When It Happens to You (3 page)

Oh God, how she missed him. How she missed the closeness in the years before Charlotte, when they would excite each other with only a look, a word, or a promise of what they would do to each other later—after class or after a party. Those days when they would come at each other breathless from the sheer force of their desire and make love until their bodies rebelled against them, leaving the two trembling and happy and raw.

Charlotte's sleepy voice jarred her back to the present.

“And what if . . . I didn't love you? Would you still love me?”

The question puzzled Greta. She looked at her daughter in profile. How much she looked like him! The fair skin and the freckles and even the exact same blue vein across her forehead. The slender nose and the green-and-blue sea-glass eyes and the eyelashes curled to blond tips. There seemed to be virtually nothing of her in her daughter's face that she recognized as her own. Not that it should matter, of course. She had read somewhere that offspring resemble the father at birth so that he has visible proof of paternity and won't abandon the child or, worse, attack it. Charlotte was living proof of Phillip's virility. She was a carbon copy of him. Could this be an obscure motivation for wanting to do it again, to create a child that looked like her instead of her husband? Could she possibly be that narcissistic?

Greta and Phillip had tried unsuccessfully to have a second child since Charlotte was two. Their failure was surprising to both of them since they had conceived their daughter within weeks of Greta's stopping birth-control pills. It didn't seem possible after all that time trying
not
to get pregnant to suddenly try and then fail. But as months and then years passed, they finally had to accept that they were going to be one of those statistics. They briefly considered adoption, but Greta worried about the possibility of favoring their biological child. Greta's mother had been raised by a stepfather who treated her half siblings with far more indulgence and care, and Greta could never quite silence her mother's voice intoning, “Better to have
all
adopted children—don't mix the two.”

The transition to assisted conception was gradual. They bought books that Phillip diligently highlighted with questions for the doctors. Greta learned about checking her cervical fluid and making fertility charts. They took her basal body temperature and made love according to its fluctuations. The doctors started Greta on low doses of Clomid, and several attempts of the “turkey baster” were all met with no success. By the time they prepared to try in-vitro fertilization, they were already so stressed-out and exhausted that they silently dreaded it. They would wait in the doctor's waiting room like weary warriors on the sidelines of a battle that already seemed to be lost.

“Important to keep positive outlook!” their first doctor's Chinese nurse practitioner would tell Greta while she searched for a vein to take blood. Chin Lau Wong was fond of quoting inspirational aphorisms to keep her patients' spirits up. “If you are in hurry, you never get there,” or “A journey of a thousand miles begin with single step.” When Greta repeated one of these platitudes to Phillip, flawlessly imitating the accent for laughs, Phillip told her that Chin Lau Wong should shut the fuck up and write for a greeting-card company. The rancor and dismissal of her husband's reply stunned her. They had always made each other laugh in the worst of times. It was one of the things that she felt they relied upon when everything else faltered—when his parents died or when her nephew went missing and they found out he had been doing heroin since dropping out of school at fifteen. The only thing dependable in times such as these was the comfort of their love, the thing that she believed in above all else.

She realized at that moment that she had never answered Charlotte's question.

“Yes. I would love you,” she whispered into her daughter's hair. “Even if you didn't love me. I would always love you.”

 

What is it that keeps us in fear of revelation? By whose design it is that we are held, suspended, hovering over our own lives? Bearing witness to it, yes, but not remembering. Choosing
not
to remember. The shy glances, the nervous tenor, the new gym membership, the unnecessary errands. What keeps us from noticing? Or if noticing, then not telling ourselves that these details matter. We need to pay attention. Because if we don't . . . then what?

What is it that keeps us safe from what we know,
should
know to be true? Is it really ignorance, or is it a sort of kindness that we give to ourselves? A part of us takes over.
Just put it off until we're stronger
, it would say if it had a voice that we could hear.
You're not ready yet. You're not ready. Let everyone else see it but not me. Spare me this. Please, not this.

