Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

“Maybe we should have called” are the first words out of his mouth.

Isabelle is dumbfounded, blindsided. She has a large group of four-year-olds and their parents showing up any minute for Avi’s party, and here are her parents, the last people in the world she expected, or wants, to see.

Her mother, amazingly, looks exactly the same: elegant, beautiful, imperious. She seems never to age. But the same can’t be said for her father. His shoulders appear more stooped. He’s lost some more hair, and he’s wearing glasses now. Looking at the two of them standing side by side, it’s hard not to conclude that Ruth has somehow been siphoning off youth and vitality from her husband for her own purposes.

“It’s Avi’s birthday, isn’t it.” This from her mother — a declarative sentence, not a question. A challenge. Certainly not the apology for four-plus years of the silent treatment Isabelle would have liked. “So we’re here,” Ruth says as she pushes past Isabelle and into the small living room. “Where’s the birthday boy?”

“Dad,” Isabelle says quietly, “you couldn’t have let me know?”

“Your mother made me promise not to.” He shrugs. “You know your mother.” Then: “She was afraid you wouldn’t let her come.” And Eli puts down the suitcases and reaches for his daughter, bringing her into a warm, much-longed-for hug. “I’ve missed you,” he says, a whisper into her hair. But Isabelle hears him. She’s missed him, too.

In the living room, grandmother and grandson are staring at each other. Finally Ruth speaks: “You look like my side of the family,” claiming him because he’s an adorable boy, and choosing to ignore the fact that he takes after Isabelle and has the Rothman genes.

“Is that good?” Avi asks.

“Well, yes, of course. Who wouldn’t want to look like the Abramowiczes? They’re handsome people, all of them.”

“I want to look like myself.”

“And that you do,” Isabelle says, coming in from the front porch with Eli trailing behind her, ever helpful, having picked up the suitcases once again. “You look like Avi Arthur Mendenhall and nobody else,” she tells her son. “Unique. One of a kind. Very special. And today the birthday boy!” All of this said as a reassurance to her son and a rebuke to her mother, who takes it as such.

Isabelle can see the hurt pinch her mother’s face — oh, that look, she’s seen it a thousand times, as if Ruth has eaten something that’s disagreed with her. Well, this has started off badly, and Isabelle finds herself rushing to rescue the moment, against her better judgment, contrary to the years of resolve she thought she had built against her mother.

“Avi, you are so special that your grandpa and grandma flew all the way across the country to celebrate your birthday with you,” Isabelle tells him.

“Lady Momma,” Ruth says.

“What?”

“I want Avi to call me Lady Momma. Grandma makes me sound ancient…which I am not!”

Isabelle is nonplussed again. How could she have forgotten her mother’s overreaching vanity?

“Lady Momma?” Isabelle’s voice rises with incredulity and a bubble of laughter.

“And I’m your grandpa”—from Eli as he walks over to Avi, bends forward at the waist like a marionette, and extends his hand to the little boy. They shake hands solemnly.

“This is weird,” Avi says, searching Isabelle’s face for confirmation.

“Yes,” she agrees, “it is. This is very weird.”

Her parents stay for two days, two long and difficult days, and by the end of the visit Isabelle has managed to work herself into a serious, inexorable headache that sits right behind her eyes and pounds her with its unrelenting message— This is a mistake, this is a mistake —because her mother and father have managed to work themselves back into her life, and Avi’s.

—

AS ISABELLE SKIRTS SAN FRANCISCO BAY, along I-80 and then U.S. 101, she rehearses what she will say to Casey. All her life her nerve has failed her at crucial moments, so she doesn’t trust herself. The only hope she has is to rehearse. And oftentimes even that doesn’t work.

She grins to herself in the speeding car as she remembers that day at Chandler when she walked across the entire campus from her apartment to Daniel’s office mumbling like a deranged street person over and over, “It would be better if I worked with another professor…it would be better…it would be better…” And even then, when she was standing before Daniel’s substantial presence, she was unable to get the words out.

Well, that worked out fine, though, didn’t it? It brought her Daniel.

Over the past two years, their e-mail correspondence has ranged far from their initial topic of conversation — her writing. They no longer discuss that, because Isabelle no longer writes.

In the beginning, after Isabelle explained why she rarely, if ever, wrote anymore—“I no longer believe I can”—Daniel would periodically raise the subject again, as if she’d never answered his question, and Isabelle would ignore him. Then he would ask again. Then again, until finally one day she shot back angrily, “Are you writing?” And Daniel wrote back one word, “Yes,” and the answer took her breath away.

She wanted to ask, What are you writing? How did you start? Are you happy with it? Can you show me some of it? But she didn’t. Without any credentials on her part, she felt she had no right to question him. Instead she wrote back, “Good,” and they went on to other topics.

Daniel tells her about his very small town, Winnock. And his daughter across the meadow who refuses to have anything to do with him. And his class and the women who have come to seem like good friends. And about Bev, who owns the bakery in town, makes heavenly cinnamon buns, and provides him with the Internet connection that makes their correspondence possible.

Isabelle writes to him at first about Avi and how much unexpected joy being his mother has brought her. But then, as they grow bolder with each other, she begins to write about her regret, about how she’s spent a lifetime feeling stuck. All but the five months she spent with Daniel. How was he able to make her believe in the future, in her ability to get there?

What was it? she asks him in an e-mail composed late one night, when it feels like she’s the only person awake on the planet. Fanny’s side of the house is dark. Rain patters gently on the roof and slides down her living room window in slow rivulets. It must be close to 3 a.m., because all the windows of all the houses she can see up and down her street are dark, and mist clings to the streetlights like cotton candy. Then she is able to write, What was it that happened between us that made every hope and dream seem possible?

Isabelle, he writes back, we fell a little bit in love with each other.

—

SHE AND DEEPTI HAVE DISCUSSED LOVE a lot. What is it worth? How much should one give up for it? How does one know it for sure? These conversations often take place in hushed voices on the porch of Isabelle’s duplex, with Avi tucked safely in bed. In the winter they bundle up in heavy sweaters and sip the aromatic chai tea that Deepti brews in Isabelle’s kitchen.

The tiny front porch feels like their private space, designed for just the two of them, Isabelle in her rocker, Deepti in her wicker chair. But one night, well after midnight, Isabelle sees the light from the television go off in Fanny’s living room and then hears her neighbor’s front door open and there is Fanny, out on her porch, wearing her old chenille bathrobe with a faded rose across the back.

“Fanny, are you all right?”

“What are you drinking? It smells like spice.”