9780425176962

Chapter One

Interrupted

The sky is the wrong color for this. It should be a sick yellowish green, tornado-weather color, not this vibrant, pellucid blue, this bright wash of unreflected light. The palm trees and shrubs shaped like Mickey, Pluto, and Dumbo are wrong as well; there should be pine trees, twisted birches, deadly hemlocks, a forest in a European fairy tale hiding danger, wolves, a man in a cloak. It's the man in the cloak she's worried about now, or rather, his Disneyland twin with the cowboy boots and jeans, the one who was standing a few feet away from Kate and Audrey while they were waiting in line for ice cream. "Why, your daughter sure is a cute one," he said. "Just about as pretty as her mom." Kate was annoyed, thinking this was just a stupid pick-up line, but now she understands that he said this only to fluster her. To distract her.

The important thing, she tells herself, is not to panic. It would only cloud her mind, and she needs to think clearly. "Have you seen my daughter, my little girl? The little girl who was standing right behind me?" she asks the other people in line. They shake their heads, all but one, a kindly-looking elderly woman, who says, "I saw her," and Kate feels so grateful, so relieved, she is close to laughter when she asks, "Where?" The woman smiles, points to a nearby bench. Kate searches for the familiar auburn hair and freckled nose of her young daughter, but she sees only an adolescent girl with pasty white skin and budding breasts, chewing on a rope of black licorice. Her knees are dirty, her pink T-shirt too tight; it sticks to her skin, stretching under the arms. Audrey looks nothing like this girl--would never wear a shirt that wasn't a size too big, would never wear pink, a color for Barbies and poodles, wouldn't eat black licorice if it were the last junk food on this earth--but for a moment Kate finds herself squinting, tilting her head, trying to get this stranger to look like, to become, her daughter.

Kate is clutching the Drumsticks too hard: the ice cream tops fall to the tidy cobblestone ground; the waffle bottoms squash between her fingers, and she shakes them off. Her hands are sticky and wet, but this is meaningless, and she uses them to wipe the hair from her face. Slowly she turns around, examining every inch of Adventureland with her laser-keen eyes. When she is back where she began, between the ice cream cart and the bench, facing the Pirates of the Caribbean, she glimpses a blue uniform and a glittering badge. She runs to the security guard.

"I can't find my daughter," she says, and the man nods, sympathetic and patient--I have seen this a thousand times, he is saying with his eyes--and tells her to calm down.

"You want me to calm down? I told you, my daughter is gone. She may have been kidnapped."

"I'm sure she'll turn up, now--"

Kate begins to shout. Her words may or may not be comprehensible to others; she herself has little idea what she is saying. Something about calling the police, a man in cowboy boots, suing Disneyland's kitschy, capitalistic ass: she is like a drunk person standing on a street corner shouting about a conspiracy, a murder suspect loudly insisting upon her innocence, a wild-eyed woman unsteadily wielding a gun while proclaiming nobody's gonna get hurt. In some part of her is the realization, So this is what it means to be out of your mind with fear . The security guard is telling her to get ahold of herself, but Kate cannot help it. She shouts louder and louder. And louder.

Kate awakened to the sound of her own mumbled voice, and checked the clock beside her bed: six-fifteen. Practically the middle of the night, but she knew that she couldn't possibly fall back to sleep. She pulled on a pair of sweats and cotton sport socks, quietly walked down the hall, and opened the door to Audrey's room. Her suddenly teenaged daughter (how had she gotten so tall? so old?) was clutching her ancient stuffed polar bear, her eyelids pulsing in some sweet, innocuous dream: about horses, perhaps, or a dewy-faced boy at school. But what did Kate know? She was only her mother, and thus naturally adept at wishful thinking.

Kate studied Audrey's messy auburn hair and freckled, leonine nose. Despite everything, despite her father, she was a normal kid, safe, kind, unaware of danger and betrayal and lies. It seemed a miracle sometimes.

