That first day, Margaret learned that Eleanor didn’t actually like coffee and that her wife was dead.
“My wife spent a lot of time here,” she said, gesturing to the café’s outdoor seating and chalkboard menu.
“She died a couple years ago.” Eleanor paused. “Actually, let’s be specific. She died three years ago. In a car crash.” Margaret had already known Eleanor was gay, in a theoretical way. Everyone knew Eleanor was gay.
It felt like a foolish thing to speculate about, but Margaret had been prone to what felt like foolishness about Eleanor for months now. Eleanor taught classes that Margaret took with names like “Sexuality and the Law” and “Queer Theory in Legal Studies.” She casually sprinkled in the names of activists and lawyers and experts that Margaret had memorized in undergrad as colleagues she had dinner with sometimes. Even as Margaret’s law school cohort spoke in class about life’s most intimate matters—the right to have sex with the people you wanted, the right to marry, the right to raise children—these were never topics put into the confines of their real existence.
And now Margaret realized Eleanor had been married, too, in a theoretical way but also a literal way. She had won the right to marry, had a wife whom she loved, watched that wife die, and then taught lectures to law students about these things in their least complicated meanings. Margaret felt breathless, to have this veil lifted in a way that felt carefully and exclusively for her.
“I’m so sorry,” Margaret said. They were sitting on the café’s patio, for anyone to see.
“It’s okay,” Eleanor said. “I know that there’s really nothing for anyone to say besides sorry. Which is fine. I just wanted to get that out of the way.”
Margaret tried to not to dwell on the end of Eleanor’s sentence. Out of the way for what? She felt certain she was missing something here. That she was overthinking, to believe Eleanor had invited her to coffee for anything other than coffee. Instead, she said, “My mom died a year ago, so I know what you mean.”
“I’m sorry,” Eleanor said.
Margaret raised her eyebrow, and Eleanor gave a hard, surprised laugh. She rubbed her face. “I really am sorry,” she said.
“Thank you,” Margaret said.
“A year ago is recent.”
“In a way it is,” Margaret said. In a year, Margaret had not improved at all in talking about this. Sometimes, she could feel herself slipping into a performance of grief, behaving the way she presumed daughters were supposed to grieve the dead. She felt like she had in high school theater productions, except now she should have been uniquely qualified for the role of mourning her own mother. “It feels like a long time now,” Margaret added.
“A year after Kris died, I was still useless,” Eleanor said. She swirled a droplet of honey so small into her tea that it seemed negligible. “I was a wreck. I wouldn’t have been talking to you like this, honestly.” Talking to me like what? Margaret wondered. She couldn’t imagine a poorly functioning Eleanor. Close up now, she could see that Eleanor wore a thin silver chain under her collared shirt. Her leather watch was four minutes fast. Eleanor didn’t glance away from Margaret once, even as a small child argued with his mother on the sidewalk and a group of teenagers yelled about nothing and a couple conspired in whispers as they left the café with a baguette. It was so flattering that Margaret felt frothy. She wondered what the two of them looked like to these strangers.
“I guess it was different. My mother was very ill,” Margaret said finally, which wasn’t a lie but felt like one, because she knew the kinds of assumptions this wording invited. “I had a long time to consider that one day she would die, so the mourning process began earlier,” she said, but this was even less true.
The coffee took place after the last class of the semester. Margaret had gone to office hours and said, “I can’t tell you how much this class has meant to me.” It seemed trite. She didn’t have better words to describe it.
Eleanor had stood, twisting around to find her coat. “Do you like coffee? Do you want to grab a coffee now?” She’d asked this easily, like breathing. “I biked today,” she added, “so I have a shorter commute than usual.”
For months, while a student of Eleanor’s, Margaret had exited each class feeling like a tuned fork. She frequently called somebody, anybody who would answer, just to talk about the weather and if their boyfriend would be coming to someone’s wedding in April. She didn’t mention the real reason she had called, which was that she wanted to ask: Have you ever stared at the back of somebody’s neck so long you felt like a Victorian damsel?
Margaret found herself tracking the transfer of white chalk dust from Eleanor’s fingertips to her black pants to the edge of her chin. She knew that to voice any of this would have been to diminish it, even as she didn’t know what it was.
