The Scenic Route (14 page)

There was something endearing about her unmitigated candor. She reminded him of a child running barefoot through the rain, and he had the urge to run after her with a pair of yellow rubber boots.

“Are you a doctor?” she asked. “Of course you're a doctor. I'm not. I'm a conference crasher. I live about ten blocks away. No, I was invited. I do live ten blocks away, but I was definitely invited. Really. I'm speaking on a panel about practice management. I have a name tag in here somewhere.” She started searching in her oversized leather purse. “Well, you'll have to trust me on it. But never trust anyone wearing orange.”

“You're not wearing orange.”

“Exactly.” She smiled again. It was a warm and enthusiastic smile. But also short-lived, like the sun poking out from behind thick clouds, unsure about the effort required to burn through. “I never wear orange. I wrote all about it in my book.”

“You wrote a book.” Austin was impressed. He had written one paper for a medical journal, and he had found it one of the hardest things he'd ever done in his life.

“It's on my name tag. I really should find my name tag. I'm supposed to be networking. Are you networking?”

“I'm networking with you.”

“How do you know I'm worth networking with?” she asked slyly.

“You wrote a book,” he responded, straight-faced.

She laughed, but only momentarily. “I did,” she said. “It's called
Managing Your Minutes: How to Get the Most Out of Your Cell Phone and Everything Else in Your Life
. It's self-help. But not touchy-feely. Because self-help can be very touchy-feely. Which is not to say the book doesn't have an existential aspect to it. But it's mostly about taking control of your life. Making emotional decisions like they're business decisions. So that you're being more ‘joyficient.' That's a term in the book for getting the maximum joy and efficiency out of everything you do. And I can't believe I'm going into my whole shtick. Though you have no way of knowing if I'm just making all this up. Are you a gullible person? I have no name tag. I could have come in off the street.”

“You could be a conference crasher,” Austin said.

“Do you want to get a drink?” she abruptly asked him.

“You're standing next to the punch bowl.”

“A real drink,” she said.

“With an umbrella in it?” he asked, though he had no idea why.

“Exactly,” she said, smiling broadly.

Austin was glad he had sprung for the room with the king-sized bed. Even with the extra space, they had almost rolled off a couple of times already.

Dallas treated the bed like a playground, and he was the jungle gym. She was different than he had expected. For starters, she barely talked, which was a surprise given the fact that she barely stopped talking until they took their clothes off. And she was calmer, slower. All the bravado fell away as she lay there beneath him, smiling and laughing.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“It doesn't feel like nothing.” She laughed again. It was a rich, joyous laugh, like it came from the deepest part of her.

“What does it feel like now?” he asked as he lifted her leg over his shoulder and leaned down to kiss her mouth, her neck, her breast.

“It feels good,” she said.

And then they both stopped talking.

It was almost an hour later when she got up to go. He held on to her wrist.

“Do you want me to stay?” she asked.

He did.

She sat down again with her back to him, shoulders bent forward, her scapulas pressing up against her skin like small wings. “I have a kid,” she said.

“Do you need to get home?”

She shook her head. “He's with his dad tonight,” she said, picking at a fingernail. “I just think it's good to express these things early.”

He looked at her sitting there. The tumble of wayward hair. The delicate arc of her freckled back. “I like kids,” he said.

She turned around. Her eyes seemed to scan his face, searching for something or a lack of something. Then she lay down and rested her head against his chest.

“I'm glad,” she whispered.

N
o one told Mandy the weekend was going to be a multigenerational event.

Well, it was Mother's Day, so two generations were implicit. But three were not. Austin had invited his girlfriend, Dallas, who came in from Chicago with her four-year-old son, Coal.

Mandy didn't know what kind of woman wanted her son's name to remind people of environmental degradation. Would you name a kid “Diesel” or “Methane”? Actually, Diesel sounded like a pretty cool name.

“Be nice to her,” her mother said, handing Mandy a freshly washed bath towel.

“I'm always nice,” Mandy said, tossing the towel onto her bed.

“You're always passive-aggressive. It's not the same thing.”

In thirty years, the only time her mother seemed to put her master of psychology degree to any use was when she was analyzing her children. Penelope Gittleman was a puzzle to her daughter. But one that Mandy had stopped trying to piece together many years back. Mandy felt the pieces had been jumbled and some were missing. Well, one crucial piece was missing.

Her mother never dated anyone after she was widowed. Or not anyone that Mandy knew of. Mandy had often thought of asking why, but she always chickened out, not really wanting to know. She imagined her mother was lonely. But Mandy was learning that living with someone could also be lonely. So maybe her mother was on to something.

“Did Austin tell you about Dallas's book?” Penelope asked.

He had sent Mandy a signed copy. “I think he mentioned something.”

“It's interesting,” Penelope said.

Her mother described things as “interesting” only when she was being diplomatic, so Mandy wasn't the only one put off by Dallas. “What didn't you like?”

“I didn't say I didn't like it,” Penelope said. “Don't tell your brother that I said I didn't like it.”

“You didn't,” Mandy said with a mischievous smile. She was glad they were on the same side. She had forgotten how much she enjoyed the feeling.

