Goodbye To All That Read online

  “Girls’ night.” Abbie snorted. “Grandma isn’t a girl.”

  “She feels like one these days,” Jill explained, suppressing a shudder as she recalled her mother’s bubbly—okay, there was no other word for it—girlishness at the First-Rate when Jill had visited her there. She remembered her mother’s easy banter not just with the geezer with liver spots on his scalp but with the kid with the dreads and the eyebrow bolt. Ruth Bendel was definitely in the throes of her second girlhood right now.

  “The three of us have never gotten together without a bunch of menfolk around,” she pointed out to Abbie. “Grandpa, Dad and Noah are always a part of it.”

  “Yeah, and they’re in the den watching TV while we’re stuck in the kitchen. Isn’t that girls’ night? You and Grandma yakking about family gossip while I get stuck clearing the table.”

  “You don’t get stuck,” Jill argued. She was diligent about making sure of that. “Noah always helps you clear.”

  “And then he goes and watches sports on TV with Dad and Grandpa, and I’m stuck in the kitchen.”

  “You could watch sports if you wanted.”

  Abbie grimaced as if Jill had just suggested she could drink Drano. “So Dad and Noah are eating pizza tonight—and I bet they’re eating in the den so they can watch TV while they eat,” Abbie complained, her gaze fixed on some flaw on her thumb nail. It, like the other nails, was painted a glittery silver, as if she’d glued aluminum foil to the tips of her fingers. “You never let us eat in the den, but you aren’t there and I bet they’re going to eat on the couch and slobber melted cheese all over the upholstery.” She paused to allow Jill the opportunity to envision the mess Gordon and Noah would undoubtedly make, then added, “Anyway, girls’ night would be me and Emma and Caitlin. Not me and my mother and my grandmother.”

  “She’s making pot roast. You love her pot roast.”

  “I love lots of things, and I wouldn’t want to eat them for dinner.”

  Jill was tempted to question her about what multitude of things she loved. She suspected that at the moment, Abbie would be hard-pressed to name a single thing she loved, and that would include her mother, her best friends, that pricey, skimpy cotton-ramie sweater Caitlin had convinced her to buy at the mall—using Jill’s credit card, of course—and her grandmother’s pot roast.

  She contemplated discussing her own misgivings about her mother’s current living situation with Abbie, then thought better of it. A Good Mom didn’t involve her children in the ridiculous dynamics of other branches of the family.

  Shit. She had to be both a Good Mom and a Good Daughter this evening. The strain might just cause her to snap.

  She could use a Diet Coke right now, preferably one diluted with copious amounts of rum. Didn’t girls’ nights include a certain amount of alcohol consumption?

  Only when they didn’t also include a twelve-and-a-half year old child. Jill had to remain sober, calm, in control. One petulant, sulky, selfish female was more than enough, and tonight Jill might find herself in the company of two petulant, sulky, selfish females. Who knew if her mother would be as ebullient now as she’d been when she’d invited Jill and Abbie for dinner?

  “This place is the pits,” Abbie opined as Jill steered into the parking lot of her mother’s apartment complex. She didn’t think it looked that awful, unless you compared it to the lovely suburban house on a manicured half-acre plot where Jill’s father was currently residing in solitude. The apartment complex had a kind of college quad look to it, half a dozen bland three-story red brick structures with evenly spaced aluminum-framed windows, bargain-basement landscaping and outdoor lighting that reminded Jill vaguely of old World War Two movies about stalags.

  Jill’s mother had told her to look for Building 4, the one nearest the corner by the crosswalk. Her mother had also warned her not to park in a numbered spot, since those were reserved for tenants. After meandering around a figure-eight of driveways, she finally looped to Building 4. The nearest unnumbered spot she found was by Building 6. Not that it mattered; with the glaring spotlights making the parking lots brighter than Fenway Park when the Red Sox were hosting a night game, she was sure she and Abbie would be safe walking to Building 4.

