Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [68]
Back outside, watching Max, standing so close to Huddie I smell his wheaty, wild onion scent and feel the faint heat of his back and chest, I see my mother, propped up on her twin bed, in her small, spare apartment (most of her money gone with her only really bad mistake, a light-fingered, slew-footed boyfriend after Aaron Price died), saying in her most fluting and therefore most furious voice, “Of course, one makes a virtue of necessity, my dear. What else? At least we have the pleasure of fooling others.” And she made herself over once more, into an admirer of the simple life, a Zen devotee, as she had made herself domestically suburban, and then professionally successful, and then a desirable woman of leisure and a certain age, when not one of these things spoke to her own wishes; she made herself pure and died between rough cotton sheets, her bald head on a pillow as harsh as a bag of rice. I squeeze my eyes and conjure the kindest, most virtuous portrait of myself: a sensible, literate woman of limited income, a devoted mother who’s chosen time with her child over professional advancement and a safe neighborhood over service for eight. Please see that.
The sky is the bright unchanging dusk of summer night; the tulip trees darken and fill until suddenly there is no light at all coming through them. We have to go in, both of us as reluctant as Max, as if there are no mosquitoes, as if tomorrow will be no good, as if this, this handspring, the one he can’t do in the velvety dark, is the one that must be done tonight.
The porch light sends Max’s shadow across Huddie’s light grey pants and Huddie’s across my porch steps, onto my feet, and I think, It will be all right if I die tonight. After I touch him.
I hand Huddie a glass of cheap wine and direct him to a quiet corner. While the kitchen is briefly under siege, I am the commander in chief. I hold on to the last two inches of Max’s T-shirt and clean his ears and his neck, wiping off the three dripping circles of boy-colored stucco beading his lily throat. My shoulder’s pressing the phone to my ear so I can promise brownies for the Great Gator bake sale. (Great Gator is the mascot of Max’s elementary school, and his snarky, omnivorous green presence is felt almost every week, since I in fact moved here, to this nothing-special house I can barely afford, because the school takes its mascot and its honor classes and its after-school program so seriously. Yes, two trays of brownies, and don’t make me mad by explaining that the kids prefer homemade.) I shake zucchini, peppers and garlic in my oldest, favorite pan, so old scorch marks tiger-stripe the original fifties-kitchen yellow. I know how I look, moving; around the kitchen in double time. It impresses and intimidates men who want to be married. Also young single women. Married men, with children (who show up periodically with bottles of wine when our children have all gone to bed), don’t care for it much, since they see it at home all the time. It must be as charming as leg hairs in the sink. And other mothers, the few who have been in my home (a six-week friendship between Max and the boy across the street; the neighborhood cancer drive; the new neighbor), don’t watch, don’t think about it, they don’t even put down their wineglasses as they set the table for me. They have all they can stand of their own necessary, gratifying agitation, whirling through their own kitchens like dervishes, scattering silverware and instructions and things to be defrosted and things to be frozen, feeling absolutely necessary to every movement and every living thing.
* * *
Huddie finishes his glass, a thin, sugary white, and wishes again that he’d brought decent wine instead of those irises, now bending in half over the jars she’s jammed them into. He puts a splinter of raw zucchini in his mouth and thinks of all the great meals he’s made, all