We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk—always on all fours, always prone, always there for you. What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part—there was no one to blame and no way to reverse it.
So now I was just waiting for her to leave me, taking the boy who was not legally my son. One day soon they would be gone. She would do it abruptly to avoid a scene. She’d go home; Carl and Suzanne would help raise him. They weren’t talking to her now, but that would change when she arrived on their doorstep with a baby and a purple duffel bag over her shoulder. With this new understanding of my position came shakiness and a loss of appetite; I held Jack in cold hands, always on the verge of tears. For the first time in my life I understood TV, why everyone watched it. It helped. Not in the long run, of course, but minute by minute. The only food I craved was unreal, unorganic chips and cookies and one especially addictive thing that was both—a fried, salty cookie. When those ran out I left Jack with her while I went to Ralphs.
“If he wakes up and cries, wait five minutes before going in. He’ll probably go back to sleep after two minutes.”
She nodded like Yeah yeah yeah I know. She was pumping. “Can you get me those grapefruit sodas?”
Driving home I realized I had forgotten the sodas. Then I thought: It doesn’t matter. Because she won’t be there when I get home. Neither of them will. Sure enough, her car wasn’t in the driveway.
It would be perverse to enter the house only moments after she’d left. I had to let it close up a little, settle. Also I couldn’t move because I was crying so hard. Wide ragged howls. It had happened. Oh, my baby. Kubelko Bondy.
Suddenly her silver Audi pulled up beside mine, two two-liters of Diet Pepsi in the passenger seat, Jack asleep in his car seat. We both stepped out of our cars.
“I let him cry for five minutes but he wouldn’t stop,” she whispered over the hood. “So I took him for a ride.”
After that I kept Jack with me, always, and I tried to do things that he might remember, on a cellular level, after she took him away. I organized a trip to the boardwalk on the Santa Monica Pier, full of stimulating, indelible sights and sounds.
“Can I bring a friend?” Clee asked.
“What friend?” I said.
“Never mind, it’s not a big deal.”
The pier was packed with hundreds of obese people eating giant fried dough shapes and neon cotton candy. Clee bought a deep-fried Oreo cookie.
“That’ll make some sweet milk,” I said, thinking about the inflammatory properties of sugar.
“What?” she yelled over the screaming clatter of a roller coaster. Each time it roared by, a Latina woman lifted her baby high into the air and he wiggled his arms and legs; he thought he was on the ride. The next time it came around I lifted Jack in unison; this he would remember. The woman smiled at me and I made a deferential gesture, letting her know I wasn’t trying to take over, she was the leader. We thrust our babies into the air again and again, showing them what it felt like to be a mother, to be terrifyingly in love without the option of getting off. My arms became tired, but it wasn’t my place to decide when to end it. How I longed to be any one of these people milling about with such easy freedom. Suddenly the roller coaster stopped with a bang; the doors clanged open and a cluster of men and children stumbled toward my Latina comrade, laughing and weak-kneed from the ride. I barely had the strength to tuck Jack into his sling; my arms hung like noodles.
And Clee was gone.
I held my breath and stood perfectly still as the crowd swirled around us.
She’d waited until I was distracted.
Her friend had picked her up.
They were halfway to San Francisco.
She’d left Jack.
I held his face in my hands and tried to keep my breath even. He didn’t know yet. It was awful, a crime. Or maybe this was her plan all along, a generous and mature choice. My eyes welled up. She believed in me, that I could do it. And I could. Relief spun with the shock of being left. I reeled in circles, stumbling toward the exit, then the bathroom, then numbly watching a skinny father as he failed to shoot a rubber duck with a gun, bang, bang . . . bang. She was watching him too. She was standing right there in her tuxedo shirt, eating a giant pretzel. The skinny father gave up and Clee glanced around mildly, looking for the next thing to watch. She saw us and waved.
“Do you think it’s rigged?”
“Probably,” I said shakily.
“I’m gonna try anyway. Can you hold this?”
Another month went by and I realized she might not know. I might be waiting for years. She might grow old in this house, with her son and the employee of her parents, never knowing she was supposed to abandon me. Her impatience would ebb away, her blond hair would turn white-gray and she’d become portly. When she was sixty-five I’d be eightysomething—just two old women with an old son. It wasn’t the ideal match for either of us, but maybe it was good enough. This revelation was a great comfort and I thought it might sustain me indefinitely, a hidden loaf. Then one afternoon Jack and I were returning from the park when we saw something in the distance.
