care of us.”
“Oh.” Claudia considered this. “So what were the things on your lists?”
Ruth snorted. “I can’t remember a one of mine. I think your father maybe wanted to learn how to fly-fish. I believe we did a few of them and then didn’t bother with the rest. They didn’t matter, really.”
Claudia thought this sounded terribly depressing: a list of false promises to each other, never to be redeemed. How was it going to help Claudia and Jeremy to write down on a piece of paper that they wanted to be in a rock band, to direct movies, to backpack across Bhutan, to learn to speak Japanese? Their problem wasn’t a lack of articulated desire, it was the inability to fulfill those desires. She understood, in that moment, the futility of ever trying to connect with her mother. She had become unparentable, so completely distant from everything she’d once known that she was now completely on her own. It was silly of her to have imagined that her mother would be able to offer anything but generic platitudes, anyway. How could she? Her mother only knew what Claudia told her, which wasn’t much at all. The last vestigial shred of Wisconsin inside her drained away, and she knew she could never go back. But where could she go from here?
The faint wail of a fire engine reverberated down the ravine. The wind was picking up; the swing twisted back and forth in apparent agony. The streetlight flickered in and out, making the park look spectacularly creepy, something from a bad horror movie. Claudia wanted to get off the phone. “You’re right,” she said. “I guess I just needed to vent. Don’t worry.”
“Oh, I don’t really worry about you that much, honey,” her mother said. “You’ve always been a sensitive girl, too easily wounded, but underneath that you’re stubborn as a bulldog. You know how to get something when you really want it. So I know you won’t give up anything important without a fight. It’s easy to have faith in you.”
In the shadows of the park, the deflated ball had begun to roll slowly in the wind, on a wobbly course toward the fence. Claudia let her mother’s words—It’s easy to have faith in you—sink in. It was the most intimate observation that Ruth had made about Claudia in years, and Claudia grew quiet as she swallowed down a lump that was forming in the back of her throat.
But her mother registered her silence as a hesitation. “Should I be worried about you?” she asked, her voice finally betraying anxiety.
Claudia found her voice again. “Of course not, Mom. Good night,” she said, and hung up. She started the car and swung back out into the street, pointing the Jetta back up the hill.
She was going home, of course—there was nowhere else to go. But it wasn’t just that: She was incapable of giving up. As her mother observed, it was just her nature. There were things she wanted—and they weren’t outrageous things to want—a nice home, a happy marriage, financial stability, the ability to pursue her dreams. A few bad months, one terrible fight, shouldn’t mean the end of all that. It shouldn’t mean that they suddenly didn’t love each other anymore. She would go home and save it all.
Claudia drove slowly back through Mount Washington, passing the darkened homes of her neighbors. She passed a clutch of fading FOR SALE signs and a half-built modern monstrosity whose construction had abruptly halted in mid-September, seemingly doomed to spend the rest of its existence swathed in blue plastic. The neighborhood was changing again, she could feel it, as if a tide had crept up on shore and was now receding again, exposing the dead fish and strangled kelp in its wake.
She thought of her father, probably hiding out in his hardware store just to avoid the screaming kids and demanding wife back at home. Is that what she had become to her own husband, a nag and a bore? Maybe she was being unfair. So what if he couldn’t seem to launch a viable career, or let go of his youth, or take their potential foreclosure as seriously as she did? Perhaps she’d unconsciously absorbed her parents’ middle-class American values—husband as provider—despite everything, and it was her job to expunge them, not his to meet them.
By the time she swung her car onto her own rutted cul de sac, she almost felt OK again. It was a silly thing, what had