The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “I’m so, so glad to see you,” Ma said, with a certain emphasis that meant: I’m the one who loves you, pay no attention to him.

  “Him” stopped behind her, forlorn. He didn’t have the strength of feeling to pull him into a natural embrace. He wanted love, but he had to stand there still as a stone, willing me to approach him. I went and kissed him, with pity and a small defiance. Ma would not be pleased.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked her, as we turned to go on.

  “Oh, your father wouldn’t let Teddy bring his favorite chicken,” she said in disgust.

  Teddy was eight, with a head of sandy curls, freckles, a striped shirt—nothing to indicate he had the kind of second sight that’s necessary if you want to tell one chicken from another.

  “It’s hopeless,” Sylvie said to me once we got out of Ma’s earshot. “Just ignore them.”

  This splendid suggestion would have been easier to put into practice if only we hadn’t been made of their flesh. It was impossible not to feel their needs and wants, not to keep trying to fulfill them.

  “Does Teddy have a favorite chicken?” I asked.

  “He’s afraid to go into the henhouse!”

  “So he has some basic intelligence.” We laughed, and it all came back to me, the brooding clucks of the hens, unseen in the stinking feathery dark, the chickenshit slippery underfoot—Sylvie and I with our pool of secret knowledge, the exact feeling of those days.

  “A little,” she allowed, grinning the way she used to, when she was going to do something like pour a bottle of perfume on the dog. “Might have been fun to have a chicken here.”

  Sweetriver’s one formal moment, and Ma wanted to bring a chicken. Formalities, conventions, that old sense of everyone coming together, dressing alike, acting alike, speaking alike for that one instant in recognition of the importance of the day, of common ideals and beliefs, even among the most disparate souls—all this was gone. The last legacy of the war in Vietnam was the notion that conventions ought to be smashed regularly, like gongs. So they were getting increasingly hard to find, and the few that were left made a dull, tinny sound when you struck them. And I, who had grown up dreaming of the day when I would step finally onto the scaffold of convention, found only thin air.

  A tray of intricate little hors d’oeuvres came floating along and I floated after it. How was the pastry twisted to make the bit of cheese inside seem delightful, and what about the little watercress and brie objet with a tricornered hat of onion jam? I had to know. Ma had gone on ahead, striding directly into the path of Philippa, who stopped hummingbird-still to take her in, and flicked an incredulous gaze toward me.

  “She does not resemble Mrs. Ramsey, dear,” she said when I got closer, and I remembered some midnight when I’d tried to convince her that my family was just like Virginia Woolf’s. “More, the Red Queen! Yes, yes, definitely the Red Queen.” She laughed as discreetly as her nature would allow. It was her peculiar way of giving comfort—of showing me I had very amusing troubles, the best kind of troubles by far. Then she went off with Pedro de los Reyes, head of the Spanish department, to the buffet.

  I gulped the onion jam thing (truly revolting) holding a shrimp toast delicately between two fingers, and, resolving to return for one of the cheese puffs later, performed a miracle of triangulation and seated my parents at opposite sides of the lawn from each other. Pop and Dolly were over near the Philosophy table—whose professors looked mangy as Rolling Stones—while I sat with the others near the Languages. Ma had her back to Philippa, and I was just about to bite the bullet and ask Ma how she was, when that famously penetrating voice began to speak.

  “That thesis should have been much more lurid,” Philippa was saying to Pedro. “And she can’t wear short skirts with those legs—look at her neck, though, and shoulders.”

  “Very nice shoulders,” Pedro answered mildly.

  “You knew the mother would be a trip,” Philippa went on, “but my god, that dress.” Her laugh went off wildly, like a champagne cork—a few more hours and she’d be free of me.

  And though I hadn’t yet asked my mother to explain her stumbled-up-from-a foxhole expression (she was placidly sipping punch but her eyelid had just twitched in a dangerous way), she began to tell me her story.

  “The chicken is only the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “He doesn’t think we should tell you.” (“He,” spoken with venomous disdain, was understood to refer to my father.)