Kate closed the door and went downstairs, into the kitchen. She ground some French-roast beans, put them into the coffeemaker, and poured in Sparkletts water, which dribbled down the side and onto the counter below. Her hands were trembling slightly. She was about to open the refrigerator door for some juice when she noticed and reread the line of magnetic poetry Audrey had created the week before:

my silver tongue slides into your fire engine and laps yes yes rose blue

Kate ran her fingers through her hair and held her hands still at the back of her head. Every time she read these words, she asked herself the same question: What did her barely pubescent daughter know about tongues that slid into fire engines and then lapped yes yes rose blue? Nothing, Kate told herself. Audrey had been trying to shock her, that was all. She had just been reading too much Kerouac and watching too much MTV and listening too much to her best friend, Sandira, who described everything from biceps to bookbags as "sexy." Audrey didn't really know anything about silver tongues and fire engines.

Did she?

Fear. Kate had been filled with it ever since Audrey had turned thirteen, started her period, begun high school--fear of everything from sex and drugs to eating disorders; fear that Audrey would become like one of those teenagers at the mall straggling behind their bewildered mothers on a back-to-school shopping expedition, cynical and sullen, her hipbones jutting from her jeans, her fresh, innocent face bored and pierced all over, like a fish that's been hooked a dozen times; fear that Audrey would simply become her own person so thoroughly that Kate would no longer recognize her--and she was filled with it now, as she sat in her ceramics studio (brightly lit, colorful, anomalously cheery), sipping her coffee, staring at her latest project, at the clay image of her own face.

There was her straight Gaelic nose, her wide, thin-lipped mouth, her squarish jaw, the two sunken mounds of her not-yet-molded eyes. Your daughter's going to leave you, she thought, imagining Audrey emerging from the gash in the upper left of her skull. In four years she would be gone, and Kate would be nothing more than the overprotective mother who called her dorm room too often.

Which had come first, Kate wondered, her logical and illogical fears, the nightmares in which she turned around to find Audrey gone, lost, stolen, disappeared, or this unfinished face, this sculpture based on the Birth of Athena, this piece about letting go, about embracing the process of her daughter's growing up? Kate did embrace the process, she did. It was just that there were times when she wished she could have locked Audrey up in the second story of their condo, shaved off her long hair (you couldn't be too cautious), brought her books to read (harmless but edifying, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Edna St. Vincent Millay) and computer games to play (nonviolent ones, naturally), until she was thirty or so. Kate ran her fingers over the gash from which Audrey would emerge, knowing that locking her daughter away would be useless. She would find a way to escape. Everyone did.

"Mom?"

Audrey was standing in the doorway between the studio and the kitchen, wearing running shorts and a tank top for cross-country practice, spooning some blue yogurt concoction into her mouth.

"Hey, good morning."

"I went to wake you, but you weren't there."

"I had the most terrible dream," Kate said, following her into the kitchen. "I dreamed that you were lost at Disneyland, and--"

"Mom, quit dreaming about me."

Audrey was looking at Kate as though her mother had read her journal, eavesdropped on her most private telephone call, rifled through her dresser drawers.

"I'm sorry," Kate said, "I promise I'll never do it again." She shook her head. "Honey, how can I help what I dream about?"

"I don't know, but just don't. It gives me the creeps."

Kate poured herself a second cup of coffee. When she turned around, she saw that Audrey was sitting at the kitchen table, her head half hidden behind a Spanish textbook. Audrey tucked her hair behind her ears--her hands were delicate and soft, her ears fragile mollusks--and reached for her glass, which almost slipped out of her hands. Be careful, Kate wanted to shout, but stopped herself. Audrey would only have given her that look that meant Kate was a crazy person, who needed to be handled with kid gloves. Careful of what? she would have asked politely. Everything, Kate would have replied.

Kate was putting away the clean glasses and plates from the dishwasher when she remembered it was Friday. Her stomach dropped a notch. Friday meant one thing to Kate: her mother. The thought induced in her a multicolored web of emotions: the irritating silvery-gray terbium of a TV on the fritz, the dark anger of a reddish black that could swallow you if you let it, the brilliant green of emeralds, Irish grass, her mother's own sharply focused eyes. If Audrey thought she had it bad, she should try having her sweet, doting, beloved grandmother for a critical, annoying, beloved mother.

"Remember," Kate said, "it's Friday"

Audrey rolled her eyes--speckled, light brown, cat's eyes. "News flash, Mom, I know."

