In the Drink (27 page)

One day in tenth grade, I’d missed the school bus home. Since the institute was a ten-minute walk from Candlewick High School, I walked there to wait outside on the lawn until early evening, when my mother’s classes were over, so I could ride home with her. I sat under a tree with my book bag. The sprinklers were off and the campus was quiet and smelled of cut grass. Beyond the grounds of the institute I could see Candlewick’s only traffic light, strung across the highway on a wire at the intersection between here and the high school, the orange peaked roof of the A&W, dust rising behind a pickup truck barreling along a dirt road; here, all was peaceful and civilized. I
sat through the afternoon, reading a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. As a young poetess, she had lived in Greenwich Village; she was small and lithe with a cap of curls, and she rode the Staten Island ferry with an unidentified “you” I pictured as a man in a beret: “We were very tired, we were very merry—we had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.” I could imagine nothing more sheerly romantic than standing at the rail and watching the sun rise over the New York harbor, “dripping, a bucketful of gold.” This was the blueprint for the life I planned to have.

Motion flickered across my peripheral vision. I looked up to see my mother, flanked by several students, striding along the walk between the administration building, where her office was, and the large pinkish structure that housed the classrooms. This quick, unexpected transition of my attention between my hoped-for future and the actual fact of my mother afforded me a glimpse of her as others might have seen her. As her students disbanded to the parking lot, my mother marched off alone toward the classrooms, a brave, defiant, mannish person in baggy trousers and an unfashionable polyester print blouse with a floppy bow, her spine ramrod-straight, her gaze fixed on a point on the horizon. Was she really so small? I had always thought of her as enormous. I felt a pang at the set squareness of her shoulders, which looked surprisingly narrow and frail suddenly.

I got up. “Ma,” I shouted. “Wait for me!” I ran headlong across the grass.

She turned and saw me and waited while I caught up with her. As I approached her, I saw a stain on her blouse. She’d probably noticed it immediately, the moment she’d spilled the coffee on herself, and said “Ach, poo!” and decided it didn’t belong to her. This had enabled her to wear it unselfconsciously,
even proudly, for the rest of the day; in her mind, it had become a badge that represented her disavowal of all stains, both external and internal. I felt inadequate and clumsy, another of her stains.

“I missed the bus,” I said stiffly.

“I’ll be done in an hour. You want to wait in my office?”

Her office was dominated by a framed portrait of Sigmund Freud, whose dark unwinking eyes were unnervingly penetrating, and seemed to ferret out every one of my secret urges. “That’s okay, I’ll wait outside,” I said. I returned to my cool patch of lawn and picked up my book, but the words jarred me now: my future wasn’t going to happen soon enough. I put the book down and plucked crabbily at the short blades of grass, scratched a mosquito bite on my bare leg, scowled off into the distance. And there was Ed Snow, trundling along the walkway, sweating in a short-sleeved white shirt, his pants bunching up in the crotch because his thighs were fat. He represented everything I hated about the Ventana Valley: he was wheezing, puffing, walking as quickly as his bulk and the heat would allow. Thinking no one was looking, he plucked the material of his pants from the fold between his buttocks, giving himself a good deep scratch in the process: this was the same man who’d whipped Billy more than once with the white belt he wore to church. “Hi, Ed!” I shouted, and when he turned and saw me watching him I felt maliciously triumphant, as if I’d got him back in some small way on Billy’s behalf as well as my own.

My mother’s speech wound down to her conclusion. The moderator wrapped things up and stepped down from his podium. There was some applause, which I contributed to, and then my mother was wading through a clutch of antediluvian admirers toward me.

“Well!” she said, beaming, her round face flushed, her eyes
bright. She wore an outfit she must have bought especially for the occasion, a suit in a racy electric blue, with three enormous gold buttons on its short jacket and a mid-calf-length skirt that hung straight down from her boxy hips; under the jacket she wore a floral-print blouse that was nearly the twin of the one I was wearing, same pattern, different but equally lurid colors. “What a wonderful surprise, to see you sitting out there! I bet you didn’t expect to be the star of my lecture!”

I was the star? “Hi, Ma,” I said with a queasy half-smile.

