free, when I was the most bound and committed. Now
I could make this not-so-little sacrifice for my mother, give her this gift, for the very reason that she didn’t expect it and hadn’t asked for it. Hadn’t squeezed it out of me.

“I do, Mama. I want to go away for a week in the Bahamas with my old mother. We’ll lie on the beach and read all the books we’ve been saving up.”

“Oh…”

“We’ll eat fish every night, and we’ll go shopping, we’ll go to the movies, we’ll fat-ass. We won’t do a damn thing if we don’t feel like it. And if we meet two nice-looking guys in the bar, we’ll let ’em buy us mai-tais.”

She gave a giddy, girlish laugh. “Well, that would serve him right, wouldn’t it? Oh, honey.” She took my arm and gave it a hard squeeze. “You know what, I’m gonna ask Birdie.”

“Birdie? What—to go with you?”

“She needs a trip, she’s been down in the dumps.”

“
I
need a trip.” Now I felt hurt. “You can’t ask Birdie, she’ll drive you nuts.”

“She will, Gram,” Ruth agreed, sidling over. “She’ll drive you nuts.”

“She probably will.” She laughed again, a gay sound, and I thought,
I love your face, I love you, Mama
. “I think that’s what I’ll do, though. Carrie, you are a sweetheart, but you’ve got enough going on right now. I’ll call Bird this afternoon, perk her up. Now, who’s doing these flowers? Ruth honey, you know how the little holder in the plaque works? You pull it out of the ground and turn it over and it’s a vase. Oh now, aren’t those pretty. Carrie, are they from your garden or Modean’s?”

So we arranged the flowers on Stephen’s grave, and I mused on the interesting fact that my mother could still surprise me, still had tricks up her sleeve. Say what you would, families never got boring. And mothering never got less complicated. All you could do was hope, like a doctor, to dono harm. But it was a futile hope, because harm was inevitable
, and then you just hoped someone, someday (Ruth, soon) took into account your good intentions.

My mother shoved up from her knees with a grunt and took a few stiff paces away, pressing both hands to the small of her back, stretching, jutting her chin out. I stayed where I was, barely brushing Ruth’s arm with mine. I stroked a finger over the raised letters,
STEPHEN EDWARD VAN ALLEN, BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER,
and tried to marshal my thoughts. Now was my chance to say something wise or true or conciliatory about Stephen. Squeezing Ruth’s tennis shoe, I said, “Your father—”

“Mom, do you think he can see us? Or hear us? Do you think he’s, like, aware of us right now?”

“Hmm. Well, I don’t know, but it’s possible, it’s entirely—”

“Because sometimes I can really feel him near me, but other times…” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I can almost not even remember what he looked like. If I concentrate on that green corduroy shirt, I can still see him.” She drew in a deep breath and blew it out. “But for how much longer, you know? What if he becomes invisible?”

“Well, then—”

“Then I guess I’ll just carry him around like a feeling. I’ll always have that, right, the
sense
of my father.”

“You look like him,” I said. “Here.” I traced my finger along the neat, decisive line of her jaw. “You’ll never lose him, because he’s in you.” She smiled. “That’s why I could never not love him. Why I never stopped.”