Authors: Elizabeth Richards
Every Day
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contents
for my father
My special thanks to Caron K., for spreading the word, to Ron Bernstein, for finding
Every Day
a home on the West Coast, and to my editor, Emily Bestler, for her perseverance and enthusiasm.
I am also grateful to my teachers Ron, Michael, and Shelby and indebted to E.G., Mitchell, Sarah, and the Cordelias for their love and good humor throughout the years.
Finally, I want to thank my agent, Ann Rittenberg, for years of brilliant work, faith, and friendship.
chapter one
The card was postmarked Kanab, Utah, and it said he was coming today, that he’d call, that he needed to see me. All morning, between things, I’ve been looking for it, drifting through rooms with my eyes on stacks of papers, wastebaskets, piles of laundry, wondering how on earth I could have mislaid something so important. At one point, in the baby’s room, I said aloud, “Now what could I have done with it?” My voice was lifted, girlish. I wasn’t loud, so the baby didn’t wake. She stirred, brought her feet up to meet her velvety hands, then sighed. Jane, my eight-year-old, was downstairs with the TV on, so I know she didn’t hear. Earlier, though, she had remarked upon my short fuse, advising therapy once again, which they seem to be teaching children about in the third grade now. Isaac, fourteen, is at baseball practice. As far as he’s concerned, I don’t have an awareness of men, have no connection to or need for them, and if he even suspected I was crazed because I couldn’t find a postcard written to me by a man who happens to be his father but has made no attempt to see him in fourteen years, he’d never stop gagging.
The man’s name is Fowler. At the time of my knowing him I was a wreck, but I could have stayed that way and not noticed. We made a truckload of plans, the old story, and he went on to fulfill them without me. We had a son with whom he fell in love but to whom he had the same trouble committing himself. I was eighteen when he left, but thanks to Isaac and my mother, I didn’t have time to bottom out. The three of us lived in the apartment where I grew up while I earned the credits for an equivalency diploma and eventually a B.A. from Hunter. My father, who had gotten his own place downtown while I was still in grade school, gave us money and had us to lunch on Saturdays. He still does the lunch thing when we can coordinate schedules. But I know that my mother goes every Saturday. They are devoted grandparents, and they’re devoted to each other. They just don’t live in the same house. From them I have learned that living arrangements can be just that: living arrangements.
For fourteen years I’ve had no direct news of Fowler. I’ve seen his name listed as visiting lecturer for some of New York’s film series. I know when a film of his is playing or up for an award. I know he’s moved out of the antisocial underground commentary he was first famous for into grander issues of progressive social import. I suspect him of having lost his humor, which seems just desserts for a man who once considered the world his playground.
After my current boss, Gillette, rescued me from certain doom as a temp, I met Simon playing tennis in Central Park. He was lithe, older, keen on just about anything. Gillette said he had “Just Divorced” stamped all over him, but I didn’t care. We got married at the boat pond eight months after we met, a district judge officiating at what my mother still refers to as “that no-frills affair.” It was the best party I ever attended. We have our three extraordinary children (Isaac knows Simon isn’t his father, but he’ll take no part in a discussion about his real father), our debts, and our loud,
uproarious life. Admitted: it is inconceivable that a postcard from Fowler should land anywhere but on the cutting room floor. But I stopped breathing for a minute when it came. I stopped the million things I do per hour. We have unfinished business.
I began an involved primping session: nail care, a facial over the spaghetti pot, for which Jane has still not forgiven me, and now, a bubble bath. Attending to body matters mortifies me, as I’ve become aware of serious changes. My backside, for instance, used to be a rather firm and perky area. Now it responds only to food and gravity. My arms hang. Bubbles are nice because it’s possible to reinvent a younger body, the one Fowler knew, the one I was so eager to show him when I was fifteen. Of course it would be unconscionable for me to be making an effort like this if it was intended to encourage a tryst. But that isn’t my purpose. I certainly don’t mind the idea of his wanting to see me, but I mean to be even more self-serving here. I will take great delight in any discomfort I can cause him after these fourteen years of raising a child who may never live down his father’s deficiency. Fowler once told me, during a lecturing junket, that I’d be the one to leave him. We were at the Wursthaus in Cambridge after one of his Eastern Seaboard screenings. (We went up the coast, from Maryland to Maine, showing his first film at colleges, one that I’d helped him edit.) I had four-week-old Isaac in the Snugli. Fowler looked wan, although the film, about wealthy women living in their cars, had been well received. He said, “You’ll leave me. Just wait.” Stupidly, I waited.
All sorts of excuses were given when he cut out: I was bound to Isaac now, I’d have to return to school, his career as a filmmaker was being stifled by the academic life, we were too much with each other and not enough out in the world that would feed our genii. I could have better managed the admission that he was bored.
