The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  The atmosphere of wonder was developing a charge and I sensed a thunderhead billowing, though her tone remained perfectly summer-afternoon, hazy and warm: “Beatrice, what would I do without you?” she asked. “I’d never have understood this on my own, but of course, it’s childish of me to hope that anyone would recognize all I’ve suffered, would really care.”

  “Well, maybe to hope that some unknown personnel officer—”

  “No, anyone!” came the wounded cry. “Anyone at all! Who is there, for me, except unknown personnel officers. I’m alone, alone in the world!”

  A silence fell as one side of me twisted the other’s arm. “There’s me, Ma, I understand, I do,” I managed to say, and truly. It was terrible, to have to blow every sorrow up until it loomed like a colossus, out of fear that no one would notice it otherwise. And then to quake in the cold dark of its shadow, defenseless against its enormity. She needed me, who, thank heaven, had been imbued in the womb with magical powers, to cast a spell on the monster, put it down.

  “I—” I said, but nothing else would come. I could not spare enough of myself to repay her for so many tormented years. Hearing my hesitation, poison poured into her heart and she said coolly that she’d let me go, that obviously I (who had a good job, a good education, thanks to her) had more important things to do. How could I have become so stingy, unwilling to give what she needed, though it was only a few simple words?

  “Please will you write the letter for me?” she asked.

  “Of course, Ma, sure.”

  “Isn’t it amazing?” she said. “It seems only yesterday you were born, you were the cutest baby, and now you’re all grown up, you’re guiding me.”

  * * *

  I SAT down and wrote: “I’ve found I have an easy rapport with disaffected students. I can help them see their natural talents and gain confidence. Many of these boys—students—need only kind guidance…”

  Her true accomplishment was quite different: she had withdrawn, in fear, into a raindrop-sized world, but she’d managed to endow her raindrop with such complex drama that it became a virtual sea. We couldn’t tear our eyes from it, we had to find out what was going to happen there next. I tried to think how to phrase this on a résumé, but there was the phone again.

  “Beatrice?” It was Sylvie. “I’ve been trying to get you for an hour.”

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “It’s … well,” she stumbled, and then in a gust of happy excitement: “It’s nothing the matter, it’s … I … guess what? I’m pregnant!”

  “Oh my God, Sylvie,” I sat down hard on the kitchen chair. “Oh my God. What does Butch say?”

  Her voice was soft, joyful. “He brought me flowers.”

  “So you’ll get married?” I said, thinking, Ah, a suicide in the family tradition.

  “Oh, no,” she said sharply, “no, no. I’m never going to get all tangled up with someone else that way.”

  “Having a baby with someone can be kind of an entanglement, Sylvie.”

  “No, don’t be silly,” she said. “If I’m not happy, if things go wrong with Butch and me, I’ll just go … wherever. We’ll just go, the baby and me.”

  “Congratulations,” I managed.

  “Thank you, Beachy,” she said, “thank you so much. I knew you’d be happy for me.”

  “Now you eat right, okay?” I said, to my own surprise. I must have heard it on TV. “Pregnant mothers need lots of—milk, I think, and leafy green vegetables.”

  She pulled on her cigarette and blew out a long, satisfied stream. “It sounds cozy, doesn’t it?” she said. “Pregnant mothers?”

  “Yes, honey, it does.”

  * * *

  “DON’T FORGET, Gemini, the tide turns when it is low as well as when it is high,” chirped The Courant astrology column, my best adviser, and the only part of the paper I could bring myself to read. I’d look away from the front page (CITYFEST PLAZA WILL DISPLACE TWO HUNDRED FAMILIES; YOUTHS ROLL VAGRANT ONTO TRAIN TRACKS, etc.). The classified was an endless list of the places I couldn’t fit in.

  The phone was ringing.

  “I guess you’ve heard,” Pop said, when I answered. There was a long silence, which I couldn’t guess how to break. Parents and children are not meant to live by conversation, I thought. You can’t have a sensible dialogue with anyone while some little tune in your head goes: “Without his sperm, I wouldn’t exist. If he’d swerved farther, I wouldn’t exist. If he had his wish, I wouldn’t exist. But he secretly adores me.” No, with a parent, you have to proceed by action: raising a timber frame or picking beans in adjacent rows.

