Any Place I Hang My Hat (41 page)

“We can’t talk comfortably standing out here in the parking lot,” I said. “Let’s go get a cup of coffee someplace so we can sit down.”

She sighed, a long breath let out slowly through slightly parted, dark purple lips. Ordinarily, that was the nonverbal announcement I am passive-aggressive. On this occasion, however, I had to consider that she was truly at a loss for what to say. Consciously or not, she was buying time. Finally, she glanced toward the motel entrance: “There’s a coffee shop in there.”

But her lover might be in there having a postcoital grilled cheese sandwich and would come to her rescue. “Not in there,” I said.

Another long breath, although this one was exhaled through her nose. “There’s a patisserie in a little shopping center. They have a few tables. You can follow me in your car”—with a little too much patience she raised an eyebrow—“unless you think I’m going to floor it and escape.”

“I’m sure you won’t. The patisserie will be fine.”

She waited until I moved my car before walking over to the door of hers. I noted her skirt didn’t look right. The side seam had relocated itself between her hip and spine, indicating either a rotating waistband or that in the motel, the skirt had been hurriedly pulled on and zipped. These are the details that get the attention of some of my colleagues, embed journalists, after too many nights of Gold Coins and Courtyards by Marriott, too many days of hearing their assigned candidate making the same self-deprecating jokes at the same point in the same stump speech. The real news for that segment of the fourth estate often became a sighting of the campaign manager coming down to the bus with a shirttail poking out obscenely from the top of his zipper after an alleged breakfast meeting with a field organizer.

I wondered if my mother knew I was an associate editor at In Depth.

Perhaps the citizens of Shorehaven were sleeping late, had sworn off croissants and brioche as high-carb criminals, or were enraged at Chirac, de Villepin, and all things French. Aside from the woman behind the shelves of tarte tatin and Paris-Brest, my mother and I were the only people in La Petite Patisserie.

My mother chose the table farthest from the counter and sat. “If you want something, you have to go up there and tell her. There’s no table service.”

“What would you like?”

“Nothing.” That was pretty much what I was in the mood for, but I went up and ordered a café au lait and a langue de chat as rent for the table and also because la vendeuse was one of those intimidating French women with a large nose made solely for derogatory sniffs and those small shoulders and miniboobs that made Americans look like Brobdingnagians. As I stood at the counter, I had an urge to toss off the order in French. I spoke it pretty well. At least French people now and then told me how nonterrible my accent was, though apparently I sounded as if I came from a region they did not. But since most of my life has been spent covering my ass, I didn’t want to risk the counter woman saying Pardon? as if she could not understand my order of a langue de chat. And if my mother was enough of a francophile to have chosen Véronique, I didn’t want her explaining, in Parisian French, what kind of cookie I wanted.

On second glance, walking back to the table, I began to see why my mother’s style was suburban gypsy. The little skirt, high boots, and turtleneck were all basic, except for the fishnets. But she wore at least a half dozen bracelets on her right wrist in varying shades and textures of gold, woven, twisted, high-gloss, matte. A few were decorated with semiprecious stones. One looked like a watch, but what I thought was the face turned out to be, as I came closer, an emerald-cut citrine about the size of my cookie. Her earrings were, disappointingly, the usual diamond studs, that rite of female passage that comes after the bat mitzvah and wedding canopy and before the funeral. Hers were sizable enough that if she wore them daily, her ears would resemble a beagle’s by the time she was sixty. When I sat down at the small, round table, she slid her chair back to increase the distance between us. With her slightest move, she jingled.

She pulled back the cuff of her sweater to get a look at her watch. It, too, was gold. It wrapped around several times, as if it had been modeled on the Slinky. Her wrists were much smaller than mine. Although we were about the same height, side by side we probably looked like Barbie and a Cabbage Patch kid. “This can’t take longer than twenty minutes or so,” she told me, not looking directly into my eyes. “I have to pick up my sons and bring them—”

I reached into my backpack and handed her my cell phone. “It will take however long is necessary. You can apologize for being unavoidably detained.” Maybe I was ODing on adrenaline; my nerves were aquiver like a plunked tuning fork. Still, I sounded amazingly like a person who has her wits about her.