  The air contained a wintry nip. Or maybe the chill Jill felt creeping down her spine as she and Abbie walked along the paved path, passing undersized yews and dormant rhododendrons, was a result of panic. This wasn’t like the first time she’d visited Grandma Schwartz after her move into the assisted-living facility. For one thing, Grandma Schwartz lived alone because Grandpa Schwartz had died, not because she’d grown tired of his channel-surfing. For another, Grandma Schwartz spent large swatches of time talking to people who didn’t exist and conducting an imaginary symphony orchestra.

  Jill didn’t want to believe her mother was senile, although if she was, it would simplify things, or at least explain them. But she’d visited her mother at the First-Rate across the street just a week ago, and her mother had seemed sane. Worse, she’d seemed extremely happy.

  At the entry to Building 4, Jill pressed the button next to her mother’s apartment number and waited to be buzzed in. Next to her, Abbie stared at the cellulite-textured ceiling. The vestibule smelled of lemon-scented furniture polish, although it contained no furniture. Just a row of metal mailboxes, an intercom and an inner door, which like the outer door was glass with chrome trim.

  “This place sucks,” Abbie said less than a second before the buzzer sounded, releasing the inner door’s lock.

  “It’s where your grandmother lives these days,” Jill commented, hoping she sounded nonjudgmental. She considered reminding Abbie to exercise tact and keep her opinions about the place to herself in front of her grandmother, but decided not to. Abbie knew how to behave. And if she opted for blunt honesty over courtesy and told her grandmother what she thought of her new home, well, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Jill’s mother might respect opinions from her beloved eldest grandchild more than she respected opinions from her children.

  Together they climbed the stairs to the second floor. Jill’s mother stood in an open doorway halfway down the hall, beaming as if Jill and Abbie were soldiers returning home from battle. Jill wondered whether she’d deserve a Purple Heart before the evening was done.

  “Welcome!” her mother bellowed as they neared the door.

  Jill noticed her mother had placed a door mat in front of the sill, a vestigial reminder of her former life as a suburban homeowner.

  Abbie scampered into her grandmother’s embrace, her sullenness miraculously vanishing as the rich, heavy aroma of pot roast wafted into the hallway. After a quick peck on Jill’s cheek, her mother looped an arm around Abbie’s shoulders and ushered her inside.

  “Come, let me show you around,” she said grandly, as if she were about to lead them on a tour of Versailles.

  Jill hesitated on the threshold, preparing herself to be disappointed and adjusting her expression to hide that inevitable disappointment. Then she entered the apartment and closed the door behind her.

  “This is the kitchen,” her mother was saying.

  Jill followed the voice into a cramped, narrow, windowless space with ugly metal cabinetry, unfashionable white appliances and brown linoleum tiles on the floor.

  “Not too big, is it,” her mother said, stating the obvious. The room wasn’t wide enough for her and Abbie to stand side by side, so she released Abbie and led her through to the living room. “I don’t need a big kitchen. I’m cooking only for myself. When I even bother to cook. Some days, all I want is a bowl of soup, a can of salmon, some fruit and cheese. For that, the kitchen is the perfect size. Now, here’s my living room . . .”

  Jill followed a few steps behind them, pausing to survey the kitchen. It was so dark. So dreary. But fragrant with the scent of seasoned roast.

  “Oh, cool!” Abbie exclaimed.

  Jill hurried into the living room to see what Abbie was crowing about. The room didn’t strik
e her as particularly cool—shag carpeting the color of faded mud, windows draped with generic beige curtains, boxy prefab furniture and a view of the parking lot. And a television set. A small one, perched on a shelf.

  “Mom, see?” Abbie’s smile was bright and challenging. “Some people do have TV’s in the living room. Mom always says you shouldn’t have a TV in the living room,” she explained to her grandmother, “because the living room is for living in and watching TV isn’t living. So we have to go to the den to watch TV. I wish we could have a TV in the living room.”

  Sure, Jill thought churlishly. And then Dad and Noah could be dripping melted pizza cheese all over the fancy furniture in the living room instead of the sturdy old furniture in the den.

  Jill’s mother laughed. “I put the TV in the living room because I don’t have any other place for it. I thought maybe the bedroom, but then if I have a guest over and we want to watch TV, where would we sit? On the bed? So I put it there. Is there something you want to watch?”