“I thought the book was clever,” Penelope said. “I just prefer someone be trained in psychology if they're going to give out psychological advice. But I'm biased. And some of the worst advice I ever received was from people with years of training. So maybe it's better to have people like Dallas on TV giving out their five cents' worth of guidance.”

“Twenty-four ninety-five in hardcover,” Mandy said.

“I'm sure it's cheaper online,” Penelope said with a chuckle.

She seemed more relaxed as of late. More subdued. Maybe she had adjusted her meds. Whatever she was doing, it seemed to be working, though she still occasionally cried in her sleep. Something Mandy had discovered on her last visit. But it was more like gentle weeping. Not the kind of crying jags Mandy had heard when she was a child. Mandy remembered Austin tiptoeing into her bedroom late at night and turning on her radio to try to muffle the sound.

Coming home brought up so many complicated feelings for Mandy. She wished Tad had accompanied her as he had promised he would before their most recent breakup. She had stopped keeping count. Or even keeping score. Which is why she didn't hesitate to call him after her mother left the room.

“Hey,” he said, “aren't we on a break?”

“Was that my decision or yours?” she asked, truly vague about the details of their last conversation.

“I think it was mutual.”

“We can't have mutual decisions if we're not living in the same state.”

“We're living in the same apartment.”

“No, I'm living in it, and you send rent checks once a month.”

“My orchestra tour is what's paying the rent.”

They had been through this a hundred times. If that was possible. It was like putting two and two together over and over and hoping that it will eventually add up to more than four. He had taken the touring gig so they could stay together. But they were never together. He was out of town most of the time. And she got lonely. And she got texts from Hal.

“How's the dissertation going?” he asked.

It had been nine months since she had proposed a new thesis about the sexual coercion of female chimpanzees in estrus, which happened to be the subject of Dr. Peña-Punjabi's research. Unsurprisingly, she approved.

The only problem was that Mandy had little interest in writing two hundred pages on a topic that had been done to death and to which she had nothing to add. In nine months she had written less than nine pages. Sometimes after hours of staring at her blank screen, Mandy would type line after line of platitudes: “Sexual coercion is bad. Sexual coercion is an act of aggression.” And if she did it long enough, questions would start to percolate in the back of her mind.
How do male chimps learn to be coercive? Is it passed down from father to son or is it something in their genes? And if adaptive evolutionary principals apply, why don't females adapt to protect themselves? Or was it their adapted behavior that had resulted in the male coercion? But whenever Mandy raised these questions with Dr. Peña-Punjabi, her faculty adviser would suggest Mandy focus her attention on better-documented areas, and by that, Dr. Peña-Punjabi meant areas documented by her. It wasn't that she was an egomaniac; she just played one in the lab.

“What if I got a job?” Mandy asked Tad.

“You have a job.”

“I mean a real job.”

“It wouldn't change anything.”

“Meaning you like living in second-rate motels?”

“Meaning I think we made a mutual decision to take a break.”

If Mandy couldn't even remember the conversation, it hardly seemed likely that something sacrosanct had been decided.

“I really need you here this weekend,” Mandy said, hating pressuring him as much as she hated admitting how dependent she had become on him. But what she hated even more was feeling like a fifth wheel in her own home, the spinster sister on her way to turning into her mother, who at least got a man to marry her before losing him.

There was silence on the other end of the line. She could hear Tad's breathing, so she knew he hadn't hung up on her. Not that hanging up was his style. No, he would usually say something like “I'm hanging up now” before cutting himself off from the tentacles of her insecurities.

“Mandy,” he said, “even if I thought it was a good idea to ignore everything we had agreed on—”

“We don't agree on anything,” she interrupted.

“That's pretty much what we agreed on,” he said. “But putting that
aside. If I was to rent a car and drive straight there from Minneapolis, I wouldn't get there until tomorrow morning, and then I'd pretty much have to turn around and come back. It doesn't make any sense.”

“What if you took a plane?”

“A last-minute flight would cost a fortune.”

“I'll pay for it. I don't care.” Given the balance in her bank account, she knew that she should care. But this wasn't about being practical. This was about wanting him there and wanting to make things right between them.

“I care,” he said. “I care about wasting money and time to do something stupid.”

She gasped. “So making me happy is stupid?”

“That's not what I meant.”

“You promised you would come!”

“I shouldn't have said that.”

No, he shouldn't have, and now the floodgates were opened. “You promised I could trust you. You promised I wouldn't regret it. But I do. I regret moving in with you. I regret ever meeting you.” None of it was true, and what she really regretted was saying any of it.

Again, there was silence.

“I'm hanging up now,” Tad said.

She shouldn't have called him. She had made everything worse. Much worse. She thought she could trust herself, but she lacked the required discipline. It was like buying a carton of ice cream on a Saturday night and pretending there would be any left on Sunday morning. Thinking about ice cream made her hungry. She slumped into the kitchen and stood in front of the Frigidaire with the doors open, seeking clarity in its frosty embrace and craving a pint of Häagen-Dazs rum raisin, but she knew the closest she was going to come in her mother's home was some sugar-free, fat-free, taste-free soy dessert.

