Love Walked In (2 page)

When I heard Mike (Jimmy Stewart) say to Tracy in that tender, marveling voice, “No, you’re made out of flesh and blood. That’s the blank, unholy surprise of it. You’re the golden girl, Tracy,” I clasped my hands under my pointy chin, prayed that she would run away with him, and swore to God that someday a man would say those words in that voice to me or else I would die. But then, at the movie’s end, my father heard cheering and left water running in the sink to watch his lately distant, disaffected teenage daughter bang her fists on the arms of her chair and turn to him crying, “with a face as open as a flower” (my dad’s own improbable words), saying breathlessly, “She’s marrying Dexter, Daddy.”

I’ll admit it. I’ve always been more than a little proud of myself for having been fourteen and deeply benighted about almost everything, but having had the sense to recognize what is surely a universal truth: Jimmy Stewart is always and indisputably the best man in the world, unless Cary Grant should happen to show up.

His
name was Martin Grace. An excellent name, which, you may have noticed, shares all but three letters with “Cary Grant.” Of course, if you’re not a freak of nature, you probably didn’t notice, and you’ll be relieved to know that it didn’t even spring to my mind right away. It was later, as I lay in bed that night, that I figured it out, mentally crossing out letters with an imaginary pencil, concentrating pretty hard, but sort of affecting an offhand, semi-interested attitude about it, cocking my head casually on the pillow, even though there was no one in the room to see me.

Truth be told, I’m a little superstitious about names. Back in college, I dated an enormous, blond, dumb fraternity boy from Baton Rouge with a voice like a foghorn purely on the strength of his being named William Powell, whom everyone knows from the
Thin Man
movies, but who is even better in
Libeled Lady
and is one of those men whose handsomeness you believe in completely even though you know it doesn’t exist.

My mother met the boy and knew instantly what I was up to. “Your nose looks like Myrna Loy’s,” she’d said. “Be satisfied with that.” Even so, I didn’t ditch Bill until a few nights later when I stood in his Georgian-mansion-turned-dank-cave of a frat house and watched Bill dancing shirtless on a tabletop, his bare, unfortunate belly pulsating like an anguished jellyfish. The bellyfish pulsated, and William Powell, with a delicate shrug, chose that moment to detach himself from Bill forever and slip out into the honeysuckle-scented night.

Slippery things, names. Still: Martin Grace. Good. Very good.

He’d stood dark-eyed and half-smiling in the doorway. Tall. Suit, hair, jawline all flawlessly cut. “Imperially slim,” is the phrase that jumped out of my fourth-grade reading book into my head. But the man in that poem ended up shooting himself, I remembered later, while this man,
my
man, clearly had only a seamless, sophisticated, well-shod life ahead of him. I’m exaggerating, but not much, when I say that as he walked to the counter—walked to me—the dogs, chess players, prams, etcetera parted before him like the Red Sea.

“Hello,” he said, and his voice wasn’t mellifluous or stentorian or melting or sonorous but was nonetheless unmistakably leading-man. As you knew he would, he had a dimple in his chin, and for a wild second or two I considered touching it and asking him how he shaved in there, because if you’re going to rip someone off it might as well be Audrey Hepburn. I didn’t, but I distinctly felt the dimple impress itself upon my unconscious, if such a thing is possible.

“Hi” is what I said.

“A coffee, please. Black.” And you could just tell that’s really what he liked and didn’t sense a self-conscious backstory involving a Marlboro Man masculinity obsession trailing like a long, stupid tail behind the request.

When I handed him his coffee, I let my hand linger on it an extra beat, so that it was still there when he reached for it. I like to pretend to myself that the cup became a little conduit and that our electricity shook it. Anyway, coffee spilled on my hand and I yelped and pressed it to my mouth like a two-year-old.

He looked at me with real concern and said, “I should be kept in a cage.”

“Occupational hazard.” I shrugged. “It’s fine.”

“It’s fine? Really? Because if it’s not, you have to tell me so I can go drown myself in the Delaware.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “The Schuykill’s closer.”

“The Delaware’s deeper. I don’t have the guts to drown myself in shallow water, even for you.”

Even for you, even for you!
my heart sang.

“Except,” he said.

“Except what?” I snapped, snappily.

