Lucy by the Sea (55)

“Oh, it’s strange,” I told her.

“Yeah? How so?”

Something was really wrong with my child.



—

A woman who was perhaps fifty years old kept walking quickly around the duck pond. She was on a cellphone and I heard her speaking Italian. Around and around she went in an outfit of dark green workout pants and a workout jacket the same color. She wore a bright orange mask, pulled down below her chin.



—

As we sat on the bench, Chrissy kept looking at her phone. At one point she said, “Sorry, Mom, I just have to answer this,” and she typed away furiously and then finally put her phone away. She seemed to relax just a little bit.

And then I had a vision: Chrissy was having an affair. Or she was about to have an affair.

I looked straight ahead while she talked, she was talking about her work, some sort of internal trouble the organization was having but her own job was perfectly safe, it was just interesting to watch these other people go after each other. Something like that she was saying.

And I said, “Chrissy, don’t do it.”

I turned to look at her, and she took her sunglasses off and looked me straight in the eye, her eyes are hazel, and I felt I had never looked at her so hard, or she at me. “Do what?” she finally said.

And I said, “Do not have that affair.”

And she kept looking at me; her eyes above her mask became tighter, it seemed to me. She would not look away. Then she began to complain about Michael. She said, “You have no idea what he’s really like, Mom. You never did. You know what he does for a living, Mom? He manages people’s money—how meaningful is that?”

“Pretty meaningful,” I said, “to those who have money.”

She got angrier. “Right. Well, there are millions and millions of people in this world without money, so ask them how meaningful it is.”

“But you knew that when you married him.”

She opened her mouth and closed it, and I realized then that when a person is having an affair, their spouse becomes demonized. This is the way it is.



—

But when she said this to me, I almost died.

Chrissy said, and her voice started to tremble, “Mom, you have no idea how fucked up it got me when you said that you and Dad were back together. You just said it, like it was nothing! You just blithely said it— Mom, you don’t get it, do you? You just tell us that after all this time oh by the way you and Dad got back together, as if all that shit that you guys went through together—that affected us, I might add!—that all that crap was all of a sudden no big deal, and—” She gave an exaggerated shrug, throwing her arms up slightly, she was really angry. “Just like that, oh we’re back together.”

We sat in silence for many moments.

“Did you have another miscarriage?” I finally asked her.

Chrissy said, “Who told you? Did Becka tell you that?”

“Nobody told me anything. I’m just asking.”

Chrissy put her sunglasses on again and stretched her thin legs out in front of her; her arms were crossed. “Yeah, I did,” she said. “In the middle of January.”

“Oh Chrissy.” I put my hand on her leg but she did not respond. We sat like that in the sun for some time. Then I said quietly, “Chrissy, this is about loss. You’ve lost three pregnancies and you’re angry. That’s really understandable. But don’t blow your marriage up over it. Please, Chrissy. Please don’t do that.”

She said, quietly, “Well, you did that. You said you had an affair and it got you out of your marriage to Dad.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And I wish now neither of us had had any affairs.”

She looked at me through her sunglasses. She was very angry. She said, “You were adored by a husband, Mom. David adored you. He adored you! And now you’re telling me you wish you hadn’t met him? How crazy is that?”

I shook my head slowly. I had nothing to say to her accusation.



—

Eventually I said, “Is this man married?”

And Chrissy said, “Mom, where have you been? How do you even know it’s a man? It could be a woman, or a gender-nonconforming individual.”

I said, “It’s a woman?”

She looked at me angrily and said, “No, it’s a man. I’m just asking where you’ve been the last couple of years. We don’t make assumptions like that anymore.”

Then I said, “Are there little kids?” And she said nothing. “Oh Chrissy,” I said. “I’m so sorry, honey. God, am I sorry.”

After a moment she turned to me and said, “Okay, the truth is we haven’t done it yet, but so what. We just haven’t been able to get away, but we’re working on it. I’m seeing him tomorrow, as a matter of fact.”

I looked at her and I said, “Honestly, Chrissy? I could be sick right now. This has made me sick.”

She said, “It’s not always about you, Mom.”



—

After a long silence I said, “Chrissy, you need to be seeing a therapist about this. Are you?”

In a moment, she shook her head to indicate no.



—

Rapidly—and unexpectedly—I remembered that last dream I had had of my father after he died, when I had said to him, “It’s okay, Daddy, I can drive the truck now.”