"Good in Bed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weiner Jennifer)

TWO

I woke up on Saturday morning to the sound of the telephone. Three rings, th en silence. A ten-second pause, then three more rings, followed by more silence. My mother was not a fan of answering machines, so if she either knew or believed that I was home, she’d just keep calling until I picked up. Resistance was futile.

“This is so obnoxious,” I said, in lieu of “hello.”

“This would be your mom,” said my mother.

“I’m shocked. Could you call me back later? Please? It’s very early. I’m very tired.”

“Oh, quit whining,” she said briskly. “You’re just hung over. Pick me up in an hour. We’ll go to the cooking demonstration at Reading Terminal.”

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.” Knowing, even as I said it, that I could protest and complain and come up with seventeen different excuses, and, come noon, I’d still be in the Reading Terminal, cringing as my mother offered a high-volume play-by-play critique of the hapless chef’s menu selection and cooking skills.

“Drink some water. Take some aspirin,” she said. “I’ll see you in an hour.”

“Ma, please…”

“I’m assuming you read Bruce’s article,” she said. My mother is not big on elaborate transitions.

“Yeah,” I said, knowing, without having to ask, that she had, too. My sister Lucy, a charter subscriber to Moxie and eager reader of any and all things related to femininity, still had her copy delivered to our house. After last night’s door-pounding debacle, I could only assume that she’d pointed it out to my mother… or that Bruce had. The very thought of that conversation – “I’m just calling to let you know that I had an article published this month and I think Cannie’s pretty upset by it” – made me want to hide under the bed. If I could even fit. I didn’t want to walk around in a world where Moxie was on the newsstands, in mailboxes. I felt scalded by shame, like I was wearing a gigantic crimson C., like everyone who saw me would know that I was the girl from “Good in Bed,” and that I was fat and that I’d dumped some guy who’d tried to understand and love me.

“Well, I know you’re upset”

“I’m not upset,” I snapped. “I’m fine.”

“Oh,” she said. This, obviously, was not the response she was expecting. “I thought it was kind of crummy of him.”

“He’s a crummy guy,” I said.

“He wasn’t a crummy guy. That’s why it was so surprising.” I slumped against my pillows. My head hurt. “Are we going to debate his crumminess now?”

“Maybe later,” said my mother. “I’ll see you soon.”

There are two kinds of houses in the neighborhood where I grew up – the ones where the parents stayed married, and the ones where they didn’t.

Given only a cursory glance, both kinds of houses look the same – big, rambling, four- and five-bedroom colonials set well back from the sidewalk-less streets, each on an acre of land. Most are painted conservative colors, with contrasting shutters and trim – a slate-gray house with blue shutters, for example, or a pale beige house with a red door. Most have long driveways, done in gravel, and many have in-ground pools out back.

But look closer – or, better yet, stay a while – and you’ll start to see the difference.

The divorce houses are the ones where the Chem-Lawn truck doesn’t stop anymore, the ones the plowing guy drives past on the mornings after winter storms. Watch, and you’ll see either a procession of sullen-faced teenagers, or sometimes even the lady of the house, emerge to do the raking, mowing, shoveling, trimming, themselves. They’re the houses where Mom’s Camry or Accord or minivan doesn’t get replaced every year, but just keeps getting older and older, and where the second car, if there is one, is more likely some fourth-hand piece of automotive detritus purchased from the Examiner’s classified ads than the time-honored stripped-down but brand-new Honda Civic or, if the kid’s really lucky, Dad’s cast-off midlife crisis sports car.

There’s no fancy landscaping, no big pool parties in the summer, no construction crews making a racket at seven A.M. adding on that new home office or master bedroom suite. The paint job lasts for four or five years instead of two or three, and is more than a little bit flaky by the time it gets redone.

