Darren’s rehab counselor told Marcia it would be best to avoid asking him questions: “Everything is new. Follow his lead.” They were letting him out for her 60th birthday, sprung on a chaperoned pass.
He showed up at the bustling Italian place near the end of dinner. They had waited forty minutes before going ahead and starting without him. His chaperone was a stooped man with girlish hands, a stutter and ancient rimless glasses. Marcia said “Hi, Dare,” and left it at that.
Darren said “Hey.” Then, with effort, but seeming to mean it: “Happy Birthday.”
He and the chaperone sat in the two open chairs, and Marcia tried to bridge the distance with her smile, an open face. She wanted to ask What held you up? Or How are you? But following Darren’s lead made questions — any questions — impossible.
“Awkward!” Nina stage-whispered.
Marcia introduced herself to the chaperone.
“Ar-ar-t-tie,” he said, looking her in the eyes. “P-pleasure.”
They went around the table, and Marcia’s old sorority sisters identified themselves.
“Anne.”
“Ellen.”
“Linda.”
Artie nodded at everyone.
“And I’m Nina,” said Nina. “My mother was friends with these ladies. Now she’s dead. I like to spend time with them because it makes me feel less motherless.” Gayle — dear, dead Gayle — and Marcia had been pregnant at the same time. They had shared an OB, who liked to joke that he could catch one baby in each hand if need be.
Artie grinned awkwardly, his teeth the same shade of yellow as the crème brûlée. Marcia liked him very much.
Zelig, Nina’s son, was asleep under the table, splayed face down like he was embracing the whole of the world beneath him: polished marble and sealant and grout and floorboards and joists and cement and earth and earth and earth.
“And who-who-who’s this f-f-fine young gentleman?” Artie asked, theatrically lifting a piece of tablecloth.
“This is really not a place for a three-year old,” Anne noted for the third time. Zelig had spent the appetizer course running loud loops around the perimeter of the restaurant, shouting his name. Anne had been decidedly frosty with her two daughters, who lived near each other in Irvine somewhere now, coordinating family portraits for holiday cards, stay-at-home-mom pseudo careerists. They were always sending out these relentlessly cheerful mass e-mails with the same discount offers. What could be better than a keepsake photograph of the whole clan? Memories Forever, it was called. Why not give each other the gift of memory this year?
“Who’s he bothering, Anne?”
“There are adult places and children’s places, Nina. A nice restaurant at 9:30 p.m. is an adult place. Adults should be able to enjoy adult places.”
“Just say he’s bothering you. Say ‘He’s bothering me.’” They were indeed Nina’s stand-in mothers, and she baited them accordingly. Artie let the tablecloth drop.
“Are you hungry, sweetie?” Marcia asked Darren, not following his lead.
“I’m fine,” he said.
She waved down a waitress anyway. “Can we get another couple menus?”
“I’m fine,” he said again.
Whatdoyouwantforyourbirthday, Mom? Darren had called to ask last week.
Just you! she’d said, overly enthusiastic, not used to this kind of overture. Not used to phone calls or questions about birthday presents. Or being addressed as “Mom,” for that matter. Usually he avoided addressing her directly. What did she want for her birthday? She was surprised he knew when her birthday was.
Just you: She had meant to say she was glad he was alive, that his existence was birthday present enough. He’d almost died this time. And the time before, too, but this time he was very nearly dead. She worried it came off like veiled criticism: He had failed to kill himself with a dose of recreational narcotics large enough to sate a frat house, and she was glad he had failed.
After dessert, Marcia opened her birthday card. Signs You’re Getting Older: The only names in your little black book have M.D. after them. Your back goes out more than you do. You’re asleep but others worry you’re dead. Happy Birthday! Signed Anne, Ellen, Linda, and Nina (under duress). A year-long gift membership to a dating website for Jews was enclosed. User 163542, come see the possibilities!
“Try it, Marsh,” they chanted. “The Internet!” They were lit from below by sparkling silverware, shiny dessert plates, votives. Who replaced her old sorority sisters with crones? How long had they been feeling sorry for her? Linda badly needed to stop wearing shoulder pads, Anne could stand to change up the perm she’d been sporting since 1982, and Ellen smelled like her four King Charles spaniels.
Darren picked silently at a piece of birthday cake.
“What do you think, Dare?” Linda, always the butchiest of them, with her raspy voice and her broad shoulders, reached over and gave him a shove. “Should your mom give it a go?”