As we descended the front steps of the building, I let her happiness at seeing me override my own dismay at seeing her, and almost managed to conjure some vicarious anticipation for the meal we were about to share together. She marched to the edge of the curb and her short arm shot skyward; I thought of this gesture of hers as “heiling a cab,” but now, as always, I resisted the rather weak temptation to tell her so. She tended to treat my jokes, especially the ones I ventured to make at her expense, as an invitation to discuss Freud’s views on humor, which naturally involved an inquiry into my unconscious hostilities.

A cab stopped. My mother propelled herself into the backseat; I slid in after her and told the driver where we were going. She turned to me, her smile still intact, since I hadn’t done anything yet to dispel it. “So,” she said. “What did you think of the little story about you?”

“Actually, Ma, I got there too late to hear that part. What was the story?”

“Don’t you remember at bedtime when you were a little girl, how you would come in my study when I was working and try to distract me?” She chuckled fondly.

“I remember,” I said, and was glad not to have had to hear her chalk all those fruitless nightly bids for affection up to some
crackpot theory. She could have simply asked me why I’d done it. A heavy weight lay in my stomach like an indigestible wad of dough. All of my apprehension about the meal to come seemed entirely attributable to the fact that I was going to have to eat Ukrainian food, which struck me now as the most dreary, stodgy, depressing cuisine on earth. “Ma, listen, maybe we should go somewhere else for a change. Maybe a Chinese place?”

“Gott knows from what animal that meat comes,” she said obtusely.

I sighed. “Righto,” I said with mock good humor.

“What did you say? That expression.”

“Righto,” I said dutifully, the native-born daughter helping her immigrant mother learn the language. “It means okay, all right—”

“Your father used to say that, how very strange, I don’t think it’s genetic to use a particular expression. But you just sounded so much like him.”

“That is strange,” I said blandly. We stopped at the intersection just southwest of Union Square. I rolled down my window and stuck my head out. The sky was shot through with light as effervescent and golden as champagne. I got a lungful of gasoline-laden air just as the light turned green and we shot forward, turned left and lurched into east-west traffic. When a truck swerved into our lane and cut us off, my mother’s arm shot out automatically and made an iron bar across my breastbone. Looking down at her arm, startled, I saw that the skin on the back of her hand was frail and papery, mottled with brown spots and webbed with thick blue-green veins. This sent a heavy wave of fear and sadness crashing over me. There she sat next to me, my progenitrix, my own future in human form, and all I wanted to do was get a free dinner out of her and send her
off to bed. Ashamed of myself, I turned to her and said with some effort, “It just doesn’t sound like he was all that great, frankly.”

“I never did tell you very much. Maybe because I wondered why would you care about this stupid fellow?”

“See?” I said with equal parts irritation and defensiveness. “He was stupid. What more could I possibly want to know about him?”

“No, nein, that isn’t what I wanted to say, I’m no good at this. Maybe we just forget about it.”

The driver had inserted his shabby, shockless taxi into a fire-hydrant space in front of the restaurant; he was idling patiently there without turning around, but something about the stolid set of his head made me realize that he was waiting for us to get out of his car. “Ma,” I said, “we’re here.”

She opened her purse, a large and ancient pleather affair with a big brass clasp and a sinisterly gaping maw that looked as if it would bite the hand off anyone besides its owner who had the temerity to reach inside. She pulled out a pink plastic wallet, from which she extracted a neatly folded ten-dollar bill. The sight of such a bill coming out of such a wallet made me sad and fearful all over again: that was the ten-dollar bill of someone who had no one to distract her from needless, fussy, time-filling tasks like folding her money into neat squares, no one to tell her that this wallet was cheesy and broadcast forlornness. I got out of the cab and waited for her on the sidewalk, unable to watch as she carefully calculated the tip to the nearest nickel and handed it over to the driver coin by coin, picking each one carefully from its pink plastic compartment. I leaned over and offered her an arm, but when she disregarded it entirely and hopped nimbly as a cricket onto the sidewalk, the terrible ache in my throat dissolved.

The taxi slid back into the current and rumbled off down the avenue; we went into the restaurant, which happened to be the same place where I’d recently had breakfast with John. It was a big place, as dingy and impersonal as an old hotel dining room, with dark wainscoting, yellowed photographs of bustling Second Avenue in the 1930s and autographed decades-old head shots of unknown actors. Fans whirred overhead like enormous insects. Egg-colored coffee cups sat upside down in a pyramid on a sideboard next to the coffeemaker; pies turned slowly in a lit case by the cash register like cars in a showroom. The rows of white-shrouded tables were set neatly with silverware and napkins, but we were the only customers. It was still too early for everyone else. Torture-chamber sounds came from the kitchen, howls and banging metal.

