Days of Awe Read online

  “Hi, Mom.” I hand over a bottle of wine and simultaneously remember that she’d asked me to bring a salad. “Oh, crap. I’m sorry. I forgot the—”

  “It’s all right, darling,” she says. “I made one, just in case.”

  I manage to feel infuriated by this. “Sorry,” I say again.

  I hear a sound from the living room and then music, and I look at my mother, who has her back to me now, stirring something on the stove that undoubtedly does not need stirring.

  “Helene,” I say, and she turns to me over her shoulder with her I’m just a slightly confused little old lady smile.

  Hannah is still huddled over her phone, muttering softly to it. “McKinley!” she whispers. “That is so not true!” My mother turns back to the stove and hums something tuneless. Hannah chuckles and tap-tap-taps away on her phone.

  “Come,” my mother says. She drops the wooden spoon into the sink and leads me through the kitchen and into the living room.

  And there, perched on the sofa, is handsome Cal, the divorcé from the support group. “Isabel.” He smiles, stands.

  Lately circumstances just seem to sneak up on me, situations I thought I understood but realize, too late, that I don’t.

  Cal is wearing a purple button-down shirt and jeans. I’m wearing the shirt I slept in last night. Josie got it for me from the Lake Michigan Bird Sanctuary; it says WISCONSIN IS FOR PLOVERS on the back. I silently resolve not to turn around. The CD Cal has put on is something Hawaiian and trendy; Chris gave it to my mother for her birthday last year. Perfect, I think.

  I’m ready to kill my mother, who is resting against the doorframe. I’ve noticed this about her recently, how wherever she goes, she finds a place to pause. Observing this vulnerability makes it slightly more difficult for me to sustain my murderous impulse, but not impossible.

  False pretenses. She has brought us here under false pretenses, and I’m not even sure what they are. “Oh, Mom,” I say, through clenched jaw. “How fun.”

  She smooths the fabric of her beige linen pants: slacks, she used to call them when I was younger, and maybe she still does. She gives her thick, caramel-colored hair a pat and lays a warm hand on my cheek. “It’s a little get-together,” she says.

  “Yes, it is.” The background music to our exchange is the festive, high pluck of a ukulele.

  “I told you to wear nice clothes.”

  “I thought you were kidding.”

  Cal looks at my mother, then at me, with an amused sort of scrutiny, like he’s got us all figured out. Smug, Josie would say. One of those men who thinks he can teach you all about yourself! I’m ready to make up an excuse and flee (by backing out of the room) when he walks toward me and takes my hand.

  “I’m really looking forward to this evening,” he says, with no obvious sarcasm, which seems suddenly like more than we deserve. His palm is warm and dry. Give me your paw, I used to say to Hannah when she was little and we were crossing a street. The phrase comes to me now, unbidden. There is something generous about all of this, suddenly, a feeling underneath logic, a shift. He holds on to my hand for another comforting second, then lets go.

  ···

  I never really knew my father. I mean, I knew him; I know him. His name is Jack. Hannah and I have dinner with him every couple of months. He lives in a condo in Herman, a sprawling exurb forty minutes west of here, with his wife, a retired dental hygienist named Sheila, pronounced “Shyla.”

  After the divorce, I spent every other weekend at his apartment, and on Tuesday nights we would go to Riddle’s for pizza together, until my sophomore year of high school, when I managed to convince both him and my mother that I had way too much homework to continue that tradition. As far back as I can remember, he was distant, sour as a pickle, and delicately nursing a festering grudge against my mother.

  Early on, just after they separated, he would try to plumb me for details. How’s she doing? Does she go out much? Does she go out with anyone in particular? Does she seem happy?

  I would take a giant bite of my mushroom-and-olive thin crust and roll my eyes. “I dunno, Dad,” I would mutter through my mouthful. “She doesn’t seem anything. She doesn’t tell me anything. Ugh.”

