Love Invents Us

The Greatest of These Is Love

I know he’s on the road. I feel him coming. I don’t know when or why or what he’ll expect my house to be. Funny enough to me that it’s my house. That I own a house. Safely in the middle of the middle block, and the only thing that stands out is the wild army of tulip trees in the front yard. I never even thought about making this place interesting. It is comfortable, it is normal; it lies on the lower end of the neighborhood spectrum, true, but in a way that arouses tolerance, not disgust. I am not like the Gilroys, who don’t water, and I am not like the Boenches, who have built a three-car garage and subtly but definitely offend in the other direction.

When he gets here, he’ll try to figure out which house is mine (the letters have fallen off the mailbox), and as he is driving slowly by, he’ll see Max on the lawn, turning cartwheels.

Huddie sits in his car, wondering where to park, and sees a young white boy on the lawn turning cartwheels, and he knows — the hair, something in the face — the boy is Elizabeth’s. And queer. He can see the boy’s queerness from two houses down. Jesus, he thinks, just get him a tutu. Huddie reaches for the bouquet, studying him. Once he’s with Elizabeth, been invited into her house, he’ll have to pretend not to see the narrow, puffed chest and the thin shivery shoulders. Boy life will be a horror for this child, and some man will have to take up for him. A mother will not be enough. You’d have to make him a faggot to reckon with, a queer you’d think twice about bothering, even on a hot, dull evening.

Huddie climbs out of the car slowly, flowers first, wishing he weighed fifty pounds less, feeling like a beached black whale in the eyes of this very white, very thin kid. The boy averts his eyes from Huddie and goes right to the flowers, apparently approving. Huddie would throw them away if the boy hadn’t seen them already; how could he have brought something so obvious, so desperate? He knows enough about wine to have chosen something impressive. One red, one white, maybe two big-bowled glasses. He could have brought her interesting cheeses from local farms, seven different kinds of crackers nestled on damask in one of the big willow baskets he now charges fifty dollars for. These flowers are bleeding away their purple foolishness, wetting the pretty tissue, the bottom of it limp, falling away in his hand.

The huge bouquet of lilac and purple irises is visible all the way from my living room window. There must be four dozen flowers in all that pink tissue. It’s the Kilimanjaro of bouquets. He’s studying my child. Max bangs on the window for my attention, and when our eyes meet, he stretches up his skinny arms and puffs out his chest. Even as he goes into his backward walkover, he has the sweet obsessive look of a leaping cat, and a cat’s light slant eyes. His legs spring out supple and wide as a wishbone beneath baggy grey shorts that slide up his smooth thighs, revealing his underwear. He wears inconspicuous boy clothes — a dirty T-shirt, ratty sneakers on bare dirty legs — but they’re useless as disguise when he’s shrugging his shoulders or tossing his straight blond hair back like a starlet. He is the perfect thing in my life, and I would like to get him some adequate protection. I wouldn’t flash gold jewelry in the bad part of town and I wouldn’t send this child into the world without a man. I am not only not enough, I think I am trouble.

I see Max watching Huddie as he gets out of the car. He still moves easily, but he needs more room. Much more room, he’s a big man after fifteen years, almost as wide as his father and taller than I remember. Huddie puts his legs out of the car carefully, scanning the street. I have half fallen for a dozen black men over the years for no other reason than that they exit their cars the way he does, the slow, self-possessed unfolding of a big man to his full size, making clear that he will not be threatened, that there is nothing to fear. And if there is, if you insist, he will reluctantly give you the trouble you’re looking for, kick your sorry ass, and go on about his business. It says Don’t. Fuck. With. Me. and it is the required daily grace under pressure of a black man in a white place, and although it must exhaust him, it moves me, and although I would think that understanding its ugly root would make excitement impossible, it excites me.

He must look enormous to Max. I don’t think he’s ever seen anyone so big in every direction, coming wide and high and black-oak solid into his speculative, pale green gaze.

