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Being Cut
By Amy Fain Roseman There was a mother in our neighborhood that drove around Houston in a yellow convertible Volkswagen bug. This was before mothers did things like get divorced from perfectly nice men and drive all over town, shifting gears, in sporty cars, assuaging their boredom, attracting attention. Lorna lived in a house in our neighborhood where a movie had been shot with Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger. There had been a restaurant scene in the movie where Lorna and her daughters sat eating and chatting as extras, the daughters preserved in their youth for life. Lorna was not so lucky. Lorna was a middle-aged, bottle brunette divorcee who sold real estate in Houston. She had a lovely daughter about my age named Elizabeth who moved away to Mobile, Alabama when she married her college sweetheart, Larry. I’m not sure Larry turned out to be such a catch after all, but Elizabeth was one of the few Houston girls who grew up to be brightly good-hearted and not fake, so some might conclude that Larry was a better find than he seemed. One late afternoon my sister and I had gone over to Lorna’s house to see Elizabeth who was my sister’s friend. She was out but Lorna was home entertaining a gentleman whose brother had been the governor of the State. I looked in on him to say hello, Merry Christmas, how’s your son I went to elementary school with? His wife had died not long before. He looked drawn, sitting in front of the television watching football. Sighing once, his soft shoulders sloped down under the grief that still pressed on him like a bad masseuse; he answered that his son was fine and that he hoped I’d have a merry Christmas too. He sighed again, and I walked back to the kitchen where my sister was in high gear, entertaining, doing her best Angie Dickinson imitation involving a high leg kick that brought Lorna, her eyes squeezed shut, to laughter, her hands stretched across her torso to her opposing arms, her olive skin squeezed under the pressure of her fingers. I smiled weakly, waiting for the punch line or some kind of explanation, not really getting what could be so funny after seeing the lonely man in the den. Lorna, realizing I was back in the kitchen, looked at me directly. “Isn’t he so boring?” Her expression was one of genuine disbelief, her painted lips closing in on themselves. Before I could think of a tactful way to respond, my sister had headed into another performance designed to bring Lorna’s attention back to her, full force. My sister began to enact another story that would take another fifteen minutes, what would seem like an eternity, until finally we could be on our way out of there. The last time I saw Lorna was at my sister’s wedding. It was dark in the ballroom of my father’s country club and the band was playing so loudly no one tried to talk. It was almost like a senior prom, but the clothes were nicer. My sister, who was thirty-five, and her groom, in his forties, were not together on the dance floor. There were no guests out there either, only my sister and a few of her bridesmaids from high school, rocking out together in a circle of three, oblivious to the remaining three hundred guests, hoping to recapture something they still missed from those years, a concept no one else could figure out, high school being a disastrous time for most of us and not the peak of our lives as it was for my sister. That same night, I was making my way through a crowd of people I hadn’t seen in years. I walked toward Lorna, never having had a disagreement with her in my life. Having moved away from Houston, I don’t think I had seen her in a decade. In the dark, barely able to make out her expression, I leaned toward Lorna to attempt a welcome in spite of the din. When I tried to greet her, she dramatically turned her face away from me, her nose upward and her jaw well-defined to the side. At first I was puzzled, not sure if there was something troubling her upper vertebrae; I continued to stare, unable to decipher her reaction. It had been an odd return to Houston that trip. My mother had died the previous year and it was close to the first anniversary of her death when my sister had decided to throw her shindig of a wedding reception. There was a lot of tension between us. She had not asked me to be in her wedding party when she had been my maid of honor six years before. It hurt my feelings, a cut to the core, especially after our mother had passed away and I had listened to her grieve long-distance and complain, often in tears, about living with our difficult, demanding father. She would call me with stories and questions regarding her new beau. Would it be okay for her to marry someone Jewish as I had done, would it be okay for her to promise to raise her children Jewish as I had not? There I was in front of Lorna, unsure of what my next move should be. She was beginning to look ridiculous, her nose having a pig-shape quality to begin with, but my concern for her was still foremost. Then I realized that this was the sinister, gossipy side of Houston I had forgotten, this was the mean-spirited side of Lorna I had seen all those years before in her kitchen at Christmas. At first I was overcome with unease at seeing Lorna like this, not having known people so backward since the antiabortionists I had lived next door to in Atlanta who vehemently supported the death penalty and crooked Republican candidates. They had become so mired professionally with a disreputable Alabama politician they had had to sell their house and move to Florida practically overnight to avoid who knows what kind of trouble with the Internal Revenue Service. I had heard most of the damning discourse through my child’s baby monitor and their cordless phone. “Who knows how far this oil will spread?” the man of the house had whispered into the phone. In the Sunshine State they could at least save their house. As I continued to gaze at Lorna, I almost laughed out loud. I’d been living in a liberal, very open college town where such nonsense only exists in the nineteenth century novels one of my friends teaches in her freshman fiction class at the university. I stepped back and saw another mom from the neighborhood I had grown up in. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and still adored the color of her platinum blonde hair which had been that way since I could remember, just a few roots in sight, but nothing her perfect smile couldn’t offset in a mere turn. I giggled at her kindness and skipped off to find my husband who was watching our children away from the noise and crowds in the broad, sofa-lined hallway that connected the ballroom to the building’s grand circular entrance. It was a relief to crawl into the car that would drive us back to the overpriced hotel my father had rented to avoid disturbing the bride at the house I grew up in. He had no idea how hard it was to entertain and feed a one year old and five year old in a single hotel room for a long weekend but at that moment, I didn’t care anymore. I was so relieved to be on my way out of Houston and back to my middle class digs where petty behavior consisted of a two year old refusing to share a toy with a playmate, not adult women acting out a pitiable fantasy of wishful social superiority. It doesn’t exist anymore. They live in a past of which they were never a part. They live in a now I can move away from and never come back to see again, leaving them to circulate sadly among themselves, knocking each other down. |
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