SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010
Imagine that that house is yours,” Martin prompts, excited, genuinely excited about making me happy. “What colors would you paint that house?”
I study the gray siding and imagine the colors I would choose. A few seconds later, I freeze, unable to conjure up any combination fantastic enough to enter into the bohemian competition playing out up and down the street. I’d need more time, a lot more time, to pick the palette that would, essentially, express to the world who I am. I am not ready for that level of public declaration.
“Martin, seriously, it’s not that simple. I wanted to be in Sycamore Heights when Aubrey was little.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why do you think?” I point to the two women chatting next to the swings while their children play. My voice wobbles when I express the irretrievable. “I could have been part of a community. I could have been around people, women, mothers I had something in common with. Mothers who felt the same way I did.”
The instant I put my longing into words, I see myself in the circle of my old Sycamore Heights friends, surrounded by the comforting animal smell of users of crystal deodorant, their hair in spikes, dreadlocks, the rockabilly girls in cowboy shirts with the sleeves torn off, interesting shoes, Doc Martens, Converse high tops, the kind of shoes no one in Parkhaven ever wears, all of us nursing infants wrapped in organic cotton receiving blankets, suckling babies in tie-dyed onesies, breast-feeding sturdy toddlers. I’d have been part of a milk sisterhood, a circle of constant, supportive friends, a happy tribe as we watched our children, who were also the closest of friends, grow up together.
I brace myself for Martin to tell me how this is possible. I can’t wait to ask him how, precisely, with all his Next superpowers, he will travel through time and give me back the childhood Aubrey should have had.
I turn away and notice that the nursing mother has finished feeding her infant. She buttons her blouse and her “baby” sits up. As he clambers from the sling, I see that this child has to be close to three years old. The instant he climbs down, the older child scales his mother. Mom never stops talking to her friend as she sweeps the sling aside and lets the four-year-old in the POTTY LIKE A ROCK STAR T-shirt plug in.
This tableau of perfect Sycamore Heights motherhood causes me to recall all the random communications—phone calls, e-mails—I’d had with my amigas over the years since I left the ’hood.
That loose group of former friends had morphed into a Sycamore Heights Listserv that eventually evolved into a Facebook page. By the time chats with my old mom friends had faded into mass postings, maybe only those with grievances were writing. But at some point it seemed that they all had divided up into teams and staked out positions on pacifiers, circumcision, sugar, war toys, the family bed, cloth diapers, television, strollers. Women who had never competed in their lives, whose last sport had been Red Rover, chose sides. Stands were taken with an inbred Hatfield/McCoy blood feud intensity. Ultimately, even the sacred of sacreds, breast-feeding, became a hot button when a new team emerged proclaiming that nursing was a deeply antifeminist act, a plot to keep women trapped at home.
Friendships were cremated in the flame wars that erupted around that one.
I replay Aubrey’s life now if we had lived here and wonder how my daughter with her early, inexplicable passion for all things pink and princess would have done in this hothouse of political correctness. Even in Parkhaven, Dori had chided me about raising a little Barbie doll.
Dori, my fellow exile. For the first time, now that it is an actual possibility, I imagine myself living in this neighborhood, a neighborhood filled with Dori clones. A neighborhood where—judging from recent postings that I’d not taken seriously until this moment—if you weren’t tattooed up like the Illustrated Man and blogging about the many ways your husband/lover/whoever was begging you for anal sex, you would probably be far weirder than a little armpit-hair ranching had made me in Parkhaven.
Though I am damned if I will reveal it to Martin, I suddenly feel more like an exile than ever. A homesick exile from some Middle Eastern country who has just recalled that her lost paradise was run by the Taliban. I don’t know what Martin reads in my face, but he says, “You’re a true rebel, Camille.”
Camille. Again, he summons up the self I had to leave behind.
“It’s what I loved about you. You always knew exactly who you were and what you wanted.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Martin, genuinely caught off guard, blinks. “Cam, don’t you remember how Amy and Gianna and that whole Sycamore Heights group used to call you Cammando?”
“They made up nicknames for everyone.”
“Yeah. Nicknames that stuck because they were so perfect.”
“Me? Cammando?”
“Absolutely. How could you forget that? You made up your mind what you wanted and you went after it.”
“I did?”
“Sure. A baby. Good schools. Getting certified. You were the woman with a plan.”
“We made those decisions together.”
“Back then? Make a decision? That was my Downfall.”
Downfall. A tiny pinprick to the brain. Next worms its way in by giving free sessions with their Breathalyzer contraption in which they identify the mark’s “Downfall,” the thing that’s wrong with the person’s life, then promise to cure it.
“Not you, though,” he continues. “Knowing who you were was always such a given to you. You were my anchor and I held on as long as I could.”
“Held on? Martin, what was you setting us up in Parkhaven except you letting go? You planting me someplace where you could leave me behind?”
“Real estate would never have changed what happened to us. What I had to do.”
“ ‘Had to do’?” I don’t bother restraining the acid in my tone. I put hydrochloric quotation marks around his words.
“Okay, should the name of this production be Let’s Help Our Daughter or should it be All the Ways Martin Fucked Cam Over?”
“I’m voting for Martin Could Be the Biggest Asshole in the Universe.” Going beyond sarcasm straight to out-and-out insult is delicious, like wriggling out of a pair of Spanx. Martin seems to take no notice. He’s more Zen than Zen Mama. I can see now why Aubrey hated my mask of implacable calm.
