Admission (27 page)

Portia stood for a moment, feeling the numbing cold against her face. It was punishing cold, insidious cold, the cold that
dragged your body across the line. She had always had a fascination with hypothermia, it occurred to her, returning briefly
to Jack London and that famous story about how the man fought and fought the cold before slipping beneath its spell. It wasn’t
the worst way to die, she thought, looking again at the field. Then, quite deliberately, she went to the trunk and opened
it. The suitcase-shaped space where Mark’s bag had been seemed miraculously intact, hours and miles later, as if he had left
an intangible placeholder in its position when he extracted his things. It wasn’t a large space. He hadn’t brought much for
a ten-day visit. Had he known? she thought, as she had occasionally thought over those hours and miles just past; but now,
as then, the thought was accompanied by a blare of sharpest pain. And now, like then, she pushed it roughly away.

The trunk was packed with gifts, food, clothing. There was the suitcase of folders from the office, too many to get through,
probably, but enough for a perpetual excuse to absent herself. She reached for the duffel bag of her clothes and the shopping
bag of food—loaves of cranberry bread she’d baked the day before, crates of satsumas, a foil-wrapped plum pudding from Bon
Appetit. She had no idea what she was doing and only intermittent memories of the road.

“Where is Mark?” Susannah said when she came into the kitchen. She had lit the stove under her kettle and had the cupboard
open, revealing her vast tea collection. With surprise, Portia noted that her mother had a box of Constant Comment in her
hands.

“In Princeton,” she heard herself say. “He has… there’s this crisis. With a man named Gordon Sternberg.”

Susannah frowned. “But when is he coming?
Is
he coming?”

“I’m not sure,” Portia said. “It’s a very volatile situation. He keeps getting calls in the middle of the night and having
to drive down to Philadelphia.”

“Philadelphia?”

Again, she was hit by a wave of incongruity. What was she talking about? For an instant, she had to retrace the conversation,
frantically rolling up its fragile string. Why on earth was she talking about Gordon Sternberg? Why was she talking about
Mark?

Setting down her suitcase and the shopping bag she’d taken in, Portia watched her mother fuss with the tea. She was wondering
at herself, at how—in all these hours—she hadn’t once thought about what she’d say to Susannah, how she’d answer the obvious
question. What had she done instead? How had she passed the grinding miles and minutes, her hands tight on the steering wheel,
hunched stiffly forward and staring bleary-eyed at the road? Surely something had been accomplished, some deep thought or
great problem untangled once and for all, but nothing came back, only a fuzziness and weariness.

Had she always intended to lie? She had lied to her mother for years, of course, though usually for far less consequential
things: the
Ms.
subscription, a birthday gift, she had let lapse a decade earlier; the cardiologist she had promised (and failed) to see
after an episode of palpitations. Lying was a well-established method of keeping Susannah away, though only one of several
in her arsenal of separation: withholding of certain information, avoidance of particular hot-button issues, the expression
of commonly held opinions on certain matters they could both get righteously indignant about (religious fanatics, beauty pageants,
breast enlargement)—each of these was a useful means of furthering the campaign. But this particular lie had been unexpected,
slipping into language without preamble and lingering afterward, like some malodorous thing. She had not intended to lead
with a lie.
Mark is in Princeton.
Not technically an untruth, but not the truth.
Mark has left me. Mark is with someone else. Mark is with a woman who is pregnant with the child he never told me he wanted.
That, she thought grimly, was the inescapable, stare-you-in-the-face, invasive, pervasive, metastatic, and ultimately fatal
truth.

“You didn’t have to wait up for me, Mom.”

“I had no idea when you’d get here.”

“Ah,” said Portia, though she was unsure of the connection.

“You must be tired. You must have left very late.”

