Admission. Part 13

"Go in," she heard herself tell Susannah. "You'll get cold. I'm coming."

"Sh," her mother said. "She's sleeping." Then, obligingly, she stepped back into the kitchen and closed the door, waiting on the other side and peering through the window.

Portia stood for a moment, feeling the numbing cold against her face. It was punishing cold, insidious cold, the cold that dragged your body across the line. She had always had a fascination with hypothermia, it occurred to her, returning briefly to Jack London and that famous story about how the man fought and fought the cold before slipping beneath its spell. It wasn't the worst way to die, she thought, looking again at the field. Then, quite deliberately, she went to the trunk and opened it. The suitcase-shaped s.p.a.ce where Mark's bag had been seemed miraculously intact, hours and miles later, as if he had left an intangible placeholder in its position when he extracted his things. It wasn't a large s.p.a.ce. He hadn't brought much for a ten-day visit. Had he known? she thought, as she had occasionally thought over those hours and miles just past; but now, as then, the thought was accompanied by a blare of sharpest pain. And now, like then, she pushed it roughly away.

The trunk was packed with gifts, food, clothing. There was the suitcase of folders from the office, too many to get through, probably, but enough for a perpetual excuse to absent herself. She reached for the duffel bag of her clothes and the shopping bag of food-loaves of cranberry bread she'd baked the day before, crates of satsumas, a foil-wrapped plum pudding from Bon Appet.i.t. She had no idea what she was doing and only intermittent memories of the road.

"Where is Mark?" Susannah said when she came into the kitchen. She had lit the stove under her kettle and had the cupboard open, revealing her vast tea collection. With surprise, Portia noted that her mother had a box of Constant Comment in her hands.

"In Princeton," she heard herself say. "He has... there's this crisis. With a man named Gordon Sternberg."

Susannah frowned. "But when is he coming? Is he coming?"

"I'm not sure," Portia said. "It's a very volatile situation. He keeps getting calls in the middle of the night and having to drive down to Philadelphia."

"Philadelphia?"

Again, she was. .h.i.t by a wave of incongruity. What was she talking about? For an instant, she had to retrace the conversation, frantically rolling up its fragile string. Why on earth was she talking about Gordon Sternberg? Why was she talking about Mark?

Setting down her suitcase and the shopping bag she'd taken in, Portia watched her mother fuss with the tea. She was wondering at herself, at how-in all these hours-she hadn't once thought about what she'd say to Susannah, how she'd answer the obvious question. What had she done instead? How had she pa.s.sed the grinding miles and minutes, her hands tight on the steering wheel, hunched stiffly forward and staring bleary-eyed at the road? Surely something had been accomplished, some deep thought or great problem untangled once and for all, but nothing came back, only a fuzziness and weariness.

Had she always intended to lie? She had lied to her mother for years, of course, though usually for far less consequential things: the Ms. subscription, a birthday gift, she had let lapse a decade earlier; the cardiologist she had promised (and failed) to see after an episode of palpitations. Lying was a well-established method of keeping Susannah away, though only one of several in her a.r.s.enal of separation: withholding of certain information, avoidance of particular hot-b.u.t.ton issues, the expression of commonly held opinions on certain matters they could both get righteously indignant about (religious fanatics, beauty pageants, breast enlargement)-each of these was a useful means of furthering the campaign. But this particular lie had been unexpected, slipping into language without preamble and lingering afterward, like some malodorous thing. She had not intended to lead with a lie. Mark is in Princeton. Not technically an untruth, but not the truth. Mark has left me. Mark is with someone else. Mark is with a woman who is pregnant with the child he never told me he wanted. That, she thought grimly, was the inescapable, stare-you-in-the-face, invasive, pervasive, metastatic, and ultimately fatal truth.

"You didn't have to wait up for me, Mom."

"I had no idea when you'd get here."

"Ah," said Portia, though she was unsure of the connection.

"You must be tired. You must have left very late."

