The piece then described Claudia's near miss at being caught, how, when she heard the crunch of the gravel that meant her parents were pulling into the driveway, she fled to her room and felt her heart knock in her chest, and she described how, when her mother opened the door to announce that she was home, Claudia saw her differently, though not angrily. I felt no malice toward her. I felt no need to forgive. She had put into words a truth she needed to move outside of herself, in what she believed was a secretive way. Of course it was not secretive, even before I found the diary. Of course it was not. See a four-year-old standing before a mother who is tying a bow at the back of a dress full of ruffles and ribbons. See the disappointment in the mother's face when she turns her daughter around. The child sees it. But she was my only mother. I stayed in my room, and when she called me for dinner, I came. When she asked if it was good, I said yes, because it was. We ate, each of us stabbing and stabbing and stabbing at our plates.
Hector, in a return to form, wrote about his first audition for television; and Billy talked about the one and only time he jumped out of an airplane. Donetta wrote about donating a kidney, a piece that both moved and astonished everyone. “You really gave away one of your kidneys to a stranger?” Billy asked.
Donetta shrugged. “You want to see my scar?”
“Yeah,” Billy said, and then Donetta, smiling widely, said that would be hard, since what she wrote was fiction. She looked at Helen shyly then, and asked if it was all right that she'd brought fiction.
Ella, misunderstanding or choosing to ignore the assignment, wrote about the first time she understood that hamburgers were from cows. She wrote, I looked at what was in my hand. It was a hamburger like before and all the catsup and mustard and pickles. But underneath was the animal in the field with brown eyes that never did a thing wrong and they did not get to choose anything about their life. And they never got mad but if they wanted to they could smash a big man right up against the side of a barn and that's it, Charlie, lights out. But they only stood in green grass in spring with little babies that loved them and they loved their babies too, you could tell from how gentle they looked down and even if they gave them a little poke it was gentle. And the babies how they nursed with their little tails flicking, which is their happiness. And in winter just standing there with no complaints even on the coldest days with steam and snot coming out their noses. Well all of a sudden I threw the hamburger away in the trash but it was too late for that cow. The moral of this story is every day is a surprise.
Well. Truer words were never spoken. Jeff wrote a three-page essay about meeting the woman he feels destined to be with. It was a setup, a blind date of sorts; he met her at her mother's house, where he had been invited for dinner, and although he was instantly attracted to her, she seemed to despise him. It was a short evening, he said wryly, but later that night, as he sat waiting for the el, he saw the woman come onto the platform and risked speaking to her one more time. Helen sat frozen in place, understanding right away who that woman was.
After class, Jeff stood fussing with papers and his backpack until the others left; then he came up to Helen and said, “So.”
“So!” she said.
“I'm kind of scared to tell you this. Actually, I'm really scared to tell you this. But I'm going with her to California.”
“You are?”
“She's going to talk to you about it; she's just not ready yet. But I told her I wanted to let you know today, and she said that was my prerogative.”
Helen had no idea what to say. She had no idea what she even felt. Too much of too much, that's what she felt.
“I love your daughter, Ms. Ames. I am so in love with her.”
Then she smiled, and Jeff did, too.
“I know very few people believe in love at first sight,” he said. “But I swear, for me it was love at first sight.”
“I believe in love at first sight,” she said.
“You and your husband?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, Tessa has told me a lot about you guys.”
Helen studied him, wondering what all Tessa had chosen to share. Then she said, “Don't take this the wrong way, okay? But I'm really glad this class is over!”
He laughed. “I'll see you at the reading.”
“Is Tessa coming?” she asked, just as he was going out the door.
He turned around. “She is.”
“Well, good, that's good.” A moment, and then Helen said, “Take care of her, okay?” It came to her, saying this, that part of her overdependence on Tessa after Dan died was bound up with her anxiety about being the only parent of an only child. She saw that she had been more worried about Tessa's inability to form a serious relationship than she had admitted, even to herself. She was miffed that Tessa hadn't said anything, but mostly she was vastly relieved.
“We'll take good care of each other,” Jeff said. “We already are. It's kind of great.”
Helen gathers her things, and turns the light out. In the darkness, she stands thinking. She told Midge once that she became a writer because she wanted to make a family of the world. She hadn't quite envisioned it happening this way, but here it is.
She thinks of Tessa in her apartment the other night, the clear-eyed earnestness with which she spoke. Then she thinks of her holding on to her mother's hand one cold afternoon when Tessa was three years old, and they were taking a walk to the library. They were pushing Tessa's yellow umbrella stroller, loaded up with books, past snow piles at the side of the road that had been dirtied with sand by the plows. Tessa said, “Doesn't it look like crumb cake?” and that was exactly what it looked like, and suddenly the sight of that snow did not make Helen winter-weary but instead delighted her.
