The Secret Women

by Sheila Williams

  Dee Dee glanced up at the ceiling, where she heard the thump-thump of someone’s footsteps in the hall. She thought about Frances’s outbursts, becoming more frequent with each passing week. Tears followed by laughter followed by dark moods and the composition of even darker poetry. Some of the poems made Dee Dee shudder: they read like Poe on steroids. Tantrums and screaming matches punctuated with the dull thud of slamming doors. Life with Frances? Or life with teenagers? Dee Dee couldn’t tell the difference. Was she making too much of this?

  Dee Dee inhaled and closed her eyes. If she was honest, it wasn’t really Frances’s moods that she needed to worry about; it was her own. Lately, she’d been on edge, jumpy. And it was never anything major that sent Dee Dee into a hissing frenzy. It was just little stuff. Stuff like wet socks, for instance.

  Chapter 33

  Dee Dee

  Two weeks ago, Lo was in the kitchen measuring out dog food. Dallas was doing doggy jumping jacks in excitement. He was like a hobbit, always hungry.

  “Hold on a minute, buddy, almost there . . .”

  “Where is your daughter?” Dee Dee growled, coming through the doorway from the laundry room.

  Lo’s brows rose.

  “My daughter? Oh. It’s like that, huh? Which of my daughters are you referring to? Maybe she isn’t mine.” His face brightened at the possibility.

  “Frances Laura.”

  Lo shook his head as he poured the kibble into Dallas’s bowl.

  “Oh, oh. World War Twenty-Four is about to begin.” He set the bowl down on the floor, where it was instantly consumed by the chubby but obviously underfed and starving yellow lab. “What did she do now?”

  Dee Dee held up one disheveled and gross-looking sock. Even from the distance of a few feet, it smelled disgusting. Lo’s nose twitched. He pointed toward the patio.

  She marched through the kitchen and dining room toward the French doors leading to the backyard, a woman on a mission. The mission was to get Frances, once and for all, to be responsible for her own “stuff” and, for God’s sake, take the time to empty out her gym bag and hang up the damp items, tee shirts and socks especially, on the line to dry or, better still, pop them into the washer. Not leave them in a soggy, balled mess in the bottom of a gym bag that was in the bottom of the laundry hamper that was in the back of the mudroom in the corner and forget about them for a week.

  Dee Dee’s internal rant came to a screeching halt ten steps from the French doors. Frances was on the patio, walking back and forth, her arms waving in the air, gesticulating wildly as if she was conducting a symphony with the philharmonic. Her face was animated, a mélange of expressions. She grinned, threw her head back and laughed, nodded, shook her head in the negative, and stuck her tongue out. Her steps were light and graceful, reminiscent of the ballet lessons she’d taken but not liked. And all the while, her lips were moving. Dee Dee’s eyes scanned the yard. Frances was talking. And talking. Then laughing. And talking some more. To no one.

  Dee Dee’s blood froze.

  Her mother used to do that. Walk around the house, waving her arms in all directions, sometimes hitting her lovely hands against a wall or the side of a counter, which left them bruised and speckled with cuts and scratches at the end of a day. Laura would dance through the house on her toes as if en pointe. She’d laugh. And she’d talk. Chitchat. About . . . what? Who the hell knew? Dee Dee and Debora had no idea—they were just kids. Their dad didn’t know either, and that pained him. But Laura seemed to know. She would talk and answer questions, carry on conversations as if there was an entire complement of personalities in the room. Talking only to her.

  But there would be no one there. She’d float past her daughters as if they were invisible, as if their words were as inaudible as the whispers of dust. Later, timidly, the girls would ask, “Mommy who were you talking to?” And Laura would answer, “Just my friends.”

  Just what friends?

  Dee Dee opened the French doors with the grip of a woman who thought she might be opening the gates to hell.

  Frances spun around and stared. “Mom? What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Frances . . . w-what are . . . what are you doing?” Dee Dee glanced around the patio. The sound of the door opening had startled a scavenging squirrel, which sprinted to safety up a tree.

  “Doing?”

  “Who are you talking to? There’s no one here.”

