Can I Get An Amen? Read online

  Within two weeks, we had put our house on the market, the house that we had purchased when we planned on starting a family. It was a sweet little cape within walking distance of the local elementary school in an affluent Boston suburb. We had planted blueberry bushes, picturing barefoot children running out in the summer to fill their fists and mouths. There was an oak tree in the front yard that had the sort of low, horizontal branches that little arms and legs could scramble right up. And it had four beautifully dormered bedrooms that we planned to fill. It became my secret, masochistic indulgence to give myself unfettered access to those memories. To close my office door or drive aimlessly, draining tanks of gas, and let myself live entirely in a future that never had a chance of existing. To imagine the life of a mother.

  “You need to get yourself to church,” my mother urged, her faded southern accent always becoming more pronounced when imbued with emotion.

  “I’m not going to church, Mom.” I was tired of this conversation, of her easy answer to everything.

  “Church is where you go when facing these things, Ellen. That’s what churches are for.” I could imagine her emphatic gestures as she spoke, her gray bob bouncing with every exaggerated shake of the head. “They are there to help you get your eyes on the Lord when you’re broken.”

  “So I sing songs and shake hands and tell my neighbor that God loves them; that’s going to help me in some way?”

  My mother paused. “Don’t let this make you bitter, Ellen. Your creator has a plan for you. He knows your future.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Church isn’t where I need to be right now, Mom.” Work was. Work was where I should be. It suddenly seemed so clear.

  During those first few weeks, I threw myself into my job more ferociously than I had in years. There had been too many late arrivals due to doctors’ appointments, too many hours spent perusing fertility Web sites that all offered the same advice and encouragement. I was newly rededicated to my job and the timing was perfect. The small advertising agency where I worked was facing tough times as clients’ wallets tightened and the unemployment rate continued to climb. The recession had been the media’s singular focus for months, but it had been almost background noise to me, as I was on a relentless quest to conceive. Month after month I thought that this was the time it was going to take; this time I would get pregnant. Then I would ride out my three trimesters and have the baby, and my career would go on an extended hiatus.

  I hadn’t told anyone at work that Gary and I had split up, so you really can’t blame them for the timing. When they laid me off, I took the news with absolutely no fluctuation of expression. I didn’t cry; I didn’t frown or smile. I sat stone-faced as my humorless boss ran through her boilerplate speech, about the economy and budgets and how it was all business, nothing personal. I nodded along, as if to hurry her up. Then I told her that I understood, got up, and left. I had simply run out of devastation. Good decision, she surely thought. Less deadweight around here.

  My relative composure was quickly replaced with monumental fits of self-pity. Oh, it was biblical, my plight! It was something straight out of the Old Testament. Left by my husband and relieved of my duties at work in the matter of a month. Surely no one had faced such tragedy! To ensure my cocoon of misery was impenetrable, I studiously avoided stories sadder than my own. I didn’t want to hear about the six-year-old boy who was about to begin treatment, yet again, to rid his body of cancer. Or the single father of three who recently became a paraplegic. Perspective, whether delivered by my mother or by People magazine, was entirely unwelcome.

  But our tragedies, no matter on which end of the spectrum they fall, often have a will of their own. And while I was myopically focused on my own recent blows to the gut, I had no idea that what I really needed to do was brace for the aftermath. Because it’s after you think the dust has settled that life really gets to have its way with you.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Just look at it this way.” Luke grinned as he slammed shut the tailgate of my car. “At least you don’t ever have to worry about your thirty-one-year-old daughter moving back in with you.” I punched him in the stomach, which had a comforting layer of pudge despite his status as “single gay male.” Only my brother, Luke, could get away with making a joke about both my infertility and my imminent move to my parents’ house. Because only Luke would take three days off from work to help me pack up my things and make the drive back to New Jersey.

  Of course it felt like another failure; I was joining the ranks of adult children living at home. Maybe if I had had more fight in me, I would have stayed. I would have found a new job, carved out a new life, joined a support group or two. But I have always favored flight. Even as a child, when mean-girl politics or shifting allegiances left me in the rotating role of outcast, I would run. I would fake sick or avoid recess or skip the party, because exile that was at least quasi-self-imposed allowed me the illusion of being in control.

