A Watershed Year (31 page)

“Blessed, blessed ground,” she said, touching the playground’s dusty surface with one hand, still hanging onto Mat with the other. “You’re all right. Everything’s all right.” She gripped the back of Mat’s head and pulled his face down to her shoulder. She couldn’t sort out what she was feeling: fear, anger, shame, all three at once.

“I’m sorry, Mat. I should have been watching you.” When she loosened her hold on him, he avoided her eyes and ran toward the fire truck where the firefighters were letting children take turns climbing into the driver’s seat. She walked over, still trembling, and thanked two of the firemen profusely. They accepted her thanks, nodding along and smiling, but they seemed to be eyeing her skirt and her bare feet and her mass of unruly hair and adding that impression to the circumstances. She hadn’t watched her child very carefully, had she, or they wouldn’t have been called in.
An amateur.

One of the firemen hoisted Mat into the fire truck to ring the bell. She watched him there, blithely clanging away, unfazed by the terror of five minutes before. The adrenalin rush had left her completely spent. When the fire truck left, she retrieved her sandals, circled the playscape, and coaxed Mat back to the car with the promise of some candy she now kept in the glove compartment. She drove home shaking and exhausted. They had been gone for less than two hours.

Lucy turned on the television and played Mat’s favorite DVD about construction equipment, then she filled up the tub for a hot soak. She looked in the mirror and saw that her eyes—already red-rimmed from the cat allergies—were puffy and irritated from the playground dust. The aftermath of fear lingered there as well. Mat could have broken his neck. She would have to stay within three feet of him until he was old enough for college.

Before getting into the tub, she ran downstairs to the kitchen and found some cucumbers in the vegetable drawer, grateful that Louis had stocked the fridge. She cut some thin slices, put them on a paper napkin, and brought them into the bathroom, resting the napkin on the side of the tub. She added some bubble bath, then sank into the warm water, slipping down until there was nothing above the water but the tip of her nose and her lips. She rested there, eyes closed, her muscles still recovering from gripping the tube.

The discipline of preventive worry had always helped before. If you worried long and hard enough about unpleasant possibilities—dying in a car crash, losing a limb to frostbite, being trapped in a house fire—you stopped them from happening, because what were the chances that your worry would be justified? But with Mat, her capacity for worry wasn’t long or deep or broad enough to encompass the myriad ways he could put himself in permanently disabling or life-threatening situations. She could worry for eighteen years straight and never cover it all.

She heard a noise and opened her eyes.

Mat was sitting by the tub, munching on one of the slices of cucumber she had planned to use on her eyes. He reached for the other and treated her to a rare smile.

“You like those?” she said. “I’ll get you some more when I get out of the tub.”

He nodded. He seemed content just to sit there in the warm steam of the bathroom, letting her talk to him in her strange language. Nothing like a near-death experience to bind two human
beings together, she thought, although she could never go back to that playground again.

ROSALEE ARRIVED to babysit as Lucy was feeding Mat his dinner of macaroni and cheese with a hot dog. All her lofty ideas about buying only organic food had evaporated in the first week when she discovered he wouldn’t eat cooked vegetables except for potatoes. Most of what he liked had some relationship to pork or sugar.

Rosalee placed a white cardboard box tied with string on the counter.

“Butter cookies,” she whispered, “for after dinner.”

“Nana,” Mat said when he saw Rosalee. She clapped her hand over her heart.

“He’s a genius, this boy,” she said.

“He’s picking up a dozen words a day,” Lucy told her. “I think it’s incredible.”

“Nothing short of spectacular,” Rosalee said, opening the refrigerator to search for one of the diet sodas that Lucy kept in supply for her. “Have you heard about Cokie?”

Mat got up and went straight to the cardboard box.

“Cokies,” he said.

“Cookies,” Lucy said. “What about Cokie?”

“Cokies,” Mat said again.

“No, hon, cookies,” Rosalee said. “She already has a publisher for her beauty book. She had a friend who knew someone in the publishing business, and she gave him the outline, and now she has a contract. Apparently she’s tapped into a very hot market.”

Lucy cleared Mat’s plate as Rosalee cut the string on the box of cookies. The whole story reminded her of a long discussion she had had once with Harlan about the conflict women feel about being viewed as attractive.

“It all boils down to how hard you want to try,” she had told him. “Pretty much anyone these days can have long blond hair. Thinness is tougher, but it’s attainable if you work hard enough. If you wear a short enough skirt, or a tight enough sweater, you can be noticed. But most women start to resent the effort. And what’s the point? Do you want that kind of attention from every male who passes by? At the same time, if you swing too far in the other direction—skip the makeup, wear sweats, tie your hair in a knot—people assume you’ve lost it completely.”

“So very attractive women, in your opinion, are trying too hard?” Harlan had said.

“Not necessarily. But we all have a limit, and it’s based on a complex formula of upbringing, financial status, natural resources, so to speak, self-esteem, and cultural pressure. Do the women in the African bush think they’re beautiful? Do they care if they’re not?”

