Good Trouble

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The World of Cheese (#u485b1ea8-1fa8-5055-a432-ff1f7276f78d)

It had never occurred to Breda Morrissey that things might go seriously wrong between herself and her son, Patrick. But back in the fall he had declared her “persona non grata”—his actual expression—and pronounced that she was no longer permitted to have contact with her grandson, Joshua, on the grounds that she would be “an evil influence.” It was a crazy, almost unbelievable turn of events, and all about such a strange matter—a scrap of skin.

Patrick disputed this. “This is not about skin, Mom,” he said during the first session of the mother-son therapy they jointly underwent in New York. “Can’t you see? That’s not what this is about.”

Breda turned to the therapist, Dr. Goldstein—Dan, her son called him—for help. But Dr. Goldstein, whose dramatic beard and small pointy nose gave him, Breda thought, the look of a TV judge, was regarding her so severely that Breda was silenced.

Breda’s reliving of this moment, as she sat in a window seat on the flight back to California, was interrupted by a nudge—a barge, almost—from her neighbor. This person was an obese woman of Breda’s own age, mid-fifties, who from moment one had been tangling and fidgeting with carry-on luggage and safety instruction documents and in-flight entertainment gadgets. “Sorry,” the woman breathed, continuing her struggle with the wires of her earphones. At the woman’s other elbow, in the aisle seat, sat a littler person in a red sweater, a man. When drinks were served, the fat woman, as Breda thought of her, wordlessly helped herself to the little man’s mini-pretzels packet. Breda understood with revulsion that they were a couple.

She looked out the window. An immense cloud floor covered the bottom of the void. Brilliant stacks of white vapor rose here and there, and pink haze lay beneath the blue upper atmosphere. It was a glorious, otherworldly spectacle of the kind that Breda, when she was a girl, would have found suggestive of winged horses and unknown realms; but what it came down to, when you grew up and looked through it all, Breda thought, was rain, rain falling on the fields and the forests and the houses and the people.

Breda kept gazing out. Something about the bumpy spread of cloud reminded her of cottage cheese, which in turn reminded her: Patrick had developed an interest in, as he put it, the world of cheese. During her stay, her son had each evening approached the dinner table with a cheeseboard, making bugling and fanfare noises. “Try this one, Mom,” he said, pointing to one of the half-eaten, slightly stinking varieties, and Breda, who wondered whether these foodstuffs were legal, took a mouthful. “Nice,” she said, refraining from any other comment—for example, that Patrick was obviously gaining weight as a result of his new hobby—for fear of provoking another outburst on his part. (And of course his wife, Judith, would no doubt be touchy, too. Everybody was touchy these days.) One night, Patrick announced that he and Judith and baby Joshua were taking a cheesing trip to Ireland. The plan was to go to the Kinsale International Gourmet Festival and then to drive from farmhouse to farmhouse, tasting semisoft rind-washed cheeses. “I’m not interested in hard cheeses,” her son said importantly. If they found the time, he said, they’d drive up to County Limerick and maybe look up whoever was left of the ancestral Morrissey family.

“That’ll be nice,” Breda said.

In the early seventies, she and Patrick’s father, Tommy, had taken the kids to a wonderful-sounding but actually sour-looking village near the Shannon River, and had met remote Morrissey cousins of his, amorphous types who led unimaginable existences in cheap modern homes at the edge of the village and were nonplussed by their visitors. As she looked down at the clouds, Breda recalled two big things about that trip: it had rained the whole time, and everywhere they ran into people named Ryan. “It’s raining Ryans,” Tommy joked. “It’s Ryaning hard.”

