Any Place I Hang My Hat (39 page)

“What about you meeting someone?” Tatty asked. “More than half the people you deal with in your job are men. When are you going to push yourself a little, try to get John out of your system?”

Just hearing John’s name spoken about three feet from my bed made me sense him with disturbing clarity. Small details: the shadow of his beard by the end of the day, the incredibly soft skin between his wrist bone and thumb. It took some time before I could speak. “Soon. Maybe I’ll give that lawyer, Steve Raskin, a call. He’s pretty attractive. Smart. Seems genuinely nice. I told you about him. He’s the one there’s nothing wrong with.”

“That’s not a ringing endorsement.”

I got back on my knees again to signal that we still had shower curtain holes to mark. “Right now, I couldn’t get it up for a ringing anything. He’ll be okay. Or someone else will be. But men don’t throw engagement rings at me the way they do at you. So it will take longer. I just hope my ovaries still work by the time I meet Mr. Acceptable. If I do.”

“And what are you going to do about your mother?” I’d already told Tatty, at unfortunate length, how I’d chickened out in Shorehaven.

“I don’t know yet. I’ve thought through a hundred different scenarios—”

“After you say, I’m Amy Lincoln, what are you going to say to her?”

“I’m not sure. That’s part of what’s holding me back.”

“What’s the other part?” Tatty demanded. “What else is holding you back?”

“I guess fear.”

“Of what?”

“That I’ll see that she’s a fucked-up mess and that I’m doomed to be just like her.”

“Why do you think you’d be like her?”

“Because I’m not like my father.”

“So?”

“So, I’m probably like her.”

“Why? You’re the logic queen, but you’re not making sense. You’re you, not her. She’s a high school dropout and a first-class bitch. You’re not. You’re not going to abandon your children.”

“How do you know, Tatty?”

“Because I know you. Now stop thinking about all that nature-nurture shit. Stop thinking like a person who works for a magazine like In Depth. Forget depth. It gets you no place. If you want to meet her or confront her or whatever, you should think like you work for …” Tatty closed her eyes. She was concentrating. Her knowledge of media did not extend far beyond Vogue and Pastry Art & Design. “Think like you’re the person at the New York Post who cuts out stories because they’re too tasteful.”

On Saturday, Tatty met a new man. Not in the bar. In a restaurant supply store. She was looking for a wooden-rim sieve and he, newly separated, for pots, pans, dishes, and glasses. His name was Troy, he was a textile conservator at the Brooklyn Museum, he was six foot two, forty-one years old, and still had most of his hair. She wouldn’t have asked, but I told her to go out with him—that I’d have our Saturday night George Cukor film festival on my own.

Since Tatty only liked movies with great clothes, I postponed Cukor, took My Fair Lady and Les Girls back to the video store, and rented Radio Days and my old favorite from adolescence, The Sure Thing. I wound up loving the clothes in Radio Days, to say nothing of the movie. And watching The Sure Thing, I realized I’d seen it so many times over the years that I’d memorized most of the dialogue. In it, John Cusack finally learns that all the babes are nothing compared with his ultrasmart and somewhat anal-retentive traveling companion. I’d never been able to remember for long the name of the actress who played ultrasmart/anal retentive because the girl in that role was always me.

I went to bed, mouth still puckered from all the popcorn I’d eaten, and was on the edge of sleep thinking that if, as predicted, Sunday was glorious and warm, I’d call Steve Raskin in the morning and see if he wanted to do something outdoorsy. Maybe go to the Bronx Zoo. Sports? He didn’t look like a runner, but maybe he played tennis and … I sat up and turned on the light. A glorious warm day. Where would Ira Hochberg be? On the golf course. And okay, my half brothers, the pumpkin heads, would be home from school, but hopefully they would be typical kids and would be playing baseball, diddling video games, or plotting how to get past the porn-blocking software on their computer.

Which meant my mother might be alone with nothing to do but meet me.

Whoever had last been in the Civic I rented to drive to Shorehaven that Sunday had either worn an aftershave heavy on the musk or had sex in the front seat. I pulled up to my mother’s block on Knightsbridge Road and parked on a different corner from earlier in the week. It was only a little after eight, but since I wasn’t sure of the customs regarding tee-off times, I figured early was better. I rolled down all four of the car’s windows to demuskify the car and once again went into my road atlas-cell phone tableau vivant.

