One True Thing Read online

  “None of your business,” I said with a grin, as though I had gotten the dress for next to nothing. In fact it had cost seventy dollars, and I had taken the label out because it read MOTHER AND CHILD. Maternity clothes, my mother needed now, to accommodate her poor swollen belly.

  When I went up to check on her, Brian was sitting crosslegged next to the ottoman, a book in his lap, reading aloud. As I came in he slid the book beneath the ruffled skirt of the chair.

  “What have you got there, Bri?” I asked. “Tropic of Cancer? Peyton Place? Story of O?”

  “Much worse,” my mother said.

  Brian slid the book out again and held it up. It was a Gothic novel, with a cover illustration of a woman in ruffled petticoats being pressed to the highly defined pectoral muscles of a man wearing only jodphurs. “Your father will call the police,” my mother said, giggling.

  “The thought police,” said Brian. “They would all be wearing tweed jackets and they would deprogram you by making you read the Oxford English Dictionary.”

  “Oh, honey,” said my mother, giggling again, “don’t make fun of the OED.”

  “They take you in a room and put headphones on you and make you listen to Orson Welles read Silas Marner,” I said.

  “Now, there’s a real mystery,” my mother said. “How someone wrote a book as good as Middlemarch and then wrote a book as boring as Silas Marner. Jeffrey would say she was all over the map.”

  “Oh, Ma,” said Brian. “The person who wrote Silas Marner was a guy. George Eliot.”

  My mother and I screamed and held our heads. “Oh, my God, Bri,” I said, “if Papa heard you you’d be on the road with your thumb out, on your way back to Philadelphia. George Eliot was a woman. It was a pen name. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans.”

  “Are you sure?” said Brian.

  “Honey, it’s okay,” I said. “You’re going to major in political science. Just don’t let Papa hear you. That and this”—I nudged the paperback with my foot—“would finish him off. I can see it: PROF KILLED BY BAD LITERARY TASTE: SON HELD.”

  There was a knock at the door and when my father looked in, we all began to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” he said.

  “A case of mistaken identity,” I said.

  When the food was on the table in the dining room, on the mahogany table with its matching breakfront and china closet and chairs that had once belonged to my grandparents, my mother took Brian’s and Jeffrey’s hands and said, “I want to say grace.” And for the first time in years we did:

  “Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat, thank you for the birds that sing, thank you, God, for everything.”

  When I raised my head and dropped my father’s hand I looked at him and there were tears in his eyes.

  For dessert I had made pumpkin pie, and as I was in the kitchen cutting it my mother came in. She looked tired and she’d eaten all her lipstick off, leaving only the edge of it, like false wax lips from Halloween.

  “I need a pill, Ellen,” she said.

  “Mama, I gave you one just after lunch. It’s only been four hours.”

  “Ellen, I need a pill. Where are they?”

  “They’re in the cabinet in the powder room. Can’t you wait until after dessert?”

  “Get me a pill, please, Ellen,” my mother said, so loudly that all conversation stopped in the next room. “And remember that this is still my house.” I could hear the edge of one of those rages in her voice, and as she returned to the table I went to the medicine cabinet.

  I heard her say to Brian, “Now—I want a full report on the roommate and any suitable girls.”

  “And you can tell me when we go out later about all the unsuitable ones,” Jeff said.

  But Brian did not go out with the rest of us. He helped my mother to bed after we’d had our coffee in the living room; he sat in her room after she’d dozed off, listening to her breathe in the dark. “Don’t fall asleep here,” I whispered, but he didn’t reply, and I knew he’d be there until my father came up. I remember thinking that if they gave any of us an aptitude test for taking care of Kate Gulden when she was mortally ill, Brian, sweet and earnest Brian, would have aced it. Jeff once had described us all: “The food chain is that Ellen lives up to Pop, and I live up to Ellen.” A little plaintively Bri had said, “What about me?”

  “You don’t have to live up to anyone, kid,” Jeff said. “You and Mom just have to get up every morning and be present on the planet.”

