The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Though there was no war, no cruel dictator, no great sweep of history at fault: we were hoist by our own petard. My mother was playing, for her husband, the music of her passionate lacklove, her anguished need. A need, like the leak in the roof that he had neglected until the door was jammed shut, the house beyond repair.

  “My children,” Pop said, as if he was standing over our lifeless bodies. “To lose my children…”

  “Listen, you two can work this out,” I said, feeling a dart from Dolly’s direction.

  “What would you do if you found a letter like this?” he asked. “A letter to another man?”

  “He’s hardly a man,” I started, but of course this was the wrong tack. “She didn’t send it,” I tried. “If you found it, she couldn’t have sent it.”

  “She felt it, honey. I guess that’s what’s important. She felt it,” he said, with certainty as if he’d set his foot down on something solid and could catch his breath.

  “She hurt his feelings,” Dolly said plaintively. She hadn’t fallen in love yet—she couldn’t know.

  “That happens,” I said, and saw her mind snap shut. Everyone knew how coldhearted and ambitious I was. We heard a car coming down the dirt road, a sound so rare there that we used to dive behind the stone wall when we heard it, as if it might be the phantom of the world outside, come to steal us away.

  Sylvie jumped up. “That’s Butch,” she said, “I’ve gotta go.”

  I followed as she ran down the stairs. Ma stopped playing and held her prayerfully for a minute, in a silence that felt like a fresh cold breeze, blowing the heavy music away. As soon as we walked out the door, she started again.

  “You see what it’s like,” Sylvie said. “I had to get out of there.” Butch was there in his little pickup, with a tough, defiant look on his face as if for him a smile was a sign of defeat. Or as if he was afraid I’d keep Sylvie from leaving. A little beige dog was sitting up front beside him like a good schoolgirl, and it leapt into Sylvie’s arms as soon as she opened the door.

  “Look,” she said laughing, “this is Springtime! We found her in a dumpster!” She slid in beside Butch, with the dog wrapped tight in her arms. She wanted me to see this tableau, to show me that she was safe, and loved. They drove away under the thick, flickering masses of the June maples, the beauty that belied everything in our hearts.

  “She’d have slept with him anyway. This way she doesn’t have to lie.” Ma missed a few beats explaining this, but turned the page and kept playing, so I couldn’t point out to her that it’s hell enough to struggle apart from a man when you’re grown up and don’t live with him, but when you’re sixteen, and you don’t have anywhere else to go …

  As we got ready for bed, Dolly picked up my wheel of birth control pills and asked what they were. When I told her, she said: “So you’ll never—you can’t have a baby?” There was a shiver in her voice, a sense that I, having gone away, had betrayed them, had become the phantom of the world outside. She sat there with her Raggedy Ann doll on her lap as if it was her own child.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Of course not. Just not right now.”

  I’d been taking them since that day Ma sent me to the doctor and had nearly forgotten why. Now I supposed I could stop. Though Philippa took them, for the estrogen, she said. We’d stood grouchily at the sink together in the morning, swilling them down like a couple of cowboys in a saloon. Thinking of this, I felt how alone I was, suddenly—it was as if the wall beside me had fallen away.

  We’d had canned mushroom soup for supper, because it was all we could find in the cupboard. Then Dolly had reached way in back and pulled out a jar of blackberry jam with a square of gingham over it.

  “I remember the day we made that,” I said. It had been much too hot but we’d been happy for some reason, ready to undertake something. Teddy was maybe three, hands and face stained purple and scratched all over from bumbling into the thorns. He rode on Ma’s hip as Ma stirred the jam. I sterilized the jars and now was melting paraffin in the battered old pot we used, and Dolly cut the gingham. It was the life my parents had intended; we were managing it here, for a minute distilling the essence of goodness together and preserving it against the sorrows to come.

  “Do you think it’s still good?” Dolly was a nervous eater, she even hated things with raisins because they made her think of bugs.

  “Probably,” I said, but I didn’t want to open it and be proven wrong. I wanted to save it so I could keep believing in it.

