Her Last Words

by Jo Barney

  On the day the letter arrived informing them that Tim had been accepted to medical school, Joan said it was time to get married. They couldn’t mess up, get pregnant, ruin it, this dream of the good life, the dream that had been hers since she was little girl.

  That first year in medical school, Tim squirmed through anatomy labs that sent him home half-sick and smelling of formaldehyde, and Joan learned to teach third graders and to cook, creating lesson plans as she stirred the spaghetti sauce or sautéed onions and munched saltines to quell the strange nausea that turned out to be Joshua. Joshua was a surprise, but he probably shouldn’t have been since Tim was Catholic, and to marry him, Joan had taken the lessons, became one, in name at least. The rhythm method was the only doctrine she accepted and the one Tim, it soon became apparent, didn’t.

  She returned to the third graders that fall, lactating sporadically at the sound of a certain pitch of child’s cry wafting in from the playground. In the evenings, she spent some of the time she needed to pump milk for the next day as she paged through The Joy of Cooking and planned the dishes for the weekend med school parties. She basked in the other wives’ reluctant praise and shared recipes on cards engraved with “From Joan’s Kitchen.” How do you do it all? they asked.

  By the time her third son was on the way, three babies in five years, with another year of interning to go, friends teased them, asked if Tim had missed the class on contraception. He had answered yes, but he had gotten an A-plus in human sexuality, and when he had rubbed his groin against Joan’s hip and grinned, she managed to grin back. “I can attest to that.” Everyone thought she was funny and a great wife. So did she, herself an intern, she told herself, preparing to be the wife of a doctor.

  She was shocked when Tim accepted a partnership in a small clinic in a village two hundred miles from a bookstore. “I need to be a big fish in a small pond,“ he said when she, the word choking her, asked why. “You’ll be good at it, the Mrs. Doctor of the town. You like being queen of everything, don’t you?” He didn’t laugh when he said that, and neither did she. Perhaps we are both just sick of school, she thought, not of each other.

  Upon their arrival in Clarkston, Joan found that the new doctor’s house, “all cleaned and ready,” according to the realtor who met them at the door, was a pinch-faced bungalow set on a small dry lot ringed by dead yews. In the weeks that followed, she learned that the town’s movie theater was open only on Fridays and Saturdays, and the best music in town was at the Lutheran Church on Sunday mornings. Art appreciation meant crinkling up crepe paper flowers in someone’s kitchen while children squabbled in the basement party room.

  “When do you have time to read all of these?” Frank, her mailman, stood on her porch one sultry afternoon and shook his head as he handed her a pile of magazines: Saturday Review, Vogue, The New Yorker. He glanced past her, into the hallway. Two overturned tricycles and an abandoned vacuum cleaner guarded the passage, and she knew he was answering his own question.

  During that first year in Clarkston, her discontent roiled in the midst of the requisite backyard barbecues that introduced the new doctor to the families of the town. Usually, the men drank too much beer and ended the evening by yanking their sulking children down the driveway, their apologetic wives waving back at Joan as she stood at the door, exhausted, more than exhausted. “That was a great feed,” Tim would grin, stepping over the pile of paper plates and beer cans and taking her arm. “Let’s go to bed.”

  At times she found herself imagining Tim’s penis as a kind of bludgeon, he, a bully, using it to subdue her, get her under control. That was just when he had been drinking, she told herself. Other times the sex still reminded her of the way they could be, the way they had been at the beginning. The trouble was he was drinking a lot, demoralized, she supposed, by the unending parade of snotty children and complaining women who passed through his office. The town’s older doctor, postponing his retirement, was the physician people still went to with their serious illnesses.

  Tim sank into his chair at the end of the day, Jack Daniels at his elbow, the boys warned to be quiet as he watched whatever came through on the tiny TV that was their first indulgence. When he came to bed, late, depressed and sullen, he would tell her to turn off her bed light; the swish of pages kept him awake. The sound of his heavy breathing fueled night thoughts shimmering with a reddish glow behind her sleepless lids.

