A Parallel Life

by Robin Beeman

  “Bill doesn’t eat seafood,” I said.

  “Oh, dear,” she said and gave me a look of true pity, her dark brows coming up, her full lips drawing together. I wished I could store that look, bottle it, preserve it in amber, for the time coming soon when I knew I’d really want it.

  Right around six o’clock two police officers strolled in and took away one of our patrons, a sweet-looking young man who had come before noon with one side of his face colored by livid bruises and an abrasion that suggested a skid over cement. He’d taken a chair in the music listening section, put on the headphones, and immediately passed out. He went quietly with only the most modest gestures of protest.

  As I was filling in the day’s final report forms, I got a call from Jack, who told me he had to see me the next day. He spoke in a whisper and I was sure he was calling from home. “I know I shouldn’t have laid all my problems on you,” he said, “but you’re the only person I can talk to right now. Listen, I’m going nuts. You don’t have to give me any advice. I just need someone to hear me.”

  “You told me already that you’re a confessor. I can’t absolve you of anything.”

  “I realize that, and I do feel guilty, you know—I want you to believe that. I’m filled with guilt. It’s worse than you know.”

  “I’m not sure I want to know too much more, Jack.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I’ll try to spare you. But I’ve got to talk to someone.”

  While I had only considered life in a convent, my sister, Maureen, had actually entered one right after high school at the time when nuns in droves were deserting. She stayed for several years until her small order disbanded because it could no longer support itself. Many of her sister nuns chose to find houses together to try to maintain a semblance of their old life with outside jobs, but at that point Maureen decided to leave for good. She joined an airline as a flight attendant almost as if it were the same sort of thing—a service job helping others on their way to some destination. She stayed on until she gained so much weight that the airline made her leave.

  Now she was an obese single woman working in the kitchen of a place that served free lunches to the hungry in downtown Los Angeles. Part of the job involved driving around and begging food from supermarkets and restaurants. Maureen was not only fat now, she could also be terribly smug about her life of good works. She and my mother were in my kitchen sitting on stools beside the counter when I got home. My mother was looking better than she had in months in a new pair of white duck slacks and a pouffy-sleeved green blouse that made her eyes bluer. Maureen had on one of her many muumuus. She had taken lately to wearing a large silver cross that hung between her breasts like a target.

  “I make a fantastic spaghetti sauce with ground turkey,” Maureen was saying to Bill as he browned hamburger and onion in a large skillet. “Do you have any idea how much damage hooved animals cause on this planet?”

  “It’s just a matter of taste,” he said. “I like the way hamburger tastes.” As always, Bill was mild and tolerant.

  “Well think of your health at least,” she said, giving me the merest nod of acknowledgment.

  “I’ll give up apples then,” he said, “if I have to give up something. They’re sure to contain toxic substances at some level.”

  “Don’t you ever cook?” said my mother to me as I put down my bag.

  “I cook on weekends.” I went to the stove and kissed Bill on the cheek.

  “I like to cook,” said Bill. “Ellen restores my faith in myself by eating anything I fix.”

  “I always did the cooking,” my mother said. “And I kept house. I could always find the table in my kitchen.”

  I made a dramatic show of sliding newspapers and books from the table to clear it and dropping them on the floor. “Voilà.”

  “And even though I cooked every meal, I managed to keep my figure,” she said, scowling at Maureen’s wide backside.

  Maureen acted as if she didn’t hear and pointedly pulled a hunk from the loaf of French bread, buttered it, and shoved it into her mouth.

  At dinner, Mandy and Amy did their job of diverting us by arguing which was really a better team, the Giants or the A’s. Amy was a Giants fan and Mandy rooted for the A’s. Each girl, with appalling seriousness, vehemently defended certain perfectly ineffable qualities inherent in each team. The rarified nature of the argument left my mother speechless. The rest of us more or less voted on various points by grunts or nods as we chewed. Maureen had refused Bill’s sauce in favor of butter and Parmesan cheese on her spaghetti, having failed to connect the existence of those two food items with hooved animals.

