Five Things I Can't Live Without (24 page)

“Hi, Nora,” Casey said, a little shyly.

“Come here,” I said, smiling. I hugged her thin frame. “It’s so good to see you.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Casey answered, hugging back.

“We’re glad to have you, even if it is only for two nights.” My mother smiled. “Would you like to freshen up, or should we have dinner?”

I opted for dinner, and she led me into the dining room. “You’ve never been here before, have you?” she asked.

“No.” I gaped at the dining room. It was huge. The mahogany table was set for four, but could seat twelve. “Do you entertain a lot?”

“Never,” my mother said.

I sat down and Casey sat next to me. Ed helped my mother bring the food in from the kitchen. “You look great,” I told Casey.

“Really?” She self-consciously pushed her hair back.

“Yes, really. You must be getting used to your contact lenses. Your eyes don’t look red at all.”

“I think I am used to them.” She smiled.

“I wish I could have been here for your birthday.”

“It was really nice.” She reached for her hair again, though it hadn’t moved since she last pushed it back. “I invited a lot of people, and most of them showed up. Dad gave me these earrings. I wear them practically every day.” She jutted her ear out so I could see.

“They’re beautiful.”

“Yeah. I really like them.”

“Don’t say ‘yeah,’” my mother corrected as she sat down.

We got quiet except for saying, “Could you please pass the … ?” and “Thank you” while we filled our plates. The spread looked wonderful, but true to form, the chicken was rubbery and flavorless and the vegetables were slightly overcooked. My mother didn’t care much for food; she cared more for appearances. I thought that someday she should take it to the next level and just put replicas of an attractive meal on the table while we all secretly ate microwaved food in the kitchen.

“We were hoping to meet Dan this trip,” my mother said. It had taken some time, but once she’d finally accepted my freelancing job, she’d forgiven Dan for not keeping me chained in the bedroom for my own safety.

“He would have liked that, too. It just didn’t work out this time.” I sawed my knife back and forth over the chicken until it yielded.

“So you live together now. That must be nice,” Ed said benignly.

“It’s going well.” I kept my tone light.

“I never even saw your last apartment.” My mother dabbed at her mouth. I noticed that her lipstick was cracking at the corners.

“I didn’t live there that long.”

“Will you live in this one very long?” she asked.

“What are you saying, Mom?” I put my fork down and stared at her.

“I’m saying, how long can you keep living in apartments? You’re almost thirty. Don’t you want a house?”

“San Francisco isn’t like Baltimore. Houses are way more expensive.”
Stay calm. Talk to Casey. Talk to Ed. Don’t let her control every interaction
.

“You don’t live in San Francisco.”

“We’ve been over this, Mom. Oakland is expensive, too. Unless you’re living in a bad part of town. Do you want me to live next to a crack house?”

Casey laughed. My mother glared at me, presumably for corrupting Casey. If my mother could, she’d have a five-second delay at dinner like they have at the Grammy Awards so she could bleep out any comments that she didn’t want Casey to hear.

“Real estate’s a good investment,” Ed said, always a smooth mediator. “And maybe you could buy something with a lot less money down than you think. I could help you figure that kind of thing out.”

“Thanks, Ed,” I said. “I’m not there yet.”

“Meaning, you and Dan aren’t there yet?” my mother asked.

“No, we’re not. We haven’t even been together a year.”

“Which didn’t stop you from living with him,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, as if as an aside for the studio audience.

“Things are coming along fine,” I said tersely. “When anything changes, you’ll be the first to know, don’t you worry.”

There was silence at the table for several minutes. Casey started biting her nails, and my mother stared at her until she stopped.

My mother finally broke the stalemate with a sigh. “We just really want him to be the one. The one who’ll take care of you.”

I sighed, too. I knew she was just worried, that she was always just worried. I hated that I had inherited her need to know, her inability to sit with uncertainty. It was the very reason I had forced the issue with Dan by living with him so early. It saddened me to realize how often my mother and I shared the same intention and impulse, while I generally chose the precise opposite course of action.

“I know, Mom. I wish I could answer that for you.”

Casey piped up. “But he’s really cute. I got the pictures you sent.”

“He does seem very attractive,” my mother said, with a smile.

“He is very attractive.” I smiled to myself, imagining him. I thought how if Dan was there right now, he’d be holding my hand under the table and running interference with my mother. I thought how funny he would be later when we were alone, recounting little gestures and nuances I’d missed. He had an eye for humorous character details, and he never sounded snide or mean when he pointed them out.

“He’s just my type!” Ed joked, and we all laughed eagerly. Then Ed teased Casey about the boy she liked, and she claimed she didn’t like anyone—and no one would ever like her—and we all protested that that wasn’t true. We three adults were content then to make the rest of the dinner Casey-centric.

After dinner, we played board games and drank hot chocolate. I noticed that my mother and Ed seemed much more at ease together than I’d ever seen them, and Casey didn’t have any crying jags at all. I thought maybe I would bring Dan for my next visit, and it was not inconceivable that he would enjoy himself some of the time.

The next day, Casey and I went to the mall. She needed new shoes and wanted my opinion. I was momentarily flattered, though Casey was a pretty unfashionable kid. I kept trying not to think of her as a kid, to remember that she was
thirteen
, but it was nearly impossible.

“What do you think of those?” Casey pointed to a chunky mule.

“Would you be able to walk in them?” I asked.

“Okay. Forget it,” she said immediately.

“If you don’t know how to walk in them now, you could learn.”

“Yeah, right.” She was studying a pair of hideous ballet flats.