“Except it’ll have to be the Thames. I leave for London in two hours.”

This might not sound so earth-shattering to you, so fabulously clever or romantic, but trust me when I tell you that it was. Right from the start, we just had a cadence, an intuitive rhythm that I might possibly compare to the sixth sense that jazz musicians sometimes have when they’re playing together if I knew the first thing about jazz. You’ve seen Tracy–Hepburn movies, yes? It was the conversation I’d been waiting for all my life.

And it kept up, that back-and-forth. He talked about his business trip—four days in London, finance something or other—and about fog, how the thing of it was it really was foggy in London.

I felt taut and tingly and flushed, as though I were wearing a new skin, but I wasn’t exactly nervous. Miraculously, I was up to the challenge of meeting this man, perfect as he was. I was “on.” I even had the presence of mind, in the presence of Martin Grace, to continue doing my job, which was fortunate because that’s the way life is, isn’t it? Even as you and the Embodiment-of-All-Your-Hopes stand percolating your own little weather system, two teenaged boys with skateboards under their arms are bound to walk up, splash a pile of dimes onto the counter, and order triple mocha lattes. And usually, it’s not when your eyes are locked with the black-lashed, chocolate-colored stunners the dream man apparently carries around on his face all day as though they were ordinary eyes, but when you’re busy jittering the dimes into the cash register that you’ll hear him say, “Why don’t you come with me?”

Because he said that, Martin Grace did. To me.

I heard it again, an eerily precise aural memory, as I lay in bed that night, turning over the all-but-three-letters/Cary Grant idea for the first of you don’t even want to know how many times. At the sound of Martin’s voice in my head, I sat up, got up, walked over to the window, my white nightgown floating like a ghost around me, and sat in the chair I’d covered last spring with figured, lead-heavy green silk that had once been a monster of a fifties ball gown hanging in a resale shop in Buena (pronounced Byoona) Vista, Virginia. I cranked open my third-floor casement window, looked at Philadelphia—my piece of it—and let my affection for it lift lightly off of me like scent from a flower and drift out into the cool air. Spruce Street: cars and lights; the synagogue on the corner; the hustlers in front of it, male and heartbreakingly young. I felt the two tugs I always felt when I looked at those boys: the tug toward wanting the cars to stop, the tug toward wanting them not to stop.

I could be in London right now, I thought. Right now, lying back on unfamiliarly English pillows with Martin Grace beside me.

Why I wasn’t is a long story—so long that it probably isn’t a story at all. It’s probably just the way I am. But the next thing I said, a major-league clunker, the conversational equivalent of falling on my face, pretty much sums it up.

I stood there in tumult, weighing common sense against desire, trepidation against adventure, caution against impulse, while inwardly banging my head against the wall because, tumult or no tumult, my answer was a foregone conclusion:

“I want to, but I can’t. My mother wouldn’t like it.”

“So we’ll leave her home this time. She can come on the Paris trip.”

As I sat at my window replaying this conversation, lonely, night-gowned, face burning, but still somehow happy, I watched a helicopter in the distance drop its beam of searchlight and swing it slowly back and forth. I imagined a couple in evening dress doing a song-and-dance number in the street below, the woman’s skirt blooming like a white carnation as she spun.

Then I tried to imagine a world in which my mother would accompany me and my older (by maybe fifteen years?) lover to Paris, and blew out a single, sarcastic, “Ha!”

My mother alphabetizes her spice rack, wears Tretorn sneakers, and never puts eleven items on the ten-item express grocery counter, ever. She is a garden club president, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. On the outside, my life doesn’t look much like hers; I’ve made sure of that. But the truth is that I am my mother’s daughter, literally, figuratively, forever.

Still, I made sure Martin Grace did not walk out the door without my number. I leaned over, folded back his lapel, and placed it in his inside breast pocket myself. Then, I gave him a look so worthy of Veronica Lake, I could almost feel my nonexistent blond tresses falling over one eye.

It
started with towels. Ten full sets, thick Egyptian cotton-dyed dark plum, pale yellow, flamingo pink. Her mother dropped the huge white shopping bags heavy with towels on the floor of Clare’s room, then ran back to the car for more, until there were ten bags lined up like teeth on Clare’s rug. “Wait until you see them all, sweetheart. So beautiful. The best. The very best.”

