by Jim Harrison
I sat there staring at Shirley and Martha until Shirley waved her hand. I thought of our mothers and how none of them had lived very full lives after their children were well into high school. My own mother was the worst case but Martha’s was nothing to brag about. At least Shirley’s was devoted to bird-watching and the cultivation of roses.
Outside Los Balcones a crowd was gathering and we could hear music from the direction of the big cathedral. It was American jazz, and fairly good but at first jarring in this atmosphere like it is in Paris when you first hear it as you’re walking down Rue Buci at night. We went outside and were utterly dumbfounded to see that the jazz band was made up of old ladies in their sixties and seventies. A Mexican gentleman next to us who said he had graduated from the University of Kansas told us the ladies had been playing together since the late 1940s. We were enthralled and stood there for a full hour listening to versions of Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, and Miles Davis. Of course these grand old ladies made me want to imitate them but the music carried me far away from any jealousy and there in the Mexican night I had an inkling that I might be able to change my life.
We had a nightcap at the hotel and for a while were as merry as we often were back in college.
“I don’t want to go to Texas tomorrow,” Martha said, and we were abruptly back in the present. Shirley took one of Martha’s hands and I grasped the other as if we were three sisters.
Part III
Shirley
THAT MARTHA! WHAT CAN I SAY? WHEN WE WERE TEN OR earlier she would reach her hand through the fences of posh residences in Bloomfield Hills and pet the nastiest-looking guard dogs. Her own mother would say, “That Martha doesn’t have a lick of sense” which is putting it mildly. She never understood what some of us in social work call the “eighty-twenty rule” which means that about eighty percent of people are well intentioned, but the twenty percent that aren’t create a hell of a lot of trouble. She just smiles and leads with her chin. If she weren’t generally protected by money she would have been a goner far before now. Of course there’s the question of how any woman could protect herself from Daryl and the infinite depths of his insincerity. In Martha’s case, though, it didn’t help that her parents have always been out to lunch, her mother truly daffy and her father the most melancholy man I’ve ever known. His first love died in a car accident over near Dowagiac and Martha once told me that if this young woman hadn’t died, she, Martha, never would have been born. I had no idea what to say because this history professor I adored asked us to try to imagine what France would be like if millions of her young men hadn’t died in World War I and World War II. This professor liked to try to shake us out of our bourgeois comfort zone, or so he said.
It’s probably not helpful to go back to the accident of birth but sometimes I can’t help myself. A few years ago Hal took me along to an auto dealers’ conference out at Big Sky which is a resort in Montana. There were a lot of organized activities for the ladies such as golf, tennis, horseback riding, and swimming but three of us decided to take a drive without realizing that though all the road maps of states in the Rand McNally are the same size Montana is a vast place and the towns on the map are a long ways from each other. Our ignorance of this made us late for an awards banquet, which pissed off our husbands. Anyway, we saw actual cowboys when we had lunch in the bar north of Ennis and I’ve never seen men who look so misused by the weather. We drove through a pretty mining town called Virginia City and then in the afternoon on a small highway near Dillon we saw a peculiar thing that made us both laugh and think. Three cowboys were moving a herd of beautiful black cows from a pasture on one side of the highway to a pasture on the other. Two dogs were helping with the hundreds of cows. I was the first to notice that the old cowboy nearest our car was actually a woman who had to be in her sixties. God knows how she stayed on her horse wheeling back and forth across the road and into the ditch to keep the cows from escaping. We got out of the car to closely watch this performance and afterward Carrie, who’s from Grand Rapids, asked the woman if she could take her photo but the woman smiled and said a firm “No.” She said, “Sorry to slow you down” and rode off with the others. A bunch of the cows behind the fence stared at us and we stared back. One of the dogs came back and we petted it but then the old woman on her horse in the distance whistled loudly and the dog ran to her. We had all been afraid this woman would fall off when her horse twisted and turned on a dime and looked like it would bite a cow if it didn’t obey.
