A Regular Guy (14 page)

“Yes. Maybe she’ll figure out some tax incentives to help the poor. I think it’d be really great if you did that, Jane.”

Olivia’s voice assumed the slow, deliberate tone often used with children. “Jane, is that what
you’d
like to do when you grow up? What do you think
you’d
like to be?”

“I don’t know. Maybe dancer or president.”

Huck, Olivia’s cousin, exploded in a loud, jagged laugh. He was bulky, square-shaped and, up until then, mostly quiet. He was an eighth-grade teacher, and Jane wanted to ask to be in his class. She’d never had a man teacher.

Mary caught Olivia’s eye, then looked down. Both women felt jealous of Jane in a prickling way. They envied her the only thing she knew she had on her fickle throne: a future. Owens was now expounding on educational policy, as Huck passed the rice.

“You work in Alta Saint John’s?” Mary asked. When Olivia nodded, she squinted. “And you’re a nurse?”

“No. Just a CNA.”

“Oh,” Mary said, not knowing what that was. “My mom died there. ”

The dinner continued, sparked with small conversations that easily went out, only Owens and Jane feeling somehow free to talk. When they finished, Owens paid the bill with his coupon, leaving a twenty for a tip.

“I look in the mirror and see what I look like,” Jane said, skipping on the sidewalk in her new sneakers, “but I don’t know what that is, if it’s pretty or not.”

“Know what I’ll get you for your birthday?” Owens said, his hand clamping her neck.

She hadn’t thought he even knew when her birthday was. She began to imagine the presents, five months away, larger and larger ones.

“I’ll take down all the mirrors in the house!”

But Jane and her mother didn’t own any, and they couldn’t take down the ones attached to doors in the rented bungalow.

“Yes!” Mary said, catching up from behind. “She shouldn’t even be
thinking
about these things. It would be so good for her to go to India or Mexico for her birthday.”

“Yeah,” he said wistfully. “You’re not turning out to be much of a hippie, Jane.”

Olivia pulled her stomach muscles in against her spine as she walked along behind Jane. Although they didn’t know it, tonight was her doing. “Let’s really try,” she’d said to him more than once. “Let’s set one day a week Jane can come to dinner and really stick with it.”

Unlike most of the women Owens knew during the years of Mary’s exile, Olivia had heard of Jane. She’d always wanted to meet the woman and the child she said was his daughter.

“She looks exactly like him,” Olivia said to Huck, in the parking lot. But he only half agreed. “Mary’s very pretty too,” he mentioned.

She made one more effort. “Does anybody feel like ice cream at Café Pantheon?”

“I do!” Jane’s voice belled out.

Owens’ renown in Alta was such that most people in the café smiled when he picked Jane up so she could see the ices. Mary lifted her arm to grab Jane’s foot. For her, too, he provided a certain position. She was, after all, the mother. Jane looked down and wondered, What does she want? Also, glancing around the café with its polished wood surfaces and marble round tables ringed with people, she wanted to be able to wear a dress.

Olivia seemed somehow less at this public moment, waiting behind with her cousin. Only the girlfriend. She sometimes imagined people looking at her, picturing the act.

When they all stood with their cones, Owens’ hand slid into her back pocket, and she reciprocated. Olivia vowed to talk to Jane often, the way she brought Owens’ mother flowers twice a week since she’d been sick. Owens approved of Olivia’s efforts, but he didn’t help much. Of the Tuesday night dinners with Jane she set up that first year, he only made it to three.

Nevertheless, that night he thought of them all as family. He threw his arms around whichever two fell on either side, crushing them against him, looking down from face to face, exhaling: “Ah, the women in my life.” On a walk with Noah the next day, he’d announced, “If Olivia got pregnant and we weren’t ready to get married, I’d go ahead and have the child. I’d get them a little place to live. It’s a more European way.”

In the bungalow later, Jane declared that when she was president, she would make every kid go to school and let every girl pick out a dress.

“Jane, you don’t like politics,” Mary said. “You don’t even read the newspaper.”

“So? Neither do you.”

“But I’m not saying I’ll be president.”

“Well …” Jane paused a minute. “Just because I don’t read the newspaper, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t help people.”

“Jane, people who do things like that are interested in elections and bills passing.”

