Crossroads (28 page)

When we finished divorcing one another, Mark wanted a beer. “I'm a little tired,” I told him. “I have a lot to do.” He got up and stood behind me and began rubbing my neck muscles, the space between my shoulder blades. If I were an angel, I know I'd have tired wings. When stress enters my body, it always gets me right between the blades. And Mark knew that spot and went right for it. He massaged it; then he began kissing my neck. If I go to hell, it will be because I could never resist him. But this time, in an amazing act of will, my body wanting, my dignity refusing, I stood up. “No,” I said, “not now.”

When he got to the door, I asked him how things were with Lila. He said something about how they were “redefining what they wanted from one another.”

“I saw her, you know,” I said.

He nodded. “She said you were nice to her.”

“She seemed distraught.” I found to my surprise that I didn't care what their “redefining what they wanted” led to. “I hope things go well.” I kissed him on the cheek.

I went to the window after Mark left. I wanted to see what my ex-husband looked like when he was alone. I wanted to see if he did anything strange. Anything to make me regret. What if I'd just made a terrible mistake? What if I were one of those brokers who just sold all his stocks, only to see them skyrocket?

He did do something to make me almost regret. Mark came out of the building and looked at the sky. He held out his hand to see if it was drizzling. That was something he always used to do. He paused for a second on the sidewalk, unsure, it seemed,
of where he wanted to go. Then he looked up at me and nodded. He knew I was watching him. “It's all right,” that nod seemed to say. I nodded back. He gave me a tiny salute and I saluted him. He turned right and I thought to myself, I wonder where he's going. And then he was gone.

I sat down at my desk, which was right by the window, uncertain myself of what I wanted to do at that moment. Then I took out some stationery and an envelope. I addressed the envelope first and then wrote
Please forward
.

I'd written Sean dozens of letters in my head but I hadn't tried to put any on paper until just then. “Dear Sean,” I began. “I've just signed my divorce papers and thought I'd drop you a line.” I tore it up. “Dear Sean, I'm not sure if you want to hear from me or not, but . . . I tried to call you once and a woman answered.” I tore it up.

Then I wrote the letter I eventually mailed:

 

Dear Sean
,

I'm leaving for Illinois in a few days. The city finally gave up on my SAP project, though I haven't, and they closed my unit. My parents are moving to the Everglades, of all places, because of Dad's blood pressure, and he asked me to take over his office. I don't know what they're going to do down there with all the alligators and flamingos, but they want to give it a try. I've sublet my place and am also going to give the office a try for about six months. I'm also thinking again about my M.A. in architecture. Well see
.

I tried to phone you a couple of times but you weren't in. I wanted to tell you that I'm sorry about so much that happened between us. I wish we had met later, after I'd had more time to recover. But this is by no means to excuse my ridiculous coast-to-coast behavior. It's just that it's taken a while for me to realize how important you are to me, how much I care for you as a friend, a person, a lover. I made a lot of mistakes and I guess this is why I'm writing. I want you to know that you shouldn't take the things that happened between us personally. If I acted the way I did, it's not because you did anything wrong. I just wasn't ready. It's important to me that you understand that
.

I'm divorced now and I feel relieved. I feel, in fact, a sense of peace. I saw Jennie, by the way. They aren't having an easy time but they seem committed to trying. I suppose having children makes a huge difference. They asked about you and they also told me they'd seen you. I hear you shaved your beard
.

I just wanted you to know I'm thinking about you and I hope you're doing well. You must be almost ready to distribute
Minor Setbacks,
so I'll look for it. I'm not sure where I'll be staying in Chicago but someone will forward mail from here or you can phone me at Mills Associates. I miss you
,

Love
,

Deborah

 

I waited a day or so and then mailed it, thinking I'd hear from him soon. But it would be months before I'd hear anything.

And so I left the East, not because I didn't like it, but because it had confused me and I had things to unravel. The Midwest, for all its tedious flatness, has never told me a lie, but the East was filled for me with distortions. And so, like the career soldier on a brief furlough from the wars, I headed home.

