“Maybe your flights will be canceled,” I said over my shoulder, “because of the weather.”
“No way,” Zeena said, and Marilyn also shook her head. “No flight I’ve ever been booked on has ever been canceled.”
“Me either,” said Marilyn.
In the backseat of Phil’s father’s car, the grandmothers looked radiant, as if old age had embraced them with light, like two filaments in two lightbulbs—that kind of bright incarceration, each one in her loose cage of glass.
Where was my mother? I wondered.
I tried to think. But the possibilities seemed as uncountable as the stars, and to try to consider them all at once was like trying to decide where the universe might end or who invented God if God invented the world, like trying to see something white on white.
“What is infinity?” Mrs. Valentine asked us one day in Geometry as she drew a perfect chalk circle on the blackboard with a compass. No one raised a hand. And when I tried to think of an answer in the silence of that classroom, I found myself suspended and dizzy above my own brain, which did not seem to be contained by my skull any longer, but which drifted above me, invisible and uncontainable, without questions, let alone answers, only hinting at its possibilities through dreams and half glimpses of things I thought, briefly, I might have seen.
These thoughts of infinity exhausted me, as it did to look up at that perfectly empty circle on the blackboard, Mrs. Valentine waiting for an answer as I considered where my mother might be.
That circle was like the 0 on the cover of my mother’s book, Achieving Orgasm.
Or the O in Ohio—the big one, separated forever from the small one by a perfunctory salutation. Hi.
Hello.
As I stared into that circle, singular flakes of snow seemed to blow through my imagination, tossed around in the wind of it, some of it settling, some of it lifting and falling like a veil in front of my face, or a ribbon of breath I was chasing—trying to catch it, trying to keep it, in a flimsy Dixie cup.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK?” DR. PHALER ASKS. “DO YOU THINK your mother might have been having an affair?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what I think about my mother.”
But what I think is this:
She was a housewife, his housewife.
For twenty years she served his dinner at six o’clock. Afterward, she washed the dinner dishes in Palmolive, to keep her hands soft. One Christmas when he offered to buy her a dishwasher she insisted she would never use it, that washing her husband’s dinner dishes by hand was one of the greatest pleasures a woman could have. And he had no idea she was being sarcastic.
This is what I know about my father:
When they were first engaged, he would have wanted his mother and brothers to see her dressed up and wearing his ring—an unimaginative diamond solitaire, quarter carat, the kind of engagement ring jewelers keep in a velvet-lined drawer labeled Tightwads. He liked the way it looked on her finger. A bit of smudged light he’d given her for agreeing to be his wife.
Simple, it made a simple statement about him on her hand.
Sometimes, he’d write my mother’s new name under his on a scrap of paper:
Brock Connors
Evie Connors
Then, Mr. and Mrs. Brock Connors.
Then, the one that hurt her teeth to see, Mrs. Brock Connors—as if, by marrying, my father would be himself, and also become her.
Newly engaged, waiting for the Big Day the way you wait for a pleasant dentist jangling his tray of silver instruments your way—all that necessary pain—perhaps my mother imagined herself in a white apron in the suburbs, wearing a pleated poodle skirt, hair pulled back in a glistening bun, plugging a vacuum cleaner in and being sucked up.
“So, why did she marry him?” Dr. Phaler asks.
“Because,” I say, “he was there. And he wanted to marry her.”
She was twenty-seven, a receptionist at Waterhouse Steel, and lived with her father, who built model airplanes in his study all day. At night, he would fly a radiocontrolled helicopter around the house—sweating as he did, manning the operations nervously, knocking over lamps, breaking things.
When she was hired at Waterhouse Steel, the company president assured her she’d have a long and promising future there, but five years later she still spent every day at the reception desk, answering the phone, listening to the other secretaries behind her whisper about layoffs and pay cuts, voices full of asthma and nervous itching.
“Waterhouse Steel. How may I direct your call?” she asked hundreds of times a day.
She even said it in her sleep. But in her dreams, there was no one on the other end of the line when she answered, just the sound of blood pumping in her own ear. Her own blood. Pale and pumping. A little wind, too. A bit of static—as if, far away, a small brown bird with dry and wiry feet was hopping across a waxy sheet of sandwich wrap on its way to her.
And she began to think the sound of that emptiness might be the music of her future—
Weather, nasty birds, and nothing.
She’d gone to college, and she’d done well. She’d received some modest attention. For English 472, her senior year, she wrote a paper about Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience entitled “Sacrificial Lamb,” which was prefaced by a quote from “The Tyger”:
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
The paper considered the dual nature of human existence as it was depicted in the songs. And Professor Norman Owen, who was a minor poet in his spare time—gray-bearded but with a rippling chest of muscles he must have spent a fair portion of his working life developing—read my mother’s paper out loud on the last day of class and even asked her to stand afterward as her classmates clapped. Through most of the semester she’d sat in the back, taking notes, and he hadn’t spoken a word to her, nor had he any reason to until that day.
“Eve,” he said, handing the paper back to her, “splendid work!”
It was what he’d written on the bottom of it, too:
Eve, Splendid work! A+
And that was that.
After class, he left the auditorium where he lectured, dogged by three or four young men—all of them bespectacled, white shirts tucked sloppily into their pencil-legged pants, huffing seriously about “The Waste Land” all the way back to Professor Owen’s office with him.
This was 1962.
The next day, her father came to pick her up in Columbus, happy to see her, happy to be carrying her clothes and books in flimsy cardboard boxes out of her little dorm room with its peeling walls, bringing her home with her A+ paper and a degree on a piece of parchment that smelled like stale cake.
When they got back to their old farmhouse outside Toledo, when they’d hauled her things back to her childhood bedroom, my mother’s father collapsed on their sagging couch and said, “Thank God that’s over!”
Meaning college.