  “Heard?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I can’t help it.” He was crying.

  “I know,” I said gently. I did know—nobody felt worse about this all than me. We’d known the parental lives would come to pieces, but that Sylvie too should be stopped in her tracks here, before she was even grown! She was only sixteen, she didn’t realize what she was doing. She wanted something soft and warm in her arms, wanted to breathe life into that beautiful dream of family. Sylvie had worked at that dream; she was the one smiling there with firm, adoring belief in her parents, the one who picked up all the wormy apples and put them through the press so we could say we’d made our own cider, the one who’d been absolutely faithful to every tenet of the dream.

  Of course he was weeping, who wouldn’t weep? If only he and my mother had had a grounding rather than a consuming kind of love, their children could have stood on that foundation to reach up toward their own dreams. Or, love aside … but we were not able to put love aside; it was our ideal, our prayer and our best excuse, because in love anything is fair. The words “I love you” brought expiation, they healed wounds without a scar. If my parents had only been able, if they could have gone simply about the business of their lives, working ahead through difficulty, accomplishing some things and not others—if they’d been more like Frank and Henny, then they might have divorced, gone mad, died, for that matter, and left Sylvie entirely on her own, but she’d have had an example to live by. She’d be at school now, studying biology—she’d wanted to be a midwife.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” I said, thinking this mild consolation was the best I could offer. “She doesn’t realize what havoc a baby will wreak for her.”

  Which was odd, because of course, Sylvie had seen babies wreak havoc before.

  “It’s not too late,” I went on. “She’s not even eight weeks along. You could talk to her, tell her.”

  “My first grandchild,” he said. “And just when it seemed nothing good would ever happen again.” He took a deep breath and continued. “You don’t know, sweetie, you don’t know what it means to me, to think that new life is coming, a fresh start where your mother and I failed … what hope it gives.”

  Of course. He’d been crying for joy. Thank God his hearing was so selective …

  “Anything can happen, sweetie,” he said, “anything at all. Nobody knows what’s just around the corner. People make fortunes because they’re standing in the right place at the right time, because they’re cockeyed the way everyone else happens to be cockeyed at the moment. Look at pet rocks, for God’s sake—it doesn’t take a million IQ points to make a million bucks, no sir.

  “And you know Sylvie,” he continued, his voice swelling, so I remembered how he used to call her “little wonder” because she could skibble up a doorframe or scramble along the barn rafters as surefooted as a mouse. She was strong and agile and had faith in what her body could do. This was the first thing she knew about herself, because she could only know, at first, what set her apart from me. And her great gift, for him, was that she was so clearly not me. She’d grown, as children do, to fit the shape of his pride.

  “She was made for motherhood,” he crowed. “Remember how good she was with babies, from the time she was five or six!”

  Yes, havoc was Sylvie’s
old familiar—she liked her lullabies in a mad patois.

  “She’s only sixteen now!” I said. “It’s too young. And what about Butch, does he seem like a natural father?”

  “Well, it’s not as if she’s marrying him, honey,” my father said. I felt like the world’s wettest blanket. Why not just let him enjoy?

  “No, Butch isn’t exactly who I’d choose,” he went on, in his Voice of Clear Reason, his salesman’s voice, “but he seems to love your sister and let’s not forget your sister loves him. It’s not up to us to dictate her life for her. She has to do what feels comfortable for her.”

  Had he been watching daytime TV? Whatever, it was easier to succumb to it, and let life roll on. It’s exhausting to cut your own path, when the parental footsteps follow such a clear trail. Even if that trail leads to perdition.

