Charley's Web (16 page)

“Yeah. Like that. I mean, my father’s not exactly Mr. Softie or anything, but he has his moments, you know. My mother always called him a ‘diamond in the rough.’ You know what that means?”

A diamond in the rough,
Charley managed to write down before the pen started running out of ink. “I believe it takes a lump of coal several thousand years to turn into a diamond,” Charley said, searching the drawer for another pen, and locating one underneath a second photograph. She removed both the pen and the photo from the drawer, and found herself staring at a picture of a grinning, dark-skinned boy, about six years old. Who was he? she wondered, flipping over the picture she’d been writing on and seeing the wide smile of a little girl, her round, brown face framed by an avalanche of cornrows, each secured by a small, bright red bow. “I’m sorry. Did you say something?” she asked, realizing Jill had been speaking.

“I said, are you suggesting my daddy’s like a lump of coal?” Jill repeated, laughing.

Who were the children in these photographs? Charley wondered, flipping over the picture again, and waiting to write. “It means he needs some polishing to really shine.”

Jill laughed again. “That’s a good way of putting it. Anybody ever told you you should be a writer?”

“What about your mother?”

“My mother?”

“Tell me more about her. I know she has MS….”

“My mom is great. Don’t start on my mom.”

“I wasn’t.”

“She did the best she could.”

“I’m sure she did.”

Why are you defending her?
Charley heard Bram say.

“I mean, it couldn’t have been easy for her, what with my dad’s temper and Ethan being just like him. And like I told you, I was a handful. There wasn’t much she could do. She was always trying to keep the peace, make everybody happy.”

“Did she know about what Ethan was doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did she know what he was doing to you and your sister?”

A slight pause, then, “We never told her, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“It’s not.”

“You’re saying you think she knew?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m asking what
you
think.”

“I think I’m beginning to feel sorry I called.”

“Don’t be. I’m really glad you did.”

“Why do you have to ask so many stupid damn questions? Why can’t you just listen, for a change?”

Very defensive about her mother,
Charley wrote, underlining
very
several times. “I’m sorry. I won’t ask anything else.”

“I think even if she
did
know, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“How can you be so damn sure about everything?”

“I’m really not.”

“Especially when you don’t know shit.”

The line went dead.

“Okay,” Charley said, sitting very still. “Okay.” After several minutes she pushed herself off the bed and returned to the living room.

“Everything all right?” her brother asked.

“Apparently I don’t know shit.”

“I could have told you that.”

“Thanks. Anyway, I have to get back to work. Oh, I wrote on the back of these.” She held up the two photographs. “Is that a problem?”

Bram squinted toward the pictures. “Nah. They’re just some neighborhood kids I was thinking of painting.”

“Cute kids,” Charley said, dropping the pictures inside her purse, and walking toward the screen door.

“Thanks for coming by,” Bram said, leaning over to kiss her cheek.

“Will you at least think about seeing our mother?” Charley asked.

“Thanks for coming by,” Bram said again, as the screen door shut firmly in Charley’s face.

THE PALM BEACH POST
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY
11, 2007

WEBB SITE

My mother and I recently engaged in a freewheeling discussion about nature versus nurture. More specifically, which n-word is responsible for one’s sexual preferences. The accepted wisdom of the day, of course, holds that one’s sexuality is as innate as the color of one’s eyes. But is it as simple as that? Think of the thousands of men and women in prison who turn to the same sex for a little comfort and relief—or power and intimidation, as the case may be—only to revert immediately to the opposite sex upon release. (What’s that old saying? “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with”?) And what of choice? Do we have no say in the matter at all?

My mother says we do. At least she says that
women
do. And before I get a barrage of e-mail from religious fundamentalists seeking to recruit her in an effort to save these poor, misguided sapphists from themselves, let me state that for a long time, my mother also chose to be gay. She argues—quite convincingly, I might add—that people are more than what they choose to do with their genitals, and that while there are lots of lesbians, possibly even the majority, who are, in fact, born to love other women, there are also many who, whether by chance or design,
decide
to love other women. They’ve been abused or mistreated, overlooked or shunned. For whatever reason, they’ve had it with men. They’re looking for a little warmth, and if the body that comes with it looks suspiciously like their own, well, it might take a little getting used to, but ultimately, that’s okay. Women are used to getting used to things. We’re good at adapting to circumstance.

While it now seems my mother has chosen to revert to the straight and narrow, for twenty years she boldly chose to be gay. She also chose to be absent from her children’s lives, which won’t exactly win her any prizes for mother of the year. But what exactly makes a good mother anyway? Again, it comes down to the choices we make.

I’m reminded of a story a neighbor told me a while back. She was on a plane coming back from somewhere, and she had the misfortune to be seated next to a big bear of a man and his young son. Soon after takeoff, the boy started squirming, and his father told him gruffly to sit still. The boy protested that his father’s wide girth was spilling over onto his seat and not leaving him enough room. The father told him to “shut up unless he wanted his ass kicked.” The son, proclaiming he knew his rights, then threatened to call 911. At that point, the father walloped him. My neighbor called the stewardess and requested a seat change. The boy’s mother, who, it turned out, was sitting in the row directly behind, quickly agreed to change seats. As they made the switch, my neighbor overheard the boy’s mother pleading with her son to listen to his father.

