London Is the Best City in America

She looked at me questioningly as if to say, For what? I didn’t answer, which, I guess, was the only answer she needed.

“Ahh,” she said, putting her fork down.

“Mom, I’m not . . . I’m not getting restarted with that. With Matt, I mean. I love him. But I can’t. I know that now. I do know that,” I said.

And as soon as the words were out, I knew that I was telling her the truth. I understood, finally, that I couldn’t go back to Matt, and not worry, every day, about ending up right back here again. In this place where I had no idea how to really begin to make myself happy.

“You know, I’ve got to say, I’m not sure I understand my children,” she said, wiping her hands on her napkin. She pointed toward the front door. “That one spends years moving between two women, hoping one of them will eventually make the decision for him that only he can make. And this one organizes her life so even the choices she makes, she is always making the other one at the same time. She leaves, she stays. She stays exactly where she leaves.”

I tried to smile at her, which made me start to tear.

“When you were little, you were always saying that Josh got to make all the choices because he was older. ‘Why does he get to make all the decisions around here, Mom?’you’d say. ‘How is that fair?’ So for your seventh birthday, your father said you could pick where we went on the summer trip. You could pick any city in America as far away as Seattle, as close as Manhattan. You know which city you picked?”

I knew it without her even saying that much. I’d always known it, and I was starting to understand something else too—where she was going with this. What I wouldn’t allow myself to see before now.

“London,” I said.

“London,” she repeated. “And the thing was, it didn’t matter how many times I told you that we weren’t paying for four plane tickets to London. That a driving trip was the only option. It was like you couldn’t see anything else. And when even Dad took out that map and tried to explain to you that London wasn’t even in America, you just kept arguing with him. ‘But I want to go to London. It’s the best city in America. I’ll only go there.’ For weeks around here. You were like a broken record.”

“Where did we end up going instead that year?” I said, trying to remember. I couldn’t recall it.

“Hershey, Pennsylvania . . . which you loved. You turned to your father the very first day there and said, ‘Dad, I think Hershey, Pennsylvania, is even better than London would have been.’ ”

Hershey. All I could visualize with any certainty was the car ride up there, sitting behind my father in the backseat, staring sullenly at the back of his head. “Really? I said that?”

“No.” She shook her head. “You complained the entire time. ‘This restaurant isn’t London. This candy store isn’t London. Over here, this isn’t London either.’ ”

“How can I not remember?”

She shrugged, picking up her fork again, fixing a bite for me this time. “You were too busy complaining.”

I took the bite from her. It was sweet and fruity and a little on the warm side—from the car or the blackout or both. The taste stayed strong in my throat. “I’m sorry about that,” I said.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” she said. “You just have to try to understand what I’m telling you. I’ve told you the story of how your dad and I met, right?”

“Only a couple dozen times.”

“But do you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” I said. “You saw him and you left the bathroom and you knew you had to be with him. You just knew. From that moment on. It would be the two of you.”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

I looked at her in disbelief. “Okay,” I said. “You’re really starting to freak me out here.”

“What I knew was that if I walked out of the bathroom and said good-bye to him, I would be fine. I would go to the play and meet someone else—if not that afternoon, then another afternoon—and I’d have an entirely different life. I’d be married to this new person or I wouldn’t. Or I’d rekindle my romance with my first boyfriend, Neiman Mortimar, who happens to be the biggest distributor of women’s prom dresses anywhere in the Northeast, now. And I’d have a different house. Different furniture. White furniture, maybe. And I’d have these big, wonderful Shabbat dinners. And I’d like my mother-in-law very, very much.”

“Susan Mortimar? The tiny woman with the cane at Whole Foods who you always say hi to? The one with the pink hair, and the mini-size cart?”

“Isn’t she lovely?”

I couldn’t help it anymore. I really started to cry. Pineapple was sticking the wrong way in my throat. My mother moved in closer to me, covering the space of the counter between us.

But she didn’t reach for my hand, or lean farther forward so she could touch my face. She just shrugged. “What happened the day I met your father,” she said, “is that I learned you have to choose. For better or for worse. You have to choose what your life is going to look like.”

I tried to swallow, tried to think of what I wanted to say, what I was really thinking. “I just don’t feel like I have good choices yet,” I said. “It makes it hard to give up the old ones.”

She waved me off. “Well. You’re behind all that anyway,” she said. “You’re still stuck on the same part you were stuck on at seven.”