I continued around the plaza, stopping for some lettuce, then went home for my car and drove to my mother’s. She came to the door in her weekend uniform: a chambray shirt tucked into khakis, lace-up moccasins on her feet. Behind her the house was shadowy, the living room with its north-facing windows, the narrow staircase up to the second floor. “Honey,” she said. “Hi, I didn’t expect you.”
I’d stopped at a bakery, and I held up the bag. “I brought muffins. But if you’ve already eaten …”
“No, not really.”
I knew she had: her reading glasses hung from a chain around her neck, a sure sign that she’d already finished breakfast and started on her weekend paperwork. It had been five years since I’d lived there, but after the accident I’d spent several nights, so I even knew what she’d had for breakfast: bran flakes with skim milk, and coffee made three-quarters decaf. In the pantry there’d been half a dozen identical boxes of cereal,
several bags of pasta, a stack of canned tuna at least a foot high. She was a creature of habit.
She took a step backward, opening the door wider.
It’s your house, too
, she always said, but I couldn’t help knocking, couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t. I stepped in and followed her to the kitchen. I’d seen her at the hospital a few days ago, but she’d had her hair cut since then and it looked bristly from the back, spiked with more gray than I’d have thought. She worked long hours as a therapist at Student Health; on weekends she holed up in a little room off her bedroom and translated jotted-down notes into fuller accounts of each session.
From the kitchen table I watched as she filled her coffeemaker with cold water, then opened the freezer and reached for the coffee bag that contained her special mix.
“Mom, I need the real thing this morning.”
She smiled over her shoulder. “OK, but it’ll be on your conscience if I end up with the shakes all day.” She got a different bag and started the coffee, then sat opposite me. I pushed the muffins toward her. “These look sinful,” she said. “What kind are they?”
“Carrot. But don’t worry, I got the ones that were only half butter.”
“Well, in that case …”
I broke off a piece of mine and put it in my mouth, the crunchy top edge that Mike loved. In my apartment there was often a little white bag containing two or three muffin carcasses, just the bottoms in their pleated paper skins.
“No news?” she said.
I shook my head. No news, no hope, nothing.
She reached across the table and patted my hand.
I looked away, and my glance fell on the curtains over the sink, made of tired, off-white muslin. I said, “I have to tell you something.”
A furrow appeared on the bridge of her nose, and she looked at me quizzically. I was sure she thought it was something to do with Mike.
“You need new curtains,” I said. “In here, in the upstairs bathroom, and in your office. Have you looked at your curtains lately? They’re dingy.”
Her face relaxed into a smile, but I could see she didn’t have a clue where I was headed. “And?” she said.
“And I was thinking I’d make new ones for you. If you’re not too busy we could go get fabric right now.”
She lifted her coffee and took a sip, then set the cup down deliberately. “That’s a nice offer,” she said, “but don’t you think you’ve got enough on your mind already?”
I didn’t want to think about what I had on my mind, and I looked away. In my peripheral vision I saw her lift her cup for another sip, then set it down again.
“New curtains would be nice,” she said.
I turned back. “Really?”
“I accept.”
We finished our muffins and coffee and measured the windows, then got into her car and drove out to one of the big fabric houses on the far side of town. It was a place I hadn’t been with her since I’d gotten my driver’s license, and seeing it through someone else’s eyes made me overly aware of the unpleasant aspects: the bright lights, the vastness, the smell of sizing. There were aisles and aisles of fabric, bolts and bolts of it: cottons and rayons and wools, shiny acetates for lining. Near the entrance a display of Fourth of July fabrics occupied a prominent position, with over a dozen different combinations of stars and stripes. I’d never understood seasonal fabrics, the urge to make yourself a shirt strewn with candy corn for Halloween, a set of leprechaun-print napkins for a St. Patrick’s Day party. When I made something I thought of longevity, how the hours I put into it would yield me an exponential number of wearing hours. Never mind the question of taste.
We made our way to the back wall, where the home-furnishing fabrics hung on giant rolls. Right away she picked a stripe for her office and a tiny flower print for the upstairs bathroom, but she was less sure about the kitchen. “Maybe this one with the fruit,” she said. “Do you like it?”
