The Unwelcomed Child (20 page)

In fantasies, I saw myself finally living with my mother, but her coldly realistic view of it was like having ice-cold water thrown on me while dreaming.

“Yes,” I said, with a neutral tone in my voice.

She smiled and hugged me. “Later, when my mother cross-examines you about our conversation, you should tell her that all I did was complain about how miserable my life really is. That way, she’ll feel better.”

“What?”

She held her smile, and then something happened that I never expected.

We both laughed simultaneously, as if we had been best friends for years and years and knew secrets we wouldn’t share with anyone else in the world.

Despite the reality she had inserted into our conversation, it was as if one of my dreams really had come true. For a few moments, at least, we were like a mother and a daughter.

But I knew that dreams pop like bubbles in the morning, and stone reality beats them down so deeply sometimes that you lose them forever.

It’s like watching something precious sink in deep water. You reach frantically but can only watch helplessly as it goes into the darkness and becomes as lost as an opportunity you had failed to grasp.

Maybe all of this was already drowned and gone.

To my pleasant surprise, Grandfather Prescott and Carlos were laughing when we returned. Grandfather Prescott was drinking some of the aperitif Carlos had brought. Carlos stood up immediately when we entered. I could see on his face that he was looking for some indication that everything had gone all right between my mother and me. She nodded and smiled.

“Short one?” he asked her.

“You bet,” she said. “And not too short.”

He laughed, then looked at me, held up the bottle, and glanced at my grandfather.

“God, no,” Grandfather Prescott said, looking toward the kitchen. “Perish the thought.”

I was disappointed. I had never tasted anything remotely alcoholic. Grandfather Prescott shook his head at me, and I hurried into the kitchen to help Grandmother Myra. She was banging things around, slamming pots a little harder, and clanking spoons and knives as if she wanted to take the kitchen apart. She turned sharply when I appeared, her hands on her small hips.

“I suppose she filled you with a lot of garbage and told you how wonderful her life is now, how she’s on the Easy Street that she never stopped believing in,” she said.

“No. I mean, she’s hoping to be happy with Carlos, but she had one unhappy marriage already.”

“Only one?” she asked with a wry smile. “You mean only one she admitted to having. I can’t imagine marriage ever being happy for her. Or for the poor soul who blindly says ‘I do.’”

She paused to catch her breath, her hand over her heart. Then she put her right hand on the counter to steady herself.

“Are you all right, Grandmother?”

“No.” She paused and shook her head. “I knew this day would come. I dreaded it, if you want to know the truth. It was easier to pretend she was dead.”

How hard,
I thought.
Does she really hate her own daughter this much? Will she come to hate me equally?

“That girl ruined her life. She could have had a decent life, even after . . . even then. Let this be a good lesson for you. Choose your friends wisely. If you lie down with dogs, you’ll wake up with fleas,” she said. She took a deep breath and returned to the food. “Let’s get this meal over with.”

She had made a pork loin roast with sweet potatoes and broccoli.

I quickly got to work chopping up the salad, and she checked on her homemade bread. The aromas were delicious. She never intended it, for sure, but this was a wonderful welcome-home meal.

“All right. Enough. It’s probably the first wholesome meal they’ve had in days, maybe months. Tell them dinner is ready,” she said.

All three were laughing when I returned to the living room. Grandfather Prescott’s glass had been refilled. My mother’s was nearly empty. They stopped and looked at me as if they had forgotten what we were waiting to do.

“Grandmother says dinner is ready. We should all go into the dining room.”

Grandfather Prescott’s face looked a little red from drinking the aperitif. Looking quickly at the bottle, I saw that more than half had been drunk.

“Get ready. This will be an experience,” my mother told Carlos. “I’d have offered to help, but I’m sure my touch would have contaminated something.”

They moved to the dining room, and I returned to the kitchen to help serve the salad first and bring in a jug of cold water. In silence, everyone gathered around the table. My mother and Carlos sat across from me.

My mother looked around and shook her head. “Believe it or not, Mom, I used to dream about this room and the meals I had in it.”

“You weren’t much of a help,” Grandmother Myra said. “I’m sure you’re not much of a cook now, either.”

“Sure I am. I cook up reservations,” she said, laughing. Carlos smiled. “Carlos can whip up a mean enchilada. I’ll give you this. You were always a good cook, Mom. ‘Slave to the kitchen, slave to the house, and slave to the man I love,’” she sang. Carlos laughed again. Grandfather Prescott risked a smile.

My grandmother looked disapprovingly at him, wiping the grin off his face as quickly and roughly as she used to wipe jelly off my lips. Everyone was quiet. She brought her hands together and lowered her head to say grace. I looked at Carlos and my mother. They didn’t lower their heads at first, and then Carlos did, quickly. As soon as Grandmother Myra was done, she nodded at me, and I rose and began to serve everyone the salad, just the way I did when my grandparents had their friends, the Marxes, over for dinner.

“You could get a job at any restaurant,” my mother said.

“Sure could,” Carlos agreed.

“I would hope her ambitions will reach a lot higher than that,” Grandmother Myra said.

“Got to start somewhere, Mom.”

“Not in the devil’s lap,” she muttered.

I served myself some salad and then poured everyone a glass of water.

“The town doesn’t look much different from the last time I saw it,” my mother said.

“You must be blind,” Grandmother Myra told her. “Many of the older classic buildings have been torn down and replaced, and many lie fallow.”

“Like I told you earlier,” Grandfather Prescott said, “it’s become one of those second-home communities. People from New York gobble up the properties at ridiculous prices and use them for vacation homes.”

“Love to have one of those houses on the lake,” Carlos said. “We got just a short view of it coming here. How big is it?”

“Two miles from end to end, with some coves, of course.”