I think Max knows exactly which house Huddie is looking for, knows why he’s come, knows that this is the man who has come for his mother. I want to think this. I’m beat. I have been explaining single motherhood and conception and marriage and homosexuality and commitment to Max since before he could listen, and I am tired of saying things clearly and reasonably in hopes of warding off trauma. Mad giggling is Max’s response to my sensible, sensitive explanations, and right beneath that, furious disbelief. When he is most angry and disbelieving, he sticks out his tongue and pulls down his lower lids, making faces so ugly and not-funny that it’s clear his only wish is to make me stop telling these ridiculous and frightening lies. He finds most adult men terrifying beasts, especially the fathers of the little girls he plays with, and he does not believe, for one minute, that there are women who like to live with them or that pairs of men make happy, healthy lives (I say the three words together always, banishing all disease, grief, and loneliness) in the worlds of Provincetown and San Francisco, and certainly not that I actually parted my legs and let a man put his penis into my vagina. He prefers to believe that I lay very close to, was perhaps sandwiched between, his idols, Mr. Rogers and Peter Pan; their united sperm would in fact explain why I have a child like Max.

“Hi,” Huddie says. I spy behind the curtains. Mothers have divine dispensation for listening in, sheet-reading, dream interpretation, and interrogation. I don’t say we should, just that we do. I do. How else can we know what to do, whom to save, where to go when they don’t come home? The amorality of my childhood, my shoplifting and wholesale lying, is nothing to what I do, and am prepared to do, every single day for this boy.

Make my son cry? I’ll hunt you down on the playground and pull your miserable heart right out of your weaselly little chest, and after dropping off the sympathy casserole for your mother, I’ll stop by the classroom to remind Mrs. Miller that there is now a space in the Bluejay reading group and Max really is ready to move up. I have made a whole life for us, and although I sometimes feel like those intelligent felons, escaping through the prison laundry truck to practice small-town medicine, well and attentively, for twenty years before the Feds show up, it is a life that makes sense to me. I can do this job better than any other. I am happy every morning and I am sad only late at night.

Max stands on his hands, and his arms begin shaking.

“How long can you do that?” Huddie asks. When we knew each other and Larry was four or five, he timed and measured and reported every athletic moment in the boy’s life. Fifty-six seconds underwater. Nine flights of stairs in two minutes. Two goals in the last quarter.

“I don’t know. You can time me.” Max rubs his arms and flings himself up into the air again, hands pressing hard on the grass as he turns a few more showy, foot-waggling cartwheels that end in round-offs of the kind the little ponytailed professionals do as they come off the beam. His feet slam the ground, and he raises his arms above his head for another handstand. I hope he hears a stadium crowd screaming his name, wild with love and admiration.

I come outside, standing still long enough for the afternoon sun to warm the tops of my bare feet, long enough to realize I haven’t changed my clothes. Maybe he will think this is ironic on my part, that I have dressed “as” something, something like a housewife, although he can’t think I’ve bought a house and supported this child by staying home and dusting. Huddie won’t disappoint Max by taking his eye off the sweeping second hand, so instead of a solemn handshake or an affectionate embrace or even a sweetly tentative palm on the shoulder, instead of anything that we have a right to expect after fifteen years, we get another minute or two of oblique suspense and parental obligation. Huddie’s smiling, keeping his eye on the watch. I smile at Max’s pointed, quivering feet, at Huddie’s handsome, broad chest and his hands, which are graceful, even shapely, and wide as catcher’s mitts, and a familiar thorny stream washes under my lids.

I know my face is longer and his is wider, bulldog-wide through the temples, with darker-edged folds beginning above his eyebrows. We both have grey, but he can’t see mine because I colored it yesterday, and despite its sprightly, mendacious auburn, I spent an hour crying and wiping dark, intractable spots off my forehead and off the tips of my ears. Although I no longer looked as old and time-speckled, I didn’t exactly look like me. Already concealed, I was tempted to go for broke and did, with mascara and silver hoop earrings and clean, intact underpants. Actually, new underpants.

“Okay, Max. Maximus. Get upright.”

“Eighteen seconds. That’s good.” Huddie’s hand covers Max’s to the middle of his damp little arm. “I’m Horace Lester, old friend of your mother’s.”

“I’m Max. I’m eight. I’m small for my age, but I’m eight.”

“Good to meet you.”

