Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [49]
Ilene Porter. 120 Fifth Avenue. New York, NY 10011.
I stare at the information so long that it becomes fuzzy and spins on itself.
Porter. 120. Ilene. 10011. New York. Fifth Avenue.
I try to make sense of it, but I cannot. Porter isn’t her maiden name, and it’s certainly not her married name. And then it hits me so clearly that I can’t believe that it didn’t dawn on me to begin with: My mother has remarried. She has rebuilt her life, and perhaps her family, with someone new, someone who is not my father, children who are not me or Andy; it wasn’t a family she didn’t want, it was our family she didn’t want.
I gasp for a breath of air, like that might cleanse me or erase the knowledge of my new discovery, but it does nothing, other than leave me heaving deeply for more. Feeling queasy, I push my chair back abruptly, and it tips on itself and rattles to the ground. Then I hurl myself out of the office, down the elevator, and into the storm-swept streets. It’s raining so hard that I think I might suffocate from the unrelenting sheets, which, I suppose as I fly down the block, is all the better, because then, no one will be able to see my tears.
Chapter Fourteen
The weather refuses to relent. All weekend I hear the tap-tapping of drops on my air conditioner, which juts out of my living room window, a window I spent an inordinate amount of time gazing out. This slow time, this time with no one to satisfy but myself—no husband to foster, no toddler to clean—still feels off, even two months after I’ve returned to my old life, like a slippery skin that doesn’t quite fit. I consider darting into the office but worry that I might run into Josie, and I’d be too embarrassed to face her and admit that I might be evolving into a second version of her: all work, no life.
In Westchester, in our grandiose house, there was no such thing as downtime. There was always laundry to be done or diapers to be restocked or Cheerios to wrestle from under the couch. At nights, when Henry would travel, which was almost all the time, I’d try to sink into bed with a new book, after I’d bathed Katie (bubble bath!) and tucked her in for the night (Goodnight Moon). But I never quite figured out how to turn it off, the button that said “full-time mom,” so mostly, I flipped through magazines or sped over websites, concocting new recipes to be tested or new art projects for upcoming playdates or worrying about hosting the best birthday party in the neighborhood, even if her birthday was four months out.
And now, there is literally no one to answer to. A quiet so profound that it is almost tangible. Jack is tending to his mother; Meg and Tyler have retreated to their beach house for, as she whispers from her cell phone, “baby-making sex.” Ainsley has already moved north to Rye. I realize, as I stare out at the expanses of water tumbling from the sky, loneliness isn’t something that materialized when Henry and I married or when Katie was born. It’s followed me my whole life, like a shadow I’m unwilling to shake.
A therapist might tell me that this stems from my mother’s abandonment, but I’m not so sure. Aren’t there traits that we’re simply innately born with? When Katie arrived, she was feisty from the start. Her screams were enough to pierce glass, and her colic was seemingly endless. For weeks, I operated on autopilot in a revolving haze of utterly exhausted delirium, in which I’d wake to her shrieks, attempt to comfort her with my breast, then clutch her close and rock her to stop the crying. When that wouldn’t work, we’d walk through the neighborhood, me, desperate with the hope that the hum of her stroller would calm her; her, utterly refusing to be calmed. Henry tried to help; it wasn’t that he didn’t offer. But he wasn’t the one nursing her. He wasn’t the one who had grown her for the past nine months. “He’s not her mother,” I’d mutter when he would try to soothe her and fail or change her and put the diaper on backward or make any tiny misstep that