Theresa Rebeck - Twelve Rooms with a View

“What was only three weeks ago?” I asked.

“When Bill died.”

“Bill only died three weeks ago? ” I blurted.

Okay, I honestly do not know why I didn’t know this. But I didn’t know; the whole situation with my mom was that screwy. One day she was living in Hoboken and working at some H & R Block office, filing tax returns, then all of a sudden she was getting married and moving to Manhattan. Then it was done before we even knew it, practically, when it became “Bill’s private, he doesn’t see a a lot of people,” or “We’re really busy this month, maybe the fall would be better. I mean, before she went off and married this guy it’s not like I saw that much of her anyway. Mostly we communicated through phone messages: the man who lived underneath her got a dog and it was barking day and night, or the phone company screwed up her billing and they were just driving her crazy, or she was trying out a new recipe and did I ever hear of Asiago cheese? It makes my head hurt now to think of how lonely those messages were and that obviously I should have tried a lot harder to see her, while I could. I’m not saying that all of us had abandoned her. Alison saw her more than me or Lucy, I knew that Alison would come out and see her and Lucy saw her too. But not all that much. So when she went ahead and married a guy who didn’t want us around it didn’t make a huge impression.

The truth is last time I even spoke to her was almost a year and a half ago, when the three of us took her out to dinner. Mom suggested it. I think she felt guilty because none of us had been invited to the wedding. So there we were, six months after our mother went and married a total stranger, arguing over where we should take her to celebrate. Bill of course was not coming, but she made kind of a big deal about not going too far from home, because he might get uptight if she went too far. Then Lucy got bent out of shape about whether or not it would be a place we could afford, as she assumed we’d be “taking” Mom and she didn’t want the bill split two ways between her and Alison because she really got the short end of the stick in these situations since “Alison” covered Alison and Daniel which meant that she, Lucy, was stuck paying for me as well as half of Mom so expensive places got really quite expensive really fast, from her point of view. She was completely blunt about all this, as usual, which I took exception to, because even though I’m consistently strapped it’s not like an occasional nice dinner out is a complete impossibility. But of course Lucy was right—we ended up at a place that charged $22 for a plate of spaghetti with red sauce, which made everyone, especially me, uptight.

So that more or less set things off on an unfortunate foot. Mom had a vodka tonic which I think cost $12, and the rest of us drank tap water. Lucy as usual totally monopolized the conversation, blathering on about the big corporations she did PR for and how difficult it was to work with corporate jerks and none of them really want to talk to a woman and how they’re all in love with themselves and their own power and she really thinks they’re all closet cases anyway. Alison never actually got over the prices on the menu, and she kept letting us know how worried she was about how much things cost, and then she got Daniel to keep a running tab on the paper tablecloth, which he did methodically, with a mechanical pencil. I told them all I was going to move out to the Delaware Water Gap with Darren, and how he had this business plan set up, that so many really wealthy people had summer homes out there now and he was putting together a company that did caretaking year round and he already had six or seven clients and I was going to help him with the bookings and also do sort of personal services for people like shopping, say.

So that was the dinner. And Mom was fine, really. Kind of a little too perky, maybe, like she was trying too hard to seem happy. But I don’t know, how can you know something like that? She never said anything at all about Bill, or how it was going with him, even though Lucy made a couple of stabs at it.

“So are we ever going to meet our so-called stepfather?” she asked, sipping her cappuccino. Since nobody had wine with dinner Daniel and Alison had relented and let people order cappuccino and biscotti after the expensive spaghetti was cleared away.

“You’re all grown, you don’t need a stepfather,” Mom said, laughing a little and looking at the last traces of her second drink.

“Wait a minute. You guys haven’t met him yet?” I asked. This fact somehow had gotten by me. I assumed the reason I hadn’t met Bill was that I was out of town too much. The fact that Lucy and Alison, who lived so close by in Brooklyn and Queens, hadn’t met Bill did actually catch me off guard.

“He’s so private, I told you, sweetheart. That’s just the way he is. Some day we’ll make it work out,” she said, patting my hand.

“You live like right around the corner from here, right? Lucy noted. “Let’s do it now. He’s home, right?”

“I don’t think he’d like that.”

“We won’t stay. We just want to come by and see where you live!” she persisted.

“I’ll tell him. Maybe we can work something out for next month.”

“Is it a dump? Are you living in some sort of crazy dump?”

“No, not at all. He’s just private, you know that.”

“He’s crazy, is what it sounds like.”

It was pretty uncomfortable, frankly; the fact that Lucy was putting it out there to Mom in front of me and Daniel and Alison made the situation really sound as creepy and weird as you kind of worried it might be. Mom just shrugged a little bit and looked down and then she sighed, like this was all too much.

Lucy took offence. “It’s a fair question, Mom,” she pointed out, kind of edgy. “You’ve been married to this guy for six months. Why can’t we meet him?”

“He doesn’t want to, is why,” Mom said. And she wasn’t apologetic about that at all.

“But he’s nice to you, right?” I said.

“You don’t have to worry about me, sweetheart, I’m fine!” she said, and she smiled at me and squeezed my hand. Which okay is maybe why it finally occurred to me after she was dead that maybe what she meant was worry about yourself you dingbat; you’ve just agreed to go to Delaware with another loser.

It also occurred to me that maybe she was ashamed of us, that’s why she didn’t want Bill to meet us. A year and a half later, sitting there on the floor of that ridiculous little television room, eating Chinese food out of cartons, and trying to figure out how to screw over the two guys who grew up there, and whose Dad had died just three weeks before our Mom died, it certainly did occur to me that maybe we weren’t acting so well.

“Are you crying?” Alison asked me, suddenly.

“It’s this Kung Pao chicken. I bit into one of the peppers, I said. “I wonder if there’s any Kleenex around here.” I stood up and looked around, confused. Lucy held up a wad of those lousy paper napkins that they dump in the carry-out bag, and breezed on with her clever plan. “I’ll have the Sotheby’s guy call Long in the morning. Eventually he’s going to have to transfer the files anyway, and they’ll have a better sense of how soon that needs to happen. Surely they know how to work this so we can start to proceed with the sale even though the property’s still in probate,” she told us, licking her fingers like a cat. “There’s no question they’ll fight it, but we could get at least a little bit of a jump on those Drinans. Potentially we could leave them in the dust.”

“They’re already in the dust. Their father just died,” I reminded her.

“Their father, who disinherited them,” she retorted.