women rushed down either side of a splendid double staircase.
How different I must have looked when I walked up to that same desk as a thirty-year-old. Scarf tossed over my shoulder, flushed with anger.
You didn’t write me back, I said.
We walked through the cold winter afternoon as I spoke—I don’t remember what I said—a torrent of words to cover my real agenda. I wanted her to interrupt me. I wanted her to say, Juliet, I failed you. Because then I would have said, Yes, you did, but all human beings fail one another. Love asks too much, expects too much; failure is written into the blueprint for love, but now that I am a grown woman, I understand that, and from now on, I will only ask you for things you can give.
I was so eager to say these things. It only would have taken the smallest opening.
But my mother remained silent, hands stuffed into her coat. Our breath rose in columns to the sky. Suddenly she stopped walking. I turned to face her and receive her response. I was excited, smiling. Without even being aware of the suspense, I had waited a very, very long time to hear what she would say. In fact, what she would say in this moment had become the central unknown of my life.
Why are you doing this to me? my mother said. You know that Louise and Gil are my very best friends. And all this was so long ago. We all loved you.
She squinted into the winter sun. We were both tall, but she still had an inch on me.
Surely Gil would tell the story very differently, she said. You are a smart girl, Juliet. But you always exaggerate. You don’t remember yourself the same way I do.
It was this final statement that sealed my defeat. Before I could stop them, the words had entered me, the anticipatory smile still on my face—the fact that, somehow, I had been complicit. I had seduced Gil. And worst of all, I could not remember doing so. I was nothing more than an amnesiac, an unreliable witness to my own life.
We walked back to City Hall in silence. My mother appeared exhausted, and I wondered if she was sick. I considered putting my arm through hers and helping her up that wide staircase, the one I had danced up and down as a girl, but something in me said, No, if you go any further, Juliet, you only have yourself to blame. You have reached the end of what’s possible here.
We didn’t see each other again for nearly a decade.
Estranged. A fitting word, and hard to say without a certain gothic inflection. Just as one should never go to bed angry, a woman should never give birth when she’s estranged from her mother. Without a mother or a mother proxy nearby, the act of childbirth feels like an anti-climax. The most difficult physical feat, the bringing forth of new life, followed by days of excretions, not least of all tears of joy and sorrow, followed by years of preoccupation, all leading to what—estrangement?
I’m not trying to blame Lucinda; I was in trouble with or without her. I never believed that she had forgotten me, all those years of separation. In fact, I was sure that she thought of me often. And yet she could not find her way to me. She wasn’t brave enough. From a safe distance, she sent letters, gifts. I didn’t exactly rebuff her, but neither was I willing to re-enter a space in which we could not talk about Gil. When I didn’t scrutinize the situation, it seemed reasonable—sometimes there was simply no solution to a problem that thorny. I kept waiting for the past to stop mattering. I believed that one day I would wake up and be a new Juliet—a Christ-like person who did not need an apology. I swear to you, if she had shown up at my door, I would have thrown my arms around her and wept.
They say that time is a healer. Well, some wounds fester. In which case, the clock works against you. I had been so desperate in Cambridge after Sybil was born,