One True Thing (12 page)

Jennifer at the bar was staring at our table. So were her friends. I gave them the finger and Jeff pulled my hand out of the air. “Whooa,’ he said. “Should we get out of here?”

“I am not your father, Ellen,” Jon said as the waitress brought our drinks. He took my glass from the tray and put it down on his side of the table.

“No you are not, Jon,” I said, reaching across the table to get it. We pulled in opposite directions; the glass toppled and my drink ran into his lap. “Jesus,” he said, standing up.

“Let’s go,” Jeff said.

“I’m ready,” Jon said, “and Ellen sure as hell is. Do you want us to drop you at home?”

“I’m going with him, Jon,” I said. “It’s been a long day. A long week. A long month. It’s very tiring, being my mother.”

“Ellen, you have lost it. You are not your mother. You have never been your mother. There is no one in the world more different from your mother than you are.”

I took my jacket from the back of my chair. “That was the stupidest thing you’ve ever said, Jon. And I am leaving.”

“I haven’t seen you in almost three months.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Oh, Christ,” said Jon.

“Cool it, Jon,” said Jeff. “You got laid yesterday, you’ll get laid tomorrow, and you’ll probably get laid Saturday.”

“Hey, Jeff, my sex life is none of your business. And neither is hers. She’s a big girl.”

“Ah, hell, she’s not as big as everybody thinks.”

“If everyone could stop talking about me as if I wasn’t here, I’d like to go home and just go to sleep,” I said. “I’m drunk and I’m tired and I’m sick of all of you. And I don’t want a ride because I want to walk home just so I can be alone for a change.”

And I was alone, walking home in the cold November night with my nose and eyes running, leaving Jonathan angry, locking eyes with Jeff and with Jennifer, whose lip gloss and tousled bangs seemed a world away to me. I felt like a very tired housewife, and I looked like one, too, in my corduroy slacks and cotton sweater. When I got home my mother was sitting in the living room, reading. “You didn’t have to wait up for me,” I said.

“My back hurts.”

Next morning the boys left me to sleep late, and when I woke up and heard war whoops from outside the window I looked out to see Brian letting my mother roll down the street in the wheelchair, with Jeff stationed down the gentle slope to stop her. The look on her face reminded me of the first time we ever put Brian on a sled at River View Park, the commingling of fear, excitement,
joy, and terror. “Go for it, baby!” Jeff yelled as he put out his arms to catch her. “Bring it on home.”

My head hurt and my tongue felt too big for my mouth. I climbed back beneath the quilt and slept until almost noon, and when I awoke and went downstairs my mother was sleeping on the couch in the living room, her hands beneath her cheek, a throw over her legs. A note from my father on the kitchen table said “Catching up at the college.” In the den my brothers were talking, their voices rising, falling, breaking. I went out on the porch and sat hugging a sweater around me until the sun began to disappear and a chill to descend. Then I went inside to make turkey sandwiches.

Jonathan did not call that evening, and I didn’t call him. When he called on Saturday it was to say that he was going back to Cambridge early to get some work done and that he wanted me to think again about coming up soon to spend a weekend with him. “There’s no way, Jon,” I said, and we hung up with no plans to talk, to meet, no “I love you,” not even any salacious suggestions for the future. Jon, I remember thinking to myself, was not of this time and this place; he was something I would come back to when I came back to being the other Ellen.

It would not be until months later that I would learn, from both their sworn testimonies, that he had spent Thanksgiving night and most of Friday morning in bed at his father’s house with Jennifer. So predictable, all of it. So unsurprising, so somehow apt, along with all the other things that happened that winter.

T
he first part of my mother’s illness had been a kind of childhood for me, the kind of childhood I might have had, had I been a different sort of girl, my mother a different sort of woman, and both our needs to woo my father less overwhelming. Holiday cheer, Thanksgiving side dishes, stories of childhood, girlhood, and marriage—all of these were handed down to me, now, with a certain air of urgency, as though it was a school assignment on which she’d fallen behind, this chance to reclaim the daughter she might have had, the one who, like Brian, would have been happiest sitting at her feet, laughing up at her own laughter.