  I had my excuses, too. Thanks to the sluggish real estate market, the house hadn’t sold, and the prospect of continuing to live there through the showings and open houses, with no job to escape to, seemed unbearable. Besides, “Vacated houses tend to move much faster,” said our real estate agent through her cloud of suffocating perfume. I didn’t know whether this was true or she just didn’t want the stench of divorce hanging in the air, with our walls of missing photos and half-empty closets. And with every visit from Gary, always made during the day when I was at work, our house had begun to look more and more like the carcass of a marriage.

  I wasn’t bringing much with me just yet, mostly clothes, toiletries, those kinds of things. I had taken the time to pack some boxes with other personal effects but had stowed those away in the basement for now. So everything fit, though snugly, in my Volvo wagon. Luke, who had arrived by train, took on the role of driver and was kind enough not to delve too deeply into questions regarding my meeting with Gary the night before. In truth, there wasn’t much to tell. An encounter that had taken on momentous importance in my mind had turned out to be a depressingly quiet and uneventful affair, like a funeral with a poor turnout.

  We met at a Starbucks, where he sat reading the Boston Globe and sipping a coffee with Splenda and milk. I paused at the door, smoothed my sleeveless black wrap dress, and tucked my hair behind my ear. He stood when he saw me approach and gave me a long, tight hug. I hoped he could feel my pounding heart, my shaking body. I hoped that he understood what he was doing to me. I never thought I would feel so uncomfortable in the presence of my husband. I told him that I was going to stay with my parents for a while, that I had been laid off.

  “God,” he said, shaking his head, as if losing my job was what had just sent my life into a tailspin and his leaving me was nothing more than a bit of turbulence. Then he moved on to the business at hand, delicately reaching for the forms that needed my signature. “Formalities, as we discussed,” he mumbled. I signed blindly, reading nothing. When it was finished, he told me again that he loved me and that he would be in touch soon.

  Luke came with me to the group home where Gary’s brother, Daniel, lived. I had wanted to say good-bye and drop off a few gifts, including a new Celtics T-shirt, the Celtics being the only entity that Daniel adored almost as much as he did Gary. While I sat chatting with Daniel, Luke stood on the sidelines, feeling the discomfort and pity felt by all first-time visitors. I could tell what Luke was thinking as he watched the palsied movements and heard the slurred voices. We grew up being told that God created each of us, handpicked our pieces and parts, both physical and otherwise. What, then, Luke thought, had happened here?

  I told Daniel that I probably wouldn’t be by for a while. Ask your brother why, I thought. Ask him. But from Daniel’s behavior, I could tell that he had already been given the gist of it. As I got back in the car, I obsessed over what Daniel would tell Gary about our visit. When would Gary realize that he was making a mistake? His next wife wouldn’t care this much about Daniel. She wouldn’t b
ring him home every Sunday; she wouldn’t take him to basketball games and movies. With a brood of children to look after, she would soon become too busy. He would become a nuisance, then a burden, before he was forgotten entirely. And what would happen to Daniel then? Are you willing to sacrifice him, too, Gary?

  Though neither of us was a smoker, Luke and I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and kept one burning for almost the entire car ride. We stopped only once, at a dismal little rest stop where a tiny Hispanic woman stood in front of a bucket of filthy water, absentmindedly pushing a mop across the brown-tiled floor. Once we hit the New Jersey Turnpike, the highway rose above the sort of postapocalyptic industrial wasteland that often defines the state, with heat rising in waves off the acres devoted to stacks of empty cargo containers and oil tanks. But soon the blinding late-August sun was tamed by the lush green of the suburbs, where the men who sat in window-filled corner offices in Manhattan skyscrapers kept their homes.

  Luke asked me if Mom had told me the latest about our father’s newest project, Channing Crossing, and the financial issues it was going through. “Yeah,” I said, “she mentioned it.” Due to my mother’s almost biological need to prophesy doom, she had been mentioning it for months. My father, a real estate developer, had rolled the dice big-time on an enormous new mixed-use development in Pennsylvania that offered both housing and commercial space. Then the real estate bubble burst and what had seemed like a potential gold mine turned into a major financial liability.

