Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

Mistake 502  
Jessica Barksdale

“I have regrets,” my second husband says.  “I mean, constant regrets.  But teaching my kids independence isn’t one of them.”
     We are sitting at the granite counter top drinking espresso.  A bird has landed on the skylight, clicking the glass with its sharp clacking claws.   I try to think of the sentence I woke up saying in the middle of the night.  It was about him, my husband, Dale.
     “He needs my help,” I say.  “It’s what parents do.”
     I don’t say other things that I’m thinking.
     “My kids—“ he begins.
     “Your kids don’t call,” I say, putting down my small white porcelain cup.  “Your kids call their mother instead.”
     “She gives them everything they want.  Why wouldn’t they call her?”
     “And you make them feel guilty for wanting it.”
     Dale is silent, but he pushes away from the counter, leaving his cup.  He knows that I or our cleaning provider—as he calls her—will pick up his mess.
     I hear the front door open and close.
     I put his cup in the sink, rinsing the breakfast things in the enormous stainless steel sink.  Light pours in the brand new tempered glass floor to ceiling windows.  The absolute black granite under my feet shines, expect, of course, where it is smudged, which it often is.  I turn and look into the living room, the oak floor awash with light, the arched ceiling opening up the house like a cathedral.
     My first husband moved his new girlfriend into our house two months after I left, and they didn’t leave.  I called her a squatter.  I may have called her other, worse things in an email that he let her read.  His then girlfriend and now wife still won’t talk to me, though now Jeff does, calling me about computers and internet connections.  We finally divorced when I agreed to take a very small lump of cash and sign over the house to him.  I never thought I’d own a house after that, but Dale had a much better divorce settlement than I did.
     Here we are.
     Dale is an architect, and the entire house was gutted and remodeled to an exacting standard—his.  He was able to see how a bathroom could be lifted up and put somewhere else, a kitchen dragged from the far south wall, a pantry where the sink used to be.  I don’t understand how walls work, how the intestines of plumbing and electrical wires run through a structure without causing disaster. 
     I work in the garden.
     My phone buzzes, and I pick it up. 
     “I’m sorry,” I say because I am.
     “I just meant that he could get the apartment on his own.  You don’t have to do everything.”
     “Sometimes we need help,” I say.
     “Sometimes we give too much help.”
     I sigh.  “I can’t help it.”
     “I know,” he says.  “Listen, I’m sorry.”
     We hang up.
     This morning, I’m driving down to the village to pick up the keys to the apartment I found for my younger son Lucien and his girlfriend Dahlia, who followed Rose who followed Lily.  He and Dahlia currently live out of state and needed some help, so I gave it to him.  Dale often reminds me that when I was Lucien’s age I was the mother of one and possessed two degrees.  I tell him times are different.
     In the shower, I think about all the places I’ve lived.  Since I left my mother’s house when I was seventeen, I’ve moved twenty-one times.  I don’t know if I’ve had a favorite place. I loved the views from a house in the Oakland Hills, a particular tree that bent so far over, I knew it would snap, though it never did.  The little house in Berkeley had a great kitchen, a lot of human scenery, but only one tree, a droopy fig tree with fruit the size of grapes.  The hot tub at the Lafayette duplex underneath the vine covered pergola was wonderful until my oldest son Alex told me he peed in it.  I was renting and didn’t know how to broach this with my landlords, so I stopped using it.  Mostly, though, I loved the house I grew up in in San Francisco.  But my mother sold it, and then a couple from Reno bought it, tore it to the ground, and built a McMansion.
     Dale tells everyone we built this house together.
     “We designed it together,” he says.
     I try not to roll my eyes because I’ve heard that’s one of the first signs a marriage is in trouble.
     It’s a lovely house.  It’s like a tree house, seeming to be suspended by cypress and oak.  It’s the kind of house a forty-eight-year old woman should live in.  There are birds everywhere and a wisteria that climbs two back decks and has heavy purple blooms so redolent that the swarm of bees keeps the birds away from the feeder.

    “Hi,” I say as I walk into the real estate office, the automatic door whooshing behind me.  “I’m here to see Randy Chan.”
     A woman with bright blonde hair and incandescent blue eye shadow slashed over her even brighter blue eyes blinks at me, one, two.  Her teeth are white as shiny chalk. “Um, he’s on the phone, but I’ll tell him you’re here.”
     “Okay,” I say.  “Thanks.”
     The receptionist stands up and lurches past me, her heels at least four inches tall, her legs round and large and very tan.
     I sit down in a sleek black leather chair and wait for Randy Chan, scrolling through the emails on my BlackBerry.  There is a light, almost imaginary music playing, the sound coming from speakers overhead.  From the corner of my eye, I see the receptionist lumber back, fall into her chair, and disappear behind the high reception desk.
     “In this market,” a man who might be Randy Chan says from somewhere down the hall.  “We have to do everything that we can.  And that means landscaping.”
     There is a pause, the office humming with machines and overhead light.  “Right.  Uh huh.  That’s just great.  Tell him,” the man says.  “Tell him to cut the goddamn trees.”
     I wonder about the goddamn trees, green and sharp and blocking someone’s views or making the house or yard dungeon dark.  Maybe the trees are like the one at the Oakland house I lived at, bent over and dangerous.  Real estate is about making things look better than they really are, clearing out everything that is ugly for that reason alone.  It’s a game, and I wonder about my son’s apartment.  What did Randy Chan do to that place to make it better?  Where is the hidden ugliness?  What is there that I can’t see, that I can’t protect my son from?  It’s too late, I think, to protect him from anything, those days so far away and gone.
     There is danger everywhere.
     “He did what?” the man says.  “No.  No.  I’ve got to call him.”
     There’s always someone to call.  After I leave this office, I will call my son and tell him that I have the keys to his new apartment, the one he and Dahlia will move into later this month.  I will call him and tell him that things can start now.  His life is on, ready to go.  I will sign on the line, and then call my son and tell him all of that without even one goddamn.
     “I’m calling him—look, I’ve got to go.  I’m calling him right now.  Goddamn it.”
     The man hangs up, and I put away my phone.  Here I am, the mother of two people old enough to have graduated from college.  Dale is right about all of this.  Lucien is old enough to really not need me to be doing this task for him at all.  But he’s out of state, and I am not.  I’m here, in this office, waiting for Randy Chan, listening to a man talk about the goddamn trees.
     “Hi.  Yeah, yeah.  Right,” the man says.  “So what is all this about the trees?”

