Crossing the Line Read online

  “Ask her to stop?” And then, when no one responded, I wince-smiled. “Wait until I get home and then look in the book?”

  Apparently, that wasn’t good enough.

  Nor was anything else I did or didn’t do.

  In Mary Jr.’s group all the women breastfed as a matter of course, but none of them made me feel guilty that I didn’t and none even asked why I didn’t.

  But here?

  It seemed like every five minutes, one of the coven was whipping out a breast and popping a nipple into a baby’s mouth, willing or no.

  And every time Emma fussed, if she even made a “coo,” one of them would look at me pointedly and start to say, “Why don’t you just…?”; followed by, “Oh, that’s right—you can’t.”

  I thought I’d long since made peace with my inability to nurture my child in that way, but each time one of them succeeded in making me feel bad, succeeded in making me feel like I was less, I thought to myself, Damn! Why should Peg’s little whinger deserve to get eight free IQ points rather than Emma?

  And, needless to say, none of them thought I should be raising Emma in the first place. Not. At. All.

  “It’s an, um, weird situation you’re in,” said Patty.

  “It’s hard enough you’re doing it alone,” said Elizabeth.

  “Shouldn’t Emma be with her own kind?” asked Helena.

  “She might be better off…” Dora trailed off.

  “You do realize, don’t you, that your baby is black?” Trudy pointed out.

  “It’s just not natural.” This, from Goodie Peg, as she promptly whipped out the other breast.

  “But—” I began in my own behalf, not to mention Emma’s. Yet I didn’t need to go any further. Sophie’s “but,” as it were, trumped my “but.”

  “But Jane is doing a good job. None of us could do better. And now I really wish we could talk about something else, please. Either that, or perhaps we should just call it a day.”

  Sophie??? This was my content-to-hate-my-sister-for-the-rest-of-my-life sister Sophie???

  But, clearly, she meant it; and, amazingly enough, they backed off.

  Even with them backing off, however, the rest of the playgroup time felt rather strained. It was certainly not a place I would want to return to again.

  While they were polite enough to me and Em, there was no real warmth there; and I don’t just mean towards us, I mean towards each other and their own kids as well.

  At Mary Jr.’s—and yes, I know, I know, I’m beginning to talk about Mary Jr.’s like it was some sort of Utopia, which it absolutely was not, but it was so much better than this—the babies seemed to be a part of their mothers; here, the kids seemed like an extension, like appendages. I’m not sure if the distinction would be clear to anyone who hasn’t witnessed it, but it certainly was to me.

  I hugged Sophie before I left because she’d stood up for me, but I knew I wouldn’t be going back, at least not for playgroup.

  The suspense was killing me.

  It had been months since Sophie’s allusion to our mother “having an affair” and I was still no closer to discovering the truth. This was in part my fault because I barely ever spoke with Sophie and I nearly never spoke with Mum, but the suspense was still killing me.

  So, I did the only thing a self-respecting daughter could do: Having learned that my mother was going out on Saturday night, and having made arrangements for Emma to spend a few hours with Dodo, I decided to break into her house.

  Now “breaking in” is a bit of an extreme way of putting it. Ever since I’d moved out, years before, I’d retained my key. True, I’d never once used it to gain entry, and, true, if my mother realized I still had it, she would have undoubtedly demanded I return it or changed the locks. But apparently she hadn’t realized it, so all I had to do was steal up the gravel driveway and sneak up on the ancestral home (okay, it wasn’t an ancestral home, just a fairly nice house outside of London) in dark of night, turn my key in the lock and…

  Voilà! Time to start snooping.

  I realize it was a lot of bother to go to when I could have asked my mother directly, but have you been paying any attention at all to our dysfunctional relationship? Mum and I didn’t ask each other direct questions, we didn’t tell each other things; we were more like two armies, forever engaged in evasive maneuvers.

  From the entry hall I made my way into the living room.

  The last time I’d been in this house, it had been for the shower my mother had thrown me several months before. At that time, the place had looked the same as it had for years—except for the presence of some of the more nauseating baby-shower decorations—as if time had stopped, as if when my father had died my mother had decided to freeze it all in amber.

