Falling in Love with Natassia Read online

  “And you feel he’s older?”

  “I don’t feel it, Nora, I know it. Plus, he’s some kind of a foreigner. I found stuff in her drawers, notes he wrote. He has that handwriting they have in Europe. You know? The way Christopher writes—”

  “Christopher?”

  “I’m sorry, but your husband has weird handwriting. Those extra loops, and the lines through the sevens? I said to her, ‘I know he’s foreign. Tell me where he’s from,’ and she says to me, ‘Did it ever occur to you that you’re a foreigner?’ ” Mary smashed her cigarette against the lip of the bottle. “Little twit.”

  “You are half Korean.”

  “She’s not. She’s Jewish. What she is is a sucker, falling for some green-card slut.”

  “Describe the notes.” Nora’s insistence on getting information was offering Mary no comfort.

  “I almost puked. It was all this intimate, predatory stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like in one note he’s talking about her neck, wanting to take a weekend to do nothing but kiss her neck. Another note’s about her breasts. You know she’s got those huge breasts, like her grandmother. Then he says—I’m quoting this—‘You are not here and my work is hard. I am hard. I think of you. I want you here, naked, on my lap.’ ”

  “He wrote that?” Their chairs had been lined up facing the water; now Nora turned her chair to look at Mary, who noticed that Nora’s face had turned as pale as her hair. Mary and Nora’s friendship was long and void of bullshit, their bond stronger than sisters’.

  Low and rough, Mary asked, “It’s bad, isn’t it? This shit this guy’s writing in these notes, it’s bad. Natassia’s in trouble, isn’t she?”

  Nora almost whispered, “You don’t need me to tell you that, not if he’s as old as you guess he is.”

  From within a cloud of smoke: “I’m a rotten mother.”

  “No, you’re not.” Nora really was whispering now. “You’re not a bad mother. You just don’t like being a mother.”

  “I hate being a mother. I love Natassia. I adore Natassia, but I wish I wasn’t her mother. I wish she was my mother.” Mary reached down for the bottle of wine, emptied it into her glass without offering any to Nora. “She’s more reasonable, she’s more patient than me. She’s so damn responsible. Like even now, with this whole boyfriend thing, her first lover, and she’s reading ahead in her chemistry book, for God’s sake, and school doesn’t start for a week.” Nora’s smile seemed so sad that Mary’s stomach started roiling. “Remember,” Mary whispered, “what a knockout little baby she was?” Infant Natassia had had a sheen like the surface of pearls on her cheeks and forehead and chin.

  “She still is,” Nora whispered back, “very beautiful.”

  “Who?” Giulia stepped out onto the deck. “I can’t sleep, it’s so hot. What about Natassia?”

  “I was hardly ever around for the kid when she was small.”

  “Mary, don’t do that to yourself.” More than anything, these three women tried to be good mothers to one another. Giulia reached for Mary’s glass to get a sip of the last of the wine. “You’re around now, aren’t you? You’re doing everything you can. You took the teaching job upstate—”

  “Which I hate.”

  “—so you could be closer to her. You quit the dance company.”

  “I quit the company because I got tired of performing.”

  “And because you were injured,” Nora added.

  “That had nothing to do with it. I performed for twenty years with injuries. I danced with a herniated disk for six whole months. I danced with asthma and bronchial infections and fevers. That injury wasn’t why I quit.”

  “So in the long run this is good,” Giulia insisted, “for Natassia and for you. You’re being kinder to your body now.”

  “Less abusive maybe,” Mary said.

  “Well, whatever, it’s good.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” As Giulia handed back the glass, Mary shook her head. “Nah, finish it.”

  With the wineglass, Giulia headed back inside. “Nora, I’m taking the kitchen fan upstairs into the hallway, okay?”

  “Fine.” After they heard Giulia’s footsteps reach the top of the inside stairs, Nora asked Mary, “Have you talked to Ross?”

  “Ross?” Mary lit a new Camel and coughed out smoke. “What can he do? He’s across the frigging country. Who the hell even knows where Spokane, Washington, is? He’s working in the hospital day and night. All he does when Natassia has a problem is throw a fit over the phone and then he sends money. Besides, he’s mad at me.”