I can hear Huddie thinking, Small, yeah. Small and then some. Just keep him out of my son’s locker room. My own thoughts about Max run so protective and so cruel I don’t give Huddie time to ask even the normal visiting grown-up questions. Maxie pulls his hand out, not rudely, and backs up for a series of handsprings. Huddie gives me the flowers, without ceremony, and I look inside for a vase to suit them, knowing I don’t have any. My impulses of the last eight years have not been toward the house beautiful. My mother had vases for every kind of bouquet and arrangement, and she had ideas about what suited which: glazed terracotta for wildflowers, tall crystal for tulips and snapdragons, short crystal for bunches of zinnias. I have a large peanut butter jar for most of Huddie’s bouquet and a spaghetti sauce jar for the rest. I long, as I have not once longed in all these downwardly mobile years, for a tall column of etched glass, for a handsome, wide-mouthed ginger jar. I wanted safety and quiet and books and have them, but now it feels less like simplicity or even the successful marshaling of extremely limited resources, and more like the road show of Grapes of Wrath. My teeth ache with shame. I want those vases. I want a big walnut table and Portuguese pottery. I want pretty things right now, and I want him to come in and see my inviting, welcoming home and long to be in it. I want a house of layered charm, from the shining wooden floors to the witty, incidental watercolors, not a couch whose surface is a mix of Astroturf weave and backyard crust. I want a house where things have form as well as function, where not every surface says make do and don’t notice. I wipe the Formica table (ten dollars for the table and three chairs at a tag sale) and put the jars on the counter. I cannot believe that I don’t own placemats.

Back outside, watching Max, standing so close to Huddie I smell his wheaty, wild onion scent and feel the faint heat of his back and chest, I see my mother, propped up on her twin bed, in her small, spare apartment (most of her money gone with her only really bad mistake, a light-fingered, slew-footed boyfriend after Aaron Price died), saying in her most fluting and therefore most furious voice, “Of course, one makes a virtue of necessity, my dear. What else? At least we have the pleasure of fooling others.” And she made herself over once more, into an admirer of the simple life, a Zen devotee, as she had made herself domestically suburban, and then professionally successful, and then a desirable woman of leisure and a certain age, when not one of these things spoke to her own wishes; she made herself pure and died between rough cotton sheets, her bald head on a pillow as harsh as a bag of rice. I squeeze my eyes and conjure the kindest, most virtuous portrait of myself: a sensible, literate woman of limited income, a devoted mother who’s chosen time with her child over professional advancement and a safe neighborhood over service for eight. Please see that.

The sky is the bright unchanging dusk of summer night; the tulip trees darken and fill until suddenly there is no light at all coming through them. We have to go in, both of us as reluctant as Max, as if there are no mosquitoes, as if tomorrow will be no good, as if this, this handspring, the one he can’t do in the velvety dark, is the one that must be done tonight.

The porch light sends Max’s shadow across Huddie’s light grey pants and Huddie’s across my porch steps, onto my feet, and I think, It will be all right if I die tonight. After I touch him.

I hand Huddie a glass of cheap wine and direct him to a quiet corner. While the kitchen is briefly under siege, I am the commander in chief. I hold on to the last two inches of Max’s T-shirt and clean his ears and his neck, wiping off the three dripping circles of boy-colored stucco beading his lily throat. My shoulder’s pressing the phone to my ear so I can promise brownies for the Great Gator bake sale. (Great Gator is the mascot of Max’s elementary school, and his snarky, omnivorous green presence is felt almost every week, since I in fact moved here, to this nothing-special house I can barely afford, because the school takes its mascot and its honor classes and its after-school program so seriously. Yes, two trays of brownies, and don’t make me mad by explaining that the kids prefer homemade.) I shake zucchini, peppers and garlic in my oldest, favorite pan, so old scorch marks tiger-stripe the original fifties-kitchen yellow. I know how I look, moving; around the kitchen in double time. It impresses and intimidates men who want to be married. Also young single women. Married men, with children (who show up periodically with bottles of wine when our children have all gone to bed), don’t care for it much, since they see it at home all the time. It must be as charming as leg hairs in the sink. And other mothers, the few who have been in my home (a six-week friendship between Max and the boy across the street; the neighborhood cancer drive; the new neighbor), don’t watch, don’t think about it, they don’t even put down their wineglasses as they set the table for me. They have all they can stand of their own necessary, gratifying agitation, whirling through their own kitchens like dervishes, scattering silverware and instructions and things to be defrosted and things to be frozen, feeling absolutely necessary to every movement and every living thing.

