Days of Awe: A Novel Read online

  The rollicking laughter of a studio audience rumbled in from the living room. “I love you, Isabel,” Josie said, “but that is sick, and you should never tell anyone else.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I need a confession from you now. A guarantee that you’ll never expose my shame.” As soon as I said the word “confession,” I cringed.

  There was a crumb on Josie’s upper lip. Her tongue darted out for it. She reached up and ponytailed her thick hair with her hand, then let it fall back down, loose. “Hmm,” she said, and looked at me, and her expression was so serious that I had to look away. “Okay. I had this boyfriend in high school. He, um…he dumped me, and then, a week later, he started dating someone else…this really pretty sophomore, Dawn Grogan. I was so hurt and just furious. Did I ever tell you about this?” I shook my head. “I went to his house one night and I asked if we could go for a drive and talk.”

  I sat across from Josie, still and mute. It seemed like she was revealing pieces of something, shards of glass distorting the light.

  “We drove for a while,” she went on, “but he was being such an ass, acting so smug and…decisive about our breakup. So before he even knew what I was doing, I drove over to their…to Dawn Grogan’s house. I pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine, and I opened the car door, and I just marched right up to the front door. I turned around for a second, before I rang the bell, and I saw him. Roger, that is. His name was Roger. I thought he would get out and try to stop me, but he was just sitting there in the car with his mouth hanging open.

  “Anyway, Dawn came to the door, and she looked at me like she didn’t know who I was, which pissed me off. And so I said, ‘Listen, you seem like a nice person, and I just want to tell you that when you and Roger started going out, he was still with me. He was cheating on me. He’ll probably deny it, but he was.’

  “And by that time, Roger was behind me, jogging up the path to Dawn’s door, and he was going, ‘No, no, Dawn, it’s not true! She’s lying!’ and I just looked at her and kind of smiled sadly and shrugged, like See? And then I said, ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater,’ like I was some kind of bitter divorcée instead of a seventeen-year-old kid.”

  She stopped and looked at me, her eyes wide, as if she had surprised herself with the story. “I just really wanted to hurt him. Both of them, actually.” She shook her head. “Well, I was in high school,” she added quickly, although of course she had already said that.

  I stared at her for a moment. I still couldn’t make out the outlines of what was true and what wasn’t; it was like driving into fog. “Good thing we grow up, huh?” I said, and she nodded. “What happened to Roger and Dawn?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Josie said, which seemed strange to me. But before I could pursue it, Hannah shuffled into the kitchen and slumped into a chair. Her hair was tangled and her face was flushed. “I was lonely in there, all by myself. What are you talking about?” she asked, and then before either of us could say anything, she sneezed six times. “I need a Kleenex and a Popsicle, please.”

  “Poor darling,” Josie said, and Hannah sidled over to her and laid her warm head on Josie’s shoulder.

  I got up from the table and rummaged through the freezer for a minute, and as the cold air swirled around my face, I thought about all the secrets Hannah would collect as she moved further away from Chris and me, as she moved away from us and into the world, and some of those secrets would be benign, but some would be the kind that slam doors inside a person. But for now she was right here, feverish and sweet and in need of tissues and a Popsicle.

  Josie and I would never mention her strange story again. Months later, after she was gone, I would put the pieces of it together with everything else I knew, and I would understand that she had told me something half true that day, true in spirit but not in fact—and, in the end, not true enough.

  “I saw something interesting on the computer,” my mother says to me on the phone on a Saturday morning. I’m sitting at the table, my hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, staring out the window at an epic battle between squirrels and sparrows at the bird feeder.

  Hannah has gone over to her friend Delaney’s house. Hannah has a slew of friends with names like that, Delaney and Cassidy and Reilly, and even a tiny, owlish girl named O’Malley: names, it seems, that their parents plucked arbitrarily from the Boston phone book. Over the past few months, a new kind of drama has crept into these friendships, whispered stories full of complicated betrayals. From what I can see, from what little she tells me, Hannah is usually brokering peace between warring factions, but who knows; maybe she’s right in the thick of it, lobbing grenades, causing her share of grief. You’re always going to err on the side of your own child.