  “No. I just think it’s cool.” Abbie pranced to the windows and inspected the view, poked her head into a closet, bounced her butt on the couch and sprang back to her feet. “Cool! It’s a futon.”

  “So if you wanted to sleep over, you could,” Jill’s mother said. “Or Noah. Or the twins. All my favorite people.”

  Jill noted that she, Melissa and Doug were not among her mother’s favorite people. Nor did her mother indicate any interest in inviting her bridge ladies or her synagogue sisterhood friends for a pajama party.

  “Mom, isn’t this cool?” Abbie’s enthusiasm seemed genuine. She darted down a short hall, announcing each highlight—“The bathroom! The bedroom! A linen closet!”—as if these features were actually special. What was it about this ghastly little apartment that had her so excited? During the drive, she hadn’t used the word “cool” once, although “cold” would have aptly described her mood.

  “It’s very nice,” Jill lied.

  “It’s all hers,” Abbie said, waltzing around the living room and ending her dance by hugging her grandmother. “It’s all yours, Grandma. You can put the furniture wherever you want. And it’s all your stuff.”

  “I like that part,” Jill’s mother agreed.

  “I want a place like this when I grow up,” Abbie announced. “I want a place like this now, but Mom would never let me.” She sent Jill a grin. “But when I grow up, I want to live all by myself, without Noah’s dirty sneakers all over the place.”

  ‘They’re not all over the place,” Jill defended Noah. “He’s got only two sneakers. How can they be all over the place?”

  “I’m always tripping on them,” Abbie complained. “And he never hangs up his towel in the bathroom. If I had my own place, I could hang the towels however I wanted. God, this is so cool.”

  Jill did not think it was cool. She thought it was just what Abbie had called it in the car: the pits. That her mother was living here instead of in her spacious, comfortable house, with its lovely, familiar furnishings and a kitchen more than one person could fit into at the same time, struck her as appalling.

  Every time Abbie uttered the word cool, Jill wanted to scream. Didn’t Abbie understand that they were supposed to be nudging Jill’s parents back together again? Telling her grandmother her new residence was cool was not the way to get her grandmother to consider moving back home.

  Jill’s mother asked Jill and Abbie to carry the tiny table from the corner of the kitchen into the living room so three chairs could be placed around it. While Jill set the table, her mother led Abbie to the window and pointed out the First-Rate store where she worked. “It’s a nice little shopping area, and I can walk. Think of all the gasoline I’m saving by walking to work.”

  She might save even more gasoline if she didn’t work at all, but Jill didn’t say that. She couldn’t, not while Abbie was babbling about how ecologically enlightened her grandmother was.

  “And I get home so quickly, I can even host a dinner party after work,” Jill’s mother continued, abandoning Abbie by the window and returning to the kitchen. “I’ll slice up the meat. Do we have room on the table for a candle?”

  “Ooh, candlelight,” Abbie murmured.

  Jill shook her head. “There’s barely room for three plates,” she said.

  “Oh, well. We can pretend a candle,” her mother said. “Jill, there’s a salad in the fridge. And I bought some pretty glasses—” she motioned toward a cabinet with her chin; her hot-mitted hands were busy pulling the roast from the oven “—so we can drink grape juice and pretend it’s wine.”

  Grape juice was not Diet Coke. Jill was finding it harder and harder to hide her displeasure.

  Within a few minutes, they were all seated around the table. Crowded around it, actually. The serving platters had to remain on the kitchen counter since, as Jill had observed, three dinner plates pretty much filled the table. The cheap stemware glasses looked festive, even if Jill had to force herself to drink the grape juice. It reminded her of all those seders when she was little and the children weren’t allowed to drink wine. She’d never understood why not. The kosher wine her mother used to serve at Passover tasted like cough syrup, and Jill and her siblings wouldn’t have consumed enough to get drunk.

  But this was girls’ night at Ruth Bendel’s cool apartment, and since Abbie had miraculously transformed from a whiny brat to a good sport, Jill had to be a good sport, too. She had to sit placidly, eating her pot roast—which was as delicious as always; evidently the tiny kitchen hadn’t cramped her mother’s culinary ability—while her mother described her job to Abbie.

