Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “What for?”

  “Listen to your assumptions. You were lucky to find someone to marry you? Why? What was so wrong with you? You were sexually experienced? You’d had a nervous breakdown? Would that have been a problem if you were male? Would you have been lucky to find a wife? And why was it so important to be married in the first place? Because a woman isn’t really a woman if she can’t find a husband and procreate? Because she—”

  Sophie stopped herself and shook her head, as if she’d said too much. And Marion indeed was disappointed in her. The dumpling was so soft and slippery in her manner that her underlying conceptual program, whether Freudian or medical or political or what, had been hard to pinpoint. Now the program stood revealed. Marion guessed that it applied to every one of the neglected or discarded wives who came here—One Size Fits All. Was she supposed to be delighted that it fit her, too?

  “You must get tired of it,” she said, not kindly. “All the ladies coming to you and complaining about their men. Week after week, men men men. It must be frustrating for you—that we can’t talk about something else. That we can’t see how oppressed we are.”

  Sophie, who’d regained her composure, smiled pleasantly. “It’s interesting that you assume my other female patients only talk about men.”

  “Are you telling me they don’t?”

  “It doesn’t matter if they do or don’t. What matters is how you imagine them. Do you think I think you talk too much about men?”

  “I think you do,” Marion said. “You keep telling me I need to develop more of an independent life. I think what you’re really saying is ‘Enough about men already—go liberate yourself.’”

  “You don’t care for the idea of women’s liberation.”

  “If that’s your program, I don’t object to it. If it works for your other patients, more power to them.”

  “But it’s not for you.”

  “That landlord was a sicko. I never saw my friend again, I never saw Isabelle, but I’ll bet you he’d found a way to have sex with her. She got behind with her rent, or she needed a professional favor, and he used his power to take advantage of her. He was fat and repulsive, and he only ran that house as a way to have sex with lots of girls. I was one of them, and what he did to me was sick. Even the part that was normal sex wasn’t normal. It was all happening in his head—I was just a thing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But let’s say he went to a psychiatrist: Sir, you’re making me a little bit angry. Isn’t it time you developed a more independent life? All you ever talk about is girls!”

  Sophie drew a slow breath and slowly let it out. “A good psychiatrist might have helped him identify the trauma he felt compelled to reenact.”

  “Ah, there we go. What am I reenacting?”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “I don’t know. Guilt about my father’s suicide. Is that the idea?”

  “If that’s what you say.”

  “I’ve stopped feeling guilty about Russ. I certainly don’t feel guilty about the landlord. I was guilty, but that’s different from a feeling. That’s an objective fact. The people I feel guilty about are Perry and the child of Bradley’s I killed without telling him. They were innocent, and I’m responsible for them.”

  The dumpling looked down at her pudgy hands. Darkness had fallen outside the window. Elsewhere in the dental office, late units of pain were being manufactured with a drill.

  “Your mother,” Sophie said. “You said she was skiing with her friends when you needed help with your pregnancy. Did you feel angry about that?”

  “My mother was a self-centered alcoholic nightmare.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. You’ve also told me about your anger at your sister. But it was your father who bankrupted your family—”

  “Shirley and my mother made him do it.”

  “He committed fraud and lied to you. Then your car salesman takes advantage of you, despite knowing how sensitive you are. A sexual deviant does unspeakable things to you. You support your husband for twenty-five years, and now he’s chasing someone else. And yet the only people you seem to be angry with are your mother and your sister. Do you see what I’m not understanding?”

  “I guess I’m not a women’s libber.”

  “I’m not asking you to be one. I’m asking you to try to see yourself.”

  “The person I see isn’t good.”

  “Marion, listen to me.” The dumpling leaned forward. “Do you want to know a thing I really am getting tired of hearing? That particular refrain of yours.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “Really? You’ve raised four great kids. You’ve given your husband as much as any man could deserve. You did everything you could for your father. You even took care of your sister when she was dying.”

  “That wasn’t me, though. It was me playing a role. The real me…” She shook her head.

