One True Thing Read online

  “I’m having them over for lunch next week,” my mother said.

  How I remember that lunch for the Minnies. Years later, when I was on call at the hospital, when my scalp began to feel rank and gritty and my face slack after a night of screaming and suffering and pleas for painkillers on the medical wards, I would try to gauge my fatigue and always I would come back to the same basis for comparison: I was as sweaty and drained as I had been at the end of the day I cooked for those women, the day I learned how much work it took to make lunch for ten, or at least to do it the way my mother did.

  The day before, she sent me shopping, and when I returned she laid her ingredients out on the kitchen counter: the chickens, the zucchini, some cream, some carrots, I can’t recall exactly what else. I was in the basement loading the dryer and I heard her making clanging noises, pulling pots and pans out of the lower cupboards, the tympani of my childhood. I could conjure up winter evenings at my desk, writing in my journal or taking notes on index cards, hearing that crash-bang and knowing that the engine of my world was running smoothly.

  “I can do that,” I said, as I came upstairs. My mother was squatting, the top half of her inside a cabinet, looking for a lid in the back. When she emerged she was clutching it triumphantly. “I should have redone this kitchen years ago,” she said, getting to her feet, using the edge of the counter for support, panting a bit.

  “I can do that,” I repeated.

  “You can make a chicken paillard and zucchini soup?” she said. She lifted her big stockpot onto a back burner and began to fill it with water from the tea kettle. “I should have redone it years ago,” she said, as though to herself. “At least I would have had a sink deep enough to put a pot in.” Then she turned, hand on her hip, narrowed her eyes and looked at me.

  For just a moment she looked hard, calculating, as though she was sizing me up. Then she wiped her hands on a dish towel and sat down in one of the chairs at the oak table. She was wearing a big blue butcher’s apron; she untied it, pulled it over her head, and handed it to me.

  “The torch is passed,” she said. “Take the chicken and put it into the pot with a carrot, some peppercorns, a stalk of celery and a handful of parsley and cover it with water. And put the kettle on for tea. You can’t cook without tea.”

  It took me all afternoon to make that meal. She sat and gave instructions. I leaped back and screamed the first time I fed zucchini into the food processor and it let out a chi-chi-chi sound that made me think it would chew up my fingers. I mistakenly poured a mug of hot tea into the chicken stock. My mother just laughed. “At least it wasn’t sugared,” she said. “Leave it alone. They’ll think it’s some exotic new recipe if they notice at all.”

  At some point, I remember, I dropped into the chair opposite her, my face damp from the heat of the stove. “If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “isn’t there an easier way to do this? Don’t people buy chicken broth in cans? Can’t you get prechopped zucchini or something?”

  “I don’t think you can get prechopped zucchini, although you can certainly get chicken broth in cans,” she said. “But I’ve always liked doing it this way. It tastes better and it makes me feel productive.”

  “Lord, Mama,” I said. “You’re the most productive person I know.”

  “Well, if you think that, it’s because of all the things like this I did.”

  “But how did you do this when we were little? How did you have the time? Didn’t we get in the way?”

  “Not so much,” she said, sipping at her tea. “You and Jeff were usually off someplace outside. And Brian would sit right here, on the floor, and cook with me. I would give him some flour and some water and he could sit here for hours and stir the whole mess together and sing ‘Waltzing Matilda.’”

  “I remember that,” I said.

  “The only problem I had was that you used to run away so often. That was mostly when we lived in Princeton. I’d be making stew or something and a squad car would pull up. After a while I got to know all the policemen. Do you remember that?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I remember you talking about it.”

  “One of them said to me, ‘Well, Mrs. Gulden, this little girl is just on her way to somewhere else.’” She turned and looked at me, her eyes so bright, and then she smiled ruefully. “But Brian just sat and stirred his mess.” There was a popping sound from the top of the stove. “You’ve got your stock too high,” she added, and I sighed and got to my feet.

  “I like the book club better,” I said.

  “So do I,” my mother said.