What’s that on the curb? he said.
It’s a person, I said.
A hunched-over gray person. Clee. Her hair wasn’t gray, but her skin was. And her face. Weathered and broken down by a burden so heavy that anyone could see it: here was a woman who hated her life. And this was how she planned to get through it, by sitting on the curb, smoking. How long had she been depressed? Months, that was obvious now. She’d been smoking out here since we brought Jack home. It must happen all the time, a fleeting passion overwhelms someone’s true course and there’s nothing to be done about it. I looked at Jack; his brow was furrowed with concern.
She can be very energetic, I assured him. And fun.
He didn’t believe me.
She lifted her head and watched us make our way toward her. No wave, just a tired flick of her cigarette into the gutter.
ONE OF MY FAVORITE TV shows was about a man’s survival in the wilderness. In a recent episode part of the man’s foot was trapped under a boulder and he had no choice but to cut it off with a tiny hacksaw. He sawed and sawed and then threw the piece of his foot into the bushes. It was black and blue. In our case the foot would have to cut itself off, to free the man. To free Clee. I would do it tenderly, ceremonially, but with the same unflinching determination. I shuddered; a panicky whine escaped me. This wouldn’t be like the first time Kubelko’s mother had taken him away, I wasn’t nine. I would never recover. But I couldn’t keep him by keeping her, it wasn’t motherly, or wifely, or likely to end well. Pick up the hacksaw. Saw and saw and saw and saw.
Real candles are a fire hazard so I bought electric votives that turned on when you shook them. There were thirty of them; it was a lot of shaking. The Gregorian chant CD was not “our song” but it was very similar to the one we’d heard on the radio that first morning. I turned it on, quietly, and turned off the lights. Jack and I stared at the plastic flames floating in the dark; among them was one real candle, the pomegranate currant column I’d given her almost two years ago. The room flickered and glowed. I tried to cry silently, so the baby wouldn’t notice. Mouth contorted and hanging open, tears streaming into it. It was the thought of being one again, after having been three—of silence and perfect order after all the noise.
There were forty minutes to get him to sleep before Clee came home from work. I bathed him as if for the last time. His night-night song came out like a dirge, so I opened Little Fur Family but the tale was too devastatingly cozy, given the circumstances. Jack began to squirm and fuss.
Why so little faith? he asked.
I said faith had nothing to do with it, you couldn’t always get everything you wanted. But he was right. A real mother throws her heart over the fence and then climbs after it.
I closed Little Fur Family, turned out the lights, and held him in my arms.
I’ve gotten myself all worked up, haven’t I? What a silly Milly. We’ll say goodbye a million times and hello a million times over the course of your long, long life.
Jack looked up at me; he was wondering what had happened to the bedtime story.
Okay. One day, I began, when you’re all grown up, I’ll be waiting for an airplane and you’ll be on it. You’ll be coming from China or Taiwan and I’ll rise to my feet when your flight is announced. Clee will stand too, she’ll be there. We’ll wait with all the other moms and dads and husbands and wives, down at the end of the long arrivals hall. Passengers will begin to trickle down the corridor. I’ll be searching, searching, my heart will be pounding, where, where, where—and then I’ll see you. Jack, my baby. There you are, tall and handsome with your new girlfriend or boyfriend. I’ll wave wildly. You won’t see me, and then you will. You’ll wave. And I won’t be able to stop myself, I’ll start running down the hallway. It’s too much but once I’ve started I can’t stop. And guess what you’ll do? You’ll run too. You’ll run toward me and I’ll run toward you and as we get closer we’ll both start to laugh. We’ll be laughing and laughing and running and running and running and music will play, brass instruments, a soaring anthem, not a dry eye in the house, the credits will roll. Applause like rain. The end.
He was asleep.
THE GREGORIAN CHANT WAS STILL playing when she came home from work. I was waiting in the candlelit bedroom. She poked her head in, bewildered. I poured tequila into the tumbler I only had one of; it had been holding dusty barrettes for the last sixteen years.
“Weird lights,” she said, sipping and looking around. The CD was on a different track now, a silencing hymn. Mute, we climbed into bed.
I lay with her and she curled around me in the old way, Ss.