Speaking with Strangers

by Mary Cantwell

  In a month or so he called and said someday he’d take down my panty hose and give me a good spanking. My marriage had been to me analogous to entering a convent—I never strayed outside the grounds—so my response, silence, was as innocent as that of a child who, despite a thorough warning, was about to take candy from a stranger. Yet I was cautious enough not to use the ticket he sent me for a panel discussion he was chairing in New York. I wouldn’t risk going alone. When I called him at his hotel and said I was sorry I couldn’t be there and wished him luck, he said, “Mah Mary, you’re always running away from what you really want.” And when I told Dr. Franklin, the psychiatrist at whose office I had so often wept during the wake I was holding for B, about the writer’s phone calls and the vulgarity that had me as mesmerized as a mongoose faced by a snake, he said, ”Don’t you go near that man.”

  But one day I did, because I thought he was life.

  Three

  During the long stretch between separation and divorce, I had read a lot. I had read about how much better it was for the children if an end was brought to an unhappy marriage. I had read that staying together for their sake was practically a crime against nature. I had made an appointment with B’s psychiatrist, who seemed surprised when I said that two people who had brought children into the world had a responsibility toward them that surmounted their own petty concerns. “You’re a real Christian!” he said, amazed. More likely, in the world in which B and I had lived for seventeen years, I was a real anomaly.

  The house quiet but for the children’s soft breathing and the occasional clunk from the radiator, I would steal from my bed and, sitting in the dark, humiliate myself with midnight phone calls. “Please,” I would beg, “I can change. I can be anything you want me to be.” Then, as usual, work saved me from being someone of whom my father would have been ashamed. (How he would feel about my self-abasement was ever on my mind and kept me poker-faced in public.)

  Mademoiselle’s guest editors, winners of a contest that would enable them to edit the August College Issue (most of which had been completed before they arrived), had as part of their prize a week in a foreign country. I had semi-chaperoned a previous group in Israel. I was escorting the new group to Ireland.

  Most of my charges didn’t like Ireland—the g.e.’s, as we called them, tended to judge countries by their shopping potential—and I was glad to be shot of them soon after we got to Dublin. The editor-in-chief called to say the magazine had got some unexpected advertising from Yugoslavia, and, lacking a quid pro quo, she wanted me to make a rush trip for a rush article. It was June, the children were out of school and in good hands, and I would have one more week away from a city in which I saw the ghosts of my husband and myself on every corner. I arrived in Yugoslavia armed with the entire Forsyte Saga, and soon found myself immersed in a London that seemed far more real than the cities and countryside about which I was assiduously making notes.

  Still, I recall sitting on the ramparts that surround Dubrovnik and thinking that if I just leaned backward a bit, I would fall to a death that everyone would think accidental. At the same time I was uncomfortably aware of the small stones that were pocking my backside. “As long as your butt is counting pebbles, mah Mary,” the balding man said when I told him of that momentary hover between feeling and oblivion, “I’m not gonna worry about you.”

  I recall, too, an old woman watching me from the window of a building bordering the restaurant terrace on which I was eating an early dinner, and that I raised my glass to her. And another woman, in white, with a pyramidal straw hat and the kind of honeyed skin and hair and slanty brown eyes I always associate with Hungarians, standing in a rose-choked fourteenth-century cloister. “Dubrovnik,” she said. “There is nothing more beautiful, is there?” When I mentioned her charm to my guide, he shrugged. “I have seen her before,” he told me. “She is mad.”

  I remember Belgrade, and how brown and sluggish the beautiful blue Danube was as it slouched past my hotel window, and an evening sitting with people from the tourist commission while all around us the other diners sang the Yugoslav equivalent of “You Are My Sunshine.” I was wearing my wedding ring, still, as I saw it, under my husband’s protection. I spoke of him, too, as if he were home waiting for me. Instead, he was to me as dead as Virginia Woolf’s brother Thoby was truly dead all the time she was writing her friend Violet Dickinson about his temperature, his moods, his crossness with his nurses because they wouldn’t give him mutton chops and beer. Even during the midnight phone calls that preceded my final letting go, I had recognized the man I was talking to as B’s simulacrum. This man, who one night hissed “Cocksucker!” into my ear, could not be my husband.