  “I’ll just have some yogurt, if there is any,” I’d said, and Ma and Dolly had turned to me with the same shadow of suspicion on their faces. Was I turning into a person who liked yogurt? Because Ma didn’t, which meant that by eating it, I would defy her, step outside the circle of her magic, and become ordinary, Midwestern, Republican, Nazi—who knew where it would stop? Seeing how things were going, Ma (who did not care about possessions) had gone back to the piano, while Pop threw his things helter-skelter into the back of the truck. After the temporary custody hearing the next day, we had to be out of the house for good. Ma had rented another one in town—old Mrs. Shipman, the cat-lady’s place. Pop was just planning to get in the truck and drive as far as he could. Neither of them had invited me.

  * * *

  ALL NIGHT I listened to my parents berate each other in the next room, like a prisoner eavesdropping on a torture. The words were indistinct but the tones—of pleading, of the lash, and the cold hatred, sharp sobs and cruel silences—froze my blood. They couldn’t pull apart without desecrating all the hopes and beliefs they’d used to share. Finally a barren silence fell and I could hear something running back and forth inside the walls. Only two weeks ago I’d been holding back the sweet viburnum branches so Philippa could stuff steel wool into the chinks of the foundations of her house, against mice. Then she’d settled back into her chair to read the Marquis de Sade.

  * * *

  IN THE morning, my parents took Teddy and Dolly, both cars, and all the tension and misery in the house with them to the County Courthouse. Sylvie and I were to spend the day packing, and waiting for Butch to deliver her, I sat on the back steps with my coffee cup, closed my eyes, and almost felt my mother’s presence as I had years ago. The sun sparkled on the brook and she was the person she wanted to be, gentle and content: if you spilled something she wiped it up without thinking and absently kissed the top of your head. She brushed the grass back and forth in hopes of finding the four-leafed clover that would save her, make her gentle and content always. Where was it? Where?

  * * *

  “WHAT’S NUREMBERG?” Dolly asked me that night.

  “A city in Germany,” I told her. “Why?”

  “The judge said we might have to have the next hearing there.”

  “He did?”

  Dolly nodded gravely, and I looked at my father, who shook his head.

  “He told your mother that accusations such as she makes against me are generally tried in Nuremberg,” he explained. “Nice guy, the judge. Witty. In over his head.”

  The judge had asked Dolly her preference, and she’d chosen Pop.

  “Well, he had to have somebody,” Dolly had said, setting her jaw. “Otherwise it’s not fair.” Teddy was to stay with Ma, and Pop was to pay her a thousand a month.

  “I give her money?” he asked. “She’s the one who has a teaching certificate. Anyway, she can live on the wonderful thing that pours out of his eyes.” He—he and Dolly—were going west, where people laughed at things like child-support laws. He’d built a fire in the fireplace and was pulling out sheaves of old papers—the kind you save because you can’t quite throw them away, though you can’t quite bear to look at them again either—to burn. Ma, of course, was at the piano, and the music was aimed at Dolly now.

  When the phone rang she kept on playing.

  “It’s not for me,” Pop said, staying by the fire. Dolly looked from one to the other, and drew herself up, above their childishness, and went to ans
wer it.

  “It’s for you,” she said to my mother.

  Ma turned a cold, blind gaze on her and kept playing. Dolly’s existence had become too painful for her to acknowledge. It reminded me of what had happened after Forsythia died—I’d done something that tore through Ma’s warmth into the black emptiness beneath, and she couldn’t look at me anymore. I expected Dolly to crumple, though I remembered that I’d refused to. I’d drawn myself in and kept stonily apart, watching for the moment when I could get away. Dolly held the phone out stubbornly, two red circles blazing up in her cheeks, repeating: “It’s for you.”

  “Ma,” I said, over my shoulder. “Answer the phone.”

  She got up and went over to take it, saying “Hello?” and then an immediate soft “Hi. Oh, hi.” One syllable. We knew then who it was. Pop stared into the fire, mesmerizing himself, and we all listened, as we used to listen from our beds for the sound of her voice in the morning.

