“Then why exactly is he just a friend?”
AFTER THE MEAL, after the bottles of Australian Shiraz and Chilean Pinot and a very expensive French burgundy had been sunk, after everyone had gone around reciting what they were grateful for—nearly all the locals had said something Steelers related; Maribeth, drunk by then, had blurted “not being dead,” to much laughter; Stephen had said “the unexpected” to much confusion; and Fritz had said his statistics class, to much derision, until Todd asked wasn’t that the class where he had met Sunny, and then poor Fritz had gone as red as the cranberry sauce. After Sunita and Todd tried to snap the still-wet wishbone and knocked over a candle, after half the group had decamped to the living room to watch the tail end of the Eagles game, after the other half had gone to the kitchen to haphazardly do the dishes, Maribeth flopped onto the couch and Sunita sat down next to her, kissing her on the cheek and saying that it was the best Thanksgiving she’d had in ages, and Maribeth had said, “Me too.” Only then did she think of Oscar and Liv.
It was the first time she’d thought of them all day.
34
The hangover came, as hangovers will, the following day.
Maribeth woke to a weak light peeking in the cracks of her shades. Her head was pounding.
She reached for her phone. It was past noon. She’d been lamenting her inability to sleep late like this since having kids, but now that she’d done it, she remembered that sleeping late, like unconsciousness, happened for a reason. Because your body knew you couldn’t handle being awake.
Staggering to the bathroom, she put her head under the tap and drank. Then she brushed her teeth, and put on a pot of coffee. While it brewed, she pulled up the shades and squinted. Outside the sky was gray and flat, threatening snow. Not that anyone seemed to care. Even the humble streets of Bloomfield were buzzing with Black Friday shoppers.
She lowered the shades and padded into the kitchen, where she cooked a pot of oatmeal, but as it bubbled and burbled on the stove, it looked like vomit. She felt perilously close to throwing up. She tossed the oatmeal in the garbage and made some toast instead.
She picked up her latest book, a collection of postmodern short stories, another big book she’d meant to read—and though she’d been thoroughly enjoying it two days ago, today she found herself reading the same paragraph over and over.
It was not a day for reading. It was a day for surrendering. She poured the coffee, put the toast on a plate, and gathered all the blankets in the apartment into a nest on the couch. Then she channel surfed until she landed on something bland and mindless, one of those Lifetime-type movies, though she didn’t actually get Lifetime, only the network channels and a few weird off-brand cable stations that seemed to come with the reception. She was watching it for about ten minutes before she realized that the story revolved around an alcoholic mother who had abandoned her four children.
She should’ve changed the station, but she couldn’t look away. She was riveted by the melodramatic scene of the wayward mother sobbing in a phone booth—the phone booth dating the film much the way her request for a Yellow Pages had dated her—hitting herself with the receiver after her collect call home was denied. Tragic as this scene was, Maribeth knew there would be a happy ending. This mother would be redeemed because she was the one on-screen. It was when the mother was not present, when she never got any air time, when she was defined only by her absence, because she’d missed court dates or forgotten birthdays, that you understood implicitly that she was a villain, her sole purpose a vehicle for someone else’s redemption.
When the commercial came on, Maribeth wondered about the made-for-TV movie of her own life. Which mother she would be? The answer came to her, immediate and obvious. The mother who had upped and left home a month ago, who had not uttered a word to her family, had not even bothered to see if her four-year-old children, whom she claimed to love more than anything else in her life, were okay. Who had got drunk and had a wonderful Thanksgiving last night even though her children were probably crying in her absence. The mother who had not called those children once, had not even sent a single e-mail.
Sure, she’d written letters. But those letters would never appear in her movie. They would not be submitted as evidence to her defense, proof of her love, flawed though it might be right now.
In Maribeth’s made-for-TV movie, she was the villain.
35
The library was generally quiet when Maribeth visited in the late mornings, but when she dragged herself over later that day, it was jammed with teenagers, who had not only taken possession of all the computers—the ones in the teen section and the ones for general use—but of the library itself. They were talking to one another in nonlibrary voices, monopolizing all the computers to watch YouTube videos. As Maribeth hovered, waiting for a terminal to open up, the teens regarded her with the sort of suspicion that mothers at playgrounds reserved for lone men.
She had no idea what she was going to say to her children. She only knew that she had to say something, she had to communicate to them that she wasn’t that mother. She was one of the good mothers, the one who fought her way back to her children. Only how could she tell them that and explain why she wasn’t coming home? If walking to and from the library had been her barometer of health, she had reached that. She could climb that hill. But now that she could, she had seen all the other peaks beyond it. And she knew she wasn’t ready to go back.
But she would be. She needed Oscar and Liv to know that. She needed them to know that she wasn’t the villain, the one who would desert them forever.