I planned to order a glass of wine right away, sip casually and urbanely at it as if I didn’t care much about it one way or the other, and then casually and urbanely order another one. However, I remembered, as we were seated by an unsmiling waiter who obviously remembered my mother all too well, that they offered no alcohol here, none at all: I could drink water, or hot tea, or the thin bitter bogwater they called coffee, but I couldn’t have even the most innocuous little lite beer. This realization almost undid me. I opened the gigantic menu and set it on the table to shield me from my mother’s ever-watchful gaze.

“What are you having?” she asked with enthusiasm. “I’m getting the potato dumplings with sour cream and applesauce and those such delicious fried onions.”

“They’re called pierogi,” I told her tersely. I wanted, with every parched cell of my tongue, a glass of red wine. “I’m going to order a hamburger.”

She clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, a
sound which made my fingers curl inward like dried leaves. “You could go to McDonald’s for that,” she said. “Why don’t you order that good meat loaf they got? Maybe a potato pancake or so, and a cold beet salad to go with?”

“No, a burger’s fine,” I said, thinking that just maybe, just this once, if I didn’t react and kept nice and calm she would leave me alone.

“But a meat loaf is almost the same thing but it’s much more interesting, don’t you think so? And those beet salads are done very well, I think. Horseradish, remember?”

“Okay,” I said through a sudden case of lockjaw. I tried to throw the menu sharply down, but it sank slowly onto the table like a toppled gravestone. “You’re right. Why don’t you go ahead and order for me?”

She blanched at my tone. “Oh, Claudia, I was only suggesting. Of course I want you to get what you like.”

“I
like
a hamburger,” I spat out, gripping the edge of the table with both hands as if it might start to levitate otherwise.

“Good, okay, that’s what you have,” she said in the clipped voice she used whenever she was out of her depth with me. “And I have the pierogi, there we are.” She wrestled her own menu shut and set it on top of mine with a little pat. I saw the whites of her eyes as she cast desperately around for the waiter, who now must have seemed to her the staunchest of allies, but he had vanished into the cabalistic, clanking depths of the kitchen. She looked down at the tablecloth, on which she was carefully arranging her knife and fork.

“I’m almost thirty,” I said.

“Yes, I know,” she said anxiously. “It’s a good age, thirty, a pivotal age, and it’s important to—”

“I’ve been supporting myself, living alone, out in the world, for almost ten years.”

“Has it been so long? That’s quite a—”

“So maybe I learned, somewhere along the way, how to order a meal in a restaurant.”

“Oh, Claudia, all I wanted to do was for you to decide on something good so you wouldn’t have to settle!”

“Just because your patients take everything you say as the word of God doesn’t mean I think you’re God and it doesn’t mean you are God.”

She stared at me, white-lipped, blank-faced. We were silent until the waiter materialized in the doorway to the dining room. We ordered, gave him our menus, and when he had disappeared again my mother said sorrowfully in a low voice, “You are such an angry young woman, liebchen. I wonder how it was you became so.”

“There’s a lot to be angry about, I guess.”

“You were such a sweet little girl.”

“Maybe I was just impersonating a sweet little girl.”

She gave me a long gaze that was saturated with some strong, particular feeling I couldn’t gauge. If I could have, I would have pulled my head and arms into my shirt like a turtle and hidden in there until she went away. “I don’t know how, with my training, my experience, I failed to allow you to flourish.”

“Who says you failed? Who says I’m not flourishing?”

We were silent for several minutes, looking around the room as if we’d taken a great interest in the head shots, sipping our ice water, clearing our throats. Finally our plates of food appeared, borne aloft in the arms of the waiter, who deposited them in front of us with a sour, hurried expression as if they were a pair of babies with soiled diapers he couldn’t wait to unload on someone else. My mother gave a gasp of pleasure at the sight of her pierogis. She busied herself with dabs of applesauce and sour cream, then tucked her napkin into her blouse and dug in. She chewed her first bite with great attention,
swallowed, lifted a corner of the napkin to blot her lips, and said, “Well, it’s a little doughy, but the applesauce is all right. You’re not eating?”