Darren was not one to open up freely. Except for that once, when he had shown up unannounced at her house at eleven p.m., wanting, he said, to “hang” — Mom, it’s like we’re bumper cars sometimes, you know? Like, we just bump into each other and then we’re off again, and I don’t get why it has to be that way — but she realized later that he had been very high that time.
“Yeah, why not.” It sounded not very much like a question. He cleared his throat and headed for the bathroom, cloth napkin in a heap on the floor by the leg of his chair. Artie, after a moment’s hesitation, got up and followed.
“Darren’s big into the Internet,” Nina said, lip in curl.
Darren was in fact fighting overlapping addictions to women and poker and pornography and downers. Strange combination, to Marcia’s thinking. “Not uncommon,” according to the rehab lady. Darren directed television commercials and was into self-actualization seminars from which he had more than once called Marcia to confess some sordid emotion, asking of her some sort of vague “closure” or “healing.” What this meant, Marcia had learned, was that she was to pay money to accompany him to one of these seminars so that he could tell her just how much he despised her before he fell off the wagon again. On the rare occasions Darren deigned to make an appearance at a family function (his grandfather’s funeral, for instance), he’d invariably have an inappropriately dressed aspiring actress/model of color on his arm. (He’s got jungle fever, Nina would sing, shimmying.) The last one, Stacia, tottered on platform heels as long as her calves and simply giggled when asked how she and Darren met, giggled and giggled and giggled. Hence, forty thousand dollars a month at an estate in Malibu with a chef, masseuse and pool. No insurance accepted. The details were like rocks Marcia had to carry around in her mouth: distasteful, making it very difficult to hold a conversation. It could be worse, though. She could be refinancing her house. Selling her mother’s big heavy pearls.
“Thank you so much, ladies,” Marcia said. Her smile got the eyes all wrong: squinty. So she halted the smiling, but then her eyes went all botched-face-lift-wide and she just gave up, examined the card on the table. Its thick folded seam looked like a scar.
Ellen signed the check. Anne expertly, without a compact, applied the same pink Chanel she’d been wearing since junior year. Linda muttered again about the Internet, the Internet, the possibilities, the Internet, a-woman-I-work-with-and-the-Internet!
They gathered for birthday dinners. They took turns choosing bestsellers, half-reading them, then getting drunk and one-upping each other on topics as diverse as daughter-in-law rage and grandchild precociousness. They were Marcia’s friends in the sense that they had been her friends for a long time. But they were not her friends in the sense that they were her friends.
Darren’s bathroom run was of course too long and Marcia wondered about the state of his digestive system. Once upon a long while ago she had been monitor and confessor of his bowels, changing diapers and keeping track of the consistency and frequency of his shit. When he returned, trailed by Artie, it was as though he knew what she’d been thinking. He offered a savage “What?” as they all got up and headed out to retrieve their cars from the valet. Without eye contact, he barked a second staccato “Happy Birthday” and got into the passenger seat of Artie’s decade-old white Lexus sedan. Artie, his eyes wet with apology for all manner of disconnected sadnesses, wished Marcia a “Hap-hap-happy Buh-buh-birthday.”
Part Two
Weeks later, at the computer, fighting the discomfort of the thing, Marcia turned out to be a WOMAN between 60 and 70 in search of a MAN between 60 and 75.
“Hell no!” Nina said. “Ask for a sixty-five-year-old and you’ll wind up with an inbox full of assholes pushing eighty.” Her hands hovered over the keyboard for a thoughtful moment. “So, wait. Here. Look. Good news. You’re actually forty-nine. Voila!”
“But—”
“No, seriously, everyone lies. You just have to factor the lies in; it’s how it’s done. Promise you. Trust me.”
“Why? Why.”
“Because. Shush.”
She was a little curious, truth be told, about the “possibilities.” But was her need for companionship so objectively large? Did her friends — did everyone — think she was pathetic? Having been dumped by the father of her child had certainly been at least a little pathetic; she had been attempting, by refusing to date over the course of these years, the lifetime since that devastation, to mitigate any further humiliation.
Years ago Marcia went out with a man — a fix-up via Anne’s husband Paul — who’d insisted she take off her shoes before she came into his house for coffee. Some sort of Japanese affectation, though the man was a Jew from the Bronx. She had demurred: lymph edema caused her right foot to swell rather grotesquely, and she was self-conscious about it. They had each stood their ground—
“Just leave them right here, they’ll be fine, I promise.”
