Sometimes when she worried about what her life would be like if there were no Stan, she would silently challenge herself to face some task alone for which under ordinary circumstances she would have asked Stan's help. "If I can fix this fallen shutter without asking Stan to do it for me, I'll know that if the time comes when he dies first, I'll be okay." Once she told her friend Marcy Frank about the way she played that mental game with herself. It was during one of those reveal-your-inner-fears lunches that close friends have, and when she'd finished, hoping for some corroboration from someone else who had been married to one man for as long as she had, Marcy laughed, then raised her eyes heavenward and said, "And this woman is a psychologist?"
When the lights were strung, she plugged them into the wall socket next to the tree to make sure all of the bulbs had survived another year, and they had. By then it was ten o'clock and she still hadn't had any dinner, but instead of taking a break she went out into the garage and found the three boxes marked ORNAMENTS, piled them on top of one another, and brought them into the living room. In the silence of the empty house, she pulled each familiar figure and ball out of the protective paper in which she'd wrapped it so carefully last year.
Every one had a memory that came with it. The tiny glass angel she and Stan and the kids bought on that weekend in Williamsburg, and the adobe house they'd bought when they visited Santa Fe, and the ceramic Minnie Mouse Heidi had begged for at Disneyland. But unlike Christmas tree decorating sessions in the past, tonight there was nobody for whom she could hold one up and say, "Oh, look. Remember when we got this one?" Get used to it, she told herself. Until there are grandchildren, you'd better get used to it.
At eleven she felt tired but on some kind of tear to finish the task. She was remembering all those Christmas mornings when Heidi and Jeff would push open her bedroom door and leap on her and Stan when it was still dark outside, while both parents longed for just a little more sleep. The lonely way she felt tonight made her think she would give up sleeping forever to have them around for another Christmas.
At midnight, still only half finished, she decided she had passed her own survive-without-Stan test, and leaving the lights on the tree aglow she went upstairs to bed. The next day by the time Stan arrived, she had finished the job and was sitting on the sofa, staring blankly at the lit-up tree, feeling depressed.
"Let me guess," he said, sitting next to her and sliding his arm around her waist. "I'll bet you're sitting here remembering every Christmas before this one as idyllic, aren't you?"
"You mean they weren't?"
"Which one shall I call up for you? The one where your mother brought seven homeless people over here for dinner and one of them threw up all over our bathroom, and one of them stole my wallet? Or how about the year where Heidi knocked the tree over and started a fire in the living room? I liked the one when your sister, Roz, came in from back east and brought some fish with her on the plane, which we all ate and got food poisoning."
Barbara laughed. "You're so right. I'm doing exactly what I cautioned all of my patients against, about having some Currier and Ives fantasy around their past holidays."
"Listen, my love," Stan said, holding her close. "These are going to be the best years of our lives. Once we get Jeff squared away, we'll do all the real traveling we've been talking about for years. Maybe we'll even find a spot we really love up north, and buy a second home. Think of it. With no kids around, I'll be able to run after you naked all through the house."
"Sweetheart, at the speed I'm running these days, it won't be too tough to catch me."
"Precisely! But that's okay because at my age I forget what I'm supposed to do when I catch you."
Their jokes about aging had become a favorite way to make them both laugh, which they now did, and then Stan took her face in his hand, turned it toward his, and said, "Honey." She knew his smile so well. "That's something we both know I'll never forget."
"You promise?" she said grinning.
"You can take it to the bank."
His sweet gentle kisses by the glowing tree warmed her, and when he tugged at her sweater, she helped him remove it, and soon they were making love on the floor.
"Maybe it's not so bad with the kids out of the house," she said as Stan caressed her.
"I say to hell with the little brats," Stan answered, touching her, loving her, making her sadness of the last many hours disappear.