  “Tell me about the real you,” Sophie said. “Besides being a ‘bad’ person, how would you describe her? What is she like?”

  “She’s thin,” Marion said emphatically.

  “She’s thin.”

  “She feels everything intensely. She’s a sinner, and she’s honest with God about that. She hopes He understands that sinning is inseparable from feeling alive, but she doesn’t care if He forgives her, because she’s not really capable of regret. She’s probably an actress—she wants attention. She’s fairly crazy, but not in a way that hurts anyone. She was never suicidal.”

  The dumpling seemed unimpressed.

  “Your sister was an actress,” she remarked. “You’ve also described her as nutty and thin.”

  “Oh, thanks for that.”

  Sophie gestured suggestively, not retracting her remark.

  “Shirley was spoiled and bitter,” Marion said. “She wasn’t a real actress.”

  “Okay.”

  “The person I’m describing is the opposite of bitter.”

  “Okay. Let’s say that’s the real you. What do you think is stopping you from being that person?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I’m fifty years old. Being divorced would be a disaster. Even if I found a way to make it work, I’d still be responsible for my kids, especially Perry. There’s no escaping the consequences of the life I’ve made.”

  “Not to nitpick,” Sophie said, smiling pleasantly, “but if the real you is incapable of regret, why does she care about the consequences?”

  “You asked me for my fantasy.”

  “No, I asked you for the opposite. It’s interesting that you interpreted me to mean a fantasy.”

  The dumpling’s endurance was extraordinary. Marion could talk to her forever, going around and around, and never get anywhere. It was nothing but a waste of money.

  “I wonder if it has to be an either-or,” Sophie said. “Maybe there’s a way to feel truer to yourself and still be a good mother. What if you started with the local theater? Tried getting involved and seeing where it leads.”

  This was the kind of suggestion—moderate, sensible, incremental—that Marion might have made to one of her kids, but waddling around on a stage with other middle-aged suburbanites held no appeal. She needed to be the intense, skinny woman smoking a cigarette at the back of the theater, watching the actors fail and finally losing her patience, striding up to the stage to show them how to do a scene. A fantasy? Maybe, but maybe not. Once upon a time, on a Murphy bed in Los Angeles, her acting had mesmerized Bradley Grant.

  “What are you thinking?” Sophie asked.

  “I’m thinking I’m going to let you go home.”

  “Yes, in a few minutes. I feel we’re—”

  “No.” Marion stood up. “Russ and I have to go to the open house for clergy. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

  She went to the door and took her gabardine coat off its hook.

  “I guarantee you,” she said, “it won’t be fun for Russ unless one of the wives is good-looking. Otherwise it’s just another occasion for his ins
ecurity, and I’m no help with that. I’m the fat little humiliation he’s married to. His only consolation is how good I am at playing nice, remembering the name of every wife, making sure they all get greeted by a Hildebrandt. Later on, he’ll tell me how bad it felt to be the oldest junior minister at the party, how frustrated he is, and I’ll tell him he deserves his own church. I’ll tell him how much better his sermons are than Dwight’s, how much harder he works than Dwight, how much I admire him. That’s another role I’m insanely good at. Except then, if the party was hard enough for him, he’ll complain that his sermons are only good because I write them for him. Ha!”

  Batting her eyelashes, exaggerating her role, she turned back to Sophie.

  “Oh that’s not true at all, honey. The ideas are all yours, I just do a little tidying up to help you express your ideas more clearly. I couldn’t do anything without you. I’m just an empty vessel who knows how to write a clean English sentence—Ha!”

  Her audience of one was watching her with somber compassion.

  “You wanted mad?” Marion said to her. “I can do mad.”