  “The Gulden Girls Book and Cook Club,” I said, and she laughed. She looked so happy. But I noticed that when she lifted her mug of tea her hand trembled. You could hear her breathing a room away. And often, almost unconsciously, she rubbed at her lower back as though she had a pain there.

  It was a good lunch; I remember that, too. Someone said that the soup had an unusual taste, and both my mother and I choked. “It’s Ellen’s secret recipe,” my mother said.

  The annual plan for the Christmas trees was made at that meeting; it took almost as much time as my stock to simmer and settle. Each year the Minnies decorated the twelve blue spruces that stood in a cluster at the end of Main Street. Each year they made dozens and dozens of balls and figures and garlands, and then they rose on ladders, all those women, like a construction crew, and turned the trees into the focal point of the town green. The mayor lit them and a choir sang carols.

  The trees were a Langhorne tradition and were taken very seriously: if you lived in Langhorne and, did not attend the tree lighting ceremony, everyone assumed you were too sick to stand, which is what I sensed the Minnies feared would happen to my mother in the six weeks before Christmas. One year a group of high school boys had picked the trees clean of their decorations in the middle of the night, and when school was dismissed that day there were two squad cars outside in the circular driveway. By next morning all the decorations were back on, and back on exactly where they had been when the Minnies had put them on.

  “Now, what are our colors?” Linda Best, the district attorney’s wife, said as she leaned her shelflike bosom on our mahogany dining-room table.

  “I think red and gold this year,” said Isabel Duane, eating her chicken in the European fashion, the tines of her fork turned down and her knife pushing bits of food onto their sharp silver points.

  “Oh, not again,” said Mrs. Byers. “Wasn’t it just the year before last that we had red and gold?”

  “You always do this, Caroline,” Mrs. Duane said. “You always lump them all together. We haven’t had red and gold for years.”

  “Oh, Kate,” said Mrs. Byers, turning to my mother at the head of the table, “wasn’t it just two years ago? Remember, because you used those angels with the big red robes and the gold trumpets? It was the year before last.”

  “Isabel’s right,” my mother said, a hand atop Caroline Byers’s to cushion the blow. “Last year blue and silver; the year before was red and white. We haven’t had red and gold since the year Ellen left for Harvard. I remember because I was making angels the first Thanksgiving she was home.”

  “How many years ago, Ellen?” Mrs. Best said.

  “Five. Or six.”

  “So red and gold it is,” Mrs. Duane said, with a little nod that said she’d known it would be so. Mrs. Byers frowned. “It seems done, somehow,” she said with a sigh.

  I could almost feel my mother relax at the other end of the table. She loved the tree decorating, and she had been deeply unhappy one year when some Minnie, now gone, moved to Florida or somewhere equally distant spiritually and physically, had prevailed upon the others to embrace a color scheme of blue and green. “Ugh,” she had said whenever she sat down to work on her decorations that year.

  My mother had one tree to do by herself, as she had for many years; she would not be moved by faint suggestions that she oversee the entire project. I thought of Dr. Cohn and her menorah. She would ge
t one, I knew, made by my mother from a pattern in some magazine. Or she would get some other token, a sampler or a needlepoint pillow. I could imagine Dr. Cohn telling people who came to her office that a patient had once made it for her.

  “Is George taking some time off?” Mrs. Best asked as they stood to leave after coffee and dessert.

  “George?” my mother said. “He has more work than ever, with this new faculty tenure committee. And he’s working on an article. You know how he is.”

  Mrs. Best’s mouth narrowed to a thin line of bright coral lipstick. “Well, yes, so is Ed, but under the circumstances—”

  “Linda, you will be late for the library meeting,” Mrs. Duane interrupted. “And so will I, and I just won’t.” Mrs. Duane hugged my mother, and I saw my mother wince and wondered where it hurt. “Lovely lunch, Kate,” Mrs. Duane said. “Lovely lunch, Ellen.” And she cut her blue eyes toward Mrs. Best and made a horrid face. Then they all were gone.

