The oxygen streams steadily out the window like a quickly deflating balloon. “Well,” I say. “How about . . .
neither
?”
She smiles, setting the book on the bed. “How’d that be for revenge? Fucking his son in his own bedroom? Would that be irony? Is that what Curtis would call it?”
I consider this—the literary question, not fucking my stepmother. “Actually . . . yeah. That would definitely be pretty ironic. Difficult to explain at Christmas, but ironic as hell. If this was a book or a movie, that’d be pretty good.”
With just the slightest shift of an arm, a move that I only notice retroactively, the front of her robe opens, revealing a trail of skin from her clavicle down between her breasts and ending at a thin, flesh-colored line of underwear a few long inches below her olive-shaped navel. My bowels and the things within loosen, and I fear that my insides are pooling on the floor between my feet. “Ashley, this isn’t a book . . . or a movie.”
She touches my arm. The skin there, muscles and tendons and bones, takes notice. “Maybe it could be,” she says. But there’s no sex left in her voice, none of the hostile Ashley from before with all her curse words and bitterness. She’s begun, quietly, to cry.
“I think I should get going now, OK?”
“Do you think I’m beautiful, Tom?”
This is such a shocking, stupid question that I actually laugh.
“You think I’m more beautiful than her, right?”
“Than who?”
But it’s too late. She crumbles, sobbing, and because I have no idea what else to do, I hug her. Buried in my shoulder, her face feels damp and warm, childlike, my daughter after a spill on her bike and not a boozy terror in a bathrobe.
“I’m beautiful,” she says.
“I know,” I say, glancing at her photograph on the bed, so crisp and vivid that her skin looks palpable.
“And I’m interesting.”
“OK,” I say. “I know you are. I know.”
“Then why doesn’t he love me anymore?”
My hands are full when I get back to the car. I’m rolling my dad’s suitcase and carrying Ashley’s naked portrait, Curtis’s green duffel bag, and my stolen copy of
The Bridge That Wasn’t There
.
“Hi, Daddy!” yells Allie. She’s moved to the front seat, and they’re both eating ice cream cones and listening to the radio.
“Are you kidding? You people couldn’t have even waited for me?”
Curtis pops the trunk and steps out of the car. “Well, you did take a long time. We’re only human. Was she there?”
I really
should
punch him right here on the street, or perhaps break this frame over his head. “Fifty-fifty my ass.”
“Oh jeez. How was she? Was she angry? Did she yell at you?”
I fling his suitcase into the car and hand him the R-rated portrait. “No, not at all. We had a lovely time. See, she sends her love.”
He holds the picture out, examining it. “My little Ash. I’m going to miss her.”
“Yeah, she’s a delicate flower.”
“Oh, don’t be mad. Think of it as a life experience. Did you get my bag?”
I toss it loud and rattling into the trunk on top of his suitcase. “What’s in there anyway?”
“Just some vitamins and things. Nothing important.”
As traffic and pedestrians and dog walkers pass, we stand together, father and son, looking at Ashley Martin’s beautiful naked body.
“Are we going now?” asks Allie. There’s a ring of chocolate around her mouth. Hank seems restless, too, smiling at us through the windshield.
“She
did
write ‘Love,’” my dad says. “I guess that’s something, right?”
“I don’t know, Dad. The tone seems sarcastic to me. But what do I know?”
“Perhaps,” he says, setting the picture carefully in the trunk. “Now, an agreement is an agreement. I believe I owe you an ice cream, right?”
“Yeah.”
“OK. Here’s five dollars. Go pick one out for yourself. And would you mind getting me a bottled water, too? Mint chocolate chip always makes me thirsty.”
T
he next day
, Allie and I are on our own road trip—the dog, too—off to see another one of my dad’s wives. My mother.
It’s illegal to talk on cell phones while driving in D.C., but outside the city, I do so flagrantly. “I’m on my way there now, Pop,” I say.
I can hear Gary pacing, wherever he is, probably the dealership. “What are you gonna say? Don’t be too obvious about it. Try to be . . . you know . . . casual.”
