One True Thing Read online

  “Your mother didn’t hire a nurse when you had your tonsils out. She didn’t hire a nurse when you had chicken pox or when you broke your arm. She wouldn’t want strangers in her home. She won’t even have a cleaning woman.”

  “Papa, I have an apartment. I have a job. I have a life.”

  The shadow lifted. The screen door slammed. A delivery truck slid by with a rumble as it changed gears and so I did not hear my father’s muffled footsteps when he returned, when he came across the porch in his deck shoes. My linen jacket sailed into my lap, and my straw hat, and then my purse came down hard on the wooden decking, my wallet bouncing loose. My duffel bag landed at my feet.

  “You”—he said, throwing a book atop the pile—“have”—and then my running shoes—“a Harvard education”—then my loafers—“but”—and the glass of orange juice rolled unbroken atop the mess, soaking the shoes—“you have no heart.”

  My father says this all the time, usually about writers. Pound’s problem, he says, is not that he was an anti-Semite but that he had no heart. Fitzgerald’s work is fatuous and second-rate because he had no heart. And now I was part of this motley crew, the geniuses and the almost-rans, all those smart people who were irredeemably flawed because they lacked something many people said George Gulden had never had at all. Something I’d spent my whole life trying to win from him.

  My possessions lay strewn around me, the bright detritus of another life, and I stared at them and at the glow of the juice glass, its curving surface shining iridescent silver in the late-afternoon sun.

  There were ghosts everywhere on the pavement and beneath the trees. Kate Gulden pulled Brian in the red wagon up the hill as Jeff and I dragged the quilt and the picnic basket behind. Kate Gulden tacked a sign that said CONGRATULATIONS across the porch posts, so that I covered my face when the principal brought me back from the state capitol after I won the essay contest. She planted bulbs around the porch lattices, painted the shutters Williamsburg blue, heaved groceries out of the back of the car, lived a domestic life double time.

  I pictured my mother marooned in the living room, some cheery woman in a white uniform making her tuna sandwiches and folding her underthings, the house silent and a little dusty. But there was no story to go with that picture. When I’d written a false paragraph in a story my friend Jules would say, “This one just doesn’t parse.”

  Kate Gulden and a hired nurse did not parse.

  All my life I had known one thing for sure about myself, and that was that my life would never be her life. I had moved as far and as fast as I could; now I was back at my beginning. All my life my father had convinced me, almost by osmosis, rarely with praise, that I was gifted, special, that there were things other people could not do that I could do effortlessly. But I had never imagined this was one of them.

  I packed up the pile of my jumbled belongings and carried it inside, the empty orange-juice glass balanced atop it all. But when I got to the door the glass rolled sideways and fell, shattering into innumerable shards, bright in the sun.

  I think that the people I know now believe I went home to take care of my mother because I loved her. And sometimes I believe that was in my heart without my knowing it. But the truth is that I felt I had no choice. I felt I had to be what my father wanted me to be, even if it was something so unlike the other Ellen he’d cultivated and tutored for all those years, even if it meant that I had to go from his brightest student to his demi-wife. I had to prove that, unlike Pound and Fitzgerald, I had a heart.

  I carried my things back upstairs to my bedroom. When I came downstairs, my father was in the den, talking on the phone. I waited in the doorway until he was finished. Then he turned to look at me, his silhouette black against the light coming in through the window. He looked as big as he had when I was a little girl, when I would watch him rise and rise and rise from the side of my bed at night until from below, his head, with its carefully brushed black hair, would blot out the light and make it nighttime as surely as if he had his finger on the switch to the moon and sun.

  He had always been able to read me; if I had good news I had never been able to hide it past the moment when he saw my face, and if I had bad news his own face would settle, even before I spoke, into vertical planes of disappointed expectation.

  “I’ll be back Tuesday morning,” I said, and he nodded.

  “To stay,” he said, a declarative sentence.

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “There are other options. Maybe you could take a sabbatical. It’s been four years since you took one for the book.”