 

It was past three in the morning when Greta awoke to the sound of the shower running. She was alone in bed. Twice already during the night, she had reached her arm across to Phillip's side and found it empty. She had thought about getting up and going into his office, where he was probably working on the case as he often did before he left on business, but the bed was so warm and Charlotte would certainly be up at six and demanding her attention. At least, that's what she had told herself.

She got out of bed and walked to the bathroom. Phillip was standing in the shower with his eyes closed, hot water streaming over his head. The moon shone down on him directly from the skylight above, and his pale skin looked even paler in the light. She stared at him, thinking that he looked like something holy.

He opened his eyes and gasped at the sight of her.

“Jesus!” he said, and put his palm over the left side of his chest, over his heart. “You're awake.”

“So are you.” Greta stood just outside the open tiled shower in her cotton nightgown. If he noticed that it was
the
nightgown, he gave no indication. He took the bar of soap, lathered it up between his hands, and then ran it over his body, turning away from her as he washed between his legs.

“You were sound asleep when I got home,” he said to her over his shoulder. “I hope I didn't wake you up.”

He put the soap back, but it slid out of the holder and hit the floor and found its place on the drain. He left it there.

“What time did you get home?” she said. “I tried to stay up reading for a while after I put Charlotte to bed, but—”

“How is she?”

“She's fine.”

“Good, good,” he said.

Greta pulled the nightgown up over her head and let it fall to the floor. She stood for a moment and waited for him to take in the sight of her naked body. He looked at her, smiled dimly, then looked away.

“Can I join you?” she asked as she entered the shower without invitation.

“I'm almost done,” he said, stepping aside.

She bent down and picked up the bar of soap.

“Let me do your back,” she said. She rubbed the soap over his broad shoulders and along his back, then put the soap aside and ran her bare hands over his warm, slick skin. Her hands traveled around his sides and down his stomach and found his penis. It was soft and wet. She cupped it in her hands as she would a small and delicate animal.

“I'm really tired,” he said by way of apology.

She took her hands away and turned him around to face her.

“It's okay, honey. We're not supposed to anyway.”

“Right.”

“And remember while you're away, no—”

“I know,” he said. She noticed the edge in his voice.

“Hey.” She put her hands up to his face. “Don't do that,” she said.

“I'm sorry.” He took a deep breath. “I'm just really, really tired.”

“I know,” she said. “Did you prepare the presentation?”

“Mostly,” he said.

“Mostly?” She stepped back and looked at him. “It's after three in the—”

“I mean
yes
,” he said. “It's a hard one, and some of the data is just . . . The details are unclear and . . .”

He trailed off, shaking his head. Suddenly, he pulled her to him and embraced her.

“It's okay,” she said. “I'm sure that once you get in there and sit down with them, all of the—”

It was then that she noticed that his body was shaking.

“Phillip?” she said, but he only held her tighter. She saw the tears now, and it scared her. It was such a rare occurrence for Phillip to cry; the last time was when Charlotte fell off the monkey bars at school and briefly lost consciousness. When Greta had finally managed to get through to Phillip's international cell phone and tell him that the tests had come back as only a “slight concussion” and that he didn't need to fly home, he started crying so violently that he had to pull to the side of the road.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm so sorry.”

“For what?” Greta asked.

He didn't answer.

“For what?” she repeated.

The water started to run cold. She reached her arm out from under his and turned the handle to the left. Phillip's eyes were bloodshot, the sea-glass irises sharp and bright in contrast to the red.

“Everything is going to be okay,” she told him.

He grasped on to her tighter.

“Do you hear me?” she said.

“Yes.” His voice sounded very small. “Oh God,” he said, and started to speak, but the words caught in his throat. “I'm sorry, I don't know what's wrong with me, I . . .”

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “It's all going to be all right. Do you understand?” Greta was surprised by the authority she heard in her own voice. “It's all going to be all right.”

She repeated it again.

And again and again and again.

