The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “A meatloaf special please, side of mashed, extra butter.”

  “Stetson!” Had he crossed the city, just to come see me? I looked up into his eyes and saw he had.

  “This is a library, sir!” I huffed like a cartoon librarian, giggling like a girl.

  “I’m sorry!” he said, and whispered: “I’d like a meatloaf special, please, side of mashed, extra butter.” His eyes ticked over me like always, accounting for my breasts as if he was afraid they might have escaped since he last saw me. It seemed a lucky thing to be able to give comfort so easily.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I have a reference question.”

  “At your service,” I said, saluting with my rag.

  Then, in the tone of soft amusement he often used when admitting something: “It’s an excuse to come by. I called up and your girlfriend said you were here.”

  Girlfriend.

  “I missed you too,” I admitted, and he smiled without meaning to, looking down at the floor.

  He leaned against the shelf while I washed the chair, and eagerly shook Cyril’s hand. “You’re a lucky man,” he said. “She’s a great salesperson.”

  “We’re not selling anything,” Cyril said, walking away.

  “I think I have just the book for him,” Stet said, pointing to the AA manual under his arm. “Everyone comes to it in his own time, though, I know.” Dear Stetson, he was radiant with AA. “Actually, Bill W’s not a very fluent writer,” he said.

  I looked up at him, and saw from the tilt of his head that he was saying this because I was a lit major and still a relative of Princess Margaret in his eyes. This sentence was a stepping-stone on which he meant to cross the gap between us. The gaps between people are so immense, but who ever looks for a true way over?

  “God, is that what it’s all about at AA? Bill W’s prose style? You go around in a circle and pick apart his metaphors, and somebody says ‘reminds me of Camus’ and someone else says ‘derivative, I think, of Faulkner’? I thought you got to tell your old stories over and over.”

  “There is that,” he said and I smiled at him, looking down so he wouldn’t see how ravenous I was for his stories. He had so many, starting in his parents’ house, backed up to the Saco River (“You never hear people fight down here the way they do in Lewiston”), his escape, life on the road with Carrion, the band he’d been sound man for, rehab (waking up on a rubber sheet, the wreckage behind him, the daily fight to come). Stetson had failed so badly. And risen in glory, because he looked that failure in the eye.

  “By the way,” he said, and I saw he was sparkling all over with something he’d wanted to tell me.

  “What?”

  He took that second glance he always took before daring to say something … “I brought something we can both enjoy,” he said, looking around and seeing we were alone (it was a library, one was always alone there). He pulled out a Penthouse magazine that advertised “Open crotch shots of Germaine Greer.”

  I gasped, as I knew it pleased him to shock me.

  It turned out there was more than one Germaine Greer on earth, and this one had an ex-boyfriend who needed some cash. Her breasts brimmed up as she parted herself, head tossed back on the pillow with a smile that said you could use her any way you liked, if only you’d love her.

  “That is not Germaine Greer,” I said. “Germaine Greer does not smile that way.” But I was blushing to the roots of myself, because it was exciting to see her revealing all her secrets. And because Stetson was watching my reaction so closely.

  “Philippa always said it’s really the womb men want to see—that’s where the action is,” I said. Lee got nervous when I talked about Philippa, so I could only mention her with Stet.

  “I guess I can see that,” he said, still gazing on Germaine. “Did I ever tell you what my father said, when I asked him about women? I said ‘Dad, what is it, between a woman’s legs, that’s so important?’ and he looked me in the eye, put his hand on my shoulder, and said ‘Son, it’s like the American flag.’”

  “Ought to be inspiring,” I said.

  “But tempting to defile.”

  I nodded, laughing with rue, though I’d never been happier. “Look,” I said, because the winter sunset was hitting the red brick rowhouses across the square, and even though one of them was boarded up and they were all covered with graffiti, they had the feeling of 1910 about them suddenly. I could imagine a milk truck, and the immigrants of that time coming home from the typewriter factory.

