Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [55]
Rarely at a loss for words, I mumbled that John had gone waterskiing and I’d forgotten my book. Without getting up, she glanced, swanlike, to either side of the chaise, then shrugged. She seemed to me impenetrable. By then I’d found my battered copy of A Sport and a Pastime on a chair near the tray. I had it in my hand, but to leave I’d have to cross back in front of her. I could hear the stillness—that hot, dense three-o’clock kind—and I wanted to vanish, to be whisked off by some passing bird. But something kept me there. Then, softly and without smiling, she spoke, her eyes toward the water. “I was watching you earlier—you reminded me of me.” As I clicked off the many things this could mean, we began talking—how beautiful the day was, the manuscript she was working on, ballet, our childhoods in New York. I knew, as we spoke, that she was still watching.
In the course of our conversation there was a gesture to sit, which I did, at the very edge of her chaise. She set down the pages, bringing herself cross-legged, while I fingered a loose button on the upholstery. Soon the pauses between us lessened. The glasses came off. She slid them high on the colored scarf that covered her hair and shaded her wide-apart eyes with her hand.
Later that summer, when we knew each other better, she would ask me to tell her all about the play the summer before. She wished she had seen it. And when I said how good, how funny John had been, she smiled with pride, pressing the tips of her fingers to her lips.
But on this day, we began, somehow, to talk about children—about babies and early bonding. Because I had no experience, I had strong ideas about the subject, and although the psychology of breast-feeding seemed a rather iffy topic, I risked it. No longer observing, she hugged her knees tight and leaned in with a quality of attention and empathy I’d rarely experienced. Things are so different now, and women have more choices, she confided. She told me that when she had her children, the baby nurses just swooped in and spirited them away. They’d fasten them by their layettes to their cribs with large pins, and there was nothing you could do. Really, I said, amazed, wanting to take her hand in comfort.
As she spoke, the years fell from her face. Like an actress, she could reach into the past, and with a shift of thought, her features would change, mirroring the emotions of another time. Beside me, at the back of the house with the sun still high, she was no longer in her mid-fifties, the poised chatelaine of Red Gate Farm and mother of the man I loved, but a young woman of twenty-six, her brow raised in wonder at all that would happen.
There was a lull. We smiled, relieved somehow. I stood to go. I could have talked with her all afternoon, but I had my book, what I’d come for, and I didn’t want us to run out of things to say. I turned, but she spoke again, her eyes far away and remembering something. “Oh … about the volleyball—you don’t have to.”
As I walked across the grass, I felt changed. My step was lighter, and there was a tenuous catch at the back of my throat. Joy, maybe. I’d always assumed I would like his mother, but I hadn’t guessed that it would be this much.
Later, when John got back, we traded stories. We were dressing for dinner in the large rounded closet on the second floor of the Tower, his clothes on one side, mine on the other. In between “did I like his shirt” and “this dress or that” and “shall I wear my hair up or down,” I told him I’d canoed to the beach and that in the shallows of the pond near the old fishing shack, I’d seen two giant snapping turtles. “Oh, and I had a nice talk with your mother.” Half-listening before,