of something far more pressing and worrisome than her last name. But she didn’t want to burden either of her daughters—and with Elise, especially, she didn’t want to sound pathetic. So she’d come up with something else to talk about, a distraction, the first thing to pop into her head. She may have rambled a little, perhaps. But she didn’t think anything she’d said had sounded crazy.
It certainly wasn’t that crazy for her to say she might want to change her name. Most of the women she worked with had gone back to their maiden names, and really, as she’d told Elise, she was starting to see how that made sense. The faxes from Dan’s lawyer to her lawyer were all titled “Von Holten vs. Von Holten,” which seemed an apt, but sad, commentary, an allusion to civil war, something whole torn in two.
Then again, Von Holten was the last name of her daughters, her life’s work, and it seemed so unreasonable that at the end of it all, Veronica and Elise would have the same last name as their father, and she would be the one on the outside, as far as nomenclenture went. Also, she had to admit she was attached to the name. Natalie Von Holten had been her name for longer than it hadn’t been. Until the day the Realtor advised her to paint over the mailbox, the side of it had read “The Von Holtens,” even during those last few months, when she was the only one still living in the house. She was the one who had hand-painted the letters just a few years earlier, using custom-made calligraphy stencils she’d bought at a hobby shop.
“Mom?” Elise had asked. “Are you okay?”
Elise was always driving when she called, stalled in traffic on some California freeway, and so Natalie had just chalked up the uncharacteristic softness in her older daughter’s voice to a dropped headset, a bad connection. She didn’t know she was being evaluated. So she’d kept going, explaining herself, holding the phone with her shoulder while she lowered herself to the floor, using her hand to gently guide Bowzer beside her. Yes, she told Elise, she was fine. She was a little tired. Things were getting crazy at the mall, everyone revving up for the holiday seasons, marking down the old merchandise. Here, she worried she was complaining again, being negative about the job she hated, pulling her successful daughter down. She smiled, thinking it would show in her voice. She went back to talking about her name. The normal thing, she told Elise, would be for her to go back to her maiden name. But she’d never liked being Natalie Otter. Like the animal, she used to say, instead of spelling it. In grade school, she had hated it; the name had been the butt of many jokes. Are your parents Otters? Is your mother an Otter? There was also the slightly more subtle pun, each tormenter truly believing he or she had come up with something new: Natalie Otter do this. Natalie Otter do that. Teachers were the main offenders. They did it to lots of kids. Hi ho! to Gwendolyn Silver. Mary, Mary, quite contrary. Do you have a question…Mark? Even in her annoyance, Natalie had felt bad for these teachers: the profession itself seemed to force regular people to attempt comedy for a captive audience. But she had longed for a name immune to their desperation, a name with weight and dignity, one that didn’t make people think of an animal that belonged to the same biological family as the polecat, the badger, and the weasel. She’d found all that, and so much more, at the age of twenty-one, when she’d fallen in love with Dan Von Holten.
“So why not just come up with a new name?” she’d asked Elise, though she was really asking herself. That’s what Maxine had suggested. Maxine worked in cosmetics. She was almost seventy, and she spoke to all the younger workers with the same friendly authority she used when telling customers they shouldn’t use so much blush. “Come up with something you like,” Maxine had said, hands raised, fingers extended so her long, acrylic nails looked like talons. “It’s your name, honey. It’s your life. You know what I’m saying? At some point, you’ve got to stop and ask yourself: why should everything be decided for me?”
It was a good question, Natalie decided, and she started to give her ideal last name some thought.