“I have my own cell phone,” she replied, but didn’t reach for it. She wasn’t exactly hostile. More like someone resigned to an unavoidable delay at an airport. For a few seconds I just stared at her, my cell phone in one hand, coffee cup in the other. After nearly thirty years of studying my own face in the mirror, from admiring my gift for making cross eyes as a kid to agonizing over zits to the daily application of makeup, I knew it well. Now I kept searching for something of myself in her face.

Her eyes were green, but of an intense emerald color that comes from contact lenses, not nature. My hair was brown with red highlights. Hers was the dark red found on Irish setters and Titian’s women, as well as in two-step, three-hundred-dollar coloring processes in salons such as Beauté. Her skin was porcelain. Mine wasn’t dark, but over the years of playing sports and working as a flagman during college summers, I had grown permanently ruddy, in the manner of white trash girls in Gone With the Wind who went without bonnets. So we shared a five-foot-three gene and maybe a couple of coloring genes. But I could find no other likeness.

She adjusted her bracelets to her satisfaction, then asked: “Well?”

“Tell me something about your life now,” I said.

“I thought you wanted to know about—”

“We have a deal. My questions get answered. I know what I’m doing. I don’t know if your mother mentioned it, but I earn my living as—”

“Whatever. My life? I’m married, but you know that. Ira has a successful business. Lighting fixtures, indoor and out, and lamps. He also has the contract to maintain fixtures for all Nassau County’s governmental buildings. And for the Diocese of Rockville Centre, which is quite a coup for someone named Ira Hochberg. What else do you want to know?”

“You have two boys?” This phrasing was in lieu of my asking, Besides me you have two other children? Instead of anger for forcing her into a conversation she didn’t want to have, or fear that I’d drop in on Ira and read aloud from Phyllis Moscowitz: The Adolescent Years, the only emotion my mother displayed was annoyance. Sighs. Now and then compressing her lips together in an expression more intense than pique but less than disgust. She shifted around in the small, woven cafe chair. Her annoyance threw me. I was so used to going through the world getting myself liked. Isn’t Amy Lincoln adorable and feisty and wonderfully down to earth? Or something like And so bright. Harvard! My mother, however, seemed to have a natural immunity to my charm. Maybe worse, she didn’t seem to hate me. Still, I tried a smile. “Are you a full-time mother?”

She was trying to turn the rings on the left hand with her pinky. I noticed what I assumed she wanted me to see: Besides the wedding band, she wore a ring with two diamonds slightly larger then M&Ms. “What does the term full-time mother mean?” she asked.

“That you’re at home raising your sons rather than working outside the home.”

“Then yes, I’m a full-time mother. I thought you wanted to know about me back then.” I probably should have said, Wow, what a beautiful ring! She said: “Are you asking me all this to soften me up or do the questions have some point?”

“To soften you up.” I tried one more smile, my broad one that shows a hint of dimples. In response, she reached down to the depths of her giant handbag and after a few seconds retrieved an inch-long enamel box with a minuscule paisley design, opened it, and popped what looked like a little mint into her mouth. “Okay,” I said, “let’s get on to the information I’m really interested in.”

“Is that a cappuccino?” she asked me.

“A cafe au lait. Can I get you something?”

“One of those. And a chocolate croissant.” I walked back to the counter and in a few moments came back with her order. She lifted the plate up to nose level, sniffed, then turned the pastry around, as if she had to do a 360-degree examination. Then she lifted the croissant, not between two fingers, but by clutching it in her fist. With her mouth open wide, she ripped off about a third of it and chewed with something less than delicacy: lips smacking, mouth making chomp, chomp sounds. I was so startled because Rose, her mother, had been well mannered. One of my dubious legacies from Grandma Lil was hypervigilance when it came to table manners, no matter how archaic or stupid they might be. If someone passed a creamer without offering the handle, they got an immediate minus five. Clutching a croissant as if it were a leg of fried chicken was beyond the pale. I remembered that the first time we’d gone out to dinner together, John had made me inordinately happy when he’d broken off a bite-size piece of roll, buttered it, and popped it in his mouth.

