One True Thing Read Free Page B

standing together on our front porch. My mother is holding my father’s arm with both her own, an incandescent smile lighting her face, as though life knows no greater happiness than this—this place, this day, this man. Her body is turned slightly sideways, toward him, but he is facing foursquare to the camera, his arms crossed over his chest, his face serious, his eyes mocking.
    Back when we were still lovers, Jonathan had picked up that picture from the piano and said that; in it my father looked like the kind of man who would rip out your heart, grill it, and eat it for dinner, then have your wife for dessert. Allowing for the difficult relationship between Jonathan and my father, the relationship of two men engaged in a struggle for the soul of the same woman, it was a pretty fair description.
    I wonder if my father still has that picture there, on the piano, or whether it’s put away now, my mother smiling dustily, happily, into the dark of a drawer.
    Next to it was another picture of my mother hanging on to my father’s arm. Wearing a cap and gown, I am hanging on to his other one. In that picture, my father is squinting slightly in the sunlight, and smiling. Jonathan took that picture. I have it on my dresser today, the most tangible remaining evidence of the Gulden family triangle.
    My mother would be saddened by my apartment now, by the grimy white cotton couch and the inexpertly placed standing lamps. My apartment is the home of someone who is not a homemaker, someone who listens to the messages on the answering machine and then runs out again.
    But she would not criticize me, as other mothers might. Instead she would buy me things, a cheap but pretty print she would mat herself, a throw of some kind. And as she arranged the throw or hung the picture she would say, smiling, “We’re so different, aren’t we, Ellie?” But she would never realize, as she said it, as she’d said it so many times before, that if you are different froma person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.
    My mother loved the hardware store, Phelps’s Hardware, and the salesmen there loved her. My father would always tease her: “Once again, she has paid the Phelps’s mortgage for the month and alone of all her sex has cornered the market on tung oil and steel wool!” My father always teased her. I was the one he talked to.
    It was a charmed day in the charmed life we lived, my brothers and I, that day we went to the Tastee Freeze. I see that so clearly now. We lolled on the grass in the backyard afterward, cooked and ate some hamburgers, watched television. And then the next morning our father came downstairs, his khakis wrinkled, his blue shirt rolled back from his wrists, and told us all to sit down. He leaned back against the kitchen counter as I sat opposite him, sipping a glass of orange juice. My two brothers sat in the ladderback chairs at either end of the kitchen table. My mother had caned the seats. I don’t include those details by way of description, but in tribute. Things like this were my mother’s whole life. Of this I was vaguely contemptuous at the time.
    When I was a little girl, she would sometimes sing me to sleep, although I always preferred my father, because he made up nonsense songs: “Lullaby, and good night, fettuccine Alfredo. Lullaby and good night, rigatoni Bolognese.” But my mother sang a boring little tune that was nothing but the words “safe and sound” over and over again. It put me right to sleep. My father always jazzed me up; my mother always calmed me down. They did the same to one another. Sometimes I think they just practiced on me.
    I remember. It’s what I do for a living now, how I earn my keep, make my mark, through memories. I remember well. I can remember the orange juice on the table, and Brian, his torso jack-knifed between his knees, throwing a ball into a mitt over and over. The glass was half full; the table was oak, a big round moon of a top on a