Speaking with Strangers

by Mary Cantwell

  “I’ve got to get away,” I say to myself when I see that part of the city and its life, which make me want to curl into a creature as blind and deaf and unfeeling as an earthworm. “I’ve got to get away.” But when I watch the sun dropping into the Hudson like a polished penny slipping through a slot, or a neighbor stubbornly planting pansies at the foot of a street tree, I am turned into Lot’s wife. The pansies won’t last; nothing lasts here. But nothing ever changes either. There will always be the sun setting into the Hudson and a New Yorker fighting cement with pansies, and as long as I am able, I will be trying desperately to take it all in. “Your eyes are too big for your belly,” my grandmother warned me over and over again. I heard her and remember the warning, but what should I do? Shut them to the pleasures and torments of this place? They are, after all, what drew me here. What keeps me here, too.

  I don’t travel now, at least not the way I used to, although I still talk, albeit more casually these days, to strangers. But before I left the magazine for a newspaper at which I sat day after day making endless phone calls, asking endless questions, and drawing endless conclusions (the job was, I used to tell friends, rather like being a brain on a plate), I went on a few press junkets. One was to France, to celebrate Perrier, but once in Paris I hardly ever left my room at the Crillon because I couldn’t bear to part with walls covered with apricot-colored silk and a tub encased in mahogany. Another time I was in France again, but in the Cognac region. I don’t remember much about it except that the weather was cold and the trees skeletal, and I ate three different fresh foie gras, each slab brandishing a little flag. The best junket was to Spain, where, the ticket having an open return, I eventually stayed with friends on the Costa del Sol. But first I had to endure a week of education about the growing, harvesting, and packing of olives. Part of the procedure involved someone’s standing for hours on a wooden block, scraping seeds off pimientos. Another took sitting at what looked like an old-fashioned school desk and crooking one’s arm over a little jar so as to, with tongs, arrange the olives in pretty tiers. Whenever, rarely, I drink a martini, I am reminded of torture. “If you only knew,” I am half-disposed to say to my fellow drinkers, “what went into getting that stuffed olive into your glass!” Then I console myself by thinking (I have, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, great faith in the mind of man) that there must now be a technological solution to seeding pimientos and inserting olives into jars.

  I loved those junkets, the camaraderie imposed by drowsy day trips to Source Perrier and barrel-making factories and olive fields, and, in the evening, the afterdinner giggles over which unattached male company executive was after which pretty young editor. Actually, the males were never unattached, but their wives, out of sight, were also out of mind.

  I loved the sharing of eyeshadow and tips about lip liner, and the way one or another of us was always called upon to order the teeth on the inevitable spine-tracking zipper on somebody’s long evening dress. All the junkets ended in elaborate dinner parties, and even though we knew the speeches would be boring and the entertainment second-rate, we were as enveloped in bath powder and perfume and expectation as if this night was prom night. After a certain age—thirty-five seems about right—one cannot count on ever again knowing the girlishness that comes of a flirtation. But feeling silk against your skin or the way your hair is falling—just right—along your cheek never fails.

  Now I go to Australia, the country I assumed I would never see again.

  Snow White and Rose Red had inherited a little money. The latter, predictably, spent hers on graduate school. The former, also predictably, headed straight to Newark Airport, where she waited three days for a flight to London on an airline whose finances were so precarious that it never took off until all the seats were sold.

  Once in a while I would lose track of her, but never for long, because she often made midnight calls from pay phones in the middle of nowhere. When, as was frequent, she ran out of change, she would hurriedly give me the number and I’d ring back. Sometimes I didn’t know which European city I was dialing. But she was well, she was happy, and if I have never received precise descriptions of the towns in which she stayed and the streets along which she walked, it is not because she didn’t want to tell me. It is because Snow White is such an assiduous keeper of journals that all her words go into them. Little is real to her unless she writes it down. If I were to ask her, for instance, what hiking through the Scottish Highlands is like, she would have to consult one of her journals to find out.

