by Nancy Thayer
This was the question foremost in her mind: was her daughter’s almost aggressive unattractiveness somehow a sign of failure on her own part? Judy could not see how it could be. She had devoted her life to making her home and family enviably attractive. She had surely taught her daughter how to face the world. And yet look at her, and at Johnny, who had run away, and at Ron.
Perhaps, Judy had almost concluded, it was simply that the number of people in the world who were willing to put forth the effort to live life decently was exceptionally limited, and perhaps one was just born with this strength of character, like a chromosome, or one was not, and no amount of parental guidance could change things. Oh, she didn’t really know, and the thinking made her tired, and she didn’t want to be sitting here at this wedding now, where people could see her and Cynthia and pass judgment on them. And if anyone dared to express any more pity toward her—well, the thought nearly made her weep.
It had taken her a long time to come to the realization of Ron’s death. So much cruel news had come at once that bitter day last October that for weeks her main sensation had been one of unreality. It really was bizarre that one night she would go to bed the mother of a perfect son, the wife of a perfect man, and wake up the next day deserted by one and widowed and shamed by the other. She had called her psychiatrist in Southmark immediately. When she said, “I do not think I can bear this,” he had prescribed the necessary drugs that kept her from feeling anything much at all for many days.
All the doctors she went to, her internist, her gynecologist, were sympathetic, and now she had a cache of wonder drugs that would see her through the next ten years. Getting through the funeral had been easy, even in its own way pleasurable, for she had an instinct for such occasions. She remembered Jackie Kennedy holding her head high behind her black veil, walking all that way behind a riderless horse, and she held that image of proud widowhood in her mind as a model. At Ron’s funeral she had held her head high and received condolences with dignity and dry eyes. The pills helped her, of course. She probably could not have cried if she had wanted to. She was so anesthetized that at certain points during the day the grief of other people, the rush of tears, the contorted faces, seemed puzzling to her, even rather absurd, and sometimes embarrassing—so much emotion! She found herself smiling in response. That was the effect of the drugs, but still the funeral had been the easiest thing, because it was acceptable and universal. It would happen to everyone in this town at one time or another. That Ron had died in a car accident when he was still so young was tragic, but it was not curious; it did not reflect upon her.
Johnny’s leaving did. This she found harder to bear than Ron’s death. It had been the cruelest thing a person had ever done to her, and she would never forgive him. All that rainy October day while she and the town were absorbing the news of Ron’s death, Gary and others were making calls, trying to trace Johnny. At three o’clock in the afternoon, they had a phone call from a man named Lewis Pinter, who was a professor of English at the college in Londonton. He was not a close friend of the Bennetts, but he had lived in Londonton for years and attended the First Congregational Church of Londonton. That afternoon he had returned from a conference in Baltimore, and while he was at the Hartford airport, he had seen Johnny and Liza at the American Airlines ticket counter. He hadn’t spoken to them—he had been in a hurry to get home, and they had been too occupied with each other to notice him—but he was sure it was they.
Judy had been relieved: Johnny was alive. She had also been sickened, because he had run off with Liza Howard. Gary had driven over to tell her what he had heard, and Judy had just sat in her chair in her kitchen, looking at him. “I can’t think of a thing to say,” she said.
“At least he’s alive,” Gary replied. “He’s a fool, but he’s alive.” Then he had asked Judy if he could have access to Ron’s study; he wanted to check Ron’s private papers.
“Surely we don’t have to go through all these things now,” Judy said.
“I’m afraid we do,” Gary replied. “There’s a reason for it—there’s a problem, Judy. I think I can help you, I think I can figure it out, but I need to see Ron’s private papers. I am his lawyer, you know. Please trust me.”
She had trusted him. She had taken Gary into Ron’s study and sat in a wing chair silently, her hands folded in her lap for—how long?—hours, while Gary went through Ron’s papers. Finally he had turned and explained it all to her, all that had happened last night, all that he had discovered today. Ron had embezzled one hundred thousand dollars from the rec center trust fund. Gary had already gone over the records and accounts in Ron’s office, and there was no money in any of the accounts there. It was as clear as day what had happened: Ron had taken the money, and when found out, he had chosen this way to keep his name from scandal, to pay the committee back, and to still in some way provide for his family.
Finally Judy had risen and turned from her chair slowly, searching. She was so stunned by all the horrors of the day that she was not even certain where the door leading from the study was; she was nearly blinded. She had gone upstairs to her bathroom and taken another pill.
Day after day Gary had been there, spending hours in Ron’s study, sorting through papers, calling Judy in the evening to tell her what queries had been sent around to locate Johnny, and sometimes just coming out to have a drink, to sit with her, to be sure she was all right. How wonderful he had been, and how different from Pam. Judy hated it when Pam came out with Gary, because then the atmosphere changed entirely.
