Elegies for the Brokenhearted

by Christie Hodgen

  “Have a drink,” your mother says, and she fixes you a high-ball. Every morning of your life, after your father (and then later, your stepfather) left for work, your mother mixed a drink with which to swallow a sedative, then spent the rest of her day refilling her glass, going around in a dreamy, imperturbable fog. She has always been cool toward you and your sisters, has gone around the house tending to her business as if you weren’t there. If she touched you or your sisters it was in the way that one touches an insect in the bathtub—with a quick, dismissive pinch. She’s never in your life told you she loves you—she simply isn’t that kind of woman—and you’ve always judged her for this. Heartless bitch, you’ve called her. But you see her side of things now, you see it all quite clearly.

  You start drinking at home, but the effect is less predictable for you than it is for your mother. You are relaxed for long stretches. But you also suffer fits in which you cry, sulk, rage. You throw things simply to break them, you leave shards of glass and porcelain on the floor—your wedding gifts, the cups and saucers, the creamer, the gravy boat—for Mike Murphy to sweep up when he gets home, which is later and later, less and less. The baby cries and you leave it. You go out for long walks, you simply leave it.

  Sometimes when Mike Murphy gets home from work you are dressed and ready to go out. “There’s a bottle in the fridge,” you say. “I gotta get out of here.” You go out to bars and men buy you drinks. You drink so much that you have to be packed into their cars and driven home. Twice you wake up in a strange apartment, with no recollection of being brought there. More often you are brought to your parents’ house—your license still lists their address—and your mother sets you up on the couch. She leaves a large plastic bowl beside you on the coffee table. “Darling,” she says, “don’t vomit on the chintz.”

  Just before the baby’s first birthday you feel a soft, swift, unmistakable kick in your gut. Jesus, you think. Jesus Christ. A few months later, when you are showing again, people start punching Mike Murphy good-naturedly in the arm. “You kids,” they say, “can’t keep your hands off each other.”

  One night, drunk, Mike Murphy crashes the car into a telephone pole and breaks his nose. He is scraped up, swollen, and he comes home wanting sympathy from his wife. But instead you rail at him. You fucking asshole, you fucking idiot. You slap him across his bruised face. I’m stuck here all day with a kid, and you’re out crashing the car? You should be kissing my fucking feet!

  “You think you’re so hot? You think you’re such a hot catch? You’re a miserable fucking bitch is what you are. A spoiled fucking brat.”

  You limpdick little shit, you say, you piss-ant son of a bitch. He turns away, you stab your cigarette into the back of his neck, he turns and smacks you across the face, takes you by the shoulders and shakes you, shoves you to the floor.

  Fuck you, you say. I’m going back to my mother’s.

  “Fine,” he says. “Be my fucking guest.”

  And so there you are, twenty years old and divorced, pregnant with your second child, living with your parents. The second baby is born, another girl, and Mike Murphy comes around now and then, wanting to see the children. “I got rights,” he says, and you tell him to go fuck himself. Then you change your mind, walk the girls over to his apartment and drop them off. Here, you say, here are your goddamn rights. Enjoy yourself. The girls cry when you leave. They have no idea where they are. Hours later Mike Murphy brings them back, with a look of terror on his face. Both girls are splashed with vomit. “I can’t do this,” he says. “I’m sorry but I don’t know what to do.”

  It is as if everything between you and Mike Murphy—the marriage, the children—were some kind of vacation gone bad, and now you want to return to normal life, you want a full refund (Excuse me, but I would like to return these). You have never managed to feel for the girls what you suppose you ought to feel. Instead, you regard them as younger siblings whose care you’ve been unfairly saddled with. You take them on long, aimless walks, one of them in the carriage and the other toddling beside you. “What beautiful children,” people say to you.

  “They’re for sale,” you tell them. “Two for one.”

  You always refer to the babies in the plural, as if there were no difference between them. It’s their bedtime, get them to shut up, their diapers are shitty, they’re sick and they’re driving me crazy. Occasionally one of them does something individually, in which case you differentiate between them by saying one and the other one. One of them falls down the stairs, and it turns out she’s fine, but the other one starts crying! They are quite different—one is fat and one thin, one squalling and the other sullen, one with your fine symmetrical features and the other warped, like the reflection of the first in a spoon—but they are joined in your mind, nearly indistinguishable, they exist only in relationship to one another, like two sides of a coin. Tweedledee, Tweedledum.

  When the younger girl is a year old you take a job as a secretary at a junior high school, and it isn’t long before one of the teachers—a tall, slope-shouldered man named Michael Collins—starts making advances toward you, which are so innocent and pathetic that you sometimes can’t keep yourself from laughing in his face. After work, he always falls into step with you on your way to the parking lot, as if by chance. “Look who it is!” he says. “I almost didn’t see you there!” As you approach your car he leaps ahead of you so that he can open the door for you. You protest, but he keeps doing it, like some errant knight compelled to perform useless acts of chivalry. One day in December he kicks your tires and says that they are low, that they need filling. I don’t know how, you say. So he accompanies you to the gas station and fills your tires. He checks your oil level, also low, as is your wiper fluid and antifreeze. He fills all of these fluids to the top, then smacks his hands together, satisfied.