  Her Christmas letters to her college friends spoke of small town living, boys busy and underfoot, the unreliability of a doctor’s life, his being on call on the weekends, her continued membership in Book of the Month. “Have you read…?” she’d ask. “Be sure to see…” she’d advise, even though the film hadn’t, wouldn’t ever make it to Clarkston. Thank God for The New Yorker, she’d think, as she typed. “Wish we could somehow work a visit, just us girls, into our child-obsessed schedules.”

  And once or twice Lou and she did get together over hurried lunches when Joan’s youngest son needed a specialist’s attention in Seattle. And Jackie came through Clarkston on a ski trip, minus her husband, but with a couple of young Jackies in tow, one year. Madge was the communicator in the group, her regular notes and letters, carbon copied, newsy because she’d pass on news that came to her, with personal P.S.’s to each of them on the last page, and the exchanges felt a little like the midnight trading of cigarettes in the solarium. A touching of hands holding a lit match.

  The boys were growing. They needed a bigger house, one with a dishwasher and two bathrooms. On moving day, exhausted from unpacking, disturbed by the discovery of termites and the smell of mold in the basement, Joan had fallen into bed and clicked off the light without picking up her book. When Tim slid under the blankets minutes later, she felt his erection rub against her hip, his hand on her breast.

  “No, not tonight,” she said. “I’m too tired.” The words emerged as if they had been lined up, waiting, at the tip of her tongue for a long while.

  Stale beer cloaked his breath. “What?”

  The boys were not yet asleep in this strange house. She put her hand against his chest and whispered, “The only time you want me is when you’re drunk.” Once again, unbidden words, even more true. Tired had nothing to do with it.

  Tim rose up, his hand on her arm, his nails cutting into her skin. “I work my ass off trying to build a practice and make money for you.” His voice scraped at her ear. “For all your hoity-toity ideas, oriental rugs, copper pans, that stuff you see in your magazines, and all you can do is bitch. I’m too tired. Well, so am I, damn you.” She pulled away, buried her head under her pillow, but she could still hear him. “I am sick of hearing how stupid my friends are, how ugly the town is, how bored you are.” He rolled away from her to the far edge the mattress, yanked at the blankets. Cool air rushed between their bodies.

  “I am sick of you, too,” she murmured into her pillow. That must have been true, for the next morning her body expelled the tiny bloody fetus that had been snuggling uneasily in her uterus. She didn’t tell him, saving the information, perhaps, as ammunition for the next fight.

  She hadn’t needed it. Their battleground was a silent, parched field, a bed sheet bounded by their silent backs. In the new house, shored up against the insects and enlivened with the antiques she found in barns and estate sales, Joan began to have gatherings, dinner parties, mostly French now that Julia Child had arrived and the children were old enough to be corralled in front of a TV with a pizza. One or two of her friends’ husbands brought good wine to her table, inspired by the vineyards that were replacing prune orchards on the south-sloping hills outside of town.

  Joan introduced Wallace Stegner to her neighborhood coffee klatch and she became the maven of the town’s first book club. Tim’s practice finally blossomed when the town’s old doctor retired to his orchids. Joan became Mrs. Doctor for real, but that role didn’t seem as important as it once had been.

  One day, as she whipped off the sheets from their bed, Joan noticed that their ma
rriage mattress had developed a continental divide down the middle. She didn’t think much about sex any more, or the absence of it. Once in a while she would wake up to the chimes of an orgasm ringing through her body, and she would not breathe, wishing for the deep pulse to go on and on, but it never did, and her fingers could not bring it back, even when she tried to imagine the first naive convulsion that had swept through her as she leaned against the chipping paint of the sorority house.

  Suddenly, their sons were teenagers. Just as suddenly, Tim began to enjoy being a father, a father of athletes who were good enough to bring him backslaps from townsfolk whose lives for six months of the year focused on sending a basketball team to State. Like Tim, his sons were tall and had good hands. There were moments when a wash of pride in her children spilled over onto the barren ground of her marriage and Joan imagined that her family would survive.

