I.O.U

by Nancy Pickard

  Which meant the foundation took some risks, too.

  The men on my board didn’t much like this new direction in which I was tugging them, although they had grudgingly agreed to fund a handful of “Jenny’s weird projects.” But not all of them, by any means. “Jennifer, have you lost your mind?” was how Pete Falwell, the current president, had put it to me once or twice when I’d made especially outrageous recommendations for funding. My husband had laughingly put it another way: “Are you trying to get yourself fired?” So the bulk of our funds still went to conservative and socially acceptable causes. Fine causes, for the most part, good causes, but comparatively rich causes. They didn’t generate the hate mail or the nasty phone calls that some of “Jenny’s weird projects” did. If I kept this up, my trustees were complaining, we might soon have actual picket lines at our front door. While they shuddered at that idea, and I didn’t exactly look forward to it, it didn’t scare me, either. There were things I had seen in the last few years, things I had done and felt and experienced, that had raised my fear threshold considerably.

  On this morning, there was an anonymous letter. “Great,” I muttered, after I opened it, “just what I need, another mysterious pen pal.” But this one was considerably different in tone from the ones related to my mother’s death. It excoriated us for giving money to “those dykes with those filthy paintings they have the nerve to call art.”

  “So what should they call them?” I said aloud. “Fred?”

  The writer was, I gathered, referring to an artists’ coalition that couldn’t exist without our funding. Their current show was a satirical one that featured paintings of nude men posed in the style of famous paintings of nude women through the ages. I thought it was hysterically funny to see chubby men painted in the manner of Botticelli, or a reclining nude man surrounded by fully dressed female picnickers, modeled on Manet’s famous Luncheon on the Grass. The exception that proved the rule of the show, however, was the one nude female—limpid-eyed, extending her limp forefinger to a powerful, robed, female God. It was God granting life to Eve in a distaff Sistine Chapel, and it was brilliant.

  This letter, this morning, would seem to indicate that not everyone in Port Frederick was equally impressed. Or amused. Apparently, not everyone’s consciousness was raised, either, nor did they think it needed to be. I stared at the damned thing, reading it over and over, until the meaning of it began to seep into me. Ah, they were threatening us with something dire… but what? I had to keep staring until it registered: “burn in hell.”

  “Oh,” I murmured, “is that all.”

  Burn. Dire. Dire Fire.

  That’s where authors of anonymous messages ought to go, I thought…

  It was an accident. Forgive me. April 10, 1971.

  My thoughts wandered far away from my office…

  On April 10, 1971, I was in college, living in a dorm in another state 450 miles away from Port Frederick, Massachusetts. Sherry was still in high school, living at home. When I left for college that fall, my mother had seemed brittle to me. Beautiful and golden as an autumn leaf, but just as brittle. I hadn’t known why. When I came home for Christmas, she’d been sweet but withdrawn, sleeping almost all of the time, so that we rarely saw her downstairs in anything but her house robe. I knew that she and my dad whispered behind closed doors that summer before school, and I’d heard the sound of raised voices frequently enough to make my stomach churn at the tension between them, but the furious whispered arguments seemed to have come to an end by Christmas when my father was away from the house most of the time and my mother spent her days alone in their bedroom. The truth was, I probably didn’t notice or even care as much as I should have, because I was young and self-absorbed and resentful of their apparent lack of attention to me. My parents, I thought, could take care of themselves. Nobody told us girls that Dad’s business was failing. There wasn’t any hint in the newspapers that summer or Christmas, and no rumors reached our ears at the swimming pools or holiday parties. And of course, we didn’t know about Dad’s girlfriend, about Randy, that is. We didn’t talk much, Sherry and I, because I wasn’t very interested in the high-school affairs of my little sister. And I didn’t want to hear—didn’t even want to believe her—when she tried to complain about how “mortifying” it was to bring her friends home after school only to find Mom wandering around the house in her nightgown, stumbling on the stairs in her slippers, mumbling to herself about things that nobody else could hear…

  “Jenny?”

