At home in the world, p.35
At Home in the World, page 35
I am not free from struggle, but I have relaxed my old manic standards for myself. I take up tennis, a game I had always wanted to play. For the next several years—until he so far surpasses me there’s not much fun left in it for him—I play tennis with Willy. At the worst moments between us, when he’s his angriest or most troubled about what goes on between his father and me, the tennis court will sometimes be the place we work things out. Summer nights we get on our bikes as late as ten o’clock and head to the night-lit courts at the college, where we hit a ball until close to midnight.
I make friends in this town. One, the newly divorced mother of a friend of Audrey’s, mentions shortly after we meet that she and her family moved here from Cornish, New Hampshire.
“Oh, really?” I say. “I lived there myself once, a long time ago. Where was your house?”
“Just down the road from J. D. Salinger,” she says.
“Did you ever meet him?”
“Not me,” she says. “But my younger daughter, Mary, got to be good friends with him. He was crazy about her.”
* * *
I am having an argument with Audrey. She’s thirteen or fourteen. She brought our big set of felt-tip pens over to her father’s house and left them there. Now, when I want markers, there are none. “It’s not enough that I provide this family with every kind of art supply there is!” I yell. “I’m providing them for him, too!”
Audrey’s voice is very soft now as a result of the vocal nodules, but there’s a firmness as she answers me. “You shouldn’t put us in the middle, Mom,” she says, “I’m sorry you have to pay for so much stuff. But it’s not my fault, or the boys’ either.”
Looking at my daughter’s face, so much like mine at that age, I am struck by how unlike me she is—wiser, in so many ways, than when I was thirteen, or even twenty or thirty. It has not occurred to me until this moment that in all the years of my growing up, I cannot remember a single occasion when I looked my mother in the eye as Audrey is looking at me now and told her she was wrong.
“You’re right, Audrey,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
* * *
My sister and I have slowly established a relationship of wary affection. We speak on the phone now every month.
For many years after leaving home, Rona maintained a career as a freelance writer, covering subjects having to do with business, medicine, or education. She wrote without calling attention to herself.
After our mother’s death, she became a columnist for a Canadian magazine in which, for the first time, she addressed issues in her own life. “It took me all that time to write like me,” she says now. “All those years of Mother’s training, I didn’t know where my voice had gone.”
She is named editor of Chatelaine, Canada’s largest magazine for women, an accomplishment our mother would have loved. In the letter she writes at the front of every issue, she often speaks with warmth and pride of our mother and our mother’s continuing and powerful influence on herself and many others who knew her.
There is still so much bitterness between Steve and me that just sitting on the same bench at a Little League game is awkward. Friday nights, when the children pack their belongings into brown paper grocery bags and head to Hillsboro, and Sundays, when I pick them up, are filled with tension and fights, mostly about stupid things. In spite of this, our children manage to negotiate the gulf between their father and me.
* * *
Back when To Die For was published, a producer optioned the book for a movie. For several years I have held out the hope that the film might be made, knowing if that happens, I’ll make a lot of money. “If our ship comes in, I’ll take everyone on a trip,” I say. “If our ship comes in, we’ll put up a basketball hoop and tar the driveway.” “Everyone gets a new bike if our ship comes in.”
In the winter of 1995, the call comes telling me our ship has come in. Nicole Kidman has agreed to star in Buck Henry’s adaptation of To Die For, with Gus Van Sant directing. I can finally pay my lawyer’s bill, and all the other bills that have hung over me since my divorce, and still put money away for my children’s college education. I take the three of them out to dinner at the best Italian restaurant in Keene. We take a trip to Hawaii. We put up a basketball hoop and tar our driveway.
I lobby for a part in the movie, sending the producers a videotape of myself reading lines from the script. They agree to give me a small speaking part as Nicole Kidman’s lawyer. The movie is filming in Toronto. Production begins in May, the month when my mother had traditionally held her annual garden party.
All her life, from the grange halls of her elocution days to her late-life career as a television talk show hostess moderating discussions of child care, my mother sought a stage to perform on. She loved an audience. She was a larger-than-life character, I always said. She should have been in the movies.
I tell the producers of To Die For I won’t be needing a hotel room because I’ll be staying at my sister’s house. This is the first time I’ve visited her home since our mother’s death.
The night I arrive Rona says she has something to give me. She returns to the room with a small plastic bag containing what look like stones and sand—our mother’s ashes.
“I’ve had these in my drawer for ages,” she says as she hands them to me. “Ashes aren’t my thing.”
The next morning a car picks me up very early and brings me to the location where they’ll be shooting my scene. Since I’ll go directly to the airport from the set, I have brought my suitcase containing my mother’s ashes.
The car deposits me at a trailer where the wardrobe mistress outfits me with my costume, a beautifully tailored suit my mother would have appreciated, high heels, and a briefcase. My hair is styled in a bun. Nicole Kidman sits in the chair next to me, more beautiful in real life than she is in the movies. I ask her to sign an autograph for my children. Then I go to my trailer to dress.
