Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  Lying in the dark waiting for sleep, Caroline pictured Diana’s scrambled red head between Suzanne’s legs, green eyes looking up past Suzanne’s breasts to her face to check out her response. Caroline fought to replace this image with Hannah and her shrug. But Hannah wouldn’t materialize.

  Oh well, happy New Year, she said to herself, moving her hand up under her nightgown. Caroline handed her bedraggled list to Hannah, saying, “I don’t know if you noticed, but I didn’t do it last month.” It had taken the past two days. She’d divided the adjectives in half a dozen ways—positive versus negative qualities, “male” versus “female,” opposites.

  “I noticed,” replied Hannah, sitting back in her desk chair and studying the list.

  “Were you angry?” Caroline sat down on the tweed couch.

  “I don’t feel angry very often, and certainly not over something like that.”

  “Disappointed?” Caroline asked, straining forward, feeling the tweed under her palms. If she couldn’t make Hannah want her to keep coming, if she couldn’t please her by doing assignments and telling jokes, maybe she could at least annoy her.

  Hannah looked up and studied Caroline, head tilted speculatively. “If an assignment is helpful and a client wants to do it, fine. If not, that’s also fine. I’m not a schoolteacher.”

  Caroline felt defeated as Hannah handed back the list without comment and lit a brown cigarette with a Bic lighter. Caroline sat back and looked out the window past the anemic ferns to Lake Glass, which had frozen solid during the holidays. The ice gleamed like an opaque mirror, whimsical designs etched into it by the runners of skates and iceboats. “Which category did you see when you told me to divide it into categories?” If nothing else, she could force Hannah to earn her fee.

  “The same one you saw. The qualities that are opposites. Generous and possessive. Kind and mean.”

  “Yeah, they pretty much cancel each other out.”

  “Do they?” Hannah held Nigel’s stone in her hand and studied the mica that lined the hollow.

  “Don’t they? Aloof and intense. Which one am I?”

  “You’re both. We all are. Being aloof doesn’t preclude being intense. And other people interpret what you do according to their own histories and how they’re feeling at the time. Next, why don’t you assign percentages to the qualities, to indicate how much of each describes you?” Getting a client to construct her own self-image was like trying to persuade her children as toddlers to build something with their blocks rather than hurling them around the room.

  Caroline grimaced.

  “What was that?”

  “I don’t know. A frown, I guess.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m sick of this fucking list.” Looking at Hannah, Caroline tore the list into tiny pieces, then tossed them into the air like confetti. As she watched the pieces flutter to the carpet, she was appalled. Clutching the tweed sofa cover, she waited for Hannah to ask her to leave, or at least to clean up the mess.

  Hannah watched the pieces settle on the rug like dandruff on a coat collar. It was always a relief when the stalled aggression began to ooze through the skin of docility, like pus from a lanced boil. “The cleaning lady will hate you.” Hannah glanced at her bark painting on the wall. Mimi spirits, with their hollow eyes and skeletal limbs, lived in rock ledges and came out only at night, to dance wildly, make love, and cavort across the Outback.

  Caroline glanced at the mimi spirit. “That thing’s really creepy.” She couldn’t believe her ears. If Hannah had it in here, it was probably important to her. And you don’t tell people things they cherish are creepy. What was happening to her? Ever since Christmas, her manners had been unraveling.

  “Do you think so? I like it. It’s Australian. I guess it reminds me of my origins.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What? Sorry you don’t like it?”

  “Sorry I said it was creepy.”

  Hannah gave a startled laugh. “But why shouldn’t you? Just because I like it is no reason for you to.” Hannah retained a perplexed smile. How did someone get so invested in placating others? “What do you want to talk about today?”

  Caroline studied the mess on the carpet. Apparently Hannah really didn’t care about the list. Or about Caroline’s calling her painting creepy. Or would she take it out on her later? “I’ve been thinking a lot about high school.”

  “What about it?”