* * *

Huddie finishes his glass, a thin, sugary white, and wishes again that he’d brought decent wine instead of those irises, now bending in half over the jars she’s jammed them into. He puts a splinter of raw zucchini in his mouth and thinks of all the great meals he’s made, all the hot, oily bits, melting disks of fat and sugar he’s needed, to fill the space this short-tempered, weary woman left in him. Reaching for a fallen bottle of oregano, Elizabeth looks for a moment like June’s white twin. Muscular women, one plush layer over a wide back and hard legs striding until the last march. Bobcat wrestlers, point guards, piano-moving women. Stand in their way and be moved, fool. Elizabeth straightens up. He has misremembered. She has five inches on June and none of her broad curves. But her girl-arrow shape widens now to a protective, unshakable stance just like June’s, what love light there is shines only on their children’s faces. Except something else crosses Elizabeth’s face, opening and closing like a night rose. Her young face was two curved blades pointing to her square chin. Now there are soft velvet pleats along the jaw, a row of faint, sweet ridges he would like to touch as she lowers her head to check the vegetables. And as she bends over awkwardly to get a roasting pan for the little pink potatoes, not the practiced kneel of stewardesses and office ladies, all of whom know that men are always looking, Elizabeth bends her knees only a little and her ass juts out, hips low and wide, her waist calling for his hands, her ass pressing toward him in those old jeans with their white, pulling seams, and Huddie thinks that it was for this that he has lived so long. Lead me on to that light, Lord, lead me home.

* * *

“Sylvan,” Max says after dinner, looking out at the yard, his legs stretched out from the couch to the coffee table, like Huddie’s.

Huddie says nothing. Don’t mock my child. Do not say “Sylvan?” like it’s a sissy ten-dollar word. Do not say “You mean green?” like no real boy would say anything else. Say “You are a faggot, Max.” And then I’ll have to kill you, and my grieving, delicate boy will be shuffled from foster home to foster home, bullied by no-neck monsters, made to wear polyester clothes that will so madden him he’ll run away at the age of fourteen — I can see him with blond down on his cheeks, little gosling tufts — and find himself go-go dancing in some big-city Combat Zone, stripping down to a sequined, bulging G-string to the strains of “Over the Rainbow” for sticky dollar bills from the hands of vile middle-aged men.

“Yeah, it is,” Horace says.

“I love that,” Max says.

“Yeah.”

Huddie and Max sit on Max’s bed. This is the beautiful room in my house. I held his little biscuit feet in my hands, in this room. And beneath those feet, my hands, which I had always admired for their smoothness, were as worn and rough as cedar bark. Ivory angel feet, with opal nails and satin soles. And my hands became his steps, my body his playground, and my whole past was dissolved into his immediate, inescapable now.

Max’s bedroom walls are the elegant Parisian yellow my mother would have chosen, and the ivy stencils from floor to ceiling are also her kind of thing. It was my last unnecessary effort. We came home to this house and three barely furnished rooms and nine drifting, cocooned, and expensive months together. We lived in baby time, where if you’ve cleaned up the spilled talcum and gotten to and from the grocery store, you’ve had a day. I had no other life than Maxie’s, and I could neither remember nor imagine one. A leisurely shower elated me. Tiny red sneakers on sale with matching red and white teddy-bear print socks thrilled me. Burned toast and puddles of zwieback filled the kitchen and I swept it all into the garbage whenever I had the energy. I saw people only as they saw Max, and so I was inclined to love them. My father sent several thoughtful but not excessive checks and a stuffed pink panda, so gaudy and lush I could only assume his new wife had picked it out. He did not send a ticket to Oregon, and I thought, He’s seventy, he’s got a fifty-year-old wife with two college-age kids, her elderly, forgetful mother lives with them, fair enough. Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms. Sol had found the right family, finally, including a stepdaughter who screamed good-naturedly at him in the background, “Sol, Jesus fucking Christ, I’m waiting for a call, you know. Tell her Max is gorgeous, send her a crazy big check, and lemme talk to Kenny before the concert’s sold out.” I thought that when she dropped out of college and got tired of Kenny, I might persuade her to babysit Max. And me.

The apostle spoons went on the shelf over the changing table, and Max had every bath in the company of gospel greats. Greta found me and sent a painting of crows and snakes, which I put back in its crate and hid in the attic, beneath zipperless luggage and winter clothes. My mother was dead but showed up in dreams so hilarious and realistic I had to believe that her soul had migrated to my subconscious, from which it was now directing late-night cinema. In my dreams, we discussed breast and bottle feeding, the right age for solids, wheat allergies, and the ways in which Max was clearly superior to the little white lumps we’d bubbled next to at the YMCA Tot Swim. We agreed on everything, and when I wavered in my own convictions, my mother, in the pale, pale lilac charmeuse evening dress she wore when I was nine, assembled experts from Anna Freud to Oscar Wilde to reassure me.

