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“Have you heard anything I’ve said?”
“Your father’s a pussycat; Elyse is a magician,” he recited without enthusiasm.
“Well, that’s pretty amazing, don’t you think?”
“Amazing,” he agreed, finally looking up from his papers. “Look. I know I’ve said this before, but I thought the whole point of hiring a housekeeper for your parents was so that you could spend less time worrying about them and more time taking care of your own family.”
“The point of hiring a housekeeper was to help my father take care of my mother,” I corrected. “And when haven’t I given this family enough attention?”
“Really, Jodi? You want to get into this now? I have to have these assignments marked by morning.”
I heard distant echoes of my parents’ loud fights racing up the stairs toward my children’s bedrooms. I pictured them cowering beneath their blankets at the sound of raised voices, their hands over their ears to block out the angry words. “Sorry,” I said, pushing down my frustration and flopping back on my pillow with more force than I’d intended.
“Okay,” Harrison said, gathering up his papers. “You’ve made your point. I’ll go downstairs.”
“I wasn’t trying to make a point,” I began. But he was already out of bed and out the door, his footsteps reverberating down the stairs.
I lay awake, reminded of the theory that, on a subconscious level, men marry their mothers, and women, their fathers. That we tend to repeat patterns from our childhoods, going with what’s familiar, however unpleasant, hoping to rewrite history, desperate to find that elusive happy ending.
Had I done that?
Like my father, Harrison could be difficult and self-absorbed, but surely this was true of most successful men. I’d convinced myself that he was somehow entitled to these traits. Being difficult and self-absorbed were part and parcel of being creative.
Like my father, Harrison could be dismissive and superior, often wielding his easy command of language as a weapon. Surely that was part of his genius. And yes, like my father, Harrison enjoyed being coddled and admired and having the last word.
But then, who doesn’t?
I had no way of knowing if I was anything like Harrison’s mother as he’d always been loath to talk about her. I knew that she’d abandoned the family after her divorce from Harrison’s father, moving across the country to pursue career opportunities, and that Harrison had spurned all subsequent attempts to reconnect and reconcile.
Watch the way a man treats his mother,a little voice whispered in my ear as I flipped off the overhead light and closed my eyes.That’s the way he’ll treat his wife.
Just another one of the voices I chose to ignore.
