The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “What am I going to do, Beatrice?” she asked, begged really. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  Oh, she was telling the truth of her feeling—that she was starving and alone, marching away from warmth, love, hope, marching through the snow with hatred at her heels and death before her. She’d felt this, for whatever reason, all her life. No soldier is more heroic than the mother who wakes out of her usual nightmare into her usual rage and grief, and sets it aside, to make a tender and patient and hopeful world for her children. In the time of Country Day school and bursting bladder, I’d come out to the car once and told her I’d never be able to hold it until I got home. “What’s your reading homework?” she asked. “The Yellow River, by I. P. Freely?’ And I said, “Don’t make me laugh!” though already the urine was rising between my thighs and she looked over and said “Oh no, not volume two, Swept Away!” And we laughed, and nothing else mattered, it was spring and I was six years old, the sopping embodiment of all her dreams, proof that she’d transcended her madness and done good in the world.

  I was her equivalent of sunlight, and if I failed to blaze out for a minute? She reacted as an aborigine would to an eclipse. As long as I was very, very careful, very, very good, though, I counted among the gods.

  “Don’t cry, Ma,” I said now. I wanted to be the sunlight, to fill the room up with butterflies for her. I curled into myself as if her pain were in my gut, whispering the great motto of ineffectuality, the prayer over the head of every disappointed child: “Don’t cry.”

  “Don’t you dare tell me not to cry! You’ve never had to face anything like this, never. Oh! ‘Don’t cry.’”

  Anger, thank the heavens. Anger would keep her from crying her substance away. She hung up and I sank onto the bed and sighed. Maybe she’d stomp out of the house now and go look for a job. Maybe everything would turn out just fine.

  Maybe, but there went the phone. It was my father, and immediately, I remembered how much I liked this poor guy, who was so absolutely cheerful in the face of penury and divorce that he could sing three verses of “Come-a-ti-yi-yippie-aye-ay” into a pay phone before he even said hello.

  They were at the Palm Beach Motor Court, in Laramie, Wyoming. “How are things back east?” he asked, and I began to answer, but it turned out that this was actually the first line of a frenetic monologue on the rugged beauty of the West, the generosity of the people there, the steak, the sagebrush, the whiskey—ah, the whiskey—but here he lost his thread, and after a moment he took up again somewhere in the midst of an elegy: there had never been a happier family than ours, did I know that? Well, if my mother couldn’t recognize it, he was better off without her. Fine, fine if she didn’t love him (his voice broke), but surely she shouldn’t expect his financial help then.

  “I think they call that prostitution out here, honey,” he said, and while I was trying to follow his logic he put Dolly on the line.

  “How are you?” she asked, seeming to expect a lengthy and serious answer. They were doing very well, she said. Her savings would last them for at least a month. They were going to rent a little house—unfurnished—she said proudly, and I smiled.

  “Have you talked to Mama?” she asked. “Is she okay?”

  I felt a weight drop in my gut as if I’d swallowed a plumb bob.

  “She’s fine,” I said, “she’s going along step by step, you know. So what’s it like, Wyoming?” I asked, to get off the subject.

  “Well,” she began, and in the one hesitant syllable I heard her little-sister’s reverence, her sense that I was an august, austere figure, a judge or Buddha to whom one must speak only one’s most illuminating thoughts—and her stubborn resistance to her own natural tendency to admire me. After a moment of reflection, during which I imagined her watching a tumbleweed roll down a long deserted street, she said wonderingly: “It’s sort of like the moon.”

  When I was making enough money, I thought, I’d bring her to live with me. Under my wing, under Frank’s roof, in this neighborhood where everyone tended his quarter acre as if Hartford had the world’s most fertile soil, coaxing persimmons or bok choy or whatever fruits they most longed for into bloom—she would thrive. I pictured her figuring an algebra problem at the kitchen table while I stirred the soup at the stove. I made Hartford sound like the promised land for her, a cheerful polyglot metropolis where the cafés were strung with plastic lanterns and each national community had its own bakery and dance hall.

