One night, doing dishes and talking on the phone with my mother, I mentioned that I had a dentist appointment, and she offered to pick me up and take me. I accepted her help, guiltily, sensing that my father and Laurene would not approve of her ferrying me places. I would be under her influence when I was supposed to be under theirs. I might have biked to my appointments, as they said I should, but I was too lazy for the forty-five minutes across town to the dentist, the doctor, the therapist, especially if my mother would give me a ride. Was it these sorts of tasks that had made my mother unable to care for me? Now, burdening her, I might push her past a limit.
She insisted it wasn’t a problem.
“I want to help,” she said. “But don’t be late. I don’t like waiting in front of that house for you to come out.”
On Saturday, all of us were in the kitchen, the windows looking out to Santa Rita, where she would park and expect me to run out. I hadn’t told my father or Laurene she was coming.
This morning, in the kitchen, we coalesced into a family.
“This old man, he plays one, he plays knick-knack on my thumb,” my father sang to Reed, who was sitting on his lap, slapping at his knees. My father took Reed’s hands in his and twirled them around each other. Reed had recently grown another tooth. Why, Reed asked over and over, in response to whatever one of us said. Whywhywhy? He was elbows and knees, bright blond hair, red lips, a dimpled chin, and miniature biceps. I loved his laugh with his head thrown back, his spaghetti arms twisting out of grasp. He was three, but he still did not sleep through the night. He woke me up in the early morning, running into my room and tickling me awake under the armpits.
Laurene and I made bruschetta according to her recipe. “Good job, Lis,” she said, as I added the garlic and dripped the garlic and oil on the bread. I was filled, at that moment, with a sense of real family, the joy in the kitchen. We had reached an eminence.
My mother was probably already parked out front, waiting for me; I knew I was supposed to be outside ready to go. I wished I’d never made the plan with her, wished I could somehow get her to go away. I hoped she would wait patiently; maybe she would understand that nothing could be more important than this.
She leaned on the horn, a long honk like a foghorn. Wasn’t she worried about the neighbors? Wasn’t she ashamed? When she honked like this, I had to rush out of the house as fast as I could. Why did it seem these minutes of what felt like family closeness always came at the moments my mother was there to take me to an appointment?
By the time I got out to the car, she was fuming and spoke between her teeth.
“You promised,” she said.
“I know, but—”
“I don’t like waiting in front of that house like I’m your maid.”
Not only did she drive me places, but also I’d started to stay at her house, for one week every two weeks. It was the space in between that was perilous, the walk to her car, the four blocks, the few days of adjustment—as if my parents (who had similar values, diets, and mystical beliefs) were not only separate people but operated on contrasting principles. The houses were close but their atmospheres so starkly different it reminded me of something I’d read about the surface of the moon, how if you put your hand on the line where the light meets the shadow, one side will freeze and the other will burn.
Soon I reduced the transfers between houses, extending my stays from one week to two weeks, to a month, to two months.
“I’d like to stay at Mom’s house more,” I said to my father at the end of the summer before my sophomore year. “Maybe half the time.” Because my parents had never been married or divorced, there was no official custody arrangement. And now that we’d fulfilled his requirement of not seeing each other for six months, I figured I was allowed to decide where I went. He didn’t seem happy about it, but he didn’t say I couldn’t. He wouldn’t give me rides between the houses, though, and when I stayed with my mother, he’d give me the cold shoulder for several days around the transfer.
The first two days at my mother’s felt excessively warm, almost cloying, as she followed me around, tending to me, cooking with what I’d recently understood to be an excess of oil, and profligate butter. I felt superior. I knew things she didn’t know. I had aesthetic refinement she didn’t have, I thought. She touched my hair and came in to say goodnight to me, when I had already learned to do without her. I hated how needy she was, how vulnerable, wanting to be with me even when I said I was fine alone; I hated the fact I was related to her, that because of her I was unable to belong in the other house. It was messy, I noticed, her kind of love. With her affection, I felt how she wanted to please me, and I thought less of her for it.
I wanted to be someone else, to be prettier, blonde, tall, worthy—but she seemed to love me, to like me, as I was. I doubted her taste.
I hoped she would not notice how I judged her. I bit my tongue and spoke in a brittle, condescending voice, pitied her strangeness and her adoration of me.
Then we would get into a fight, and she would sob, saying that she was hurt and I treated her badly, and I would see her as human again, some defense would fall, my perspective would shift, and I’d feel close with her again. We couldn’t help repeating this pattern every time, even after we became aware of it.
“Steve doesn’t love me,” I told her. “I was born too early.” We were sitting outside on the side steps, under the wisteria vine, eating half a watermelon with spoons.
“He does love you,” she said. “He just doesn’t know it. You, you are what is important to him.”
Her words produced a great bloom inside me.
“He knows it,” she said, “he’s always known it, but he’s disconnected from himself. He doesn’t know his own heart, because he lost it.”
I wasn’t nothing; I was something. I thought of how he asked me about Tina: he doesn’t know what he has until it’s too late, and the pattern is overlapping. He uses me to find out about her, and later he will use someone else to find out about me, and on and on—the tragedy, for him, of no two points connecting.
“It’s better to do your own job poorly than to do someone else’s job well,” she said. It was from Hinduism. She also said, “Mama may have, papa may have, but God bless the child who’s got his own.” That wasn’t Hinduism; it was part of an old song.
There was a stack of papers on her desk, bankruptcy paperwork. I was hardly aware it was going on. I saw a man’s sweatshirt in the back of her car. “Just a friend’s,” she said, her dating life not part of our visits. I found out later she’d dated and broken up with a mathematician and was attracted to someone in her yoga class, a software engineer from the Bronx with a black belt in karate, but she wasn’t sure if he’d noticed her. On Thursday nights, the yoga students would go out for salad and pizza at Vicolo on University Avenue.
By the end of each visit with my mother, I felt some other part of me rise out of a shell—maybe my soul—the texture of it all around me again, some calm, warm authority. When she had errands to do that didn’t concern me—going to the art store, grocery shopping—I rode along in the car with her, just to be close.