Falling in Love with Natassia Read online

  She tossed around the pile of dirty travel clothes on the floor until she found her T-shirt. She pulled it on, yanked open the curtains, stood at the window. The women and the dogs were gone. Mary was looking out on nothing but gardens—darkening grass and shadowed flowers. There was a long rectangle of color in front of her. Sunflowers and long sticks of gladiolus and thick patches of roses and zinnias and other stuff she didn’t know the names of, all of it overgrown and too obvious, like some gaudy happiness that was completely foreign to Mary. It even embarrassed Mary to find herself here. In their sessions, Dr. Cather kept harping on the view of this garden, saying it was a beautiful symbol for what Mary was working toward. Cather said that in the act of choosing such a place Mary was making progress. As if Mary actually had a choice. Mothering is about planting and tending. It’s about growth. You and Natassia are both growing, together. This is a joke, Mary thought, this place has nothing to do with our lives.

  Here she was, living in a cottage where the view from all her low windows was nothing but flowers and the deep green heart of the hedges surrounding the sides of the greenhouse. Everywhere, huge chunks of green. Mary didn’t understand a thing. What had got into Natassia? She’d never been in this kind of trouble before. What’s wrong with the kid? Why’s she doing this to me?

  And then the phone right next to her feet rang, and Mary grabbed it.

  “Hi. Mom?”

  “Nataaa-sia!” Mary whispered the name, because, as soon as she heard the kid’s voice, it happened. In Mary’s chest the hard rock of her anger loosened and tumbled, and rising up like volcanic froth inside her was all the love she felt for her daughter. Why couldn’t she have the rest of it, too? The patience to be a real mother. It always happened like this: that jolt of love, then the regret chasing right after it. The toughness Mary used to talk to the world disappeared. No one but Natassia heard the voice talking now, saying, “Oh, honey.”

  “I know, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  Mary and Natassia had begun talking to each other in this gentle whisper when Natassia was a little girl, three or four years old, staying with Lotte and David, or with Ross and one or another of his girlfriends. Mary was always away dancing, but no matter where in the world she was, Mary called Natassia every night, and when she did, Natassia turned her back on everyone she was living with and told Mary her secrets—that Lotte had cooked a dinner that was too creamy, that Ross’s girlfriend was wearing stupid clothes, that Ross was acting dumb again (which meant, to Mary, that he was probably getting high too often). These were Natassia’s small whispered secrets, and from across oceans, across state lines, across town, Mary would whisper back, “I know, Natassy, none of them are perfect, but you toughen up and be nice to them, and I’ll see you soon.”

  As Natassia got older, there were fewer confidences, the separations became a way of life, but Mary and Natassia held on to their habit of whispering on the phone. In those voices, they could say anything to each other, and now Mary said softly into the receiver, “Natassia, honey. What the fuck’s going on, sweetie?”

  “They said I was shoplifting.”

  “Were you?”

  Silence. The air was hardening. Lately the whispering never lasted long.

  “Natassia, who’s they?” Mary stepped up onto the wide, low windowsill and leaned her forehead against the windowpane. “Where were you?”

  “At Ralph Lauren, on Madison and Seventy-second.”

  “So you were shoplifting?” Nothing. Mary scratched her knee against the window screen. “Answer me.”

  “M-o-m-m.”

  “Answer me.”

  “It’s the BF’s birthday this week.”

  Mary jumped down from the windowsill and landed flat on both feet. The whispers were over. “You stole from a store for your frigging boyfriend? Are you crazy?” she screamed, forgetting everything she’d learned in therapy. Cather was always telling Mary to try not to scream at Natassia, to try expressing her anger with questions and gentle talk. Right now, though, Mary was tired and pissed, and she bagged all the chitchat and took the shortcut straight to her anger. “Natassia, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “I just want his birthday to be nice, Mom. He hasn’t had a nice birthday in, like, years. He told me that. He can’t remember his last nice birthday.”

  “Well, neither can I. Adults never have nice birthdays. This man is manipulating you, Natassia. Can’t you see that?”

  “Well, at least when it was my birthday he made a bigger deal out of it than you did. And he hardly even knew me then.”

