“Oh, Ariel, just …” Jerry buried his face in his hands, and massaged his eye sockets. “I don’t … Just take the goat, will you? Please leave me out of it.”
“Thank you, Jerry, thank you,” Ariel said, and started to leave Jerry’s office, then turned back. “Do you know how?”
“How what?”
“How I should take the goat?”
Jerry’s mouth fell open.
“Like, should I use a leash?”
He opened his mouth but couldn’t summon an answer. Instead he spread his hands as if to encompass the desk piled with legal files, the bookshelves filled with clothbound case law, the framed degrees from a second-rate college and a third-rate law school, the suffocating levels of student debt, the indignity of failing the bar exam not once or twice but three times, the dispiriting realization that he was a born choker, self-relegating himself to this sleepy small-town practice, prenups and DUIs and mortgage refis, small-fry litigation that ends with boilerplate NDAs. Jerry was intimately familiar with every corner of unremunerative law, but none of it had anything to with transporting orphaned goats.
“Thanks Jerry,” Ariel said. “I owe you a drink.”
He blinked his assent; this wouldn’t be the first time that Ariel paid for Jerry’s expertise with a glass or two—or three or four—of bourbon. Jerry embraced all the clichés of the struggling small-town single-shingle barrister, complete with failed marriage, irresponsible nutrition, and functional alcoholism.
Fifteen minutes later Ariel was leading Fletcher down the road by twenty feet of cotton clothesline that she’d plucked from her backyard, which was often strung with clothesline, another housekeeping choice of which her mom disapproved.
“It’s your life,” Elaine said. “I guess.”
*
“I’ll get George,” her mom says now, walking away from this fight, thankfully. “Hold on.”
Ariel waits while the background noises shift, until it sounds like a television. Of course: Elaine’s main parenting strategy has always been to turn on the TV. Ariel tries not to fret too much about the choices her mom makes in loco parentis, while Ariel is away once or twice per year on her business trips. But the TV crutch drives her bonkers.
“Hi Mommy.”
A few months ago, George’s voice started to crack and change, and now Ariel barely recognizes it, the sound of her own son. But even in its less familiar form, George’s voice melts her heart, especially when he calls her Mommy.
“Hi Sweetheart. You doing okay?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Mostly.”
“You taking your medicine?”
“Yeah.”
“But still you’re not feeling great?”
“Not great, no.”
“On a one-to-ten, how bad?”
“I don’t know. Not that bad.”
Ariel doesn’t want to press, doesn’t want to force him to complain, doesn’t want to reinforce his victimhood, which can be corrosive, can become an obsession, can evolve into the primary way you define yourself. Ariel had fallen into this pit herself, and it had taken so long to climb out. Her child is trying to avoid this fate; she should let him.
“Okay,” she says. “If it gets bad?”
“I know what to do, Mom.” He sounds exasperated, probably a familiar sound to every parent. It’s probably what Ariel herself sounded like thirty years ago. Hell, it’s probably what she sounded like just a minute ago, yelling at her own mother.
“Please don’t worry, Mommy.”
Oh God. Don’t worry?
Ariel has started crying again, and she moves the microphone away from her mouth so her kid can’t hear it. She takes a deep breath, trying to swallow her crying, to push it down just enough to force a smile so she can say “I won’t” and it will sound sincere, this complicated little lie she’s telling her son.
“I love you,” she adds, wanting to say something that’s true. “I love you so much.”
*
It hadn’t been a deliberate choice. It just happened one night at a time, George crawling into her bed after a bad dream, or with a stomachache, and simply not leaving. Eventually he stopped offering the excuses. She’d be reading—she was always reading, it was a big part of her job but one that she couldn’t accomplish during the workday—with Mallomar resting his ridiculously hairy chin on her shin. George would come shuffling in, slink over to the other side of the queen bed, followed by Scotch, who’d plop down on the carpet, curling into a butterscotch-colored ball.
In the morning when Ariel’s alarm went off, George would still be there, and she’d let him sleep for another hour while she took care of all the morning things. Then she’d pat his shoulder, he’d ask, “What?” and she’d say, “Time to get up.” This had been happening almost every night for years, during which Ariel never stopped questioning it. Was this a healthy degree of closeness, of comfort, of dependency? Or was she screwing up her kid? Or herself?
She found herself unwilling to do anything about it. The truth was she liked it, liked having another life next to her, liked hearing the kid breathe, knowing he was safe, not sick, not nightmaring, not lonely. And neither was she.
When George had been six years old, or eight, when he was four feet tall, fifty pounds, when he sucked his thumb and carried his teddy bear, when she carried him in her arms: Back then it was much easier to answer charitably, to see theirs as a natural way to live, partners in everything, dinner together every night, wake up together every morning. All they had was each other. That was clear to everyone, especially to themselves.
Then he started to pull away. More afternoons away from home, playing with other kids, soccer and baseball and video games. When he was home, he spent more time alone in his bedroom; he no longer did homework at the dining table within sight of Ariel preparing dinner, he no longer watched TV with her at night, he no longer wanted her to read aloud. He resisted public displays of affection, then private ones. He started to keep secrets, withholding information for the sake of withholding, to test out lying, seeing how it works, if you get caught, what are the consequences.
There’d been no dramatic pronouncements, no hard stops, no big blowouts, no new rules. But although gradual, this evolution happened over the course of just a few months. It came on fast, adolescence.
Ariel could still vaguely remember her own experience of pubescence, the imperative to create distance, to define a new self that was separate from her parents. She remembers being unable to avoid hating her parents, even though she hadn’t wanted to; at least before they’d given her reason.
She could see this now in her own child. She could even recognize his occasional bouts of self-loathing; she could tell that George didn’t understand it, couldn’t justify it, didn’t know why he couldn’t resist the urge to criticize her cooking, her driving, her anything.
“Mom, could you, just, not?”
“Not what?”
“Could you not, like, breathe so loud?”