The Moment of Everything (3 page)

My apartment was not a mirror image of Hugo’s two-bedroom palace on the other side of the wall, but rather a one-bedroom add-on, an afterthought with a small breakfast bar that separated the suggestion of a kitchen from a living room that was just big enough for a love seat, a papasan chair, a forty-seven-inch flat-screen, and five Ikea bookcases, stuffed with the books that chronicled my life.
The Great Gatsby
that suffered a Dr Pepper explosion. A
Pride and Prejudice
that never recovered from a nosedive into a puddle. And the only book my mother ever gave me: a B. Dalton edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, the one with the Little Mermaid on the cover, its pages brown and crisp and fragile with wear.

I loved that book and its terrible stories. For an entire summer, I read and reread the horrors that happened within. While my friends plunged into childhood fascinations with
Dracula
,
Frankenstein
, and
Sweet Valley High
, I delved into the severed lives and unhappy endings of those fairy tales. In the pages, I found the story of a mermaid who sacrificed her voice for legs and slept on the doorstep of the prince she loved. While each step felt like knives slicing into her feet, she danced for him whenever he asked. In the end, he married someone else and the Little Mermaid drowned herself in the sea. My mother loved the singing crab and the dancing fish in the movie. But it was the original mermaid I loved.

I’d always wanted to be the girl whose mother bought her lots of books. I imagined her patting me on the head and writing a blank check so I could order from the
Weekly Reader
at school. I imagined my walls covered floor to ceiling in brimming bookshelves with a shelf ladder on wheels that I could climb up and propel myself back and forth, stopping where I liked to inhabit whatever magical world seemed perfect for that day. Our house did have lots of books, untouched Harvard Classics from
Twice-Told Tales
to
The Sun Also Rises
that stood like centurions in my mother’s living room. The coffee table books—reverent photographs of Southern farmlands or South Carolina football—were always polished and clean of fingerprints. And in her kitchen were cookbooks as neat as the day Mama excavated them from the
Southern Living
shipping box. No
White Fang
or
Treasure Island
or
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Those, I found on my own at the library.

When I was eight, my mother was horrified when I told her I wanted to be a librarian. I could see how she pictured me, a matronly stack-dweller with comfortable shoes and hair in a bun looking over her glasses at people with a dour expression full of contempt for past-due fines. Nothing I said could convince her that her vision was not my future. The librarians I knew were superheroes of data. Like the Old World explorers, they navigated uncharted oceans of information, drawing maps to get anyone anywhere. And they were the keepers of things other people forgot, archiving the incidents of life and piecing them together.

In high school, I’d started volunteering in our town’s library, a small yellow house close to the square. My parents’ house had endless quiet rooms where an only child could hide away with a book, but the quiet of the library quivered with life, those searching for what they needed and wanted. And I could help them find it. I pushed carts of books up and down the aisles, the wheels squeaking under the weight of words. I pounded due date stamps on lined cards I slipped into books’ paper pockets. And after my shift was over, I stayed and crouched on a Kik-Step stool in the distant corner of the Reference section and read books my mother would never have let me bring in the house—Judy Blume’s
Forever…
,
Song of Solomon
, and lots and lots of historical romances with wind-swept hair and overflowing bodices on the covers.

As an undergrad at the University of South Carolina, I learned from the librarians how to understand what people wanted and how to navigate their way to what they needed. All the skills I needed to land at Internet start-ups, like building content management systems and the interfaces that drove them, I learned in a library. I understood that every pile of information has a pattern, a thread that runs through each nugget. Give it a tug and everything falls into place. “The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,” T. S. Eliot wrote in
Four Quartets
. “For the pattern is new in every moment.”

I still paid my grunt dues shelving books at the college library, the 8 p.m. to midnight shift, bowing to the dictates of the Library of Congress’s numbering system. It was meditative, scanning the spines along the shelves and finding just the right spot for a book. And each night, as I pushed my cart of books down the rows, returning what had been borrowed to their home, I’d come across a pair of lovers in one form of embrace or another. Sometimes it was simply leaning into each other against a wall while reading or catching a nap. And other times, from the other side of the shelves I could hear a couple in the throes of passion that only people without their own rooms could conjure. At night, the stacks were like the forest in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, with mischief and passion hanging in the shadows.

I set Hugo’s
Chatterley
down on the breakfast bar and opened it to the title page. At the top, someone had written a date—
April, 1961
. And then my eye traveled down the rest of the page, resting on what wasn’t supposed to be there. The entire title page was a patchwork of handwriting.

I turned on the lamp above the bar and looked more closely. It looked like a man’s handwriting, a mixture of script and print, utilitarian but with an elongated elegance. The
t
’s were crossed with bold strokes and the
i
dotted with a short upward dash, like the flame on a candle.