  “They’re training me how to run the photograph machine,” she boasted. “Not that I’ll work there very often. They’ve got these two ladies who basically run the photography department, and one of them is pretty bitchy, pardon my language. But my boss likes everyone to know the basics, in case someone is out sick or there’s a big line or something. Everybody has digital cameras nowadays. It’s not like film and negatives. Just pushing buttons on computers. Not that I’m a computer whiz like my brilliant grandchildren, but I can push buttons.”

  I’m a computer whiz, too, Jill wanted to declare. She, after all, was running a career from her kitchen computer, if you could call writing enticingly about raisin-and persimmon-hued bra-and-panty sets for Velvet Moon’s catalogue a career.

  “So, how’s school?” Jill’s mother asked Abbie. “What are you learning these days?”

  Abbie grinned and shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “You’re in honors pre-algebra,” Jill reminded her.

  “Yeah. I’m learning pre-algebra,” Abbie told her grandmother. “My soccer team is four-two so far this season. I’m one of the top scorers . . .” And on she babbled, about soccer and Toby Klotzenberg’s bar mitzvah—“in downtown Boston, at the Westin? He invited the whole seventh grade!”—and how if it were up to him, Noah would shower only once a month, he was such a pig.

  It wasn’t until dessert—do-it-yourself sundaes that were delicious, but Jill would have been better off, for a lot of reasons, with a Diet Coke—that Abbie raised the subject of her grandparents’ separation.

  “Are you pissed at Grandpa?” she asked, then apologized and said, “I mean, are you angry at him?”

  “Angry? No,” Jill’s mother said as she dug into her heaping bowl of butter-pecan ice-cream drowning in chocolate syrup, M&M’s and a lopsided dollop of canned whipped cream.

  Abbie swallowed a spoonful of M&M-flecked chocolate ice-cream. “Well, you’re like divorcing him, right?”

  “We’re separated right now. Where we go from here, who knows?”

  “But it’s like, what did he do? He showers every day. He has to, he’s a doctor.”

  “A very good doctor,” Jill’s mother said. “The thing is, at different times in your life you need different things. Look at your mother.” Abbie obediently turned her gaze to Jill, who didn’t want to be looked at. She hadn’t volunteered to be Exhibit A for her moth
er’s lecture on good doctors and failed marriages. “When she was your age, she had needs like yours.”

  Jill shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “I’m not sure—”

  “She wanted to be pretty, she wanted boyfriends, she wanted to go to Paris, she wanted a bosom . . .”

  “Mom.” Jill took a slug of grape juice and wished with all her heart it was something else.

  “I didn’t know you wanted to go to Paris,” Abbie said.

  Jill dismissed that old fantasy with a shrug. “I thought it would be exotic. And romantic. And the food would be great.”

  “So why didn’t you go?”

  “I was twelve years old,” Jill replied.

  “I mean later. When you were older.”

  “When I was older . . .” She sighed. She’d become Exhibit A, after all. “When I was older, I went to college. Then I met your dad, and we got married and had children, which seemed more important than Paris. I’ll go someday,” she insisted, because Abbie looked so sad for her.

  “Exactly,” her mother chimed in. “When she reaches a different time in her life, she’ll go.”

  “With Dad?” Abbie asked.

  “Of course with Dad,” Jill said, hoping to reassure her daughter that she and Gordon would never do to Abbie what Jill’s parents were doing to her.

  “What if Dad doesn’t want to go?” Abbie pressed her. “He always says insulting things about French people. He calls them frogs.”

  “He’s joking,” Jill said, even though when Gordon went on one of his anti-France tears, he seemed pretty serious.

  “When I grow up,” Abbie said thoughtfully, “I’ll get married and have kids and have a fantastic job that pays a lot, but I think I want to go to France by myself. I think you should go by yourself, too, Mom. You don’t want Dad there making stupid jokes.”

  Jill busied herself with her sundae, which was melting into thick, multicolored soup. She stirred the syrup into the liquefying ice cream, turning everything the same blah brown color as the carpet.