by Ann Packer
“Greedy?” Liz had said. “It seems pretty normal to me.”
Up on stage, the man in the dark suit had been joined by a second man in a dark suit. The first man had been talking for quite some time, and while Sarabeth had missed most of it, she had an impression of confusion. From Mrs. Dalloway she remembered insane Septimus Smith sitting on a park bench and thinking he heard an important communication in the roar of an airplane passing overhead. The idea of hearing something unreal had always terrified her.
“It shall be the end of me,” said the second man angrily.
“They said they would come,” said the first man. “I believe they will come.”
And two more people did come, another man in a dark suit and a woman in a long, droopy dress and spinster shoes. Virginia Woolf at last. Stones in her pockets, madness…As a child, Sarabeth had thought “madness” was a word for unmerciful rage.
You can’t even get mad, Billy had said, toward the end. Has it occurred to you that you’re angry at me?
They were in an unpleasant therapy-speakish few months, where, as at the beginning, they had to have sex as soon as Billy arrived at her house—now because if they waited they’d devolve into weepiness and cajoling. Shortly before the end, he showed up late one Wednesday night and said in a tone of the deepest misery: I can’t do this anymore. He didn’t mean cheat on his wife; he meant tolerate Sarabeth’s unhappiness.
“We are you,” Virginia Woolf was saying to one of the dark-suited men.
Sarabeth had to leave. She caught Nina’s eye and tapped her forehead by way of explanation, then half stood and sidestepped past dentist Karen.
Losing Billy had ruined her. Or maybe it was being with him that had ruined her. Why had it happened? Why had she had coffee with an obviously married man? Why had she sat on the curb in front of the Berkeley Bowl with an obviously married man? Why had an obviously married man talked to her at the heirloom tomatoes?
Because you were so pretty, he said once. And you looked so sad. I wanted to make you laugh.
In her car, five blocks from his house, Sarabeth cried. Sad won him and sad lost him, and through it all time passed. She was on the down-slide to fifty, and she was alone, alone. What had been happening, up on the stage? What had Miranda been saying? We are you. Flaubert had said it first, but maybe it bore repeating. Mad Septimus Smith and all the characters in all of literature, Anna, Levin, Vronsky: they were their makers, painful parts of their makers. Made to bear too much, but known.
Across the bay was Liz, who truly knew Sarabeth. Thanksgiving was six days away. Sarabeth’s own makers were long gone, and whether or not they had ever known her was a moot question because they didn’t know her now: her mother had been dead and gone for decades, her father dead for years and long gone before that. Gone, too, was her lover, the love of her life, and oh, she had loved him so, his kindness, his focus, his lightness—maybe his lightness most of all, the way his self, mind, soul, essence, whatever could move about so easily, his body moving easily through her house, not as if entitled but as if free, that was it, he was so free. So much was gone, but still Sarabeth had Liz.
The weekend crept by. She called Liz a few times, but there was no answer, and she didn’t have the heart, or maybe the energy, to leave a message. She canceled a Saturday afternoon shopping date with Jim and Donald and instead moped around the house. She wished she were the type of person who could rent a slew of movies, or eat massive amounts of sugar, or take soothing aromatherapy baths when she was unhappy, but it seemed she could only feel unhappy, one minute at a time. Billy, and her loss of him. It was so hard to find someone you actually liked, someone you loved: Why had she let it go? Why hadn’t she tried harder? She had suggested this to him, one of their last times together—I could try harder—and it was the one time she saw him cry. He cried like a man, just the liquid eyes and nothing else.
Sunday morning she almost threw it off. She woke to rain, the thip, thip, thip of it as it hit the ground outside her bedroom window, and she burrowed under her covers and for a moment thought that to fall back asleep on a Sunday morning in late autumn when it was raining was a minor pleasure of a certain, specific order, like the pleasure of the first bare-legged day of spring, when you’d just shaved your legs, or the pleasure of a spoonful of peach sorbet at the height of summer.
Peach sorbet reminded her of Billy, though, and she couldn’t get back to sleep. She stayed in bed for another hour and a half and then got up and crept into the kitchen, to the miniature but somehow engulfing work of making tea.
It was during phases like this that the disrepair of her house most bothered her. In the late morning she spent a despairing half hour contemplating the horror that was her bathroom—not just the water-ruined windowsill in the shower but also the filthy radiator and the bug-filled light fixture and the incredibly ugly aqua tiles, any number of which were chipped. She could distinguish between the radiator and the light fixture (both of which could be cleaned, theoretically) and the windowsill and the tiles (neither of which could be repaired without a great deal of money and trouble), but she was powerless to take on either kind of problem.
All afternoon she avoided her living room window so as not to have to see the lit-up inside of the Heidts’ house and their Sunday company. Toward dusk she returned to the bathroom and ran water for a bath. While the tub filled, she fingered the abalone shell that rested on the glass shelf above her sink. Billy had brought it to her from Tahiti; its color was the shimmery blue-green of the ocean when the sun was low. Their reunion after that trip had marked what was in retrospect the beginning of the end. He’d had a glorious time. The boys had spent hours every day in the water and had come back with their dark hair blond and their pale skin deeply tanned. To Sarabeth it was excruciating.