We spend all morning shooting the three-minute scene in which I appear so that the director can record the action from every possible angle. Nicole and I make our way through the crowd of extras playing reporters at least thirty times while I deliver my lines, holding tight to my briefcase. Finally, the director says, “It’s a wrap.” I go back to my trailer and take off the beautiful suit and the high heels and return the briefcase.
First, though, I remove from it the small bag that I’d put inside earlier that morning containing my mother’s ashes. I knew my mother would have been amused that she finally got to be in the movies.
One day Audrey and I will scatter my mother’s ashes in Mexico.
* * *
I still can’t let my mother go. I’ll see a woman in her mid-sixties walking down the street, wearing a big, colorful hat, with the kind of purposefulness to her stride that my mother always had. For a minute I will follow this woman, pretending it’s her.
In the bathroom of a friend’s house, I see a bottle of the perfume my mother wore and I open it and breathe it in. I’ll reach into the pocket of a coat that used to be hers, and find some little list to herself with the name of a book or a record or a movie. Bagels. Sour cream. Rhinestones. Those would be for Audrey.
* * *
In the wake of so many losses, I find myself wishing, again, that I could make some kind of connection with my long-ago landsman. So once again, I write Jerry Salinger a letter. “Can I come and take a walk with you one day?” I write. He doesn’t answer.
* * *
I long to make peace with Steve, too.
The idea comes to me that maybe I could create a fictional character, a woman like me, living in circumstances similar to mine, in the aftermath of a divorce with a similar amount of bitterness to mine. If I wrote a novel about this woman maybe I could explain to Steve how I feel. I could bring my character to a point of forgiveness that I have been unable to achieve, myself.
In the spring of 1994, when my children go to their father’s house for spring vacation, I pack my computer in the car and drive ten miles to the Brookside Motel. I stay there two weeks, working on the first draft of the novel, Where Love Goes.
In the novel, the woman recognizes, finally, that she loved her husband once. In some ways, she probably always will. “How can you look at your child and not see in his face the part of him that comes from his father?” she thinks. “How can you not love that part?”
At the end of Where Love Goes, the divorced mother has forgiven her husband. They’re not friends but they can sit and talk together on the bench at soccer games the way my children long to see their father and me do.
* * *
The movie of To Die For is chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival. I decide to bring all three of my children to the gala premiere. I call my sister to give her the news.
“I hope we can manage to get tickets,” she says. “These things tend to sell out.”
“Rona,” I tell her. “Of course I’ll get tickets for you.”
“So I guess you’ll be needing a hotel?” she says.
My sister and her husband have a large, beautiful house. Benjamin is out on his own now. “I was thinking we could stay with you,” I say.
“Oh,” she says.
The next day she calls back. “I’ve been thinking about the problem of your visit,” she says. “You and the children can stay at the house.”
“That’s great,” I say.
“Paul and I will stay at a hotel.”
So they do. But every morning, before work, they leave their hotel and return to their house to have an enjoyable breakfast with us.
“You know, Rona,” I say, “sometimes I get the feeling you don’t even like me.”
“No,” she says slowly, in a way that makes me understand how hard it has been for her.
“It’s not that at all,” she says. “It’s just that you … take … up … so … much … space.”
* * *
It’s Sunday in mid-January in the winter of 1995, and my night to pick up our children at our old house in Hillsboro. Tonight in particular, I dread the drive, and not just because it’s snowing.
Steve and Charlie have gone out for dinner with friends tonight, and Audrey didn’t come to Hillsboro this weekend, so the only one I’m picking up is Willy. Normally I stay in the car with the motor running, waiting for the children to bring their stuff out. But because Steve isn’t here, Willy suggests that I come in the house.
I haven’t been inside the place for years, and I’m not prepared for what happens to me when I step into my old kitchen. A bitter taste rises in my throat. I step into the hallway and glance at the bed where all three of our babies were born. Light from the full moon shines in the window. I go back in the kitchen, run my hand over the wood of the kitchen counter, where I must have prepared thousands of meals, and look out the window to an eerie and beautiful streak of light slashing across newfallen snow. I remember another full moon when Steve and I had fought so bitterly I paced the rooms of this house until dawn, lying down next to first one of my sleeping children, and then another, unable to find peace.
This isn’t the first time I feel that bitter taste: I had it the day seven years ago that I drove a U-Haul filled with my belongings down this driveway, the day I sat in a courtroom hearing a guardian ad litem evaluate my performance as a mother. The surprise comes from discovering that years later, standing in my old kitchen for the first time in years, the wild rage I supposed I had put aside flares up again.
Willy’s excited to have the chance to show me all the new things in his room. I admire the pictures he’s put up on the walls of his room and a rock he found in the woods, a carved wooden horse from a yard sale, a picture Steve made him of a space alien. But my head’s pounding.
On the kitchen counter lies a screw gun that Steve uses in his work as a sheetrocker. I pick it up and palm it as if it were a .45. I put it down again and then pick it up. I look to see where my son is now. In the bathroom.
I tuck the screw gun under my jacket and walk out the door. I stand in the driveway, looking up at the moon, big as a plate and hanging right over my head, lighting the apple trees, the lilacs, and the skating pond. The snow’s falling hard.
