She cherished a picture of him at sixteen in summertime, grimy, wet with sweat, leaning insolently on the door of a Chevy. Every Sunday when she called him to talk, she would hold the picture in her hands, remembering the sun of that day, the baked smell of his skin, but she never mentioned it to him. Such intimacy would embarrass him. Their relationship, once so close that he was physically part of her, was now delicate, limited. When she got too sentimental, he rebuffed her. Every week, she vowed to herself that she would not pester him again with her chatter, and every week, craving his warm voice and recalling the concord of their heartbeats, she broke down and called him.
He was the kind of boy who had a list of safe topics ready for Mother.
She had raised him alone. For almost a year after separating from her husband, she suffered from a painful amazement that he could just walk away from their relationship the way he had. How could you give up on other people? How could he abandon his home like that? Then for a long time she contemplated his rejection, wondering if there was some important conclusion to draw, but, in time, a very green spring came along. She revived her morning walks, only now she walked with the boy in a carriage in front of her. As the boy grew older, she clenched his cold, tiny hand in her own and they walked together.
Over the years, determined his father wouldn't miss out on his son's life, she had written letters. Her ex-husband answered a few times, at long intervals. One night when her son was three years old, after a movie that had left her crying, she wrote. “We are doing very well. They put balloons up all over the city to celebrate the Fourth this year. We got up early, before the children carried all the balloons off.” He wrote back, “I miss you and the little one.” Emboldened by this show of interest, she invited him to visit them. He wrote back quickly for once. He needed more time to sort things out.
One afternoon when the boy was seven and balky, she went browsing in a bookstore downtown and he disappeared. At first she hunted the aisles almost casually, certain he had merely wandered off. Then, deciding he was being deliberately rebellious she commanded him to return in her nastiest voice, plotting his punishments out loud. The other patrons scowled at her, but she hardly noticed. When her son did not come out of hiding, she left her coat behind and ran down the street screaming his name until her voice left her.
Back at home she caught her breath in her chair, watching out the window for his return. The late afternoon heat poured over her. She tried to think of the next sensible thing to do.
When the boy returned after dinnertime, he woke her up. She had been frowning, he told her. Snoring, too. She tried to grab him, hold him close, but he stood woodenly in her grasp, angry about something. When she let him go, he closed the window quietly, shutting out the evening wind.
She knew he would have special needs, growing up with a single parent. Trying to forestall future problems, she arranged his room in a bedroom at the far end of the house so that he would have privacy when he needed it. Once he got over his fear of the dark, he shut the door to his room and kept it shut.
When he finally asked, she tried to explain why his father had left them. “We were very young,” she said, and for the life of her couldn't think how to explain the inevitability of that cataclysm. “He wanted to see more of the world. And he was homesick for where he used to live.”
“What did you do to make him leave?” the boy asked, turning his gaze full on her for once.
“Nothing.”
That was not entirely true.
She and the boy's father had never fought. They had lived a quiet life in a quiet town together until one summer day, sick to death of the hot, dry weather of the West, he pulled up stakes, taking her and their infant with him. They moved to a town on the shores of Massachusetts, where he had grown up.
The Northeast did not agree with her. She wilted in the humidity and missed the usual smells, the yellow grasses. And her husband, never much of a talker, sank into a rocking chair stupor out on the porch, emerging only for meals and work. Three months later, she flew herself and the baby home and refused to return. Her husband stayed in Fairhaven. In his first letter to her he described the flowers in bloom, the million shapes and colors; in his second, he raved about the white buds of summer jasmine, about how short, intense, summers were tolerable, even delightful in their transience; in the third he enclosed a brightly colored maple leaf. Then, except for those rare replies to her letters, he stopped writing.
The truth was, she could not make herself stay with a man who inhabited such an inhospitable nest. And she knew it was not the weather or the pretty colors or scents of the seasons that kept him holed up somewhere in New England. He had simply extended his hibernation into the realm of the physical.
As a toddler, her son never talked much. She liked to talk, and he made a good listener, so she told him what she felt about the day, or the people nearby, or the news. He seemed content as her audience. When he did feel moved to share something, an observation, a revelation, about what had happened that day with the teacher, something that scared him, his perceptions filled her with pride. She felt very lucky to have such a sensitive and intelligent child.
As he got older, if she questioned him too much, his face would fill with reproach, so much so she wanted to laugh, although of course she didn't. He had given her that same look years ago when he was three, when she put too much weight on one side of the teeter-totter, sending him sailing too high, making him cry. She guessed that he had inherited the need for a private safety zone from his father, but by then, she had grown accustomed to speaking her mind to him, to having him as a silent but, in her imagination at least, sympathetic, witness. She had to make a conscious effort to gear her stories to his disposition, to stop when he looked bored or the least bit angry.
