A Delicate Question

Emily Hanlon                                                                                     Word Count - 2743

5 Phillips Street

Salem, MA 01970

978-880-5424

emily.hanlon@hotmail.com

A Delicate Question

“How did you like my cake?” I ask Tyler in an attempt to spark a conversation in the stillness of the car.

I’m driving us home from Easter dinner, down roads lined with the sprawling houses of affluence. Other than Tyler and me, our family lives in wealthy neighborhoods. Not mansions, not the homes of the rich-and-famous, but certainly the more-than-comfortable. I glance as the big, shingled houses pass, feeling an envy I’m conditioned to feel even though I don’t want to. The house we just left, my sister Jessica’s, is the biggest in our family, but not the grandest in her neighborhood. As soon as we walked into the house, she apologized for the one nick in the paint on her front shutters.

“Who would even notice that, Jessie?” my mother said, waving her away. Then she asked me if I’d picked up the slipcovers she’d recommended for my living room. I hadn’t. I told her that I just hadn’t had the time, but the truth was they were way too expensive for something I didn’t really care about.

“Make the time,” Mom said. “Your living room is starting to look a little shabby.”

I hid my eye roll, but maybe not well enough.

“The cake was good,” Tyler says. “I liked the cream in the middle.”

Although at 17 he can easily take the wheel, I’m still worried about Tyler on highways. I didn’t even let who would drive be a topic of discussion. I just took the keys from my purse and got into the driver’s side. His sullen teenager’s state keeps him silent most of the time, but I was sure that not offering him the keys put him further into this funk.

“I’m glad,” I say, and try to think of another conversation-starter to pull him out. He’s so rarely around these days, always at track practices and meets, school events, or out doing I-don’t-even-want-to-know-what with his friends.

At dinner, my mother had asked Tyler about his recent decathlon, and reminded him for the fiftieth time that his cousin got a full ride to UMass Amherst on a crosscountry scholarship.

“College can be so expensive for parents if you don’t have that extra help,” she’d said. “Especially for a single mother.”

I slow the car to allow three giant wild turkeys to cross the wide street.

I glance to the side and am surprised to catch Tyler watching the turkeys’ ambling progress, a smile on his face.  

“Mom?” he asks.

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you a delicate question?”

I pause. It’s strange request, especially coming from him. The fact that he’s initiating a conversation is thrilling, but it’s with apprehension that I tell him, “Sure.”

He’s quiet for a few moments until I pull forward, the road now free of the wandering fowl.

“Why are you so weird?”

I almost laugh. The question is so blunt, so innocently posed. It proves to me that he is still a child in some ways, despite the dark wisps of mustache on his upper lip and the runner’s legs that are now longer than mine. I glance to the side to look at him again and his neck is craned so he can watch the turkeys gracelessly stumble their way into the wooded area.

“What makes you think I’m weird?” I ask him.

He turns back to me and says, “I don’t want to insult you.”

“Too late, Ty,” I say, but on a bubble of laughter so he’ll know I’m not really mad.

He settles back against the seat and smiles without looking at me. He swipes his hand across his forehead on this hot April afternoon.

“Well,” he finally says. “For one thing, you dress like it’s 1965.”

I glance down at my outfit – light mohair sweater and a pink, linen pencil skirt getting wrinkled under the seatbelt; strappy shoes that look like they escaped from a stage production of “Hairspray.” I feel a twinge of offense. I expected the reaction I’d gotten from my family. My mom made a guarded remark that maybe the tight skirt didn’t quite work for my body type. Jessica gave me an inscrutable up-and-down glance but said nothing. But I never thought Tyler cared what I wore. I’ve always known I was a bit different from his friends’ moms, but I had foolishly convinced myself that he appreciated this bit of individuality.

“So?” I say.

“You probably can’t really even remember 1965. I mean, how old were you back then? Three or something?”

I force the hurt from my voice as I tell him, “I was negative-8 in 1965, thank you very much.”

“Well, there’s my point. You can’t be nostalgic for a time when you weren’t even born yet.”

“I just kind of like the fashion of that time,” I tell him. “There’s nothing really wrong with that.”

“You’re insulted. I knew it.”

“No, Tyler,” I start to say, but then I decide to be honest. “OK, a little. But why does what I wear bother you?”

He doesn’t answer this question, just scratches at his head of spiky black hair.

“Like I always say,” I continue. I repeat the mantra I have been unsuccessfully trying to drill into him his whole life. “Follow your heart, not the trends.”

