by Lisa Alther
The next morning she shoved the pieces under her mattress, but Maureen found them when she was changing the damp sheets. As she carried them away, Caroline buried her teeth in Maureen’s forearm. Maureen had four stitches and returned to Galway with many bad memories of the New World. Caroline was sent to her room for the rest of her life. Maureen was replaced by Esther from Poland, who told bedtime stories in broken English about being a teenager in Buchenwald.
Caroline studied her sons as they gazed with adoration at Gabriel Kotter. Jason periodically asked her to marry a man like Gabriel Kotter so he could be Jason’s dad.
“You’ve already got a dad,” Caroline would point out.
Jason would screw up his face with distaste, and Caroline could no longer summon enough loyalty to Jackson to reprimand him.
Jackie and Jason had both had special blankets, but giving them up hadn’t been a big deal. They just gradually lost interest. Maybe they felt secure enough with her not to need substitutes? Maybe she wasn’t such a flop as a mother after all? She speculated on how much she’d damaged them by dragging them from house to house. Out of Jackson’s neo-Tudor manse in Newton, and into David Michael’s van with a scene from Mao’s Long March painted on the back window. To the Somerville commune, then up here to this cabin in the woods. Each time they made a bad grade or fought with a friend, she assumed it was her fault for burdening them with so much instability. Of course she herself had spent her first eighteen years in the same rambling Victorian heap in Brookline, and she was no paragon of mental health. Good mother. Could she add that to her list?
She thought about her list as she opened the oven door and poked the baked potatoes with a fork. If Hannah could tell her to divide it into categories, evidently she’d seen some herself. But what? Kind, honest, ungenerous, possessive, wimpy…. She hadn’t a clue. Good sense of humor, she was going to add. But Hannah hadn’t liked her jokes. Or rather, she responded to them, then told her she was wasting her money. Fine. She wouldn’t tell any more. Let Hannah sit there all day like Buddha, getting exhausted by other people’s problems.
She remembered saying to Hannah that she felt she had to do what other people wanted for them to like her. Would she tell Hannah her problems just because this was what Hannah wanted? But she didn’t care whether Hannah liked her. Then she recalled telling Hannah she did care. Why the hell had she said that? Because she really didn’t. That Betty Furness look-alike meant nothing to her. She’d add “liar” to her list.
Was it even true she felt she had to do what others wanted for them to like her? She thought about Jackson, his pager strapped to his belt like a mountain man’s hunting knife. When she finally voiced despair over the fact that she never saw him, he stayed at the hospital more than ever. What about David Michael? She pictured him drawing on a joint, his ponytail tucked under an operating cap, a fleck of marijuana flaring in his mustache. When she complained about his other women, he took up with Clea, one of her best friends, who lived right there in the Somerville commune. Whenever she failed to be long-suffering, people withdrew. But Diana had withdrawn too, and Caroline had always tried to do everything Diana wanted. Including this god-awful celibacy.
As Caroline tore up lettuce leaves and tossed them into the wooden salad bowl, she resumed her memorial service for Pink Blanky, the only object of her adoration whose departure had been involuntary. No, that was incorrect. What about Marsha? Caroline remembered pedaling her tricycle down the block one summer afternoon, grieving over Pink Blanky. She was pedaling with her eyes closed, hoping to fall into a manhole or get hit by a bus. Probably she would without Pink Blanky to protect her. It was all her fault. She’d left Pink Blanky home alone with a murderess.
A girl riding a red tricycle in the opposite direction pulled in front of Caroline and said, “Don’t cry, little girl. I can be your friend.” She had a short ponytail on each side of her head, like pig’s ears, tied with narrow pink ribbons.
It turned out Marsha knew everything worth knowing except what penises were for. She knew which neighbors’ gardens you could pick flowers from without getting caught; how to crush the flowers to manufacture perfume (which you put in emptied pill capsules and forced the younger neighborhood children to buy); why there were cracks in sidewalks; how to fasten playing cards to tricycle wheels with clothespins to make flapping sounds as you rode; why certain graves had sunk in the cemetery down the street (grave robbers had stolen the coffins); where baby brothers like Howard came from (you bought them at a hospital), and why you shouldn’t hurt them. Caroline ceased to be a scaredy cat who couldn’t even get to the bathroom alone at night. Marsha was the Lone Ranger, and Caroline was Tonto. Marsha was the Cisco Kid, and she was Pancho. Marsha was Roy Rogers, and she was Dale Evans. Their tricycles were stallions, and they rode them all the way to the end of the block.