“I would really rather not.”
“Well, I don’t allow shoes in my house.”
“I’m sorry, I would just rather not.”
“Do you have any idea the kind of filth we track into our living spaces on our shoes?”
—and said their goodbyes on the front stairs. Anne had been furious.
Nina wriggled onto the side of the chair and then over, pushing Marcia off and out of the way. He could be SINGLE, DIVORCED or WIDOWED, but widowed would be ideal. He’d still worship the memory of his old, sweet, lumpy love. He’d be heartbroken, amenable, eager. None of the sprouted misogyny of the newly divorced, no entrenched quirks of the confirmed bachelor.
“Let’s hope for someone who hasn’t been alone too long,” Nina said. The mouse was like an extension of her hand; she was swift and graceful with it. He should be OVER five-foot-ten and have at least a COLLEGE DEGREE. “They always tell you not to date someone just out of a relationship, but those guys are way, way easier to work with. Malleable. Men get warped when they’re alone too long.”
“Everyone gets warped when they’re alone too long.” Marcia was referring to herself, meant no offense. “Everyone old is warped.”
“You’re not old.”
Marcia laughed. “I’m not young.” She had the fleeting thought that she was glad Gayle was dead: It was nice to have Nina around.
“You’re the same age as Helen Mirren. Did you see that tabloid bikini shot? Snap out of it.”
“You know when your mom and I were in school we had to take typing?”
“Ideal date?”
“Well.” Marcia considered. She wanted to abandon the whole idea. Like while putting on gym clothes for her dutiful bi-monthly trek to Lady Fitness: I can’t, I can’t, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, you can’t make me. No, she would not bail. She would Just Do It, as the gym clothes advise. Once there she’s always glad she made it to step class after all; she feels robust and unassailable en route home afterwards. This would be like that. “A chance to get to know each other.”
“That’s implied. Here, okay: ‘Dinner, a movie, a moonlight stroll, breakfast in bed.’”
Marcia laughed again. The thought of sex with men from the Internet was absurd enough to make moot even the smallest protestation. The thought of sex was absurd, Internet or no Internet. It really wasn’t that important as you got older, sex; it just mattered less and less. One dared not say this out loud, however. Especially to a single mother in her thirties.
Nina left at eleven, rousing Zelig from a deep sleep in front of the television. He was disoriented and near-tears as they made their way up the drive.
“Want . . .” he said, trailing off. Whether this was a verb he’d hoped to connect to himself and an immediate desire or a noun meant to identify the sorry state of being alive, there was no telling.
* * *
On visitor’s day in Malibu, Marcia wore a cream linen pantsuit and delicate gold chain necklace. She looked, she thought, not at all like the kind of woman whose only son trolled the Internet for anonymous sex whilst munching Valium.
“We have a wonderful opportunity today,” said the counselor, “for openness and healing.” Seven residents — overweight, underweight, heavily made up, tattooed, pierced, gorgeous, and Darren — sat next to seven visitors. Marcia saw no sign of Artie. Underweight’s visitor — her father, it soon became clear — was a handsome man with a deep tan set off by a thick shock of white hair. Marcia caught his eye and smiled cheerfully — Do I look like the kind of woman whose only son trolls the Internet for anonymous sex whilst munching Valium? — but he did not reciprocate. His daughter, it turned out, enjoyed vomit and heroin.
“She never talked about anything,” Darren told the group. “My father left and she just refused to say anything. My father died and she didn’t say anything. She just sits in her house alone, drinking tea and reading the paper.”
The counselor looked pained. “Darren, how about telling your mom about some of the more positive framing we’ve been learning these last few weeks?”
His shoulders relaxed a little with an exhale. “It was just really hard for me not to have anyone to talk to growing up.”
“Darren feels that he was left to his own devices at crucial moments in his life,” the counselor translated.
Marcia nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I understand.”
Darren had a life coach and a therapist and a sponsor and a peer mentor, too. Marcia had sat helplessly at more of these group therapy sessions than she could count. Darren feels ignored by you. Darren feels that you do not hear him. Darren feels judged by you. Excuse me, she did not dare herself to say, but how is it possible to be both ignored and judged? You see? Darren would say to the life coach or the therapist or the sponsor or the peer mentor. You see??
