“I’m sorry I didn’t text earlier; I was—”
“Don’t worry about it, just want to make my schedule for the day!” she says breezily.
I want to believe she’s being nice, but I can’t help the prickle of annoyance that she doesn’t even consider askingHow are you?before launching into her own queries. If someone who is usually prompt didn’t text me back for a whole night, I’d at least have a cursory wonder if everything was okay.
But my mom has never had that mother’s intuition that allows her to consider her children’s well-being outside of her own. If I said to her,Mom, I was stuck on the roof all night,she would absolutely overreact and make a big fuss, but it wouldn’t occur to her to even ask after me. She assumes I’m always fine; it’s a comfort to her to believe I’m always fine.
“I should be ready in half an hour or so, if you want to start making your way over here. Nothing opens until eight a.m. anyway,” I finally say. “I’m going to hop in the shower quickly, but otherwise I’m good to go. And George needs to go out too.” He looks up at me, grateful for the acknowledgment.
“Great, great, great,” she says, blowing me a kiss. “I’ll text you when I’m close. Bring some treats for Waldo.”
At that she hangs up.
“Your mother is a piece of work,” Dane mumbles, grabbing my plate and walking it over to the dishwasher.
George is now standing, a little silent entreaty to get moving. And since I don’t want to dwell on whatever kind of piece of work my mother is, I take that as my sign to follow George’s implicit instructions and start getting ready.
Somehow, even after a strange night, I’m able to pull my day back in order. I jump into the shower and let the scalding-hot water rinse off whatever remnants of the evening are pervading my skin. It’s a reset.
When I’m dry and dressed, I come out to a patient George. I worry that he thinks I left him on purpose, and this is his way of showing me he can be more of a team player. Even though most people would be happy with a dog that waits nicely, I don’t like this unsure version of him. But I’m hoping after a day or two of normalcy, he’ll go back to believing he’s king of the home.
Dane has cleaned up everything, and I give her a wordless hug. She reciprocates with a kiss on the cheek, and I know that’s all we’ll ever have to say about this. I’ll never have to mention my inadvertent locking out if I don’t want to. And for that, and many other reasons, I’m forever grateful to have Dane in my life.
I head out at eight, once I can see my mother’s location approaching mine. Her phone is dead half the time, so it’s not always an accurate way to time her, but whenever she’s remembered to charge it, it’s easier than trying to get ahold of her. It took some coaxing to get her to turn on her location sharing—she claimed she wanted to be “off the grid”—but I eventually got her to accept the basic fact that if she’s going to have a smartphone, the phone is tracking her whereabouts whether or not she’s allowing me to see it, and eventually she relented.
Our trip to the market is easier than I feared it might be. It’s still early enough that the large Wednesday market isn’t overrun, my mom brought the more low-key Waldo, and she doesn’t debate me about which tomatoes to get. We wander over to my favorite stand, Eckerton Hill, and she proceeds to ask the twentysomething college-student employee more questions about soil than I think he was prepared to answer. You’d think she was a country dweller or an agricultural biologist and not a neurotic New Yorker who gets freaked out when she sees a moth.
And thankfully, out in the light of day, George is trotting along, head held high in his normal state. He’s ignoring every dog, including Waldo, and barking at leaves he finds offensive. It might not seem normal for most dogs, but it’s blissfully normal for George. I let myself worry slightly less that I’ve given him irreparable trust issues.
Armed with three different types of tomatoes and new knowledge to spout about cucamelons (Did you know about these, Nora? Surely you couldn’t if you hadn’t brought them over to me), my mom waves goodbye half an hour later. I have enough time to drop George off and give him an extra cuddle before heading off to work.
My clients today are mercifully straightforward. It’s as though the universe has recognized I had enough nonsense last night and need to not have anything too dramatic to deal with.
I get home and spend the night cooking and baking. There’s something essential for my nerves about the manual step by step of a recipe. I make shepherd’s pie, because I’ve been thinking of it ever since Jmentioned it, despite it being totally unseasonable. And it’s definitely the right move because a warm, creamy, meaty, stew-like concoction is essential to setting me back in a centered place. And as I scoop out the dough for black-and-white cookies, I imagine handing them to neighbors and clients tomorrow and seeing the small smiles that cookies inevitably bring out in anyone.
It’s calm. After a night of the unexpected—unexpected scenarios, unexpected people, unexpected revelations—I need a night where nothing happens and everything is easy. It’s as though I started with my scalding shower and ended with cooking to fully put the strangeness of last night behind me.
But when I get into bed later that night and pull out the new book I purchased yesterday, my hand hovers. I want to skip to the last few pages like I always do, just to be safe in the knowledge that I know it’ll all end okay. But I hate that Eli’s voice is now in my head.That’s life, Nora. No one gets to know what’s ahead.
It’s certainly true of Eli. My judgments of him were all ... off base.
Or maybe that’s not fair to me. They were based on a context. And that context is often our reality when we meet someone—we’re not free when we’re introduced to a new person. We’re slotting them into some role—employee, friend, first date, man in therapy who doesn’t want to be there. We see someone a certain way based on how they’re projecting themselves onto that role. It’s so rare when we just get to be whollyourselves.
And maybe that’s why the texting with J feels so uninhibited. It feels freer than any other relationship in my life right now.
Idon’tknow what’s ahead. It’s frightening. But I’m proud of myself. I’m taking the leap without knowing the ending. I’m putting myself out there with J, and it feels worth it. I’m doing it my own way—slowly. Carefully. But I’m not avoiding it anymore. I’m not hiding behind a document.
It’s so annoying that I once again hear Eli’s voice from earlier.
That’s the fun of it.
Chapter 16
Coming home from a Friday family dinner always leaves me feeling a bit wiped out.
The way my parents talk is a sensory overload. They talk past each other, over each other, interrupt and correct, all while going a mile a minute and never seeming to take a breath.
Tonight’s topics ranged from whether they should turn the butterflies in the Bronx Zoo butterfly house into art once they die (because apparently my mom spent alongtime speaking to an artist who preserves butterflies and believes that there’s a missed opportunity for the zoo, and she’s now looking into who she can contact) to the intricacies of whether my dad can fix a clogged pipe by pulling upjust a little bitof grout from the tile. There wasn’t a point explaining to my dad that he’d probably end up having to retile his entire bathroom floor if he started this particular DIY project. In the same way, there wasn’t a point explaining to my mother that the Bronx Zoo probably already has a plan in place for their butterflies.
