One True Thing (3 page)

I wonder if my father still has that picture there, on the piano, or whether it’s put away now, my mother smiling dustily, happily, into the dark of a drawer.

Next to it was another picture of my mother hanging on to my father’s arm. Wearing a cap and gown, I am hanging on to his other one. In that picture, my father is squinting slightly in the sunlight, and smiling. Jonathan took that picture. I have it on my dresser today, the most tangible remaining evidence of the Gulden family triangle.

My mother would be saddened by my apartment now, by the grimy white cotton couch and the inexpertly placed standing lamps. My apartment is the home of someone who is not a homemaker, someone who listens to the messages on the answering machine and then runs out again.

But she would not criticize me, as other mothers might. Instead she would buy me things, a cheap but pretty print she would mat herself, a throw of some kind. And as she arranged the throw or hung the picture she would say, smiling, “We’re so different, aren’t we, Ellie?” But she would never realize, as she said it, as she’d said it so many times before, that if you are different from
a person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.

My mother loved the hardware store, Phelps’s Hardware, and the salesmen there loved her. My father would always tease her: “Once again, she has paid the Phelps’s mortgage for the month and alone of all her sex has cornered the market on tung oil and steel wool!” My father always teased her. I was the one he talked to.

It was a charmed day in the charmed life we lived, my brothers and I, that day we went to the Tastee Freeze. I see that so clearly now. We lolled on the grass in the backyard afterward, cooked and ate some hamburgers, watched television. And then the next morning our father came downstairs, his khakis wrinkled, his blue shirt rolled back from his wrists, and told us all to sit down. He leaned back against the kitchen counter as I sat opposite him, sipping a glass of orange juice. My two brothers sat in the ladderback chairs at either end of the kitchen table. My mother had caned the seats. I don’t include those details by way of description, but in tribute. Things like this were my mother’s whole life. Of this I was vaguely contemptuous at the time.

When I was a little girl, she would sometimes sing me to sleep, although I always preferred my father, because he made up nonsense songs: “Lullaby, and good night, fettuccine Alfredo. Lullaby and good night, rigatoni Bolognese.” But my mother sang a boring little tune that was nothing but the words “safe and sound” over and over again. It put me right to sleep. My father always jazzed me up; my mother always calmed me down. They did the same to one another. Sometimes I think they just practiced on me.

I remember. It’s what I do for a living now, how I earn my keep, make my mark, through memories. I remember well. I can remember the orange juice on the table, and Brian, his torso jack-knifed between his knees, throwing a ball into a mitt over and over. The glass was half full; the table was oak, a big round moon of a top on a sturdy pedestal with predatory claws at its base. My mother had rescued it from a junk shop, stripped and refinished it,
waxed it with butcher wax until the muscles in her arms stood out like pale polished wood themselves.

“Cancer,” my father said as we sat ringed around it. There had been certain vague signs, certain symptoms. She had felt sick for a long time. “Your mother procrastinated,” he said, as though she was somehow to blame. “First she thought she had the flu. Then she imagined she was expecting. She didn’t want to make a fuss. You know how she is.”

The three of us looked down, all three embarrassed by the thought of our forty-six-year-old mother imagining she was pregnant. I was twenty-four. Jeff was twenty. Bri was eighteen. You looked at the numbers and you could tell we were planned children. We knew how she was.

My brothers were leaving for college that weekend. Their stereos were packed up, their suitcases standing open in the center of their rooms. And I had come back from the city for four days for a visit. I hadn’t even unpacked, just pulled clothes out of a duffel bag on the chest at the foot of my bed, not putting anything away, leaving the drawers of my dresser empty and clean, lined with flowered paper. Four days seemed enough for the occasion. More, and I would miss a book party and lunch with the editor of an important magazine. A week in the hospital, she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female—a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

Funny, how the imagined pregnancy jarred us at first more than the cancer, which we could scarcely comprehend. And how I suddenly realized why my mother had seemed so joyous the month before, in town to take me to lunch on my birthday, her pale translucent redhead’s skin flushed with pink. A forty-six-year-old woman aching to ask her sophisticated city-daughter where you could buy attractive maternity clothes. It makes me hurt now, just to think of what was going on in her head, before she finally discovered what was going on in her body.

