One True Thing

by Anna Quindlen

  “Haven’t you read the papers?” Jeff said.

  I shook my head. “Shit,” Jeffrey said, and he got up and looked in the refrigerator, closed it and then opened it to look again.

  “Jon is your problem,” he said. “After Mom died he told his old man that you’d been saying you wished she’d die. His old man heard about the autopsy and went to Best to get extra tests done. Jon nailed you.”

  “Jon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He gave me up?” I asked.

  Jeff nodded.

  “Pretty extreme way to end a relationship,” I said.

  “Cut that crap, Ellen. He screwed you, big time. He’s scum and he always was scum and now you’re going to pay for your shitty taste in men.” Jeff took my hand again. “I know what happened,” he said. “Don’t you think I know what happened? There’s only one person you’d ever do this for.”

  “I’m doing it for her,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Mama,” I said. “I’m doing it for her. Jeffie, I can’t talk with you about this any more. Not one more word. I just can’t. Will you get me a lawyer?”

  “What should I tell Pop?” he said.

  “Tell him I understand,” I said. “Tell him we’ll talk sometime. I just don’t know when.”

  “And if I run into Jon?”

  I thought for a minute, my hands in my lap. I thought of Jon calling his mother in California, asking her how she could have just walked out one day and left him behind, left a two-year-old to grow up with a hole in his heart. I thought of him hearing her reply, “I just did.” I thought of his hands on my lower back and my breasts, his mouth on my belly, of the datebook and the apartment he had probably already sublet, with a big double bed. My head hurt.

  “Tell him to go to hell,” I said.

  “It’s a deal,” Jeff replied.

  When my therapist asked me to keep a journal dissecting the events of that year, she wanted me to particularly deal with the emotions I experienced immediately after I was arrested, before the grand jury heard and decided my case, decided whether to indict me or not. For a while I thought about doing what I had always done for Mrs. Forburg when I wrote compositions or poetry in her class, spinning synthetic emotions out of the silky yarn of intelligence. I was more likely to scam my therapist than Mrs. Forburg, who was far sharper and harder than her often twinkly manner would suggest. She would send my poems back with the dismissive “Clever … but!” or the softer “Nice language, but where are you in here?”

  It was difficult to tell my therapist, as I finally did, that I felt very little during the weeks after I was charged with my mother’s death, although if I had known as much about psychiatry as I do today I would have realized that this was an eminently acceptable answer, easily classified as “lack of affect.” At the time I assumed it was because I had lapsed, like an alcoholic or a mental patient who must be recommitted, that I had made a stab at being my mother’s daughter and had now reverted convincingly to being my father’s, my emotions pickled in a solution of cynicism and self-involvement. Sometimes I wondered whether all children had to choose in that fashion. I pictured my mother sitting watching a toddler, looking for the early signs: which would it be, his or hers? Like embroidered hand towels. I wondered if that was why there were three children, to break the tie. On numbers my mother had been the big winner, but perhaps not on sheer strength of devotion, at least not until the end.

  It was difficult to explain how ordinary your life can be, even when extraordinary things are happening around you. Jeff was right; the number of reporters outside Mrs. Forburg’s house grew in the next few days, then ebbed, then grew again when new reports surfaced that the prosecutor was asking for help from a famous pathologist in Florida, that my former boyfriend was expected to appear before the grand jury, that the school board was considering disciplinary action against Mrs. Forburg, who walked into the glare of television lights and a half dozen flashes every morning when she left for school.

  “Let them fire me,” she said, making coffee the morning this last appeared in the Tribune. “I can get my Social Security and maybe it’ll teach my students something about doing the right thing.”

  “I still don’t entirely understand why you’re doing this,” I said.

  “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” she said.

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously, you needed help and I was in a position to provide it. There’s no mystery in that.”

  “You’re playing the Shirley Booth role in this movie.”

  “I always hated Shirley Booth,” Mrs. Forburg said. And then she left and you could hear the noise, a hum and then a fusillade, lousy with fake intimacy: “Brenda, are you going to lose your job?” “Can you tell us how Ellen is doing?” “Have you talked about what she did?” Then the noise of the car turning over and scattering gravel as she pulled out of the driveway, and the questions died away.

  That was the only peculiar thing about my life, that and the way people looked at me in the supermarket or at the mall, the sidelong glances and the stares. After the first two weeks the reporters outside drifted away, waiting for the next hearing, the easy drama of the courtroom. But the Tribune kept running the picture of me leaving the courthouse after my arraignment whenever Mr. Best would make a new announcement, and I had only to smile slightly when a little girl lifted her skirt over her head in a grand gesture in the produce aisle or I thought idly of something my mother had once said about mall rats, and someone was sure to narrow their eyes and peer at me. Yes ...I’m not sure ...yes, it is ...that’s her.

  “Her mother,” you could sometimes hear them whisper. The little girl would drop her dress and move closer to the stroller in which her baby brother slept, mouth open, chubby legs bowed on either side of a great diaper bulge.