  “Mother’s praying the rosary, you know,” Maureen said as we cleared the dishes. My mother, Bill, and the girls were playing Scrabble in the living room. “I thought she’d given up on the faith.”

  “I don’t know that it means she hasn’t,” I said. “I know she’s stuck in the Sorrowful Mysteries. I’m not sure that’s a good sign.”

  “She still loves our father. I think she’s praying for him to come back.”

  Maureen and I had had this discussion ever since he left us. “I think you want him to come back,” I said. “I think you want the circle closed neatly. You want the ideal of the holy family reified.”

  “That’s not fair.” She’d brought over a two-liter bottle of red wine for dinner and we’d each had a couple of glasses. Now she sloshed some into a water glass and tilted it back. “I believe in the sanctity of the marriage vow.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” I said. “People say things in a ceremony with a lot of people looking on. It’s just some primitive legalistic form. It hasn’t anything more to do with life than a rental agreement. If the apartment suits you, you stay. If not, you look for another. You should know. You took a vow too—you were a bride of Christ—and look what happened to you.”

  “That was different. We were forced to disband.”

  “Well how do you think Jesus felt?”

  “What would you do if Bill did what our father did?” she asked, ignoring my last comment. Her neck was blotched red and the red was spreading to her face.

  “Bill’s very happy,” I said. I poured my own glass, but left it sitting there. “Bill’s not like our father.”

  “But you are, aren’t you?” she said. “You’re like Dad. I’ve always suspected you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I love Bill. I love my marriage.”

  “You’ve always defended Dad.”

  “His leaving made me unhappy, too,” I said. “I just thought I understood him.”

  Tears rose in her eyes and began to slide down the sides of her nose. “Oh, Maureen. Don’t still be miserable over that. It happened years ago—geologic periods ago.”

  “I can’t help it. I’m lonely and miserable and it’s all his fault. If they’d stayed together, I’d have trusted marriage and I wouldn’t be the way I am.” She let her head fall onto her folded arms and began to cry. Her shoulders heaved. The sounds of the sobs coming from her were terrible, big gulps like hiccups followed by choking.

  “Maureen, don’t do this.” I reached out and touched her shoulder and felt her quiver.

  She looked up, her eyes red, her mascara flowing in tiny dark channels down her cheeks. “We’re all empty inside. That’s what being human means. Only God can fill us up. I eat too much because I’ve got a hole inside of me that I can’t fill up in this world.”

  “My sister Maureen says that we’re all empty and that she eats too much to fill the hole inside her,” I said to Jack. We were back in the gray apartment. It was a sudden hot day and the leather couch stuck to the backs of my legs. “Does that make any sense?”

  He’d mixed me a vodka with tonic but he was drinking his vodka straight over ice. “It sounds like she’s been going to one of those groups where people talk about their feelings.”

  “I just thought it was interesting.”

  “Okay, it’s interesting. But I’ve got my own problems. I�
�m sorry your sister’s overweight.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I know things are rough for you and I wasn’t trying to diminish your problems.”

  “Everybody’s sorry.” He slammed down the drink and poured another. “You don’t have any idea what’s going on. You don’t know what my problems are. You have no idea.”

  “I realize that.”

  “She came home from the hospital yesterday. We sent the kids to her mother’s so we could be alone. She said she wanted to talk. Do you know what she wanted to talk about?”

  I didn’t say anything. I could think of several topics Roxie might have chosen. Jack tried to get the glass up to his lips, but his hand began to tremble. The glass slipped from his fingers. His eyes followed its descent with as much horror as if it had been a bomb. When it struck the floor and shattered, he looked truly puzzled, as if he couldn’t remember how the pieces of glass, the cubes of ice, the liquid had gotten there.

  I went to the kitchen for some paper towels. He followed me, stopped me at the sink, and turned me around, holding my arm so that I had to face him. “She wanted me to help her die,” he said. “Roxie had some idea that I could help her die.”

  “What do you mean?” There was a sudden buzzing inside my skull as if he’d touched a switch. His voice seemed to be coming from a distant planet and yet I could smell his breath, the onions he’d had for lunch before the vodka.