  He pressed his lips together, and the lines grew long down either side of his face. “It seems to me another woman is what’s wanted here,” he said. I’ve never forgotten the way he said that sentence. My father’s syntax was often peculiar, as though he’d absorbed the Victorians whole when he made them his area of expertise, taken them in as you do an oyster. But for once it seemed to me he could have said “I want” or “I need.” He could have paid me the compliment of necessity, or indispensability. But no: “It seems to me another woman is what’s wanted here.”

  We looked at each other and I thought I saw something relax in him, in his eyes and shoulders, and I knew that he knew I would do what he wanted. “We’ll see how it goes,” I said.

  “Ellen,” he said, “this is not something that can be decided piecemeal. It’s important that we settle this for the duration. Your mother will need someone to take her to the hospital for chemotherapy. I have no idea how debilitating that will be or how many other things she will no longer be able to manage. The doctor says she will need someone with her during the day. And a sabbatical is out of the question for me right now.”

  “A sabbatical is out of the question for me right now, too.”

  “Ellen, will you do this or will you not?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll be back on Tuesday.” And I turned to go.

  “Ellen,” he called when I was at the door. I watched as he passed his hand over his jaw. “This is a difficult time,” my father said, and the effort of that sentence, within it the shadow of an apology, seemed to shake him. We were not in the habit of apologizing to one another. There had never been the need; neither of us ever disappointed. He sat down in a chair and let his head fall back, his hands slack along the upholstered arms. He looked old.

  “I need to get the broom,” I said. “I broke something.” And I went to the kitchen and stood for a time, my head against the broom-closet door, a dustpan in my hand, and then went outside to clean up.

  And so it was that I came back to Langhorne on a Tuesday morning, drove back in a rented car with a burgeoning sense of claustrophobia worse than if I’d been caught in an elevator between floors. I turned off the highway and drove through the more modest parts of town, the parts where the small houses were only an arm’s length apart and the bigger ones had been chopped up into apartments for students and staff.

  The green in front of the Town Hall was planted thick with asters in an early autumnal rusty orange. I always thought the town green looked best in spring, glorious with daffodils, hundreds of them. When a breeze moved across them they bowed, together, like dancers in a Busby Berkeley musical.

  It seemed a long time until April, that day I drove back into town.

  My few New York belongings were in the car—the futon, an old trunk, and a portable electric typewriter. As I pulled into the empty driveway, our house looked as though it was abandoned. Next door I saw a curtain rise, then fall.

  I had quit my job at the magazine and sublet my apartment. The people I worked with had tried to be sympathetic, but they were incredulous. “My mother is sick,” I said to the managing editor, a stout, short man named Bill Tweedy, flushed from high blood pressure and hard drinking, who had worked in newspapers and had contempt for himself and for the rest of us because we had the luxury of having six days from start to finish in which to put out a publication.

  “Ellen,” he said, �
��not to be crass, but a sick mother means three weeks off and a very nice arrangement of flowers sent by the staff. You were doing good here. You did that nice short thing on the gay cop, the story on the girl who got murdered on Madison Avenue, that was a good piece. You did all the research on that kids-and-summer guide. If you quit, there’s no guarantee.”

  “I have to,” I said.

  “How about if I gave you a promotion?” he said. “More money?”

  “Mr. Tweedy, do you honestly think someone would come in and say their mother was dying of cancer to get a raise?”

  “Ellen, this is New York.”

  My friend Jules, my only real friend at the magazine or in New York, took me to lunch. Jules was fragile, physically and psychologically, too, but no one ever noticed because of the enormous aureole of black curls around her small pointed face, and the resonant timbre of her deep rich voice. Both made her seem like a big person, invulnerable and sure; the misapprehension that we shared those qualities had drawn me to her when we first met.