Portia considered this. Then, to gather information, she looked at her watch. It was nearly two-thirty in the morning, a fact that took her completely by surprise. The drive from Princeton, after all, lasted about six and a half hours, and she and Mark had left at eleven that morning. For a moment, she tried to a.s.semble the past hours, to shuffle them into order, but they seemed to resist her. There was the walk with Rachel, the place she had stopped in Brattleboro, mainly to use the bathroom, but there was food involved, too, not that she'd eaten it. A chain restaurant with a southwestern theme. (What was happening to Vermont? she had thought, reading the menu of "sizzlin' " things, choosing at random.) There had been some time there, sitting over her "sizzlin' " plate of something, feeling ill. And a margarita, it seemed to her, though that wasn't like her at all, to drink when she was driving. But what about today was remotely like her? "Like her" was her job, and Mark, and her house on her street, and going for a walk with Rachel and the dog. "Like her" was the semiannual drive across Connecticut and up 91, past Brattleboro and Putney, and the final stretch to Hartland and her mother's house. She concentrated now on that stretch of road: white moonlight on the highway with the river to her right, dull under a sheen of ice. She did remember driving that road, and the Vermont Welcome Center, and the sick, Blow Upon the Bruise way she had felt pa.s.sing the sign for Keene, New Hampshire, and the big A-frame house near Rockingham that for years had had an enormous stuffed animal in the window but now did not. She remembered, farther back, pa.s.sing the exits for Northfield and Deerfield and Springfield in Ma.s.sachusetts, but strangely couldn't say in which order they'd come. And, farther back again, to that horrible, elastic time on the street in Hartford, after Mark left, which was when her true grip on the day slipped through her fingers and was irrevocably lost. How long she had spent there, staring at the same Ma.s.sachusetts plate on the same muddy green Ford Taurus on that miserable street, she had no idea at all.

It was like one of the made-for-TV movies of her youth, she thought grimly, sipping the tea Susannah had handed her. Sybil of the snows, driving their car-was it still "their" car? or had it instantly become her car when he left by the driver's-side door?-along that straight and narrow road, with one of her capable alternate personalities at the wheel: the girl in the steel bubble, compromised by her lack of immunity, cut off from the world. Portia N., Portrait of a No Longer Teenage Alcoholic, downing a mango margarita with her "sizzlin' " something or other, and then, shamefully, getting behind the wheel of the car. Who knew what damage she might have done?

"I stopped," she told Susannah. "For dinner. In Brattleboro."

Her mother frowned. "But I was going to give you dinner."

"Oh, I know, Mom. And it would have been much better than what I got. But you know how you can get so hungry, suddenly, that it actually becomes distracting? I was famished. I had to eat."

"Okay," said her mother.

"The food was awful," she a.s.sured her.

"Would you like something now?"

Portia shook her head. She hadn't, in fact, eaten much of her dinner and wasn't hungry now. To be honest, food had become inherently unappealing. Hunger would be something else to fake while she was here. Another burden. Another outright lie.

How long can I keep this up? Portia thought. The ten days of her visit? To the end of the academic year? A calendar year? Could she keep it up forever, burdening mythical Mark, her partner, with grievous workloads and familial crises?

Oh, Mom, Mark had to fill in for the dean of faculty and address the Cla.s.s of '75.

Cressida's graduating from high school, and he wanted to be there.

Can you believe it? He came down with strep! He's in bed watching every episode of Six Feet Under for the third time.

She could draw Mark forward through an eventful, burgeoning career, pepper his health history with ailments, mine his parallel personal life for conjured experiences. Nothing too dramatic, of course. Nothing too real, like an affair, a pregnancy, a child. Twice a year she could come north to visit, laden with gifts and apologies from him. Susannah never came to Princeton, or hadn't for five years, at least. And now, with this pregnant teenager and-Portia could hardly bear to think of this-the baby coming, her mother would be thoroughly distracted. Sipping her tea, she tuned in sporadically to Susannah's monologue, which had pushed off from Portia's own comment about hunger into wild tales of Caitlin and the food she consumed. Bags of oranges! Half a coconut cake! The girl was struggling with her fast-food addiction, despite Susannah's own very thorough enumeration of the ecological, economical, and, yes, culinary sins of the entire industry. Susannah had found a McDonald's wrapper in the car, the incriminating crunch of environmentally indefensible Styrofoam underfoot.

How long could I keep it going? Portia wondered idly. Six months, certainly. Possibly a year. If her mother remained this distracted, it could go further. It would be like a game, she decided. A bet with herself, the reward linked to the number of years, months, days, she managed to keep her mother in the dark. Bonus points if she found herself making excuses for Mark's absence at Susannah's deathbed. I'm so sorry, Mom. A freshman English major cut her wrists over the weekend. The whole campus is in lockdown....

