by Rona Jaffe
“I hate parties,” Margot said.
“How about lunch! Someplace corny and terrific, like the Rainbow Room.”
“With presents?”
“We’ll just have the four of us,” Ellen said. “You, me, Nikki, and Rachel. That’s just four presents.”
“Well, you do the calling,” Margot said. “I’m too busy.”
What a grouch Margot was lately, Ellen thought. You’d think a nice Christmas lunch with three friends was a big effort for her. “All right,” she said pleasantly. “What day? Let’s see, Christmas comes on a Thursday this year, so Wednesday they’ll shut the office early. It’s a short week and everybody always has to shop at the last minute, and there are all those office parties, so what about Friday the nineteenth?”
“It suits me,” Margot said. “I have nothing to do for the rest of my life.”
Nikki said the nineteenth was fine, and so did Rachel. Lawrence had to be away Thursday and Friday on business that week, so lunch with her friends would cheer her up. Rachel said she would make the reservation in her name at the Rainbow Room, which they all agreed was an inspired choice. So high in the sky, with the magical view that made the city look wonderful instead of the way they saw it every day, the aerie beloved of tourists and lovers.
“Would you believe,” said Rachel, “I’ve never been there?”
“Neither have I,” said Nikki. “Let’s make it early, twelve thirty, so we can get good and drunk.”
Each of them marked down December 19 in her appointment book. A festive pre-Christmas lunch, one decent thing to look forward to. And so, each was now going toward her destiny.
It had not occurred to Margot that anyone would find her recent behavior different, for the reason that she didn’t care what anyone else thought. It was hard for her to concentrate on people at all. She was in a deep state of what she could only describe as grief. At night she drank her vodka and took her sleeping pills, feeling as heavy and invisible as a black star in the galaxy, burned out, dead. In the mornings when her alarm rang she lay in bed for a long time wondering where she would find the courage to get up and face another day. Pain held her heart in a vise. It made her head ache and her breathing labored. Often she sighed deeply. She thought she must be the loneliest person in the world.
How could she ever go on? This year was coming to an end, another would start, and what would be different for her? She could hardly imagine struggling through the rest of this week in her pain, much less another whole year. She couldn’t remember when she had taken a vacation. Year after year she let the opportunities slip away, taking her vacation as vacation days, wasting time, because she never had any place to go or anyone to go with. She thought now of all the places she had wanted to see and never had because she had been working so hard. Kerry was taking Haviland to Paris for Christmas. He was rich now. His novel had been sold to paperback for two hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Margot had money saved, she could have gone to Paris, but who wanted to spend Christmas in Paris alone? Or Christmas anywhere alone? She didn’t miss Kerry at all any more, but she would always miss the happiness of those months when she really thought she would at last have someone to go somewhere wonderful with.
So long ago, when she was in college, she had spent two weeks with another girl on Cape Cod. After college she was too busy working and too poor to go anywhere. For a few years she had spent vacations with her family, until she found the difference between their idea of fun and hers insurmountable. She had been young then, she had wanted to be out, to dance, to laugh, to flirt. Now she felt like a robot. The smile, when it came, was automatic, forced. Two days she called in sick and didn’t go to work, but lying in bed immersed in this black grief was worse than facing people, so she returned. Always she carried within her this pain, irremediable. What could stop the anguish—a drug, an adventure, a love, death? She knew that if love came now she would be unable to accept it. How would she be able to see love or even kindness when everyone seemed at such a distance? She was apart from them even while they were face to face, speaking. The pain made her move slowly as if deep in thought. But her thoughts were empty, and sometimes she did not even think at all. Sometimes hours went by without her noticing, and other times she thought she had been sitting in the same place for an hour and it was only minutes.
She was never hungry any more, but she was very thirsty. It was from the sleeping pills and the liquor. She had two doctors now, and neither of them knew about the other. One gave her Seconal, the other Dalmane. Dalmane gave her a bitter taste the next day. They always made you pay, one way or the other.