Huddie puts his hand out to smooth Max’s hair, spread out on the pillow. He has done this a thousand times, and always with pleasure, but not to hair like this.

“I go to Hebrew School. I’m in Hey. Last year, I was in Daleth. That’s practically babies. We carpool with the Shwartzes and the Manellis. I hate her. She’s really, you know, she stinks.”

Huddie gives the blanket a tug and sits down, moving two black velour gorillas (one with red bow tie, one with peelable banana in paw) to the foot of the bed. In the language of parents and children, Max knows this means his time is almost up; Huddie anticipates the last sleep-defying whoosh of conversation, Max’s long day swirling out in a cloud of words and coded feeling.

“Are you Jewish?”

“No, I’m not. I go to church from time to time.” The ten years he was a deacon are a flat dream, a life built from the outside in: deacon, Chamber of Commerce president, New York Produces Man of the Year, County Youth Basketball coach, good father, good husband, as far as the job went.

“Some people convert.” Max says this into the foot of an eyeless Raggedy Andy doll. “Our snack lady was born Catholic.”

“Uh-uh. There will be no conversion, Mister Max. I think being Jewish is great for you and your mom. But I’m not Jewish.”

“I don’t think it really hurts that much,” Max insists. Huddie winces and wonders if that is really Max’s point, to say “I know you have one. I have one, too. And we are not alike and if I could I’d get the men who are like me to cut yours off.” Max shows what Huddie recognizes as a full-court-press smile: both dimples and the upper lip slightly lifted to reveal the shining white incisors. He is not without weapons, after all. Max raises his arm, and for an insane minute Huddie thinks Max will rest his small hand on Huddie’s groin. The boy takes a headless Ken from under his blanket and tosses it into the garbage.

“Three points. Good night, little man,” Huddie says.

“Good night.”

“You can call me Huddie.”

“Huddie. You can call me Max.”

“Good night, Max.”

“Good night, Huddie. Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite, ducky!” This last is yelled like a football cheer.

Huddie turns out the lights, smiling, and wonders who the father is, who’s been fucking her for the last fifteen years. Apparently, the wish to possess that hit him when he saw the undersides of her white thighs long and harshly flattened out against the oak bleachers has not gone. For the last fifteen years he’s believed he was not a jealous man and it turns out he just didn’t remember.

Max’s sound sleep makes us nervous. We shift around on the couch until we are far enough apart to look directly at one another. Huddie’s stomach presses over his belt in a powerful, endearing slope, and his arms are as big around as small barrels, filling his shirtsleeves. If I cut him, he will open brown, red, pink, down to white bone, small petals of blood rising on his skin. But he puts his arm on the back of the couch, and now I want his fingers to brush against me so much I walk to the foot of the stairs and pretend to listen for Max, who has slept through the night since he was three months old.

“How are your folks?”

“My father’s all right, re-remarried. My mother died nine years ago,” I say. I have considered myself an old orphan, not a heartwarming one, but an orphan nonetheless, ever since.

“I’m sorry. Did it get better between you?”

It got enormously better, as we both saw her death zooming up like the next and necessary exit. We entered her terminal phase like lovers in the shoddiest dime romance: reckless, breathless, selfless, you name it, we threw it out the window. We styled what was left of her blonde hair, and when that was pointless, I spent six hundred dollars I didn’t have on a platinum bob and an ash-blonde pixie cut and found myself defending the Gabor sisters against their bad press. We created the River Styx Beauty salon (my mother named it) and made up a gruesome menu of services sought by the decomposing but still-fashionable clients of our high camp owner—“That’s M’sieu Styx to you,” she’d snap at the other customers, waiting on our side of the bank.

“It got much better.” And then I got pregnant and had to miss her all over again, just as if she had been the best mother in the world. “And Gus?”

“Oh, baby. They’ll have to drive a stake through his heart.”

“That seems fair, for all the heartache he caused us,” I say, and then see that I shouldn’t have. No matter how old, no matter how bad, we are the only people who can genuinely and expansively bad-mouth our parents. Huddie shakes his head slowly, and I think that I have, with one careless, sincere remark, revealed all my enduring shortcomings.

“You still talk about fair. You’ve been in this world for forty years and talk about fair. I love that,” he says, as if I’ve shown him my childhood bear collection.

“I like the idea of fair. A little rough justice every now and then is appealing. Unlikely, but appealing.”

