Read Online Ordinary Love and Good Will by Jane Smiley - Free Book Online
Authors: Jane Smiley
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the bathroom if I want to? Can I get a drink, or should I call you? Is there a glass for me in the bathroom? Where is it?”
I chuckle.
“I looked at her when I was tucking her in, and I thought, Joe would say this is the real thing, so I said, ‘Do you want a kiss good night, Jennifer?’ and she said, ‘Do you mean on the lips or on the cheek?’ Diane is in love.”
I put my feet up on the coffee table and reach a spoon into the ice cream. So. Okay. I am lucky that there is always this comfort to come back to, this incidental bumping on the couch of mother and daughter, this expectation of conversation like silk running through your hands. I admit I am often amused and sometimes annoyed at Ellen’s rudeness, but this is what she is aiming for, this rare comfort between mother and daughter. It might be that we would not have had it had our history been more conventional. As a child she was disputatious and resolute, with a will to have the last word that sometimes bordered on the self-destructive. After Pat brought the children back from England, Ellen embarked upon her mythic wars against his tyranny. At the same time he was fighting me in court for full custody and had twice moved the children secretly so that I couldn’t get in touch with them, Ellen hounded and disobeyed him so relentlessly that she won herself pretty free access to me, and when he moved away to Chicago, a year before the accident, she moved in with me and Joe. I was the spoils of war, and she cherished me accordingly. I felt the same about her, I have to admit. She enjoyed the added conviction that the war had been hers and she had won it; I was grateful for my good luck. Her years with me were delightful—no fights, no teen-age resentment—but I have since thought that she trained herself for a different life from the one she has chosen, and that she has never quite figured out how to beat her swords into plowshares. But I don’t know. The little girl I remember? When she was four, she insisted that she never slept. When I doubted her about it, she spent a month calling to me at all hours of the night, announcing what time it was and declaring that she was wide awake.
I try to accept the mystery of my children, of the inexplicable ways they diverge from parental expectations, of how, however much you know or remember of them, they don’t quite add up.
Sunday morning I am dressed and rummaging through the pantry as the eastern windows begin to lighten, and I see that it is going to be another lovely morning, hot afternoon. The long grass lies over, gray with moisture. I decide to go out and pick some marigolds for the kitchen table, and my sneakers leave dark tracks in the dew. The Malones cut their lawn yesterday, as every Saturday—there is still a sweet grassy smell lingering in the air, and the marigolds, as I bend down to cut them, give off an intense odor—sweet-acrid—that some people hate but that I love. In Nebraska, of course, my mother’s farm garden was huge and important—rows of cabbages and tomatoes and potatoes and brussels sprouts and turnips, but all of them separated by thick lines of orange and brown marigolds or brightly colored nasturtiums. I press the cushiony little blossoms to my face. Behind me—I don’t have to turn and look, I know what is there—my house is full of sleep.
Well, the fact is that I have been a mother for thirty years, now, half again longer than I was a child, and the last thirty years have given me as many habits and predilections as my childhood did. The bodies in the house, whose presencecomforts me, are the bodies of my children, not my mother and father. What comforts me is not my own safety anymore, but theirs.
I have learned, over the last twenty years, to embrace the possible and not to mourn the rest. I don’t often think, as I did last night, of those little five-and-a-half-year-old boys, climbing so trustfully into the back seat of the blue Pontiac. Michael in blue shorts
I chuckle.
“I looked at her when I was tucking her in, and I thought, Joe would say this is the real thing, so I said, ‘Do you want a kiss good night, Jennifer?’ and she said, ‘Do you mean on the lips or on the cheek?’ Diane is in love.”
I put my feet up on the coffee table and reach a spoon into the ice cream. So. Okay. I am lucky that there is always this comfort to come back to, this incidental bumping on the couch of mother and daughter, this expectation of conversation like silk running through your hands. I admit I am often amused and sometimes annoyed at Ellen’s rudeness, but this is what she is aiming for, this rare comfort between mother and daughter. It might be that we would not have had it had our history been more conventional. As a child she was disputatious and resolute, with a will to have the last word that sometimes bordered on the self-destructive. After Pat brought the children back from England, Ellen embarked upon her mythic wars against his tyranny. At the same time he was fighting me in court for full custody and had twice moved the children secretly so that I couldn’t get in touch with them, Ellen hounded and disobeyed him so relentlessly that she won herself pretty free access to me, and when he moved away to Chicago, a year before the accident, she moved in with me and Joe. I was the spoils of war, and she cherished me accordingly. I felt the same about her, I have to admit. She enjoyed the added conviction that the war had been hers and she had won it; I was grateful for my good luck. Her years with me were delightful—no fights, no teen-age resentment—but I have since thought that she trained herself for a different life from the one she has chosen, and that she has never quite figured out how to beat her swords into plowshares. But I don’t know. The little girl I remember? When she was four, she insisted that she never slept. When I doubted her about it, she spent a month calling to me at all hours of the night, announcing what time it was and declaring that she was wide awake.
I try to accept the mystery of my children, of the inexplicable ways they diverge from parental expectations, of how, however much you know or remember of them, they don’t quite add up.
Sunday morning I am dressed and rummaging through the pantry as the eastern windows begin to lighten, and I see that it is going to be another lovely morning, hot afternoon. The long grass lies over, gray with moisture. I decide to go out and pick some marigolds for the kitchen table, and my sneakers leave dark tracks in the dew. The Malones cut their lawn yesterday, as every Saturday—there is still a sweet grassy smell lingering in the air, and the marigolds, as I bend down to cut them, give off an intense odor—sweet-acrid—that some people hate but that I love. In Nebraska, of course, my mother’s farm garden was huge and important—rows of cabbages and tomatoes and potatoes and brussels sprouts and turnips, but all of them separated by thick lines of orange and brown marigolds or brightly colored nasturtiums. I press the cushiony little blossoms to my face. Behind me—I don’t have to turn and look, I know what is there—my house is full of sleep.
Well, the fact is that I have been a mother for thirty years, now, half again longer than I was a child, and the last thirty years have given me as many habits and predilections as my childhood did. The bodies in the house, whose presencecomforts me, are the bodies of my children, not my mother and father. What comforts me is not my own safety anymore, but theirs.
I have learned, over the last twenty years, to embrace the possible and not to mourn the rest. I don’t often think, as I did last night, of those little five-and-a-half-year-old boys, climbing so trustfully into the back seat of the blue Pontiac. Michael in blue shorts
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