  “I wasn’t sure. I don’t think she was sure. She talked about me getting a gun for her—a pistol—or maybe a shotgun. She talked about how sometimes with a pistol you could miss, even if you held it in your mouth—miss and then be a vegetable but not dead. She talked about poison. I told her that I couldn’t even listen to her talk this way, that I hoped she wasn’t really serious. I begged her not to ask me to help her.”

  I held onto the counter as he tightened his grip. His right knee, the bad one, buckled, and he tilted like a toy. Using my arm, he pulled himself up. “She said that if I loved her, I’d put a pillow over her face. ‘I love you, Roxie,’ I told her, ‘I’ll be here for you. I’ll try to see that you don’t have any pain, but I can’t help you die.’ ” His fingers bit into my arm. He licked his lips.

  His eyes were having a hard time focusing, shifting from the memory inside his head to me standing in front of him. A twitch on the left side of his face followed each shift. “She turned away from me and looked at the wallpaper. It’s a print paper with roses all over the wall. Big fucking cabbage roses. We put the paper up together when we first moved into the house. She stared at the damn roses and wouldn’t look at me anymore, as if I wasn’t worth looking at. She just stared—all slumped over, and I knew I’d failed her again.”

  “Don’t Jack,” I whispered. “Don’t tell me any more.”

  “Shut up,” he said. His hand was a tourniquet on my arm. “I mean I’ve just failed her over and over and over. Finally, minutes later, she said, ‘It’s okay, Jack.’ The way she said it made my heart sink. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, dismissing me, you know, like one of the kids in her class who couldn’t ever get things right. ‘You do what you have to, Jack.’ ”

  “I don’t want to be here,” I said. I was sweating but beneath the sweat my skin was icy.

  “I understand, Ellen. But I need company now. I don’t want to be alone now.”

  “Go back to her Jack. Go back to Roxie.”

  “I can’t. Not now. She won’t have me now. I need to be with someone. You’re in this, too.”

  “No.” I shook my head and tore away from him and went to the living room and knelt by the broken glass. Gingerly, I began picking up the bright slivers, the shards. “No. I’m on the outside, Jack. I’m not in that part of your life, Jack. Did you forget that?”

  “She knows about you. You’re involved.”

  “If it hadn’t been me it would have been someone else, and you know it.” I had the pieces of glass resting in the palm of my hand. I got up and went to the wastebasket but he grabbed my wrist.

  “Do you know what she’s doing at this very moment?” he asked, holding my wrist so I couldn’t drop the glass. I swayed and shook my head. “She asked me to leave the house. She’s been saving pills. All this time in the hospital, they’ve been bringing her two pills, she only takes one and saves the other.”

  “Let me go.” I hadn’t meant to scream but I heard my voice echo back from the hard gray walls. I twisted away and the glass spun from my hand. His face looking into mine was fierce. Fierce and without recognition. His odd, almost pupilless eyes swam in their whites. His tan was like a filthy mask. He seemed to grow taller, become attentuated, and in an odd way almost purified by his rage. I ran out into the hall and down the steps onto the sidewalk where the sudden May sunlight wiped out the world.

  I forgot that I had a car. When I arrived at my mother’s apartment, I was shivering and my teeth were chattering. She let me in without a word and I fell onto her couch. “I’m sick,” I said. “You have to take care of me.”

  “What do you mean, you’re sick?” She frowned and stayed by the door, leaving it open as if there was a chance that I’d need to bolt as quickly as I’d come in.

  “I think I have some kind of flu. I just want to rest.”

  “You have a home, you know. Why aren’t you there?”

  “I’m shivering, Mother. Let me stay here.”

  She stayed by the door keeping her distance from me. “I just put fresh sheets on my bed. Go on in there.”

  Her eyes had gone to my skirt. “You’re bleeding,” she said.

  I looked down and saw that there was a cut in the palm of my hand. Streaks of blood smeared across my skirt. “It’s just a little cut,” I said. “Broken glass.”

