When It Happens to You

by Molly Ringwald

  “Did you and Harry get divorced?” she asked.

  Betty shook her head. “No. We are not divorced,” she said. She considered telling the rest of it, but the girl’s curiosity seemed satisfied, and Betty told herself that she could explain it next time. It was a ruse that she often used with herself—the putting off till the next time, and then the next, until the awkwardness of telling became too great and she could rest permanently in the solace of omission. Betty went back to her trimming and hummed a Locatelli sonata that she had been listening to on the radio earlier that morning.

  “Charlotte!” The girl’s mother’s voice carried down the hill.

  The girl reached up and took hold of the branch with her hands and then fell to the ground. She ran home to her mother without saying good-bye.

  And so began the daily and sometimes twice-daily visits from the young girl. She would show up unexpectedly, linger for a few minutes, and leave with just as little notice. There were some days when Betty would return from running errands, usually the post office or the grocery store, to find some sort of talisman of the girl’s having come to visit. A pile of sticks carefully arranged just outside the front door or a small bouquet of flowers torn from Betty’s own garden. After a couple of these makeshift bouquets, Betty felt obliged to ask the girl not to pick flowers from the garden but to leave the blossoms intact for other people to appreciate. Betty hadn’t even finished the sentence before the girl’s cheeks reddened and she raced home in silent fury.

  She didn’t see her for a few days after that, and Betty was surprised to find that in spite of all the years that she had felt trapped when in the company of Mandy, her own flesh and blood, for some inexplicable reason she missed the girl’s presence. She was confounded by the familiar stab of loss connected to this tiny stranger, and just when she had resigned herself to bear yet another absence, the girl reappeared. Betty was so overjoyed to see the girl sitting outside her front door that she wept—an uncharacteristic display that shocked her. She told the girl it was hay fever.

  A couple of days later, Betty was at her desk, attempting to get through a large pile of bills that she had been putting off for too long, when she heard strains of a violin coming from outside. She recognized it as “La Cinquantaine” by Gabriel-Marie. When she opened the door, the girl was sitting on her porch with a small violin tucked underneath her chin, playing the song remarkably well. When she had finished, she looked up at Betty and grinned.

  “I bet you didn’t know that I could play violin, did you?” she said.

  Betty sat down on the wicker chair next to the door. “I certainly did not,” she said. “You are full of surprises.”

  “I used to take violin lessons twice a week, since I was three,” the girl said. “That’s almost . . . hang on.” She paused, puzzling through the math in her head. “Four years ago.”

  “And you don’t take violin lessons anymore? That’s a shame, you play so beautifully.”

  “My last teacher moved away,” the girl said. She took her bow and brushed a curl off her forehead with the tip of it. “My mommy said that she would find me a new teacher, but then she doesn’t.”

  “Well, you tell your mother to hurry up and find a new teacher.”

  “You can tell her yourself. She’s just next door. She’s not doing anything.”

  Betty smiled and shook her head. “You tell her for me. I have to get back to paying my bills now.”

  “Do you have a lot of money?”

  “That’s not an appropriate question, you know,” Betty said.

  “Why not?” the girl asked. “I have a lot of money. I put two dollars in my bank account every week, plus the birthday money that my oma and opa send me, and my mommy says that when I’m a teenager, if I keep saving, I’ll have enough money to buy a car.”

  Betty stood up and smoothed out the creases of her khaki slacks.

  “Well, I wish you the very best with that. Please excuse me now while I finish paying my bills.” She patted the soft bed of curls on the girl’s head and turned to go back in her house.

  “How’s Harry?” the girl asked.

  Betty’s stomach lurched at the sound of her husband’s name in the voice of someone else. She stopped in midstep, struggling to maintain her balance, and sat down quickly. Touching her hand to her forehead, she patted away the perspiration.

  “He’s very well,” Betty said after a moment. “Thank you for asking.”

  The girl smiled and lifted her violin back onto her shoulder.

