At the moment she’d decided to head home, she heard her name called. She turned and started walking, but the voice followed. “Elaine. Elaine, is that you?”
She stopped then; it was Joyce Taft, from the fifth floor of her apartment building.
“Hi, Joyce.”
“I thought so. Are you all right? I saw you standing out here. It’s awfully cold out.”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
Joyce was examining her, as if hunting for clues to explain this behavior. The mother wondered if the neck of her nightgown was showing above her coat. She thought she should say something else so she said, “I just came out to clear my head.”
Joyce nodded and the mother understood she would soon become a story Joyce would tell to a half-dozen people in the building: She’s been like that ever since Warren moved out.
“I’m heading home, if you’d like company,” Joyce said.
The mother looked at the window; they were walking toward the front cash register.
“Thanks, sure,” the mother said.
He was back home at around five. The mother and the boy didn’t see each other until the early evening.
That night as they stood in the kitchen, she managed to get him to say he’d been seeing the hostess.
“I don’t want you to see her again,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t.”
“I like her.”
“You like her.”
“I do,” he said, as though defending a great principle.
“Is she your girlfriend?”
“No.”
“What is she?”
“She’s a friend. Am I getting the fifth degree here? Do I need a lawyer present?”
“You can do what you want.”
“I’ve had a good week.”
She didn’t know what he meant by the comment.
“Go ahead and screw her if you want,” she said, unfortunately, pointlessly.
Her boy did a strange thing then. He started crying.
He didn’t go out that night or the next. He watched TV on his own, or read in her study. He wasn’t friendly or particularly unfriendly.
After three nights of this, the mother asked, “What happened to the hostess?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?”
“I blew her off.”
And that was that. He went out with friends that weekend and for a few nights did nothing. She’d walk by the hostess and draw looks and then she stopped walking by.
One day on her way home she felt the hostess following her.
“What did you tell him?” the hostess said.
The mother turned and faced her. The hostess had on a thick navy turtleneck sweater over tight black jeans. She had a small stack of Buongiorno’s menus in one hand, as though to remind the mother of where she’d just sprung from.
“I told him I didn’t want him seeing you.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want him to. He’s nineteen, what are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“He’s just a kid.”
“No he’s not.” She raised her eyebrows. “Believe me, he’s not.”
The mother’s hand jumped out and slapped the woman. The woman slapped the mother back, and then they were yelling at each other and swinging their arms. A waiter and the stout old manager ran out to break it up.
“Pathetic bitch,” the hostess said beneath her breath.
She had always imagined a life for her son that would exceed her own: more travel, better clothes and food, a little land maybe, near a body of water; an unimpeachably bright, elegant, and decent partner, whom the mother could imagine as a daughter, the one she’d never had, for whom she could now buy sweaters and stylish scarves and sign the gift cards Love, Elaine. But what if what she wanted wasn’t what he wanted? What if this hostess was what he wanted? Her awful little apartment, her abject little life. And what if they had children and they looked not like him at all but like her? She pictured two children, four and six with the hostess’s face, those small dull eyes and those sunken nostrils.
It occurred to her the hostess would tell her son about the incident. She’d describe the mother as crazy, and the boy might agree.
She called the boy’s father and there was no answer. It was eleven thirty New York time. She tried again at one and reached him. After a little banter about her writing, he asked, “What’s up?”
“I hit her,” she said, surprised at her own disclosure. “And she hit me back.”
“Who?”
“The hostess.”
The line went silent, and the mother considered telling him she was joking.
“You hit her?”
“Yes. It was a mistake, okay? But she hit me as well. The people from the restaurant broke it up.”
“I don’t know what to say. Let it go. It’s his life. Jesus, Elaine, you hit her?”
“I didn’t call to be upbraided.”
She dreamed that night the hostess was pregnant and that she’d given her son a disease.
She didn’t see the hostess in the restaurant window after that. One day she saw in the doorway the manager who’d broken up the fight. She asked him what had happened to the hostess.
“We let her go,” he said.
“Over the incident?” the mother asked.
“Yes, of course. We don’t condone that kind of thing. I hope you and your husband will come back and eat with us again,” the man said.
Two days later she met with her editor. They went to lunch to talk about the new pages, which were about the failed-birthday-party scene in East of Eden (the moment that launched the late 1950s and ’60s youth culture, she postulated) and the influence of the Beats and the French new wave, and when the mother returned to the office, she found herself speaking at great length on all these subjects with the receptionist, a sophomore at Bowdoin College in Maine, an English major, with green eyes and lovely teeth, who wanted someday to be an editor. She had read the mother’s last two books.
“What I loved about them both was how personal they were. Whatever you’re writing about it’s as if you’re speaking to one person, to a good friend. That’s what you make the reader feel like. You made me feel like it. I felt smart reading your books; smarter than I usually feel, anyhow.” She laughed.
There were still ten days left in her son’s vacation.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” the mother asked.
They would go to the movies and then get Indian food. He was doing her a favor, the mother said, because the girl might end up editing one of her books someday. The night started slowly, but before long the boy was telling his stories, and the girl listening, then telling a few of her own. The mother prodded them both with questions. They had much in common, she thought. But there were enough differences for them to learn from one another. When the girl excused herself to go to the restroom, the mother said, “Is this awkward? I mean my coming along like this.”