“Chemotherapy,” my father said. There were verbs in his sentences but I did not hear them. “Liver. Ovaries. Oncologist.” I picked up my glass and walked out of the room.

“I’m still speaking, Ellen,” my father called after me.

“I can’t listen anymore,” I said, and I went out and sat on the front porch, on a wicker rocker with a cushion that, of course, had been made by my mother.

T
he things they sold at antique stores in my New York neighborhood were like things my mother had bought years ago—square old chests made of russet-colored cherry wood, patchwork quilts, wicker settees painted white. We lived on the nicest block in Langhorne but in the smallest house, a white clapboard farmhouse left over from the days when the surrounding hills were farms and the college was the estate of Samuel Langhorne, who had made his money in machine parts on the cusp of the industrial revolution.

Our house looked like a pony that has somehow nosed its way in among the horses, a painted miniature to their murals. But it was as beautiful as any inside because of my mother’s hard work. She had married a man who would never be rich, but she said she had not minded, because she knew he had a vocation instead. Lapsed Catholic that she was—or perhaps not so lapsed, in her heart—she had said it exactly that way, as though my father had become a priest, or at least taken vows, when his seven sacraments were only “Introduction to Victorian Poetry,” “The Romantics
and the Seasons of Love,” and other such offerings in the college catalogue.

Even on its nicest block, where most of the residents were too rich to work at the college, Langhorne had the odd feel of a town that is about something other than itself. Washington is like that, and Orlando, Florida, which has Disney World. And Boston. When I went to college in Boston—or Cambridge, as all Harvard students learn to say—I was convinced it was because I wanted a larger pond, a more cosmopolitan setting, blessed release from the bell jar of Langhorne, where everyone knew my name and my class rank, which was number one. And of course I wanted to sleep with Jonathan whenever I could and he was at Harvard, so I went there, too. I was always afraid that if I wasn’t in bed with Jonathan, keeping his cold feet warm, it was a cinch someone else would be.

But the truth is that Cambridge and Langhorne are in many ways very much alike, and not just because so many of my father’s spiritual colleagues are in Cambridge, roaming the streets with the
Times
tucked under their arms, in cuffed chinos with the knees bagged out. All college towns are essentially the same. There is something strange about the roots of people settled in a place where everyone else passes through.

I sat on the porch and looked across at the Buckley house as I had done so many times before—Tudor, stucco, rhododendrons and a perennial garden fading fast, losing its pinks and whites and blues, nursery colors. They had gotten balloon shades in the living room since the last time I was home.

There were no shades on the windows in my apartment in New York. When my mother had visited the month before, it had been not only to have lunch but also to figure out which items of furniture, stored in the cellar, would fit nicely in my two small rooms. “You have no window coverings!” she had said. “The whole world is watching you undress!”

“Oh, Mama, big deal,” I said. “Everyone in this neighborhood is gay.” I was damned if I’d tell her that the first time I pulled off
my shirt in my bedroom I’d looked across at the amber lamps lighting other people’s lives and clutched the cotton to my chest. Or that since then I’d dressed and undressed in my windowless bathroom, like a virgin on her honeymoon.

But I was damned, too, if I’d put up balloon shades, or lace curtains, or those narrow venetian blinds. One of the things I loved about having my own place was the spill of white light across the scratched wooden floors each morning, the wave of mellow light that snuck slowly across the futon on my bedroom floor in late afternoon and early evening, the moon rising outside my window.

The light and sun and stars belonged to me in that place where anyone, looking in the window, would find a stranger, an unknown. Not Ellen Gulden. Not little Ellen, who, when she was eight, was dressed for Halloween as a princess in blue net and star-shaped sequins. Not Ellen Gulden, who met Jonathan Beltzer in A.P. English and became inseparable from him when she was seventeen. Not Ellen, who graduated from Harvard with a magna—
“Non sum summa est?”
said my father, who did not speak Latin and had only been a magna himself, but I got the message anyhow—and then went to work for some big magazine in New York as an editorial assistant and sometime reporter.

