Exit Strategies

by Catherine Todd

  What I had thought when the Medallion Foundation offered me the way out was I’m saved! Saved from my own stupidity, in part. Once upon a time—in the days of the Volvo in the garage, the shopping trips to Saks, the lunches that didn’t require the removal of Saran Wrap first—I’d rarely given a thought to what I would do if the money were to vanish. I mean, money may not solve your problems, but at least it keeps the wild things away from the fire. It’s not as if I missed all those warnings from Betty Friedan (get a job, protect yourself) either. I heard them; I just didn’t want to listen. I was a doctor’s wife with a teaching credential and two kids, and doctors’ wives didn’t have to work. My husband, my parents, my in-laws, and even my friends (at least the ones I had then) all bought into it. Besides, the thrill of working is definitely overrated. I hadn’t changed my mind about that, but nevertheless, if I could go back and start over I wouldn’t be so naive.

  The only thing the foundation asked in return for its money was a letter on the first of every month (or more often, if there was anything to say) reporting on my professional progress. Since the board members chose to remain anonymous, I didn’t know whom I was writing to, and of course I never got anything back. All I had was a post office box and my imagination to go on. In my gratitude and intoxication with my change in prospects, I imagined a kindly old gentleman who got my jokes (someone like a slightly younger Alistair Cooke) reading my letters, and turned them into a combination journal and letter home.

  Dear Members of the Board, I’d write, imagining him, Pendleton Silverbridge (I’d read too much Trollope at an impressionable age), in a navy-blue cashmere sweater and Bally loafers, with an aristocratic nose and beautiful white hair.

  Law school is the most amazing combination of the lofty and the down-and-dirty. [Okay, scratch down-and-dirty and substitute nitty-gritty. I had to make some concessions to age.] For example, today, in my Torts class, we learned the concept of “res ipsa loquitur.” That means “the thing speaks for itself,” and it’s used in reference to a situation that by its existence confirms a tort (a legal wrong) without any other evidence. (It goes to the concept of negligence and exclusive control of whatever might have caused an injury, but never mind.)

  Do you know the example that’s used to illustrate this concept? A rat in a soda bottle! In other words, if you find a rat in your soft drink—or even in your Chardonnay—something bad (actionable) has obviously happened. Very obviously.

  After I heard about it, I couldn’t get that poor rat out of my mind. I mean, how would it get in there? The bottle neck is too narrow, unless we’re talking about a very small rat or a very big bottle. Or—eeuuw—what if it crawled into an empty bottle as a baby rat and grew too big to get out until one day it met its end in a Niagara of carbonated brown liquid? The possibilities are endless, and all of them are unappetizing. Not only that, but do you know what happens to flesh when it is immersed in a cola drink? We did an experiment with raw steak in sixth grade.

  I think I’ll swear off soft drinks.

  Luckily, the real Pendleton Silverbridge did have a sense of humor, or, more likely, all my correspondence went directly into the round file unread. In any event, the checks kept coming, so I saw no need to crimp my style. Besides, I had all the dignity and aloofness I could stand at Roth, Tolbert & Anderson by day and at law school by night. And anyway, getting things down on paper was good therapy. I’d learned that from the psychiatrist I saw when I was going through my divorce.

  The letters had stopped when I graduated, of course, but sometimes even now I composed progress reports in my mind.

  Despite your unstinting generosity, six years of hard work, two horrible months of studying for the bar exam, and one thousand two hundred and fifty-six frozen entrée dinners, I’m not sure I can go through with it all the way to partnership.

  I tried to imagine old Pendleton, born to a life of privilege and entitlement, reading a letter like that. It would disappoint him severely, I’m sure. It reeked of ingratitude and self-pity. Besides, I couldn’t afford a midlife crisis; there were too many people depending on me. I didn’t have an Exit Strategy. I’d have to stick it out till the next stage of life, the one where you’re happy just to be alive without tubes down your throat or balloons up your arteries.