“Sure.”
“I went by the Mayers’ last night,” she added casually.
I’d been fingering a flowered chintz, but now I let it go. I felt stricken, hating the idea of her discussing me with Mrs. Mayer. “You did?”
“I took them a casserole.”
I smiled. “Did you try to pass it off as homemade?”
“Very funny—it was.” She was watching me, her head tilted slightly. It seemed she was trying to decide whether or not to tell me something.
“What?” I said.
“I think she’s concerned about you. That you’re writing him off, although she didn’t put it that way.”
I thought of Mrs. Mayer’s pale face, the watchful way she’d looked at me over tea the other morning. I tried to focus on the fabrics. For a moment sewing seemed like the saddest of enterprises, a world of hope embodied in the clean rolls of fabric, when all you’d really get would be a new slipcover, a new throw pillow for your same old bed.
“Are you?” my mother said carefully, and I wondered what she was thinking, if somewhere deep inside she was hoping I was. Not writing him off, maybe, but thinking of some kind of ending. I’d never thought she wholly approved of him—of my settling with anyone so early. She never said anything, but I saw it in her reticence on the subject, in the way she was always so nice to him, as if she were waiting him out. I figured if she did disapprove the reason was her own wrecked marriage: not that she wouldn’t want me to succeed where she’d failed, but that she’d fear her failure had planted the seeds for mine and would want to protect me from that.
I hadn’t said a word to her about the rocky state of things that had existed between me and Mike before the accident. I hadn’t said a word to anyone.
“No,” I said, looking back at her. “I’m not.”
“I didn’t think so.” She reached to touch a blue-and-white harlequin print. “I told her to worry about her own feelings and let you worry about yours.”
“Mom!”
“Oh, not in so many words, silly. I was a good PTA mom, don’t worry.”
A “PTA mom” was code for the exact kind of mother my mother wasn’t. A PTA mom baked chocolate cupcakes and iced them with orange frosting for the class’s Halloween party. My mother sent me to school with a giant can of Hawaiian Punch.
“So what kind of casserole was it?”
“Chicken and mushroom. You know, cooking is kind of fun, I’d forgotten.”
“Is this the beginning of a new trend? The Working Woman Who Still Has Time for Her Home?”
“Oh, I doubt it. Anyway, you’re making the curtains, not me.”
I shrugged: I’d finished the linen jacket the night before and I needed another project, simple as that. “True,” I said, “but they’re not for my home.”
“You’re not going to move back in with me one of these days? Don’t break my heart.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
She looked serious all at once. “That’s all right, you know. It really is.”
“I know.”
She tilted her head, a concerned look on her face. “Do you have plans for the afternoon?”
“Lunch with Jamie. Then the hospital.”
She nodded slowly. She hesitated for a moment, then put her arms around me and pulled me close.
Jamie still lived in Miffland, the student ghetto near campus, and to get there from my mother’s I had to drive right by the corner I’d always thought of as the breakdown corner. Not once but twice my Toyota had died right outside Hank’s Shoe Repair, and both times Mike had come and fiddled with it to get it running again—the second time in his suit, because he was already working at the bank by then. It was my first time driving by since the accident, and I gripped the wheel until I was well into the next block.
Miffland was full of large, wood-frame houses rented nearly to ruin, with scrabbly front yards and overgrown lilacs everywhere. It was a neighborhood where certain houses maintained reputations for decades and more: the dopers’ house on the corner of Mifflin and Broom, someone might say in passing, and although the dopers you knew who’d lived there were long gone, six more just like them had taken up residence and were carrying the torch.
I found Jamie sitting on her sloping front porch in a flowered bikini top and cutoffs, her dark blond hair pinned high off her neck. Five or six guys lounged on the second-story porch of the place next door, a house famous for the bright yellow color someone had painted it long ago, faded now to a dirty ocher and peeling so badly you could see the light blue underneath. The guys were on aluminum lounge chairs, sitting in front of a pair of giant speakers that had been set face-out on the sills of someone’s bedroom windows. Gangsta rap blasted from them: “something something bitch,” I heard as I made my way up Jamie’s walk.