He’s never followed this advice. He is the epitome of a trend-follower. He spends his cashiering paychecks as quickly as they get direct-deposited on brand-name track pants and the $200-a-pair sneakers. Two years before, I stopped buying him Christmas presents since every item I purchased was immediately returned. I gave him a blue sweatshirt once and was advised in an irritable voice that he wears only gray or black. The phone I got him was the wrong model. He needs the biggest, the best. I can’t afford to accommodate him as his needs grow more and more expensive.

We pull onto the highway that will lead us to our modest home, a half-hour but a world away from Jessica’s posh neighborhood. I accelerate to join the stream of holiday traffic. A little girl in the car next to us contorts herself to press her face to the side window and stick out her tongue at us. She’s bored. Long drives and tedious family dinners are what Easter is all about.

Speaking of tedious, the dinner we just shared with our family was close to torture. I don’t understand a single thing my mother or Jessica say. It would be impossible for me to care any less than I do about new curtains, the state of the real estate market, or whether it’s better to roast or grill asparagus.

“What’s your opinion?” my mother asked me. “You’re the cook.”

She’s been saying variations on this since I started my own bakery when Tyler was a toddler. Tyler and I always have fresh rolls and decadent desserts, but we eat Marie Callender’s frozen pot pies every night for dinner.

“I’m a baker, Mom, not a cook,” I said. “I don’t know the first thing about vegetables.”

Mom gave me a curious look, as though she didn’t already know this, and moved on to talk about “staging houses.” Jessica is interested in real estate ventures as well, or she feigns as though she is. She’s good at pretending. She always has been. But then, it seems she’s good at everything.

“Can I tell you what I really think?” Tyler asks me, bringing me back to the present.

“Shoot,” I say, changing lanes, my eyes on the road.

“I don’t want to make you mad.”

“You’ve already called me weird and added 11 years to my age. How much madder do you think I can get?”

I’m joking. I’m intrigued by this unprecedented conversation, this innocent tactlessness, and his opinion of me. I push down all of the hurt welling inside of me. Insults be damned, we’re having an honest conversation. Had I ever had one of those with my mother when I was high school? Have I ever had one at all?

“I think,” he says, “you really like being weird.”

“Please go on,” I goad him. He’s a nut for all forms of science, so I say, “State your hypothesis and provide evidence to support it.”

“My hypothesis is that you want to stand out. You want people to look at you and say, ‘Wow, she’s so unusual.’”

“Am I Cyndi Lauper?”

“Who?”

“Forget it. Go on. Evidence, please.”

“Like I already said, you dress funny.”

“Noted and admitted.”

“You talk funny, too.”

“I do?”

“In hyperbole. And too many metaphors and similes. It’s – what’s the word – a cumbersome way to speak.”

“Good word.”

His voice turns weary as he says, “You sing and dance in public,” as if this is the thing that weighs him down most in the world.

“They play good music in stores these days. I can’t help myself if ‘Come on Eileen’ comes on at Market Basket.”

“Mom.”

“OK, you’ve got some good points. I admit that I’m weird. The question is why.”

“I do have a theory,” he says. He shifts around in his seat and tries to take off his seatbelt. I give him a light whack and he clicks it back in. “You want to be seen. You need people to look at you.”

I can’t help the touch of defensiveness this sparks in me.

“I don’t care if people look at me or not.”

“OK. Right there.” He turns and watches the side of my face while I navigate our way off the exit. “That’s a lie. You do care if people look. You need people to look.”

I am stunned and speechless.

“Why would I need people to look at me?”

There is a red light right off the exit, the road that leads into the mall parking lot, deserted today. When I stop, I turn my head and find him staring at me with an expression of both concern and satisfaction. He looks as though he’s finally figured out a complicated formula that has plagued him his whole life, but the answer he’s found is disturbing.

“Because your mother doesn’t look at you.” He pauses a long time. “Grandma never treated you very good, did she?”

Suddenly, I shrink. I stare at my son, my young but old child who clearly knows way more than I’d given him credit for. Way more than he should. I swallow hard against rising bile.

“Grandma was a terrific mother,” I insist. “She still is.”

“Mom.” Tyler doesn’t reach out and touch me. He hasn’t had much physical contact with me since he turned 13 and got too cool and awkward for hugs. But he tips his head and regards me and his eyes are both kind and wise. “I know how she is. Everything you do, she tells you immediately that Auntie Jess has done it too. And she implies that Auntie does it better.”