  It was ironic, then that a basketball game brought an end to that hope. The team was on its way to the state tournament, and most of the town filled the bleachers cheering on their boys. The game was tight, the outcome hanging on the last sixty seconds on the clock. Tim, enflamed by a referee’s call, fueled by beers drunk before the game with his coterie of sports lovers—a lawyer, a dentist, a contractor, and this particular night, the Unitarian minister—had careened down the wooden steps, leapt over the announcer’s table, and smashed a fist into the face of a stripe-shirted man a foot shorter than himself.

  Blood spread across the shiny maple floor, and her husband screamed words forbidden in this small town even in the heat of a game. Joan caught sight of her sons slouching like guilty penitents, elbows on thighs, eyes averted, their faces pale with embarrassment. The melee continued as Joan made her way across a wall of knees leading to the aisle, climbed the concrete stairs to the exit. She knew, walking home, that Julia Child and a book club were not enough to fill her empty places any more.

  Tim did not come home that night. The next evening he didn’t appear for the dinner she had not cooked. She sent the boys, who seemed to be glad to escape from whatever would happen next, out for pizza, and she went to bed. She opened her book, tried to read, but she could not see the words through the storm behind her eyes. Perhaps this was just one of those bad times, she thought. Once the boys are out of the house, she and Tim would have time to sort things out. She shouldn’t rush things. She had managed this far, hadn’t she? She put her book down. When she tried to bring back the images of her family, whole, the way she had once been to be able to imagine a dream life, she saw only the stricken faces of her sons, heard the crazed voice of her husband. She returned to her novel, forced herself to read word by word, until the story took over, her own story extinguished for a while.

  She was startled by the sound of the front door slamming, footsteps pounding down the hall. Tim staggered across the room and made his way to the bed. He leaned over her, his face falling forward until his eyes were watery slits.

  “Guess what?”

  Joan couldn’t look at him. She felt for her book, opened it. “What?”

  The headboard shook as he leaned on it. “I found someone who loves me.”

  She turned a page. “Lucky you.” The moment she said those careless words, the last remnant of that old dream floated away like a fleck of dust.

  Tim moved out the next day, taking his skis and his leather reclining chair. He hesitated for a moment in front of the TV, but decided to leave it behind “for the boys,” he said, in a fatherly way. Besides, it was only a twenty-incher.

  Her sons, in turn, stopped clutching at what had been, and free-fell for a while, each getting into his own sort of trouble, graduating somehow, managing finally to leave his parents, the town, his brothers. As the last boy closed the door behind him, Joan found herself alone and ready to begin all over.

  She chose San Francisco for her rebirth. She had taken The Sunday Chronicle for years, a nostalgic reminder of her life in San Mateo. Herb Caen still made her laugh even though he arrived on Wednesday. Despite or because of the lack of live theatre in Clarkston, she had looked forward each week to the news of the opera and play openings in the city as if she held season tickets. Just as her mother had thirty years before, she realized as she packed the few items she would keep for her new life.

  * * *

  Folding clothes into boxes, Joan had let her thoughts wander, and the words “season tickets” came into focus, bringing with them a vision of a young tired woman, a single mother with a child to feed, for whom going to a play in San Francisco was the stuff of dreams. Even if she could afford a cheap seat, her mother complained, she would have to pay for the bus fare, and a dress and coat to wear. San Francisco was dressy, you know, not like on the Peninsula. Despite this reality, Emily Short read reviews of the city’s plays and clubs and talked to her daughter about the actors and comedians as if she knew them personally. Not being able to go to the theatres became shorthand for everything else that was lacking in her life.

  They were dirt poor. Emily worked days in a commercial laundry and came home with her hair steamed and straggly and burn marks on the backs of her hands. Joan cooked their dinners and did not invite friends to her house. Neither her mother nor the house could bear the scrutiny of outsiders. Joan learned from a grandmother, during one rare complaining visit, that her father was not dead. Indeed, he had married soon after he left Emily, pregnant, disgraced. Joan supposed she had half-siblings somewhere. Emily didn’t know.