“She’s my mother. Don’t worry, I think I can handle her.”
“Tell her that I miss her. And that I’m sorry.”
“You don’t even know what you’re sorry for.”
“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t matter. At this point, I’ll be sorry for whatever she wants me to be sorry for.”
The contrast here is distinct. Twenty-four hours ago, my
real
father sent me blindly into the wild to help him escape my fake mother. Today, my fake father has sent me on a mission to retrieve my
real
mother. My family’s delicate architecture is cracking, and for some reason its men are all counting on me. From my perspective, this seems, at best, unwise. “We’ll get this figured out,” I say. “OK?”
Gary wishes me luck and I set the phone on the seat next to Hank. In the back, Allie is reading
Jonah and the Whale
, a book my dad bought for her in New York. It might be a little advanced for her, but she’s doing her best. She moves her lips when she reads, silently to herself, and love flutters through my chest, causing me to grip the steering wheel. There’s a fully formed image in my head of Allie as an adult. She’ll be one of those lanky, scatterbrained women you see reading paperbacks as they walk down the street, stumbling over curbs.
“Is Grandma mad at Grandpa Gary?” she asks.
“Not at all,” I say. “She’s just taking a little vacation from him, that’s all, visiting with your aunt Bernice. Adults do that sometimes. Perfectly normal.”
“Is that what Mommy’s doing now? Taking a vacation from you?”
Well played, little girl. Well played.
“Baby, come on. Who’d ever wanna take a vacation from me? I
am
a vacation.”
Allie used to think I was the funniest man alive. All I had to do was make a fart-y noise and she’d laugh for twenty minutes. Now I get little more than a polite grin. In just a few more years, she’ll think I’m a total embarrassment.
“Well, Hank agrees with me, right, Hank?” The dog looks at me from the passenger seat, and then turns back to the window and the blurry Maryland suburbs. One ear is cocked, and I can see that he’s wondering whether this is a good car trip or a bad one.
I’m wondering the same thing.
My aunt’s neighborhood is a small, wooded hamlet outside Rockville, Maryland, with yards and garages and mailboxes, and it all seems so exotic and foreign. This is how most people live, right? In suburban neighborhoods like this across America. The realist and the urban snob in me are constantly at odds when it comes to the suburbs. One thinks they seem like paradise, the other is convinced they’re a monochromatic, cultureless cesspool of fidgety boredom. Like most things, they’re probably somewhere in the middle.
When I pull into Bernice’s driveway, she happens to be standing there on the front lawn in jeans and a denim shirt, watering a patch of flowers, like a modern-day Willa Cather. She waves, but she does so suspiciously. “Hey, handsome,” she says.
“Are you talking to me or the dog?” I ask.
“I’ve always been more of a cat person.” She gives me a rough hug and I can feel her callused hands on my back through my sweater. Her hair is gray and scattered across her head, and she pushes it back with her hand. Hair to Bernice is something that gets in the way. My father has long suspected that she’s a lesbian. However, in fairness, he suspects this of all women who don’t like him.
“You look good,” I say.
Allie sidles up to my leg, looking shyly up at my aunt.
“Well, hello there, little missy. That’s a pretty bracelet you’ve got.”
Allie tugs Katie’s bracelet and quietly says thanks. She’s turned shy in front of this big woman.
“So, I hear you’ve got a stowaway,” I say.
“Prefer to think of her as a houseguest. One with an open invitation.”
I smile, just to let her know that no woman in Birkenstocks is going to scare me. “I’m just here for a visit, B. No need to worry. I brought her a present actually, some reading material.” I show her a rubber band–wrapped copy of my book. “I think you might like it, too. It’s very antiestablishment.”
Bernice doesn’t laugh. She has always liked me, but her fear that I’ll someday transform into my father is never very far below the surface. Standing in her driveway with a manuscript in my hands probably isn’t helping. “Your mom’s in the back. So, Allie. Let’s talk about lemonade. What’s your stance? Pro or con?”
