Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  Arlene appeared to jump slightly. Her arms fell. Her back and head straightened. She smiled. Dusty appeared at her side, gesturing excitedly. They turned and left the office. Shortly they emerged from the building and walked to the VW, Dusty talking and gesturing, Arlene smiling. As they drove off, Caroline pulled a yellow Kleenex from Arlene’s box and tried to cry. But her tears wouldn’t flow. The next day she stole some pill bottles from the Mass General supply room. She lined them up on the dresser in her apartment and stared at them every morning, deciding whether to continue for another day. If she wasn’t parrot to Arlene’s Florence Nightingale, who was she? No one.

  As Hannah listened, elbow propped on chair arm, chin propped on fist, she examined the dynamics of the rejection, knowing she herself was next in line. Mummy, Pink Blanky, Marsha, Rorkie, Arlene, a couple of men, Diana…God knew who else. At some point, as Caroline continued to feel better, she’d try to get Hannah to reject her too, so she could move on, free of the dependency. Hannah wasn’t sure how. She herself had tried every trick in the book with Maggie—not showing up for appointments, going to another therapist in midstream, accusing Maggie of planning to retire.

  She tried to imagine Arlene’s version for some clues as to Caroline’s tactics: “I taught this kid everything I knew, and it still wasn’t enough. She kept hanging around. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted. She’d already landed a good job, was getting paid more than me. She kept implying I wasn’t doing enough…” Hannah had seen it time after time in couples therapy. The two people’s accounts of an event were scarcely recognizable. The husband thought he’d offered to take out the garbage, and the wife thought he’d criticized her housekeeping.

  “Did you get paid more than she?”

  “I guess so. I never thought about it.”

  “Wouldn’t it piss you off if some kid who’d worked for a few months was getting paid more than you, who’d worked for twenty-five years?”

  Caroline was startled by Hannah’s language. She talked like a barmaid, but in that fancy British accent. “But that wasn’t my fault.”

  “None of this is anybody’s fault. It’s just how the world works. People can be noble and generous, but we can also be petty. You’ve got to protect yourself from other people’s pettiness.”

  Caroline said nothing. Arlene jealous of her success? What a bizarre notion. Arlene was a big strong competent woman.

  “Do you see any parallels?” asked Hannah.

  “To what?”

  Hannah raised her eyebrows.

  “To my family?”

  Hannah smiled. Raised eyebrows had come to equal her family. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, Caroline was so responsive to subtle clues signaling approval. “How old were you when your brother was born?”

  “About four, I guess.” Nine months after her father’s return from the South Pacific, to be specific.

  “So you’ve begun walking, talking, growing teeth, using the toilet, going out to play, feeding and dressing yourself. And Mummy replaces you with a charming and helpless little baby. Must make you want to shed all your achievements as quick as you can.”

  Caroline frowned. That was what she’d felt, all right: that she wanted to be Arlene’s student again instead of a supervisor at Mass General. But had she felt this toward her mother? She couldn’t remember.

  “How do you feel about your brothers?”

  “I liked them a lot. Still do. I took care of them.” But according to her mother, a few days after Howard’s arrival home from the hospital, Caroline gathered all his clothes and toys into a pile and asked, “Can we take him back to the hospital now, Mommy?”

  “But I guess I was mean to them sometimes,” said Caroline. “I used to lynch Howard’s teddy bear. And let the air out of his bicycle tires so he couldn’t follow me.”

  Hannah laughed. “Well, it couldn’t have been easy, being expected to take care of someone who’d replaced you. After all, he meant more work and less attention for you. You’d be entitled to dislike him.” Each of her children turned into a total dingbat as the next arrived home from the hospital—wetting the bed, stammering, forgetting how to tie shoes, sucking thumbs, trying to nurse again. Poor little maniacs.

  “But I didn’t. I was crazy about Howard. Still am.”

  “Good,” said Hannah, watching one side of Caroline’s face contort into a grimace that contradicted her words. “And what’s just happened with Diana? Didn’t you say she’s been flirting with a new young woman? Just as you’re starting to feel happier and stronger?”