  “Three associations just for Lithuanians, for example,” I said. I’d noticed Lithuanians in particular because Ross was of Lithuanian descent, causing Philippa and me to do some research on Eastern Europe.

  “Well,” Dolly said solemnly, “You ought to join one, Beatrice.”

  I felt a kind of drowning sensation then: shame. She’d heard my tone, when I flew out of the closet at them that day, but she hadn’t understood the words. Lesbian, Lithuanian—what did it matter? She recognized that I was declaring allegiance to something outside the family, something strange and probably terrible for which I was standing up with pride. So, then, she would stand behind me, she didn’t need to know more. She was going to embody our parents’ ideals, even though they themselves had never upheld them.

  How I wished I had just shrieked fuck you at them, like any normal, rebellious daughter. I wanted to make manifest all the shame in that house, but our terrible secrets were not the villainies one finds in the newspaper, things like incest and physical cruelty, but weaknesses—ignorance, fear, paralytic uncertainty—that kept us from growing and changing and taking part in the world. So we ended up living together in a cauldron and exercising our miseries, with amazing ingenuity, on each other. I couldn’t name our sins, so I found something else that dare not speak its name.

  Three

  I WASN’T going to be like them, crippled the way they were. I had honest work with a time clock and a paycheck and sore feet.

  “This is the salt-free broth, this is the fat-free broth, and this is the salt-free, fat-free broth,” the supervisor explained, nodding toward three chrome vats in which these identical solutions were boiling. “A heart patient could die from a single cup of fatty broth, and salty broth can seriously harm a stroke victim or anyone with high blood pressure. So this is a good spot for someone like you.”

  For someone who spoke English, she meant. My colleagues were mostly Filipino or Vietnamese. Daisy, who worked across the belt from me, had Down’s syndrome.

  “There, look. You’ve already missed one,” she said. The trays were lurching by at a terrible rate and I seized a ladle of broth, but as I rushed to pour it into the cup I scalded my hand instead. Flinching, I spilled more of course, dropped the cup, and brought my hand to my mouth as if it were a sad little creature that could be consoled with a kiss.

  “Now you’ve ruined the whole tray,” the supervisor said, lifting the napkin from its puddle and holding it in front of my face like a soiled undergarment. “Reverse the belt!” she barked. Three trays had gotten past me brothless, now.

  “Concentrate,” she said. The forward motion began again, and, though my innards shriveled with each tray that came toward me, concentrate I most desperately did. When I missed one, Daisy would shake her head and point to the errant cup like a drill sergeant. My left hand was blistered and trembling. Now, when the broth burned my hand I felt a vengeful pleasure in seeing the clumsy thing punished. If it continued to betray me, it was going to starve with the rest of me, did it not understand?

  “Get it right, get it right, get it right!!” Daisy screamed suddenly, and flung her dishrag, on which she had been obsessively wiping her face—at me. It landed in the salt-free vat, folding itself gently on the surface, then sinking, until the supervisor, who had come running upon hearing Daisy’s shrieks, fished it out with her tongs.

  I was gleeful at the prospect of seeing Daisy chastised, but she went after me.

  “You are a probationary employee. People like you never work out. Daisy becomes anxious
when there’s a change of routine. Do as you’re told or you will find yourself back on the street with your sandals and your degree.”

  Daisy shot me a malevolent glance. She knew full well how despicable it was to get things wrong all the time; here was her chance to feel contempt from the upper side.

  Wounded, I became haughty. Fine, let them hate me. I was only there to begin my meteoric rise. I watched a tray of bright wiggly Jell-O make its way around the room in someone’s hands: it was the only beauty I could see, and when it was carried behind a partition, I felt as if some last candle had guttered out and left me alone in the dark.

  * * *

  THE PHONE rang in my dreams for a long time before I realized it was a real phone, and even then I tried to reach it without breaking into consciousness. I put it to my ear (1:14 A.M. the clock said; it gave the only light in the room) and heard a stifled cry—my father’s. I clenched myself against this, the way you do when you see a creature split open on the side of the road, and listened from some high distance as he said how he’d imagined growing old with his wife, looking back over the photo albums together. Now he felt he’d wasted his whole life; he didn’t know where to turn.

