entirely. Which, most days, when I wasn’t letting her betrayal define me, I managed to do quite well.
So no, I didn’t realize that she lived within miles of me and that conceivably, she’d never really gone that far to begin with.
“Well, maybe you should call her. I don’t know. It’s up to you,” Jack said to me tonight, as the taxi pulls to an abrupt stop at a yellow light.
Of course it’s up to me!
I almost snapped, then realize that it wasn’t him that I’m mad at. It was just my initial inclination, to mount an overwhelming defense of my actions because I’d spent so many years doing so with Henry, who never understood, who, in his own words,
couldn’t understand,
how I could let my mother slip away after decades of not knowing her.
“You’re crazy not to track her down,” he’d say, over pasta or when I’d finally soothed Katie to bed or when I was stretching after a power walk, ambushing me with the subject when I was least prepared.
“How would I be crazy not to?” I’d always retort back, once I’d caught my breath at the surprise attack. “Here is a woman who has wanted no part of my life, who decided that I’d be better off without a mother than with her
as
my mother, and gave me no say in the matter, and now, she wants back in? I think I’d be crazy
to
give her that chance.”
“She’s your mother!” Henry would say, his voice boiling with judgment. “Isn’t that worth something?”
I’d seethe silently and exit the room, fleeing both my husband who didn’t know what was best for me and the skeletons that he’d insist on digging back up.
So tonight, with Jack, it’s hard not to rage at his innocuous reply, even though I know that he doesn’t fault me for my choice. Hell, I’m not even sure how much my choice registers with him. He was so tied to his mother that, I think in the cab,
he just doesn’t get it,
would never get the fury and the devastation that comes from abandonment. But he didn’t get it in an entirely different way from Henry. Henry got it—he got how she scarred me—and yet he still chose to tirelessly push me to make different choices. Jack just breezed right by it because the pain was so beyond his scope of recognition, and now, in the cab, I am relieved,
grateful
for this, because it absolves me of the anguish of rehashing a dead situation.
Before I can think any further, we’re at Cipriani, and I step past the pigeon, and Jack takes my hand, and we pretend that the tiny fissures that were microscopically exposed in the cab—my mother, his ambition—aren’t part of a larger problem between two people who fail to understand the intricacies of the other.
With nothing else to do, we step forward, onward, and away we go.
A WAITER GREETS US with drinks (rum and Coke!) and pushes open the grand, gilded doors. The cavernous space, which could easily hold a thousand guests, had been overhauled to resemble a botanical garden. Hundreds upon hundreds of rose petals had been strung from each chandelier, so the room not only smells like the first rites of spring but it also looks like perhaps Dali’s interpretation of an arboretum: blossoming stems cascading down from the ceiling, jutting into themselves and over us, illuminated by twinkling white lights that glisten like polka-dotting stars through the branches. Towering statues composed entirely of fruits of the season—pine-apples, peaches, pears, and oranges—adorn each cocktail table, and the splatter of color, coupled with the crisp burnt-orange tablecloths, bounces off the stark rose petals, and truly, I feel as if I’ve stepped into the Garden of Eden.
“Who do you know here?” Jack shouts in my ear, trying to make conversation above the din of the swing band at the back of the room and the clatter of hundreds of other voices, all equally elevated in an attempt to be heard.
“No one, really,” I shout back.
We both stare blankly at the buzzing hive of partygoers until, miraculously, I
So no, I didn’t realize that she lived within miles of me and that conceivably, she’d never really gone that far to begin with.
“Well, maybe you should call her. I don’t know. It’s up to you,” Jack said to me tonight, as the taxi pulls to an abrupt stop at a yellow light.
Of course it’s up to me!
I almost snapped, then realize that it wasn’t him that I’m mad at. It was just my initial inclination, to mount an overwhelming defense of my actions because I’d spent so many years doing so with Henry, who never understood, who, in his own words,
couldn’t understand,
how I could let my mother slip away after decades of not knowing her.
“You’re crazy not to track her down,” he’d say, over pasta or when I’d finally soothed Katie to bed or when I was stretching after a power walk, ambushing me with the subject when I was least prepared.
“How would I be crazy not to?” I’d always retort back, once I’d caught my breath at the surprise attack. “Here is a woman who has wanted no part of my life, who decided that I’d be better off without a mother than with her
as
my mother, and gave me no say in the matter, and now, she wants back in? I think I’d be crazy
to
give her that chance.”
“She’s your mother!” Henry would say, his voice boiling with judgment. “Isn’t that worth something?”
I’d seethe silently and exit the room, fleeing both my husband who didn’t know what was best for me and the skeletons that he’d insist on digging back up.
So tonight, with Jack, it’s hard not to rage at his innocuous reply, even though I know that he doesn’t fault me for my choice. Hell, I’m not even sure how much my choice registers with him. He was so tied to his mother that, I think in the cab,
he just doesn’t get it,
would never get the fury and the devastation that comes from abandonment. But he didn’t get it in an entirely different way from Henry. Henry got it—he got how she scarred me—and yet he still chose to tirelessly push me to make different choices. Jack just breezed right by it because the pain was so beyond his scope of recognition, and now, in the cab, I am relieved,
grateful
for this, because it absolves me of the anguish of rehashing a dead situation.
Before I can think any further, we’re at Cipriani, and I step past the pigeon, and Jack takes my hand, and we pretend that the tiny fissures that were microscopically exposed in the cab—my mother, his ambition—aren’t part of a larger problem between two people who fail to understand the intricacies of the other.
With nothing else to do, we step forward, onward, and away we go.
A WAITER GREETS US with drinks (rum and Coke!) and pushes open the grand, gilded doors. The cavernous space, which could easily hold a thousand guests, had been overhauled to resemble a botanical garden. Hundreds upon hundreds of rose petals had been strung from each chandelier, so the room not only smells like the first rites of spring but it also looks like perhaps Dali’s interpretation of an arboretum: blossoming stems cascading down from the ceiling, jutting into themselves and over us, illuminated by twinkling white lights that glisten like polka-dotting stars through the branches. Towering statues composed entirely of fruits of the season—pine-apples, peaches, pears, and oranges—adorn each cocktail table, and the splatter of color, coupled with the crisp burnt-orange tablecloths, bounces off the stark rose petals, and truly, I feel as if I’ve stepped into the Garden of Eden.
“Who do you know here?” Jack shouts in my ear, trying to make conversation above the din of the swing band at the back of the room and the clatter of hundreds of other voices, all equally elevated in an attempt to be heard.
“No one, really,” I shout back.
We both stare blankly at the buzzing hive of partygoers until, miraculously, I
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