He never seemed entirely happy, but if she asked, and he replied, he would say but of course he was a happy boy. When he did appear cheerful, he would laugh to himself and refuse to explain why. If she insisted, he would launch into a long story, intentionally boring, she decided, devised to discourage her questions. So, over a period of years, in a process unfortunately parallel to the one that had derailed her from her marriage, her questions dried up, and so did her stories. She curbed her tongue, keeping her topics to the practical and trivial.
The day he left for college, for just a moment as he stepped toward a waiting car, she forgot all about the distance between them. The rangy six-footer disappeared and in his place stood a small boy in a doorway, angry and sad about something she could not fix and did not understand. She cried, clinging to him. “Don't make a scene, Mom,” he said, gently lifting her arms off him and taking his leave with a casual wave. She finished off that afternoon with whiskey and a mystery story. She cooked no supper. She drank lukewarm coffee from the breakfast thermos and watched the sun go down.
During his college years, they spoke once a week. She confined herself to the kind of anecdotes he tolerated best, short, funny ones. He didn't share much. He had homework, a test. A pile of books to read. “Which ones?” she might ask, and he would answer vaguely, “Oh, some philosophy. Some physics.” Something she could not sink her teeth into. “I saw a movie,” he might offer, and she would jump. “Which one?”
“I forget. A shoot-'em-up. Great special effects.”
The years passed. Then, one weekend, busy with picking weeds and selecting ripe strawberries for dinner from her garden, she forgot to call him. Sunday slipped by. On Monday, she didn't know where he would be. So went the rest of the week. The following Sunday, she fully intended to call at the usual time, but Mrs. Peters from next door came by asking for advice on killing gophers in her yard. Happy for the company, she offered a piece of poppy seed cake. She kicked herself later, as Mrs. Peters ate two pieces, all the while implying that her own efforts to control the gophers had in fact caused an infestation in Mrs. Peters's yard. She felt too upset to call her son that day, too upset to make small talk.
The following Sunday, as she whiled away the afternoon with the papers, he called. “Mom, where have you been?”
“Right here.”
“I've been so worried! I almost called the police yesterday!”
She had forgotten to call him for a couple of weeks. How surprising! Still, it was probably a good thing. Time was passing. He needed to get along without her. By habit, she reached for the picture of him leaning on his car, but it was gone from its usual spot. She must have stowed it during the dusting on Tuesday. Rummaging in a desk drawer, she found it.
“I haven't gone anywhere,” she said. “I'm still sitting in my blue chair and talking to you.”
“The blue chair,” he said. “You've had that forever. That's where I found you… remember that time I ran away?” he asked.
“Of course I do.” But how funny that he did, and funnier still that he would mention it. He had been so little then, still able to stand under her outstretched arm.
“I was really scared.”
“This was a small town. I knew you'd be okay.”
“Why didn't you try to find me, Mom?”
“But I did. I searched for hours.”
“Then you gave up.”
“I waited for you at home. I hoped you'd find your way back. And you did, didn't you?”
As time went by, and the phone calls grew ever more erratic, she lost interest in gardening. She would force herself outside, but the leaves became dry and brittle before her eyes, the landscape drained of its usual colors. She called old friends, but found herself wanting to hang up almost immediately. Their conversation, friendly enough, proved as insubstantial as the local ocean fogs. There was no intrinsic value in these relationships, she realized, letting them lag. She quit reading the news, stopped watching her evening shows. Life reduced itself to an egg in the morning, cleanup, sandwich, cleanup, and long periods when she stared out the window, mentally vacant.
Then one night, she took out some pills and set them on her bed stand. She poured herself a glass of water, opened the bottle, and hesitated.
She would wait for one more phone call, then end it.
Strangely, the sight of the pills on her bureau gave her strength. Over the next few days, she conversed cheerfully with neighbors, and, full of purpose for a change, tidied her papers and her life. Her home looked almost happy.
On her birthday, an intolerably smoggy day a month after he graduated from college, he called.
“Happy birthday!”
She couldn't speak for a minute. Sitting down on the bed, she fingered the pills. Her last day. He would be sad, but he would rough it, as she had. These blows that knocked you down only bruised and battered. They did not stop you cold. You went on. He was so young still.
She roused herself. She knew what she should say, but they didn't have that kind of a relationship. Maybe, she decided, as he told her about what he was up to, she would leave him a letter. She could write at her leisure, explain things somehow.
He talked, and she found herself nervous, the warm ocean wave of his voice on the other end, usually so important, receding on a tide. She found his meaning hard to extract, although she tried, shifting her attention from the pills, from the window and the clearing of the sky outside, white clouds consuming the yellow haze, back to him.
Odd the way the usual quick hang up did not happen. He talked about the smell of the ocean breezes and the din of the weed cutters in early summer. She couldn't help noticing how remarkably like his father he sounded, picking up on the sensory details of life as though entirely untouched by them. The similarity unsettled her, reminding her of another leaving a long time ago. This was different, she told herself, because his reaction would be different. Hardy, she hoped. He was an independent soul, she felt, although she was guessing.
