Bright Precious Thing

by Gail Caldwell

  I remember this day in particular, though, and I don’t know why. I can see the sun falling through leaves and I can feel that it is autumn—the temperature cool—and I know, too, that I was in a familiar zone of discontent, a feeling I made worse by berating myself. Caroline, more than anyone I’d ever known, recognized the dark place I could catapult into, and she knew how to convince me it was an illusion.

  One of the ways she did so was by telling me a story, my story, as though I were five or had never heard it before. She cleared her throat, used her hands to make the point. “May I remind you,” she said. “You moved to Boston.” She blocked out each sentence with her hands, as though every life event deserved, say, a running foot. “You got sober. You started work at the Globe. You started therapy. You got Clementine” (my first Samoyed). Here she gave me the side-eye and smiled. “And me, I might add.”

  Yes, you, I might add, twenty-plus years later.

  I grabbed on to every memory I had after she died. Like a desperate shopper in one of those giveaway races against the clock, throwing everything within reach into the cart. I could almost feel my brain whirring in the first weeks after she was gone, etching into history every laugh, eye roll, physical gesture. The day she steadied me on our first walk, when I tripped on a root in the path. The ropy muscles of those forearms, the arms that rowed the Charles and swam the ponds and that I held on to for hours in the last weeks of her life.

  I’ve written about her before, but you don’t forget people when they die; you don’t stop loving them or relying on them. I know we can romanticize the dead. I try not to do it. She’s been gone a long time now and I think about how it might be if she were here, if we had had the friendship we thought would go on for decades. It’s a heartbreaking game because the rules are mutable and time always wins and there’s no alternate reality where I didn’t change and she didn’t die.

  So. The rule, the platitude, is that you have to go on. Which we do, most of us, some more creatively and easily than others. I survived Caroline’s death, and losing her shaped my life, because a loss like that—it’s like the heart is returning from war; it is simply never the same. And everything good we had—the depth of the friendship, the trust, the laughter—those were the things I got to keep. The force that allowed me to stick around, mow the grass, love and lose dogs, bury my parents, grow old, love new people. I miss her still.

  Nearly a decade after Caroline died I went back to Austin, where I was reading at a book festival, and where half the women I’d come of age with still lived. Someone threw a party, and one of my friends toasted me because I was home, and we all started talking about the old days, as well as the book I’d written about Caroline and the different losses all of us had been through. I looked around the room at those beautiful, aging faces I’d known for so many years and saw something I’d not known before. “You guys,” I said. “I never could have had the friendship I did with Caroline without all of you. You—everything we all went through—is what taught me how to be that close, be that kind of friend.”

  * * *

  —

  If the emotional legacies of the women’s movement blessed our friendship, so did living in a post–Title IX world. She taught me to row and I taught her to swim; we spent hours together in the water or on it, or walking and talking about it. The intense physicality of our experience made it wider and more intimate at once, a largesse I would miss like a phantom limb when she was gone. By the time Caroline and I became friends, in the 1990s, women’s athletic prowess was a societal given. But females had a far more limited range of expressing intimacy when I was growing up. They had shopping and makeup and competing over boys, unless you also throw in home economics, a mandatory class I came close to flunking after nearly setting the cooking lab on fire. In postwar America, the window had closed on the women’s athletics that were a part of the 1930s; by my high school years, just as rock and roll was blowing open the culture, girls had few sanctioned ways to express a love of the natural world and their own bodies in it. I became a swimmer as a young girl because I’d had polio and was less stable on land than in water, not because female athletics were encouraged. They didn’t even exist, not in the Panhandle in the 1950s or ’60s.

  I saw a young runner one day at the nearby reservoir, where she was mostly likely training for the Boston Marathon. She was doing three-mile circuits, passing me every several minutes for another lap, and I commented to a friend how beautiful she looked—all that grace and power. “We didn’t really have that,” Shannon said, matter-of-factly, and I was so startled by this notion that I came home and dug out my high school annual, class of 1968. Sports in the Panhandle of Texas. Seven pages were devoted to football. Boys had eight or nine sports—wrestling, track and field, baseball, football, tennis, golf, basketball—which ran on for seventeen pages. Girls had two: cheerleading and gym. There’s a photo of gym class, with three or four awkward girls in white cotton uniforms, standing around in eye makeup with their arms crossed. A snapshot of history, ludicrous and painful, and revealing for what isn’t there. The missing pages.

  Some of this was a matter of geography and privilege as well as gender: The Ivies tended to train the girls in all kinds of ways that were not in the Texas rule book. Texas girls could triumph in barrel racing, but that took money (and a horse). What we didn’t have was some avenue, some way to feel our own life force growing up and through space. You don’t much think about what you haven’t yet learned, what you didn’t have a chance at, and I marvel a little at the irony of what this absence created in me—the polio that slowed me down on land gave me the water instead.