She had not sent Christmas cards this year. Last year’s cards, enough left for this year, lay dusty on a shelf. She received cards and didn’t bother to open them. She merely glanced at the return address. She wasn’t even curious enough to open the ones with no return address on them. A voice inside her said that some of them might be invitations to parties where perhaps she might find someone who would change her life. But Margot knew that was no longer possible. She could not go to a party, and if she did she would find no one who could possibly want her the way she felt now. She longed only to die.
She never telephoned her friends any more. They assumed she was very busy. Ellen called sometimes to complain. Reuben still was with his wife, there was no one interesting in the office, and Jill was looking skinny again. On and on, blah blah. Margot let Ellen talk until she was spent, wondering what it must be like to be so self-absorbed that you didn’t even care if the person at the other end grunted or not.
Rachel called at the office inviting Margot to a small dinner, and Margot lied and said she was busy. It was all she could do to get home from work and crawl into her apartment, her hole. She hadn’t had the window washer for months, and the grime kept out the world. She kept her shutters closed, where before they had been open to the sun. Her plants, untended, unwatered, died. She let them lie there, stinking in their pots. Dust accumulated on everything. The cleaning woman had left, and Margot had not bothered to hire another. Every day she thought, Today I must find someone to clean up that mess. But, then, perhaps tomorrow she wouldn’t be here any more, she would have done it, taken the pills, finished this meaningless life.
She told herself her life had all been wasted. Nothing had worked out the way she had dreamed when she was young. But she knew it didn’t matter. What mattered was the loneliness. There was nothing worse than being all alone.
On Thursday night Margot counted out her pills. The phone rang and she let the service pick it up, as she usually did. Often she forgot to call her service for days, and they assumed she was away and picked up her phone on the first ring. She hadn’t paid them either. A pile of unpaid bills lay tossed on the cluttered dresser along with unopened mail and part of whatever she had worn and taken off recently. Her clothes were on the floor, on chairs, in the bathroom. For a while, in a better mood, she had briefly wondered what would happen when she ran out of things to wear, but now it wouldn’t matter any more. The landlord could stop sending her letters about the back rent and take his apartment. She had ten Seconals and twenty-five Dalmanes. The drugstore’s was the only bill Margot still paid; she was afraid they would cut her off. Now she was cutting them off, all of them.
For a moment she felt happy, if happiness was an absence of pain. She walked through the quiet apartment to the kitchen with the pills in her hand. Somewhere she had read that it was impossible to take so many pills, so you had to empty the capsules into some taste-disguising liquid like orange juice. She tried it with one Dalmane in a spoonful of juice. Not too bad.
She carefully opened the other Dalmane capsules and dumped them into a tall glass of orange juice, mixing them up carefully with a spoon so there wouldn’t be a useless lump at the bottom. She would take the Seconal in the normal way, to reassure herself that she really was doing this. She would get into bed first in case it worked too fast. She wanted to drift off to sleep, not fall on the floor.
She put on a clean nightgown. For a minute she thought she ought to write a note, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. What was the point of writing that she was so lonely she couldn’t go on any more? Who would care? Nobody wanted to be bothered with lonely people, they added nothing to life but guilt and gloom. Whoever found her would see the empty pill bottles and figure out soon enough what had happened. People killed themselves every day around Christmas. It was the disease of the season of joy.
In bed Margot drank down her ten Seconals with the glass of orange juice containing the twenty-four Dalmane capsules. Almost immediately she felt relaxed. Her door was carefully bolted, her phone was in the closet with the bell turned down, and she was safe. She could die in peace. She, who had never lived in peace, would at least have that.
It drifted through her mind that tomorrow was the Christmas lunch with Ellen and Rachel and Nikki. Tomorrow had seemed so far away that it didn’t exist. Now it wouldn’t, for her. Sleep came in a strange way, numbing, as if something had seized her. Her body felt so heavy that she couldn’t move. The pills took over, with their power, and Margot gave in to them, grateful that at last something was taking over the life she could no longer bear or control.