“Nice neighbors,” I said as I sat down next to her. “When are you going to move?”
She laughed. “They’re not bad. They’ll be sophomores next year and they just escaped from the dorms. They keep coming over and asking to borrow, you know, sponges. I don’t think they’re very likely to use them.”
I glanced up at the guys. “Probably not.”
She set her glass down and looked at me. “So?”
I shrugged. “Nothing new.”
“Are you OK?”
I shrugged again.
She picked up her glass and took a long sip. “See the one in the yellow T-shirt?”
I looked up at the guys: the one in the yellow T-shirt was looking down at us. “Yeah.”
“He seems pretty cool.”
“Cool?” I said. “Don’t you mean hunky?”
“What is he, a candy bar?” She smiled. “Just a little smarter than the average nineteen-year-old was all I meant.”
“Liar.”
“Oh, leave me alone. Go get us some food, why don’t you? And I’ll have another of these.” She handed me her glass, and I headed for the front door.
Inside, the living room was dark and musty. Jamie’s roommate lay on a tired gold velvet couch, still in her nightgown, the phone at her side and the receiver pressed to her ear. As I passed by she looked up but didn’t acknowledge me. Her fiancé was in Los Angeles, in business school, and they talked every Wednesday night and every Saturday morning. On the first of each month he FTDed her a dozen red roses.
In the refrigerator I found a container of potato salad and a bowl of tuna, and I put them on an old bamboo tray, then added a box of crackers. I refilled Jamie’s glass with iced tea and got myself some.
“They’re having a party tonight,” she announced when I got back outside.
“Who?”
“Those
guys.”
She gestured with her head at the neighbors. “They just called down and told me.” She forked tuna onto a cracker. “What do you think? It might be good for you.”
I smiled. “Not that you have any desire to go yourself.”
“Carrie.”
I looked at her. We’d been friends for eighteen years—best friends, we used to say, until it was too obvious to mention. I knew she wanted to go to the party, but only if I’d go, too.
“What’s his name?” I said.
“I think it’s Drew.”
“You
think.”
“What I think is that it would be good for you to get out.”
“As long as it’s just for me,” I said with a smile.
“I’m serious.” She shifted her chair so her back was to the guys. “No more teasing, OK?”
I shrugged. “OK.” I looked up at the guys again. Yellow T-shirt sat with his legs splayed, a beer can in hand, moving a little self-consciously to the beat of the music. I felt as if I knew, or could guess, everything about him.
“He’s nineteen,” she said—more, I thought, to herself than to me.
“Well, maybe we should fix him up with Julie Mayer. She’s nineteen, too.”
She shook her head. “No way. Julie probably wants some guy with black boots and a goatee. Sensitive but moody. An artist, or maybe some guy in a band. A beautiful face and long, thin fingers.”
“Who doesn’t? Where is this person?”
“I don’t. God, what a pain. And neither do you, Carrie—do you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Do you?” she said again.
“It sounds a lot better than what I’ve got—a vegetable.” I turned away and buried my face in my hands. How could I have said such a thing? How could I have
thought
it? After a moment I felt Jamie touch my shoulder.
“You didn’t say that.”
I looked up at her. “But I did.”
She turned away sharply, and I felt a flash of rage at her. I wanted to prod her, make her call me on what I’d said, but when she looked back it was gone, she’d completely erased it.
“Care?” she said gently. “Do you want me to go to the hospital with you this afternoon? I could just wait in the lounge if you want to see him alone, and then afterward I’d be there if you felt like talking.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“You can call me any time, you know,” she said, frowning a little. “In the middle of the night or whenever.”
“I know.”
We sat in silence. I was just thinking of making an excuse to leave when she spoke again: “Was Roommate Dearest still on the phone?”
“Glued to it.”
“Oh, honey,” she said in a syrupy voice. “Roses. How—how original.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“Uh uh, Todd’s boring. I just hope she never figures that out.”
“Not as boring as talking about him.”
She shrugged.
“For that matter, why do we always have to talk about guys?
That’s
boring. I mean, here we are, we’re smart, we must have something more we can talk about. Politics or books or the weather or something.”