  So predictable, that it would all begin to unravel in a bar. That was where we went after the dinner dishes were done, Jonathan and Jeff and I, to a bar called Sammy’s, named in honor of Samuel Langhorne, who was about as much a Sammy as Thomas Jefferson was a Tommy or John Adams a Jack. The place was one of those dark English-pub imitations, with cheap, mass-produced stained-glass windows and a big dark wood bar with heraldic nonsense fixed to its front. It was full of town kids home for Thanksgiving break and the community college kids, who wished they were. Jeff had to wade through a sea of glad hands and big smiles. One girl ran her hand up his khaki leg from knee to thigh and said, “Come over to see me.”

  “Who was that?” Jonathan asked.

  “A very happy woman,” said Jeff. “Name of Jennifer.”

  “They’re all Jennifers,” I said. “When our mothers were young, they were all Kathys and Pattys. In ten years they’ll all be Ashleys and Taras.”

  “Aren’t you tough!” said Jeff.

  “My middle name.”

  “Yeah, you put on a good show, El. But I see through you.”

  “Deep down inside a romantic?”

  “Deep down inside a softie.”

  “This conversation is like a Kahlil Gibran sitcom, for Christsake,” said Jonathan. He smiled over at Jennifer, who smiled at him. I slipped my hand into the back pocket of his jeans.

  “I’ll cut it off, Jon,” I whispered as we sat down at a table, a slab of heavy varnished wood with a round red votive candle winking at its center.

  I hadn’t had a drink since the day I’d come back to Langhorne. It didn’t feel right; it didn’t parse. Neither had the seal of sex I’d felt between my legs as I’d cooked and cleaned the night before in my mother’s house. I thought about it as the need to be in control, to be there for her in every way, in case of some crisis, some emergency. I thought about how terrible it would be if she was left to suffer alone while I took my forays into pleasure in Jonathan’s boyhood bedroom with the pennants still tacked over the bed, if she called out and I was too muddled by wine to hear.

  But now, when I analyze my own behavior, I think I felt obliged to deny myself anything carnal, a frisson of lust, the blur of a shot of vodka, to help pay for her pain, as though pleasure was an affront to her.

  That night in Sammy’s, with Jonathan smiling that promising smile across the table at me, the red light making amber shadows on his face, I forgot all that. I had two beers, then something called a Samuel Sling, fruit juice and a muddle of different liquors, one of those drinks that go down so easy and make your head swim so fast. Under the table I ran my foot up the inside of Jonathan’s thigh. The two men talked about the football, their course work, their professors. In the middle of a sentence I cut Jeff off.

  “He just kills me,” I said.

  “Who?” said Jon. But Jeff knew.

  “My father. He just kills me. He sat there and let you guys clear the table. He didn’t say a word to me about dinner. And he goes off before she’s even asleep and says he has work to do in his study. As though we were servants. As though we’re there to serve him. Jesus.” I signaled the waitress across the room. “We need another round,” I called.

  “The hell you do,” Jeff muttered.

  “This is what it’s been like from day one, Jeffie,” I said. “He is literally never there. I literally do everything.”

  “Does your mother complain?” said Jonathan.

  “That’s not the point,” I said loudly.


  “El, the entire bar doesn’t have to share this with us,” said Jeff. He shrugged and looked at Jon. “My mother never complains about anything.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And now she can’t because he’s never around.”

  “He was never around before,” said Jeff.

  “She was never dying before,” I said.

  “Everyone deals with bad stuff in their own way,” Jon added.

  “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it, Jon?” I said. “Whenever one of you guys says people deal with bad stuff in their own way, it means you don’t deal with it at all. You just wait for it to go away. You don’t help. You don’t listen. You don’t call. You don’t write. WE deal with it in our own way. WE deal with it. We girls. We make the meals and clean up the messes and take the crap and listen to you talk about how you’re dealing with it in your own way. What way? No way!”

  Jennifer at the bar was staring at our table. So were her friends. I gave them the finger and Jeff pulled my hand out of the air. “Whooa,’ he said. “Should we get out of here?”

  “I am not your father, Ellen,” Jon said as the waitress brought our drinks. He took my glass from the tray and put it down on his side of the table.

  “No you are not, Jon,” I said, reaching across the table to get it. We pulled in opposite directions; the glass toppled and my drink ran into his lap. “Jesus,” he said, standing up.

