A. AHomes - The Mistress's Daughter

“Can I meet your mother?” the friend asks.

“Sure, I guess,” I say. It seems odd that the friend is more excited, more interested in meeting my mother than I am. It seems strange, but at the moment everything seems strange.

“No,” she says. “I guess that wouldn’t be right. You’ll tell me about her. And maybe take a picture.”

I would like to go as myself, not my best self or average self, but my worst self. In the end, I dress up. I am once again compelled to try to make a good impression. In some fantasy of my own, I want her to see how well I turned out, want her to be proud of me.

In the hallway outside the Oyster Bar she is wearing a fluffy white fur jacket, a printed silk blouse, and slacks, her hair piled high on her head in a post-beehive bun. She looks like someone from another decade — a woman who believes in glamour, who listens to Burt Bacharach and Dinah Shore to cheer herself up. I suspect this is the way she must have dressed when she used to meet my father — probably also in hotels — but now she’s fifty-five years old and a lot has been lost to time.

“Is that you?” she asks, breathless.

“I can’t believe it,” she says, her voice escalating beyond giddy and into a husky sort of mania — on the verge. “I can’t believe I’m seeing you.”

She takes my hand and kisses it.

Before anything else happens I want to run to a pay phone and call my friend. “Remember when you asked me if I was going to kiss her…well, she kissed my hand. Did she know we had that conversation? Is my phone tapped? Is this the difference between what one is born as and what one becomes, hardware versus software, nature versus nurture?”

She kisses my hand and I want to run.

I follow her into the restaurant. She orders a Harveys Bristol Cream, I order a Coke. I have never seen someone drink Harveys Bristol Cream. I only remember it from ads; suave couples in front of a fireplace, drinking Harveys.

I feel suddenly defensive; under her gaze, I sense I am not measuring up. She is sitting there in her old rabbit jacket and I am across from her in my best clothes. She never graduated high school and I have multiple master’s degrees. She is the one who for months begged to meet me and I am the one who avoided her. I tell myself it is not about surfaces. I tell myself everything will be all right.

“I’m having lobster,” she says.

“And what will you have?” the waiter asks.

“Nothing, I will have nothing.” I have nothing, I am nothing. Nothing suits me fine.

“Have lobster,” she says.

I am allergic to lobster. “Nothing is good,” I tell the waiter.

She talks about Atlantic City. She says that she has left her job — I don’t know if that means quit or was fired — and is going to open a beauty parlor with a couple of “wonderful operators.” She talks, about anything, everything, without the awareness that the person sitting across from her is both her only child and a complete stranger.

Her lobster arrives, she pulls meat from the claw, dips it into a silver pot of butter, and pops it into her mouth. She brings the claw to her eye, looking to see if there is more. Nothing is enough. I stare, wondering how she can eat. I can barely breathe.

“Did your father send you something for your birthday? He was going to send you something very nice.”

I can’t help but remember the gold-plated locket that’s appropriate for an eight-year-old. The gift, apparently, was her idea — they discussed it beforehand.

I am a thirty-two-year-old woman sitting across from my mother and she is blind. Invisibility is the thing I live in fear of. I implode, folding like origami. I try to speak but have no words. My response is primitive, before language, before cognition — the memory of the body.

Her lobster finished, she removes her plastic bib and orders another drink.

“I have to go soon,” I say.

She takes out a cigarette case and extracts a long, thin cigarette.

I check my watch.

“Will you ever forgive me?”

“For what?”

“Giving you away.”

“I forgive you. You absolutely did the right thing,” I say, never having meant it more. “Really.” I get up.

“I have to go,” I say. I flee, leaving the woman in the rabbit coat alone with her Harveys Bristol Cream.

“Will I see you again?” she calls after me.

I pretend I don’t hear. I don’t turn around. I walk out of the restaurant and cross to the other side of the hotel; I don’t breathe until I am safe on the other side.

My friend is in the Oak Bar. Several minutes pass before I am able to say anything.

“Well, what was she like?”

“I have no idea.” In retrospect, I think I was in shock.

“All you all right?” the friend asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me,” she says.

Someone else, another mind, might extrapolate from her demeanor, her gestures. All I can say is, “Dusty Springfield.”

“What would you have liked from her?” the friend asks.

“Literally? I would have liked it if she’d looked at me and asked, Is there anything you need, anything I can do for you, anything you want to tell me?”

“Did you make a plan to see her again?”

“No.” I will never see her again. Somehow I know that.

On Valentine’s Day the phone rings. “You can just go to the roof of your building and jump off.”

“Ellen?”

“I’m angry with you, can you tell?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t send me a Valentine,” she says.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to,” I say. “I didn’t send anyone a Valentine.”

“Well, all you had to do was go to the store and pick one out.”

“I’m not really sure why you’re so angry with me.”

“You don’t take good care of me. You should adopt me and take good care of me,” she says.

“I can’t adopt you,” I say.

“Why not?”

I don’t know how to respond. “You’re scaring me,” is all I can manage.

“Are you still there?” She asks.

“Yes.”

“Can you hold on while I get a drink of water?” Water. Her accent, her pronunciation long, a Maryland twang infused with the flavor of the Jersey Shore. Hold on while I get a drink of water. Was it water or was it Harveys Bristol Cream?

April 27, 1994, the mother’s birthday. Against the advice of friends who say that following the Valentine’s Day massacre I should do nothing to encourage her, I should keep my distance, I should be careful about sending mixed messages or any message at all, I feel I must do something. I want her to know that I care and am struggling with all of this, and that for the moment this is the best I can do. Not knowing the name of any florists in Atlantic City, I call FTD and try to send the very best.

“What is your name?” the woman asks. “Your name, address, and phone number?”

I give the FTD operator my name, my address, my phone, and realize that I am sweating profusely. I feel as though I am being interrogated. How many years went by when I didn’t know Ellen’s name, her address, her phone number?

“Yellow, pink, or red?” I am hating the operator.

“Red.”

“We can deliver this tomorrow.”

“No, it’s for next week. I want it delivered on the twenty-seventh.”

I’m ordering ahead, I want to be prepared, I don’t want to miss the date.

“Deliver on the twenty-seventh,” the operator says. “And the card?”

“The card?” Just asking me about the card makes me livid.

The card. “‘Happy Birthday, Ellen’—signed ‘A.M.’” I can’t bring myself to say “Love.”

“Just ‘A.M.’?” the order person asks. “Not, ‘Love, A.M.’?”

“No.”