The Love Children (7 page)

I went home after that. Mom was home although it was only a little after four and she was surprised that I had skipped work. I didn't tell her I'd also skipped French and math. The minute she
laid eyes on me, she could tell something was wrong, so I told her about the cops. I said I didn't feel well.

She looked at me with concern and felt my forehead, and I had this idea she was smelling my breath. I could still taste the pot in my mouth and wondered if she could smell it, but she didn't say anything. She told me to lie down and she'd bring me some tea. In a little while, I drifted off to sleep. But after that, I thought she acted just a little bit odd. Something was bothering her. I could tell by the set of her neck. And a few days after that, she told me she thought I should spend the summer with Dad. She had decided this all on her own. She asked Dad to get me a job and he called a couple of nights later to say I could be a waitress at some bistro there a friend of his owned, and together he and Mom hustled me up there, giving me no say whatever about it. I was livid.

I admit it was heading to be a lonely summer anyway. Sandy was going to the summer camp she'd gone to for years in Maine, this year as a paid counselor. Bishop was going to the dude ranch in Nevada that his uncle owned, also to work for pay. The only kids who would be around over the summer were Dolores, and probably Steve. Steve was going to be working full time but he'd be around nights and I could see him on weekends. I didn't want to go to Vermont and protested vociferously. It did me no good. Mom was determined to get rid of me. Steve thought she knew what we'd done in the car—I think he thought I told her—and that she wanted to separate us. I didn't see how she could know about that, but then I didn't see how she could know about the drugs, either. That she knew something seemed clear.

Or maybe Dad had been right all these years and she did have a lover and wanted to get me out of the way. The idea had crossed my mind before. Or maybe it was because she was trying to find a new job. Ever since Daddy left after Christmas, I'd been hearing
her phone her friends to ask if they knew of anything. She had made up a résumé and had it photocopied in the Square and sent it to a hundred colleges. She did most of this in her cubicle in Holyoke Center, where she kept an electric typewriter, so Daddy wouldn't know what she was doing—we never knew when he might appear, and whenever he was home, he searched her desk and trash basket. He wasn't the least bit embarrassed to do this, even if I saw him. I'd told her about it. He'd always done it, even before he left.

Mom did find a job, late in June, right before I was to leave for Vermont. She was hired at Moseley in Boston, luckily, starting in the fall. The night they called to offer her the job, we were in the kitchen together, preparing vegetables. She dried her hands and took the phone. She didn't say much, and when she hung up, she stood there for a while, as though thinking deeply. Then she said, “I got a job, Jess.”

“Great! Where?”

“Right here,” she was almost crying. “In Boston. Moseley.”

“Terrific!” I meant it.

She took off her apron. She poured a scotch. She sat down at the table. “Sit with me, Jess.”

I put down the leek I'd been about to slice.

“You know I wanted to get a full-time job, a tenure-track job, so I could earn enough to support us.”

I knew.

“I'm going to be paid thirteen thousand dollars,” she said. “We can live on that.”

“Great.”

“That means I can divorce Daddy.”

“No!” I cried.

She sat there in silence as I bent forward, crying. My heart was broken.

“I'm really sorry, honey.”

“It will kill him. Do you have to? Do you have to?”

“It won't kill him. And I do have to. You know why. His constant rage . . . It makes me hate him. And living with someone you hate is unhealthy. It makes me hate myself. It's bad for my health. And it's bad for you. And I want a happy life. I'm thirty-eight years old. I still have a chance for a happy life.”

“It will kill him!”

“No, it won't. He'll think it will, but it won't. He'll find someone else to rage at fast enough.”

“I won't ever see him!” My voice rose.

“We'll try to fix it so you do,” she said.

But I was inconsolable, and she had to finish making dinner all by herself. I went up to my room and lay on my bed. In the end, I came down. I was hungry, and we were having veal chops with a puree invented by Alice Waters, a great chef in California, of leeks, potatoes, celeriac, and white turnips, something I really love. And stewed tomatoes.