  He’d imagined this all in a season of hope, when he was my age and the world was in front of him. There was a photo album—it ended on my first birthday. After that, we could never find the camera.

  “I—when I asked her to marry me, the look on her face. I’ve never seen such, such—” He broke off in a sob, and started up again, more plaintive than anguished.

  “She was the one who wanted to buy the ping-pong ball factory,” he said. “It wasn’t my idea, she thought of it—now it goes under, and it’s all my fault. And she says that’s why she’s leaving, so she can blame me, but she was dreaming of that boy all this time. She felt as if something wonderful was pouring out of his eyes, into hers—all that time she was writing to him, longing for him. I can’t bear it, I don’t know what to do, I can’t cope.”

  He’d lost his home and his family and he had only this phrase from a TV commercial to describe his feeling. It was like fighting a war with a can opener. Somewhere, Philippa was reading, she was looking at something from one side and the other, she was asking herself how Balzac would view it, what Woolf would have said.

  “You’ll make yourself sick,” I said. “Stop now. Stop and just rest. Where’s Dolly? Asleep?”

  “Yes,” he said, with a sigh. He’d protected her, she didn’t know she was alone with a desperate man.

  “You sleep too, Pop. You’ll feel better tomorrow. Things always seem different in the daylight.”

  “I know,” he said, his voice broken, “it’s wrong of me to tell you all this … but I don’t know where else to turn. A man can’t live like this, sweetie, a man needs the feel, the smell of a woman he loves.”

  I shuddered, but it was only over the phone. He talked on more and more quietly until he’d talked himself to sleep like a child, and I hung up very gently, so as not to wake him.

  * * *

  HAD SWEETRIVER been only a dream? My paper topics: “The Mythopoeic Substance of Shelley’s Ozymandias”; “Despair in Beckett \ Despair in Brecht”; “Is Borges Kidding?” All of them written out over page after page, while I lay sprawled across my bed, thoughts, dreams, and feelings looping together in lovely patterns, to absorb me while I waited for the day I’d be released from literature and set loose in the world of love. Now it seemed no more real than the “farm” I grew up on. And Philippa too was gone, receded back into the shadow world with the farm and the education. The thought that she missed me was as silly as my idea that I’d find a niche in investment banking. She was a college professor. I was a Dietary Aide III. There had never been anything of substance between us. I must be as crazy as my parents, to have thought such a thing.

  I pushed my cart down through the maternity ward into oncology and started taking in the trays. The uniforms and hair nets marked us, so the doctors, nurses, even most of the patients, acted as if we were invisible, discussing their private sorrows in front of us under the assumption we couldn’t speak English. A young woman, pale and fearful, bandaged around the chest and arm, reached her good hand out to smooth the hair of her little daughter, whose face was the image of hers, but radiant, excited. “My mom had an operation!” she said, proudly, and in her mother’s tender smile I felt her premonition of death, of leaving her child alone. An old man’s cawing scream came from the next room. Thoracic surgery; the ribs have to readjust … I stood at the gap where the curtain’s metal track ended: Did he have someone to hold him? Because that’s the central necessity, I was beginning to see. I was alone, a ghost who peered into these lives, seeing, seeing, though they never saw me.

  Now, a woman with bandaged eyes, whose husband was reading aloud to her from the bedside chair. I cleared a vase of tulips from her table, listening:

  “The word ‘presbytery’ had chanced that year to drop into my sensitive ears and wrought havoc … I had absorbed the mysterious word with its harsh and spiky beginning and the brisk trot of its final syllables … ‘Presbytery!’ I would shout it over the roof of the henhouse … the word rang out as a malediction: ‘Begone, you are all presbyteries!’”

  He read in a fond, rueful voice, as if this was the story of his own youth, and I recognized the sentences as I might a lullaby my mother had once sung to me; my throat caught and tears sprang up, though I hardly knew why.

