My Dearest Friend

by Nancy Thayer

  “What is it?” she asked before Cynthia had even finished reading the letter. She was insane with curiosity.

  “Daddy’s coming to see me in the play!” Cynthia said. “Oh, wow, he’s flying all this way just to see me in the play!” She twirled around the room as if waltz music were filling the air.

  Daphne rose gingerly, as if in the last few seconds she had aged fifty years and all her bones were so brittle that one slight touch would break them. “How did he know about the play?” she asked.

  Cynthia stopped her twirling. She looked at her mother defiantly. “I wrote to him,” she said. “I found his address in your address book and I wrote to him and told him about the play and sent a picture of myself and told him that now that I was an interesting person, he might want to get to know me. I invited him to come see the play.” Her joy overwhelmed her defiance. “And he’s really coming!” she whooped.

  “But, Cynthia. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?” Cynthia asked, eyes wide, moronic.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you had written to your father?”

  Cynthia shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think you’d mind. I didn’t think he’d write me back, I guess.”

  Mother and daughter looked at each other.

  “I never have tried to keep you from your father,” Daphne said evenly. “I’ve always made attempts—”

  “Mom.” Cynthia bugged her eyes out at Daphne. Then, obviously trying to control herself, she said with ultimate patience, “I know you’ve tried with Dad. But now I thought I should try. This isn’t about you and Dad, Mom. This is about me and Dad.” She looked down at the letter, and in spite of herself, her joy came rippling out of her, brightening her face with radiance. “I’ve got to go call Donna!”

  She raced from the room and into the kitchen. Daphne sat in the still eye of the storm and listened to her daughter dial the phone. “Donna!” she screamed. “Guess what! My father’s coming to see me in the play! He’s going to fly all the way from California!”

  There were holes in several of Daphne’s underpants, and suddenly she felt a strong desire to mend them right away. She went to her room, took out her sewing kit, and set to work, stabbing and yanking the thread through like a madwoman. She had tried. God, this was a slap in the face, it was Joe saying, “Cynthia, I’ll have something to do with you as long as your mother isn’t involved,” but why should Joe act as if Daphne were the poisonous one? Daphne had always been the one who tried. There had been hate in her heart, but she had kept it hidden, or released it in tearful outbursts only when alone or with Pauline and Douglas. When Joe remarried and moved to California, Daphne had tried to keep him interested and informed about their daughter. Cynthia had been only two when he left, just a baby. Every four months or so for the first few years, Daphne had sent Joe current photos of Cynthia as she progressed from a toddler to a kindergartener with braids and a bike. She sent neutral, polite letters about Cynthia’s ballet or piano lessons, friends, school activities, along with copies of Cynthia’s report cards.

  Not once had there been any response. She might as well have sent it all into a black hole. Once a month she did receive the court-decreed child-support payment in a plain white envelope, but never any personal word, never any questions or suggestions or congratulations. It was as if Joe were paying a utility bill, or income tax, a legal necessity, nothing else.

  Bizarre. Joe had been the one who had had the affair, but he had been furious when Daphne wanted a divorce. He would never forgive her for not forgiving him. And perhaps that was just. But that he would take his anger out on his daughter, that he would have such a total lack of interest in Cynthia—that was bizarre.

  When Cynthia had been very little, Daphne sent her bright funny Christmas cards and birthday cards and presents and signed them “Love, Daddy.” But when she was eight, Cynthia seemed too intelligent for such a charade, and who was this “daddy,” anyway, who communicated only twice a year? Very carefully Daphne explained that Daddy had gone away to live in California so he could teach there and that he was very busy and forgot about holidays. Later, when Cynthia was older, Daphne made Joe out to be a sort of absentminded-professor type. “It has nothing to do with you, sweetie,” she said. “It’s not that your father doesn’t love you. He doesn’t know you. He’s just too wrapped up in his work. Some men are just that way.”

  What else was Daphne to say? That Joe was cold, egocentric, reprehensibly unloving? Psychologists warned: Don’t criticize the other parent; the child knows that parent is in her somehow and she will come to hate herself. Daphne had tried to protect Cynthia. She had tried to remain neutral always. She had never ranted, raved, hurled insults about Joe—within Cynthia’s range of hearing.

