"You could get a roommate," my mother said. "Maybe it's not so much." My mother, on her stiff stilts of legs, never allowed her face to express much emotion, but I could tell she liked it.
We spoke to the woman in the antique store. She said the rent was $600 a month, and had scarcely finished the sentence before my mother wrote out a check as a deposit. The woman said she would call the landlady—she didn't see that there would be any problem. I took the train home with my mother; the whole trip we discussed the apartment. She said that maybe the landlady would reduce the first month's rent so that I could get metal security gates installed over the back windows. At $600 a month, however, it was hard to complain.
When we got home the landlady called: she hadn't spoken to the woman in the antique store when I saw the apartment, but it had been rented only a few minutes before we looked at the place.
"Goddammit," I said to my mother. "That was my apartment. It felt like my apartment." The flavor of lemons and chalk filled my mouth, the taste of disappointment. This loss was an indication that my whole life was out of sync. Nell was also disappointed. There was nothing she could say or do, but she did show me an article in Fate magazine which suggested that possibly I had lived in the apartment in another incarnation but was not meant to now.
Luckily I had something to fall back on; Yale had accepted me the previous spring, and though I had told them I wasn't going to come, now that I changed my mind they said I could still attend, but without the scholarship.
Though I had enjoyed living in my own apartment in New Haven, I didn't mind being back at home with my mother. She lived in Southampton, on a back suburban street, far from the large mansions that lined the waterfront. The tiny house had been built in the 1930s, before the Hamptons became so popular and expensive. Some summers, my mother went away on a trip and rented out the house for $5,000 a month; this summer she had a job as librarian at the Southampton library.
In her house we were constantly tripping over each other, but we didn't get on each other's nerves: we called each other, as a joke, "Letitia" and "Hermione." Though we had never seen the movie Grey Gardens—about a mother and daughter, related to Jackie Onassis, who never went out of the house and grew old and eccentric together—this was what we imagined we were like. We lived on quick-cooking Ramen noodles, spinach, and snow peas; tuna fish, direct from the can, frozen corn fritters heated in the oven; or baked potatoes topped with Cheddar cheese.
In the afternoons I rode my bike to the beach and walked up the mile stretch and back, scuffing my feet through the foam at the edge of the sand and waves. I spent a lot of time thinking: What makes me the way I am? Okay, I figured, I was a combination of genetic and environmental accidents. On the other hand, surely my personality wasn't entirely beyond my control. It disturbed me that I seemed to be totally uninter- ested in men: when I went out with them, it was only in order to be able to study them as if they were natural history museum exhibits. Captain Ahab couldn't be blamed completely for this. That I wasn't worried about finding someone—this wasn't normal, according to the magazines. Even Anna Castleton had turned away from men only because they had proved to be so rotten.
The way I felt now, I wasn't really interested in any aspect of life. Not in the least bit. Perhaps I really would live at home, my mother and I growing older, more set in our ways, graduating to higher degrees of oddness. Yet what would become of me when my mother grew too old to support us both? Abnormal. I tried to imagine myself decked in a purple fez, smoking a cigarette in a long ivory holder, sipping absinthe or crème de menthe and actually speaking to people—having what is known in books as "conversation." Murmured voices, the sound of brittle chatter across a ruby-lit nightclub. Yet my imagination couldn't pick up the words.
There were so many ways to fill up a day, let alone a life. I didn't see how I could possibly cram anything—anyone—else into my hours. For example, one afternoon I spent three hours reviewing the contents of a sweepstakes brochure that came in the mail. It took hours to figure out the rules of the sweepstakes; apparently one had to purchase an item of jewelry for $4.99 before the entry form could be considered valid. Though I knew I'd never enter, I felt obliged to read about each item of jewelry: elegant "love" ring with genuine diamond; Pegasus pendant with genuine ruby and swirl of faux diamonds; Princess Di's famous sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring; the Diamond Wedding Cross, Symbol of Eternal Unity. The descriptions were written in a style as interesting to me as my feminist crit. courses had once been.
In May I received a letter from Ray. He had been looking for me all semester, and had asked Yale for my address but they refused to give it out. As a last resort he decided to write to me in care of my old address, and the letter was forwarded.
All spring I had been gardening with a frenzy: the small fenced-in backyard hadn't been touched in years. On her days off my mother sat in the yard in a screened-in tent house from Sears—insects bit her even when no one else was bothered— and watched me at work. I spent hours in the sun, stooped over the splotchy faces of pansies, puffy foxgloves, inebriated day lilies, glossy as honey, quivering with palsy. The flowers trembled in the salt air. My fingers were raw, I refused to wear gloves and my hands were permanently veined with dirt.
"Go ahead," my mother said. "Call him. You haven't spoken to anyone besides me in months."
"I don't like him," I said. "He makes me feel like he's going to throw me into a coffin and walk around on top of it." But I called him up and asked him to dinner; he was ready to come out that night, but I told him to wait until the weekend.
For his visit I made chili and corn bread and a salad; I supposed I really had been cut off for quite a while. I found myself going out of my way to dress up, make the dinner elegant. When my mother came home from work we went out to the yard to sit in the tent house. This was our ritual almost every night. I had a beer and she had a concoction made from soda, pina colada mix, and sometimes ice cream. So far she hadn't questioned me about what I wanted or planned to do. I knew she was glad to have me here. We sat in the light of the citronella candle—even inside the screen house insects somehow managed to bite her—and listened to the crickets and barking of dogs down the road. The aroma of the raspberry bushes in the yard and the sour potato smell from the potato fields a half-mile away filled the night air.
At eight o'clock we ate our salad; Ray was supposed to have come at seven. My mother decided to eat her chili. "You and Ray can eat alone," she said.
"Ma, I don't even like this human," I said.
"Well, what did you ask him to come for?"
"You told me to invite him."
So we bickered, gently. Still, it was a way to pass the eve- ning. Maybe I had been too harsh in my previous judgment of Ray. Maybe she would find Ray genuinely charming.
At nine o'clock he called from a gas station; he had gotten a late start and there was a traffic jam.
"He's not even close," my mother said. "Why don't you just tell him to go home? By the time he gets here it'll be ten o'clock."