  “Habla ingles?” the man asked me, kindly. I had, I realized, been standing there with the tray in my two hands, gaping at him, for a very long time.

  I nodded, setting the tray on the table. I’d forgotten it was possible to answer him in words. Colette, that’s who had written those lines—My Mother’s House—I’d read it because Philippa said I ought to.

  “Where do you come from?” the man asked me, and I looked out the window, over the ruined block beneath the hospital, the boarded storefronts, and the sidewalk that glittered with broken glass, toward the west, the land I grew up on. I remembered now that in my dream of Ross, we hadn’t been in the dormitory hall but walking down the narrow dirt road toward home.

  “Connecticut. I grew up in Connecticut,” I said. It had been real once, it had, though now I saw it as if through the wrong end of a telescope, smaller and smaller, farther away.

  “This is Connecticut,” the man said, very helpfully, in the high voice people use to soothe babies and pets. “Hartford is the capital of Connecticut.” He lifted the cup of ginger ale to his wife’s mouth and forgot me, and I went down in the elevator back to the sub-basement, to the locker room where my face in the mirror looked so thick and plain and stupid with the hair drawn back in its net and the neat uniform collar, I understood why no one had wanted to look at me.

  * * *

  THE PHONE was ringing when I walked in the door at home. Suicide, I thought, though whose would it be? Ma, having prayed all her married life for divorce, realized now that it only proved she’d been abandoned. And Pop, who’d never dared open his eyes to see us, had suddenly realized he’d missed his chance. Dolly had bargained away her mother, to stay with him until that moment, when the affection she knew must be in him would finally spill. There she was on the edge of the desert, roasting in the hallucinatory heat, shivering through the vast frigid nights …

  “Hello?” I said, my voice trembling.

  “He is deranged!” Ma cried, as if we were already in the midst of the conversation. “Pathetic, limp, fearful, and deranged!” Suddenly she was sobbing. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she wept, at the thought of this pathetic, limp, fearful, and deranged person, and how he’d been torn from her arms.

  “It’s so sad, Ma, I know.”

  “It’s not sad,” she snapped, furious I hadn’t read her mind. “It’s revolting! He owes me money! How am I going to live?”

  “What about the job?” I asked. “The teaching job.”

  “Oh don’t be absurd, Beatrice,” she said.
“They don’t want me.”

  “Did you call up?”

  “There’s no point in calling up!” She was truly exasperated now by my ingenuous optimism. “It’s all gossip and backbiting around here, God knows what people are saying about me, but you know Sarah Randolph has heard every word of it. They’re small-minded, conventional people and no one wants to know my side. Oh, my head. Teddy, honey, get me a hot cloth, will you? As hot as you can make it, and wring it out tight.”

  While the water ran in the background, I asked if she’d worked on her job letter.

  “Yes,” she said, a good schoolgirl, and began to read it out: “I started teaching when I realized my husband was incapable of holding a steady job, and I would have to fend for myself and my children alone. I’d been teaching at Wononscopomuc Public High School for three years and never had any problems until another teacher’s jealous vendetta against me—” She broke off for a minute, saying, “Thanks, honey, you’re so good,” to Teddy. I’d brought the hot washcloth so often myself that I could feel her relax from miles away, and my own pulse slowed.

  “You might want to take a—more positive—tack,” I said. I liked the sound of my voice, when I was giving her advice. It reassured me to hear it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that they’ll be looking to see what you can do for them. You want to show them what you have to offer, give some examples of what you’ve done already, stuff like that.”

  “You mean they don’t really care how hard it’s been for me.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “No, of course,” she said with a bitter little laugh. “Of course.” Then, marveling at the workings of a world that wouldn’t concern itself with the perils befalling the innocent ex-wives of the pathetic, limp, fearful, and deranged, nor rush in to ease the sufferings of wide-eyed, altruistic teachers at the hands of their cruel, jealous colleagues … “It’s not important to them. You see, Beatrice, that’s the kind of thing I’d never have realized if I didn’t have you to point it out. Why should it be that way, why? Now that you say it, of course it makes perfect sense: Why should the world care about me?”