  Then one day she came home with a young Australian met in a Dublin bus station (their hands touched as they reached for the same street map), and suddenly I had a son. He had red hair and blue eyes and a gap between his two front teeth, and when I baked bread he pulled a rocker into the kitchen to keep me company. When he wanted Snow White to go to Brisbane with him (he was bent on marriage), I said, “Go, because Australia is a wonderful country and, besides, his kind doesn’t come twice.”

  So she went, but less because of him perhaps than because of Lillian. “She’s still taking care of me,” she said.

  The marriage did not last, but Australia did, and Snow White is there, in Sydney, in a little house furnished mostly with furniture she has found on the street and with my mother’s needlepoint pillows. My mother also paints tole trays and little boxes and sends them to her, along with watercolors of Bristol scenes she bought years ago from Bristol’s old Women’s Exchange. The Women’s Exchange, which took consignments only from the certifiably genteel, is where a lot of Bristol matrons bought wedding presents when I was a child. It is strange. Just as I found a semblance of my Uncle Bill on Lanai, so I have found a semblance of Bristol on a continent thirteen thousand miles away. I see my mother with her needle, her canvas, and her skeins of yarn. I see her sitting at a kitchen table, which has been spread with newspapers, drawing a gold line on a black enamel tray with a brush as thin as a hair. When I look at the watercolors, I see Bristol Harbor as it was when I was young, before a factory was built on its south shore and spoiled the vista. I see a dimly recalled gazebo built on a small spit of land not far from our house. I see what Snow White has never seen but what, because she assures me she is psychic (“Lillian came to me the night she died and sat in the rocking chair in my bedroom, and said she would never leave me”), I am convinced she sees anyway.

  In Australia I have also found a semblance of myself. It is in my elder daughter. Some children are the spit-and-image of their parents, but usually they are people we have never seen before. It takes only a minute or two to figure that out. But it may take years before we realize that sometimes our children are people unlike any we have ever known. For most of her life I searched for bits and pieces of myself in Snow White, thinking that if I found them we could connect, that we would be like two strips of Velcro finally uniting. But I never found any until she moved to Australia, and then I discovered that my child and I shared the same itchy feet, the same curiosity, the same willingness to wake every morning to a new vista. “You are,” she told me a year or so ago, “my favorite traveling companion.” Sleeping over pubs because we cannot find a hotel room, taking buses whose destinations we don’t quite know, feeding loaves of bread to kangaroos, shivering at the terror that is a Tasmanian Devil and at the glory that is a cockatoo—we are, while in transit, one person.

  Recently we were wandering through an amusement park in Melbourne, built in the 1930s and entered through a huge, laughing mouth. Around the perimeter was a roller coaster, its dips so gentle we thought it worth daring (neither of us looks for things that might frighten us, because we know too well that they are looking for us). But when we went up to the booth for tickets, we were told the roller coaster was temporarily out of order.

  How I had wanted that ride on the roller coaster, not so much for the journey itself but because it would, in a sense, bring us full circle! Here we would be, my baby and I, side by side again and, as in the years when her life was bounded by
a room with bunny wallpaper, a rundown park with rubber swings, and a mother who, whatever her faults, was always good for a bedtime story, looking in the same direction.

  My disappointment was erased the next morning, though, when Snow White came to my hotel to pick me up for the ride to the airport. It was very early, so I was sitting in bed sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. She slid in next to me, picked up the section I had finished, and, the paper still in her hand, dozed off, with her head resting on my shoulder.

  When she was born I cried, because until that moment I hadn’t realized that in giving her life I was also giving her death. I wanted her back in my womb so that I could keep her safe and warm for as long as I lived. Now, her sleeping head against my shoulder, she was safe and warm again, and once more I was pregnant with my first-born.