  I saw Germans, always recognizable because their shorts never quite covered their rumps, and coveys of Russians, the women all wearing the same kind of shoddy, low-heeled beige shoes, and elderly American women unconquered by their varicose veins and elastic bandages. I dined one afternoon on roast kid (I thought it was baby lamb), in what I was told was Tito’s favorite restaurant, and one evening with a young man who idolized Albert Szent-Gyorgyi. When I spoke of Szent-Györgyi’s having said that the world was a small cave we could not afford to litter, the boy looked at me with warm brown eyes and said, “You sound like a Yugoslav student.”

  Talking. I was talking all the time, because there was no Yugoslav who didn’t want to practice his English and because I have the gift, if gift it is, of instant intimacy. Add up those moments when you and a stranger connect, I thought to myself, and you can turn them into a life for yourself.

  The longest talk was with a middle-aged woman who was working for a new hotel on the Adriatic. The old town, settled by Bosnian Turks, was nearby, and we walked through threads of streets and the smell of sardines to a restaurant on the water, where she spoke of her two brothers and a sister-in-law who had been executed during World War II. She couldn’t forget them, she said, but she had forgotten to hate. “We spend so much time looking inside ourselves that all we see is darkness. But if we look out—there is so much that is beautiful.”

  Ah, this is one of the good times, I said silently, this coming together with someone I would never see again, and both of us looked toward the sky, hunting the Big Bear and the Little Bear. But as we did I realized that my children, having grown up under a sky in which the only star one could rely upon was Venus, had never seen either, and I was sick with longing. No, this was not a life, this little accumulation of epiphanies, not a life for me.

  Before I left Yugoslavia, however, there was another good time, in Split, which I liked because walking through it was like touring fifteen or so centuries at the same time. Bits and pieces of at least a thousand years of construction had been jumbled together into the architectural equivalent of a magpie’s nest. Rome is also a magpie’s nest, of course, but Rome is too big for me to swallow. Split was just my size.

  I was wandering through a small church, mostly Byzantine, I think, and asking more questions than the guide, a girl no more than twenty, could answer. “Oh, this isn’t fair to you,” she said, and ran off to get the head guide, a tall thin man in his fifties, dressed all in white but for the black beret tilted over his thick gray hair. He was enormously well informed, and polished to a degree that Americans (sometimes I feel a part not only of a recently evolved country but of a recently evolved race) never attain, but I suspect he was also poor. Why else would a university professor, which he was, spend his summers trying to educate tourists like me into some quickly forgotten semblance of scholarship?

  Was he married, I wondered, or a bachelor? Did he have a house, an apartment, or one small room? Did he find what he was doing demeaning? I wanted to burrow my way into his head, because I wanted to burrow my way into his life. I didn’t know how to live mine; I didn’t even know how to sit still. That was the real reason I traveled. It was a way to quiet the ants that were forever crawling under my skin. But I asked him nothing except the period of this fresco, the provenance of those c
urious columns, thanked him politely, tipped him nicely, and returned to Soames and Irene and London’s damp chill.

  It was the same when I got back to New York. I needed books so that I could live their characters’ lives, not mine, and I needed rooms beyond the virginal white bedroom in which I sat, propped against pillows, a glass of slivovitz (my only souvenir of Yugoslavia) in my left hand and a book, any book, in my right. I was listening, to Virginia Woolf, to Jean Rhys, and, mostly, to Colette, whom I believed to be the font of all wisdom, not realizing that she, who wrote so movingly about solitude, scarcely had a solitary moment in her life.

  Beyond my bedroom door was a windowless inner room good for nothing but a library, and here it was that I had imagined my children doing their homework when they were old enough for it, at the big center table under the green-shaded hanging lamp. But when the time came, Rose Red did her homework wherever I was, and Snow White did no homework at all.

