Every Day (11 page)

In her haste over most things, Mother forgets to inflect. Statements are questions, questions statements. Discourse in general is muddled. “Only a linguist could translate,” my father says fondly, now that he deals with this on a less regular basis.

I both adore her mania and hate it. It has given me the ability to stand apart from things and to brood to the point of cruelty.

“Mother, we’re all right. I was hoping we could stay here for a little while. Simon and I are having some differences. Jane and Isaac are with him, and I have Daisy. Please don’t mind.”

Out with it
’s been my method with Mother for a long time. Otherwise we’ve got an eternity of circumlocution and non sequitur to decode.

“Well, I couldn’t possibly mind. But what about Jane, then, and Isaac. Will
he
be able to manage them. What will they do all the day?”

“They’re in camp, Mother. I haven’t been kidnapped. I’m still their mother. Daisy needs me more right now. And I need you to be calm.”

“Well of course I’ll be calm. But you can hardly expect an unannounced visit to go unnoticed, particularly when half the family is missing. Where one earth did you find to park at this hour.”

I tell her about the train.

“Good God. You could have taken the yellow car, Leigh, and not bothered with all that.”

Sometimes I think our differences could be summed up in the matter of nomenclature. She calls our jalopy “the yellow car”; I call it “the mustard bomb.” She calls her arrangement with Dad “an experiment”; I call it “separation.”
Pas comme il faut
is her way of describing unacceptable behavior, whereas I would simply say it was crude or unacceptable. Occasionally I yearn for that gentility, but most of the time I mourn its impracticality. Still, it is easy, with Mother, to get swept up in the flourish of her idiom.

“I don’t know,” I say. “There’s something about a train.”

She ignores me.

“Nama,” Daisy says, and she squeezes my mother’s long cheeks, arranging her face horribly. But Mother allows it.

“You’re my little fatty,” she says. Then, turning away from the glory of Daisy, “Well, in any event, you’ll need some breakfast and something to put on for a few days. And I want to hear all about this business when we’re settled. Do you want your father in on it yet?”

“No.”

“He’s expecting all of you on Saturday.”

“We’ll be there, in some form.” I hear myself fading out, voice trailing away as it does when I’m overwhelmed. Dad loves Simon and he loathes conflict, which he considers unnecessary and luxurious given the state of our world. If I don’t find some way to assure him that this is temporary, another of my aberrant responses to what is surely a paradise of a life, he’ll be crushed.

I sit at the kitchen table and welcome her coffee, thick as diesel. Mother has always ignored the proportion advice as far as coffee’s concerned. One heaping tablespoon of grinds for every six ounces of water is the way she does it. Daisy waits in the old high chair, the one sans safety strap (“Such
a lot of rubbish, all these
accoutrements,”
Mother says of such things), for her food. Mother fixes her a boiled egg and toast dripping with butter and strawberry jam, which does nicely in lieu of waffles. She admires Daisy’s appetite.

“I don’t know what went wrong with Jane. She eats so poorly, always has. But look at this one!”

I know how I’m supposed to take this: you ruined her (Jane) with all that breast milk. She never got used to
other
food.

“Jane gets what she needs,” I say, horrified at the hollowness of that statement, given where I am. Mother doesn’t respond, just goes on with the feeding.

•   •   •

Outside Macy’s, where, Mother’s convinced me, we’ll find a few sale items for Daisy and me to tide us over, she says, “I do think Jane ought to be with you, you know. Isaac is old enough now for a few days of this sort of thing, but Jane isn’t.”

As I haven’t yet told her about Fowler, I can’t fathom her ability to understand what “sort of thing” she means. All I said, over toast and eggs, was that I had some loose ends to tie up.

“Jane chooses her father.”

Mother lifts the stroller, without meaning to, and slams it on the pavement. Daisy screams to get out. “How can you
say
such a thing?
Of an eight-year-old?”

The comfort of her help, of her company, gives way, and now I am helpless, a child myself, certain that the rough deal I’m facing is completely my fault. It’s familiar, terrible, this certainty.

I kneel. “I’m sorry,” I say to Daisy, but she bats me off, screaming for her Nama. I get up, defer, watch my mother gather her up, give her the Paddington rattle, shield her from me.