To her frustration, Marcia could not remember the origin of the name Darren. Why had they named him Darren? A name with no meaning, no history, and no real relevance to their cultural, religious or family heritage. Could it have been because of the television show about that sexy witch and her clueless husband? Dick had liked that show. Had she named her child thoughtlessly? Was that why he was who he was? There was always the why with Darren: Why was he Like This? Why was he Darren? Linda’s daughter Stacey had named her daughter Ona. Presumably, as Nina loved to point out, without bothering to look up onanism or onanist.
So the unconsidered name was Marcia’s first failure. Then, following the advice of the pediatrician in hopes of getting Darren to sleep through the night, she had allowed him to scream himself unconscious alone in his crib at four months old. For two hours, he had screamed. At the time it had seemed a brutal necessity borne of exhaustion; now the memory made her feel physically ill, and she wanted to hold him again, that tiny child.
After an exquisite lunch of homemade ricotta ravioli and pesto under a heavy green canvas umbrella, the ocean hissing sweetly below them, and still no sign of Artie, they said their goodbyes.
“See ya,” he told her, smiling his strange, angry smile.
Part Three
She was surprised to find she loved the Internet, loved checking it and checking it and checking it and checking it. She knew this much: In a relationship, she could best tolerate weaknesses she herself did not share. She did not want a spendthrift. She did not want an over-reactor. She did not want someone with low self-esteem. She had recently begun therapy. (“Wow,” Darren said. “Only thirty years too late.”)
Was it too much to hope for someone with altogether fresh, surprising flaws? Was it too much to hope that it would cost her nothing at all to accommodate those unfamiliar vulnerabilities?
Her first date — screen name: CATCHOFTHEDAY3 — was a seventy-one-year-old widower, retired from tax law, an avid fisherman.
“What was your best catch ever?” Marcia asked him, game, over salad.
“A one-hundred-pound hammerhead shark,” he crowed, destroying her appetite.
“Wow,” she forced. Was that even possible? And what was the point of luring a large animal, mutilating it, hauling it out of the ocean? Recreation? She couldn’t have been less impressed or interested. “That’s amazing.” The meal stretched interminably ahead of her. She drank three large glasses of Bordeaux, started to think about dying, about what it would be like, about the minutes of her life ticking away at this table, with this man. When he pulled out pictures of his grandkids (Emily, 9; Ethan, 6; Max, 2) she felt like her throat was closing up. She felt itchy and hot, like she might be developing some sort of wine allergy.
“And what about you?” he asked, folding the snapshot back into his wallet, then lifting an ass cheek to replace it. Short legs, a comb-over. “Any grandkids?”
“No,” she laughed. She’d meant for it to come out light, unconcerned, simple; instead it was a rueful bark, a heavy cannon launched over the top of the third glass, smoke trailing thickly behind. “My son Darren is . . .” She could already tell he didn’t want to hear it, or wouldn’t hear it right. “. . . has problems.”
“Aw,” said CATCHOFTHEDAY3. “He’s got to grow up sometime!”
Later, in his idling Jaguar in front of her house, Marcia could see the forthcoming attempt at a kiss taking shape even before he turned off the engine. If she listened closely she thought she could actually hear the gears shifting in his head: rusty, ancient, awful. She was embarrassed already, for both of them, but she let it happen anyway. There was no stopping a thing like that. He slipped his tongue between her lips, darted it in and out, lizard-like. His breath was rotten, like he’d never flossed in his life, like not even once.
When she got inside she made herself slightly burnt toast with margarine, asked herself quasi-cheerfully if it had been really that bad, brushed her teeth for a solid four minutes, put on a freshly laundered nightgown and socks, got into bed with her ancient electric blanket, shivered, and fell asleep.
* * *
“I can’t do this,” she told Nina on the phone after date number two, a widower (LOOKIN4LOVE) who’d teared up when she ordered chocolate mousse because Ruth was always on a diet; she refused to believe that I thought she was beautiful, but I did, I really did.
When it had come time for Marcia to relay the facts — childhood in Brentwood, first Jewish family admitted to Los Angeles Country Club, honors English teacher at private girls’ school in the valley, only son, no grandchildren, one failed marriage a hundred and ten years earlier, decades spent in blissful isolation ever since, the need to have her own bucket of popcorn at the movies and not have to discuss what she’d seen, the way she prided herself on the ability to go an entire weekend (Friday evening to Monday morning) without speaking one word to a single solitary soul, the birthday/book group, Nina — she had fallen back on “I don’t know, I suppose I’m pretty boring.”
A wail erupted on Nina’s end.