REDBUD

ILSE O'HARA CLOSED HER EYES
when her daughter Greta cut across two lanes of traffic and swung a U-turn to secure the parking place in front of the nursery. For years, Ilse had refused to let any of her children drive her, but now as she found herself fading into that increasing invisibility of the elderly, she no longer bothered protesting being relegated to the passenger seat.

“You know that's illegal,” she said. She would sit it the passenger seat, but that didn't mean that she would keep quiet.

“Yeah,” Greta said. “But if I didn't do it, we'd get stuck. They won't let you do a U-turn for miles.” Greta turned down the radio to concentrate and expertly backed into the spot. “And look at this. It's the Ko!”

“The what?” Ilse peered out the window at the espaliered apple trees trained beside the entrance. Although she had always admired the art, along with bonsai, she couldn't help but feel that there was something cruelly manipulative about it. She supposed that you could argue that all landscaping was manipulation of a kind, but these trees looked crippled, like the victims of Chinese foot binding.

“The Ko,” Greta said. “You know, as in the Kojak?”

“You mean the bald man?” Ilse narrowed her eyes and frowned at having lost the thread of conversation. “I don't understand.”

Greta attempted to explain the concept: in college, her friends used to refer to ideal parking spaces as the “the Kojak” because in the 1970s television series, the main character would inevitably pull into an empty parking spot just in front of the location where he was about to bust the bad guy. “Get it? The Kojak. Or, for short, the Ko.”

“Kojak was Greek,” Ilse said as she carefully climbed down out of the SUV. Why everyone felt the need to drive these enormous gas-guzzling monstrosities was beyond her. She drove all three of her children in a powder-blue 1966 Chevrolet just fine, but now everyone's car was bigger, fatter, and taller, blocking your view of the road and forcing you to succumb and purchase a big ridiculous car yourself. It was like being in a restaurant where some loudmouth decides to raise his voice, and everyone else raises theirs in turn in order to be heard. After a while, it becomes a cacophony of dinner conversations that no one wants to hear.

While Greta rifled through her purse for change for the parking meter, Ilse walked to the back of the car and examined the dents on the bumper. All of her children were terrible drivers. Well, her daughters. It was ironic that her son, the only good driver, had died behind the wheel. He had been just shy of his twenty-second birthday at the time of the accident, and though ultimately it was deemed a suicide, Ilse still believed that Rory didn't really want to die. He wanted to live; only, he could never truly figure out how.

“They weren't me,” Greta said, gesturing to the dents.

“It's not going to help the resale any,” Ilse said.

“Well, then I guess it's a good thing I'm not selling it,” Greta said. It was impossible to be with her mother for any length of time without reverting to their old mother-daughter animosity—something that began in Greta's teen years. At age thirty-nine, however, Greta understood that this antagonism was no longer just a phase, as she had once hoped it would be, but something that would remain throughout her life, like a chronic stiffening of the bones. As much as Greta would have liked it, they would never revert back to the easy comfort she had once felt as her mother's last child, her “change of life” baby. Greta grew up far too early, and for this she felt she was never entirely forgiven.

Ilse sighed, giving Greta the eerie impression, as she often did, of her mother listening to her thoughts.

“Is this place even open?” Ilse said. “It doesn't look open to me.”

As she shuffled across the gravel, Ilse took off her prescription sunglasses and replaced them with her trifocals. She stood at the entrance of the nursery and examined a row of succulents. Greta strode past her into the entrance.

“It's open,” she said, waiting for Ilse to join her.

“I never much cared for cactuses,” Ilse said.

“Cacti,” Greta corrected.

