A Theory of Relativity (7 page)

“Because I don’t want to die.”

“What, honey?”

“When you die, I have to die.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yes, I will.”

“You’ll be a big grown-up lady with lots of babies of your own, and the last thing you’ll want to do is die. You’ll be sad, but you’ll go on and you’ll remember me . . .”

“No, I’ll die, too.”

“No, you won’t. Stop this, Georgia. And anyway, Georgia, I promise I won’t die until you’re all ready for me to die . . .” Why did I smoke for ten years, Lorraine would think, at times like those; I didn’t even like it.

Why did I let my aunt Clara give me diet pills? Why don’t I take vitamin E and B12 every day? And C? And eat green peppers like potato chips
?
People in my family don’t die young, she’d thought. Holidays at her mother’s looked like the gathering of a coven. I’ll be one of them, she’d thought. I can promise.

“Are you sure you’re not going to die, Little Mom?”

“I’m sure, I promise.”

“Do you promise, you’ll always be my Mommy Dolphin?”

“Yes, I will.”

“You’ll always be my Mommy Dinosaur?”

“I promise.”

“You’ll always be my Mommy Koala, and bring me eucalyptus leaves?”

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“Always.” This, as the two of them cuddled in a nest of old comforters, munching graham crackers they imagined as leaves.

Georgia at twelve, with a pout like a shelf that Lorraine’s mother, Grandma Lena, said the birds would poop on. Georgia, shoving in Lorraine’s face a library book on the adopted adolescent, “It’s all here. You just wanted to replace the perfect baby you couldn’t have. Nice try.” Lorraine had followed Georgia to her locked bedroom door that day, putting her mouth against the crack, opening her memory wide to receive some vestigial wisdom, something to say that all her teachers training might have somehow instilled in her angry, fearful mother’s brain. How could anything comfort a child who felt like an understudy in the drama of her own family’s history?

“Georgia,” she’d said finally. “You’re my child. I only love you.” Silence.

“I love the mother who gave birth to you. I love the father who made her pregnant. I would let them come to live at our house if they would promise not to take you away.”

Silence.

“Of course, you replaced the baby I couldn’t have. You didn’t only replace her, you . . . erased her. She never existed. When you were little, I . . . people would sometimes think I’d given birth to you because we looked alike. At first, I got a kick out of that. I did want to feel like everyone else. But after a while, it bothered me. It was like I was letting people pretend it was better that you looked as though you came from me. I wished you were blond, like Gordie, and six feet tall, so you would know for sure I didn’t have to pretend that you came from my body to love you. I just love you, not some facsimile of me.” A tremor had overtaken her voice, and she’d imagined Georgia’s contempt, then Georgia’s rage. She was in there doing something awful, sawing her wrists, swallowing a whole bottle of Tylenol, making a rope of sheets. “Georgia!” she’d shouted, “Come out here. I’m going to go get a screwdriver and take off this lock!” And she would have, but as she turned to go, the door opened a crack, so that Lorraine could see the glow of the weird black light inside, and Georgia extended one hand, which her mother had taken, without a word, the Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 39

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two of them standing there until both their palms were hot and their wrists weary.

Lorraine thought, I would take that. I would be happy with heaven if it were only that one hand. I would go to church every day and stifle all my doubts and forbid my bitterness.

Georgia at fourteen.

Quick-marched up the walk at two in the morning by Dale Larsen, after having slid on the downspout to run to a hideous, dangerous midnight beer bash in the woods. Lorraine dragging Georgia up the stairs, growling through clenched teeth that they were going to have to move to Canada, slapping her on the butt and the arms and the back of the head all the way up to her bedroom, to the pillow dummy Georgia had made to suggest her innocent, sleeping shape. Who were the parents of these other kids? Alkies? Third-shifters? Didn’t they value their children’s lives? When Georgia told her, proudly—“
Life
is something you know nothing about, Mother”—that she was the only eighth-grader allowed, the rest of the crowd were seniors in high school or dropouts who worked at the lumberyard or the trout farm, dangerous barn-burner boys in tight jeans, Lorraine thought she would have to wear disguises in town to hide her shame and swollen eyes. It was with a rueful, shameful comfort that Lorraine realized, after high school began, that Dale Larsen’s own Stephanie was even worse, the international poster child for bad influences.

