kindness whenever I could.
Bruce’s mother, Audrey, had been the tiniest bit intimdating, with manicured fingernails painted whatever shade I’d be reading about in Vogue the next month, and perfectly styled hair, and a house full of glass and wall-to-wall white carpeting and seven bathrooms, each kept immaculately clean. The Ever-Tasteful Audrey, I called her to my friends. But once you got past the manicure, Audrey was nice, too. She’d been trained as a teacher, but by the time I met Audrey her working-for-a-living days were long past and she was a full-time wife, mother, and volunteer – the perenniel PTA mom, Cub Scout leader, and Hadassah president, the one who could always be counted on to organize the synagogue’s annual food drive or the Sisterhood’s winter ball.
The downside of parents like that, I used to think, was that it killed your ambition. With my divorced parents and my college debts I was always scrambling for the next rung on the ladder, the next job, the next freelance assignment; for more money, more recognition, for fame, insofar as you could be famous when your job was telling other people’s stories. When I started at a small newspaper in the middle of nowhere, covering car crashes and sewage board meetings, I was desperate to get to a bigger one, and when I finally got to a bigger one, I wasn’t there two weeks before I was already plotting how to move on.
Bruce had been content to drift through graduate school, picking up a teaching assignment here, a freelance writing gig there, making approximately half of what I did, letting his parents pick up the tab for his car insurance (and his car, for that matter), and “help” with his rent and subsidize his lifestyle with $100 handouts every time he saw them, plus jaw-droppingly generous checks on birthdays, Chanukah, and sometimes just because. “Slow down,” he’d tell me, when I’d slip out of bed early to work on a short story, or go into work on a Saturday to send out query letters to magazine editors in New York. “You need to enjoy life more, Cannie.”
I thought sometimes that he liked to imagine himself as one of the lead characters in an early Springsteen song – some furious, passionate nineteen-year-old romantic, raging against the world at large and his father in particular, looking for one girl to save him. The trouble was, Bruce’s parents had given him nothing to rebel against – no numbing factory job, no stern, judgmental patriarch, certainly no poverty. And a Springsteen song lasted only three minutes, including chorus and theme and thundering guitar-charged climax, and never took into account the dirty dishes, the unwashed laundry and unmade bed, the thousand tiny acts of consideration and goodwill that actually maintaining a relationship called for. My Bruce preferred to drift through life, lingering over the Sunday paper, smoking high-quality dope, dreaming of bigger papers and better assignments without doing much to get them. Once, early in our relationship, he’d sent his clips to the Examiner, and gotten a curt “try us in five years” postcard in response. He’d shoved the letter in a shoebox, and we’d never discussed it again.
But he was happy. “Head’s all empty, I don’t care,” he’d sing to me, quoting the Grateful Dead, and I’d force a smile, thinking that my head was never empty and that if it ever was, you could be darn sure I’d care.
And what had all my hustle gotten me, I mused, now slurping the boozy slush straight from the bowl. What did it matter. He didn’t love me anymore.
I woke up after midnight, drooling on the couch. There was a pounding in my head. Then I realized it was someone pounding at the door.
“Cannie?
I sat up, taking a moment to locate my hands and my feet.
“Cannie, open this door right now. I’m worried about you.”
My mother. Please God no.
“Cannie!”
I curled tight onto the couch, remembering that she’d called me in the morning, a million years ago, to tell me she’d be in town that night for Gay Bingo, and that she and Tanya would stop by when it was over. I got to my feet, flicking off the halogen lamp as quietly as I could, which wasn’t very quietly, considering that I managed to knock the lamp over in the process. Nifkin howled and scrambled onto the armchair, glaring at me reproachfully. My mother started pounding again.
“Cannie!”
“Go ’way,” I called weakly. “I’m… naked.”
“Oh, you are not! You’re wearing your overalls, and you’re drinking tequila, and you’re watching The Sound of Music.”
All of which was true. What can I say? I like musicals. I especially like The Sound of Music – particularly the scene where Maria gathers the motherless Von Trapp brood onto her bed during the thunderstorm and sings “My Favorite Things.” It looked so cozy, so safe – the way my own family had been, for a minute, once upon a time, a long time ago.
I heard a muttered consultation outside my door – my mother’s voice, then another, in a lower register, like Marlboro smoke filtered through gravel. Tanya. She of the sling and the crab leg.
“Cannie, open up!”
I struggled back into a sitting position and heaved myself into the bathroom, where I flicked on the light and stared at myself, reviewing the situation, and my appearance. Tear- streaked face, check. Hair, light brown with streaks of copper, cut in a basic bob and shoved behind my ears, also present. No makeup. Hint – well, actuality – of a double chin. Full cheeks, round, sloping shoulders, double D-cup breasts, fat fingers, thick hips, big ass, thighs solidly muscled beneath a quivering blanket of lard. My eyes looked especially small, like they were trying to hide in the flesh of my face, and there was something avid and hungry and desperate about them. Eyes exactly the color of the ocean in the Menemsha harbor in Martha’s Vineyard, a beautiful grapey green. My best feature, I thought ruefully. Pretty green eyes and a wry, cockeyed smile. “Such a pretty face,” my grandmother would say, cupping my chin in her hand, then shaking her head, not even bothering to say the rest.
So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliche, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed, and there were two determined lesbians banging on my door. My best option, I decided, was hiding in the closet and feigning death.
“I’ve got a key,” my mother threatened.
I wrested the tequila bowl away from Nifkin. “Hang on,” I yelled. I picked up the lamp and opened the door a crack. My mother and Tanya stared at me, wearing identical L.L. Bean hooded sweatshirts and expressions of concern.
“Look,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m just sleepy, so I’m going to sleep. We can talk about this tomorrow.”
“Look, we saw the Moxie article,” said my mother. “Lucy brought it over.”
Thank you, Lucy, I thought. “I’m fine,” I said again. “Fine, fine, fine, fine.”
My mother, clutching her bingo dauber, looked skeptical. Tanya, as usual, just looked like she wanted a cigarette, and a drink, and for me and my siblings never to have been born, so that she could have my mother all to herself and they could relocate to a commune in Northampton.
“You’ll call me tomorrow?” my mother asked.
“I’ll call,” I said, and closed the door.
My bed looked like an oasis in the desert, like a sandbar in the stormy sea. I lurched toward it, flung myself down, on my back, my arms and legs splayed out, like a size-sixteen starfish stapled to the comforter. I loved my bed – the pretty light blue down comforter, the soft pink sheets, the pile of pillows, each in a bright slipcover – one purple, one orange, one pale yellow, and one cream. I loved the Laura Ashley dust ruffle and the red wool blanket that I’d had since I was a girl. Bed, I thought, was about the only thing I had going for me right now, as Nifkin bounded up and joined me, and I stared at the ceiling, which was spinning in a most alarming way.
I wished I’d never told Bruce I wanted a break. I wished I’d never met