“I swear to fucking God, Zelig, take it off. I’m not asking you again.” The wailing tapered off to a whimper, then quieted entirely.
“It isn’t for me,” Marcia said. “This stuff.” Sitting with strange old men in large idling cars outside her house.
Nina sighed. “Zelig! Now. Marcia, can I call you back?”
“Absolutely,” Marcia said.
The phone rang twenty minutes later.
“Okay. We’re both sedated and in bed.” Zelig, now almost four, was Nina’s partner-in-crime, which made even the roughest parenting patches seem like a loopy adventure: stressful, wacky, no biggie in the end. She brought him to music festivals and movies and cafés and restaurants, lived her life just as she always had, only with the little boy in tow. She worked for a record label, did something with rock bands, traveled a lot, seemed to move within a vast network of friends and friends-of-friends, referred to hers as “the life.” In the sixties, “The Life” had meant prostitution, but Marcia knew that this association, like most of her associations, was anachronistic. Marcia prided herself on maintaining an insoluble membrane around herself through which nothing as transient and meaningless as slang, as this or that trend, could penetrate. How else to protect herself from ever-shifting tides? Zelig could nap anywhere, Nina bragged. He had slept backstage at a Radiohead show when he was eight weeks old. He had traveled cross-country with his mother in a tour bus at two. “Now. How bad was it?”
LOOKIN4LOVE had teared up twice, apologized profusely, and had seemed, by the time they sat in his Mercedes, even less inclined to initiate some sort of amorous farewell than was Marcia. Which was at once a relief and somehow insulting.
Nina found this hilarious. “I once went out with a guy who gave me a lecture at the end of the night about why he wasn’t going to kiss me. He had, like, a power-point presentation. Douche.”
It was Nina’s favorite insult, though she was too young to remember when women actually did such things, encouraged to think themselves filthy, barely manageable. Marcia had tried muttering it under her breath, in traffic, say, when someone cut her off, but it sounded absurd, brought forth awful sense memories of those awful euphemistic advertisements and that awful sickly flower scent. That same scent on the scratch-and-sniff page of Zelig’s copy of “Pat the Bunny.” How shameful to have been part of that generation, too ignorant or compliant to know better. She found herself wishing bitterly that she’d been smarter, or born later. Wishing, really, that she was Nina: fearless and free.
Marcia didn’t tell Nina the worst part of the date, that after hearing his dead wife’s name Marcia could not stop repeating it to herself until she was finally safely back in her house, alone: Ruth, Ruth, Ruth. LOOKIN4LOVE was solicitous and kind, clearly in agony. Ruth, she chanted to herself. Ruth, your husband is a mess. At parties, in another life, the husbands had talked to the husbands and the wives to the wives.
Part Four
Couldn’t we perhaps read something a little more interesting? she wondered periodically. They found her condescending. Yes, she thought herself smarter than they. And they understood that. And still: couldn’t they read something a little more interesting? Her ninth graders were doing more sophisticated literary analyses.
They let it go because they could indulge in a little pity party where Marcia’s singledom was concerned, all hushed and consoling. As though it couldn’t be a legitimate choice she’d made: Peace and quiet and her own bucket of popcorn at the movies and blissful exemption from having to discuss the movie on the way home. They were not at all conscientious about curtailing discussion of their own marriages, their own squadrons of grandchildren, the cruises and cruises and more cruises they were planning now that Bob/Stuart/Jeffrey was retired. She bristled at the sappy shit novels they insisted on reading and discussing in depth; they made endless mention of their huge, happy, healthy families.
And then there was Nina, hanging around her dead mother’s friends, enjoying wine and cheese like she was one of them, given to statements like “there’s just no way I’m going make it through my thirties without getting herpes.” The women were marginally appalled but more than a little amused. On one adolescent Halloween, Nina had famously removed her tongue ring, dressed up in clean, conservative clothes, straightened her hair, donned control-top pantyhose and beige lipstick: “Me, if my dad hadn’t died,” she’d said by way of explanation. She was as self-possessed and vibrant, at sixteen, at twenty-five, at thirty-two, as anyone Marcia had ever known.
She couldn’t talk to her friends, Nina said. They didn’t understand. Their parents were still alive. Their empathy hung on having lost a grandparent or two. She felt freakish and unrelateable, small talk beyond her. She could, she claimed, stand only Marcia’s presence, only the book-club ladies, only her sweet elderly therapist. She had crossed over, she said, to the dark side. “I can’t listen to my friends whine about how their parents don’t understand them,” she’d said. “At least the fuckers have parents.” Nina’s father had died when she was seven, of a massive coronary. Then Gayle, fifteen years later, of cancer.