  My love for Caroline was a defining relationship in my life, and it coincided with a time when I was beginning to feel the strength and freedom of a certain age. For me this was my early forties: You’re old enough to be street-smart and young enough to run a marathon. I had work that I loved as a book critic and I was raising my first Samoyed, a beautiful fifty-plus-pound sled dog who enhanced everything already good about my days. I had weekly deadlines, and the pool and the woods and a woman friend who might have been my twin, but for the fact that she already had a twin. A few years earlier I had left a man I loved, or thought I had loved, but in fact was held hostage by, desperate as I was for his praise and his love. He was the last chapter in a rough decade, years sometimes colored by a crummy romantic relationship. An obsession, a heartbreak, a tragic narrative. My work and my sobriety were what saved me. And my friendships with women, particularly Caroline. I think we each grew into our reflections; we grew into the person that the other one already saw standing there. We loved in one another the strengths we didn’t know we had alone.

  * * *

  —

  The man whose praise I was desperate for often read and edited what I wrote before it saw print. A turning point came for me in one of these blue-pencil moments. I had managed to get a rare interview with John le Carré, and I was pleased with the way I’d begun the story. (If time is any indicator of certainty, thirty years later, I still am.) I watched as he read, his brow furrowed. I saw him pause and then cross out my first sentence. “Too flashy,” he said.

  The pause was what gave him away. It was a look I’d seen a couple of times before, in graduate school and in the writing world, when a man I had respected flinched and tried to put me in my place. I was eleven years younger here, and the better writer, and I knew it.

  Once he was through editing, I thanked him and took the copy into my study. I restored my words to the way I’d written them. The story ran two days later, on the section front. He read it over breakfast, and raised his eyebrows and looked at me. I smiled.

  * * *

  —

  The week of the Christine Blasey Ford testimony and Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and we are in yet another time warp. Pandora’s box has been opened with a crowbar over the past two years, hope lingering inside, the evils that wom
en held on to as secrets spilling out like crazy. I am talking to a friend (as is every other woman I know) about our own sexual histories, about speaking truth to power. About what to do when truth whispers or yells and power doesn’t really care. I say I feel lucky that no sexual assault, micro or macro, took me down. Or left irreparable damage, messed me up in ways known or unknown. I don’t consider this anything more than dumb luck. People keep and contain and release trauma in myriad ways.

  Then my friend reminds me of something. “You got your father’s strength,” she says, even though she never knew my father but has known me many years. “It’s almost as if you breathed it in.”

  And credit where it’s also due: My mother took guff from no man. I saw her stand up to men with more power and money and education than she ever dreamed of, men she even feared, but in the end they got out of her way or held the door. She stood less than five three and was afraid of almost nothing, which is why I’d pick her for my team every time.

  We’re all wearied from the stories. Too many assaults, major and minor, too many revelations and confessions and oh-my-God remembrances. So I’ve been selective in the ones I’ve told. Here’s what I left out: The New York Times editor who insisted on buying me dinner, then started stroking my bare upper arm as he told me he didn’t have a job to offer me—yet. The men writers I interviewed who lunged at me after they’d had a drink or two. I left out the colleagues and other women’s husbands who have grabbed me inappropriately. The professors. The flashers on the river and in the woods, the creeps on the sidewalk at ten P.M., the catcalls and presumptions of everyday life. And hey, nothing special going on here. If I’d been a welder or lived on a ranch all my life or served in the military, I’d have different stories with a similar bent. They’re as common as bad traffic or the flu.

  THE OLDER TYLER GETS, THE more she wants an update on the old-boyfriend or -girlfriend story, even though I remind her often that if you don’t marry, life is long and so is the list of exes. But she persists: Just tell me. So I begin again with early boyfriends, high school breakups, summer romances. She wants the whole parade and I edit wildly as I go, knowing one story is too boring, one too inconsequential. Then suddenly I find myself in the swamp of young adulthood that for me included drugs, long-haired boys, an arrest here and there. I realize the story is changing and so I stop.

  Do you know about drugs? I ask. This precocious child looks confused, and I realize she thinks I mean things like penicillin and milk of magnesia. Oh, you mean marijuana! she says. Yes, I say, and then I get emphatic. “You have to promise me something, OK?” She nods, slightly alarmed at how serious I’ve become.

  “You have to promise that if, years from now or whenever, you decide to try alcohol and drugs, you’ll come talk to me first.” She shushes me and says OK OK OK.

  “But, Gail,” she says. “I don’t need to try drugs.” She shows me her palms, as though all this is obvious. “I’m already awesome.”

  One day when Tyler is in the middle of a long story, she interrupts herself and says, as if it just occurred to her, “If you live alone there’s no one to talk to!” But mostly she seems to think I’ve gotten away with something. The first time she saw me drink milk straight from the carton, her eyes widened. “I could never do that at my house!” “Of course you couldn’t,” I say, “this is what you get to do if you live alone. Plus you can have ice cream in the middle of the night, with chunks of broken cookies, and walk the dog at midnight, and no one ever tells you what time to go to bed.”

