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  I don’t want to see. I choose selective blindness. I select the appropriate cliché—ignorance is bliss, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, while discarding—in my mother’s case—love is better the second time around. I know it’s fashionable these days, enlightened even, for mothers and daughters to trade intimacies. But I don’t want to know what she and my father did, what she and Arthur do. I don’t want to know if she loves Arthur more, loved my father less. When I was little, I balked at mother-daughter dresses. Grown up, I rebel against matching sexual obsessions, too. What am I afraid of ? That my mother lusts for Arthur the way I do for Louie? That she holds particular parts of Arthur’s body particularly dear?

  We take the escalator down to the baggage carousel. The luggage hasn’t been unloaded yet so we watch the empty rubber track spin round. A toddler with a head of red curls sticks a green plastic dinosaur onto the carousel and runs furiously to get it before it disappears through the rubber-curtained slot. This he does over and over again, laughing with such delight that all the harried airline passengers are beaming like grandparents. I am standing at the widest curve where the toy finally tumbles off the edge. I pick it up. It’s not exactly a dinosaur, I see. I hand it to him. Freckles circle his eyes and nose like goggles. “What is this?” I ask.

  He looks at me astonished. His mouth drops open as if I’m an alien from outer space. “Mutant Ninja Turtle, dummy,” he says.

  I think of children, of my mother’s miscarriages, of my biological clock. Of the child Jake wants, of the turkey baster one his wife’s got, of the one Louie didn’t get, of Max. Suddenly, I realize that more than a book, more than a job, more than a man, I want a child. And the minute I think this, I wonder if it’s true.

  I am saved from further agonizing by the arrival of the luggage. First comes a guitar in a hard case stickered with decals from Southern land grant colleges. Followed immediately by my mother’s and Arthur’s suitcases leaning against each other as if one demanded the other to prop it up.

  We hurry to the parking lot, into my car, and out of the airport where the traffic lanes seem to part like the Red Sea to ease and hasten my mother’s arrival back into my life. The tunnel is nearly empty. We glide through it. And just when the opening comes into view, Arthur clears his throat. He taps me on the shoulder, from the back seat. My mother is sitting up front with me though I suggested they both might like to sit together in the back. “And let you feel like a chauffeur,” my mother had protested.

  “But you’ll be separated.”

  “Only temporary,” she grinned.

  “Yes,” I say now in answer to Arthur’s tap. I adjust my rearview mirror so I can see him. He’s leaning forward. His expression is serious, professorial. “Katinka,” he begins.

  “Yes?” I encourage.

  “Before, at the airport, your mother and I said we had something to tell you.”

  I brace myself against the steering wheel.

  “Well, I have asked for your dear mother’s hand in marriage. And she has graciously accepted.”

  “How wonderful,” I exclaim. “Though I’m not surprised.”

  “Then we have your blessing?” Arthur asks.

  “Absolutely. I couldn’t be happier.” And I am. My mother has a lovely man, a man to share her life, her bed, to share, if not cure, her seasonal affective disorder. Age-appropriate, education-appropriate. Geographically inappropriate. But you can’t have everything. “When’s the wedding?” I ask.

  “Not soon enough,” Arthur says.

  “Arthur’s getting tired of living in sin,” my mother confesses, giving me a little we-girls-together poke.

  “That’s not it at all, my dear. I mean to make an honest woman of you.” His eyes find mine in the rearview mirror. “We thought in the spring. May.”

  My mother sighs. “There’s so much to do. Buy a dress. Arrange the food. Sell the house.”

  I start. “Sell the house?”

  “Of course, dear. We’re certainly not going to live there.”

  “But don’t you want to keep it. For vacations and stuff ?”

  “Katinka, Old Town’s not exactly on the coast.”

  “I know that. I just thought …”

  I get through the end of the tunnel, pay the tolI, maneuver on and off the Central Artery. When I stop at a traffic light, I turn to look at my mother. She is studying me, her face brimming with such sympathy and understanding that it’s a relief to turn back to the disinterested and predictable pattern of green arrows and yellow walk signs. My mother leans over the front seat. “It is her childhood home,” she confides to Arthur.

