Free The Mistress's Daughter by A. M. Homes Page A

dishes breaking, the engine punching through the back of the refrigerator, a headlight coming through the crisper door. I hope the dog isn’t in the kitchen, that no one has gone in for a snack. I sit with my foot on the gas, wanting to do it, and then thinking about my mother and my mother’s dishes, how much she loves her dishes, how much I love my mother, how I wouldn’t want to break the dishes and how it wouldn’t be quite the same if I went into the house first and emptied all the shelves and then came back out again and went crashing through.
    I pull up outside the house and I don’t want to go home. There is no home, there is no relief, no sense of having simply survived.
    Christmas is almost over. I do not want this to be the most depressing story ever told. I turn off the engine. I wait.
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    In January 1994, just after the new year, Ellen calls and asks, “When will you see me?”
    I say, “Saturday.”
    She is shocked. So am I. I’m not sure why I say Saturday; but in some way it feels inevitable. How much longer can it go on: When will you see me? Why won’t you see me? We need to meet in an agreed-upon way—and not in a kamikaze attack like the scene in the bookstore. There is no good time, no right time. I am repelled and I am also curious.
    I say Saturday and immediately regret it.
    She gets too excited. “Where will we meet? What will we do?” Ellen envisions the meeting as a fun-filled-day-in-New-York package—horse-drawn carriages, ice cream sodas, going to a show (by this she means a musical).
    I’m thinking an hour, maybe two. I’m thinking a little bit will go a long way.
    â€œLet’s meet at the Plaza,” she says. “At the Oyster Bar.”
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    The Plaza is a part of the fantasy—home of Eloise, four o’clock tea, a tourist attraction. The last time I was there, Zsa Zsa Gabor was in the lobby talking the man at the candy store into giving her free chocolates.
    â€œWill you let her kiss you hello?” a friend asks.
    â€œI don’t think so,” I say and then feel bad. “If she wants to kiss my hand, she can.”
    All of the books on adoption and reunion say to arrange for someone to meet you after the reunion for a kind of deprogramming session, to pick up the pieces. I call a friend, a woman with children and grandchildren of her own, and arrange for her to meet me in the Oak Bar at 6 P.M. I tell her that if I’m not there, she’s supposed to come into the Oyster Bar and get me. This is in case the mother tries to somehow detain me, to put me under her spell, in case I lose my free will and have to be plucked from my mother’s clutches.
    â€œCan I meet your mother?” the friend asks.
    â€œSure, I guess,” I say. It seems odd that the friend is more excited, more interested in meeting my mother than I am. It seems strange, but at the moment everything seems strange.
    â€œNo,” she says. “I guess that wouldn’t be right. You’ll tell me about her. And maybe take a picture.”
    I would like to go as myself, not my best self or average self, but my worst self. In the end, I dress up. I am once again compelled to try to make a good impression. In some fantasy of my own, I want her to see how well I turned out, want her to be proud of me.
    In the hallway outside the Oyster Bar she is wearing a fluffy white fur jacket, a printed silk blouse, and slacks, her hair piled high on her head in a post-beehive bun. She looks like someone from another decade—a woman who believes in glamour, who listens to Burt Bacharach and Dinah Shore to cheer herself up. I suspect this is the way she must have dressed when she used to meet my father—probably also in hotels—but now she’s fifty-five years old and a lot has been lost to time.
    â€œIs that you?” she asks, breathless.
    â€œI can’t believe it,” she says, her voice escalating beyond