  Lauren rolled by and stopped at the door. Melissa looked up and smiled; Lauren was the firm’s most senior associate and the next on the partnership list.

  “I’m going to treat myself to a glass of wine at the Grant,” Lauren said. “Tom’s picking me up in a few minutes. Would either of you like to come?”

  “I’d really love to,” said Melissa, “but I’ve got a date.”

  I remembered dates. Dimly. Sex was an even dimmer memory. Don’t go there, I told myself.

  “With Jason Krill,” Melissa added, for my benefit.

  I wondered if she would drive him wild wild wild. I thought there was at least a possibility. “How nice for you,” I told her.

  “Becky?” Lauren asked, looking amused.

  “Sorry, I can’t,” I told her. “I’ve got to work.”

  And don’t forget the ice cream, said my mother’s voice, in my ear.

  Chapter Four

  My house was in a part of La Jolla that defied even the most assiduous efforts of real estate agents at verbal adornment. The best they could come up with was single-level convenience (no troublesome second story) and peek of ocean view (from the garage). Real estate is a big deal in La Jolla, where the sale of even one or two multimillion-dollar houses a year is enough to guarantee a comfortable income. In consequence, the competition is cutthroat, and the village newspaper is filled with brokers’ ads sandwiched in among the articles on rotting whale carcasses on the beach and advertisements for personal chef services. All the real estate agents have their pictures in it too—most in double-decker pairs of many possible combinations (husband and wife, mother and daughter, mother and son) and all sporting identical have-I-got-a-cream-puff-for-you smiles.

  Our house was not a cream puff. It wasn’t even plain French bread. What it was was affordable on the proceeds of the sale of my Mediterranean-style (Warm and inviting, 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, luxurious master suite with spa, contemporary gourmet kitchen, hardwood floors…) house in the Muirlands—which I had to split with my ex-husband after the divorce—and located in the same school district so my kids wouldn’t have to be uprooted. Before my son, David, went away to college in Los Angeles, Alicia and I had shared one bedroom with a closet the size of a hot-water heater, and he and my mother had each had their own equally diminutive quarters. There was one bathroom, with ancient green tile, mold-gray grout, and a big sink that still had separate spigots for the hot and cold water. The bathroom window had been painted so many times it would no longer open, so whenever you took a shower (a short one, with so many people waiting), condensation streamed down the walls and rendered the mirror useless.

  Not that I was complaining. It was a struggle to make the payments every month, but one day, after my mother was gone and Allie was out of the house, I could sell it for an absurdly princely sum. The zip code alone guaranteed it. After I paid off the first and second mortgages, I’d have a couple of hundred thousand, or maybe more, left over. It was just about all the retirement I would have, if you don’t count Social Security (and nobody my age should count Social Security).

  I shifted the carton of chocolate ice cream into the crook of my left arm and fumbled for my house key on the dark porch. I could hear the television going as I pushed the door open. My mother had command of the set in the living room, while Alicia watched in her own bedroom. Neither was an admirer of PBS, but that was all they had in common. The second set had solved no end of problems and turf wars, although in principle I objected to making it too easy for your child to watch TV, as opposed to uplifting activities like reading or homework. In principle I objected to a lot of things, but sometimes expediency was the only thing between me and the Prozac.

  My mother looked u
p from the couch when I walked in. Burdick the cat was stretched out next to her. He wasn’t supposed to be up on the couch, but I’d given up trying to enforce the prohibition, since the minute I left the house my mother encouraged him. The cushions had little rips in them where he’d flexed his claws. Now he no longer even bothered to open his eyes when I showed up.

  “How was your day?” my mother asked me. Her eyes strayed back to the set. Television was a big part of her life now, her companion. I didn’t blame her. She’d reached the age where most of her friends were in rest homes or reposing someplace more final. My father had been dead ten years. At least on TV your favorites never really left you; you could almost always catch them in reruns, if you stayed up late enough.

  “Fine,” I told her. “How are you feeling? Did you find your medicine?”

