One True Thing

by Anna Quindlen

  It was cold that day, but we stopped at least a dozen times so my mother could talk to people she knew. It was difficult to maneuver the wheelchair up and down the curbs and over the uneven pavements, and sometimes she became impatient. When she wanted to go into the Langhorne Shoe Shoppe, I struggled with the chair at the door, holding it open with my hip, trying to steer and force the big rubber wheels over the ridged floor mat in the doorway.

  “This is exactly like dealing with that damn double stroller I bought when Brian was born,” she said. “I’d be heaving and hoing it through the door and you’d be halfway out into the street with me screaming after you.”

  She used the armrests to help herself stand up and walked inside, leaving me to back out and set the brake on the street. I watched her through the display window, glimpsed her profile between a pair of tassel loafers and some hiking boots. We had the same sharp noses. She was talking to one of the salespeople, and then she sat down. I stood on tiptoe and could see her slipping off her flats, and then someone emerged from the back room with a tower of boxes.

  “Ellen?” a voice said behind me.

  It was Mrs. Forburg, my English teacher. “Couldn’t you call me Brenda now?” she said.

  “To be honest, I’d rather not. I think you should remain Mrs. Forburg forever. It’s a kind of honorific.”

  She laughed. In her parka and gray pants she was as small as a ten-year-old, but she had the dried-apple skin and white-gray hair of a grandmother. “Is your mother inside?” she said.

  I nodded. “She appears to be buying shoes. I didn’t know she needed shoes.”

  “Does any woman really need shoes?” Mrs. Forburg said, looking down at her own gray walking oxfords. “Buying shoes always gives me a lift, like buying new stationery or a new purse. It makes you feel as if there’s something to look forward to.” She reached across the chair and touched the back of my hand. “Did you get my note?” she said.

  “I did, I did, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to call you. Jeff and Brian were home for Thanksgiving, my mother and I are doing a lot of things together. The house. You know.”

  “I didn’t mean it as a command performance. I just wanted you to know that I’d always be happy to feed you some spaghetti and listen to your troubles.”

  There was the high rattle of the bells over the shoe store door, and my mother came out with a bag. “Beautiful new loafers,” she said as she sat down heavily in the chair. She looked up. “Mrs. Forburg!” she said.

  “It’s good to see you, Mrs. Gulden.” My mother slipped the shoe box out of her bag and showed off the loafers, gleaming cordovan leather with tassels. She showed me how the black flats she was wearing were slightly down-at-heel. It was quite a performance, but I could tell by the look in her eyes that Mrs. Forburg recognized it for what it was. It was the same look she had once given me when she handed me back a B paper savaging Charlotte Brontë, a paper made up almost entirely of my father’s opinions. “Original thought next time, Ellen,” she had said quietly that day, but it had sounded less like a rebuke because of the sympathy in her gray eyes, and a certain tone to her voice, the same tone she had now. She saw things, Mrs. Forburg.

  She had always been my favorite teacher—Jeff and Brian’s, too, although neither of them had been as mesmerized by English literature as I was. Mrs. Forburg had deftly steered me through fiction and verse, gently edited my poetry, which was clever but not at all deeply felt, and made me keep a journal my senior year, although I think she sensed that she was getting the expurgated version of my life. “She is still the best English teacher I have ever had,” I said one night when I was home during my last year at college. “Then you are taking the wrong courses at Harvard,” my father had said dryly. I had been shocked into silence, but my mother had not.

  “You’re just jealous, Gen,” she said evenly.

  “Jealous? What do you mean?”

  “Ellen can have more than one teacher,” my mother had said without looking at him. There was a sharp scraping sound as he had pushed back his chair.

  “You misjudge me, Katherine,” he replied.

  On the street outside the shoe store my mother smiled up at Mrs. Forburg and took her hand. “I’d like to invite Ellen to dinner, Mrs. Gulden,” Mrs. Forburg said. “To get reacquainted. Would that make life difficult for you?”

  “No! Absolutely not! She’s cooped up in the house all the time with me and she gets antsy, although she doesn’t say it. I’ll make her call and arrange it with you.” And so we continued down the street.

  “I didn’t know you needed shoes,” I said.

  “I don’t,” my mother replied.

  It was a busy afternoon. We stopped at Phelps’s and Mr. Phelps hugged my mother, swaying back and forth, his eyes glistening. “Oh, don’t go getting mushy on me,” my mother said, smiling at him brightly. He gave her the name and number of a young mother who had been in to ask about stenciling flowers on a crib. “I wanted to have you talk to her, but I wasn’t sure how you would feel about it,” Mr. Phelps said. “I’ll call her when I get home,” my mother promised.