Tommy, who a week after Patrick’s wedding quit his biotech job and ran away to Costa Rica with the German woman. Packing his bags, he was the wronged furious one. “You make me feel like I’m vermin,” he said, scrunching into his suitcase underpants Breda had just ironed. “With Ute I can bring up anything, absolutely anything. I can be anything. Jesus, I never knew what it was to feel alive. To think I’ve wasted all these years being made to feel a jerk, a creep. You want to know what we talked about last night? We talked about cunts I have known. Cunts I have known. How they smell differently, how they’re shaped differently, how they behave differently. Including your cunt. Oh yes. Do you know how special that is? Do you realize the level of trust and intimacy that takes?” On and on he went, appalling her. He began to shout. “Remember when I was alone in the Ukraine? All alone in that goddamn hotel and I get on the phone to my wife, my fucking wife, my one and only partner till death do us fucking part, and I asked you to say something for me, something with feeling, something that might connect us, anything at all. I’m not telling you to scrub floors or stick your hand in a pile of shit. I’m not ordering you to do anything. I’m asking. I’m begging for a sentence or two, that’s all, just a few words, words a husband is entitled to expect from his wife. What do I get? Nothing! ‘You know I don’t do that kind of thing, Tommy.’ That kind of thing? I’m howling for a drink in the fucking desert and you give me that shit? Well, fuck you, you uptight daddy’s girl.”

Breda was reexperiencing this horrifying episode because something about her son’s recent harangues had put her in mind of his father.

As for the daddy’s girl taunt, that went back forty years, to 1967, the year Breda traveled to Notre Dame for Tommy’s graduation. Notre Dame was so Catholic and male that people on campus mistook her for a nun. After the ceremony, she and Tommy—they’d met six months before, at a wedding in Newport—set off on a cross-country drive to San Francisco. The plan was to return east in the fall so that Breda herself could start college. She started to feel sick just west of the Indiana border. At first she thought it was the weed they’d been smoking, or maybe carsickness, but by the time they reached Missouri she knew she was pregnant. To celebrate, she and Tommy drove on to Reno and got married. When Breda rang home, her father answered the phone. He was a Boston lawyer. He found the whole thing—the trip to California, the jokey shotgun wedding, the long-distance pay phone shenanigans, the premarital sex—shocking. “Goddamn punk bullshit,” he said, and hung up with a sob. When Breda tearfully redialed, her mother answered. “You’ll have to forgive your father, sweetheart,” she said. “It’s just that these things have consequences. Maybe that’s something you can’t really understand at your age.”

Breda patched things up with her parents, who came to see that she had married Tommy out of a sense of responsibility and not out of romantic whimsy. “It’s a wonderful thing,” Dad said when she became a mother. “And you’re a wonderful girl.”

Siobhan was born in the spring of 1968. Patrick came along two years later, named by Tommy for his father even though, to hear Tommy tell it, Grandpa Pat had barely acknowledged his own son. “He’d treat you like you’d treat a dog: ruffle your hair, take you for a walk in Van Cortlandt Park.” This conversation took place one night soon after her father-in-law’s death in 1975, when Tommy and she lay in the darkness of their Santa Barbara bedroom. “The best thing about Dad was he was a terrific whistler,” Tommy whispered. “Oh, Jesus, he could whistle. He’d stick a thumb or pinkie in his mouth and shoot out this real earsplitter. He stopped taxis like they do in the movies.” Tommy, shifting on his side, said, “You ever hear me whistle?”

“I think so,” Breda said. “Sure.”

“He taught me,” Tommy said in a low voice. “He taught me how, Breda.” His shoulder started to tremble, and Breda touched it.

Grandpa Pat was a New Yorker and passed his last years in a Midtown residential hotel. After his death they found his room filled with pepper shakers and salt shakers taken from the diners and bars in which he’d whiled away his days. Tommy displayed the shakers on a shelf at home. “Some families inherit sterling silver, others stolen restaurant utensils,” he said. Later he asked Breda to box away the shakers because they made him think of the sands of time and depressed the hell out of him.

