said to her now, “I do not spend all my time with Tim. I hardly spend any time with Tim. I work and I study. All the time.”
“He’s a lot older than you, isn’t he? He’s out of school already?”
“He’s in graduate school. He’s twenty-four.”
“You’re only twenty,” she said, as if I didn’t know. “You should be focusing on yourself right now, on your schoolwork.” She looked away and clicked her tongue. “And twenty-four is significantly older.”
He’s the best part of my life, I thought. I slid my eyes toward her. “You’re suggesting I go younger?”
She closed her eyes. She looked so unhappy that I felt bad.
“I have to tell you something.”
I looked at her.
“You seem hostile, honey. Are you angry with me?”
“No,” I said, because saying yes would take up too much time.
She straightened her shoulders. “I know this might make you uncomfortable, but it’s important for me that you understand. Whatever your father has told you, I was never…technically, unfaithful in my marriage.”
I winced. There were things I did not want to know about her, images I did not want in my head.
“Veronica. Would you look at me, please?”
I raised both eyebrows. She had spoken with all the authority she’d really had over me several years ago, as if I were fourteen again and she wanted me to unload the dishwasher.
“Please look at me, Veronica. You’re still not allowed to be rude.”
I looked at her. My mother has pretty eyes. They are large and dark, and they make her look friendly and a little concerned, even when she’s mad. I pursed my lips and waited.
“I know your father and his lawyer will make what they want of that note.” She swallowed. “But I at least want you to know that Greg and I never…made love.”
I clapped my hands over my ears.
“Fine.” She fiddled with the knob for the heater. “I just wanted you to know. It was a friendship. It might have turned…later…There were feelings there. There were for me. But we had only talked. We talked a lot. That day he fell asleep—we’d just been talking.”
“In bed?” I shook my head, annoyed with myself. I had just asked her to spare me the details.
“I was unhappy. I was unhappy with the marriage, unhappy in general. It was nice to talk with someone.”
“Then why didn’t you get a divorce then?” Before you had a sleepover, I meant. I didn’t need to say it. My tone was condescending, an adult speaking to a child. It felt good, gratifying, and then it didn’t.
She shook her head. That was all. Maybe she had no good answer. That was a difference between my parents. My father spelled everything out, making a clear argument for his indignation; but with my mother, I was left to guess, to piece together clues from my memories. I had had no idea she’d been unhappy. Or rather, I had not really thought of her as happy or unhappy. The last year I lived at home, my mother spent her days driving my grandmother Von Holten to doctor appointments and even to a butcher on the other side of the city that sold pickled pig’s feet, a delicacy that made my mother nauseous but brought her mother-in-law back to her happy girlhood in Queens. My mother learned to read a glucose meter. She became an expert at folding up my grandmother’s wheelchair, putting it in her trunk, getting it out again. Three times a week, they went to an indoor pool, and my mother walked with her through the water.
My father had been appreciative. I remembered him saying so, all the time. He wished he could do more himself, he said, but financially speaking, this wasn’t the year for him to take any time off. Expenses were adding up: Elise was in law school. I would go to college soon. My grandmother’s money had run out, and yet she continued to live. So every day, both my father and my mother were up early, and gone in their respective cars before I caught the bus for school; but at the end of the day, my mother seemed the more tired of the two. After dinner, she would go up to her room, saying she wanted to read; but if I walked by their room after eight, her eyes were usually closed. By the time I went to bed, my father would still be downstairs in his chair, watching the news with Bowzer’s head in his lap.