“You know what?” Clem said. “I don’t want to talk about it. Can we just not talk about it?”
There were murmurs of relief. His peers understood.
“I’m not quitting the group,” he added. “But I think I might go home now.”
He tottered from the room and down the stairs as if he’d been excused for medical reasons. Back at the parsonage, he went straight to his room and locked the door, picked up an Arthur C. Clarke novel he’d borrowed from the library, and absorbed himself in someone else’s world. Two hours disappeared before he heard a tap on his door.
“Clem?” his father said.
“Go away.”
“May I come in?”
“No. I’m reading.”
“I just want to thank you. Clem. I want to thank you for what you said tonight. Can you open your door?”
“No. Go away.”
The pain his father’s weakness caused him was like an illness, and it persisted in the weeks that followed. At the next Sunday meeting, he reminded himself of Tim Schaeffer, a boy from the group who’d had surgery for brain cancer and returned to meetings for two months before he died. Everyone wanted to be Clem’s partner in trust-building exercises, no one gave him shit if he didn’t feel like opening up with his feelings. Rick Ambrose told him, privately, that he’d witnessed few acts of greater strength and courage than Clem’s standing up to defend his father. Ambrose proceeded to confide in him, ask for his help with logistical decisions, and make an affectionate running joke of his atheism. Never referred to, but obvious to Clem, was Ambrose’s recognition of his need for a new father figure.
He no longer respected the old man. Having glimpsed his fundamental weakness, he now saw it at every turn. Saw him exploiting Becky’s politeness to drag her on their Sunday walks, saw him distancing himself from their mother at church functions and chatting with other men’s wives, heard him blackening Rick Ambrose’s name because young people liked him, heard him reminding people who didn’t need reminding that he’d marched with Stokely Carmichael and integrated the swimming pool, saw him gazing at himself in the bathroom mirror, touching his shaggy eyebrows with his fingertips. The man whose strength Clem had admired now seemed to him a raw blot of egregiousness. Clem couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was giving up his student deferment to show his father what a strong man did.
The smoke in the Chicago-bound bus and the weather outside it were enforcing an early twilight. Snow falling on the cornfields dimmed and smudged the furrows and stubble, the distant cribs. The baby in the seat behind Clem had invented a word, buh, and fallen in love with it. Each time she said it—Buh!—she squealed with fresh delight, at intervals timed perfectly to keep him wide awake. Without his taking any action, the bus was carrying him forward, toward the task of telling his parents that he’d written to the draft board, away from the violence of what he’d done to Sharon. The depth of the violence was becoming ever more apparent, his aching more grievous. The only relief he could imagine was Becky’s blessing.
Disgusted with herself, the overweight person who was Marion fled the parsonage. For breakfast she’d eaten one hard-boiled egg and one piece of toast very slowly, in tiny bites, per the advice of a writer for Redbook who claimed to have shed forty pounds in ten months, and whom Redbook had photographed in a Barbarella sort of jumpsuit, showing off her futuristically insectile waistline, and who had also advised pouring oneself a can of a nationally advertised weight-loss drink in lieu of lunch, engaging in three hours of vigorous exercise each week, repeating mantras such as A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips, and buying and wrapping a small present for oneself to open whenever one succeeded in losing x number of pounds. Excepting a decade’s supply of sleeping pills, there was no present that Marion wanted enough to serve as a reward, but she’d duly been going to Tuesday and Thursday morning exercise classes at the Presbyterian church and would have gone there today if Judson hadn’t been home. Deprived of the proper half sandwich, with mayonnaise, to which an hour of Presbyterian calorie-burning would have entitled her, she’d lunched on two stalks of celery with cream cheese in their grooves. These had almost got her out the door, into the chute of an afternoon without temptations, but one of the cookies she’d baked with Judson had broken in half. Seeing it broken on a cooling rack, among its whole fellows, she’d felt sorry for it. She was its Creator, and to eat it was a kind of mercy. But its sweetness had unleashed her appetite. By the time her disgust caught up with her, she’d eaten five more cookies.
