I had inadvertently left bananas to blacken on the counter over break, and even though I’d wrapped them in plastic, and even though the air was chill, when I came back from Starbucks, the apartment had by then warmed a little — the radiators steamed like trains; had the landlord spotted my return? — and I could see there were fruit flies beginning to flick around the sink. Flour moths fluttered like the tiniest angels from somewhere — who knew? The leftover boxes of cereal? Flour moths but no flour. I grabbed at them midair like a mad person. The Mexican strawberries in the refrigerator had grown the wise and cheery beards of Santa Claus, and some Peruvian pears were cauled with mold. The cream cheese was a tub of dull green clay. In contrast to the few bucolic snowflakes of my visit home, this place seemed a sort of soiled, surreal, shaken-up snow dome of student life, so I turned off the lights. Murph had left hers on in her room, including the neon THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX, which she had saucily, instructionally, hung over her headboard. And so I unplugged it. Then I put on a sweatshirt and long underwear and went to bed, hoping that in the morning the new year would reveal its newness: so far it seemed painted too familiarly in my heart’s old sludge.
The phone rang early. Sarah’s voice was bright and on. “I’m going to have the taxicab swing by and pick you up at eleven o’clock. We’re flying to Packer City,” she announced.
“We are?” I was scarcely awake. I was going to have to become a new person biologically just to associate with her.
“Do you mind? Just pack a little overnight bag, and we’ll be back tomorrow. We just got a phone call about a baby up there, and we’re going to meet with the birth mother.”
Another birth mother. How long could this go on? And did it matter, as long as Sarah paid me?
“Good, fine,” I said. I had never been on a plane before. I had never been in a taxicab, but I didn’t dare tell her this.
I didn’t really have an overnight bag. I had a backpack, and in it I put a nightgown, underwear, and a different shirt. Otherwise, I would wear the same clothes I had on now. I threw in a book—Zen Poems, from a friend from last year who had transferred to a small Buddhist college in California. “So, now you’re going to Zen State,” Murph and I had said, and he gave us the book to reform and silence us. It had poems in it like “The world is a wake / vanishing behind a boat / that has rowed away at dawn.”
Okay … Let the Buddhists depart the world and subdue their despair. Still, I did not think one necessarily had chosen wisely by leaving the party altogether and going home early to a kind of walking sleep. I preferred the mentally ill witch Sylvia Plath, whose words sought no enlightenment, no solace, whose words sought nothing but the carving of a cry. An artful one from the pitch black.
Oh, if only she had married Langston Hughes!
I had written on a Post-it, as if to mock my mother’s own list making, my favorite line: “I’m no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind’s hand.” Then I had stuck it — oh yes, oh well — on the frame of my mirror.
We stand around blankly as walls.
Motherhood like radar or radiation was radiantly in the air.
I saw the cab from my window, and when I came down the porch steps the cabbie jumped out and opened up the trunk for my backpack. “Hi,” he said, smiling. How old was he? Thirty? What had he studied? French literature? The cabbies in this town seemed all to have law degrees or PhDs or unfinished dissertations on ancient Greek pottery design or the hegemonic hedges of Versailles. A slightly disputatious animation in his face caused me to take him for a law degree type — there were too many of them here, since law students didn’t have to take the bar exam if they stayed in town, and so the town had long ago begun overflowing with lawyers, many of whom were now at the wheels of city buses, FedEx vans, and taxicabs. I got in the backseat and there was Sarah, beaming. She was wearing not a peacoat but a long shearling one. Perhaps she had gotten it for Christmas. “Another adventure in prospective motherhood!” she exclaimed.
“Yes,” I said, thinking the phrase sounded like something Murph would say about a careless romantic fling. I found myself wondering again where Sarah’s husband was.
As if reading my mind, she said, “Edward’s going to try to meet us there. He’s flying back from a conference in L.A., via O’Hare, and if the flight’s on time we should see him at the Green Bay airport. We’ll rent a car and all drive back together.”
“I’ll get to meet him,” I said stupidly.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Or, you can do what a lot of people choose to do: just go through the motions.” She expelled a quick, ambiguous bark of a laugh.
The cabbie, I believe, hated her already, but when the meter tab came to twenty even, which she gave him, and then when she couldn’t find anything smaller for a tip and dug a quarter out of her pocket apologetically, he handed it back to her. “Ma’am, you need this more than I do.”
She turned briskly away from him. He popped the trunk without getting out, and we lifted out our own bags and hurried into the airport. “I’m really a good tipper, ordinarily! I really am!” she said. “I’m known for my good tips!” I nodded. I believed her, though she had yet to pay me a dime. I remembered a remark my often frugal father used to make: I only like to be gratuitous when it is absolutely necessary.
“There are no manners in the Midwest anymore,” Sarah said. “You have to go to the South. And even there it’s getting patchy.”
At the ticket counter they checked our IDs, Sarah keeping hers a little hidden from me, as if she disliked her picture. She stuck it quickly back into one of the many zippered pockets her burnt umber handbag contained. “This pocketbook has so many compartments, it’s hard to remember where you’ve put things,” she said. “It’s like an intelligence test.” I had only ever heard one other person use the word pocketbook instead of purse: my mother. “But it’s magical. There’s so much room. You can keep loading it up and discover so much you didn’t know was there! It’s like the stream of endless clowns that keeps coming out of the Volkswagen! Still, if I were my own mother? I’d have every zipper labeled.”
To me, Sarah herself was like a Volkswagen endlessly expelling clowns. “You have a mother?” I said. “I mean, your mother’s alive?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Awesome,” I said, in that peculiar way, I knew, our generation had of finding that everything either “sucked” or was “awesome.” We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps, as with the British, it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.
“My mother and father had a real relationship,” she said.
“Well, they were married.”
“Anyone can get married. They had a relationship!”
“Do your parents like your restaurant?”
“My father died before he saw it. But he never liked to eat out. I once took him to a Benihana in New Jersey, but the sizzling hibachi table made him very jumpy. I think it conjured all these memories of the war and the firebombing of Tokyo. After that he refused to eat out with me. He would say, ‘Come see us! Your mother has made a beautiful kugel!’ He was a rich old man scared of the sizzle of a grill.”