“Look,” Pam would say, walking across the room and gesturing as she spoke so that her coffee sloshed from the cup onto the saucer, “you’ve got to make some plans. It’s been three weeks now and I don’t think you’ve gone out of the house. You can’t just sit here for the rest of your life. The church auxiliary is planning its Christmas bazaar now, and we need committee heads desperately, and the League of Women Voters is—”
“Pam,” Judy said firmly, “I don’t want to help anyone. I don’t want to see anyone in this town. I can’t bear all their drippy, smarmy pity.”
“Oh!” Pam said then, only slightly daunted. “Well, then, why not take a trip? It would do you good to get away from here. There’s certainly no reason for you to stay. Cynthia’s off at college, and who knows when Johnny’s going to show up again. Surely you’ve always wanted to travel somewhere, off to visit old friends or to see Europe …”
“I don’t want to travel. I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to stay here and have my privacy,” Judy said.
“But can’t you see that’s bad for you?” Pam said. “It’s not healthy to spend all your time grieving.”
But Judy was not spending all her time grieving. She did not mind that others, looking on, thought that was the activity of her life; it was the proper thing for a woman in her position to do. But long ago—long ago, when she was a teenager, losing an entire way of life because of her parents’ foolishness—she had learned absolutely the futility of grief. It was a useless emotion, accomplishing nothing, changing nothing. She knew her life had been changed completely; she did not want it to be so, but there was nothing she could do to make it otherwise. Yet she did not see that she should have to give up everything, her entire style of living, and she refused to be drawn into the peppy circle of valiant widowed and divorced women who began to cluster around her in the weeks that followed Ron’s death. How she despised those women with their mawkish cheer, inviting her to movies, bridge parties, dinner parties, tea parties; how she hated them for their attempts to include her in their pathetic little group. She would not join them, she would not take up macramé or aerobic dancing or charity or table tennis. She would not join this disenfranchised, second-class, manless world. She would not wear her inferiority like some bright badge. She would rather die. She would rather sit in her house, where she remained inviolate and superior. She would rather wait.
It was not that she had actively planned to seduce Gary Moyer away fr
om Pam; never that. It was simply that she had waited. The day that Gary told her about Ron’s death, and later about Ron’s difficulties with the rec center money, he had told her that he would take care of her, and she had taken him at his word. She had spent her entire adult life constructing her world so that she would receive envy from the people she lived among, not pity. When she left her house to go to the grocery store or the lawyer’s or the post office, people could not seem to pass her on the street without expressing their pity. Even if they did not speak, it was in their eyes. She hated all that pity, it fell on her like a blow. She was all right on the inside, she was a fine quiet void on the inside, blank and still, smoothed out by pills. But all that pity coming toward her hit her, shocked her, ate into her. She hated it. She preferred to stay at home. She preferred to wait.
Each morning after life was back to normal—after the funeral, and Cynthia’s return to college, when the phone calls and drop-ins from well-meaning acquaintances had died down—Judy would rise, shower, and dress in something nice, something expensive, a cashmere sweater or a suede skirt. She would fix herself a proper breakfast, complete with cloth napkins and a tea cozy over the teapot, and she’d clean up the dishes. Then she’d just sit in her living room, admiring her furniture. Sometimes she would clean house; sometimes she dozed sitting up. Her waiting had a secretive and industrious function. She was like a woman growing a baby inside her, who appears to be doing nothing on the surface, or like a spider silently creating the chemicals that will become the filaments of a web.
And in time Gary had become her lover, and now he was filing for divorce from Pam so that he could marry her. It would not be too much longer before her life would reach some kind of attractive normality again. She had always liked Gary, and she was pleased that he was a lawyer. That was definitely a step up from a contractor. She liked his suits. He went all the way to Boston to buy them. They would have a good life together, an elegant life. She would always be grateful to him, because he had saved her—saved her in so many ways—from disaster. And he would always be grateful to her because he liked being a hero. That was why he had chosen the law, to enforce the execution of justice in the world, and now he could do it personally, which was more satisfying because it was so clear-cut. He was saving her life.
They had discussed Pam, of course, and agreed that although their divorce might cause her some temporary anger and discomfort, ultimately it would make her happy, too. Now that her children were growing up, Pam seemed to find the outside world more interesting than her home, and with Gary out of the way, she would be free to do whatever she wanted. She was that kind of woman. Now Judy looked across the aisle and up a few rows at Pam, who sat chatting to her children as they waited for the wedding to begin. It seemed to Judy that a shade of unhappiness lay beneath Pam’s eyes, like a pale bruise. Of course this would be a difficult morning for her. She would be forced to remember her wedding to Gary as she sat here anticipating Mandy’s wedding to Michael. She did not have another wedding of her own to dream toward, but then, Judy thought, Pam was not the sort who needed weddings or even dreams. She would be all right.