In her tennis shoes and her oft-mended gabardine overcoat, she proceeded past trees whose bark was darkened by the moisture their frozenness had condensed, past residential façades no longer promising the marital stability they had in the forties, when they were built. Her gait felt more waddling than striding, but at least she didn’t have to worry about being noticed. Unless it was to pity her for not owning a car, no one gave a thought to a pastor’s wife out walking by herself. As soon as people had met her and identified her position in the community, situated her at the Very Nice end of the all-important niceness spectrum, she became invisible to them. Sexually, there was no angle from which a man on the street might catch a glimpse of her and be curious to see her from a different angle, no point of relief from what she and time had done to her. She’d become invisible especially to her husband in this respect. Invisible to her kids as well—rendered featureless by the dense, warm cloud of momminess through which they apprehended her. Although she considered it possible that not one person in New Prospect actively disliked her, there was no one she could call a close friend. However short on money she was, perennially, she was even poorer in the currency of friendship, the little secrets that friends shared to build trust. She had plenty of secrets, but they were all too large for a pastor’s wife to safely betray.
What she had instead of friends, on the sly, was a psychiatrist, and she was late for her appointment with her. She detested jogging, the thudding downward flesh-tug of her heavy parts, but when she turned onto Maple Avenue she started running with short and shallow steps, which conceivably burned more calories, per unit of distance, than walking did. The houses along Maple were a free-for-all of competitive decoration, their shrubbery and railings and rooflines infested with green plastic vines bearing fruits in dull colors. It wasn’t clear to Marion that the charm of Christmas lights at night was enough to offset how ugly the hardware looked in daylight hours, of which there were many. Nor was it clear that the excitement of Christmas for children was enough to make up for the disenchanted drudgery of it in their adult years, of which there were likewise many.
At Pirsig Avenue, she slowed to a marching pace. The only person in New Prospect who knew she was seeing a psychiatrist was the receptionist at the thriving dentistry practice of Costa Serafimides, in a low brick building near the train station. Dr. Serafimides’s wife, Sophie, saw her psychiatric patients in a small, unmarked room between identical rooms in which plaque was scraped and cavities filled. Anyone who noticed Marion in the waiting room would assume that she was there for such work. Once she was in Sophie’s office, she could hear the squeak of rubber-soled comfort shoes, the whine of motive cords on pulleys, and smell the pleasant antiseptic peculiar to dentistry. The office contained two leather chairs, shelves of reference works, framed certificates (Sofia Serafimides, MD), and a deep-drawered credenza full of drugs. It was like a modernized confessional box, a not greatly secluded place to have the inside of one’s head scraped, with payment exacted not in future Hail Marys but in cash on the spot.
Marion in her early twenties had been a seriously practicing Catholic. She’d believed, at the time, that the Church had saved her life, or at least her sanity, but later on, after she’d met Russ and made herself a level-headed Protestant, she’d come to see her youthful Catholicism as another form of craziness, more sustainable than the form that had landed her in a hospital at the age of twenty, but morbid nonetheless. It was as if, in her Catholic phase, sh
e’d lived under a vault that made the sunniest day dark. She’d been obsessed with sin and redemption, prone to being overwhelmed by the significance of insignificant things—a leaf that fell and landed at her feet, a song she heard playing in two different places on the same day—and paranoid with the sense that God was watching everything she did. When she’d fallen in love with Russ, and had received the wonderfully concrete blessings of her marriage to him, one healthy child after another, each one of them precious enough to have sufficed, she’d closed a mental door on the years when the sun had been dark and her only friend, if one could call an infinite Being a friend, had been God. The incessantly praying girl she’d been at twenty-two signified mainly as the person she was blessed not to be anymore.