She listened now without listening for content. She pressed her ear to the receiver, eager for something besides words. She listened for rhythm, for a thrumming, for a bigger meaning. It took a minute for her to realize what she wanted. She was asking a lot of this final conversation, wasn't she? She urgently wanted to make final contact with his heart.
What she heard instead was a young man's awkward voice, her distracted chat, and punctuating silences between them. But that was who they were, she thought, realizing she didn't have to hear its beat through the phone, or even in the words he said. His heart continued to beat inside her, alongside her own, out of sync.
She knew she must sound funny, but she couldn't help it, as things large and painful moved inside her own heart.
She swung her attention back to the conversation. She had expected to say good-bye by now, but then questions began, like, what was the weather like there today, and how big were her beefsteak tomatoes this year?
She wouldn't tell him she hadn't planted any. “Oh, not as big as last year's. But when did you start to worry about my garden?”
She could hear the silence ballooning, as it so often did, full of all the things they would never say to each other.
Then, he exhaled. “I've met someone.”
“Someone?” she asked stupidly.
“A girl named Tammy.”
A gusher of something, her blood pumping perhaps, made her suddenly dizzy. “Hang on,” she said, then took a sip of water and four deep breaths. “Honey,” she said, “what does that have to do with my garden?”
He wanted to tell Tammy about her tomatoes, he said, because she complained that all they could get were ones that tasted like cardboard.
He had a girlfriend.
How long was her hair? What kind of clothes did she wear? Was she tall? Thin? Pretty? Freckled? Plump? Sweet-natured or cross? Smart? Foolish? Fun? Serious?
A student? Older than him? Younger? An only child?
Sterile?
Sick?
Big-bosomed?
But he would hate her questions, and so she didn't ask them. “I've got to go,” he said, as he always did when he had had enough.
“Okay, dear,” she said, as she always did, careful to keep the leap of frustration she felt at this abrupt pronouncement out of her voice. This time something new crept upon her-fear. She stopped all such feelings and thought about her last words to him. Nothing came to mind. She couldn't show what she felt without scaring him, too. “Have a good evening.”
“Oh, that's weird.” He laughed slightly. “I almost forgot to say why I called! We're flying out for her dad's birthday next weekend. Would you come?”
“Her folks live out here?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“Real close to you, actually.”
Surprising herself even more, she said immediately, “Of course I will.”
“I'll pick you up.”
“Okay, honey.” She waited for his good-bye, picking up his picture to look at, hoping she would not cry.
He hovered on the phone. She could hear him breathing. “Honey, are you still there?”
“Yeah.”
He breathed in and out, and she followed the rhythm like a jumpy little tune. Why didn't he hang up?
“It's a double celebration. Mom, we're getting engaged.”
“Oh, honey!”
“Marriage next June, if that works out.”
“That's wonderful news.”
“And she wants to settle near her parents. We'll be able to visit more often than I have lately.”
“That would be really nice, dear.” A vague picture arose and sharpened in her mind, of roses, of arbors, sunshine, smiling people, a happy event in her very own beautiful, flower-soaked yard. “How did you meet? At school?”
“No, she worked in a copy place at night putting herself through college. I was always in there in the middle of the night.”
“Who spoke first?”
“You obviously don't know her or you wouldn't bother to ask.”
She heard a tinkle of laughter in the background. So Tammy was there, listening. “What's she like?”
“Oh, she's a riot. Has a story about everything. Kind of like you, Mom, although she talks more. Much, much more.”
He yelped and dropped the phone. “Oops,” he said, “sorry.”
“Will she be with you when you come?”
“Yes. And, Mom. I tried to resist, but she begged me. And I gave in. I told her all about you.”
“You have?”
“She knows all your secrets.”
“Really.”
He laughed. “I'm sure there are a few left you can tell her yourself, if you can get a word in edgewise. You two are gonna get along like a house afire, Mom. That, I promise you.”
He kept her on the phone for a very long time. She heard love in his voice, and hope. Listening to the emotional outpouring, her heart pumped faster. Her eyes welled up. They made plans for his visit, then she said good-bye and hung up.
Sun came through the window, spilling butter on the bed, warming the skin of her arm. Outside, blue skies, puff clouds, all kinds of prettiness.
Plans to make.
She needed to make the place beautiful with her flowers. It wasn't too late to put in some azaleas for a fall bloom. She stuck the pills into her bedside drawer. Dusting his picture with a dishrag, she gave it a kiss and put it back on the desk.
She remembered the day the photograph had been taken, how eager he had been to change the oil on his first car, how she had begged him to read the instructions in the manual first, how he had gone ahead and got more of it on himself than into the pan. How hard she had laughed.
When they came, she would show the picture to Tammy. And then, Tammy would ask about her son's interesting expression. She would tell her all about it.
And then, Tammy would talk.