  And from there she dropped her series of little bombs: (1) ValuSpot, the largest retailer of ping-pong balls on the East Coast, had found a cheaper source and stopped buying from my father, so that (2) they’d been unable to keep up with the mortgage payments, complicated by the fact that (3) they actually held two mortgages on the house, one from the bank, and one from the teachers’ credit union, which had caused (4) two lending institutions to foreclose on the house at once, which left (5) bankruptcy as the only choice and, on another subject entirely, (6) Ma had lost her teaching job after she wrote a love letter to one of her students—well, not a love letter, really, just a term paper comment that had gotten out of hand—she’d been trying to boost his self-esteem. They’d wanted her out, now they had their excuse.

  “Motorcycles are the only thing he’s good at, Beatrice,” she said (this “he” was spoken with aching devotion). “So of course, that’s what he wrote about. He’s not going to be a rocket scientist” (here she waved a hand vaguely in my direction as if I had discovered in Wilde’s epigrams a coded formula for jet fuel) “but he knows motorcycles and I wanted to show him that’s a worthwhile thing.”

  They had to be out of the house by the end of the month, and oh, they were divorcing—this at least was a bit of good news. “Out on the street,” she wailed. “With three little children.”

  She gazed at me pleadingly. Surely I, the graduate, would have the answer. She’d do whatever I told her, of course, and if it didn’t work out she’d be furious. I suppose that’s the wellspring of my character—I expect my words to have an effect, usually a pretty bad one.

  Therefore I said absolutely nothing, and made a flurry of eye contact with Sylvie. We never felt so cozy as when we were shaking our heads together over their follies.

  And I felt again that wave of excitement I’d had when I heard the tents go up—here it was finally, the catastrophe that had threatened us all those years, that we’d hidden from and dreamed of, worked against, though we prayed it would come. The lightning would strike, the house would burn to the ground, and with it every bond that held us to each other; we’d be free. A shiver ran through me. What next?

  Sylvie said, by rote, “It’s all going to work out, Ma.”

  Fork poised, Teddy asked, “What is this?”

  “Chicken,” we all said.

  “It doesn’t look like chicken. It looks disgusting.”

  “It’s creamed chicken, your favorite!” Ma said.

  “No, it’s not,” Teddy said. “Pizza’s my favorite.”

  “Your father likes pizza,” Ma said witheringly. “Creamed chicken is your very favorite dish.”

  “It is?”

  “Would I make up something like that?” she said, catching my eye as he poked his fork gingerly in.

  Teddy looked at Sylvie, who nodded very wisely, so he tried a bite. And made a face.

  “On your last birthday you asked to have creamed chicken,” Ma said. “I’m your mother, I know.”

  He gave up, and began to eat, though without conviction. Olney and Dotsy floated by, she winding a ribbon around her finger and saying, “Well, it doesn’t release until I’m twenty-five, so until then, I’m kind of on my own.”

  “So what’s going to happen?” I asked Ma.

  “He’s going out west,” she said. “And I … well, I have to see what…”

  “Ma, this boy,” I began.

  “I didn’t do anything, I did not!” she cried, so sharply that I had to stop and try to figure out what I’d accused her of. “Wh
at kind of monster do you think I am?” she asked.

  I thought she was a very charming sort of monster—a monster who Meant No Harm. Just to sit close to her was to feel her panic in the face of life—to feel it exert itself on your own senses, pulling them into agreement with hers until everything swung wild and the air was full of unseen danger and you were alone and at its mercy and it was driving its needles in, and you’d do anything, break anything, tear at your own skin even, to escape.

  I moved my chair a little. “No, Ma,” I said quietly. I was exquisitely aware that Philippa was right behind us. “I didn’t say you did anything wrong.”

  “Oh, my head,” she said suddenly, dropping it into her hands as if it had grown too heavy with all the dread and woe. “Sylvie, go through my purse, would you, see if you can find my pills?”

