A Likely Story

Sunday, May 8th

Mother’s day!!!!!

I am in here hiding from everybody. As the sun moves to the horizon and our ship sinks slowly in the west, we bid farewell to the friendly huts and rude natives of... of home, I guess.

This weekend began to unravel on Friday, when I stayed so long at Vickie’s place that I had to tear straight home by cab in order to be here by a plausible hour — the story was that I had met with my editor in her office, naturally, not in her bed, and there’s a limit to how late I can return from somebody’s office — and Ginger was already home from her office when I got there. She kissed me hello, then wrinkled up her nose and said, “What’s that smell?”

Oh, my God. What musk, what rutting scent of lust, what steamy reminder of passion still lurked on my flesh? Trying desperately not to look guilty, I said, “Smell? What smell?”

She sniffed. She frowned. She sniffed again. She gave me a very skeptical look. “Soap,” she said.

“Oh!” My mind fishtailed wildly. I smelled my hands, which were trembling. “It must be that damn stuff in the men’s room,” I said. “You know, that pink liquid they give you? I pressed on the thing, and it squirted all over the place. You can still smell it, huh?”

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes were very slightly narrowed, but frown lines of indecision were visible on her brow.

“I’ll go wash it off,” I said, and made it away from those scanning eyes as rapidly (but casually) as I could.

Ginger said no more about it, though during dinner she did say, “We ought to invite this new editor of yours to dinner sometime. I really ought to meet her.”

Everything in life happens because something else happened before it. In this case, soap had led directly to a dinner invitation. Pretending I didn’t see the connection, I said, “That’s a good idea. She’s very important to us, we ought to cultivate her.” Ooh; was that too ambiguous?

Maybe not. Ginger nodded, eyes completely unnarrowed, and said, “Is she married?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Boyfriend, then. Or girlfriend?”

“Gee,” I said. “I have no idea.”

“Who should we have for a third couple?”

We chatted about that. 1 wondered if Ginger’s mind was running as rapidly behind her idle chatter as mine was behind mine. After a while, Gretchen — we eat with the children — changed the subject (my heart warmed to her) by saying, “I did a painting for Jennifer’s birthday.”

The next day — yesterday, now — was to be (has now been) Jennifer’s twelfth birthday. Gretchen continues to be an inextinguishable visual artist, though her Christmas drawings for my book have at last dribbled away to nothing. (I was thinking for a while of sending her to Isaac Asimov.) It was now my job to ask to see this painting and to be supportive, so I did and was.

It was pretty good, actually, within its limitations. Jennifer’s birthday being in May, and that being traditionally and famously the month of flowers, Gretchen had done, on a twelve-by-sixteen sketchpad sheet, a watercolor of a field ablaze with flowers. From across the room it looks almost like a later Jackson Pollock drip painting, but up close it is all these flowers, lovingly copied from books and magazines and calendars, crowded in great colorful profusion over the entire sheet of paper.

I did not say it looked like a January-sale pillowcase from Macy’s. I told Gretchen it was beautiful, and that I was sure Jennifer would love it, and we all admired it for a while. I was very, very good, and much later in bed Ginger said, “Gretchen knows you don’t like her.”

I said, naturally, “What?”

“If you could see the way you look when you talk to her.”

“That’s ridiculous. I told her how great the picture was.”

“She could tell what you really thought. We all could tell. Gretchen happens to be my daughter, you know.”

“I’m well aware of that.”

“And what’s that tone of voice supposed to mean?”

“Ginger, I didn’t come to bed to fight.”

Nevertheless, we fought. I have nothing against Gretchen, but somehow that isn’t enough for Ginger. I’m not sure, on the subject of Gretchen, what would be enough for Ginger. The argument didn’t get anywhere simply because there was nowhere for it to go, but on the other hand it showed no sign of ending, so after a while I got up and sat in the living room and sulked. Ginger didn’t follow me, either to make up or continue the fight, and when I went back to the bedroom — either to make up or continue the fight — she was asleep, so that was that.