“What attracted you to my father?”

“What do you think?” She ran her tongue over her top front teeth, presumably to mop up any chocolate or stray crumbs.

“I believe I was pretty clear before. I want all my questions answered.”

“He was … Do people still call him Chicky?” I nodded, expecting she would ask me how he was or what he was doing now. “He was a rebel,” she said. “A car thief. Did you know that?”

“Yes. What else is there about him that made you willing to run away from home?”

“Frankly? He was a great fuck. Of course, that’s by a teenager’s standards. Does that”—she opened her mouth and widened her eyes in mock astonishment—“shock you?”

“Do I look shocked?” I sipped my coffee. It had cooled but still had that wonderful bitter French bite. “You stayed with him for a considerable amount of time. He told me you were living under fairly hellish circumstances, with a rat—”

“I will not under any circumstances talk about that!” The woman behind the counter seemed unnerved by my mother’s outburst. She edged closer to the cash register. My mother demanded: “How the hell can you talk about a rat in a place like this?”

“Let’s move on then. You married him, at least in part, because you thought you were pregnant. You weren’t. How come you stayed?”

“I can’t remember. I was a kid.”

“Why didn’t you go back to your family? What was there about your parents that was so terrible you couldn’t—”

“They were boring. Okay? I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal. But just try living with it. More than boring. Suffocating. And incredibly pretentious. My father would give me endless lectures. He’d sit in his chair in the living room and keep trying to get me to sit too, but I would never give him the satisfaction. He’d blab on and on about my getting some goal in life. Oh, and that I needed to do something after school, like being a candy striper. Or collect dollhouse furniture. His big thing was that I should join a group of nice, young people and take long bike rides. Like out to Montauk Point. He hadn’t a goddamn clue as to who I was. And worse, he didn’t care. He knew what he wanted in a daughter and it was never me.”

“And your mother?”

“A five-foot-seven cube of ice. A cube that fancied herself an intellectual. I don’t think there was one time in all my teenage years that she said, ‘Véronique, you look great.’”

“Your name was Phyllis then, right?”

“That’s not exactly a brilliant deduction. My mother or someone told you.”

“But boring parents … Is there anyone who got through adolescence without thinking her parents were boring or stupid or crass or snobbish? Was there anything else about them?”

“Like what?”

“Were they abusive to you in any way?”

“Emotionally abusive.” She bit off another hunk of croissant with the same sound effects as she had the first. She washed it down with her coffee, a surprisingly silent operation. “Completely unloving. Nothing I did was worth anything to them. I mean, even if I had taken up stamp collecting for him or let her take me to orchestra concerts, it wouldn’t have been enough for them. The fact of my collecting stamps or going to concerts would have made stamp collecting and concerts the wrong thing to do. Maybe it doesn’t sound like a big thing now, but believe me, I was dying in that house. If I’d been forced to stay there, I would have committed suicide. You know why? Because eventually they’d break me. They’d turn me into them. And I’d rather be dead than be that way.”

“I hope to have children one day, so now I’m going to ask you some medical information. Not a lot. Rose can give me the family history.”

“Rose? Are you and Rose best friends now?”

“I met her. We’ve exchanged a couple of letters and phone calls.”

“Are you planning a round-the-world trip or a Fifth Avenue penthouse with your inheritance from Rose?” my mother asked. “Because if you are, you should know she loves the boys, absolutely loves them. And what she has isn’t serious money anyway.”

“How was your pregnancy with me?”

“What? You want the truth? Terrible.”

My heart was so heavy it sank into my gut. “Why was it terrible?”

“Because he couldn’t even afford a doctor. I had to go to a clinic up at Bellevue. It was like being in hell. Sometimes there weren’t even enough chairs for all the women, and most of them … It wasn’t their first baby. They would bring their other children with them and they kept screaming at the top of their lungs. And most of them were dirty. I know that’s not politically correct to say, but that’s how it was.”

“Was I born in Bellevue?” She nodded. “Forgetting about the clinic for a minute, how did the pregnancy go medically?”

“All right.”

“No problems during the nine months or with the delivery?”