Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  “Ah.”

  “Ah what?”

  “Did you hear what you just said?” asked Hannah. She tapped her cigarette into a hollow stone Nigel had given her years ago. He found it on the beach one afternoon. “Mommy, come look at the gray grapefruit,” he called. Splitting open this unlikely gemstone with a hammer and chisel, he discovered a hollow interior studded with quartz crystals and lined with mica, which flashed in the sun like fish scales.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you apply it to your life?” Hannah was seeing that infant, trying so hard to please and failing so consistently. A normal baby didn’t just hang in a jump seat. Nigel practically tore the doorjambs down, swinging like a parachutist in a windstorm. During her internship at the state hospital, she tried to work with a teenage girl who did nothing but sit in a corner with her knees to her chest, her sweat shirt drawn up over her head and down around her ankles. The girl seemed to feel if she could remain perfectly still and silent, she’d offend no one and stay safe.

  “What?” Screwing up her face, Caroline studied the pale, limp asparagus fern in the window. It was criminal to treat your plants like that. She’d bring Hannah some Miracle-Gro.

  “What about in your personal life? What was the most painful thing at home this week?”

  Caroline twitched. This was going exactly nowhere. How could this British housewife understand American genocide?

  “Think,” suggested Hannah. These failed revolutionaries sometimes pissed her off, projecting their inner state onto the world and then insisting it constituted objective reality. Chippie the Hippie had been in that morning moaning about lack of world peace. She’d asked if it wasn’t hypocritical to demand world peace when you hadn’t even achieved personal peace. “There must have been something.”

  They sat in silence as Caroline, ankle resting on opposite knee, traced the red rubber tread on one white shoe with her finger.

  Hannah shifted her gaze out the window to the parking lot. Jonathan walked by, fluffy snowflakes falling on his gray Afro, which looked like a dandelion gone to seed. He climbed in his Scout and drove off. Hannah struggled not to smile at his new bumper sticker, which read “Eat More Lamb. 50,000 Coyotes Can’t Be Wrong.” A part-time farmer, he was also cofounder and codirector, along with herself, of the Lake Glass Therapy Center. They’d gravitated toward each other in graduate school because they were older than their classmates, and they’d worked together ever since, despite times when they irritated the hell out of each other.

  The silence was oppressive. Caroline cast around for something to placate Hannah. “My sons, Jackie and Jason, got into a fight and broke their video game.”

  “Why was that painful?”

  “Because it was brand-new.”

  “So get it fixed.” Any minute now Caroline was going to shoot off into some complicated evasion, a startled quail catching sight of a hunter. “What else?” Caroline was right to be scared. Some of the things she’d have to face about herself would be painful.

  Caroline pinched the bridge of her nose. “Nothing else.”

  “You’ve had a pleasant week?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then why are you here? You must have better ways to spend your money?”

  “Yeah, actually I’ve been saving up to build a sauna…”

  Here came the digression. Hannah raised her eyebrows ironically to stave it off. The stronger the defenses, the more devastating the wounds underneath, she reminded herself to reclaim patience.

  Caroline observed the raised eyebrows and fell silent, aware that she wasn’t trying. She glanced out the window to the lake. Snowflakes the size of goosedown were swirling around, as. though Jackie and Jason were having a pillow fight in the yard. Eventually she began to talk in a low voice: “Diana, my lover, or my ex-lover, left out a letter she was writing that said I was difficult to live with because I was a taker.” She fiddled with the ivory gull at her throat.

  Stubbing out her cigarette, Hannah suppressed a smile at the ease with which Caroline acknowledged reading someone else’s mail. She was beginning to like this woman. Once she got through the bullshit, she was alarmingly straightforward. Hannah made a mental note of the ex-lover bit. Her sex life was messed up. That was enough to depress anyone. “You don’t see yourself as a taker?”

  “I’m a nurse, for God’s sake. A mother. Anyhow, last month Diana complained I was cloying because I did things for her all the time.” She ran her hand distractedly through her Afro.

  “How do you see yourself?”

  “Huh?”