  “Let’s go,” Jeff said.

  “I’m ready,” Jon said, “and Ellen sure as hell is. Do you want us to drop you at home?”

  “I’m going with him, Jon,” I said. “It’s been a long day. A long week. A long month. It’s very tiring, being my mother.”

  “Ellen, you have lost it. You are not your mother. You have never been your mother. There is no one in the world more different from your mother than you are.”

  I took my jacket from the back of my chair. “That was the stupidest thing you’ve ever said, Jon. And I am leaving.”

  “I haven’t seen you in almost three months.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Jon.

  “Cool it, Jon,” said Jeff. “You got laid yesterday, you’ll get laid tomorrow, and you’ll probably get laid Saturday.”

  “Hey, Jeff, my sex life is none of your business. And neither is hers. She’s a big girl.”

  “Ah, hell, she’s not as big as everybody thinks.”

  “If everyone could stop talking about me as if I wasn’t here, I’d like to go home and just go to sleep,” I said. “I’m drunk and I’m tired and I’m sick of all of you. And I don’t want a ride because I want to walk home just so I can be alone for a change.”

  And I was alone, walking home in the cold November night with my nose and eyes running, leaving Jonathan angry, locking eyes with Jeff and with Jennifer, whose lip gloss and tousled bangs seemed a world away to me. I felt like a very tired housewife, and I looked like one, too, in my corduroy slacks and cotton sweater. When I got home my mother was sitting in the living room, reading. “You didn’t have to wait up for me,” I said.

  “My back hurts.”

  Next morning the boys left me to sleep late, and when I woke up and heard war whoops from outside the window I looked out to see Brian letting my mother roll down the street in the wheelchair, with Jeff stationed down the gentle slope to stop her. The look on her face reminded me of the first time we ever put Brian on a sled at River View Park, the commingling of fear, excitement, joy, and terror. “Go for it, baby!” Jeff yelled as he put out his arms to catch her. “Bring it on home.”

  My head hurt and my tongue felt too big for my mouth. I climbed back beneath the quilt and slept until almost noon, and when I awoke and went downstairs my mother was sleeping on the couch in the living room, her hands beneath her cheek, a throw over her legs. A note from my father on the kitchen table said “Catching up at the college.” In the den my brothers were talking, their voices rising, falling, breaking. I went out on the porch and sat hugging a sweater around me until the sun began to disappear and a chill to descend. Then I went inside to make turkey sandwiches.

  Jonathan did not call that evening, and I didn’t call him. When he called on Saturday it was to say that he was going back to Cambridge early to get some work done and that he wanted me to think again about coming up soon to spend a weekend with him. “There’s no way, Jon,” I said, and we hung up with no plans to talk, to meet, no “I love you,” not even any salacious suggestions for the future. Jon, I remember thinking to myself, was not of this time and this place; he was something I would come back to when I came back to being the other Ellen.

  It would not be until months later that I would learn, from both their sworn testimonies, that he had spent Thanksgiving night and most of Friday morning in bed at his father’s house with Jennifer. So predictable, all of it. So unsurprising, so somehow apt, along with all the other things that happened that winter.

  The first part of my mother’s illness had been a kind of childhood for me, the kind of childhood I might have had, had I been a different sort of girl, my mother a different sort of woman, and both our needs to woo my father less overwhelming. Holiday cheer, Thanksgiving side dishes, stories of childhood, girlhood, and marriage—all of these were handed down to me, now, with a certain air of urgency, as though it was a school assignment on which she’d fallen behind, this chance to reclaim the daughter she might have had, the one who, like Brian, would have been happiest sitting at her feet, laughing up at her own laughter.

  But once she began to use the wheelchair our relationship was reversed, she the child, I the mother. Perhaps it was why she had resisted it so strongly. It was difficult for her to get around the house alone; the doorways were narrow, the rugs a beautiful impediment in shades of crimson and deep blue. But although I moved the furniture closer to the walls, I did not even ask if I could roll up the old Orientals. What she needed now was for the things around her to be as lovely and familiar as possible. So much else was shifting and becoming ugly.

