The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  And Ma, looking left out as always, hurt to the bone, went down the hall to call Teddy and returned on tiptoe. “He’s asleep,” she whispered, beckoning us into the kitchen again.

  “There,” she said, when we were all sitting. She still sounded prickly but she was doing her best. “Christmas Eve. Dinner. Who’d believe it? Beatrice, will you say grace?”

  “Dear God, thank you for blessing us with so much love,” I said, meaning it, in part, ironically: Hadn’t she repeated again and again that love was the only important thing on earth? And did we not love each other? We did. So all must be well, and these soup bowls of meat (stewed for hours and still I could barely chew through it) had not been ladled out to illustrate Ma’s hopeless hungers but the ingenuity of her satisfaction. She was clinging here, in this dark-walled kitchen with worn-through linoleum, the Formica singed and bubbling, while I had a home to go to where the walls were white and the carpet was thick and soft.

  Butch said, “Amen!” and tore off a chunk of bread.

  “So, how’s the new clothesline working out?” he asked, and Ma took up where she’d left off.

  “Where would we be without you?” she asked him, with a seriousness usually reserved for questions of theology. “The venison, my clothesline—you know, Beatrice, he replaced the leaking window on the south side, he’s been my angel and protector, and that’s the truth.” I saw Sylvie there across from me, my little sister, who had been dumbfounded by the softness of her puppy, and tears sprang up and I didn’t know whether to rescind the ironic grace I’d offered and replace it with something earnest, or to crash out of the back door to escape all the need in that tiny room.

  * * *

  THE FIRST thing I heard next morning was Teddy, wailing that he wanted to open his stocking. It was still dark. I was on the living room couch and I felt deeply, utterly, comfortable, as if I were about to find out that Hartford had only been a dream. I listened for Ma’s voice. It was Christmas, so she’d want more than anything to be happy, and this meant that if the least thing got out of kilter she’d panic and fly into a rage. She dialed the phone and I heard her reasoning with a bewildered Sylvie.

  “He just wants things to be the way they used to be, honey. He wants to run in and sit on your bed and open his stocking with you.” The whispering continued, I dozed off and when I woke up, Butch and Sylvie were at the back door. It was a quarter to six.

  “Merry Christmas!” Ma said. She sat down at the piano and started playing “Deck the Halls.” Butch stood behind her looking like he’d been blindsided by Christmas in the middle of the night, but the music was rousing and Ma’s determination on good cheer was incontrovertible. The room was freezing because the landlord had let the oil run out, but she’d gotten the woodstove blazing and I sat up with my blanket around me, took the cup of coffee Sylvie held out with two hands, and kissed Teddy, who cuddled in beside me, and sang.

  Nearly every gift was intended for warmth. Ma had gotten me a printed shawl, soft green with big, loose heads of pink and ivory hydrangea. It was as if she’d managed to save me a square yard of the past—the next thing to uprooting the hydrangea in front of the old house for me. Unwrapping it, I looked up with a real shock of joy on my face, saw her smile with love, and felt as if I’d filled her room with butterflies at last. She was like a child; when she was happy she truly believed in a beautiful, innocent world. Which meant that she was doomed to disappointment. But for the moment, the room was full of her happiness; it was a bright, soft, intoxicating thing.

  “I was afraid you’d wake up with a headache,” I said.

  “No, I feel fine,” she said. “That’s the good thing about being a drunk—you don’t get sick in the morning.” The sun was up. A few last oak leaves were rattling on the tree outside. I leaned back with my coffee, hearing, It’s only a but-ter knife, in my mind, to the tune of “Paper Moon.” I filed this away; I knew Stetson would like it.

  Sylvie and Ted were playing Parcheesi (Butch had had to leave to open the bar), and she crowed wildly just then; she’d gotten a blockade. Our disaster had saved her from having to push ahead into the world beyond our family, which might, for all any of us knew or understood, have been outer space. Every time Pop lost a business or Teddy went to the emergency room—with every reversal, we had to give up whatever love or accomplishment we’d been pursuing and return to familiar territory, start over. Sylvie was safe under the quilt here with a baby floating inside her; she was where she belonged. It was I, with my striving, who’d gone astray.