  “List some adjectives that describe you. Tell me what you’re like.” Hannah was pleased they’d gotten to the heart of the matter so quickly: Caroline didn’t know who she was.

  Caroline sat silent. Jackson said she was too intense. Howard insisted she was cruel when they were kids because she lynched his teddy bear and let the air out of his bicycle tires so he couldn’t follow her. Of course he also said the worst day of his life was when he realized he couldn’t marry her. Cloying. A taker. Which was she?

  “Does it occur to you that Diana sees you as a taker because she’s afraid she is herself? Otherwise, why would it be an issue for her?”

  Diana a taker? Wrong. Diana sent her friends solstice cards, went to the mall to hand out extra vegetables from the garden, knitted ski caps for the Special Olympics, put stranded tourists in her spare room during foliage season. Then she remembered Diana’s mother, a shrill woman in pink plastic rollers and thin white socks, who was always phoning from Poughkeepsie to complain that Diana was an ingrate. Diana laughed sourly after each conversation, but maybe she was secretly worried her mother was right.

  “Do you see the link?” asked Hannah.

  “What link?”

  “Between your reaction to the Jonestown thing and to Diana’s letter?”

  Caroline frowned. “What?” Where was this woman coming from? Nothing she said made sense.

  “Think about it. Your assignment for next week is to make a list of adjectives that describe you.”

  “My assignment?” She didn’t realize she’d indicated an interest in returning. “How long does this usually take?”

  “Does what?”

  “Therapy.”

  “If I can’t get somebody back on her feet in a couple of months, I ought to be in another profession. I don’t want my clients to become my breadline.” Caroline probably wouldn’t even try if she knew how long it sometimes took to unravel patterns woven over thirty-five years.

  Caroline looked at her. Everyone she knew had been in therapy for eight years. Hell, she could stand anything for two months. Even this nonsense. Then she could tell Jenny she’d tried and it hadn’t helped. There were always those pills in her closet.

  “So you’re a nurse,” said Hannah, as Caroline wrote a check. “Where do you work?”

  “In the emergency room at Lloyd Harris. It’s my lunch hour.”

  Hannah nodded. “Just like home, huh?” She stretched her feet out on the rush footstool.

  Caroline looked up. “What is?”

  “It sounds as though you’re accustomed to being surrounded with crisis.”

  “It does?”

  “That’s how it sounds to me.”

  “No, I had a very happy childhood.” Caroline stood up, handed

  Hannah the check, and took the appointment card Hannah held out to her.

  “Good. I’m glad.” Folding the check in half, Hannah felt Maggie’s smile tug at the corners of her mouth.

  As Caroline walked out, Hannah stood up, stretched, and thought about Maggie, a fierce old lady with a sharp brain and an even sharper tongue. She had trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New York and hung out with all the famous Sullivanians, prior to retreating to her summer house on Lake Glass after the death of her husband. Where she went into a funk for several years, from which her own therapeutic skills couldn’t rescue her, emerging eventually with some new techniques hammered out in th
e forge of her own private hell. Upon her return to the land of the living, she split her time in New Hampshire between private practice and teaching at the university in town, where she helped the clinical psychology department develop its Ph.D. program, from which Hannah was one of the first graduates. Born in Czechoslovakia, Maggie had lost most of her family to concentration camps, which gave a certain credibility to anything she might say about human suffering. Her house on the lake near Hannah’s had been filled with antiques, carpets, and art objects purchased on her world travels. She was one of the few people in the area with whom Hannah had been able to discuss England and Australia.

  Arms folded across her chest, Hannah strolled down the carpeted corridor picturing Maggie, glasses on a chain around her neck. She put them on, not to see better, but to conceal her eyes, which were always revealing inappropriate reactions to clients’ dilemmas, such as amusement or fascination. But Maggie had poked and prodded with delicate restraint to get Hannah to face her own pain and rage. Watching them finally gush out like amniotic fluid during labor had been a sobering experience. Years later, after she and Maggie became colleagues and friends, Maggie used to maintain that doing therapy was simply a question of raising the child concealed within each client, and then disillusioning the client about the extent of your own powers.