Allie looks at me and then admits that she likes lemonade.
“Well good. Come with me and we’ll see about making some. I have a special formula. But it’s a secret, so no telling your daddy.”
As Allie and Bernice head off to the house, both stop short when they see that ugly little Hank is crapping triumphantly in the middle of this perfectly manicured lawn.
“That’s gross, Hank!” says Allie.
Bernice looks at me and shakes her head.
“Thatta boy, Hank. Good dog.”
My mom and dad met at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This mythical program in the middle of the middle of the country is to the American fiction writer what Harvard Business School is to people with real jobs. It also happens to be the place where I was conceived. I’ve never stepped foot into that sprawling square state, but I’m proud to say it’s where a good bit of my brain and circulatory system were formed. At the program, my mother was a star among all the stars there. Her stories were regularly published in the
Iowa Review
and then on the national scene, finding their way into the
Paris Review
, the
New Yorker
—back when it published three stories an issue—and a few anthologies of young American writers. Conversely, my dad was one of those young men who exists in every arts program: an unnecessarily good-looking guy who tells everyone how talented he is but never seems to finish anything.
When they graduated, my mom was offered a teaching job in D.C. and her thesis, a slim collection of short stories that is no longer in print, was published to glowing reviews and very few sales. With me busily floating and growing inside her stomach, Curtis and Maryanne got married. My dad tagged along to D.C., eventually finding a job at the American University library, where he toiled away in the stacks fiddling with his first novel, and the midseventies continued.
When I was two, that book, which he eventually finished, launched one of the most decorated writing careers in modern American letters. My mom, aside from the occasional exquisitely crafted letter to the editor of the
Washington Post
, has not published a word since.
Shortly before my dad left her—I was about Allie’s age—I overheard her talking to a friend on the phone. I was on the floor beneath the kitchen table rolling Matchbox cars across the linoleum when she said, “A family can only support one writer. It’s as simple as that.” I don’t know who she was talking to, but I remember thinking, even then, that she was probably right.
Hank and I come around the side of Bernice’s house, and I find my mom on her hands and knees in the back garden. She’s in a pair of her sister’s soiled overalls and work gloves, and I stop and watch her for a moment. Anna contends that she’s a lonely woman, my mom, but to me, she looks like she’s always looked, a little too thin and serious. She smiles when she sees Hank, who charges into the yard like his name’s on the mortgage.
“Look, Hank, it’s Mother Earth,” I say.
There’s a streak of dirt across her face, and she’s working a little miniature shovel, tilling the ground. There’s a mess of flowers in plastic bowls sitting in the grass. I know nothing about flowers, but I can always identify my namesake, violets. Somehow, they’ve remained among her favorite flowers, all purple and heart-shaped.
She’s small in my arms when we hug, this little person in a bigger woman’s clothes. Hank sniffs the flowers and she shoos him away with her foot.
“This is my penance for not returning your phone calls, driving all the way to Maryland.”
“What happened to your face, dear?”
“Allie’s kindergarten teacher and I got into a fistfight,” I say. “You should see her. She’s like a linebacker.”
She studies the wounded side of my face and shakes her head.
“I like the choice of flowers,” I say. “Would a violet by any other name be so . . .
purple
? Shakespeare wrote that. You can look it up if you’d like.”
“They’re prettier and more vivid in the wild, I suppose, but domestic violets are nice, too. The Greeks believed they symbolized fertility and potency, you know.”
As I quietly let the irony of this knee me in the groin a few times, we settle into two of three wicker chairs. I set my manuscript on the third chair with a satisfying thump, imagining that I’ve written dozens of them, but the world, for some reason, has been waiting for this, my career-defining masterpiece.
“That’s it, huh?” She flips through the first few pages, leaving little brown fingerprints under the title. “You know, you’ve never even told me what it’s about.”
“It’s a period piece. A team of crime-fighting lesbians travel back in time to assassinate Hitler.”