But mostly, you could tell on Saturday mornings, when what my friends and I dubbed the Daddy Parade began. At about ten or eleven o’clock every other Saturday, the driveways up and down our street, and the neighboring streets, would fill with the cars of the men who used to live in these big four- and five-bedroom houses. One by one, they’d exit their cars, trudge up the walkways, ring the bells of the homes where they used to sleep, and collect their kids for the weekends. The days, my friends would tell me, would be full of every kind of extravagance – shopping excursions, trips to the mall, the zoo, the circus, lunch out, dinner out, a movie before and after. Anything to keep the time passing, to fill the dead minutes between children and parents who suddenly had very little to say to each other once they’d got done either mouthing pleasantries (in the cordial no-fault cases) or spitting vitriol (in the contested cases, where the parents paraded each other’s shortcomings and infidelities in front of a judge – and, by extension, in front of a gossipy public, and, eventually, their children as well).

My friends all knew the drill. My brother and sister and I did it a few times in the early days of my parents’ split, before my father announced that he wanted to be less like a father, more like an uncle, and that our weekend visits didn’t fit in with his vision. Saturday nights would be spent on a pullout bed in his condo across town – a small, dusty space full of too much expensive stereo equipment and top-of-the-line TVs, and either too many pictures of the children, or, eventually, none at all. At my dad’s place Lucy and I would huddle on the thin mattress of the pullout couch, feeling the metal frame poke us all night long, while Josh would sleep beside us in a sleeping bag on the floor. Meals would be taken in restaurants exclusively. Few of the newly single dads had the skills to cook, or the desire to learn. Most of them, it turned out, were just waiting for a replacement wife or girlfriend to come along, to stock the refrigerators and have dinner waiting every night.

And on Sunday morning, in time for church or Hebrew school, the parade would begin again, only in reverse: the cars pulling up and disgorging the kids, who’d hustle up the driveway trying not to run or look too relieved, and the fathers trying not to drive away too fast, trying to remember that this was supposed to be a pleasure, not a duty. For two years, three years, four years they’d come. Then they’d vanish – remarried, mostly, or moved away.

It wasn’t that bad, really – not third-world bad, not Appalachia bad. There was no physical pain, no real hunger. Even with the drop in the standard of living, the suburbs of Philadelphia were still a damn sight better than the way most people in the world – or the country – lived. Even if our cars were older and our vacations less lavish and our in-ground swimming pools less than pristine, we still had cars, and vacations, pools in the backyards, and roofs over our heads.

And the mothers and children learned how to lean on each other. Divorce taught us how to deal with stuff, whether it was reduced circumstances, or what to say when the Girl Scout leader asked what you’d like to bring to the Father/Daughter banquet. (“A father,” was the preferred answer.) My girlfriends and I learned to be flippant and tough, a posse of junior cynics, all before we hit sixteen.

I always wondered, though, what the fathers felt as they drove up the street they used to drive down every night, and whether they really saw their former houses, whether they noticed how things got frayed and flaky around the edges now that they were gone. I wondered it again as I pulled up to the house I’d grown up in. It was, I noticed, looking even more Joad-like than usual. Neither my mother nor the dread life partner, Tanya, was much into yard work, and so the lawn was littered with drifts of dead brown leaves. The gravel on the driveway was as thin as an old man’s hair combed across an age-spotted scalp, and as I parked I could make out the faint glitter of old metal from behind the little toolshed. We used to park our bikes in there. Tanya had “cleaned” it by dragging all the old bikes, from tricycles to discarded ten-speeds, out behind the shed, and leaving them there to rust. “Think of it as found art,” my mother had urged us when Josh complained that the bike pile made us look like trailer trash. I wonder if my father ever drove by, if he knew about my mother and her new situation, if he thought about us at all, or whether he was content to have his three children out there in the world, all grown up, and strangers.

My mother was waiting in the driveway. Like me, she’s tall, and heavy (a Larger Woman, I heard Bruce’s voice taunt in my head). But whereas I am an hourglass (an extremely full hourglass), my mother is shaped like an apple – a round midsection on toned and muscular legs. A former high-school standout in tennis, basketball, and field hockey, and the current star of the Switch Hitters (her inevitable lesbian softball team), Ann Goldblum Shapiro has retained both the carriage and the sensibilities of a onetime jock, a woman who believes there’s no problem that can’t be solved, and no situation that can’t be improved, by a good brisk walk or a few laps in the pool.