Harlan, as usual, had brought her back from her flights of abstract theory.

“It’s different for men. We all think we’re attractive.”

Rosalee rummaged through the box of cookies and pulled out one with a chocolate-coated bottom and handed it to Mat, who stuffed the entire cookie into his mouth.

“So how’s Paul taking it?” Lucy asked. “Chew, Mat, chew.”

“He’s trying to talk her into using the book money as a down payment on a T.G.I. Friday’s franchise. He’s seen the numbers, of course, and he says it’s a foolproof investment.”

“Seriously?” and then to Mat, “Do you want some milk?” and back to her mother, “What does Cokie say?”

“So far she’s resisting. He told me she went out and bought herself a Prada wallet the other day. Five hundred dollars. And when he asked her about it, she said she deserved it. She said it would keep its value better than the five hundred dollars’ worth of Legos in the basement. So I guess she does have a way with words.”

THE PINK LINEN NAPKINS at the French restaurant were folded into the shape of swans. Lucy held one up and examined the folds, trying to figure out how it had been constructed.

“See, this is the kind of thing I won’t be able to explain to Mat. Only Americans would use origami on napkins and try to pass it off as French.” She was nervous, or maybe just tired from the playground incident. Aside from the ridiculous swans, the restaurant had an unwelcome formality to it. She felt like a child trespassing in the adult world as she tilted her head to examine the crystal chandelier above their table. Why had Louis picked this place?

Louis shook out his swan and put it on his lap. He had worn a tie and a jacket but still looked like the youngest person in the room, except for the teenage busboy who came to fill their water glasses. He looked uncomfortable as he glanced around.

“Someone told me the food here was great,” he said in a low voice. “But this isn’t what I pictured.”

“Who told you it was great?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Louis, who?”

“Ellen,” he said. “But that was… before you and I… we never came here.”

Lucy could picture Ellen in a place like this, ordering waiters to and from the table, sending back an undercooked entrée. Lucy had never sent anything back. It had always made her feel uncomfortable to be treated with the forced deference of the tip dependent. She wanted everyone to be friends, equal, right down to the guy at the car wash who took her money and put her antenna down. But Ellen would have enjoyed it. Of this, Lucy was somehow sure.

As Louis scanned the wine list and ordered a bottle of merlot, she realized how little she knew about him—his family, his childhood, his politics. It felt as though their relationship had been thrown into reverse, and here they were on the awkward first date.

“So tell me about your parents. Were they Republicans or Democrats?” She sipped the wine, which left a bitter taste on the back of her tongue. “I had one of each, which is kind of funny because—”

“I thought we could talk about Mat.” He fiddled with his salad fork as the waiter placed a basket of French bread on the table.

“Well, today I took him to a playground, and that was a disaster—”

“No, about me and Mat. You let me stew for a whole week, Lucy. It wasn’t what I expected when you came back. I know we never really talked about it, but I thought you’d let me help.”

She buttered a piece of bread, wondering herself why she didn’t want his help. If anything, she could use more help. She bit into the bread, which was slightly stale.

“Why do you think I adopted him?”

“Why?”

“I’d really like to know how it looks from your perspective.”

“Because you wanted a child, because you’re a good person.”

A good person.
The words stuck in her throat along with the stale bread, which had formed itself into a large pill.

“But see, that’s what I’m struggling with. I didn’t do it because I’m a good person, Louis. In fact, I’m still not sure why I did it. I mean, I wanted a child, but I think I did it more to stop up the holes—the holes in my life, not Mat’s. Does that make any sense?”

“You’re being too hard on yourself. The end result is that you’re giving him a better future. That’s what matters.”

She placed the half-eaten piece of baguette on her bread plate. Was the end result all that mattered? Was it really that important to understand her own motives? She pictured them as a tangled ball of yarn that might take years to unravel.

“I still have this guilt that maybe I didn’t have my priorities straight. So that’s why I need to be so careful now. I can’t afford for Mat to get confused, because I think he’s finally starting to understand that we’re in this together. I’m trying to turn it around now, to fill in the holes in his life.”

“So you’re saying I’ll confuse him.”

“I’m saying I need a little time to figure it all out. It’s so new still. I don’t have a handle on him yet.”

Louis paused as the waiter came over to take their orders. Neither of them had looked at the menu, so they asked for more time. The waiter filled their wine glasses and slipped away noiselessly.

“I’m sorry,” Louis said. “I shouldn’t be pushing you. Take as much time as you need.”

She was pleased at first, until she glanced up from the menu and saw the expression on his face, which didn’t match the generosity in his voice. He wanted to understand, but he didn’t. She could tell by the way he shifted in his chair and glanced back at the chandelier, as though patience were a virtue he could find among the winking crystals that dangled over their heads.

She ordered the filet mignon, medium, and ate it anyway when it was served rare.