  “I can’t…” she said. “… No, I … no … no … yes of course but … well … maybe … I can try, but … you know I can’t talk now.” She listened a minute and her tone changed, the authority sifted out of it and she sounded jealous and wary. “Who’s that?” Then calmer … “Oh, oh, I see … I’m sorry, all right…” To hear the longing in her voice, the anxious wish to please him, was like coming over a rise in the road and seeing the house in flames.

  My father’s globe still stood on the piano. It was fragile and he intended to take it in the front of the truck with him when he left. The world it showed no longer existed, of course, but the thing itself was handsome and solid, and I closed my eyes, touched it, and spun it around, feeling Ceylon and Abyssinia and Saint Petersburg pass smoothly by. Elephants, parapets, cinnamon, silk! Of course the minute television got inside them, they turned out to be Sri Lanka and Ethiopia and Leningrad, full of famine and pestilence and war. When I opened my eyes, I saw my finger was resting on—entirely covering—the New England states, and considered that I must be fated to stay close to home.

  “No, it’s not that,” Ma said into the phone, “it’s not that at all.” She was trying to tell him something without letting us know, something that was going to change the course of our lives. I couldn’t help thinking that this Larry had a place to live, even if it was only a wretched converted garage, and he had a motorcycle, and parents, and now our mother too.

  “I will, I’ll try,” she said, hanging up.

  “A student,” she explained to us and sat back at the piano without playing. All that time I’d been wishing she’d stop, I hadn’t realized that the music was like a wild sea swirling over a terrible arid expanse. Now I shuddered at the silence.

  “Go ahead, Ma, you can play,” I said, but she stood up suddenly, stepped over the heave in the floor, and went toward the kitchen as if she meant to go out the back door. Then came back and sat down again.

  Then up, saying: “I’m going out,” defiant as a teenager, so that I felt like a mean, straitlaced mother for wanting to restrain her.

  “Can I come?” Teddy asked.

  “No!”

  “I never get to go with you, it’s not fair,” he said. “Pop wouldn’t take me to the dump yesterday, he wouldn’t take me for a ride in the truck, and it’s not even a school night…” He looked around at us—he knew we weren’t taking him with us into the heart of the story.

  “Hey, they took you to court today and I had to stay home,” I teased, and reached to swing him up onto my lap, but he twisted away.

  “They didn’t take me in with the judge! I had to go with the lady!” he cried, stamping his feet, but glancing over at me in fear and bewilderment to see if he was wrong. I looked back at him with a guilty bewilderment of my own. I’d joined the adults and betrayed him, acting as if the custody hearing was a family outing, as if his intuitions were all wrong. He peered into my face, weighing what I’d said against his own feeling.

  “It’s a terrible day, honey,” I admitted. “I know it. We just have to bear it, and work hard to keep calm.”

  “You’re not the mother!” he said. Startled by the truth this touched on, we all drew back for a minute and Teddy rushed on into his hysteria.

  “You can’t go, I’m not letting you go,” he said, grabbing Ma’s shirt and pulling at it as if he could physically stop her. He’d have done the same thing if she’d been going out for milk, but, for once, it was fitting. I felt his panic rise in myself too.

  “Stop it!” I said, taking him by the shoulders. “Stop it right now, do you hear me?” I looked into his face with cold fury, thinking that really it was my mother who ought to stop it, that it was cowardly of me to be yelling at Teddy instead of her.

  “Stop pulling at me! Let go!” Ma swatted at Teddy as if he were a bat that was clinging to her clothes. “Let me go!”

  He let go, and stood there roaring, “I hate you, I hate you, you take me with you or I’m going to…” He stopped, teeth gritted, eyes wild. What recourse was there? “I’m going to hit my head, hit my head,” he screamed, slapping at his head with the flat of his hands.

  Pop, still on his knees at the fireplace, bent into himself suddenly, silently, like a monk in flames. “I can’t do this, I can’t do this,” he wept.

