by Lisa Alther
A mile away they found Jason, shivering by a lamppost, shoeless, coatless, sucking a thumb. Caroline got out and hugged him. Then she squelched a wish to hit him for terrifying her.
As he climbed in the car, he asked, “Mommy, can we go back to our own house now? Grandpa and Grandma don’t like me.”
Caroline said nothing.
The route back to her parents’ house took them past her old high school again. Caroline glanced at the darkened hulking old building feeling dread. When she led Jason into the house, she was aware her parents were studying him critically. He was an ill-mannered little boy, and it was all her fault.
“What was that all about?” asked Caroline’s father of the sniffling Jason as Caroline rubbed his frozen toes. All Caroline wanted was to be alone in bed, lying as still as possible. A grave would be even better. She eyed a doorway and pictured herself hanging silently in it—from a noose.
Caroline sat up in the spool bed from her girlhood, suddenly wide awake, flesh burning. She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to recall what she’d been dreaming. Something about rowing in a leaking boat with Jackie and Jason in an effort to escape a nuclear fireball. The sun was white hot, and the water still as glass. They reached a beach, but every time the boat landed, a man in an ill-fitting army uniform pushed them back out to sea and threatened to split the hull with a bloody ax.
Wiping the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand, she tried to quell her anxiety. She used to lie in this bed and cover herself with Pink Blanky for protection. But where was her pink blanket when she really needed it? She was definitely losing it. She tried to remember where she’d put Hannah’s phone number. But she couldn’t call in the middle of the night. But by daybreak she wouldn’t need to call because either she’d feel better, or she’d have killed herself.
She tiptoed into Howard’s old room to be sure Jackie and Jason were still breathing. Kissing them, she inhaled their healthy boy smells. How often had she put everyone else’s interests ahead of theirs, she wondered. Leaving them long hours with unfamiliar babysitters while she worked late. Ignoring their requests for time and attention so she could save the world. Slaving for suffering humanity while her own sons suffered. She’d done the same to Diana—worked late, canceled dates, rushed out in the middle of intimate dinners, expecting her to understand that patients’ needs came first because she and Diana were blessed with such a rich love. But maybe Diana hadn’t understood. Maybe that was why she’d withdrawn. Maybe that’s why she called Caroline a taker. Maybe Suzanne put Diana ahead of suffering humanity. Caroline was a lousy mother, and an even worse lover. Diana was right to have left her. Her stomach clenched rhythmically like labor pains.
She remembered Hannah’s saying she was kind and gentle. But what did Hannah know? That was what she was being paid to say.
Climbing back into her bed, she struggled to picture Hannah, her quiet strength and composure. Her calm face, graying hair, and blue eyes. She gave an exaggerated version of Hannah’s shrug. It had worked last weekend to banish the woman miscarrying in the motel room. If she tried, she could rid herself of that vision of little Jason, barefoot and coatless, shivering all alone in the dark. She shrugged several more times, searching desperately for the state of mind that went with such a gesture.
• 6 •
Hannah’s feet hit the carpet next to Arthur’s and her four-poster bed. Grabbing her throat, she ran for the bedroom door. By the time she reached the living room, she was fully awake and able to stop herself from flinging open the door to Simon’s old room to shake him awake, as she had from time to time when he was a teenager. At least if storm troopers arrived to carry him off, he’d think it was just his crazy mother having her bad dream again. She remembered that Simon wasn’t even home. He and Joanna had come out on Christmas Day but had returned to their apartments in town after a turkey dinner.
Hannah sank into the leather couch and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. Drawing the smoke deep into her lungs, she closed her eyes and tried to relax into the cushions, which felt icy through her nightgown.
The dream came less often, but no less convincingly. In it, she awoke with a band of pain around her forehead. She staggered to the bathroom and vomited. On her way back to bed, thinking she had flu, she checked the children, as she had since they were infants, to be sure they were breathing. And Nigel and Mona weren’t. Their faces were cold to her frantic fingertips, and slightly blue in the moonlight. In disbelief she raced around throwing open windows. As frigid air howled through the house, she fainted. When she came to, she vomited on the Oriental carpet in the living room. She crawled to the phone, called the operator, and then passed out again.