  The phone rang, and kept ringing, though Ma fixed it with an icy stare. Sylvie answered and managed to speak with great warmth while maintaining a posture of irritation, then rolled her eyes and gave the phone to me. Pop and Dolly both said how happy they were; they were going to Peabo’s for Christmas dinner, his tree was built of antlers, yes, real antlers he’d collected over the years—he did a good business flying hunters to the more remote areas of the state. That hollow, lonely feeling began to settle on me, the feeling that nothing was solid or true anymore.

  “Ma, talk to Dolly,” Sylvie said.

  “That’s what everyone wants, isn’t it?” Ma said, pouring herself a Scotch with a little glance of defiance at her fusty, disapproving daughters. Well, she was a free spirit, she drank when she liked. “Everyone wants me just to forget how she’s rejected me. Her lungs were weak when she was born. I slept sitting up with her in a sling around my neck … for six weeks.…”

  “It’s Christmas, Ma.”

  “Here,” I said, “Ma wants to talk.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Ma said. Then, “I’m glad to talk to you too.” Then a long, listening silence, with a shadow deepening on her face. Then, stonily: “Well, you’ve made that choice, haven’t you? And I didn’t stop you, did I?” She thrust the receiver at me and stalked away.

  “Someone had to tell her that what she’s doing is wrong,” Dolly said to me primly.

  Ma was crying softly in the corner.

  “Eva, I should have named her,” Ma said later.

  “Eva?” Sylvie asked.

  “Hitler’s mistress,” Ma explained, and Teddy laughed and laughed.

  * * *

  “WHEN YOU said it was a trailer, I thought you meant it was a … trailer,” I said.

  Sylvie had wanted me to see her new home, so there we were, out behind the ball field, where Butchy’s trailer, a rounded beige model, such as families towed behind their cars during some inconceivably happy earlier age, was parked here between two real mobile homes and an old schoolbus up on blocks.

  “It is a trailer,” she said. Inside it, Springtime was yapping wildly. “It’s nice neighbors mostly, but Ed in the schoolbus, I don’t think he feeds his dogs. Here, Springy,” she opened the door and he leapt out and raced around and around the trailer, causing furious, hoarse barking behind the bus.

  “Shut that dog up, he’s getting them all going!” a man shouted.

  She wheeled around to shout back, but shook her head and stopped herself. “Come on, come on, little silly,” she said. Springtime sprang up into her arms and she carried him inside. “No point arguing with crazy people,” she said, as if repeating a lesson. “Just keep your distance, leave them alone. Oh, it’s freezing in here!” She turned all four of the gas burners on high and very soon the top quarter of the room was stifling. “I’ve got to get a little fan,” she said.

  “Is it safe to use the burners like that?” I asked.

  “So far…” she said lightly. The linoleum was worn away underfoot, as we were standing in the only patch of real floor in the room, in front of the stove, between the table and the bed. Sylvie bent to look out the back window, where a hillside of low brush was filled with candy wrappers blown in from the Little League games. “See, that’s Butchy’s father’s land. The goat’ll keep the weeds down in there.”

  “I thought you said a donkey.”

  “You have to get a goat, with a donkey. Or the donkey gets lonely.”

>   “Oh.”

  “Let me just grab the shampoo and we’ll go back to Ma’s.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS no shower in the trailer, and Sylvie had never cut her hair because Pop loved little girls with long hair. So she washed it at Ma’s after Ma and Teddy had gone upstairs to bed that night, and then she sat with her back to the stove to dry it. There we were together, the two of us who remembered all the same things—the blue-and-yellow spider spinning in the clouded window of the henhouse, the sprinkling of violets in the grass, Ma bringing out a pitcher of lemonade, Ma’s eyes gone dead suddenly because she’d glimpsed something wrong, something despicable, in one of us.

