Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

She’d heard, before, the death knell of a relationship—or rather it was something feelable, like a storm in the air—and in her experience it began in this way, with small lies of propriety that amassed into little towers, lulls in conversation or split seconds of strange eye contact or a line or two spoken by the other person that made you think huh, that’s not what I expected you to say. Of course she always hoped her relationships, as they were beginning, wouldn’t meet their ends, but the fact was that she’d always expected them to. She hadn’t expected it with Helen, though, until that moment.

Julia would prefer to take the train to work, would happily be halfway downtown right now, trying her hand at the crossword while someone else handled the navigation, were it not for her daughter, or perhaps more accurately were it not for her own weakness, her own failure to rear a pleasant, punctual child who can make it to homeroom every day without the aid of an eleventh-hour parental rescue.

She does a lap around the kitchen island, collecting a banana, a Clif bar, and her aluminum water bottle, dutifully awaiting her in the dish drainer, hand-washed last night by her mother/hostage, whom she does not acknowledge before disappearing out the side door.

She’s not always unpleasant, and it’s in moments like this—moments when her daughter seems beleaguered instead of belligerent, just plain tired—that Julia can most readily access love for her; it’s in moments like this that their problematic cycle of coddling and enabling gets renewed; Julia would be late to work for the rest of her life for just a few quiet moments like this in the car with her daughter, who isn’t elementally an asshole, not on an atomic level, just—with her chewed-down nails and her ridiculous shorts—seventeen.

“There’s no—point,” she said. And she meant it; there weren’t enough hours in the day. It was like looking closely at the construction of an old house: once you started looking, really looking, you saw that almost everything needed fixing, and that many of the fixings were contingent on the fixing of other things first, so you had to get the order right: ergo, if the house was still standing, and not actively on fire, it probably made the most sense to just look away.

She would never be as proud of her life as Helen was of hers, as readily defensive of her positions. She would never feel as simplistically satisfied with her own existence.

And why should he care? It wasn’t his fault she was doing what she was doing; it wasn’t his responsibility to comprehend the magnitude of the fact that she was in another state and nobody knew. She wondered how it felt to be so unencumbered, a cocky, handsome young man with rich parents who loved you madly and the belief that everyone wanted to hear what you had to say.

In solidarity, she straightened in her seat, adopted the confident suburban mom authority she pulled out at parent-teacher conferences and Build-A-Bear. “It is a huge investment.”

It was, she supposed, easier to have compassion for someone else’s mom than it was to have it for your own.

She wept in the shower some mornings and shuffled through the Trader Joe’s checkout line like a refugee purchasing organic mini peanut butter cups and she had no idea who she was, ever, not for a single minute of a single day, but Mark was right that it was too late to change her mind. That she’d signed up for this whether she wanted it or not, signed up for Ben, who of course she wanted, the tiny person who relied on her. And she had been reliable; until today, she had been.

He’ll flip if we’re late; you know how nervous he gets; I don’t want him to just be waiting there.” With his little backpack, and today’s craft, her boy.

Alma appears to have been crying: her daughter’s face is red, scrunched, like the baby she’d been at the beginning, except now it’s streaked with mascara and much, much sadder, or if not that—Alma had felt her infant discontent deeply, and expressed it with gusto—at least a more complex sadness, because sadness got more confusing as you got older, accreted and layered and camouflaged itself until the source was buried beyond discovery.

She feels the unique guttural panic, an instantaneous splenetic throb that starts up right away whenever she sees them hurting, and she remembers to be terrified for her daughter, terrified in all the usual ways one must be terrified when raising a young woman, all the ways the world will try to make her vulnerable, try to stymie her and slight her, to take away what’s hers.

she knows that short of reabsorbing her daughter into her own body there is no way at all to protect her, especially now that she’s on the precipice, about to leave home.

Something that has always astounded her, particularly since her children were born, is how truly, consistently bad the universe is at time management; instead of meting out crises at manageable intervals it seems to deposit them in erratically spaced piles, like the salt trucks in the winter, each pile containing a rainbow of miscellaneous emergencies.

But there are days she wishes that her daughter better understood the tenuousness of it, wishes she could conceptualize the possibility of losing it; she sometimes wants to take Alma by the shoulders and warn her to appreciate Mark’s steadfastness—his presence, the constancy of it, as careworn and certain as a kitchen towel—and to contemplate, if even for a moment, what it might feel like to wake up and find it gone, as Julia had.

nothing of substance, nothing about how to actually live, about how to move easily through the world or fall in love or have confidence in her abilities, nothing about how to stay upright, when there are so many forces conspiring to knock her down.

Her whole family makes fun of her efforts to ameliorate problems with carbohydrates and togetherness; she has always wondered if the tendencies come from some lingering vestige of her father, her latent Italian genes within, or if they came from Helen Russo, the woman who taught her that everything could be solved, or at least made momentarily better, by a glass of wine or the smell of baking bread.

So she makes neon orange macaroni from the box, which Alma had been devoted to, in young childhood, with a ferocity that they used to find concerning. She holds her breath as she knocks on her daughter’s door, bowl in hand.