  “It’s beautiful,” Stet said. “It’s like a ruin.”

  We were drawn to the front window together and stood shoulder to shoulder, watching a hamburger wrapper blow across the square in the cold, rosy light, feeling so like a couple looking over their newly planted acres that I had to resist the urge to put my arm around him.

  “It’s a shooting gallery over there now,” he said.

  “Remember when drugs were like a promised land you could find in your own self? All the visions appearing? Everything seemed so much more intense and important after you had some dope. You were finally getting into a deeper dimension. It was more like what I’d expected from life.” Or rather, from love.

  “That was an illusion,” he said sharply, and just as I was heartily agreeing (having remembered what deep water this was for him), I saw Lee drive up in front. It was five o’clock.

  I grabbed my coat and ran out to her, feeling as though I’d been caught doing something awful.

  “Stetson came by,” I said, hoping for absolution. The tiniest change came over her, some variation of her breathing. I switched the subject. I didn’t want to tell her about “Undeliverable, Building on Fire,” either, so I asked how her day had gone, and she said tiring, but good. I looked out the window and started humming, not thinking, until the words rose into my mind suddenly. “I get no kick from champagne … mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all … I get a kick out of you.” I pushed the door open with my foot on “kick,” and saw that it was our sunlight hour—the time when the sun came over the crest of the roof across the street and shone right in through our windows.

  “Sweetie, don’t do that,” Lee said, “it makes a mark.”

  Four

  SYLVIE’S BABY was a boy, seven pounds five ounces, named Jesse, not after anyone, Sylvie explained—it was just that Butch like its sound. He’d taken an extra shift at the bar and wasn’t around much, but the money was great, and little Springtime kept Sylvie company at home. Peabo, Pop’s flying instructor, had given Dolly his frequent flier miles so she could come back to help out, but after she was there for two days Butch said he was sick of tripping over her, and when Ma heard Dolly was at Sylvie’s she pulled out the baby blanket she was knitting and reworked it into a sweater for Teddy instead.

  “I suppose you’ve been planning this little visit all along,” she said to me, bitterly. I didn’t answer. I was contemplating the vision of myself as evil genius, devoted to driving my mother out of her mind through stratagems as devious as persuading the bad sister to guard the good sister’s doorway and so, cruelly separating a woman from her firstborn grandchild.

  “I suppose your father will be here next,” she said. Yes, Mother, and after that, Albert Speer—I got him a weekend pass; I’ve got connections in Hell. I sighed, and this was apparently an incitement, because Ma said suddenly, and with great force, as if she’d been holding her tongue all this time: “His first act toward you was an act of murder! And now somehow he comes out smelling like a rose, you’re willing to shelter him, to care for him, you don’t even care what he did to me.”

  My heart filled with sympathy for this poor aspiring murderer. I was the author of his troubles, but I hadn’t meant to be, and I wanted something to come out right for him, someday.

  “I guess I should have learned by now that no one is going to understand me, not even my own child.”

  After she got off, I held the receiver button down for a second and then dia
led Sylvie, to ask Dolly to come visit me, so I could take her under my wing. I was going to build a perfect replica of childhood for her. I put an old patch quilt on our guest bed, and turned it down the way Ma used to, when she had a moment of respite and was trying to make things nice. And I made Ma’s spaghetti sauce for dinner, and planned a trip to the aquarium the day after she arrived. I went to five different florists looking for Queen Anne’s lace and bee balm to make a bouquet like the ones we used to pick at home.

  “Those are field flowers,” a clerk explained, looking at me strangely, so I could see I’d violated some florist etiquette that everyone else understood. “You know, the kind that grow wild. There’s no point in selling them.”