But once she began to use the wheelchair our relationship was reversed, she the child, I the mother. Perhaps it was why she had resisted it so strongly. It was difficult for her to get around the house alone; the doorways were narrow, the rugs a beautiful impediment in shades of crimson and deep blue. But although I moved the furniture closer to the walls, I did not even ask if I could roll up the old Orientals. What she needed now was for the
things around her to be as lovely and familiar as possible. So much else was shifting and becoming ugly.

One day she decided we should go downtown on foot—“and on wheels,” she added—to pick out three more books at Duane’s. She put on a blue pea jacket that had always fitted her perfectly, sleek and elegant, and it concealed how thin and concave her chest was now, like the breast of a baby bird.

“What about a little makeup?” I said. “Just in case we run into someone.”

“Somehow I don’t think your father envisioned you having a career as a cosmetologist.”

“And why not? I could wind up in the
Tribune
that way.” My mother liked to say that every engagement announcement in the local paper was of a cosmetologist engaged to a man “associated with” a construction company. It drove my father crazy when she read them aloud, but crazier still when she read about the weddings, all the detailed descriptions of someone’s point d’esprit dropped waist, bishop’s sleeves, and cloudburst tulle headpiece.

“Oh, Ellie, you’ve been in the
Tribune
more than anyone except Ed Best and the mayor. Go look in my scrapbook upstairs. Girls’ State, the Spelling Bee, the Essay Contest, your graduation speech. You’re always in the
Tribune”

“It sounds like you’re keeping a running count.”

“You bet I am. And why shouldn’t I? Now go ahead and put a little makeup on me, but don’t get carried away.”

It was more difficult than I’d imagined. When I had smoothed on foundation, penciled in eyeliner, and brushed on mascara and blush, my mother looked a little like the kind of pictures I’d drawn of her when I was five, all round red cheeks and eyelashes like spiky black spiders. I had not gotten the effect I wanted, which was the impossible illusion that Kate Gulden was just as she always had been.

“It’s very difficult to do this on someone else’s face,” I said.

My mother leaned on the chest of drawers in the hallway and
peered in the mirror. “You’ve never worked on a redhead before,” she said. “That’s your problem.” She took a small sponge from the bag of cosmetics I was holding and scrubbed her face for a moment.

“Much better,” I said.

“Your career as a cosmetologist is over before it began,” my mother replied.

“As a cosmetologist, I’m a great writer.”

“You are a great writer,” said my mother, my fan club, my burden, as I buttoned her pea jacket and pulled on her beret.

With her bony face and pallor, she looked like an aging fashion model. She’d always been a pretty woman, my mother. Unlike so many other women, whose wedding photographs are more like pictures of their daughters than of themselves, she had kept her looks and her bright eyes.

I put on my down jacket and brought the chair backward down the front steps—
clunk, clunk, clunk
—in a technique I’d learned from watching mothers in the city with their strollers. My mother came down the steps slowly and carefully and sat down.

“I feel stupid in this thing, but I want to go out,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been a hermit. You too. You haven’t been out since your brothers left after Thanksgiving.”

We came down the street slowly because I was afraid of losing control of the chair on the slope and because I could tell, watching her head swivel from side to side, that she was looking around carefully, sight-seeing in her own neighborhood. “Look, Ellie, the Jacksons already have a tree up in their living room,” she said, and “Claire Belknap had better put something over those roses or she’ll lose them if there’s an early frost,” and “Why did the Bests paint their house that color? It was so nice when it was white.” It was as though she was seeing for all it was worth that day, all of it, every single insignificant trivial marvelous detail of it, every one.

At the bottom of the hill we turned onto Main Street just below the green. The flowers that usually ringed the flagpole were
gone now. The twelve big evergreens stood alone, the sweeping angel wings of their branches so beautiful.

