The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  The next weekend they took the Saw Mill River Parkway north into Connecticut, and when they arrived at the old house at the end of the long dirt road, she knew they belonged there. It had been somebody’s folly—built of fieldstone and heavy timber so the walls were two feet thick, surrounded by a “formal garden” utterly overgrown, and fifty acres of marsh and bracken, two wide meadows full of brambles, a brook running along at the base of the hill, an old root cellar with potatoes and squash still piled. They could see the sky through the barn roof, and it smelled sweetly of hay, of the farm in the library book where wishes came true. They crossed the brook on a log bridge and walked up the hillside. Claire bent down to touch the flowering blueberries, lifting the wax bells with her fingertips so he could see how many berries they’d have.

  Ted looked out over the fields, thinking of the work it would have taken to build the stone walls between them. Work makes the man. To go forward, in work, in marriage, one needed to be able to forget the past. He would begin by forgetting that day when he’d seen life coming at him with all its terrible decisions and had driven off the road. He’d been afraid of having a child who needed his guidance. If he had no answers to give, if he failed at fatherhood—that would be more than he could bear. But here was his wife beside him, and his little daughter, and it gave him courage: yes, he’d like more children, more soft little things like milkweed fluff, who flew to their parents for love. He’d borrowed against his inheritance and bought the place that day.

  * * *

  THESE WERE the people I was doomed to love! She, seething with an ardor entirely unfocused, smoking, smoking, her eyes narrow, her silence terrible: my first glimpse of beauty. And he, in one of those bursts of optimism that punctuated his despairs, was fitting the coop with chicken wire—his old T-shirt, faded red, my favorite color then and now. I squeezed into their embraces, to feel them wanting each other. Or, at least, how desperately they wanted what they couldn’t get from each other. Their passion swam along underneath us, we felt it move there, we never knew when it would rise up and flick our little boat over with its tail. He went to Agway for chickenfeed. She rocked back and forth on a kitchen chair, biting her knuckle to keep herself from sobbing.

  She was pregnant again and again, and so came Sylvie, Dolly, and finally Ted, our parents’ folie à deux becoming folie à trois, quatre, cinque, six … Pop faded, grew dim, and Ma intensified, like a storm. She was always pregnant—there was the one too vigorous who tore the placenta away and starved, the one born months early. We could have named her Sadness, this fragile sister; she was the incarnation of our wistful parents’ wishes, curled translucent under the incubator lamp, sucking the bud of her thumb through her few hours of life.

  Ma’s head ached and ached; we tiptoed around, hoping to avoid the invisible tripwires that seemed to set those headaches off. I’d drawn with crayon in my copy of Goodnight Moon: how could it be, that a child of hers could do such a thing? She gathered the books in her arms, took them out to the trash barrel behind the barn and set them on fire. Books were sacred, sacred: Did I understand? Her grandmother’s poems, bound in cloth printed with violets, were kept face out on the shelf, a reminder of the high place from which her family had fallen. They’d been literary, way back, far above my father’s common moneymaking sort of people. When Ma was twelve, she won a medal for reciting more Shakespeare from memory than any other twelve-year-old on Staten Island—it was made of real gold. Did I understand? In her high school yearbook, her quotation was: “Nobody understands me.” And looking into the eyes of that smouldering girl, it was hard to tell whether this was a lament or a boast.

  He, our father, was away, on some kind of business (we didn’t ask what kind; it was frightening to see him search for the answer as if he himself didn’t exactly know), and she didn’t trust the car, was sure it would burst into flames when she was driving. She would only use it in an emergency, so we were always at home, becoming strange together, contorting ourselves to fit each other and keep the rest of the world at bay. We were not suited to the work of farming—it meant doing the same thing day after day, with no immediate result, and thus it could not pull our attention away from our own drama. We took naps, we wandered up and down the stairs looking for a lost pencil, we sat at the window and stared. When the phone rang a terror gripped us and we cried, “Answer it, answer it!” as if it had come alive suddenly and would have to be slain.