Jill and Stacey were making Christmas candles in milk cartons. You poured in the wax around the wick, and when it hardened you cut away the paper container. You could dye the melted wax and even scent it. They had decided to make some red ones, some green, and scent the red ones with cinnamon and the green ones with pine. The advantage of these candles, besides their being inexpensive and fun to make, was that you could give them to everyone indiscriminately, so no one felt favored or shortchanged. They were giving them to their parents and all their friends. Jill liked the idea of giving the candles to her mother, because it meant she would be able to keep them herself.
Ellen came into the kitchen to observe them. Jill didn’t like her mother breathing down her neck. “Oh, would you girls make three more for me to give as gifts?” she said.
“Oh, Mom,” Jill said, “this isn’t a store.”
“You don’t have to be so selfish,” her mother said.
“Sure, Mom,” Stacey said cheerfully. She would do anything to buy her mother’s love—a lot of good it ever did her.
“Thank you, Stacey. Jill, use a potholder.”
“I intend to.”
“If there’s a mess, I want you to clean it up. We have to eat on that table.”
“Who are you giving them to?” Jill asked.
“Margot, Nikki, and Rachel,” her mother said. “We’re having a pre-Christmas lunch tomorrow.”
“What were you going to give them if we hadn’t made the candles?”
“I bought them pomander balls at Bendel’s, but they cost too much, and now I can return them.”
“I bet we could go into business and sell these things,” Stacey said.
“Mom, why can’t we eat in the dining room tonight?” Jill said, annoyed. “Then we wouldn’t have to clean up anything until we’re done.”
“Because your father isn’t going to be home for dinner and it’s too much trouble for me to carry everything back and forth.”
“We’d help you,” Stacey said.
“Just do as I say,” her mother snapped.
“Ooh, she’s in some mood tonight,” Stacey said when Ellen had left the room. “What do you think’s bothering her?”
“Her boyfriend dumped her,” Jill said.
“You’re kidding! How do you know?”
“The good old telephone, how else?” Jill grinned. “She told Margot all about it. Also, he never calls, and the others used to after she ditched them.”
“She’s going to catch you some day,” Stacey said.
“Never. The telephone is like dope to her. She’s a phone junkie. When she gets attached to that thing an earthquake wouldn’t blow her off. She doesn’t know I’m on.”
“I don’t know why we can’t eat in the dining room,” Stacey said. “After all, we’re making three of these for her.”
“Parents have to be unreasonable to prove their power. Don’t you know that? If we gave in to reasonable requests they’d never be sure, would they?”
“You’re right,” Stacey said thoughtfully. “I never thought of that before, but you’re absolutely right.”
They cleaned up the kitchen in time for dinner, deciding to finish the rest of the candles another time. Their mother had picked up two barbecued chickens on the way from the office. The smell of them made Jill gag. Stacey ate with her customary enthusiasm, and Jill didn’t eat anything. She wondered why her mother wasn’t nagging her. This was indeed a most unusual event. Maybe her mother was so upset over the lost boyfriend that she didn’t notice, but Jill doubted it. She must have some other devious plan. Her mother was full of them.
After Stacey washed the dinner dishes she went into her room to do homework. Jill had no homework she couldn’t put off until another day, which was her usual attitude until the last minute, when she was stirred into a frantic burst of activity. She set up the ironing board and started ironing her jeans for school tomorrow. There was one thing she had to say for herself: she wasn’t sloppy. She washed her hair at least three times a week and she always wore neatly pressed clothes. Such rituals comforted her. She spent a great deal of time attending to her skin. When she’d started having periods she had been worried that she would start to have zits too, but her complexion was as clear as ever. Jill attributed this in part to the fact that she didn’t eat.
She was pleasantly lost in her own thoughts when her mother appeared in the kitchen. “Jill,” she said, “I have an idea.”
Jill knew that tone. It meant I have an idea you’ll hate.