On my way out of the city, I had picked up the Times and the Washington Post. However, in order to read them without having passersby wonder, How come that woman sitting in that green Civic is reading the paper there instead of doing it at home? I would have had to position it on my knees, which would prevent me from looking out at the doings around chez Hochberg.

By nine o’clock, the only action on the block involved the neighbors walking one or another variety of retriever and shuffling down driveways in robe and slippers to fetch plastic-bagged Sunday papers. I realized about ten minutes later I did not have the temperament for detective work. It was so boring. My choice was to roll up the windows, listen to NPR, and inhale musk or keep the windows down and silently recite Hamlet’s soliloquy, the Gettysburg Address, the preamble to the Constitution, the Twenty-third Psalm, and then move on to R.E.M. lyrics.

By the time I got to promote the general welfare, I was out of the car. Either the Hochbergs were know-nothings or someone in the family had already brought in the newspapers. If I didn’t do something, my day could be interminable. Would I have to wait for Ira to peruse every ad in Newsday before heading off to his club? I did not want to have to deal with him. I wanted to meet her alone.

Casually, I strolled down to the middle of the block. My eyes went right-left-right, up and down, again and again, looking into the windows of the colonials and Tudors to see if anyone was looking out. No one was, it seemed.

And there I was, at the end of the Hochbergs’ driveway, looking at a garage that did not have any windows. I was surprised. I’d simply assumed all suburban houses had windows uselessly high up on their electric garage doors. On the other hand, the absence of them was somewhat comforting since I would not have been able, except via ladder or pole vault, to peer through a pane of glass at least six feet above the ground. Figuring I looked suburban enough in khakis, pink shirt, and well-aged loafers, I moved closer, crossing the strip of lawn that was no-man’s-land between the Hochbergs’ Tudor and the hacienda next door. I went slowly, trying to appear like a girl in the ’hood searching for a key or some small possession in the grass.

What if she glanced out her window and saw me? My mouth went dry. My palms became wet as I imagined the nasal shriek of a police siren as Nassau County cops, summoned by my mother—She’s stalking me, Officer—leaped from their patrol car, guns drawn. Or called by the neighbor in Casa Perlmutter, in which case their guns would remain holstered and they’d simply spray Mace.

My hope that there would be a window on the side or the rear of the garage was soon dashed. So I had no way of knowing if there were two cars or one, if Ira was sitting in the kitchen or standing in a sand trap. I retraced my slow steps over the lawn and made my way back to the car, regretting that I hadn’t brought along a Styrofoam container of coffee, like detectives in movie stakeouts.

A look at my watch made me groan—fortunately, not loud enough to disturb any neighbors. Nine-twenty. The good news was I didn’t have to go to the bathroom yet. The bad news was I could be stuck on Knightsbridge Road anywhere from five minutes to eight hours. I might have put the car in drive and gotten the hell out of there at that moment, except, while reaching into my handbag to feel around for a random Tic Tac, I came up with a pen. I reached over to the passenger seat and grabbed one of the eighteen thousand sections of the Washington Post. In the narrow margin, I began to write: IF I CALL & SHE ANS & I ASK FOR IRA, WILL THNK AMY? MAYBE Y MAYBE N. IF Y, WHAT CAN HAPPEN?

I started imagining the police siren once more, but I took a deep breath and forced myself to write again: IF SHE THNKS IT’S ME, I CAN DENY/HANG UP/ADMIT IT’S ME. WHICH??? PLAY BY EAR? IF SHE THNKS ME, WON’T NECESS. KNOW I’M IN CAR 4 HOUSES AWAY. ON OTHER HAND, MAYBE KID OR IRA HIMSELF P/U FONE. IN THAT CASE

I never got to that case. A mechanical noise interrupted the suburban quiet. I glanced at my mother’s house. The garage door was rising. I turned on the engine of the Civic and somehow remembered to put the car into drive. I waited and within seconds, the rear of a dark car emerged. Someone—no, two people were in the back. I was about to creep up to follow it, but then I realized the car might turn and face my way. Yes, there was the front of the car. A woman driving. No one in the front passenger seat.