  I jumped in my office chair, startled by the sound of a real voice.

  My assistant, Faye, always so motherly and kind to the young delinquents in her life, walked in carrying legal documents pertaining to a recent bequest to the foundation. She placed them in front of me, and pointed. “I’m sorry, but you checked the wrong boxes. According to this, you’ve advised them to place the money in a personal checking account in the name of the deceased.” She smiled. “Maybe you think he wants to take it with him.”

  “Faye, I’m sorry, help me fix it.”

  This time, she carefully pointed out to me which boxes to check, which lines to sign.

  “Jenny, have you read that letter from the Morality in Our Arts Committee? MOAC?” Faye smiled, and took back the signed papers I handed her. “The one that says we’re all going to burn in hell for portraying God as a woman?”

  “MOAC,” I said, “MOAC, MOAC. Sounds like a sick parrot.” Faye laughed, but I hardly heard her. The word parrot had triggered a memory. “My mother had a canary for a few years, Faye. It was definitely hers, too, not ours. It wouldn’t sing for anybody but her, or perch on anybody else’s finger without biting us. I hated that damned bird. It looked like her, too—thin and pretty and pale yellow, like her hair, and it hopped around its cage with these quick, little, nervous movements.” I made my fingers dance in the air. “Just like Mom used to dash around when she was excited or upset about something.”

  She had darted about, like that canary, on the day I left for college, pecking me with little nervous kisses, annoying me with silly, last-minute worries so that I’d felt relieved to get out of the house and to be on my way to school at last.

  “Jenny?”

  I looked up. “I’m sorry, Faye, my mind was wandering.”

  She gnawed on her lower lip for a moment, and then spoke in the gentle tones of a recovery room nurse. “I can take care of the office, Jenny. There’s no good reason for you to be here, so soon after…” Faye paused. “I’m sure you have many things to take care of at home, maybe you’d be better off there…” She trailed off. Although she stood right in front of me, I had the impression Faye was speaking to me from across a vast chasm, standing on the other side, so very far away from me.

  “No,” I said.

  She waited.

  When I realized she was still there, I repeated, “No, no.”

  When she was gone, I transferred my gaze from the pile of papers on my desk to the view outside my window: bare tree branches, empty sky, pale sun. The poet was wrong. April was not the cruelest month, March was; at least some of the green promise of April would be kept, but March offered no hope at all. In March, it looked as if the world had truly died and might never be reborn, the trees would never bud again, or the leaves grow, the animals would remain in their hibernation forever, snakes would drift deeper and deeper into their cold sluggishness, and birds would never nest, old bones would never warm by sun but only by fire, and even the darkest skin would pale to the color of ice, even the warmest heart would freeze, splinter like ice, and split.

  The phone was ringing.

  I laid my head on my arms, on my desk.

  There was one thing I held on to: My mom had called me the week before they put her into the hospital Just to say hello, she told me. Sherry was fine. Dad was fine. She wasn’t feeling too well, herself, but she’d be fine. How was I? I’m fine, Mom, but I’m in a hurry, got to get to class. I love you, Jenny. I love you, too, Mom. Goodbye, honey. �
�Bye, Mom.

  “Jenny?” Faye started to come in, stopped. “Jenny?”

  The next thing I knew, I was cradled in her arms, weeping into her soft shoulder pads. Although I insisted I could get myself home, it turned out she had to drive me because I’d lost my keys someplace between the parking lot and the office.

  “I know this phenomenon,” Faye assured me. Her father had died the previous year. “I call it the Alzheimer’s of grief. You’ll forget things and misplace things, until you’ll think you’re losing your mind. But it’s just grief, Jenny. That’s all your mind can hold right now, that’s what’s important, you shouldn’t expect it to hold on to little, unimportant things… like your name, or your phone number, or your car keys!”