Clare leaned against the doorjamb, let the wood press into her shoulder, half inside, half outside the room. She listened to her mother chatter and watched her toss the towels onto the bed, really pitching them so that the bath sheets unfolded like banners in the air and the washcloths fluttered open like little birds. Apple green, crimson, hydrangea blue. The bed was heaped with them. Clare put her thumb-nail between her teeth, didn’t chew it, but held it there.

“Have you ever seen such beautiful towels? I feel the colors in my bones. Right inside my bones. Don’t you, Clarey?” Clare’s mother was breathing hard, almost panting, as though looking at the towels were like running or dancing.

Clare said, “We have towels already.”

Her mother walked over to her and swaddled her in a towel the soft brown of a brown egg. The towel was huge. Clare was going on eleven and was tall for her age, but the towel wrapped around her twice and puddled at her feet. Inside it, she felt skinny and hunched. Clare’s mother took Clare’s face in her hands, gently. Under her makeup, her cheeks were flushed. “It’s important to wash them before you use them the first time. And to wash each set separately so you don’t spoil the colors. Do you understand that?” Her voice was hushed and serious, so Clare nodded. Her mother took her hands away and looked over her shoulder at the bed covered with towels.

“We’d better go down and have lunch now, Mom,” Clare said.

“Oh, they just make me want to weep,” said Clare’s mother, and she lay down on the towels and wept.

The
next morning, Clare sat in her fifth-grade classroom making lists.

Orphans. All of Clare’s favorite characters were orphans, and she wrote their names in the back of her notebook while her teacher went over the reading-comprehension questions for the Helen Keller autobiography the class had read. The questions were on a sheet of paper on Clare’s desk, with Clare’s answers penciled in underneath each question.

Clare’s mother called her worksheets “soulless,” not because the questions were stupid and reduced the readings to a bunch of lumpish facts; not because for what her mother was paying for the fancy Main Line school, they should have been coming up with something a lot fancier than worksheets; but because the sheets were copied on a Xerox machine. She recalled for Clare the mimeographs of her youth—the curling, slick paper, orchid purple smudgy ink, and the odor, a fragrance like none other. “I’d pick up the worksheet first thing and just
breathe
it, Clarey! That smell was the smell of
school
.”

Clare had wanted to say something good in response to this, something original and declamatory about her own school, how it smelled or didn’t, something to let her mother know that they were a team, two interesting people who noticed smells and soullessness. Clare tried hard to toss off sharp, quirky comments in front of her mother, to quip, is how she thought of it, the way girls in books were always quipping. Anne of Green Gables was a big quipper, for example. Once in a while, at school or with their cleaning lady, Max, who wasn’t a lady really but a nineteen-year-old with a tattoo of a phoenix rising from smoldering ashes across her bony shoulder blades, Clare was capable of quipping. But often, with her mother, conversation was tricky. Clare found herself trailing after, while her mother’s mind and voice dashed ahead, doubled back, ping-ponged in amazing ways.

Anne Shirley, Sara Crewe, Mary Lennox. These were the top-three orphans, with Anne miles ahead of the other two, so Clare wrote their names in inch-high lettering that came as close to calligraphy as she could manage given her number two pencil and limited artistic talent. When she was younger, she would sometimes draw pictures of each next to their names: three pale, big-eyed faces, each almost perfectly triangular, and topped, consecutively, with red hair, black hair, blondish hair. After the Big Three, there were others. Heidi. The Roald Dahl orphans: James and Sophie. Wild, vaguely creepy Pippi Long-stocking, if you believed, as Clare did, that Pippi’s father was drowned and not a cannibal king. Tom and Huck. David, Pip, Estella, Oliver and the rest, struggling through fog, grim streets, and their twisting, thickly populated stories. The Boxcar Children. Unforgiveable Heath-cliff; Hareton, who hanged the puppies from the back of the chair; Jane Eyre. Recent, bestselling orphans: Harry Potter, the sad-faced Baudelaires. There was also a subcategory of half-orphans, usually motherless, and a subsubcategory of half-orphans with kindly housekeepers: Scout and Jem; all four Melendy kids (five after they adopted Mark, a full-fledged orphan); even Nancy Drew, who was almost an adult and barely counted.