  It is easy to write about sorrow dry-eyed, but not about joy. When I remember that morning in Melbourne, my eyes get wet, but no more so than they do when I am watching Fred Astaire dancing. It is happiness that makes me cry, happiness and maybe some kind of as yet undiscovered gene that’s handed down from Celt to Celt and sometimes makes weepers of us all. “Ah, Mary Lee,” my father said when I was sobbing over my introduction to “Sailing to Byzantium,” “you’re a sentimental Irishman, just like your old man.” Ah, Papa, you were right.

  Rose Red I have met before, mostly in my grandmother. At her christening she was given my grandmother’s name and, with it, her tenacity and self-discipline and impatience with what Rose Red calls the “artsy-fartsy” and what Ganny called “nonsense.” In my childhood, Ganny cured my occasional sadness by taking me to play bingo and tour our town’s five-and-ten. In my adulthood, Rose Red does it by dragging me to Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. “I think my mother could use a brighter blush,” she says to the woman at the cosmetics counter, and I extend a docile cheek.

  She loves books and movies, but, unlike me, she does not look to them for wisdom, only amusement. For instruction she goes directly to life itself, and it is life that she is forever steering me toward. There is something of my father in her, too. Like him, she expects a lot from me, courage mostly, and if I have ever been brave it is because she has forced me to be. Knowing her, I now believe that the greatest favor one can do people is to ask of them more than they think they can give.

  The day she married I thought to find her nervous, frightened even, as I was on my wedding day. But the only nervous person walking down the aisle was I, coupled once more with her father. She had a swan’s serenity. I, while we delivered her to her fiancé and the judge who performed the ceremony, was fighting tears until I sat down and reached for Snow White’s hand.

  Still, despite all that Rose Red has done to show me what matters and what does not, I remain confused. My head is so crowded with long-ago images and concluded conversations that I cannot shut the lid on myself. Some people marvel at my memory; others, novelists usually, distrust my ilk. They believe that those of us who write memoirs are, in truth, writing fiction. “How,” they ask, “can these people remember so much?” But we can. In fact, we cannot always see the present until it is the past, which means that, although some part of our brain is observing and preserving the moment, we are not truly living it. Years later, though, it will be resurrected, more often than not without our willing it. “I write,” I’ve told those who’ve cared to inquire, “because I have mud between my ears, and writing is my way of making things clear.” But the statement is inaccurate. It is not mud but a logjam that is between my ears.

  Twice the logjam exploded and set my mind to moving as smoothly as a river. The first time was when I had Rocky Mountain spotted fever and thought I might die. The second time was recently when, again, I thought I might die. My response to both scares was the same. “My duty was done,” I have written of the fever, “and the last thing I would see with earth’s eyes was my daughters, my descendants, growing like trees.”

  Even so, something was different about the second terror. There was no balding man to wonder whether or not to call. He was dead. Nor, although I would have liked to speak to him, did I think of calling B. He has always been very much on my mind, but I suspect I disappeared from his many years ago. What could we have possibly said to each other? Unlike those people with whom I had laughed and chatted and, yes, communed while I was roaming around the world, he was not a stranger. Ergo, communication, above all communion, was impossible. We knew each other too well.

  Instead, I turned off the ringer on my phone, was cheerful for the sake of the few people I had told about my illness, and spent most of the time, day and night, staring out my hospital window. The room was high up, on the fourteenth floor, I think, and all I saw was a sky into which intruded the spires of several buildings and the occasional small plane. There were books I could have read and magazines scattered at the foot of my bed, but morphine had me slightly dozy, the way I am just before I settle down for sleep. So I drew out the long gray ribbon, the one with the brightly colored blocks with which I so often amuse myself. One of the blocks, one I had not examined for many years, was of the day soon after college graduation when I emerged from a train into Grand Central Terminal, a leather-cased Smith Corona portable in one hand and a suitcaseful of unsuitable—old Bermuda shorts, Brooks Brothers shirts, a gingham skirt, and a dress for after-football cocktail parties—clothes in the other. That was the day, I realized on the instant, that I embraced my true bridegroom. That was the day I married New York.