Everything about her shocked us. But mostly what we saw was that she was not, as we had thought, beautiful. At least not in the soft and exotic way we had imagined. She looked like women we saw pushing carts at the Safeway, choosing fruits and vegetables with care. She looked like anyone, different than our mother, but not the extraordinary, magical woman we had hoped. She was simply a mother—someone else’s mother at that.
We all—the three of us, our parents, and Joelle—stayed seated on the red folding chairs at the red card table, our plates full of our mother’s famous couscous salad, the one with cucumbers and kalamata olives, and feta cheese; the one she always took to potluck suppers. Joelle’s mother spoke again. “Joelle,” she said, in a cool voice, “come on now.” We could imagine that voice at The Club, floating across the shimmering blue of the swimming pool, beckoning Joelle to her. We could imagine it whispering good night. But we could not then understand the power in that voice. With those few words it took Joelle away from us and changed our lives.
Joelle stood, but it was our mother who stepped outside. “Please,” she said to Joelle’s mother. “Let’s not do this. Not in front of my girls. I don’t want them upset by any of this. Let’s go inside with Hal and talk like adults.”
“I’ve talked all summer,” Joelle’s mother said. “She doesn’t want to come here anymore. She wants to come home.”
This shocked us. Later, the three of us hot and sweaty in our bed, our legs tangled together, we would try to sort it out, how all of those whispered phone calls had been pleas from Joelle to leave us, to not come back. We felt betrayed by Joelle, by her mother, by the things we could not even begin to understand.
“After all this time,” our mother said, “why can’t you let it go? It was all so long ago.”
Joelle’s mother did not answer her. She just said in her cool voice, “Joelle, let’s go. I’ve come to take you home.”
Joelle took the napkin from her lap and folded it into a neat square, then got to her feet. She did not look at any of us, not even our father. She just walked away, past us, past her own mother who stood in the same pose Joelle had held all day, arms folded across her chest, face turned upward so that her nose pointed toward the ceiling. Joelle opened the screen door carefully and stepped outside, into the hot August night.
Our father was on his feet now too, but somehow we understood that this was between our mothers—Joelle’s and ours. We understood the way it was, that Joelle would always belong to her mother, and we would always belong to our mother. The adults said things, but we were no longer listening. Instead, we let the realization that we could not have a different mother, that we belonged to this one, settle in. Joelle and her mother walked down our path, side by side, to their Ford and we watched them drive away from us.
Eventually, of course, Joelle would visit again, awkwardly at first and then slowly with a confidence and understanding that somehow she straddled two families, two lives. She never again seemed as mysterious as she had before that summer night. In the way that children have, we put aside that which we could not have or comprehend and let both Joelle and her mother become ordinary in our eyes. They both lost the hold on us they used to have and instead developed into two separate people, fixtures in our lives in different ways, but firmly a part of us: the big sister with a different mother, our father’s ex-wife.
As for us that August, we went to the beach, where we brought our mother perfect shells that we collected along the shore. In the sunshine there she seemed to grow beautiful. Had her hair always had that particular wave to it? And wasn’t the way her front teeth overlapped interesting? We wore the new bikinis she had bought for us, and brightly colored rubber flip-flops, and wreaths of black-eyed Susans. Every chance we had, we hugged our mother tight. We whispered that we loved her because we did, irrevocably, unconditionally, eternally. We don’t want any mother but you, we assured her, and ourselves. It was August and hot and summer was coming to an end. Even there, at the shore, we could smell autumn approaching. We could feel its chill in the air, sending goosebumps up our arms at night. Our mother pulled us into her arms and held us, thankfully, close.
ESCAPES
WHAT I DO with my niece Jennifer is this. I ride the cable cars again and again, paying four dollars each time. She is fourteen and gets a thrill hanging off the side of the car as it plunges down San Francisco’s steep hills. She says it is like flying, and indeed the wind does pick up her Esprit scarf, the one decorated with purple and yellow palm trees, and tosses it stiffly backward in the same way that Charles Lindbergh’s scarves appear in old flying photos of him.