  “And you know, land’s cheap out here, there’s acres and acres, especially in the farther reaches—once you get a few miles off the highway, you can really get a deal. If I can just make a few thousand to start out with, I’ll be able to buy a pretty nice spread. People commute into Laramie by small plane. So if things don’t work out, and Sylvie decides Butch isn’t what she wants, she can bring the baby and come out here. Plenty of wide-open spaces, fresh air, it’s a great place to bring up a child. You know, I guess it’s true what they say, honey: Time heals all wounds. I’m starting to see that just because I’m divorced doesn’t mean I can’t gather my children around me the way I always meant to. I’ve got my Doll here already, and if Sylvie and the baby came out, well, things are just looking up, I guess that’s about all I have to say. But there I go, talk, talk, and I don’t let you get a word in.”

  No, because after all, God only knew what I’d say. There I’d be, boasting about some book I was reading, that he wouldn’t have thought himself fit to understand, and even as he hated me for it, he’d have to remember that he’d already wanted to be rid of me, and then a fog of guilt would rise up and make it even harder to look at me, or, God forbid, listen. So he talked and talked, trying to make amends. I responded with polite little echoes. At the end, we could both say we’d managed it, we’d acted like father and daughter.

  So my heart sank when he declared his intention, after all these years, to listen. The last time I’d tried to get some message across to him I’d ended up flying out of the closet like Tarzan on a vine. I cringed and vowed to answer his questions honestly and fully.

  “So,” he said, while I braced myself. “How do you like Hartford?”

  “It’s kind of lonely,” I admitted. “I get up in the morning and I can hardly get myself to go to work.”

  “Well, honey, no one actually likes going to work, do they?” he asked, warily. What was wrong with me, that I expected so much? “But we all have to go, that’s what being grown up is.”

  Of course, he was right. Life was like this—meaningless, but crushing. There were compensatory pleasures—vacations, new stereo equipment, and stuff.

  “We all feel that way sometimes,” he went on. “But we don’t just give in to it.” The sound of his voice pleased him, the stern-but-fair tone, and the fatherly feeling it gave, of standing above me. “Without self-discipline where would the world be?” He got lost in his thinking and came up again to say: “Your mother raised you with the idea you were some kind of star—but the fact is, we all have to work for our bread.”

  True. Life depends on daily effort. There can be no giving in to the torpor that’s always swaying beneath, calling you down. The strange thing was that he’d hardly managed to bear going to work himself. He said he was a lone wolf, an individualist—he couldn’t take bossing. So he lay on the couch, combing the newspaper for new horrors, waiting for the next world war. When it came, all labors would be lost—so why labor? He fell asleep; his change slipped out of his pocket—we’d swarm the cushions when he got up. Suppose I didn’t steel myself, and so followed him into twilight life? That would be awful. I squared my shoulders and changed my tone.

  “It’s a nice apartment,” I said, “a nice neighborhood, lots of families—you know, gardens, and clotheslines and statues of the Virgin and everything.”

  “That’s great, great, honey,” he said, doing me the favor of forgetting all that went before.

  “It’s good to know you’re nicely settled, sweetie. And about Sylvie—you know, Butch is just such a nice guy—not a genius, no, but a really hard worker, and he’s had a rough time of it with his father and the problem at the Cumberland Farms and all—Sylvie’s a godsend for him, and he loves her so much, it’s wonderful to see.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. The “problem” at Cumberland Farms had been armed robbery, though everyone said Butch was only the driver and then, only to spite his father, that he would never harm a flea of his own will. “Though I do wish she’d finish high school,” I ventured.

  “She’s young,” Pop said. “She’s a bright kid, she’s going to learn from everything she does. Look at the different kinds of people she talks to in the diner, people she’d never meet if she just went on in school. School’s important, I don’t deny it, but different people learn in different ways. The high school Dolly’s going to out here, very few of these kids go further on. They’re going to work on the ranches or the oil industry, they don’t need Shakespeare. Life is full of surprises, sweetie, people take different paths. Look at Albert Einstein, he never got past the third grade!”

  “Albert Einstein didn’t drop out of school to keep house for an armed robber,” I couldn’t help pointing out.

  “Well, you can’t run the world, sweetie, and neither can I,” Pop declared, in the tone of a man bobbing along on an inflatable raft while the world he couldn’t run passed by.

