Attach ments(92)
“You’ll never have to fend for yourself like that, Lincoln. You never have to be alone. Why would you want to?”
He leaned back against his bedroom wall and slunk down until he was sitting on the cast-iron radiator. “I just … ,” he said.
“Just?”
“I need to live my own life.”
“You aren’t living your own life now?” she asked. “I certainly never tell you what to do.”
“No, I know, it’s just …”
“Just?”
“It doesn’t feel like I’m living my own life.”
“What?”
“It feels like, as long as I stay home, I’m still living in your life. Like I’m still a kid.”
“That’s silly,” she said.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Your own life starts the moment you’re born. Before that, even.”
“I just, I feel like as long as I live with you, I won’t …I’m not …It’s like George Jefferson.”
“From the TV show?”
“Right. George Jefferson. As long as he was on All in the Family, he was just somebody who made Archie Bunker’s story more interesting. He didn’t have anything of his own. He didn’t have a plot or supporting characters. I don’t know if you ever even got to see his house. But after he got his own show, George had his own living room and kitchen …and bedroom, I think. He even had his own elevator. Places for him to exist in, for his story to happen. Like this apartment. This is something that’s mine.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t know,” she said. “I never watched The Jeffersons. ”
“What about Rhoda?” Lincoln asked.
She frowned. “So you’re saying you want to be the star of the show now. That it’s time for me to fade into old age?”
“God, no,” he said. “It’s not like they canceled All in the Family when The Jeffersons started.”
“Stop talking about television. Stop telling me what everything is like.”
“Okay,” he said, trying to think clearly, bluntly. “I want to live my own life. And I want you to live your own life. Separately.”
“But you are my life!” she said, breaking into frustrated tears. “You became my life on the day you were born. You’re part of me, you and Eve, the most important part of me. How can I separate from that?”
Lincoln didn’t answer. His mother walked past him out of the room. He slunk farther down, onto the floor, and held his face in his hands.
HE STAYED THAT way for twenty minutes or so, until he realized it was taking some effort to hold the position, until he felt more tired than guilty or angry.
He found his mother sitting on the living room floor, looking up at the chandelier. “You can take the couch from the sunroom,” she said when he walked in, “the brown one. There’s too much furniture in that room already. It would fit fine here. It’ll look almost purple in this light.”
He nodded.
“And I’ll find you some nice dishes at the thrift shop. Don’t buy any more plastic. It leaches into your food, you know,” she said, “and simulates estrogen. It lives in your fat cells and causes breast cancer …I don’t know what it does to men. I wish I’d known you needed dishes. I saw a complete set the other day at the Goodwill, with a butter dish and a gravy boat and everything. White with little blue daisies. Not exactly masculine, but still …”
“I’m not picky,” he said.
She nodded and kept nodding. “You can have anything you want from your bedroom, of course, or you can leave it. That will always be your room. Just like your sister’s. You can always come home if you need to, or even if you want to. That house is your home as long as it’s mine.”
“Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”
He walked over to her and held out his hands, pulling her to her feet. She held on to his hands, squeezed them, then started smoothing her long skirt.
“I suppose your sister knows all about this already,” she said.
“No,” Lincoln said.
“Oh.” That was good news. “Maybe I’ll call her. Maybe I’ll see if she wants to help me go shopping for your kitchen.”
“Sure,” he said. He hugged her then, tight, and wished that he’d thought to do it sooner.
“It really is a beautiful apartment,” she said.
EVE CALLED LINCOLN at work the next day. All she could say was, “Good for you” and “I’m so proud of you.” She offered Jake Sr.’s help if Lincoln needed to move anything. “Just a couch,” he said.