Goodbye To All That (29 page)

“I’m going to a club this weekend. In Boston.”

“You joined a club? What kind of club?” Now that her mother was working, she could no longer enjoy bridge afternoons with her friends. Maybe she’d found a bridge group that met weekends, although why she had to go all the way into Boston to find a foursome, and why she needed her cashmere sweater—

“A club, where they play music and people drink.”

Jill’s mouth clamped shut as she tried to digest this. Her mother was going to a
club
? “Do you have a date?” she asked, forcing the words around a strangulating knot in her throat.

“Don’t be silly. If I wanted a date, I’d be living with your father. I’m going with friends, that’s all.”

“What friends?”

“Wade Smith from work. You met him that day you came to First-Rate, remember? With the thing in his eyebrow?”

Jill recalled a skinny white kid with dreadlocks. “You’re going to a club with him?”

“And his girlfriend. His ex-girlfriend. Not exactly ex. It’s complicated. Wade wanted to invite Bernie to join us, but I said absolutely not. He’s married, and he’s always flirting, and it’s bad enough he flirts at work, but what if he flirts while he’s at a club? Unless he flirts with his wife, but I got the impression Wade wanted to invite him without his wife. Forget about it. I’ve got my hands full with Wade and Hilda.”

“Who’s Hilda?” Jill didn’t bother to ask who Bernie was. From her mother’s tone, she assumed she was supposed to know that already.

“Wade’s girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. Almost. I don’t want to take up your time, Jill, I know you’re busy watching the soccer game, so if you could just pick up those few things for me. You can bring them here, to First-Rate. I’ve got a locker I can store them in. I showed you the staff room, didn’t I?”

Jill didn’t care about her mother’s locker in the staff room. She cared that here she was, worrying about how the family was going to survive Thanksgiving, and her mother was gallivanting off to a club with a guy Jill wouldn’t leave alone in the same room as her daughter, and someone named Hilda.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked.

Her mother laughed. “It’s like I’m their chaperone. And just because I specialized in Corelli doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy some rock-and-roll every now and then. I was a Beatles fan. I didn’t jump up and down and scream when they played, but I loved their music.”

“Rock today is a little different from the Beatles.”

“You think I don’t know? I’ve got grandchildren. I’ve got a TV. So can you get those items for me before Saturday? I’d really appreciate it. You don’t want your mother going to a club in Boston wearing her First-Rate apron, do you?”

Jill didn’t want her mother going anywhere in her First-Rate apron. “All right,” she said.

“You still have your key to our house, right? I don’t think Dad changed the locks.”

Not if he wanted Jill’s mother to come home. But maybe he didn’t. Maybe he enjoyed life as a single as much as she did. Maybe he’d already done a pub crawl or two. He had access to his full wardrobe, after all.

“I’ll get to it before Saturday,” she promised her mother, even though she knew damned well she’d get to it tomorrow. She’d set aside the Prairie Wind espadrilles again and run her mother’s errand for her. She was, after all, the person who took care of everything.

THE KEY HER MOTHER had given Jill when she was a ten-year-old still unlocked all the outer doors to her parents’ house. She was accustomed to coming and going through the back door. The front door was used mostly by company, parcel delivery people and the occasional Jehovah’s Witness passing through the neighborhood. So once she’d parked in the driveway, she circled around to the back of the house, passing the flower bed her mother always planted with chrysanthemums. None there this year; Jill’s mother had obviously been planning her escape in early September, when she would otherwise have put in the mums.

Jill entered her parents’ kitchen.

She wasn’t sure what she expected. With her mother gone nearly a month, would the place be a wreck? Unwashed dishes piled up on the kitchen counters? A three-inch carpet of dust covering the floor? The master bathroom sink clogged with beard hairs her father had neglected to rinse down the drain?

What she found was the house she remembered. The atmosphere felt a little stagnant. Since her father was at work all day, no one was around during the sunlight hours to throw open a window and let in some fresh air, but she didn’t smell rotting food or the stale, musty fragrance of dirty socks that always emanated from Noah’s bedroom. Sections of that morning’s
Boston Globe
lay scattered across the kitchen table, but the only unwashed dish was a coffee mug in the sink. Was her father eating breakfast? If so, where was the plate, the bowl?

Maybe she should have run this errand in the evening, when he would be home and she could check up on him. But the thought of explaining her mission to him made her queasy. How would he take the news that his wife hadn’t just abandoned him but had also apparently abandoned her senses? Going club-hopping with pierced twenty-somethings in Boston? The news might give him a heart attack, and unlike him, Jill wasn’t a cardiologist. She’d taken a CPR course when she was pregnant with Abbie, determined to be prepared for every emergency her precious firstborn might encounter, but that was twelve and a half years ago. If her father keeled over, she wouldn’t know how to revive him.

She peeked through the doorway into the dining room, the table lightly filmed with dust and truncated without the leaves inserted in it. Not ready for Thanksgiving, she thought dolefully. All right, so she’d host the damn dinner. Would both her parents come? Would they insist on sitting at opposite ends of the table, and would they growl and snap at each other?

With a shudder, she turned and headed down the hall to the stairs. If she hosted Thanksgiving and her mother showed up wearing her turquoise cashmere sweater and low-heeled pumps, would her father wonder when she’d gotten hold of those garments? Or wasn’t he even aware of which clothes she’d taken with her when she’d moved out? If Jill ever left Gordon, he wouldn’t notice which clothes she’d packed and which she’d left behind. As it was, he hardly noticed her clothing while she lived with him. Every now and then she would catch him staring hard at her and frowning. “Where did that shirt come from?” he’d ask, and she’d answer that she’d owned the shirt for years, and she wore it frequently, and he’d give her a bewildered shrug and, if he was thinking fast enough, mention that she looked nice.