  Now Daphne pricked her finger with the needle and blood spotted the white cotton underpants right at the elastic waist. What she wanted to do right now was to grab that cloth and tear it. She wanted to hear the material shredding, she wanted to feel destruction, the power of ravage. But after all, Cynthia had said a true thing: this was not about Daphne and Joe, this was about Cynthia and Joe. If Daphne could only hang on to her sense and stand back, if she could only control her jealousy and fears, then perhaps Cynthia would have a father in her life.

  And wasn’t that what Daphne wanted for Cynthia?

  Joe called Cynthia that evening to tell her his plans. Cyn answered the phone—it was infinitely odd to Daphne to hear her daughter say casually, “Oh, hi, Dad.”

  Daphne waited for Cynthia to call her to the phone—wouldn’t Joe want to check plans with Daphne, ask her for information? After a few minutes she could stand it no longer.

  “Tell your father I can pick him up at the airport if he’d like,” she said.

  “He says thanks, but he’ll rent a car in Boston,” Cynthia relayed. “Okay, see you then,” she said to her father. Hanging up the phone, she turned to Daphne with the face of a woman in love. “Mom, he’s got such a nice voice!”

  “Mmm,” Daphne said, trying to sound noncommittal. “What are his plans?”

  “He’s going to fly to Boston, rent a car, stay at the Westhampton Inn, and see the play on Saturday night. He wants to take me out to brunch on Sunday morning, then he’s got to fly back to California.”

  “Quick trip,” Daphne said, smiling, heart thudding. Thank God he’s not staying, she thought. This will be over before I know it.

  That Saturday night she did not see Joe; she did not attend the play, but went to the Whites’ to drink and be obsessed. Sunday morning, though, it was she who opened the door to Joe’s knock.

  There he stood, on her doorstep, her ex-husband, the man who had changed her life, the man who had married her, impregnated her, wrapped himself around her, and betrayed her. He was bald, and that sign of age made her happy, but he was slim and tanned and he must have been wearing contacts; she knew he needed glasses. With that tan, without the familiar blond hair and glasses, she would not have recognized him if she had passed him on the street.

  Joe stood on her doorstep, and Daphne found herself smiling an absurdly friendly smile: if she met him now, she would not find him attractive! He seemed like a pleasant man, but so nondescript. She felt no yank of desire. Her heart floated out of her like a balloon.

  “Hi, Joe. Cynthia’s just coming. Would you like to come in?”

  “Here I am!” Cynthia called, rushing down the stairs, swinging her purse. “Hi, Dad. See ya, Mom.”

  Joe nodded at Daphne and smiled with his mouth, but his eyes stayed cold. He put his arm around his daughter’s shoulder and led her to his rented car. Daphne stood in the doorway watching them walk away. The only thing Joe had said to her was, “Hello.” After all these years. Not even a “How are you, Daphne?” If she read his expression correctly, then Joe still hated her. But why? She was the one who should hate him. Certainly at the moment she had feared him.

  And she had been right to do so.

  When Cynthia came home fr
om brunch with Joe, she told Daphne that her father had invited her to live with him and his wife in California, and Cynthia had accepted his invitation. Daphne stood in her sunny living room on that clear spring morning and felt her blood turn to venom.

  “… and I think it will really be good for me,” Cynthia was saying earnestly. “It will broaden my horizons. I’ll be able to see what a completely different part of the United States is like and get to understand a different culture.”

  Daphne looked at her child and thought: I hate you. You are a stranger. You are a monster. You are an ungrateful, spoiled little bitch.

  “Don’t look at me that way, Mom. Mom, I knew you’d be this way. Mom, come on. Dad lives in California, he lives near Hollywood. He’s going to give me a car. He says he’s really proud of me, Mom, and he wants to help me be an actress, he thinks he really could help me and I really could be an actress. You’re always complaining about how we never have enough money and you never have any help, and now here I’m going to be getting some help, which will help you—I mean, you’ll be able to spend some money on yourself for a while.…”

  “I can’t believe you chose to live with your father instead of with me,” Daphne said. The words were choking her. Her grief was choking her.