When they lay spent, Stan asleep beside her on the floor, the phone rang. Barbara ran through the house naked to answer it. It was Heidi, and in just "Hi, Mom," Barbara knew there was something seriously wrong. First there was a lot of crying. Then there was a jumble of words Barbara couldn't understand. While she listened patiently, trying to sort it out, Stan brought her a bathrobe, which she slid on. Finally she understood what it was Heidi was trying so hysterically to tell her. Ryan Adler, her fiancé, had married someone else. The someone else was a woman named Bonnie West, who was a local San Francisco radio personality.
"We had this fight, and we weren't speaking, but like I just figured it would blow over and he'd be coming back. You know? I mean that's what always happened before and um, she's his old girlfriend from a really long time ago, and so during the time I was waiting for him to call me, he was . . . marrying her. I am so lame. I can't believe I had to hear this from someone who saw it in the paper. Can you believe I ever trusted this man?''
Barbara bit her tongue.
"So now, I mean you are really not going to believe this part, I mean this is so totally deranged, it's sick. He calls here the other night, and he's um, whispering, and I heard his voice and I'm going, Don't crack, Heidi, don't say anything. Just let him talk, and you're going to die when I tell you, Mom.'' Stan brought Barbara some coffee and she gestured to him that Heidi was going through a trauma as she listened to the rest of the story.
"He said, 'Oh, God, Heidi, why did I do this? Why did I marry her? I mean it's so clear to me now that you're the one I really love.' So I said, 'You're crazy, Ryan. That's why.' And then he said something about how his mother thought Bonnie was more right for him than I was, and I said, 'Thanks a lot, that makes me feel really great!' Anyway, the worst part is he said, 'Can I come over?' I mean, can you believe this? This man wanted to come over and have sex with me and still be married to her! How could he think I'd say yes to that?"
"What did you say?" Barbara asked, surprised by this burst of intimacy from Heidi, whose answer to the question "What's new?" was, notoriously, "New York, New Jersey, and New Hampshire."
"I'll tell you something, Mom. I was feeling so bummed out and so completely lonely at that moment that it was real hard to say no. Because all I wanted was one more hour of him saying he loved me."
Poor child, Barbara thought. My poor child. "But?" she asked, knowing she shouldn't.
"Don't worry, Mother," Heidi said with disdain for the question. "I didn't do it. I hung up and took the phone off the hook. But, um, now I'm really sad and you have to help me, because they've moved into his place which is right near here, and I've got to get out of here. Fast. I don't think I can survive bumping into either one or the two of them."
"Let me see what I can do," Barbara told her.
There wasn't a moving company available on such short notice, so Barbara called Hertz Rent-A-Truck in San Francisco, and she and Stan flew up. They spent Christmas Eve day packing up Heidi's apartment, all of the kitchen supplies, clothes, and finally the furniture, and moving everything down the two flights of stairs, loading all of it onto the truck. Stan drove the truck as Barbara and Heidi followed behind him in Heidi's car. Barbara drove and Heidi cried all the way home. When they arrived in Los Angeles, they went straight to a storage rental space Barbara had called before they left. With the help of some of the night-shift employees, they unloaded it all and finally went home.
Heidi spent Christmas morning sitting on the sofa, staring at the blazing fire in the living room fireplace with damaged eyes and a lovelorn expression ove
r an affair that Barbara knew she believed she would never get over.
"It takes time, honey," Barbara said, sitting on the sofa next to her. "And you have plenty of time."
"Yeah" was all Heidi said. Barbara tried to maintain some holiday spirit. Though it had been a while since she'd done it, she remembered her old recipe and made a huge stack of what turned out to be delicious pancakes. Then she turned on a tape of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing Christmas carols, but she had to turn down the volume so she could take a call from Jeff, who was skiing in Snow Mass. She was glad for him that he was far away from the Singer household blues that morning, and changed the subject when he asked, "How come the goonball is there? I thought she was gonna be with her dorky fiancé."
At about eleven A.M. the doorbell rang. When Barbara opened the door she was surprised to see Marcy and Ed Frank, their son-in-law, Freddy, who looked like Ed, and their daughter, Pammy, Heidi's childhood friend, who was very pregnant.