  And my father’s face would grow pinched and tight, his forehead furrowed and his mouth set in a peevish frown. “Well,” he said to me once, “I could never get past that wall of defensiveness and anger, and it looks like you’re turning out just like her.”

  I suppose it’s possible my mother mourned the divorce in private, when I wasn’t around, but I’m pretty sure she just breathed a huge sigh of relief and never looked back. There were empty spaces in our house after my dad moved out, but she filled them with work and friends and me—at least, I think so; I think I filled that space. She was the office manager at the Fraser Feldman Medical Group, a dermatology clinic downtown. She got home at six thirty, and she heated up Lean Cuisines for us or threw together meals involving far too much canned tuna and/or frozen corn. (I was in college before I realized that not all vegetables came from a bag with a huge green man on the label.) She played cards with her single lady friends every Saturday night: her gay divorcées, she called them cheerfully, without subtext. And every night she kissed me and told me I was the best thing that ever happened to her. She didn’t cry when my father moved out. She cried when I went off to college. She cried at my wedding. She cried the first time (the first five times, actually) she held Hannah.

  So, Cal: Cal squeezing my hand sweetly and smiling at my mother like he wants to know more about her? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I will allow it.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” my mother says, and heads back through the hallway.

  Hannah, still in the kitchen, lets out a high-pitched, bloodcurdling scream. Just after my heart stops but before I can race in to stanch the blood flow, she comes rushing out to me.

  “Mom mom mom mom! Can I run over to Chloe’s please please please just for five minutes she got a new puppy A PUPPY oh my God can I PLEASE?” Hannah’s hair is loose and long and uncombed, her eyes bright and pleading. She tilts her head at me. “Woof?”

  “No!” I say, because of course she can’t leave her grandmother’s house where dinner has been made and company invited and the table set for four. And then, “Yes.” Because Chloe lives just two blocks away, and Hannah is not asking if she can get a tattoo or toss back her first shot of whiskey, and am I really the kind of mother who says no to puppies? And also, if I’m being honest, because every no these days has the potential to become a dull and endless battle, the cause of another snarl of disdain, another reason for Hannah to turn away, and sometimes I just don’t want that; sometimes, right now, I just can’t. “Yes. Okay. Go on. Tell Grandma, and be back in a half hour.” I lay my hand on her head for a second. “Got it?”

  “Got it,” she says, three-quarters pleased, one-quarter mocking, which is a good ratio these days. “I got it!” She tucks her blond hair behind her ears and smiles at me with the face of her father and she’s gone.

  “I’m Cal,” Cal says to the space where Hannah was, holding out his hand as if to shake hers. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” but just like before, it’s gentle.

  “Hannah, say hello to the nice man.” I shrug at Cal. “I’m sorry.”

  “My son is thirty-five,” he says.

  “Kids, huh?” And why do I feel as if Cal has just seen me naked?

  “Well, now,” he says. “Shall we arrange our chairs in a circle?”

  It takes me a second. Then I clap my hands twice. “Tonight we’re going to try something different,” I say, my hands on my hips. “Tonight we’re going to arrange our chairs into a trapezoid!”

  Cal giggles—the real, live giggle of a human male, so rarely heard. It catches me completely off guard. “And then,” he says, “we’ll load up on cookies and grouse about how much we despise our former spouses!”

  “Spouse grousing!”

  “Mate hating?”

 
“How miserable we are!” I exclaim, caught up in it. And then we stop short, because I’ve cut a little too close to the bone, and we both know it.

  “How Miserable We Are,” Cal says, more quietly now, “is the title of a musical I’ve been working on.”

  A ping sounds deep down within me, a submarine’s sonar echoing somewhere unexplored. Is this a man who could make my mother happy? Is there such a creature? “I would see that,” I say.

  Helene brings out a plate and sets it on the low glass table in front of the couch. “Crudités,” she announces. “I like to say that word. Croo-dee-tay. But it’s really just raw vegetables!” She’s nervous, I realize, and I understand that it’s my filial duty to make this work: that this is the reason I’m here. Unfortunately I haven’t showered in two days, and I haven’t had a social exchange with anyone over the age of twelve in weeks.

