Wally Lamb - We Are Water

Because he didn’t value my work. That’s why we were having trouble. Because everything was about his work, and mine didn’t count. I was just supposed to be home with the kids all day, at their beck and call, and then grab an hour or two after they were finally down for the night, when I was too exhausted to tap into my creativity. Half the time I’d be down there, trying to work on something, and I’d fall asleep. He’d have to come down, wake me up, and lead me upstairs to bed.

But boy, I balked at that marriage counseling idea. I thought the deck would be stacked. Me versus two psychologists. I was afraid she was going to tell me to give up my art. But instead Suzanne validated what I was doing. Helped Orion to see that my work mattered, too. And she helped me to realize the extent of his grieving for his mother. “Now that my mother has passed, it’s like we’re both orphans,” he said, trying hard to hold back his tears. “I mean, I was the result of my mother’s affair with a married man. A Chinese man who wouldn’t leave his Chinese wife for his Italian girlfriend, and then … took a powder. Just goddamned disappeared.” He had never said much about his father’s absence from his life, and until then I’d assumed he just accepted it. “The only thing I ever got from him was his last name,” he said. “And it’s different. I know it is. I had my mother a hell of a lot longer than you had yours, but …” He broke down in sobs then, and I ached as I witnessed the pain he was in. I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder. Pulled tissues from the box on the table and handed them to him. Watched him wipe his eyes, blow his nose. For the next several seconds, none of us spoke. Suzanne kept looking at me. Waiting for me to say something. And in the middle of that uncomfortable silence, I almost risked telling him my truths. My secrets were on the tip of my tongue. But then Suzanne glanced at her clock and said we had to wind up. That we’d gone a little bit over and her two o’clock would be waiting.

I don’t know. Maybe if we had kept going to those sessions, I would have told him. But we didn’t. Things were better between Orion and me—more like they’d been in the beginning. The closeness, the way he could get me to laugh. Like that time he took me to Boston—Haymarket Square—and taught me how to slurp oysters from the half-shell. Took me that first time to the Gardner Museum … And being a mom had started getting a little easier by then. The twins were growing out of the “terrible twos.” They had begun to amuse each other, catching bugs out in the backyard or going down to the stream out back to capture tadpoles and crayfish. That bond they’d developed gave me a reprieve. I could sit near them. Keep an eye on them while I was sketching out new ideas for pieces I wanted to make. And thanks to those counseling sessions, Orion had become more supportive of what I was doing. What I was trying to do. He began spelling me on the weekends so that I could do my work, go on my hunts for new materials. When I won that “best in show” prize? It was Orion who had urged me to enter the competition.

And then, in the middle of this better time, I got a little careless about birth control and along came Marissa. Our unplanned child.

He had kept promising he was going to get a vasectomy but never followed through with it. I was furious when I realized I was pregnant again, but only at first. I calmed down, just like I had with the twins. Accepted it. But my work suffered. I had to make all kinds of sacrifices because I put them first. Because I was a damned good mother …

Most of the time. But then there were those times when I wasn’t. When Andrew would make me so mad that … Because he was always goading me. Challenging me. Wasn’t that why he took the brunt of it? Or was it because, of the three kids, he has the most O’Day in him? The reddish hair, the Irish eyes. He resembles my father around the eyes. And he has my father’s walk.

And who else does Andrew resemble? Go ahead. Say it.

“Miz Anna?”

“Hmm?” I look up, startled. Our housekeeper is standing there. “Yes? What is it, Minnie?”

“I axed you if you got anything else needs washing?”

“Washing? Uh, no. Just the stuff that’s in the basket. Thanks.”

“Did I scare you just now, Miz Anna?”

“What? Oh, no. I was just thinking about something else.”

Minnie doesn’t say so, of course, but I get the feeling she doesn’t really approve of two wealthy women marrying each other. Or maybe she just doesn’t get why we’d want to … Our housekeeper: I feel guilty even thinking it, let alone saying it out loud, which I did to Hector yesterday when he showed me the umbrella he’d found leaning against the wall downstairs in the lobby. “This isn’t yours, is it, Miss Oh?” he asked me.

“No, but I’ll take it. It’s our housekeeper’s. Thanks, Hector.” I reached into my purse, took a twenty from my wallet, and held it out to him.

“No, no, that’s okay. This thing don’t look like it cost twenty bucks to begin with. You don’t have to tip me all the time.” But I waved away his resistance and made him take it. I had just withdrawn two hundred dollars from the ATM at that Korean grocery store around the corner, so there were nine other twenties in my wallet. It wasn’t as if I was going to miss the tenth. Twenty dollars: what’s that these days? A taxi ride up to the Guggenheim plus tip? A couple of those fancy coffee drinks at Starbucks and a slice of their pricey pound cake? I’d rather let Hector have it.

Hector’s affable and he’s a talker. He works construction during the week, at the site where they’re building the 9/11 memorial. Works at our building on weekends. I like it when he tells me about his life. He has custody of his three kids for reasons he’s not gone into with me. One boy and two girls—the same as Orion and me, although his kids are still young. They’re beautiful children; he’s shown me their parochial school pictures. Now that school’s started again, he pays a neighborhood abuela to watch the kids from the time they get home until the time he does. His sister takes them on the weekends when he’s here. When I asked him once if it bothered him to work every day in that hole where the towers used to be, he shrugged and said that thing everyone says now: “It is what it is.” Ariane used to have that feminist poster in her bedroom: Rosie the Riveter, flexing her bicep, and beneath her, the motto: We can do it! Obama’s campaign motto last year was a variation on that. “Yes, we can!” he promised, and we needed so much to believe him that we actually elected a black man. I remember staring at the headlines and the TV news the morning after the election, in happy disbelief. But the economy’s even more of a mess than it was, our kids keep dying over there in those wars we started but can’t end, and it’s turned out that Obama isn’t a superhero after all. Maybe that’s the legacy of those fallen towers, all those lost lives: our national feeling of futility. No, we can’t do it. It is what it is . And who’s most affected by the way things are now? Not the people who can still afford the prices at the pump and at Starbucks. I heard on the news the other day that 77 percent of the children in New York’s public schools qualify for free breakfast and free lunch. That by next year, the unemployment rate may reach past 10 percent.

Last weekend, Hector was on second shift. Earlier that day, he’d borrowed his sister’s car and taken his kids to Six Flags for a last summertime hurrah. But coming back, the car broke down, and he was over an hour late. I’d just come back from a movie, and the building manager was berating him right in front of me while I waited for the elevator. There’d been complaints, he said, about the entrance being left unsupervised. Hector was mistaken if he thought he was irreplaceable; there was a stack of applications sitting on his desk. “And who do you think’s going to have to stand there before the co-op board and listen to them gripe this coming Monday? You, Martinez? No, me, that’s who.” I wanted to walk over there and ask that stupid manager if he’d ever been late. If he was perfect. What was that thing Jesus said when he was defending the adulteress? Let he without sin cast the first stone . But then the elevator doors opened, and I got in and pressed five without having said a thing. When Viveca called me from Greece and I mentioned the incident between Hector and the building manager—told her I wish I’d spoken up—she said it was probably better that I hadn’t. “The co-op board doesn’t like it when tenants get mixed up in issues involving the help,” she advised …