  In the Safeway an elderly woman pressed a little book of daily meditations with a rose on the cover into my hand. “God bless and keep you, dear,” she said.

  “You’re better looking than your pictures,” said the checkout girl.

  And the telephone answering machine in Mrs. Forburg’s dining room was full of messages. The Tribune reporter, Julie Heinlein, was tireless in her pursuit of me, scenting the sort of break that would take her away from Langhorne and on to somewhere bigger, better. Her voice wheedled and coaxed on the tape—an interview, an off-the-record conversation, a first-person account. Once she said, “I’ve been told that you, too, are a journalist.” And I remembered Bill Tweedy’s disgusted judgment one night over boilermakers in the Blarney Stone downstairs from the magazine offices: “A journalist is a reporter who worries too much about his clothes.”

  There were the nut cases, of course, offering to marry me or to hold me down and kill me painfully so that I would fully appreciate my sins. And there were the advocates. The Center for the Right to Die had taken up my cause and offered to provide me with a lawyer.

  “It is time for every one of us to realize that family members know better what is right for the terminally ill than the courts, the police, or the medical personnel who would keep them alive at all costs,” said a man who identified himself as the executive director.

  “I didn’t do it,” I said to the machine.

  “You have become a symbol to millions of people of how caring family members are victimized by a system that offers no hope to their loved ones,” he continued. “You could be an important voice for the movement to allow people to die with dignity and, if necessary, with assistance.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said again.

  The next message was from a man who said that he knew a variety of sex acts that I would enjoy. I listened to the messages myself because I didn’t want Mrs. Forburg to have to hear them, but afterward I felt sick, as though I had stomach flu. I lost weight during those weeks. I could not keep food down.

  Every few days on the machine there was a voice I knew as well as my own, that in cadence and timbre was much like mine. “Ellen?” m
y father would say. “If you’re there, would you kindly pick up?” In the silence I would hear his breathing, a little ragged, as though he’d been running. “Ellen?” There was never more of a message than that, my name and the demand that I respond, until one afternoon he began to speak.

  “Ellen,” he said quietly, “I would like to talk about what happened. I know it’s difficult for you. But we cannot leave this unsaid.” There was a long pause. The tape made a clicking sound as it moved around its eyelike spools. “I didn’t know what they were doing at the police station,” he continued. “I had no idea they would arrest you. I would have come. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t—” there was a choking sound, a sharp breath. “We should talk,” he said. “We need to talk.” And then there was the noise, so final, of the receiver being put down.

  That was the last message I got from him.

  Apart from that, the days were ordinary, almost tedious. I think now the only real manifestation I had of what was happening around me, in the newspapers, in offices at the courthouse and the municipal building, was a feeling not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents’ house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college.

  It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for as I wandered through Mrs. Forburg’s rooms; I remembered how empty it had seemed after the hospital wagon came and the attendants efficiently, almost magically, took the body away. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

  During those weeks in Mrs. Forburg’s house, much of my life was predictable. In fact it was much like the life I had lived those last few months tending my mother, and yet it felt so empty by comparison. There was no center to it, no point. It was an empty housewife’s routine of sweeping floors, folding laundry, even watching soap operas. I cooked and cleaned and read; I simmered casseroles and made pies. But there was no one, nothing, around which all this activity revolved. It was simply the white noise of my life, the way to make the time go by least painfully. I was like a mother whose children have been killed in some horrible accident and yet who continues to put a pan of brownies on the table on a trivet every afternoon at three.

  One night I went to put out a bag of garbage, to leave it at the end of the short drive off the graveled country road where the McNulty brothers would get it in the morning. They would throw it into the back of the truck they took to the dump, where they were as constant a sight, with their low foreheads and dirty watch caps, as the big oily-feathered birds who picked with sharp beaks at the orange sections spotted with coffee grounds, smeared with mayonnaise and lettuce.

  I had put another bag there earlier, and by the light of the nearly full moon I could see a racoon with its pointed snout buried in one corner of the glistening green plastic. It whirled to greet me, baring its little yellowish teeth, nothing cute or cartoonish in its ratlike eyes and scrabbling hands, and then it ran across the road and into the dark. I saw that it had spread its booty around the mailbox post, an untidy heap of bones cleaned to gray whiteness like the moon, a tuna can, a small jar that had once held tartar sauce, a half lemon now reduced cleanly to a bowllike bit of yellow peel, two greasy paper towels like dying flowers.

  I began to work off the twist tie of the bag I was holding so I could put all the things inside it, but as I stooped to pick up the first bone, my ankle went awry, slipping sideways, and I fell heavily into the grass and dirt and began to cry, long rattling gasps that held my chest down like a hand on my sternum. I sat and wept, my face lifted to the sky as though the moon might warm it. A chicken bone, the fragile ribs and cartilaginous center bow of a breast, was beneath the heel of my hand, and I picked it up and threw it with all my might, hearing no sound as it landed in the scrubby weeds on the other side of the road.