Portia considered this. Then, to gather information, she looked at her watch. It was nearly two-thirty in the morning, a fact
that took her completely by surprise. The drive from Princeton, after all, lasted about six and a half hours, and she and
Mark had left at eleven that morning. For a moment, she tried to assemble the past hours, to shuffle them into order, but
they seemed to resist her. There was the walk with Rachel, the place she had stopped in Brattleboro, mainly to use the bathroom,
but there was food involved, too, not that she’d eaten it. A chain restaurant with a southwestern theme. (What was happening
to Vermont? she had thought, reading the menu of “sizzlin’” things, choosing at random.) There had been some time there, sitting
over her “sizzlin’” plate of something, feeling ill. And a margarita, it seemed to her, though that wasn’t like her at all,
to drink when she was driving. But what about today was remotely like her? “Like her” was her job, and Mark, and her house
on her street, and going for a walk with Rachel and the dog. “Like her” was the semiannual drive across Connecticut and up
91, past Brattleboro and Putney, and the final stretch to Hartland and her mother’s house. She concentrated now on that stretch
of road: white moonlight on the highway with the river to her right, dull under a sheen of ice. She did remember driving that
road, and the Vermont Welcome Center, and the sick,
Blow Upon the Bruise
way she had felt passing the sign for Keene, New Hampshire, and the big A-frame house near Rockingham that for years had
had an enormous stuffed animal in the window but now did not. She remembered, farther back, passing the exits for Northfield
and Deerfield and Springfield in Massachusetts, but strangely couldn’t say in which order they’d come. And, farther back again,
to that horrible, elastic time on the street in Hartford, after Mark left, which was when her true grip on the day slipped
through her fingers and was irrevocably lost. How long she had spent there, staring at the same Massachusetts plate on the
same muddy green Ford Taurus on that miserable street, she had no idea at all.

It was like one of the made-for-TV movies of her youth, she thought grimly, sipping the tea Susannah had handed her. Sybil
of the snows, driving their car—was it still “their” car? or had it instantly become
her
car when he left by the driver’s-side door?—along that straight and narrow road, with one of her capable alternate personalities
at the wheel: the girl in the steel bubble, compromised by her lack of immunity, cut off from the world.
Portia N., Portrait of a No Longer Teenage Alcoholic,
downing a mango margarita with her “sizzlin’” something or other, and then, shamefully, getting behind the wheel of the car.
Who knew what damage she might have done?

“I stopped,” she told Susannah. “For dinner. In Brattleboro.”

Her mother frowned. “But I was going to give you dinner.”

“Oh, I know, Mom. And it would have been much better than what I got. But you know how you can get so hungry, suddenly, that
it actually becomes distracting? I was famished. I had to eat.”

“Okay,” said her mother.

“The food was awful,” she assured her.

“Would you like something now?”

Portia shook her head. She hadn’t, in fact, eaten much of her dinner and wasn’t hungry now. To be honest, food had become
inherently unappealing. Hunger would be something else to fake while she was here. Another burden. Another outright lie.

How long can I keep this up? Portia thought. The ten days of her visit? To the end of the academic year? A calendar year?
Could she keep it up forever, burdening mythical Mark, her partner, with grievous workloads and familial crises?

Oh, Mom, Mark had to fill in for the dean of faculty and address the Class of ’75.

Cressida’s graduating from high school, and he wanted to be there.

Can you believe it? He came down with strep! He’s in bed watching every episode of
Six Feet Under
for the third time.

She could draw Mark forward through an eventful, burgeoning career, pepper his health history with ailments, mine his parallel
personal life for conjured experiences. Nothing too dramatic, of course. Nothing too
real,
like an affair, a pregnancy, a child. Twice a year she could come north to visit, laden with gifts and apologies from him.
Susannah never came to Princeton, or hadn’t for five years, at least. And now, with this pregnant teenager and—Portia could
hardly bear to think of this—the baby coming, her mother would be thoroughly distracted. Sipping her tea, she tuned in sporadically
to Susannah’s monologue, which had pushed off from Portia’s own comment about hunger into wild tales of Caitlin and the food
she consumed. Bags of oranges! Half a coconut cake! The girl was struggling with her fast-food addiction, despite Susannah’s
own very thorough enumeration of the ecological, economical, and, yes, culinary sins of the entire industry. Susannah had
found a McDonald’s wrapper in the car, the incriminating crunch of environmentally indefensible Styrofoam underfoot.