  “Mom, it’s just for a year. Like I’ve lived with you for sixteen years, right? I mean, Dad has paid child support all along, and he deserves a turn, right?”

  “But how could you accept his invitation without discussing it with me? Don’t you care what I think? How I feel?”

  Cynthia looked down at her feet. “I guess I was so surprised and excited I just accepted right away at once.” She looked up at Daphne. “Mom, I’ve never even seen California. I’ve never even seen anywhere.”

  “Don’t you know how much I’ll miss you, Cynthia?” Daphne said, keeping her voice gentle but not letting it break.

  “Well, I’ll miss you too.”

  Daphne looked at her beloved only child and thought: I hate you as I have never hated anyone else in my life. I hate you enough to hurt you. I want to hurt you as much as you are hurting me.

  “Oh,” Daphne said. “Cynthia.” With great and agonizing control, she walked past her daughter. She grabbed up her purse where she had left it on the hall table and went out the front door. She got in her car and drove off down the street. She drove around for almost an hour before she went to Pauline’s house. When she stood on Pauline’s doorstep, knocking on the door, her eyes were so swollen from crying that she could scarcely see through the puffed and painful lids.

  “Oh, God … oh, sweet Jesus God,” Pauline said when Daphne told her the news, and hugged Daphne and then made her sit down and drink quantities of Scotch.

  “You can’t blame her, you can’t blame her,” Pauline had said. “Every girl wants her father to love her—to adore her. Daphne, you have to let her go.”

  It had not even occurred to Daphne not to let Cynthia go. She would never stop Cynthia from going. But that Cynthia had not even hesitated when asked!

  “My whole life has been devoted to raising that child.”

  “Maybe Cynthia is aware of that.” Pauline used this cruel observation as a form of surgery, as a means of healing, like cauterizing a wound. “Maybe she thinks it’s time you devoted some of your life to yourself.”

  “Oh, come on!” Daphne exploded. “It wasn’t like that, and you know it! I didn’t sacrifice my life to hers! I had a good time, I had fun—I had David.”

  “Well,” Pauline said calmly, “in any case, Cynthia was destined to leave home soon. In two years she has to go off to college. If you had the money, you would have sent her to some kind of camp. Or prep school. It’s time for Cynthia to go. It’s time for you to move on too.”

  Daphne wanted to hiss and spit at her friend. She wanted to coil up in a long rope of frenzied muscles and strike out at Pauline, flicking at her with her venomous tongue. That was the night the snake came to live inside her, coiling deep in her abdomen, that subtle eager creature that lifted its diamond-shaped head, its glittering eyes, and smiled its evil sneaking smile whenever Daphne thought of her daughter. Or her ex-husband. Or any number of other things. It accompanied Daphne everywhere she went, even in her sleep.

  When Daphne finally went back home, she found that Cynthia had eaten dinner and done all the dishes and cleaned the kitchen. She was already asleep in her room, at nine o’clock. Or pretending to be. Between the evening of her announcement and the middle of June when she left for California, Daphne and Cynthia said perhaps eighty-three words to each other, most of them repetitive and mundane: “Will you be home for dinner?” “Did you walk Dickens?” They did not discuss Cynthia’s decision again. Clearly Cyn did not want to know about Daphne’s thoughts—or feelings—on the matter. Cynthia was ostentatiously polite and helpful around the house, always making her bed and doing her chores without being asked, as if heading off any explosion that could lead to a discussion. Daphne was polite in return. She would not let Cynthia see how much she was hurting her. She drove around with a realtor, looking for a house she could afford, put a down payment on the Plover cottage, cleaned out the home she had shared with Cynthia for fourteen years and held a mammoth tag sale, sold the huge grand piano that had been her mother’s, found the dilapidated baby grand, and began sewing curtains for the new house, where she would move at the end of the summer. She acted as if she were excited about her future too.