  Hannah visited Maggie at Lloyd Harris every day as she was dying of cancer. Maggie retained her sharp mind and tongue, but her body wasted away. Her eyes, which had so often sparkled at Hannah with amusement, were clouded with a pain her glasses couldn’t conceal. The corners of her mouth, which had twitched with suppressed smiles, now twitched with grimaces. It was the ultimate in disillusionment. Among her last words, spoken in a raspy voice as she lay in the hospital bed surrounded by life-support equipment with dials like hyperthyroidal eyes, were, “So you see, my dear Hannah, as wonderful as I may be, I die just like everyone else.”

  Discovering from Holly that her next appointment had canceled, Hannah returned to her office, sat in her chair, lit a cigarette, and gazed out the window. An orange Le Car crept up the street beyond the parking lot. Hannah exhaled. The driver, a former client named Harold Mortimer, was one of her most outstanding failures. She could see his strained white face gazing at her office window, hoping for a glimpse of her. Sometimes he stopped to leave messages of undying devotion under her windshield wiper. Maybe her new car would fool him.

  As the orange Le Car turned the corner, Hannah speculated on Caroline’s emerging pattern. She’d probably try to win Hannah over, then try to get Hannah to reject her. And at that point Hannah would refuse to cooperate. The one useful skill she had learned at the Sussex boarding school her grandmother had shipped her off to was fencing. She did the same thing in here all day—exchanging thrusts and parries, until one day she’d drop her foil and allow a client to plunge right at her. And she’d observe their bafflement when she neither crumpled to the floor nor slashed back. But of course she’d learned to do this by sparring with Zorro during training.

  Hannah’s shoulders sagged. She propped her elbow on the desk and rested her chin in her hand. Her grandmother probably programmed her for this tedious profession by telling her all the time how gifted she’d be at working with troubled people, if only she’d get her own garbage out of the way. She smiled faintly as she thought about her grandmother, white hair in an elaborate bun, corseted bosom jutting out like a Victorian sideboard as she ran jumble sales for charity behind a stall in the High Street. Hannah had always predicted the old battle-ax would outlive them all, but she hadn’t. And no doubt raising an angry, rowdy granddaughter hadn’t prolonged her stay. She recalled how the old woman’s white eyebrows fluttered with dismay when Hannah spent afternoons after school racing her bike down the sidewalks through the Heath with a pack of boys and dogs, while other girls went to ballet lessons. Or balancing along the high garden walls of neighboring houses, peering into upstairs windows at neighbors changing clothes, taking baths, or making love. Or careening down Christ Church Hill on roller skates with pedestrians leaping out of the way. Or using her pocket money to ride a double-decker bus to the end of the line and back. Or making kites to fly from the high hill on the Heath out of the Financial Times before her grandfather had read it.

  Hannah’s father had gone to Australia as a young man to convalesce from tuberculosis on a sheep station owned by a family friend. There he met Hannah’s mother, a daughter of the owner. They married and produced Hannah. Hannah had hazy memories of straining to interpose herself between her parents while her father shouted. Her mother died of typhoid picked up while tending an aboriginal who camped on the station. Her father brought Hannah back to his parents in Hampstead prior to departing for service with the British High Command in Trinidad. She remembered him as a handsome, breezy man who turned up in Hampstead every few years with a deep tan and smiling teeth like tiny white tombstones. All he ever said to her was a phrase he’d picked up in Australia: “So how’s it going then, mate?” He’d pat her awkwardly on the shoulder while gazing at a far wall.

  Hannah glanced at the bark painting on her office wall. The aboriginal gave it to Hannah’s mother before he died, and Hannah’s father brought it back to Hampstead. Her grandmother thought it was hideous and kept it in a closet under the stairs. In white on reddish-brown bark, it featured a bizarre leaping creature called a mimi spirit, with hollow eyes and sticklike limbs. It had terrified, yet fascinated, Hannah. Whenever her grandmother found her looking at her, she’d shake her head and sigh, “My wild aboriginal granddaughter.”