  At Duane’s, both Mr. and Mrs. came from the back room to discuss what we should be reading next, and I saw Mrs. Duane drop a Gothic novel with a cover illustration of a tortured-looking woman in a hoopskirt into our bag. The wives of two faculty members came over to tell my mother how well she was looking, and she leaned down out of the chair to speak to their children, toddlers and one gangly girl of eight or nine who stared hard, perhaps remembering her parents whispering about something terrible—“Kate Gulden … so young … George’s wife … just awful”—in the kitchen. A woman who lived several blocks over from us began to talk of homeopathy and herbal medicines, but my mother smiled and said, “Not now, Frances.” Then we went down the street and got an ice-cream cone and I pushed the chair home with one hand while I licked away.

  “Good thing you looked nice,” I said. “I felt like I was with Jimmy Stewart at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.”

  “They’re all just sorry for me,” my mother said.

  “Oh, please,” I said. “That wasn’t what that was all about. They were all so happy to see you. Everyone likes you.”

  “I know that. They just didn’t have to think about it until now.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  “You can’t judge, Ellen. People are different. People love in different ways. Sometimes hugs and kisses, sometimes something else. And sometimes they can’t feel it, they’re just made that way.”

  “Like who?” I said, afraid.

  “My mother was like that. She was very poor as a child, and things were hard, and I’ve never been sure how she came to marry your grandfather, but it wasn’t what either you or I would think of as a love match. And I think some part of her shriveled up and died from not being used, not being exercised. The closest she came was loving my brother, and look how that ended. The closest thing she has to a son is a flag all folded up into a triangle that she’s never unrolled once, and a rubbing of his name from the Vietnam Memorial that one of her nephews sent her after he took a trip to Washington.”

  I turned the chair into the flagstone path to our front door. We never used it, always went in through the kitchen, but there were six steps there and here it was only three to the porch and a shallow sill into the hall. “It’s almost time to decorate the house,” my mother said, as I came around to face her and help her out of the chair.

  And she raised her arms to me to be lifted up, and I wrapped mine around her. She pulled me closer and I could feel her body like sticks in a bag, the slightness of her now, her ribs like some fragile musical instrument beneath my hands.

  “Thank you, Ellie,” she said.

  “We’ll go downtown again next Saturday,” I said. “You can buy some more shoes. Everyone will be so happy to see you.”

  “I’m happy to be home. I’m so tired I’m going upstairs to bed as soon as I have some tea.” We walked up the st
airs together, arm in arm. “I can make it myself,” she said.

  “Do you need a pill?”

  “I’ll get one myself. Ellen?”

  “Huh?” I said, bumping the wheelchair back up the steps.

  “Call Mrs. Forburg and arrange to go to her house for dinner,” my mother said. She moved slowly into the kitchen, her fingertips feeling along the walls, itsy-bitsy spiders yellow-white against the wallpaper, as though she was blind as well as lame.

  I lay on the couch for a while and finally I fell asleep, almost as tired from the afternoon as she was. When I finally woke I could see the streetlights shining amber through the looped drapes of the living room, and hear my mother in the kitchen. In my mind’s eye I could see her sitting at the oak table, her upper arms as round, her skin as pink and clear, her eyes as serene as they had been six months before.

  “Here’s the most important thing to remember,” I heard her say in her authoritative “Ellen, you will not wear that dress to play in Buckley’s backyard” voice. “You must tap most of the paint off the brush before you begin. You want an almost dry brush, not a wet brush.” And then: “It’s definitely a girl? Oh, that’s wonderful. I have one daughter and you can’t imagine … twenty-four … yes, she is … well, I do, too … oh, I know, but you get used to it … well, that’s wonderful. What design did you choose?”

  The woman who wanted to stencil the crib. Of course. I stared at the streetlamp and thought I saw snowflakes falling against the scrim of its glow. Claire Belknap had better mind her roses. Ellie Gulden had better wax the runners on her sled. Ellie Gulden’s sled was still in the garage, a Flexible Flyer with her name painted in red script on the crossbar, next to Jeff Gulden’s sled and Brian Gulden’s sled

  Kate Gulden had painted the names. My father had never pushed us down the hill at River View Park and never pulled us up. There were no snow days at the college, where everyone could tumble out of bed and into classroom buildings. There were no weekends for a man who wanted to be a department head, or later for a man who was one.

  But I could see her, standing at the place at the bottom of the hill where there was a dip and then a bump, yelling up at us, a cap pulled down over all but the smallest divot of eyes and nose and mouth, “Not so fast. Not so fast. Slow down. Oh, my lord, Jeffrey, you’ll give me a heart attack.” All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid. Jeff had broken his arm once on that hill, and she had taken her tempera paints and painted a toy soldier up the entire length of his cast. He had been mortified.

  A few minutes later I heard my father come in the back door, and her cry: “George! So early.” She sounded much as she had that day I first came back: “Ellie! You’re home.”

  “Come outside and see the snow,” I heard him say softly.

  “There’s snow?”

  “Just a little.” And then the kitchen door opened again, and closed with a click, and I went up to bed and heard no more. In the morning there was no snow at all, except in my mother’s memory. “I caught it on my tongue,” she said. She laid her hand on my father’s at the breakfast table. “It was beautiful.”