"Uh-oh, I can tell by the look on your face that we should have called first," Marcy Frank said apologetically, probably because Barbara, still in her bathrobe, looked bedraggled from the ordeal of the last thirty-six hours. "But we were right up the street at my sister-in-law's house and we thought you two would be lonely without your kids around, and we wanted you to see Pammy's enormous tummy."
"Uh . . . " Barbara wasn't sure what to do. What she wanted to do was say, "Go away" and close the door, and she was considering doing that when Heidi, curious to know who was there, got to her feet, walked to the door, and when she looked out at the four people, who were surprised to see her, and then saw Pammy's stomach, she moaned, began to cry, and left the room to go upstairs.
"Maybe we should go," Ed Frank said.
Barbara sighed. "Oh, come on in," she said. "Stan, honey, make these people an eggnog while I go take care of Heidi." She was relieved when just as she stepped into Heidi's old room where Heidi lay in a fetal position on the unmade bed, the phone rang. Before Barbara could get to it, Heidi uncurled herself and reached for it.
"Hello?" she said in a stuffed-nosed voice. "Oh, Merry Christmas to you too, Grammy, only this is Heidi, not Barbara." Barbara sat down on the bed. "I'm home because, um, my boyfriend married someone else, so I didn't want to stay up there anymore, because I was, um, too hurt. So my mom and dad came up with this humongous truck and they spent all day moving me here, and I'm going to live with them for a while till I figure out my life."
As soon as she got all of that out, her mouth opened wide in a cry that couldn't come out. She was shaking with inward sobs, and Barbara moved closer to where she was sitting on the bed and held her hand. Heidi listened to whatever sage advice Gracie was dispensing on the other end of the phone. Advice to which Heidi kept nodding until she got her bearings, then finally she said, "I know. You're right. I agree. No, I know. You're right and I will, I promise. Okay. Here's my mom."
"Hello, Mother," Barbara said.
"You have to have her moved into her own place before the first of the year,'' Gracie said instead of hello.
"Well, Merry Christmas to you too," Barbara replied.
"You with all your psychiatric training know better than anyone that after all her hard-won independence, moving in with you now is the worst thing that could happen to her. That girl has to get back on the horse. Stand on her own two feet as soon as possible," Gracie said in her I-mean-business voice.
"Mother, she's fine. A few weeks in her old room might be healthy for her, a little return to the womb, with Stan and me pampering her. How bad could that be?"
"Don't do what's right for you, Barbara. Do what's right for her," Gracie said.
"Happy holidays," Barbara said and put the phone back in the cradle. "Shall I tell the Franks to go away?" she asked Heidi. Heidi put her arms around her mother's neck and her head against Barbara, and Barbara could feel her own hair getting wet with her daughter's hot tears. "I'll be glad to go down and ask them to come over for dinner next week when you're feeling better."
"No, I'm okay. I'll wash my face and come down. I really am glad for Pammy. I want to come down and see her." She stood and walked sniffling into her bathroom.
"Honey," Barbara said, and Heidi stopped and looked at her, her pretty face blotched and scrunchy from the tears shed, "I promise you'll make it through this."
"Thanks, Mom," Heidi said, and went into the bathroom to wash her face.
By the thirtieth of. December she and Barbara found an apartment in West Hollywood that Heidi liked and Barbara and Stan could afford to help her keep until she got a job. The last item Barbara moved into the apartment was the old tattered Winnie the Pooh. She had transported it with a few other things from home in her car. While Heidi was talking to the man who had come to install the phone, Barbara took the bear into the bedroom.
"Look after her," she said, hugging the stuffed toy. Then she put it on Heidi's pillow and went to work.
39
ON CHRISTMAS EVE DAY, Ruthie and Shelly went to a big noisy party at the home of a television producer who lived in Santa Monica. "Did you hear about the whale in the San Francisco harbor who got AIDS? He was rear-ended by a ferry!" A bald guy who was standing by the piano told that joke to his girlfriend.
