“I . . . lost it,” I said. I should have felt better that he was calling, but that part of my heart felt dark and shriveled and unforgiving. He wasn’t reaching out. Not really. All he wanted, I suspected, was to berate me more, to put me back into the box I was breaking out of.
“Is there something you aren’t telling me?” my mother asked. She was hesitant, and a momentary shard of hope rose inside me, as it had the other day when I had thought she might be opening to me. “Has Phillip—mistreated you in some way?”
I paused, equally hesitant. We were wandering the edge of undiscovered emotional territory—honesty. Reality. “No,” I sighed. He would never hurt me, not the way she was asking about, anyway. As small and mean as he could be, he had never raised a hand to me, and as far as I knew, he hadn’t slept with anyone else.
“Maybe you’re disconnected. That happens in a marriage sometimes . . . things get busy . . .” She trailed off, hopefully, and I realized she was waiting for me to jump in and agree, to put her at ease, to end this awkward conversation.
“Maybe,” was the best I could give her.
“Madeleine,” my mother began, then interrupted herself to reach over and pat my hand. Her fingers were slender and cool. “You can’t just sit here and let it all fade away. Call him back at least. Talk to him. If there’s no real problem between you, then you have to give it another chance.”
I leaned back in my chair, lifted my hands to the ceiling, then let them fall back in my lap. I could feel myself starting to cry, and I didn’t want to cry. My mother never cried. My sorority sisters cried, but those were pretty, delicate tears, energetic enough to evoke sympathy, but not enough to cause mascara to run or redden their noses under their foundation. When I cried, it was loud and messy and ugly, my eyes pink and swollen, my nose red and stuffy. I didn’t want to cry in front of my mother for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that it made me so unlovely, and I already felt unlovable.
“You know why he married me, Mother. Did you really think it was going to last?”
“He married you because you were in love,” she said, with the strength of conviction of someone who refuses to see anything they don’t want to.
I fast-blinked away the tears hovering at the edges of my eyes, blurring the dining room into a soft wash of green and blue, like a Monet painting. “Well, I may have loved him, but he didn’t love me. I probably even knew it at the time, a little bit. Why was a man like Phillip going to marry someone like me? You thought that, Mother. I know you did. Everyone did. I know it’s all anyone at the wedding was thinking about.” My self-pity was coming to a rapid boil, and I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore, angrily wiping them away with my forearm. “He married me because I was malleable, because I’d let him walk all over me. And he does. He married me because I was pretending to be someone else, someone who would make him look good. He married me because he wanted Dad to invest in his company. He didn’t marry me for me. He doesn’t even like me. He doesn’t even know me.”
“Madeleine, stop talking like that right now. Your poor father—what a horrible thing to imply.” My mother was flustered, which never happened. Maybe because we were having an honest conversation for once in our lives, because she was trapped here with me and couldn’t invent some excuse for hanging up the phone, a pile of correspondence she just had to deal with or remembering the roses needed deadheading or there was a committee meeting she was late to.
“I never would have married him if you hadn’t pressured me so hard.” I was pushing back tears, raw and ugly, and I wanted to hurt her, to break her perfect facade, to make her cry with me.
“I’m sorry, are you saying this is my fault?” my mother asked.
“You were the one who wanted me to get married! You were the one who was so embarrassed I wasn’t! I married him because I didn’t want to disappoint you anymore.”
“Don’t put your unhappiness on me, Madeleine,” my mother said, and the disdain in her voice only made me feel smaller and less worthy. “You were the one who accepted his proposal. You made the vows. I didn’t force you to do anything.”
She was right. And yet she wasn’t. I had spent so much time wishing someone would love me, and she had underscored that desire in a million ways, from every time she had told me I would never find a husband at art school to every date she had set me up on. And when she had met Phillip for the first time, before we got engaged, I could practically see the hunger in her eyes. She had wanted that for me so badly. The first time we had dinner together, she had dug her sharp elbow into my side repeatedly whenever I veered onto some unapproved conversational topic, and when Phillip had proposed, she almost collapsed in gratitude.
She was my mother. If she thought I was capable of withstanding the buffeting winds of her opinions, she was wrong.