Like her sister before her, my mom’s reaction is no reaction at all. She stopped finding me funny when I graduated from high school. “I’m sure it’s about you,” she says. “All first novels are autobiographical. In spirit, at least.”
“I threw in some sex. And a car chase. And a rabid St. Bernard. And a vampire. I’m going for marketability
and
critical acclaim. And I would also like to buy a Lamborghini.”
Hank is sitting in the grass between us, and I notice a book there at his paws. My mom is a remover of dust jackets, and so it takes some squinting to see that it’s
The Stories of Curtis Violet
. “Doing some light reading?” I ask.
She worries some dirt beneath her fingernails. “His stories aren’t even that good, you know,” she says.
“A little sentimental maybe, but they have their moments.”
“I’d forgotten about his problem with endings. They’re too rushed and pretty, like he’s writing for TV. His contribution is the novel. Novels can end pretty, but not stories. That’s the rule.” Decades of teaching high schoolers about reading and writing have left my mother very concerned with rules, and there’s a territorial edge to her voice. Awarding Curtis the Pulitzer must be a slap in the face of my mother’s lovely, long-forgotten little collection.
“Sonya says they gave him the Pulitzer as like a lifetime achievement thing.”
“Literary awards are completely arbitrary, Thomas. They always have been. I think the only reason Nicholas Zuckerman didn’t win this year is because all of those awards committees are tired of giving him awards. You can be penalized for being brilliant sometimes. Curtis was a nice, popular choice.”
“Well, according to him, it’s long overdue.”
She laughs, finally, looking into the middle distance of Bernice’s yard. “He’s always been his own most dedicated fan.”
There’s no point in telling her that he’s crashing at my house. Another symptom of Child-of-Divorce Syndrome is the rationing of information. In truth, the fact that I have any relationship with Curtis at all has always made me feel like shit when I’m around my mother. I could’ve disavowed him when I was a little kid and never spoken to him again. A better son probably would have. Instead, I allowed Curtis to continue being my dad. This is perhaps my greatest sin against my mother.
“I hear you two have been chatting,” I say, venturing. “That’s certainly a development.”
She scratches Hank’s ears, buying herself a few seconds. “So, I suppose Gary sent you. I should have guessed that.”
For the second time this weekend, I’ve been accused of being sent in the name of a father’s bidding. “Let’s avoid melodrama, Mom. He didn’t
send
me, and I’m not a hit man. He’s worried. He doesn’t know what’s going on.”
“Ha,” she says. “Of course he doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s been calling here two or three times a day and leaving messages with Bernice. ‘What’d I do, Maryanne? What’d I do?’ It’s very tiring having to explain things to him all of the time. He thinks people are like his cars—like they can just be fixed and everything will be fine.”
“Is that really so wrong? Wanting to find out why you’re unhappy and make it better? Would you prefer he didn’t care at all? You of all people should understand that maybe that’s not the best quality in a husband.”
She looks at me, a little annoyed. “This isn’t about him caring or not caring. Don’t be intentionally dense. You try to pretend sometimes that you’re more like Gary than you actually are. You’re a Violet, and so you know that things are always more complicated than that.”
My mother has gone back to her post in the lawn again, digging away at the ground, a plastic container of little violets at her side. She rarely lets me off the hook, holding me to a different standard of emotional intelligence than the other men in her life—even my brothers. She allows them to behave like Gary, docilely going about their lives, content and happy and completely oblivious to the sticky, ugly things just a few inches below the surface of everything.
“You ever wonder if it’s really
not
more complicated than that?” I ask. “That maybe everyone else is right, and people like you and me just need to quit looking for stuff to be depressed about?”
She looks up, and then back at her dirt, dismissing this stupidity without comment. When I was little, I read books because I thought that’s what people were supposed to do, because that’s what my mom did and what my dad did. While I stumbled and squinted my way through math and science and everything else useful in the world, I was always confident in words and stories and the things lurking in the brains of the characters who wandered in and out of my life. Sometimes I wish I’d been born to normal people—people to whom a book was just a book and people could be fixed like Fords.