Practically the only thing Marsha hadn’t known was how not to die when hit by a Bunny Bread truck in sixth grade. Caroline had known to trust no one, even when the light was green in your favor. If she’d been with Marsha that afternoon, instead of at a meeting of a school club Marsha couldn’t join because her grades weren’t high enough, Marsha wouldn’t have been run over. Caroline hadn’t even wanted to join a club that didn’t want Marsha too. Marsha’s feelings had been hurt.
The neighborhood kids spent a lot of time searching the crosswalk and curb where Marsha had been hit for bloodstains. When Caroline walked by, they’d call for her to come look at a pebble they insisted was one of Marsha’s teeth. But Caroline could see it all too clearly in her head already—Marsha’s body bloody and mangled, limp and lifeless on the concrete.
Caroline saved her babysitting money and bought a potted lily for Marsha’s grave. Esther had been replaced by Geraldine, who told bedtime stories about fleeing Mississippi after her husband was lynched by the Klan. Geraldine, head wrapped in a flowered scarf, agreed to take Caroline on the bus to Marsha’s grave. But she looked at the lily and said, “Have mercy, child, you don’t want no real flowers. Shoot, that old thing’ll rot just like her. You want you some plastic ones that’ll stay pretty from here to yonder.” So she and Geraldine stopped off to buy some purple plastic hydrangeas. As she looked at the marble headstone of a lamb, Caroline reminded herself that Marsha’s death was her fault. She hadn’t been with her that afternoon. She hadn’t known until too late that Marsha needed her protection as much as she needed Marsha’s.
When she got home, she locked herself in the bathroom with a box of Uncle Ben’s Rice. Marsha’s mother was an ex-nun who’d left her order because it denied her an electric heating pad when she developed arthritis. Marsha had often told Caroline about doing pennants for being bad, like you waved at football games. As pennants for causing Marsha’s death, Caroline sprinkled a layer of rice on the tile floor and knelt on it with her arms outstretched, like Jesus on the cross. After several such afternoons, her knees rubbed raw, she ran out of rice. She considered watching “American Bandstand,” but instead took her allowance to the store for more rice. Because if she wasn’t someone who deserved punishment for causing her best friend’s death, who was she? No one.
As Caroline flipped the pork chops and began slicing apples into the iron skillet, she speculated on whether those purple hydrangeas were still on Marsha’s grave, fresh as the day they were bought. After Marsha came Rorkie, then a series of gruesome boyfriends, then Arlene, Jackson, David Michael, Diana. Ever since Pink Blanky, she realized, there’d been someone she’d endowed with its wisdom and benignity.
As she set the tan stoneware plates on the table, which were among the few relics other than Jackie and Jason from her marriage to Jackson, she remembered Hannah’s saying this afternoon that she was a kind and gentle person. Was there any truth to this? After all, the woman had a Ph.D. and a British accent. Even if she did run around barefoot.
Looking up from the floor in front of the TV, Jackie asked, “What’s so funny, Mom?”
She realized there was a bemused smile on h
er face. Oh God, no. Please not another Pink Blanky surrogate. “Nothing,” she snapped.
• 4 •
Dressed in a nightgown and rose flannel robe, Hannah sat in an armchair by the Franklin stove in her bedroom reading Love Comes Fast and drinking a dry martini. She could hear the rustle of Arthur’s Wall Street Journal in the living room. Her paperback was tattered and dog-eared, having passed through the hands of three friends who traded gothic romances with the enthusiasm with which her children used to trade baseball cards. She’d begun reading romances years ago, to find out what many of her female clients saw in them. She quickly understood they devoured them to convince themselves of the glamour of dreary marriages and boring or abusive husbands. Having discovered this, she also discovered she too was hooked. The damn things turned her on. Clients often complained their relationships went stale, as though it were their partners’ faults for not being transformed into exciting new people every few years. She’d reply, “That’s why God gave you an imagination.”