  But in a flash, while Daphne still didn’t believe it would happen, Cynthia was gone. The house was empty. Her clothes and treasures were packed and sent off, and her bedroom, which had been cluttered with the signs of a happy active life, sat in the midst of Daphne’s house as still and tidy as a room in a museum. Daphne wanted to set the house on fire and let it burn down around her.

  One good thing: she had lost all the weight she had gained after David’s death. For a long while after Cynthia left her, she had no appetite. Wasn’t that odd? When David had died, she ate and ate; when Cynthia left, she could not swallow. Daphne didn’t know what it meant; she did not care to know. She was relieved when she could finally move into the cottage, leaving behind the house where she had lived so much of her life with her darling daughter.

  After the night when Jack had kissed Daphne—and she had kissed him back—he had caught up with her in the college parking lot and awkwardly apologized.

  “I’m so sorry,” he had said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “It’s all right,” Daphne had said. She had been so exhausted that she had held on to her car door in order not to sink onto the ground. She had spent the night, after Jack’s kiss, wide-awake, thinking—and longing. Not just for Jack, perhaps, but for someone. She had longed to be in a lover’s arms.

  Jack had mistaken her pallor and gravity for censure. “I’ve been so stressed-out and confused lately,” he said. “Carey Ann and I … well, this has been a rough spot in our marriage. The move, I mean.”

  “I understand,” Daphne had said. If she had had the energy, she would have been touched by Jack’s agitation and misery; she thought he was feeling guiltier than he should. She was older than he was and knew that often, with friends, the sexual undercurrent broke through the dam of propriety. People were always going around mending their dams, tamping back sex.

  “I love my wife,” Jack said. “I really love her. I’ve always intended to be faithful to her. I still do. I don’t know what came over me.” He was sincerely baffled.

  “It’s just that I’m so irresistibly attractive,” Daphne said, grinning, trying to break the tension between them. She did not want to lose his friendship. She liked him too much. “Who could blame you?”

  Jack laughed gratefully. “Well, you are attractive,” he said gallantly. “But I promise to control myself in the future.”

  Daphne held out her hand. “Let’s be friends,” she said.

  He shook her hand. “Friends,” he answered.

  Over the past three months, Daphne an
d Jack had become real friends. Daphne needed him as a friend. With so many people gone from her life, and as winter set in, she felt gradually more isolated in her little house at the dead end of the road. Few people read as much as Daphne did, and Jack was a reader. They had an endless supply of things to talk about. Sometimes Daphne would put down a book and want nothing more than to call Jack to talk to him about it.

  Jack needed Daphne, and she knew that. As the semester wore on, it became clear that Jack and Hudson Jennings were having difficulties settling into a comfortable relationship with each other. Daphne was caught in the middle. She kept trying to explain one man to the other. Jack was adored by the students, and now he ate his lunch every day in the cafeteria at a table packed with students—some weren’t even in his class—and they talked about everything. He never thought to sit with the faculty members, and when Daphne suggested that it might be politic to do so now and then, Jack said, “But the students are more interesting. And I’m a teacher!”

  He was a teacher, and that became the focal point of their friendship. He was teaching, in addition to neoclassic lit, three sections of freshman English. He found it a challenge teaching grammar and punctuation to college students who still didn’t “get” it. Sometimes even very brilliant students would have trouble with the basics of sentence structure, while students who were struggling in everything else took instantly to grammar. He almost believed it was genetic, chemical, that there was something physical in the brain that ruled one’s disposition toward language.

  Daphne had dug out the old files and lesson plans she had used when she taught freshman English so long ago at U. Mass., and some nights she sat with Jack at his dining-room table, talking about teaching. For Daphne this was as delicious as talking about old lovers with a friend. The pleasures of the classroom! The glory when a student finally got it right!

  They had plenty of time to talk, because Carey Ann had become seriously interested in early-childhood learning. Once she had discovered that there were definite things one could do to try to shape a child’s behavior, she attacked the subject with the zeal of a religious convert. She attended her group one night a week, and sat in on a class in early-childhood behavior at a community college two nights a week. She was too late to enroll for credit, but she hoped to start working for a master’s the next semester.