Here she stopped, stunned by her own callousness, her failure as a daughter, partner. Everything, really. She turned to her mother, really trying to focus now, full of contrition. She saw, as always, an echo of her own form in the shoulders and neck, the same hair, the same set jaw. Her mother's legs had held up-she supposed that boded well for herself-but the skin of her hands and face, skin that had rejected sunblock as some form of artifice, no better than plastic surgery or any other means of subverting the actual appearance of age, was papery and speckled with brown. Portia had used sunblock for years, ever since the first magazine articles about what it could do. Was this what she had prevented? She noted Susannah's steel gray ponytail down her back, white wisps of hair escaping around her face, and thought with some shame of the color she had begun to use, only in the last year or so, only when the gray at her temples began to colonize the rest of her head. ("This whole generation!" Susannah complained. "They've never seen a real vegetable. They don't know what a carrot is supposed to taste like! It's all processed meat and artificial flavors from some lab in New Jersey!") There were lines-new lines? old lines?-around her mother's mouth and eyes. Susannah had been for so long a local sage, matriarch to younger women, pillar of female wisdom, that her pa.s.sage to real age was at once unremarkable and a jolt. But the solid, steel-haired woman across the table, waving her weathered hands over an earthenware mug of herbal tea, had plainly departed middle age. She was old, thought Portia. p.i.s.sed and old. And, oddly, looking only forward.

Caitlin was due in May and thinking of staying on, over the summer, to recover and see her baby settled. Also, said Susannah, to lose her pregnancy weight, as she intended to keep the fact of her circ.u.mstances private.

Portia, finding this conversational thread, at least, diverting, asked how this would be possible. "Don't they know why she's here?"

"They know she's here, but not why. They think it's a high school exchange. Her father phones her every Sunday to ask if she went to church."

Portia smiled.

"She did go, actually. For the first month. Not that it's easy to find the right kind of church. She ended up at that awful place in West Lebanon, across from the Four Aces diner. You know?"

"It used to have a sign out front that said, 'Are You on the Right Road?' " said Portia.

"It still does. They're appalling people. Terrorists, really. Of course, I took her. She's her own person, and it's not for me to decide. I just waited for her across the road in the diner. But after the first few times, she came out and said she didn't want to go back. Somebody said something to her, about her increasingly obvious 'sin,' I mean. I offered to help her find another denomination, but she hasn't mentioned it again."

Portia nodded. She still thought of the sleeping girl upstairs-in the room she typically occupied on her visits, no doubt-with some sense of unreality: a teenage incubator for her mother's absurd idea of late motherhood, a girl for whom this interlude must come wedged between obscure past and obscure future. That Susannah already spoke of the fetus as a child-known to her, dependent upon her, and even loved by her-felt so strange, so off-kilter, as if she had dressed a stone in baby clothes and held it to the breast.

Looking across the table now, she tested this image and so found herself ruminating, in turn, on the icy marble Piet she had seen with Mark at St. Peter's in Rome. Their first summer together. And then, with a certain grotesque flourish, of a poster on the wall of her dermatologist's office in Princeton, which showed a buxom babe in the tiniest of bikinis on a tropical beach, luscious as a peach from the neck down, but from the neck up a withered crone. It was meant to scare you into using sunblock, and most effective.

Susannah's hopes for the child, which she was now elucidating across the table, were, naturally, beyond reproach: love and care, education and glorious self-actualization, music and art and science, organic food (lovingly prepared), and so on, all toward a far horizon of the greater good-for surely, the way her mother envisioned things, this child was born to right the wrongs of the universe. (Why, Portia thought wearily, is every unborn child the lost Einstein or Pica.s.so? The engineer who would have reversed global warming or figured out how to run airplanes on ground-up industrial waste? Why were these aborted or miscarried fetuses never the next Dahmer or Bundy? The anonymous forty-eighth addict to overdose in 2056? The never identified partic.i.p.ant in the gang rape? The sociopath executive who takes down an entire company and puts thousands out of work?) Listening, Portia became aware of it gradually, through the fog of her now great fatigue, and sadness, and distress at being here, and fear for the future: the full-on shocking realization that both her long-standing partner and her mother were about to become parents. Again. But not her. Not her. Soon, they would both be taking small hands into their own larger hands and walking into the future, while she... well, did not. While she... what? Began a new application season? Considered moving to a smaller house? Contemplated renewing her gym membership?

"Portia," her mother said.

She looked up. "Yuh?"

"I said, will you be able to take her?"