  She meant mad as in angry, but the way she exited the office, jerking open the door and closing it too hard, was mad in both senses. She was mad at herself for using the word fantasy, mad at Sophie for pouncing on the slip. The self she’d unearthed was only a fantasy? They’d see about that. The important thing, she told herself, as she sailed past the Greek receptionist and out into the weather, was to not eat one more goddamned cookie, ever again. To properly starve herself; to see food as the enemy it was; to glow white-hot with the burning of her fat, false self. If it was mad to be obsessed with her weight, then let her be mad. Her fat-loss program in the fall had been a feeble thing, born of a dumpling-sanctioned hope of rekindling Russ’s interest in her, of avoiding a split from which she stood to lose far more than he did. Her heart hadn’t been in it, and now she knew why: she’d never gotten over Bradley. The man in whom she’d invested herself had been a second choice—as insecure as Bradley was confident, as clumsy at writing and tentative at sex as Bradley was magnificent. Maybe, at the time, in Arizona, she’d needed a man she could manage and be more brilliant than, but the marriage had long since dwindled to a mere arrangement: in return for her services, Russ didn’t throw her to the wolves. She still had Christian compassion for him, but when she thought about his penis, vis-à-vis Frances Cottrell and the other pretty women of New Prospect, it wasn’t quite true that there was no comparing him to her long-ago abuser. That much the dumpling had been right about.

  The old corner drugstore had been Rockwellian when the Hildebrandts moved to town, but the owner had since remodeled it with ugly laminates, covered the wooden floor with linoleum, and installed fluorescent lighting. In the same improving spirit, the Christmas tree inside the door was artificial, its needles silver, not even fake green. Behind the front counter, doing the Sun-Times crossword with a pencil, was a large-eared man in his late twenties, too old to be working as a clerk if it wasn’t a career path he’d somehow, heartbreakingly, chosen. Marion stepped up to the counter and surveyed the candy-bar display with militant loathing.

  “I need cigarettes,” she said.

  “What kind?”

  “Strangely,” she said, “the only brand that comes to mind is Benson & Hedges. It’s because of that TV commercial, the one with the elevator door.”

  “‘They take some getting used to.’”

  “Are Benson & Hedges any good?”

  “I’m not a smoker.”

  “What’s a popular brand these days?”

  “Marlboro, Winston. Lucky Strike.”

  “Lucky Strike! Of course! I used to smoke them. One of those, please.”

  “Filter, no filter?”

  “Good Lord. I have no idea. How about one of each?”

  Handing over her money, she was tempted to explain that she hadn’t had a cigarette in thirty years; that she’d quit smoking after being released from a locked ward and moving in with her uncle Jimmy in Arizona; that cigarette smoke had aggravated Jimmy’s asthma and tasted wrong to her at high altitude; that she’d filled the hole of her missing habit with rosary beads and daily visits to the Church of the Nativity, a walk of two thousand four hundred and forty-two steps (habitually counted) from Jimmy’s front door; that she’d discovered Nativity when, eager to be helpful, she’d accompanied Rosalia, the mother of Jimmy’s man, Antonio, to a Sunday mass, because the men were late sleepers and Rosalia kept forgetting where she was going; that Marion, whose state of mind was like the high country in spring weather, strong sunlight snuffed by clouds and breaking out again, over and over, all day long the alternation, brightsummerwarm, darkwinterchilly, had thrown her soul open to every single thing she encountered, because none of these things was a locked ward, and that the presence and majesty of God, revealed in a womblike little Catholic church where her uncle’s lover’s senile mother received Communion, had happened to be one of them; that God had become a better friend to her than cigarettes. It saddened her to think that the big-eared young man had no larger ambition than working in retail, and she would have liked to enlarge his evening by sharing some of the high-country vividness with which, all of a sudden, she was recalling her life pre-Russ. But the clerk had already picked up his crossword again.

  Heedless of the slush in her shoes, she ran across the street and took shelter beneath the awning of a travel agency. She wasted two matches before she got a filterless Lucky lit. Her first drag was reminiscent of losing her virginity—painful and awful and excellent. She knew very well that cigarettes had killed her sister. She also knew, from reports in the paper, that the risk of cancer was proportional to total lifetime exposure. Shirley had erred in not taking a thirty-year break from her exposure. Marion didn’t intend to smoke forever, just long enough to regain the figure of the girl who’d given her virginity to Bradley Grant.

