Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [71]
Life can only be understood backward,
but it must be lived forward.
Kierkegaard
That was the sort of shrink Sybille was.
I drive to the airport with Lily and Natasha to get Mike and Ed. We are all in a state of high excitement about seeing the girls.
Divorced mommies learn, eventually, to put mother love in the icebox for weeks at a time—when the babies are with their daddies—or go mad. And I had learned my lesson well by now. When Mike and Ed were away, I put them out of my mind—if not out of my dreams. I learned to keep them near yet far. I learned to suspend feelings. This trick will be necessary in the afterlife, if there is one. For, of course, we are already in the afterlife: it intersects with our world, threading in and out of our days like a candy ribbon. Some days we are serene and all-knowing, other days frantic and caught up in the mortal coil. I seem always to have been obsessed by the myth of Persephone, as if somehow I knew that I would live a life in which I needed her wisdom to cope with the chronic departures of my daughters. They come and go—to Hades and back again—and when they return, it is always spring.
We wait at the airport in the crush of people—relatives roiling in familial frenzy, bored limo drivers smoking and loitering with the glazed, indifferent eyes of those who are going to meet strangers. They carry big paper lollipops with these strangers’ names. But the family members carry their passion and expectation: flashing eyes, auras of anticipation and anger—whole family histories read in their pacing feet, their troubled brows.
Airports have always affected me deeply, made me want to cry. All these arrivals and departures, losses and restitutions! All these people going off to hang suspended above the ill-fitted fragments of their lives! So may puzzles! So many departures!
In our age, travel has become a drug. There are people who grow so used to coming and going that they find it impossible to stay still. If they are not boarding a plane and going somewhere, they feel somehow bereft—like a gambler deprived of his chips, or an addict of his needle, or a sexoholic of her marble cock.
The twins!
They come through the arrival gate looking three inches taller than they did two months ago, unkempt, dirty-faced, with untied shoelaces—just like two ten-year-old girls who have been with their father.
“Mom! Mommy!” They shout almost in unison. The joy on their dirty faces at that moment is wondrous to behold. And my heart: it seems to burst its membranes, to expand, to convulse around their coming. The waters break. I am awash in tears, which then I wipe and hide. My little cookies, my big-small girls, my little chips of DNA whirling forward through the universe. My double darlings, my double dollop of chocolate chip ice cream, my two little puppybodies, fragrant with musky nympharoma, my bubble-gum Reebok babies, with the double dirty smile.
“How was the flight?” I ask, just to have something to say, when there is nothing to say—just hugging. We hug. We hug and hug and hug. The whole Amazon commune hugs. Five women hugging each other.
“Airplane food sucks the root,” says Ed.
“Aaagh,” says Mike, doing a ten-year-old’s imitation of vomiting.
“What did you eat?” asks Lily—that being her domain.
“The usual swill,” says Mike.
“Yeah,” says Ed. “The usual mystery meat . . .”
“You guys sure have grown,” says Natasha, who seems to have grown herself, even at thirty. They all seem to grow three inches when they leave me, all except Lily, who, like all our fairy godmothers, remains comfortingly the same.
“How was Dad’s house? What did you do?” I ask. We walk to the baggage claim.
“Daddy has this new girlfriend,