  “Totally understandable,” he stage-whispers back.

  “Even at her age, it’s an adjustment. She never did like change.”

  “Stop it,” I nearly yell. “Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here. Don’t talk about me as if I’m chapter one’s test case in Introduction to Psychology.”

  “It’s perfectly natural to feel this way, Katinka,” soothes my mother the shrink.

  “When Zenobia was four,” Arthur adds, “we told her we were moving to a big house with a yard and trees and where she could have a dog and her own enormous room. She refused to budge; she preferred what was a converted pantry with no windows and only room for her bed.” He nods at my mother. She nods back. Freud and Jung in consultation, diagnostically in accord.

  “That’s not the case,” I say. But of course it is. I think of my room, its pink-painted walls, the pale blue trim, the sprigged quilt and the matching one my grandmother made for my doll’s bed. I think of the posters—horses, kittens, acrobats, ballet dancers, teen heartthrobs, black-clad poets with cigarettes hanging from their scowling lips, politicians who lost—that charted the seven stages of my obsessions. Next to the garage lies buried my first pet, Carlyle the hermit crab. Inside its doors I received my first kiss. There’s the scrape on the gate the day I got my driver’s license. The porch swing on which I’d daydream about getting out of there.

  Right now, of course, all I want is to go back. Back where mothers occupy their rightful place, where there is no seasonal affective disorder, where stories don’t get rejected, where the only choices to be made are between strawberry and chocolate chip.

  “Katinka,” my mother says, now giving me a brimful oh-how-I-understand look, “would you mind terribly?”

  “Of course not,” I lie.

  10

  Milly’s house sits on a hill of large Victorians two blocks from Mass Ave. In summer, with the windows open, you can make out the stop and start of traffic, hear horns honking, impatient to turn onto Linnaean Street. In February, though, you can feel like you’re sheltered in a kind of Kennedy compound smack dab in the middle of the city. In times of crisis it’s a refuge.

  It’s nine in the morning and I need a refuge. I’m sitting at Milly’s notorious kitchen table crying into my beer, or rather, my reheated coffee though if I asked for beer Milly would immediately supply it. Milly is my oldest Cambridge friend. We met the first day of freshman week, each lugging a box of dilapidated stuffed animals up the dormitory stairs to our adjoining rooms. As Milly and I talked in the corridor, both our mothers had been dramatically cheerful, snapping our new sheets onto the plastic-encased mattresses, folding precise hospital corners, smoothing our Coop-bought Indian bedspreads. Pretending that going away to college was as ordinary as a Friday night sleepover. Pretending that these beds would be aired and fluffed and made in a daily adherence to their fine example.

  Milly’s mother had a kind face and no-nonsense hair tucked into a bun. Farmhouse wife, I thought, noting her wide comforting lap. Immediately I colored in kittens chasing the balls of yarn from her knitting basket while fruit boiled away in copper pots for the preserves she put up. I was shocked to learn she was from New York, lived in a stately apartment on the Upper East Side, and owned two neurotic Afghan hounds with rhinestone collars named Nick and Nora.

  My own mother at that time had an Upper East Side cap
of black curls courtesy of Maine Cut at Old Town’s newest mall. Her earrings swept her shoulders. “That’s a tough act to follow,” Milly had said, nodding at my mother from the doorway. My mother had hitched up her skirt and was daubing at a run in her pantyhose from the bottle of clear nail polish she kept in her purse.

  Later someone on our floor said she saw both of our mothers getting smashed at Nick’s Beef and Beer after they left us. But Milly and I are sure that’s just apocryphal.

  “So Janet’s getting married,” Milly says now. “I’m not surprised. I’m only surprised it took this long.”

  “Oh God,” I groan. I turn my head and look out Milly’s window. Though the houses on her street are huge, the lots are small. Milly’s kitchen looks into the glass-bricked window of her neighbor’s shower stall. This is a recent renovation and Milly has just realized that when his light’s on and hers is off, she can see his outline as he takes his nightly shower. When Charlie was on a business trip last week, she invited me over to watch. “It’s really neat,” she’d said, “like ultrasound.”