She drew on her cigarette and exhaled. Slow suicide, these cigarettes. But smoking them, she could at least control her intake of poisonous fumes and die at her own chosen rate. The wind swirling off the lake was rattling the storm windows. She could hear waves slapping the gray rocks along the shoreline. She inhaled the fresh scent of the balsam tree in the corner, which was also dying quietly.
The town rescue squad arrived that night and rushed them to the emergency room at Lloyd Harris. From which only three of the five emerged on foot. A freak accident. Impossible, the furnace dealer said. An east wind had driven the exhaust down the chimney. The rescue squad left the door unlocked, and before Arthur could get home from his business trip to Des Moines, the antiques were stolen. She felt sure, life being the ongoing delight it was, one day in someone’s house she’d look into a corner and see her pine cupboard.
She could have—what? She began to review her responses in obsessive detail, trying to see how she might have prevented the outcome. She should have smelled the exhaust, should have gotten up sooner, should have had the furnace checked out for this possibility. How had she brought this on? What crime was she being punished for? She’d broken up Arthur’s first marriage. Mona and Nigel were a result of the breakup. Therefore, they had to be taken away from her….
She knew this was crazy, what clients came to her about. There had been a time when she’d have picked up the phone and called someone, as she now suggested clients do with her, had there been anyone to call. But she quickly realized she was stuck with this horror. Even Arthur—as much as he mourned the children, as often as he comforted her in the numb months that followed—hadn’t been there that night. Her friends and colleagues looked at her as though she were the Ancient Mariner, a rotting albatross cradled in her arms. When she tried to speak matter-of-factly of the accident, they looked embarrassed or pitying. Maggie came closest to hearing her out, poking at the wounds in her office at her house on Lake Glass. She forced Hannah to rehearse the events of that night time after time as though Hannah were a soldier with shell shock. “Describe what they looked like,” insisted Maggie from her tapestry-covered wing chair, thick glasses concealing her eyes. “How did their skin feel when you touched them?”
“What are you—some kind of bloody ghoul?”
“Tell me again about crawling to the phone, Hannah.”
“No! I won’t! Goddam you, Maggie!” At one point Hannah hurled the box of Kleenex at Maggie, who caught it and threw it back.
Once it was over, some of the horror had been depleted. But even Maggie had been ad libbing. Her three children were alive and well, called every week and came to visit on holidays.
Having no one to call wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling to Hannah. In the Hampstead house, with her mother in the grave and her father in Trinidad, she often woke from bad dreams and padded into her grandmother’s room to watch the old lady snore in her black eyeshade and ear plugs, longing to wake her up but afraid to. Loss and abandonment, guilt and terror. The same primal atmosphere her clients inhabited. Probably that was why she was such a good therapist.
Listening to the crashing waves, she tried to switch off her emotions. It was easier to silence them when she had to in order to perform her job. So she began to run through her clients from the previous week. Ed
, the engineering student, had found himself an older woman, since his campaign to seduce Hannah had failed. He was flaunting it, yawning and sprawling open-legged on the couch with coy remarks about how little sleep he was getting.
Hannah felt her tense mouth soften into the beginnings of a smile. Caroline was with her parents in Boston. She hadn’t phoned, so she must be getting along all right. Those parents of hers. To have a daughter like that and not dote on her. Her smile turned bitter as she realized Mona would have been only a few years younger than Caroline had she lived. Then she reminded herself that therapy was like a trial with only one witness. Caroline’s parents’ versions of what had gone on in that household would be entirely different, from Caroline’s and from each other’s. And they’d all be telling the truth—each his or her own individual truth. Hannah had been outraged the entire time Joanna was doing therapy by the scenario Joanna constructed from their shared past, which involved negligence Hannah had no memory of. Finally she accepted that this was how Joanna needed to make her break from home.