“They never quite know what to do with that planting area after they take the asters out but before the trees are decorated,” my mother said. “Our first year here, there was this new woman, I think she was the provost’s wife, who donated dozens of poinsettias. Public Works put them all in, no questions asked. Not one person seemed to know that poinsettias are tropical plants and have to be kept indoors in a cold climate. Next morning it was the saddest sight you’ve ever seen, like a battlefield. All those plants had just keeled over. Your father came home thinking this was a wonderful story and I told him I had known when they were putting them in exactly what would happen. But we were new here and I didn’t know who to tell, or if I should tell, and so in the end I just kept quiet. Your father thought that made the story even more wonderful, that he had a wife so clever that she’d known how ridiculous the whole idea was. So he told it around at every Christmas party, although in the telling I kept getting cannier and cannier and meaner and meaner. Your father got a very good story out of it. But the provost’s wife was chilly to me for years.”

It was cold that day, but we stopped at least a dozen times so my mother could talk to people she knew. It was difficult to maneuver the wheelchair up and down the curbs and over the uneven pavements, and sometimes she became impatient. When she wanted to go into the Langhorne Shoe Shoppe, I struggled with the chair at the door, holding it open with my hip, trying to steer and force the big rubber wheels over the ridged floor mat in the doorway.

“This is exactly like dealing with that damn double stroller I bought when Brian was born,” she said. “I’d be heaving and hoing it through the door and you’d be halfway out into the street with me screaming after you.”

She used the armrests to help herself stand up and walked inside, leaving me to back out and set the brake on the street. I watched her through the display window, glimpsed her profile
between a pair of tassel loafers and some hiking boots. We had the same sharp noses. She was talking to one of the salespeople, and then she sat down. I stood on tiptoe and could see her slipping off her flats, and then someone emerged from the back room with a tower of boxes.

“Ellen?” a voice said behind me.

It was Mrs. Forburg, my English teacher. “Couldn’t you call me Brenda now?” she said.

“To be honest, I’d rather not. I think you should remain Mrs. Forburg forever. It’s a kind of honorific.”

She laughed. In her parka and gray pants she was as small as a ten-year-old, but she had the dried-apple skin and white-gray hair of a grandmother. “Is your mother inside?” she said.

I nodded. “She appears to be buying shoes. I didn’t know she needed shoes.”

“Does any woman really need shoes?” Mrs. Forburg said, looking down at her own gray walking oxfords. “Buying shoes always gives me a lift, like buying new stationery or a new purse. It makes you feel as if there’s something to look forward to.” She reached across the chair and touched the back of my hand. “Did you get my note?” she said.

“I did, I did, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to call you. Jeff and Brian were home for Thanksgiving, my mother and I are doing a lot of things together. The house. You know.”

“I didn’t mean it as a command performance. I just wanted you to know that I’d always be happy to feed you some spaghetti and listen to your troubles.”

There was the high rattle of the bells over the shoe store door, and my mother came out with a bag. “Beautiful new loafers,” she said as she sat down heavily in the chair. She looked up. “Mrs. Forburg!” she said.

“It’s good to see you, Mrs. Gulden.” My mother slipped the shoe box out of her bag and showed off the loafers, gleaming cordovan leather with tassels. She showed me how the black flats she was wearing were slightly down-at-heel. It was quite a performance,
but I could tell by the look in her eyes that Mrs. Forburg recognized it for what it was. It was the same look she had once given me when she handed me back a B paper savaging Charlotte Brontë, a paper made up almost entirely of my father’s opinions. “Original thought next time, Ellen,” she had said quietly that day, but it had sounded less like a rebuke because of the sympathy in her gray eyes, and a certain tone to her voice, the same tone she had now. She saw things, Mrs. Forburg.

She had always been my favorite teacher—Jeff and Brian’s, too, although neither of them had been as mesmerized by English literature as I was. Mrs. Forburg had deftly steered me through fiction and verse, gently edited my poetry, which was clever but not at all deeply felt, and made me keep a journal my senior year, although I think she sensed that she was getting the expurgated version of my life. “She is still the best English teacher I have ever had,” I said one night when I was home during my last year at college. “Then you are taking the wrong courses at Harvard,” my father had said dryly. I had been shocked into silence, but my mother had not.

“You’re just jealous, Gen,” she said evenly.

“Jealous? What do you mean?”