by Rona Jaffe
At the funeral we all tried to act calm and not cry. Afterward my father told us we had been “good.” I don’t know what’s so good about that, but it was what he and my mother wanted. Everybody in this family pretends to be perfectly happy all the time, even when they’re not, and if they can’t be happy then at least they have to be brave. I know that even though he won’t admit it my father hates that my mother has epilepsy. She told me about her epilepsy after I saw her have a seizure, and she told me that I don’t have it and never will. I asked her if my father knew she had it before he married her, and she said that was a funny question. I said I didn’t know why it was so funny, and then she said he didn’t know for years. Right away I could see it all. It’s just like he is with us. We have to be the best. The best in school, the best in sports, and be popular and happy and healthy. It’s as if he doesn’t care about us being that way for us, but for him. He would be embarrassed if we weren’t what he calls “winners.” One day we all went swimming and he yelled “The last one in is a loser!” I kept thinking there always has to be a last one unless it’s a tie, so there always has to be a loser, and that isn’t fair. I wonder if Jonathan thought he was a loser?
Jonathan was a genius. I don’t just say that because he was my brother: His photos were brilliant. He did scenery, and empty rooms, but he didn’t like to take pictures of people. He said they never looked the same to the camera as they did to him, and he couldn’t figure out if the way they looked to him was the way they really looked or if the camera was right, or if maybe he just wasn’t a very good photographer. Jonathan worried about things like that, but he was really a happy person, and I don’t understand how he could kill himself. I mean he had everything. Everybody liked him. And if something was so terrible that he wanted to die, why couldn’t he have talked to me first about it?
I have to stop now because they’re calling me for dinner. If dinner is anything like breakfast and lunch were, everybody is going to talk about things that don’t matter, and they’re going to pretend Jonathan never existed. But that makes it worse. He’s sitting right there at the table, in his usual place, and he’s never going to go away. That’s the worst part, that he’s never going to go away but he’s not here either, and I need him.
Chapter Six
That fall the results of the questionnaire that had been sent to their class appeared in The Ladies’ Home Journal. Emily was a little disappointed that after spending a whole week trying to frame proper responses she was not even quoted by name. There were some quotes, but they were credited to “a housewife in Seattle,” or “a college professor in Vermont,” and the rest of the article was divided between a compendium of the kinds of information that had been gathered and six interviews in depth with women the author had found interesting, or perhaps typical. Emily thought how ironic it was that if she had written the truth about herself and her life all these years she probably would have been one of the six women who was chosen. Marriage immediately after graduation to the perfect catch, followed by a perfect home and family life, and then a nervous breakdown! A woman who had wanted two perfect children and then had wanted to kill them! What a story that would have made for all her classmates.
She was back at the analyst, but this time it wasn’t because of herself so much as it was because of Ken. Dear old Dr. Page, who had been middle-aged when they started her analysis. Emily felt as if they were two old warriors together, they had been through so much. She sat down in the worn brown leather chair facing Dr. Page across the huge, scarred desk. Years ago she had wondered if patients had stuck knives in it to make those pits and marks, but now it just seemed like a symbol of comfort. They were all scarred and recovered, in some way.
“You know, it’s so unfair,” Emily said. “Ken is still sexy and attractive to me. I remember his wrists, when I first went out with him. He wore his watch on the inside of his wrist, and he had that sandy hair on his arms … I thought it was so sexy I got a weak feeling in my stomach. In those days I thought hands and mouths were the sexiest parts of a man, and I guess I still do. It doesn’t matter to me if his body gets older. We’re all human. But it doesn’t seem to count for a woman. We have to stay young and firm and never change or else the men complain.”
“Not all men feel that way,” Dr. Page said.
“But Ken does. It’s funny … you remember how I used to be my own worst enemy, how I always thought I was so ugly. It was part of my craziness, always inspecting myself and being so critical, never knowing what I really looked like. And when I finally got over it and Ken was so happy, and we did things together, and he was supportive …” She choked back the lump in her throat and tried not to cry. Dr. Page silently pushed the box of tissues closer. “No, I can’t,” Emily said. “I’ll look a mess and then he’ll say something.” And then she did cry.
“It sounds as if Ken needs some therapy,” Dr. Page said. “He’s gradually turned from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.”
Emily giggled through her tears. “Doctor Buchman.” There was a pause while she gathered herself together and wiped her eyes. She wore waterproof mascara to her analyst’s sessions. “He’s always putting me down lately. And I’m not so secure that I can deal with that. I don’t think I ever will be totally secure, just like some people will never be fast runners. I’m just not built that way. But I don’t need the person who is supposed to be my helpmate and best friend tearing me down all the time. Last night we were getting undressed for bed and he looked at me with this absolute distaste and said: ‘You’ve got a fat ass.’ And I don’t. Do I?”
“You know you don’t,” Dr. Page said gravely.
“I swim, I play tennis, I do my exercises, I watch everything I eat. My women friends say they envy me because I look so well. They’re kind to me. Ken seems to hate it that I’m not twenty. I don’t know what it is he wants. I think he’s great, I tell him so all the time, but he just looks at me as if he wishes I weren’t there.”