  Unfortunately, Faye was still speaking to me from across a great divide, and so her wise words registered only dimly, and they were the very next things I lost. When she guided me up the walk to our cottage, she said, “Call Geof the minute you get inside.” She fished for the hide-a-keys behind the front door light, and opened the door for me. “If you don’t, I will. Then take some aspirin and go to bed.”

  “I’m fine now, Faye.”

  “You’re sure you’ll be all right until Geof gets home?”

  I had no intention of interrupting him at work, not when he’d already had to take so much time off for my family affairs.

  “Sure.”

  “Okay,” she said, sounding skeptical. “What’s your name?”

  “Jenny,” I said, sheepishly, and grinned at her.

  “Hold on to that,” Faye said, and kissed my cheek.

  I thanked her, waved vigorously as she drove off, and then shut myself in the house. I didn’t realize, until I was alone, how very much I didn’t want to be. Come back, Faye! But I couldn’t even chase her down in my car—I’d lost my keys and didn’t have a car. Feeling desperate for company—why didn’t we have at least a cat!—and embarrassed about it, I phoned my sister’s house, but my stepmother answered. “Jenny, dear,” Randy said. “There’s nobody here but little ole me. Your father has gone to the club, Lars is at work, Sherry has a church meeting, and the children are at school. Is there anything I can do for you, dear?” Dear. My skin crawled at the sound of it. You’d think the woman was thirty years older than I, instead of very nearly my own age.

  “No, Randy, dear,” I said. “’Bye.”

  Bitch, I said to the telephone.

  Who? it inquired. You or her?

  My friends all worked; I couldn’t just call and dump on them in the middle of their jobs. Of course my best friend was a psychiatrist, so she was used to it, but something in me shied away from calling Marsha. I thought of others I might call, like my favorite trustee, Lucille Grant, or my mother’s friend, Francie Daniel, but it suddenly seemed such an effort, too much effort, really. And besides, if they really cared about me, wouldn’t they be calling to make sure I was all right?

  I dragged myself up the stairs to our bedroom.

  The pretty yellow room, with its fireplace, bay window, and cozy four-poster bed, felt bleak and cold and lonely.

  I stripped, leaving my clothes where they fell.

  I crawled naked into the middle of the bed, and pulled the covers over my head.

  The phone rang, but I let the answering machine get it.

  It rang again, immediately afterward, and I ignored it.

  And again, a few minutes later.

  Keys turned in the front-door locks.

  Faye, not trusting me to call my husband, had phoned him herself. The lieutenant called my name from downstairs and, receiving no response, took the stairs in a few bounds. Soon, I felt the mattress sink under his weight. Through the covers, I smelled his Old Spice. Then I felt his hands rubbing my back through the blankets. He stroked and stroked… my back… down my arms… over my hips… down my legs to my feet… up to my back… even my hidden skull. And then he lay down beside me and pressed himself against the covered lump and put his arm over it as if to protect it.

  We lay like that—the fully dressed police lieutenant and the lump— for a while before he spoke again.

  “I think we need some help here,” he said.

  Under the covers, I went rigid with fear. You don’t have a crazy mother without wondering, in your darkest and most private moments, whether it might happen to you, too. And there I was, prostrate and hiding in the middle of the morning, turning into a vegetable like my poor sick mother. Oh God.

  “I’m going to call Marsha,” Geof said, and his weight shifted on top of the mattress as he got up.

  She told him to deliver me to her house after office hours.

  I crawled back under the covers and stayed there in my cave.

  Geof returned to work that afternoon, after seeing that the only thing I intended to do was to sleep for hours. Then he came back after me and drove me into town to the home of my longtime friend, Marsha Sandy.

  Geof hugged me to him tightly, kissed me hard enough to leave an imprint, and then left me completely alone with her.

  “Howdy,” she said to me.