  “Goddamnit,” I cried, and I tried to get to my feet, but Mrs. Forburg was behind me, bending stiffly to put her hands on my shoulders.

  “It’s just the Goddamn mess,” I said. “Look at it.” I moved my hand in a wobbly arc and finally brought it up to my chest, feeling my breathing catch and slow, catch again.

  “Go inside,” she said. “I’ll do this.” And I did.

  Sometimes I helped her with her homework, editing senior essays with a red pen, grading the true-and-false tests. True, they said, Shakespeare began a sonnet “Death Be Not Proud.” True, they said, Mr. Darcy is a character in A Tale of Two Cities. True, they said, Silas Marner was written by a man named George Eliot.

  It’s funny, isn’t it, what will make you break? Your lover moves to London and falls in love with a news reader for the BBC and you feel fine and then one day you raise your umbrella slightly to cross Fifty-seventh Street and stare into the Burberry shop and begin to sob. Or your baby dies at birth and five years later, in an antique store, a small battered silver rattle with teeth marks in one end engraved with the name Emily lies on a square of velvet, and the sobs escape from the genie’s bottle somewhere deep in your gut where they’ve lain low until then.

  Or the garbage bag breaks.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong went my big red checks on the test papers, and then I got to Silas Marner and George Eliot and I pressed my hand to my face, trying to keep everything inside where it belonged. I walked, head down, to the one small bathroom in Mrs. Forburg’s house.

  “You can’t keep it all bottled up,” she said when I came back out.

  “Sure I can,” I said.

  “Do you want tea?”

  “No. What I really want is a drink, but that way lies disaster.”

  “Amen,” said Mrs. Forburg, who went to Al-Anon meetings twice a week in the basement of the Lutheran church, as she put a bowl of peanuts on the table. “Don’t get grease on my papers.”

  “You guys always do that,” I said, struggling with a smile. “Even at college, you always call them ‘my papers.’ Why are you so fierce about the possessive?”

  “I never thought about that before,” Mrs. Forburg said, eating a handful of nuts. “Maybe it’s because they’re the only tangible part of teaching. Except for you guys, of course, the finished product, but even that’s ephemeral. You watch the students work in class and you know that what you’re doing is taking hold, but there’s nothing really to show for it except this.” She held up a paper covered with red ink. “Bad example, but you understand my point. You look at the papers and you can see what sticks and what doesn’t. It’s one visible manifestation of how well you’re doing what you do. That, and occasionally you’ll get a letter from one of them that lets you know you did a good job.”

  “I should have sent you a letter like that. I was full of what you taught me. I mean, I lived on what I’d learned from you through four years of English lit.”

  “Thank you, my dear. That’s what you always hope will happen, but it doesn’t really give you much to hold on to. I suppose in a way it’s like having children. No one really knows how good a job you’ve done unless, paradoxically, you’ve done a bad one and a child goes wrong. Otherwise, you’ve spent years on this work with precious little credit.”

  I don’t know what I would have done without Mrs. Forburg during all those weeks. It was like living with a softer, more gentle version of my father, ever anxious to discuss the link between literature and life but not judgmental about opinions that diverged from her own. In the evening we had dinner together, watched the evening news, and talked for an hour or two afterward at the table in the kitchen, with the blinds always shut tight. When she went out to her meetings I watched television sitcoms and read mystery novels and talked to Jules on the phone.

  “People aren’t supposed to ask about AA things, are they?” I asked one night after Mrs. Forburg had come home from her meeting.

  “I don’t know about people,” she said. “
You can certainly ask me about Al-Anon.”

  “Why do you go?”

  “Because it helps me to understand why I do some of the things I do,” she said.

  “Sorry, I put that badly. You usually go to Al-Anon if you have a family member who is an alcoholic. Who’s the family member?” I raised my arms, palms open, as though to indicate the empty house, empty of photographs or mementos, too, so different from my mother’s house. “Sorry,” I said, “that was a nasty way of putting it.”

  “Have you noticed you apologize a lot these days?” Mrs. Forburg said.

  “Is that a way of evading my question?”

  “No, it’s something you might want to think about. The answer is that my ex-husband was an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic. And my mother was an alcoholic. And I was, in the vocabulary of the addiction, the enabler who made it possible for all of them to go on drinking. I took care of my mother when she was drunk and then when she was dying, and I adored my father and made excuses for why he did what he did.”

  “And your husband?”

  “Oh, he was my father all over again—charming, smart, and crippled. You can find my story in any handbook on alcoholism. But knowing that you’re typical doesn’t go a long way toward making you feel better in your day-to-day life.”

  “How long have you been divorced?” I asked. I could not remember Mrs. Forburg ever being married.

  “Twelve years,” she said.

  “It takes you that long to get over it?”

  “That’s a naive comment from someone as intelligent as you are. It takes your entire life to get over some of the people you’ve loved, and some you never get over.”

  “You always do that. The intelligence thing. It’s as though if you’re smart, you will understand yourself.”

  “You’re right. That’s naïve of me. Particularly of me.”

  “Is your father still alive?”