Leaving the World by Douglas Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page A

up—’
    ‘Goddamn it, Jane – I am your friend, right? And as your friend, I think I deserve to know all the salacious details . . . just as you know all of mine.’
    ‘But if there aren’t any salacious details to report . . .’
    ‘You are impossible.’
    ‘So I’ve been told.’
    Told, in fact, by my very own mother on many occasions during adolescence when I wouldn’t share details of my own life with her. As Mom didn’t have much life outside of our own life she was frequently bothered by the way I didn’t tell her things, and seemed to keep so much to myself. Part of this was a reaction to her need to be all-interested in everything about me – to the point where she was downright overbearing. Now, of course, I see the very personal despair – the loneliness and isolation and sense of having been cast off by my father – that made her turn her energies on to me as her very own Grand Project, who would achieve in life everything that had been denied to her. So, back in high school, every homework assignment, every book I read, every movie I saw, every mark I received on an exam, every guy who ever asked me out on a date (not that there were many of them) became something for her to scrutinize.
    It all became too much. My mother had turned into a micro-manager – trying desperately to make certain I sidestepped as many potential pitfalls and mistakes as possible. By the time I reached college, I had became so much more private, so guarded, that the landscape between us had changed irrevocably. She enquired less about my life and checked herself whenever she was about to veer into the meddlesome. On the surface, we were still pleasant enough with each other – and I did let her in on the basic superficial stuff in my life. But she knew that we were no longer close.
    Yes, I felt terrible about this – especially as I knew that, for Mom, it was further proof that she could ‘do nothing right’.
    But perhaps the most telling exchange we ever had about all this was after the break-up with Tom. It was Christmas. I was back home in Connecticut, and I hadn’t mentioned anything yet to her about the phonecall I had received from him before Thanksgiving. Naturally, on my first night back, she asked me if ‘my future son-in-law’ would be arriving on December 26th (as he always had done in the past).
    ‘I’m afraid Tom will be spending Christmas with his future in-laws in Ireland.’
    Mom looked at me as if I had just spoken to her in Serbo-Croat.
    ‘What did you just say?’
    ‘Tom met someone in Ireland – a medical student. They’re an item now . . . and we’re not.’
    ‘And when did this happen?’
    I told her. She turned white.
    ‘And you waited this long to tell me.’
    ‘I needed time.’
    ‘Time to do what , Jane? If you haven’t forgotten, I’m your mother – and though you may have pushed me to one side—’
    ‘I call twice, three times a week, I show up for every major holiday—’
    ‘And you keep all the big stuff in your life hidden from me.’
    Silence. Then I said: ‘This is the way I have to do things.’
    ‘But why? Why ?’
    We can rarely tell others what we really think about them – not just because it would so wound them, but also because it would so wound ourselves. The gentle lie is often preferable to the bleak truth. So in answer to her demand, ‘But why? Why? ’, I simply met my mother’s maimed gaze and said: ‘It’s my problem, Mom . . . not yours.’
    ‘You’re just saying that to keep me quiet, to let yourself off the hook.’
    ‘Let myself off the hook for what ?’
    ‘For being such a closed book. Just like your father.’
    Dad . I so wanted his approval, his interest. But he always remained elusive, distant, beyond my reach. He was now living full-time in South America – and, from the sporadic, quarterly phone calls I received from him, I knew he was shacked up with a much younger woman, and little else beyond that. But I still