After Tommy disappeared to Costa Rica, Breda stayed put in the matrimonial home in Santa Barbara, unclear about where things stood. When it became apparent that her husband wasn’t returning, she sold up and moved into an apartment in Atherton to be near Siobhan. Siobhan had urged the move. But within a year, Siobhan and her family headed east to Alexandria, Virginia. “Well, that’s how it goes, I guess,” Breda said when her daughter broke the news. “If you have to go, you have to go.” Breda stayed in Atherton, working as an administrator for a medical practice. She took a weekly (and straightforward and pleasant) call from her son, and a biweekly (and difficult and tetchy) call from her daughter. Inevitably the latter put her through to the grandchildren. She called their names down the line and listened for a response. “Talk to Grandma,” an adult instructed in the background. Then a child’s voice, small and stubborn and distinct: “Don’t want to.”

From time to time, her children brought back news from the Switzerland of Central America, as Costa Rica was apparently known. It was so humid down there, Breda learned, that a paperback would practically rot overnight. It was also amazing. There were monkeys and colored birds and sloths and waterfalls and rocky beaches. Tommy, who had never been interested in the Californian ocean, allegedly took up surfing. There was a story that he’d saved a woman from being drowned, which Breda found hard to believe. More plausibly, he became a nature guide. He led groups into the forest and pointed out birds and termite hills. He had one trick, Patrick said, where he swung his machete into the bark of a tree, and sap—was it rubber?—came oozing out. When the hike was over, he took the surfers and ecotourists and movie stars (apparently Tommy had rubbed shoulders with Woody Harrelson) for a bite to eat at the Crazy Toucan, which was the restaurant owned by the German woman. Patrick showed his mother snapshots of a wooden house with colored lights strung across the front porch. “See? That’s where the bar is, right there. That outbuilding, that’s the kitchen.” “Nice,” Breda said. “And there’s Ute, with the blonde hair. She’s a great cook. Fusion food.” He pronounced the woman’s name Ootah, as if he were an expert on Germany.

“Fusion food,” Breda said. “Sounds good.”

Breda and Tommy did not divorce. For a time, Breda was unsure which was worse: the mortification of divorce or the mortification of being so forgotten about that one’s husband could not even bother to place one’s breakup on a proper legal footing. Then Breda came to think, What difference does it really make, in the end? This question, she discovered, was increasingly applicable to a lot of things. It was true, as her mother had once remarked, that the consequentiality of things became clearer as you grew older, so that actions and especially omissions assumed an importance they never used to have; and so one grew more hesitant. But on the other hand it seemed to matter so much less whether you wound up with outcome A or outcome B.

Four years into their marriage, Patrick and Judith bought a house in the Bronx, not far from where Tommy had grown up. They held a housewarming party and Patrick made a big deal of it, insisting Breda fly over. “Bring your boyfriend, Mom,” he joked. His father also turned up, with the German woman. When Breda offered to help out with the refreshments, Patrick said, “Just relax, Mom. Enjoy yourself. Leave the cooking to Ute. It’s what she does for a living.”

For an hour Breda mingled with the young people and played an agonizing game of hide-and-seek with the Costa Ricans. But a conversation with Tommy was inevitable. Emerging from the kitchen, he said jovially, “Hello, Breda.” It was their first conversation since their separation, which also was four years old. He looked quite different. There was a beard and a ponytail, and his hands were cracked and brown. He was heavier, in spite of the surfing and the fusion food. “Good of you to come, Breda,” he said, making her feel like an interloper. They made small talk. Breda noticed that Tommy made repeated use of a new expression. “The roads are kinda funky down there,” he said of Costa Rica; and, “It’s kinda funky meeting up again like this, isn’t it?” No doubt this was beach talk or bar talk or surf talk. He had lost that exact, scientific air she’d once found attractive. A memory suddenly seized her: Tommy’s liking for sniffing and snouting her ass while she took up a position on all fours; even, once, when she was menstruating and blood trickled down her inner thigh. “It’s passion, honey,” he mumbled. “This is passion.”