Clare grouped and regrouped the orphans, categorizing them by age, sex, hair color, country of origin, economic status. Clare was starting a list of the poor ones who ended up rich when she heard her teacher stop talking. Worksheets notwithstanding, Ms. Packer was nice and was maybe even a good teacher, Clare thought, although she was no Anne Shirley, who—once she’d grown up and become a teacher—loved every student as her own child, who won over the wicked Jen Pringle, and who inspired handsome Paul Irving to become a famous poet. Ms. Packer had a loud voice, was thick-waisted, thin-haired, and her fashion sense ran to Birkenstock sandals with socks, thumb rings, and what was whispered to be bralessness. But she seemed to care about books, and she sometimes talked about the characters as though they were real people, with tears in her eyes and a choke in her throat. She wasn’t married, and Clare understood that it was because she was madly in love with Charles Darnay and no other man measured up.

The night before, upon Ms. Packer’s suggestion, Clare had stuffed cotton in her ears and worn a blindfold for two straight hours. After she caught her finger in a drawer, busted her shin against the Biedermeir table, and spilled an entire glass of iced tea, she’d sat in a chair for a long time and afterward understood that being blind and deaf meant being alone with your thoughts and feeling a tide of worry rise around you.

Ms. Packer stood, arrested midsentence, pencil in the air, looking at the back of the room, and when Clare twisted around with the rest of the class to look, she saw her mother standing in the doorway. She wore a wrap dress, heels, sunglasses, lipstick. She was lithe and elegant, and her hair fell like a sheet of silk to her shoulders. When she looked at Clare and smiled, Clare felt a knot she hadn’t realized was under her ribcage loosen. My mother, she thought. Look at her. Who would worry about a woman like that?

But then she saw Mrs. Jordan, the assistant to the Head of the Lower School, hovering behind her mother, looking put out, and Clare remembered that parents never came to the classrooms. They waited in the reception area, and Mrs. Jordan sent a helper down to retrieve their children. Clare imagined her mother striding like a runway model down the school hallways while Mrs. Jordan pattered after her, apprising her of the rules in a tense but polite voice. The knot tightened.

“Sorry to interrupt, Ms. Packer, but I need Clare,” said Clare’s mother, turning her smile on Ms. Packer.

Then, Clare’s mother dropped like a dancer or a panther into a crouch and shook back her hair. She held her arms out to Clare, as though Clare were a toddler. “I need you, Clare,” she said.

As Ms. Packer and Mrs. Jordan exchanged bemused, disapproving looks over her mother’s shining head, Clare chose the side she was on. She looked from teacher to administrator, then grinned at her mother, a grin she made sure wasn’t just the fashioning of her mouth into a shape but that went all the way to her eyes. Then, she shoved books and notebooks into her backpack and stood up.

“You’ll e-mail me with the homework, please, Ms. Packer?” she said briskly, just tipping her voice up ever so slightly at the end of the sentence to turn it from statement to request.

She glanced at her friend Josie, whose desk was next to hers, and noticed that Josie’s expression was familiar, the combination of admiration and friendly envy with which Josie always regarded her when they spent time with Clare’s mother. Josie had once told Clare that she thought of her mother as a cross between a fairytale princess and an exotic animal like a peacock. Josie was a bright girl, but not especially creative, and this was definitely one of the most interesting things she’d ever said to Clare, which showed just how much Clare’s mother fascinated Josie. Even when Clare’s mother did some ordinary mother thing, like give them a plate of cookies, Josie gazed at her in amazement as though she’d just performed magic. Even though Clare’s mother showing up in their classroom was peculiar, it probably didn’t seem particularly so to Josie, who saw everything Clare’s mother did as special and unexpected. Rules that applied to other mothers didn’t apply to her.

Ms. Packer nodded at Clare, her brows still knit. Then, Clare turned on her heel, as pertly as any storybook heroine ever did, walked to the classroom door and, as she hadn’t done for years and not caring what the kids in her class would think, took her mother’s hand.

Clare stayed stride for stride with her mother, head high, ponytail swinging, down the hallways of the school, through the oak-paneled entryway, and out the door. They were coconspirators stepping out together into the sunny afternoon. But, in the parking lot, her mother looked down at Clare’s face and said, with a hint of irritation in her voice, “Nothing to worry about, Clarey. I’m your mother. I’m allowed to take you out of school without jumping through hoops.”