  But now everything had changed.

  The blue sofa we’d had forever was now gone and in its place was a beige leather one that smelled as though it had just been delivered. Everything—the carpeting on the floor, the paintings on the walls—were all things I didn’t recognize. And, on the end table, where once upon a time there had been family photos of us doing family-type things—hard to believe that Sophie and my mother and I had ever been part of a unit that did family-type things together, but there you have it—there were still school photos of me and Soph, and even some of Mum with us girls, but there were no longer any of my father. It was as though he had never been.

  When I realized what was missing—him—I felt a sharp pain inside. I’ve never been one to give over to the sentimentalizing of kin, probably because mine were mostly so bad, but my dad had always been the bright spot in the family for me. He’d died when I was very young, so maybe I just loved him with the peculiar eyesight of time and distance, or maybe things really had been that way, but I always remembered him as being my champion in that family. And now that champion was completely gone, no longer existing even in pictures.

  Not wanting to dwell on the loss of my father, either literally or now metaphorically, I made my way to the kitchen, intent on helping myself to a glass of the cheap wine I knew my mother always kept in the fridge.

  But even that was different.

  Instead of the oversized jug I was accustomed to, there were expensive bottles of Chianti and Bordeaux from vineyards I’d never heard of. The bottles were unopened as though waiting for a special occasion or someone to share with.

  Oh, great, I thought. I can’t even pinch a single glass of wine to steady my nerves, because she’d notice it.

  Having been thwarted in the kitchen, I decided to head straight for her bedroom.

  The door was closed, which seemed odd for a person living alone. But then the thought occurred to me that she must have gotten used to it like that when Sophie and I had still lived at home, each of us needing our own privacy, and she’d never changed the habit.

  I slowly pushed the door open, expecting who knows what, and hit the light switch.

  Oh. My. God.

  Even this had changed!

  I ticked the changes off on my fingers: the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom. I felt like the three bears stumbling upon Goldilocks, save that my mother wasn’t here and there was only one of me.

  My mother’s bedroom, previously a sanctum sanctorum of frilly pinkness that had made me wonder how my father had stuck it out for so long, had been transformed into the kind of room that, hell, I would live in.

  Gone was the cabbage-rose needlepoint carpet; instead, she’d left the original and very beautiful wide floorboards exposed, polished to so high a sheen it invited you to skate across it in bare socks. Where once there had been a white-and-gold painted bed with about sixteen pillows plus a stuffed cat on it, there was now a simple oak sleigh bed with a white down comforter on it so thick it looked like a cloud. And, where once there had been a vanity table so froufrou it would’ve made Barbie barf, there was a writing desk, which was antique wood and had a design of trailing ivy that looked to have been hand-painted on the gently curved drawers.

&n
bsp; As I stood there lusting after that beautiful writing desk, it suddenly occurred to me: a writing desk! If my mother were likely to keep a written record of what she was up to, or anything of that nature, this was where it would be.

  It took me all of two seconds to locate a datebook she had tucked away in the center drawer. I paused a moment before opening it, feeling a guilty pang that I was violating someone else’s privacy. But then I thought—I rationalized—that if it had been anything so personal as an actual diary, I never would have looked inside. But this was a mere datebook. How private could the things here be? I’d probably just see things like “Dentist appointment, 2:00 p.m.” or “Don’t forget to plant the tulip bulbs” or “Do something to mark Jane’s birthday…”

  I riffled through the pages, working my way backwards from today. And there was a pattern, a pattern that had nothing to do with teeth or flowers or me. On every weekend, going back to the beginning of the year, there were entries that alternated “Vic here this weekend” with “Me at Vic’s this weekend.”

  I sat down on my mother’s cloud of a bed, shocked, and wondering why I was shocked. I’d known this was coming, right? I certainly hadn’t disbelieved Sophie when she’d voiced her suspicions, but somehow, I supposed I hadn’t internalized it. And now I had.

