I found Sid in the guest room, glassy-eyed and grumpy, playing a multiplayer video game on her laptop. I demanded she shower, put on a button-down, and meet me downstairs. Sensing my desperation, she complied. I stripped, ripped, and washed the kale and set it out to dry, rinsed and patted the steaks and shook them with salt and pepper. （I am of the opinion that good steak should have no seasoning other than salt and pepper.） I lightly boiled an egg and then broke it into the bottom of a wide, low salad dish with anchovies that had been mottled with garlic and olive oil. To that I added the kale and a massive amount of freshly grated parmesan, and then massaged it until it shone. I set out the cheese, salami, bread, crackers, and olives and decanted the wine. I pulled out my tray of cocktail fixings with the firm intent of getting completely and gloriously wasted.
The air was chilly, but daylight savings was still a few weeks away, so I pulled out extension cords, ran them into the backyard, and plugged in two heat lamps so that Sid and I could sit and watch darkness fall and the evening creatures peek out from the bushes. There were always a disturbing number of deer, covered in flies and ticks and savagely ripping the heads off all the flowers—those you saw every night. Often you would see a fox, sometimes reddish rabbits, and very occasionally a beaver or an opossum. One year there was an ancient-looking tortoise from God knows where who lived nearby the pool for a month as she laid her eggs.
Sid and I set up a folding table and I put the steaks on the grill. By the time they were ready I had drunk half my martini. I ate like a beast, ripping chunks of flesh with my teeth, stabbing enormous forkfuls of the salad into my mouth and letting the oil smear all over my face, shoveling crackers and cheese, alternating my red wine with my martini to wash everything down. Sid and I tore the sourdough with our hands, soaking the pieces in salted olive oil. I had a memory of my mother, back when I was twelve or so. She was a nurse’s aide, and after she and my father divorced she picked up shifts as a waitress at a local Irish pub, the kind that exists in most towns in America, with burgers and onion rings and soggy fish and chips and a perpetual stale-beer-mixed-with-cheap-floor-cleaner-topped-with-cigarette-smoke smell. Friday nights I （and I suppose my sisters if they were home, though I don’t remember them ever being there） was permitted to stay up and wait for her to come home. I would read and watch late-night TV and try on her makeup in the bathroom mirror until around 11 p.m., when her shift was done. She would come in bearing two grocery-sized bags full of pub fare, and a couple bottles of Coca-Cola, and she and I would feast on the soggy, greasy food and the sugary desserts until we could eat no more. I remember us silent, content, and chewing. It was the one time my mother and I shared a common appetite together, perhaps the time we were the closest.
I looked over at my daughter. She was staring out into the bushes, her mouth full. There were sickly gray rings below her eyes and the drawn expression on her face made her look like a daguerreotype of a morose Progressive-Era female intellectual.
“Have you spoken to Alexis?” I asked her.
She nodded. “She might come here to visit.” She said it gloomily, examining what was left on her plate.
“That’s great,” I said, forcing cheer into my voice. “Right? Isn’t that great?”
“I don’t know.” Sid shrugged. “Now there are terms.”
“Terms like what?”
“Terms like getting married and having a child.”
Alexis was funny. People were funny. Besides having a serious job and a decent income （that would be significantly reduced if I stopped renting out the cabin to help pay her student loans） there was very little about Sid that suggested she was ready to live the kind of life Alexis wanted. Maybe Alexis imagined she’d be the reliable one, the caretaker, the one who packed the lunches and went to the school events, while Sid flitted around like Puck, doing fun things like throwing the baby in the air and loading the car for spontaneous beach trips. Alexis had her own career though, she would need help and support, and the lack of responsibility and accountability from my daughter would soon become oppressive.
I chose my words carefully so she wouldn’t take it as an indictment.
“Maybe you want different things,” I offered.
Her face froze in annoyance for a moment, but for whatever reason, she let it go.
“Could be that’s all it is,” she said. She used a hunk of bread to sop up the bits of kale and cheese and meat juice left on her plate and then gnawed it like an animal.
I took our dishes inside, refilled our wine, and brought out slices of cake, which gave way under the sides of our forks with pleasing, geometric neatness.
The light grew dim and creepy. I thought about my story. If I were to stop teaching I would have a significantly greater amount of time to work on it. I could finish the first draft in a month, perhaps, if I was diligent. I could have another published book before I turned sixty.
“I’m thinking of doing it,” I told Sid.
“Doing what?”
“Stopping teaching.”
“Are you kidding me? Why?”
“I don’t want to be teaching if people don’t want me there. If I’m making people uncomfortable.”
“It’s not about them being uncomfortable. Trust me. It’s about them winning. What will it look like if you stop? You’ll basically agree to be seen as an accomplice when you had nothing to do with what Dad did.”
“But maybe you’re right, maybe I am an accomplice.”
“Listen to me. I can call you an accomplice because you’re my mother and he’s my father and I don’t like the idea that you were telling me a lie this whole time. But if you’re an accomplice, most everyone is, right? It was common knowledge, right?”
“Right.”
“So don’t quit, please.”
“I don’t know. My day may be done. Nobody wants to hear from me anymore. Always I run into some struggle with my students. I used to find it fun, trying to get on their level, trying to understand where they were coming from. Adapting, for them, for the moment, not wanting to be left behind. But now I think that maybe I should be left behind.”
“Don’t be silly, Mom. You’re an extremely youthful person. You look young, you act young, you think young. You’re just down on yourself right now.”
“How young?” I turned to Sid to make sure she wasn’t just puffing me up.
“What do you mean?”
“How—young do I look?” I was drunk, or I wouldn’t have asked. When she was growing up, wanting her to find her worth elsewhere, hating myself for my obsession with my appearance, I never once asked Sid how I looked, even as I longed for her praise. When John would call her cute or laud her clothing choices I would tell her that it was only the inside that mattered. Even as I obsessed, I never spoke of my weight, my wrinkles, my grays. Before the awkward adolescent years I would swoon at her long-legged grace, her wide mouth and white teeth and luxurious hair, but would keep my thoughts silent. It had worked, in a way. She was a confident but not a vain young woman. Or whatever obsession with her looks she had absorbed by osmosis she also kept hidden far below.
She looked at me with an indulgent smirk. “You don’t look a day over forty-five.” Then she patted me on the knee and said, “Really.”