"Why don't I come watch the meet today, and then we can go straight to Grandma's?"

"Coach Bryant's supposed to take us out for pizza after the race. I might go, or I might not. I'll call you if I need a ride."

Kate knew better than to press the issue. If she pretended she didn't care, maybe Audrey would decide to come to her mom's. If Kate told her, "You know, honey, I'd really like it if you ate dinner with us tonight," Audrey might go out for pizza just to spite her, and then Kate would have to deal with the disapproval of her mother, who tended to take any absence at her Friday dinners as a personal insult. After years of serving frozen pizzas, gourmet TV dinners, and Chinese takeout, her mother prepared elaborate meals every Friday night now that Kate was an adult--whether to atone for her earlier sin or because she truly enjoyed cooking once a week, Kate wasn't sure. Her black-bean-and-chèvre enchiladas of two weeks before had been a big hit, but last week Audrey had refused the tournedos with porcini mushroom sauce ("Beef wrapped in bacon strips? I'll never run again"), and Kate knew that if she told her mother Audrey was going out for pizza after her race, she would suspect it was simply a ruse designed to avoid eating the food she had so lovingly prepared.

"Okay," Kate said, making her voice neutral and calm. "Just let me know."

A car honked, and Audrey was out of her seat, out of the kitchen--"Bye Mom see you later!" "Wait! Do you have your lunch? Have a good race!"--and out of the condo, slamming the door, in the time it would have taken Kate to ask herself where she'd left her keys. Gone with the wind, Kate thought, staring at the yogurt congealing on the counter.

What kind of wind? Audrey would ask, sharing her uncle Luke's distaste for clichés. A refreshing ocean breeze, a terrifying twister?

Both, Kate would say. Both.

Kate touched the leather-hard clay face and felt a hum of excitement. The fear was gone now--or rather, swallowed into the back of her mind, nothing more than a useful tool to help her with the sculpture. She loved this moment, when a figure was shaped but not completed, when she could still envision it as perfect, its expression evoking the exact combination of emotions she'd imagined, when reality with its inevitable disappointments was still a few hours away (You could never render the exact combination; you could never perfectly achieve your vision; the clay had its own mindless vision, too.) She ran her fingers over the ridge of her clay brows and pushed the imperfect future from her mind. She summoned her concentration, saw the finished eyes staring back at her as she wanted them to look--there, that was it, just like that--and then picked up her dowel and dug in.

She had been working for twenty minutes or an hour or maybe even half the morning when the telephone rang. Instead of irritation, she experienced something akin to relief. Her eyes were tired; she could use a break. She reached for the cordless phone.

"Hello?"

"Are you up?" came her mother's gruff voice.

"Of course I'm up."

"Well, I know how you sometimes go back to bed after Audrey leaves for school."

Kate had done this four, maybe five, times in all the years of Audrey's formal education, but her mother, having caught her once, was never going to let her forget it. "I'm not in bed, Mom, I'm in my studio. What's up?"

"I was just checking with you about tonight. I thought I'd make Thai, with that curry dish you and Audrey like so much, and pad thai with extra peanut sauce for Luke. I hope he's feeling okay," she added. "He sounded kind of funny the other night."

"Funny how?"

"I don't know. Just ... funny."

For as long as Kate could remember, her mother had complained to her about Luke, just as--Kate knew--she complained to him about her, and complained about Colleen to anyone who would listen. Her children were failures, their mother believed, and she had no one to blame but herself, and her husband, who had gone and died on her when she was only thirty-three, leaving her alone with three young kids. "If only your father were alive ..." Kate had heard variations on this refrain throughout her life. "If only my Grady were here ..." Then everything would be different, and not just different, of course, but better. Colleen wouldn't exhibit such an uncanny biblical likeness to the Whore of Babylon. Kate wouldn't be hiding away in that gated condominium complex as though it were some females-only menstrual hut. And Luke, Luke would have an ordinary, happy existence, with a wife, or at least a girlfriend, and a car that didn't lurch every time you drove it over fifty. He'd have a job worthy of his talents--as a journalist, or a college professor, maybe even the dean--instead of wasting his brain and education all these years in that bookstore that smelled like cat litter and musty old paperbacks.