Then came yesterday, Jennifer’s birthday. I know as well as Ginger, as well as anybody, that this heavy nuclear family schtick of Mary’s is all a plot to get me back — even though it’s exactly the same way she acted when we were together, which helped to send me away in the first place — but I’ve nevertheless really got to be present for my daughter’s birthday, whether it works in with my ex-wife’s scheming or not. But try to use logic in these things; go ahead.

It was hard to tell whether Ginger’s morning coolness was a carryover from the bedtime argument or a statement of attitude about the current day’s program; whichever it was, I pretended to see nothing wrong, got through the morning with no harsh words from anybody, and at eleven-thirty Joshua and Gretchen and I took the subway downtown for Jennifer’s birthday lunch.

Complicated families lead to complicated arrangements. Ginger’s kids and I arrived at noon for a buffet party lunch to which about a dozen of Jennifer’s female friends had also been invited. At two that crowd left, and Mary and I had the four kids — ours and Ginger’s — for an hour, during which the boys went off to Bryan’s room to play and Mary discussed Gretchen’s painting with her in a very good and supportive way, asking the names of individual flowers, complimenting the kid on so accurately getting the comparative sizes of all the different ones, and telling her she should title the picture “Heavenly Field,” because it’s so much better than real-world fields. Flowers from different parts of the world and flowers that bloom at different seasons all blossom together in this picture: “Like a chorus of flower angels,” Mary said at one point. She didn’t overpraise, but she made her interest so clear that the birthday girl, Jennifer, who had at first been rather obviously indifferent to the present, eventually said she would put it on the wall in her room. Gretchen, naturally, basked in all this attention, grinning from ear to ear and swinging her feet back and forth under her chair, as though it were her birthday.

At three Lance arrived to take his two away for the rest of the weekend, and Mary and Jennifer and Bryan and I settled around the kitchen table to play the boardgame version of Uno — one of my presents to the birthday girl — until five-thirty, when I left to walk down to the Village, meeting Ginger in front of the Waverly, where we saw the six o’clock showing of the movie, followed by dinner in a very pleasant neighborhood restaurant called the Paris Commune, over on Bleecker Street. I frequently feel I’m in a commune myself, with this olio of parents and children all swimming around in the same stew, but Ginger and I were out of the stew for once last night, and it was one of the best evenings in memory: no edginess, no complication, no defensiveness, no guilt.

Then came today. Goddam Mother’s Day! A fake, a palpable fake, nothing real in it at all. Nothing even sentimental, if you look at it with a cold clear eye. It’s the cynical invention of greeting card manufacturers and candy-makers, that’s all it is, a lot of Republican bastards making a dollar off everybody’s guilt trips.

Mother’s Day was started in 1907, an early example of economic pump-priming, one of the desperate ploys to push consumer spending during the Panic of that year (which was the same year, by the way, that immigration into this country was first legally restricted — so much for sentiment). In that same year, proving it was really the moment to work motherhood for all the profit it contained, Maxim Gorky published his proletarian novel, titled with modest simplicity Mother, in which a mother is tricked by the Czar’s secret police into betraying her son, a revolutionary, during the failed 1905 rebellion in Russia. How’s that for shamelessness? (Not on the part of the secret police; on the part of the writer.)

Mother’s Day. They oughta put back the other two syllables.

There was no way, of course, that Mary could let Mothers Day go by without making use of it in this indefatigable campaign of hers; the kids required my presence to help them honor their origin. Sure they did.

As for Ginger, my being dragged away to Mary’s place two days in a row would have made her testy all by itself; the fact that her own kids were away with Lance and there was nobody around to honor her as a mother put her right completely round the bend. Oh, I can’t tell you.

In fact, I won’t tell you. I behaved at least as badly as anybody else. I am in here hiding from everybody, and in my considered opinion mothers shouldn’t be honored, they should be shot on sight.