  Thanks, you say.

  “My pleasure,” he says. And you get the feeling that it is, it actually is.

  Well, you say, I live just around the corner.

  “Okay,” he says, and stands waving as you pull out of the parking lot. Not until the next morning does it occur to you that he had to walk back to his car at the school, over a mile away through the snow.

  In your judgment this man is flawed in a number of ways: he is too tall and too thin, too pale and soft-spoken, his nose is crooked and has a bulbous tip, he is weak-natured, boring. Still, he is kinder to you than anyone has ever been, and he worships you in the way that you feel you deserve to be worshiped. He starts taking you to dinner, to movies. He meets the girls, who clasp his nose in their fists. He seems to know what to do with them. He tosses them up in the air and they squeal.

  No one in your family has ever been to college, and so there is something of a triumph in this man—a man with a master’s degree, a man who wears a tie and a corduroy blazer to work. “An educator,” your mother calls him, with a certain amount of reverence, and you like the sound of it. An educator, you say, looking at yourself in the mirror. I’m married to an educator. For it is only a matter of time before he asks you.

  As Mrs. Michael Collins you live a dull, steady life in a three-bedroom ranch home, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. You are with your husband almost all of the time. You drive to work together, drop off and pick up the girls together, go to the grocery store together, dinner on Saturday nights, church on Sundays. This goes on for years, and by all appearances you have settled down. Yet you are not at home here. This is the kind of place, you think, where people go to die, quietly and alone, like elephants. Your house starts to look like a coffin. It gets so that thoughts of escape run more or less constantly through your mind.

  One day your neighbor, a stuffy widow named Mrs. Barsotti, knocks on your door to inform you that a black man in a Ford Nova has been driving around the neighborhood. “With no apparent purpose,” she says. “I just wanted to warn you that there might be trouble afoot.”

  You close the door in her face. Bitch, you say.

  “It’s her
generation,” Michael Collins says. “She doesn’t know any better.”

  Something snaps in you, begins to unravel. You start going out at night, to all the old places you used to go, and once again there are men lined up to buy you drinks. You drink, you drink. One night you come home and find Michael Collins waiting up for you, sitting at the kitchen table with the younger girl, building a model ship, and the sight of him taking care of your child, while you’ve been out with other men, strikes you as funny.

  How’s your little boat? you say to him, and laugh. What a bitty little ship you have. What a junior little schooner. You start laughing and can’t stop. You fall down laughing and he tries to pull you up, off the floor.

  Michael Collins says, “Come on. She doesn’t need to see you like this.”

  Like what? you say. Like this? You unbutton your dress, step out of it, fling it across the room.

  “Maggie,” he says, “come on now.”

  Am I making you nervous? you say. Your mood begins to slide, from playful to angry. Would it make you feel better if I went outside? Would it?

  “Maggie!” he says, but you’re already outside on the front lawn in your bra and underwear. “Hey, Mrs. Barsotti!” you cry. “Quick! Call the cops! A black man stole all my clothes!” And then Michael Collins tackles you with a blanket. But you scramble away from him, screaming, and soon enough Mrs. Barsotti comes outside, clutching her bathrobe together at the neck. “Shall I call the police?” she says. “Oh dear, shall I call the police?”

  You quit your job, move into an apartment of your own. The girls are eight and nine that year, and much of your daily routine is harried—it seems you are constantly yelling at them. Get up, you say to the girls, get dressed, brush your teeth, comb your hair, wash your face, put your shoes on, did you put your shoes on? Where are your goddamned shoes? Jesus Christ, how should I know? Get your coat on. Go on, go then, go without a coat, the bus is coming, I can hear it coming, go on, get out of here, get out of here!

  When you get home from work the girls chirp at you like baby birds, chirp about their various needs and ailments (they are bored, one of them has a loose tooth, a stomachache, one of them has to make a shadow box of Abraham Lincoln’s childhood home and needs your help, one of them needs money for a field trip) until you crack. Get out of my sight, you say. Go play outside, would you leave me alone, would you leave me alone for two goddamn minutes? You come down with headaches and retreat to your bedroom, shut off the lights. But they follow you not five minutes later. “Now?” they say. “Can you help us now?”

  It’s even worse when they try to help you. They bring glasses of water and bottles of pills. “Here, Mom,” they say, “for your headache.” You see in their eyes they are afraid of you. As if you’d ever harm them. Get out of here! you say, slapping the pills from their hands. Leave me alone! They run away crying.

  For a while they are malleable. You can send them away and still they love you, still they come running for you when you call their names. For there are times when you love them desperately. You come out of your bedroom and see them sitting on the floor, playing a board game together, one of them says, “Here’s your hotel, ma’am,” and the other says, “Why thank you, sir.” Their voices are high and earnest. They have not yet fallen into sarcasm. You love them, you love them. You sit on the floor between them and kiss them, you make growling noises and pretend to eat their ears, they squeal, they climb on top of you. You love them so much you want to crush them.