  Frances’s expression of concern morphed into one of disbelief. She lifted the veil of long dark reddish-brown curls from her shoulders to reveal the earpiece and cord attached to her cell phone threaded through the inside of her tee shirt.

  “I’m on the phone, Mom. With Austin. Why?” Her features tightened into a mask of granite. “Is that what’s wrong, Mom? You thought I was talking to myself? Talking to invisible people? Like your crazy mother?”

  “Frances . . . My mother wasn’t . . . She was ill, okay? I’m sorry, I just thought . . .” What did you think?

  “I’ll call you back,” Frances said into the microphone at the end of her phone cord. She stuffed the cord into her hoodie pocket as she brushed by her mother. “Yeah, I know, Mom. Grandma Laura was sick. I know that. You say it over and over. She was mentally ill. But I’m not. Okay? Okay? I’m not!” The French doors slammed behind her.

  At any other time Dee Dee would have followed her through those doors, right at her heels, reading her the riot act about the laundry, mental illness, and how you don’t talk to your mother like that. But this time she could only stand there, in the middle of her beautiful patio, amidst the red and white roses she’d planted in her garden, the lavender now blooming and attracting hummingbirds and slow- and low-flying bumblebees, and the waxy leaves of two magnolias that she was nursing along, hoping they would take off in the now more unpredictable weather of southwestern Ohio. Because in her head, another conversation was playing, a loop that never stopped. Frances had pushed the “Laura button.” The button that always made her feel ashamed, that excavated voices and scenes from another day long ago that had spiraled out of control. A day when things had been said that shouldn’t have been, that couldn’t be taken back or forgiven. Or even atoned for. That day had begun with a seemingly little thing too.

  * * *

  It was October, a Friday after school. Dee Dee was fourteen. She and Teena were going to Cydney’s slumber party, and home was on the way. Normally Dee Dee didn’t bring friends to her house, especially to this house. They’d moved—again—and the “new” place wasn’t new at all; it was an older home on 14th, a “fixer-upper,” as Dad called it. Debora called it “dilapidated.” After six months, Dad was still fixing it up. He’d told them that the area was in “transition.” And besides that, there was her mom. But Dee Dee decided to take a chance. It was four thirty. She and Teena would stop by the house, she’d throw a few things into a bag, and they’d take off to Fifth to catch the bus. Deb was at cheerleading practice, Dad wouldn’t be home for hours, and Mom . . . and here was where Dee Dee crossed her fingers and said a silent prayer. Mom had been sick for a bit and spent a few days in the hospital. But the doctor had given her blue pills that made her sleep. With a little luck, Laura would be under the covers and Dee Dee (with T in tow) could slip in and out of the house without Laura hearing a peep.

  She unlocked the door and tiptoed into the front hall, glancing back at Teena. She whispered, “My mom’s sleeping.”

  Teena nodded.

  They slid off their shoes like thieves, then floated up the stairs and disappeared into the bedroom that Dee Dee and Deb shared.

  Ten minutes later, they floated back down. Quietly, they wriggled their feet back into their shoes.

  “Hi, baby! Whatchu doing?”

  The girls froze at the bottom of the stairs and looked over at the person standing next to the couch in the front room. Dee Dee glanced at her friend. Teena looked as if she was staring down a nightmare.

  Laura wore the pink nightgown her da
ughters had given her for Mother’s Day, but it looked nothing like it had when it was new. Its vivid pink had faded to soft salmon: the hospital laundry washed everything in hot water and dried the clothes on a high heat setting. The hem was dangling, white thread trailing downward; the wrinkles were deeply set, more like crevasses than wrinkles; and the gown, a size medium to accommodate Laura’s height, was now too large. Her appetite had waned, and the gown hung across one shoulder so loosely that Dee Dee thought, her heart in her throat, that it might slip off completely. Worse, Laura had put it on backward, and the label was hanging out. Her feet were bare, the claw-like toenails three months beyond the need for a pedicure. And her long, thick hair had not seen the inside of Elegance Salon in months. The tangled strands were half straight, half not, and some still carried remnants of the Ethel Merman auburn-orange tint that Laura used when she tried to color it herself. She looked like an escapee from Night of the Living Dead, part X.

  “Is sis one of your friends?” Laura asked. Her voice was deep and raspy as if she’d smoked a warehouse of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. But Laura hadn’t smoked for years.