How long could I keep it going? Portia wondered idly. Six months, certainly. Possibly a year. If her mother remained this
distracted, it could go further. It would be like a game, she decided. A bet with herself, the reward linked to the number
of years, months, days, she managed to keep her mother in the dark. Bonus points if she found herself making excuses for Mark’s
absence at Susannah’s deathbed.
I’m so sorry, Mom. A freshman English major cut her wrists over the weekend. The whole campus is in lockdown.…

Here she stopped, stunned by her own callousness, her failure as a daughter, partner. Everything, really. She turned to her
mother, really trying to focus now, full of contrition. She saw, as always, an echo of her own form in the shoulders and neck,
the same hair, the same set jaw. Her mother’s legs had held up—she supposed that boded well for herself—but the skin of her
hands and face, skin that had rejected sunblock as some form of artifice, no better than plastic surgery or any other means
of subverting the actual appearance of age, was papery and speckled with brown. Portia had used sunblock for years, ever since
the first magazine articles about what it could do. Was this what she had prevented? She noted Susannah’s steel gray ponytail
down her back, white wisps of hair escaping around her face, and thought with some shame of the color she had begun to use,
only in the last year or so, only when the gray at her temples began to colonize the rest of her head. (“This whole generation!”
Susannah complained. “They’ve never seen a real vegetable. They don’t know what a carrot is supposed to taste like! It’s all
processed meat and artificial flavors from some lab in New Jersey!”) There were lines—new lines? old lines?—around her mother’s
mouth and eyes. Susannah had been for so long a local sage, matriarch to younger women, pillar of female wisdom, that her
passage to real age was at once unremarkable and a jolt. But the solid, steel-haired woman across the table, waving her weathered
hands over an earthenware mug of herbal tea, had plainly departed middle age. She was old, thought Portia. Pissed and old.
And, oddly, looking only forward.

Caitlin was due in May and thinking of staying on, over the summer, to recover and see her baby settled. Also, said Susannah,
to lose her pregnancy weight, as she intended to keep the fact of her circumstances private.

Portia, finding this conversational thread, at least, diverting, asked how this would be possible. “Don’t they know why she’s
here?”

“They know she’s here, but not why. They think it’s a high school exchange. Her father phones her every Sunday to ask if she
went to church.”

Portia smiled.

“She did go, actually. For the first month. Not that it’s easy to find the
right
kind of church. She ended up at that awful place in West Lebanon, across from the Four Aces diner. You know?”

“It used to have a sign out front that said, ‘Are You on the Right Road?’” said Portia.

“It still does. They’re appalling people. Terrorists, really. Of course, I took her. She’s her own person, and it’s not for
me to decide. I just waited for her across the road in the diner. But after the first few times, she came out and said she
didn’t want to go back. Somebody said something to her, about her increasingly obvious ‘sin,’ I mean. I offered to help her
find another denomination, but she hasn’t mentioned it again.”

Portia nodded. She still thought of the sleeping girl upstairs—in the room she typically occupied on her visits, no doubt—with
some sense of unreality: a teenage incubator for her mother’s absurd idea of late motherhood, a girl for whom this interlude
must come wedged between obscure past and obscure future. That Susannah already spoke of the fetus as a child—known to her,
dependent upon her, and even loved by her—felt so strange, so off-kilter, as if she had dressed a stone in baby clothes and
held it to the breast.

Looking across the table now, she tested this image and so found herself ruminating, in turn, on the icy marble
Pietà
she had seen with Mark at St. Peter’s in Rome. Their first summer together. And then, with a certain grotesque flourish,
of a poster on the wall of her dermatologist’s office in Princeton, which showed a buxom babe in the tiniest of bikinis on
a tropical beach, luscious as a peach from the neck down, but from the neck up a withered crone. It was meant to scare you
into using sunblock, and most effective.

Susannah’s hopes for the child, which she was now elucidating across the table, were, naturally, beyond reproach: love and
care, education and glorious self-actualization, music and art and science, organic food (lovingly prepared), and so on, all
toward a far horizon of the greater good—for surely, the way her mother envisioned things, this child was born to right the
wrongs of the universe. (Why, Portia thought wearily, is every unborn child the lost Einstein or Picasso? The engineer who
would have reversed global warming or figured out how to run airplanes on ground-up industrial waste? Why were these aborted
or miscarried fetuses never the next Dahmer or Bundy? The anonymous forty-eighth addict to overdose in 2056? The never identified
participant in the gang rape? The sociopath executive who takes down an entire company and puts thousands out of work?) Listening,
Portia became aware of it gradually, through the fog of her now great fatigue, and sadness, and distress at being here, and
fear for the future: the full-on shocking realization that both her long-standing partner and her mother were about to become
parents. Again. But not her. Not her. Soon, they would both be taking small hands into their own larger hands and walking
into the future, while she… well, did not. While she… what? Began a new application season? Considered moving to a smaller house?
Contemplated renewing her gym membership?