  “Can I play you my song again before you go inside?”

  “Yes, dear,” Betty said. “Play it for me once more.”

  She leaned back in the wicker chair. Closing her eyes, she recalled the summer nights in Berkeley when she and Harry would picnic together during the season of open-air concerts, Mandy sleeping next to them in a Moses basket. It was a time when, unlike their peers who longed for the catharsis of a Monterey Festival or a Woodstock, she and Harry had shared a passion only for classical music. Mozart. Vivaldi. Chopin. Chamber music. Opera. Harry used to say that long ago if there was a soundtrack to their life together, it would be Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations—they made a point of seeing him every chance they had until he no longer performed in public. Many years had passed since Betty had heard any music live, and listening to the girl play the violin for her now swept Betty back to those days, which felt both sweet and savage in the remembering.

  Before long, the girl managed to further weave herself into the fabric of Betty’s life. It was during a stretch of unseasonable summer rain when Betty, on impulse, invited the girl into the house. As she wandered through the living room, she made a point of touching everything with her index finger extended like a conductor’s baton. Then she stopped at a framed piece of faded collage art that an old student had made for Harry back in the seventies. The student had been a sullen girl with long, truly black hair—apparently due to some Native American blood—parted down the middle, as was the fashion back then, gathering into dark, inky pools on her shoulders. The student admired Harry to the point of distraction, and although he would never dare to admit temptation, he judiciously introduced the student to Betty early on in the semester, defusing whatever intriguing ambiguity may or may not have existed. Betty became a mentor to the young woman and had her in her linguistics class the following year. She still received a Christmas card from the woman every year, addressed by hand.

  “We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.”

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  The girl read the quote from the collage aloud, mispronouncing Nietzsche’s name.

  Betty corrected her.

  “Nee-chuh? He has a funny name,” the girl said.

  “It’s German,” Betty told her. “That’s Harry’s, you know. A student of his made it for him years ago, and he is very fond of it.”

  She was acutely aware of only using the present tense, and for a moment, Betty was seized by a nagging guilt at the thought of deliberately deceiving someone—a child, no less. But the luxurious relief of allowing herself to speak freely of her husband was ultimately greater than the uncomfortable ethical dilemma. Time is a fluid thing for children anyway, she told herself. She remembered when Mandy was a little girl and how she would tell stories of events as though they had happened years earlier, when in truth only a week or two had passed. Time doesn’t exist, but things go to the feeling of time. Which philosopher was responsible for that one? How she missed calling out to Harry and hearing him always supply the correct answer.

  “Did all of his students have funny names?” the girl asked.

  Betty laughed. “No, dear. Nietzsche didn’t make that for him. He was just the person who said it. He was a philosopher. That is what Harry taught, philosophy.”

  As Betty said this word, she mentally prepared herself to define it, but the girl didn’t ask. She continued strolling around the room, eyeing artifacts like a conscientio
us shopper, until she arrived at the bookshelf. She sat down in front of it cross-legged and reached for a book from the bottom shelf. Betty cleared her throat.

  Abruptly, the girl stopped and looked over to Betty for permission.

  “Go ahead,” Betty told her. “Just be careful.”

  “Can I have a glass of milk?” the girl asked.

  “Is that how we ask for things?” Betty said.

  “Can I please have a . . . stupid glass of milk?” she said.

  “No you may not,” Betty said. “Not until you ask nicely. And we don’t say can. We say may.”

  The girl narrowed her eyes into slits and jutted out her chin. She took a deep breath and held it for a moment. Then she let out the air through slightly puckered lips. It was an affectation, and Betty wondered if she had acquired it from her mother.

  “May I please, please, please have a glass of milk?”