From then on, Jane demanded a subscription to the newspaper, and for a month, she and her mother spent all day Sunday making their way through the sections.

One calm Friday in April, Mary walked the long mazelike path back to the old bakery, letting the soft wooden screen door bang. In the kitchen she found Rosie, the milkman’s stout daughter, dripping liquid frosting crosses on a tray of Sunday buns.

Rosie moved slowly to the drawer under the telephone, where Mary’s mother had kept scratch paper and finger-sized pencils.

Mary had flown home to the funeral and stayed up all night, sorting her mother’s things into piles. But her mother’s possessions were so familiar that at dawn she left them all, taking the bus back after only one day.

Rosie led her down the narrow staircase to the basement, where one cardboard box remained. “Rest we gave away,” she explained. Near the top of the box was the wooden case of her silver.
Made in France
, it said. Opening the lid, Mary saw all the cutlery stacked evenly in the slotted felt like keys, blackened from lack of care. Then she carefully closed the small latch, marveling that it was intact, despite her neglect, suddenly and silently grateful to her mother.

“You’re lucky that’s still there. Them across the street wanted to sell it. She took all your ma’s doorknobs.” Rosie nodded. “My dad had to wrestle it out of her mitts. Your ma told him, ‘Someday she’ll come back and want it.’ ”

Mary understood then that her mother had been not too strict but too lenient and had given her too much when she was young, imposing the lifelong burden of regret. Following the wide, white swathed buttocks of Rosie—whom she’d known all her life—she climbed back up into the flour-infused air. Mary had let the bakery go too. She could
have worked here every day, in the warm yellow room that smelled of yeast and sugar.

“Are you coming out to see the neighbors?” Rosie asked. There was a strangeness to her adult voice, of virginal curiosity.

“I will sometime,” Mary said. She couldn’t bear to think what else was thrown away because she’d been in a hurry. Maybe nothing is worse than knowing you have hurt your own self.

Mary bought a morning roll and Rosie took her money, the cash register ringing its cheer. A young man came in and asked for two buns with nutmeg flowers on top. He was wearing a shirt that could have been a pajama top, the collar ripped from washings.

“You look like you need a cup of coffee,” he said to Mary.

They sat down on the steps outside. As he lightly drummed the cement, she told him what she’d told no one else, how she’d left at nineteen and never come back in time to see her mother. Then the funeral, when she abandoned the house full of childhood.

“What did you go back to?”

“I have a daughter,” Mary said.

“There you go,” he said, fisting her hand inside his.

As they talked, Mary remembered the times she’d wanted to give Jane away. Once, Jane stared at her straight up from the dusty plank floor of the apple farm. It was before dawn, and Mary’s body—ninety percent fluid, she’d once read—felt hopelessly watered down from being up every hour to feed. She was contemplating adoption. She sat at the small desk in the room, examining a pamphlet she’d picked up from the local church, then carefully wrote the address on a plain envelope. But her daughter kept staring at her, as if she knew something about Mary no one else did. They made a silent pact that morning, and Jane never again woke up in the night.

“See, she knew. She slept because she knew I couldn’t take it.”

But she had kept her daughter. She had. A hundred times, maybe a thousand, it had been so hard—the ghost of a butterfly flickered in her back, a permanent weakness felt even now—but she had gone through it and she still had her. That was the one thing she did.

“Your mom’d understand,” the man said. “That’s what she did,
right?” Mary had received a card and a check from her mother, the only present attending the birth.

His name was Eli and he played drums in a start-up band that practiced every night. For money, he ran a gardening team.

“I knew your mom. I used to trade her birds. I’d give her a pair of quail and she gave me a tab at the bakery. This new one, Miss Hips, wiped me out. I still go because I like your mom’s nutmeg rolls.”

That night, he came to visit after his band practice. He brought a triangle, which still hung on their front porch years later. When Jane stood in front of him, asking her mother a question, he rubbed her shoulders and said, “Hey, man, what’s going down?”

Jane couldn’t tell about Eli. He was nice, but she didn’t think he was what Mary wanted. He was like a boy, more of a friend. He’d tickle and make her mother laugh, sort of at him, sort of with him.

