Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [72]
“Yeah,” says Mike. “She’s bath happy.”
With Dart gone, I am suddenly stung by the news of a new girlfriend. Does the heart never heal?
“Bath happy?” I ask. The twins look as dirty as ever, coming home from their father’s house. Mike’s auburn hair has the remains of a wad of cut-out bubble gum matted into it, and Ed’s auburn hair hangs limply around her dirty face. They both have backpacks overflowing with all the stuff a ten-year-old girl considers essential to life on this or any planet: bubble gum, emergency chocolate, a favorite soiled stuffed animal (Mike has Trapper Bear; Ed, William Shakesbear), a notebook to record impressions (“California is grate. I miss Mom”), several Judy Blume, Norma Klein, and Roald Dahl books, T-shirts with witty sayings (“Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here”).
“Where’s Dart?” asks Ed.
“He usually comes to get us, doesn’t he, Mom?” says Mike warily.
I had not counted on this part of the Dart-gone problem. Well, might as well tell the truth. I always tell the kids the truth—in the gentlest way I know.
“He’s gone to California,” I say, “to look for a job in movies.”
“Oh,” says Mike.
“You mean you guys broke up,” says Ed.
“We saw it coming,” says Mike.
“Yeah,” says Ed. “He was out of order.”
“You deserve better, Mom,” says Mike.
I am left with my mouth hanging open.
It is bliss to have them home. We ride. We shop. We walk through our raspberry brambles, picking the brilliant red berries that gleam like little clusters of Venetian glass. We cuddle in bed at night among the stuffed animals.
The twins have decided to move into the guest room so as to be nearer to Mom—they seem to know I need them as much as they need me—and at night I climb into the water bed between them, smelling their nymphic smell, feeling their puppybodies with the brash newborn fingertips of the just sober.
Lying in bed with them at night, I think of all the times I nearly left them motherless, raging at my own motherlessness, trying to spite Elmore or Dart or Dolph or Theda for my own self-pity, thinking someone could be sorry if I drove, stoned, into a tree. And someone would: me. And these two little someones I hold in my arms.
How sharp is the regret of early sobriety! All those wasted years! All those wasted nights I was too drunk to feel my daughters’ flesh with fresh fingertips. I used to read to them, glass in hand, clowning drunkenly for them as I read Roald Dahl or Judy Blume or Norma Klein. Who was the loser? No one but me. I missed my life.
Lying there, I would try to total all the bedtimes I had missed, all the hours, minutes, seconds, blotted out in the brain cells. Impossible. Now I had such clarity that at times the world seemed unreal. Every second seemed alive, inhabited with animals, vegetables, minerals, molecules. Alive! The whole earth alive hurtling through the cosmos and I rocking in the water bed with my daughters in the womb of space-time. And no longer alone.
“Mom, can you cook?” says Ed.
“Why?”
“Daddy says you can’t cook,” says Mike.
“Of course I can cook. Watch.” And I stab one arm out of the water bed, pick up the telephone, and call the pizzeria.
The twins laugh and laugh. Forty-five minutes later we are all sitting in the wobbly water bed, demolishing an almost-hot extra-cheese pizza.
“We missed you, Mom,” says Mike.
“Yeah,” says Ed. “You’re the greatest mommy in the world.”
“Thank you,” I say, looking up.
I understand what it means to be twice blessed, twice born.
And Lily comes in to scold us for pigging out on pizza in bed.
But some days, reality is too much to bear. I dream of Dart. One night, he is with me—his golden, muscled shield of a chest gleaming. I see and smell it in my dream. For some reason, he is wearing my pearls—ropes and ropes of them. He dives into the sea. And when he surfaces, the pearls have lost their luster and are eaten away to reveal plastic beads at their hearts.
“Baby, I’m sorry,” he says sheepishly. “I love you.
You’ve always been the woman in my life—but I’m not