She wears her hair short and lets it stay gray and dresses in comfortable clothes in shades of gray and beige and pale pink. Her eyes are the same green as mine, but wider and less anxious, and she smiles a lot. She’s the kind of person who’s constantly being approached by strangers – for directions, for advice, for honest assessments of whether bathing suits made the would-be wearer’s butt look big in the communal dressing room at Loehmann’s.

Today, she was dressed for our outing in wide-legged pale pink sweatpants, a blue turtleneck sweater, one of her fourteen pairs of activity-specific sneakers, and a windbreaker accented with a small triangular, rainbow-colored pin. She wore no makeup – she never wore it – and her hair was in its usual air-dried spikes. She looked happy as she climbed into the car. For her, the free cooking demonstrations at Philadelphia ’s premiere downtown food market cum meeting place were better than standup comedy. They weren’t intended to be participatory, but nobody bothered to tell her that.

“Subtle,” I said, pointing at her pin.

“You like?” she asked, oblivious. “Tanya and I picked them up in New Hope last weekend.”

“Did you get me one?” I asked.

“No,” she said, refusing to take the bait. “We got you this.” She handed me a small rectangle wrapped in purple tissue paper. I unwrapped it at a red light, to find a magnet depicting a cartoon girl with squiggly curled hair and glasses. “I’m not gay, but my mother is,” it read. Perfect.

I fiddled with the radio and kept quiet during the half hour drive back to town. My mother sat quietly beside me, obviously waiting for me to bring up Bruce’s latest opus. On the way into the Terminal, in between the vegetable vendor and the fresh fish counter, I finally did.

“Good in bed,” I snorted. “Hah!”

My mother gave me a sideways glance. “So I take it he wasn’t?”

“I don’t want to be having this conversation with you,” I grumbled, as we worked our way past the bakeries and the Thai and Mexican food stalls and found seats in front of the demonstration kitchen. The chef – a semiregular I remembered from the Southern Favorites lesson three weeks before – blanched as my mother sat down.

She shrugged at me, and stared at the blackboard. This week it was American Classics with Five Easy Ingredients. The chef launched into his spiel. One of his assistants – a gangly, pimply kid from The Restaurant School – started hacking away at a head of cabbage. “He’s going to cut his finger off,” my mother predicted.

“Shh!” I said, as the front-row regulars – mostly senior citizens who took these sessions way too seriously – scowled at us.

“Well, he is,” said my mother. “He’s holding the knife all wrong. Now, getting back to Bruce…”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. The chef melted a gigantic glob of butter in a pan. Then he added bacon. My mother gasped as if she’d witnessed a beheading, and raised her hand.

“Is there a heart-healthy modification for this recipe?” she inquired. The chef sighed and started talking about olive oil. My mother returned her attention to me. “Forget Bruce,” she said. “You can do better.”

“Mother!”

“Shh!” hissed the front-row foodies. My mother shook her head. “I can’t believe this.”

“What?”

“Would you look at the size of that pan? That pan’s not big enough.” Sure enough, the chef-in-training was cramming way too much imperfectly chopped cabbage into a shallow frying pan. My mother raised her hand. I yanked it down.

“Just let it go.”

“How’s he going to learn anything if nobody tells him when he’s making a mistake?” she complained, squinting at the stage. “That’s right,” agreed the woman sitting next to her.

“And if he’s going to dredge the chicken in that flour,” my mother continued, “I really think he needs to season it first.”

“You ever try cayenne pepper?” asked an elderly man in the row ahead. “Not too much, you understand, but just a pinch gives it a really nice flavor.”

“Thyme’s nice, too,” said my mother.

“Okay, Julia Child.” I closed my eyes, slumping lower in my folding chair as the chef moved on to candied sweet potatoes and apple fritters, and my mother continued to quiz him about substitutions, modifications, techniques that she’d learned in her years as a homemaker, while offering running commentary to the bemusement of the people sitting near her and the fury of the entire front row.

