Vladimir(40)
“Terms like getting married and having a child.”
Alexis was funny. People were funny. Besides having a serious job and a decent income (that would be significantly reduced if I stopped renting out the cabin to help pay her student loans) there was very little about Sid that suggested she was ready to live the kind of life Alexis wanted. Maybe Alexis imagined she’d be the reliable one, the caretaker, the one who packed the lunches and went to the school events, while Sid flitted around like Puck, doing fun things like throwing the baby in the air and loading the car for spontaneous beach trips. Alexis had her own career though, she would need help and support, and the lack of responsibility and accountability from my daughter would soon become oppressive.
I chose my words carefully so she wouldn’t take it as an indictment.
“Maybe you want different things,” I offered.
Her face froze in annoyance for a moment, but for whatever reason, she let it go.
“Could be that’s all it is,” she said. She used a hunk of bread to sop up the bits of kale and cheese and meat juice left on her plate and then gnawed it like an animal.
I took our dishes inside, refilled our wine, and brought out slices of cake, which gave way under the sides of our forks with pleasing, geometric neatness.
The light grew dim and creepy. I thought about my story. If I were to stop teaching I would have a significantly greater amount of time to work on it. I could finish the first draft in a month, perhaps, if I was diligent. I could have another published book before I turned sixty.
“I’m thinking of doing it,” I told Sid.
“Doing what?”
“Stopping teaching.”
“Are you kidding me? Why?”
“I don’t want to be teaching if people don’t want me there. If I’m making people uncomfortable.”
“It’s not about them being uncomfortable. Trust me. It’s about them winning. What will it look like if you stop? You’ll basically agree to be seen as an accomplice when you had nothing to do with what Dad did.”
“But maybe you’re right, maybe I am an accomplice.”
“Listen to me. I can call you an accomplice because you’re my mother and he’s my father and I don’t like the idea that you were telling me a lie this whole time. But if you’re an accomplice, most everyone is, right? It was common knowledge, right?”
“Right.”
“So don’t quit, please.”
“I don’t know. My day may be done. Nobody wants to hear from me anymore. Always I run into some struggle with my students. I used to find it fun, trying to get on their level, trying to understand where they were coming from. Adapting, for them, for the moment, not wanting to be left behind. But now I think that maybe I should be left behind.”
“Don’t be silly, Mom. You’re an extremely youthful person. You look young, you act young, you think young. You’re just down on yourself right now.”
“How young?” I turned to Sid to make sure she wasn’t just puffing me up.
“What do you mean?”
“How—young do I look?” I was drunk, or I wouldn’t have asked. When she was growing up, wanting her to find her worth elsewhere, hating myself for my obsession with my appearance, I never once asked Sid how I looked, even as I longed for her praise. When John would call her cute or laud her clothing choices I would tell her that it was only the inside that mattered. Even as I obsessed, I never spoke of my weight, my wrinkles, my grays. Before the awkward adolescent years I would swoon at her long-legged grace, her wide mouth and white teeth and luxurious hair, but would keep my thoughts silent. It had worked, in a way. She was a confident but not a vain young woman. Or whatever obsession with her looks she had absorbed by osmosis she also kept hidden far below.
She looked at me with an indulgent smirk. “You don’t look a day over forty-five.” Then she patted me on the knee and said, “Really.”
My whole face burst into a wide, almost painful smile. I was so pleased, in fact, that tears threatened to roll down my cheeks. I slammed the rest of my martini and retreated to the kitchen with the excuse that we needed more wine.
* * *
Sid brought out a portable speaker and turned on some music, so we didn’t hear the car pull into the driveway. We were faux-modern dancing in the backyard, making funny shapes with our bodies, pretending to pass electrical impulses back and forth that would shake us from top to bottom. After our martinis and two bottles of red wine I unearthed some maple bourbon, which we were bopping over to and shooting straight. I had a brief moment of clarity in which I noted that the pool was covered and we wouldn’t fall in. This time, I wasn’t sure one of us wouldn’t drown. With each undulation and move of my body I imagined I was shaking all the frustrations and negativities up and away from my inner self and flinging them away from me, back out into the atmosphere, to be absorbed by the universe. You don’t get through a PhD with a concentration in women’s literature without encountering some New Age–ery, and drinking could bring out my mystical tendencies.
Sid was the one who grabbed my arm and pointed her out. Standing at the back gate, held up with duct tape as it wasn’t yet fixed from Sid kicking it in, was a woman, watching us. As soon as my eyes fixed on her I realized how drunk I was and how nearly impossible it would be to keep a steady course as I walked to greet her. “Come with me,” I said to Sid, and grasped her arm. We approached cautiously, like Dorothy and the Scarecrow entering the dark forest, arms linked.