The hitch in my chest is like a sharp meat hook. 

Maybe I have said too much in front of him, have complained about my mother aloud without realizing he was absorbing it. He’s seen too much, too many arguments.

A horn blares. The light has changed and I flounder unnecessarily with the gear shift and the car darts forward. I pull into the mall parking lot and come to a jerking stop in one of the lined spots.

“Tyler,” I say. My breathing has grown heavy. It’s an approaching panic attack.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he says in his low, deep man-voice and I drop my head on the steering wheel.

“No, Ty,” I say. “Don’t be sorry. I’m the one who’s sorry. You should never have those thoughts about your grandmother. Or about Auntie.”

“Come on, Mom, I’m not a little kid. I see how she acts.”

“You see, but you don’t really know.”

I think of my mother looking me up and down, putting me on her mental scale, watching the widening of my hips as I progress through middle age, a phenomenon that somehow my older sister has avoided. My mom seems to think little of a bakery that barely breaks even instead of providing the means for a house with shutters. And she also tends to think single-motherhood is a failure as a lifestyle. This is what Tyler is referring to. It’s all he sees. Maybe because it’s what I have focused on for his whole life – for my whole life.

“You don’t get it, Ty. You need to look at the big picture.”

“Explain the big picture,” he says, and he sounds honestly interested.

How can I tell him the big picture?

He’s right in so many ways. It’s probably true about why I dress and talk and act out in public like I do. There is a lot of Cyndi Lauper in me, and it’s also maybe the case that it originated with me trying to stand out from under my sister’s shadow.

 But the big picture?

Tyler was 2 years old when his father left us. He doesn’t remember my complete breakdown. He doesn’t know that he lived with my mother for three months while I recovered in the hospital, nor does he know that her money paid for that hospital and my lawyer in the court case. He never heard her say the words, “Don’t worry about how much it costs, sweetie. We’ll get through all of this.” So many nights I spent with my mom, crying and being held and being told that it would all be all right. Nights when it seemed the judgment I’d lived under from her was just gone. Not buried or hidden, but gone.

“Grandma has always taken care of us,” I tell him, struggling to keep my voice steady.

“But Mom, she clearly plays favorites.”

This is true. How can I deny that?

“I think…,” I say and then stop. “Tyler, I think neither you nor I can understand this. I only have you, the one kid. And I love you and I like you. If you have two, well, you’re going to like one of them better. It’s inevitable.”

I’m starting to calm down a bit there in the ghost town of the mall lot. My fingers begin to loosen their grip on the steering wheel and it’s getting easier not to cry. I wonder why this conversation happened, why right now, and I realize it had to happen at some point. But I can’t tell him the whole story. Even though right now I feel like I’m talking to a grown-up, a peer, I’m not. The time is not right – not yet.

“Why does Grandma like her better?”

“They’re very much alike.”

“Do you like Auntie Jess?”

“I haven’t actually had a conversation with your aunt since I was 5 years old and she told me there was no Santa.”

His chest humps on a little laugh before returning to serious.

“Doesn’t that hurt, though?” he asks me. “That she likes Auntie better?”

“Sometimes,” I say. I nod once. “Yes, it does hurt.”

“That sucks,” he says.

“It’s just the nature of life, of family.”

I let my hands drop and put my head back against the seat.

“Good god, Tyler. I was not expecting this today.”

“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Tyler turns and looks out the window, stretches his neck around so he can see the line of cars coming off the interstate and passing by the entrance to the shopping center.

“Seems like the traffic has let up,” he says.

“Has it?” I’m spent and I don’t really register what he’s said.

“You seem upset,” says Tyler. “Maybe I should drive home from here.”

After a beat, I laugh.

“You little conniver,” I say, I lean to the side to bump shoulders with him. “You set this whole thing up so that you could drive home.”

“No, Mom, I…”

“Don’t fool a fooler. I’m onto you.”

A rare smile grows on his face.

“You got me,” he jokes. “Can I have the keys?”

I scan the blacktop, partitioned off into spaces by faded yellow lines.

“I’m kind of enjoying sitting here for the moment,” I say. “There’s something peaceful about a closed mall.”

“OK,” he says, and he flicks the radio on to one of his godawful stations, playing electronic dance music. “But I get to drive when we go.”

“I’ll think about it,” I say.