  “Doody,” I replied to my childhood friend.

  She took my hand and led me into her den, where she pushed me down into a cushiony easy chair. Then she pulled a footstool directly in front of me and sat down on it. Marsha wore dark gray wool slacks and a cashmere sweater in a lighter shade. She looked elegant, concerned, and every bit as determined as she used to look behind the catcher’s mask on our softball team in the fourth grade. I sighed and leaned back, surrendering to the inevitable.

  “Geof thinks I’m cracking up.”

  “I do, too.”

  “Oh, great! That’s just what I want to hear from a shrink.”

  “Well, tell me… what’s up?”

  “Not me, Doc. I’m all the way down.”

  “And nothin’ looks like up to you?”

  “Um.”

  “I heard you were looking for your mother in an obituary.”

  “Yeah, and she wasn’t there,” I said, bitterly.

  “So where is she?”

  “The rumor is, she’s dead.”

  “Well?”

  I sighed, and looked away from the sympathetic brown eyes focused so intently on me. “Maybe, but I’m not convinced she was ever alive. If you believed that obituary, you’d think she only lived through other people. But surely that can’t be true. There must have been a… her.”

  Marsha clasped her hands over one knee and waited silently for me to continue.

  “I have this awful feeling I didn’t know her —whoever she was—at all. It’s like I didn’t pay enough attention.”

  “So? Children don’t.”

  I waved off her easy reassurance. “It’s like Willy Loman, you know? Attention must be paid. And it wasn’t. And I didn’t. And what if somebody had paid more attention? There were signs, Marsha.” I turned my face to look at her again, accusingly, lumping her in with all of the doctors who hadn’t explained anything to me. “She was terribly upset, and there were signs. That Christmas, she was seriously depressed, I realize that now. Maybe she could have been helped earlier. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Oh, Marsha!” I leaned over and put my head in my hands, overwhelmed by a feeling of utter helplessness and futility. “There’s so much I didn’t know! And I still don’t know! My father was playing around on my mother, my mother was going crazy, our business was going bankrupt. And I didn’t know anything about anything at all! There I was, just blithely picking out clothes to wear back to school, and my mother’s and father’s worlds were falling down around them, and I was too goddamned blind and selfish to sense it! I can’t bear it.” Marsha unclasped her hands, and stroked my head, lightly, comfortingly, as Geof had done. “I have a master’s degree in business administration, for heaven’s sake, and I don’t really know why our business failed. It embarrassed me and shamed me and I don’t think I really wanted to know. And I know even less about why my mother’s life failed. Marsha, I can’t bear the thought of
what she endured, without any help or comfort from me—” I was crying so hard by then I couldn’t talk any more.

  “Come on.” Marsha’s voice was gentle, but she tugged strongly on my knees to get my attention. “Children aren’t supposed to have to take care of their parents, and if you didn’t know what was going on, it’s because they tried to protect you from it. You know that. There’s something else bothering you. What else is wrong, Jenny?”

  I felt cold, and it took me a few moments—I had to stop crying first —to get up the courage to finally put my worst fears into words.

  “They say I look the most like her.”

  “Yes?”

  “She was quieter than I am and God knows she was shyer, but people say we were a lot alike in other ways. And Sherry was always Daddy’s Little Girl, but Mom was closer to me—”

  “Yes?”

  “And one day I went off to school and she was this perfectly normal woman… nervous, a little high-strung, but normal… and then the next thing I know, she’s… nuts.”

  “And?”

  The truth finally came blurting out. “And if it could happen to her, if I’m so much like her, why couldn’t it happen to me? I want her to be different from me, Marsha. I’m desperate to find some difference between us! I want her to have existed as a completely whole and separate person from any of us, so that I don’t have to walk around feeling terrified that it could happen to me. Geof wants to have children, and I’m beginning to think, maybe. But Marsha, I’d die before I’d take even the smallest chance of putting my children through—”