  “About what a nightmare it was.”

  “Oh yes? Continue.” Hannah always listened to clients’ accounts of American high school life with fascination, probably the same fascination her mother felt observing aboriginal rites.

  Caroline talked about her clique, run by a girl named Melanie O—Rourke, who was called Rorkie. Hannah had noticed that the queens were usually known by their last names. The “Yankee” girls who rode horses and went to summer camp on Cape Cod had nicknames, like Cricket or Muffin or Crumpet. “Yankee” in England meant any American. “Yankee” to someone from the American South meant any nonsoutherner. “Yankee” here in New England meant someone from a Puritan family.

  Rorkie was a cheerleader, secretary of the student council, guard on the basketball team. Caroline was delineating the school pecking order—the Jewish intellectuals and activists, the Irish jocks and politicians, the Yankee socialites and do-gooders. “…Rorkie and I became friends in sixth-period study hall. I was thrilled when she started asking to borrow things—pencils, paper, class notes. Then she began to pass me notes with gossip about people in the study hall. Then she invited me to join the Girls’ League, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Mostly the Girls’ League staged slumber parties and dances. Rorkie decided whom the club would ostracize. Whenever she turned on someone, the club would go to that person’s house and strew toilet paper around the yard. Then at school the pariah would cry and ask why Rorkie hated her, and Rorkie would tell me, and I’d pass along the word. I don’t know what Rorkie saw in me.” Caroline was picturing Rorkie, who was Black Irish with dark hair, creamy skin, and green eyes. She sauntered in her tasseled Bass Weejuns rather than walked, a Mafia don, minions surrounding her like bodyguards.

  “Maybe she was scared of you because you weren’t completely under her thumb,” said Hannah, watching out the window as the orange Le Car drove past. If she rearranged her office, she wouldn’t have to see that vehicle.

  “I certainly wanted to be under her thumb,” said Caroline, running her hand through her Afro.

  “What stopped you?” Hannah tapped her cigarette ash into the hollow stone.

  “They were Irish. My father was Irish, but my mother was Yankee. My Boston Irish accent was pretty mild, and they thought I was stuck-up. At school I’d talk Boston for them, and at home I’d talk Yankee for my mother. I made good grades, and they were flunking. I was Episcopalian, and they were Catholic. I was going to college, and they were husband-hunting. I tried to conceal all this, but I guess I wasn’t too successful. The other girls put up with me because Rorkie made them. And Rorkie put up with me because…I don’t know why.” Caroline was feeling nauseated recalling the constant anxiety over what to do, say, and wear.

  “Because you were the only one who stood up to her,” said Hannah. Caroline was refusing to hear anything about her own strength of character. What about those aspects of herself that had faced down the Right-to-Lifers on the statehouse steps, that tore up lists and tossed them in the air, that told jokes that would have gotten a laugh from a corpse, that raised two sons single-handedly, that coped with death and mayhem every day of the workweek? It was bizarre to realize such a forceful woman saw herself as an outcast and a victim. Hannah almost laughed out loud, as Maggie once had at her during a strained patch in her marriage when she told Maggie she had to stay with Arthur because she needed someone to take care of her.

  “Because I helped her with her term papers,” Caroline was explaining. “Let her drive my parents’ car. Lent her money. She liked my house. There was a
recreation room in the basement where the Girls’ League had parties.”

  “So you did nice things for her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does this sound familiar?”

  “Does what?” asked Caroline, rubbing the bridge of her nose with two fingers.

  “You as servant and lackey.” Hannah was seeing Caroline as a child, waiting on her parents, representing their wishes to the other children.

  Caroline frowned. All these leaps backward and forward in time were so confusing. What did high school have to do with her family?

  “Are you aware of the oldest-daughter syndrome?”

  “It sounds like a disease.”