She thinks of the time Tessa was six and so ill with a violent flu she would not eat for days, and the pediatrician who called to check on her said that if she didn't eat today, he was going to have to hospitalize her. Helen sat at the bed beside her feverish daughter and held up a spoonful of red Jell-O and told Tessa that her bear, Snugs, had come in the middle of the night to speak to Helen, and he had said he felt really bad that Tessa wouldn't eat and in fact had had bad dreams on account of it, and he really hoped Tessa would eat some Jell-O so he wouldn't have bad dreams like that again tonight, they were dreams of those flying monkeys that Tessa also once feared. Tessa looked closely into the face of the bear lying next to her and then picked him up and put him in her lap. And then she ate some Jell-O, one shuddering bite and then another and one more, and Helen thought, I will never know such gladness and relief again. But of course she did, because that's what children are capable of: creating freight train feelings in their parents with a bite of Jell-O, with a single glance, with a sigh that they make in sleep. Helen stands in the darkened classroom and sees Tessa stirring mud puddles with a branch of blooming forsythia, pointing to a setting sun and saying, “The sky's coming down.” She sees her posing in her first high school dance dress, her braces glinting, her corsage wildly off-kilter.
Helen has a strong sense that Tessa and Jeff are so right for each other that they will end up marrying; and however prematurely, she regrets for Dan that he will miss the wedding. She knows that a father's transferring his daughter to her husband is meant to be symbolic, but for Helen, to whom the task will fall, it now seems quite literal. I give her to your care.
On a few occasions in her life, Helen has felt deep happiness as a kind of pain. The day she married Dan. The day Tessa was born. Now comes another such time. She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.
thirty-two
YAWNING, HELEN LIES IN BED READING THE LAST PAGE OF MARGOT Langley's manuscript. When she got home from clas
s, she'd found it on her porch with a note from Saundra saying, Please? Helen started to throw the thing out, but then, right after dinner, decided she'd just read a page or two—she was curious. After that, she'd convert the manuscript into scrap paper; she's low on scrap paper. But the book is really good. It's more than that. It's that rarest of things: a literary novel that is entirely accessible. Its style is elegant and subtle, its impact profound. She became tearful reading certain parts; she laughed aloud at others.
The story concerns a woman who immigrated to the United States in her twenties, and follows her life, her daughter's, and then her granddaughter's. The details—of nineteenth-century New York City cobblestone streets, washed and glistening in the morning sun, contrasted with the hectic energy of those streets today; the clothing, all those swishing skirts and Gibson girl blouses giving way to blue jeans and stilettos; the Sunday dinners moving from heavy, five-course meals served on crocheted tablecloths to take-out sushi eaten directly from the carton; the ache of homesickness combined with the heady hope for a new life in a new country, the clashing of values and beliefs over the years, the way that an understanding of ancestors can make for a simultaneous peace and charged expansion within oneself. This book deserves every bit of help she can give it. The question is whether she should give it help. She is still in possession of the letter Margot wrote to her, and she thinks for a moment about going to get it. But what would be the point? She remembers what it said about her own novels: insipid. Besides, what needs to be decided here should be outside of what was in that letter. Hadn't she just recently, on the occasion of her disastrous speaking engagement, told a roomful of people that it was necessary to separate the author's work from the person? Should she not look at Margot's book in that way, as a work of art separate from the creator? And as someone who mourns so acutely the decline of reading, shouldn't she do everything she can to support good literature as a way to draw people back into this most worthy of pastimes?
She tosses a couple of pillows aside, turns out the light, and lies down. Gradually, the objects in the room come into focus: the bureau with her many bottles of perfume, the chair in the corner, a stack of books beside it, the closet door, cracked open. She'll have to get up and shut it; she is fifty-nine years old and still afraid of an open closet door at night. Just as she still leaps into bed from a fair distance away, lest the monster who lives under the bed reach out and grab her ankles. She did this sometimes even when Dan was alive; it was almost a reflex. He laughed at it, and she told him at least her fantasy wasn't as bad as Midge's. Midge used to fear that a man with a knife lived under her bed, and he might at any moment decide to push his long blade slowly upward. Of course, Midge no longer lay rigid, listening for any sound of movement. She had banished her fear at about age nine. Helen's has persisted a bit beyond that point.
Ah, well. Add it to the list. Assume financial responsibility. Learn home mechanics. Overcome night fears. Acquire sense of direction. Recognize daughter as a grown-up. Grow up herself.
Yesterday afternoon, in what Helen had described to Midge as The Miracle in the Deli Department of Jewel, Tessa had finally called her mother's cell phone to tell her about Jeff, and there was nothing girlish about her declaration of her feelings for him. The childish one had been Helen, who had burst into tears and then emphatically denied that she was crying.
Helen turns on the light, picks up the last page of Margot's manuscript. Reading those last few paragraphs again, she is even more convinced of its worth. Damnit. Maybe the title will be terrible, and she can rejoice in that.