  “I think it might be worse than she wants to admit,” said Luke as he turned into the long paved driveway of my parents’ very beautiful home.

  I felt my shoulders tense. Things were supposed to be better than my mother indicated, never worse. “Like, how much worse?”

  “I don’t know, Elle. I just think it’s weird that they didn’t rejoin Rook National this year.”

  I thought back to the conversation in which my mother had said that they didn’t plan to renew their membership at the club. “But Mom said that Dad’s shoulder has been bothering him too much for golf.”

  “I know,” said Luke hesitantly. “But I think they are just temporarily in a tight spot. I’m sure it’ll pass, though.” And we both settled into that ambiguous but comfortable thought.

  . . .

  “Oh, praise you, Jesus!” came my mother’s elated voice as she saw Luke and me walk safely into the kitchen. She abandoned the bowl of pasta that she was tossing and, wiping her hands on a dish towel, bustled toward us. “I was so worried about y’all driving on that terrible I-95. Just last week someone from our church nearly had an accident with a tractor-trailer just outside Stamford.” I was first on the list for a hug and she reached her thin little arms up around my neck. At five feet six inches, she was the shortest member of my family by three inches. “My little Ellen. My poor little baby girl! I am so sorry, Ellen.” I hadn’t seen her in person since before Gary left. “I know that you can’t see it yet, but this is all part of God’s plan for you.”

  “Mom…,” I started by way of a warning, but she had already moved on.

  “Luke, thank you so much for going up there to help your sister.” She held him long and tight and I knew what she was doing. She was doing what she had done each and every time she’d seen him since he came out of the closet: she was trying to pray the gay out of him. She was trying to save his soul. While my mother adored Luke, she didn’t adore, as she put it, “his lifestyle.” His being gay was incredibly hard for my parents to accept, so she adopted a bifurcated view of her son: there was the gay part and then there was the rest of him, the part that God had made. When my mother came up for air she eyed us suspiciously. “Have y’all been smoking?”

  “Just crack, Mom,” answered Luke. “Some blacks were selling it by the side of the highway.”

  She swatted him with a dish towel and dropped that line of questioning. “Daddy’s going to be home later,” she said as she pulled pasta bowls out of the cabinet. “He had some meeting at the bank.” Luke shot me a meaningful look. “So, tell me,” she went on. “How was the drive? Y’all have any close calls?” My mother viewed the perils of the American interstate system as a constant and relentless menace. She was always astounded when we managed to travel them unscathed and viewed our safe journey as nothing short of a miracle. Luke and I just shook our heads. “No?” she asked, sounding a touch disappointed. “Well, that was God’s mercy.”

  She began ferrying pasta over to the table. “Lukie, grab some forks,” she said, plucking a mushroom from the top of one of the bowls and popping it in her mouth. “I made that tagliatelle with the white wine–mushroom sauce that Aunt Kathy told me about. Wait till y’all taste it.”

  As she scampered back to the fridge to grab some Parmesan cheese, I noticed how her narrow hips seemed to swim in her white linen pants. “You look like you’ve lost weight, Mom.” She was always on the slender side, but she was beginning to look fashion-editor thin.

  “Everything gets harder when you get old, honey,” she said as she flitted back to the table like a hummingbird. “Even eating.” She plopped into her chair and I heard the clang of her heavy gold watch hit the table. It rested above the same hand that held her small, humble engagement ring, a relic from an earlier time. Taking off her headband, she readjusted it on her head, pulling her silvery gray hair away from her face. “But I’ll make up for it tonight. I’m starving.” I stared at her for a moment. My mom was still beautiful, even without makeup. Her well-moisturized skin bagged beneath her eyes a bit but still clung nicely to her enviable bone structure.