Margaret could have continued pining like this because there was nowhere for the pining to go. She couldn’t verbalize Eleanor to other people without feeling silly: here is Eleanor in one of her many solid-colored suits; her hair cropped like a young boy’s, mouse-brown except for the whisper of gray at her temples. Eleanor looked like what she was: a fifty-year old law professor who ran a prestigious clinic, and had a rescue dog, and shopped at the Park Slope co-op, and biked home across the bridge when she could. Once, while standing on the same train platform, Margaret had seen Eleanor on her way home for the night, her typical brown oxfords, worn smooth like caramel, swapped for red Converse. Margaret wondered how she could have worded her excitement: You’ll never guess what happened today. I found out that one of my professors changes into sneakers for the subway. And I was the only one who saw it. Can you believe it? She felt as if she’d gotten away with a crime.
After that first coffee, the emails started. Eleanor sent Margaret an article about environmental law and honeybees. Up your alley? the subject line read. Margaret had already burrowed into bed by the time her phone lit up with the notification. It was from Eleanor’s personal address, which wasn’t perhaps very personal because it was merely her whole name spelled out. Margaret could have puzzled it out herself at any moment; could have, she realized now, sent a delicate hello to Eleanor anytime during the semester. She listened to the radiator crescendo. She lay in her bed straight on her back and watched the lights from outside climb across her ceiling.
She sounded the email out to herself until she could memorize it. From: eleanor.harris@gmail.com. To: mjb@glaw.edu. 11:33 p.m. Up your alley? Then a hyperlinked article from the Washington Post: “These environmental justice groups want to represent bees in the fight against climate change.” Sent from my iPhone. And then a lone initial, like a quick peck on the cheek: E.
Margaret imagined what Eleanor might have been doing when she composed the email. Whether she wore socks to bed, or liked to keep a glass of water on her nightstand, or left the dishes for the morning. She wondered how Eleanor’s nights had changed since her wife died. Margaret counted her breaths.
In those first weeks without her mother, Margaret made spicy cashew dressing, and a Thai meatball soup, and an eggplant stir fry, and then she made them all again. She fretted that the soup was not quite pinkened enough—that it looked too much like plain coconut milk and not enough like tom kha gai. She added more cayenne, and red chili flakes, and then it was so spicy that her father professed, in his soft, polite way, that while it was wonderful he couldn’t possibly finish it. And after all this, she determined she had not even managed a noticeable dip in the fish sauce bottle.
This is to say: she wondered what her mother had made over the years that required so much fish sauce. Two whole bottles, in fact, tucked into the shelf on the drawer of the fridge, the glass cloudy from the cold. Margaret tried to piece together her mother’s cooking habits backwards. In the spice drawer, she found a tin of whole white peppercorns but no black pepper. There was an untouched bottle of corn syrup but no cooking oil of any kind, let alone olive oil. It seemed to Margaret that her mother must have bought the corn syrup for something specific. Maybe she had purposefully used the last of the olive oil up.
Margaret consumed whole days puzzling over these kinds of questions, which seemed infinitely more open-ended than why her mother had committed suicide.
Margaret had graduated college two years earlier. At the time, she spent her weekdays working as a pro-bono paralegal and her weekends feeling ridiculous, serving catered weddings in a bowtie. She had enough money to be safe and too little to move anything along in her life, so she took the LSAT. And then her father called, and she realized as he said your mother is dead and also, as efficient as he always was, I’ll have to move, that the period of time she once regarded as a kind of post-grad soup would now forever be the period in which she lost her mother.
Her two jobs seemed abruptly, equally silly. She moved home to help her father pack up the drafty, wooded house in Maine she’d grown up in, with its bay windows and copper sinks. While boxing up the pans, Margaret uncovered three cast-iron molds in the shape of tiny corn cobs. She took them to her father in his study, and waved them to jog his attention.
“For cornbread,” he said easily, obviously, as if he couldn’t believe she didn’t know better, but she hadn’t. She couldn’t remember ever having cornbread with her parents, or them having it together, and yet it must have been something they’d done often enough and long enough before her to purchase themed equipment. This is what she thought about when she dropped the box of cookware at Goodwill.
Eleanor and Margaret got coffee twice more, each time further from campus until finally coffee became dinner. Margaret learned that having Eleanor’s singular attention felt so pleasant as to be excruciating. After each date she slinked back to the subway, feeling like a skinned grape as she sat on one of the wooden benches, unsure if she could withstand any other social interactions for the day with her friends.
The torture was her own doing. It wasn’t that Eleanor behaved like a professor in these moments. She was much better. Instead, their conversations were exercises in Margaret unfolding her brain. In trying, like a wooden toy, to be herself; to not just say the things she felt would earn Eleanor’s praise.