As he made his way up the walk after the accident, Dale must have thought of those long-ago days. Lorraine climbed up onto the bed, propping herself against the adjustable headboard where Georgia’s religious medal, with its swords and dragons, hung from a tack on a shred of red ribbon. Lorraine’s tears were so great in volume she felt she must be dissolving from within. If she stepped onto a scale, she would find herself pounds lighter, the way she and her sister Daphne would be when they were girls, after hours of running around the school’s track in rubber suits.

Gordon had been easier. Lorraine sometimes thought she had taken Gordon for granted. Like many second children, he’d chosen the role of compliant child, if only to ensure his share of the attention. Georgia Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 40

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ruled. Vixen, Lorraine’s father called her. Critical of Gordie, doting, bul-lying, forgiving, impressionable, sarcastic. He’d worshiped her. Had Lorraine ever wished she’d had two Gordies, two hardworking, calm children, who let her sleep nights—both as babies and as young adults?

Lorraine and Mark had never worried about him, even when he’d dived and climbed under and over the earth with EnviroTreks. Gordie knew himself. He knew his measure, how genial he was, how good-looking, how graceful. He didn’t rock the boat. Georgia was ever bemoaning something—her weight, her hair, hiding her brains one day, bragging about them the next. Lorraine had despaired of her daughter ever finding equilibrium.

Had she ever regretted Georgia? Had a stray ribbon of that regret found its way on high, like a banner drawn by a small plane? Lorraine had done her own reading, when Georgia entered her hellcat phase, and no matter what Lorraine said, Georgia had a comeback: “I don’t hate you just because adopted kids are supposed to have identity problems, Mom,” Georgia had once told her—her expression had been so blank that Lorraine’s first impulse, to laugh, curdled in her mouth—“I hate you personally.” Lorraine couldn’t count the nights she’d shaken Mark awake, Mark—who could have slept through the demolition of the roof—and insisted on being cradled, begging for reassurance about their daughter.

She’s a smart girl,
Mark murmured, over and over
. She’s too smart to
go too far.

Georgia graduated with honors. Then, despite all those high test scores, Georgia stayed home, working at The Soap Bubble, dating boys who would be farmers or salesmen, taking marketing classes at Woodruff Tech. A change had taken place. Georgia had forgiven her parents. Only when she was older, almost too old to fit in, when she was sure she could shelter under the wing of the little brother she’d bossed, had she followed Gordie to Florida State and met Ray. The grown Georgia was just like the baby Georgia reborn, a wistful young woman who liked baking smells and presents wrapped with cloth ribbon, who collected fairy-tale books, who made Lorraine laugh by holding her mother on her lap, who helped Nora with canning.

It seemed, when she’d moved back home as a married woman, that Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 41

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she’d almost never been away. Georgia and Lorraine had fallen in silly, sticky, cards-for-no-reason, mother-and-daughter love. Taller by three inches than her mother, Georgia had again been her baby dinosaur . . .

the frothy wedding, the textbook birth, Georgia clinging to Ray’s forearm on one side and her mother’s sleeve on the other, Gordon, wide-eyed, choosing that moment to proclaim that he would never again have unprotected sex, Georgia’s unwonted sensitivity, “I wish you could have given birth to me, Little Mama, because I feel so bad that you never got to have this feeling of . . . being the creator,” her sweet expan-siveness dissolving Lorraine’s surprising envy.

Georgia had been shy, that was all. As Keefer was shy. It had been fear that turned her angry. Fear of the big world.

The violation of this! Gordie might insist that there was no fairness or justice in nature, but Lorraine had been sure, until now, that there was. She had never, as an adult, doubted it, just as she had not doubted her ability to hear her children’s requests when they were still too young to talk. She’d put away her art-school disaffection and run to catch up with God. Why, then, had she and Mark, when time had already run out, been given the chance to raise a child so perfect—her very bilateral symmetry, digits in order, one almond eye spaced either side of a forceful nose, made Lorraine want to fall to her knees—and then had that chance revoked?

