“In its liberal zeal to understand, to accept, to heal, it reduces the grand tragicomedy of love and lust to a Hallmark card.”
There were ways in which her mother’s kindnesses could be seen as real and truthful. There were ways in which anything could be transformed in the brain into something positive, Greer thought. After all, the twisting of words and meanings of events was the kind of work that employed some people: lawyers, novelists, journalists, marketers, the people who were paid to falsify and narrativize the world. But, still, she could not totally turn her mother into someone who was wholly kind, no matter how much she tried. There was always something lurking just beneath the surface, a kind of false hospitality that belied its selfishness with every overture. When tracked over the years, all of the offers of kindness were always bound up with something else. A stay at her mother’s house would coincide with her pastor visiting for supper and oh, what a beautiful surprise, he gets to meet you, or an offer to use the beach house she’d purchased with her new husband was always saddled with a last minute request to just please take a look at the hot water tank, would you? It’s been acting funny.
So this request, a request to meet them at the beach house for a weekend, left her waiting for the kindness to shake itself and reveal what was really going on. Despite that, Greer packed up her things, loaded a reed mat still sandy from last summer, two bathing suits (both black), a half-used tube of suntan lotion and three magazines she bought at Port Authority and made her way from New York City down the coast to South Carolina on the train. The house was on Defusky Island, a small place that wasn’t very tourist friendly and so didn’t have much to offer in the way of attractions. Time spent there mostly consisted of sun, sand dunes, kissing bug bites, and the bottle of wine her mother opened every day at five on the dot.
When she arrived, after train and bus and cab, she was tired. Just leaving the city was such an ordeal that it worked almost as a wall to keep her in most of the time. It was why people came and stayed, even though it was so hard there. It was, in some ways, easier than trying to get free of the place. Her mother and her stepfather were waiting for her at the house, her mother with a pink drink in a martini glass in her hand, a tiny fragile umbrella floating in it. That was nice of her, Greer thought, and couldn’t think of an ulterior motive for the welcome cocktail so accepted it happily.
“We’re just so glad you’re here,” her mother said. “Aren’t we?” His stepfather nodded dutifully.
“So glad,” he said.
Most of what he did was parrot her mother and that was fine with Greer, honestly. She’d rather that than have to hear his actual opinions on things, which seemed more troubling, even, that her mother’s. At this, her stepfather stepped aside and Greer thought it was so she could find her way into the house, have space to bring her bag through the doorway, but instead, behind his hulking frame was a smaller younger man.
“This is Mark,” her stepfather said, as if that would explain anything.
“Hi, Mark,” Greer said and Mark seemed to notice the strangeness, so stepped toward her and said, “I’m Howard’s colleague at work.” Again, he said this as if it explained anything. “Your mom and Howard invited me up for the weekend."
Greer’s head was reeling. She shook his hand and they said a few things to each other, Greer smiling and drinking her pink drink—Cosmopolitan, her mother had whispered when she handed it over, conspiratorial grin on her face—until she felt she had said enough and could ask to go the guest room. Once she was in her room, unpacking the linen t-shirt and see through striped cover-up from her measly overnight bag, Greer’s mother appeared in the doorway.
“Isn’t Mark cute?” she said, again, conspiratorially.
“Cute? What? Why is he here this weekend?”
“We thought it might be nice for you two to meet.”
Oh, God, Greer’s stomach sank. They’d brought a man here to set her up with, and not just any man, but one of her stepfather’s business colleagues. A colleague who worked remotely in New York, they’d made sure to mention immediately. How fucking weird, Greer thought, as soon as she understood that the man had known about it before he’d left for Defusky.
Isn’t it strange, he’d said when they were first introduced, we were probably on the same train down here.
She could see how her mother had conceived of the whole weekend, sit down dinners every night where Greer would get to know this guy, this Mark, and through the salt air and the kind guiding hand of her mother, Greer would finally meet a nice man to be with. It was as if she thought the world really worked the way a Hallmark card worked. There was a Hallmark card for every occasion that her mother thought important and real—engagements, weddings, anniversaries, babies—but there were no cards for the things that Greer experienced—a stunning Grecian vacation with a man she really thought she was in love with for six months, anniversaries of living in New York alone (9 years this month), years of dating interesting men who taught her languages and how to cook and grow weed and take LSD—and until there were, Greer’s mother was in thrall to the idea of Greer making it to an event she could reasonably receive a card for.
The next morning, Greer got up extremely early so that she could see the sun rise and hopefully get out of the house before anyone else was up. But, it turned out, Mark was an early riser too, and he was lacing up his running shoes when she came quietly padding out of her bedroom with her flip flops in her hand. The whole house still smelled of the steaks they’d eaten last night and it almost made Greer sick, the smell of seared fat in the morning.
“I thought I’d be the only one up,” Greer said, and felt acutely aware of her sleep-stale mouth that she had decided not to brush this morning.
“I’m a morning person,” Mark said. “What were you going to do?”
“Take a walk,” she said. She couldn’t lie. She wanted to say, go have my period and cry on a rock for a while or go have phone sex with my lover in Thailand, something that he could never have invited himself along for. But, instead, she’d told him exactly what she was going to do.
“Mind if I join?”
“No, not at all.”
The beach was cold in the morning, the wind whipping over the foamy waves. The water, when it touched her feet, was like ice. It still wasn’t really warm enough to justify a stay at the house.
Mark talked and talked, asked her about her life and her work, told her things about himself. Nothing had made her feel more like an old maid than this. Mark still seemed sunny, happy, in search of a way to impress her. She felt like a dull stone, unable to be shined up for anyone anymore.
Greer began to think of the many failed love affairs and relationships she’d had. Maybe there was some of her mother’s simplicity to the way things worked. You either liked someone or you didn’t. You either made it to an anniversary or you didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t so hard.
“Do you want to take my clothes off?” Greer said.
“What?” Mark said, startled.
“I said, do you want to take my clothes off. Does looking at me in this dress make you want to take it off of me? Because that seems the simplest way to know if we really need to keep having this conversation.”
In her mind, this had seemed straightforward but vaguely flattering to Mark. In her mind, there was a little softness to it and it implied that she wouldn’t mind taking off his clothes. In practice, it was harsh and strange, the words coming as if she had pulled them out of thin air.
“I mean, yes, I do,” he said, “though I wouldn’t have phrased it that way, probably.”
A seagull hopped up towards them and reached down into the sand for a french fry. They were walking past a restaurant that had just opened for morning eggs on the beach. They stopped. They ate. Mark was kind to the waitress. Greer could see why her mother and Howard had chosen him. He was a good man, that could not be debated, she could sense it on him, even in just the thirty minutes they’d so far spent alone. He was a good man who wanted to take her clothes off.
That night at dinner she let herself fall into her mother’s version of things, into the nice life someone had imagined for everyone long ago. She pretended for a moment, a long moment, stretching through the whole weekend, that she was the kind of person who would have had a child at twenty-three had she just been given the opportunity. She and Mark traveled home together on the train and she felt it, some protected little bubble around them, the couple bubble, the sun-kissed glow, the just-actually-kissed glow. It wouldn’t last, it never did, that wasn’t what she wanted and she certainly couldn’t be coaxed into it by her mother. The train pulled into the underground stench hole that is the Port Authority and Greer felt her head rise from Mark’s shoulder—the soft, inviting shoulder—and get up, move back out into the strange city, walking away a few steps ahead of him.
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