•   •   •

We pick up some playclothes and Portacrib sheets, then move on to women’s sport clothes. Mother insists on a pair of summer slacks and a skirt for me.

“You
need
things, for God’s sake,” she says. “Don’t tell me you don’t.”

Daisy is her phenomenally good-sport self until we get to the cash register. I leave Mother to pay, at her insistence, and head for the cafeteria to wait for her via the lavatory, where I change Daisy and fill a basin with cold water to dunk my head in.

“Wake up, asshole,” I whisper to my reflection. I’m haggard and fleshy, like a much older woman who has given up on something huge, living happily, for starters. Daisy starts into an empty stall, then backs out.

“Ick-y,” she says, smiling.

I remember that I shirked toilet repair before we left. This fact, on top of the others, fills me with grief. To have left two of my children in a house with a broken toilet . . . I imagine each of them cursing me, venting, Jane just screaming primally, Isaac doing his own sort of nonverbal damage to the doors and walls. Fist. Baseball bat.

I’m an hour away, but I may as well be in Siberia. What I’ve done, I just now realize, is to alter their lives, making their home unrecognizable, their parents fools. I’ve done the unutterable, predictable thing: exactly what my parents did to me.

•   •   •

Mother has found some way around the cafeteria line and to a table, probably with a graceful lie about a sick grandchild in the restroom, witness the stroller full of
accoutrements
for the child’s recuperative period. Mother’s tired beauty and her eloquence enable her to circumvent the most pedestrian of processes, which makes the fact that she’s married to a Marxist all the more perplexing.

“They’ve got some lovely-looking soup. Vegetable, I think.
Daisy loves soup. I hope it’s all right with you that I ordered us some.”

“Of course,” I answer, Dad’s formality creeping in. “But isn’t it a little warm for soup?”

“Oh,” Mother says, flustered. “Now that you mention it.”

“No,” I say, softening. “Whatever. She does like it.”

“Good. Because here it comes.”

Mother has actually gotten a server to leave her station behind the steaming chrome architecture of the kitchen to bring us three bowls of soup and two sodas.

“Here we are,” the woman says. She’s about Mother’s age, but thick in the middle and lavish in her gestures toward our comfort, setting us regular places with napkins and silver and asking, “How’s the baby feeling?”

I should pinch Daisy’s thigh to get a proper noise out of her, but too late: she smiles cunningly, and the woman takes this as a compliment.

“See that? Rose’ll make it all better.” She brings fat hands together. She’s got a rich landscape of a voice, one to get lost in. “She’s a beauty.”

“Thank you, Rose,” Mother says.

Rose.
It’s the kind of name none of us has. We’re so locked into our histories, my father, husband, and son in the Old Testament, my mother, Marion Leigh Wadsworth, the girls, and I on Plymouth Rock. From what I understand, neither I nor my children could ever be considered even remotely Jewish, although at Hastings I was the resident Jew.

“You ladies enjoy,” Rose says.

Mother says, “I really think you should bring Isaac and Jane to the city. Until you get whatever it is sorted out.”

I spoon Daisy soup, then, stupidly, as I’ll only have to do it again, I wipe her mouth.

“Foop,” she beams.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what it is.”

“You won’t believe it,” I say, looking only at Daisy.

She sighs. “He’s in town, isn’t he.”

The mere mention of him brings him here, to the cafeteria in Macy’s, and he’s watching how we do things, what we say, a kind observer, at the ready should we drop something or forget any of our bags on leaving.

“Leigh,” she warns. “Don’t be a fool.”

“Mother, please,” I say softly. “He had some news.”

“Of course he did.”

Fowler is in back of me, his mouth at my ear.
It’s all right to tell her. Tell the planet. We make our own rules. But you know all this.

“He’s sick. I don’t know what it is. He might not make it through the winter.”

Mother looks embattled. “At this rate, Leigh, neither will you.”

I leave it. We go ahead and eat.

•   •   •

While Mother is at her afternoon tennis game in the park, I begin my maniac phoning.

They’re not home. He must have picked them up from camp and taken them for a swim, over to Kirsten’s or the neighbor’s club. I can’t bring myself to leave word, after listening to our recorded message, which has all of us talking at once and then Isaac saying, “You caught us at a bad time—can we get back? Please say yes.”