“You could! Why don’t you try the other shoes on?”

“I didn’t really like them anyway.”

“What size are you? I’m going to find a salesperson and get them for you.” I figured I should have a take-charge big-sister moment. And what could be better bonding than me teaching Casey how to walk in heels?

“Nora, I really don’t want them.” She seemed on the verge of tears.

“Okay. Well, let’s keep looking around.” It was sad, knowing she was still this sensitive. As late as last year, she sometimes cried in class when she couldn’t do a math problem. I hoped that she’d outgrown that, at least. “What about these?” I picked up a pair of shoes with a heel in between the flats and the mules.

She cocked her head while she considered.

“Casey, it won’t hurt my feelings if you say no.”

“No,” she said. She laughed, and I laughed with her.

“But what do you think about that size heel? I figure you could gradually get used to walking in higher heels.”

“Okay.” She started looking for heels of precisely that height, studying a series of shoes with intense concentration. Finally she held one up triumphantly. “What do you think?”

“I like them,” I answered honestly.

“Great. I’ll try them on.” She seemed relieved. I felt a twinge of annoyance that my mother had sculpted her to be someone who was constantly swinging between tension and relief.

As we sat waiting for the salesman to bring the shoes in her size, I asked her about things at home.

“They’re fine. The same as always,” she said, tugging at her gum with her fingers. On top of everything else, my mother had made her orally fixated.

My mother had been overinvolved through my elementary-school years, but it was nothing compared to how she acted once I got into junior high. She was obsessed with my safety and convinced any bad choice would have dire consequences. I occasionally caught her eavesdropping on my phone conversations, and she tagged nearly every friend as being a “bad influence.” That was her favorite expression until I turned eighteen. What she didn’t realize was that she didn’t actually prevent much of what she considered bad behavior; she just drove it out of the house. Well, she succeeded in making me completely anxious while I did it, which was why, for example, I needed to smoke pot before having sex. “Is Mom freaking out about you being thirteen?” I asked.

“She’s been giving me a lot of lectures lately,” Casey said.

“Yep.”

“And she asks questions constantly.”

“She would have made a good private investigator.”

Casey laughed.

“Just remember that the world isn’t always the scary place she makes it out to be. And you can be trusted, even if she acts like you can’t. Do you know what I mean?” I asked.

“Not exactly.”

“Mom has a tendency to treat the people she loves—meaning, the people she’s worried about—like criminals. And when she treats you like that, you probably start to doubt yourself. And you figure that the world must be really scary for her to be so worried. You end up doubting that you can handle things, and thinking that you’re better off not trying. But you’re better off thinking less and trying more.” Feeling a little self-conscious about my speech, I added, “At least, that’s my opinion.”

We were interrupted by the arrival of the shoes. The salesman helped Casey slip them on and she walked toward the mirror, hesitantly at first and then more confidently. “I like them,” she said.

I realized she hadn’t asked my opinion first, and that made me smile. “Then let’s buy them.”

That night, by force of habit, I made sure my mother wasn’t listening on another extension before calling Dan.

I told him in detail about how much better the visit was going than I’d expected. “I actually wish I lived closer so I could be a big sister more of the time,” I said wistfully. “Maybe I should visit more often.”

“We could have Casey come out and stay with us,” Dan said. “I think it’d be fun having your sister around.”

I closed my eyes and pictured the expression on Dan’s face when he said that. I’d been missing him all day. I’d been missing the sound of him and the sturdiness of him. Just hearing his voice, I felt held by him. And then I felt a pleasant tingling.
No, you are not having phone sex in your mother’s house
. But I liked that I wanted to.

“Things have been off with us for a little while,” I said. “I know it’s my fault, but I’m ready to really work on things.”

He didn’t speak for a minute. “I’ve never told you my theory about coasting, have I?”

“No.”

“In general—remember, this is just in general—men are better at coasting than women.”

“What do you mean by ‘coasting’?” I asked, intrigued.

“Coasting is just going along and presuming everything’s okay. You’re not gearing up for anything, you’re just coasting. It’s like figuring that if there’s no noise under the hood and the car’s running, there’s no problem. I think women listen a lot harder for noises, and even if they don’t hear them, they think there’s still something going on.”

“So you think I’m listening too hard,” I said. I was smiling.

“You might be.” I could almost hear him shrugging. And smiling. I knew he was smiling.

“I’m coming home tomorrow.” I just wanted to hear it out loud. My smile widened.

“Oh, I know.”

The next morning, I said good-bye to Ed and Casey and packed my luggage into my mother’s Lexus.
I should always do shot glass visits
, I thought, settling into the front seat and waving at Casey as my mother backed out of the driveway.

“This has been a good visit,” I said, smiling at my mother.

Surprise flashed across her face, then a nanosecond of evaluation (Is Nora being sarcastic? she wondered), and then a return smile. “I wish you’d come more often. Or even better, invite us out to visit you. We haven’t been to San Francisco in years.” She started humming “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.”

“That’s San Jose, Mom, not San Francisco.”

“I know. I’m just in a good mood. I don’t get to see you often.”

My mother spent nearly half the time in my presence commenting on how little she got to see me. It often seemed that the idea of me was far more satisfying than the reality.

I scanned the radio to find the classical station. Classical music has always calmed her nerves. For that reason, classical music tends to remind me of just how high-strung my mother is, and by extension, of my own inherited temperament, so it has the inverse effect on me. One time I went to the symphony on a date and almost had a panic attack during the first movement of Shostakovich. But right then, with my visit just minutes from its completion, I decided that it was best to keep my mother calm and contained.