"I'm sure he's fine, Mom," Kate said. "You worry about him too much."

"Mothers worry. It's part of the job description, as you well know. Page seven thousand and something, I think it is. I suppose Alek's coming tonight?"

Kate pulled the phone a few inches from her ear and sipped her coffee. Was this how Audrey felt? Did the same catarrhal tremor of irritation that was creeping up her own throat creep up her daughter's when Kate said the equivalent of "I suppose Alek's coming tonight"? Her mother knew very well that Alek was coming tonight--he came with Kate to her mother's every Friday--but had to act as though she didn't care one way or the other whether he came to dinner, whether Kate married him, whether he became a stepfather to Audrey. It was the same tone, Kate imagined, her mother would use at a business meeting, a poker-blank look on her face, when she'd say, "I don't know, the price seems a bit high," about some investment she had every intention of grabbing.

"Yes, Alek's coming," Kate said.

"I'd better make something with shrimp in it, then."

"Mom, don't go to any--"

"Listen, the day it's trouble to make a meal for my family is the day you might as well hammer the last nail into the coffin. Well, I'd love to sit here and gab all day but I'm already late for an appointment. See you tonight."

Kate heard a click, followed by silence, and had to repress the urge to run to her garbage can of clay and punch into it with her fists. If Alek were here, he would laugh at her, asking her what Mommie Dearest had done this time. "Your mom's such a sweetie," he always said. Naturally he said this: he had an endearing, infuriating knack for concentrating on people's good qualities, not their flaws; and besides, he and her mother were allies, of a sort. Kate was stubborn, they agreed. Beneath her tough exterior (just a show, of course) she was really very vulnerable, sensitive, almost tender, still on a decade-long rebound that was clouding her better judgment. She wouldn't know a good thing (Alek Perez, high school history teacher, warm, funny, smart, handsome, great with Audrey, owner of the cutest beach bungalow anyone had ever seen) if it hit her over the head with a sledgehammer.

"Mom's upset because I won't marry you," Kate had told him one day the past summer.

Alek had smiled. He had a beautiful smile, genuinely pleased, open, and sincere, his dark brown eyes smiling along with his mouth; it had been one of the features that had attracted Kate to him in the first place, because anyone who smiled like that, she'd believed, had to be incapable of hiding anything: love, boredom, a secret life, matchbooks inscribed with the names of unfamiliar restaurants.

"Your mother's a wise woman," he'd said. "Call her up, apologize. Tell her the wedding's on."

"And complicate my perfectly wonderful life?"

"Tell me. Wouldn't marrying the right man--if he happened to come along--make your life even more perfect and wonderful?"

"When I see someone with the words `The Right Man' scrawled on his forehead, I'll let you know."

"You're breaking my heart," Alek said.

Kate's husband had loved her too little, while Alek's wife had loved him too much. Now they seemed destined to live out mild versions of their former spouses' neuroses. With Alek, it had begun quite simply: he had met Violeta in his credit union. She was the dark-haired customer service representative with eyes worthy of her name, and he'd soon found that they shared an interest in cooking, a passion for basketball, and a love of the outdoors.

"Wait a minute," Kate said, when she first heard the story. "You discovered all that when you applied for a loan?"

"Maybe not right then, but soon after. And I was just opening an account."

"Okay, go on," Kate told him. They'd been seeing each other for only a couple of weeks, but already they'd found their common obsessions: holy matrimony, wrongs done to and by, contracts made and broken.

"Violeta was everything I thought I wanted at twenty-six. Loyal, ready for commitment, affectionate ... maybe too affectionate. Her one flaw, if you could call it that, was that she was a little clingy."

"Clingy?" Kate asked.

"Yeah, you know. She liked to talk on the phone a few times a day, even if we were going to see each other after work, and she was always holding on to me in public, wrapping her arms around my waist and digging her fingers into my ribs. But if anything, I found her devotion flattering. Besides, I was bewitched by her. Six months after we met, we were joined in holy matrimony--forever, I thought at the time."

"A church wedding?" Kate interrupted. She wanted to picture it right.

"Tijuana."

"Tijuana! Oh, Alek. Then what?"