"Take...?" said Portia.

"Caitlin," said her mother. "I need to go to Burlington on Thursday. With Frieda."

Frieda was her housemate-her only housemate since the weaver had decamped years earlier-and Burlington meant something medical.

"Is she okay?"

"Probably. They're always finding something to biopsy. If she does get cancer again, it'll be from all the radiation they've exposed her to all these years, from all the mammograms."

"Mom..." Portia sighed. "If it weren't for a mammogram, she'd already be dead."

"They don't trust us to manage our own health, with our own fingers. They don't believe we can be responsible for our own bodies. If we find it ourselves, they tell us we're hysterical. It has to come out of a machine to be real."

"They," Portia commented, "are as likely to be female as male, these days."

"But the system is male."

She gave up. She was too tired and it was too pointless.

"So you can take her?"

Portia frowned. "I thought you were taking her."

"No. Not Frieda. Caitlin."

"Oh. Okay. Where does she need to go?"

"As I said. To the midwife. In Hanover."

"Oh," said Portia. "Well, if you need me to. Of course. I'm sorry, Mom," she said, noting Susannah's exasperation, "I'm so tired. I think I need to go to bed."

Susannah got up. She put her mug in the sink, and Portia's, then eyed the bags by the back door "This is food," said Portia, pointing.

"Oh, thank you."

She lifted the suitcase of files, obviously straining with the weight of it.

"That one," said Susannah, "looks suspiciously like work."

"I had to," Portia said apologetically. "We're all working over the holiday."

Her mother frowned. "What a shame. I really hoped you could relax while you were here."

She did sound aggrieved, Portia thought, but not entirely convincing.

Portia hoisted the suitcase, then the duffel of clothes, which Susannah insisted on taking from her. They went, one behind the other, into the hallway and up to the second floor, wood creaking beneath every tread on the stairs. At the closed door of the room in which she normally stayed, Susannah turned back and put her finger to her lips-mother and fetus were sleeping within-and Portia was led to the last room down the corridor. This had once been home to the weaver, and two of her works remained, pinned to the walls in dusty accusation. Now the room belonged to Frieda, who used it to write her songs and store her instruments, notebooks, and varied materials connected to her infrequent appearances as a singer-songwriter. Frieda, who had once belonged to a feminist drumming circle (the Different Drummers, they had fondly named themselves), kept her hourgla.s.s-shaped drums in one corner. These were African talking drums she had made herself in a weeklong workshop with a drum master in Boston. She had a computerized keyboard for songwriting and a trio of guitars, upright in their stands. There was a distinctly unwelcoming daybed in the corner, heaped with kilim pillows and a rough-looking African tribal cloth. Portia wondered if it had clean sheets. Or sheets at all.

"Thanks, Mom," she said, setting down her bag. "You must be tired, too."

"I have to be up early," said Susannah. "Caitlin has one more day of school before the vacation. Should I let you sleep?"

Sleep, thought Portia, nodding, as if this were an altogether new concept. For the first time, it occurred to her that she might not be able to sleep despite her exhaustion, despite her longing for the oblivion. Sleep, for the first night of her new, unpartnered life, the first night of her new reality.

Susannah stepped up close to her and, with sufficient warning, leaned forward to embrace. Portia embraced, in return, in her usual way: body moving forward, spirit pulling back. Then she was left alone.

The room had a vaguely unused air, with its yellowing music magazines stacked on a low table, and the stone cold electric typewriter clad in a film of dust. She wondered if Frieda, whose songs (she had always felt) were not terribly original or particularly melodic, had actually abandoned this career, and if that was true, why? Because her cancer had come back? Because she had begun to feel ridiculous, singing to clueless schoolchildren about the Bread and Roses campaign or serenading the like-minded with musical moralities they already shared? Perhaps she had simply moved on, from one thing to the next, one interest, one moment in her life. People did that, Portia thought wearily. They changed their minds, their lives. They changed the cast of characters or the scenery.

This wasn't the way Portia tended to think about her own life, she realized-as a progression or even a course correction. She had always considered herself fortunate, not only that she had found Mark, a compatible person who had made a home with her, but that she had found, by strange luck, a profession in which she was both competent and rewarded as such. How many people with just her qualifications and just her skills were doing time in some cubicle somewhere, moving numbers around, dying inside? Her life was a port in the storm, a craft in unpredictable waters. Her life, it occurred to her, was a careful refuge from life.