  Caroline gave a dazed smile and looked down at her fingernails. “I don’t know, it sounds farfetched to me.” But what had Diana said the other night? If you realize how neat you are, why would you want to be with me?

  “I agree.” Hannah still found it astonishing, even after all these years of helping clients excavate their patterns and of watching her own in operation. “If you felt a sexual attraction to Arlene, she probably felt it too,” said Hannah, trying to make the most of Caroline’s confusion. “And lots of heterosexuals are terrified of their homosexual impulses.”

  Caroline looked up from her study of her fingernails. “Are you saying everyone is homosexual?”

  “One of my clients used to say she was trisexual—she’d try anything sexual.” Hannah reflected that at various times she’d have fucked anything—trees, dogs, vegetables. It had a lot to do with hormones and very little to do with true love.

  Caroline was laughing. Then she stopped abruptly. Hannah was not only not respectable, she was downright kinky. Caroline studied her bare feet with bewilderment.

  “I think we’re all bisexual,” said Hannah, “and make choices based on social pressures and family dynamics.”

  “Choices?”

  “That’s what life is all about.”

  “Becoming a lesbian sure didn’t feel like a choice.” She studied Hannah in her natty blazer and gray flannel slacks. This respectable middle-aged lady was apparently acknowledging her own bisexuality. But had she felt desire for a woman so compelling that she couldn’t eat, sleep, or concentrate, so all-encompassing that when she dreamed it was of nothing but caressing a naked female body? As Caroline had in relation to both Clea and Diana. Hannah always looked calm and cool. Caroline tried to picture her face flushed from passion, her sharp blue eyes unfocused with desire. She realized with a jolt that she’d like to take Hannah to bed and make her care whether Caroline returned for her next appointment, make her feel sexual obsession so strongly she’d be compelled to doubt her own bland convictions about “choice.”

  Caroline lowered her eyes. Jesus. Hannah said Arlene would have felt Caroline’s attraction to her. Did this mean Hannah was aware of it too?

  “Caroline, do you understand you’re going to try to get me to reject you?” Sometimes just saying this was enough to subvert the compulsion. Other clients wouldn’t have been sidetracked by Armageddon.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because it’s what you’re used to, what you’re geared for. What you need in order to move on.”

  “But that’s about the last thing I want, and I thought it was all a question of choice,” Caroline threw out tauntingly.

  Hannah looked at her for a while, then smiled faintly. “Conscious choices aren’t always in agreement with unconscious ones. That’s why we’re trying to bring the unconscious ones out for an airing. To see if they’re what you really want.” She drew on her cigarette and flicked the ash into the hollow stone, reflecting that it was even more complicated than that.

  “Diana thinks you’ve put me up to dating Mr. Right,” said Caroline, to break the silence.

  “I don’t care whom or what you date.”

  “That’s what I told her.”

  “Does Mr. Right have a real name?”

  “Brian Stone.”

  Hannah nodded and said nothing. She’d done counseling with him and his wife while they were splitting. A nice man, dedicated to his profession, but remo
te and workaholic. Caroline was zeroing in on Daddy again, just like a homing pigeon. And no doubt about to shed Diana in the process.

  “And Diana’s not too pleased?”

  “Nope,” said Caroline with a grin. If Diana was coming around, she was certainly taking her time. She’d been out with Suzanne last night, coming home early in the morning to shower and change before leaving for work.

  “Whom do you want?”

  “I don’t know. Both maybe.” Caroline jutted out her jaw defiantly.

  Hannah smiled and gestured with her cigarette hand. “Be my guest.”

  Caroline looked at her. She didn’t really mean that. She talked a good liberal line, but she’d had the same husband for eighty-six years or something. However she sounded, she was a pillar of conventionality. If Caroline called her bluff and came on with her, she’d flip out.