Later, over cappuccinos and hot buttered pretzels from the Amish pretzel stand, she gave me the speech I was sure she’d been preparing since last night. “I know your feelings are hurt right now,” she began. “But there are a lot of guys out there.”

“Yeah, right,” I muttered, keeping my eyes on my cup.

“Women, too,” my mother continued helpfully.

“Ma, how many times do I have to tell you? I’m not a lesbian! I’m not interested.”

She shook her head in mock sadness. “I had such high hopes for you,” she fake-sighed, and pointed toward one of the fish stalls, where pike and carp were stacked on top of each other, open-mouthed and googly-eyed, their scales gleaming silver under the lights. “This is an object lesson,” she said.

“This is a fish stall,” I corrected.

“This is telling you that there are plenty of fish in the sea,” she said. She walked over and tapped one fingernail on the glass case. I followed her reluctantly. “You see that?” she said. “Think of each one of those fish as a single guy.”

I stared at the fish. The fish, stacked six high on the crushed ice, seemed to gape back. “They have better manners,” I observed. “Some of them are probably better conversationalists, too.”

“You want fish?” asked a short Asian woman in a floor-length rubber apron. She had a filleting knife in one hand. I thought, briefly, about asking to borrow it, and what it would feel like to gut Bruce. “Good fish,” she urged.

“No thanks,” I said. My mother led me back to the table.

“You shouldn’t be so upset,” she said. “That article will be lining birdcages by next month”

“What an uplifting thought to share with a journalist,” I said.

“Don’t be sarcastic,” she said.

“I don’t have any other way to be.” I sighed.

We sat down again. My mother picked up her coffee cup. “Is it because he got a job at a magazine?” she ventured.

I took a deep breath. “Maybe,” I acknowledged. And it was true, seeing Bruce’s star rise while mine just stayed in place would have hurt even if his first story hadn’t been about me.

“You’re doing fine,” said my mother. “Your day will come.”

“What if it doesn’t?” I demanded. “What if I never get another job, or another boyfriend”

My mother waved her hand dismissively, as if this was too silly to even consider.

“But what if I don’t?” I asked raggedly. “He’s got this column, he’s writing a novel”

“He says he’s writing a novel,” said my mother. “Doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“I’m never going to meet anyone else,” I said flatly.

My mother sighed. “You know, I think some of this is my fault,” she finally said.

That got my attention.

“When your father used to say things…”

This was definitely a turn I didn’t want the conversation to take. “Mom…”

“No, no, Cannie, let me finish.” She took a deep breath. “He was awful,” she said. “Mean and awful, and I let him get away with way too much, and I let it go on for too long.”

“Water under the bridge,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” said my mother. I had heard her say this before, of course, but it hurt every time, because every time it made me remember just what she was apologizing for, and how bad it had been. “I’m sorry because I know it’s what’s made you this way.”

I stood up, grabbing her cup and mine, our used napkins, the remains of the pretzels, and headed off to find a garbage can. She followed behind me. “Made me how?” I asked.

She thought about it. “Well, you’re not great with criticism.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You don’t seem very comfortable with how you look.”

“Show me a woman who is,” I shot back. “It’s just that not all of us get to enjoy having our insecurities exploited for millions of Moxie readers.”

“And I wish…” She looked ruefully toward the tables at the center of the market, where families were gathered, having sandwiches or coffee, passing sections of the Examiner back and forth. “I wish you believed in yourself more. Like with… romantic stuff.”

Yet another conversation I didn’t want to be having with my late-in-life-lesbian mother.

“You’ll find the right guy,” she said.

“I’ve been underwhelmed by the choices so far.”

“You stayed with Bruce too long”

“Ma, please!”

“He was a nice guy. But I knew you didn’t love him that way.”

“I thought you were out of the heterosexual advice-giving arena.”

“I’m making a special guest appearance on an as-needed basis,” she said cheerfully. Outside, by the car, she gave me a rough hug – a big step for her, I knew. My mother is a great cook, a sympathetic listener, and a good judge of character, but she’s never been big on touchy-feely stuff. “I love you,” she said, which was also out of character for her. But I wasn’t going to object. I needed all the love I could get.