She'll give it an endorsement, an enthusiastic one. So the woman doesn't like her writing. Can't Helen rise above her own hurt feelings to help promote a book worth reading? Maybe if more books of this quality are published, the tide will turn: book sales will rise, bookstores will not founder and close; the important role of books in people's lives will be recognized and embraced.
She knows that some people, Midge, for example, would tell her not to offer any help at all. They would suggest that she was crossing some boundary she shouldn't cross and was compromising her personal integrity. They would say that if Margot Langley held her in such contempt—and took the trouble to write her a letter saying so!—she was undeserving of Helen's attention, much less praise. And a case can certainly be made for that point of view; one should defend oneself, care for oneself. That's true. One should not kiss the hand that slaps one's face. Should one. Maybe she won't help after all. The woman will get other blurbs. Anyone who reads this and has the slightest appreciation for literature will help. Surely that is so. And yet she wonders even as she thinks this if it is true. The literary world is full of jealousy, full of people afraid that if someone gets a piece of the literary pie, they will have to give up their own.
She turns out the light again, lies on her side, and closes her eyes. She thinks about a report she heard on the radio about a family whose home in Africa was destroyed by their neighbors. The interviewer asked one of the family members if he thought he could ever move back there. He said, “I don't know,” with enormous sadness. And Helen thought, But he will go back. Because it is his home.
What she decides now is not so far from that. She will craft the best blurb she can for Margot's book. She will try to help an author who detests her, because of the home she wants to build inside herself, because of how she wants to live. In the end, to forgive, to tell the truth, to honor what is worthy of admiration, hurts less than the alternative. And there is this: if she offers words of praise to Margot, it will free her from the stinging criticism Margot offered her. Odd to think it works that way, but for Helen, it does. She does not regret it now, nor has she ever.
thirty-three
WHERE IS KATE DEMIAN? HELEN WONDERS. SHE LOOKS CAREFULLY around the auditorium again. Maureen Thomas and her assistant are in the front row, seated with Nancy and the students who will be reading. Helen and Tessa are seated in the back. At the reception that took place earlier, Maureen told her that she'd heard there was a lot of talent in the two groups this year, and she'd been looking at Margot Langley when she said this. Helen regarded her, too, the lanky, redheaded woman who, earlier, had perfunctorily thanked Helen for her endorsement. There was nothing in her manner to suggest she remembered sending Helen the letter. “Did Nancy mention a student named Claudia Evans to you?” Helen asked the agent, and Maureen widened her eyes as she bit into a cookie. “Awfully dark, huh?” she said, delicately removing a crumb from the corner of her mouth. Kate Demian was not at the reception due to a late flight, but had reportedly landed and was on her way to the Harold Washington Library, where it was believed she would be in plenty of time for the reading.
But now Helen does not see her, and her disappointment is acute. From all she knows about Kate, she would be Claudia's ideal editor. Among the books she has edited are—
“Mom!” Tessa says.
Helen looks at her. “What?”
“Wake up !”
A board member has come to the stage and begun a rather lengthy introduction to the friends and family and newspaper reporters who have come to hear these readers. There are easily one hundred and fifty in the audience; maybe more. With the exception of those Helen suspects are Billy's friends, the people are dressed up in Sunday finery and their faces are full of pride. The ages range from what appear to be grandparents to a sleeping baby, resting like a potato sack on a man's wide shoulder.
Nancy is introduced, and she steps to the podium and makes opening remarks, then names Helen and Saundra Weller as the teachers this year; they are asked to stand and be applauded.
Then Nancy introduces the first reader: Ella Parsons. Helen and Nancy had agreed that Ella should go first so that she wouldn't have to wait to read; in past years, she had gotten loud backstage in her impatience. Ella marches purposefully toward the microphone, leans in close to it, and says, “This is about one time in my work,” so loudly it appears that every person in the audience jumps. “Whoa!” she
says. “Wait a minute.” She squints out into the audience. “Where's the remote?”
Someone comes from behind the curtain and adjusts the microphone—and Ella, too, moving her away from the microphone—and she starts again to read from her piece about Halloween in the nursing home, how the residents handed out candy to nursery school students, except for Mabel Gruder, who ate hers. Those little kids and the residents, they are on the different ends of the line, but they still have some same things. Like they both like candy and both have to get taken to the bathroom. When you see the little hand reach for candy in the big hand, sometimes it makes me feel like crying.
Helen looks around at the audience. They seem as engaged as she has been every time Ella has read something, and it gives her a rush of pleasure.
When Tessa was seven, she gave her first piano recital. Helen was seated in the front row, and when Tessa came out from backstage in her little pink dress and seated herself on the piano bench and began playing, Helen started laughing uncontrollably. It was nerves, but she couldn't account for the form they took. She shook with laughter, her hand pressed against her mouth, for the entire duration of the piece. Later, she asked Dan if he thought Tessa had noticed and he said no, but that Tessa was the only one who didn't notice. “Whatever made you do that?” he asked, and Helen said she didn't know.