  “How come?” Nora asked.

  “It’s stupid. Lotte and I have been after him to make his will. Like, you’d think if you were smart enough to be a doctor you’d know that you need a will, especially if you’ve got money and a kid and a live-in girlfriend. Anyway, he finally made the will. Then we had to decide who we were naming as Natassia’s guardians, in case something happens to both of us or to his parents.”

  “You have a will? That’s impressive.”

  “Lotte shamed me into it. Anyway, Ross is holding us all up because he’s trying to decide if he should name Harriet as the guardian instead of you and Christopher. Harriet sounds nice on the phone, but he’s only been with her—what?—two years? So I’m—”

  “Me and Christopher?” Nora dipped her hand so deeply into her white hair her gold wedding bands disappeared. “Oh, Mary.” It was a moan. When Nora lowered her hand, her fingers were trembling. “Mary, you don’t want us. Ross is right.”

  “Nora.” Mary leaned toward her and caught that scent that was always on Nora’s skin—moisturizer Christopher made for her from olive oil and lanolin and vanilla, a scent constantly connecting Nora to her husband. Nora could be a pain sometime, but Christopher had a wide-open heart, and the two of them together were as solid as they come. Just like Ross’s parents. Mary felt reverent before these people’s marriages. Of course Nora and Christopher were the right choice to be Natassia’s guardians. “You’re not telling me you wouldn’t do it.”

  “But, Mary—”

  “Nora, relax. If you fucked up, Christopher would know what to do. He’s always known what to do with Natassia. He’s the one who could talk some sense into her about this boyfriend business.”

  “Christopher can’t talk to Natassia about that, Mary.”

  “No-ra, what’s with you tonight?” There’d been a time, ages ago, right after Nora’s parents died, when Mary had had to worry about Nora, but Nora had been better now for a good ten years. “Come on, hon, relax.”

  “Listen,” Nora began, tilting her head back into the canvas chair, and Mary, watching her, was thinking, With a neck that long she should have been a ballerina. “Mary, I know you hate it when I say this, but why not find a good therapist?”

  Mary leaned her head back, too, but closed her eyes to the night sky. She felt a wash of weariness, that awareness she’d had lately that the words and gestures used to tell the truth almost always hid the truth. She still hadn’t told Nora or Giulia or Natassia or anybody about Dr. Cather, the psychologist she’d started therapy with almost three months earlier. “My daughter just turned fifteen,” Mary had said at that first session. “It’s time for us to start living together, but I don’t know how to do it.” And Dr. Cather had said, “Can you start by telling me a little of how the two of you have been living until now?” Mary didn’t know why she was being so hush-hush about Cather. Probably because every time she had a session she thought about quitting.

  Nora reached over and touched the arm of Mary’s chair. “Won’t you do it? For Natassia?”

  Mary sighed. She and Nora never kept secrets from each other, and now, with Nora being so earnest, Mary felt like a fraud. She knew that on the surface her outrage looked convincing. Her daughter was having regular sex with a man who was maybe twice the kid’s age, maybe even as old as Mary, thirty-five, and from some godforsaken place where they home-brewed vodka out of potatoes or made th
eir dinner out of dogs. Of course Mary had reason to be worried. Deep inside, though, she was outraged for all the wrong reasons.

  “I could give you names, Mary. Good people.”

  “Oh, Nora, please.”

  And then the friends were silent for a long time (their fourth-grade peevishness), until there was a crack of dry lightning far off in the sky. Then they were silent a while longer, then Nora went inside to return a phone call from Christopher.

  AS SOON AS SHE WAS ALONE, Mary stepped off the deck, onto the beach. She could feel little bugs flying up out of the damp sand. This sickened her. Smoking, she walked to the water’s edge. Stood there. A soft, warm wave rolled up, wet her bare feet, rolled away. Then a big wave reached her knees and pulled way back, leaving Mary standing on a smooth wet stage of sand. Full moon, pale light all over the place. Mary’s limbs felt heavy. Smoke was dense in her lungs. Tossing the half-smoked cigarette, she did a spin, kicked wet sand onto herself. Her shadow was in front of her, behind her; everywhere she looked, she saw her shadow—flat, distorted, scaring her. She started walking.