  Betty nodded and went into the kitchen, fetching a glass from the cupboard. She had milk in her refrigerator only by chance. Normally, she drank her morning tea with half-and-half, but since it was coming up on what would have been their fifty-second wedding anniversary, Betty had bought milk to prepare his favorite dish: New England clam chowder, from a recipe Harry’s mother gave to Betty before they eloped. It was the only thing that Harry’s mother had ever given her. The taciturn New Englander blamed Betty for the elopement, and the subsequent relocation further cemented her rancor toward the eighteen-year-old Betty. No matter how many times Harry warned his mother, she never stopped insulting his young bride. In their first year of marriage, Harry made the choice to sever ties with her, the mother with whom he had shared a great affinity throughout his childhood and adolescence. Their relationship never recovered, even after Betty herself begged Harry to reconcile in the years after his mother was diagnosed with the same cancer that would one day claim his own life. It was one of the few things that Harry remained inflexible about, and though Betty would have preferred not to have been the source of familial discord, she couldn’t deny the thrill of being so rapturously regarded by one’s own husband. Though he never had any more contact with his mother, at the height of her teenage rebellion Mandy sought out the woman and forged a bond. As a result, Mandy inherited most of the estate—along with Harry’s older sister, Janet, a spinster. Not that there was much to inherit, and what Mandy did receive she squandered. On what? wondered Betty. Probably drugs or an interminable list of inappropriate men.

  Betty walked back into the living room holding the glass of milk with her good hand, trying not to spill, and found the girl gone. The encyclopedia lay on the floor, open to a page on the Superb Fairy-Wren—an Australian bird noted for its social monogamy and sexual promiscuity. Betty closed the book and placed it back on the shelf.

  Once school vacation began, the girl began to linger for longer stretches of time. They worked together side by side in the garden, where the girl proved herself to be a diligent helper, and on wet and gloomy days, she lay down on the braided rug in the center of the living room with one of the encyclopedias while Betty read or sorted through mail. Their discourse was easy and Betty welcomed the childish queries about Harry. What is his favorite color? (Green.) Does he know how to fly a plane? (No.) Did he ever have a pet guinea pig? (No.) The girl seemed to accept his physical absence as though one might an imaginary friend, and her questions gave Betty the opportunity to savor her time with Harry. She told long, sprawling anecdotes about the first time that she and Harry met at a county fair in western Massachusetts. The time that Harry discovered that she wasn’t ironing his shirts but buying them in bulk from JCPenney while stashing the soiled shirts behind the freezer in the garage.

  “Why didn’t you tell him the truth?” the girl asked. “My mommy tells me that if you always tell the truth you won’t get into trouble.”

  “Your mother is correct,” Betty said. “I didn’t tell him the truth because I was embarrassed. I wanted him to think I was perfect.”

  “My teacher at school says that there is no such thing as perfect. And if you can’t make mistakes, you can’t make anything.”

  “Well, you have some very intelligent people around you.”

  “But I like to be perfect, too,” the girl said, after a moment of thought. “I threw my violin away ’cause I couldn’t make the song perfect.”

  “Perfection is the enemy of the good,” Betty said, turning over an Atlantic Monthly magazine subscription renewal form addressed to Harry D. Arthur. She set it aside onto his pile.

  “I hate the violin,” the girl said.

  “Oh no, but you play so beautifully!”

  The girl shook her head violently and turned over on her back attempting a backbend. The blood rushed to her already-flushed face as she strained to stay in the position.

  “My mommy doesn’t like the violin.”

  Betty was puzzled. Why would she sign her own daughter up for years of violin lessons if she didn’t like it? Clearly the girl had talent, but there must be more to the story. Betty had forgotten how you only get slivers of stories from children—usually what they echo from overheard adult conversations.

  The girl fell back on the rug and reached her arms up, grabbed her ankles and rocked back and forth.

  “Did Harry ever . . . live somewhere else?” the girl asked.

  “Live somewhere else, you mean before we met?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, did you ever decide that maybe you would live with someone else—even though you still loved him?”

  Betty looked at the girl’s face, reading the anxiety and confusion in it. She paused as she considered how to answer.

  “Never mind, I don’t care,” the girl said.