Is this a nurturing mother? Is it part of a woman’s nature to placate and make nice? True, she didn’t abandon her son, at least not physically, but what message is she giving him? That it’s okay to bully and berate someone because he’s smaller and more defenseless than you are? That might is right? She would undoubtedly argue that she had no choice, that she was as defenseless as her son, that to stand up to her husband at that moment meant a beating later on. But the truth is that she did have a choice, as all adults do, and it’s a mother’s job to protect her children, even when it means putting herself in harm’s way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about child abuse these days, and I just can’t get my head around it. Why have children if you’re going to mistreat them? It’s not as if we don’t have options. We can choose from multiple forms of birth control, or we can choose to abort or put unplanned babies up for adoption, give those innocent children the chance for a stable and loving home. Instead, too often we choose to bring children into unloving and downright hostile environments, with parents who are too poorly equipped, or just too emotionally unavailable, to care for them.

I’m not talking here about teenage mothers on welfare, who have been maligned enough. Most of these girls are only looking for someone to love and love them in return, and many are the products of abuse themselves. The majority of these young women try really hard to be good mothers for their babies, but their choices are limited at best. The approval they’ve been seeking all their lives has been transferred from errant boyfriends to needy offspring, and when that child cries all night, it’s easy to hear those cries as a rebuke. “You’re not a good mother,” those cries repeat over and over again, confirming their worst fears. Sometimes, it’s easy to strike out.

So what stops one person from lashing out and drives another to pick up that screaming infant and shake it so hard its neck snaps? Are some people just more violent by nature, or have they been raised in households where violence has been nurtured? Abuse is a communicable disease, one that gets transferred from one generation to the next. It can turn deadly at any time.

I could argue that my mother may have abandoned me, but hey, at least she didn’t beat me. You could counter that while your mother might have beaten you, hell, at least she was there. The debate is as endless, and ultimately as pointless, as the debate over nature versus nurture. What matters ultimately is
how
we choose to live our lives. We don’t get to choose our parents. We
do
get to choose the kind of parents we will be. And as bystanders, we also have a choice: to stand up to injustice whenever and wherever we witness it, or just change seats and do nothing.

The knocking on Charley’s door was as ferocious and insistent as it was unexpected. It was barely nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, too early for anyone to come calling. Charley put down her coffee cup, pushed aside the morning paper she’d been perusing—she always liked to get a feel for the way her columns read in actual newsprint—and made sure the belt on her blue terry-cloth bathrobe was secure, then left the kitchen table and walked down the hallway toward the front of the house. “Who is it?” she asked, glancing toward the children’s bedroom, where Franny and James were playing a new board game her mother had bought them.

“It’s Lynn,” came the angry response. “Open the door. I have a bone to pick with you.”

Charley closed her eyes, took a deep breath, forced a smile onto her lips, and opened the door. It was “déjà vu all over again,” she thought, seeing Lynn Moore standing on the single outside step, waving today’s paper in her face, the crystal studs in her long, red fingernails flashing before Charley’s eyes like tiny squares in a revolving disco ball. Her dark hair had been stuffed into a lopsided twist at the top of her head, threatening at any moment to burst loose of its many bobby pins. “Another one?” Charley asked wearily.

“Don’t you have anybody else to torture?”

“You didn’t like my column,” Charley stated rather than asked.

“What is it you have against me anyway?”

Charley felt her shoulders slump. “Would you like to come inside?”

“No, I don’t want to come inside.”

“I’ve made some fresh coffee.”

“I don’t want any coffee. I don’t want anything from you except to be left alone.”

“And yet, here you are,” Charley pointed out.

“It wasn’t bad enough that you’ve already portrayed me as some pathetic sex maniac…”

“I never said…”

“Now, I’m irresponsible as well.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What was I supposed to do?” Lynn continued, as if Charley hadn’t spoken. “I was squeezed into my seat beside this big brute of a guy whose entire demeanor screamed ‘Don’t mess with me,’ and what am I supposed to do when he starts slapping his kid around? I called the stewardess over, told her what was going on, and she advised me to change my seat. So, I’m asking you, what was I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“The hell you don’t,” Lynn exclaimed, waving the morning paper in Charley’s face. “According to little Miss Know-It-All, I was supposed to stand up to the injustice I was witness to, forget about the fact I’m crammed into a confined space thirty-seven thousand feet above sea level, and nobody else on the damn plane has witnessed the abuse.”

“I wasn’t specifically referring to you,” Charley hedged.

“You most certainly were. Who else told you that story?”

“I was trying to make a point.”