She began to undress, and the phone rang. She stepped out of the bathroom and looked at her answering machine. She knew she needed to get outside herself, but how, when it was she who was keeping herself in? Nina had called three times, but she hadn’t answered, hadn’t responded to the increasing concern in Nina’s solicitous messages; and the apologetic e-mail she’d sent Miranda had brought a concerned call to which she had not responded either.
Her outgoing message finished playing, and the answering machine beeped.
“Uh, Sarabeth,” said a man’s voice. “Liz wanted me to call you because, uh, this is Brody, Brody Mackay, and Liz wanted me to call you because something’s happened, and—” He sighed, and, staring at the phone, Sarabeth trembled.
“Lauren tried to hurt herself. She did hurt herself. She’s in the hospital, and Liz wanted me to let you know. Thanks, bye.”
Something was terribly wrong in the physical world—it was as if Sarabeth’s house had turned sideways. She reached for a chair and sank onto it. Lauren tried to hurt herself, she did hurt herself. What did that mean? It had to mean what she thought it meant, but it couldn’t mean what she thought it meant, because that couldn’t have happened. Sarabeth’s heartbeat was crazy—it wasn’t so much fast as incredibly loud. Lauren couldn’t have done that. Done what, though? She didn’t know what Lauren had done. She needed to call and ask.
But: Liz wanted me to let you know.
Why hadn’t Liz called? The house turned sideways again, and Sarabeth ran into her bedroom and dove onto the bed. She put her fist to her mouth and gnawed at her knuckles and sobbed. She had to go to Liz right now, but she didn’t know if she could.
She had to, though. She kicked off her sweatpants and pulled on jeans. If she was going to drive across the bay she needed to eat, and she ran (why was she running?) into the kitchen and grabbed a bag of rice cakes. At the front door, though, she stopped, overtaken by dread. In seconds she was back on her bed.
She reached for the phone, then hung up at the sound of the dial tone. She should be in her car already. She should be approaching the freeway. If she went right now she could make up for the time she had lost. But went where? Where was Liz? What she needed was
to call Brody back and ask for more information. But would he be home? Wouldn’t he be with Liz, wherever she was? And if they were together, why hadn’t Liz placed the call? This again, insistent now: why hadn’t Liz placed the call?
Because she couldn’t.
Sarabeth felt a wave of dizziness. She sat up, then quickly lay down again, her heart hammering. She could not see Liz that upset. She couldn’t. This isn’t about you! she screamed at herself, but terror came down over her anyway, and she gave herself up to it, trembling, panicked, paralyzed.
12
Sunday night was the first night Liz and Brody were both home at bedtime. She rummaged through her dresser, past her pajamas, until she found what she hadn’t known she was seeking: her old gray knit pants from the Allen Allen catalog, so worn that the so-called cotton cashmere was as pilled as real cashmere, and the seat and knees ballooned. She pulled them on, then found a ragged T-shirt for a top.
She got into bed next to Brody. Joe had gone up early, pleading homework; he’d been asleep when she went to say goodnight.
Brody turned off the light and rolled to face her. She lay still, letting the darkness settle, letting herself settle into the darkness. The exterior walls of the house felt too far away, and then, after a while, not quite so far. Brody put a hand on her shoulder, and she tried to force herself to relax. She would not make love, but she could be touched. And she could touch. She reached for his hand and held it. “I’m—”
“Shhh,” he said, “don’t,” and she withdrew her hand and turned away.
“It’s just,” he said, but then he fell silent, and she waited for more. After a while it was clear there would be no more, and she tried unsuccessfully to remember what she’d been going to say, but it had been replaced by anger.
“Sorry,” he said at last, and she waited for herself to soften, face him again, stroke his cheek. She didn’t.
“Sorry about what?” she said coldly.
“Never mind.”
“What?”
“That I don’t want to talk.”
“Who’s talking?”
“Liz.”
They were side by side, both on their backs, cold as corpses. She felt herself exhale heavily. He touched her hand, and in a second she was on top of him, pressing her mouth against his, straddling his leg and rubbing herself against his thigh until in almost no time she was about to come. She was incredibly aroused, gaping, half an inch from a firestorm. “Oh, God,” she cried, and she felt for his penis, but it was completely limp, and she let go. She ground herself against his leg again, and then she came with a loud, sighing groan.
She lay where she was, half on top of him, panting. “Sorry,” she said.
He stroked her back. “It’s OK.”
She reached for his penis again, but he caught her hand and held it away, and she moved off him and faced the wall. Outside, a tree branch scraped against the house, driven by the wind. She felt sticky, and not just between her legs. Had she showered today? She remembered combing her wet hair in front of the TV and the 49ers had been on, so evidently she had. Before leaving the hospital to come home, she’d asked Brody to call Sarabeth, but she’d forgotten to ask, when she returned, if he had done so. Obviously not.
Lauren’s liver was going to be OK, but Lauren—Lauren was not OK. Dr. Porter, the psychiatrist in charge, had said that she’d consider releasing her to Liz and Brody’s care, but she strongly recommended Lauren be admitted to the adolescent psych ward instead.