  Looking at it now, Hannah remembered a farm pond encircled with ghost gums, in whose branches kookaburras laughed; a lamb named Mutton, who gradually turned into a sheep and wandered across the wide verandah of their cottage, shitting little round turds on the flowered parlor carpet; flocks of garish galahs, flashing flaming waistcoats; small dark children tumbling with her in a dusty paddock; flies buzzing incessantly; her father’s hat, with corks hanging from the brim on strings, to keep the flies away; the winter rains drumming on the iron roof. She remembered a hand pushing damp hair off her forehead when she was half asleep. But she couldn’t remember her mother’s face. The only face she could summon was from a faded photo, sad and strained. A little girl, Hannah, clutched her arm, as though aware her mother was about to vanish.

  “Why so somber?” asked Jonathan from the doorway, holding out a wrapped sandwich.

  Hannah looked up. “I was just thinking about my mother.”

  “That’ll do it.”

  “Come in. Sit down. Thanks. Is this ham?”

  Jonathan nodded his bushy gray head. “What’s happening?” He sat down on the tweed couch and unwrapped his own sandwich.

  “The usual.” Hannah picked up half her sandwich. “Loss, sorrow, betrayal, and deceit.”

  Jonathan smiled. Mary Beth appeared from the next office. She wore a high-necked ruffled blouse, Mao slippers, and generally resembled Little Miss Muffet after forfeiting her curds and whey to the spider.

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked Jonathan.

  “I’ve just realized I don’t like clients giving me all this power.”

  Hannah took a large bite. Mary Beth was fresh out of graduate school and still thought real life was an ongoing seminar. Hannah knew the upcoming conversation by heart. A client had split with his wife because he thought Mary Beth had told him to. Now he was miserable and was blaming Mary Beth. Jonathan was making all the usual responses about clients hearing what they wanted to hear, not having to come back, etc.

  “Call it trust instead of power,” suggested Hannah between bites. “It’ll help you feel better.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you call it,” said Mary Beth, leaning up against the doorjamb. “It’s still power.”

  Hannah shrugged. “So be a veterinarian.” When they were interviewing, she hadn’t been sure about Mary Beth, who seemed a trifle earnest. But Jonathan insisted they needed another woman, someone young, with credentials as i
mpressive as Mary Beth’s. It was hard to tell if she’d work out because she still had what Hannah called novice nerves, took everything that happened with clients too seriously and too personally. Sheer exhaustion would no doubt cure her of that.

  “A client has to relinquish a certain amount of power for the process to work,” Jonathan was saying.

  Hannah watched him look up at Mary Beth with a patient smile. He felt Hannah was too harsh. Hannah felt he drowned people in honey. They used to argue over this issue of power. But she was still convinced clients didn’t hand over any power at all. All they did was to use the therapist as a standin for the strong part of themselves, until they were ready to face their own strength.

  • 3 •

  Caroline went through the lunch line, taking salad and coffee. Holding her plastic tray, she glanced around the large, drafty tiled room. Diana was sitting at a table with Brenda, Barb, and Suzanne, all dressed in white uniforms. Feeling no wish to be pleasant to Suzanne, who’d spent the past week lurking behind oxygen tanks in the halls to pop out for chats whenever Diana passed, Caroline walked to a table inhabited by Brian Stone in light green scrub clothes and plastic booties. Brian was a young surgeon whose wife had recently left him, taking their children to Boston without a backward glance. Caroline had assisted him several times in the ER, and they’d sometimes drunk coffee together between cases. She admired the delicacy and deftness with which he tied sutures, as though assembling a sailing ship in a bottle. He struck Caroline as a touching fellow, with his receding hairline, his mournful eyes, and his endless grief over Irene’s departure. Although she scarcely knew him, she’d become his confidante. It was impossible not to because Irene was all he ever talked about.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Brian looked up with bloodshot eyes and a pained smile. “Delighted.”

  Taking the dishes off her tray, Caroline asked, “So how’s it going?”