  She looked startled. “You know, I don’t remember.” She smiled. “I guess I made quite a fuss over nothing. Would you mind looking for it for me? I’ll take it right now.”

  “Sure, Mom.” I patted her shoulder with my right hand. My left was still holding the ice cream. “Just let me put this down.”

  My mother had nine bottles of pills arrayed on top of her dresser, for daily use. The blood-pressure medicine was first in line. I picked it up, wondering whether she had found it and put it back in its place or just overlooked it. Had she taken her pill? Would I need to start counting them out for her, checking against the contents of the bottle? I would have to talk to her doctor soon. Meanwhile it was safer not to risk giving her another one.

  My daughter was lying on her bed wearing jeans and a Delia sweater that barely came to her waist. Her uniform. I wish I could say that she looked like me, with her blond hair and green eyes, but no such luck. My eyes and hair were straight brown all the way, and I’d probably never looked that good in jeans even in my prime.

  The door was open, but I tapped on it anyway. “Hi,” I said.

  She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. “Hi,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in. Want some help with dinner?” Her offer was overenthusiastic, so I knew she knew something was up.

  “In a minute, thanks. Could we talk a little bit first?”

  Her expression changed to one of wariness. “What did I do now?” she asked me.

  I don’t know why all those medieval artists bothered to conjure up such elaborate visions of Eternal Torment. If any one of them had had a teenage child, he would have known that perdition starts long before the afterlife. How about “The only time you ever talk to me is when I’ve done something wrong” for laying on a major guilt trip?

  I took a deep breath and wished that the secret to serenity really did lie in respiration. I waited; no such luck. The self-improvement books always lied to you. “Grandma called me at work this afternoon,” I said. “She couldn’t find her blood-pressure medication.”

  “I didn’t do anything with it.”

  “Allie, she needed help finding it, and you weren’t here.”

  She let out her breath in a little puff of exasperation. “Mom, you worry about her too much. She’s fine. She doesn’t need someone watching her all the time.”

  “I haven’t said she does, but she does need someone to check on her now and then.” I looked at her.

  She squirmed. “I was just a couple of hours late. Vanessa and I were watching the softball game after school.”

  “We agreed that checking on Grandma would be your responsibility,” I said. Reasonably. Calmly. “Like a job. When you have a job, you have to do it, even if you’d rather be doing something else.” I hated the way this conversation was going. I knew that lecturing her was the least likely way to produce results. But I was powerless to stop it. It was as if I were listening to a tape of somebody else’s sermon, somebody who wasn’t going to win a lot of converts.

  She lifted her chin. “Then fire me.”

  “Oh, Alicia.”

  “I mean it, Mom. We didn’t agree to anything. You told me I have to do it. What choice did I have?”

  “Nobody has a lot of choice here, Allie. Not you, not me, not Grandma. We have to do the best we can.”

  She squirmed on the bed, her eyes shifting away from me. “It’s different for you,” she said in a distant voice. “You’ve had your life.”

  I gasped, but she didn’t notice. She wasn’t even trying to wound me, which made it worse.

  “I love Grandma, really I do, Mom,” she continued, “but it’s boring spending all this time with her. She used to be sort of fun when I was younger, but now all she does is watch television and talk about her health. I can tell you every single thing that’s been wrong with her since 1968, and I wasn’t even alive then.”

  “I know,” I said not unsympathetically.

  “I want to be with my friends. I want to be able to stay after school for activities whenever something good is going on, not just when I’ve arranged it with you in advance. I want…” She shrugged.

  “You want to do whatever you want, no strings attached,” I told her. “But you can’t; nobody can.”

  “You do. You can go to work or bring home dates or whatever you want, while I have to take care of Grandma.” She was getting teary and unreasonable; if we kept on, one or both of us would end up yelling. I took a breath.

  “Allie, you know why I have to work, so let’s not go over it again. And you also know I haven’t brought home a real date in a year and a half.” And when I had, she’d refused to speak to him when he came to pick me up on the grounds that just because somebody speaks to you, why should you be obligated to answer back? Between that and referring to the poor guy as “that dork” in a not-so-sotto voce, she generally made things so unpleasant I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Her father was not long dead, and I hadn’t wanted to do anything more to upset her life. “To understand all is to forgive all,” the French say. Well, maybe.

