Be Careful What You’re Grateful For
A friend of mine once drove from Los Angeles to Yonkers in a flight of panic. Straight through. No pause to see a landmark. No stop to collect two hundred dollars. No foray to a diner he’d heard about in the news. He just jumped in his car and drove.
Josh was living on the West Coast, but he hailed from the East which is where his parents still lived in a house not on the Scarsdale side of Cherrywood Road. The twisty street he grew up on cut through Westchester County serving as a dividing line for zip codes and all that they came bearing. Sixteen Cherrywood sat on the Yonkers side – lower taxes, worse schools, spotty garbage pick-up. Josh’s parents wanted the cash. It was a purposeful pick. Despite a knot of cluttered and clogged familial lines, on the heels of a knock-down-drag-out with his once-in-a-lifetime-girl who wasn’t yet his girl, home is where J ran.
Without warning, he simply showed up on the flagstone stoop.
When he walked through the threshold of the split-level house, Josh’s mom said, instinctively, as if encountering a postman who used the front door instead of the box by the street, “What the hell are you doing here?”
Her candor, though not at all unpredicted, still caught him a bit off-guard. He’d not thought about what might happen when he got there. He’d only cut and run.
“Ines and I had a horrible fight,” he said. “She freaked and I panicked.”
“You panicked,” his mom repeated flatly, returning the words like a run-of-the-mill groundstroke. The kind you hit back without thinking.
Then with a glob of odd generosity, “Do you love her?” The question landing like a drop shot with Roger Federer spin.
“I do,” Josh said, perhaps a bit reluctantly, but more so as a fact he wasn’t even certain was one until the words formed in his mouth and made their way into the air. (He didn’t really know for years.)
“I’m not asking if you want to marry her,” she said at a decibel for neighbors on each side of the tax line to hear, “I’m just asking if you love her.” She shook her head.
“Yes.” he responded resolutely, his voice rising to rival hers, “I do.”
“Then what are you doing here?” his mother snapped, the jagged edges of her words cutting new incisions while closing others up.
The next morning when he awoke, he got in the car and retraced the tracks of his 40-hour cross-country drive.
Josh’s mom had never been a fan of Ines. Had she had a pick in the who’s-my-son-dating draft, Ines would not have been selected. Not in round one. Or two. Or three. Or maybe at all. Ines came carrying baggage. The kind you can’t leave by the curb in hopes that somebody will inadvertently pick up and put on another plane. She had a past littered by marooned marriages (plural), she was considerably older than J (so much so that grandchildren would not be in the cards), and she was in show business (“never trust actors, you can’t be sure when they’re acting.”) Ines came hauling stuff that stayed. A relationship with her would make for Josh a life quite different from the one his mother had kept on lock-down inside her head. Sending her only son out the door back to the girl who would re-direct the course of things was and was NOT what she intended.
And yet it’s what she did.
Looking out the window of the house deliberately purchased on Cherrywood Road, she involuntarily kept kindness at bay. She wasn’t grateful for much about the moment, but she was grateful her son was in love.
The years that followed chased a cranky, crooked path.
Josh and the muse of his flight eventually married (though who married whom is a point of distinction still). His life—their lives, his and Ines’s with one another—became the stuff of want-to-ride rollercoasters. At least to the two of them. The next fifteen years with Josh’s mother, however, were laced with awkward avoidance, sentiment and terse I-told-you-not-tos. “My mother was a world-class Olympic medalist in grudge-holding,” J once said. He walked on a high wire suspended between two polarizing loves.
Though all the goop Josh’s mom had seen as checks on the con side of the list didn’t disappear, marks she couldn’t have predicted kept popping up on the pro side of the ledger to somehow balance things out. Secretly aware of her own struggles, J’s mother eventually succumbed to what Ines had to do to be Ines. Softening was not his mom’s forte, but when it hit her, her shoulders dropped. She told Josh she finally saw Ines for who she was. J said, “Don’t tell me! Tell her.” She did and the arteries opened.
The two women who deeply loved my friend lived their way to a very good place. They built a telephone kinship that fortified one another through their final years. A friendship that even cleared some of the corrosion between the mother and the son.
While Josh’s mom would not be a candidate for the Good Mother Hall of Honor, the son that survived her cauldron of love came out a marred and marvelous multi-faceted man. It’s hard to part and parcel what to be grateful for. Alchemy is the great unknown.