I hug my steaming knees, then stretch. It is still morning, minutes shy of noon. A Saturday. Sunlight refracts in the water where the bubbles have vanished. I am a housewife. I live an hour outside of Manhattan, and I have work I can do at home and be paid for. My husband has never so much as uttered a cruel word to me, he is a fine father, and any bill I can’t manage he takes on even if it means a third job. He isn’t the humorless dolt I once imagined I’d end up with if I couldn’t have Fowler.
“Mom, I have to
go
!” Jane bellows from the living room. Our downstairs toilet is broken. I told Simon I’d get it taken care of today.
I hurry, creating a tidal wave of bathwater. The cordless rings atop the hamper. I freeze, knee-deep in suds, my skin goosebumpy. My throat is full. I clear, answer, wait.
“Well.” The twang, earned in Southern roots and upbringing. Sun in the voice. “You’ve got a cold.”
“No.”
“It is you, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
He laughs. “Meet me. I’m standing on Fifth Avenue, across from the Sherry Netherland. Can you get here?”
I hear Jane’s heavy tread, her whining diphthong. “Mo-om.” I consider his invitation, pull at the plug chain with my toes. The drain sucks the water out in greedy, loud gulps. “In an hour,” I say. I’ll take the girls to Kirsten’s. She’s home Saturdays with her two. Jane loves it there because of Adrienne, eleven, the local expert on AIDS.
“I’ll have one drink while I wait,” he says. “I’ll calm down. This city gets to me. Fabulous.” He clicks off.
Still holding the phone, I let Jane in.
“A towel would do wonders,” she says. “And try not to drop the phone. You’ll be a crispy critter.”
She beams at this. I pull my blue wrapper around me.
“Okay, Mom,” I tell her. My daughter, the forty-year-old. She knows more now than I’ll ever know.
“Mom, are you losing weight?”
Jane asks me this from time to time because she knows it makes me feel good because I am not losing weight. I haven’t gained, but I haven’t overthrown a few pounds left me from having Daisy, my glorious ten-pounder. Some days it gets to me, although today isn’t one of them.
She sits down. Peeing is not a private event for the girls in this family. Simon and Isaac close the door, but we can always hear. “Who was that anyway?”
“A friend. I’m taking you over to Kirsten’s for the afternoon.”
“But Dad said he’d take us to the pool.” Her mouth does the thing all her friends’ mouths do to display disgust, upper lip raised on one side, and her eyes roll.
“Kirsten has a pool.”
“It’s above ground!”
I’m about to call up my don’t-give-me-that-yuppie-private-school-me-generation-backtalk speech when I catch myself. In light of the criminal I’ve decided to have lunch with, I let her have her protest.
“Put your bathing suit in a bag.”
“Fine,” she says, huffing, and flushes.
• • •
I think about underwear for the first time in a while, choosing a Victoria’s Secret print set. Over this, jeans and a black silk blouse, all of it reminiscent of younger days when Fowler and I went to downtown bars to meet his friends. Jane comes in with her neon beach bag and scowls. “Mom, are you going to a concert?”
“Yes. The Stones are playing Central Park.”
“Very funny, Mom. Daisy’s up, you know.” There are so many ways in which I am a bad mother today. I can’t get past Jane with a thing.
I can hear Daisy, my serene child, cooing and laughing in the little room next to mine. With her I felt I’d finally perfected baby-making: she slept through at three months, she nursed for twelve, she’s been sick three times in eighteen months, and she hasn’t lost her fat yet. I’m still in love the way I was when they were rolling her in to me at the hospital in her plastic tray. Of course I adore my older ones, but Daisy lets me breathe. Isaac is so angry, so protective of all of us, so ready for the shadow that is his absent father to come in and ruin things, that he never enjoys anything except, occasionally, baseball practice. Jane runs our home. Daisy doesn’t seem to need me at all, and so I need her every minute.
“Can I take her out of her crib?” Jane asks, sure of my answer.
“Yes. Put her suit in too. I’ll get some crackers and juice.”
We travel well, as a family. We’re usually prepared with snacks and tapes for the car and car games that can drag on for hours. The children have always liked going places, even if it’s two minutes to Kirsten’s or six hours to see friends in Vermont. In the front seat Jane empties the glove compartment in search of the 10,000 Maniacs tape, which I know Isaac took to listen to in the Mustard Bomb, our expiring second car meant for local outings.
“Isaac’s such a schmuck,” she says.
“Jane, must you?” I plead. It’s not entirely her fault she has such a vocabulary. Both brother and father have been known to cast such an aspersion on whomever from time to time.
“He takes everything.” She slams the compartment and crosses her arms.
“Aouff,” Daisy keeps saying, which I take as an indication that I should hand her something to ear.
“When are you going to be home?” Jane whines. “I want to go out and get my own Maniacs tape.”
“This afternoon,” I promise. “We’ll go to Sam Goody and get you one, and maybe something for Daisy to listen to.”
“Okay.”
I can’t bear to see my kids unhappy, and I often promise them things we can ill afford. The two older ones are aware of this defect in my parenting, but it isn’t often that they try for an upper hand. I don’t know how we’ve done it, but we’ve gotten them to believe in limits.