I see you everywhere by Julia Glass

Author:Julia Glass [Glass, Julia]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780375422751
Publisher: New York : Pantheon Books, c2008.
Published: 2008-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

She reaches into her shopping bag. “Yes you are, sweetheart, and we have never been so grateful to know it, believe you me.” Mom wears large gold fox heads on her ears and a scarlet knit dress that few women her age could pull off. She’d never dream of a face-lift or color her silver hair, but years of posting in a saddle have preserved her tight hips and legs. She sets on the chair a racehorse mystery by Dick Francis and a hotoff-the-presses book about the Exxon Valdez disaster. “But wait till you see this,” she says triumphantly. She plunks a book on my lap called Why the Reckless Survive. “I was relieved to see someone thinks that they do! A scientist, no less.” She points to the Ph.D. after the author’s name. Larney laughs. He seems to laugh as readily as most people blink. Mom points back at the shopping bag. “Bananas and grapes, clean undies, Jergens lotion. Am I a good mother?”

“Yes, but you’re making me nervous rushing around. Sit.”

“That’s because I’m temporary.” In her maddeningly androcentric way, she addresses herself to the man in the room. “I’m going to wash the grapes, and then I’m leaving you two alone and heading off for lunch at the Chilton Club. I talk too loud for the place, but they’ll just have to squirm their way through it. I give the maître d’ a naughty thrill. He loves me. He’s from Duluth; we talk about the Vikings between courses.”

After she leaves, Larney puts the books back in the bag and pulls the chair to the bed. He leans an elbow against my hip. “I’m not going to take advantage of your forgetfulness. I know I’m just a vacation in Bermuda. I know about your animal self. I know about the sperm king. But we were having a fabulous time. You’ll have to take my word on that.”

“What about my animal self ?” (Though I want to ask, “What about the sperm king?”)

“How you’re giving in to it, letting it rule; those were your words.”

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I sigh. Would he mind just telling me how we met? He attacks the task with pleasure. I was hitchhiking south of Boston. The sun was setting. When I got into his car, he could tell I was very upset: heartbroken, angry, or both. When I told him where I was headed—to my parents’, God knows why—he said his destination was just ten minutes from there. He got me to talk about my policy work on conserving seals in the Northwest and convinced me to go to a cocktail party the next night (at the home of his uncle, skipper of the fateful boat). I showed up at the party in what Larney describes as a Minuteman missile of a sequined dress, a dress intended, in his opinion, for tearing off. I agreed to go home with him if he understood one thing. “You said, I remember exactly, ‘I’m in the market for a little amnesia.

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