Vladimir(24)
I lit one using a lighter (lighting by a match, unless it’s an easy-strike match, ruins the first drag). While I wanted to enjoy it more than I did—the smoke felt abrasive and thick in my throat—the transgression against my better judgment was beautiful. My head lightened immediately and sensation was sparkling through my body when I heard footsteps on the driveway coming toward me. Thinking it was John, I kept my gaze fixed forward, as though I hadn’t noticed.
“So now you come to his house?”
My daughter’s voice rang out of the darkness—I turned to see her at the back gate, illuminated by the motion sensor light that hung over the garage.
“Sid?” I called to her but she didn’t hear me. She was fumbling with the gate, pushing at the latch, which had to be turned and then lifted to be released. I rose to walk over and open it for her, when, in her rage, she kicked the door down entirely.
“Don’t you walk toward me, skank,” she yelled at me. “You come to his house? He lives here with his fucking wife who is my fucking mother, you little skank.”
It is always—funny is not the right word, but maybe interesting—how the exceedingly drunk are truly the most repetitive people in the world. I remember John getting blotto one night in the city (he vomited in the cab and I paid the cabdriver the last fifty dollars we had in apology) saying, while he was in this compromised state, “I Goddamn love you. Do you know that? I Goddamn love you” on repeat. It was uncharacteristic, and I remember feeling pleased for a bit, then tired, then disgusted.
It took me a moment, however, to realize that because I was in near-complete darkness, and Sidney was so very drunk, she didn’t recognize who I was. She dropped her attaché and shrugged off her European hiker’s backpack like a townie barfly readying himself for a brawl. I said her name again, but before I could tell her that I was her mother, and not her father’s paramour, she stumbled toward me and grabbed me by the shoulders with her strong grip. She smelled like a distillery, and her eyes were steely and distant and red-rimmed—waking consciousness buried deep within her. “I’m going to fuck you up, skank.” She lost her balance slightly and hugged me into a kind of boxer’s clinch. She was taller than me, and far sturdier, and she staggered against me, pushing me so that I stumbled backward.
“Sid, it’s your mother, it’s Mommy.”
I felt her soften for a moment and take in my face. “Oh Mommy,” she said, but instead of releasing me she pulled me into a tighter embrace.
Our nighttime sprinklers went off, spritzing her, and she recoiled out of instinct. Still gripping me, she tripped on the hose that was attached to the sprinkler, and, in trying to regain her footing she veered us to the right. I told her to watch out, but she and I collided with the outdoor trunk in which we kept the cushions and the pool toys. Then, like a physical comedian from an old movie, she dragged us away from the trunk and, in doing so, put her foot inside the inner tube Phee had used that was still sitting inflated by the side of the pool. In her attempt to shake it off—it seemed she mistook it for an animal—she, now with one strong arm hooked around my waist, hopped and kicked her leg wildly, hysterically. Knowing there was only one thing that could possibly help I struggled against her, dragging her closer and closer to the edge of the deep end of the pool until I used all my strength to jump into the frigid water, bringing her, who held me as tightly as a raccoon holds a piece of foil in a trap, with me.
It had been cool the past week, so the water was a terrific and icy shock. Sidney let go of me immediately and waved her arms wildly to get to the surface. Before I rose to help her, I allowed myself one gorgeous contemplative moment underwater. Even though she was drunk, and it was very dark, it was still true that my own daughter had mistaken me for a student.
* * *
I climbed out of the pool immediately, but Sidney stayed in, whipping her head back and forth, shaking off the water.
“Mommy,” she wailed.
“Get out of the pool, honey.”
“Mommy, I need you.”
“Okay, my sweetheart, just get out of the pool. Use the shallow end. That’s it.”
She climbed out and lay her body down on the concrete next to the pool and stared up into the sky. Cold to the point of pain but unwilling to leave her, I stripped my drenched clothes and underwear and wrapped myself in a leftover towel that hung on one of the pool chairs and hadn’t been taken in from the weekend. It might even had been Vladimir’s towel, I let myself think, as I wrapped it around my naked, goose-pimpled body.
I shimmied beneath her and rested her head in my lap. She turned to the side, snuggling against me.
Her clothes sagged and weighed on her. She was wearing her out-of-work uniform, her standard apparel of a dark hooded sweatshirt over her white oxford shirt, under which she wore both a white T-shirt and tank to minimize her already small breasts, dark selvage jeans, and boots that looked like they belonged to a naturalist in the early twentieth century. She would regret getting the boots wet in the morning—she was as persnickety about the neatness of her clothes as any man (it is my experience that while women love clothes and fashion, there is no one as interested in the preservation of the like-new state of their vestments as a preening man). She made a decent salary, she lived with her partner, and I paid her student loans, and so though she dressed simply, she had a weakness for expensive boutiques that specialized in hand-crafted apparel with clean lines and high-quality materials.