“Cacti,” Ilse repeated. It was one of her daughter's most maddening traits, her quickness to point out when Ilse was wrong. She knew it was “cacti” the moment she said “cactuses”—of course it was “cacti”—but Greta was so fast in correcting her that Ilse hadn't had the chance to do it herself. She thought of all of the times her own mother made a mess of her English grammar, yet Ilse had never dared to correct her. Her mother was already in her early twenties when, with only the barest knowledge of English, she had emigrated from Germany. Her first husband and Ilse's birth father, Gunther, had died early in the war, and by the time the kind, curly-haired Irish-American soldier showed up in their village just south of Düsseldorf and fell for Ilse's mother, she was all too happy to be claimed. The fact that she had a three-year-old daughter didn't seem to diminish the soldier's ardor at all—at least, not yet. It didn't hurt that Ilse was an exceptionally beautiful child. She had inherited her father's rosy-cheeked complexion, and her hair, as pale as the wheat fields surrounding their village, hung in elegant natural curls around her fine-boned face. It took less than a year, after the hastily formed family arrived in the Pacific Northwest, for Ilse's mother to learn rudimentary English. Determined to allay the obvious discomfort of her new husband's family, she spoke only English from the moment she moved into the forbidding, drafty Victorian home; whenever Ilse tried to speak German with her mother, she was either hushed or ignored. As a consequence, before she had even turned six, Ilse had surpassed her mother in English, and despite her early efforts, Ilse's mother would speak a heavily accented broken English for the rest of her life. Yet she lived without fear of challenge, whereas Ilse's own daughter never failed to correct Ilse's grammar or pronunciation.

Greta waited for her mother at the entrance with a spiral notebook in hand. She had asked her mother to come and help with a new landscaping project, and now she was trying hard not to regret it. Ilse was an expert amateur botanist; any house that she had lived in had possessed a lush and wild garden. Bursting forth in all directions, her gardens were so remarkable in their untamed beauty that strangers often stopped by the house to admire them. A local Oregon paper once even sent a reporter to interview her mother, photographing her posing awkwardly next to a row of heirloom tomatoes—this well before the proliferation of everything heirloom at the local farmers' markets. Much of the charm of these gardens arose from such pockets of exoticism. Throughout Greta's childhood, her mother had steadfastly refused to grow anything standard. How Greta had longed for a classic Red Delicious apple or a perfectly round beefsteak tomato as a child, but Ilse had insisted that these were for the ordinary. It seemed to Greta that Ilse was a perfectionist who coveted the imperfect. The quote the paper ran to accompany the photo was “There is no such thing as a green thumb. Only people willing to get brown knees.” Greta remembered how proud she had been of her mother's aphorism, assuming that she had coined the phrase, only to see it years later embroidered on a pillow in a mail-order catalog.

Although it was true that Greta had taken on the new terrace garden project, calling on her mother's aid was mostly a pretext, what her husband had always referred to as her tendency to “bait and switch.” A few days earlier, her mother had casually mentioned over the phone that she and Greta's father had agreed to take in Greta's sister's son Milo who, at twenty-two, had announced that he was serious about getting off drugs. It had taken considerable effort on Ilse's part to get Milo to even consider coming to live with his grandparents on the tiny Pacific Northwest island where they had more or less retired, but it seemed that life in the Los Angeles suburb where Milo had been raised by Greta's older sister, Laurel, and her string of unsuitable men, had become untenable. He ran away from home for the first time when he was fourteen years old, choosing to live with the mild if vacuous cannabis-dealing parents of his girlfriend, Summer. By the time he was fifteen, the girlfriend had moved on to an older man she met at a local mini-mall coffee bar, and the pseudofamily, no longer interested in sympathizing with Milo or discrediting his mother, from whom he had been growing impossibly estranged, kicked him out of their house. The last thing Summer's mother had said to him after he had waited on the front porch for hours for her to return was, “Milo, you will never be able to take care of Summer, and she will never be able to take care of herself. You must let her go.” That night, he tried heroin for the first time in a stranger's garage and imagined that he was a baby again in Laurel's arms before everything went bad.

Greta couldn't help but judge her sister harshly as a parent. Laurel had Milo when she was in her early twenties, and it seemed to Greta that she spent Milo's childhood distractedly pursuing a replacement father for the one that Milo—and Laurel—never really knew. By the time he was nine years old, Milo was so angry at Laurel for not being there, for choosing other men over him, that he became a master of the insult. He disparaged Laurel for everything. She couldn't cook or clean; she was forgetful, clumsy, careless; and she had no money. She didn't even have a college education, as he was quick to remind her, especially in front of a suitor. Why would you want to be with her, he asked, if you didn't have to? He wore her down with his relentless reproaches and punishing judgments until she found herself actually hoping, when he walked out of their apartment at the age of fourteen, that he wouldn't come back. This was confessed to Greta one night after too much wine, hastily retracted, and never spoken of again.

