The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “And in fact, you were never there in the first place,” I snapped.

  She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, but I didn’t care, so long as she didn’t grab hold of me now and pull me down. It seemed possible to me that, with great effort, I might be able to shed my own meshugas—my family—accomplish this or that, keep out of debt, go to the supermarket without being fearful of the cashiers, love someone—all this might be in reach, but just barely, and not with Dolly holding on to my skirt.

  Dolly took a deep breath and sat back in her chair. “But it’s true,” she said. “I’ll be home tomorrow.” She was giving up on me, and the minute I felt her grip loosen I was filled with regret.

  “Dolly,” I said.

  She waved a hand, sniffed, and even smiled a little. “I took pictures of the baby. Pop said he can’t wait to see them. There’s a store out there that develops them in an hour.”

  Lee came in peeling her rubber gloves off like a surgeon and went to the sink to wash her hands.

  “I think that was shellac I was stripping off there,” she said. “I closed off the back room.”

  Her face was so closed against us, it seemed I’d need a can opener to reach her.

  “What were you two arguing over?” she asked, when Dolly was tucked in and we got into bed.

  “Yogurt, strawberry yogurt,” I said disgustedly. “Really, about the past and the future. The thing is that she can’t bear to admit what’s happened to her, that she needs her mother, that she made a mistake going with Pop, she can’t bear to see it and the mistakes just snowball.” I talked on and on, about my family, all families, the human entropy by which each wrong turn leads you further toward the edge of life, generation after generation, until you’re lost.

  She laughed. “My little dramatist,” she said, with kind condescension, patting my hand. “Go to sleep, things will seem different in the morning.”

  “Your little what?” I asked.

  “Don’t be offended,” she said, still smiling. “It’s cute, I mean of course it gets on people’s nerves, your intensity, you know—your way of thinking too much—but I think it’s cute, it’s part of why I love you.”

  “Cute?” I said. Well, what if I roared from the depths of myself, and bit off her head? Because that was what I, cute little pie that I was, felt like doing just then. There was, I thought, a superciliousness to Lee’s humility: a contortion of ego. Hers was all the larger for managing to appear so small. “I do not think too much,” I said, with Churchillian composure. “I am trying to figure my way out of a mire.”

  “I know, sweetie,” she said. “I know it’s hard for you.” The pity in her voice revealed to me a small and peculiarly simple landscape that I’d never glimpsed before—her view of me.

  “How about a little back rub?” she asked me. “Or a cup of chamomile tea? You know how I like to indulge you.”

  “Talk to me, then,” I said.

  “Sweetie, there’s no use examining everything the way you do,” she said. “This, too, will pass, as they say” (she faltered, afraid of misquoting). “No use crying over spilt milk,” she said, to make herself clearer. “You’re still young, you like to be philosophical, mystical” (strange emphasis, as if these words were pornographic). “And that’s fine, it’s sweet, really, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Well, I guess I just forget how young you are,” she said, “You’ll cool down, and it’s refreshing, your being so, you know, naive. Let’s go to sleep. I don’t care about the yogurt. I just want you to be happy, that’s all.”

  “You hypocrite! You just want me to shut up. I don’t want a cup of tea, or sleep, or a little back rub, I want to reckon with life, can you possibly understand?” How loud would I have to scream, to make her turn into Philippa?

  “What is there to say?” she hissed, all her patience finally sparked to anger. “What do you want me to say? Tell me, and I’ll say it! You want more, I know, but there isn’t more. Accept! Content yourself with what is. Grow up.”

  We lived in a world where growing up meant giving up—abandoning your own aspirations, laughing a little at all those silly hopes and dreams, mummifying yourself in layers of fat, or television, or golf. No wonder everyone was obsessed with youth!

  “I’m not smart enough for you, that’s all,” she said.

