All You Need Is Love (15 page)

Dad’s mouth rumples. “For the whole weekend?”

“No — not the whole weekend. Just the night.”

“Where are you heading?” He flips through menus as a way of making his question seem incidental rather than part of his need to know where I am every second of the day.

I hold my cell phone in one hand, keys in the other and make an impromptu decision. “I’m going to see Mable at the hospital and then going to Newport to spend the night at Lila Lawrence’s.”

“Doesn’t her mother have a bit of an alcohol problem?” Dad asks like he’s just inquired as to whether Lila’s mother enjoys a nice round of golf.

“I think a bit is semi-understating it, but yes, not that that stopped you from letting me visit last summer. Anyway, her mother’s in Palm Springs.”

“So there’s no adult present?” Dad puts the menus down and looks at me.

“Lila’s over eighteen, she’s an adult,” I suggest. Not mentioning the fact that I’m about to spend the whole summer unattended.

“Really, Love — that doesn’t count. I’m sorry, I can’t let you go. Go see Mable then come back here and we’ll get chimichangas.”

“I hate chimichangas.”

“No you don’t — you ate them all the time,” Dad insists and pushes the El Corazone menu at me.

“When I was six, maybe,” I say.

“Fine — then we’ll order from somewhere else. Or I could come with you and we could visit Mable together.”

“You just went this morning and we were there together yesterday.”

We stand looking at each other, me with my keys and cell phone at my hips like they’re in a holster and Dad with his sacred take out selections. We’re at a draw.

“Fine — go. To Mass General but don’t go the back way — there’s a game at Fenway and you’ll be stuck in traffic.”

“Okay,” I nod. I feel at turns like I’m twelve years old, or a hundred, but not really my true age. Not until I get to the car, settle into the front seat put the visor down to check and see if there’s really a foreign object in my eye (eyelash, piece of grass, dust) or just that irritating feeling in my eyeball that makes me pull my eyelid down twelve times in basset hound mode to check. No foreign object in my eye, but a disk drops into my lap from its position tucked away into the visor. I open the case and read the scrawled note inside:

Love — Am away this weekend but didn’t want you to think I forgot about the mix. When do I get my Cutlery one? Here’s my go at one word songs. I tried to avoid too many name songs since that felt like cheating — plus, they kind of suck (Amanda, Alison, Gloria not withstanding — even Cecelia is one of Paul Simon’s lamer tunes, don’t you think?) Someday I vow to write a name song about the dog I don’t yet own and make it a good song. Anyway, the liner notes are on the disk itself. — J.

One — U2

Persuasion — Tim Finn

Centerfold — J. Geils Band

Africa — Toto

Aurora — Bjork

California — Joni Mitchell

Songbird — Fleetwood Mac

Candy — Martin Sexton

Nobody — Tom Waits

Mother — Pink Floyd

Rain — Madonna

Strip — Adam Ant

Mess — Ben Folds Five

Blackbird — The Beatles

Trouble — Coldplay

I’m pleased to note he didn’t sign his note
JC
or with some Swiss expression that translates into wear your rabbit slippers and the mountains will find you smiling or something. But it does register that he leaves out what exactly his weekend plans are. Are we friends? Kind of — I mean, enough to swap cds, but are we hanging out on the weekends, tuned into each other’s lives? Not really. It’s both comforting and blah-making (blah-making=pseudo-depressing when it’s not an issue worthy of that giant word but still something that bugs you).

I flip the visor up, put in the disk and drive, determined not to read too much into the songs — sure, Centerfold is about seeing a girl naked and lusting after her but so far I haven’t posed nude and don’t plan to — and Persuasion has that line “I’ll always be a man who’s open to persuasion” but that doesn’t mean that’s what Jacob feels. Not necessarily.

One of the reasons I haven’t completed his mix is because cutlery is a difficult theme around which to build a cd. I’m also hyper-aware of the mix tape/cd as holder of hidden feelings phenomenon and I just can’t cope with the pressure to find songs that remain as neutral as I am supposed to feel. Not supposed to, as neutral as I do feel, a getting to know you all over again kind of friendship. Several degrees warmer than cold, but not quite fuzzy.