The car backed up onto the road and drove toward me. Fortunately, I was momentarily paralyzed, because any obvious move might have made her look my way. She didn’t. Her eyes were on the road as she passed me and turned left. Within seconds I did some kind of turn, three-quarter, U, God only knows what, but now I was behind her. A Volvo, dark blue. Even though I’d never thought about her behind the wheel, I felt slightly disappointed that she had such a stolid car. One block, two blocks. Not that I expected a Maserati, but …

She pulled into a driveway so quickly I didn’t have time to slam on the brakes. I kept going at about twenty-five miles an hour right past her. A boy, one of the pumpkin heads, I realized, got out. She waited while he moseyed up the path toward the front door. The house was like an oversize fairy-tale cottage with a thatched-looking roof and sides of old stones. The boy’s hands were in his pockets. His shoes dragged along the stepping-stones. Obviously, the hip walk for the under-ten set. By the time he must have reached the door, I was on the next block, hiding out in someone’s driveway, waiting for her to back out. I kept looking back and forth, from the Volvo to where I was. A face suddenly appeared in a window of the house whose driveway I was in. A man in his mid-forties in a white T-shirt was staring at me, wondering why I was there. What the hell was I going to do? I smiled, waved at him. As I began backing out, he finally waved back. But had I lost sight of my mother’s Volvo? I looked down the cross street left and right, then finally, as I begin to pant frantically, I realized she was still where she had been.

I gripped the wheel to keep my hands from shaking. If this had been happening in Manhattan, I could have handled anything—almost anything—with barely a blink of an eyelash. Ditto for any other city, Chicago, Madrid. But in the suburbs I felt like a foreigner who, with every uncertain movement, every effort to blend in, feels as if she’s inviting the attention of an entire populace who will not like her.

As it turned out, this was not a car chase to write home about. She was a better driver than I, but that was no contest. Still, though she didn’t signal for any turns, I managed to follow far enough back to feel safe. The other thing she didn’t do was look in her rearview mirror. She appeared intent on driving and, as far as I could tell, was not having any conversation with whoever was in the back.

This time she didn’t pull into a driveway, just slammed on the brakes in front of a modern redwood house that looked as if it had traveled to Long Island from Marin County and, for some reason, decided to stay. The back door opened. The other pumpkin head emerged from the car. Actually, both of them looked like nice kids. This was the younger one, chubbier than his brother, his round head echoed by a round belly, the kind of sweet-faced fat boy who shows up in TV news segments on the perils of fast food.

Now she was alone. For an instant, I recalled the standard movie maneuver in which a car passes the car it’s been following, then cuts it off, forcing the driver to slam on the brakes: Taking cover behind fenders, cursing, and gunfire often ensue. I knew such cinematics were ridiculous, so I simply started following her again.

For a few minutes, I concentrated completely on the driving. When she turned, so did I. We pulled onto a main road, a wide boulevard with traffic lights and what looked like uninteresting stores. She passed a traffic light, green. For me it turned yellow. Then, just as I got to the corner, red. Quickly, I looked one way, then the other, saw no one, driver or pedestrian. I ran the light.

About two miles down the road, she stopped for a red light. I could have pulled up next to her and gotten a glimpse, but I was too afraid some biological ESP would murmur, Véronique, that’s your daughter over there. And speaking of being afraid, I suddenly realized she could be on her way to the club to join other golf widows for a three-bloody-Mary brunch. Okay, I might be able to get past a guardhouse by smiling and saying, I’m Dr. Cohen’s guest, except the Honda Civic would not be much of a help. Mentally, I was still at some country club, wishing I had worn dressy pants instead of khakis, when she made a quick left. The light was changing. Cars were speeding toward me, but I gunned the gas and, a couple of seconds later, pulled into a parking spot six or seven cars away from where my mother’s had pulled in. It was the parking lot of … I looked up at the sign … the Gold Coin Motel.

She got out. Still petite, but then, most girls don’t grow much after age sixteen. Skirt on the short side, boots on the long side, and a black turtleneck tucked in to display a small waist. Not age appropriate, but from where I sat, she looked surprisingly good. No bulges, no jiggles. I didn’t get to see her face because her back was to me. She was hurrying, almost running, to get to the motel entrance.

I checked out my watch. A little after nine-thirty. Fine. If she was going into a local motel for the usual reason, I figured I’d have time to go and get a cup of coffee. And maybe even read the papers.