“You're destroying the ozone,” her mother said, padding in behind her.

Mandy stopped for a moment to figure out if that was even true, and she concluded that it was but only in the most tangential of ways, before grabbing a bowl of grapes and closing the doors.

“Is your friend going to be joining us?” Penelope asked.

Mandy's shoulders tensed. She wished she hadn't mentioned Tad to her mother. And she never would have done so if he hadn't said he was going to come with her.
Never again.

“No,” Mandy said. “No friend coming.”

“I thought you said you were bringing a friend.”

Mandy kept her eyes focused on the grapes. “You must have misunderstood.” She heard the edge in her voice and the soft sigh that escaped her mother's lips. Mandy felt both angry and guilty, but the guilt won out. “Have you decided where you'd like to go tomorrow for brunch?”

“I was thinking I could cook something here.”

“You're not cooking on Mother's Day.”

“I like to cook.”

“Since when?” Mandy wanted to ask, but she held her tongue. Her mother probably wanted to make a good impression on Dallas and Coal.

“We could take you to one of your favorite places,” Mandy suggested, “like the Original Pancake House.”

“That was always your favorite place, not mine,” her mother said, smoothing a strand of Mandy's hair.

Mandy remembered that as a kid she could never decide what she most wanted to order, so Austin would offer to share with her, and they'd get both the skillet-sized baked apple pancake and even bigger Dutch pancake. “I bet Coal would like it,” she said.

“He's a sweet kid,” Penelope said, gazing out the kitchen window.

The backyards in Southfield seemed to have shrunk since Mandy was young. Yet the trees were larger. She didn't remember any trees taller than the houses when she was growing up. But now there were
two in her mother's backyard and several more in the neighbor's. Oaks and pines. Mandy remembered loving the weeping willow trees at her elementary school. She felt comforted by the idea of a tree that cried.

Austin was chasing Coal around one of the oak trees. When Austin caught Coal, he lifted him over his head, then let go for a split second, pretending to drop him, before swooping him back up skyward. Coal laughed uproariously, screaming out, “Again! Again!”

Mandy watched her mother watching. She saw the tear form in the corner of her eye. Mandy knew her mother was thinking about her father. Mandy somehow always knew when her mother was thinking about her father. She felt a stone pit in her stomach. Every time she took a breath it nestled deeper into her flesh.

Dallas was also outside with Austin and Coal, her copper red hair blowing in the light wind. Mandy only dreamed of having bangs that shiny and straight. Dallas was snapping pictures with her phone while holding an umbrella over her head with her other hand, despite the cloudless, sunny day.

“What's with the umbrella?” Mandy asked.

“She has very sensitive skin,” Penelope said. “She's half-Armenian.” As if that explained it.

“And half-vampire?” Mandy asked. She heard her mother sigh again before leaving the room. Mandy knew she should have kept that thought to herself. Better yet, she shouldn't have had it in the first place. She was still tense from the call with Tad. She needed some time to herself to unscramble her emotions. But that wasn't going to happen, because the brood was heading indoors. As she heard the door to the garage open, she thought of making a run for it. But there was nowhere to go. Her mother had gone upstairs. Austin, Dallas and Coal were now downstairs. And Mandy was trapped.

“Okay, Monkey,” Dallas said as they entered the kitchen, “time for your nap.”

“Monkeys don't take naps!” Coal responded.

Mandy considered offering data to contradict that hypothesis but restrained herself. She kind of liked his spunk, even if his facts were a little wobbly.

“No nap, no ice cream,” Dallas said. At the words “ice cream” Mandy perked up a bit. Maybe they had brought contraband with them.

“Can we go swimming in the lake after?” Coal asked.

“We're not in Chicago,” Dallas said as she unzipped his navy fleece jacket, leaving him to squirm the rest of his way out of it. “No lakes here.”

Actually, they were surrounded by lakes, but Mandy had to admit that none were as close by as in Chicago.

“But we can go to a pool,” Austin offered. “How about that?”

“Is it a big pool?” Coal asked, seeming unconvinced a pool compared favorably with a lake.

“A very big pool,” Austin said.

“Will you come swimming with us?” Coal asked, turning to Mandy. She didn't know if she was more taken aback by Coal's interest in her joining them or the notion of her going swimming.

“Mandy doesn't swim,” Austin said, covering for her.

Coal nodded in a sympathetic way. “You can borrow my floaties,” he said.

Mandy had never fallen for a boy so quickly. She wondered if he would consider dating her in twenty years.

“That's very nice of you,” she said, “but I'm allergic.” That's what her mother had written for years on her phys ed notes, and it still worked.

“I'm allergic to peanuts,” Coal volunteered.

“That sucks,” Mandy said.

“Mandy!” Austin said as Dallas glared.

“I mean, that means no sucking on any peanut butter Popsicles for
you,” Mandy said, thinking fast but not quite fast enough to make much sense.

Coal looked at her skeptically. “Yuck! There's no such thing as peanut butter Popsicles.”