  One day she decided we should go downtown on foot—“and on wheels,” she added—to pick out three more books at Duane’s. She put on a blue pea jacket that had always fitted her perfectly, sleek and elegant, and it concealed how thin and concave her chest was now, like the breast of a baby bird.

  “What about a little makeup?” I said. “Just in case we run into someone.”

  “Somehow I don’t think your father envisioned you having a career as a cosmetologist.”

  “And why not? I could wind up in the Tribune that way.” My mother liked to say that every engagement announcement in the local paper was of a cosmetologist engaged to a man “associated with” a construction company. It drove my father crazy when she read them aloud, but crazier still when she read about the weddings, all the detailed descriptions of someone’s point d’esprit dropped waist, bishop’s sleeves, and cloudburst tulle headpiece.

  “Oh, Ellie, you’ve been in the Tribune more than anyone except Ed Best and the mayor. Go look in my scrapbook upstairs. Girls’ State, the Spelling Bee, the Essay Contest, your graduation speech. You’re always in the Tribune”

  “It sounds like you’re keeping a running count.”

  “You bet I am. And why shouldn’t I? Now go ahead and put a little makeup on me, but don’t get carried away.”

  It was more difficult than I’d imagined. When I had smoothed on foundation, penciled in eyeliner, and brushed on mascara and blush, my mother looked a little like the kind of pictures I’d drawn of her when I was five, all round red cheeks and eyelashes like spiky black spiders. I had not gotten the effect I wanted, which was the impossible illusion that Kate Gulden was just as she always had been.

  “It’s very difficult to do this on someone else’s face,” I said.

  My mother leaned on the chest of drawers in the hallway and peered in the mirror. “You’ve never worked on a redhead before,” she said. “That’s your problem.” She took a small sponge from the bag
of cosmetics I was holding and scrubbed her face for a moment.

  “Much better,” I said.

  “Your career as a cosmetologist is over before it began,” my mother replied.

  “As a cosmetologist, I’m a great writer.”

  “You are a great writer,” said my mother, my fan club, my burden, as I buttoned her pea jacket and pulled on her beret.

  With her bony face and pallor, she looked like an aging fashion model. She’d always been a pretty woman, my mother. Unlike so many other women, whose wedding photographs are more like pictures of their daughters than of themselves, she had kept her looks and her bright eyes.

  I put on my down jacket and brought the chair backward down the front steps—clunk, clunk, clunk—in a technique I’d learned from watching mothers in the city with their strollers. My mother came down the steps slowly and carefully and sat down.

  “I feel stupid in this thing, but I want to go out,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been a hermit. You too. You haven’t been out since your brothers left after Thanksgiving.”

  We came down the street slowly because I was afraid of losing control of the chair on the slope and because I could tell, watching her head swivel from side to side, that she was looking around carefully, sight-seeing in her own neighborhood. “Look, Ellie, the Jacksons already have a tree up in their living room,” she said, and “Claire Belknap had better put something over those roses or she’ll lose them if there’s an early frost,” and “Why did the Bests paint their house that color? It was so nice when it was white.” It was as though she was seeing for all it was worth that day, all of it, every single insignificant trivial marvelous detail of it, every one.

  At the bottom of the hill we turned onto Main Street just below the green. The flowers that usually ringed the flagpole were gone now. The twelve big evergreens stood alone, the sweeping angel wings of their branches so beautiful.

  “They never quite know what to do with that planting area after they take the asters out but before the trees are decorated,” my mother said. “Our first year here, there was this new woman, I think she was the provost’s wife, who donated dozens of poinsettias. Public Works put them all in, no questions asked. Not one person seemed to know that poinsettias are tropical plants and have to be kept indoors in a cold climate. Next morning it was the saddest sight you’ve ever seen, like a battlefield. All those plants had just keeled over. Your father came home thinking this was a wonderful story and I told him I had known when they were putting them in exactly what would happen. But we were new here and I didn’t know who to tell, or if I should tell, and so in the end I just kept quiet. Your father thought that made the story even more wonderful, that he had a wife so clever that she’d known how ridiculous the whole idea was. So he told it around at every Christmas party, although in the telling I kept getting cannier and cannier and meaner and meaner. Your father got a very good story out of it. But the provost’s wife was chilly to me for years.”