  Sylvie heaved the thing onto her lap. Across the lawn, Pop was talking with great animation, as always when forlorn, and Dolly cupped herself toward him, listening as if the force of her attention might hold the poor splintered man together a little longer. I tried not to look, to keep Ma from noticing, though of course she could see nothing else. If he stopped to pet the cat, she despised the creature for stealing the crumbs of tenderness that rightly belonged to her. And Dolly didn’t have to stick at his side either; he understood we ran an awful risk by being nice to him; he never pressed the point.

  “Larry, that’s his name,” she said, as if those syllables proved something immense. “He’s not a boy, he’s nearly twenty. And Bea, he’s so bright, if it wasn’t for the dyslexia you don’t know what he might have done.”

  Sylvie pawed in the bottom of the purse. “Here, here, I’ve got ’em,” she said. “Is there water?”

  Ma gulped them down with her wine.

  What had I been thinking, when I said I’d go home? Of the mock orange, how I used to walk right into the middle of it, to smell the flowers, rain dripping down my collar from the leaves, bumblebees working around me. Beauty is an anesthetic, that’s why we love it so. Mock orange smells so sweet, you can forget everything, including the reason why you’re hiding from your family in a bush full of bees.

  “What will I do? Where will I go?” Ma was asking.

  “A liaison, a dalliance, that’s all,” Philippa was saying to Pedro across the way. How had she become such a dashing conquistador? What about those shy phone calls when I’d felt something in her creeping out to meet me, though she’d tried to lock it in? Or the way she’d imagined me as “one of those bunnies”?

  “Though, the bosom,” she added, in a tone of lascivious regret.

  “Yes, lovely, lovely,” Pedro breathed, sounding very deeply moved.

  “I’ve hated him for twenty years,” Ma was saying, “… since even before you were born. What they did to people, Beatrice, how they tortured them, despised them.” You had to know her logic to understand this—they were the Nazis, my father’s people. She shuddered. “That I married a torturer. And now here I am, alone with three little children.”

  “How’d you come by those children, by the way?” I asked, thinking that it did look careless, this absentminded bearing of children by a Nazi year in and year out.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, so we had sex four times! So what?” she said, though some instinct caused her to pull at her hem. “You don’t know—you really don’t know, Beatrice—how I’ve suffered. And now, now what?” Her voice was heavy with tears again. “I have nothing.”

  This was the first phrase of an aria whose crescendo might shatter the perfect bowl of sky above us, and I interrupted quickly:

  “You have me, Ma.”

  “Thank God for you, Beatrice,” Ma said, looking into my eyes so that I saw how badly she needed something, some thing she was sure I could give her. She took my hands in a gesture at once imperious and abject, and my heart swelled toward her against my will. She was awash in a torrent of her own making and I would have to fish her out somehow, and then would come the next flood, and the next, but I couldn’t bear to see her drown.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she said. “I knew, Beatrice, knew from the minute you were born.”

  That I would someday work the miracle that saved her from herself. “And now, look, all this.” She gazed around, at the tent, the lawn, the stone chapel with its reflecting pool, and all the other parents, among them a couple of movie stars, a famous disbarred lawyer, and of course the modernist, Bill Canterbridge—as if the place belonged to me.

  “Ma,” I said, looking helplessly back at Philippa …

  Who cried “Beatrice!” in apparent surprise at seeing me. She rushed over saying, “This must be your mother!” with a glance at Pedro: Did he see now what a peculiar conquest she’d made? Toward me she arched a brow—she’d seen, she was properly aghast, and in this way at least, she loved me; she wanted to know the story.

  “You must be very proud of your daughter, Mrs. Wolfe,” she said in a voice full of secret allusion.

  “I certainly am,” Ma replied, as if Philippa had challenged her to a duel whose winner would have the exclusive right to take pride in me. “It’s an odd thing for me to say, I know,” she went on, “but Beatrice is my … my role model. Through these horrible times…” (Philippa shot me a glance and I tried to signal—folly, destitution, divorce—with my eyes) “… she has been a constant inspiration to me. No matter what, I can always think, no, no, there’s Beatrice, she’s your daughter, and look what she can do.”