“Do you think there’s another woman?”
“Who knows?” Emily said. “Ken never could handle that. But this time it’s worse.”
“What about drinking?”
“Well, lately it seems to put him in a bad mood instead of cheering him up.”
“What about drugs?”
Emily looked at her aghast. “Ken?”
“It happens in the best of families.”
“I used to worry about the kids. But they seem all right. Ken is an adult. He’s not a rock star or one of those movie people. I know a lot of them take things.”
“Ken has constant contact with that world,” Dr. Page said. “And it’s also easy for him to get drugs if he wants them.”
“Ken is a nice Jewish boy,” Emily said, insulted.
“And you are a smart girl from Radcliffe,” the doctor said.
“If it were a brain tumor or one of those diseases that changes the personality, his doctor would tell me, wouldn’t he?”
“Not if Ken swore him to secrecy to protect you because you couldn’t take the stress of knowing. But it doesn’t sound as if Ken cares that much about your feelings.”
“Oh, who knows what Ken cares about,” Emily sighed.
Even though her name wasn’t actually mentioned in the article about her class, Emily left the magazine prominently displayed on the coffee table in the living room, opened to the article, so people would see it. Adeline was very pleased and made Emily buy her a copy. Emily’s tennis group was coming over on Monday, because it was her turn to have them at her house, and Emily knew it would be a good topic of conversation. They’d gotten to be pretty good tennis players over the years, especially since they all took tennis lessons and some of them even went away to tennis camp (to get away from their husbands, she suspected), but the real reason for their weekly tennis-and-lunch meetings was companionship and talk. They were her friends, and they were nice to her, but Emily still secretly thought of them as frivolous women. Their husbands were all successful, and they introduced new me
mbers of their group as the wife of so-and-so, as if the woman herself had no identity. Their conversation revolved mainly around clothes, new gyms, trips, and gossip. They read whatever new books you were supposed to read, and they wouldn’t be caught dead reading a magazine for housewives, but the article might make them talk about their own dreams and expectations, and it would be a different kind of day.
On the Friday before the Monday tennis lunch Emily sat at the kitchen table planning the menu with Adeline. “Please don’t make pasta salad again, Adeline. Everybody’s on a diet. How about Chinese chicken salad?”
“Everybody likes macaroni salad,” Adeline said. She refused to call it pasta even if it was shells.
“Well, they left it over last time and I was embarrassed,” Emily ventured bravely. “There’s a nice recipe in my file for the Chinese chicken salad, and go easy on the soy sauce.” She smiled. “Maybe it would be funny if I put a dish of diuretics on the table on the side of the salad. They’d all laugh. They’re going to go home and take one immediately, they always do.”
“I’ll make chicken salad with mayonnaise,” Adeline said grimly. “Those pills are bad for you.”
“Vinaigrette?” Emily said. “Please?”
“I don’t know why you all want to watch your weight anyway,” Adeline said, disgusted. “You’re all too thin.”
“Fruit salad and cookies for dessert,” Emily said briskly, ignoring her. She was working her way up to the tradeoff. Any negotiation with Adeline took sly diplomacy because it was a battle of wills, and Adeline always managed to win or at least destroy your victory.
“Too much work, sweetie,” Adeline said. “I can’t clean the house and make lunch and dinner too. If you’re on a diet you can’t have cookies.”
“All right,” Emily said pleasantly. She wrote the menu as she talked. “Chicken salad with vinaigrette dressing—very light—and fruit salad for dessert. Make a lot because we’ll have the exact same thing for dinner. I don’t care, and Dr. Buchman likes that.”
And on Sunday afternoon I’ll make the cookies. Me. My own special cookies. Not yours. Mine. And you’ll serve them.
It didn’t matter that at Friday dinner Emily’s piece of fish which she had requested dry broiled without any butter because Ken had said she had a fat ass was served by Adeline as a white, rubbery, and repulsive mess without any seasoning either, because Adeline’s nose was out of joint about the no butter. That was a minor skirmish. The real victory was coming Sunday, when Emily could bake her butterscotch chip cookies in peace and bliss.
On Sunday Ken was out of the house right after breakfast, claiming a tennis game. He didn’t bother to invite her, either to play or to watch, but by now she was used to it. It was like the bad old days, when she was beginning her nervous breakdown, when he used to vanish for hours on end because he couldn’t stand to be with her. But now she was perfectly sane, and she had something to do if he left her home alone. She was beginning to think of the happy time they’d had together when she was well again as simply an interlude, not their life. Even their years together at college, going steady, and the early years of their marriage when she was still working, had taken on the aspect of a brief, happy vacation from reality. Those were two other people; young, idealistic, trying to conform. They had chased happiness with the dedication of two kids studying for an exam, armed with their research gleaned from the media and public opinion. Emily didn’t even know what happiness was supposed to mean anymore. She knew what made her happy, and she also knew it wouldn’t mean a thing to someone else. But maybe that was what happiness was: what Kate called “doing her own thing.” God knows, she had no idea what made Ken happy, or Kate. Peter, she suspected, wanted nothing more than success and money and material things, and perhaps his own idea of love. She didn’t even know what Peter thought love was. He talked about his imaginary future beautiful live-in girl friend the same way he did about owning an expensive car. But she wasn’t going to think about any of them now. This was her day.