She would come over unannounced, smoke a joint, grow tired and philosophical, stretch out on the couch, and wonder softly: “Can I sleep over?” And then Nina had come upon the need for a child like a road-block: no way around it.
“Who fucking cares?” She had said dispassionately one night on a chaise in Marcia’s backyard. She had gone off the pill, slept with a no-strings older married friend, and was keeping the baby. Marcia thought this crazy, reckless, and fascinating. Fall had set in and they were wrapped in blankets against the Los Angeles night air, which always seemed so much colder than expected, somehow.
“Nothing ever happens the way it’s supposed to and who fucking cares, anyway?” Marcia hadn’t been sure what this meant, exactly. Nina looked nothing like dear, dead Gayle but for the exact same hairline — asymmetrical and impossible to wear any way but loose and messy. It had, in their perfect-flip-era early-sixties adolescence, been the bane of Gayle’s existence. Marcia remembered a period of time in the spring of 1962 spent unsuccessfully dissuading her friend from hairline electrolysis.
“I mean, why not?” Nina had said. “What’s one good reason why not? Money? Life is life.” She was a special girl, Nina, special from the time she was a tiny: fierce and funny and bossy as hell. Darren, three weeks younger to the day, used to cry whenever Nina came near him.
* * *
“No more dinners,” Nina declared. “Dinner is way too long. Coffee. Finite. A half-hour. If you like each other, you have the rest of your lives to eat meals together.”
So on her third date, Marcia met DRFEELGOOD for coffee, and had something approaching a good time. He was bearish, an anesthesiologist with palms like platters and a Range Rover.
“I know, I know, global warming,” he said, first thing, when he pulled up in front of the Coffee Bean and got out of the car. “I know.”
“Global what?” Marcia said, coquettish. And then, admiringly: “Big car,” as though she’d never seen its equal. She loved a cocky bastard. Dick had not infrequently begun conversations with the phrase “The thing about me is…” well into their eight-year marriage. As though Marcia were a perfect stranger, only just getting to know him. Enough years had elapsed, enough time had worn away at her memories, and DRFEELGOOD seemed charming.
It was a quick date, forty-five minutes on the nose. Marcia had lied, on Nina’s advice, and told DRFEELGOOD that she’d have to leave at six for a dinner party.
“Well, Martha,” he said to her, an enormous hand on her back, “you seem like a nice lady.”
“As do you,” she said.
“I am a nice lady!” he said, and they both laughed, Marcia with a hot flush. He gave her a polite kiss on the cheek and opened her car door. “I’ll e-mail you.”
“Okay.”
Bingo, DRFEELGOOD. The sheer size of him, the way he hadn’t seemed nervous or hesitant in the least. She bought a teeth-whitening kit at the drugstore, prepared to dazzle him on their second date. It was an odd feeling, dusty and vertiginous, and she went with it.
But he didn’t e-mail, and she spent days analyzing those three little words — I’ll E-mail You — with Nina.
“He said he’d e-mail me.”
“Sometimes they don’t do what they say they’re gonna do.”
“But then why would he say it?”
“One of life’s little mysteries.”
“Should I e-mail him?”
“No.”
“Maybe he’s just swamped.”
“No.”
Marcia waited a few days, then a few more.
“Maybe—” she’d begin to say, detailing a justifiable reason why DRFEELGOOD hadn’t e-mailed.
“Do not e-mail him, Marcia. Do. Not.”
So this was dating: open-ended disappointment that wore, if you were lucky, gradually off.
CATCHOFTHEDAY3, however, did e-mail. I had a wonderful time, he said. Would you like to see the new Spielberg film with me next Saturday?
Marcia wasn’t sure. When last she’d been an active dater, a second date had meant some specific thing. Second base?
Part Five
Nina came over with Zelig and a copy of “He’s Just Not That Into You.”
“Grammy Marcia,” Zelig said, looking up from his Rubik’s Cube. “Look at my nails!”They were light blue and glittery.
“Very nice,” Marcia said.
“And my toes!” He kicked off his sandals. Done to match.
“Yes,” she said. “Blue.”
