Bright Young Women(104)

“Ruth,” a familiar voice said. I turned and saw my ex-husband, who wasn’t supposed to be there, his belly rejecting the buttons on a bad suit. “Wow. You look like you stepped out of a fashion magazine,” he said. I hugged CJ tight with sincere relief. Although he was the world’s least stealth philanderer, he had always made me feel less alone in the presence of my family. More than that, he was the very personification of what Tina was trying to drill into my head: that today was not about being together as a family but about my mother performing togetherness for others and maybe even for herself. I imagined my being there did allow her to keep that small voice at bay, the one that spoke to her in the solitude of the night, torturing her with the truth. Our family was irrevocably broken.

“I thought Martha forbade you from coming,” I said to CJ, and I was amazed that I could sound so sweet and compliant when, inside my head, a one-woman rebellion was forming.

“Is that Martha Denson, you mean?” Father Evans asked. Martha had also attended Issaquah Catholic. My ex-husband’s first wife was a senior when I was a freshman, and my ex-husband’s third wife was a freshman when I was a senior. CJ could write a hit country song.

“We should probably take our seats while they are still in the shade,” my mother suggested before Father Evans could ask any more perfectly reasonable and inconvenient questions. Everyone began to disperse. It took my mother a minute to realize I was walking back the way I’d come.

“Ruth!” she called after me, laughing a little, as though I’d accidentally gotten turned around.

I stopped for her, though I recognized it was only a courtesy. There would be no convincing me to stay. Something ethereal and serene descended upon me, and it didn’t feel so much decided as divined by God: Time to go, Ruth.

“I only came because I didn’t think CJ would be here,” I said without anger or blame. My mother had lied to me to get me to come. This was who she was and would likely always be. It was my responsibility to accept that. In a dizzying flash, I saw Tina in Frances’s kitchen the first night we met, her fingernails in Nixon’s black fur. You think you’re going to come here and you’re going to get advice, and then if you just follow that advice, it will get better. Instead, what you learn is how to take responsibility for it. It was a sensational moment of lucidity, one that begged to be shared with the person who prophesied it.

“I didn’t think he would be!” My mother was flailing, desperate to reclaim her hold on me. “I guess he finally took a stand against her.” She smiled and rolled her eyes—that ole battle-ax Martha. But this act had finally worn thin, and my expression was bored and disengaged. It must have been terrifying for my mother to realize she had so completely lost me, and for that I did feel compassion. “Please don’t make a fuss, Ruth,” she added, her voice verging on panicked. “You’re here. And you look…” She flopped her arms in my direction, at a loss for words. Not because I looked beautiful beyond description but because my mother never paid me compliments, and it must have been like sifting through a drawer of sharp knives for a blanket. Her mind wasn’t where you looked to find something soft and warm. “So put together,” she ended up saying. “It would be a shame for it to go to waste.”

But it wouldn’t go to waste—Tina would see me. Tina, who wouldn’t struggle to tell me I looked beautiful, whose mind was not barbed but curved in the way of a prescription lens, focusing the light and rendering things clearly. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, taking a small step away from her, “but this doesn’t feel good to me.”

My mother appeared genuinely dumbfounded. “Good for you? It’s not meant to feel good for you. Your father is dead.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean pretending. That I’m still married. That we are one big happy family when we aren’t.”

My mother wore her comfortable victimized sneer, as broken in as a favorite pair of jeans. It had always frightened me that she could find anything amusing about her disappointment. As if she spent her days waiting for life to let her down like she expected it would, then shared a dark laugh with herself. She had been smart to prepare for the worst.

It was the same sneer I’d seen the morning my father died in a car crash on the way to the place where we stood now, after suffering a minor heart attack on the heels of the argument the three of us had around the breakfast table. I’d stayed the night after CJ and I had our final, explosive fight about a bobby pin he didn’t even realize he had stuck to his collar when he came home too late again, and in the morning I’d informed them that CJ and I were not going to work things out this time, that I was going to ask for a divorce because I was a homosexual, and they both knew I was because my father was one too.

“I knew you would do this,” my mother declared with a sick sort of triumph. Her face was ruddy, pin-cushioned with beads of sweat. “I said to myself—maybe it’s better Ruth doesn’t come. Because I knew you would only make it about yourself. But I extended an olive branch, and now here I am, doing exactly what I knew I would spend the day doing. Comforting you, when I’m the one who needs comforting.”

I was grateful to her for giving me such a hammy display of her cruelty, which up until that point she had doled out discerningly, at a rate meant to keep me coming back for more. She had made it so easy—not just easy, but pleasurable—to walk away from her. I got on my bike, and I rode to the water, where the breeze was, and Tina too.