I raise my arm the way my sons have taught me when we’re playing catch, and let the screw gun fly. I watch it land in a clump of snow-covered bushes and walk back into the house and call Willy.
By the time we get back to our house in Keene I feel sick with shame and embarrassment. In the morning I try to work, but all I can think about is Steve looking for his screw gun and realizing it disappeared the same night I came to pick up Willy.
I put on my jacket and go to my car. With so much fresh snow on the roads, it takes me nearly an hour to reach our old house.
As I turn the final bend in the road leading up to the house I see with relief that Steve’s car isn’t there. I pull up alongside the porch and walk over to the clump of bushes where I threw the gun. At first I can’t spot it.
Then I see the handle, just barely sticking up out of the snow. I dry the gun off on my shirt and carry it onto the porch, where I set it on a table. I get back in the car and drive away.
Chapter Twenty-three
IT COMES TO me that winter, 1996: I have to leave New Hampshire. So long as I live here, I will be haunted by my history. Audrey’s leaving home herself in a few months. My sons still have a few years left before they head out into the world, but they are old enough, too, that I believe they could handle living farther away from one of their parents now.
My friend Shirley, a realtor, sticks a FOR SALE sign in our front yard, under the tree where we hung the mummy. That afternoon, she brings the first of many families of strangers to walk through our house.
Our lives are going to change. I don’t know how. I don’t even know where we’re going, only that it’s time to go.
* * *
The next few months are among the hardest times we’ve known. Walking through the rooms of this house I’ve come to love, I look out the window at the kids jumping on the trampoline in the yard—boys in pants so big they sometimes fall down as the boy goes up—and wonder what I was thinking of to set this whole terrible, wrenching change into motion. Our house is crammed with stuff, every toy my children owned that I could never bear to part with. Drawers full of my children’s old school papers and letters and art supplies, junk jewelry, fabric, buttons, photographs, my mother’s sewing machine, her mixer, her hats. Friends ask me how I’ll ever manage to vacate this house, it’s so full of things. “You’d better just light a match,” one says.
“Why don’t you move to New York?” one friend suggests. My friend Vicky, the reader with whom I used to stay in my Family Circle days, suggests Brooklyn Heights. Another reader friend suggests Denver. Somebody else, Portland, Oregon.
I travel to Northern California for a weekend and look at houses. Three weeks later, on a second trip—this time with Charlie—I stop in at a real estate open house in a town just north of San Francisco. The house costs more than I have any business spending, but because I have one good tax return, from the year of the movie sale, I qualify for a mortgage. I ask myself “What’s the worst that can happen?” and make an offer.
The day my offer is accepted, I get a call from Audrey, back home in Keene, to say our house has just been burglarized. Gone: our bicycles, snowboards, stereo equipment, guitar, VCR, camera, computers—including the one I work on, with hundreds of pages of work on it, not backed up on any disk.
When I come home, I spend hours with the police and the insurance investigators. It turns out my daughter had a party at our house the night before the burglary, and noise complaints were filed with the police. Two days later, when she called to report the burglary, she and her friends became the chief suspects. “In a majority of cases like this,” the detective tells me, “it turns out to be someone in the family.”
Now detectives are interviewing all of Audrey’s friends. One day I look out my window to see a detective talking to one of the boys who comes and jumps on our trampoline every day after school. Soon nobody is jumping on the trampoline anymore. Every kid in our yard is under suspicion. I look at them differently, too. What if it was this boy that I used to invite in for cookies, or that one?
My daughter and I, who have been at odds all year, argue bitterly now. “You know you weren’t supposed to have a party while I was away,” I say. Now look.
With the approval of the police, I send a letter to the local paper. “The hard drive to my computer was stolen,” I say. “I earn my living as a writer. If anybody knows where it is, please return it. Just leave it on our doorstep. No questions asked.”
Two days later, at ten o’clock at night, I get a phone call from a woman in town. “Come to my house right away,” she says. No need to ask why.
When I get there, she and her ex-husband, who lives in my neighborhood, are sitting in the living room with my computer hard drive, which they got from their twenty-year-old son, a boy Audrey knew slightly in junior high but isn’t friendly with. The father found my hard drive in a storage building out in back of his apartment. But he swears his son didn’t burglarize my house. “He met a student from the college at a party who asked him to hold on to it for him for a few weeks,” the father says. “He was just doing the guy a favor.”
“Our son’s never been in any kind of trouble before,” his mother tells me.
I wish they had just left the computer on my doorstep, but mostly I’m just so happy to have my hard drive back. I tell the father to bring it to my house and leave it on my step tomorrow morning, and I’ll simply tell the police that part, keeping their son’s name out of it.
The next morning, the hard drive is returned. But it turns out the young man also had another item his parents had not mentioned before: my portable computer, which is damaged and no longer usable.
I know if I tell the police and the insurance company about the damaged portable computer, too, my story will sound implausible and they won’t reimburse me. The police have already spent hours grilling Audrey, who, I am clear, is guilty of nothing but having a party against my wishes.