  I’mgoingtoDelaney’sokay? she announced an hour ago, and before I could say, I love you, why are you so angry at me lately, you are my life, you own my heart, you are the sole reason I exist, and also close the door behind you, it slammed shut.

  “I said I saw something on the computer,” Helene says again. She’s growing accustomed to repeating herself, since so many of her friends have become hard of hearing.

  “Did you squish it?”

  She ignores me. “So I tried sending it to you on the e-mail, but I don’t think it worked. I’m going to read it to you.” She puts the phone down for a minute and, after some clattering, picks it back up. “Isabel, it says, ‘Your marriage may be over, but your life is not.’ ”

  “Mother, my marriage is not…” But I stop, suddenly worn out. It’s been two weeks since the dedication at the cemetery, two weeks since Chris and I slept together. Since then we’ve barely spoken. We’re cordial to each other when we drop off and pick up Hannah, polite and embarrassed and chilly as exes.

  “It says here: ‘You can recover.’ ”

  “Good,” I say. “I hate my sofa.”

  Helene sighs, then ignores me again. “I want you to come back to yourself,” she says. “Before you tell me to mind my own business, I want to say that I know how hard it’s been. So much loss.” Her voice catches, and I stare hard at the milky coffee in my cup, let the rising steam dampen my face. “I mean,” she continues, “my marriage is over, too! I’ll go with you.”

  I don’t remind her, Your marriage ended thirty years ago; I don’t say, This is the worst idea you’ve ever had, and that includes the time we went to Germany and you glared at everyone for an entire week and whispered to me whenever you saw someone with gray hair: Where do you think he was? What do you think she was up to? Instead, like always with my mother, I stanch the hemorrhaging doubt and agree to the thing she’s asking.

  ···

  A woman wearing a HI! MY NAME IS JILLIAN name tag stands up and says, “Hi! My name is Jillian!”

  I snort, and then I look around and realize that no one else thinks this is funny. My mother elbows me in the ribs, just for good measure.

  “Can we all pull our chairs into a circle?” she asks, squeezing the shoulder of the man sitting next to her. “Can we do that?” I have a feeling that Jillian is fresh out of her social work master’s program and that we’re her first support group. I imagine that she’s newly married and goes home every night with a paper bag full of fresh marjoram and turmeric and dill, and that she and her husband, a young patent attorney, cook elaborate dinners and then eat together at a candlelit table. Gosh, Tim, they all looked so sad!

  Jillian tucks her blond hair behind her ears and smiles at us so sweetly that I have the urge to raise my hand and say, I don’t know what a circle is. This is the kind of thing Chris never found funny.

  “All right,” she says, smoothing her hair again, a nervous tic, as we complete our first group task, and the clank and scrape of chairs subside. “First things first.” She looks around with pride: her circle! “Why don’t we all say our names and why we’re here.”

  Helene relaxes in her seat, her hands folded on her lap, her left hand gently supporting her right one, a slightly awkward position i
mperceptible to anyone who doesn’t know she’s had a stroke. “What are you thinking?” I whisper. My seventy-two-year-old mother is still my emotional barometer. If I know what she’s thinking, maybe I’ll know what I’m thinking.

  “Hush,” she says.

  The great big bald man two seats from Helene shoots his hand into the air. “I’m Harris!” he shouts, then turns tomato red and lowers his voice. “I’m here because my wife and I decided to end our marriage a few months ago. It was mutual, and we’re still great friends.” He laughs like he’s blowing out a candle. “Nah, I’m just kidding.” He looks around the room, assesses his audience, and licks his lips. “What I mean is,” he says, even more quietly, “we’re not great friends.” He shakes his head a little bit. “I actually kind of hate her.”

  Last night, when I told Hannah that I would be going to the Relationships in Transition support group, she got up from the table, looked me in the eye, and yelled, “Goddammit,” which is still one of the worst things she can think of to say. Then she stormed out of the kitchen and didn’t talk to me for the rest of the night, her half-finished spaghetti congealing in the bowl until I finally dumped it. I left her alone until bedtime. The house sucked up our sounds and felt huge. Finally, late, I went in to kiss her good night, and she reached up and pulled me toward her, her arms around my neck, her breath warm and a little vinegary. “Mommy,” she whispered, half asleep, her eyes closed. “I don’t want you to be sad.”