  “I’ll clean up, Ellie,” my mother said, but ten minutes later I found her asleep in the living room and I cleared the table and did the dishes myself. It had been a lovely lunch, but it had tired her. I hated Linda Best.

  The leaves turned and floated down, commonplace to all but the children, who scuffed through them along the curbs in their school shoes on the way to the bus stop. We made Halloween treats, a quarter and a Tootsie Roll and a plastic witch riding a broom, all tied up in an orange napkin with a black ribbon. I learned how to make beef burgundy, although I nearly ruined it, and to fold napkins into swans. The tasks were both tedious and challenging, like diagramming complex sentences. “In the unlikely event that I become the overseer of an elegant household,” I said, “I will have one company meal.”

  “Don’t forget your zucchini soup,” my mother said.

  She told me stories of going to public school in New York when the schools were still good there, about riding a Schwinn her father bought secondhand in Riverside Park, about being forbidden to go to City College, which was all the dry-cleaner’s daughter could afford, first because her father wanted to protect her from the Jews, then the blacks. She took out her past lives as though to look at each, fold it carefully, and put it between tissue paper in some cedar-scented bottom drawer.

  She told me of how her brother Stevie, older by two years, had gone to Fort Benning on a bus to join the Army and how she had envied him the excitement, the trip down south, the communal life instead of the airless apartment with the tiny spotless kitchen, and finally the tissue-thin letters with the strange exotic stamps. She told me of how they finally brought him home from Vietnam in 1965.

  “My mother said to the funeral-home director, ‘Open the box.’ Stevie’s dress uniform was perfect, I don’t think he’d worn it more than once or twice, but his poor face was so swollen that it was hard to tell it was him. And they’d powdered it over, but you could still see that it was a funny blue color, like a bruise. My mother looked at him and she said ‘Steven’ very quietly, and she touched his hand.”

  That was the only time my mother cried during October, that and in front of the television. At night sometimes we went through the television listings with a pencil, picking out old movies. We watched them with a bench in front of us, bowls filled with Styrofoam balls, pins, ribbons, sequins, so we could work on the Christmas decorations.

  We watched Waterloo Bridge, saw Vivien Leigh jump to her death after descending into prostitution. We watched Dark Victory—Bette Davis blind—and Now, Voyager—Bette Davis beaten down. We watched Stella Dallas three times.

  And cried and cried and cried and cried, blowing our noses into the tissues that stood amid the finished decorations. Or sometimes we cried at tragedies on the news shows, toddlers, as yellow as young pumpkins, who needed new livers, girls who left home to become Broadway hoofers and wound up as decapitated hookers, former child stars photographed with hidden cameras as they picked food from dumpsters. Mass murders, earthquakes, floods, fires—all took our minds off real tragedy for at least a little while.

  We finished Pride and Prejudice and turned to Great Expectations. My mother thought Pip’s admiration for Estella was unconvincing. “It’s the weak link in just about every book I’ve ever read,” she said one day, lying on the couch with the book on her lap, her raspy breathing punctuated with a barking cough. “They set up a very smart, very thoughtful, very nice character, and then have him fall in love with someone that anyone could tell is a horrible human being.”

  “But in real life nice smart people fall in love with horrible people all the time. More often than not, in my experience.”

  “Well, you should know,” my mother said, and then immediately added, “I’m sorry.”

  “Apology accepted,” I said.

  “Believe me, Ellie, I understand sexual chemistry. Understand it perfectly. From experience.” My mother’s face began to turn a deep rose color against which her eyes looked very brown, but she seemed determined to go on. “It’s a powerful thing.”

  “Mama,” I said, “are we about to have that little sex talk we never had when I was thirteen?”

  “I beg your pardon! We did have that little sex talk. For God’s sake, I practiced for it for two weeks. And we had it when you were eleven, when I first noticed that you had”—she made a pointing motion with her index fingers—“poking out the front of your swim-team tank suit.”