  Some days, though, we managed to seem like the characters in her childhood book, the book that had gotten us into this trouble. Braving the musky darkness of the coop, I’d go along hen by hen, thrusting a hand in beneath each one to bring out a warm, shit-spattered egg, carrying them down the hill in a tin pail, knowing that my reward would be the feeling that I was a farm girl, part of the beautiful scene in my parents’ imagination, which was the one thing they really shared. I’d climb into the willow tree to sit all afternoon, reading, watching the brook swirl over the stones beneath. Did I love to read? To hear the water? God knows. I loved knowing that Ma would look out the bedroom window when the headache let up, and see me. And soon she’d be leaning in the front door, all gentleness and hope, so beautiful you couldn’t take your eyes off her, her soft smile showing mostly amazement, that her life had come out like this, her land stretching in front of her, her children reading in the trees..

  * * *

  RECALLING IT for Philippa, I remembered only that—how beautiful it was. The place, the people, were far away, unable to barge into my vision with all their ungainly wants and rages. Oh, I missed them, I missed the immense love I’d borne them as I sat on the hillside in the evenings, having edged away from the table and its enduring argument, turning the screen-door catch with my hand to silence it so I could escape unnoticed, to look down at the warm light beaming from the windows, all of it more dear to me the more I was estranged.

  “Untouched by the outside world,” I said, tears of nostalgia stinging.

  “Well, they had to send you to school,” Philippa said, with swift professorial authority, through which, suddenly, shot a spark of doubt. “Right?”

  “On and off,” I answered. “You know, when the mood struck.” I laughed, with a little edge of danger—which she caught and reflected in her own laugh, making me tipsy. No one had ever seen danger in me before.

  “The school question had to run the rapids between Ma’s contradictions, like everything else,” I said, with a little swagger, having transformed my poor mother to granite with the turn of a phrase. Her ambitions for me had been boundless, but she hardly expected any mortal teacher could help me fulfill them. Teachers were small and ordinary people like my father, who would only want to shrink me, to show me limits instead of possibilities. And there must be no limits, because I was going to grow immense and all-seeing, become a sorceress and save her soul. After three days of kindergarten, she’d had enough of public school and blazed into the headmistress’s office at Northwest Country Day to declare my genius. I hung behind her, avoiding the woman’s eyes while greedily taking in the details of her presence—tweed suit, gray pincurls, a perfume whose fragrance would come to represent constancy to me, so that each afternoon, as I shook her hand before running out into whatever maelstrom my family was suffering that day, I’d breath deep, hoping to carry a whiff of her away with me. My mother’s pride—which had to be immense so as to wrestle down her shame—made her seem at least twice the headmistress’s size. I edged a little further behind her, wanting more than anything to just go home.

  Or not quite “more than anything.” More than anything, I wanted to be good, which meant only that I must make amazing accomplishments and love my mother best. I had to see that smile in which all her furies were resolved, everything calmed and completed by … me. The school terrified me—my classmates were Miles Armbruster III, Eliza Anne Cornwell, etc., children who spoke with the commanding voices they learned from their riding teachers, and whose chauffeurs delivered them to school because their parents were occu
pied in the manner of normal people, whatever that was. I barely dared move for fear the secret stigma of our lives would somehow be revealed to these people; I couldn’t possibly raise my hand and ask to use the girls’ room. Which left me hearing the unfortunate—“Miss McGinty? Beatrice wet herself again,” from Eliza Anne, and receiving the kind loan of a pair of Miles Armbruster’s mittens to replace my drenched socks.

  Years later: Ma and I were watching Reagan’s Inaugural Ball on TV and Miles Armbruster danced by. “Do you remember when he lent you his mittens for socks?” she asked. “That’s what you call a connection, Bea.” Another of the gifts Ma had given me. But every school morning, she had stood bereft in the kitchen doorway as if I betrayed her by leaving, and looking back at her I would feel something blur in my heart. She loved me so, loved to take me up into the woods to read stories in a glade we’d found where bright green grass grew under a canopy of laurel, loved to sing to me while she hung up the laundry and I ran back and forth under the blowing sheet. She loved me and I abandoned her, that was just the way her life always went.