“I don’t really listen to music, to be honest,” Eleanor said. This time they were at a vegan bistro. Eleanor had said it was her favorite restaurant, and it was a place Margaret loved so fiercely, for her own reasons, that she hadn’t been sure whether she should even say so, if it would seem like a lie. They each ordered the same entrée.
“What are you always listening to on those headphones then?” Margaret asked. Eleanor had small, over-ear headphones that looked like they belonged with a cassette player.
“Podcasts,” Eleanor said. “Audiobooks. Not smart ones. I relisten to the Harry Potter books all the time.”
“That’s a relief,” Margaret said. “If you listened to legal briefs I’d need to leave.”
“Don’t leave,” Eleanor said, almost too sweetly. Margaret felt goosebumped. “Honestly, I like the silence too, just from wearing them with nothing playing. I like not being bothered on the train.”
“I think it’s a little sociopathic to be somebody who doesn’t listen to music,” Margaret said. “I’m not going to lie.”
Eleanor gave a full laugh. She leaned back in her chair and spread her legs, crossing one over the other. She was wearing dress slacks that looked scratchy. Margaret wondered what would happen if she cupped Eleanor’s knee.
It had been snowing, soft and breathy, when they met at the bistro. A puddle had developed under her umbrella.
“I really just have no taste. It’s no deeper than that. All music is the same to me. Sometimes I play jazz, but I couldn’t tell you which jazz is better than any other,” Eleanor said.
“It’s not about what music is better than other music,” Margaret said. “It’s about which you like better.” Then she felt silly, like when a child explains what they learned at school to someone at the dinner table. “I mean I’m sure you know that.”
“Yeah, but I truly have no opinion.” Eleanor smiled, as if teasing. It was a smile and also a dare.
“I think you’re just being difficult,” Margaret said.
“What do you mean?”
“You definitely have music you like better than other music. Or you just don’t like jazz very much.”
“It’s possible,” Eleanor said. “At least about the jazz.”
“A fifty-year-old woman who doesn’t know what music she likes?”
“Forty-nine,” Eleanor corrected.
Margaret surprised herself by laughing. It should have been something embarrassing. She had googled Eleanor’s age months ago. Apparently the internet had been wrong. “I’m sorry. When do you turn fifty, then?”
“My birthday was two days ago,” Eleanor said, “so I guess a year from two days ago,” and Margaret swatted at her and cried, “Happy birthday!” and then she asked the waiter to bring them the last two slices of carrot cake in the dessert case.
The summer before Margaret left for college, her aunt pulled her aside at a barbecue, away from the shrieks of her cousins in the pool. When I heard about how your mom’s been doing, on one hand I can’t believe it. But on the other hand, I guess I should’ve seen it coming. She was all highs and lows, even when her lows weren’t that bad, she said.
Once, over the phone, Margaret’s grandmother had insisted Your mother was never very good at keeping her room clean. It was always so obvious which side was hers and which was her sister’s. She’s been like that her whole life. You’re nothing like her though, of course.
In these moments Margaret had felt with clarity, with lottery-winning sureness, that she loved her mother more than anyone else in the world loved her. Her aunt had known her mother through all of her different swimsuit styles, and bedroom configurations, and boyfriends, and diplomas. Her grandmother had known her mother as long as she had been a heartbeat on this earth. And yet Margaret knew they were lying to themselves because she remembered a version of her mother that didn’t feel doomed.
Margaret knew her father had married a woman who was normal enough for a proposal; a woman who had weathered three years of cohabitation and dates without ever letting a fundamental scent of unwellness taint their relationship. In sleeves of Kodak photos, they were ruddy-faced, her mother with sweet fly-aways and tiny sunglasses. To accept that the person in those photos had been hiding incurable illness felt impossible. It was true, Margaret knew, that clues of her mother’s illness could have followed her all her life. But those clues in hindsight may have just been her. To agonize about where one began and the other ended was useless, Margaret thought.
Their household hadn’t been unbearable until Margaret started high school. Her mother had always been flighty, but hers was a temperament that worked fine for children. They wrote stories with crayon on pieces of white printer paper taped together so they resembled a scroll. They baked banana cupcakes, and when Margaret mismeasured the baking soda, her mother insisted they would be fine, and then they were. Once a month her mother let Margaret call out of school just because.
Sometime around middle school, Margaret’s mother had stopped going outside altogether. The stock market crashed. She lost her job, while Margaret’s father was promoted. Kismet, her mother had said, and then together they looked up the definition on the internet. Now, her mother would be home all the time. Yes, kismet.