  Yes, surely someday I would lead a revolution, star in an epic, burn at a stake. Then, finally, everyone would know who my mother was. “I only hope I can follow in her footsteps,” she summed up, as if pledging allegiance.

  “I wish you every success,” said Philippa with a very slight bow, and a glance at me in which the expression “Off with their heads!” could easily be intuited.

  “She’s my thesis advisor,” I thought to explain, watching her go off toward the bar, but Ma had already forgotten her and was looking over at Dolly and my father. “I can’t take this, I’m going to explode,” she said—seeming to foretell a physical inevitability.

  The provost came along, stepping aside so Philippa could pass, and stopped for a minute to congratulate me, gripping my arm and pulling me toward him to say, into my ear: “You look savagely beautiful.”

  I fell on this like a jackal—could it be, that there was some quality in me that I hadn’t recognized? Because I really was savage, so mightn’t he be right about the beauty too? If he was, the world would take me in, I knew.

  “I can’t be here with him like this,” Ma said, louder, “I am going to explode.”

  “Would you like to go to the library and see my thesis?” I asked, feeling what a feeble gambit this was. That I had written a hundred intelligible, if ponderous pages, must prove I had some inner compass and might be able to move forward instead of going around in circles all my life, but Ma could hardly be expected to see this. Was that thesis going to get up and pay her mortgage, after all, or restore her lost love? No, it wasn’t lurid enough. It would lie there in the library, serving no purpose at all.

  “My life is crashing down around me,” she said, with angry tears, “I can’t think about your thesis now.”

  Of all the things that rushed into my mind, not one could be spoken. Across the lawn I saw the provost lean in to whisper to Kitty LaWren, a modern dance major whose senior performance—“Bunny Life,” for which she had worn only a pelt of white fur glued to her buttocks—had been hailed as a brilliant commentary on the way women are reduced by men to sexual playthings, and must certainly have had a salutary effect, since it had been attended by every single student and professor at the school. I read his lips: Kitty was looking savagely beautiful too.

  My thoughts, torn so rudely from the mock-orange bower, took refuge in memories of Philippa. She had read everything, thought about everything. She was on intimate terms with Emma Bovary and Dorothea Brooke and all those women conceived not by mere parents, but
by authors: ordinary women whose lives had extraordinary depth because they were lucky enough to work, love, connive, fail, and die in the warm light of their creators’ understanding. How wonderful to have someone like Philippa studying you every day.

  I’m a Lesbian, I thought stubbornly, and with this, a little wall flew up between me and my mother, and I felt safe for a minute. But I couldn’t very well say it, and casting around to fill the silence, I found another way to prod her. “I guess I should go over and see Pop before the ceremony,” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. So, it was just as she’d suspected, I was her enemy and like it or not she would have to order my execution. “Ask him,” she said bitterly, “just ask him, if he thinks you’re brilliant now.”

  * * *

  “THE EARTH was formed out of chaos, honey,” he said when I’d reached his side of the lawn. “It’s solid.” He put his foot down, to prove it. “Your life will be too.” He was given to flights of philosophy, assays into this or that territory that filled in for conversation. In conversation, the other person gets to talk, and you don’t know what sort of thing they might say. The person who knew him most intimately was my mother, and she used that knowledge of his tender spots so she could know where to drip her acid. And maybe it was true that only acid could burn through his thick hide to reach his heart.

  I brought myself up—never mind, it was my commencement day and he was trying, at least, to say something fond. I saw in his face how much he wanted to love me—to butt through the big block of his disappointment in me and come out into sunlight again. Standing there in his suit, he looked like the man he had wished to become, the father he ought to have been, and I wanted to say, “There was a rabbit, I’m sure of it. You didn’t mean any harm.”

  A great tearing noise issued from the orchestra. The graduation march had been written by one of the music majors, as a “realistic evocation of the great stress associated with growth and change.” This was all explained in the program, as if it were a new idea that growth and change might be stressful. Oh, how had I gotten stuck here, class of 1978, the most ridiculous year of the most appalling century in history?