Double Happiness Read Free Page A

distress of composition (I began, oddly, to sympathize about this with my mother’s husband). And the rain. Every single day. I was forced to work double shifts pouring bagged popcorn into the pretend popper unit. Everyone in the West Village was coming to the movies, it seemed. By the time I got home each night, it was late, and the phone at Faye’s guest cottage rang and rang.
    My painter finally recovered enough to spend a night of love on my air mattress. We jiggled and drooled and painted our chests with Nutella. When the phone blared after midnight we assumed it was his mother, who’d insisted on taking my number. But the answering machine speaker played out an echoing voice in the little room that, even without words, only crying, I knew was my own mother instead. I scrambled to pluck up the receiver. Wait, wait, I said. Hello?
    She was still there, breathing hard, whimpering, Darling? And now I felt my sternum shudder and give. Where are you? I asked.
    At home. She was locked in her bathroom, the one with the pinwheel wallpaper, the Jacuzzi tub, and the pocket door she had long debated: solid core or green glass? I could hear, even behind her harsh breathing, the bang of a fist against the swirly maple she’d finally picked and a muffled growl just like old Sven warming up for his holiday message. It’s locked, she said. I listened. The window, she said. And I thought hard. The window opened onto a trellis that reached down to a patio which bounded the putting green. If she pushed her pelvis— she didn’t like that word; hips then, I said, keep your hips close to the wall of the house. She could probably shimmy down.
    That’s crazy, said the painter, and laughed. (That laugh ended our relationship.) Flush the toilet, I said in a whisper, as if her husband could hear me, flush before you open the latch. I would get the next bus to Freehold. Just walk into town, can you do that?
    Of course, she said, putting me in my place. If she could get out the window, she’d see me there. He called me a sick, rotting cunt? she said, as a question, as if reviewing whether she was making the right move.
    Well, you’re not, I said. Be careful of your feet. There might be broken glass.
    Sweetheart, she whispered, for goodness sake.
    My mother was a woman who dressed for bed. When the bus pulled in at the all-night diner in Freehold I scanned beyond the parking lot for where her cream satin peignoir might be flitting through the holly bushes. The exhaust-smelling heat of the bus had made the Nutella gluey. My sleep T-shirt stuck to my chest. I backed down the exit steps, uncertain. The bus driver stared at me. Eyes on the road, you pervert, I barked, then felt ashamed. My mother would be ashamed, too, if she’d heard me.
    I had a coat for her and some shoes. Sneakers are for athletes, she always maintained. So I carried my only pair of black sling-backs and a lovely silk overcoat she’d given me, but no money. I’d borrowed the fare from the painter. Now, I realized, as the bus chugged away and the quiet settled in, that my mother probably didn’t have much cash on her, either. Didn’t matter. First I’d find her, and then, once she was appropriately dressed, we’d hitchhike our way to Faye’s guest cottage.
    Was it an hour? It’s hard to know in the dark. But eventually, when she didn’t show up, I began the long walk past the cornfields to her house. I was shivering though the weather was balmy, and I was hungry. Each lumpy-looking shadow made me afraid I might find her lying by the side of the road like some fallen animal. But I didn’t find her. When I came to the end of her drive the house was lit as if for a holiday party. The button lights glowed to trace the curve of the the drive through the fragrant peach trees. The deep porch, its long planters thickwith ivy and juniper, was aglow. It seemed every room was lit: the writer’s den, the guest