When I hear “Mother” it makes me miss the hospital exit so I have to loop around in the ever-changing mess of Boston’s roads while my mind wanders from imagining what my dad was like as a twentysomething to wondering if I will loose my nerve to ask Mable if maybe I am her daughter.

“Before I lose my nerve, I have to just ask you something,” I say when I’m not even all the way inside her room. Mable is sitting upright in bed, she looks close to her normal self, though I have to admit that I’ve begun to forget what she looked like a year ago, before all of this, before I knew cancer terminology, before I’d ever seen her cry from pain (I had seen her cry after cutting onions and after one big break-up but she’s not a big wailer).

Mable studies me for a second, “Oh my God — is this about sex? Did you do it — are you okay? Do you need anything — or no, wait — you’re going to aren’t you — oh I’m so glad you came to me first.”

I watch the slow but steady drip of fluid from the pulpous bag on the iv pole as it runs its course into her veins and walk over so I can hold her hand. She likes me to give her a gentle massage by squeezing her fingers one at a time.

“Um, no.” I keep my lips pressed together and sit on the bed with her, resting one of my arms on the bedrail for balance. “I am not having sex today — in fact, that memorable day or night has been pushed off into the unknown for an indeterminate amount of time, but I appreciate the reminder that I’m newly single with no prospects.”

“First of all you always have prospects. You just don’t always see them or see yourself as a viable option, Miss Lady Sings the Virginity Blues. Second of all, and I know I’ll sound like your mother, but there’s nothing wrong with waiting.”

I swallow hard at the “sound like your mother” part and skip over the sex talk. As far as I’m concerned it’ll happen when I say it happens and it’s unlikely to occur right now so I can fast forward and get to the real reason for my visit.

“Mable?” I ask. Big breath in. Release. “This is crazy — I know it’s…but I have to ask because I just need to know and I’ve been getting the feeling that you’ll tell me the truth now but only if I find the right way to ask or not the right way, but find the courage. So…” Mable looks at me expectantly and my heart pounds so loudly I’m sure she can hear it even over the pulse monitor’s bleep and the off and on announcements from the hallway.

“Are you my mother?” I ask. I sit perfectly still and wait to hear what she says.

Mable has her eyes cast downwards towards her lap and when she lifts them, she’s crying. Tears spill over her sunken cheeks, dripping off her protruding jaw and landing with a tiny plunk on the crisp white sheets. I don’t know if the tears are because she is or isn’t or because she’s horrified that I asked or if I’ve opened some old wound that I shouldn’t have.

In the middle of her crying Mable smiles, “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“So, you’re not?” I ask.

Mable cries harder and shakes her head. “It’s a little creepy to think about —very Greek tragedy. But also…” She starts to wipe the tears on the back of her hand. I reach for the tiny paper tissues on the side table and manage to pull out nearly the entire contents. I hand her the stack. “But…” She grabs my arm hard. “Can’t you just see us, reuniting, or wait — no — you and I would have had this relationship all along but you’d have to now reflect on what it meant that I turned out to be your mom…”

“You’re sounding very made for tv movie,” I say.

“Well, come on, if ever there were a MFTVM with us, it’s right now!”

“Yeah.” I feel disappointed. But I also feel relieved. It’s one thing to grow up with no real notion of my mother is, what happened — although I guess I know by now that she left — but it’s another thing to think that on top of Mable’s illness, that it’s my mom who might die. “So it’s not true.”

“Nope,” Mable says.

“So why were you crying?”

“Because I feel bad. I feel like your dad made a mistake not telling you things and I just went along with it because it was either that or not be in your life as much as I have been. And now — now you’re this woman…” Mable pushes back into her overly firm pillow to get a better look at me. “You’re not grown up but you’re damn close and you’re still in the dark.”

“I don’t know what I would have been like if you and Dad told me everything right away —I mean, who can say if I’d be better adjusted today if I had the facts.”

“The fact is, and it’s the facts that matter most, is that your dad loves you so much. And no, I’m not your mom, but I feel like you’re…not my daughter but my little sister or — no, I guess just my niece that I’m really close with, if that makes sense.”

I nod. “It makes sense. But — it’s like…”

“I know,” Mable interjects, “It’s like niece isn’t special enough.”