  He might be right, I kept reminding myself—Sylvie might have found a man who would love her and take care of her, Pop might strike copper or whatever it was you struck in Wyoming, earn back Dolly’s college savings and more, get married again, live happily, die with money in the bank. Sometimes people who drop out of school discover the truths everyone else has been educated to overlook. Some armed robbers make excellent husbands. Certainly my father was statistically due for a break, and lots of people take dramatic turns in midlife, have strokes of fortune or understanding. The tide turns when it is low as well as when it is high.

  “Isn’t it exciting?” Dolly asked dutifully, when he put her on the phone. I replied dutifully that it was. Pop was teaching her to waltz, she said, to the theme music on Merv Griffin, which was about the only TV they could get. And they were moving into their rental house next week—it was on a cul-de-sac, like all the houses there. From the air, you could look down and see them, cut into the landscape.

  “Pop’s taking flying lessons. When he gets back on his feet he’s going to get a small plane. You really need one out here.”

  “You do?” I asked, trying to sound normal. Did not the phrase “flying lessons” call to mind the people who bought our furniture and crashed in flames? Who abandoned their children out of folly?

  “It makes him happy, Beatrice,” Dolly insisted, angry at my hesitation. “If you could hear the way he talks about it, the way everything looks from the sky. I’m going up with him tomorrow, so he can show me,” she said. “Don’t tell Mama, I don’t want her to get mad.”

  “I won’t,” I promised—quite honestly, as I didn’t dare speak of her to Ma. “But Dolly, be careful, okay?” I said, as if a passenger in a small plane piloted by a man whose sheer empty optimism threatened to loft him into orbit could save herself by “being careful”! Very clever.

  “So, have you joined any of those clubs?” asked my conscientious sister.

  * * *

  I HAD not. Everyone on earth belonged to something, except for me. Here were the Italian-Americans celebrating a festival, the bishop waving from his limo sunroof, the plaster saint bobbing behind. Saturday morning the whole West Side drifted along the sidewalk toward Temple Beth-El, fathers in suits holding the hands of their littl
e girls. There was reggae night at the Haitian-American club, happy hour at The Hart and Doe, bingo for old ladies, and for the teenagers, rival gangs. For all I loved to go to church, to see people singing together with their egos quietly tucked away, I had no religion. Certainly no social class. Americans don’t believe in them. And what would I put under ethnic heritage—Nazi?

  In fact I was nobody, another American whose identity was to be read from the tea leaves, or changed with a surreptitious tap at the cup. Seeing a HELP WANTED sign at Kmart, I’d imagined myself standing at a cash register instead of over a soup vat, and it seemed a wonderful thing. I rushed in to apply and found myself at the back of an endless line. When I reached the desk and the receptionist said they’d run out of applications, I burst into tears. She looked at me, incredulous: how did a person come to such ridiculous desperation?

  Philippa would have known what to do, but I couldn’t let her hear my cowed, shaking voice. She’d give up on me, and without her, without the trick I had of believing myself connected to her, I didn’t know how I’d live.

  To think that only weeks ago, I’d been the lesbian she had made of me: an electric, exotic creature, half-woman, half-serpent, known to most people only from fantasies they daren’t even realize they had. When my freshman adviser asked me why sex was so important to me, she might have considered that every age has its form—the nature essay, the epistolary novel, the roman à clef—ours was bodily rather than literary. The sexual act—aka “the act of love”—was our medium; through it, each of us expected to have his/her own individual say.

  Here dream and circumstance clasped hands and the circle was closed; my wish to be someone, belong to something, hear Philippa’s rat-a-tat voice bringing down sacred cows like ducks in a shooting gallery—these were not peculiarities, they marked me as a member of a movement. I was lost, frightened, not to mention increasingly small-minded and angry, because I was part of a disenfranchised group, a group ignored and despised by the general run of Americans, who could honestly be counted among the meek, the deserving, the deprived. Why hadn’t I seen it before? Of course I felt alien and misunderstood. I was a lesbian, a lesbian adrift in the heterosexual world.