She got out the cookie sheets, the mixing bowl, and the ingredients she had bought the day before. Adeline never left the cookie sheets clean enough for Emily’s taste, so she scrubbed them until they shone, and then she began to mix her secret recipe for what she thought were the best, chewiest, melt in your mouth butterscotch chip cookies in the world. They were not too sweet and not too greasy. Nothing in them tasted artificial. It had taken her years to get the recipe exactly right, with Kate and Peter as her willing taste testers. When fickle Peter finally pronounced them addictive, Emily knew she had it.
While she baked her special cookies her mind was wiped free of everything that bothered her. She had music on the kitchen radio, but she hardly listened to it. She felt warm and creative as she put everything together, even though it wasn’t difficult, and then when the cookies were baking Emily sat in the kitchen waiting because she loved the way they smelled. She could almost tell by the smell when they were exactly ready. But she enjoyed going over to the oven and peering in through the glass window to watch those pale little blobs of batter rise and move and bubble and start to turn their golden color. How could she ever have allowed Adeline to deprive her of this?
When the cookies were ready and had cooled off enough Emily took one, just one, and put it on her best plate. She poured a glass of skimmed milk. Then she took her milk and cookie out to the pool area and sat in the shade at the metal table under the umbrella and tasted her handiwork very carefully. It was perfect, as usual.
She put the others neatly into her cookie tin, the layers separated by waxed paper, and knew that with the magazine article and the nice lunch, her tennis group day would be a success.
It was. Aside from a remark that idle hands find busy work, an obvious malapropism, Adeline served the cookies without a murmur, and Emily’s friends devoured them. The article set them reminiscing about their lost young dreams and quickly realizing that they’d gotten exactly what they’d wanted. Emily began to think maybe it really wasn’t their fault they were so frivolous; they had never been told there was anything else for them.
At dinner she tried to tell Ken about her pleasant day. “Hookers,” he said disdainfully. “Your friends are nothing but hookers and parasites, living off their husbands.”
“They are not!” Emily said. Her throat hurt. Why was he spoiling everything again? “They don’t have to work; their husbands are rich. But they do charity things. They help raise money for Share …”
“Only because they want to go to the parties and see movie stars.”
Emily was brave from her feeling of accomplishment and allowed herself to be angry. She wondered if Dr. Page would approve. “You see movie stars. You get to look at their pimples and who knows what else.”
“What exactly does that mean?”
“I don’t know what it means, but I don’t want to know either.”
Ken’s face got so dark with rage she thought it would pop. He got up from the table and threw down his napkin. “You’re just as bad as they are,” he said in that voice, congested with hate, she had come to know and fear, and then he left the room.
Adeline entered the room silently and began to clear the table, knowing the meal was over before it had even begun. Emily wondered what Adeline must think about their arguments, and then decided she didn’t care. She heard Ken’s car roaring out of the driveway and went up to the bedroom to cry.
Later she heard Adeline’s car chugging away. It was dark already these days, and soon it would be standard time again and then it would be dark really early. Then they would turn off the heater in the pool because Ken said it was too expensive. Then, when he had stopped swimming his laps, what would he do to work off his anger? Hurt her? Stay out all night? She’d rather he stayed out all night than ever lay a hand on her. Sometimes, like tonight, he looked as if he were actually ready to do her harm.
Maybe she should leave him. But where would she go? What would she do? People like her didn’t get divorced; they ju
st kept working on their marriages and hoping things would get better. She knew she was a boring married woman now and if she left Ken then she would only be a boring divorced woman. Nobody but her analyst seemed to think she had any worth. Maybe she should get a dog. A dog adored you no matter what. But dogs shed and jumped on things, especially you and your bed. No, she was not even meant to have a pet. Emily washed her tear-swollen face and wondered what in the world she was meant for.
She ought to try to keep up her scrapbook of Kate’s press clippings. She had been keeping scrapbooks for years, at college and then since she was married, but she never looked at them obsessively anymore because the past was the past. But still, if your daughter was a successful actress, you had reason to be proud and keep a record of what she had done. Emily had a whole folder of clippings and photos that she’d been meaning to sort and paste into the new leather album she’d bought. They were in her walk-in closet in the bedroom, on the shelf.
There was Ken’s tennis bag right outside her closet door where he’d left it instead of putting it away in his own walk-in closet where it belonged. He’d just dropped it down when he came home for dinner. It reminded her of that movie Gaslight, where the husband kept trying to drive the wife crazy. If Emily tried to put Ken’s things away, or do things for him, he would turn on her and say she was smothering him, and if she left his bag where it was he would come home and accuse her again of being a parasite. She marched right over to it and picked it up, and then, for no reason she could think of, she opened it and looked inside.