  “No, you can’t do anything, can you? You never could,” Ma said with cold, final contempt, while Dolly knelt to comfort him, looking up at her with venom.

  “That’s right, take care of him,” Ma said to her. “Did he ever take care of you? Did he think one minute of your well-being? Do you really imagine he wants to have you with him, except maybe because it hurts me? ‘Oh, my children, my children,’” she mocked. “As if he had ever thought of his children before! My god, he tried to kill me when I was carrying Beatrice. When you fell out the window, Dolly, when you were two years old, he didn’t want to pay the hospital bills, he’d have let you lie there with your leg broken.”

  He’d probably said something like: “Her leg can’t be broken.” Ma made something awful of everything, after all. But then he didn’t seem to hear anything until it was shouted. He was cruel in ways no one else would notice, she had to make the scars herself.

  “I watched over you,” Ma went on, quiet now because she was saying the simple truth. “I was there for you, I carried you up and down the stairs for weeks. Choose him, then, go with him, but…” We listened. She was artful, she was always shaping whatever happened to suit her more fully, and if she’d used that extra dimension to work her life into a play or a painting, who knew; instead, though, she lived it out. Her voice turned to acid. “Don’t expect my sympathy when you realize what you’ve done.”

  This made a good finish and she sat down, but the rage welled up and pushed her to her feet again.

  “Your children?” she said to Pop. “Your children. Well, what about my home? What about my life? What did you do with that? Look at me, all this time I was patient, I told myself you were trying your best, I thought, ‘Don’t stand between a man and his dream,’ even though you were dreaming of ping-pong balls! While you gambled with everything I had, and lost. And my youth is gone and what do I have to show for it, nothing.” She spat the word “nothing,” then repeated it tenderly, comforted by it in some deep way. “Nothing at all.”

  And very, very calmly, as if she’d gotten her anger out and was returning to our task, packing these last few things, preparing to leave, she picked the globe up and carried it over to the fireplace. Teddy, astonished that his tantrum had not provoked the usual response, stopped crying and kept still with the rest of us, watching her.

  “Everything I loved, gone,” she said, sounding portentous, nearly Shakespearean. And then: “Everything,” quietly, kneeling beside Dolly, laying the globe on the fire gently as if putting a baby down for its nap.

  “Claire!” Pop said, but it was too late. The globe filled with fire, glowing like a rising sun for a minute before it fell in on itself and went gray.

  * * *

  “WAIT!” I said. I did
n’t know what to say next. My reflex was to keep Ma there a few more minutes and hope the centrifugal force of family would pull her back in.

  She turned, irritated, curious, and, I could see, hopeful. I was the worldly one, the one who could always put things back together, what with my brilliance and my college education. If I’d said, right then: “Sit down and stop being silly. We need to put our heads together and work things out…” In fact, if I’d said anything in a tone of confident authority, I might have wound back time so the world bloomed out of the fire again and my mother took it up like a baby and they reconciled over its sweet head.

  But seeing the hope on her face, I only wanted to dash it. Let it happen, the thing they’d been threatening all these years, threatening each other with as if they didn’t know we felt it too. Let it come, let them see the consequences of their drama. Let them live in the world they’d made.

  Oh yes, I knew what I wanted to say. When you take a person who has been nurtured in a climate of total hysteria, then pour her mind full of Great Literature with its pithy phrases, you may, reader, have created a monster. I faced my dear family as I was, stuck full of all the barbs from all the years, engorged with my education, ready to speak from—yes, my heart. It was a terrible thing to see.

  “There’s something I feel I ought to tell you, while we’re all together here.” I’d spent long enough cowering in a walk-in closet with these people, fearful so Ma wouldn’t be alone in fear. I was getting out, I was going to blow the door right off.

  “I’m a lesbian,” I announced, in a voice that sounded strangely of TV-movie-heroine. Thank you for the tour of Russia, Mother, and the side trip to Pamplona. Now for the Greek Isles—there she is now, fair Sappho at her lyre.