She made the divorce another reason for me to go up to Vermont. She said I should be with Dad while I could. He didn't know she was intending to divorce him. I sure wasn't going to tell him: I didn't want to pay for her sins. Not only did she make me go, she sent me up there by
bus.

 

As it happened, that summer in Vermont wasn't so bad. Dad was easier when Mom wasn't around. He stayed out in his studio from about ten in the morning until eight or nine at night. His housekeeper would carry out a sandwich and a beer and some cookies around one in the afternoon, and she left food on the stove when she left in the afternoons at about three, when her kids finished school. He was supposed to heat the food up for his dinner, but he never did; he ate it lukewarm, right out of the pot. But at least food was available. I heated it up when I came in from work, and always thought of Steve. It wasn't spaghetti like his grandma's, it
wasn't bad, and maybe it was even good, but heated-over food is never delicious, and I was used to delicious food.

Dad would come in around nine, pour a stiff drink, and sit down. He'd just sit there, staring into space for a while, drinking fast, pouring drink after drink. After a while, his soul would come back into his eyes, and he'd get up and grab a pot and a fork and sink into a kitchen chair and eat. He'd slice off a hunk of meat and eat it with his fingers. He ate this way when he was alone—he thought I didn't know. When I was in the room, he used a knife and fork. Whether he finished something or not, he left the pot on the stove. Unless I happened to go in and see the leftover food and wrap it in foil and put it in the fridge, it would get so dried out that the housekeeper, Mrs. Thacker, would have to throw it out the next day. I thought about my mother's horror of waste and shuddered, but I knew it was useless to say anything to my father. He was in another world. Like Mrs. Blake said about Mr. Blake, he was always in paradise. Only I felt my father wasn't in paradise but maybe hell. It made me feel so bad for him. Like being an artist was some terrible doom.

After he ate, he'd pour a fresh drink. I'd hear the ice cubes tinkling in the glass when he came into the living room, and I'd look up from my book or the TV and say, “Hi, Dad,” and he'd say, “Hi, Jess,” and sink into his armchair and after a while he'd fall asleep. I'd wake him before I went to bed and tell him to go to bed. He either did or he didn't. I couldn't stand the way he lived, but he didn't give me a hard time. He always spoke gently to me, always seemed a little surprised that I was there.

Working at the café, which I had dreaded, was fun. It drew college kids from New York who spent summers in Vermont. I made some friends and became pals with a girl called Gail, who lived in Manhattan and went to Brearley. She came in every day for a cappuccino. She smoked pot right out in public. She reminded me of Phoebe a little. When we met after work, we usually shared a
joint or two, and often I just stayed at the café, hanging out with Gail and some other kids. There was nothing else to do there.

Mom called me every week. At first I wouldn't talk to her; I was so mad at her for sending me up there. But after a while I relented; I knew she missed me and was sad without me. I never told Dad she'd got a job, or said anything about her wanting a divorce. Some things you just didn't mention to my father; it would be like lighting dynamite. At the end of August, she called to say that she was flying to Mexico in a few days to get a divorce. I asked if Dad knew and she said no. I didn't understand how she could get a divorce without his knowing, and she said he'd signed a power of attorney. She said that when he had been home at Christmas, he'd been in a rational state of mind for a few days and she could talk to him about their separation without his having a tantrum. She even got him to go with her to see a lawyer; she'd borrowed five hundred dollars to pay him. The lawyer called Dad and asked him to come into the office to sign a separation agreement, and Dad did. But judging from how he acted later, he must never have believed Mom would go through with it.