The truck finally gave out, and after they left seven messages, Owens took them to buy a new car. Mary chose the make and model. With Owens, she was discovering, you had a moment of chance, and if you said what you wanted, sometimes he said yes. She could glean no particular logic to his decisions. So she asked for more than felt really right, and it gave her a high strange giggle when he assented. She felt he was letting her in too, not just Jane. But maybe not. She got the model she wanted but not the color. Only one was there on the lot, and Owens didn’t want to wait; it was maroon and she’d been hoping for blue.

Driving home the first new car they’d ever owned, Mary and Jane still felt joyless. Jane didn’t know if it was her father’s way of giving—he’d looked grim, writing the check—or her mother’s tendency to suspicion, but they drove straight home and parked and Mary never trusted that car. Almost always she smelled a faint trace of oil, and they drove with the windows open, even in the morning. Now, two months later, it wouldn’t start. And Mary had to get to the city to give blood. Rosie had walked all the way to the bungalow the night before, delivering an envelope addressed in light pencil to Mary di Natali, Auburn. “Here’s the letter I said came to the bakery.” It was from Bixter, who
needed an operation on her one eye. She sent the name and address of the hospital where the blood could be forwarded. “It’s a funny thing. I’d been thinking of you two for a couple weeks, and then I remembered we have the same blood.” Mary and Bixter each prided themselves on being RH negative.

Mary and Jane decided over and over all day that they’d ask Owens to lend them a car. He owned three. Mary wanted him to take theirs back and get the truck again or a new new car, the one that was blue.

He was late, but that didn’t mean anything. When he finally came, Jane shuffle-tapped across the floor. “Now that you’re together, will you guys please decide like you said you would how old I have to be to be allowed to wear a dress?”

Owens considered this. “I guess we did say we’d get back to you on that, huh?”

“And also how old for dangly earrings.”

“See,” Mary said, “I don’t think she should be thinking about these things.”

Owens held a finger to his lips, pondering. “Well, I’d have to say eighteen.”

“Yes,” Mary said, solemnly, her long neck bent.

Jane moaned in a way that was mostly pleasure. It was nice like this, when they agreed. They were her parents and they were making rules. Impossible rules.

Mary’s face filled with what only Owens could recognize as guilt. “The car isn’t working again, and I have to go into the city.”

“Bixter’s having an operation,” Jane said.

“Did you take it in?” he said absently. He knew no Bixter.

“I wonder if it’s just a lemon, so much has gone wrong already.” Mary was repeating what Eli had said, but they didn’t mention his name around Owens.

“The last time was a cable, Mary. Cables are little things.” He’d bought it. That was the end.

“But I have to get there tomorrow, and so …” She lapsed into a fragile smile, which she expected would delight no one, like a poor tap dance.

“We wanted to know could we borrow a car from you,” Jane finished.

“Just for tomorrow,” Mary added.

He shook his head slowly. “No.”

“Why not?” Jane snapped.

His jaw made a hard angle. “I don’t have a car to give you.”

Jane sprang up. “Come on, Mom. If we’re going to ask Julie, let’s do it now. It’s late already. I’ll go with you.” She stood under the porch light, waiting with her hand out to take her mother and cross the yard to ask of neighbors again.

After they asked to borrow his car, Owens didn’t call for three months. The first weeks, they didn’t say anything, even to each other. On the sixth Sunday, they woke up feeling bad, so they decided to treat themselves. Eliot Hanson had come with the check on the first, like every other month. At the mall, they bought a black velvet headband for Jane and found a hooded sweatshirt for Mary on sale. They both needed socks and underwear. And they bought themselves a fondue pot and had it gift-wrapped, then ate lunch in a restaurant that made crepes. It was easy for Mary to make Jane laugh. Her aunt Alma never cut her hair in her whole life, she said. She could sit on it, but she wasn’t vain at all. “She hardly knew it was there,” Mary said.

“Mom, no one has hair that long by accident. Not nowadays anyway.” Mary was more like a grandmother when it came to hair.

Jane added up the purchases and announced that they’d spent one hundred and six dollars. “Everything’s so expensive,” Mary said.

In the late afternoon, when they parked in their driveway, Julie was hauling a long table in over the lawn. They helped her manuever it through the door and then let it down gently by the front window. Julie arranged the chairs she already had around it, then took out candles and placed a pitcher of flowers in the center. Now she had a dining room, and Jane thought you could just see that every night, dinner would be different.