How would Keefer, the puree of Georgia and Ray, turn out? She had already been dragged through so much change. They had all tried to shield her. The Nyes had taken her for a full week after Georgia’s first chemo (the baby had come back drinking from a sippee cup, and Lorraine felt reproached for her laziness in letting her keep her bottle). But how could the best efforts of anyone give Keefer the babyhood she’d deserved? Ray could not have stayed at home full-time; the hospital bills alone would have sunk them. The baby could not have been away from Georgia, and Georgia could never have summoned the energy to take care of Keefer on her own. Thank God for Gordon’s predictable job, his stripped-down personal life and inexhaustible reserves of disposable time, his courage in taking leave even as a rookie teacher. Gordie, Lorraine believed, had given Geor-Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 42

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gia the best possible experience that her destruction could have per-mitted.

It must have been so hard for him.

Lorraine would have to equip Gordon with some sort of basic skills for raising Keefer before she could . . . before she could, what? Die?

Degrade? Though Gordon had become proficient at teasing Keefer into her sweet potatoes and out of her nastiest diapers, his role in the baby’s life still had consisted mainly of chasing her around the living room on all fours, growling like a bear.

But Gordon would be able to manage. Eventually. Gordon would have to manage. He would have to grow up faster. He would have to figure out that time was real and that he could not say whatever came into his head as soon as he thought it.

Lorraine noticed that she could no longer see her feet tucked against her headboard. The day had slipped past her window, the room into dimness as she lay necklaced in her tears. There, she’d thought. A day and a night and another day and another night evaporated. Georgia was decisively among the dead now, not the living, every minute drawing her further from her mother . . . Lorraine had done not a single thing but sit up and lie down, sit up and lie down and use the bathroom and refuse phone calls, even from Natalie Chaptman, though Natalie was the closest thing Lorraine had to a best friend, if she didn’t count Mark.

But Natalie’s husband was the funeral director, and Lorraine could not bring herself to have a conversation with someone holding a phone in a building where her daughter’s and son-in-law’s bodies lay. When the telephone rang yet again, she was in the midst of calling out to Mark to say she was asleep when he walked into the room.

“It was Diane and Big Ray; they’re coming over now.”

“Now?”

“Lor, they want to see us. They want to see Keefer.”

“She’s at Nora’s.”

“Nora’s on her way here. She’s bringing Keefer. Diane and Ray want to take her in the pool at their hotel.”

“I suppose that’s all right.”

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“I told them it would be fine.”

“I don’t think she’ll go to them.”

“I think she will . . .” Mark sat down on the bed, then lay down, tucking Lorraine’s head under his chin, pulling her over onto his chest.

“Are you . . . do you want to get up and change, or anything?”

“Why, Mark? Do I look like a slob?” The first time they’d met her, Diane had just come in off the tennis court. “I hate this weather,” she’d said to Lorraine. “I hate to perspire. And it’s worse if you work out. I’m a bad Southerner, for sure,” she’d said, and extended one perfectly French-manicured hand, silky as talcum powder. When Lorraine complimented her on her skirted shorts, Diane confided, “Honey, I have to buy them in the girls department at Neiman-Marcus. The missy sizes just fall right off me. . . .”

Over Mark’s exasperated protests, Lorraine had spent the evening at the hotel in Jupiter, throwing away her own clothes.

Now, as he looked her over where she lay on the bed, Mark said to Lorraine, “I don’t think you look like a slob, sweetie. But you might want to put on something that’s not quite so . . .”

“So what?”

“Well, wrinkled.”

“Okay,” Lorraine sighed. She walked into their closet and turned on the light, offended by the sight of so many brightly colored articles of clothing, so many inanimate things that outlasted people. She pulled out her most comfortable jeans and a white shirt that was . . . well, not very wrinkled. She then reached for a soft jersey pin-striped dress, underwear, and stockings, laying out her clothes in the order she would put them on, as she had since she was a child, bra, pants, slip . . . Mark interrupted her.