  “Yeeessss, Mom. This is Teena Sampson from school. Uh, look, Mom, we gotta go. Cydney’s slumber party . . .” Out of the corner of her eye, Dee Dee saw Teena bolt for the door. She heard her friend say, “I’ll wait outside,” in a terrified whisper before the front door closed with a loud click.

  “Where’syourfriendgo?”

  Dee Dee blinked back tears of embarrassment. “She . . . she left. I . . . I gotta go, Mom. Bye.”

  “Whatstherush, Dee . . . Deanna? Gimme a hug.” Laura grabbed her and folded her into a bear hug with a strength that contradicted her scrawny arms.

  “Mommy . . . No. I gotta go. Besides, you . . .” Dee Dee’s nose crinkled, and she sniffed back the snot but not the fury. She tried to wriggle out of her mother’s arms, and for a moment they were engaged in what looked like a professional wrestling maneuver. “You . . . smell! Mom, when was the last time you . . . took a shower? You look like a . . .” She gasped, the tears and frustration welling up into one big knot in her chest. “Mommy, go back to bed. Please? Go . . . back to wherever you came from!” She finally pushed away from her mother and stepped back.

  Laura stared at her, blinking wildly as if she didn’t know where to look. Her mouth gaped open slightly lopsided, as if she’d lost control over her muscles. She frowned. “I . . . took a bath . . . Didn’t I? Didn’t . . . I thought I did.” Laura paused as if trying to remember what a bath was. “I don’t remember. Maybe . . . yes, maybe I should take one. A bath. Or shower . . .” She glanced toward the back wall of the room as if there were someone there. Then she smiled, sheepishly.

  Dee Dee thought, That’s a Mommy smile, a real one.

  “You know,” Laura said slowly, forming her words with care in case she chose the wrong one. “In this new house, I-I forget where the bathroom is.” She chuckled at her little joke.

  And Dee Dee couldn’t help it. “I hate this house. I hate that we had to move. And it’s your fault.”

  Her mother’s smile melted away. “What do you mean? Deanna . . .”

  “Dad said we had to move. Because of the money . . .” Dee Dee thought, I shouldn’t say this, it’ll hurt her feelings. I shouldn’t. But she did. “Because he needs money to pay for your hospital and the doctors and your medicine that doesn’t work. So now we have to live in this dump! It’s humiliating! I hate to bring my friends here! And then . . .” It was all rushing out, floodwaters of words pouring over a weak and damaged dam. “Why can’t you be like everybody else’s mom? Why don’t you wash? Why are you dressed so . . . weird?”

  Laura stared at Dee Dee, then glanced down at her clothing, running her hands across her body as if seeing herself for the first time, totally unaware, as if some other woman was standing in her body wearing a pink nightgown on backward. When she looked up at Dee Dee, her expression reflected fear, sadness, and self-loathing. It was the most heartbreaking thing Dee Dee had ever seen.

  Dee Dee turned on her heel and ran. Out of the room, out of the house. She grabbed Teena by the arm and dragged her down the street.

  * * *

  Dee Dee clasped her mug between her palms. The warmth from the tea should have been comforting, but it wasn’t.

  Tomorrow. This weekend. Carmen and Elise were stopping by to help her sort through the boxes in the basement and to give her moral support as she finally disposed of—in one way or another—Laura Frances O’Neill Brown’s few belongings. Dee Dee saw the boxes in her mind, forlorn looking and deliberately forgotten, sitting on the unused Ping-Pong table, where Lo had put them after the water heater died a few months ago. Four boxes. Luke Brown had packed up his wife’s things after her death, and the boxes had remained unopened since then, a sad little quartet usually consigned together to a top shelf in the corner of the basement just above half-full cans of Sherwin-Williams paint the contractor had used on the house. They weren’t heavy, and there wasn’t any rattling when you shook them, so both Dee Dee and Deb had surmised that there wasn’t much in them. Laura hadn’t lived long enough to acquire much and had spent over a quarter of her life in hospitals. Eighty percent of the time, Laura hadn’t even spoken. She sure hadn’t been at Macy’s buying things.