  Hannah watched Caroline eyeing her speculatively. Asking her if she’d had a relationship with Arlene had probably put ideas in her head. Maybe that question was a mistake? She remembered her own horror at finding herself attracted to Maggie during therapy. She told herself it was disgusting, she a middle-aged mother and Maggie a grandmother. But the feelings kept coming. One day out of the blue Maggie asked, “Is it really so terrible to want to be close to someone you care about, Hannah?”

  “What?” asked Hannah warily, sitting on the couch in Maggie’s office studying the pattern of the wine and blue Oriental carpet.

  “Look, I know what you’re feeling for me, and it’s okay. It’s normal in therapy. It’s normal whenever people open themselves up to each other. Normal, and not very important. Just because we have the misfortune to live in a culture that says it’s abnormal doesn’t make it so.”

  Gradually the urgency faded, and the issue was never referred to again in the subsequent fifteen years of close friendship. Maggie had always gone for the jugular as a therapist. She claimed once in New York a man in a raincoat exposed himself to her on the street. She grabbed him by the arm, saying, “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t do anything with that.” And dragged him upstairs to her office for an hour of therapy. Being British, Hannah tended to operate with more guile. So she smiled pleasantly at Caroline and allowed her to exit, still in the grip of all those disturbing and revealing feelings.

  Caroline was walking down a sidewalk. In the grass sat a small boy holding a wild thrush. He tossed it into the air. The bird flapped its wings frantically. The boy held a string tied to its leg, with which he hauled it back in. Caroline walked over to him. “Is that your bird?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Trapped it.” He clutched it in one fist. She realized if she angered him, he’d tighten the fist.

  “Don’t you think you should let it go?”

  “Nope.”

  Caroline looked around for his parents, or a policeman.

  Hannah marched up and yelled, “Let that bird go, you little creep!”

  Startled, he did so, the bird’s leg trailing the string in flight. Hannah looked at Caroline with raised eyebrows.

  Sunlight on Caroline’s face prodded her awake like a cat’s paw. She tried to remember her dream. Which had left her feeling hopeful. Something about a bird. As she stretched, she realized she was getting middle-aged. For the past fifteen years she’d usually managed to wake up next to someone, but these days she actually preferred waking up alone. You could stretch without disturbing your bedmate. You could drift on the wind currents of your dreams without rolling into someone’s insistent earth-bound arms. You could feel the sunlight creep across your covers leaving patches of warmth, without having to put into words how billowy the clouds out the window looked, how blustery the wind that was shaking the window next to the loom. Waking up with someone was the ultimate in intimacy. She recalled people toward whom she’d felt, If you want sex with me, fine; but if you want to wake up next to me in the morning, forget it.

  Caroline could hear Suzanne and Diana giggling upstairs. She could be giggling with Brian right now, if she too had the ethics of a skunk. They’d gone for dinner last night to an old stone inn on the far side of town. As they walked in, across wide pine floorboards, Caroline spotted Hannah at a table in the corner, with a distinguished-looking man with thinning white hair. Hannah wore a tailored pinstriped suit with a skirt, and a coral silk blouse. She was leaning forward, smiling into the man’s eyes.

  Caroline gripped Brian’s arm convulsively. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I just saw someone I don’t want to talk to.” The tune “I Only Have Eyes for You” was running through her head. Only it wasn’t true. Hannah turned those dazzling blue eyes onto a host of other people. Caroline felt swamped with jealousy. This is ridiculous, she told herself as the hostess ushered them into another room, with a low ceiling, hand-hewn beams, and a huge stone fireplace with a mantel lined with pewter plates and tankards.

  As Caroline drank a Manhattan and chatted with Brian about his operations for that day, she reclaimed her composure. In the middle of a hysterectomy, she saw Hannah and the man walk past the window next to her table and over to Hannah’s copper-colored Mercury. The man unlocked her door and opened it. As Hannah turned to get in, he pinched her ass. She laughed and poked him in the ribs with her elbow. Caroline watched, outraged. How dare he demean her like that? How dare she enjoy it?