  Luke complimented the dinner, and my mother launched into detailed but characteristically frenetic instructions on its preparation. Her recitation of the recipe faded into background noise as I took in the room. My parents had built the house eight years ago, after I was already out of the house and living on my own, so I had never really spent much time there. The odd weekend here or there, maybe a week between Christmas and New Year’s; that was it. The kitchen looked like it was lifted from one of my father’s model homes. It was nice, very nice, in a ubiquitous granite-countertops-and-stainless-steel-appliances kind of way. It flowed into a living area that had cathedral ceilings with enormous windows flanking the massive stone fireplace. All the furniture was big. Big leather couches, big armoires, big oriental carpets. We sat at an enormous farm table that seated twelve, above which hung two big drum-shade chandeliers. Luke took a sip of water from a big goblet. I instantly missed my little cape.

  Snapping me back to the present was my mother’s voice. “So you saw Gary before you left?” Her thumb rubbed at her index finger, a nervous tick.

  “Yeah,” I said, twisting the stem of my water glass. “We met for a cup of coffee last night.”

  “And how’d that go? Do you think he’s going to come to his senses?”

  I slumped back in my chair. “I don’t know, Mom. I kind of doubt it.”

  Her gaze darted up to a framed family photo that hung on the wall. Luke was fifteen, I was thirteen, and Kat was twelve. Her eyes lingered on Kat. “I don’t know why God chooses to give children to some women and not others.” Her expression was distant, as if she was trying to make sense of events from the past in the context of the present, as if it was all part of some complex equation that had to add up. Then she quickly shifted gears, telling us about Aunt Kathy’s recent trip to Ireland. Aunt Kathy, for whom Kat was named, was my mother’s only sister, and they were bonded in a way that none of us entirely understood. As siblings, we were all close, but Aunt Kathy and Mom were like veterans of the same war; they knew each other on a level that no one else could.

  After dinner Luke offered to help bring my things upstairs. “Which room?” he called from the foyer, a bag in each hand.

  “The blue room!” replied my mother. Gary and I had slept in that room before, with its calming mist-colored walls and big white bed. I liked the blue room.

  By the time my father came home, Luke and I had brought up all
my things and I was beginning to unpack. Somehow the physical act of unzipping suitcases with the intent of putting things in drawers—drawers that were not my own—summoned an unexpected and unwelcome sense of panic.

  When I heard the echo of my father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, I quickly fought to regain my composure. “Where’s my girl?” he called as he headed down the hallway.

  Though I knew that he knew exactly where I was, I played along. “In here!” I said cheerfully as I blotted the wet streaks on my face with the backs of my hands.

  The door cracked open and he stuck his head in. “Hey, Dad,” I said, forcing a smile as I sat on the bed in front of an open suitcase, the bedside lamp giving off a soft, yellow glow. Somehow it was harder to see my father than it had been to see my mom. Gary was exactly the type of man my father had wanted me to end up with, his hardscrabble roots appealing to my father’s up-at-dawn, midwestern sensibilities. “He’s a self-made man,” my father would declare proudly when describing Gary to his friends. These were churchgoing men, pillars of the community who admired ambition, perseverance, and a strong work ethic. “Put himself through college and law school. And you should see how wonderful he is with his brother.”

  “Oh, Ellie,” he said sadly as he stepped inside and saw my red-rimmed eyes. He looked tanned and vigorous, his thinning white hair appealingly wind whipped. He sat down next to me and tousled my head gently. “Everything is going to be fine, kiddo. Just fine.” He flashed the soft, comforting smile of a primetime network television father. “All this with Gary is going to work itself out.” I sniffed and nodded. I hated to disappoint my dad. We all did. But one by one, each of us in our own way had let him down. Luke was gay, I was getting a divorce, and Kat… Well, Kat was Kat.

  He gave me a kiss on the forehead and told me again that everything was going to be okay; then he went downstairs to begin an evening routine that involved a glass of Scotch, a leather chair, and Fox News. As soon as he closed the door, I lay down on the bed and wept, gripping a pillow against my face to muffle the sobs. It was an angry, indignant cry. But when I was fully purged, I clenched my jaw and balled my fists and vowed that that was it. I wasn’t going to become some sad, barren spinster, puttering around my parents’ house like an invalid. I was going to put one foot in front of the other and move on from this shit. I would get over Gary; I would accept our divorce. God, she’s so healthy, people would think. She’s really pulled herself through all this. And if I couldn’t do it, then I would pretend to. I was good at pretending.