“Oh, you made it all right. ‘As bystanders, we have a choice. To stand up for injustice or just change seats and do nothing.’ Tell me, don’t you ever get tired of passing judgment on people?”

“I wasn’t trying to pass judgment.”

“No, you don’t have to try. It comes naturally to you. You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”

“Mommy?” a frightened voice said from behind her.

Charley turned around to see Franny swaying unsteadily in the kitchen doorway, her eyes wide with trepidation. “It’s okay, sweetie. Mrs. Moore’s just upset.”

“At you?”

“It’s all right, Franny,” Lynn told the child. “I’m going now. Just do me a favor,” she said to Charley. “Stop using my life as fodder for your column.”

“Thanks for coming by,” Charley whispered, echoing Bram’s words as she closed the door, then turned back toward her daughter.

“Why doesn’t anybody like you?” Franny asked.

“What? Who says nobody likes me?”

“Everybody’s always yelling at you.”

“No, they aren’t.”

Franny looked unconvinced. “I heard Elise talking to Daddy.”

Charley knelt down in front of her daughter, smoothed some stray hairs away from her forehead. “What did she say?”

“She said that the only person you care about is yourself.” Tears began forming in the corners of Franny’s eyes, as if she sensed she was being disloyal to her mother merely by repeating the things Ray’s wife had said.

“What else did she say?”

“That you were ‘selfish beyond words.’”

“Wow. Beyond words.”

“What does that mean?”

Charley gave the expression a moment’s thought. “It means there are no words to describe how selfish she thinks I am.”

“But you aren’t. Are you?”

“No, I’m not,” Charley agreed. Was she?

“Are you a real piece of work?”

Charley laughed. “Let’s just say I’m a work-in-progress.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I still haven’t got all the kinks out. But I’m trying my best.”

“I don’t think you’re selfish beyond words.”

“Thank you, darling. I appreciate that.”

“What do you ’preciate?” James asked, running into the hallway and throwing himself against his mother and sister with such force, it knocked all three of them over.

Charley quickly scooped her two children into her lap. “I ’preciate my two beautiful angels.”

“I’m not an angel, silly,” James said, laughing.

“He’s a work-in-progress,” Franny proclaimed with a shy smile.

“I love you both so much,” Charley told them, kissing them repeatedly until they’d had enough and squirmed out of her reach.

“How much?” James squealed, running down the hall backward.

Charley threw her arms out to her sides, stretched her fingers out as far as they would go. “This much.” Laughing and crying at the same time, she watched her children disappear inside the bedroom. Beyond words, she thought.

An hour later, the doorbell rang. “Dear God,” Charley muttered. “What now?” She approached the front door cautiously. “Who is it?”

“It’s Glen McLaren.”

Charley pulled open the door. He really
does
look like a gangster, she couldn’t help but think. Had he come to collect on the debt of gratitude she owed him? What exactly was he expecting? “Well, this is a surprise.”

“A not unpleasant one, I hope. Is this a bad time?”

Correct use of the double negative, she thought, stepping aside to let him enter. “Coffee?” she asked, although it meant making a fresh pot. After Lynn’s visit, she’d downed three hot cups in quick succession, burning the roof of her mouth.

“No, thanks.” He made no attempt to move farther inside than the foyer, his eyes flitting between the interior of the house and his silver Mercedes on the street. “Where’s James?”

“Playing Monopoly with his sister,” Charley said, signaling toward the bedrooms. “You want me to get him?”

“No. It’s you I came to see.” He glanced back at his car. Was he afraid someone might vandalize it?

“Oh?”

“I was hoping to collect on that debt you owe me.”

Charley glanced nervously toward the bedrooms. “Now?”

“Now seems like a good time to me.”

“What exactly is it you have in mind?”

“Do you like dogs?” Glen asked.

“Dogs?”

“Specifically, little white mutts named Bandit that don’t shed and aren’t yappy, but
are
housebroken, and will be
heart
broken, if they have to stay in a kennel for the next three weeks.”

“You have a little white dog named Bandit?”

“He was a gift from a rather misguided former girlfriend.”

“Of course he was.”

“But I promise you he’s fully trained, and he won’t be any trouble.”

“You’re asking me to look after your dog for three weeks?”

“I’m going to North Carolina to be with my son while his mother takes her belated honeymoon, and the person who was supposed to be looking after Bandit, well, let’s just say we had a slight disagreement, and she never wants to see me or my dog again.”

“Interesting.”

“It isn’t really. But Bandit is. Trust me, you’ll love him so much you won’t want to give him back.”

Charley wasn’t sure how to respond. “It’s not that I’m saying I won’t do it,” she hedged, “but I’m not exactly a dog person. I’ve actually never had a pet in my entire life. I wouldn’t know the first thing…”

“The first thing is to remember to feed him every morning and give him fresh water. And then, just repeat the same thing at night. Take him for a few walks in between. He’s still a puppy, so it’s probably a good idea to take him out every few hours to do his business. You just plop him down on a spot of grass and tell him to ‘do busy,’ and he does.”