C
HICAGO
is the chewing gum capital of the world and we Chicagoans cling to one another with a certain banal stick-to-itiveness. They gave me a hero's welcome home. My parents invited everyone who'd known me since before I was born.

Renee and her husband, Eddie, the periodontist, were there with their three children, Wendy, Sam, and Jody. Renee had grown rather chunky, and that once rounded Renoiresque body was on the verge of fatness. Eddie, who'd always been built rather tall and broad-bottomed, with a long, spindly neck, looked more like an ostrich than I'd remembered.

My parents had also invited my great-aunts and great-uncles. My great-uncles, Irv and Al, were twins in their nineties who'd been born in Russia, but all they remembered about it was the mud. My uncle Al, however, remembered the entire industrial revolution from the invention of the incandescent bulb to the airplane, the car, the flush toilet. “You know what killed my uncle Mort?” he said. “The flush toilet. He was ninety-five and he used to run down the stairs to the outhouse
all day. Then they put one toilet in the building, so he dies of constipation, waiting in line.” Uncle Al also recalled perfectly the Wright brothers' first flight.

What he couldn't remember was my marital status. “So, where's that husband of yours? The lawyer?”

“Oh, he couldn't make it today, Uncle Al.”

Uncle Irv told him to shut up and mind his own business.

My parents had invited all my cousins, including two who weren't speaking due to some minor litigation no one could discuss. They invited people who remembered me when I was “this” big and people who were sure I couldn't be a day over twenty. And then there were the Applegartens, the Baumgartens, the Snares, the Shears; there was my parents' canasta club, my father's golf group, the Women's Board of the B'nai Emet Hospital.

It was the end of May and my parents had thrown open their town house in old Rogers Park, and all day Sunday people filed in and out, people I often didn't remember. A nearby deli had made huge trays of smoked fish and finger sandwiches, and I felt somehow, in the face of the jovial people trying to have a good time, that I'd arrived in town just in time for my own funeral. “Look,” my mother said to me,” look who's here.” She brought over a woman I'd never seen before. The woman looked at me and clasped her hands across her large breasts. “Deborah,” she said. “Oh, I remember you when you were this big,” and she cupped her hands as if she were holding a loaf of bread. “You were such an itsy-bitsy thing.”

My father called me to the phone. “Your brother.” Zap called from downstate and said he'd be up to see me soon. He had a new girlfriend named Brenda, who was just “a living doll,” according to my father. Zap put Brenda on the phone. She giggled and said, “Gosh, I don't know what to say,” and handed the phone back to Zap. “See you in a week or so, O.K.?” I said O.K., as Renee motioned for me to come say good-bye to someone I didn't remember having said hello to.

Before Renee left, she asked me, “Where are you going to stay while you're in the city?” I told her I'd assumed I'd stay with our parents. “What are you?” she said. “A real live masochist? Why don't you stay with us for a few weeks?” I told her I'd think about it.

While Dad drove my great-aunts and uncles back to their nursing homes, Mom put on a tape recording that hypnotized her so that she wouldn't eat. “You are fat, you are disgusting. You will eat only one can of water-packed tuna a week. You will not eat lamb chops. You will not eat more than six ounces of chopped beef . . .”

When Dad got home, Mom turned off her recording. We all put on our robes and settled down to watch “The Rookies.” In the middle of the car chase, Dad said, “Marge, have you seen her feet?”

My feet? What was wrong with my feet? I followed my parents' gaze as each grabbed a foot and examined it with some care. “Ooh,” Mom said.

“What is it? Warts? Fungus?”

“Calluses,” Mom proclaimed. “Just look at those calluses.”

“I walk on them,” I offered by way of explanation.

“When was the last time you had a pedicure, young lady?” my father asked.

I couldn't remember ever having had a pedicure. So Dad said, “Marge, get her a pedicure this week.”

“Not at twenty-five dollars, I won't.”