  “I’m not that desperate yet.”

  Her neighbor’s a trim man who teaches at the Business School. “What do you think he’d say if he knew I knew he used soap on a rope?” Milly wondered. Milly was surprised he wasn’t more careful in his choice of architect.

  “Maybe he did it deliberately to tantalize you,” I said.

  “Yeah, right,” she sighed.

  “It’ll be all right,” she says now.

  “I’m happy for her, really, but damn, she gets a second good relationship.”

  “And you didn’t even have a first. That’s what’s bothering you?” Milly asks.

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. Between Seamus and Louie, it’s not exactly as if I’d been celibate. Remember the computer programmer with bad eyes. That reporter who criticized everything I wrote. The orthopedic surgeon—Dick Breakers—what a name!—who already had a wife.”

  “The pits. Whenever I get sick of Charlie I say Dick Breakers to myself. It’s better than Lourdes.”

  I look out the window again. A squirrel is crawling on the ledge above the glass bricks. For all that I’m miserable about my mother and Arthur living upstairs, it could be worse. Imagine looking out my window and into their shower. I picture them together inside Arthur’s shower curtain—clear, bordered with a Greek key—lovingly soaping each other’s back. Better to imagine than to know.

  That’s true about Louie, too. Better to imagine than to know. I can speculate on his past, his life with Cheryl, his secrets, what he feels for me. I prefer to make up my own stories—they have a plausibility that real life lacks. I like tying up all the ends into a tidy little plot. I think of Louie’s own little tidy plot. As a piece of writing not good. Not exactly bad. As a story not interesting. As autobiography, however, utterly fascinating. Louie submitted his story as fiction, I remind myself. Even though I tell my students, as I have been told, write what you know. What do I know about Louie? What does Louie know? What is he telling? If I’d gone to Yale instead of Harvard I might have been better trained to deconstruct the text. But saved by Cambridge’s icy sidewalks, I’m not going to have to pull apart Louie’s story to figure out the truth, not in class anyway. He’s going to be in the hospital another few days, then pretty much immobilized. I called the registrar’s office to get him his money back. “Because it’s a medical emergency he’ll receive a full refund,” some functionary informed me in a snitty tone.

  “You better notify buildings and grounds,” I warned. “If something happens on one of your paths, it won’t just be a tuition refund you’ll have to worry about.”

  “How’s Louie?” Milly asks me now.

  “Surrounded by his loved ones. Which may or may not include me. I’m not sure how it’s going to work with my mother and Arthur back and Louie both motion-impaired and not easy to hide. A cast does draw attention to itself.”

  “Then don’t hide him. You’re a grown woman, dammit, who’s been married and divorced. Who can make her own choices.” Milly hits the table for emphasis, causing a wave of coffee to splash over the rim of her mug.

  “And you’d tell my mother that?”

  “Janet? Not on your life.”

  The squirrel has moved up under the eaves. On Milly’s windowsill, ivy plants fail to thrive. There’s a rusty lunchbox on the counter and a wicker laundry basket overflowing with a tangle of darks and lights. There are squirrels in Milly’s walls—I can hear them scurrying—carpenter ants in the basement. In the attic silver-fish are turning the pages of Milly’s and Charlie’s old Norton anthologies into lace doilies. And yet I know that up in Milly’s study where she does her meticulous illustrations for medical texts, the pencils lie precise and sharpened on her desk, whose surface is as smooth and free of dust as those beds our mothers made for us so many years ago.

  Milly shakes her head. “You know how fond I am of Janet. Even though, when I count my blessings, one of them is that she’s your mother and not mine. But isn’t it high time to stop worrying about her?”

  “Of course. If only.” I pause. “Milly, do you think Louie is my rebellion? My way of getting back at my mother?”

  “Seamus was.”

  “Seamus was my mother’s dream. All those degrees. His reputation, though granted overblown. Still …”

  “He was so much older.”

