At the end of the 1980s, Ava had finally had it with the entropy at the Health Department. She would no longer be demonized and vilified as the enemy in the AIDS epidemic; she would not stand there with that uncomfortable, hateful, oh-isn’t-this-cute smirk on her face that her colleagues put on while those angry boys — including her own former intern, for that matter — chained themselves to her desk and called her a murderer. Oh, no, Ava had told Hector after she’d finally left, that was the last straw! That’s when Ava grit her teeth and summoned all her resources and friends with money and clout and bought that run-down building on Avenue B and started Judith House, a care residence for women with full-blown AIDS. No one would ever look back on this whole thing and say she stood by, a useless bureaucrat. There was only so much more helplessness on her own part that she could tolerate.
But had Ava also bitten the bullet for her own family? For her daughter? Because even now that Ava had clamped down on her manias with heavy drugs, she still felt crappy much of the time and was a scattershot mother at best. Things had gotten a little better, but there were still a million little ways Ava let Milly know that, well, there was simply too much going on — too much sickness, too much death — for Ava to dote over Milly and her homework and her art projects the way other Upper East Side mothers did with their daughters. Sam, Daddy, was there for that. Ava was simply not that sort of mother.
But Milly had had to concede that she still needed her mommy. That was the poignant, humiliating truth of it. And since the breakup with Jared, Ava hadn’t been half bad about being there, Milly had to grant that. The Sunday dinners. The calls that had now become daily, even if they were brief, more about her mother’s travails than her own. (Because, it had to be understood, her mother’s travails were the travails of the city, while Milly’s were merely the travails of one twenty-four-year-old, middle-class woman, and they took place mostly inside her head, the venue of much quibbling and second-guessing and angst.)
So, now, the airport call to Ava. “You have to be careful, Ava,” she repeated. “You’re going to run yourself down like you did last year, then you’ll have to take a week off again and work from home and drive Daddy crazy.”
Ava laughed dimly. “I’m not staying late at Judith House tonight,” she said. “Daddy and I are going to Blue Ribbon for dinner.”
“You guys are so trendy,” Milly remarked drily.
Ava chuckled. “I suppose.” Another pause. “How’s Esther?”
Milly loved the way her mother said that: How’s Esther? In that dutiful, I’m-a-good-mom-for-acknowledging-my-daughter’s-lesbian-partner singsong. The I’m-being-such-a-good-sport-about-this-whole-lesbian-thing-and-biding-my-time-till-it-passes kind of tone.
Milly laughed. “She’s good. She’s away this weekend, too. She’s on a panel at Oberlin.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Ava said. “Is that about women and — and fiction and identity?”
Milly laughed again. “Sort of. It’s all about Willa Cather, actually, in some way.”
“Oh, that’s nice. And how about you, honey? Did you get the NYCHA grant?”
“It’s NYFA, Mom. NYFA. New York Foundation for the Arts.”
“Oh, that’s right. Sorry, NYFA, NYCHA!” NYCHA was the New York City Housing Authority, which Ava had to tussle with regularly.
Milly rolled her eyes. “Right. No, I haven’t heard about the NYFA grant yet. Hopefully in the next week.”
“Right.” Her mother sounded distracted. Milly could hear rowdy gals in the background, the Judith clients and staffers mixing it up, finding daily laughs amid their troubles. Her mother was probably leafing through paperwork right now, as they talked. Well, at least here they were, checking in.
“And what are you and Drew going to do in L.A.?” her mother managed to ask.
“I don’t know!” Milly said brightly. “We’ll probably see friends. Drew said she’d take me to see this, like, cabaret act I’ve always wanted to see — it’s a husband and wife, I guess, a really bad Steve and Eydie, who do lounge versions of Michael Jackson songs on a synthesizer at this cheesy old lounge where everybody — well, you know, like Generation-X types — goes to see them ironically, but they take themselves seriously. I’ve always wanted to see them.”
“That sounds like fun,” her mother said, but so absently that Milly knew she’d lost her mother’s tenuous attention. “And — and—” Her mother was trying to pull back into the conversation. “What about Drew? Is her book out?”
“It comes out in a month, I think.”
“And what’s it called, again? Breathing Lessons?”
“No, that book already exists. It’s called Learning to Breathe.”
“Oh, right. It’s a novel, right?”
“It’s a memoir.”
“A memoir? She’s twenty-six years old!”
Milly laughed. “I know! Well, she’s written a memoir.”
“About her whole drug thing.”
“I think so.”
“Well, I hope she portrays you nicely. You certainly were nice to her that whole time.”
“Oh God,” Milly moaned. “I don’t even want to know if I’m in it.”
“I should hope that you are. At least a little bit. In a nice way.”
“Well, I’m sorry about your clients who died. Try not to push yourself too hard, Ava.”
They gave each other their love and ended the call. Then Milly called Esther at the place she was staying at Oberlin. “I wanted to call you before I got on the plane to L.A.,” she said, with that strange, especially girlish and delicate rush of feeling whenever she first spoke to or met up with Esther.
“I can’t talk long, Babyturnip, I’m frantically leafing through these Cather books before the panel starts at one.” Esther called her Babyturnip. Once, when they were having sex, Esther started calling her every manner of fruit or vegetable — pumpkin, kumquat, parsnip, turnip. My little turnip. And somehow, Babyturnip had stuck. On one hand, it goaded Milly just a little bit. She was sufficiently aware of her own beauty to know that she looked nothing like a turnip, and she wondered if this was Esther’s way of debeautifying her, of taking her down a peg. On the other hand, she liked it when lovers, and people in general, had a nickname for her. Jared had called her Millipede, and Drew continued to, and she liked that nickname even though some people said that the thought of a millipede grossed them out. Not Milly, though. When people gave her a nickname, she felt that she must be special to them. So that’s why she hadn’t objected to Babyturnip.
“It’s okay, I won’t keep you long,” Milly said. She thought of Esther, spread out on the bed in faculty housing at Oberlin, her heavy dark brows knitted together, clamping a chewed-over pen between her teeth. Esther, who was thirty-eight to her twenty-four, who had short, sensible, brushed-back salt-and-pepper hair; wire-rimmed glasses perched low on her nose; generous hips underneath her overalls; a winter parka full of lecture notes, cab receipts, tobacco that she rolled into her own cigarettes — lip balm her only concession to vanity. Esther, the CUNY Grad Center professor, the prolific author of thoughtfully outraged books about women’s sexuality in an age of sexual destabilization and disease stigmatization, even a(n admittedly highly conceptual and allegorical) novel, Cantaloupe Cowgirls. Esther, who people thought was cutting and acerbic in her comments, but who really, Milly knew, was just blunt and assertive and quickly knew whom she liked and respected and whom she didn’t, and couldn’t help but show it.