He tips his head, saluting my idea and me, and I sigh like an old, old woman, because the only choice is kissing or crying over what is behind us and I want to leap ahead without even knowing who he really is or how or if he’s leaving June or whether he will really love Max and do we now have to have real holidays instead of my casual improvisations?

I sigh and feel our first time, catching me in the chest. It is still my old stubbly couch and only that beneath my fingertips, but the dark plum silk of his cock unwrinkles in my hand, his flesh hardens, rising up, blindly seeking me. The sweet plump point of his nipple bites my palm. We had no words for our genitals then; we said “this” and “that” and “you” and “me,” and when I touched him just the way he wanted, all parts going the right way, his sweat spattering my face, he cried out, “Oh, yes, we’re in the zone now.” And we laughed so hard we had to stop for a few minutes, but that is where we were, and I began to say that too, and kept saying it, with other men, even though it was never as true and saying it brought me closer only to the past and never to the man right next to me. And with no vocabulary at all we had done everything we wanted to do, everything I want to do right now, although in my mind I airbrush us, pulling those young bodies out from our folding fleshy shells, even as I want to see him now, kiss the tender, pitiful changes time has left on that beautiful boy, that handsome young man.

“You could have us both.” I think I can say that. “Don’t give up what you have.” Life will be tolerable (it would have been even better than that if you’d never showed up with those ridiculous flowers and that gigantic car), and once a month it will be all-white gardens drenched in silver moonlight, sweet whole mouthfuls of revelation, a feeling of rightness in the passing essential bits of everyday. And the rest of the time, I will still have the pleasure of being a good mother, even the unmentionable pleasure of being the only parent, the court of first and last resort, the highway, the dead end, and the only gas station for forty miles. And I count on that and Max counts on me, and you are the joker in the deck, my man.

“What are you thinking, Horace?”

“Nothing.”

“You lying jellybean.”

“You’re right. I won’t tell you what I’m thinking.” And he can’t. Pictures of June, tenderly and efficiently pressing her weight on his unbendable leg two hundred times a day until he regained use of his knee; in labor with Larry, her wet face, stunned and determined; Larry as a small boy, tearing through spangled wrapping at Christmas, glitter sticking to his curls; June’s appendectomy and most of the choir crowding into her room afterwards, Rosa Grant’s flowered straw hat perched on the IV, pink silk ribbons fluttering in front of the vent; six thousand fans, standing for that last basket; June walking the floor with colicky Larry, milk plastering her red chiffon don’t-forget-your-husband nightgown to her breasts; flashes of white and black women’s bare behinds bouncing in front of him in various motel rooms, their cheeks knotting and opening, the tiny soft arrowhead of hair beneath them; women flipping over in his hands like fresh fish, their breasts swinging and sliding in silky blue-white sacks up to their shoulders, or three shades of brown in sweet handfuls coming to rest on either side of a narrow chest, cocoa pools around purple nipples and stretch marks like the veins of fall leaves, every shape beautiful, calling for his mouth, all of them gone forever.

He smiles. “I’m here. Right here.”

“No matter what?”

“Well. That’s a lot of ground. Yes, no matter what. No one’s going to die from this. And I won’t have to shuffle off this mortal coil knowing I lived the wrong life.”

He takes my hand. “And what’re you thinking? Elizabeth?”

“Nothing.”

“You lying hound.”

“Yup. And I won’t tell you.” And I cant: pictures of him trembling over me a million years ago; of Max’s face — the first Max — peevish and remorseful in the face of death; the faint, nameless image of my Max’s father, blond and tall, foolish but not unkind and not unattractive in his uniform, in bed for twenty-four hours straight until he shipped out, as I hoped he would, and now I watch my son for signs of stupidity and wanderlust; Margaret and Sol reading silently after I’d gone to bed and come out again to see what grown-ups did—“Nothing,” my mother said, “we do nothing”; my easy cloistered evenings, doing laundry, making lunch, cutting coupons, playing with Maxie and his Claudette Colbert paper dolls, of which Huddie will surely disapprove, and they will fight and Max will weep and Huddie will turn to dark unreadable stone, and long for the sensible ease of June and the pleasant routine of childless, healthy middle age. And I surely cannot tell him that I’m no more good for me or for him than I ever was, that I will disappoint and confuse him, that I’ve been alone my whole life, and that it may really be too hard and too late, not even desirable, after such long, familiar cold, to be known, and heard, and seen.

“It’s late,” I say.

“It’s a long drive,” he says.

If this were really the end, if this were only my story, I would tell you everything.