As I sat on the porch of my mother’s house I was in a place where almost everybody knew, not only my name, but all those things. A shadow crossed my lap, and I knew it was my father.

“My train is at six-ten,” I said, my voice trembling.

“Ellen,” said my father, “your mother needs you. She is coming home Tuesday and she won’t be well for long. The disease is apparently advanced. Soon she may not be able to bathe herself. In a month or two she will not be able to cook or clean.”

“We can hire a nurse. That’s what the Beldens did when Mrs. Belden’s mother was sick.” But even as I said it I knew how preposterous it sounded. In the Gulden household, the ethos was do it yourself, for everything from Christmas gifts to floor sanding.

“Your mother didn’t hire a nurse when you had your tonsils out. She didn’t hire a nurse when you had chicken pox or when you broke your arm. She wouldn’t want strangers in her home. She won’t even have a cleaning woman.”

“Papa, I have an apartment. I have a job. I have a life.”

The shadow lifted. The screen door slammed. A delivery truck slid by with a rumble as it changed gears and so I did not hear my father’s muffled footsteps when he returned, when he came across the porch in his deck shoes. My linen jacket sailed into my lap, and my straw hat, and then my purse came down hard on the wooden decking, my wallet bouncing loose. My duffel bag landed at my feet.

“You”—he said, throwing a book atop the pile—“have”—and then my running shoes—“a Harvard education”—then my loafers—“but”—and the glass of orange juice rolled unbroken atop the mess, soaking the shoes—“you have no heart.”

My father says this all the time, usually about writers. Pound’s problem, he says, is not that he was an anti-Semite but that he had no heart. Fitzgerald’s work is fatuous and second-rate because he had no heart. And now I was part of this motley crew, the geniuses and the almost-rans, all those smart people who were irredeemably flawed because they lacked something many people said George Gulden had never had at all. Something I’d spent my whole life trying to win from him.

My possessions lay strewn around me, the bright detritus of another life, and I stared at them and at the glow of the juice glass, its curving surface shining iridescent silver in the late-afternoon sun.

There were ghosts everywhere on the pavement and beneath the trees. Kate Gulden pulled Brian in the red wagon up the hill as Jeff and I dragged the quilt and the picnic basket behind. Kate Gulden tacked a sign that said
CONGRATULATIONS
across the porch posts, so that I covered my face when the principal brought me back from the state capitol after I won the essay contest. She planted bulbs around the porch lattices, painted the shutters Williamsburg
blue, heaved groceries out of the back of the car, lived a domestic life double time.

I pictured my mother marooned in the living room, some cheery woman in a white uniform making her tuna sandwiches and folding her underthings, the house silent and a little dusty. But there was no story to go with that picture. When I’d written a false paragraph in a story my friend Jules would say, “This one just doesn’t parse.”

Kate Gulden and a hired nurse did not parse.

All my life I had known one thing for sure about myself, and that was that my life would never be her life. I had moved as far and as fast as I could; now I was back at my beginning. All my life my father had convinced me, almost by osmosis, rarely with praise, that I was gifted, special, that there were things other people could not do that I could do effortlessly. But I had never imagined this was one of them.

I packed up the pile of my jumbled belongings and carried it inside, the empty orange-juice glass balanced atop it all. But when I got to the door the glass rolled sideways and fell, shattering into innumerable shards, bright in the sun.

I think that the people I know now believe I went home to take care of my mother because I loved her. And sometimes I believe that was in my heart without my knowing it. But the truth is that I felt I had no choice. I felt I had to be what my father wanted me to be, even if it was something so unlike the other Ellen he’d cultivated and tutored for all those years, even if it meant that I had to go from his brightest student to his demi-wife. I had to prove that, unlike Pound and Fitzgerald, I had a heart.