  Sylvie would try to catch my eye, to keep me there, but I wouldn’t, I couldn’t stay home. I was on an errand whose great if unnameable purpose I felt every minute, and I had no idea how to go about this except to go—fervently—to school. And Miss McGinty had noticed my nearsightedness; I had glasses now and knew that trees were made up of individual leaves.

  Sylvie understood (this was her genius). “I have a little cough,” she said, and Ma’s hand went to her forehead and finding no fever, smoothed her fine hair back and kissed her brow.

  “We’ll bake bread,” she said, closing me, the faithless, out of the family circle. “Cinnamon swirl.”

  Let them stay then, I thought, hating them, wondering why I was so mean. By the time I was in fourth grade and some financial misfortune had dashed me down from Olympus back to public school, we were used to the idea that I was bent on fulfilling my own ambition, while Sylvie was so kind and gentle that she wanted to stay home and help. They stood at the end of the driveway to watch me off to the bus, Sylvie holding Dolly by the hand—it was September, the chicory and goldenrod bloomed on the roadside and I startled redwings out of the marsh grass as I ran, heart tearing, up the dirt road. Our life was so beautiful, it must be as Ma said, that it was more authentic, more fine and true than other lives.

  The bus was full of kids from real farms, who reeked of manure from their morning chores. In the valley, where the blacktop crossed the line (into the state of New York, also the state of sinful fantasy for me), it stopped in front of the autobody shop to pick up Butchy and Donna Savione; then we got back into Connecticut and girls named Debby and Lisa would get on with their stables of plastic horses, and the bus picked up speed as we passed the Armbrusters’ and the other great houses along Main Street, heading toward the state of perfect receptivity, not to a subject, but a teacher, whoever he or she was that year—the live being whose magnetism would pull all my loose, mad atoms into alliance and lift me away from my family into the world I was going to conquer for them.

  Vietnam was on the news every night, but it had no more to do with us than the antacid commercials that interrupted it. Our reality was there in that house. The essential news we took from the tension in Ma’s voice each morning. Waking up, I listened to hear her in the next room, to guess whether she would adore or despise me that day.

  This depended, mysteriously, on my father. He was away on his vague businesses and when he was coming home, she’d clean the house with a blind fervor and prepare herself as carefully as for that first date. Clouds of scented steam billowed from the shower stall where a few hours earlier mushrooms had been sprouting—now it was spotless and she stood with bowed head against the water, swaying like a woman at prayer. She emerged healed somehow, shining with physical pride, her ironing scar an angry Gothic arch over her left breast. All her doubts were behind her and she strode in magnificent nakedness downstairs to get a pair of her wretched panties (she would not spend money on panties, she’d have counted it impure).

  She unnerved him—she was so hungry, she might eat him alive. Her breasts were beautiful, but he couldn’t help remembering that heart beneath. Hearts must be compared to fists for a reason, and hers was fearfully strong. So he kept his distance, kissing her in a way she said was typical of the passionlessness of the upper classes. He felt he’d married beneath himself, did he? She was quite sure he did, though as always he was wrong.

  “Pearls before swine,” she said, when I wrote a little poem for him. Well, she was going to drag me and my poems up from the pig wallow, or die trying. After all, he was a Nazi (yes, she had filed away those early confessions, so she’d know where to attack). This, obviously, was why she had dreamt the SS were chasing her up the back hill. And she, though apparently a Catholic, was truly at heart a Jew. Was she not extremely intelligent? And persecuted everywhere she turned? Sephardic, she told me—spritzing herself with a little Mediterranean glamour, just in case. His was the face of evil in the mirror! Why couldn’t anyone see?