“For how long?” Liz had cried, and Dr. Porter had pulled her glasses from her nose and said, “Until she’s less of a danger to herself.”
At night the hospital was full of secrets, but in the morning the secrets were gone and it was just busy. Lauren wasn’t scared anymore, or she was scared in a different way, of the terrible real things that would happen rather than the terrible unreal things that wouldn’t. She would not be attacked in the dark. She would not suffocate in her sleep. But she would leave this room, in a few hours, and with school going on, going on without her, she would go to a place where there were crazy people.
In her peripheral vision she saw the woman whose job it was to watch her. The woman had a magazine, but Lauren didn’t want to turn her head to see if she was reading it. She didn’t want to look at her at all.
The woman was a “sitter.” It was hospital policy that someone watch Lauren to make sure she didn’t try to off herself, which was ridiculous because she wouldn’t do that in a million years.
Girls burning themselves with lit cigarettes, boys pacing the halls and thinking they were God. It was going to be a nightmare. She’d have a roommate who’d probably sneak some guy in and fuck him while Lauren lay awake in the next bed, and some bitch of a nurse would dole out pills in little paper cups. And school would go on without her; it would go on and on.
She needed to get back—before people found out. She could say she’d gone on a business trip with her dad. Or she could say she’d had…pneumonia. Only how completely idiotic was that when she hadn’t even had a cold? She remembered math, Aimee Berman telling Mr. Pavlovich that she didn’t know the answer, Jeff at the water fountain, Jeff smirking. And then Thursday night at home, lying awake, thinking about…
He hadn’t meant it, the smirk—hadn’t meant that he knew everything about her feelings and found her and them disgusting. She blew everything out of proportion. Here, now, in the hospital: she was mortified. She’d heard there was an operation you could have to make you sweat less; was there one to make you blush less? Couldn’t someone sever some nerves? At once her wrists hurt, and she looked down at them, lying at her sides, wrapped in white bandages. It was almost as if they weren’t hers, except they hurt. At least she didn’t have to drink the stuff anymore. It had been so disgusting, thick and viscous and smelling like rotten eggs. A wave of nausea came over her just thinking about it: this hot, foul feeling in her stomach. She didn’t know how many times she’d puked the stuff up—when she did they made her drink more. Or they stuffed a tube in her nose and pumped it in. She’d had diarrhea like crazy. Her stomach boiled, and she thought, No, and then she barfed on herself.
She sat up and swung her legs to the side, but it was no use: she heaved and barfed again, all over her lap, her bare legs, the floor. The sitter was standing now, looking at Lauren with her pig face pink, eyes wide. Where were Lauren’s parents? Where where where?
“Go ahead,” Brody said, “take him if you want—that’s fine.”
Joe was upstairs getting his backpack, and Brody was watching Liz across the breakfast table, waiting for her to decide what she wanted. Minutes ago, she’d asked him to drive Joe, but now she thought maybe she would. Make up your mind! he thought. It’s not that big a deal!
“You know, maybe I actually should,” she said. “Since I drove him on Friday. To sort of—normalize things.”
They exchanged a look—nothing would normalize anything—but he played along. “Yeah, why don’t you? It might be good for you, too.”
“I think I will.” She went to her purse and got out her keys. “You’ll be ready when I get back?”
“Absolutely.”
Joe came into the kitchen, struggling with the zipper on his backpack, stopping at the table for a last bite of toast. “Ready,” he said to Brody.
“Actually, Mom’s going to take you.”
Joe’s face changed a little, a slight dimpling above his left eyebrow that signaled surprise, disappointment, something.
“That OK?” Brody said.
“Sure.”
“I don’t have to,” Liz said.
“God, it’s fine, can we just go?” Joe blushed and then said, in a softer voice: “I don’t want to be late.”
When they were gone Brody got up and cleared the table. He loaded the dishes into the dishwasher, wiped the counters. Apparently there would be paperwork at both ends; the transfer could take most of the day.
He went into his and Liz’s room. He yanked at the covers b
ut stopped short of making the bed. He opened the curtains, then opened the window for good measure. The outdoors is a big place to heat. That was his mother, back when he was a kid. Even then he’d had a thing about fresh air. He stood at the open window, waited for the feel of the cold outside to reach him.
In five minutes Liz would be back. He found his laptop and logged into his e-mail. He’d checked his BlackBerry a few times over the weekend, scanned the sender names and subject lines, but he hadn’t read anything. Now he selected a few e-mails at random and just glanced. Kathy, his assistant: “…don’t know if you’ll be…” Fred Rodriguez from sales: “…unless we increase cross-sell activity…” Tim Hilliard at Secur-Soft: “…follow up on our conversation of…” Kathy again: “…really worried, know you’ll be in touch when…”
He heard the front door open. “Brody?” Liz called.
“In here.” He closed the laptop and set it aside. He was almost to the bedroom door when she appeared.
“Ready?” she said.
“Yeah.”
She stood there with her purse hanging from her forearm, a troubled look on her face.