  “You stop trying to play hardball with me. I want you to tell me the truth right now. How old is this guy? And where did he come from?”

  Ready to hear the truth, thinking she really was going to get it, Mary sat down on the edge of the windowsill, but she wasn’t wearing underwear, and a paper clip jabbed her in the butt. She jumped up, strode over to the pile of dirty clothes, pulled on underpants, stepped onto the couch, and sat on one of the arms. “Where’s he from, Natassia?”

  “I don’t know exactly how old, and that’s the truth. I’m not lying to you.”

  “Listen, girl,” Mary said, shuffling things around on the coffee table until she found a cigarette and matches. Then, because she didn’t know what to say next, she said, “You are grounded. For the next two weeks, until we get this mess straightened out, you are grounded. You are home every night.”

  “Sorry, Mom.” Natassia’s voice had recently assumed some new, adult tones—deeper, detached, tinged with resolve. Even talking gibberish she sounded grown-up. “His birthday’s tomorrow, so I can’t stay home this week.”

  “This is not a dinner invitation. You will do it.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “You will.”

  “Make me. How’re you making me from all the way up there?”

  Mary sighed, stepped off the couch, kicked open the screen door, and went outside in nothing but her T-shirt and underwear to sit on the stone-step stoop of the greenhouse. The gardens were nothing now but a darker dark in the black of the night. No one was around, and Mary didn’t care who saw her. She lit her cigarette, exhaled. For several minutes over the long-distance telephone line, nothing more than this was happening. Not one good thing would come from this call. Lotte would just pay the phone bill.

  Mary rolled her neck. Natassia heard it crack. “Gross, what was that? Your neck? You should take care of your bones, Mom. You’re going to end up with osteoporosis.”

  Cather was always telling Mary that anyone could feel love for a kid, that was easy, but if Mary wanted to be a mother she was going to have to follow up. “Mothering,” Cather said, “is follow-up.” It suddenly seemed to Mary very foolish that she was seeing a shrink to learn how to be a mother. This, Cather would say, is resistance.

  Screw Cather and her resistance. From dance, Mary knew one important truth, probably the only important truth: action comes from desire; if you want to move, you will move. The thing that had made Mary step into the studio every day, all those years, was the surety that there were possibilities for her within the space of the dance floor. She just didn’t want to step into motherhood. There was nothing there she wanted for herself. All at once, Mary felt that huge tiredness again. This kept happening to her lately. She’d read about diseases that began this way. Maybe she was getting ready to die. Maybe this overpreened garden would be her burial plot. A real joke.

  Finally, Natassia asked, “Was Nora’s fun this weekend?”

  “I just do not like the idea of this guy, Natassia. He’s too old for you. He’s using you. I don’t like any of it.”

  “Yeah, Mom, but I do.”

  “Natassia.” Mary touched the tip of her cigarette to a patch of dry skin on her foot, held it there until she felt the burn. “What am I supposed to do with you? What am I supposed to do?”

  FOR HOURS AFTER THAT PHONE CALL, Mary was awake, lying on her futon on the floor. In the middle of the night, still sleepless, she ai
med the remote control at the TV, turned it on. As she tapped her pipe against the edge of the ashtray to empty out the dead tobacco, she clicked through the channels. There was no cable in the greenhouse, no MTV. There was fuzzy NBC and CBS. The PBS station came in clearest. A nature show was on. A mother cheetah named Duma was watching, helpless, as her four cubs were being killed by lions in the jungle. A storm came up. Windy rain whipped the palm trees. When the lions finally went away, Duma tried to drag what was left of her little cub corpses to a safe, dry spot.

  “But then,” the show’s invisible narrator said in his calm PBS voice, so much like the voice of God, all-knowing and unmoved, “Duma has no choice but to leave her cubs to the rain and the predators.”

  “See,” Mary said to the TV, wiping her eyes, “it’s not just me. You do what you can. That’s all you can do.”

