We Are Water. Wally Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ to speak up immediately, let them know. I never called Viveca on what she’d said, though. It was weeks after the fact, and she probably wouldn’t have even remembered making the comment. And anyway, Viveca’s never corrected my grammar, either. She probably just cringes in silence whenever I make a mistake. Maybe that was what Orion did all those years, too … That day when Ariane jumped to my defense after Marissa embarrassed me, I invited my A+ daughter to let me know whenever I said something wrong. I knew she’d be gentle about it. Clue me in privately. But Ariane never took me up on it. She was not only the best student of my three, but the kindest, too—more compassionate than either her twin brother or her little sister. She has her father’s temperament, his need to help others. Which is probably why she’s a soup kitchen manager, not a lawyer. She and her father have always been close. Ariane is Daddy’s girl. When I told her that morning that we were getting a divorce, she was immediately defensive on Orion’s behalf, and that was before I told her the reason why I was divorcing him. My god, when I did tell her, she was furious with me. But she came around, started speaking to me again soon enough. My mother is leaving my father because she’s in love with a woman, she must have decided. It is what it is …

      When I called Ari yesterday to let her know I wanted to pay for her flight in from California for the wedding, she said, “No, no, Mama. You don’t have to do that.” But I want to. I appreciate her making the effort. San Francisco to Boston: how much would that cost? Four hundred dollars? Five hundred? She can’t afford that. Not on whatever she makes managing that food bank out there. Her annual income is probably less than what Marissa makes on the residuals from that insurance commercial she’s in. That thing runs so often: Marissa as a newlywed shopping with her “husband” for insurance from that blissed-out saleswoman with the headband and the big hair. How much must that actress make? She’s on TV all the time, on the radio, in pop-up ads on the Internet. She always acts so hyped-up about the insurance she’s selling, it’s as if she’s taken amphetamines or something. I’m just going to write Ariane a check and send it to her, no matter how much she protests.

      I offered to pay for Andrew’s and his fiancée’s flights up from Texas, too, but he says he doubts they’ll come. Can’t spare the time. It bothered me that he said it with such disdain. I told him I was looking forward to meeting his bride-to-be but that I understood, of course. Still, I got the message: he doesn’t approve of my marrying Viveca. I’m just not sure if he’s resentful on behalf of his father, his gender, or his newfound religious conservatism.

      Of my three kids, Andrew was the least likely, I would have figured, to embrace evangelical Christianity. On the contrary, he was always the one most likely to break the rules if not the Commandments—the only one of the three his father and I ever had to sit in court with. The marijuana arrest, the shoplifting arrest, the time he and his high school pals got drunk and spray-painted those school buses. And then, at the beginning of his senior year, those hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers, and it changed him. I can still see him, glued to the TV on that awful day, tears running down his face. When he started in about how he wanted to be part of America’s response, it had frightened me.

      I begged Andrew not to go into the military. Said all the wrong things. Argued that all those stupid Rambo movies he had grown up watching were all just macho Hollywood bullshit. But Orion was wonderful. He calmed me down, reminded me that the last thing we should do was make our son defensive. He was eighteen, after all; he didn’t need our permission to enlist. Then Orion had gone online. Had gone downtown and talked to that recruiter. Armed with the information he had gathered, he had approached Andrew with that measured, logical way of his. Explained to him that if he went to college, got his degree, and still wanted to serve, he could enter as a second lieutenant and be eligible for Officer Candidate School. And so Andrew had gone off to school instead of off to war … It was that goddamned organic chemistry class he was taking junior year in college that had wrecked everything. Filled him with self-doubt every time he flunked a quiz. That, and the fact that the girl he’d been dating since his freshman year had broken up with him. He hadn’t even told us he’d withdrawn from school and enlisted until two weeks before he was due to report for basic training. Well, at least he finished up his degree after he enlisted. Took care of that piece of unfinished business. …

      Now he’s found his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And my guess is that the god he’s pledged himself to frowns upon gay marriage. When Ariane sent me the link to the newspaper article about Andrew’s engagement, it became obvious, more or less. Mr. and Mrs. Branch Commerford of Waco are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Casey-Lee, to Mr. Andrew Oh, son of Dr. and Mrs. Orion Oh of Three Rivers, Connecticut. Orion’s and my divorce was finalized almost a year ago, and I haven’t lived in Three Rivers for the last four. Either Andrew is in denial or he’s lying to his in-laws and his bride-to-be. She’s a pretty little thing, a petite blonde. Casey-Lee: it’s a beauty contestant name. Somewhere along the way, I read or heard that Texas has had more Miss Americas than any other state. And those parents’ names—Branch and Erlene. Erlene: I’d bet any amount of money that she’s got big hair. There’s a brother that Marissa says everyone calls Little Branch. Big Branch and Little Branch: good god. Well, if Andrew needs to hide the fact that I’m marrying Viveca, I guess I can be discreet about it. But when they get married, I’m not about to fly down there and pretend that his father and I are still Mr. and Mrs. If I’m even invited to the wedding, that is. Maybe I’ll be expected to stay away, stay under wraps. What was that book they had us read in high school—the one where the crazy wife was locked upstairs in the attic? …

      It’s ironic, really, that my son now seems to have an aversion to lesbians. He sure was curious about them when he was in high school. I remember that time when, after I’d told him a hundred times to go upstairs and clean his pigsty of a bedroom and heard “I will, Mom … I’m gonna” that I finally gave up. Decided to go up there and do the job myself. And I did—with a vengeance. Filled up three big garbage bags with crap that I was going to throw out, whether he liked it or not. I was a woman on a mission. And when I went to flip his mattress, I discovered his stash of dirty magazines and all those gym socks that never seemed to make it into the hamper, most of them stiff with I-knew-what … I didn’t much mind the Playboys and Penthouses. Half the teenage boys in America had those hidden away, I figured. But one of his socks was stuck to the cover of a magazine called Girl on Girl. I’d stood there, flipping through it—looking at all those hideous pictures of women having sex with cucumbers and other women wearing strap-on dildos. Fake sex, it was obvious to me, although it probably wasn’t to Andrew. They all had freakishly big breasts, and one of them, I remember, had areolas as big as the rubber jar opener down in our kitchen drawer. They all looked drugged. In the photo that infuriated me the most, two women were wearing nothing but cowboy hats and holsters cinched around their hips, and one was inserting the barrel of a gun into the other’s vagina. I flipped when I saw that one! Marched downstairs and out to the garage where Andrew was fiddling with the gears of his ten-speed. “Where did this come from?” I demanded, and when he saw what I was holding in my hand, even his ears turned red. He told me a kid in his homeroom had shoved it in his backpack without him knowing it. “Baloney!” I said. “You listen to me, young man. And look me in the eye, too.” I waited until he did. “Whoever took these pictures, and whoever publishes this garbage, is committing violence against women. You got that? And whoever’s looking at it is guilty, too. You have two sisters, Andrew. This junk is an assault on them and me and every other woman, including the ones in this picture.” He mumbled something that I didn’t catch. “What? I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”

      “I said they posed for them, didn’t they?”

      “Yes, they did. Probably in exchange for drugs. Or because they’d get beaten up by their pimps if they didn’t. This is violent male fantasy, Andrew. Do you think women want to have guns stuck up inside of them?”

      “Okay,” he said. “You made your point.”

      But I was just getting started. I waved СКАЧАТЬ