And under that was a second bit of writing in a different hand, the letters full and looped together, flowing and feminine, and I thought of summer green grass and swirling skirts.

I picked up the book, holding it tight to keep it together, but my grip was too much and the pages exploded all over the counter. As I scooped them into a pile, I thought about how much I loved Hugo. I loved how he thought I could take a book like this with me to the meeting tomorrow. He reminded me of my great-aunt Trudy, who always carried half a grapefruit in her purse and never understood why you didn’t want to share it.

I munched on the asparagus and then settled into the papasan chair I kept by the window, cracking open the spine of the unblemished
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Dizzy had given me. I was ready. This was going to be good. I was going to will it into being good. I turned to the title page, the crisp, unwritten-on title page, but my eyes drifted back to the pile of pages on my breakfast bar.

I turned back to the book in my hand. Chapter 1, page 1. I forced myself to concentrate. I was going to finish this book tonight, and tomorrow at this book club, socks would be blown clean off and into the dryer. At page two, I felt an uncontrollable urge for a Diet Coke and some Pirate’s Booty.

A few minutes later, crunching down on a piece of cheese-powdered puffed rice, I found myself gazing again at the pieces of Hugo’s book. Nearly every page was tattooed with notes in the margins, written in the same two hands as the scrawls on the title page. I angled the book toward the lamplight. At the beginning of chapter one, I found this:

I sat there—Pirate’s Booty halfway to my lips—wondering what the hell was going on. I picked up another random page from the pile. Page 156.

I looked down at the paper that was now scattered all over my kitchen. Of all the questions that buzzed in the hive of my brain, this is the one I heard the loudest. What the hell had happened between “thank you for writing” and “to make you essential to me”?

I shoved the loose pages aside, trying to find a note on a later page. 389, nothing. 335, nothing. Even in the high 200s, there wasn’t any correspondence. But then, at last, I turned to page 249.

I felt like I’d arrived home from a trip to find I’d picked up someone else’s suitcase at baggage claim. I scanned the sheets in front of me. Words seemed to expand and contract in Henry’s and Catherine’s writing, words I’d seen all day long in the romances I’d been reading at the Dragonfly.
Embrace
,
desire
,
longing
. They were words from books, not real words that real people used, not anymore. They were meant for parchment and quills and pots of ink, to be sealed off with wax and hand delivered by men riding desperately through the night. Yet there they were, looping characters written in ballpoint in the margins of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
.

I gathered the explosion of pages toward me, tenderly returning them to where they belonged. Whoever Henry and Catherine were, they were in my care. I don’t remember how long it took for me to go through and reorder all those pages. I only remember the sounds of Hugo’s party seeping in through the closed window, and how I tried to ignore them as if they were the sounds of lovers in the next room.

Thank God for the UPS man. If it weren’t for the doorbell, I’d still be asleep. When it woke me up, I found myself halfway sliding off my sofa with a loose page drool-glued to the side of my face. I scrambled to the door, signed John Lennon’s name on the pad the UPS guy handed me, and held the door as he wheeled the box inside. Then I looked at the clock. The SVWEABC meeting started in an hour. Dizzy would be here any minute to pick me up. I dove into the shower and then ran to my closet. I could either go for the Cisco marketeer look in an outfit a saleswoman at Nordstrom picked out for me, or I could go for the T-shirt and jeans look of a Googler. I chose the latter, pulling on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that said
Schrödinger’s cat is dead
on the front and
Schrödinger’s cat is not dead
on the back. I was sure Dizzy would be in his usual cargo shorts and T-shirt, too. We are geeks. Best everybody know that up front.

Just as I heard Dizzy’s biodiesel convertible pull up outside, my cell phone rang. Mama.

“Did you get the package I sent you?” she asked. “I just got a text from UPS that it was delivered. What do you think?”

There was no point opening the box now. I knew what it was. Another piece of furniture. There was never a problem in the world my mother didn’t think could be solved by a Tiffany lamp. Before I moved to California, I didn’t have a place of my own for her to redecorate. But she’d had no problem driving more than thirty miles to my college apartment, charming one of my roommates into letting her in, and replacing my T-shirts and torn jeans with linen skirts and Ann Taylor sweater sets anytime she wanted. Now that I was three thousand miles away, she could only send stuff, and furniture was her stuff of choice. Bulky, cumbersome, pain-in-the-ass-to-get-rid-of furniture. In my working days, I’d speed-dialed the Salvation Army to haul away marble-topped kitchen carts, leather wing chairs, and baroque console tables that Marie Antoinette would have considered a bit over-the-top. Lately, I’d turned to Craigslist and managed to pay my Internet bill for several months thanks to Mama’s largesse.

“I can’t talk right now,” I said. “I’m on my way to a meeting.”

“You can’t be on your way to a meeting. You’re unemployed.”