Maggie used to chide her for her taste in reading matter. One morning when Hannah stopped by Lloyd Harris, she found Maggie watching “The Price Is Right” on TV. “Aha, I caught you!” said Hannah. “I’m not supposed to read romances, but you can watch game shows?”
“My dear,” said Maggie in her quilted bed jacket, “when you’re dying, you can watch anything you like.”
Hannah lingered over the last several pages, pleased Love Comes Fast was ending as she’d known it would: boy gets girl, boy fucks girl, boy and girl display every symptom of living happily ever after. She laid the book on the floor and lit a cigarette. Closing her eyes, she felt the warmth from the stove. Another reason she read romances instead of Madame Bovary was that they had happy endings—unlike many of her clients. After listening all day to reports of child abuse and wife beating, rape and incest, she was too tired for any more realism. She needed stories in which good guys got what they wanted—and bad guys what they deserved.
Standing up, she stretched and walked to the window, which had a panel of stained glass across the top. Cold seeped in around the caulking. Way down the lake the lights of town lent a faint aura to the night sky. Simon and Joanna were down there somewhere, doing whatever they did. They’d formed in her womb and clung to her skirts for years, and now they bounced checks, cooked quiches, played racquet ball, and conducted love affairs entirely without her assistance. She looked at the portraits on the wall of Nigel and Mona. She couldn’t so easily imagine their current state, though God knows she’d tried. Wherever they were, she hoped they too were managing all right without her.
She studied all four pictures, painted from photos by a man in town. Each child her product, yet each so distinct. Simon, good-looking and bossy, with the features and gestures of a father who vanished when he was one—the same fair hair and pale skin, the same arrogant tilt to his head and jut to his jaw. Nigel, a slight, wacky little boy in thick glasses who used to run down to the lake at dawn to skip stones, terrifying her when she found his bed empty. Once she sent the uniformed game warden down to find him, hoping it might frighten him into staying in bed in the future. He fell to his knees, raised clasped hands, and said, “Arrest me, sir!” Mona, pudgy and cuddlesome, friend to new children at school, savior to injured pets. She’d have grown up to be a mother, a nurse, a therapist, a social worker, burdened as she was with her mother’s sympathy for anything weak or injured. And Joanna, brisk and efficient as a little girl, the librarian when the kids played library, head nurse when they played hospital. A successful stockbroker now, president of the Lake Glass Business and Professional Women’s League, New Hampshire Businesswoman of the Year last year. The game warden once gave them an abandoned fawn. Joanna planned how to shelter and feed it, but it was Mona who nursed it with a baby bottle day after day.
As to how Hannah was managing without them—well, it certainly was different now in this perpetually neat and quiet house. She kept waiting for the empty nest syndrome to arrive, but so far it hadn’t. Occasionally she felt lonely, but it was easy to convert that into a sense of delicious solitude. She had only to recall the chaos of a house crammed with small children; the piles of laundry and dirty dishes and broken toys; the fights and blaring music. Of course during that raucous phase she maintained her sanity by reminding herself that one day soon they’d all be gone and she’d miss their mad chaos. That time arrived, much sooner than she’d imagined, and miss them she did. But not to the point of not savoring this sudden stillness, broken only by the snapping of the fire in the Franklin stove and the rustle of Arthur’s Wall Street Journal. That was probably the difference between her and some of the mothers who landed in her office. They felt frantic during the chaos, lost when it was over.
She strolled into the living room and fixed herself another martini in the antique pine dry sink that served as a bar, wondering if she drank too much. It was true that a night without a martini seemed to her like a birthday without a cake. But she never claimed to be an ascetic. She sat down on the leather couch across from Arthur, who smiled at her over his paper. He wore his favorite tattered green sweater with leather buttons and elbow patches, which made him look like Mr. Chips. She began sorting through that day’s clients. She tried to identify and detach from the emotions that swirled through her office so they didn’t distract her. Early in her career it had been tempting to regard them as real and to leap into the fray, but eventually she realized that the emotions clients sparked in her were important only as clues to the reactions they’d elicited from previous significant people in their lives. If she felt anger, probably that client was accustomed to inciting anger.