Next: Kirsten.

“They’re on their way over,” she says automatically.

I beg her to have them call me the minute they get there.

“You’ve been gone for under twelve hours, Leigh,” she says with irritation. “Nothing’s happened to them.”

“I want to talk to my children,” I tell her.

“Then
live
with them.” She hangs up.

I call her back. “Are we really doing this?” I ask her.

“We?”
she pleads.

My turn. I hang up.

I look around my old room, wishing for siblings. If I had siblings I could call them. They could come back to this apartment and make themselves comfortable with things to eat and pillows, and they could talk me out of this desperation. They could marvel at Daisy’s chewing on the spines of my college texts in the combination desk-bookshelf-cupboard that I can remember being thrilled over acquiring. It made me feel wealthy, like one of my classmates, to have such a structure to keep all my things in. I was minus the walk-in closet, the private bath, the wraparound terrace, but I felt I was ahead in terms of the uniqueness of my parents. Not one of my classmates could brag that she had a Jewish father and a mother who didn’t believe in God. (It was their one commonality, I thought, the atheism. I thought it sounded fashionable then, although it terrified me, made me feel as if I were floating in a satellite universe that was only coincidentally connected to the one everyone else was living in.)

A brother or a sister would ground me, I think.

I lie on the floor next to Daisy, who now sits over a series of inch-high plastic people, fitting them into shallow wells in a plastic school bus. I know that in minutes I’ll be asleep, so I pull her over, settle her into the V of my hips, arrange the toys so she’ll stay occupied while I nap. If I knew a prayer I’d say it now. I’d tell whoever it is their names, all three, and ask for help in getting us back under the same roof. And then I’d ask whoever it is not to let Fowler die, and to flood Simon with forgiveness.

•   •   •

Our theory, Gillette’s and mine, that glut begets immorality, holds water. In fact, given my research on the court of Louis XIV, it’s irrefutable. Feigning scholarliness and singleness of purpose, I have enlisted the help of one of the librarians at the 40th Street branch, a man younger than myself, trim, elegantly dressed, who gestured dramatically, palms open to
the world of European social history, when I asked for books on seventeenth-century French mores.

“My
dear,”
he swooned. “Your chariot awaits.”

It is midmorning. I left Daisy home with Mother. I walked forty blocks to get here despite a crashing headache and terrible fatigue. I’ve had six hours of sleep, in spurts of one and two hours, since I brought us to Mother’s two mornings ago.

He hands me a printout of ten titles, mostly biography and collected essays, each with a long abstract.

“Tip of the iceberg, dear heart. Once I teach you the matching game, you’ll be able to make your selections more expediently.”

I’m trying to be intent, but I keep wondering about this man, where he went to college.
ELIOT BERMAN
, the nametag reads. He types in two commands and the computer lists more titles. He shows me the instructional card of prompts, and I thank him, clutching the printouts.

“You’ve been dear,” I say, kicking myself. Something Mother would say.

“Not really,” he says curtly. “This is my job.”

I turn back to the screen.

“Will there be anything else?”

Almost venomous he is, all of a sudden, ill-treated servant to master, misogynist to all of womankind.

“Yes,” I say, chinking.

“Be quick, would you.” He slants his head away, eyeballing me.

“I need a book on degenerative diseases of the muscular system. Just a general text that would list them and the features of each, how each first manifests itself and progresses. If you’d be so kind. I’ve left my husband for a man who’s dying of one of them, he hasn’t told me which, and I’d like to get my bearings.”

Eliot smiles to himself, a puzzling smile, not exactly amused, not uninterested.

“Back in a jif,” he says, only glancing my way. I know he won’t be, that if he’s lucky, he’ll be on his lunch break or have gone home by the time I pass by the reference desk again, but I need him to know he’s gotten the wrong end of the tiger this morning.

Oh, let’s not do need.

I search, and find.

Dull, hardcover tomes full of dull, hardcover facts, no voices. Liselotte is my best guide. Reluctantly I jot down notes, facts, none of which has any impact. Open on the desk, Liselotte’s letters drown them all out:
It is a miserable thing when people may no longer follow their own common sense but have to conform to the whims of whores and self-interested priests.