She sat on the hard daybed and nudged aside the bag of applications with her foot. There was an air mattress, she now saw, on the floor beneath the window, prepped with sheets and a quilt-an accommodation that would have ensured a sore back for herself or Mark, whoever drew it, not to mention the impossibility of s.e.xual contact while in her mother's house. Not that they had ever had s.e.xual contact in her mother's house. And now, she thought, trying to grasp the humor of this, they never would have s.e.xual contact in her mother's house-by no means a terrible thing. Even this briefest levity was painful. She felt weariness in every muscle, weariness even in her skin, her hair, but she delayed lying down, afraid to find out that sleep intended to elude her. For the shortest moment she allowed herself to wonder about Mark: where he was, what, if anything, he was saying or doing. And Helen, whose face, oddly, but also mercifully, Portia could not seem to summon from memory. Was she comforting him for the loss of a sixteen-year relationship? Was she congratulating him on having finally taken action? Had they both, already, closed that very inconvenient door behind them? Thinking of Helen gave her an instant of sharpest misery and hollowed her out with loneliness. She had not felt this kind of loneliness for many, many years, an odd state of affairs, she couldn't help but think, for a person who had relatively few people of any importance in her life.

She thought suddenly about Susannah's travels, her life like a widening nautilus of contact, all of them, it seemed, perpetually in her wake or everywhere around her. She still had bosom friends from her childhood in Great Neck, most of them still living in that green and pleasant suburb. She had friends from college and even graduate school, though she had not given much of her attention to graduate school. She kept up with her co-habitants from the commune in Northern California, her neighbors from Harlem, the women she'd lived and cooked and worked with in Baltimore, and of course the many, many neighbors and collaborators of the Northampton years. They were all in Susannah's life, all the time, it seemed, writing letters, visiting, talking ceaselessly to her, listening to her, making her evenings hum with the ringing phone. Everyone stayed with her. No one let go. Not the protegees or rivals. Not the sorority sisters from Berkeley, one of whom had later spent a year living in the womyn's collective in Baltimore. Not the long-ago boyfriend (and dope dealer), now long married and back on his fertile crescent of California soil, or even his wife, the woman he had in fact left Susannah to marry, who had also, somehow or other, become her mother's confidante.

It was a gift, thought Portia, like an ear for music or suppleness or skill with numbers, and she had not inherited it. Her gift lay elsewhere, as in the knack for isolation, the ability to make herself perfectly alone in the world-away from anyone she had harmed, and anyone else who might have cared enough to help her, and everyone who hadn't known, which was everyone.

I spent much of last year in an intensive treatment program for an eating disorder. But I don't have an eating disorder. I have never allowed others to impose their ideas of who I am on me, and I never will.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

THIS CONCERNS YOU.

Caitlin, as it turned out, was a quiet girl with short brown hair and a look of perpetual diffidence. Four months along, she had reached that point in her pregnancy where a general thickness prevailed: thickness from ankle to wrist and through the middle, which had not yet morphed into the cla.s.sic profile. Pregnant? in other words. Or merely fat?

Portia, who had finally fallen asleep in the still middle of the previous night, had missed the girl's departure for school in the morning, but she was alone in the house at dusk, reading folders at the kitchen table, when a school bus creaked to a halt outside and a girl in a dark blue parka descended the steps. Portia watched the girl pull tight her coat, crossing her arms over her chest. On her shoulder she carried a heavy book bag, which thumped at her hip as she came up the drive, and in one hand she held a thick roll of oversize artwork, fastened with an elastic band. When she reached the kitchen door, she stopped and stamped her feet to dislodge the snow. Portia, reflexively, shut her folder.

"You must be Caitlin," she said to the startled girl when the door was opened.

The evident Caitlin did not respond but looked perplexed.

"I'm Portia. Susannah's daughter?"

"Oh." She looked thoroughly relieved. "I forgot you were coming today."

"Yesterday, actually. I got here last night."

"I must have been sleeping," she said, noting the obvious. She took off her coat and hung it up on one of the hooks by the back door. She seemed disinclined to talk but rummaged in her backpack.

"You're on Christmas break?" Portia asked.

The girl nodded without looking up. She was wearing a zipped red sweatshirt and baggy jeans. Normal jeans, just big.

"You must be glad to get out."

Caitlin turned and looked at her. She seemed affronted. "I like school."

"Oh," said Portia. "Well, that's good."