“Who bought the Nelsons’ house?” my mother asked. “The one closest to ours on the lake?”

“Don’t know who they are,” Grandfather Prescott said. “Some city people, I’m sure.”

I looked down quickly. They were talking about Mason and Claudine’s summerhouse.

“I remember one summer,” my mother began. My grandmother cleared her throat loudly. “I was just going to say when we all took that boat ride with the Nelsons. Even you had a good time that day, Mom.”

“That was a long time ago,” Grandmother Myra said. “You were still . . .”

“Innocent and pure? Yes, I was. I enjoyed my high school life here,” she told Carlos. “We were a small school, but we had great basketball teams and baseball teams. Great school parties, too.”

“You’d think you enjoyed the school because you had good teachers.”

“I know I did, Mom. They got me through well enough to get into SUNY Albany.”

“A miracle if there ever was one,” Grandmother Myra said, and nodded at me to continue serving the dinner she had prepared.

I rose and went into the kitchen to get the platter of pork. After I brought that out, I brought out the sweet potatoes and the broccoli.

“Does she clean the house and wash all the clothes, too?” my mother asked, looking at me.

“Hard work keeps her out of trouble.”

“What trouble can she get in living locked up?”

“You should know,” my grandmother retorted. “Curfews and rules were simply things to break.”

“If you hold the baby bird too tightly in your hands, you’ll kill it.”

“Too loosely, and it will fly into a wall.”

“I feel like I’m watching a ping-pong game,” Carlos said, and Grandfather Prescott surprised us all by laughing.

He fell silent in the wake of Grandmother Myra’s intense glare. Then he began passing the platter of sliced pork around. My mother was smiling. Suddenly, she laughed, looking as if the aperitif had finally gone to her head.

Grandmother Myra slammed her hand on the table, making the dishes and silverware jump. “I won’t stand for frivolity at my dinner table. Food is a holy blessing. That’s why we are thankful for it. There’s no place at my dinner table for this sort of frivolity.”

“No place anywhere in your home for any frivolity, Mom.”

Grandmother Myra stiffened in her chair like someone who had been kicked at the base of her spine. She nodded, with her eyes narrowing, as she turned to my mother. “You’re doing just what I predicted, setting a bad example for Elle. Look at you. You look like a clown in all that makeup and that ugly thing in your nose. You haven’t grown up a day since you left. You poison the very air with your breath. Well, I won’t permit you to bring any immorality back into this house. It still reeks of your former sins.”

My mother stopped laughing. She looked at me and pushed her seat back.

“Hey,” Carlos said.

“No, Carlos. This is not going to work out. We’ll both get indigestion. I thought maybe, just maybe, the years had mellowed you, Mom, but if anything, they’ve made you even harder.” She stood up and turned to me. “You would have been luckier if they had done what they had said they were going to do, given you up for adoption. At least then, you would have had half a chance at some sort of normal life.”

“Normal? Call your life normal?” Grandmother Myra retorted.

“Anything is normal compared with this. Let’s go, Carlos.”

“But . . .”

“Let’s go. I’m sorry, Dad. For a few moments, it was almost possible.”

“I wish everyone would just calm down,” Grandfather Prescott said. “If we calm down, we can get along and enjoy our first meal together in a very long time.”

“Enjoy?” My mother laughed again and then looked serious. “You haven’t changed, either, Dad. You’re still looking the other way. You should have been there for me. You both should have been there for me.”

“You should have been there for yourself,” Grandmother Myra told her, her eyes strong, steady, and full of faith in her own beliefs. Not my mother, not anyone, would shake that out of her, I thought. She’d never doubt she was right. Was that good, or was that the arrogance she warned me to watch for in myself?

“Right. Well, I hope you don’t ruin her the way you ruined me,” my mother said, “but I don’t see how that won’t happen. If she has any sense, she’ll run off now while she has a chance. That’s what I did, and if ever I didn’t regret it, it is now. At least I’m living in a world where sex isn’t a disease, where you don’t have to be ashamed of your feelings and treat your period like a stab in the groin.”

For a moment, it felt as if the air had been sucked out of the house. The silence made my ears ring. It was like being in the eye of a storm.

That passed, and Grandmother Myra exploded. “Get out!” she shouted, standing and pointing at the front door. “I won’t permit Elle to hear any more of this filth.”

“She is my daughter, Mother. You can wash her until the skin falls off, and I’ll still be part of her. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

I felt as if my insides were burning. She was saying all the wrong things. If anything, after she left, Grandmother Myra would be even more vigilant and afraid that evil would show its face in mine.

Carlos looked terrified now. He rose quickly. “I’m sorry, Prescott,” he told my grandfather.

My mother stood there defiantly. “You think of me as the bad one, the evil one, but when I think of what you did to me, how you treated me when I came to you in great need, I know in my heart that Christ himself would wonder how you managed to use his name and put your foot in his church.”

I thought Grandmother Myra would have a heart attack right then and there. She was so overwhelmed with fury she couldn’t speak. Her mouth opened and closed. My mother turned and walked out of the dining room, with Carlos right behind her. I kept my head down. Grandfather Prescott looked as if he was gazing into a bright fire. We heard the door open and close.

After a moment, Grandmother Myra sat. She drank some water. “Finish eating,” she told us. “It’s a sin to waste good food.”

My grandfather began eating like an obedient child. I pushed my food around, wondering how I was going to get any of it down my tightened throat. Somehow, in a wakelike silence, we managed to finish what was on our plates. When I saw no one was going to eat any more, I rose and began to clear the table.

“You shouldn’t have encouraged them,” Grandmother Myra told my grandfather. “Sitting there and drinking that . . . that whiskey.”

“It was hard for a stranger to walk into all this, Myra. I tried to make it easier.”