Well, there wasn’t any such thing as an adequate parent anyway. It was an impossible job. If their parents had been present, clients felt suffocated. If absent, clients felt deserted. How could one flawed mortal protect another from all the ghastly things this world dished out? She hadn’t been able to protect Mona and Nigel. Even if you could protect your children, you’d probably be doing them a disservice. She had a feeling this world wasn’t meant to be settled into like a comfortable old sofa; it was meant to be experienced, then discarded like an empty tin can.
She wondered if her clients had any idea how much she needed to see them become healthy happy adults, needed to know she was doing everything she could to help this happen. The process had been interrupted with Nigel and Mona, leaving her with all these thwarted instincts. It was like being pregnant with a dead fetus. Somehow you had to get it out. She’d tried to get pregnant shortly after that awful night, with the pathetic notion of replacing the irreplaceable, but it hadn’t worked. So she’d gotten her degrees and devoted herself to rearing other people’s grown children. Lately she’d begun to wonder how much longer it would take to work through this. Eventually she’d move on. But to what? Probably to an aluminum walker.
Sucking on her cigarette, she watched the tip flare and sputter in the dark. The wind whined through the cedars along the cliff. She was shivering. Squashing out the cigarette, she stood up and walked to the greenhouse window. The cold had etched an icy forest of prehistoric ferns on the panes. The pattern stood out in the moonlight like the rickshaw-pulling coolie on the lantern globe in that house on the Australian sheep station so many years earlier. Sitting on her mother’s lap playing with her gold wedding band, Hannah used to watch moths flutter around the candle flame that illuminated the coolie, watch them immolate themselves with a sickening odor. Her mother, Maggie, Mona and Nigel…Grief sliced through her like a scalpel.
Taking a trembling breath, she pressed her fingertips to the glass. If there was a design to frost crystals on window panes, she reminded herself resolutely, who was she to say there was none to human events, even if the shape wasn’t always detectable in the gloom?
Back in bed she wrapped herself around sleeping Arthur and waited for morning, pleased with herself for staving off the despair. Sometimes it took a pitcher of martinis and a nice slow screw.
Oh my God, thought Hannah as she looked at Caroline’s face in the waiting room. Numb and puffy, eyes squinting with pain. Back to square one. As they walked down the shadowy corridor, Caroline carrying her parka, Hannah observed the tightness in Caroline’s shoulders beneath her white uniform top and geared up for combat with Caroline’s devils.
Caroline sat on the couch in silence, examining the tread on her snowmobile boot with the fingers of one hand. From time to time she looked up and opened her mouth, but no words came out.
“Just say anything,” said Hannah. “It doesn’t have to make sense.” They continued to sit in silence. Hannah was seeing that little baby, hanging motionless in her jump seat, trying to be inoffensive by appearing nonexistent.
Finally Caroline looked up and said, “I’ve lost it. I felt good last week. But it’s gone.”
“You may have lost it, but you can get it back if you decide to.” Hannah realized she was grateful for her own bouts of despair like last night’s, if only to confirm that the techniques she offered clients could work.
“You make it sound as though I enjoy feeling bad.”
“Is that what you hear me saying?”
Caroline didn’t reply. She felt too shitty to play Hannah’s word games today. Added to her despair was a new element: terror, that Hannah would find out Caroline had come to depend on her, summoned her image and gestures to feel better when she woke up in an anxious sweat. Hannah would see her neediness and be repulsed. I know what you want and you can’t have it. Caroline couldn’t let her know how important she’d become to her. If she kept perfectly still and silent, Hannah wouldn’t be able to tell.
“So what happened in Boston? How did you lose it?”
Caroline sighed and folded her arms across her stomach. “It’s too boring.”
“You don’t look bored. You look like you’re in pain. How do you feel?”
Caroline looked at Hannah’s blue eyes and felt exhausted, her poker-playing expression slipping like a denture wearer’s upper plate coming unstuck. “Not too good.”