He just didn’t pay attention to things like her wardrobe. Her father didn’t pay attention, either. She was willing to bet most men didn’t.

Melissa’s boyfriend, the hairdresser, probably did.

She felt like a trespasser moving through the empty house. The soles of her sneakers muted her footsteps as she prowled up the stairs. It was silly, really. She wasn’t breaking any laws. She didn’t have to tiptoe around. Besides, no one was home to hear her.

She tiptoed anyway, because logical or not, she felt like a trespasser, grabbing her mother’s clothing behind her father’s back.

At the top of the stairs, she paused. What was it about returning to your childhood home that caused you to regress? Standing at the top of the stairs, gazing down the narrow second-floor hallway, she could have been seventeen again, wishing she had the nerve to tell her parents she was going out and it was none of their business whom she was going with or where they’d be. In her case, she would only have been going out with her girlfriends—Lucy Shapiro or Marianne Delmonica or a group of fellow staff members from the school newspaper—and where they’d be would likely have been the roller rink or the movie theater at Shopper’s World, or maybe swimming at Walden Pond, which besides being a historical landmark also had a cute little beach. They would not have been going somewhere to get drunk or stoned. They would not have been searching for guys to pick up. Sure, they might check out guys, but they wouldn’t have wound up at the house of someone whose parents weren’t home, where everyone could pair off and vanish into various bedrooms. Jill had always been a Good Daughter.

Doug had been a boy, so her parents hadn’t been overly protective of him. They’d tried to be protective with Melissa, but she’d shrugged them off and they’d let her. By the time Melissa had been old enough to get into trouble, Jill had been in college, Doug in medical school, and her parents no longer had the energy to be vigilant. Their two older kids had survived adolescence, so maybe they’d felt less of a need to police Melissa, and she’d had the guts to take advantage of her freedom. And look at her now: a lawyer, with degrees from two Ivy League schools.

And a boyfriend who colored and cut women’s hair for a living.

Scolding herself for being such a snob, Jill stalked down the hall, passing Doug’s and Melissa’s bedrooms, both of which remained essentially untouched since they’d moved into adulthood. Through the open door of Doug’s bedroom Jill glimpsed the shelf holding all the model airplanes he’d built from kits as a boy. Lots of precision work on them, delicate painting and gluing of miniature decals. Good practice for slicing and rearranging people’s corneas.

She also glimpsed a sliver of Melissa’s pink bedroom through her open door. Melissa had been awfully feminine as a child. She’d insisted on the pink walls, the pink bedspread, the pink curtains. Strawberry, Jill corrected herself. Or Pepto-Bismol. Did that count as a food?

Jill’s childhood bedroom had been converted into a study, the bed replaced by a sofa, a small television sitting on a wheeled stand where her desk used to be. The shelves that had once held every Judy Blume book ever published, along with a teeming menagerie of stuffed animals and a milk-glass piggy bank that was usually heavy with money because she never did any naughty stuff—like buying pot or sneaking into bars with a fake ID—that cost money, now contained the obsolete family encyclopedia and rows of Consumer Reports magazines in chronological order.

If Jill hadn’t already felt like a trespasser prowling through the house, entering the master bedroom would have done the trick. Guilt seized her as she stepped over the threshold into the room her parents had shared until her mother’s departure a month ago. The bed was made, barely. The blanket lay haphazardly across the mattress and both pillows looked mashed and misshapen.

Both pillows? Were two people sleeping in this bed?

Oh my God.

No. Jill refused to believe it. If her father was sharing a bed with someone, it wouldn’t be
this
bed, the bed he’d shared with her mother. Jill simply couldn’t accept that possibility.

He must be doubling up the pillows under his head. Or punching Jill’s mother’s pillow to sublimate his rage at her mother. Or alternating sleeping on her side of the bed and his own, since her mother had refused to rotate the mattress.

She paused at the foot of the bed, debating whether she should sniff her mother’s pillow, just to see if it smelled of some other woman’s perfume, and then decided she couldn’t bear the possibility that it might.

Turning resolutely from the bed, she marched to the closet. Her mother’s side looked slightly depleted, but she had apparently left most of her clothing behind when she’d moved out. Jill quickly found the turquoise V-neck and the white silk-blend shell. She pulled them out and hung them on the doorknob, then dropped to her knees and rummaged through the shoe boxes lining the floor. Her mother was no Imelda Marcos, but she did have a surprising number of shoes, including some Jill had never before seen. A pair of pumpkin-orange satin pumps—they must have been dyed to match a dress. Women used to do that for formal occasions—buy white satin shoes and dye them to match their gowns. Did her mother have a pumpkin gown? If so, Jill was relieved never to have seen her wearing it. Pumpkin was definitely not her color.

A pair of thong sandals with plastic daisies glued to the straps. A pair of boat shoes, for a woman who claimed boating was for rich
goyim
. A pair of black pumps with three-inch heels. She’d specifically said she wanted her low-heeled pumps, though. If she was going to be dancing at this club in Boston
 . . .

Jill shuddered again. The last time she’d seen her mother dance had been at Laurie’s wedding last year. Laurie was Jill’s cousin, her Uncle Isaac’s youngest. A while back, she’d spent a year studying Buddhism and ingesting hallucinogens in Katmandu, and she’d returned to the states with an extremely hirsute Californian whose name was either Chandaka or Ernie, depending on his mood. They’d had a vegetarian wedding—Jill’s parents had muttered profusely about the abundance of bean dishes and the absence of anything resembling meat in the buffet, and the wedding cake’s frosting had tasted suspiciously like tofu—but Uncle Isaac had insisted on hiring a DJ who’d played regular music for the party. Jill recalled that her parents had danced a sprightly fox trot to Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue.”