"Let's go," Shelly said to Ruthie. He'd been inside the house at the bar getting a Perrier when he overheard it. Now he came out to the pool area where she was sitting talking to some women writers. He didn't feel like being polite, so without even saying hello to the others, he picked Ruthie's purse up and handed it to her. "Right now."
Sid was having a great time climbing on some play equipment with a group of other kids in which the older ones were tending to the little ones, and Ruthie had been relaxing for the first time in a long time, gabbing away. Now she was worried about Shelly and the anger in his eyes. "Are you okay?" she asked him.
"Yeah. I just want to get out of here."
"We just got here," she said, wondering what was wrong.
"Then you stay. I'm going."
"What about Sid?"
"He can stay or go. It's up to you."
"Ah, Shel. Why can't we all stay?"
"Because I want to leave."
"And do what?"
"Go home."
"Why do you want to go home? It's Christmas Eve, a family time."
"Get ahold of yourself, Ruthie. We're Jewish and we're not a family."
The ocean was loud but not loud enough to cover what Shelly said. One of the women saw the pain in Ruthie's face and took her hand, but she pulled it away. "Here's the ticket for the car," she said, yanking it out of her purse. "I'll keep the baby here with me and get a ride home." Shelly took the ticket, turned, walked over to Sid, and with a little kiss good-bye, was gone. Through the large windows of the front of the house Ruthie saw the valet parker pull her Mercedes up, and she watched Shelly get into it and drive away.
According to the doctors, so far he was doing fine. He went to his appointments every month to have his T-cell count checked and to be examined for any symptoms of AIDS, and all was well. But the fear and the stigma tormented him. Sometimes he would wake up and write poetry, which she found around the house. She knew that many nights he would lie in bed, longing to sleep, to cross the threshold into dreams where he was healthy and unafraid, but his anxious mind wouldn't let him. Instead he would find himself filled with heart-pounding panic.
He would hyperventilate and feel nauseated and shaky, so he would get up and walk down the hall and into Ruthie's room. And Ruthie, knowing in her sleep that something was wrong, would wake to find him sitting there. He had come in just to be near her. Once she was awake she would sit up, kneel beside him on the bed, and massage his shoulders, kneading the knots of fear out of his back, saying over and over again, "You're okay. You're okay. Your T-cell count is high, your appetite is good, Sid and I love you, and you're okay." And soon her words and the comforting physical contact of the massage would ground him again, and he would relax.
W
hen Ruthie felt his shoulders lowering and the tension ease, she would get up, put on her robe, and take his hand. "Come on," she would say, leading him down the hallway to the baby's room. And they would stand together in the nursery lit only by the Mickey Mouse night-light and look at the face of their peacefully sleeping son.
"This is why you can't panic. This is why you have to say, 'Everybody's going to die, but they're going to have to take Shelly Milton kicking and screaming out of this world, because I'm hanging in for Sid the Kid.' Are you with that, Shel? We made it through 'Rudy the Poodle,' and love, and death, we made it through frizzy hair and suicide attempts, and we will make it through this one, too." Then she would walk him to his room and watch while he got back into bed, then go to her own room and sit wide awake until she heard him snoring before she could go back to sleep herself. She loved him and she should have gone home from the stupid Christmas party with him, in fact she should leave now and meet him there. One of the women she'd been talking to had walked inside to get something to eat, and the other one was chasing after her own little toddler. Ruthie decided to start asking around to see if she could get a ride home when she spotted Louie Kweller across the crowded backyard.
Louie Kweller was looking a little rounder than he had in the early years, when along with Ruthie and Shelly and all the other comedy writers he had haunted the Comedy Store. But he was still sweet looking, and when he greeted Ruthie with a very warm hug, it felt good and he smelled great. One of the things Ruthie remembered finding so attractive about Louie was that he was well-read. Once they'd had a conversation about a television series which had a lot of simultaneous plot lines and Louie described it as having a "Dickensian multiplicity." Another time he compared the plot of a sitcom they'd all watched together to a Stephen Crane short story.
"No kidding?" Shelly had laughed. "I thought Stephen Crane was the head of miniseries at NBC."
The Stork Club Page 33