In the world I grew up in, only people of a suspicious nature were asked to leave a job. When I told my parents about my layoff, they insisted I return home and live out my unemployment shame under their careful watch. If I were only to come home, marry, and have children, then the Lord would provide. There was a time, I suppose, that I thought the same would be true of ArGoNet. If I were only to do everything I was asked, ArGoNet would give me a wealthy and secure future. But no matter how much I worked or how good I was, it didn’t matter in the end. It came down to numbers, and the numbers were smaller when they came from India. The sea judges not whom it swallows. Savior or sinner, it’s all the same to the tide.

“Mama, I can’t explain right now, but I have to go. It’s important.”

“More important than your family? Okay, go to your meeting. And your father and I might die right here on the road to Hilton Head, but what do you care about that?”

My parents were married a week after they graduated from college. My father, a track star. My mother, a runner-up for Miss South Carolina. The pictures of their early life together are full of smiles and the ease of two people who would have their connect-the-dot lives paid for by the people who brought them up. They did not ask questions. They didn’t even know there were questions to ask. I knew exactly how their Saturday had gone so far. Daddy, as he’d done since before I was born, would have gone to meet his fraternity brothers for breakfast before returning home to Mama, who would already be dressed in a sherbet-colored golf outfit, complete with ankle socks and matching sun visor. Their golf bags would be leaning against the banister in the foyer, and she would be sitting on the curving oak staircase, hands clasped around her stubble-free knees, waiting for him. When I was a kid, they would golf closer to home, getting a babysitter for Friday and Saturday afternoons and evenings at the club. But as soon as I hit my teens and was able to stay on my own, my parents, newly untethered, discovered the world of golf resorts. These places were my parents’ Six Flags, a land of primary-colored evening wear and perfume that smells like fresh-cut grass. I’m not sure Mama even liked golf. But Daddy loved it and that was what mattered to her.

“Okay, Mama, I’m going to open it right now.”

With a kitchen knife, I sliced open the top of the box and pulled out a mission-style oak end table, a surprisingly understated choice for a woman with stuffed mallards on her kitchen wall.

“Have you opened the card?” she asked. “Open the card while I’m on the phone.”

“I don’t see a card.”

“It’s in the drawer. Why don’t you ever look inside of things?”

Outside, Dizzy tapped on his horn a couple of times while I opened the drawer to find a piece of my mother’s stationery adorned with tiny lilies, her favorite flower. “For new beginnings,” she had written on the envelope.

My mother was a beautiful woman who tried to make everything around her as beautiful as she was. But to me, there was nowhere that she succeeded more than her handwriting. Her letters looked as if they’d practiced walking with unabridged dictionaries balanced on their heads until their posture was perfect. The
o
’s were never too fat and the
l
’s were never too skinny. It was the handwriting of a woman who had never doubted where she belonged and woke up each day knowing what it held in store.

My heart jolted when I opened the card to see a check for $10,000. I stared down at the four beautiful zeroes all attached to one another at the top as if they were loops in lace. My mother was finally helping me in a way that was actually helpful.

“Mama, I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, we decided to give you your inheritance early.”

Now I was a bit stunned. Those zeroes suddenly looked very tiny. My parents were loaded. This was, for all practical purposes, a disinheritance.

“Well, it’s not all you’re getting,” she replied to my silence. “Just a bit to cover your move back home.”

And there it was.

“I’m happy here,” I said, hearing Dizzy honk his horn again. I grabbed my bag and ran out the door with Mama still in my ear.

“You don’t know what happiness is. You’re unemployed and unmarried. You gave this California thing a try and it didn’t work out, which I seem to recall telling you would happen before you went to all the bother of moving out there. It’s time, Margaret Victoria. Time to come home.”

As I slid onto the bench seat of Dizzy’s car, I thought about my parents’ house. A big colonial revival near the downtown square, built by my great-great-great-grandfather after the War of Northern Aggression with money he siphoned from the carpetbaggers. I always felt pushed out to the corners of that house, which was too full of my parents’ deliberate joy with each other to leave room for me. As I pictured it, I could smell my mother’s lilac soap. She’d wait until just an hour before my father’s arrival at home to bathe, washing away the scent of the day spent out of his presence. Her longing for him frightened me. Our home was not enough for her. I was not enough for her. If I had ever lost my father, I would have been an orphan.

“Do you know what your uncle Jamie said to me the other day?” Mama went on. “He asked me if you were one of those funny kind of girls. Then he tells me that it’s okay if you are because he accepts your ‘alternative lifestyle.’ He says this to me right by the Vidalia onions at the Winn-Dixie. I cannot have a gay child, Margaret Victoria. That’s all just fine about Dizzy. His mama has four more boys. But not me. It’s just you, and if you’re gay…Well, that’s just too much to ask of me.”

