Seduction
You're a child and you watch the hike of your father's pants as he lifts his leg into the family car. You watch the power passing from him to the ignition. He twirls knobs, sets the rearview, balances the bowl of his mahogany pipe in the small, round ashtray. You recognize his force and you watch, from the backseat, silent.
The power brake is important given the lingering Canadian ice, visible only when a splice of light catches the black glaze. The satisfaction in your father's broad hand, reddening as he presses his thumb into the end button and lifts the stiff handbrake, the color draining from his nailbeds, from his knuckles, pulling the handle up until the big c l i c k, releasing it back down, then letting go.
You're a child and your mother slides into the passenger seat. She is dressed in a two-piece suit, the kind you'd expect of Lauren Bacall or Princess Grace. Your mother is proper and sexy at the same time. You know deference is part of her silence. She checks her lipstick in the visor mirror. This car, unlike the family's past Buicks or Oldsmobiles, is small and the air is tight, like a packed refrigerator, each of you fighting for cool and sanity in the lungless container.
You're a teen and for once he is moneyed so your father buys your mother a car, a flirty Corvair. A convertible. The car unleashes something in her and she drives with flourish, like she means it, unlike what happens at home. Take that time, one of the times, your father lost his job and your mother said, weakly, like a just-nursed kitten, maybe you can't work with anyone, and he grabbed her jewelry box from the dresser, dangled it out the open bedroom window, a donkey smile and hyena laugh, she screaming until he turned the open box into the black frozen air and the jade earrings, the pearls, the gold necklace with her first initial, the diamond ring (from her mother), all that and more, flipped, twisted, and somersaulted like a diver off a high board, except not into water but deep powdered snow, where, some of the jewels anyway, would not show up until spring.
You always try to speak up. Stay quiet is what comes back. Settle down now. If you're even heard you don't know it.
Your mother drives the Corvair with the top down. You can see how she takes to the car, grows into it, like a seduced mistress. Some would say she is a bombshell, all blonde, hair up in a French twist, paisley silk kerchief fluttering in early sweet summer. Women on sidewalks take their husbands' arms as the men turn to watch the lady in the Corvair revving into second gear. She parks and slips out of the car, long legs in block heels—never staccato—and the French Canadian doorman at Ogilvy's half bows as he opens the store's heavy baroque doors, Avec plaisir, Madame.
She smiles at the doorman, smiles at the clerk behind the perfume counter, even when Christmas in July (her beloved scent) is not in. She smiles at the server in the tea room while she waits for her cousin, Leonor, ten minutes late, then twenty. She smiles at your father when she opens the apartment door and he is pouring his it-must-be-five-o'clock-somewhere drink.
Your mother's smile isn't Mona Lisa's, and certainly not the Grinch's. It's not what they call a Pan Am Smile, corners of the mouth up-up-up, lips stretched wide, teeth front-to-back exposed. Your mother's smile recruits her mouth, cheeks, and eyes all at once. It's full and flush, like a newly-opened bloom. Sometimes, her smile is modest, mouth closed yet upturned, eyes soft yet far away. Your mother can't help but smile.
It doesn't do her much good when, in their galley-style kitchen (no doors on either end), her husband is French-kissing Leonor in an embrace. Or when he buys a small sailboat, even though they can't afford it, even though your mother is terrified on the water, even though no one takes a single sailing lesson. Or, for that matter, when he talks her into moving across two continents to live in a third, when all she ever wants to do is love her people and entertain and have fun.
The Corvair doesn't last long, too flimsy for the thoughtless Montreal winters. Your mother and father's marriage lasts forever. Your mother is happy enough, then later on unhappy, then happy-ish thanks to new friends, and happier still with a grandchild close by, then unhappy when he's not. Your father mellows but never knows to make amends. Maybe he would have won her over with some travel or a new stove or more nights on the town. Maybe he would have won her over with a new car.
It's easy to blame him, just as easy to blame her. You remember. The belt tight in his hand coming down on your young thighs. You remember. The soap in his fist rubbed in your mouth—in your braces—the taste a metallic burn. You remember. The tickling that went too long but wouldn't stop. And she, always silent in a corner as if in a timeout.
You can't let go when your mother is dying and he leans over her shouting, Breathe, just breathe, as if she could turn on airflow like charm or hospitality. You can't let go when he says, They took her from me, even when she's yours, too. It's a challenge in the end to find acceptance, which means facing yourself and finding ways to love them.
The Long Overreach
Stacey owned ninety-nine pairs of shoes and pulled us, laughing, into her closet. “Come see if you don’t believe me!” Racks of them. Some collapsed on one side, some scuffed from rubbing the car floor, some faded by the sun. The Elvis blue suedes. The white loafers for the first day of spring. The slingback pair—pink—with kitten heels (painful heels, she’d wear these mostly for sitting). The polka-dot ones (matching the scarf she’d tie in a bow under a snappy white collar). And more shoes. Shoes the color of Pepsi, of hibiscus tea, of dirty snow, of blood. The stacked-heeled black boots that slayed her back (she’d keep them anyway). Even golf shoes, although we ribbed her about those. We weren’t sure they should count (her husband was the one who really played).