  He went upstairs to change (into a T-shirt, not Stanley Kowalski) and she, lonely in the world she’d banished him from, noticed that Sylvie had failed to mop the kitchen; she dissolved in a tearful rage. See? He’d come home and found us wanting, and now he would go away, and leave us alone to starve in the woods, like the Jews in Germany. She was leafing through Treblinka for the appropriate passage, and he was steeled against her, did we see how he steeled himself against her, his own wife, whom he had promised to love and honor, in sickness and in health? But no, she could not turn to him, he did not listen and did not care, she had nowhere to turn because nobody understood her and she had married a murderer, there had been no rabbit (and, aside to me, who, being the oldest, seemed always on the verge of driving somehow, so that little tips ought to be welcome: “You must never, never swerve to avoid an animal in the road. Human life comes first.” Raging glance shot at my father). I was eleven, and seeing the phrase “lost control of the car” in a newspaper accident report had naturally assumed a car could develop a mind of its own and slam itself and its driver into, say, a bridge abutment, out of … spite … or whatever.

  But, was that a rumble of thunder? Distant, but lightning travels at the speed of … (behind her my father was wearily shaking his head; this drove her to greater urgency). “Sylvie, unplug the television, Dolly, now, come with me, please; no, Teddy, don’t cry, everything’s going to be fine, honey.” She held his head tight to her shoulder, reveling in his fear, his need for her, her voice taking a new, thrilling turn as she pointed west: “Look at the sky,” where the clouds were boiling, gray and green. “Up, up, come on,” and then a sharp crack, to which she responded with an immense shudder as if it had split her in two, my father with eyes cast heavenward at the performance as she pushed my head down through the low door, and turned to say, “Any phone calls to make, dear?” We all knew that the most indoor lightning strikes come over the phone wires.

  It was close in that cupboard, all of us cramped together in the dark. Dolly was protesting, as always, her little fists clenched, little arms crossed, little mouth pursed with disapproval. Of what did she disapprove? Of Ma, for hysteria. Of Pop, for condescension. Of me, for acting above it all. Of Teddy, for being overwhelmed. She huddled closer to Sylvie, then pulled back. “You smell like hot dogs. Gross.”

  “We had hot dogs for dinner. You smell like hot dogs too.”

  “No I don’t,” Dolly said, insulted, pulling further into the corner in case this was true. Ma sang to Teddy, rocking him on her lap, twirling his curls around her finger, comforting him as someone ought once to have comforted her. She told us about the ball of lightning that had come in through her window, right after her father left for the war: a brilliant, sizzling pompon that zipped across the room, lighting on the lamp, the radio, the metal doorknob, all the while she, a little girl with no father to help her, sat mesmerized, sheet up to the chin, waiting for it to
hurt her, until it was sucked into an electrical outlet and disappeared.

  “No one believed me,” she said. “They never believed me.”

  So she had given up truth. She made facts of her feelings; menaces grew to fit the terrors they aroused in her, wounds deepened to prove the extent of her pain. She flinched mightily, at a thunderclap, murmuring “It’s okay, it’s okay,” into Teddy’s hair as if the fear was his.

  There was pleasure in the linen closet, a deep calm. Finally, we’d worked it so the danger was outside ourselves, and we were banded together against it, safe. When we emerged, into a freshly washed landscape, the last violet clouds ragged over Skiff Mountain, the charge in the air was dispelled, and there was some sense of forgiveness, and we heard the parents giggling together in the middle of the night. In the morning, for no discernible reason, they’d become the kindly, striving people they’d always wanted to be, Pop swinging the little ones up for a hug as we came down the stairs.

  Once I asked him how it happened—what made the grim détente between them dissolve all of a sudden. He thought a long time, and finally said, “Well, I guess we made love, honey.”

  Sex did it. I did not, of course, know what sex was. On my seventh birthday, he’d taken me aside and, saying solemnly, “I wish you didn’t have to know…” looked deep, deep into my eyes and explained the physical act with no context, so it sounded repulsive and bizarre and I pictured them managing it in the bathroom. I doubted I could ever love any man enough to bear such a thing, and so had given the thought up, but here it was again. Any earlier murder attempts seemed to have been forgotten and there was even a suggestion of some future in which we would all live happily together, and all because of sex.