  “Well, unfortunately I do not happen to be in possession of a field,” I huffed. The nerve of her, acting as if just because I didn’t have a field I was somehow less of a person and not entitled to the same flowers as everyone else. I felt like bringing her up on a civil rights charge. “I mean, look at this! You have a special on Asian terrestrial orchids!” Was this what was left to the poor and unlanded, a bunch of expensive and probably carnivorous jungle plants that looked like mutated sexual organs and smelled of mouthwash and paint thinner? I turned on my heel.

  And there she was, my sister, alighting with her many parcels from the bus across the street from the florist, dropping one glove, then another, bending to retrieve them and losing her glasses, the scarf sliding from around her neck, then, her face lit up as soon as she saw me and she ran toward me across the busy street, though her shoes stayed behind and the bus driver was holding out the purse she’d left on her seat.

  As I hugged her I felt her steel herself, as if I were holding her too tight or too long. I stepped back. I had so much to say to Dolly and none of it could really fit into words. We stood there at the curb, looking at each other with hope and suspicion, like people on a blind date. When I last knew her, before I went to Sweetriver, she’d been a mystical nine-year-old who lived according to a mad Talmud of inner rules: she couldn’t go to school without a little bracelet she’d woven for herself out of cherry twigs, and she’d counted Ma’s goodnight kiss as an amulet and refused to speak afterward, answering any question with a flurry of frantic hand gestures meant to illustrate the dangers she’d face if her silence were broken. Since then, I’d seen her once or twice a year in the midst of the squabbling parents, flapping chickens, and barking dogs that constituted our family. I had no real sense of her. And here she was, tall as a woman, uncertain as a girl, scratching the back of her left ankle with her right foot like an ibis or flamingo or some other bird that seems, though it spends its life in water, not to care to wet its feet. A spark of confidence and her face would have been beautiful. What struck me about her, though, was her inquisitive silence: she was full of questions she didn’t dare ask. She’d stepped on too many land mines in her life … maybe that was why she stood on one foot.

  “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” she said.

  “No, no, only a minute … I’m so glad to see you.”

  “Yes,” she said, looking left and right as if now that she had crossed the street, she remembered she ought to watch out for cars. “Yes, it’s really nice of you, Beatrice … This is just great.”

  She might have been reading from a phrase book. She knew there was some proper way to address formidable me, with my degree and the terrible shadow cast by my sexuality, and now my great big-shot job at the library—but who could guess what it was? I felt terrible for her, having to look up to me, but I knew I was the best she had.

  “Welcome to Hartford!” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said earnestly. “Oh, you should see the baby! He’s so adorable, his little eyes are so dark and round and curious. You’ll love him, Beatrice, and the trailer is just like a little playhouse!”

  “Cramped, though,” I said, in case she was hurt that Butch had sent her away, but she frowned and insisted the place was lovely and spacious, that you’d never guess it was only eighty-four square feet, and furthermore, she could completely understand why it might have been hard for them to have her there, with a brand-new baby and all. “It’s perfect! He’s the most beautiful little baby,” she said again, as if she had to prove it to me, since I was on the Pill and probably believed all babies ought to be killed.

  “All they really need is money,” she said. We were back at the apartment and she was looking around at all of Lee’s furniture. “It’s hard, with a baby—they’re doing the best they can, Butch works and works, it’s a hard life.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not money that’s lacking, it’s emotional wherewithal,” I tried to explain. “They’re totally at sea, how can they support each other? How can they make a good foundation for their child?”

  She looked at me without comprehension. “I suppose the library hired you because of all the college?” she asked.

  “I suppose that had something to do with it,” I said.

  “Not everyone has to go to college, Beachy,” she said sharply. “Plenty of people do just fine without it. They learn a trade, they work their way up.”

  Was she turning into my father? She’d failed to mold herself completely in Ma’s image, and look what had happened. Dolly had to listen to him, all day, every day. She didn’t know a single person west of the Mississippi, except Pop, and she was in danger of becoming lost in him, of knowing the exact labyrinth where his heart and mind came together, and not one other thing.

  I’d escaped; Dolly had followed him into the fire. I wondered if I could pull her back somehow without falling in myself.