Not until the previous spring, when Perry had had his sleep troubles, his problems at school, had she opened the mental door again, to compare his symptoms with what she remembered of her own, and not until her first visit to Sophie Serafimides, in the clinically scented little room, did she experience real nostalgia for her Catholic years. She remembered how soothing the transactions of the confessional had been and how she’d loved the immensity of the Church’s edifice, the majesty of its history, which had made her sins, grievous though they were, feel like tiny drops in a very large bucket—richly precedented, more manageably antique. Christianity as Russ preached and practiced it laid very little stress on sin. Marion had long been inspired, intellectually, by Russ’s conviction that a gospel of love and community was truer to Christ’s teachings than a gospel of guilt and damnation. But lately she’d begun to wonder. She loved her children more than she loved Jesus, whose divinity remained something of a question mark, and whose resurrection from the dead she basically didn’t believe in, but she absolutely believed in God. She could feel His presence inside her and around her all the time. God was there—no less now, when she was fifty, than when she’d been twenty-two. And to love God even a little bit, even only when she happened to ask herself if she did, was to love Him more than she could love any person, even her children, because God was infinite. She wondered if good Protestant churches like First Reformed, in placing so much emphasis on Jesus’s ethical teachings, and thereby straying so far from the concept of mortal sin, were making a mistake. Guilt at First Reformed wasn’t all that different from guilt at the Ethical Culture Society. It was a version of liberal guilt, an emotion that inspired people to help the less fortunate. For a Catholic, guilt was more than just a feeling. It was the inescapable consequence of sin. It was an objective thing, plainly visible to God. He’d seen her eat six sugar cookies, and the name of her sin was gluttony.
As she marched through the Pirsig Avenue business district, she tried not to look at the store windows, whose displays of merchandise reproached her for the gifts she was giving her kids. It was true that Russ opposed the commercialization of Christmas and had set a meager budget for it, but this was hard on the kids, especially Judson, who was growing up in such a prosperous suburb. She’d bought him a football game that a toy-store salesman had assured her every boy wanted but Judson was probably too bright to enjoy for long. For Becky she’d bought a cute suitcase that had been marked down in price, probably because it was the wrong size to be useful. For Clem, as a token of his scientific ambitions, she’d bought a secondhand microscope that was probably obsolete in comparison with the ones at his school. And for Perry—oh, Perry wanted so many things, and would have made creative use of all of them, and was so considerate of her, so much on her wavelength, that he’d hinted only at presents he knew she could afford. She’d bought him the cheapest of cassette recorders, the kind of thing that an appliance store displayed to assure the buyers of other cassette recorders that they weren’t getting the worst one. And all the while, at the back of her hosiery drawer, all the while she’d had an envelope containing the eight hundred dollars in cash she hadn’t yet spent on her sessions with Sophie Serafimides, whom she was paying to be her friend.
Beneath this selfishness lay deeper circles of guilt. She lied and she stole, and once upon a time she’d done far worse than that. She’d lied to her husband from the moment she met him, and she’d lied to her daughter not fifteen minutes ago, on her way out the back door—“I’m late for my exercise class.” She was late, all right. Two hours late for a one-hour class! The dollars in the pocket of her gabardine coat were twenty of the fourteen hundred she’d received from the Wabash Avenue jeweler to whom she’d taken the pearls and the diamond rings she’d set aside when she emptied her sister’s apartment in Manhattan. At the time, as the executrix, she’d told herself that she was redressing an injustice perpetrated by her sister; that Becky already had too much money coming to her and didn’t need costly jewelry. The theft might still have been forgivable if Marion had followed through on her intention to spend the money on Perry and Clem and Judson, to whom Shirley had left nothing. But after her first “hour” with Sophie, in June, when Sophie had suggested that weekly counseling would be more valuable than a sleeping-pill prescription, and had explained her sliding fee scale and asked Marion if she could afford, say, twenty dollars a week, and Marion had replied that she did, in fact, have a small personal fund at her disposal, there was no more denying the evil of her theft.
Thanks to her running on Maple Avenue, she arrived at the dental office just five minutes late. The parking lot was emptier than usual, the waiting room occupied only by a mother and a boy reading Highlights for Children, apparently unconcerned about the oral discomforts awaiting him. That the mother and her son were Black spoke to the liberalism of the Serafimideses, whose educations had taken them not only to the suburbs but also, as Marion knew, because she’d asked, out of the Greek Orthodoxy of their childhoods; they belonged to the Ethical Culture Society. The receptionist, a paragon of discretion, sixtyish and Greek herself, gave Marion a silent nod of permission to go straight to the sanctum.