I looked over at Dizzy and remembered telling Mama he was gay. To her credit, she never said a bad thing about him or treated him any differently, in that she still expected him to kowtow to her every desire in exactly the same way she did with everyone else. But every time she was around him, I could see the effort in her eyes as she reconsidered everything she said or did, as if instead of gay, he was from a foreign country. It wasn’t the matter that Dizzy was gay that bothered her. It was the inconvenience of it.

“It’s because we let you read too much isn’t it?” she asked. “I never should have let you quit the tennis team. If you’d gotten more sun you wouldn’t be like this.”

“Mama, I’m not gay.”

Dizzy spewed his mocha all over his steering wheel.

“Then come home and get married like a decent woman,” Mama said. “Bill Cumberland just got divorced.”

“He’s as old as Daddy.”

“He’s single.”

“I have a life here.”

“Do you have a husband? Do you have a family?”

Again, I answered her with silence. Marriage had always seemed like some distant event to me, like that extra ten pounds people always say they’re going to lose.

“Margaret Victoria, please explain to me what the point of all this is. You’ve been out there for ten years.
Ten years.
Now, you have gotten neither rich yourself nor married someone who is. I saw on
Oprah
the other day that there’re so many single men in Silicon Valley that they call San Jose ‘Man Jose.’ Apparently you can’t swing a dead cat without knocking over a dozen single men. With those kinds of numbers, what’s wrong with you, Margaret Victoria?”

I could tell her about my last blind date, a couple of weeks ago, who canceled twice because of work then took me skydiving because he’d read a study online that doing something physically exhilarating on a date activated pheromones that led to attraction. I’m sure he was very interesting, but I was too busy throwing up from all the exhilaration to pay attention to what he was saying.

“The odds are good, Mama. But the goods are odd.”

“Then what is the point of staying out there?”

I looked at Dizzy, hands on top of the steering wheel, thumbs tapping at a song in his head. I wanted to tell her that I came out here to be with my friend, that Dizzy and his family became my family when I realized I really had none of my own. I came here to prove something to myself, and that I was still trying to figure out exactly what that was.

“Thank you for the table,” I said. “But I can’t accept it, and I can’t accept the money.”

“You’re going to starve to spite me? They’re hiring secretaries at the new Mercedes plant in town. Men like secretaries. You could live here and drive to the plant every day.”

“I’m not keeping the check, and I’m not keeping the table.”

“You have to keep the table. It belonged to your grandmother.”

I looked at the shipping invoice taped to my mother’s envelope. “It’s a Pottery Barn floor sample.”

“Don’t be smart.”

As I tore up the check, I felt anything but smart.

The SVWEABC blog announced the June meeting would be held at Avi Narayan’s house in Woodside and asked members to inform the hostess of any dietary restrictions due to allergies, religion, weight-loss plan, or politics. (The post’s comments included grumblings about the non-UFW grapes at the last meeting.) The blog also included entries for highlights from a biography of D. H. Lawrence, links to books of critical analysis on Amazon, and the PDF file of a paper one club member’s daughter wrote on Lady Chatterley for her Sex and the Social Order class at Smith. A clip art drawing of a finger with a string wrapped around it pointed to a reminder for all members to “support your local bookstore” and purchase the Penguin Classics edition of the book from Apollo Books & Music with the club’s discount.

“Sometimes I think we put more effort into the blog and the nibbles than we do reading the book,” Avi said, her British accent whispering over her
r
’s as she escorted Dizzy and me into her living room.

I had first guessed Avi to be in her mid-forties, but now I noticed the loose skin at the neck and puffiness around the eyes that made me add a few years to that number. Regardless, she was what we would describe back home as a “well-preserved woman.” Next to her red sundress, her skin was the color of toasted sugar. She had her thick black hair tied in a leopard-print scarf that would have looked like a discarded candy wrapper on my head. I’d bet Avi had never fallen asleep drooling on her sofa in her entire life. She probably emerged from the ocean each day in a seashell while cherubs adorned her hair with flowers. She was as close as I was ever going to get to Oprah.

“Yep, it’s a very effective use of clip art,” I said, to which Dizzy gave me a look that said he was sure, if I’d tried, I could’ve come up with an even lamer line, like, “The wallpaper is nice” or “I like cheese.”

“Well, you two stay right here,” Avi said, “and I’ll fetch you both a cup of tea.”

“You read the book, right?” Dizzy asked, after she stepped away. “Please tell me you stayed up all night and wrote down all kinds of brilliance that will blow the panties right off this crowd.”

The truth was that I’d just read over the SparkNotes before I fell asleep in the wee hours of the morning. I’d stayed up most of the night reading, but not the novel.

And on the opposite page,

And then, at last, on the following page, I’d sighed with relief when I saw Catherine’s handwriting.