  In the next scene, filmed a year later, Duma was running with her second litter of cubs. “Slut,” Mary said to the TV, but she was happy for Duma’s second chance. When the cubs gathered around their mother’s teats, she was slit-eyed with pleasure, or with pain. A vulture that looked like George C. Scott flew above them, but it kept its distance. The mother will do it right this time. Duma’s cubs needed to eat and grow, so she went out into the bush and came back with some lesser, slower jungle-being to feed to her babies. How sorrowful all those beasts looked when they finally had some prey in their mouths.

  Mary filled her pipe and lit it again while Duma’s new cubs ran wild in the jungle. “And after a year,” the cool voice of the narrator said, “one day, as the cubs are playing with their mother”—they were chasing her, she was chasing them, playing tag and hide-and-go-seek, everybody happy—“their mother leaves them. Leaves them to survive on their own.”

  In mid-game. She just left. The cubs looked around and their mother was gone.

  “Jeez,” Mary said, “even I wouldn’t do that.”

  CHAPTER 5 :

  AUGUST

  1989

  The next morning, Mary got on the case right away. Even before making her coffee, she called Lotte to say she would be down in the city by that afternoon to take care of Natassia’s mess.

  “No big rush, dear,” Lotte said. “David was able to take care of the legalities.”

  “Already?” Mary was spinning her asthma inhaler on the kitchen counter, Russian-roulette-style. “How? When?”

  “Last night. We remembered that one of David’s old authors is a detective. The guy made a few phone calls—what’s his name?—I can’t remember. He wrote a few weak mysteries that never did very well. Anyway, he called the police and—”

  “The detective-writer called?”

  “Yes, and he found out that the report written up by the store’s security guard was badly botched. You know, they hire these kids who aren’t trained and who don’t care—and why should they care, really, for what they’re paid? So now it looks as if the store doesn’t have a leg to stand on. They’re dropping the charges.”

  Mary took the inhaler out of her mouth. “Dropping the whole thing?” Her breathing changed, slowed. “The whole mess?”

  “Natassia’s name and personal information are on file with the manager at Ralph Lauren, and they don’t want her shopping there anymore.”

  “She shouldn’t have been in there to begin with.”

  “Well, I agree with you. Imagine those girls shopping on Madison Avenue like middle-aged matrons. I guess their next stop would have been across the street at Pierre Deux, to look over drapery fabrics.”

  Mary smiled into the phone. Even in a crisis, Lotte could cheer Mary up.

  A FEW HOURS LATER, down in the city, Mary was standing in the dim, tile-floored hallway outside of Lotte and David’s Upper West Side apartment, leaning against the door, listening. Her pelvis was doing Kegel exercises, tightening and releasing. Inside the apartment, Natassia was playing the violin—a new piece, some waltzy thing. Mary stared at the Amnesty International sticker stuck on the door, just below the tarnished brass peephole. She gripped her key until it pinched her palm, punishing herself for being so afraid. What can the kid do to me? Mary had known enough to come down to the city to talk to Natassia. Now that she was here, though, she had no clue what she was supposed to do next.

  Natassia, on the violin, was working her way up the strings to a high note. She almost missed it. Mary winced.

  Why wouldn’t Natassia be as malleable as a dancer and let Mary choreograph? Lots of dancers let Mary show them what to do. They trusted her judgment. Then they worked together—dancers and choreographer—so nobody looked stupid onstage. Why did Natassia do nothing but blow Mary off?

  Mary unlocked the door and yelled “Hello?” so Natassia wouldn’t get scared when she heard footsteps. “Hey, Natassia?”

  Natassia stopped playing and yelled, “Shit.”

  “Well, hello to you, too.” As Mary walked down the hallway, her sneakers smacked the wood floor. She stopped in the archway of the living room. “Why aren’t you dressed yet? It’s almost three o’clock.”

  “You ruined it.”

  “What?”

  “I’m making a violin tape for the BF, for his Walkman, and you ruined it. This is the third time I tried.”