  “We were going to name Hannah ‘Crudités,’ ” I say. “Helene talked us out of it.”

  “Ah, Hannah’s better,” Cal says. “There would have been so many other Crudités in her class.” He takes a polite bite of a baby carrot. What is it about him and carrots? “My son’s name is Peter.”

  Helene sits down next to Cal on the couch and turns to him. Is she batting her eyelashes?

  “Hmm,” I say, liking this man more and more. “Really? Peter Abbott?”

  He flashes me a smile, quick and conspiratorial. “No. It’s Michael.”

  My phone plays a few notes from The Twilight Zone, a text from Hannah: Can I stay at Chloe’s 4 dinner I know u will say no but the puppy is soooo cute! I luv u pleez can I? pleeez?

  I pass the phone to my mother. “Oh, let her,” she says.

  OK, I type. u can but u will need 2 make it up 2 Grandma. & b back by 8. don’t b L8 or u will meet a dire f8. If Hannah and I could just text, our relationship might be perfect. Although I can also entertain the possibility that she gets my messages and just rolls her eyes.

  During dinner, which is a surprisingly tasty pasta primavera (did she order in?), the talk turns to Relationships in Transition, as it was bound to do.

  “It’s been very civil,” Cal says. “My lawyer tells me that in the cleanest cases, both parties approach the divorce as if it’s a business transaction.” He wipes his mouth and then takes a sip of water. “And we have. Truly, we’ve treated each other with utmost respect, much as we did throughout our marriage. Catherine—my ex-wife—is doing very well, I think. She would be shocked to hear that I’m…struggling.” At that word, the crack that exposes the depth, he grows quiet, reddens a little, smiles.

  “A business transaction is easier when there’s not an eleven-year-old girl in the mix,” I say, more vehemently than I had intended.

  Cal nods. “I would imagine.”

  “Hannah’s with me half the week, with Chris the other half. But the days rotate, so sometimes he gets the weekends and sometimes I do.” There’s a pair of tongs in the salad bowl I don’t recognize, clear plastic with blue-tipped handles. When did my mother get new salad tongs? “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I have to go into her room, because I don’t know where she is.”

  “Divorce was harder back in the day,” Helene says. “But it was easier in some ways, too. The mother kept the kids, and the father sent the checks. I think maybe it was better for the children. Well, it was better for you. None of this confusion. Joint custody was unheard of.”

  “Unless you were talking about who got the marijuana,” I say.

  My mother gives me a look, and Cal laughs.

  “Mom, this is yummy,” I say, and she points to a spot on my T-shirt in response. “No,” I say, smiling. “That was there before.”

  My mother—perfectly put together as usual, well coiffed, her makeup, as always, applied carefully—gives me a look and changes the subject. “Isabel is a very talented photographer,” she says.

  “Indeed, I am! I like to take photographs of babies nestling in oversized teacups.” I spear a pea with my fork and hold it up. “Or sometimes I dress them in little green pea costumes and arrange them as if they’re peering out of gigantic pods.”

  “Sounds whimsical,” Cal says.

  “Oh, and then I also have a series I’m working on of cats wearing bonnets.” I don’t know why I act like this around my mother.

  “Isabel, stop it.” Helene sets her own fork down and straightens her necklace, a string of gigantic, shiny yellow beads. “I’m just sharing with Cal that you are…interesting.”

  I haven’t taken a photograph of anything except Hannah since college. But it’s true that I loved photography, way back when, loved the way shadow separated light, the intersection and overlap of angle and curve, inanimate and alive. And color! How a burst of azure would stand out unexpectedly in a background of emerald green. But whatever. The things we love when we’re twenty, we replace them with things that weigh more, that require care and feeding: the things we are obliged to love.