Outside of the real estate office, I look at the cars going by.  The first time I was on this street—on this patch of sidewalk—was in 1980.  My boyfriend John brought me here for hamburgers, the place long gone, a falafel restaurant there instead.  While we were there waiting at the joint’s take out window, my former high school psychology teacher walked by, his glass eye looking toward the street traffic, his real one on me. 
     I’d always hated him because he asked me questions, even when I kept my gaze on my desk.   He knew I didn’t want to talk about anything, so he kept calling on me.   
     Mr. Unruh.  Where are you and your eye now?
     John and I lived in a house on a hill, below us nothing but fields and oak trees.  Now, it is a retirement community, all stucco and fence.
     I put my hand in my coat pocket and feel the jangle of Lucien’s keys.
     I turn right and head down and then up the block, wondering if I should go into Rite Aid.  Or should I just get in my car and drive down to this apartment that isn’t mine?  Should I look for vermin and dirt?
     I get in my car, drive down the hill under two freeways, and around the lake, parking in front of the building.  My body hums even after I turn off my car, and I open the door and get out before I can think about it.  Swallowing down something sharp, I walk up the painted stairs, past the potted plants and bistro table, and find apartment A.
     When my first husband and I moved into our first apartment, I walked through door so glad to be independent.  It was all ours:  the two bedrooms, one bath, the living area and eat in kitchen and all the used furniture we’d cobbled together.  Within one night, though, I was crying, holding my pregnant belly and wondering how we could stay here, this place with bubbling bathroom walls and ants.  What was I doing here, in Oakland, with no yard, living across from the high school and all its noise?
     I’d made 500 mistakes, and this was mistake 501. 
     I put the key in one lock and then another and push the door open.  No to the beginnings, I think.  No to the starting place.  Yes to the later place, where there are no bubbling walls or vermin or dirt. 
     I wonder what Mr. Unruh would think, one eye having to do the work of two.  What would he notice that no one else would?
     The floors are clean and shiny, my shoes clacking as I slowly walk the room.  Light streams in the window, the view from the front room a Chinese Christian Church, writing in two languages on the front:  Practical Christianity, it reads.  Come Sunday.
     Will it be practical come Sunday, or should we come Sunday?  I really don’t know.
     The bathroom is 1940’s pink tile with ivory inlay.  The toilet and shower are a piggy bank pink, the white blinds unbent, flush against the window.  The bedroom is light and bright, too, with no vermin climbing the walls.  Clacking back out to the dining area and kitchen, it appears the counters and sink are new, but the cupboards and appliances are older, the range with four coiled black burner eyes, the kind people put aluminum foil under to catch Rice-a-Roni and corn kernels.
     When I was in college, every apartment in town had this same cheap oven and range.  Dale would call it a contractor’s special.  I learned to understand the sound of the hum that the burners made, the high hum meaning it was ready.  Everything scorched, everything burned.
     I turn from the kitchen and walk back into the living room.  I did a good job picking this place.  I could live here, I know that.  I could bring a mattress and buy some groceries and stay here until my son comes to claim what’s his.  I would plug in a radio and steal the neighbor’s wireless.  Then I’d have to go home, back to Dale and the house I’m still trying to fit into. 
     Even with the cathedral of windows, there’s not one I like to look out of.
     Someone laughs in the outside hallway, the sound already a memory of happy.  I turn around again in the room.  There are no vermin; there is no dirt.  Lucien will call and say, “I’m at the California border.  Only 7 more hours.”
     He’s moved six times since he went to college, this number seven.  He’s catching up.  He’ll call me from Redding.  “Stopping at the Black Bear Diner.  Be there soon.”
     I look up, remember the sentence from my dream:  His exactitude is only matched by his intractability.
     “You really can’t help people by helping them,” Dale said once.  “You need to let them be.  You need to let them figure it all out on their own.”
     “How can they figure it out if you don’t tell them?” I asked.
     He never answered.
     I can hear my heart in the echo of the empty room.  Nothing has happened here, yet.  There is no memory, no matter what sound someone makes. 
     Outside the window, I see gulls, clouds, telephone wire.  Maybe I can drive to the airport and fly somewhere where there are no walls that I know around me, nothing to hold me in.

Jessica Barksdale is the author (as Jessica Inclan) of twelve novels, including Her Daughter's Eyes, The Matter of Grace, and When You Believe.  She is a professor of English at Diablo Valley College and teaches novel writing for UCLA Extension.