Young Wives. Olivia Goldsmith

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      Angie shook her head. She hadn’t eaten anything real in days, but if she did it wouldn’t be something as disgusting as that. All at once she felt very sorry for herself. Didn’t her mother even remember that she hated sardines? She’d always hated them, since she was little. Her mother and father had been such an odd mix: her mother was so domestic but not a physical person, while her father craved being taken care of. They’d battled over who should take care of whom for almost twenty years. Meanwhile, who’d taken care of her?

      Suddenly Angie felt as if she were very, very young. Five years old, or maybe four. And lost, like the time she’d been lost at the zoo and had wandered into the park only to realize she couldn’t find her way home. At the time, she’d decided she’d just sit down on a rock and wait until she grew up, because she knew she couldn’t make a home for herself until she was older. When her mother had found her, she hadn’t cried. She’d just felt very, very lucky.

      Her luck, though, had changed. If she had sat on the rock all those years until she was grown up, the way she was today, she still wouldn’t be able to make a home for herself. She thought of all the care and attention she’d poured into the apartment in Marblehead. Picking out the sheer curtains, buying the sofa, and carefully stacking their wedding china—it had all been exciting but exhausting. She couldn’t do it again.

      She looked around her. Was this what she was doomed to, then? A room like a warehouse with nothing but a few cans in the larder? Her mother had once run a household and served warm nourishing dinners and put starched linen pillow cases on all the beds. Angie remembered the comfort of that. What had happened? Was her mother falling apart, Angie wondered? She seemed cheerful, though distracted, and now concerned for Angie. Was this the way every woman lived when they weren’t living for somebody else? Or was her mother in more pain than she was showing? The break-up with Laura could not have been easy for her.

      Whatever it was, however her mother felt, it was clear to Angie that there was no place for her here. Angie might as well go out and find a rock to sit on.

      With that knowledge, all of her loss seemed to tumble in on her. She began to cry and then not to cry, but to sob. Her shoulders began to heave in spasmodic jerks and the noise she was making was almost obscene.

      Natalie’s arms were around her in a moment. “Oh, baby. Oh, sweetheart,” Natalie said, stroking Angie’s greasy hair lovingly. “Oh, my little baby. You loved him that much? You loved that idiot so much? Mourn as long as you have to. But I think it couldn’t hurt you to start doing something for yourself. You definitely need your hair touched up. You want me to ask my guy to do it?”

      “Mom, my problems won’t be solved by highlights.”

      “No, but it’s a start.” Natalie took a deep breath. “You never really liked that job up in Needham. You just took it to be close to Reid.”

      Angie couldn’t remember now why she had taken the job, but she knew she was lucky to get it. It hadn’t been easy to get the month’s leave of absence, either. But Angie wasn’t ready to go back or to quit. She put her head down and hunched her shoulders, knowing what was coming.

      “Why don’t you give up those rich people’s wills and trust funds?” her mother asked her. “Why don’t you join our practice?”

      Angie looked up from the Formica tabletop and stared at her mother. Natalie ran a women’s legal services clinic where the clientele was primarily women so down and out, so pathetic, that they didn’t have a few thousand to ante up to an attorney.

      “I can’t work there,” Angie said, frightened of both the idea and her snobby repulsion. Her mother’s practice served mostly poor or embattled women coping with everything from a disastrous divorce to immigration problems to harassment. Angie wasn’t ready to spend her time helping other depressed women. She was too depressed herself. “I’m not registered with the bar here.”

      “That doesn’t mean you can’t drink I can swear you in until you get the bar,” Natalie said, and with a flourish brought a bottle of burgundy over to the table. She poured herself a glass—a jelly glass with blue dinosaurs on it—and then one for Angie. “Listen to me,” Natalie said, leaning forward and holding her glass of wine. “What the hell is the point of going back to the scene of the crime? What’s the point in going back to a selfish life where you’re thinking of nothing but your own pleasure—or your own pain? Believe me, one is worse than the other. Join us. We’ll get you through the bar in no time and we have a hundred women with problems so pressing, they’ll make your adventure with Reid look like a day at the circus. Did I tell you about the eighty-two-year-old woman evicted from—”

      “Mom, I don’t want to hear about her pain,” Angie interrupted, and took a swig of her wine. “I have my own.” This wasn’t what she had craved, what she had expected and needed. She wanted her mother to fix her old life for her, not offer her a new one … a boring, awful new one with a house like a garage and a job worse than social work.

      “You think I don’t understand?” Natalie asked, raising her brows. “Of course I understand. All you can do is think of him. How maybe it didn’t happen, how you are looking for excuses, or, if there is no excuse, how maybe it was your fault and then you can forgive him anyway. How just because it happened once before, doesn’t mean it’ll happen again. Yup, I know what you’re thinking. But those are all the desperate configurations of a rat trapped in a maze, looking for the little bar to press to get the cocaine that the scientist administers at the end of every test. You’re obsessed with your future former husband because you’re still hoping somehow you can get that hit of affection. That hit of sex.”

      Angie turned her head away. Her mother might be accurate, but accuracy didn’t feel like what she needed right now. Natalie leaned across the table, trying to get closer, but Angie kept her face averted. Natalie’s voice softened. “You feel like without it you can’t go on, that you’re trapped. But I’m here to tell you that being ‘in love’ is only an addiction. It keeps delusions going. It separates you from your real life, from real love, which you can feel for a friend, God, an animal, even a man. ‘In love’ sets you up to worship Prince Reid, some false idol you’ve erected within your temple. You were only with him for a year, Angie. You’re young—only twenty-eight. Oh, there can be a man, later, if you want one. A good man, one who could be there for you.” Natalie’s voice toughened up then. “One who doesn’t look like Brad Pitt in any way.”

      Angie stood up and reached for her purse. Somehow she felt more depressed but less hysterical then she’d been. Her mother hugged her. “You look beat,” Natalie said, patting her on the shoulder. She hugged her again and Angie, too weak to hug back, let herself melt against her mother. That was what she wanted: to melt, to disappear, to lose herself forever.

      “Do you want to sleep over?” Natalie asked. “I can unfold a cot I use when we get full at the crisis center.”

      Angie restrained herself from shivering. The idea of sleeping on a bed of misery here in this warehouse made her father’s sofa and the plaster infinity signs overhead seem almost heavenly. “No,” Angie said. “I’m just fine.”

      “Yeah,” her mother said. “You’re fine and I’m skinny.”

      Angie managed to give her mother a watery smile before she shrugged into her coat and left.

11

       In which dinner and an ultimatum are both served СКАЧАТЬ