  Natassia was scaring the shit out of Mary with this boyfriend business. If it were the stuff a normal mother would be worried about—AIDS and pregnancy—maybe Mary could talk to Nora about it, but that wasn’t what was freaking her out, not at all. The kid was just getting started and she was using condoms. With spermicide. Extra-safe. When Mary was fifteen, it had taken a while for the news to sink in that she really did have to take a pill every single day. There’d been a few crises she could have done without. Still, abortion after abortion, the problem each time had been logistical: when and where and how to get the money. Mary never suffered the doubt that had made Nora so crazy for a couple years after her one and only abortion—sophomore year, college.

  And Mary surely never had the parental thing to worry about. By the time she was in high school and having sex, her stepmother, Dorie, had long since given up paying attention to her, and her father, Jerry, paid attention to no one but his wife. When Mary outgrew her clothes, she dressed herself by rummaging through the Lost and Found box at the ballet academy where she spent most of her time. For weeks she’d live with Nora’s family, and Jerry and Dorie never even bothered to call the Conollys to find out if Mary was there or not. From fourth grade on, Nora and her parents were Mary’s most reliable friends, but dance was and had always been Mary’s only mother, the thing that took care of her, body and soul. Every time she got pregnant, Mary knew what to do. She needed to dance. The solutions to the problems of her body had always been within her body, within dance.

  “Why did you go ahead and decide to give birth to Natassia?” Dr. Cather had asked at one session. Mary had never managed to figure out why, but it must have been the right thing to do, because she couldn’t imagine the universe without Natassia in it. Sometimes Mary wondered if she really had done it for no better reason than to have a child with Ross’s long legs.

  Another day, Cather asked Mary, “Why do you think you chose never to marry Ross?”

  Easy question. Ross was really something—sexy as hell and wicked smart—but basically he just got way too nuts.

  Mary turned her back on the water, did a cartwheel that landed her on dry sand. She tried a handstand, faltered, jumped out of it, and landed on both feet. Oiuu. Her hip, her sacroiliac joint, was screwed up again, out of alignment. She’d been skimping on warm-ups, telling herself she didn’t have time, and now her body was on strike, not doing anything she used to count on it to do. Mary, in her life, had been without money, without apartments, without jobs, but she’d never known deprivation in her body before.

  Her friends kept telling her that the teaching job at the private high school upstate was a brave, good choice. Now she was strapped into it, strapped into all those good intentions to be steady for Natassia, to create a home so Natassia could move out of her grandparents’ apartment and live with Mary upstate. The teaching job gave Mary medical insurance. She could start saving money for Natassia’s college. But Mary suspected—was practically sure—that it was way too late for her mothering to kick in. Besides, she didn’t know how to do any of that stuff anyway.

  Looking over her shoulder, she saw she was now a long way from the small lights of Nora’s cottage. With this guy going after her daughter, Mary was terrified. Not fear for her daughter’s safety, not fear of losing her. It was greedier. It was this: If older men, foreign men, exotic men were going after Natassia, then Mary was the mother, the taboo. There’d be no one left for her. The truth she had to hide from Nora was that Natassia’s guy, in his love notes, sounded like the kind of guy Mary needed for herself.

  CHAPTER 3 :

  AUGUST

  1989

  Nora was swimming and swimming and had been swimming in the Long Island Sound for hours and she still felt no better. Two days had passed since Mary and Giulia had gone back to the city, leaving Nora alone at the beach, but she couldn’t get away from herself, and she couldn’t get away from Christopher, even in the water, where his phone calls couldn’t reach her.

  She had swum so far out that when she looked toward the shore the house was a dot in the darkening evening sky. Still, Nora could not escape the word Natassia. With each slice of her arm into water, Nora heard Mary’s voice: this guy, this boyfriend, a man, shtupping, some kind of a foreigner. Natassia’s in trouble, isn’t she?