  A measure of her disturbance was that, although she felt light-headed, the Lucky didn’t make her sick. It made her want another one. She walked only two blocks, jumping at the sound of every passing car, jangled and buffeted by the snowy mayhem of it all, before she sat down on a bench outside the town hall and lit up again. Had cigarettes always been so delicious? She gladly noted her lack of hunger. The thought of Doris Haefle’s Swedish meatballs—how many of which Marion had eaten, exactly a year earlier, she’d enjoined herself to keep count of, before losing count—turned her stomach. Snowmelt was seeping through her coat beneath her butt. The boughs of the town hall’s ornamental hemlocks sagged under heavy loads of white. She was smoking the second Lucky faster than the first one; an elation long lost to her was building in her chest. To do something with it, she spoke aloud a word she didn’t think she’d used since the morning the police picked her up in Los Angeles. She said, “Fuck!”

  Oh, it felt good.

  “Fuck Doris Haefle. Fuck her meatballs.”

  A hatted commuter, briefcase in hand, head lowered against the driving snow, paused on the sidewalk to look at her. She raised the hand with the Lucky in it and waved to him.

  “Everything okay?” the man said.

  “Never better, thank you.”

  He continued down the sidewalk. Something about his gait, the determined slant of his body, reminded her of Bradley. Bringing her Lucky to her lips, she saw that its coal was about to burn her fingers. She frantically shook it into the snow.

  Bradley would be sixty-five now. Old, but not so very old, not in a preservative clime like Southern California’s. Did he still think about her? Or had he, like her, entombed his memories and tried to make himself a different person? It would be terrible if he’d forgotten her. But even worse if he remembered her only as the girl who’d behaved unforgivably: if their months of bliss had all been blotted out by the day she’d gone to his house and spoken to his wife. Why had she had to do that? Why had she had to hurt an innocent third party? Everything might be perfect if she hadn’t.

  The matches were damp now
—she scorched a fingertip lighting one. To make an informed guess about which version of her had stayed with Bradley, whether the good might outweigh the very bad, she tried to summon her memories of his passion for her. The memories wouldn’t sit still, one bled into another, but she had the impression of a great many instances of passion. Even when she’d lost her mind and frightened him, he’d had to struggle to keep away from her. Later, yes, surely, he’d hated her for going to his wife. But so what? She’d hated him, too, for rejecting her. The hatred had quickly faded. What remained in her memory was the thrilling rightness of being with him. Maybe, with the passage of time, he’d come to feel the same way?

  She imagined abandoning Russ before he could get around to abandoning her. Wouldn’t that be a surprise. The fantasy of losing thirty pounds and ditching Russ was so satisfying that she might have been content to keep indulging in it, sitting on her bench, if it hadn’t occurred to her that the library had a collection of phonebooks …

  In the mangy snow behind the library, she flicked the end of her fourth cigarette into the parking lot. The facts of the world had submitted to her state of mind. She now had good reason to hope that Bradley was alive in Los Angeles; she had an address and a phone number. Electrified by nicotine, she wondered what to do next with her disturbance. Low on the list of options was smelling the meatballs of Dwight Haefle’s nasty wife. For a moment, she worried that Becky might be waiting at home to go to the open house; that her sense of duty had prevailed over her need to be with Tanner Evans. But this seemed unlikely, and Becky, if it came to that, could go by herself to the open house with Russ, who’d be happier with that arrangement anyway. He was proud of Becky’s beauty and preferred parading it in public, every Sunday afternoon, to being seen with his wife.

  “Fuck you, Russ.”

  Remembering how it felt to want to murder someone, she thought she might yet become a women’s libber. But she was done with the psychiatric dumpling. No imaginable breakthrough could leave her more broken through than she was now. She felt like going home and emptying her hosiery drawer of its remaining cash, to forestall any temptation to crawl back to Sophie, and spending it on an extravagant present for Perry, but the stores were all closing.