  I frowned. I vaguely remembered something about tampons and fertilization, but it was as murky as the water in the pool where we practiced for swim team, with its yeasty smell of overchlorination, a smell I had realized some years later in Jon’s car was second cousin to the smell of semen.

  “Please don’t tell me you don’t remember,” she said.

  “I kind of remember.”

  “I even had a little pamphlet about the female sex organs, and then all you cared about was the math. What about twins, you said, and I explained that there were two eggs. What about triplets? I think you got all the way up to octuplets. That was the first time I’d heard that one, octuplets. And finally I told you how the egg and the seed got in the same place at the same time and you said, without missing a beat, ‘How does it feel?’”

  Suddenly it all came back to me. I remembered how on that day, too, my mother’s face had flushed bright, and she had run a hand distractedly through her hair, and then my father had come into the hallway unexpectedly, noisily, ebulliently, with some great news—a sabbatical? a publication in some scholarly journal?—and she had never answered the question. But I had known the answer by her face, and, later, by her manner some Sunday mornings at the breakfast table, bemused, sleepy, and self-satisfied.

  “Of course I told you the truth,” she said now, completing the memory the way it ought to be. “I don’t think you were a bit pleased. You just looked at me in that sizing-up way you had when you were young and went upstairs. I wondered what you were thinking. I always had a hard time figuring out what you were thinking.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I didn’t do a very good job of dealing with that,” she added, looking down at her hands and turning them in her lap. “Figuring out what you were thinking. Your father was better at it. Much better.” She looked at me and added, “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, a little mystified because I was not sure what the apology was for. For so long I’d thought about myself as a girl who’d walked away from her mother’s life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she’d let me go.

  One morning I awoke confused from a dream in which Jonathan and I were biting at each other at the front of a large lecture room filled with students. I heard high cries from the bedroom below, and for just a moment I thought that there was a baby somewhere in the house, waiting to be changed and fed. Then my father called my name. When I got to their bedroom he was sitting on the edge of the bed, a towel around his waist, and my mother was crying without tears.

 
; “She’s in horrible pain,” he said. “She says it’s her back.” And he turned to her. “All will be well, Katydid, shh, shh, shh. All will be well. Shhhh.”

  “A heating pad,” my mother said, her voice shrill.

  “She’s been up most of the night,” my father said. “I couldn’t find a heating pad but she insisted I shouldn’t wake you.”

  “Let Ellen sleep,” my mother said querulously, as though she had been repeating it all night long.

  I brought a heating pad down from my room and together my father and I pulled my mother upright, one on each arm. With the quilt rolled back and her nightgown slipping off her shoulders and twisted up around her thighs I could see how much she had hidden from me until now. The skin on her upper arms hung down in wrinkled sacs; her collarbone stood out like the beams that hold the house up. Her legs were narrow stalks, bruised. I was reminded of a girl in our house at Harvard whose diet consisted only of bananas and Evian and who left at midsemester, still insisting as her size three leather skirt slipped down her bony hips that what she really needed was to run another mile each morning.

  Six weeks we’d lived so close together and yet she had insulated me from much of the disintegration she saw whenever she removed her nightgown each morning. Insulated me when she kept me out of Dr. Cohn’s office, when she talked to me in gentle code of works of fiction and past lives, when she shut the door of the bedroom and bathroom and mustered her gay smile on our excursions. “Let Ellen sleep,” she had insisted, and I knew why. She was not yet ready to let her child be the grown-up in the house. She had had one great calling, as a mother, and she would not be forced from the field.

  When we laid her back down on the heating pad, my father and I, she was breathing as though she’d run up the stairs herself.

  “You have a nine o’clock,” she said to him, without opening her eyes.

  As I was calling the doctor I heard the door open and close, and knew that he was gone. I wondered what he thought when he looked at the wreck of her body, whether he was sad or repulsed. I wondered what she thought as she watched him look. I wondered what life was like on the night shift, whether she was able to say and feel the things in the dark of their bedroom that she kept from me in the light of day, whether he was a better man than I now thought him.