  “We didn’t think that then. Distinguished, we thought. Worldly.”

  Milly laughs. “Experienced. Long-tenured in the art of sex.”

  “Back then I thought that age equaled experience equaled skill.”

  “In teaching?”

  “That, too.”

  “Seamus was a good teacher,” Milly admits. “I was so jealous,” she adds. “You had this Joyce professor at your feet. And I had Wallace Ross—remember?—the Alfred E. Neuman look-alike. He used to make these elaborate weekly study plans, and every other week he’d pencil my name in for a twenty-minute coffee date.” She sighs. “Remember Irish Poets? A lecture hall of three hundred and Seamus was reciting just to you. Wallace was a chem major. He was always obsessively studying the periodic tables. I’d have to quiz him. Then I’d think of Seamus and all that poetry. I’d be pining for Yeats and getting some dry formula. I was green with envy.”

  “Seamus was a talker. That Irish gift of gab.”

  “Is Louie a talker?”

  “He talks. He walks. He even sort of writes. He’s better quiet, though.”

  “Charlie’s quiet. Quiet is nice.”

  “I don’t know Louie’s quiet. What’s behind it yet. Whether there’s even anything there. He’s sensitive. He’s earnest. He’s wonderful in bed. How did he get so wonderful? Natural talent, like being born with perfect pitch? Or years of practice on all different sorts of instruments? If I start obsessing about that I can make myself crazy. But I like him. Maybe I love him. But why? Because he’s so different from Seamus? Because my mother wouldn’t approve? And since I fulfilled all her dreams as a teenager, at thirty-one I need to rebel? Because he’s a diamond in the rough, because he’s a kindred soul, because he’s a writer in the making, or just right for making, because he’s a projection of my wildest Lady Chatterley fantasies, because I’m blinded by desperation or brilliantly clear-sighted.” I shake my head. “Then there’s Jake. Jake Barnes, yet!” My own coffee slurps into a puddle across from Milly’s, two brown islands on a curled Formica sea.

  “You don’t have to decide anything, Katinka. Not now,” Milly says. “Why not just enjoy being courted by two men?”

  “If we were back in college I could. In the good old days we used to see four different men on four different nights. But now, dating’s a form of serial monogamy. You live in a mini-marriage with someone until you break up with him. Then you hitch up with someone else. God, I know sixteen-year-olds making supper for their boyfriends every night. These days two dates make you a bigamist.”

  “You’re right,” Milly agrees. “My kids tell me tha
t by fourth grade you’ve got to go steady for the sake of your social life.”

  I look at the lunch box on Milly’s counter. Behind the kitchen door hangs the blue-striped apron Charlie wears for his July Fourth barbecue. The glass on Milly’s windows is wavy and bubbled with age. Generations of feet have scooped out the wooden treads on the back hall stairs. Generations of squirrel families have skidded through these walls. Milly’s house, her world is something solid, permanent with deep-seated roots. I have no roots. My childhood home is being sold out from under me. My mother, though still my mother, is becoming somebody else’s wife. There must be a loss with every gain. When the equation changes, everything changes. There’s a difference between somebody’s blue apron hanging on the back of your door and somebody’s blue uniform tossed at the foot of your bed. “Oh, Milly,” I sigh, rubbing an edge of chipped Formica, “it’s you I’m jealous of.”

  I must be looking so miserable that Milly takes my hand. “Let’s go to the movies,” she insists. “We can hit the early show and get the early bird discount.”

  “How about Singing in the Rain? Tampopo? We could rent a video?”

  “Come on,” Milly commands.

  We ride the T from Porter to Harvard Square. We walk over to Church Street where, when I survey the titles of movies on the marquee, I nearly fall into a snowbank out of shock. Three out of the four have love in the title and one is Italian. I feel so suddenly feeble that I’m convinced that they’re giving me the senior citizen discount instead of the early bird one.

  “Get ahold of yourself, Katinka,” Milly orders in the no-nonsense voice of a mother of two. “Buck up. This will be good for you.”