And now it had been over a year since Laurel had become entrenched in a New Age yoga practice—“a cult,” their father insisted, despite other higher courts deeming it a “new religion.” Whatever it was, it was clear to Greta that it took Laurel away from her sorrow, from her son, and most of all from the question of what she would do with her life which, at age forty-four, had transformed into the question of what she
hadn't
done with her life. The “self-realization” she had recently experienced was a balm for all of the feelings of failure, imbuing her with a sense of direction and purpose that she claimed not to have felt since she was pregnant with Milo. All of the meddling and overbearing instruction that she had steadfastly rejected from their parents Laurel welcomed from the religion. She had all but moved to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to help with the construction of a new mission, and a few weeks ago Greta received a disturbing e-mail that hinted of an impending marriage arranged by the leaders of the religion. Laurel had written to Greta to enlist her assistance in getting Milo to join her in Sri Lanka so that they could live as a big happy family. Though it was Milo who was detoxing when the e-mail arrived, it seemed to Greta that it was her sister whose head had been irretrievably altered.

Outside, Ilse shuffled past Greta and peeked into the unlocked front office. “Is there anyone here?” she called out. She was careful to keep both of her feet behind the entryway, as though a simple step would provoke a charge of trespassing. This fearfulness, so deeply ingrained in her parents, was something that Greta had combated (not altogether successfully) her entire life.

“I don't see why it should be closed,” Greta said. “It's the middle of the day. Why don't we just take a look?” She headed toward a narrow dirt pathway running along the outside of the building. Enormous potted palm fronds flanked the trail, tipping toward each other to create an inviting tropical canopy. “Come on, Mama.”

Ilse hesitated. Then, with a sigh, she hurried after her daughter. “I don't have much time, you know. We're going to have to be quick about this.”

It was shaded and cool along the path, and for the first time since seeing her daughter that day, Ilse felt herself relax. Walking in Greta's slim gray shadow, she eyed the trees set in large terra-cotta containers and faintly shook her head. “Never much cared for palm trees.”

“I know,” Greta said. “I think maybe that's one of the reasons I don't like them.” She realized even as she said it that it was an offering.
You see, Mother? We are alike in some way. Even though we disagree on everything, part of me will always be part of you.

Ilse removed her glasses, breathed on the lenses, and wiped them with the tail of her faded red flannel shirt.

“Now, what is this garden you are doing, exactly? What happened to that lady you used? The one who charged you an arm and a leg?”

When Greta and Phillip were building their dream house, their architect had persuaded them to use a ridiculously overpriced landscaper, and for some reason Greta had made the mistake of telling her mother how much she had paid the woman. Ilse had never spent over a hundred dollars on a pair of shoes, and the extravagance that Greta had shown appalled her mother. Think of what could be done with that money! Who knew if that money would be there the rest of their lives? And what about Charlotte's college education? It was shameful. To make matters worse, the landscaper designed with ornamental grasses to match the house's modern aesthetic. Grass! Her daughter spent her husband's hard-earned money on
weeds
. If that landscaper knew anything at all, she would have known that pampas grass was a menace. She may as well have planted purple verbena or lantana. Of course, Ilse didn't say anything about it to Greta, but privately she railed against the development to her husband, Graham, surprising even herself by the tears of rage it provoked. Graham was perplexed, as he often was, by his wife's upset. Why should it matter so much to her? Newspapers had come to glean hard-earned knowledge from her, she spat. She couldn't count how many times people asked when she would go into business for herself. And her own daughter shut her out as though she was nothing but an amateur, some provincial farmer selling pickles at the county fair.