Hannah shrugged, sat back, and lit a cigarette. Okay, feel bad if you insist, kiddo. She waited, watching Caroline sit as motionless as a corpse, concentrating on maintaining her own sense of well-being, and willing it to communicate itself to Caroline. Sometimes she thought anything that got said in here was irrelevant. What she really had to offer was an attitude, which a client picked up, if at all, by osmosis.
Studying Caroline’s anguish, she concluded that parents and grown children should make a pact to stay out of each other’s lives. Let the parents retire to Fort Lauderdale and play shuffleboard. Let their children set up households and repeat their parents’ mistakes, until they developed enough understanding of the difficulties of being parents to forgive their own. She didn’t see much of Simon and Joanna anymore, even though they all lived along Lake Glass. They checked in regularly, but not for long. The tug of the past was too compelling.
Caroline started talking in a monotone about Christmas. Hannah heard another variation on what she already knew about Mother and Dad Kelley. Therapy reminded her of the bell tower at Christ Church, down the street from her grandmother’s house in Hampstead. On weekends carillonneurs rang the changes, their equivalent of piano scales, a slight variation on the basic pattern being introduced every few minutes.
She was left with the image of a humiliated little boy running barefoot through a winter night.
“Do you understand why what happened was so upsetting for you?”
“I was terrified something awful had happened to Jason.”
“And?”
“I thought my parents would think I was a bad mother to have raised such a rude child.”
“And?”
Caroline frowned and rubbed the bridge of her nose. These sessions were like a TV game show. When Caroline guessed the right answer, she’d hear an inaudible buzzer.
Hannah raised her eyebrows.
“How Jason felt was how I felt as a child in that household?” Caroline heard herself say.
Hannah pursed her lips. Bingo. “Did you?”
Caroline was stunned by what she’d just said. She had a happy privileged childhood.
“Take another look at those photos,” Hannah said.
Caroline sat in silence, gazing out the window to Lake Glass. Hannah felt a twinge of envy. Her clients got to see the lake. She got to see the parking lot. Was this any way to run an office?
“You’re entitled to feel pissed off, you know,” said Hannah. “I would have. Lousy gifts, not enough food, a houseful of loonies.”
“They’re
good people.”
“If you say so.” Caroline wouldn’t touch her anger with a ten-foot pole.
“They mean well.”
“But it’s not good enough, is it?” If Caroline wouldn’t get angry at her parents, maybe she’d get angry at Hannah.
“I realized I’ve treated Jackie and Jason like that all these years.”
“Whom did you learn it from?”
“I’ve been a terrible mother. I didn’t defend Jason—not over the gifts, or the food, or the broken game. I was only concerned with whether my parents would see me as a bad mother.”
“Rubbish. You’re doing beautifully.” Rather than face her parents’ imperfections, she was playing up her own. In these regions of the soul, all events were simultaneous: Caroline was at once the infant and the thirty-five-year-old mother.
“How would you know? All you know is what I tell you.”
“My friend, I pass many a delightful hour in here with child abusers. If child abuse is your ambition, I’m afraid you’re a dismal failure. Look, at least your son was able to run out of the house. He didn’t just hang there in his jump seat trying to be good. You must be doing something right.”
Caroline felt a flicker of gratitude. Hannah always insisted on seeing her failings as virtues. But it was just a technique. Having something to do with that Venus. Her eyes rested on the gray stone statue on the windowsill. She smiled wanly.
“What’s so funny?” asked Hannah.
Caroline nodded toward the statue. “Her expression is so calm and kind. I think I have Venus envy.”
Hannah gave a startled laugh. A touch of color had returned to Caroline’s cheeks. Still grinning, Hannah asked, “What do you suppose your parents get out of filling their house with loonies?” She knew the answer from observing herself at various times: They got to avoid contact with their own family, and they got to feel sane by comparison. But she wanted to find out how far Caroline had come.