Before I knew what was happening, my parents had procured towels, cuticle scissors, Pretty Feet, a steel scrub brush, nail clippers, and manicuring tools. “I don't know how you can even walk on these feet,” my father said. Before I could think to protest, my parents revealed the dark, cracked crevices of my toes, my feet, feet that had always managed to get me where I needed to go, feet that had never been criticized before, examined before, the one part of me that had somehow managed to get away unscathed, now being pumiced over.

They systematically went to work. My mother applied creams and scrubbed calluses. My father worked on the nails, trimming, oiling, snipping away. And so I sat, amazed, a drawn-and-quartered child, almost the same age as a long-playing record, having her feet studied and cleansed by two aging parents who cannot ask or tell anyone about her divorce, who pretend she does not have lovers, and who have resigned themselves to retirement among the 'gators of the Everglades.

“My God!” my mother said. “You've got potatoes growing under these nails. Cauliflower. Look at that, Howard.” She displayed some crud she'd discovered under the nail. Howard shook his head, disconsolate. No wonder she got a divorce, no wonder her marriage didn't work out, he was thinking. Whose could, with all that dirt under her toes.

My parents had almost finished with my feet, and they looked forlorn as they shook their heads back and forth. But in an odd way, this made them happy. This made them feel needed. So I let them clean and prim my feet as they'd once done my bottom. With all the skill of an ancient mother, my mother put large dabs of Vaseline between my toes. Then she rested my feet on a towel. “Now,” she said to my feet, “don't move.” She disappeared somewhere into the kitchen and returned a few moments later with plastic bags and rubber bands. “What're you going to do with those?” I watched with some amazement as they stuffed my feet into the Baggies and closed them with rubber bands.

“So you don't get grease all over the place,” my mother said.

That night as I drifted to sleep, my feet still in plastic bags which I'd tear off in the middle of the night, I listened to the distinct voice of my mother's rasping hypnotist. “You are fat, you will eat only . . .”

The next morning I went to a nearby audio shop and bought a set of headphones to go with my mother's tape recorder. She was very pleased to receive them, and like some lobotomized roller skater she drifted through her domestic chores of the day, in a TM-type trance, mumbling from time to time to herself, “I will not eat lamb chops.”

 

Renee, “the revolutionary,” as our parents once referred to her, lived in a prefabricated house in a development outside Downers Grove. She and Eddie had taken a lot of care in picking the right place to live. They wanted a neighborhood where the taxes weren't going to go sky-high but where the public schools were as good as the private schools, without busing. “What's the sense of paying school taxes if you can't send your kids to school?” was the extent of Eddie's commitment to political thought.

Renee, however, was active in the PTA, and on Saturdays Eddie was a scoutmaster, which he considered to be his civic duty. “What's the sense of having kids if you don't spend time with them?” was Eddie's theory of child-rearing. You could hardly tell the house was prefabricated. It had been well landscaped, with lots of shrubs and a cherry tree. Any time Eddie thought one of the kids wasn't telling the truth, he'd point outside and say, “Remember about the father of our country and the cherry tree.”

Things hadn't always been so sweet and simple for Renee. When she was very young, she was the perfect child. She played the piano beautifully; she made her own clothes; she got straight A's. The catechism of our youth was “Why can't you be more like your older sister?” Zap and I honestly tried. We spent a lot of time trying, until we realized Renee couldn't be like Renee anymore.

“Zap got the looks and I've got the brains,” Renee used to say. She stuck me somewhere in the middle of them, both chronologically and spiritually. I was the orange sheep of the family, flamboyant and obvious in my errors, which never reached the blackness of Zap's. While I bungled along after my
brother, who somehow managed to stay out of juvenile court on at least three occasions, Renee, who had a reputation short of perfection, was in fact a time bomb ready to go off. The summer when my mother took off for California and Dad went out to bring her home, Renee was supposed to take care of us. While Mom and Dad thought she was cooking our meals and making us keep our curfews, Renee was phoning up for pizzas and abandoning us to our own devices while she let strange boys buy her popcorn and cop a feel in the balcony of the old Alcyon Theater, where she'd once played a piano recital of Chopin preludes.