thing” she means. All I said, over toast and eggs, was that I had some loose ends to tie up.
“Jane chooses her father.”
Mother lifts the stroller, without meaning to, and slams it on the pavement. Daisy screams to get out. “How can you say such a thing? Of an eight-year-old?”
The comfort of her help, of her company, gives way, and now I am helpless, a child myself, certain that the rough deal I’m facing is completely my fault. It’s familiar, terrible, this certainty.
I kneel. “I’m sorry,” I say to Daisy, but she bats me off, screaming for her Nama. I get up, defer, watch my mother gather her up, give her the Paddington rattle, shield her from me.
• • •
We pick up some playclothes and Portacrib sheets, then move on to women’s sport clothes. Mother insists on a pair of summer slacks and a skirt for me.
“You need things, for God’s sake,” she says. “Don’t tell me you don’t.”
Daisy is her phenomenally good-sport self until we get to the cash register. I leave Mother to pay, at her insistence, and head for the cafeteria to wait for her via the lavatory, where I change Daisy and fill a basin with cold water to dunk my head in.
“Wake up, asshole,” I whisper to my reflection. I’m haggard and fleshy, like a much older woman who has given up on something huge, living happily, for starters. Daisy starts into an empty stall, then backs out.
“Ick-y,” she says, smiling.
I remember that I shirked toilet repair before we left. This fact, on top of the others, fills me with grief. To have left two of my children in a house with a broken toilet . . . I imagine each of them cursing me, venting, Jane just screaming primally, Isaac doing his own sort of nonverbal damage to the doors and walls. Fist. Baseball bat.
I’m an hour away, but I may as well be in Siberia. What I’ve done, I just now realize, is to alter their lives, making their home unrecognizable, their parents fools. I’ve done the unutterable, predictable thing: exactly what my parents did to me.
• • •
Mother has found some way around the cafeteria line and to a table, probably with a graceful lie about a sick grandchild in the restroom, witness the stroller full of accoutrements for the child’s recuperative period. Mother’s tired beauty and her eloquence enable her to circumvent the most pedestrian of processes, which makes the fact that she’s married to a Marxist all the more perplexing.
“They’ve got some lovely-looking soup. Vegetable, I think.Daisy loves soup. I hope it’s all right with you that I ordered us some.”
“Of course,” I answer, Dad’s formality creeping in. “But isn’t it a little warm for soup?”
“Oh,” Mother says, flustered. “Now that you mention it.”
“No,” I say, softening. “Whatever. She does like it.”
“Good. Because here it comes.”
Mother has actually gotten a server to leave her station behind the steaming chrome architecture of the kitchen to bring us three bowls of soup and two sodas.
“Here we are,” the woman says. She’s about Mother’s age, but thick in the middle and lavish in her gestures toward our comfort, setting us regular places with napkins and silver and asking, “How’s the baby feeling?”
I should pinch Daisy’s thigh to get a proper noise out of her, but too late: she smiles cunningly, and the woman takes this as a compliment.
“See that? Rose’ll make it all better.” She brings fat hands together. She’s got a rich landscape of a voice, one to get lost in. “She’s a beauty.”
“Thank you, Rose,” Mother says.
Rose. It’s the kind of name none of us has. We’re so locked into our histories, my father, husband, and son in the Old Testament, my mother, Marion Leigh Wadsworth, the girls, and I on Plymouth Rock. From what I understand, neither I nor my children could ever be considered even remotely Jewish, although at Hastings I was the resident Jew.
“You ladies enjoy,” Rose
“Jane chooses her father.”
Mother lifts the stroller, without meaning to, and slams it on the pavement. Daisy screams to get out. “How can you say such a thing? Of an eight-year-old?”
The comfort of her help, of her company, gives way, and now I am helpless, a child myself, certain that the rough deal I’m facing is completely my fault. It’s familiar, terrible, this certainty.
I kneel. “I’m sorry,” I say to Daisy, but she bats me off, screaming for her Nama. I get up, defer, watch my mother gather her up, give her the Paddington rattle, shield her from me.
• • •
We pick up some playclothes and Portacrib sheets, then move on to women’s sport clothes. Mother insists on a pair of summer slacks and a skirt for me.
“You need things, for God’s sake,” she says. “Don’t tell me you don’t.”
Daisy is her phenomenally good-sport self until we get to the cash register. I leave Mother to pay, at her insistence, and head for the cafeteria to wait for her via the lavatory, where I change Daisy and fill a basin with cold water to dunk my head in.
“Wake up, asshole,” I whisper to my reflection. I’m haggard and fleshy, like a much older woman who has given up on something huge, living happily, for starters. Daisy starts into an empty stall, then backs out.
“Ick-y,” she says, smiling.
I remember that I shirked toilet repair before we left. This fact, on top of the others, fills me with grief. To have left two of my children in a house with a broken toilet . . . I imagine each of them cursing me, venting, Jane just screaming primally, Isaac doing his own sort of nonverbal damage to the doors and walls. Fist. Baseball bat.
I’m an hour away, but I may as well be in Siberia. What I’ve done, I just now realize, is to alter their lives, making their home unrecognizable, their parents fools. I’ve done the unutterable, predictable thing: exactly what my parents did to me.
• • •
Mother has found some way around the cafeteria line and to a table, probably with a graceful lie about a sick grandchild in the restroom, witness the stroller full of accoutrements for the child’s recuperative period. Mother’s tired beauty and her eloquence enable her to circumvent the most pedestrian of processes, which makes the fact that she’s married to a Marxist all the more perplexing.
“They’ve got some lovely-looking soup. Vegetable, I think.Daisy loves soup. I hope it’s all right with you that I ordered us some.”
“Of course,” I answer, Dad’s formality creeping in. “But isn’t it a little warm for soup?”
“Oh,” Mother says, flustered. “Now that you mention it.”
“No,” I say, softening. “Whatever. She does like it.”
“Good. Because here it comes.”
Mother has actually gotten a server to leave her station behind the steaming chrome architecture of the kitchen to bring us three bowls of soup and two sodas.
“Here we are,” the woman says. She’s about Mother’s age, but thick in the middle and lavish in her gestures toward our comfort, setting us regular places with napkins and silver and asking, “How’s the baby feeling?”
I should pinch Daisy’s thigh to get a proper noise out of her, but too late: she smiles cunningly, and the woman takes this as a compliment.
“See that? Rose’ll make it all better.” She brings fat hands together. She’s got a rich landscape of a voice, one to get lost in. “She’s a beauty.”
“Thank you, Rose,” Mother says.
Rose. It’s the kind of name none of us has. We’re so locked into our histories, my father, husband, and son in the Old Testament, my mother, Marion Leigh Wadsworth, the girls, and I on Plymouth Rock. From what I understand, neither I nor my children could ever be considered even remotely Jewish, although at Hastings I was the resident Jew.
“You ladies enjoy,” Rose
Similar Books
