“Francie,” I said.
She looked at me again and said, “Lynnie! I didn’t even recognize you, honey! Are you all right?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said.
“Do you want to go wash up? Your mom’s with somebody just now.”
The door to my mother’s office was closed, and I wondered if David was in there with her. I nodded at Francie, then went into the bathroom, and what I saw in the mirror wasn’t pretty: hair matted from sleeping on a grimy floor; face smudged with dirt and probably spilled gin; a T-shirt that was wrinkled and stained. In the small room I could tell that I really needed a shower. I took a long look at myself and shrugged. “You’re turning into Wylie,” I said out loud. Nonetheless I washed my face and patted my hair with water, smoothing it somewhat, though there was a ratty tangle at the base of my neck. I felt deeply, impossibly calm. I thought I’d feel that way forever, but my mother came through the door, and then I knew I wouldn’t.
She stood before me in the fluorescent light, the lines of her face etched almost blue in the severity of its glow. She’d gotten a haircut recently, and her straight, neat hair was clipped even closer and more neatly than usual around her ears. I found myself staring at her blue-striped blouse, which was made from a slightly sheer fabric that showed the contours of her bra. The thought of her and David together while my father was alive kept flashing in my brain, unwanted and too loud, like commercials on TV. It was one thing for her to have taken up with a married man out of her widowed grief and his impossible home situation; it was quite another for it to have started years ago, in the past, when there weren’t such excuses. I couldn’t be generous about it; I could hardly even allow the thought of it into my mind.
“You should be ashamed,” my mother said.
“Ha!” I said, sounding weirdly like Daphne Michaelson. After this I started to choke and had to take a drink from the sink. I felt dizzy, too, all of a sudden, and kept clutching the sink after I was done drinking.
“That poor woman hasn’t had an episode in years,” my mother went on. She was standing so close to me that I could smell the clean, slightly medicinal scent of her lotion or deodorant.
My stomach churned. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten, or what it was. “I don’t feel good,” I said.
“Nor should you,” my mother said primly. “David told me you’ve been harassing her. She’s not a well woman, Lynnie. You can’t just treat people any old way you like and not expect there to be consequences.”
I stared at her. The fluorescent lights seemed to buzz and twitch, veering from white to blue to white again, the tiles swimming on the floor. I lifted my hand from the sink and then, still dizzy, put it back again. “Any old way?” I said. “What about you, Mom? How do you treat Daphne Michaelson? What are you, her best friend?”
My mother shook her head. She was prepared for this, I could tell. “Don’t start with that,” she said. “You’re an adult. Not a child.”
“I don’t feel good,” I said again.
She went into a stall and closed the door. I could hear her pee, then the sharp quick sound of her pulling down the toilet paper. The whole time I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering if I was going to throw up.
“You live in a dream world,” my mother said from the stall. “You worshipped your father, I always knew that. And you thought everything at our house was perfect. So I never wanted to disillusion you. But Arthur, you know, was—”
“Mom,” I said. I went into the cubicle next to hers, closed the door, and threw up, my knees on the cold tile floor. It was a sour, nasty mash that held the lingering aroma of gin. I felt simultaneously hot and cold, disgusted and relieved. Small bright lights of many colors popped and sparkled at the edge of my vision. I wanted very much to lie down on the cold tile and take a nap.
“Are you finished?”
“I don’t know.” I reached up and flushed the toilet.
“What’s wrong? Do you have the flu? Should I take you to the ER?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. My stomach was still in restless motion, but it seemed to be slowing down. I could see her navy-blue flats under the stall door; they walked to the sink and came back, and she held a damp paper towel below the door. I took it and wiped my face and blew my nose. I contemplated standing up, then thought better of it.
“I never worshipped him,” I said, although it occurred to me, as I said it, that I had. And all my memories of being ashamed of him or angry at him were lame attempts to disguise this inevitable truth. I’d always accused Wylie of trying to be just like my father, but in the stall, looking down at my bare legs, I felt that everything I’d ever done — including leaving home and studying art history, a field as far away from physics as you could get — was meant to defy or provoke him, to overcome, in any way I could, the limits of his attention.
“And I didn’t think everything was perfect,” I said, quieter now. The flats waited, silently. “I just never thought it was that bad.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” my mother said, and heaved a great sigh. “It was somewhere in between.”
I felt another wave of nausea tumble through my stomach like clothes in a dryer, and didn’t say anything. The flats left the room.
When I went to her office fifteen minutes later, she was gone. Francie said she’d left to run some errands, but I suspected she was over at the Michaelsons’, helping David and his sons deal with Daphne — a scene I couldn’t exactly picture, and didn’t want to, either.
Back at her condo, I let myself in, and slept through the bright hours of the day.
I woke up in the afternoon, ravenous and weak. I ate half a pint of ice cream, took a shower, then finished the other half. I wondered where Wylie et al. had gone, and why I always had to track them down like the younger child wanting to tag along and play. They were probably tunneling beneath the city, planning to suck all of Albuquerque into the lava flows or something. I felt light-headed and strangely cheerful. It seemed like vomiting in the bathroom in front of my mother had done me a world of good.
An uncharacteristic cloud had settled over the sky, turning the light in the condo to silver. It made me miss New York, its grayness and rain and subways, and Michael, and even the pain of losing him. A person can get nostalgic for anything, as long as it’s in the past. I wandered around the house looking at pictures. There was my parents’ wedding picture, Chicago, 1974: my mother smiling widely between dark red lips, my father looking dazed, as if stunned by his own good fortune. But maybe he was only stunned. There were hardly any other pictures of him around, and most were of Wylie and me. In every recent picture, I noticed, we had the same smile, even, practiced, and not at all genuine, as if really smiling were a childish habit we’d put away forever.
I stared at The Wilderness Kiss for a while, its brilliant dark colors, the woman and man locked in a kind of combat with the desert looming behind them. My mother was right; I’d never thought about the reality of my parents’ marriage, what violence or heartbreak was contained in it, and with what consequences. Why was having a child — the son pictured in The Ball and Chain—so painful to Eva that it drove her insane? Studying the man in the picture, the one cradling his own mother, I saw in his thin, dark countenance a resemblance to both Wylie and Lincoln Kent, the yoga instructor.
As I gazed at the paintings, I pictured my father with Eva on those late nights when I’d thought he was at the lab, and then bringing her work home to my mother in an act of almost brutal defiance. He must have known about her and David. He knew, and Eva was his revenge. Rose red, romantic red, red in the afternoon. But he wouldn’t leave my mother for her, even after she became pregnant, because of me and Wylie. And Eva went crazy, crazy enough to set fires and destroy her own work, just as crazy as Daphne Michaelson, alone in her house while her husband and my mother watched television together.