  But I came to know the real Jules, the one who pulled that hair back from her face and leaned forward to peer suspiciously at herself in the mirror, who fell in love, was broken by it, sat alone for weeks feeding herself on yogurt and show tunes, and fell in love again. I knew the Jules whose mother from her earliest memories had told her that she should never be disappointed by failure because failure was all you could expect.

  “This is a woman who would have told Abe Lincoln not to pursue a law degree,” Jules told me once.

  Jules loved me as I’d never been loved by a friend before, with full knowledge. She’d once been told by someone who had been a year ahead of me at Harvard: “Ellen Gulden would walk over her mother in golf spikes to succeed.” “Well,” Jules had replied, “I’m not her mother.” After I’d cleaned out my desk at the magazine she took me out for lunch and held my hand across the table.

  “Let them think we’re dykes,” she said disdainfully, glancing around at the buttoned-up men in deceptively wide and wild ties eating something tartar at the tables around us. “With the guys I meet, I only wish we were.” When I started to cry she passed me Kleenex filled with lint from her leather backpack. There was a green M & M stuck in one corner of the tissue. Jules was incredibly, proudly disorderly. There were often odd bits of old food and half-empty coffee cups on her bedroom nightstand. “Eat it,” she said of the M & M. “It will make you feel better.”

  “You have to do this,” she added, rubbing my fingers as though I was a child who had come in from the cold. “You would want your daughter to do it for you.”

  “Jules, what about my life?”

  “What about it? It’s not forever. Look, Ellen, I understand. Do you think in a million years I would want to move back into my mother’s apartment in Riverdale and listen to her go over all the ways in which Marvin and the floozy screwed up her life? But the truth is that she’s your mother, and she needs you for a while, and you get your life back at the end and you’ve done the right thing.”

  “My mother and I—”

  “Please,” said Jules, “okay? Just please. Your mother and you have a difficult relationship? Excuse me, but why wouldn’t you? Why should you be different from every other daughter in the world? Besides, she sounds like the only halfway decent mother in the world. Has she ever told you you need to lose weight?”

  “I’m a good weight.”

  “You see, there you go. The fact that you would think that you have to be overweight to have your mother suggest you need to lose weight shows the ways in which you are clueless about how bad this relationship can be. The fact that you could say that you are a good weight is a measure of what a sane upbringing you had.”

  “You don’t know my father.”

  “I don’t need to know your father. I know Jonathan.”

  Jules did not like Jonathan. It was one of the only sore spots in our friendship.

  “Don’t start,” I said.

  “Agreed,” said Jules, pushing her curls back with her fingers.

  “I’m just afraid.”

  “I know you are. But when you come back here you will have done something really important.”

  “If I come back.”

  Jules squeezed my hand so hard I winced. “This is not Peter Pan,” she said. “Your brothers are not the Lost Boys. They can learn how to run a microwave. Your father can learn where the Goddamn dry cleaner is. But no one,” she ended, and her eyes filled, “can help your mother with the shit she’ll be going through but you.”

  “Hire a nurse,” Jonathan said when I called him at the data-processing job he worked two nights a week to pay for law school.

  “She didn’t hire a nurse when I had bronchitis,” I said.

  “Oh Ellen, did Papa George come up with that line? It’s so—so self-sacrificing. It sounds just like him.”

  “Fuck you, Jon,” I said.

  “Oh, you will,” he said, his voice silky, and he described in detail how I would when next he was in Langhorne, which seemed like years from now.

  That was what I was thinking of as I tugged the futon from the back seat of the rental car—all the times we’d laid atop it and worked away, trying to find the places that would drive one another half mad, feeling half mad when we succeeded. Like a mummified prom corsage or a lock of hair, the stains on the futon were the memoirs of our life together. There was no place I could possibly imagine putting it that would not disturb the perfect prettiness of my mother’s house.

  It would be conspicuously out of place in my room, which was sponge-painted a pale blue, its windows veiled in flowered chintz. Over my desk were my diplomas, framed and matted, and the certificate from the state essay contest, handed to me hastily by the commissioner of education as the cameras made their nick-nick insect sounds. I had written a glib and self-righteous defense of euthanasia, and the conservative Catholic governor, who usually awarded the $1,000 prize, wanted nothing to do with me.