  Hannah smiled. “It is, in a way. The oldest girl in a family is often turned into a little mother for the other children. Sometimes she’s expected to mother her own mother. She goes out into the world and searches for the nurturing she didn’t get when she should have. But if she finds it, she doesn’t know how to accept it because it’s so unfamiliar.”

  Caroline was pinching the bridge of her nose. So she’d tended Howard and Tommy. So what? That was twenty years ago. “I’d have fit in with Rorkie’s crowd if I’d been on the basketball team…”

  Hannah raised her eyebrows. Maybe her assessment was too close for comfort?

  “…but my mother thought basketball was tacky. She insisted I be in the Junior Service Club instead, which raised money for college scholarships for Roxbury students. But I was really good at basketball. I’m sure I’d have been a varsity starter.”

  Hannah shrugged. “It’s not too late to be a basketball star. Why don’t you go out and hire a lot of short people?”

  Caroline gave a startled laugh.

  Hannah smiled. Caroline’s and her eyes locked. A charge of amusement flickered between them like heat lightning.

  Caroline dropped her eyes to the box of tissues on the chest. Hannah wasn’t taking her difficulties seriously. It had been painful to watch Rorkie and the others flock to the gym for basketball practice after school….

  She recalled she was complaining to someone who’d lost two children to carbon monoxide. You think you’ve got problems? Guilt washed over her as she looked at the toothless, towheaded children on Hannah’s bulletin board. But goddam it, she never asked to know about those little creeps.

  “Hannah, if you can’t cope,” Caroline said in a low voice, “I don’t want to know about it.”

  Hannah studied Caroline through narrowed eyes, trying to follow her train of thought. “But I can cope.” Usually, she added to herself. She shifted her gaze out the window to the “Club Sandwiches Not Seals” sticker on Caroline’s bumper, still in the dark about how they’d gotten from basketball to Hannah’s coping abilities. They sat silent for a long time, Hannah uncertain what was going on. Something about her joke, and that moment of contact afterwards, but what? When in doubt, ask, she finally decided.

  “What are you thinking, Caroline?”

  Feeling silly, Caroline said nothing.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, it seems ridiculous all of a sudden. People are starving and dying, and I’m moaning about basketball.”

  Hannah looked at her thoughtfully, in her white uniform with the ivory sea gull at her throat. Once a client got started, usually she wouldn’t shut up about the many injustices she’d endured. Caroline’s approach was refreshing, but was it therapy? “Your pain is as real as anyone else’s, however trivial the triggers seem. Don’t belittle it, or it’ll continue to kick you in the teeth.”

  Caroline sat looking perplexed and plucked at her ivory gull.

  “Just take my word for it. Basketball is important for now. I’m sorry if my joke made you think it wasn’t. So what happened with Rorkie?”

  Startled into cooperation by Hannah’s apology, Caroline struggled to recall. “One day at school I got this citizenship award, and the next night they rolled my yard with toilet paper. When I asked Rorkie why, she said my Christmas card had been too Protestant.” A snowman in a top hat, as Caroline recalled.

  “Probably she didn’t like competition as queen of the school.”

  “But that’s the only award I ever got.”

  “She didn’t get it, did she?”

  “I thought she’d be pleased for me.”

  “How quaint. Hitler had Germany. Why would he want France?” Hannah raised her eyebrows.

  “Hitler?”

  “Every group has its Hitler. Also its Jews.”

  Caroline sat in silence for a long time. Last week Hannah called her a scapegoat. Now she was on about Hitler and the Jews. What was she trying to say? Why didn’t she just say it?

  Caroline thought about the months after Rorkie ditched her, when she sat by herself in the lunchroom watching Rorkie and her pals in their madras Villager shirtwaists at their usual table as they carefully avoided looking at her. Mandy Carrigan now occupied Caroline’s former chair at Rorkie’s right hand, and got the privilege of bringing Rorkie her waxed half pint of milk from the cooler. It felt as though all Caroline’s internal organs had been removed, leaving a hollow shell of flesh that performed the activities expected of it by day, and that lay awake all night wishing for a careening Bunny Bread truck. If only there were some way to decline the Citizenship Award, or to have it awarded to Rorkie instead. If she wasn’t Eva Braun to Rorkie’s Hitler, who was she? No one.