  “The trailer’s cozy, don’t you think?” she said. “I pretend we’re on a boat sometimes, when it’s windy.” She smiled and tilted her head back, lifting her hair to get the heat under it, about to tell me the story of her love, which, like all such stories, seemed amazing to the two people involved in it, and completely ordinary to everyone else.

  “He doesn’t know,” she began. “He doesn’t really know what he’s feeling, but I do, I can always tell.” She looked down quickly. I was the older sister, the one who explained everything … I had a Voice of Experience, and my experience in Matters of Love was vast. Sylvie only had Butch, and now his child.

  “Beatrice, he’s so good, that’s why he gets in trouble the way he does. He tries to make everything work for everyone and when he can’t do it, he gets mad, and you know the rest,” she said, with a combination of shy pride and resigned embarrassment. “His parents … you know, they’re just lost, it’s hard for people like that. His mom was born Jewish, but Butchy’s father was Catholic and she converted when they got married, and she raised Butch Catholic (which is I’m sure why he’s the way he is), and now, she’s born-again! They baptized her and fifty other people, in Mudge Pond, last August.”

  “Nice, stable family,” I teased.

  “Well,” Sylvie said, palms up, “I feel at home with him!” and we laughed happily at the thought of these two families joined together and the stories that might result. Then she turned serious again so I could feel all her longing and how it must seem to be fulfilled now. “It’s like he’s always been there, like a shadow in my dreams.”

  The shadow of some boy on a motorcycle, my father, maybe, except this one was hers, and always would be: her face showed his feelings, how could he leave? Now she knew what it was to be the ray of magic in a man’s darkness, have him grateful, to you, for everything he sees.

  “He’s not the kind who’d ever notice me,” she said shyly, as if he were Adonis come down out of the sky.

  “The Cumberland Farms thing, the B and E, he feels so bad about it,” she said. “He was a kid, he’d seen it in the movies, that’s all. But of course, if he’d never done it he’d always have gone to Cumberland Farms for his coffee and I’d never have gotten to know him. (She’d been working at Odge’s Variety, two blocks away.) So I guess God works in mysterious ways, just like Ma says. There I’d be, watching Carrie Listel scratch lottery tickets, which is a hard thing to watch, and he’d say hi and I’d give him his change. I didn’t really notice him, until he didn’t come one afternoon. Then I realized I’d counted on seeing him. Carrie Listel came in and bought her tickets and she stood there scratching them off—she won ten dollars, she bought ten more tickets, then she won two, bought two more—I couldn’t stand to see it, she worked at the nursing home, she needed that money, and I felt like I’d run through all my chances to see Butch the way she was running through her chances at winning the lottery.

  “So the next day I said—very lightly, like it was something I’d noticed in passing—‘You didn’t come in yesterday.’ And he looked guilty! Just for a second, like he was sorry to disappoint me. And then he got terribly shy and gruff and gave me exact change and went straight back out again and I thought ‘He must really like me!’” She looked down and played with the fringe on the afghan for a minute, as if she’d just said something conceited and was waiting for me to reprove her.

  “It’s written all over him, how he feels about you,” I said.

  “It’s funny with a man, isn’t it, Beatrice? All the things they can’t say, so they just radiate them instead. I figured out ways to let him know without exactly telling him—like one day I said his coffee cup had been in my dream the night before. If you could have seen how he smiled—I could tell it really made him happy. After he left that day, Carrie Listel won a hundred dollars and put it in her pocket and went home, satisfied for one minute out of her life, and just as she was leaving she turned around and said, ‘Watch out, young lady,’ in a very severe and kind way … like a mother, and I said, ‘I will, Mrs. Listel,’ and I wanted to pick her up and twirl her around, because I knew she’d seen that Butch loved me. The next day he was going over to help his brother put on a roof, and when he said he wasn’t coming in, I made sure to sound disappointed (usually I’d be careful not to), and then he said, “I’ll be back by dinner,” and I said, “I’ll be off by then,” and he said, “I know,” and then there was this long silence and I said, “Thank you, Butch, I’d love to have dinner with you.”