“Rachel knows a lovely young boy I think you ought to meet,” her mother said. “His name is Andy. He’s nineteen, and he goes to college with her. He’s a freshman because he lost a year traveling. He seems like a very interesting person.”
“I don’t want to meet a boy,” Jill said.
“He’s very good-looking,” her mother went on. “He has long red hair and a moustache and a little beard. He’s thin, you ought to like that. I think you’d make an adorable couple.”
“I don’t want to be an adorable couple,” Jill said. She dug the iron into her jeans. Why didn’t her mother leave her alone? The thought of the boy was like a threat hanging over her. He was probably some young guy who wasn’t interested in her mother, so her mother wanted to keep him in the family. It wasn’t her job to keep young studs in the family. Boys made her nervous, especially any boy her mother might pick out. That was just too incestuous for words.
“I don’t see any harm if you just meet him,” her mother went on. “I’ll have Rachel give him your phone number. You just go out with him once and see what happens.”
“Kids my age don’t go out on dates,” Jill said. “We go in groups or we go steady. I don’t want a boyfriend.”
“You’re sixteen. It’s time. Do you want to be alone while all your friends are having fun?”
“I have friends and we have fun,” Jill said. She was getting sick to her stomach. Her mother seemed enormous, ballooning until she filled the whole kitchen with her presence. Go away. Oh, please, go away.
“Jill, why don’t you grow up?” Her mother’s voice was sharp and angry. “You can’t be an infant forever. You can’t deny that men are half of the human race. You have to go out. You might like him.”
Jill tried to shut out her mother’s persistent voice. She made noises in her head to drive the voice away, she thought of the words of songs, she imagined a train screaming through a long tunnel. She bent over her ironing, not looking at her mother, willing her to disappear.
“If you’d get interested in a nice boy instead of thinking about yourself all the time … perfectly nice boy … well recommended … what’s so horrible about going out with a nice boy?” The voice kept intruding on her inner defenses, poking at her, trying to tear into her. Ninete
en was too old. Any boy her mother would force on her was the wrong boy. Her mother wanted her to go to bed with a boy. What did her mother know about the way boys grabbed at you? Her mother didn’t have to go out alone with some horny stud, she didn’t know how boys behaved on dates. Her friends knew. You had to go to bed with a boy unless you were just friends. Why didn’t her mother shut up and leave her alone?
“Jill, you could answer me! You could look at me! Why are you so stubborn? All right, if you won’t decide, then I’ll decide for you. I’ll call Rachel right now.”
She wants me to be just like her, Jill thought. Terror and rage filled her. She had never known such rage, it was overwhelming. She took the first thing at hand, which was the iron she was holding, and threw it at her mother as hard as she could.
The hot iron hit her mother squarely on the side of the head. She fell instantly. On her cheek there was a triangular mark just beginning to redden, and from the corner of her mouth came a small trickle of blood. She was very still. Jill suddenly realized she was dead.
I’ve killed her, she thought. I killed her. She didn’t feel anything—not grief, not fear. The only thing Jill felt, unaccountably, for the first time, was hungry. She opened the refrigerator and took out a chicken leg and ate it.
He stood outside Rachel’s apartment building in the cold December darkness and waited. His patience was endless. He knew her husband was away tonight and she would be alone. The only problem left to overcome was how to get into her building without being seen by the doorman and thus perhaps later recognized. But he had figured that out too. It was the holiday season and there would be parties. If not tonight then surely tomorrow night, Friday. He had two chances. He would wait. His overcoat collar was turned up and his hands were in his pockets, but he was not cold. He simply wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible. He stood away from the bright street lights, near the bench next to the low stone wall that kept people from going into the park. If anyone noticed him they would think he was a bum or a mugger and would walk by him as quickly as possible, eyes averted. He watched the cabs and cars going by, and he had seen her come home earlier, swathed in fur, carrying gift-wrapped packages in a shopping bag. She had not left. She was there, upstairs.