  Even without my editorial, she is fascinated by the freedoms: a TV in the kitchen, swims on winter evenings, dinner on the couch. “If you got married now, you’d be in the Guinness Book of World Records!” she says. We both laugh. In her mind I am living life as a giant child, or a wrinkled teenager, or some perfect mix of freedom and pleasure. A semi-myth I do little to dissuade.

  17

  And now Marjorie must make an appearance on this stage. A white-haired, valiant woman who lived by no rule book and thus wrote one, unknowingly, for all the younger women who adored her. I didn’t know her when she was a knockout, but rather decades later, when she had become what knockouts age into if they are lucky: confident and uncaring, her laughter like an aria, her stride outpacing even the border collie—she had five over the years—who was always by her side. Cory was the last of them, a tricolor who walked next to her off-lead all over Cambridge, staring adoringly as she spoke to him in full paragraphs. Marjorie had been in England with her mother in her late thirties, and they had gone to the lake country to watch the legendary sheepdogs at herding trials. She came home straightaway, as she put it, located a breeder of a working line, and began an extraordinary arc of human-dog relationships that spanned the next forty years.

  But then most of Marjorie’s relationships seemed extraordinary, at least as viewed from the outside, or by the other person in them. When I met her she had just retired from decades of teaching at Shady Hill, a progressive private school in Cambridge, where she influenced a generation of students and teachers both. “She changed my life,” people kept saying at the memorial a few months after she died. She was born to privilege in Scarsdale, New York, in 1932, and became an economics major and field hockey star at Swarthmore—this when girls didn’t necessarily go to college, much less storm the field or pretend to understand money, its curves and mystery and unpredictability. Those traits belonged instead to femininity in the fifties, which wasn’t of much interest to Marjorie. She was a little embarrassed by her background, and the doorways it opened were of no interest to her unless the path could help someone else. After college she got involved in the burgeoning civil rights movement, teaching in the inner-city schools in Chicago until she came to Cambridge.

  It’s a classic tale, the liberal bluestocking from an elite station wading into the social justice causes of the 1960s. I have a hunch that Marjorie was a red from the first time she encountered private property, probably in the sandbox. She possessed some elemental sense of fairness, evident from the moment you met her. Because of her physical prowess, you could recognize from a block away the alacrity with which she moved. The character, too, was something like that.

  However much the rest of us believed in her, she was the last in line at that fountain of certainty. Underneath the brilliant mind and the larky laugh was an agonizing shyness that kept her away from large gatherings and fueled the fondness for bourbon she had for many years. It was part of what made her reach toward Caroline and me, I think; she befriended us both when we were raising young dogs, and she saw in us a younger reflection of herself—canine-infatuated introverts—that made us part of a string of surrogate daughters she raised over the years.

  She was an unrepentant atheist, a political progressive. She also managed, without contradiction, to be a real estate tycoon and savvy investor, all on a teacher’s salary and with a poker face and a great deal of nerve. That economics degree, tucked away like the pedigree, was never mentioned but never absent. She dressed in old sweaters and jeans and probably looked in a mirror only to check her teeth for spinach. Her tree house of an apartment in Cambridge—easily affordable after she had bought and flipped, bought and flipped—was filled with antiques, most of which she had found, and with geraniums that bloomed year-round. The kitchen was a large room with six windows she had never bothered to renovate, furnished with old file cabinets and a Depression era–sized refrigerator. There was a floral couch in the corner, and I used to pile on the couch with the dogs and a mug of tea and everything in me would relax.

  She taught me about houses and the stock market and perennials and training a dog off-lead, and what things she didn’t know were mostly a result of her age. She was as bad on the computer as she was good with investments, so when the world was first going online, she asked me to help her set up her stock portfolio (buried in many lucrative cubbies across investment houses) so that she could track it online in r
eal time. I phoned the morning of our date and told her to get all her statements together and I’d be over.

  When I arrived she had coffee ready and a pile of papers in a file by the computer, and I sat down and found the site I wanted, ready to start transferring data. Marjorie put a hand on my wrist to stop me.

  “I have a confession to make,” she said, and when I looked up she was grinning. “I’m loaded!”

  I laughed. “Why am I not surprised?” I said, and then she opened the files to her precious statements, various caches of blue chips and bonds and complex investments that she had bought and held and held and held.

  Ah, years since she’s gone, and she gives me such pleasure still.

  We talked for hours over the years about deeper things: how to die and being alone and the great hurdles and benefits of having, both of us, stayed single. The last year that Caroline was alive, a few months before she got sick, she and Marjorie took me to dinner on my birthday, a cold night in January when it was difficult to feel much cheer. It was 2002; I was fifty-one, and had bought my first house in Marjorie’s neighborhood six months earlier. She and I said good night to Caroline at the restaurant and drove home together. Sitting outside my house in the warm car and the cold dark, Marjorie turned to me and said, apropos of nothing, “I don’t think having a husband would have changed your life. But I do think having a house will.” It was pure Marjorie, a quirky and precise birthday blessing, and more than a decade later, I believe she was right.