Chapter One Chapter One I''ve never smoked, but it''s the last day of my mother''s shiva, so here we are. I have the cigarette between my teeth, standing on the back patio, looking at what was, just two months ago, a pristine white sectional, now weatherworn. My mother kept everything clean. She kept everything. Carol''s rules to live by: Never throw away a good pair of jeans. Always have fresh lemons on hand. Bread keeps for a week in the fridge and two months in the freezer. OxiClean will take out any stain.
Be careful of bleach. Linen is better than cotton in the summer. Plant herbs, not flowers. Don''t be afraid of paint. A bold color can transform a room. Always arrive on time to a restaurant and five minutes late to a house. Never smoke. I should say, I haven''t actually lit it.
Carol Almea Silver was a pillar of the community, beloved by everyone she encountered. In the past week, we have opened our doors to sales associates and manicurists, the women from her temple, waiters from Craig''s, nurses from Cedars-Sinai. Two bank tellers from the City National branch on Roxbury. "She used to bring us baked goods," they said. "She was always ready with a phone number." There are couples from the Brentwood Country Club. Irene Newton, who had a standing lunch with my mother at Il Pastaio every Thursday. Even the bartender from the Hotel Bel-Air, where Carol used to go for an ice-cold martini.
Everyone has a story. My mother was the first person you called for a recipe (a cup of onions, garlic, don''t forget the pinch of sugar) and the last one you called at night when you just couldn''t sleep (a cup of hot water with lemon, lavender oil, magnesium pills). She knew the exact ratio of olive oil to garlic in any recipe, and she could whip up dinner from three pantry items, easy. She had all the answers. I, on the other hand, have none of them, and now I no longer have her. "Hi," I hear Eric say from inside. "Where is everyone?" Eric is my husband, and he is our last guest here today. He shouldn''t be.
He should have been with us the entire time, in the hard, low chairs, stuck between noodle casseroles and the ringing phone and the endless lipstick kisses of neighbors and women who call themselves aunties, but instead he is here in the entryway to what is now my father''s house, waiting to be received. I close my eyes. Maybe if I cannot see him, he will stop looking for me. Maybe I will fold into this ostentatious May day, the sun shining like a woman talking loudly on a cell phone at lunch. Who invited you here? I tuck the cigarette into the pocket of my jeans. I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence. I am incapable of understanding that she will not pick me up for lunch on Tuesdays, parking without a permit on the curb by my house and running inside with a bag full of something--groceries, skin-care products, a new sweater she bought at Off 5th. I cannot comprehend that if I call her phone, it will just ring and ring--that there is no longer anyone on the other end who will say, "Katy, honey.
Just a second. My hands are wet." I do not imagine ever coming to terms with the loss of her body--her warm, welcoming body. The place I always felt at home. My mother, you see, is the great love of my life. She is the great love of my life, and I have lost her. "Eric, come on in. You were standing out there?" I hear my father''s voice from inside, welcoming Eric in.
Eric, my husband who lives in our house, twelve and a half minutes away, in Culver City. Who has taken a leave of absence from Disney, where he is a film executive, to be with me during this trying time. Whom I''ve dated since I was twenty-two, eight years ago. Who takes out the garbage and knows how to boil pasta and never leaves the toilet seat up. Whose favorite show is Modern Family and who cried during every episode of Parenthood . Whom just last night, I told in our kitchen--the kitchen my mother helped me design--that I did not know if I could be married to him anymore. If your mother is the love of your life, what does that make your husband? "Hey," Eric says when he sees me. He steps outside, squints.
He half waves. I turn around. On the glass patio table, there is a spread of slowly curling cheese. I am wearing dark jeans and a wool sweater, even though it is warm outside, because inside the house it is freezing. My mother liked to keep a house cold. My father only knows the way it''s been. "Hi," I say. He holds the door open for me, and I step past him inside.