It was Johnny who worried Judy the most now. She would never understand why he had run off with Liza Howard, and she knew in her heart she would never forgive him. But that did not mean that she wanted him to be unhappy for the rest of his life. He was still her son. She had devoted her life to the raising of her children; she had done everything in her power to help them grow into well-adjusted, successful people. If he failed to become what she hoped, then all those years—all her life!—would have been a waste. And that would be intolerable.
No one ever told the truth about motherhood, Judy thought. The first year of Johnny’s life had been difficult and demanding. She had been exhausted with the tending and washing and feeding and carrying, but in spite of the hard work it had seemed a reasonable task. But when Johnny began to walk, and at eighteen months was reeling through the house, creating chaos with his every step, drinking Ivory soap from under the sink, pulling dishes off the table, plugging the toilet with tissue, climbing up in the cupboard to find and eat aspirin, Judy realized that she, like all new mothers, had underestimated her job. What she had to do with one individual in the space of a few short years was nothing short of what the force of evolution did with a species over billions of years: she had to transform this wild, uncivilized animal into a functioning human being.
It had puzzled Judy that no one had ever told her about this side of motherhood, for the violence, the vigilance, the forceful channeling away from beasthood was certainly as much a part of her daily life as was the cuddling and rocking and stroking. Johnny was not even hyperactive. He was simply a healthy, strong, curious child. He would have happily broken every dish and glass in the house for the sheer joy of throwing, hearing china crash, watching things spatter. He did not know the value of things. When placed in a room with another child his age, it seemed to him a perfectly natural act to hit that child over the head with a plastic hammer. Children were brutes by nature, and the job of the mother was to transform them into human beings.
When Johnny was three, Judy had taken him to the public library for an afternoon’s Children’s Hour. All the children were asked to sit on little swatches of rug in a cluster in front of a smiling librarian. The mothers were given small wooden chairs to sit on at the back of the room, where they could observe their children but not interact. Judy watched, holding her breath, while Johnny sat through an entire story; at home she read to him often, but he tended to become restless quickly, and would slide off her lap and start tossing his toys about. Then the librarian played a singing game with them called “Where Is Thumbkin?” The children put their hands behind their backs, and following the librarian’s lead, brought out their fists with the appropriate finger sticking up at the right spot in the song. It was at the fourth finger—“Where is Ring Man?”—that Johnny brought out his hands with his ring fingers sticking crookedly up. Judy watched, and as she did she felt tears streak her face. She was so relieved, so grateful. Her child was beginning to play the games of others. He was entering into the civilized world rather than disrupting it. He was going to be okay.
That was the turning point. She had told herself she would remember this moment always, and she was right. As the years passed and new challenges arose, she knew she could meet them because of that first small success. She did not demand unusual accomplishments from her children. She gave them piano lessons and skating lessons, but she did not wish they would excel, win medals, take part in competitions, that sort of thing. In fact, she shied away from children and parents who were competitive in sports or academics; they seemed so intense, almost vulgar, so blatantly attempting things, going about their learning so earnestly. No, she wished overall, unobtrusive, serene success for her children. And they had been good children, they had made her so very proud of them—until Liza Howard came along.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand why you ran off like that,” she had said to Johnny the day he came back. They were sitting formally in the living room; Judy was wearing a blue-checked shirtwaist. Gary had discreetly dropped Johnny at the door and left the two of them alone. Johnny was so handsome, tanned, filled-out, manly-looking, that Judy wanted to embrace him with joy: my handsome son. But she was so furious at him for what he had done that she also wanted to slap him, to rail and curse at him. These two violent emotions seemed to cancel each other out, and of course she had taken some Valium so as not to make too much of a scene, so that she sat in a blue velvet chair, cool and quiet, staring at her son as if he were some sort of specimen, a human curiosity, which actually he was to her.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain it to you,” Johnny replied.
“Don’t you feel obligated even to try?” Judy asked. How could you have done this to me? she wanted to shriek.
“Oh, Mom,” Johnny said impatiently. “I’m twenty-four years old. I’m a grownup.”
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br /> “I know,” Judy said. “I’m well aware of your age. I’m also well aware that you were engaged to Sarah Stafford. You had commitments here. And you just walked out, without a word.”
“I’m sorry, Mom, I really am,” Johnny said, but as he spoke, Judy could see that he was not sorry. He was glad. He was strong and proud from his rebellion; he was like some fancy stud horse who had jumped the fences and galloped away. Now, captured and brought back home, he could not help tossing his head in admiration of himself. And of course it was sex at the source; after all her devoted work, bestiality had triumphed again.
“You could have called,” Judy said. “You could have done that much.”
“If I had called, you would have convinced me to come home,” Johnny said. “You would have been angry. I was too happy. Mom, I’ve always been so good all my life …”
“You make ‘good’ sound distasteful,” Judy said.
“Well, I suppose it is distasteful to me,” Johnny said. “Being good the way I was, well, it was almost the same thing as being dead.”