  “Lots of people do fine without college,” I said, carefully. “It’s absolutely true that there are all kinds of paths through life.”

  “Pop never went to college,” she said, recognizing my wariness and resenting it.

  “Indeed, Pop never went to college and look at all he’s done,” I said.

  “Right!” said Dolly, who was unaccustomed to irony. Her face relaxed. I felt her tension drain away. “I wish more people could understand that, Beatrice,” she said.

  Lee came in with a folded towel and washcloth for her, in a very tasteful shade of eggplant—she’d bought them when we moved in, to complement the pink and gray tiles in the bathroom. I checked Dolly’s face—yes, she was properly impressed, she had never seen towels like this. And she seemed slightly uncertain—wasn’t it wrong somehow to have nice towels? I myself had always had a secret lust for towels, and thick rugs, and rose-printed curtains like the ones from my mother’s girlhood, before she got lost in her jungle of rage.

  “It’s very nice of you to have me,” Dolly said to Lee. “I’m so glad to have the chance to get to know you.” She opened her bag and set her things on the dresser.

  “You look beautiful, Dolly,” I said, because she did, in a very cool way, and because we always said this, out of love, to each other.

  A ray of hope shone in her face but immediately vanished. “I can’t look in the mirror, Beachy,” she said. “I know I look just like Pop.”

  Like the exact sort of person her own mother despised. She got into bed and Lee and I moved around the kitchen, setting out the breakfast things. “So, I’ll pick up juice at San Juan’s tomorrow,” I said. “And you’ll get the fish at Louie’s?” We’d already planned this, but I wanted to feel like the head of household, whose child was settling down to sleep. It was an accomplishment, this calmness. It was worth the sacrifice.

  “Good night, Dolly,” I said at her door, but she didn’t answer, and I thought, She’s at home here. I intended to keep her.

  Lee always seemed anxious when she found me reading, as if I might find something in a novel that would turn me against her. She never said as much; in fact, she’d often bring me a cup of tea, or ask if my light was bright enough, but I could feel her discomfort. Once, when I was involved in a book and read right through breakfast instead of looking at the paper, she asked, “What’s it about?” with a kind of irritate
d disbelief, and later used the phrase “the life of the mind” as code for “an affectation.” So I didn’t read when we were at home together, and once we lived in the city and I began to feel really guilty toward her, I stopped reading at all—I was determined not to betray her. Now, though, I picked up my copy of Middlemarch, with all the notes I’d taken in Philippa’s class, and brought it to bed with me. Lee was asleep. It was dark and quiet, and the bouquet of anemones I’d settled for hovered there in the vase. The étagère stood as serene as if it had been passed down to us through the generations, and I thought for a minute that there might be real possibility in my future, that my promise might be more than some fantasy my mother had cooked up. Stetson saw it too, after all. Falling asleep, I thought of him.

  * * *

  “IT’S SO nice to have a sister who can take me places, like this,” Dolly said, as we got on the bus to go to the aquarium. I, who’d been planning it all month, was excited as a child, but she sounded mostly dutiful. It occurred to me that she was constantly pretending—to be excited and happy, to rely on Pop, to be fine without Ma … until the pretense took on its own life, protected her so she didn’t have to see herself alone in a desert. She could tell I was happy to be the big sister, the guide, so she was playing the little sister for all it was worth. Well, I was going to show her a better way. There’d been a photograph in the paper of a tank full of billowing jellyfish, “moon jellies,” whose transparency held light so they seemed to glow in the dark. When Dolly saw this, she might know some of the things that were possible if you broke through the invisible barrier around our family.

  I’d offered her yogurt for breakfast and she’d looked at me as if I must be out of my mind. She’d keep Ma alive in her absence by keeping to Ma’s ways, and this meant despising yogurt and persons who liked yogurt, and other foods or habits or words. As we walked down the sidewalk to the bus stop, she stepped conscientiously over each crack.