“No, Mom. I’m not worried. I’m really not worried,” said Clare, inserting what was almost a skip into her step. “Ms. Packer and Mrs. Jordan, they’d be okay, if they weren’t so—conventional.” Clare’s mother squeezed Clare’s hand.

“Sometimes, darling, a mother just has to let everything go, and take her daughter to lunch.”

“I agree,” Claire almost sang, and she felt everything was fine—better than fine. She’d used a good word, “conventional” and, in a breezy, laughing voice, her mother had called her “darling,” a luxurious, old-fashioned endearment that Clare had read a thousand times but had never been called.

Inside
the rose-colored walls of the restaurant, before her mother said unthinkable things, Clare was happy. At first she was happy because she had decided to be, and then she relaxed into her happiness and just felt it.

The restaurant was cool and high-ceilinged, with waiters in creaseless white shirts, and with tight bunches of purple flowers in tiny vases on the tables. It was the sort of place that is sure enough of itself to be noisy and bustling rather than hushed, and Clare thought it was wonderful. The way the water sat in the glasses; the menus that didn’t open but were a single pale yellow card; the small, brightly colored, evenly spaced paintings that hung across one wall—all of it dazzled Clare.

“If you can tell us which of these two wines you’d recommend and why, you’re our man,” said Clare’s mother to the handsome, black-haired waiter. She handed the wine list to him and pointed to the two selections, her hand lightly touching his, her fingers looking tapered and delicate. She spoke in a low voice, and the waiter smiled. His front tooth was chipped, causing Clare to notice how young he was. This is the way men smile at beautiful women, she thought, and she felt proud that even this guy who was almost a kid, almost a boy, could fall under her mother’s spell.

When he brought the wine, he filled her mother’s glass, and then held the bottle over Clare’s glass. Clare started to tell him no, but he was looking at her mother, not at her and, astonishingly, her mother nodded. Clare watched the dark wine rise in the glass, watched the waiter’s hand give a slight twist at the end, then sat staring at the wine, unsure of what to do next. Should she remind her mother about her own mother’s sister, Aunt Patsy, who at age nine, after a dinner party, had sneaked downstairs and drunk the dregs of every guest’s drink? “They found her in the front yard, laughing at the moon. From that moment on, she was a hopeless drunk. Hopeless.” Her mother’s words, her mother’s cautionary tale; it seemed impossible that she’d forgotten it.

But her mother was raising her own glass and looking at Clare, eyebrows arched. It was a large glass, long-stemmed, like nothing Clare had ever held or drunk from, and she wrapped her fingers gingerly around the stem, then—glancing at her mother—cupped her hand under the globe and lifted. Her mother nodded approvingly. Maybe it was all right, then; it must be.

“It’s as important to know when to break the rules as it is to know when to obey them. Here’s to playing hooky!” Her mother touched her glass to Clare’s, and Clare drank, tasting the odd, rich harshness, but swallowing anyway. Tears started in her eyes, and she blinked hard. Please don’t let me be a hopeless drunk, she prayed, then snatched the prayer back. It must be that some people can become hopeless drunks and others can’t, Clare thought, and her mother must know this and know Clare to be the kind who can’t. If her mother didn’t know that, she would never allow Clare to drink, not in a million years. She imagined her mother knocking a glass from her hand, just as Clare was raising it to her lips, the glass shattering, the wine purple on the wall.

The food was interesting, little complicated creations resting in the centers of large plates, sauce drizzled in gleaming patterns, meat placed on top of vegetables instead of next to them. Clare would just begin to dismantle or eat around the edges of one creation, when another plate would come. It was too much food—much too much—but that was OK because her mother was eating with gusto, really digging in, and it hit Clare that her mother hadn’t been eating much lately. She would flit around the kitchen at dinnertime, perch—legs crossed, one swinging—on a countertop, but would rarely sit for long. Clare tried to remember seeing her mother actually chew and swallow food. Her mother had always been slim, but recently Clare had noticed how thin she was: hands grown translucent, almost clawlike, skin pulled tight over her cheekbones, hipbones jutting alarmingly under her dresses. She looks like a model, Clare had reassured herself, but it was still a relief to see her mother eat, and Clare was happy.