Anything Is Possible(12)
At home, the lights she’d left on made her house appear cozy; it was one of many things she had learned about living alone, leaving lights on. And yet as she put her pocketbook down, moved through the living room, the ghastliness descended; her day had been a bad one. Lila Lane had shaken her profoundly, and what if the girl reported her, told the principal that Patty had called her a piece of filth? She could do that, Lila Lane. She was up to doing that. Patty’s sister had been no help, there was no point in calling her other sister, who lived in L.A. and never had time to talk, and her mother—oh, her mother…
“Fatty Patty.” Patty said these words aloud.
Patty sat down on her couch and looked around; the house seemed faintly unfamiliar, and this was—she had learned—a bad sign. A taste of meatloaf was in her mouth. “Fatty Patty, you get yourself ready for the night,” she said out loud, and she rose, and flossed her teeth and then brushed them, and washed her face; she put her face cream on, and this made her feel just a little bit better. When she looked into her pocketbook to find her phone, she saw the small book by Lucy Barton that she had slipped in there earlier. She sat down and examined the cover. It showed a city building at dusk with its lights on. Then she began to read the book. “Holy moley,” she said, after a few pages. “Oh my gosh.”
The next morning, Saturday, Patty vacuumed the upstairs of her house and then the downstairs, she changed the bed, did the laundry, and she went through the mail, tossing out the catalogs and flyers. Then Patty went into town and bought groceries, and she bought some flowers too. It had been a long time since she had bought flowers for her house. All day she had the sense of having a piece of yellow-colored candy, maybe butterscotch, tucked inside the back crevices of her mouth, and she knew that this private sweetness came from Lucy Barton’s memoir. Every so often Patty shook her head and said “Huh” aloud.
In the afternoon she called her mother, and Olga answered. Patty asked her if she could come every day now instead of two days a week, and Olga said she’d have to think about it, and Patty said she understood. Then Patty asked to speak to her mother. “Who is this?” her mother asked. And Patty said, “It’s me, Patty. Your daughter. I love you, Mom.”
In a moment her mother said, “Well, I love you too.”
After that, Patty had to lie down. She could not have said the last time she’d told her mother she loved her. As a child she had said it frequently, she may have even said it that morning when her mother agreed that Patty didn’t have to be in Girl Scouts anymore, Patty being a freshman in high school, and her mother said, “Oh, Patty, that’s okay, you’re old enough now to decide,” her mother standing in the kitchen handing her lunch to her in a paper bag, just being herself, Patty’s mother. And then Patty had come home from school that same day, in the middle of the day, with cramps—terrible cramps Patty used to have—and Patty came home, and she heard the most astonishing sounds coming from her parents’ bedroom. Her mother was crying, gasping, shrieking, and there was the sound of skin being slapped, and Patty had run upstairs and seen her mother astride Mr. Delaney—Patty’s Spanish teacher!—and her mother’s breasts were swaying and this man was spanking her mother and his mouth reached up and took her mother’s breast and her mother wailed. And what Patty never forgot was the look of her mother’s eyes, they were wild; her mother could not stop herself from wailing, this is what Patty saw, her mother’s breasts and her mother’s eyes looking at her—yet unable to stop what was coming from her mouth.
Patty had turned and run into her bedroom. After a few minutes, Mr. Delaney’s footsteps were heard going down the stairs, and her mother came into her room, a housecoat around her, and her mother said, “Patty, I swear to God you must never tell a soul, and when you’re older, you’ll understand.”
That her mother’s breasts were so big Patty would not have imagined, seeing them unharnessed and swinging over that man.
—
Within days, horrible scenes occurred in a home that had once been so placid and ordinary that Patty had not considered it so. Patty did not, in fact, tell anyone what she had seen—she wouldn’t have known what words to use—but she never returned to Mr. Delaney’s class, and then—oh, it was so sudden!—her mother, after exploding in a confession, moved into a tiny apartment in town. Patty went to see her there only once, and there was a blue beanbag chair in the corner. The entire town talked of her mother’s affair with Mr. Delaney, and to Patty it felt like her head had been cut off and was moving in a different direction from her body. It was the oddest thing, and it went on and on, that feeling. She and her sisters watched as their father wept. They watched as he swore, and became stony-faced. He had been none of these things before, not a weeper, or a swearer, or a stony-faced man. And he became all these things, and the family—they had all just been innocently sitting in a boat on a lake, it seemed like—was gone, turned into something never imagined. The town talked and talked. Patty, being the youngest, had to wait it through the longest. By Christmas, Mr. Delaney had left town, and Patty’s mother was alone.
When Patty began to go to the cornfields with the boys in her class, and even much later, when she had real boyfriends and she did it with them, there was always the image of her mother, shirtless, braless, her breasts swaying as that man grabbed one in his mouth— No, Patty could not stand any of it. Her own excitement caused her always terrible, and terrifying, shame.