On the long way back to Big Sky we stopped for a drink even though we knew we were running late. Carrie said that our generation hadn’t watched westerns the way our mothers had. We watched Leave It to Beaver reruns and Happy Days while our mothers saw Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers so that they often thought they’d become cowgirls. I said we are what we are born to. The ranch near the cow pastures looked weather-beaten and not too prosperous and I imagined that maybe the woman had been born there. It certainly wasn’t an accident in a bad way that she came to live the life she did. Frankly, I thought it was wonderful but then I had no idea how hard her life might be. We laughed when Carrie said that she looked tougher than our husbands.
I was remembering and thinking about this when I awoke in the middle of the night when the electricity had failed during a violent thunderstorm that seemed lovely in my state of semi-sleep. Also, in a tree outside the window a group of birds that I knew were grackles would shriek back at every clap of thunder. I thought idly that they were like a Greek chorus yelling at God. In college I loved Euripides and still have the Lattimore editions. My affection for Walt Whitman sort of waned because it was hard to maintain this enthusiasm.
I stood up in the dark and took off my nightie running my hands over the sheen of sweat on my body. One thing about Daryl is that he sure was a technician of physical love. Once on a warm spring day we took a walk out on the Rose Lake natural area and slipped off a trail, where Daryl made love to me while I was bent over a stump. I loved the sheer beastliness of it all there in the pastel greenery. Hal just wants me to go down on him while Daryl always did more than reciprocate. Only in the act of love did he seem honest.
I rummaged in my purse hoping to find one of those airline shooters of vodka but when I found it I didn’t want a drink. I sat by the window and then suddenly the streetlights came back on. Just below the window I saw a very wet musician sleeping on a park bench hugging his cased guitar. He looked so fragile with shoes but no socks. Our Episcopalian minister used to talk about men and women and the Divine Plan but one has doubts. I witnessed fantastic states of love between some of the most wounded of my social-work clients but almost never except momentarily among my own social group. Everyone seems up for grabs in the wrong direction. Of course most of my clients were in desperate straits and desperately unhappy but I know one couple, the man a quadriplegic from Vietnam and the woman a paraplegic from diabetes, who lived in a motel room with a hot plate, tiny fridge, toaster oven, microwave, and television. She would lovingly feed him his Campbell’s alphabet soup or Mexican fiesta frozen dinner. As a joke they would sing love duets to me. The man would also sing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” adding, “but He dropped it” as a sarcastic embellishment. They thought this was very funny. I think of my dad up in that northern Michigan farmhouse with his brain dying but then he had already led a very full life. I remember being angry with him the summer of my eighteenth birthday when I was getting ready to move forty miles away to Ann Arbor. For my birthday he gave me a Subaru and only shrugged at my disappointment. Martha had her dad’s Jaguar sedan and Frances a nifty hot Mustang while I was stuck with a low-rent Subaru. It took months for me to figure out the car was appropriate but then I’m a slow study.
I never had much talent for anything in particular except for maybe understanding people. I was pleased when that Tufts group said that this was also an indicator of intelligence. Frankly, Martha and Frances don’t seem to notice much except what’s going on in their heads. F
or instance when I made love to Daryl so long ago in the university infirmary I knew what I was doing. My dad had warned me a number of times about men who were basically dishonest but at the same time I wanted to do something naughty and daring rather than just date those sexually whining Phi Delts who were always trying to shove your head toward their laps. So I did it in the hospital with Daryl not believing for a split second that I was relieving his sexual tension so he could write his Kierkegaard essay.
It’s like Martha and Frances want everything to be a pleasant blur. Nothing seems to go together in their lives. I tease them about defining their lives by their reactions to their husbands. I ask, What will you do if your husbands die or leave you? I mean, it’s obvious that there has to be more to your life than a husband and children. It was funny when my super-bright black secretary said she suddenly got married to follow the “biological imperative.” For twenty-seven years she hadn’t wanted a baby and then woke up one Thursday morning and wanted one, or so she said.
