Still Life with Plums (19 page)

I walk toward her, this tiny woman—a foot shorter than me—with a monolithic presence, who scrutinizes me so completely I want to run back to the foyer. But her mouth opens and out pours my name in one long, cave-buried howl: “Julie?”

“Yes,” I assure her.

She swoops in for an urgent embrace that nearly cracks my spine. “You came all the way from Chicago?”

“Yes,” I lie, because I can’t tell her that I was in town visiting my mother anyway, that it’s a monumental coincidence.

“Come,” she says, strapping one arm around my waist to guide me through the crowd, well-wishers patting her shoulder, kissing her cheek as we pass. We could be at a tea party, your stoic mother and I, the way she nods and smiles, the lilt in her step as she ushers me to your father, slumped in a chair, staggered. Clearly this is no tea party for him.

“You remember our Julie,” Frances says.

Our
Julie.

Your father raises his handsome head—I always thought he was handsome, tall, chiseled, so different from his scrawny son. Cute, yes, but you cannot deny the scrawny.

“Julie?” he repeats, a fleeting zap of current in his vacant eyes.

He stands and I cup his cold hand in mine.

“Have you seen him yet?” he says.

My heart dives into my stomach. “No.”

Frances grips my hand. “I’ll take you. He’s right over here.”

Your father collapses back into his chair as your mother whisks me away.

“This is Julie,” she chirrups to people, relatives, who may or may not have heard of me. Introducing me as if I were her daughter-in-law. “She’s a columnist, you know.” As if I deserve a place of honor and respect on this unhinging day.

“That’s Julie,” someone whispers as I pass.

The crowd around you parts as Frances approaches; they understand protocol.

I suck in my breath before taking you in.

And there you are.

Your mother says: “Isn’t he handsome?”

I have to say yes, and you do look pleased, that pre-formed smile at this reunion.

But the truth is, Tommy, you also look like a used car salesman with your hair slicked back. Striated comb streaks plowed through whatever pomade they used to tame that wild hair I remember so well, wispy. All Peter Frampton, tips tinged gold by the sun. You’re not golden now, though you’re still as wiry as Frampton. Nose still elfin. High forehead only etched with a few well-earned wrinkles. Under that suit coat your folded arms cratered with cigarette burns from all those games of chicken you bragged about, reminding me of your rough roots: you West End, redneck, grease-monkey boy with your GTO that grumbled through my hilly East End neighborhood night after night. My stodgy fundamentalist neighbors tisk-tisking from behind pulled curtains:
Get a muffler!
They didn’t understand about hot rods and shag-carpeted dashboards.

Neither did I until you started driving me home from school the spring of our senior year. Your West End, soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend’s picture taped over your 8-track tape player. Looking not
unlike
me—or any other ’70s girl: long auburn hair parted in the middle, straightened by chemicals or irons or orange juice can curlers because there was really no other acceptable style back then for the cool. Before taking me home you parked under the accordion awning at Dwight’s and cranked down your window, pressed the button that would summon the crackling voice: “What’ll it be?”

Two Cokes and a large fries
.

Always.

It felt as if we were diving back into the ’50s when the carhop brought our tray. We nestled our weeping drinks between our legs—no built-in cup holders yet—the condensation dampening our thighs. We dunked our fries in ketchup and talked about… what? School? Doubtful, since both of us were more interested in getting stoned in the alley than required reading: Thomas Hardy and Willa Cather. Blah. My leaning back then was Carlos Castaneda and Kahlil Gibran, mind-altering writers for mind-altering years. Your obsession was car engines, and you spouted soliloquies about carburetors and fuel pumps in another language. You could have been conjugating Latin verbs.

Perhaps we talked about life after graduation. Your father buying you a NAPA Auto Parts franchise in Kermit or Pinch. I can’t recall exactly, though I remember that it was miles from anything remotely resembling civilization—whatever that meant to me at the time. Certainly there were no institutions of higher learning. But this was your father’s grand idea that would set you for life, or so you claimed. You crowed about take-home pay that sounded like riches, your intention exactly.

Today, with your mother beside me, I look at your hands, your fingernails, for greasy residue, the mechanic’s tattoos, and there they are, still, because no amount of Gunk hand cleaner could unloose them then, or now.