Ed, an engineering student with a double cowlick and lanky legs, had been in that afternoon. Gentle, whimsical, and attractive, he struck her as the kind of young man Nigel would have become. He talked about his sexual attraction to older women. She’d guessed this was coming and had felt the attraction too. These attractions tended to be fleeting. Apart from her devotion to Arthur, to lose interest she had only to think about how much training a young person would require. Training in physical lovemaking, since the enthusiasm of youth couldn’t compensate for the expertise of long experience. But especially training about what one could reasonably expect from another person, training about the space and freedoms you had to allow so as not to kill off the qualities that drew you to someone in the first place. She’d been through all this with Arthur—the frantic demands for proofs and declarations of devotion—in the course of learning to let love alone, to wax and to wane, to heave and shift and settle and heave again, without endless dreary dissection. Learning to come as close as possible for two people lodged in separate bodies, but then to accept the necessities of that separateness and move away, sadly perhaps but without rancor, knowing you were merely setting the stage for reenacting the pleasure of breaking down the separateness once again.
“How much older?” she asked Ed with a smile, teasing him to defuse the issue.
“A lot older.” He blushed and gazed at her.
Fuck you, kid, you just blew it, she thought. “Ed, let’s look at why you bring that up now….”
Sipping her martini, she considered Caroline’s wariness about transference. Quite right. They couldn’t just replace their parents with her as their magical protector. They had to find protection within themselves. But how to get them to switch from looking out to looking in? Transference was so delicious at first, like being in love.
Probably it was the same thing. At the time, in her grandmother’s house overlooking the Heath, she’d have said she was “in love” with Arthur. But in retrospect it certainly resembled the transference she felt later toward Maggie, and that many clients now seemed to feel toward herself. The same hunger for acceptance—and the same eventual fury at feeling such need, longing, and gratitude. After she and Arthur had been going at it for several weeks in her Victorian sleigh bed, she sat up one morning and announced, “You miserable bastard!”
“What?
” He rolled over, his brown hair scrambled, and opened his eyes in alarm.
“You’re going to leave me.”
“What?” He sat up, clutching the covers to his chest.
“Get out of here.”
“Huh?”
“I said go away.” She shoved him out of bed with her feet.
“What are you talking about? I love you.” He stood there on the cold oak floor, naked and vulnerable in the early morning light.
“Oh, do shut up!” She began sobbing.
“I have to return to America. But I’ll come back for you.” He climbed under the covers again.
As he tried to hold her, she swatted him over the head with the folded London Times, snarling, “Don’t bother. Just scram and get it over with.” She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth, thinking of her handsome father in Trinidad with his bright white teeth, thinking of Colin rotting in his mossy Belgian grave, thinking of her mother turned to dust in the Outback. Loving people wasn’t worth it.
Arthur did scram that day, but he came back—and kept coming back. God knows why, since she insisted on punishing him for the others who’d run out on her. Except that he always acknowledged she was the best piece of ass he’d ever had.
Stubbing out her cigarette and setting her martini on the end table, she called sweetly, “Arthur.” They’d had no further problems once they established that he made the big decisions, like whom America would go to war with, and she decided everything else. “Get over here.”
“I recognize that tone of voice,” said Arthur, lowering the Wall Street Journal. “I believe it’s my wild aboriginal rose.”
“Damn right,” she said, patting the couch beside her.
Standing outside her office door, hand resting on the doorjamb, Hannah closed her eyes and tried to regain her composure after an hour with a banker who’d been sodomizing his son. Doing therapy had gotten easier since her discovery that she wasn’t running the show. When she first started, fresh out of graduate school, she took notes, analyzed them in accordance with whichever theory had her in its grip, and plotted a course of action. Then, when clients failed to conform to her plans, she wanted to kill them. But over the years, as she struggled to make sense of Mona’s and Nigel’s deaths, she was forced to choose between cracking up and accepting that events occurred at their own pace and for reasons that were often opaque. You tried to learn from whatever happened, however little enthusiasm you might feel.