  My mother was having an affair…okay, maybe not an affair since my father was no longer living. My mother was having a liaison with someone named Vic. Every weekend, either he came here or she went there, which explained where she was tonight—at Vic’s.

  “Should I be raising Emma?”

  The speaker was, of course, me.

  My audience?

  Mary Jr.’s playgroup. Or what there was of it that day, at least, as we played with our babies in a playground not far from her Brixton address.

  They—Mary Jr. plus Marisa and Chantelle—didn’t appear to understand my question.

  “Who would raise Emma,” asked Mary Jr., speaking for the group, “if not you?”

  “I don’t know.” I thought about it. “Perhaps someone with a Trinidadian background.”

  Chantelle was surprised. “Why would she want that?”

  “Er,” quickly I sought to backpedal, realizing that—of course!—none of them knew I wasn’t Emma’s natural mother. “Well, I never knew what her father’s background was and I just thought that I didn’t want to rob her of anything. But, if say, she had a Trinidadian to raise her…”

  I was losing myself.

  “I don’t know,” I tried again, “so she could fit in with the kids she’d be playing with, I suppose, like your kids. So she’d have some sense of where she came from.”

  Marisa shook her head. “None of our people came from Trinidad,” she said.

  “They didn’t?” I asked.

  “No,” said Mary Jr. “Tobago.”

  “All of you?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Well, except for Charmaine’s people,” Marisa said. “They came here from the Dominican Republic, but that’s just them.”

  I was stunned.

  Apparently, they were too.

  “Why’d you think all our people originally came from Trinidad?” asked Mary Jr.

  “I dunno,” I shrugged. “Statistics?”

  “Statistics?”

  “Yes, statistics. Don’t the majority of blacks in England originally come from Trinidad?”

  “Just because something’s a majority,” said Marisa with a very precise seriousness, “it doesn’t mean every single individual.”

  “I mean, it’s like America,” Chantelle pointed out. “Everyone who comes here from America isn’t from Texas.”

  I looked at Emma playing.

  “So,” I said, “like all of you, Emma’s people could have come from somewhere other than Trinidad.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Chantelle. “Her people could have come from any of a number of places.”

  I thought about Dodo with her Trinidadian recipes and Trinidadian music. I closed my eyes. No way could I tell her I’d fucked up again. And what would be the point? So maybe there was no way of knowing if we were giving Emma the right cultural heritage, but at least we were giving her some cultural heritage. I mean, wasn’t it a bit like the whole God thing? People all over the world were constantly arguing, sometimes even killing each other, over who knew the only way to get into heaven. The way I figured it, just so long as you could get everyone to agree on the Thou Shalt Not Murder thing—and maybe the one about honoring thy mother and thy father too, now that I was one of the former—it was all the same in the end.

  So I would let Dodo go on playing the music and making the food and I’d be grateful that Emma was getting something, even if there might never be any way of knowing for sure if that something was right.

  “God but this playground sucks,” Chantelle spoke with uncharacteristic disgust, snapping me out of my self-concern.

  I looked around me, at the overgrown grass that was more like a field, at the rusted equipment, at the seesaw that would only see and never saw.

  “Well,” I said, forcing a smile and trying to put a bright spin on it, “it is a bit—”

  “Sucky,” Chantelle said.

  I gave up.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It is.”

  Churchill & Stewart had been willing to let me expense lunch at The Connaught, if it meant possibly snagging a hot book away from our competitors. And so I found myself on a bright spring day, sitting on a Queen Anne chair, trying to decide what to do with a capon, trying to help Simon Smock decide if that painting we were looking at was a real Turner or something else.

  “I suppose,” I suggested, hoping I was sounding diplomatic, “one of us could always go over there and glance at the signature.”

  “Ach,” he made a German sound, even though he had no German accent, as he pooh-poohed me, “what would be the fun in that?”

  “None,” I agreed brightly, hoping I was coming across as being agreeable.

