Signs and Wonders (18 page)

“Consider it your pied-à-terre,” he told her.

She didn’t know what this meant, either, but could tell he was proud of the phrase. Over the three days they’d spent together she’d at least learned this much about him.

They ate breakfast while reading the newspaper. After a while Sophie took a shower and packed her bag. She was already thinking about school, the party she’d missed by being here, what she’d say to her mother when she called that night.

“Hey,” Philip said, “what are you doing for Thanksgiving? You could spent it here with us.”

“I’m supposed to go home,” Sophie said. She bit her lip, hesitating, then took a chance. “Why don’t you guys come out there? Mom and Dad would love it.”

“We’ll see,” Fiona said. She was standing next to Philip, moving her left hand with its bright engagement ring up and down his arm. “I’m not sure I’ll feel up to traveling. As you can tell, I’m already pretty hormonal.”

Sophie looked at her brother.

“Fiona’s pregnant,” he said.

“Oh, wow,” Sophie said, as Fiona stared at her with an expectant smile. “Congratulations,” she remembered to say.

“Thank you! We’re thrilled,” Fiona said, and her stroking picked up its pace. She was beaming. This was her show; the whole weekend, Sophie thought, had been her show. Even the letter. She thought of how her mother had sounded on the day the letter came, when she said, “I always thought of him, wondering where he was, every minute of every day.” Unspoken was the idea that, somewhere off in the world, he had been thinking of her too.

“I should go,” Sophie said.

They offered to take her to the station, but Sophie refused. She wanted to be alone, to plan her phone call that evening.
It was as if we’d known each other all our lives.
It was her turn now to leave out everything that couldn’t be said. The last thing her brother offered, as she left, was “Keep in touch,” as if they were high school friends whom college choices might force apart. Fiona jumped in: they had friends in Boston, so they’d come visit and take Sophie and her roommate out to dinner. Sophie believed her. She would drag Philip to Boston and probably, eventually, to California, taking him everywhere there was family, people to whom he was connected.

Indeed, this is what happened. The child was born and named Andrew, and he looked like Sophie and Philip: the same red hair, the same boxy face. When Fiona brought him to California, she presented him like a trophy to Sophie’s mother, who exclaimed happily over him, and said all the right things, and it wasn’t until after the visitors left that she locked herself in the bedroom and
cried over everything she had lost: a whole child’s future, a whole child’s past.

On a drunken Thanksgiving years later, Fiona would confess to Sophie that she wanted to have other children after Andrew, but that Philip was against it; too much money and time would be required. “He doesn’t understand about family,” she said, this initial grain of suspicion having hardened to a sturdy pearl. Sophie, with four glasses of wine in her and struggling through divorce, could only nod exhaustedly, too drunk to remember Fiona as a young woman aglow with her child and her confidence and her love. Whether she remembered it or not, though, this was the end of her own childhood: the day she left Fiona and her brother in New York, Fiona waving good-bye with one hand and holding on to Philip with the other, as if without this tether he might float away into some other orbit. This escape Fiona would not allow. Instead she held his arm and smiled at Sophie, her eyes sparkling fervently, amply sparkling, as if she felt so full of love that she could afford to give some away.

George picked her up wearing a suit and tie.

“It’s like a date,” she said.

“Except it’s not,” he answered, without a smile. That he could never keep from the obvious retort was Reason #463 they were divorced. Nonetheless, he looked good. Since the angioplasty he’d cut out meat and fried food, and his skin had shrunk to a handsome tautness around his cheekbones, like a man stranded on a desert island. She herself had taken up spinning and had lost at least four pounds in the past month, not that George would ever notice or comment (Reason #464). In the car he put on some screeching jazz music, the kind he knew she hated, and Ruth sighed pointedly and looked out the window as they drove into the city: this was a war of gestures both habitual and genuinely annoying. After the divorce they’d each moved into separate town houses in the West Island suburb they’d lived in for years. Superficially this was for the kids, so they could still come home to more or less the same place; secretly, she thought, it was for themselves, so as not to have to find new friends, grocery stores, dentists. Not that the
kids seemed grateful anyway. Matthew lived in Calgary with his two children and hardly ever came home, pleading the expense; Jennie lived in Montreal West and visited constantly, complaining to each of them about the wrongs visited upon her in childhood. She had an encyclopedic memory of her own problems. In reparation she extorted from them both money and support for every new undertaking. Thus far, in her thirty-five years, she’d been a photojournalist, yoga instructor, ceramicist, and canine masseuse, each aspiration more unlikely than its predecessor.

Tonight it was light opera. She’d joined a local company and was appearing in their performance of
The Mikado,
as one of the three little maids from school. When she told her father about the casting, he’d said, “Aren’t you a little old for that part?” and she hung up on him. Then she immediately called to bemoan his insensitivity to Ruth, who agreed, though she had thought the same thing. You just couldn’t say things like that to Jennie. People who never had children thought that parents were responsible for their kids’ personalities. But Jennie had been exactly the same since the day she was born: she had to be pulled from the womb with forceps, hysterical with protest, and her mood hadn’t shifted since. Whereas Matthew, who shared her genes and upbringing, was so remote and placid, so totally imperturbable, that Ruth at times wondered if he was paying attention to anything at all.

George and Ruth had to attend all of Jennie’s events, or there’d be hell to pay in the form of recriminating phone calls and gifted self-help books about truly loving families. When George first remarried, his second wife, Marlena, used to come as well, but she and Jennie didn’t get along and she soon begged off. Ruth envied her. Now it was just the two of them, and after a while they’d started carpooling, because why not? They’d been divorced for
fifteen years; they still hated each other, but at this point they were resigned to it.