  “Yes, it was,” he said, and smiled back at her.

  No one knows what goes on inside a marriage. I read that once; the aphorism ended “except for the two people who are in it.” But I suspect that even that is not the truth, that even two people married to each other for many many years may have only passing similarities in their perceptions and their expectations. I think I read somewhere, too, that social scientists interviewed couples and found that they had vastly different ideas about everything from their spouse’s favorite dessert to their preferred sexual position.

  Sometimes I feel limited now by how much life experience I have to extrapolate from books and research articles.

  But I know from experience that those least capable of truly assessing any marriage are the children who come out of it. We style them as we need them, to excuse our faults, to insulate ourselves from our own expendability or indispensability. I remembered the great relief I felt when I first read about Oedipal theory, the relief of knowing that the triangle in which I found myself was archetypical.

  So that when I saw my parents together day after day during that winter I could not truly say whether their relationship was changing or whether I was really seeing it for the first time because I was seeing my father for the first time.

  One day early in December he asked me to have lunch with him in a steakhouse several miles from campus, the kind of dim and faintly pretentious out-of-the-way place I imagined you would take someone for an assignation.

  “Come here often?” I said, as the waiter brought drinks and steered us toward the salad bar.

  “Most of the time I’m far too busy for lunch. I eat at my desk while I work.”

  “I’m flattered,” I said.

  “Ellen, I had several agendas when I asked you to meet me today. But one of them is certainly to find out why you are being so hostile. I know this is not the optimum situation for any of us, but you and your mother certainly seem to be managing well. I’m perplexed as to why I’m met with coldness or overt hostility whenever I enter the house.”

  “Give me an example,” I said.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” he said, “this is not a debating contest. You know exactly what I mean. Do you need more help? Should I have a nurse come in?”

  “A nurse didn’t take care of me when I had chicken pox.”

  “This is not chicken pox and if you need an example of what I’m talking about, the sarcasm in that sentence is sufficient. Do you want salad?”

  “Not if it’s iceberg lettuce and canned chick-peas.”

  “I’m quite certain it is.”

  The waiter took our order, and there was a long silence broken by the sound of someone in the kitchen throwing pots and pans around in a fit of temper or extraordinary clumsiness. The brother of a member of the college board of trustees stopped by our table to say hello.

  “Look, Papa,” I said. “I don’t want to fight with you. I’m under a lot of pressure. I don’t need any more from you. I’m just getting through this day by day.”

  “I understand that completely, Ellen. And I understand that whenever we talk about what is going on, we talk about you, about how you are feeling, about your unhappiness. I think this time should be about your mother. It calls for a little empathy.”

  “Empathy is the one thing I never really learned,” I said softly. “You never taught me empathy.”

  “Learn it now,” he said peremptorily.

  “And you? Where is your empathy?”

  “I told you before—”

  “I don’t want to hear about the mortgage. The college would give you a leave any time you wanted. You’ve taken sabbaticals to write books and you can certainly take one to participate in the most important thing that’s ever going to happen in your Goddamn life.”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “Oh, fuck that, Papa. I’m the one who is behaving appropriately here, to use your expression, and you’re the one who’s not. She needs you to be with her.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “She doesn’t need to tell me that. She shouldn’t need to tell you. Yesterday she sat for twenty minutes with the Goddamn Christmas wreath on her lap before I could put it on the front door. She kept feeling it as if she were blind, as if the meaning of life was in the pinecones she’d wired to that wreath. I asked her if she needed help putting it up and she just said, ‘This is pretty, isn’t it?’ Sometimes she goes into her room and pretends to sleep and instead she goes through all these boxes of stuff she has, swim-meet ribbons and pictures we drew years ago and old papers from when she was in high school. She just stares and stares at them. Why should she have to sit by herself and look at pictures of her life when she could have the real thing? Why should she sit around conjuring up her memories of your life together when she could be wi
th you making real memories? Everything has changed in that house, everything, from my level of empathy to her level of agony. But you don’t know about either because you’re behaving as though life goes on as usual. Life as we knew it is over. Done. Finished.”

  My father sawed away at a bloody steak without looking at me. Finally he said, “You’re giving her the morphine?”

  “And I’m going to keep giving her more and more. If the pills turn out not to be enough, I can get a little pump that will deliver it into the catheter they put in her chest. But I’m not you. And I can’t deal with all the pain in her head. She can only go so far with me. She still thinks she has to protect me, or baby me, whatever. You’re her husband. She needs to talk to you.”

  He stared at his food, making it into a kind of still life: a piece of dry gray-white baked potato, a red wedge of meat. Another. Another. It looked as though he was playing chess with his lunch as he moved it in mysterious patterns. As he cut and arranged he spoke quietly, so that he could not eat unless he stopped. And could not stop until he had finished.