  I spent the money on a hiking trip in Colorado and a leather jacket for Jonathan.

  So I rolled my futon into the garage. Whenever I saw it there, over the next few months, whenever I went out to get a can of oil or a screwdriver, its misshapen bulk in the corner made me tingle, like a spinster peeking into the master bedroom of the house next door, all grim mouth and warm crotch.

  I don’t know how much my mother knew about my sex life, or the rest of my life, for that matter. I don’t know how typical our relationship was, either. Perhaps I know the wrong sort of woman, overcerebral and nervous. I only know that I can tell from the timbre of Jules’s voice on the telephone, edgy and a little higher than usual, that she has just seen or spoken to her mother. I only know that one day I went in to see my adviser at Harvard, a woman who had appeared on television news programs more than once in the role of a Valkyrie, brandishing her almost incendiary intelligence, and found her with her head in her hands. “The tenacious umbilical cord,” she said lightly when I asked if I should come back another time, but her posture had given her away.

  When I considered her dispassionately I knew that, as my friends said, I was lucky in my mother. It was simply that I rarely considered her at all. My mother was like dinner: I needed her in order to live, but I did not pay much attention to what went into her.

  My father was dessert. He exhibited the kind of dim general interest in my brothers that fathers had in the television shows of the 1950s. But he did not play catch, and he did not fish. He read, and he taught. Sometimes he let me correct his blue books for freshman English. Sometimes I think he got his reputation as a savage grader from me, although I might have inherited my predilection to judge harshly from him as well.

  The most potent memory of my childhood is the sound of the door opening in the evening as he came in. It always reminded me of that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door of the house and the black-and-white world of Kansas turns Technicolor.

  As I opened the same door, that Tuesday morning, t
he house was dim and gray, quiet, seemingly empty. The air smelled of some flower, very sweet, and I saw a pitcher filled with freesia on the gateleg table in the hall. In the living room there was a slender glass vase filled with blue iris, bright against the yellow-and-white striped walls. On the silver tray on the piano were the cards: “From the faculty and staff of Langhorne College,” “Get well, Kate—Skip and Caroline Byers,” “From the Buckley family with our love.”

  And then I turned and she was there, on the stairs, in blue pants and a shirt, the color lighting up her red hair like a flag. “Ellie,” my mother said, in surprise and gladness. “You’re home!”

  I did not know whether it was my imagination, but her shoulder blades seemed sharper, little wings jutting from her back as I pressed her close. She smelled of bath powder, but of something more chemical, too, and when I squeezed her I thought I felt her wince, although it was I who pulled away first, as I always had.

  “I’m fine,” she said, sitting down in one of the big wing chairs. “I am. I weighed myself this morning, thinking I’d be pounds lighter, but I’m still the same. It must be all this water I’m holding. But the water’s supposed to calm down, and meanwhile I have to take it easy. ‘NO painting,’ said Dr. Cohn, my new doctor, who is, you’ll love this, a woman. ‘NO papering, no stenciling, no upholstering.’ I had to stop her and say, ‘May I needlepoint and sew?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if it doesn’t include a ladder or a staple gun.’”

  She went on like that for so long that it seemed she would run out of air; she talked about the doctors, the flowers, the food in the hospital, the food her friends had brought to the house in casserole dishes. And then suddenly her face stilled, sagged. Her eyes lost their shine, and she took a deep breath. She seemed to marshal her strength, and then her eyes lit up again like lanterns that had momentarily guttered in the wind of her thoughts.

  “I don’t know why I’m talking about all that,” she said. “The important thing is that I’m all right. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it, to make sure I’m all right? And I am. I never want you or the boys to worry about me. I feel good. I feel fine. I sleep more than I used to. But I’ll be myself before you know it. It would kill me if I thought you were worried. I can live without a staple gun.” And we both laughed.