When they arrived—the auditorium was in a high school, and she had a sudden flashback to seeing the kids, as teenagers, in
The Pajama Game
and
Guys and Dolls
—Jennie was standing in the freezing-cold parking lot, smoking a cigarette and watching for them anxiously. She was wearing her stage makeup, white powder and thick eyeliner meant to make her look Japanese. A black wig was perched on her dirty blond hair like an ugly hat. Her arms were crossed and her shoulders slouched inside an enormous blue parka, beneath which peeked a red kimono. When she saw them she looked at once vexed, relieved, and somehow starved. Had she honestly doubted they were coming? Where had she gotten this eternal hunger for their attention? It was a hole they could never fill, year after year though they tried.

“I thought you might not make it,” Jennie said.

“
I
thought you didn’t smoke anymore,” George said severely.

“I don’t, really. This is just nerves.”

“You look great, honey,” Ruth said. “Can’t wait to see you up there.”

Jennie grimaced. “Well, it might suck, to be honest with you,” she said. She always had enough distance from her various endeavors to know they weren’t worthy of her time—just not enough to avoid getting involved in the first place. She took a final drag, dropped the cigarette, and poked a sandaled foot from beneath her kimono to crush it out.

“Break a leg, kiddo,” George said.

“I probably will, in this getup,” she said, then gave a little wave and tottered back into the building, taking tiny steps across the snow-covered ground.

Inside, people were filing slowly down the aisles, and Ruth wondered if any of them were here for the joy of Gilbert and Sullivan as opposed to supporting their children or spouses or cousins. It was hard to tell from their expressions whether or not they actually expected to be entertained. She and George took seats toward the back. A small orchestra was warming up by the stage, the instruments rising in a jumble of trills and squawks. In the row in front of them a young child sat weeping silently, holding a melted chocolate bar, the chocolate smeared all over his face. His mother took a Kleenex from her bag and wiped his face roughly, without asking why he was crying.

As she looked at the program, George grimaced and started rubbing his arm.

“What’s wrong?”

“Racquetball injury,” he said. “I’m still playing with Kenny twice a week.”

Ruth sighed and returned to the program, realizing she should’ve known better than to ask. He’d probably only rubbed his arm so he could then brag about racquetball, as if she cared. He’d always been proudest of things she considered trivial (Reason #465). Someone flicked the lights off, then on again, twice. A baby squealed, a resigned hush fell over the audience, and music began to play. Nanki-Poo was looking for Yum-Yum, his true love, but Yum-Yum was already taken, engaged to Ko-Ko. The situation looked bad for Nanki-Poo. The company was having some trouble hitting the high notes, the man playing Pish-Tush had a stutter that repeatedly made him lag behind the music, and the conductor sweated heavily as he fought to bring the musicians and singers into line. The actors’ makeup shone under the bright lights. Her memory stretched farther back to when her children
were little, dressed up for Christmas pageants and spring festivals, their cherubic cuteness making every missed line and off-key note all the more endearing.

“This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” she muttered. George shushed her, but also nodded.

Jennie and another woman joined Yum-Yum onstage and began to sing. Glancing down at her program in the dark, Ruth tried to remember whether Jennie was Pitti-Sing or Peep-Bo.

“Three little maids who all unwary come from a ladies’ seminary!” they sang, each a quarter-tone off from the others. They were filled to the brim with girlish glee, they informed the audience, fake smiles splitting their faces. Not a one was under thirty, Ruth thought, and they all looked burdened with concentration, arching their necks as they strained for the high notes. Jennie gestured wildly with her hands and sang louder, though no better, than the other two. Finally the song ended, and her parents, loudly, clapped.

At intermission they split up to visit the restrooms, and by the time she came out George had returned to his seat. She would’ve liked to people-watch in the lobby, maybe buy a cookie from the bake-sale table, but didn’t want to stand there alone, so she went back in. The unhappy child in front of them had disappeared, though another baby farther down was crying full throttle. When she pushed past George, he ignored her. The lights were blinking on and off again.

“What do you think?” she said.

He didn’t answer, which was typical. When Jennie was a teenager—fighting with them constantly over curfews, boyfriends,
grades—George tried for the first few minutes to reason with her as if she were one of his colleagues and they were negotiating labor costs or shipping charges; but then he’d check out of the conversation and sit stonily at the dinner table, his hand curled around his water glass. Ruth was the one who’d kept soldiering on, while he sat waiting mutely for the war to be over. She’d fight with Jennie and then, once they were in bed, harangue George for not helping. “I can’t do this all by myself,” she’d say.

“But you
are
,” he’d say in return.

And years later, when he was moving out, she asked what, precisely, he thought he’d find elsewhere that was better.

“Peace and quiet,” he told her.

So now she gave him his peace and quiet. She didn’t care anymore. She arranged her purse on the seat next to her and watched the curtain rise on act 2, which provided a wealth of further complications: deaths and marriages, both real and fake; old people pitted against young; and the Mikado himself, whatever he was. All this was conveyed through trills and patter and high-pitched chortling. During one song she glanced sideways at George, and the look of pain on his face mirrored exactly how she felt inside. She almost laughed, knowing at least they agreed on one basic fact: this show was terrible.

But then, while the Mikado was presiding over some major disagreement, George turned to her in the dark and whispered, “I have to go to the hospital.”

“What?”

“I think I’m having a heart attack.”

“For God’s sake, why didn’t you say something earlier?” She bolted out of her seat and people all around them turned their heads to watch. George stood up shakily and she offered him her
hand, but he ignored her and limped, as if cramping, up the aisle. The expression she’d thought was a frown had deepened into actual pain. She followed him uselessly out of the building.