“I know that you, that we, want her to go to college, but why? What is our root desire for her?”
“Oh, gosh, I don’t know. Maybe that she won’t end up scrubbing out toilets at Applebee’s. Is that a good ‘root desire’?”
“Lot of baristas with college degrees. Probably even a few toilet scrubbers. No, what is your dream for her?”
I almost say “adventures,” but remember how Aubrey chastised me for that and turn the question on him: “What’s yours?”
Without hesitating, Martin says, “I hope she will have what we ha … had.”
The drag before he says “had” was Martin catching himself almost saying “have.” That is Martin almost letting it slip that I am as changeable a fabric for him as he is for me. That within my double-faceted weave the iridescent person I was when we first met will always wait, will always sparkle. That is when I realize that I have the same gift he does: We can give each other back our youth. This is the crack cocaine that Dori was talking about, and I am stunned to realize that Martin might be smoking it too.
My phone rings. I check it, tell Martin, “It’s her.”
Martin tips his head back and slaps his hand on his chest with relief, then steps away from the table, out of earshot.
“Aubrey?”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry. I’m sorry I couldn’t call. But I’m fine so—”
“You are not fine! You stole your college money.”
“That was my money.”
I am livid at her unapologetic entitlement. “That money was not yours. That money was for college.”
“It was for my future.”
“A future that you have allowed that … that …” No reason to hold back anymore. “That slimy jerkwad creep to steal.”
“You do not know the first thing about Tyler. He is not who you think he is.”
“Coach Hines? He’s the jerkwad. Mom, you really, seriously don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So tell me.”
“I can’t right now, but Tyler did not steal anything. This was completely my idea. I had to talk him into it. Renting a trailer this summer was my idea. We made money and learned how to run a business. Then, later, we learned how to cook real food.”
Those odors I’d smelled on her. I was right.
“A roach coach! That is what you threw all of your college money away on!”
“We also had to pay a year’s lease on the space in advance to negotiate a good price. We had to buy all our equipment. We had to put down utility deposits. It’s expensive to open a business.”
“Business? A freaking roach coach is not a business.”
“See? Just the way you keep saying that. Roach coach. Roach coach. Roach coach. That shows that you do not know what you’re talking about.”
I am almost too mad to think about the heavenly crepe with caramelized onions and chicken that I just ate. Or the mind-expanding tacos. Or the throngs of people shoving big dollars through small windows. I am certainly nowhere close to admitting, even to myself, that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I start to speak, but Aubrey cuts me off. “That is exactly why I could never have told you about the plan. You would never have let me do this. You would have forced me go to Peninsula.”
“It didn’t have to be Peninsula. Aubrey, you never even talked to me about any of this. Told me how you felt.”
“What was the point? So you could make fun of it like you’ve always made fun of the only places where I remotely fit in?”
“I have never made fun of—”
“Band! Attendance office! The lunch wagon! Shit, you and Dori made fun of me for keeping my room neat.”
“For God’s sake, Aubrey, I made a couple of lame jokes about your band hat.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve been a big disappointment and that I’m not off singing in cathedrals or mapping the human genome or any of those other things you think I should be doing. I’m sorry that it turns out that this is what I’m good at. What I like.”
“You don’t know what you like. That’s what college is for.”
“For a lot of kids, maybe most, yeah. For me, if I had let you force me into going to Peninsula—which you somehow would have if I’d started talking to you about it—I would have hated it and flunked out and that money would be gone and I would have nothing.”
It’s disconcerting to hear Aubrey talk about me as some kind of unstoppable force in her life when it has been over a year since she even seemed able to hear me.
“This is so not what I had in mind for you. You do realize that, if I made this a legal matter, the law would be on my side.”
Then, with an unsettling calm, she says, “Yeah, it probably would.”
Maybe she’d take my threat more to heart if I’d actually called the police that first time she disappeared. Or maybe we’d have just devolved into a Jerry Springer–ready mother-daughter duo radiating hatred at each other.
I read once that it takes fourteen miles for an oil tanker to change course. The same change for mothers and daughters must take a nearly equal number of years. But in all those miles and years there does come one precise moment, one discrete point in an infinite vastness, when you start heading in an entirely new direction. I know that, for better or for worse, Aubrey and I have hit that moment when instead of arguing with me, fighting to convince me to accept what she wants, she states in a steady, even way that doesn’t ask for my permission or seem ready to bristle when I don’t offer it, “Mom, I have to go. We have to get ready for the opening.”
“Where, Aubrey? Tell me where you are. I need to see you. Make sure you’re all right.”
“I’d really rather not say. I’ll invite you when we’ve got the kinks smoothed out. But I’m too nervous now and you take my strength away. I have to go. Sorry.”
She hangs up. Before I even have a chance to be hurt by Aubrey telling me I take her strength away, the phone rings again.
“Mrs. Lightsey.” It’s Tyler. He’s whispering. “Come to Town Square. But, you know, just for a look. Don’t let her see you, okay?”
“I know that the money was for college. Not what we used it for. We’re going to pay you back. With interest.”
I’m not sure why, at that moment, I look over at Martin, who has wandered off and is studying our old house and the cartoon-colored bungalows around it. Probably because of treacherous, atavistic brain wiring of the sort that made cavewomen look to their mates, the upper-body-strength ones, when a saber-toothed tiger approached, I think of him working Coach Hines and Randy. Whatever the reason, I’m strangely confident when I say, “Oh, there is no question about that, Tyler Moldenhauer. You will pay back every single cent.”