  “That’s no reason to take it out on me. It’s not fair.”

  I shifted tactics. “Maybe not,” I told her. “But what do you think I should do?”

  She looked exasperated. “You’re the mother. Why are you asking me?”

  “Because you’re the one who’s complaining.”

  She ran her fingers through her fine blond hair. “I don’t know. But do something. I’m already a sophomore. I don’t want to miss my entire high school career.”

  She made it sound as if she’d been forced to turn down a seat on the Supreme Court. “I wish…” she added.

  I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

  I wish Daddy were here. Daddy would understand.

  Chapter Five

  Daddy, as it turns out, probably would have understood. My husband, Richard Pratt—Doctor Richard Pratt, as his mother always emphasized when mentioning his name to anyone who, however unwittingly, gave her the least conversational opening to do so—had had his own problems with my mother, especially in the early days of our marriage.

  “Does she have to come so often?” wasn’t even the half of it.

  “I don’t think Richard likes me,” my mother said, as if she was stunned by the possibility. “He never says anything.”

  “Nonsense,” I told her more than once. “He’s just tired.”

  “He seems to be tired a lot,” she observed.

  It isn’t easy to explain about my mother, still less about my ex-husband.

  My mother, Mary Alice Weston, was the youngest and best-looking of five children, an adored family pet—at least to hear her tell it—who grew up with a somewhat exaggerated sense of entitlement and the high-handed manner that sometimes falls to those lucky enough to be treated with an excess of deference. Since my father was, to all intents and purposes, willing to devote himself entirely to her comfort and happiness, their marriage was perfectly agreeable, at least for her. He even called her “Baby.” Would Freud have liked that one or what?

  My husband, on the other hand, was smart and handsome, brilliant at his studies, athletic, a
nd the only boy. Maybe just a little supercilious, but wasn’t he entitled? His sister might have resented him, but his parents could read his destiny from the cradle. His first name was Doctor before he ever left kindergarten, although it would take him twenty more years before the M.D. was officially added.

  In short, he thought he was a prince. Unfortunately, my mother knew she was a queen. A queen looking for courtiers. The combination was bound to be disastrous.

  Not that the skirmishing was overt. Richard was polite to my mother whenever he dragged himself home to our apartment, exhausted and barely sentient, after hours in the lab or classroom or, later, the hospital, and found my parents visiting. He just didn’t talk to her, not really. He never said a word when she occupied the only comfortable chair, insisted on sitting in the passenger seat of the car, or stretched out on our bed—the only one in the apartment—for “an hour’s beauty sleep.” He smiled numbly when she criticized the furniture or replaced the lamp shades uninvited. I was a little numb myself—I was working on my credential and practice teaching, and I didn’t have the energy to protest. Besides, I was out of the habit; it was so much easier to go along with what she wanted. What did a few alterations in our bare-bones student apartment matter? We weren’t home that much anyway.

  “Mary Alice is like some giant ocean liner,” Richard grumbled on one of the rare occasions when he could summon up the stamina for both sex and conversation. We were lying, spent, on sheets that needed changing. “She leaves little eddies in her wake wherever she goes.”

  “She doesn’t mean to interfere,” I told him insincerely.

  He gave me a disbelieving look and turned out the light. Well, how could I guess from that that he was seething inside?

  I didn’t know how much anger he’d accumulated until my mother scheduled some minor surgery for the day of his med school graduation. As soon as I reminded her, she changed the date, but Richard refused to believe she hadn’t done it as some sort of bizarre gesture of one-upmanship. He would not be cajoled out of his feeling of affront. By that time I was pregnant with David, hot and uncomfortable most of the time. I’d developed a love-hate relationship with the toilet bowl. I didn’t feel like arguing. “It’s not that big a deal,” I told him.