  I stayed in her bed sliding in and out of sleep. Perhaps I really did have a flu. From time to time outside of the door I heard voices. Bill came in and sat by me, and then a doctor, a friend he played tennis with, arrived to examine me. The girls whispered to me and left and came back with flowers they’d picked. My father came in and held my hand, which someone had bandaged. My mother was sitting beside me when I opened my eyes the next time. Then I slept.

  My mother had a cup of tea on a tray on the bedside table. I pulled myself up and let her arrange pillows so I could sit. Her face looked different. There was an odd lopsided smile now. A single lamp on the nightstand lit the room. Beyond the curtains, a street light created a false moon. I was a little girl again. I’d returned home after a long time. I could remember another life in between then and now but it seemed blurred like a scene glimpsed through the window of a racing train.

  “Your father and I are having lunch together tomorrow,” she said, bending over me with the tray.

  “Oh, Mother,” I said. I must have wailed or moaned the words, because she stood up and gave me a disturbed, frightened look. “Mother, don’t get led into all of that stuff again. He’s not going to change. Don’t get your hopes up,” I said.

  She continued to stand there with the tray in her hand but her face relaxed, and the smile—lopsided and guileless, amazingly guileless—returned. “I know that. I’m not expecting miracles. It will just be nice to talk to him again after all these years. We’re not married anymore.”

  “As long as you understand that,” I said. I let her place the tray on my lap. The tea was strong and bitter. There was a piece of toast too and I ate that with her standing beside the bed watching my every bite.

  “Do you want me to roll the television in here and we could watch together?” she asked when I’d finished.

  “No. I think I’ll rest again.” I was as exhausted from eating as if I’d climbed a mountain. She left the door slightly open and I heard the sound of television voices and then the theme of the late news show and then voices again and finally the weather for the next day, then quiet. I must have slept again but I woke to the sound of my mother’s voice—chanting, rhythmic, rising, and falling—and I recognized the words. She was saying the rosary.

  “Are you s
till on the Sorrowful Mysteries?” I asked when she came in later.

  “Yes,” she said, “but I see the possibility of moving on to the Joyful now.”

  “And from there to the Glorious?”

  “I don’t believe in rushing things,” she said and closed the door.

  My mother is a better person than I had believed. She has allowed my father to make peace with her. They’ve had lunch twice now, and although I know they will never be together again, they appear to have rediscovered something in the other that had been mislaid. Some kinds of change, it seems, are possible after all.

  On the morning I went back to work, I read the obituary for Roxanne Muller Duggan. She was forty-one years old. There would be no service. Donations could be made in her memory to the Walnut Grove Science Education Program.

  That same morning, I talked to Ben Michaelson and we agreed to exchange shifts so that he could take classes in the afternoon. I would lunch from noon to one and be home when Bill returned. Then I went to Section 635—Gardening—and gathered a stack of books for my book sack.

  On my lunch break I took a walk along the creek in a nearby park. It was one of those sun-choked late-May days, somnolent with a sense of spring fulfilled, that grants its own form of grace. I am sure that it had never occurred to Bill that I might have another life, and I have decided that he must not find out. I hope for the best. We don’t need to know everything.

  Solstice

  IT WAS THE DAY the Murphy’s Shetland pony Fiesta broke down Tilly Worth’s garden fence and ate all the Kentucky Wonders as well as the marijuana plants Tilly grew to supplement her Social Security, the day Walt Tarver found two women making love in his barn, and the day the Polonius brothers’ compost pile caught fire and the fire truck broke an axle on the road up to put it out. It was the loveliest day of the year, the longest sweetest day, the day when summer is still a new idea, and it was the day Rita Tooley wound up with two lovers and couldn’t make up her mind.

  Neither of the men was perfect. But Rita wasn’t the sort to mind. She bought her clothes in the flea market, and she fastened her ideas together with the happy glue of coincidence. She liked cups with chips, and men with flaws. Rita was beautiful but no beauty. She was small and a bit heavy. Her hair was abundant but wild, and her smile wide but off center. Her eyes were innocent of meaness and she cooked like an angel.