Despite the temperature, the house is still as welcoming as ever. My mother was an interior designer, well respected for her homey aesthetic. Our house was her showpiece. Oversize furniture, floral prints, and rich-patterned textures. Ralph Lauren meets Laura Ashley meets a very nice pair of Tod''s loafers and a crisp white button-down. She loved textiles--wood, linen, the feel of good stitching. There was always food in the fridge, wine in the side door, and fresh-cut flowers on the table. Eric and I have been trying to plant an herb garden for the past three years.
I smile at Eric. I try to arrange my mouth in a way I should remember but that feels entirely impossible now. I do not know who I am anymore. I have no idea how to do any of this without her. "Katy, you''re grieving," he said to me last night. "You''re in crisis; you can''t decide this now. People don''t get divorces in the middle of a war. Let''s give it some time.
" What he did not know is that I had. I had given it months. Ever since my mother got sick, I''d been thinking about the reality of being married to Eric. My decision to leave Eric had less to do with my mother''s death and more to do with the remembrance of death in general. Which is to say I began to ask myself if this was the marriage I wanted to die in, if this was the marriage I wanted to see me through this, my mother''s illness, and what would, impossibly, remain after. We didn''t have kids yet--we were still kids ourselves, weren''t we? Eric and I met when we were both twenty-two, seniors at UC Santa Barbara. He was an East Coast liberal, intent on going into politics or journalism. I was a Los Angeles native, deeply attached to my parents and the palm trees, and felt that two hours away was the farthest I could possibly go from home.
We had a class together--Cinema 101, a prereq we were both late in taking. He sat next to me on the first day of the spring semester--this tall, goofy kid. He smiled, we started talking, and by the end of class he''d stuck a pen through one of my ringlets. My hair was long and curly then; I hadn''t yet started straightening it into submission. He pulled his pen back, and the curl went with it. "Bouncy," he said. He was blushing. He hadn''t done it because he was confident; he had done it because he didn''t know what else to do.
And the uncomfortableness of this, the ridiculousness of his, a total stranger''s, pen through my hair, made me laugh. He asked me to get a coffee. We walked to the commons and sat together for two hours. He told me about his family back home in Boston, his younger sister, his mother, who was a college professor at Tufts. I liked the way he saw them, the women in his family. I liked the way he spoke about them--like they mattered. He didn''t kiss me until a week later, but once we started dating, that was it. No breaks, no torrid fights, no long-distance.
None of the usual hallmarks of young love. After graduation, he got a job at the Chronicle in New York, and I moved with him. We set up shop in a tiny one-bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I worked as a freelance copywriter for anyone who would have me, mostly fashion blogs whose hosts were grateful for help with language. This was 2015, the city had rebounded from financial ruin, and Instagram had just become ubiquitous. We spent two years in New York before moving back to Los Angeles. We got an apartment in Brentwood, down the street from my parents'' house. We got married, we bought a starter home, farther away in Culver City.
We built a life that perhaps we were too young to live. "I was already thirty when I met your father," my mother told me when we first moved back. "You have so much time. Sometimes I wish you''d take it." But I loved Eric--we all did. And I had always felt more comfortable in the presence of adults than young people, had felt since the time I was ten years old that I was one. And I wanted all of the trappings that would signal to others that I was one, too. It felt right to start young.
And I couldn''t help the timeline. I couldn''t help it right up until last night, when I suddenly could. "I brought over the mail," Eric says. My mother is dead. What could any piece of paper possibly say that would be worth reading? "You hungry?" It takes me a moment to realize that my father has asked this of Eric, and another second to understand that the answer is yes, actually, Eric is nodding his head yes, and a third, still, to realize neither knows how to prepare a meal. My mother cooked for my father, for all of us--she was great at it. She''d make elaborate breakfasts: goat cheese frittatas with scooped-out bagels. Fruit salad and cappuccinos.
When my father retired five years ago, they''d begun to eat outside, setting up on the veranda for hours. M.