The “Grammy” was a little hard to take; Marcia felt guilty as the beneficiary of this title. Nina had introduced it from the get-go; what difference did it make to Zelig? But Marcia was not his “Grammy.” Dear, dead Gayle was his “Grammy.” So he therefore had no Grammy. This seemed like a reality he could and should understand. But Marcia bore the strangeness: Nina needed Zelig to have a Grammy and she, Marcia, was it.
Anyway, Zelig seemed to genuinely like her, his “Grammy” Marcia. And she liked him, too, certainly, though in general felt so out of place and disqualified where children were concerned that it was difficult to relax. It wasn’t that Darren was her fault, per se — he’d had, in addition to his disinterested and depressed mother, the impossible-to-impress, largely absent, and eventually dead narcissist for a father — but surely things might have been different if Marcia had loved him more, or better. Darren feels rejected and abandoned by you. Darren would like to feel accepted for who he is, with all of his faults. Darren feels like you don’t really love him. Darren likes long walks on the beach and dinners out. Darren would like to find a partner, lover, and soulmate. Sense of humor a must.
Nina put in a DVD of the original “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” She foisted upon Zelig movies and books and television shows that she herself had enjoyed as a child. He and his mother, then, shared formative influences and references, sang the same songs: Nina ironically, Zelig earnestly.
Nina and Zelig seemed — gleefully singing don’t care how; I want it now! and substituting “Tofu!” in sing it once, sing it twice . . . chicken soup with rice — more like old buddies than caretaker-and-dependent. Who knew you could mother a son in such a way?
“Let’s go scope out the dudes,” Nina said. In Darren’s room, everything was exactly the way Darren had left it: plastic wall sleeves full of baseball cards, framed LeRoy Neiman print, faded blue and red bedspread, the lingering sense of surely-somewhere-stashed box of pornography, a fine coating of mustiness and old semen on everything but the computer, shiny and lightening-quick, on Darren’s old desk.
He had come over a while back to help her set it up, knitting his brow and barking orders at her like theirs was a secret mission, like they were in great danger.
“I need a scissors!” he’d shouted. “Where’s the instructions?”
Where are the instructions, she stopped herself from correcting.
Marcia was supposed to have been incredibly grateful he’d come over to help her at all; it was a sort of honor, she knew. She was supposed to validate, to support. She thanked him profusely and tried to compliment him.
“Wow, Dare, you’re really wonderful with computers.”
He’d glared at her, rolled his eyes, managed a poisonous “whatever.”
“Let’s see what the deal is, here,” Nina said. Marcia perched on the edge of the bed. “What’s your screen name?”
“GARBO5.”
Nina typed it in and looked up at Marcia, quizzical.
“You know, Greta Garbo: ‘I vant to be alone.’”
“Well, no wonder this isn’t happening for you. Password?”
But her password was too embarrassing even to share with Nina, so she typed it in herself.
“New message!” Nina crowed. It was from LOOKIN4LOVE, thanking Marcia for a lovely time on their date the week before and for being so kind to him. I’m realizing that I may not be quite ready to date, he wrote. With Ruth’s death still at the forefront of my mind, I’m finding it difficult to move on. But it was very nice to meet you and I wish you all the best.
“Douche,” Nina said.
“Mommy!” Zelig yelled from the TV room. “It’s the bad part!”
“He hates that ‘Cheer Up, Charlie’ song at the beginning,” Nina explained. “You know? When the mom’s stirring the laundry with a giant fork? Scares the crap out of him.”
Nina got up to fast forward. There were no other new messages. Marcia scrolled through her measly inbox—CATCHOFTHEDAY3, LOOKIN4LOVE, DRFEELGOOD, and one she’d never bothered responding to (FOOLFORLOVE16) because he’d gone all the way down to thirty (thirty!) in describing his sought-after match.
She looked at DRFEELGOOD’s initial e-mail: How about we get together? I’d love to hear more about your job at the all-girls’ school! Do they wear uniforms, or what?
She did a spontaneous search for men between 30 and 40, thinking that she’d do the motherly thing and “scope out” some “dudes” on Nina’s behalf.
“Why don’t you do this?” Marcia asked when Nina came back into the room. “Look what darling boys.” She’d found a couple already who seemed good-looking and charming, not a grammatical error to be found in their profiles.