  “…if you don’t have ovaries, you don’t need a uterus,” Brian was saying, “so I take out the entire shooting match.”

  “I see,” said Caroline, intent on the departing Mercury. Marriage, that grotesque institution Caroline felt such contempt for, worked for

  Hannah and her husband. Caroline could see from their faces and gestures that they were happy. She sat in shocked disbelief, playing with the maraschino cherry in her drink.

  “…that way you don’t have to go back in again a few years later to remove a cancerous uterus.”

  “What?” asked Caroline. “Oh yes, I see.” She was thinking about her own marriage to Jackson. It had consisted almost entirely of waiting. Waiting around the phone hoping he’d return her calls, waiting for the boys to wake from their naps so she’d have someone to talk to, waiting with supper in the oven to see if he’d come home, waiting to go to sleep in case he showed up wanting a late-night meal, waiting in bed for him not to be too tired to make love, waiting in the soft gray light of the Newton dawn with her arms around a king-sized pillow for him to return home after dashing out in the middle of the night to an emergency, waiting for the man who’d courted her with such flair and enthusiasm to reemerge. She’d been an expert at waiting, until she couldn’t wait any longer and walked out.

  “What about you?” asked Brian, cutting his ham.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said what about you?” He raised a piece of meat to his mouth on his fork.

  “What about me?”

  “What was your day like?”

  “Fine, thanks. Nothing unusual.” She’d thought that was the nature of marriage. But Hannah’s marriage wasn’t like that.

  “Tell me about your ex-husband.”

  Thinking Brian must be telepathic, Caroline said, “There’s not much to tell. We met while I was working at Mass General. He was a resident. The usual: We dated, fucked, married, had kids, and divorced, in that order.” She poked at her butternut squash with her fork, recalling the first time she ever saw Jackson, at the ER admissions desk in his white lab coat and tie, dark hair falling into his eyes. He looked at her name tag and called her Miss Kelley, whisking around issuing orders with brisk efficiency. Absorbing his commands, Caroline thought to herself: It’s okay, I can handle this guy. As he strode away down the corridor, the nurse standing beside her said in a low voice, “I wonder if that man ever takes time out to eat pussy.”

  Caroline was at one of the many low points in her life. Without Arlene she had no magic. When the bloodied victims of car wrecks or knife fights rolled through the ER doors, she wanted to run the ot
her way. A young girl with meningitis died in her arms one morning at dawn. She didn’t know whom she’d been trying to kid passing herself off as a healer. She developed a rash all over her body and began lying around her darkened apartment missing work. Her colleagues started to notice her listless distraction and kept asking if she was all right. Night after night in her apartment, pill bottles lined up beside her, she watched on the evening news as one American city after another flared up in flames of racial frustration. Soon whites would be butchering blacks in the streets, the gutters clotted with blood. It wouldn’t end until the black race was extinct. It was summer, and after the news she’d lie on her carpet in a pool of sweat as through her open windows drifted noises from car crashes on Route 9, and the screams of muggers’ victims. But there was nothing she could do except eye those pill bottles.

  At the hospital Jackson and she nearly tripped over each other several times turning corners. Eventually he exchanged a sentence or two with her during such a collision. And late one night they sat on a stretcher outside an X-ray room and talked long enough for Caroline to learn he’d grown up in a tract house in Springfield, where his father worked in the Smith and Wesson factory, put himself through Tufts on scholarships and part-time jobs, lived alone in a Back Bay apartment. He looked startled to hear himself inviting her to dinner at Jimmy’s Harborside that weekend.

  As they ate clams casino, lobster, Caesar salad, and drank Chateau Lafitte, they looked out on the harbor, where gulls mewed and swooped among the masts of docked sailing yachts. Jackson talked about his plans to buy such a yacht someday. Caroline could see the fish market where she helped her father buy the catch of yesterday throughout her childhood. Soon she was so busy being courted that she had no time to watch cities go up in flames on Walter Cronkite….