Now I’m thinking of the nuts and bolts of getting Martha off the hook. Having visited women’s prisons in my line of work I couldn’t see how one could do Martha any good. She’s not nearly tough enough. A lifetime in Bloomfield Hills does not prepare you for life outside of Bloomfield Hills unless you’re taking a trip to Palm Beach or Rancho Mirage or some such place.
Hal told me that everything depends on whomever is in charge of the prosecution and that we shouldn’t try to totally outgun the guy which might cause him to overprosecute out of pride. This was the calmer Hal talking a few weeks after he flipped the nude photo to me at our religious retreat. The bare-ass picture was scarcely something to pray about. It looked like an after-the-crime police photo with me sprawled on a sofa in the light of a floor lamp. Hal’s reaction puzzled me but then I eventually figured out it was part of the athletic culture. His laughter and “Miss Goody Two-shoes” jibe seemed to come out of left field but then it fit with his vengeance plans that I talked him out of with difficulty. His intended revenge consisted of hiring someone in New York City to waylay Daryl with a baseball bat. In other words I was an innocent victim of my glands and I needed to be protected with physical violence. After both of Daryl’s knees were “jellied” (Hal’s term) he would be unlikely to pursue me. Of course there are farcical elements here. There are unpleasant aspects to Hal but he’s not a parody. He went to the University of Michigan on a football scholarship from a small town on the Indiana border where his enormous father worked at the grain elevator. Hal was one of the few athletes in his class to graduate cumlaude. When I first met him as a sophomore I found his absolute desire for self-improvement endearing. Unfortunately, the ex-athlete thing can be irritating, sort of like many ex-marines. For instance, after two years Hal quit the honor of being on the Republican Senate Committee because all his colleagues did was talk. What did he expect? Should they have put on uniforms and thrown themselves against each other?
He worked so hard polishing his grammar and trying to learn the trade of a gentleman. His lapses came with anger or momentary inattention. Once at a tailgate party he said something ineptly anti-Semitic to Martha and rather than apologize he wrung his hands over the gaffe for weeks. His father is Yugoslav and his mother Polish with neither culture known for gentle tolerance.
I finally fell asleep in the chair and woke up cold at first light with the ceiling fan and air conditioner blowing on me so that I felt like I was camping out in northern Michigan. My father went through a brief camping phase when I was about ten but during our first trial runs Mother would take the car and head to the closest motel by midnight. Once up near Epoufette in the Upper Peninsula with Mother tucked away in a motel a little bear showed up at our campsite. It was strange to see my father frightened for the first time. He hugged me in my sleeping bag and yelled, “Go away, bear.” The bear nonchalantly crunched through a dozen eggs and then a package of bacon and walked off with a loaf of bread. That experience ended the camping phase though the thirty-year-old gear is still in the back corner of the garage.
When I finally got warm wrapped tightly in the bedclothes and was drifting off again into troubled sleep I was trapped by my usual nest of psychologisms. The three of us are only children who are pondering divorce and flying solo again now that our children are nearly grown. My two, Brad and Louise, are cool customers not overly troubled that they know their father had a fling with a young black woman who cleans cars at his dealership. Maybe it is because his affair didn’t threaten the stable home they desire though they’ve never defined this. Brad condescendingly said that his dad was just a “big boy.” When I found out and confronted Hal, waiting for him to unstiffen with two martinis, he blubbered, “I’m so sorry but I just wanted to have some fun.” I couldn’t think of anything to say but sat there across from him at the kitchen counter thinking that I’m no fun. “Serious Shirley,” as Frances used to tease. My daughter, Louise, actually implied that I wasn’t very sexy. She’s a pretty big rough-hewn girl of seventeen for whom we had to get counseling for sexual promiscuity when she was fourteen. Her actual excuse at the time was that she “just wanted to have fun.” We looked in vain with the psychiatrist for a deeper motive.