  “So what am I afraid of? I’m just going to open a few boxes.” Dee Dee was startled to hear her own voice. “Okay. Now I’m talking to myself.”

  Pandora, the first human woman, whose name was Greek for “gift of the gods,” —a sick joke, Dee Dee thought—was given a special jar by Zeus. When she opened it—after being warned not to—all the troubles of the world flew out. Dee Dee visualized one of the decrepit water-stained boxes, its flaps wide open while pestilence, plague, famine, and other evils poured out, a dark, howling flood of woe. It made her sad. Nearly every remembrance she had of Laura, even the pleasant ones, had a sepia wash across it, her mother’s face tinged with some aspect of her illness that had bubbled up to spoil even the shortest Kodak moment. So how could anything good come out of those boxes?

  Dee Dee decided to break the pact and open the boxes herself, before Elise and Carmen arrived, and after Lo left for the gym. That way if there was something awful or embarrassing inside, well, she could deal with it or call Deb. Laura had been haunted by dark things, things that only she could see or hear. Although the memory for Dee Dee was fleeting and fog-bound, Laura had called them “devils”—didn’t she? She’d drawn them to show Luke, to show her doctors and anyone else, to “prove” that devils existed. To her, a dark world lived side by side with the light one. If there was something weird in the boxes, Dee Dee would be the first one to see it. And if there was a real devil inside one of them, she’d deal with that too. Besides, she knew of at least one thing that wouldn’t be in the boxes.

  Her own guilt.

  Chapter 34

  Dee Dee

  The next morning, Dee Dee set the four sad-looking boxes side by side on the Ping-Pong table. They’d been on the floor when the water heater broke, and they’d gotten wet—pretty much everything in the utility room had gotten wet. The boxes were water-stained but not damp anymore. They smelled musty and ancient, the odor Dee Dee imagined emanating from excavated Egyptian tombs. Dee Dee’s father hadn’t looked through them. “There wasn’t time,” he’d told her. “I had a million other things coming at me.” Luke had put them in the cabinet under the bookshelf in the family room, and they stayed there until he died in 2009. There didn’t seem to be any order to them, so Dee Dee assigned numbers in her head—box one, box two, box three, box four. The lightest box in weight was the noisiest, its contents shifting from side to side when Dee Dee picked it up. The heaviest she assumed was tightly packed with sketchbooks and newspaper-wrapped frames.

  “Box number one.”

  Dee Dee opened the box and picked up the items in it one by one, wondering why anyone would have taken the time to pack them. It was like cleaning out the junk drawer in the kitchen. One s
tick of Juicy Fruit gum, mummified to brittle fragility and disintegrating in her fingers; dried-up BIC pens; a Walkman but no earphones, the batteries corroded into white powder; a pencil sharpener; a smiling Buddha paperweight; a fan from Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church; a Rubik’s Cube; and other miscellaneous and useless whatnots. These were Laura’s things, the little personal items she’d kept in her room . . . Had she been in a room? Or had it been a ward with lots of other patients? Or (too sad to think about) a cell? It was so long ago, and Dee Dee had been young and didn’t remember. She realized that she had no idea what her mother’s living situation had been like at Shawnee Springs Hospital. When Luke had taken her and Deb for visits, they sat in the solarium, the only room with “proper light,” Laura the artist had said. She felt ashamed that she didn’t know how her mother had spent her days in the last years of her life. Now that Daddy was gone too, there was no one to ask.

  She took more time retrieving each of the doodads from box one, examining them and setting them side by side on the Ping-Pong table. She extracted a coffee mug, stained on the inside from the black tea her mother had liked, ironically decorated with the word “coffee” in several languages. An unopened package of incense, and Dee Dee could still smell the fragrance: sandalwood, distant and exotic. An eclectic group of cassettes rubber-banded together, some of the tapes trailing like ribbons; among them was Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, Nina Simone, and Alice Coltrane’s mystical Eastern riffs. Pulling out a little California Raisin action figure, she hummed “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” fingering his tiny orange shoes. There was a notepad that contained no notes and an address book imprinted with the name of an insurance agency. No addresses; the pages were pristine. Didn’t Mommy have any friends? Laura had been so fun-loving, smart, and witty.