  “No, dear. Harry and I never tried that—though there are many married people who do. Sometimes . . . it can be a way to have clarity. To see things more clearly.”

  “My mommy would rather be with someone who plays with a polar bear instead of my daddy.” Her face crumpled and tears slid down the side of her cheeks. “It’s not even a real polar bear. It’s for babies. A stupid show for stupid babies.”

  She turned over onto her stomach and hid her face in her arms. Betty watched the girl’s shoulders shake, though no sound emerged.

  Betty struggled to kneel beside the girl. She patted her small back and stroked her hair.

  “I’m sorry, dear.”

  The girl sat upright and turned to face Betty, her lashes clumped together with the wetness. Betty was struck by how much she resembled a doll that Mandy had played with when little. The doll had been her constant companion for years until she left it on a train when the three of them went to Europe for the first and only time as a family.

  “Whenever I ask my daddy who he loves more, me or Mommy, he says that Mommy is the heart and I’m the heart inside the heart.” The girl wiped her nose with the back of her hand and dried it on the front of her pinafore sundress. She began to cry again even harder.

  “Your daddy sounds very sweet,” Betty said softly.

  “But that means when he doesn’t love Mommy anymore, he won’t love me anymore because I’m inside Mommy’s heart!”

  She threw herself against Betty, pressing her face against her soft midsection.

  “No, he will always love you.” Even as she spoke these banal words of reassurance, Betty was reminded that she herself was living proof that it was possible to fall out of love with your child. The pull of parental love had been tenuous for both her and Harry from the very beginning—and it hadn’t taken all that much for it to give out entirely. Perhaps there is a finite amount of love that we are all allotted, Betty thought to herself, and Harry took it all, just as she took his, and there was simply nothing left for their child. Mandy should have been an enhancement, that is what one’s children were supposed to be, but instead she was an obstacle. They didn’t know how to talk to her or how to be with her, and they both viewed her as a rival in a contest that she had little chance of winning. As hard as it was to admit,
even all these years later, it wasn’t Mandy’s fault how things had turned out. “You made me who I am!” Mandy would scream at Betty when she was a teenager, as incident after incident piled up—failing grades, school suspensions, car accidents. And then, into her twenties, the apartment evictions, the job firings—not to mention the readily available drugs that were so hard for Mandy to resist, in even the best of circumstances. “If you and Daddy could have deigned to share some of your precious love with me, maybe I wouldn’t have grown up to be such a fuck-up.”

  There was no point in arguing. Betty knew that Mandy was right, and there was nothing to be gained in making Mandy feel crazy in addition to unloved. All Betty could do was apologize and tell her daughter that she deserved more.

  Holding the girl in her arms like this now made Betty shudder as she considered how her own daughter might react had she been watching. At forty-four years old, Mandy—or Amanda, as she now insisted on being called—had enjoyed little success in her chosen career as an artist and even less in matters of the heart. All of this only seemed like further proof that as much as she had excelled as a wife, Betty’s failure as a mother was exponential in comparison.

  “I love you,” she heard the girl’s muffled voice say. The weight of the ensuing silence seemed to take the air from the room.

  “I love you, too,” Betty said aloud, without even thinking. She felt the girl sigh as her body relaxed against her own. Hearing herself say the three words that had always been reserved for just one person was both pleasant and unexpected.

  She was most surprised to discover that she meant it.

  Rosella, the Guatemalan cleaning woman who came once a week to help with the deep cleaning and laundry, asked Betty if it would be okay to bring along her eight-year-old daughter now that school was out for the summer. Betty told Rosella that it was fine, and for the first couple of weeks the woman’s daughter sat at the kitchen table without incident, reading books and coloring while her mother cleaned. Rosella spoke little English, and if her daughter had more facility with the language, her shyness kept her from revealing it. Betty smiled at her and offered some of the sugar-free hard candy that she had purchased for the girl, but mostly Betty tried to stay out of the way until Rosella was finished.