  “I’m not sad,” I said, then immediately, like an idiot, started crying. I swiped my face and hoped Hannah couldn’t tell. “You make me happy,” I whispered. “Usually!”

  She opened her eyes and looked at me, confused for a second, then laughed. The pinkish glow from her ballerina night-light illuminated her face. While the rest of her room has transitioned into a cave, remnants of its previous incarnation remain, like pottery shards from a lost city. “You make me happy sometimes,” she said.

  “That seems about right.”

  Now Hannah is over at Chris’s apartment, probably belly laughing with him at one of the disgusting reality shows they like to watch, shows about rodent infestations or revolting jobs people have involving sewage.

  And here, in the warm basement of the East Side Community Center, Jillian fixes her gaze on the pretty young woman next to my mother who looks like she would rather be yanking out her own toenails than sitting on a metal folding chair, poised to reveal her deepest pain to a roomful of strangers.

  The woman’s long brown hair is held back from her face by an arrangement of bobby pins. She glances around and realizes that it’s her turn, that there’s no escape.

  “Um?” she says, her palms open in front of her. I have a sudden vision of the kind of girl she was in fifth grade, an occupational hazard of mine. I imagine her hair in a tight braid down her back, clipped by those same bobby pins, her eyes wide and serious. The funny canvas shoes she wears that were popular last year. How hard she tries, the B minuses she gets on her spelling tests and math quizzes. Good improvement! Super effort! The small group of sweet, plain girls she hangs out with, steering clear of the clever, beautiful, mean ones. How in that way, she’s smarter than she seems.

  “I’m Lee Ann?” she continues. “My husband and I met in college, and we’ve been married for six years.” She’s wearing a gold band, and when she says the word “husband,” she touches it with her thumb. “One night he came home and told me that we’d gotten married too young and that he wasn’t in love with me anymore, and that he probably never had been?” Her voice rises and breaks on the last word, but she soldiers on. “Even though he was the one who proposed to me.” She sniffles.

  My mother is digging around in her purse while Lee Ann is talking, probably searching for a mint. “Mother,” I hiss. “Helene!” Helene looks sideways at me and hands Lee Ann a tissue.

  “So, last week he moved out,” Lee Ann says. “And that’s why I’m here.”

  “That sounds really painful, Lee Ann,” Jillian says. “Thank you for sharing.” She waits a few seconds, then turns to my mother. She reminds me of a doctor delivering bad news to a patient, dispensing a careful dose of sympathy, then moving on to the next case. “And you?” she says to Helene. “Can you tell us who you are and why you’re here?”

  “Oh!” Helene says, pretending to be surprised. She shrugs and smiles like the little old lady she is not. “I’m just here to support my daughter.”

  And then it’s my turn, and a river of garbage rolls through my veins, and I just say, “Pass.”

  “Relationships in transition,” as it happens, can mean a number of things. There’s the forty-year-old married woman who fell in love with her female yoga teacher; there’s the woman who lost sixty-five pounds whose husband no longer wants her. There’s the man whose wife died after a long battle with cancer; there’s the woman whose husband died after a short battle with cancer. There’s Barb, the steely-eyed middle-aged woman whose husband left her to pursue polyamory. “And right before I understood what he was telling me, I blurted, ‘Who is this bitch Polly?’ It may be my biggest regret that I actually asked him that!” There’s Neil, the man with the bushy beard who’s thinking about leaving his wife and kids and moving to Alaska “for a while” with a twenty-four-year-old woman named Rainy he met in a rock-climbing class at the Y. You can almost feel the air getting sucked out of the room when he tells his story. Barb, in particular, glares at him hard. Last there’s Cal, handsome and impeccably dressed and older, maybe in his late fifties, who tells us that he and his wife have been separated for a decade but only recently finalized their divorce. “And I find myself surprised,” he says carefully, “by the pain this has unleashed.”

