She can’t, though. She couldn’t possibly. Because to do so would be to provide them with a whole new set of words and actions to analyze and deconstruct. She can hear Alice now: In saying that a sigh is just a sigh you’re actually admitting that it’s something much larger than that—you’re basically proving my point. Christ! Donna thinks. How exhausting it must be, seeing the world and the people in it not for what they are, but rather as conduits for a language of nefarious messages. Had she taught them to think like that? Likely, she wagers. Yes, somehow, her children are her own fault.
And Paul. Poor Paul. Selfishly, she had been hoping that his breakup with his boyfriend (she can scarcely remember the man’s name) might afford them an opportunity to reconnect, but now she doubts the likelihood of all that. Still, her son’s in pain, and that breaks Donna’s heart. It’s difficult not to think of him as a wounded child who needs his mother during moments like this. Instead of seeing him as a grown man, she can’t help but think of her son as the teenager who bleached his hair or pierced his ear—the boy who was forever searching for ways to escape who he feared he might be, but who always managed to stumble back to himself again.
But then, what else can she do but delicately let him know that she’s here, ready to listen, and hold, and coddle, should he ever allow himself to need her? And oh, God, she knows she can’t blame him for this, but she’d just about screamed when he said he wanted to talk to his father. She’d had to leave Paul in the parking lot, crushing his cigarette into the gravel, lest she risk running her mouth and telling him what she really thought: that his father died a bigot who understood compassion about as well as he understood tolerance, that the only advice he would have had for Paul would be to change everything about who he was.
*
“St. Charles,” Ollie’s father says, and Donna strains to hear him above the din of the cocktail party—the mix of music and voices and ice knocking against glasses. “That’s a bit of a ways outside Chicago, is it not?”
Ollie’s mother looks at her husband and then at Donna. She smiles, meekly.
“It’s really not all that far, and it’s still very cosmopolitan,” Donna says. She adds: “I also know London quite well.”
“There you have it! Sounds like you three have already got a lot to talk about.” Ollie kisses Donna’s cheek and squeezes her shoulder, and Donna smiles back at him, taking in his big, puppylike eyes, his floppy hair, his lanky good looks. She’s fond of him. She was when she first met him in Chicago four years ago, but now she feels that fondness growing. He’s likable. Plain and simple. Just like Eloise.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Ollie says, “I’ve got to go have a word with security. Seems that there are some young men who’ve taken to climbing the lampposts outside, and I’ve got a dreadful feeling the suspects are none other than my bloody groomsmen.”
The three of them—Ollie’s parents and Donna—all laugh. Ollie shrugs and leaves.
Now feeling unprotected and exposed, Donna turns back to her soon-to-be in-laws. In one hand a gin fizz sweats against her palm. She’d originally planned to wear the blue tunic tonight, but at the last minute decided to go with something simple instead. An old silver A-line that had always given her luck. Maybe that had been a mistake.
“I’ve never been to Chicago,” Ollie’s mother says, after what appears to be much consideration.
Everyone nods.
How long must she stand here? Donna wonders. On one hand, she wants to flee, to escape into the throngs of Eloise’s friends and assorted in-laws to find some abandoned table where she might fade into the background. On the other, though, she knows she’s obliged to stay and make conversation with Ollie’s parents, no matter how dreadful and vapid that conversation may be. She has to laugh at their jokes, to frown at their minor complaints, to agree with their politics, even if she finds them vulgar. Worst of all, she knows that they’re bound to her by the same set of obligations.
Ollie’s father looks over his shoulder toward the kitchen, where a steady stream of waiters bearing trays of prawns flows out into the restaurant. Really, Donna wants to say, you can go. We don’t have to do this.
Thankfully, just as she’s about to ask something about the price of gas in Dorset, Eloise grabs her arm from behind.
“Mind if I steal you away for a moment, Maman?”
“Ollie’s parents and I were just starting to get to know one another.”
“It’ll only be a second, I swear.”
She smiles at Ollie’s parents and begs their pardon.
“I’ll bring her back shortly,” says Eloise.
Relieved, they both tell her not to worry.
Eloise leads Donna toward a second bar near the rear of the restaurant, where it’s less crowded, and where she can finally hear herself breathe. Of the three tables in the room, two of them are empty, occupied only by crumpled-up napkins and half-empty glasses. At the third sit a man and a woman—Eloise identifies them as a cousin of Ollie’s and his moody wife—engaged in a heated conversation, their heads bowed together. Along the south wall there’s a single window, and through it Donna can see sea-borne mist start to encircle the trunks of the trees on the restaurant’s small lawn. It’s a moonless night and, save a few courageous stars, the sky’s an inky black.
“What is it?” Donna asks her.
Eloise grins.
“Wait here,” she says.
Donna does as she’s told, sitting at one of the free tables. Happy to be off her feet, she slips her heels off and rubs the sole of her left foot, where a dull ache throbs. Looking out the window again, she watches as lights in the stone houses of Dorchester flicker on and off. As much as she tries not to, she can’t help but concern herself with the impression she made on Ollie’s parents. Had they thought her provincial? Simple? Crass? She’s irritated that she cares. Moreover, she’s irritated that they know that she cares. And she knows that they do; she’d seen it in Ollie’s father’s face, when he asked her about St. Charles’s proximity to Chicago. He’d nearly laughed when she said “cosmopolitan.”
Or maybe she’s making it all up.
She takes a larger gulp of her gin fizz and holds the liquor in her mouth until she’s got no choice but to swallow it or be sick. Where has her daughter gone? she wonders. She thought she wanted to melt away into a wallflower when she was talking to Ollie’s parents, but now that she has her solitude, she feels alone, exposed. Watching the couple argue at the table across from her, she decides that she wants to be back among the throng; she wants to disappear amid other people. Yes, she’ll go search for Eloise. She’ll go find her daughter.
But then, just as she’s standing, she hears her name.
“Donna?” a deep, accented voice says.
“Oh,” she says, her heart in her throat. “There you are.”
Alice