Martha, Frances, Shirley, perhaps lonely single children who found sisters in each other. With marriage maybe it’s simply easier being lonely by yourself than with someone. I get very tired what with my job and taking care of Hal who can’t fry an egg. He can boil water for instant coffee after a nap and that’s that. A friend of mine at work who married a second-generation Italian is in the same situation. They’re mamma’s boys. Hal’s mother FedExes him on our billing number boxes of pierogis which are similar to raviolis full of cheese. I boil them and on the plate cover them with melted butter and sour cream despite the fact that last year Hal had to have a stent put in his aorta. He has this for lunch on Saturdays. He’s still better than Martha’s husband who is the world’s most boring human.
A big part of the whole problem is that America pretends to be a classless society but this isn’t the least bit true. Rich people really don’t know poor people except maybe in small towns like Reed City, near my father’s farm. At college Hal used to refer to our groups as “swells,” an antique word he got from his father. Hal has this nerve-racking humility about his family which he refers to as lower-class. He used to introduce me as his “high-class wife” until I insisted that he stop. One of his huge brothers is a farm manager and the other works for the railroad. His mother in her sixties still cleans a doctor’s clinic at night for what she calls “pin money.” She won’t take a dime from Hal who does very well with his dealership. His father who is nearing seventy still carries two one-hundred-pound bags of oats at once when he’s loading a farmer’s pickup at the grain elevator. The question for me is how much anguish I have a right to cause by filing for a divorce? I saw a breathtaking amount of anguish when I was an ordinary caseworker so that now when I sit at my desk and read files I can re-create anguish in a split second. We went to a country-club dance last week and had more than a few drinks. On the way home Hal teased that if I had another affair to make sure the guy didn’t have a camera. “I couldn’t take it,” Hal said in our driveway.
I overslept because my travel alarm didn’t work and the girls woke me up with coffee. There wasn’t a great deal of time so we decided to have breakfast at the airport. Both Martha and Frances looked as though they’d slept badly. Martha opened the window so we could hear this guitarist singing a lovely lament. It was the same sockless man I had seen during the night on the park bench. I waved and dropped him a handful of ten-peso notes as did Frances. Martha was suddenly so distracted that she didn’t really notice what we were doing.
“Everyone wants me to say that I didn’t intend to kill Daryl but I did,” Martha quavered.
“Just say so and you’re headed for prison.” Frances was irritated. “You’ve seen those women’s prison movies on late-night television? I’m sure you have. Try to imagine being suff
ocated by a giant black lesbian, for Christ’s sake. Think of all the bad food and no vacations.”
Martha began sobbing and I told Frances to stop talking like that. “This is not the time to be naively honest,” I said, embracing Martha’s shaking body. “Men get away with beating up their wives and girlfriends. I’ve seen many horrifying cases of this. What you did to Daryl just made him sick. I bet he’s out of the hospital now and getting ready to write about the whole thing.”
“What was the motive for sending out the photos?” Frances grabbed the airline vodka shooter on the coffee table beside my purse, unscrewed it with difficulty, and drank it down in one gulp.
“Can’t you remember back in school when he said that fucking could be part of class warfare? He just wanted to punish us,” I insisted.
“Maybe that’s too simple but definitely part of it. Sex wasn’t just sex to Daryl. It wasn’t an idea he spread over his whole life. He never stopped arguing about everything with anyone at hand. I’m sure that when he was alone he conducted imaginary arguments. In San Francisco I took him out to meet a curator friend of mine at the de Young Museum. I was thinking about buying a couple of Pascin drawings and wanted her opinion. Anyway, within fifteen minutes Daryl had my curator friend crying over the idea that the drawings might be fake even though their provenance was perfectly in order. Later I called the curator and apologized saying that Daryl should be hosed down with lithium on waking every morning.”
