Lady in the Lake(13)

“I’m really sorry that your father and I are getting a divorce.”

He shrugged, dragged a French fry through ketchup. “No skin off my butt.”

“Seth. You don’t even know what that means, not really.”

He stopped to think. “Sure I do. It means—”

“Well, it’s not nice. And it’s not how you speak to your mother.”

“You left. You’re not my mom.”

“I’ll always be your mother. I just didn’t want to be your father’s wife anymore.”

She could see him trying to feign nonchalance. But he couldn’t help himself. “Why? You don’t fight. Well, you do now, but you didn’t before. I don’t get it.”

“I’m not sure I can put it into words. It’s as if I had a glimpse of—like in the poem, the road not taken. I don’t think I’m the person I was meant to be.” She added hastily, “I was meant to be your mother. You had to exist, the world needs you, Seth. That was part of my destiny. But not all of it. You’re almost grown. I want to do something with my life.”

“Like a job? But you’ve never worked. What would you do?”

Maddie did not fault Seth for not realizing that he had been her work. She hadn’t seen it that way either. Running a household, raising a good if somewhat sullen boy, being a devoted wife—up until she left—these things were not work. Your children gave you cards on Mother’s Day. Your husband, if he was prosperous enough, gave you jewelry on your birthday. Every culture was full of folk songs lauding mothers. But it wasn’t a job.

As a boy, Seth had read biographies about the childhoods of great Americans—presidents, sports figures. The series included a few girls and some were outstanding—Jane Addams, Amelia Earhart, Betsy Ross. But one of the chosen women was Juliette Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts, a pretty minor accomplishment, in Maddie’s eyes. How brilliant did one have to be to come up with a female version of the Boy Scouts? The series was so desperate for females to include that they even devoted one volume to Nancy Hanks, whose only role in history was to give birth to Abraham Lincoln.

“I know I have only two years of college, but there’s a lot I could do.”

“Like what?”

“I could—work at a museum. Or maybe get a job at the radio station.” Wally Weiss owed her that much, she thought wryly, although she could not imagine calling on him for help.

Sensing weakness, Seth asked if he could have a second Coke.

“Sure,” Maddie said, defeated. It was folly to expect a child to care about a parent’s dreams and desires.

When she got home, she stared at the phone, willing it to ring. Ferdie almost never called on Wednesdays. Not because he knew of her standing dinner with Seth, but because—well, he never said and she didn’t want to ask. There was a wife, there had to be a wife. That Maddie could endure. But she was pretty sure there were other women, too, and she was wild with curiosity about them. She stared at the phone, all too aware that she was living that Dorothy Parker story, the one about the girl’s plaintive prayer to God to make the phone ring. Maddie had loved Dorothy Parker as a teenager but never worried about boys calling her. Everything had gone according to her plans until the summer after high school, when she tried to reel in a fish that was much too big for her inexpert hands. She was self-aware enough to realize that the relationship with Ferdie brought back that outlaw time, that it made her feel young, having to pursue another relationship in secret.

The phone didn’t ring.

But there was another sound, like sleet against her window. She went to the bedroom and there was Ferdie on her fire escape.

“I was driving by,” he said, “and I saw the light on.”

“You shouldn’t be out there,” she said, “someone will call the cops.”

“Luckily, the cops are already here.” He swung a uniformed leg over her windowsill.

She was between his legs when the phone started to ring. He placed a firm hand on her head and she found herself working to the phone’s rhythm. It kept ringing and ringing. Who let a phone ring twenty times? Ferdie and the phone finally gave way and she fell back, pleased with herself, when it started to ring again. It had to be Milton, and if it was Milton, then it had to be about Seth. What could have happened in the two hours since she saw him last?

She picked up the phone, but it was just the girl from the jewelry store, asking if she wanted to go to that political meeting. Sure, why not, sometime, depending on her schedule? She would have said anything to get off the call and back to Ferdie.

Later, as Ferdie napped beside her, Maddie wondered how she could keep her promise to her son. She had to do something with her life.

She had to matter.





My family ate black-eyed peas for the New Year.




My family ate black-eyed peas for the New Year. Do you know the custom? It’s supposed to bring luck. My father didn’t like it. He didn’t like anything that had the faintest shade of hoodoo to it. If you spilled salt at the table, he thought it better to just let it lie. He would walk under ladders, cross any black cat’s path. To my father, superstitions were godless. Live right, follow the Ten Commandments, and you wouldn’t have to worry about ladders or cats or the number thirteen. But he let my mama make black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, as long as we didn’t talk about it, and I believed in those peas.