Amy Bloom - Love Invents Us

He must look enormous to Max. I don’t think he’s ever seen anyone so big in every direction, coming wide and high and black-oak solid into his speculative, pale green gaze.

I think Max knows exactly which house Huddie is looking for, knows why he’s come, knows that this is the man who has come for his mother. I want to think this. I’m beat. I have been explaining single motherhood and conception and marriage and homosexuality and commitment to Max since before he could listen, and I am tired of saying things clearly and reasonably in hopes of warding off trauma. Mad giggling is Max’s response to my sensible, sensitive explanations, and right beneath that, furious disbelief. When he is most angry and disbelieving, he sticks out his tongue and pulls down his lower lids, making faces so ugly and not-funny that it’s clear his only wish is to make me stop telling these ridiculous and frightening lies. He finds most adult men terrifying beasts, especially the fathers of the little girls he plays with, and he does not believe, for one minute, that there are women who like to live with them or that pairs of men make happy, healthy lives (I say the three words together always, banishing all disease, grief, and loneliness) in the worlds of Provincetown and San Francisco, and certainly not that I actually parted my legs and let a man put his penis into my vagina. He prefers to believe that I lay very close to, was perhaps sandwiched between, his idols, Mr. Rogers and Peter Pan; their united sperm would in fact explain why I have a child like Max.

“Hi,” Huddie says. I spy behind the curtains. Mothers have divine dispensation for listening in, sheet-reading, dream interpretation, and interrogation. I don’t say we should, just that we do. I do. How else can we know what to do, whom to save, where to go when they don’t come home? The amorality of my childhood, my shoplifting and wholesale lying, is nothing to what I do, and am prepared to do, every single day for this boy.

Make my son cry? I’ll hunt you down on the playground and pull your miserable heart right out of your weaselly little chest, and after dropping off the sympathy casserole for your mother, I’ll stop by the classroom to remind Mrs. Miller that there is now a space in the Bluejay reading group and Max really is ready to move up. I have made a whole life for us, and although I sometimes feel like those intelligent felons, escaping through the prison laundry truck to practice small-town medicine, well and attentively, for twenty years before the Feds show up, it is a life that makes sense to me. I can do this job better than any other. I am happy every morning and I am sad only late at night.

Max stands on his hands, and his arms begin shaking.

“How long can you do that?” Huddie asks. When we knew each other and Larry was four or five, he timed and measured and reported every athletic moment in the boy’s life. Fifty-six seconds underwater. Nine flights of stairs in two minutes. Two goals in the last quarter.

“I don’t know. You can time me.” Max rubs his arms and flings himself up into the air again, hands pressing hard on the grass as he turns a few more showy, foot-waggling cartwheels that end in round-offs of the kind the little ponytailed professionals do as they come off the beam. His feet slam the ground, and he raises his arms above his head for another handstand. I hope he hears a stadium crowd screaming his name, wild with love and admiration.

I come outside, standing still long enough for the afternoon sun to warm the tops of my bare feet, long enough to realize I haven’t changed my clothes. Maybe he will think this is ironic on my part, that I have dressed “as” something, something like a housewife, although he can’t think I’ve bought a house and supported this child by staying home and dusting. Huddie won’t disappoint Max by taking his eye off the sweeping second hand, so instead of a solemn handshake or an affectionate embrace or even a sweetly tentative palm on the shoulder, instead of anything that we have a right to expect after fifteen years, we get another minute or two of oblique suspense and parental obligation. Huddie’s smiling, keeping his eye on the watch. I smile at Max’s pointed, quivering feet, at Huddie’s handsome, broad chest and his hands, which are graceful, even shapely, and wide as catcher’s mitts, and a familiar thorny stream washes under my lids.

I know my face is longer and his is wider, bulldog-wide through the temples, with darker-edged folds beginning above his eyebrows. We both have grey, but he can’t see mine because I colored it yesterday, and despite its sprightly, mendacious auburn, I spent an hour crying and wiping dark, intractable spots off my forehead and off the tips of my ears. Although I no longer looked as old and time-speckled, I didn’t exactly look like me. Already concealed, I was tempted to go for broke and did, with mascara and silver hoop earrings and clean, intact underpants. Actually, new underpants.

“Okay, Max. Maximus. Get upright.”

“Eighteen seconds. That’s good.” Huddie’s hand covers Max’s to the middle of his damp little arm. “I’m Horace Lester, old friend of your mother’s.”

“I’m Max. I’m eight. I’m small for my age, but I’m eight.”

“Good to meet you.”

I can hear Huddie thinking, Small, yeah. Small and then some. Just keep him out of my son’s locker room. My own thoughts about Max run so protective and so cruel I don’t give Huddie time to ask even the normal visiting grown-up questions. Maxie pulls his hand out, not rudely, and backs up for a series of handsprings. Huddie gives me the flowers, without ceremony, and I look inside for a vase to suit them, knowing I don’t have any. My impulses of the last eight years have not been toward the house beautiful. My mother had vases for every kind of bouquet and arrangement, and she had ideas about what suited which: glazed terracotta for wildflowers, tall crystal for tulips and snapdragons, short crystal for bunches of zinnias. I have a large peanut butter jar for most of Huddie’s bouquet and a spaghetti sauce jar for the rest. I long, as I have not once longed in all these downwardly mobile years, for a tall column of etched glass, for a handsome, wide-mouthed ginger jar. I wanted safety and quiet and books and have them, but now it feels less like simplicity or even the successful marshaling of extremely limited resources, and more like the road show of Grapes of Wrath . My teeth ache with shame. I want those vases. I want a big walnut table and Portuguese pottery. I want pretty things right now, and I want him to come in and see my inviting, welcoming home and long to be in it. I want a house of layered charm, from the shining wooden floors to the witty, incidental watercolors, not a couch whose surface is a mix of Astroturf weave and backyard crust. I want a house where things have form as well as function, where not every surface says make do and don’t notice. I wipe the Formica table (ten dollars for the table and three chairs at a tag sale) and put the jars on the counter. I cannot believe that I don’t own placemats.

Back outside, watching Max, standing so close to Huddie I smell his wheaty, wild onion scent and feel the faint heat of his back and chest, I see my mother, propped up on her twin bed, in her small, spare apartment (most of her money gone with her only really bad mistake, a light-fingered, slew-footed boyfriend after Aaron Price died), saying in her most fluting and therefore most furious voice, “Of course, one makes a virtue of necessity, my dear. What else? At least we have the pleasure of fooling others.” And she made herself over once more, into an admirer of the simple life, a Zen devotee, as she had made herself domestically suburban, and then professionally successful, and then a desirable woman of leisure and a certain age, when not one of these things spoke to her own wishes; she made herself pure and died between rough cotton sheets, her bald head on a pillow as harsh as a bag of rice. I squeeze my eyes and conjure the kindest, most virtuous portrait of myself: a sensible, literate woman of limited income, a devoted mother who’s chosen time with her child over professional advancement and a safe neighborhood over service for eight. Please see that.