Dad was always a paradox: he regularly blew up at her or me, shrieking absolutely hateful things in tantrums that lasted whole weekends, but when she would mention divorce, he would laugh. He would say how happy they were together and that he never loved anybody but her. He constantly suspected her of infidelity, but even when he was in a rage, he assumed she was utterly bound to him and would not leave him, no matter how horribly he behaved. At the meeting with the lawyer, he promised to give Mom generous child support. She and the lawyer urged Dad to get his own lawyer; he refused. He signed the papers and stormed out of the office.

Mom knew he'd never pay the child support. That was why she knew she had to get a better job before she left. I was happy
I had a job, so I could buy my own clothes and not ask Mom to do that, knowing how thin she was stretched. It's odd to think of money being love. Someone told me that Freud said money was shit, but that's crazy. It's love, doled out or withheld. It made me wonder how my father felt about me that he wouldn't send Mom enough money to even feed me, as though I was the one who had divorced him.

 

At the end of August, my mother flew down to El Paso and crossed the border in a van to get a Mexican divorce. The night before, she called my father from Texas to tell him what she was doing. I was asleep when the phone rang, which it did a few times before I was able to pull myself out of sleep; I went to the top of the stairs, preparing to run down and pick it up. Dad must have been sleeping in his chair; he answered the phone and quickly exploded in curses, calling Mom horrible names. I ran back to my bed. He stayed awhile on the phone; I couldn't believe Mom would remain on the line to be called those names. Then I heard loud noises. Dad was clattering and clanking around, throwing things, it sounded like. Suddenly he appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Did you know about this?”

I sat upright in bed. “What?”

“Shit!” he cried, and stomped back down the stairs.

The next morning, as I got ready to go to work, he threw some things in a bag and tore out of the house, yelling at me not to burn it down. He got in his truck and drove away, fast. When I was sure he was gone, I called Mom to see if she knew what had happened. But there was no answer. I tried to think of who else I could call, who else might know. I called Annette Fields, but she wasn't home.

The next evening as I was sitting down at the table to eat the dinner Mrs. Thacker had left, my father burst in through the back door.

He took one look at me and shouted, “Did she tell you?”

“What?” I asked, hating the tremor in my voice.

“The
divorce
, bitch!” he screamed.

Bitch
?

He stomped past me and went to the pantry and opened a fresh bottle of Canadian Club, poured himself a glass, and sank down at the table.

“She divorced you?” I asked timorously.

“She tried,” he muttered. “But I fixed her.”

I waited. I didn't dare ask. But he couldn't contain himself.

“She thinks I'm a dummy. She thinks she can use my power of attorney. But I sent a telegram to Mexico, revoking it. Hah!”

“How did you know where to send it? How did you know the address?”

“Americans get divorced in Juarez,” he said. “They stay in El Paso and cross the border in a van. That's the cheapo way to do it. That's what she'd do. I know your mother. Oh, yes! I called the court there.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Means she thinks she's divorced, but she isn't!” he grinned. “And then I met her at Logan and told her so! Fixed her wagon. That bitch!”

“You met her at Logan? How did you know what flight she'd be on?”

“There's only one flight a day from El Paso to Logan. Had to be on it.” He smiled that sick grin again and poured whiskey down his throat.

I hadn't realized my father was that resourceful. I always thought of him as an innocent, an artist with his head in the clouds, who just couldn't help being inadequate in daily life. That was why he drank; everybody knew artists and writers drank because making art was so hard. Jackson Pollock and William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald—you
didn't expect them to be able to deal with daily life, fixing a faucet or mowing the lawn. But Daddy could work with his hands—he built all his studios.

“What did she do?”

“Nothing,” he shrugged, “what could she do? It's a fait accompli!” He smiled again.

Somehow I couldn't picture my mother standing there silent for this. Not that I wasn't dismayed that she'd divorced my dad. Why did she have to do that? And why did she have to do it while I was living with him?

“She must have done something,” I insisted.

“Bitch,” he swore.

“Are you calling
me
a bitch?”

“You act just like her sometimes.”

That did it. I stood up.

“What's the matter with you?” he cried.