  The one thing Joan knew at sixteen was that she wouldn’t settle for the life her mother had endured. She studied hard, worked after school, and won a scholarship to a school in Oregon where no one knew her. When she brought home the cashmere sweater and the narrow skirts she would take to college, her mother said, one more time, “I suppose you think you’ll be getting season tickets.”

  “Yes, I will,” Joan answered.

  And now, finally, almost twenty-five years later, she was about to enjoy them. Amazing what a person discovers deep in the pockets of memory. Amazing, too, the ease of discarding some of those memories along with old linens and worn rugs. She finished boxing her china and called for the woman who would price the leftovers and hold the sale of her former life.

  When she arrived in the City, she bought an apartment on Jones Street. Its five rooms were austere at first, a bed the one piece of furniture because she had brought only her good dishes and silver with her. She walked every part of the city, looking for the antiques and old rugs and art that would make the flat her own. And then, before the money from the sale of the Clarkston house and the divorce settlement ran out, she enrolled in grad school at San Francisco State. She would become a therapist. Teaching was no longer an option. She needed to earn enough money to support the new dream she was building.

  Within five years of getting her license, she had developed a growing counseling practice of folks willing to pay her well to listen to their woes. She had also accumulated, through the opera guild, her tennis club, and reconnection with a few old acquaintances from her San Mateo days, a coterie of women to keep her company. If she were somewhat estranged from her children, well, wasn’t every mother and her sons, for a while at least, while the sons worked out their own destinies?

  For a time she was in love with a man who made her laugh. She’d not experienced that before in a man and she found herself tingling with delight at his knock at the door. Except that this particular tingling also involved the inhaling of a line of white powder through a rolled bill, which she did until she realized love had nothing to do with it.

  After ten years, she was as firmly rooted into her San Francisco life as the tiny sequoia she had planted in the ceramic pot on her terrace the first day she had moved in. Then she met Brian Bishop.

  She had known of Brian, of course, and she was flattered when she noticed him looking at her over the heads of patrons in the lobby of the opera house at the opening night of Antigone. She had come with a woman from her book group, a talkative, busy person who had foun
d someone to engage in a long and detailed conversation. Joan had moved on, and she stood, leaning against a thick pillar, sipping her wine. She was wearing a pale peach shantung shirtwaist under a silk patchwork jacket and she felt quite good about her choices, especially when several pairs of jeans waggled past. Jeans with stilettos had never made any sense to her, reminding her of her days in Clarkston where jeans meant feeding chickens or wandering through Kmart.

  “Who designed your jacket?” a male voice close to her asked. Startled, she turned and saw him at her side.

  ‘I don’t even know,” she admitted. “I bought it in Ireland.“

  “May I?” and at her nod, he gently turned her collar and read the label. “I should explain. I have a shop, in Maiden Lane, perhaps you know it, Avignon?” He patted her neck, soothing the fabric back into place. “I am always on the lookout for new designers. Most of my things now are from Japan. I have several Irish lines, though, and I was sure I recognized your jacket.” He grinned. “Kind of silly, I guess…”

  “No, I’m flattered, Mr. Bishop.” The sweet scent of his hands at her throat confused her, sideswiped her words. “I’m delighted to meet the owner of one of my favorite shops, even though I don’t buy much from you. A bit spendy, you know.” She could finally look at him straight on. Several years younger than she, fit, startling green eyes, and silver hair, a bit of the Irish in him, she guessed. As his hand reached for her arm, she saw that his fingernails were cut straight across, white at the tips, carefully maintained. For some reason, that pleased her.

  He drove her to her home that night, thanked her for the chance to talk theatre, and shook her hand. Perhaps a woman edging in on sixty should not expect to be kissed goodnight, she speculated. Or perhaps she could have done the kissing. Who knew the rules anymore?