“Be careful,” his mother said, closing her eyes. “I think you mean that.”
Jennifer did mean it. Why wouldn’t she mean it?
“Where did he come from?” His mother shook her head and opened her eyes again. “In high school I was such a nerd. How did I produce a boy like him?”
“His father?” Jennifer ventured, because his mother was staring at her like she owed her an answer.
She laughed, a sharp, quick sound. “No. I always thought that’s why they don’t get along. Tommy’s every boy who gave him shit in high school. Every boy who took the girl he liked to the prom.”
“Oh,” Jennifer said. Tommy always said, “My father doesn’t like me,” casually, as if it didn’t matter, and Jennifer always said, “That’s not true, you know that’s not true,” but maybe it was true. His mother seemed to be saying it was true.
“Who wouldn’t rather go with Tommy to the prom? Look at him. I’d rather go with Tommy to the prom. Clearly you know what I mean.”
“I love him.” Jennifer was torn between indignation and dismay. Did Tommy’s mother think that was all he was to her, a good-looking boy? “I love him,” she said again.
His mother flopped back in her chair and sighed. “I know you do, honey.” Her voice had softened. “And he loves you. He just adores you. You two are so in love it’s like looking into the sun. His father says . . .” She shook her head. “But sometimes these things last.” She said this as if to herself. Then she seemed to remember Jennifer. She straightened up and gave her a motherly smile. “Go on back to bed now,” she said.
Jennifer obeyed, though the whole thing was terribly, excruciatingly weird. She’d just been ordered by her boyfriend’s mother to climb back into bed with her boyfriend. She lay there blinking at the ceiling, feeling for the first time that in spending these nights with him she was doing something wrong, feeling for the first time, but not the last, that when it came to Tommy she might not be the best judge of what the right thing was.
He stirred again, and this time she didn’t touch him. After a moment, he rolled toward her and pulled her against him, as tight as he could, as tight as possible. He murmured in her ear, “Where’d you go?”
From her vantage point in the future, in a house in the woods, at her own kitchen table, Jennifer looks back and imagines that in that moment she had a prophetic vision. In that moment she understood that Tommy’s need for love would be impossible to satisfy. She saw that she’d spend years and years trying to convince him, finally, that he was loved enough, and when that didn’t work she’d spend years and years trying not to love him anymore, but the habit would be so deeply ingrained, so primal, she wouldn’t be able to stop. She would never be able to stop.
Do you, Jennifer, take this man?
She thought when she came up here to the Mountain she’d be without him, truly without him, for the first time in twenty-seven years, as if she could tap the roof of her car to set him free, like the denizens of Sewanee send their angels home. But maybe ghosts are less cooperative.
Her parents tried to separate them once, sending her to New York right after high school to become a dancer, when what they really wanted was for her to go to college. Not that they ever said it was about him, of course. If they disliked him, they never said so to Jennifer, though she could see in the looks they exchanged that they discussed it when she wasn’t around.
She was a lyrical jazz dancer, not the best in the world, she knew even then, but she could make people watch her. This was something she could do only when she was dancing, an unconscious ability she didn’t know how to control. Her parents put all their hopes on the notion that she still wanted something besides her boyfriend, and off she went to New York City, eighteen years old and knowing no one. It seems like she must have been brave but she doesn’t know if she’s ever been brave, so she wonders now if it was fear that drove her, the same fear that drove her parents: that her love for Tommy was terrifyingly total, that if she stayed with him she’d never be a separate person.
She signed up for a beginner class with a prominent teacher, and he saw something in her, made her a scholarship student and then part of his company. Who knows what might have happened? What did happen is that she came home for a visit, and Tommy was there at the airport. He dropped to his knees right there at the gate and pulled out a ring. Everybody applauded.
The dance teacher called and asked her to come back, but it was like that possibility already belonged to another life. For a long time after she and Tommy got married, she forgot New York, and the time apart. She remembered being with Tommy like she’d never had a single doubt.
Who would she have been without him? She has wondered this, now, for ten years or more, and she thought when she came up here she’d finally find out. But this is a fantasy. Let go of your hopeful delusions. She’ll always be the person Tommy made.