  One morning she took Tommy to Jordan Marsh to buy his first jockstrap. Afterwards as they walked to the MTA station, they saw some SANE pickets in the Boston Common. A man in a clerical collar handed her some literature, which she read in her room when she got home. The human race had had it. Her personal grief over Rorkie was irrelevant. The world was about to end. Raging infernos would incinerate most living things. Whatever was left would sicken and die. The next weekend she returned to the Common and joined the pickets. It soon became clear she had a duty to humanity to go to nursing school. If she herself survived the firestorms, she could tend the maimed and scorched….

  As she smoked, Hannah gazed out to the bank of dirty snow on the far side of the parking lot. Why not rearrange this place? The couch could go where the desk was now, and the desk against the opposite wall so she could see the lake from her chair. Brilliant. Why hadn’t she thought of this fifteen years ago?

  “You’ll no doubt be pleased to hear I had a date with a man for New Year’s Eve,” said Caroline, shaking off the past.

  Hannah squelched her first response of “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell me how I feel.” “Since you know I don’t care about the sex of whom you date,” she said instead, “you must be pleased yourself?”

  Caroline shrugged. “At least Diana’s annoyed.”

  Hannah smiled. “For someone so intent on being a good girl, you certainly have your ways of getting even.”

  Caroline smiled. “I do, don’t I?”

  “So how did your date go?”

  “I ended up in the closet talking to a friend on the phone. I thought about calling you. But I figured you were probably out shooting it up.”

  “No, I was home. Asleep probably. This time of year is hard on me. My children died right around now.” It felt as though it was time to step up the Great Disillusionment.

  Caroline looked at her. She wasn’t crazy about knowing this. But Hannah did look pale and tired. Caroline felt an urge to cheer her up. She made tea for her mother, covered her with a blanket, turned on the opera, baby-sat her brothers. None of these were appropriate with Hannah. She told her mother amusing stories: “At the end of the evening I told Mr. Right I was queer.”

  “That must have enchanted him.”

  “I think it turns him on. He’s been phoning ever since, and dropping by to see me at work. I believe he thinks he’s going to save me.”

  “From what?”

  “From a lonely middle age.”

  “Do you think he is?”

  “The only thing I know for sure is that whenever I say, ‘I�
��ll never do that,’ it means I’m about to do it. So my answer is: I don’t know. But I doubt it.”

  Hannah laughed. She liked the quirky ways Caroline’s mind worked.

  Caroline was pleased by the way Hannah’s face had just relaxed and lit up.

  As the door closed behind Caroline, Hannah got up and went over to the tweed couch. Beyond the ferns in the window Lake Glass stretched out to the mountains on the horizon. Definitely a nicer view than the parking lot. She must have set things up this way in her more self-sacrificing days. View Therapy, or something.

  She lay down on the couch, head on a cushion, stocking feet on the couch arm, and acknowledged to herself that she had in fact felt a twinge of gratification at hearing Caroline had a date with a man. In theory and on principle she was impartial, but in practice she was constantly having her nose rubbed in her own assumptions: since she was happy, unhappy people should live as she did.

  How would she feel if Joanna were lesbian? Maybe she was. She’d certainly picked a gruesome series of young men so far, the most recent being a violinist with the Boston Symphony who was constantly in rehearsal or on tour. But she’d probably worry even more if Joanna were homosexual. It took so much energy to be unconventional in this culture. Her homosexual clients spent about half their time fending off or coming to terms with all the social disapproval.

  The receptionist buzzed her. Chip was here. The show must go on. She sat up, glancing out to Lake Glass, smooth and still under a steel gray sky. When she had a chance, she’d rearrange this place.