Nina snorted. “Right.” She leaned over and began browsing. “‘I’m looking for my best friend and soul mate!’ Know what that means? Erectile dysfunction. Oh: you ‘have a great sense of humor,’ do you? Then Why Am I Not Laughing? Look at this one! ‘SEXYBEAST76’! He’s real sexy! Yeeow! Let’s see how tall he is!” She went on like this for a while. “Oooh, looky here: the thirty-nine-year-old is looking for a twenty-two-year-old! He’s probably the nurturing type. Here’s a picture of KEVIN1970 taken in a bar while he’s holding a martini. Spray tan much?”
“He seems sweet,” Marcia protested weakly.
“Marcia,” Nina said finally, “these guys are complete douches. Not to mention the fact that they’re definitely not in the market for single mothers.” She scrolled down, down, then stopped short.
“Uh-oh.” And there was Darren in a series of snapshots: one with a woman cut out (you could still see the side of her face and the swell of an enormous inflated breast — she looked like Stacia, or a Stacia), one with his shirt off, at the beach, the sun glinting off his pectorals as if he had oiled himself, another with a different woman cut out. Nina tried valiantly to hold back laughter.
His profile was awful, full of errors and idiocy: Anybody that thinks they know who their looking for is selling themselves short. Nothings sexier than a lady in stilettos. She’d had no idea he had even the slightest interest in a Jewish woman. He’d marked his level of observance as “traditional.” He’d listed himself as seeking “marriage and children.” Marcia was too baffled to speak. She supposed she knew people often represented themselves (even to themselves) in ways incongruent with reality. But Darren? J-Match?
Nina stretched quietly out on Darren’s bed, examined her cell phone. “You should probably get off his profile, Marsh. People can see who’s viewed them, I think.”
But how could she? She was frozen in place, reading hungrily. . He liked Vietnamese food? He enjoyed windsurfing? His smile in the snapshots was so nakedly, surprisingly human. Where had he learned such atrocious grammar?
“Darren is why I’m not on freaking J-Match,” Nina muttered before getting up and leaving the room. Marcia flashed onto a memory of herself and Gayle sunning themselves on loungers in Gayle’s backyard in another century, supervising their tiny children in a wading pool, Nina entertaining herself thoroughly while Darren kept shouting Watch me, mommy. Watch me, mommy. Mommy: watch me! There was a photograph somewhere. She would find it and frame it, remind herself to hope for the best where Darren was concerned, to pity him with motherly patience, penitence.
In the TV room, the Oompa-Loompas were chronicling the demise of another no-good child. Zelig was fighting sleep, refusing to give in, losing the battle.
“Nina?” Marcia called. She found her on the patio, cell at her ear. One sec, she mouthed. Marcia sat on the brick steps and looked at the fence, slats chipping around the top, mud-stained down below.
“I’m just going to run out, meet these guys for an hour or two,” Nina said, tapping at the phone. A piece of her hair swung attractively down around her jaw in the evening breeze. “I have to pick something up. Do me a huge favor and put him to bed? He’s already halfway there.” Zelig was all but asleep on the couch, thumb in mouth, his other hand curled by his temple. Marcia trailed Nina to the door, like following a giant truck down the highway, carried along in her wake.
Nina was so improvisational and unworried. “You know what’s funny?” She had said to the book club shortly before Zelig was born. “I totally just assumed I’d have a hard time getting pregnant! I’m, like, weirdly proud it was so easy.”
“No one thinks they’ll be able to get pregnant until it happens,” Anne had said wistfully. And they had all nodded, remembering, eyes on Nina’s enviable, undeniable fecundity.
Now Nina gave Marcia a kiss on either cheek, hoisted her enormous, worn leather bag, and, with a flash of an enormous, joyous silver earring, that pretty lock of hair, was gone.
Zelig woke as Marcia tried to scoop him up off the couch; she wasn’t as adept at handling him as she hoped she’d be. He was heavy. He began to whimper, then cry, half-consciously registering Nina’s absence.
“She’ll be back soon.” Marcia said.
“Grammy Marcia,” Zelig whimpered, holding tight.
She carried him down the hall, switched off the light, laid him down in Darren’s old bed and curled herself around him so he wouldn’t have to let go. She hadn’t been all that physically affectionate with Darren — she had been busy and resentful and unable to articulate why. Hers had been a constant presence, but a distant, unhappy one. You had different things to give at different times in your life.
She stroked Zelig’s hair in the shifting glow from the sleeping computer. He loosened his grip as he fell back to sleep. Marcia began to feel sleepy herself, arms full of warm child. Just before she drifted off, she could, with a sudden, shameful degree of happiness, see it perfectly: He would grow to hate his mother, too.