She’d braced herself for the fallout, for the painful disclosure of everything that had happened in the last few months, the last few years, all her uncertainties and darknesses and doubts and, most recently, her betrayal, which, funnily enough, had come to feel like the least serious thing overall, simply a stupid manifestation of less tangible things, everything that was wrong projected cartoonishly on a tiny screen. She’d been so ready for an explosion that the stillness scared her.

Was that not the point of being married, having to carry less?

It was then that she realized his insisting she not tell him was the meanest thing he could think to do back to her, forcing her to be alone with it, and it wasn’t until that moment—that flicker of cruelty from the nicest man on the earth—that she realized the magnitude of what she’d done, and the miracle of his still sitting beside her like this, of his not steering her into a snowdrift.

This was what she’d been waiting for all along, the inevitable door closing, and she wondered if she hadn’t perhaps been trying to accelerate the process by doing what she’d done.

It was a brazen thing, she thought, to disappear, much bolder than she was capable of. Her mother had always couched her father’s leaving as cowardice, but actually leaving—Julia didn’t begin to look at it this way until her mother left her too—had to take something like gumption; going away and staying away forever must have required a not insignificant amount of tenacity. How many times had she wanted to leave in the last few years? But she lacked the follow-through, the strength. She was not tenacious in the least.

“Me?” she asks, then: “Sure.” I’m obsolete, she does not say. My kids don’t need me anymore; my life feels, once again, like it might be unraveling; I think I might actually, at fifty-seven years old, need a mom, Mom. “I’m fine.”

You could get used to not having someone in your life but you could never completely stop wanting them there.

she felt the spectral weight of Helen’s gaze urging her to be confident, to fake it if she had

The baby was her secret with Mark, the secret that was replacing her old secret, the secret that they were sharing: the secret upon which they, together, were building a new foundation.

She had a tendency, she knew, to turn people into her enemies before they’d actually had a chance to wrong her, just for the sake of cleanliness.

was so much easier to be this way—had always been easier to be this way—than it was to look at anything directly.

She hadn’t been a bratty kid—she hadn’t been given the opportunity, really—but she found herself prone to meanness as a child in a way that always struck her as slightly unnatural, a knee-jerk distaste for most of those around her and a tendency—like a stewing, necromantically afflicted child from a movie—to silently wish for misfortune to befall classmates who had wronged her, or who had things she wanted.

she felt a very familiar feeling now, a kind of sweeping, generalized jealousy for lives that weren’t her own. She had never been good at imagining what normal people did, but that didn’t stop her from trying: other people awaiting their tardy unborn children were getting manicures with their moms and baking banana bread and listening to inspiring stories about their own arrivals into the world.

After she found the note the next morning, she got in the shower, which was the safest place to cry in the suburbs, and she stayed there until the water grew cool.

“Great light,” says her daughter, who has never in her life noticed light quality, and Julia feels, for a second, betrayed.

The consensus seems to be that mothers of the groom are supposed to look like old-timey stewardesses or the funereally coiffed corpses of Victorian children, lots of fussy little suits with square shoulders, stiff gauze and Peter Pan collars.

her first year out of college, a lost year, really, one of many in her twenties; the hole it left in her life was infinitesimal enough to have closed up almost immediately, like a lobe around the absence of an earring.

an utter lack of regard for her as anything beyond a little bit of fun. Not until Mark came along had she felt extant, and it had been mutual, hadn’t it, the two of them finding each other? One of the greatest gifts of her life, finding him. It’s

Surmountable things, problems that with the slightest exertion of energy could be solved, but problems too that aggregately amounted to a low-level current of mild despair.

She’d done everything she was supposed to do, and yet here she was, alone—and she liked being alone, and was good at being alone, but she’d started to feel too alone, like everyone else had figured out something she hadn’t and begun to leave her behind.

extremities that seemed to be awaiting the arrival of a larger body.

He had already cemented himself as kind and earnest—there were similarly kind, earnest, floppy-haired boys all over the Midwest—but this visible anxiety advanced him to a higher plane on which men took risks and feared the outcomes.

she leans back into his hand, still following with her eyes the floral, feral blur that is Alma: their daughter who had not so long ago been small enough to nap in the ninety-degree crooks between their wrists and their elbows.

There’s something about his face that seems to act as a magnet for the desperate and maligned, for the people who have been unsuccessful finding kindness elsewhere.

Bedtime with Alma used to be an unbelievably tedious production, hours of reading and singing followed by a breathtakingly slow creep backward through her bedroom door, an interminable back-and-forth of I love you.

Because it broke her heart to think of her daughter thinking like this, dreaming of dying. And because she, too, couldn’t choose which was worse, being the leaver or being left.

softened. Meeting Mark had been like finding a beloved old sweatshirt she hadn’t realized she’d lost. He smelled right; their bodies fit peaceably together. Like he’d been there all along.

She couldn’t believe how much more livable the world seemed with him around. Suddenly she wasn’t alone anymore; he’d arrived in her life with a strength of presence that she truly found baffling.

He was a surprise to her in all ways, a handsome, accomplished man with very kind eyes. The universe finally lobbing her a softball.

It was a knack you had to pick up, letting someone adore you.

She’d never been prone to sentimentality; never until she met him had she felt that warm liquidity in her chest, something about to spill over. But she didn’t know; she’d always heard that you just knew, and she’d as yet, in her lifetime, only experienced gut reactions of the dread variety.