Charley's Web

by Joy Fielding

  “Oh, no. Don’t cry. Come on, Charley. It’s okay.” He took the cup of coffee from her shaking hands and wrapped his arms around her. “Please don’t cry. I’m useless when a woman cries.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He shrugged. “I wanted to see if I could make a go of it. And you gotta try not to get too excited about it. Ten days is not a big deal.”

  “It’s a very big deal.”

  “There are probably going to be relapses. I’m going to try really hard, but I can’t make any more promises I can’t keep. It’s like they say—one day at a time.”

  “One day at a time,” Charley repeated.

  There was a long pause. “I’m just not ready to deal with her yet,” Bram said finally.

  “I understand.”

  “Maybe one day.”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “You can tell her I’m all right,” he said. “Tell her I didn’t freak out or anything.”

  “I will.” They sat together in silence for several minutes, Bram’s arms encircling his older sister, their bodies rocking gently back and forth. Eventually, Charley’s eyes drifted back to the paintings on the wall. “Those are really amazing, you know that?”

  “You think only the Brontë sisters have talent?”

  Charley squeezed her brother’s hand. “Anne sent me a copy of her book.”

  “Really? I had to buy mine.”

  “You actually went out and bought it?”

  “It was on sale at Costco.”

  “Did you read it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “I liked it,” he admitted sheepishly. “What can I say? I’m a romantic.”

  Charley kissed her brother’s cheek. “God, you’re sweet.”

  A loud wolf whistle cut through the airless room.

  “What the hell is that?” Bram jumped to his feet.

  “Relax. It’s just my cell phone.” Charley was laughing as she reached into her purse and retrieved her phone. “Hello?”

  “Charley?” the woman’s voice asked tentatively. “Is that you?”

  Charley hunched forward in her seat and lowered her voice. “Jill?”

  “Am I getting you at a bad time?”

  Charley looked at her brother, who was regarding her with a mixture of curiosity and concern. “No, it’s fine. Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s great.”

  “Good.”

  “Can you talk?”

  Again Charley looked at her brother, thinking she should probably conduct this conversation in private.

  Understanding her need for privacy, he whispered, “Why don’t you go into the bedroom? It’s cooler in there anyway.”

  “Be right back,” she mouthed, pushing herself off the couch and heading toward the small room to the right of the kitchen. “Okay,” she said as she sank into the blue comforter that covered the double bed. A soft breeze from the fan in front of the window blew gently on her neck.

  “Are you at work? It sounds like I’m getting you away from something,” Jill said.

  “No. Actually, I’m at my brother’s.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. How is he?” Jill asked, as if she and Bram were old acquaintances.

  “He’s fine.”

  “Does he remember my sister?”

  “Yes, of course. He told me they went out a few times.”

  “Did he like her?”

  “We didn’t really get into it.”

  “Well, say hi to him for me. Tell him I’m really excited to be collaborating with his sister.”

  “Has something happened, Jill? Is that why you’re calling?”

  “Oh, no. Is that what you think? That I’m in some sort of trouble?”

  “Are you?”

  “No. Everything’s great.”

  Everything’s great, Charley repeated in her head. The second time Jill had said that. Charley thought it an odd choice of words to describe living on death row.

  “I mean, considering,” Jill amended, as if understanding Charley’s silence. “No, I’m just calling because they said I could use the phone this morning, and you said if I ever wanted to talk, or anything…”

  “Of course.” Charley glanced around the room for a pen and some paper so that she could take notes. But there was nothing on top of the bureau that stood against the far wall except a hairbrush and a spray can of deodorant, and the only things on the lone nightstand beside the bed were a photograph of Franny and James, and a copy of Anne’s book, Remember Love. Charley thought of the small tape recorder that was sitting on her own bureau in her bedroom at home. Don’t leave home without it, she told herself, catching sight of her pronounced frown in the mirror over the bureau before opening the single drawer of the nightstand and absently rifling through it. “What did you want to talk about?” She located a pencil, but its point was broken, and she tossed it back inside the drawer. There was no paper, nothing at all to write on.

  “Well, it’s just that after you left yesterday, I started thinking.”

  “About…?”

  “The things I said. And especially about some of the stuff I wrote in my last letter.”

  “It wasn’t true?” Charley noticed a photograph lying facedown at the rear of the drawer and decided she could write on the back of it, presuming, of course, she could find something to write with.

  “Oh, no. Everything I’ve told you was the God’s honest truth,” Jill replied, and Charley pictured the young woman’s eyes opening wide as her hand reached up to pull at the elastic in her hair. “It’s just that I’m afraid I might have given you the wrong idea.”

  “How so?” Charley was about to return to the living room to get her purse when she discovered a ballpoint pen lying next to an old pipe. She automatically lifted the pipe to her nose, inhaled the stale odor of hashish. Stale, she reminded herself, putting it back, then clicking open the pen and balancing the phone on her left shoulder as she began scribbling on the back of the photograph: Phone call from Jill at 10:45 a.m., Thursday. Afraid she gave me the wrong impression during our meeting.

