Touch and Go

Abstract

Touch and Go S. L. Ferarro (bio) Ana's friend Valerie says that the secret to living sane is letting go, and Ana nods agreeably: she likes the idea of letting go and cutting loose—she's perfectly willing, she says, to kick up her heels and let the good times roll now and then. "No, no, you don't understand," Val says. "It's not fun, sweetie. It's the hardest thing you'll ever do. You have to let go." Lunch is over—they are dawdling over second cups of tea—and Val's refrain is by now so familiar that Ana toys, for a New York nanosecond, with the possibility that aliens have blinked them to a place her seventeen-year-old son, Dan, would call Planet DejaVu2 and where, for all she knows, she is trapped for eternity. She takes a last sip and sets the dainty, translucent teacup gently on its saucer. Val is old enough to be Ana's mother and specializes in warnings: she does not believe that satisfaction is actually possible, certainly not in any sustained fashion. In her opinion Ana is not properly letting go of her children, who are grown, or her hopes, or her dreams. She is failing to relinquish the passions and the intense, driving forces—the yearnings!—that are forgivable only in the young. She is failing, Val intimates with exquisite kindness, to see life as it is, to embrace the sure-footed disillusion of those who know better. Like herself. Val is sorry to say this, and she loves Ana dearly, but she thinks Ana's chronic hopefulness dooms her to something worse than feeling bad. It makes her look foolish. Ana stirs uneasily in the delicate heat of her friend's gentle smile. Val had always been small and is shrinking fast—a warning, without saying a word, of what might lie ahead. On this afternoon, she wears a beige sweater, a beige, gray, and orange plaid skirt, and unscuffed gray flats. She turns her head, sparrow-like, and lifts the teapot. Her hair, of late an autumn bronze, lies smooth and neat against her skull. Her eyes glisten. "Refill?" Officially, they are talking about Dan, Ana's fourth and youngest, her baby, and his upcoming departure for college—all part of the plan!—which will leave Ana in what she nervously fears will be "a maudlin, masochistic maelstrom" of swirling dust motes and doubt. Val nods. She understands. "Such is life," she says. "Although you never know. Things have a way of working out. I have a friend, she's ninety. She says, 'Honey, if you live long enough, everything comes to pass.'" [End Page 89] "Easy for her to say." "Please, it's a miracle she's saying anything; she's even older than I am. But your boy Danny: he's young. And correct me if I'm wrong, a bit of a mama's boy? Isn't he the one who cried so hard, day after day, when you left him at kindergarten?" "He was five years old. It was separation anxiety. I did what I had to do." "Which was?" "After a week of tears and wild, terrible faces, I took him—me, his own mother—to the principal's office. She escorted him to class. He stopped crying." "So now it's your turn. You have to separate. To let go." Ana smiles and ducks her head in mute acquiescence. What Val says is almost certainly true—about Danny, about everything. But it's also true that Val (so motherly, so negative) is really talking about herself. She has—with admirable grace, to be sure—let go of a daughter who keeps her distance; a husband who left her for a younger woman and then died, quickly and without pain, in the arms of that other woman (who took the money and a younger lover, went to Portofino); and most recently—this really is a killer—a breast. After the surgery, she resolutely let go of a high-profile job running a community center. After the chemotherapy, she burned old letters, gave away knickknacks, and sold the house in...