  “The talents your parents nurture in you,” I say, looking at Helene. “I think that if you’re lucky, they become hobbies, and if you’re unlucky, then you pursue them seriously as an adult.” Helene is staring at me as if I’ve just grown scales. “I mean, how many gymnasts do you know? Who’s a ballerina? Who ends up doing that?”

  Nobody says anything for a minute (and, really, what did I expect?). There are the sounds of chewing, swallowing. Josie managed to follow her passion without deluding herself, more or less. Then again, she and Mark didn’t have kids.

  Before she died, she was working on a project in which she reimagined famous works of art from a strange, possibly brilliant, but definitely confusing feminist perspective. There was a Rodin Barbie and a three-foot-tall Hello Kitty Mount Rushmore. Her theory was that when you see a work of art flipped on its side, you ask questions of it that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise. (“Like What the fuck?” Chris said later, gazing at those four pink-bowed, unknowable, yet still-vaguely-presidential kitties.) All but one of her artworks is gone from our house now, packed away in the basement. I keep the smallest one next to my bed, though. It’s a little painting of the Mona Lisa as a bearded man in an Italian soccer jersey, looking for all the world as if he’d just scored a goal, or possibly missed one.

  I get up and go into the kitchen to refill the pitcher, running the tap until the water is icy cold. I hold my wrists under the stream for a minute, let it chill my pulse.

  What if you make the right choices? What if you shelve those immature and solipsistic pursuits in favor of the grown-up occupations of family and career—happily, you do it without regret, in love, looking forward—and then those fall apart? You turn around and you’re staring at the moonscape that used to be your life.

  “Are you an avid bird-watcher, Isabel?” Cal asks as I walk back into the living room. I pour water into his glass, then my mother’s.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your shirt,” he says. The lines around his eyes deepen with his smile.

  “Oh!” I can’t tell where my comfort with Cal comes from, but I’m no longer embarrassed to be wearing old jeans and this ridiculous shirt. “Well, we had a robin’s nest in one of the bushes in front of our house last year,” I say, sitting back down. “When those birds first hatched, I would go outside and watch them all the time.”

  “So, then.” He nods. “You are.”

  “Uggch,” Helene says, that familiar sound. “Birds are horrible creatures. Filthy. Those beady, reptile eyes.” She shoos an imaginary sparrow away from her face with her good hand.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Cal says. “I’ve gone birding a time or two, years ago. It can be very serene.”

  “When the robins were just a day or two old, I would go out and chirp at them.” I make a little tweeting sound. “And they’d look up at me with their blind, bulbous faces, and they’d open their beaks like they thought I was their mama. But after another day or two, they figured it out, and then they ignored me.”

  “Like life,
” my mother says, “except the baby birds grow up and ignore their real mothers.” Helene reaches over and gives me a little squeeze.

  “Sorry, Mom, did you say something?”

  ···

  After dinner, my mother and I are alone in the kitchen while Cal is gathering plates in the dining room.

  “He’s nice,” I whisper to her. “I like him!”

  “I’m glad, honey. I do, too.” She rests her hip against the edge of the sink and adjusts her enormous necklace. “He could be a…diversion. A little confidence booster.”

  “Oh! Okay. I guess so.” The idea of my mother having a casual fling is, of course, disgusting to me, but I try to roll with it. “I guess I thought he might be more than that?”

  “Well, that’s not up to me.”

  “Oh, Mom, of course it is!” Maybe all these years of being single have made her feel powerless. Or maybe she’s stuck in the prefeminist world of dating, where the men make all the rules.

  “Huh.” She smiles. “That’s sweet, but…”

  We’re standing inches from each other. Up close, her skin is pink and powdery. The wrinkles around her eyes and mouth make her face look delicate and lacy, like a pastry. She smells good, too—melony. I’m suddenly filled with tenderness toward Helene. “He’d be lucky to have you, Mom.”

  Dishes and silverware clink together in the dining room. Helene looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Izzy,” she says, “honey,” then bites her lip.