  “Well, I think I painted a pretty negative picture of my family.”

  “It wasn’t that way?”

  “It wasn’t all that way,” Jill qualified.

  “Well, yes, you told me there were some good times. The trip to Disney World when your father called you ‘cupcake.’” And your brother raped your sister in the next bed, she added silently.

  “Yeah. Like that. I mean, my father’s not exactly Mr. Softie or anything, but he has his moments, you know. My mother always called him a ‘diamond in the rough.’ You know what that means?”

  A diamond in the rough, Charley managed to write down before the pen started running out of ink. “I believe it takes a lump of coal several thousand years to turn into a diamond,” Charley said, searching the drawer for another pen, and locating one underneath a second photograph. She removed both the pen and the photo from the drawer, and found herself staring at a picture of a grinning, dark-skinned boy, about six years old. Who was he? she wondered, flipping over the picture she’d been writing on and seeing the wide smile of a little girl, her round, brown face framed by an avalanche of cornrows, each secured by a small, bright red bow. “I’m sorry. Did you say something?” she asked, realizing Jill had been speaking.

  “I said, are you suggesting my daddy’s like a lump of coal?” Jill repeated, laughing.

  Who were the children in these photographs? Charley wondered, flipping over the picture again, and waiting to write. “It means he needs some polishing to really shine.”

  Jill laughed again. “That’s a good way of putting it. Anybody ever told you you should be a writer?”

  “What about your mother?”

  “My mother?”

  “Tell me more about her. I know she has MS….”

  “My mom is great. Don’t start on my mom.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “She did
the best she could.”

  “I’m sure she did.”

  Why are you defending her? Charley heard Bram say.

  “I mean, it couldn’t have been easy for her, what with my dad’s temper and Ethan being just like him. And like I told you, I was a handful. There wasn’t much she could do. She was always trying to keep the peace, make everybody happy.”

  “Did she know about what Ethan was doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did she know what he was doing to you and your sister?”

  A slight pause, then, “We never told her, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “It’s not.”

  “You’re saying you think she knew?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’m asking what you think.”

  “I think I’m beginning to feel sorry I called.”

  “Don’t be. I’m really glad you did.”

  “Why do you have to ask so many stupid damn questions? Why can’t you just listen, for a change?”

  Very defensive about her mother, Charley wrote, underlining very several times. “I’m sorry. I won’t ask anything else.”

  “I think even if she did know, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “How can you be so damn sure about everything?”

  “I’m really not.”

  “Especially when you don’t know shit.”

  The line went dead.

  “Okay,” Charley said, sitting very still. “Okay.” After several minutes she pushed herself off the bed and returned to the living room.

  “Everything all right?” her brother asked.

  “Apparently I don’t know shit.”

  “I could have told you that.”

  “Thanks. Anyway, I have to get back to work. Oh, I wrote on the back of these.” She held up the two photographs. “Is that a problem?”

  Bram squinted toward the pictures. “Nah. They’re just some neighborhood kids I was thinking of painting.”

  “Cute kids,” Charley said, dropping the pictures inside her purse, and walking toward the screen door.

  “Thanks for coming by,” Bram said, leaning over to kiss her cheek.

  “Will you at least think about seeing our mother?” Charley asked.

  “Thanks for coming by,” Bram said again, as the screen door shut firmly in Charley’s face.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE PALM BEACH POST SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2007

  WEBB SITE

  My mother and I recently engaged in a freewheeling discussion about nature versus nurture. More specifically, which n-word is responsible for one’s sexual preferences. The accepted wisdom of the day, of course, holds that one’s sexuality is as innate as the color of one’s eyes. But is it as simple as that? Think of the thousands of men and women in prison who turn to the same sex for a little comfort and relief—or power and intimidation, as the case may be—only to revert immediately to the opposite sex upon release. (What’s that old saying? “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with”?) And what of choice? Do we have no say in the matter at all?

  My mother says we do. At least she says that women do. And before I get a barrage of e-mail from religious fundamentalists seeking to recruit her in an effort to save these poor, misguided sapphists from themselves, let me state that for a long time, my mother also chose to be gay. She argues—quite convincingly, I might add—that people are more than what they choose to do with their genitals, and that while there are lots of lesbians, possibly even the majority, who are, in fact, born to love other women, there are also many who, whether by chance or design, decide to love other women. They’ve been abused or mistreated, overlooked or shunned. For whatever reason, they’ve had it with men. They’re looking for a little warmth, and if the body that comes with it looks suspiciously like their own, well, it might take a little getting used to, but ultimately, that’s okay. Women are used to getting used to things. We’re good at adapting to circumstance.

  While it now seems my mother has chosen to revert to the straight and narrow, for twenty years she boldly chose to be gay. She also chose to be absent from her children’s lives, which won’t exactly win her any prizes for mother of the year. But what exactly makes a good mother anyway? Again, it comes down to the choices we make.