  At the end of the hour, after the litany of mundane miseries, Jillian shoots laser beams of sincerity out of her blue eyeballs and slays us all. The room, electric before with nervousness and untold stories, is quiet now, hushed and embarrassed as if we’d all just met at a bar and gone home with one another, then woken up the next morning in a fog of regret. Chairs rake backward as everyone gets up.

  If Chris were here, he’d be leaking sympathy for the wretched of room B-117. He’d press his arm against mine, barely able to control his kindness. By the end of the night, he’d have exchanged e-mail addresses with Barb; Lee Ann would be nursing a hopeless, mournful crush on him; even bearded Neil would feel understood by Chris, would promise to do better. Then on the drive home, in the private warmth of our car, I would say something sharp and accidental. I would idly wonder if Neil’s wife drove him away, or I’d giggle about the way Jillian’s makeup stopped at her jawline—and Chris’s concern for a roomful of strangers would freeze before my eyes into a block of solid ice.

  And Josie? Josie would throw her arm around me and squeeze. You do not belong here, she would say, among the chubby and the damned.

  Helene and I wend our way to the dessert table in the back of the room, her hand on my shoulder like she’s the queen. My elegant mother has perfected the art of not looking like she needs help. The table is piled high with sublimated feelings—brownies and cupcakes; biscotti and doughnuts and éclairs; light, jam-filled pastries; fluffy, sugar-dusted shortbreads; macarons and macaroons; several varieties of carefully labeled gluten-free chocolate-chip cookies. Not coincidentally, after the broken dam of the last hour, I find that I am jonesing for sugar, almost shaking for it.

  Cal, the recently divorced one, stands next to us, pondering the selections intensely. After a minute, he places two small squares of cream-cheese-frosted carrot cake on his plate and smiles at us. His hair is thick and threaded with gray, and there’s an appraising, off-kilter sexiness about him, like he’s done a thing or two in his life, but he’ll just keep those stories to himself. “I believe if I choose carrot cake, I can justify having two pieces,” he says, making sure to look first at my mother, then at me.

  Helene, her hand still on my shoulder, adds a bit of pressure to her grip. “Definitely true,” she says. “You’re getti
ng your vegetables.”

  We introduce ourselves again, and if a person can die of awkwardness, I think I will, my internal organs about to seize up and grind to a halt as sexy, older Cal flirts with my mother. He even goes so far as to brush a crumb off of her sleeve. My mother, and this stud! Well, now I know why she wanted to come here.

  I grab three chocolate-chip cookies, a cupcake, and an éclair and pile them on my plate. Carrot cake, my ass. “Mom,” I say, trying to pull her attention toward me like the needy nine-year-old I suddenly am. “Mom. Mom. Mom. Doesn’t this look like the dessert table at my wedding?”

  But it’s Cal who turns to me and chuckles. “Catherine and I got married at the courthouse,” he says. “There was a row of inmates in orange prison jumpsuits sitting on a bench in front of the judge’s chambers. We used to say that they were her bridesmaids.” He smiles at me, and the weird, small, hibernating rodent of my soul opens one eye and looks around before falling back asleep.

  I shove a huge bite of éclair in my mouth and feel the overwhelming need to make a run for it. I’m about to guide my mother to the door when Jillian claps her hands three times, loudly. “Can everybody come on back to the circle for a minute? Just for one more short minute?”

  Cal looks at me. “She loves that circle,” he whispers. His smile is quick and generous, like he likes to appreciate things.

  “Loves it,” I say, smiling back and hoping there’s no chocolate on my face.

  The air in the room has shifted again, or maybe it’s my own lungs. As we head back to our chairs, Helene leans into me and whispers, “Is he the kind of person who would hide us in an attic?” which is her litmus test for every non-Jewish boyfriend I’ve ever had, which is all of them.

  My mother and I sit back down, and I hand her a chocolate-chip cookie, which, with her good hand, she accepts.

  ···

  Helene was four when she left Germany. In a shoebox in her closet, there’s a soft, faded black-and-white photograph of her on the boat, sandwiched between her parents, holding their hands, crying. The railing is behind them and the ocean beyond, gray and menacing in the photograph. I can only imagine how tightly my grandparents must have been gripping Helene’s little fingers.