  With two wet hands, Nora covered her wet face, let her body weight pull her underwater, then spread her arms and floated to the surface. It was happening again, as it hadn’t in so long, the torment, which always came to Nora in a cyclone of words. Whereas Christopher was a visual person, and Mary was a body person, Nora knew herself to be a word person. This realization had been one of the hard-earned gifts of the intensive therapy she’d undergone while training to be a psychologist. You are haunted by language helped to explain the insomnia she’d suffered for years. Learning that she had mastery over language had helped her gain mastery over her thoughts, then allowed her to repossess sleep, one of the biggest victories of her five years in therapy.

  Until a couple of years ago. Then Christopher began pushing—really pushing—to have a baby, even though they had put the baby question permanently on hold, and the old torture began in Nora again, as it had today, anxiety churning out nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs—strings of them (boyfriend, shtupping, trouble) repeated and repeated, slamming into one another with the fast attraction of magnets, in unpredictable patterns inside her head, inside her chest and heart. What Nora experienced was the sound a word made, or she’d see in her mind’s eye the spelling, or sometimes a picture would be summoned up. Usually, during one of her torments, all three manifestations happened at the same time, overstimulating her, making her dizzy, making her sick. Sounds and spellings and images, each one a small, potent representative of the problem within her that refused to be solved. There was no way around it. If Natassia’s boyfriend was as old and worldly as Mary had described, the girl was in a relationship that was—as Nora herself might write in a report on one of her patients—inappropriate. Inappropriate spun around with Natassia and all the other words that wouldn’t leave Nora alone.

  Why the hell was Mary going around telling her daughter’s secrets? When Nora saw M-A-R-Y in her mind, it was a tarnished thing with too much light on it, like sun on the fender of a dirty car. Looking at M-A-R-Y gave Nora a headache. She shifted the direction of her swimming to be parallel to the beach. All weekend, Mary had worn that mess of brass chains on her ankles, two gold hoops in one earlobe, a stupid feather hanging from her other earlobe. Nora had had to struggle to hold back the thought that Mary always looked dirty, like a kid at camp, a wild child living far away from adult supervision. (Who was the teacher who’d written “wild” and “need for supervision” on one of Mary’s report cards? Fifth grade? Sixth?) Mary just refused to be bothered with certain details of adult life. Like raising her daughter, for instance. Thinking it, Nora felt worse. She knew, probably better th
an anyone else, how much Mary struggled as a mother. But Mary’s obstinacy was beginning to annoy Nora. Like the little detail of Mary’s insistence that Natassia wasn’t part Korean, a statement that was (1) a lie; (2) unfair to Natassia; and (3) racist. Some green-card slut. Mary’s xenophobia was mean, against everyone, including herself.

  Unless it suited her. It wasn’t uncommon for Mary, when she needed money, to scour Backstage’s audition notices for ASIAN FEMALE. Nora remembered a winter when Mary was badly injured and could rehearse but couldn’t teach, and she auditioned for—and landed—a commercial that required her to dress up in a geisha-girl costume. It was a thirty-second spot, late at night, advertising a private midtown men’s club. Soft porn, really. Hardly anyone saw it, but still.

  This was before most people had VCRs, so Ross had paid some outlandish amount of money to buy a copy of the commercial, which opened with Mary sitting at a makeup mirror having her hair, a black wig, pinned up by another girl in a kimono, whose sleeve was slipping, baring her shoulder. A voice-over said something like “This girl is getting ready for you. Are you ready for her? Don’t keep her waiting.” Then the camera cut from the mirror scene to a close-up of Mary’s made-up face, then cut away to a silhouetted girl with her back exposed, her kimono slipping—it was the other girl, not Mary—then cut to Mary’s face, then to the girl’s naked shoulders, then a tighter shot of Mary’s face staring straight into the camera, then an entire naked back. The last shot was slow-motion: Mary releasing her hairpin and doing a spin, her black-wig hair fanning out.

  Residuals from that commercial came in for three years, and Mary heard from the agency that when men came to the club as a result of the commercial, they often asked for “the little Japanese girl at the mirror,” even though it was the other girl who showed parts of her body. Mary’s face, especially whitened for that TV commercial, had a quality so ancient, a beauty so still, a blankness so unmarred by emotion or personality, that an untraveled Westerner could hardly begin to guess at the soul templed within that girl.