  I’m reminded of a story a neighbor told me a while back. She was on a plane coming back from somewhere, and she had the misfortune to be seated next to a big bear of a man and his young son. Soon after takeoff, the boy started squirming, and his father told him gruffly to sit still. The boy protested that his father’s wide girth was spilling over onto his seat and not leaving him enough room. The father told him to “shut up unless he wanted his ass kicked.” The son, proclaiming he knew his rights, then threatened to call 911. At that point, the father walloped him. My neighbor called the stewardess and requested a seat change. The boy’s mother, who, it turned out, was sitting in the row directly behind, quickly agreed to change seats. As they made the switch, my neighbor overheard the boy’s mother pleading with her son to listen to his father.

  Is this a nurturing mother? Is it part of a woman’s nature to placate and make nice? True, she didn’t abandon her son, at least not physically, but what message is she giving him? That it’s okay to bully and berate someone because he’s smaller and more defenseless than you are? That might is right? She would undoubtedly argue that she had no choice, that she was as defenseless as her son, that to stand up to her husband at that moment meant a beating later on. But the truth is that she did have a choice, as all adults do, and it’s a mother’s job to protect her children, even when it means putting herself in harm’s way.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about child abuse these days, and I just can’t get my head around it. Why have children if you’re going to mistreat them? It’s not as if we don’t have options. We can choose from multiple forms of birth control, or we can choose to abort or put unplanned babies up for adoption, give those innocent children the chance for a stable and loving home. Instead, too often we choose to bring children into unloving and downright hostile environments, with parents who are too poorly equipped, or just too emotionally unavailable, to care for them.

  I’m not talking here about teenage mothers on welfare, who have been maligned enough. Most of these girls are only looking for someone to love and love them in return, and many are the products of abuse themselves. The majority of these young women try really hard to be good mothers for their babies, but their choices are limited at best. The approval they’ve been seeking all their lives has been transferred from errant boyfriends to needy offspring, and when that child cries all night, it’s easy to hear those cries as a rebuke. “You’re not a good mother,” those cries repeat over and over again, confirming their worst fears. Sometimes, it’s easy to strike out.

  So what stops one person from lashing out and drives another to pick up that screaming infant and shake it so hard its neck snaps? Are some people just more violent by nature, or have they been raised in households where violence has been nurtured? Abuse is a communicable disease, one that gets transferred from one generation to the next. It can turn deadly at any time.

  I could argue that my mother may have abandoned me, but hey, at least she didn’t beat me. You could counter that while your mother might have beaten you, hell, at least she was there. The debate is as endless, and ultimately as pointless, as the debate over nature versus nurture. What matters ultimately is how we choose to live our lives. We don’t get to choose our parents. We do get to choose the kind of parents we will be. And as bystanders, we also have a choice: to stand up to injustice whenever and wherever we witness it, or just change seats and do nothing.

  The knocking on Charley’s door was as ferocious and insistent as it was unexpected. It was barely nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, too early for anyone to come calling. Charley put down her coffee cup, pushed aside the morning paper she’d been perusin
g—she always liked to get a feel for the way her columns read in actual newsprint—and made sure the belt on her blue terry-cloth bathrobe was secure, then left the kitchen table and walked down the hallway toward the front of the house. “Who is it?” she asked, glancing toward the children’s bedroom, where Franny and James were playing a new board game her mother had bought them.

  “It’s Lynn,” came the angry response. “Open the door. I have a bone to pick with you.”

  Charley closed her eyes, took a deep breath, forced a smile onto her lips, and opened the door. It was “déjà vu all over again,” she thought, seeing Lynn Moore standing on the single outside step, waving today’s paper in her face, the crystal studs in her long, red fingernails flashing before Charley’s eyes like tiny squares in a revolving disco ball. Her dark hair had been stuffed into a lopsided twist at the top of her head, threatening at any moment to burst loose of its many bobby pins. “Another one?” Charley asked wearily.

  “Don’t you have anybody else to torture?”

  “You didn’t like my column,” Charley stated rather than asked.

  “What is it you have against me anyway?”

  Charley felt her shoulders slump. “Would you like to come inside?”

  “No, I don’t want to come inside.”

  “I’ve made some fresh coffee.”

  “I don’t want any coffee. I don’t want anything from you except to be left alone.”

  “And yet, here you are,” Charley pointed out.

  “It wasn’t bad enough that you’ve already portrayed me as some pathetic sex maniac…”

  “I never said…”

  “Now, I’m irresponsible as well.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Lynn continued, as if Charley hadn’t spoken. “I was squeezed into my seat beside this big brute of a guy whose entire demeanor screamed ‘Don’t mess with me,’ and what am I supposed to do when he starts slapping his kid around? I called the stewardess over, told her what was going on, and she advised me to change my seat. So, I’m asking you, what was I supposed to do?”