Then I hop back into the GTO and scooch up beside you, Steve Miller or Bob Seger spilling from the radio as we discussed my future: college, because I knew I needed a skill. Learned that lesson by working at another drive-in hot dog stand and watching those fifty-and sixty-year-old women slap patties onto the grill, concoct the secret sauce, boil thousands of hot dogs day after day after day, their feet swelling, the sweat pouring in that 114° kitchen, earning slightly
more than minimum wage. The sole bread winners because of their disabled husbands, and now they were raising their grandkids, too. I stood beside them rolling up hot dogs, refilling the bun steamers, the seared burns on my arms and legs—the short order’s tattoos—worth the meager paycheck spent not on a husband’s medications or a granddaughter’s Dairy Queen birthday cake, but on pot and mescaline and beer. (I confess that I hide this mustard- and onion-soaked chapter from my NPR-supporting, peach-martini-sipping neighbors in the Chicago burbs.)

The lives of those beehived, hamburger-flipping women were as foreign to me as yours, living as you did
way
out in Spring Valley: ten miles from town that might as well have been a million to my insulated, chapel-veiled Catholic life. All I knew was that you started your education in those rough Wayne County schools with skanky, hairy arm-pitted girls who fist-fought for their boys—or so we all imagined. Because even in West Virginia—the lowest state in the pecking order—we were desperate for someone to pick on, too. And how quickly those of us who fled this soot, our
backward
heritage, climbed up a rung or two to by donning that nose-thumbing attitude like a new Armani suit—a designer label we assured our metropolitan jetsetters we could
never
find back home, though we could if we had the inclination, I now admit.

Your mother pats your hand and makes cryptic references to your drinking habits. “His life would have turned out so differently if you two were still together.” Said as cool and detached as if we’d just broken up six months ago. As if she’d been thinking it every day of her life since then, obliterating your marriage and children, and grandchildren—a fact I still can’t fathom as I try to avoid your mother’s assessment, the weight of her inference. You certainly drank very little with me, except on our first official date, of course, when you showed up drunk, threw up an hour later, slurred apologies as our double
date drove you home and slogged you to the front door to deposit you into your mother’s arms—a regular pieta. And the next day, the ungrammatical letter stuck in my locker vent, the plea for forgiveness, the promise to never do it again. And you didn’t. In truth, we only traded a legal substance for an illegal one sold in baggies, but at least I didn’t have to worry about you driving drunk.

And how you loved to drive. The two of us whipping off somewhere in your GTO, leaving my neglected friends in our dusty wake, the windows down, wind knotting my hair, but I didn’t care. A Marlboro dangling from your lip, James Dean, another cause-deprived rebel—a difficult persona to maintain with your mother chasing after you with buckets of chicken livers. Your adrenaline torqued by taunting police, leaving them in a trail of smoke and tread marks—or so you claimed. And the places we went, magical to me, who barely understood our hometown’s geography after all those sheltered years on the hill. I certainly knew nothing about the West End, or Kentucky, the state line we crossed at night to park and gawk at oil refineries, the gridwork of lights, flames shooting from columns. Better than fireworks.

I have been in hotels, Tommy. Gaped at spectacular views in New York, Athens, Rome. Still, nothing will compete with a blue muscle car parked before the industrial lightshow that back-dropped our clumsy petting, exploring, your astounding patience. And when it happened, finally, that carnal coupling the trembling nuns taught me to fear, it was neither frightening nor a crescendo of sexual enlightenment. It was sweet, and pure, and probably the most honest moment of that part of my life.

You spoiled me, you know, for other men. Hung me so high in the clouds no one else could reach. Not that anyone tried. In fact, some weren’t just content to lasso me back to earth; they wanted to bury me prematurely, too. Which makes your devotion all the more
stunning—another secret yearning I will never divulge to my feminist friends.

“Here comes Tommy’s oldest,” Frances says. She’s still gripping my hand.

I pivot my head expecting a skinny boy with a golden halo of hair, cigarette burns on his forearms. He’s not a boy any longer, at twenty-four.

