Gabriel Roth - The Unknowns

I wanted to rent a car at the airport, in case I need to get out of the house at some point, but my mom insisted on picking me up. The last time I came she met me at the gate, but now you can’t get through security without a boarding pass. Irrationally I look for my name on the hand-lettered signs held by the limo drivers, but no, there’s my mother, standing off to the side and waving shyly. She looks older than she did when I was twelve, a development that still surprises me. I bend down to hug her and she throws her arms around my neck.

“Well!” she says. “How was your flight? Are you thirsty? Did you drink water on the plane?” (The dehydration that results from air travel is one of my mom’s preoccupations.) She is impressed that all my stuff fits into a carry-on, although I’m only here for two nights.

She leads me through the parking lot to her SUV. I offered to buy her a car, but she refused; the house was enough, and not having to make mortgage payments enabled her to trade her hatchback for this hideous Nissan. “I’m so glad you could come!” she says once we’ve pulled onto the freeway. “You must be so busy these days!” The fact that I have millions of dollars and no job makes my mom uncomfortable: she doesn’t know what I do all day. Nor do I, really.

“I’m just sorry I missed your real birthday,” I say. (It happened three days ago; tomorrow’s the party.) The dull clouds emit biblical shafts of light, reminding me how much I hate Denver’s melodramatic weather.

“How are things with Maya?” she says. I’ve only told her a little, but apparently she can tell it’s serious.

“Everything’s great,” I tell her. It’s true, if you filter out all the stuff I don’t want to think about right now and couldn’t tell my mom even if I did. But I have the urge to say something more, to tell everyone how important Maya is. The newspapers are printing the wrong headlines, focusing on the inconclusive reports of weapons inspectors and intelligence agencies when they should be describing her sense of humor and beautiful little breasts. “I’m kind of totally in love with her,” I say, because it’s also true.

Mom glances at me nervously before her eyes flicker back to the highway. “You will make sure she signs something, right?” she says.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, although I can feel understanding blooming like a rain cloud.

“Oh, I shouldn’t say anything,” she says. “And I’m sure if you’ve picked her she must be a wonderful girl. It’s really wonderful, Eric — I’m so happy for you! I just mean, well, you’ve worked so hard, and it would be terrible to lose all that. I know something about how women can be.”

To the west the mountains look tapped out, as though the last minerals have been extracted and there’s nothing left but piles of dust. I calculate the number of hours until I get back to San Francisco and see Maya again, away from my mother and her anxiety: forty-three. No, it’s an hour later here: forty-four.

“Mom, I’ve been seeing her for six weeks,” I say. “We’re not getting married for a while.”

Mom turns off the highway and heads toward the subdivision in which she chose her new home, a freestanding manse surrounded by identical siblings, all painted the same lilac with purple trim, out in the windy grassless plains to the south of the city. I haven’t been here since the closing, when my mom wept and one thin strand of my life’s accumulated fear and guilt was severed. I asked her if she wouldn’t prefer something closer to town, something cozier, something that’s not identical to every other visible structure. She talked about the absence of noise and crime and dirt, but I suspect the property’s true appeal was less tangible. My mother fears hotel beds and used clothes and public swimming pools, objects with a history of occupancy by strangers. Moving into a new-construction home , as the developer’s literature put it, was like an exorcism.

I follow her inside and swing the surprisingly light front door shut behind me. The hall, with its elevated ceiling and pretentiously sweeping staircase, looks almost exactly as it did when we came here with the talkative woman from the sales office. My mother spent her life in houses that were too small, and the idea that she might finally have enough room made her giddy and scattered.

She heads straight into the kitchen without offering me a tour, and, unprompted, begins to make grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, a meal I have always loved. I want to sit at the kitchen table, from which I have watched her cook thousands of meals, but there isn’t one: the table is in the dining room now. Does she usually eat there, or does she take her food into the living room and watch TV? The stainless steel refrigerator is decorated with magnets in the shape of pumpkins, but there’s nothing for the magnets to pin up. As she greases and flips the sandwiches, we talk about her work, about that jerk Wade, about the party tomorrow. Neither of us wants to talk about Maya anymore, which means there’s not much to say about my life.

When she’s made two grilled cheeses for me and a half sandwich for herself, we carry the plates and soup bowls into the dining room. I return for paper towels and silverware and we sit down on opposite sides of the table, smiling at the familiar situation and the unfamiliar setting. She blows on a spoonful of soup and says, “Well, your dad called.”

“You talked to him?” As far as I know, my parents hadn’t spoken in seven years. “How was that?”

“Honestly, it was hard,” she says. She sets the spoon back in her bowl without tasting the soup. “He had his friendly manner, and he asked how I was doing, and I didn’t know what to tell him. And then he asked if I’d been in touch with you! As though you were a friend from school or something like that.”

“Did he say anything about having dinner with me?”

“He said that he had offered you this job— pitched you , was the way he said it — and that you had turned it down, and that you were making a big mistake and I should talk to you about it. He said here was your big opportunity for lightning to strike twice, and you were about to miss it.”

“Did you tell him to go fuck himself?”

Mom frowns at the language. “No, I didn’t,” she says. “But I told him you were smarter than both of your parents combined and you could make your own decisions.”

I make a noise that attempts to thank her without endorsing the insult to her own intelligence. “If he bothers you again, tell him to call me,” I say. “There’s no reason you should get dragged into this crap.”

“I’ll be fine,” she says. “I’m not scared of your dad.”

After dinner I check out the rest of the house — too many surfaces, not enough objects to rest or hang on them — and retire to the guest bedroom. I’m almost certain I’m the first person to stay in this room. On the verge of sleep, my mind snags on Mom’s frightened admonition about a prenuptial agreement. I know she’s trying to prevent my life from being sabotaged the way hers was. But I have to believe it won’t be that way when Maya and I divorce. We will be reasonable, sympathetic, adult. I wish I could be certain. Will we be trapped by bitterness and regret? Will we be able to find one another through the thicket of hostility, to reach out and clasp hands and say, Here I am, I loved you once ?

Victoria, who works with my mom, is the first to arrive. She brings her son Carlos, aged ten months, fleshy and grumpy. We sit in the living room in front of the big picture window, and my mom fetches a bag of Tostitos and a bowl of salsa. (I worry that Victoria will feel patronized by the quasi-Mexican snack, but she dips happily.) When the doorbell rings again, my mom is bouncing Carlos on her lap, so I volunteer to answer it.