Sophie Serafimides was a chair-filling dumpling of a woman with beautiful olive skin and a great volume of crinkly white hair. Although Marion had been struck by her angelic surname when she found it in the Yellow Pages, she’d chosen Sophie for her given name. The attending psychiatrists who’d treated her in Los Angeles had been men of such insufferable male condescension that it was surprising she’d recovered her sanity at all. To have found a female clinician in New Prospect was something of a miracle, and if she’d “transferred” onto Sophie any of her issues with her unloving, reality-avoidant mother, who’d died of liver disease in 1961, fully estranged from Marion, she had yet to become aware of it. Sophie Serafimides was all about reality. She radiated—exemplified—Mediterranean warmth and good sense, which itself could be insufferable, but not in a way for which Marion could blame her.
Nothing pleased the dumpling more than to be brought a fresh dream, but Marion didn’t have any dreams for her today and preferred confession anyway. After hanging up her coat, she sat down and confessed that she was wearing her exercise clothes because she’d had to lie to Becky about where she was going. She confessed that she’d gobbled up—crammed into her mouth, stuffed herself with—six sugar cookies. Sophie smiled pleasantly at these confessions. “Christmas comes but once a year,” she suggested.
“I know you think I’m too obsessed with this,” Marion said. “I know you think it’s beside the point. But do you know what I weighed this morning? A hundred and forty-three pounds! I’ve been starving myself since September, doing my knee bends and my sit-ups, avoiding sweets, and I’ve lost six pounds in three months.”
“We’ve talked about counting things. The way we use numbers to punish ourselves.”
“I’m sorry, but, for a person my height, a hundred and forty-three pounds is objectively a lot.”
Sophie smiled pleasantly, her hands folded on her belly, the ampleness of which didn’t seem to embarrass her. “Eating cookies is an interesting response to feeling overweight.”
“Well, Becky was being a pill—she’s suddenly unbearable. I could handle it if it w
as just a matter of being irritable and secretive, but Tanner Evans called the house last night, trying to find her, and I didn’t hear her come home until after midnight, and this morning she was up bright and early, which is unusual. She isn’t telling me anything, but it’s obvious how happy she is. And I was thinking about the sweetness of being in love for the first time—how nothing in the world is sweeter.”
“Yes.”
“Tanner is a great kid. He’s talented, he goes to church, he’s really quite beautiful. When I think about my own adolescence, what a disaster it was … Becky is the total opposite. She’s a good person who makes good choices. I’m proud of her—I’m happy for her.”
Sophie smiled pleasantly. “So proud and happy, you had to eat six cookies.”
“Why not? I could starve myself for a year, it still wouldn’t make me eighteen again.”
“You really want to be eighteen again?”
“If I could go back and be like Becky? Unlive my life and do it over again? Absolutely.”
The dumpling seemed to resist an impulse to argue the point. “Okay,” she said. “And what else?”
She already knew the answer. The what-else was always Russ. Marion, in the waiting room, had seen patients emerging from the clinic with expressions more distraught than dental work could account for, and every one of them had been a middle-aged woman. From this she’d gathered that Sophie’s clientele consisted mainly of wives, depressed wives, wives whose husbands had left them or were about to, as the epidemic of divorce ravaged New Prospect. Given a clientele like this, it was understandable that Sophie would view all husbands as a priori suspect. To a hammer, everything looked like a nail. During their first “hour” together, Marion had sensed that Sophie disliked Russ sight unseen. In subsequent “hours,” she’d tried to explain that her marriage wasn’t the problem, that Russ wasn’t like other husbands, that he’d merely been shaken by a humiliating career crisis, while Sophie, in her pleasantly smiling way, had asked Marion why, if she wasn’t worried about her marriage, she kept showing up on Thursdays to talk about it. Finally, in August, Marion admitted that something had come over Russ—he was standing up straighter, taking better care of himself, while seeming acutely repelled by her and snapping at every little thing she said—and that she was no longer so sure what he might do. To Sophie, this represented a “breakthrough” on Marion’s part, and she’d graciously allowed that her marriage might be worth fighting to keep. She suggested that Marion put herself out into the world more, develop more of an independent life, give Russ a new context in which to see her. Maybe, since money was an issue anyway, she could take a half-time job? Or a university-extension course? Marion’s own plan of action for her marriage was to lose twenty pounds by Christmas. Sophie, who was far heavier than Marion, and yet apparently still attractive to her wiry little dentist husband, had approved her plan reluctantly. If she wanted to lose weight, she should do it for her own sake, as a way of taking control of her life.
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