  Their rooms were on the other side of the library, Snow White’s strewn with strange caches of dirty glasses and gum wrappers and notes passed at school, letters from people barely met, and Janis Joplin records. Already, she had a passion for the doomed and the dramatic and would put on a long pink dress and tie a homemade black velvet choker around her neck on Sunday nights to watch the Masterpiece Theatre shows about Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and their courts. Above all, she was obsessed with Anne Frank, whose diary she read over and over again. She identified with Anne Frank, she said. Anne Frank was her best friend.

  Rose Red’s room was neat, with a dollhouse, stuffed animals on the bed, birthday cards taped to the wall, and a small electric organ and miniature bottles and a soap collection and a candle collection and stacks of Archie comics. When the girls were small, I had sat in the room with bunny wallpaper and told them stories and sung “Rock-a-Bye, Baby.” Now, with the streetlight shining in my window and the garden dark beneath theirs, we stayed apart too many nights, Snow White with Anne Frank and Rose Red with her Archies and I with my books, my wonderful books, which all my life had arisen and engulfed me in a reality more powerful than my own. When I was a child, immersion in a book deafened me to calls to come to the dinner table, help dry the dishes, get ready for bed. Now, at night, books deafened me to soundlessness—a phone that didn’t ring, a door that would never open again to bring my husband home. But I could hear Daisy Buchanan weeping over Jay Gatsby’s shirts, and Lord Peter Wimsey wooing Harriet Vane with John Donne.

  Rose Red, determined to be “young in her youth,” was also determined that I provide her with a childhood. If I came home from work tired and thinking about sandwiches, she would say, “It’s a mother’s responsibility to give her child hot meals,” and send me, my exhaustion suddenly erased by her demands for order, to the kitchen. Out they would come, the linguine with clam sauce and the salad, and there my daughters would sit, the one lazily forking her pasta and the other grinning triumphantly.

  We worked on her dollhouse together—one summer weekend when my mother was visiting, she and I had wallpapered all its rooms—and sometimes Rose Red and I spent long hours after supper with intricately detailed coloring books and colored pencils, each of us busily and quietly turning out fantastically ornate Elizabethan court dresses. The day she talked me into washing the clothes of her Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy dolls and painstakingly ironing them, she watched from my bed, blissful because her mother was doing what a mother was supposed to do. As a baby she never tried to climb out of her playpen the way Snow White did, and, later, she never sat on a chair without first testing its strength with a timorous hand. Her ear was finely tuned to the moment of ripeness, and not until she heard it would she move on.

  I was, and remain, grateful for her bossiness. In guarding her childhood, she was also guarding my motherhood. Too, she had my grandmother’s earthiness—my grandmother, whom I once saw carry a live water rat by its tail to the backyard incinerator, and who inevitably uttered, “The old goat!” when a widower went courting. One evening Rose Red and I were cooling ourselves at my bedroom window when a car stopped directly under the streetlight. The passenger—male or female I do not know, because the nearby meat market was thick with transvestite prostitutes—promptly unzipped the driver’s fly, then buried her head in his lap. Rose Red ran from the room, in shock I assumed, to come back a minute or so later with her bird-watching binoculars. After carefully adjusting the sights, she trained them on the couple and howled, “Mom, they’re corrupting me!”

  Snow White, though, didn’t want to be young. Snow White wanted to grow up very fast, because adulthood—sixteen years old, anyway—meant emancipation. I had cried over B and now I cried over her, wondering what made my husband and now my daughter want to run away from me. That it may have been something in them and not something in me never entered my mind, so convinced was I of my power to destroy.