“It doesn’t connote closeness.”

Mable laughs — “It doesn’t
connote closeness
? You are so prep school. Why even go to college, you have the vocab now. No wait — forget that last part, of course you’re going to college — go wherever they have the best cereal bar. Seriously. You’ll get a great education anywhere, meet friends wherever you go, but only a select few colleges and universities have a truly broad spectrum of cereal.”

“I’ll make sure to remember that on my tours,” I say. “Good professors? Check. Well-equipped campus? Check. Capt’n Crunch and Grape Nuts? Check.”

“What made you ask this all of a sudden?”

I stand up and pace around the room while we talk. “It wasn’t really all of a sudden. When I was in London Arabella and my friends Keena and Fizzy — yes, I know I now have friends with weird names — they got into the whole maternal mystery thing and then I thought about it.”

“What were your clues?”

“You were married to a guy named David, right? That’s Dad’s name…”

Mable rolls her eyes. “For my millisecond marriage I was Mrs. David Goodman.”

“You were married to David Good-man?” I say making his name an adjective.

“Yes, he was good, but sadly the free-loving grass roots enviro-freak that he was made him determined to not only save the world but be king of it.”

“What became of Mr. Goodman?” I ask and pour myself a cup of water. The flowers I bought for Mable have long since shriveled up, but she saved one by drying it upside down and taping to the wall. I don’t touch it for fear I’ll crunch it by accident.

“He sold blended juice drinks out of that green van we had and after we split he went to San Francisco to…” Mable holds up her fingers in a piece sign and mellows her voice, “To like start an organic juice company, man.”

“Nice,” I say. “I’m sure he found inner sanctuary.”

“Or something,” Mable says. “I have an old acoustic guitar of his I always meant to send back.”

“The one that I used to strum as a kid — the one with that paisley strap?”

Mable nods. “What else — what Sherlock symptoms did you obsess over?”

“Well, Galadriel is her name, right? And I only recently found out that your middle name starts with a G and…”

“Gina. My middle name is Gina. I went through a phase of using Gina as my first name but then…Worst nickname I ever had was in college when these cooler than thou mean kids called me Vag.”

I crack up. “That’s bad.”

“Okay, Pukeowski — don’t rub it in.”

“Plus, it just seemed feasible. Like you and my dad made this pact to raise me apart but together and when I got old enough you’d…”

The big window that forms one of the room’s walls is slightly tinted so when the rain starts outside, the droplets appear gray, splattering random patterns of lines and dots on the pane.

Mable pats the bed so I’ll come back over and sit next to her. It’s very air-conditioned so I get a blanket from the hallway and wrap it around my legs and tuck Mable in so she stays warm.

“Galadriel was my best friend,” Mable says and picks at the bandage tape on her arm until I nudge her to stop. “We met at Sarah Lawrence College freshman year — she was this very cool, very dramatic woman. You know, a little like Arabella — how she can wear a cowboy hat and not look like an ass or then the next day be all into the downtown art scene. She always knew what was going on, even at eighteen she just had it.”

“You mean that
it
that people talk about when they do bios of famous people?”

“Exactly. She made heads turn, she attracted people not just because she was gorgeous — but because she had this quality of…”

“Of what?”

“You know what it was? I’ve thought a lot about this over the years — it was that she wasn’t ever there completely. Like she was just out of reach all the time, so it made you want to hear everything she said and know where she was headed next.”

“If you know someone’s going to leave, you want them more?” I take the blanket off my legs and put it on like a cape.

“So one spring break I brought her home — she was supposed to be in some movie filming in New York.”

“She acted?”

“Not really — she was more in the right place at the right time all the time — all the time. So you’d say, Gala, where’re you going after class? And instead of saying to the library to study or out for coffee, she’d say really casually that she was taking
insert name of big rock star here
to that guy in the village who customizes boots. And while she was there she’d bump into a pre-famous Julia Roberts and have coffee with her and two years later Julia would ask Gala to come to a premiere and so on…She was just one of those kinds of people that always seems to be on the pulse of everything.”

“She sounds kind of cool — in that way,” I say. “I don’t want to be impressed with that stardom element, but I kind of am…”