"Within a couple of months, it became clear to me that Violeta's affection was turning into ... well, some kind of a disease. Her love began to suffocate me, like a blanket over my face I could never remove."

Kate mock-shuddered. "What do you mean?"

"For example. During basketball season, she'd come to the gym every single day after work and watch the team practice. These weren't games, although she went to those too, this was just practice. Or she'd spend half of her paychecks on fancy lingerie, and if I didn't notice, she'd lock herself in the bathroom and sob that I was losing my passion for her. I tell you, I had to memorize every little nightie and bra she had, because if I said, `Is that new?' and it wasn't, it was just as bad. One time, after I told her I was too tired to have sex, she slept in the bathtub all night."

"No."

"When she started throwing things at me if I came home even ten minutes later than I said I would--"

"Oh, my."

"--I suggested that we see a marriage counselor. She refused. Then one day she quit her job at the credit union and began to devote her entire days to cooking me dinner. I'd leave for school in the morning, and she'd already be kneading dough. I told her, `Violeta, the problems in our marriage have nothing to do with your culinary skills. You don't need to do this. Really. But she was determined. Like she thought that if only she cooked the perfect meal, everything would be fine."

Kate was both delighted and repulsed by Violeta's obsession. She imagined the poor woman must have been devastated when Alek asked for a divorce, but the story didn't end as she had expected.

"I was racked with guilt," Alek said, "and completely terrified of her reaction. I thought she might try to kill herself, or me. Finally I got up the nerve to say I was sorry, but I saw no alternative, I really thought we should get a divorce. I was prepared for anything. Sobbing, screaming, suicide threats, a steak knife at my throat ... Instead, she said she was relieved."

"Relieved?" Kate repeated.

"Relieved. And tired. Tired of all that expended energy, tired of trying to convince herself that she loved me more than she did, that I was really worthy of her passion, and furthermore--that was her word--furthermore, she had never liked camping."

Alek might have become cynical after that, might have jettisoned his dreams of domestic bliss for a life of frozen pizzas and safe sex with women who were really just friends, might have become the sort of person who says, jokingly, of course, "Marriage is an institution, all right--an institution for the mentally ill." Kate noticed, however, that he talked about his marriage with bemusement, as if to say, through his tone and quizzical expression, Isn't life strange? Isn't love a mystery? and Wasn't I dumb? Yes, dumb. For Alek had learned a lesson from Violeta. In hindsight, he understood that he had fallen in love with her so quickly, so easily, because he'd been seduced by her adoration for him, a mistake, he said wryly, he would never make again. Love, he had come to believe, was not a two-way street, it was two one-way streets that ran parallel to each other, and in the same direction if you were lucky.

"People think they want unconditional love from their mates," Alek had told Kate once, "but it isn't true. We want to have to earn it. To work for it a bit. And we ought to love--how's this for a radical notion?--someone who deserves it."

"Too radical," Kate said.

"Yes, someone with the strange combination of qualities we happen to value. Humor, kindness, a gleaming intelligence in her eyes. The confident way she walks across a room. A stubborn hardheadedness that lets you know this isn't a dress rehearsal but the real thing, and if you screw up you might not get a second chance."

Alek had given her this list in a tone of quiet intensity that had let her know, if she'd been too modest to recognize herself in the description (and at first, she hadn't been at all sure--did she really walk across a room with confidence?), that he was talking about his feelings for her. Kate had been quick to undermine his ardent profession, to put it into perspective with some kind of joke ("Well, anybody would be in love with that person," she'd said), beginning the teasing on the subject that would become their routine. She hadn't been ready to fall into his arms and be told that she was loved; she certainly hadn't been ready to tell him that she loved him, too. And even now, more than two years later, while Kate was very, very fond of Alek, she couldn't quite say that she was in love. Sometimes, staring at his face--his smooth skin the color of walnuts, his dark crescent eyes, the mole to the left of his somewhat flat nose and his high, Mayan cheekbones--or listening to him talk passionately about some great book he'd read or some politician he opposed, or observing his ease in bantering with Audrey, she would feel a tightness in her chest that she knew was an affection and trust she hadn't experienced in ears, maybe ever.

(Continues...)

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Self-Portrait With Ghosts

0425176967

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