  Simon Smock in the flesh was exactly what his pictures had promised, but shorter. He really did use a lion’s-head cane he didn’t need. He really did wear a purple cape that was always hitting someone in the face when he put it on. He really was Capote-ish in a rotund way, only with black Salvador Dali hair and a Zorro mustache. If the man were a book, store clerks would be at a loss as to where to shelve him.

  Prior to the meeting, I’d put my head together with Dodo’s more experienced one to try to figure out in advance what was going on with Simon Smock and all the mystique he was surrounding this book with.

  “Isn’t that weird,” I’d asked Dodo, “the way he made a big deal out of selling a book written by a British author in foreign markets before attempting to sell it here?”

  “Weird,” she agreed, fingers steepled thoughtfully against her lips, “but not unprecedented.”

  “No?”

  “No,” she said, relaxing back. “I’ll bet this is what’s going on…The author, whoever she is, is probably a midlist author—some nice reviews, respectable sales, but nothing to go into a bidding war over. Now she’s written something uncharacteristic, something that Simon thinks could make a lot of money. The problem is that if he tries to sell it with her name on it, no matter how hard he pushes it as her breakout book, publishers will just check the sales records through the chains and say, ‘Oh, right. She’s a 10,000-copy author. Thanks, but no, I don’t think we’d want to do 100,000 copies of that one’ and move on.”

  I thought I was catching on.

  “So,” I said, “rather than trying to sell it here first, Simon takes it elsewhere, starts all kinds of buzz going with the foreign scouts, begins all this mysterious-author stuff…Why, can’t you just hear people now? ‘Who’s he got? Is it Joyce Carol Oates with a new personality? Has Stephen King decided to do another Richard Bachman? Is Martin Amis trying to see if people will still recognize his writing if he writes as a woman?’ Before you know it, we’re all falling all over ourselves to give him all the money we’ve got i
n the budget when we don’t even really know what he has.”

  “Exactly,” smiled Dodo.

  “So,” I asked, “will we do it?”

  She stopped smiling. “Yeah. Of course we’ll do it.”

  Now that I was face-to-face with this weird little man, still debating the damned maybe-Turner, I was wondering, Could he really be so wily?

  Realizing one of us had to finally break the business-talk ice, “So, about this book you’ve got…”

  “Here,” he said, pulling several hundred loose pages out of a satchel I hadn’t seen before. I hadn’t seen the satchel previously because it had been obscured by the cape.

  He thrust the pages into my hands and started to rise.

  I hoped he wasn’t going to whip that cape around himself again. People got hurt whenever he did that.

  He whipped.

  The waiter, experienced from before, dodged it.

  “But,” I protested, “aren’t you going to have a sweet?”

  “No. I’m having that with Sam Peters of Willow Press as soon as I get over there.” He consulted his watch. “And I’m late. Oh, well.” He patted his satchel beneath the cape. “He’ll wait.”

  “But what…?” I half rose, shouting after him.

  He waved two fingers in the air, without turning around. “Two weeks! I’m giving everybody two weeks to make offers!”

  Blasted books that are always telling you what to expect!

  Emma would not roll over.

  Back in February, at the end of Emma’s second month, I’d first seen the dreaded words appear under the May Even Be Able To list: “roll over (one way).” Two little words, plus that two-word parenthetical aside, had driven part of our playtime for the past three months. Now, here we were, May 31, the last day of her fifth month, and that blasted “roll over (one way)” directive had risen to the top of the section, where it now perched like a vulture under the “By end of this month, your baby should be able to” heading.

  I tried everything over the past three months: placing her on her stomach with her head turned away from me, as I lay on the other side, singing or clapping, in the hopes that her desire to see the person that matched the voice would make her somehow turn her head hard in the right direction to tip her over. But, the smart minx, she just slowly turned her head around facedown until she saw what she wanted to see, no rolling over required. I tried lining up her stuffed animals, especially fuzzy bunny. I even enlisted Kick the Cat, but Kick got distracted while rolling over himself, which caused Emma to make raspberries of appreciation but in no way encouraged her to emulate Kick’s feats.