  Even so, there were moments, like the evening the two of us went to the theater and Snow White, wearing her best gingham dress, asked why people didn’t dress up for great occasions like this one. I commiserated; I agreed; we were partners in condescension. There was another evening when someone had given me house seats for the Royal Ballet and we sat next to an old woman draped in diamonds, whom I recognized as the mother of a famous murderee, and her escort, the usual young man in the usual tasseled Gucci loafers. Snow White couldn’t see the stage for the diamonds, and finally asked the old woman if they were real. “Oh, yes,” the woman said, and held out her braceleted arm for inspection. We were happy that night, she a child again and I a mother with a foolish, apologetic grin. She let me tuck her in for the first time in months when we got home—Rose Red was already asleep—and I thought of Sylvia Plath’s poem about the dead woman who has folded her dead children “back into her body as petals / Of a rose close when the garden / Stiffens . . .” I would never wish my children dead, as I often did myself, but I knew all about wanting to fold them back into my body, where I could keep them safe and warm forever.

  “Mah Mary,” the balding man said, angry because his rare evening in New York was being ruined by the pain in my head, “you’d better do something about those headaches.”

  But I had. After their onset, when I was twenty-three, I had sat for years in a psychiatrist’s office, because a doctor had told me therapy would cure migraine. It didn’t. It doesn’t.

  The headaches came without warning; they were unavoidable, because I couldn’t analyze their cause, and they usually left me crying and helpless for three days. More destructive than the pam, however, was the contempt I—and B, too—felt for me. I had read that personality was responsible for migraine, that it was the punishment accorded perfectionists and the high-strung, people who could not take criticism or confrontation. Once again I was proving myself impossible, and I could hear B’s impatience in the balding man’s voice. Perhaps a Bronx hospital’s headache unit that I had just heard of might be helpful. Perhaps the doctor who had said I had migraine and sent me to a psychiatrist had made a misdiagnosis. Perhaps, I thought, hopeful because I didn’t realize the seriousness of the alternative with which I was presenting myself, I had a brain lesion.

  Week after week I took a long subway trip and a long walk to the hospital, to sit in a waiting room crammed with people who had whatever it was I had. There were small children there, and middle-aged men, and people who were dressed nicely, and people who were dressed poorly. Rather than the isolated neurotic I’d believed myself to be, it appeared I was part of a community of sufferers, and that knowledge was more useful than any of the countless ergotamine tablets I had swallowed over the years.

  The tests, none of which I had had before, seemed endless. At the end of them the doctor, a young Filipino whose hair was as black and as stiff as the bristles on a clothes brush, said, “You have common migraine.”

  “Oh, God,” I said to myself, “he’s going to send me to another psychiatrist.” I could see them all beginning again: the tears when I spoke of my father, who had betrayed me by dyin
g, the tears when I spoke of B, who had betrayed me by loving someone else, the endless circling between my childhood and the present, and no exit from the pain in my head.

  “You probably inherited it,” he added.

  A set of swollen arteries, as inevitable to a Cantwell as a prognathous jaw to a Hapsburg, had been handed down from generation to generation. For the pain in my head I’d been declared “not guilty.”

  “Your personality didn’t create the pain. The pain created your personality,” the doctor said. I should have been joyous. Instead, I was enraged. But for that cluster of aberrant arteries (not my fault, not my fault), I was normal. Yet for years, several doctors, countless magazine articles, my husband, and myself had told me that, in one respect at least, I was not.

  To be normal. I became infatuated with normality, asked doggedly that it be defined, and measured myself against the definition. When a doctor told me that my blood chemistry fit “the textbook definition of normal,” I bragged. My blood pressure, a steady 120 over 80, enchanted me. If I could have, I would have papered a room with the results of my Pap smears. All said, “No abnormal cells.” It was not so much that I feared cancer as that I loved having a cervix that was lined with innocence. Others were enthusiastic about their abnormalities; I, about my normalities. I was crazy about my cholesterol count.

  Heterosexuality, however, defeated me. I could not construct a norm. B was the first naked man I had ever seen, and when I did, I thought of Jesus in His drooping loincloth. Surrounded by an iconography that showed God as a man, my sexual associations were religious, and what I wanted from sex, when finally I did want something from it besides babies, was Communion. Is that normal? History, pyschology, and a millennium or two of literature say no.