Your son is handsome, Tommy. Built like a football player, tall as your father, trim military haircut that is the fashion now. A gold loop in his ear, also trendy. I wonder what you think of him, so
in
, when you were so anti-in. Something I admired about you. Didn’t give a shit what anyone thought, were not swayed or cut by popular opinion—an insecurity in myself I still try to rein in. A tendency that makes me prone to reverse snobbery in addition to the usual kind. I think that’s what drew us together. Two likeable misfits who meant no harm.

I later learned that our strange pairing raised more than one quizzical eyebrow. Ten years after high school I ran into Kurt Owens at a Milwaukee restaurant. You remember him: our bullshitting classmate voted most likely to be murdered. He was still very much alive and trying to speak in code about how unfathomable it was for a certain brooding, artsy girl to date a certain wiry grease-monkey boy. A conundrum that kept our classmates scratching their heads—though we had no idea anyone gave us a second thought.

Artsy girl must have thought he was a wonderful man
, I said to Kurt.

I suppose so
, Kurt said, no doubt wondering if that could possibly be the truth. It was. Mostly.

Because we did fight, tried on adult language and scare tactics due mostly to your sullen possessiveness. Like the time you caught your friend,
your
friend, ogling my legs as we tossed Frisbee at the armory. When we got in the car you sped down Spring Valley Drive, that
crazy, S-curved mess, driving 90 miles an hour, going airborne as we crested hills. We were flying. But you didn’t care, because you were trying to alarm me with the power behind your 440 engine, as if you wanted to smash us into a tree to show the power behind your love. Though I clawed the seats and screamed: “Tommy, slow down!” the truth is, your frightening jealousy thrilled me.

Your son’s very pregnant wife plods over lugging a fierce two-year-old who wants his daddy: Now!

“This is Trina,” your mother says. “She’s expecting in a month.”

“How nice,” I say, feeling suddenly woozy, overcome by lineage: mother, son, grandson, great-grandson. A generational snapshot that could very well have been mine, at least some genetic version of it. And I remember so well when you called me with your big news. I was a sophomore in college and suddenly bookish, as if someone switched on a siren in my brain that screamed:
Learn!
(Before we broke up, when you called me from Kermit or Pinch, you listened in silence as I blathered on about Ionesco and Beckett, Kant and Kierkegaard. I listened even more silently as you moaned about late shipments of wiper blades and spark plugs. Your incessant pleas:
Move down here. Please!
My stalling answer:
Not yet. Not yet. Not.)

But the last time we spoke, your wobbly voice in the receiver indicated your drunkenness, the sober hiatus apparently over:
I’m getting married! And she’s pregnant!
Like you just won the lottery. I guess you did, because that’s everything you ever wanted. More than money, more than car chases, more than fame (a byline in
The Tribune
, for example), you wanted a family. I knew by the way you looked at me that time I held your newborn niece. I saw my squat-kitchened, chain-linked future unfurl in your eyes.

A cluster of new arrivals approach and I try to slide my fingers from Frances’s grip.

She holds on tight. “Where are you going.” It’s not a question, exactly. More like a scolding.

“To the bathroom,” I whisper. “I’ll be right back.”

She doesn’t believe me, and with good reason. She relents, though her frown reveals her disappointment in me, in my weakness. I am no stoic grande dame. Thankfully she is engulfed by a circle of fluttering women so I no longer have to suffer her critical eye.

I slink to the wall and skim along it toward an exit, bumping into flower arrangements, statues of cherubs and women balancing burdensome urns on their shoulders. I nearly make it to the door, nearly, when a woman’s hand cups my elbow, a penetrating steel clamp.

“Are you Julie?”

I scan her in the same manner she scans me. “Yes.”

“I’m Maureen. Tommy’s wife.”

Oh fuck.

I knew this would happen, eventually, and I look at this woman who looks not
unlike
me with her bobbed auburn hair, the practical haircut for middle-aged women.

I take her hand, open my mouth to offer appropriate words, but she offers astonishing ones of her own: “I knew you would be beautiful.”

I sputter because, I can tell you this now, late-bloomers never ever feel beautiful. Wait. That’s not true. I felt beautiful when you looked into me in a way that no man did before, or has since.