  The room was a mess—sheets of music, a bowl of cereal milk, shopping bags, a bathrobe, bed pillows, old photo albums, a banana peel, a stack of Blockbuster videos, newspapers—the debris of several different projects all over the chairs and the couch. Natassia, too, was a mess. The scene might have been normal for anybody else’s daughter, but Natassia had never been a messy person. Even as a little girl, after just a few weeks of Montessori, she’d been focused enough to finish and put away one game or homework assignment before beginning another, and she’d always been a pain in the butt about wanting her clothes to be clean. Seeing her now, Mary felt embarrassed, as if she had walked in on someone in a state of abandon that should have been private. The thought rose up inside of Mary: My daughter is undone by love. She told Natassia, “You need to wash your hair.”

  “I know that. And I need to shave my legs and iron the shirt I bought for him. I have a whole list here.” And in fact, on the coffee table, there was a legal pad with a long list written in Natassia’s slim, upright handwriting. Out of habit, Mary scanned the page for secrets. “Mom, please, would you iron for me? I’m really rushed.” While the tape rewound, Natassia held the tape recorder tenderly on her lap, as if it were a kitten.

  Mary pulled in her abdominals. “Lotte told you I was coming here to talk to you.”

  “I’m meeting him at seven o’clock for his birthday dinner, and I still have to get his gifts together and do all this other stuff.” The tape recorder clicked. “Okay,” Natassia said, and set the machine on the coffee table.

  “I told you last night,” Mary said, dropping her backpack at her feet and crossing her arms sternly over her middle (like Yul Brynner in The King and I), “you’re grounded for two weeks.”

  Natassia swung her long frizzy ponytail over her right shoulder and lifted the violin, which was the same auburn color as her hair. Natassia’s hair had the texture of Lotte’s—thick and electrified, tight tiny waves all over the place. When it was dirty, like now, it didn’t look greasy; it looked stopped, halted. “Okay, quiet now,” Natassia said. “This time it has to be perfect.”

  “Why didn’t you think of taping this gift for him before you went into Ralph Lauren with hot little fingers?”

  “M-o-m-m, quiet. Please. Will you please switch the tape recorder on when I give you the signal?”

  As she sat up straight on the edge of the sofa with her pink cotton nightgown pulled up above her knees, Natassia’s long legs stuck out in sharp angles, like Ross’s basketball legs. Mary watched Natassia lift her chin to make room for the violin. She raised the bow and nodded her head toward the tape recorder. “Okay, Mom. And this time it has to be perfect. No background noise. Come on, turn it on, please.”

  Unsure if she was making an idiot’s conce
ssion or an intelligent negotiation, Mary hit the START button. Natassia’s bow bit into the strings.

  While Natassia played, Mary sat on the floor, leaning her back against the archway, smoking her cigarette, watching. The kid really is a mess. Mary knew that if she got up close, Natassia would smell stale and sweaty. Her lips were red, worried and chapped, licked raw. Mary hated the waltz Natassia was playing, and it embarrassed Mary to see how nervous Natassia was as she picked her way through a tricky fast part. Natassia played the violin like a little girl, keeping the waltz sugary. Mary fought the urge to interrupt and say, “Slow down for the legato. Jazz up the staccato. Vary the rhythm.” But if Mary said anything, she’d have to hear the piece again.

  She did have to hear it again. To make sure she had the most perfect recording, Natassia put in another blank tape and played her piece one more time. Mary lit a second cigarette and bit her cuticles. Natassia had always been thorough and precise preparing her school projects, but it was driving Mary crazy now to see how afraid the kid was to screw up. Sometimes people like this showed up in Mary’s dance classes—skilled, capable, but so fucking careful. Nothing oozed out of them but fear and worry, and still they wanted to be professional dancers. If you want it, you can’t be afraid of it. Mary felt sick to see the relief on Natassia’s face when she played the difficult phrase without missing a note. All for a guy. Never had Natassia seemed silly to Mary until now, in love. Natassia played the last syrupy section, inching toward the inevitable conclusion.

  “Okay,” Mary demanded, lighting her third Camel, ready for business, “now tell me what happened at Ralph Lauren.”

  “It was so stupid.” While her recording rewound, Natassia knelt next to the coffee table.

  “Uh-uh-uhn,” Mary scolded.

  “What? Oh.” Natassia’s thumb had found its way into her mouth. “Sorry.”