Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [67]
“I don’t know. You can time me.” Max rubs his arms and flings himself up into the air again, hands pressing hard on the grass as he turns a few more showy, foot-waggling cartwheels that end in round-offs of the kind the little ponytailed professionals do as they come off the beam. His feet slam the ground, and he raises his arms above his head for another handstand. I hope he hears a stadium crowd screaming his name, wild with love and admiration.
I come outside, standing still long enough for the afternoon sun to warm the tops of my bare feet, long enough to realize I haven’t changed my clothes. Maybe he will think this is ironic on my part, that I have dressed “as” something, something like a housewife, although he can’t think I’ve bought a house and supported this child by staying home and dusting. Huddie won’t disappoint Max by taking his eye off the sweeping second hand, so instead of a solemn handshake or an affectionate embrace or even a sweetly tentative palm on the shoulder, instead of anything that we have a right to expect after fifteen years, we get another minute or two of oblique suspense and parental obligation. Huddie’s smiling, keeping his eye on the watch. I smile at Max’s pointed, quivering feet, at Huddie’s handsome, broad chest and his hands, which are graceful, even shapely, and wide as catcher’s mitts, and a familiar thorny stream washes under my lids.
I know my face is longer and his is wider, bulldog-wide through the temples, with darker-edged folds beginning above his eyebrows. We both have grey, but he can’t see mine because I colored it yesterday, and despite its sprightly, mendacious auburn, I spent an hour crying and wiping dark, intractable spots off my forehead and off the tips of my ears. Although I no longer looked as old and time-speckled, I didn’t exactly look like me. Already concealed, I was tempted to go for broke and did, with mascara and silver hoop earrings and clean, intact underpants. Actually, new underpants.
“Okay, Max. Maximus. Get upright.”
“Eighteen seconds. That’s good.” Huddie’s hand covers Max’s to the middle of his damp little arm. “I’m Horace Lester, old friend of your mother’s.”
“I’m Max. I’m eight. I’m small for my age, but I’m eight.”
“Good to meet you.”
I can hear Huddie thinking, Small, yeah. Small and then some. Just keep him out of my son’s locker room. My own thoughts about Max run so protective and so cruel I don’t give Huddie time to ask even the normal visiting grown-up questions. Maxie pulls his hand out, not rudely, and backs up for a series of handsprings. Huddie gives me the flowers, without ceremony, and I look inside for a vase to suit them, knowing I don’t have any. My impulses of the last eight years have not been toward the house beautiful. My mother had vases for every kind of bouquet and arrangement, and she had ideas about what suited which: glazed terracotta for wildflowers, tall crystal for tulips and snapdragons, short crystal for bunches of zinnias. I have a large peanut butter jar for most of Huddie’s bouquet and a spaghetti sauce jar for the rest. I long, as I have not once longed in all these downwardly mobile years, for a tall column of etched glass, for a handsome, wide-mouthed ginger jar. I wanted safety and quiet and books and have them, but now it feels less like simplicity or even the successful marshaling of extremely limited resources, and more like the road show of Grapes of Wrath. My teeth ache with shame. I want those vases. I want a big walnut table and Portuguese pottery. I want pretty things right now, and I want him to come in and see my inviting, welcoming home and long to be in it. I want a house of layered charm, from the shining wooden floors to the witty, incidental watercolors, not a couch whose surface is a mix of Astroturf weave and backyard crust. I want a house where things have form as well as function, where not every surface