  She opened her hands as if to let a pair of doves loose, and gave her brilliant, jagged smile. “You know, I think men want sex so much because they have to let their tenderness loose that way, before it, kinda, drowns them,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I tried, in my Voice of Experience, but the irony curdled and I missed my mark.

  “After that first time, he jumped up and said, ‘I gotta go,’ and I thought, ‘What happened?’ And then I thought, ‘I know what happened.’ I did! It was too good, too right, the kind of thing you have to get away from before something spoils it, and I sat up and looked around and I thought, ‘This is the nicest trailer I’ve ever been in’ and I just burrowed back under the covers and slept there and I thought, ‘I’m home.’ And when he came back, he lay down and looked in my eyes and he didn’t say anything, but I knew, I could feel it, and I said, ‘Oh, Butch, I do, I love you too.’ And he hugged me so tight, I knew, I always know, what he’s feeling; it’s in his eyes, in his hands, but he can’t say it.”

  She was quiet for a minute, luxuriating in her thoughts, remembering. I considered telling her my story about Lee, though I knew it would embarrass her. I used to love embarrassing Sylvie, because it proved how much more worldly I was, but now I didn’t have the heart.

  “Which is why I knew it was okay to get pregnant,” she said, stubborn, and pleading. Wouldn’t I please see that she was following her inner compass, the only reliable guide? Didn’t I also live this way? I nodded. I wanted her dreams—these soft little girl’s dreams—to come true.

  “What do you mean, you knew it was okay?”

  “I knew he wouldn’t mind in the end. He saw it as more work and worry, but I knew.”

  “So you convinced him.”

  “I think I’ve convinced him,” she said. “I mean, I told him it was the safe time of the month, that’s how it happened. Then I acted surprised. I mean, I was surprised! There’s somebody else inside me. I knew it right away; my period was two days late and I knew it, I could feel I was different, some tiny change in the taste of things, and then I just felt a change sweeping through me like a wave. But I acted like it was an accident, and he believed me.” (She pursed her lips to contain a smile, and I thought how true it was, that if you wanted to feel a man’s love, you had to trick it out of him. I was so grateful to be away from that now.)

  “He believed me, and he was worried, but I could see he was happy too—proud, like. He knew in himself that we’d accomplished something together. You know when you love a man and you feel him inside you the first time, you know how it seems to be a…” She got shyer and shyer, but more and more determined to say what she was thinking, even though words couldn’t really touch it. Still, by speaking, she could begin to turn a mercurial feeling into a solid reality. The sentence she spoke, she would remember
, repeat it to herself—and when everything went awry (as it would, because it always does), she’d still have it to bring the past to life again, nearly as reliably as if she could save the essence of that day, that love, in a bottle, to be opened in the depths of old age. “… like, a holy thing? And you’re so tender and amazed and you can hardly believe you’re together and you’re facing the wildest danger—the danger of being seen, known—facing it together. You’re full of daring because you love each other, and you look in his eyes, and you feel him—well, you know what I mean.”

  Unfortunately, I did.

  “And out of that comes, a, a…” She started crying; out of happiness, because she was knocked up by an ex-con bartender from the valley and every night she could touch him and feel him want her and she was going to be poor and worried and probably increasingly angry, but this was the price you paid for having just a month, a year of this feeling. She was amazed to have such a lucky fate, and though I could see the troubles stretching ahead, I mostly envied her. She was so happy in her illusion, and as it seemed to me there was no happiness but in illusion, I prayed hers could be preserved.

  “He will love the baby,” she said. “He already does. Because he loves me.” She was tentative, waiting for me to contradict her, but when I nodded she said firmly and quietly, “I know he does. And Bea, I wouldn’t have been any good in college … I was never that good in school.”

  She’d fallen behind because she missed so much, staying home to keep watch over everything. The teachers would say “Beatrice Wolfe’s little sister,” and she’d panic at having to live up to me because I loomed so large in her mind.

  “You know, with this Nubestos thing, maybe we can save some money, and who knows what then?”