In her day, she’d been a soccer referee, simply for fun. When it was she last blew that whistle, we did not know. The refereeing was hard to imagine. Today’s Stacey: always a French manicure, green scarf and green plaid skirt, knee socks with black blazer, Peter Pan blouse under red crewneck sweater, coordinated red lipstick. These outfits. A ref.
Post-ref: a husband, kids, a second husband (the golfer), a move—flush from the sale of their California home—here to Central Oregon. They bought into a development hemming a golf course. She became Dan’s medical practice manager. We sort of adopted her, which is to say, we liked her. Fond friends, but not fast friends. We didn’t confess secrets with Stacey, seek advice, or walk together downtown, shopping bags in hand, heads thrown back, laughing.
But we loved her playfulness. Her Jewish jokes. She did her share of wisecracking. You’d think her quips would come from a large, husky woman (she was small, thin, Type 1 diabetic). She had some great lines. Like when we told her the long list of things our husbands wouldn’t eat, she said, Just like my grandson—you know, the toddler. When we told her how we’d shake our hands full of kibble dust over our dogs’ bowls, she shot back, I better watch out if I see you near the salad.
Why, we don’t know, but she’d sometimes slip into a sort of highbrow speech. Words like herewith or unbeknownst. Or she’d talk about stunning homes up in the hills her dearest friends had bought. About priceless art. Exquisite gardens. It was a different Stacey, a theatrical Stacey, and it was disquieting. Didn’t feel real. What brought that out in her? We liked her better wisecracking.
Her handwriting. The polished symmetry, the rounded letter tops, the curlicues on the last letter of the last word of each sentence, the bottom edge straight and level, as if the words sat on a ruler. Handwriting close to perfection.
Reminded us of, Perfect is the enemy of good. We wondered if Stacey was stuck in perfect. She stayed late at work. Brought in expensive consultants. Phoned Dan (her boss) in the evenings, calls that turned into hour-long conversations. We understood she needed to do all this, to reassure herself or to find answers she didn’t have or who knows, maybe just to show how good she was. We understood she overdid things.
Even so, she was joyful and open and funny. Peppy, zestful. Such a slender, wee woman spilling over with energy and generosity. She’d turn up with mountains of cookies, some in freezer packages, just in case. (They’d stay in our freezer for weeks or months or years or forever.) Appetizer plates with enough vegetables for a WeightWatchers party. Three bottles of wine when one was enough. We wanted to say, please, no more.
Often she’d lose her Stacey-ness and start the high-minded speak, or go on about this or that person at work, or enlist one of us in whipping up a surprise—a needless one, one that was too much, embarrassingly too much. It was all a kind of overreach.
Her husband, Larry, had been fighting cancer. We stood by her. He’d had it before, she told us; he was a survivor. Until he wasn’t.
Another year. Stacey, a widow. Dan retired. His practice closed. Another medical group hired her. Too many staff issues, though. The owner micromanaged. The plants were plastic. She was looking for a new job.
“I’m lonely. I want to date. Jewish-date.” She couldn’t see it happening in Bend, Oregon.
“Try a dating app,” we’d say. “Start a long-distance romance. People can move!”
“I want my old friends, my community, my synagogue.”
She couldn’t let go of California, in spite of expensive housing, big down payments, high taxes. Expensive everything. We tried to talk her out of it. We lost. We didn’t have time for a going-away party. She brought us banquets of food from her freezer.
She moved. Back to her old friends, her old California neighborhood, still alone and she missed her dead husband, but she was where she’d been happy. We talked a lot on the phone. Texted, too. She was working now. She wouldn’t have to worry about money. She could do this. She moved into a furnished rental, made plans to buy a house, move her stuff out of storage.
The job. Better pay. Top responsibilities. They piled it on. Piled it on because she was there, because she said she could do it—do it all—because she was generous, because she was an overshooter.
“It’s excessive,” she told us. “Way over the top. But I’ve got to do this or they’ll think I can’t. You know. My age.”
She did it, all right. Took on the work. Took it and took it and took it, and one day at home, she stood and reached for who knows what and had a stroke or a seizure or an aneurism or a something, and fell and hit her head going down on the desk corner, and bled out on her rented living room floor. Because she was alone. Because she took it on and held it in. Because she was older—and couldn’t risk letting the world know.
That’s how we had to make sense of it. We could blame it on being ashamed of aging. We could blame it on society pushing us—achieve, achieve, achieve. We could blame it on not accepting, or not knowing, our limits. Truth is, anything could have felled her, say a massive stroke while leaning for the salt at dinner. Or that same stroke while building a Lego castle with her grandson. She could have still been in Oregon, or on a trip to Norway, or sitting back playing mahjong.
Maybe Stacey idealized California. Maybe she wasn’t realistic about what the move would do to her. Maybe losing her husband was more than she could take, even as an overreacher. The fact was, she never said no to life and wasn’t about to start, even at seventy-something. Even if it meant her own end.