  The years go by, they wear you down. The life you’ve always imagined for yourself—the ease, the luxury, the excitement—seems far away, chimerical. You grow bitter. You believe you have suffered like no one else, that you have been cheated, and you mean to have your revenge in whatever little ways you can find. You park in handicapped spaces, throw trash out the window of your car. You drive recklessly, impulsively—several times you back into parked cars, then speed off without leaving a note. Your rules of order are self-righteous, Darwinian. In apartment buildings, when you share a washing machine with other families, you interrupt another person’s cycle and remove their clothes and pile them, sopping wet, on top of the washer so you can start your own load. Once, when a craving for an apple pie seizes you, you put the girls in the car and race to the grocery store, you hustle over to the pastry section to find an old woman examining the last apple pie. She holds it up, inspects it, turns it this way and that. She makes a move to place it back on the shelf but then reconsiders and puts it in her cart, and you stalk her until she wanders away from her cart and you swoop down and steal the pie. You snooze, you say, you lose.

  You are bad with money. You forget to pay the bills and the lights go off, the heat shuts down, you go to turn on the faucet and it shudders, seizes. Then you call up the electric and gas and water companies and give them an earful. I got kids, you say. I got a kid who wants a drink of water here, what the hell am I supposed to tell her? You are always charging clothes on your Filene’s card, wearing them, and then returning them as defective. I washed this once, you say to the salesgirl, just one lousy time, and look, it’s all pilly! Nothing thrills you more than arguing with the employees of the stores you patronize. You bully them until they cry, and when their supervisors appear you do the same. Your voice rises into a shriek, and the other customers dart away. “Lady,” the managers say, “please. Please.”

  You can’t keep a job. You are easily bored and impulsive, and walk out of work every six months. Your boss says something discourteous—“Get your ass in here!” he yells from his office—and you march right into his office and remind him that you are a human being, goddammit, and that every human being deserves to be treated with a minimum level of respect. Then you come home, thrilled with yourself, and recreate these scenes for the girls. They sit on the couch watching you. “A minimum level of respect,” I said. You should have seen his face. I think he shit his pants! And then I stand there at my desk packing up my things, cool as a cucumber, he comes out and says he’s sorry—he doesn’t want anyone to hear him so he’s standing there whispering, but I don’t even look at him, I just shut off my typewriter and put on its cover, real slow, and I take all the company pens out of the desk and put them in my purse—you know how I love those pens—and he’s standing there telling me not to go, he’ll give me a bonus, he’s sorry, but I just walk over to the elevator and press the button and wait like nothing’s happening, I’ve got all the time in the world. You should have seen the other girls, the looks on their faces, they never liked me but they like me now, let me tell you, they’re singing my praises. Later, though, when the thrill has worn off and you find yourself, once again, without a job, you sit on the couch and drink, you cry, you hold your head in your hands. Shit, you say. Shit, shit, shit.

  When you are feeling low you walk through department stores and sit down at makeup counters and have yourself made up by the saleswomen. They gather around you, touch your skin with creams and lotions and powders, they make you up like a doll. “Oh, look!” they say to each other. “Oh look how beautiful.” These are older ladies with clownish makeup and liver-spotted hands, with thinning hair they tease and spray into little peaks. You should be a movie star, they tell you. I know, you say.

  The girls get older, they change. They lose interest in you, they grow tired of your moods. One screams at you, the other one stops speaking. When you arrive home from work it is to an empty apartment. The girls are out with friends, or prowling through shops, or at the library, they are God knows where. You sit alone, in the peace you always claimed you wanted, but it is far worse, this quiet, than anything else.

  For a time you are seized by an obsession with money. It’s the eighties, and there seems to be money everywhere (Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest) and you can’t for the life of you fathom why some of it isn’t yours. One night, in a bar, you meet Bud Francis, sole heir to the fortune that is Francis Housewares and Electronics, and when he takes you to meet his parents you size up their house, a small
mansion with pillars flanking its front door—pillars! Someday this will all be Bud’s. Someday, you decide, this will all be yours.

  Just before you marry Bud you take the girls to meet his parents. Meet your new grandma and grandpa, you tell them. You show them around the house. The upstairs bathroom, all marble and granite, is bigger than the girls’ bedroom. There are two separate sinks in the vanity, side by side, facing a mirror that runs the length of the wall. The older girl, the beautiful one, stands at the sink, turning its gold-plated handles on and off, on and off, as if in a trance. She starts to cry. “Mom!” she says. “There are two sinks!” To learn that life is like this for other people—that it has been all along, just not for her—is too much. She stands looking at herself in that wide mirror, blubbering. “It isn’t fair!” she says.

  Life, you tell her, isn’t fair. As you say this you sense already that things won’t work out with you and Bud—you will never live in this house.

  With your next husband, Walter Adams, it is as if you’ve decided to reverse every instinct and inclination you’ve ever previously pursued. Initially you don’t even consider Walter to be a romantic prospect—he is merely a connection that proves useful. When you first meet him, and learn that he is a mechanic, you tell him that your car (a Buick Skylark, which you’ve custom-painted a bright flaming red) has been rattling, a mysterious ailment that no other mechanic has been able to treat or even diagnose. He tells you to bring your car by his house, and you do, the very next day.