  “Lee!” I said, “that’s not so. That’s not what I mean.” This was much too cruel, I would never have allowed myself to think such a thing. “You’re so smart, Lee, you are,” I said. “Look at all you’ve done, how far you’ve gone at work.” I apologized on and on, forgetting that she had meant, smug creature, to save me from all my thinking, as I (smug creature) had wished to save her from the desperate ordinary darkness of her life. Now she lay pressing her hands to her heart as if she could slow it that way, or as if I needed to be reminded how fragile she was, how easily I could hurt her. I took a deep breath and tried to be understanding. “We’re different people, we want different things, that’s all,” I said. “I wish you’d talk to me more, and surely there’s something that you wish from me, something you would change about me too?”

  No, she said, accusingly—nothing, she loved me the way I was.

  “Please, I want to know,” I said. “If we’re going to live together we’re bound to have problems, differences, and how will we ever work them out if we can’t make our feelings known?”

  “I don’t see why we’re ‘bound’ to have problems,” she said stiffly, but after a few long minutes she admitted that, yes, there was something that troubled her.

  “What?” I felt a great weight drop from me—there was hope, we would talk things out, we’d be fine with a little give and take.…

  “You could.…”

  “I could what? Don’t worry, silly thing, I won’t get mad, this is all part of getting to know each other, it’s part of the fun of it, don’t you see?”

  “You could—” and the words rushed out as if she could hold them back no longer: “You could use your own towel!”

  “What?”

  “You could use your own towel,” she said, swallowing. “I put yours on the top bar, you know? It’s just more sanitary.”

  No doubt, but the request seemed to make the world go black. “All right,” I said. “From now on I’ll use my own towel.”

  “It’s no problem about the yogurt,” she said. “I’ll eat in the cafeteria tomorrow.” Her voice was blank—she was tired of me and my family, my insistence on tracing the byzantine labyrinth of life. “Let’s just forget it now, and sleep,” she said, and a minute later I felt her twitch as she dropped off. She was good at forgetting things.

  I heard something from Dolly’s room—was she crying? I went to her door, but she was silent, even when I called her name.

  I stood at the window in the living room, pressing my forehead against the glass. It was a perfectly clear night; I could feel the universal emptiness, and I was glad to think how accidental we all were, a species born by accident, our language and sympathies so well developed, by accident, that we’re doomed to live lives whose hope and despair are equally illusory. How is anyone supposed to live, knowing all the time that he’ll die? It was a great comfort, the pointlessness of everything. In such a haphazard world, no one could be very much in the wrong, my mother might ride off on the back of some kid’s motorbike, my father might blow away in the wind, and if I lay here in Lee’s bed and did nothing, so what? We’re ants, all of us, teeming, industrious, utterly expendable. Someday we’ll be relieved of the burden of life; until then …

  Then something moved in the cemetery. An apparition in a long white gown stumbled into the street below me, seeming to run and cower at once, falling against the wrought-iron cemetery gate and resting there as if she was a rag that had been tossed over the rail.

  It was Susan. After a minute she lifted her head, cringing at first, but seeing she was alone she looked quickly up and down the street, into the cemetery, and finally directly up at
the window, though it was dark and she didn’t see me. Her feet were bare and she crossed her arms for warmth. She started across the road, but changed her mind and with a sudden resolve scooped a handful of gravel up from the cemetery drive and aimed it straight at me.

  “Susan!” I called, putting up the window.

  “No!” She put her finger to her lips and pointed to our back entrance, and I unlocked the kitchen door, waiting at the top of the stairs while she tiptoed up with such elaborate care for silence that when a step creaked I felt like screaming.

  “What is it?” I asked her, closing the door with the same exaggeration. “What’s happened to you?”

  She had a split lip and a black eye. The heavy flannel nightgown I’d envied was torn down the front and she held it closed with her hand. It was old and worn, she said, and it had just given way at a tug.

  “Who tugged it?” I asked her. “Pat?”

  Yes, she told me as I wrapped ice in a towel, things like this had happened before, though not this badly. She held the pack to her eye and winced. Her own tears were salting her wounds.

  She didn’t seem angry, only sad. I had to understand, she said, that Pat never meant to hit her—Pat had been kinder to her than anyone she’d ever known. It was her natural response to stress, that was all. I didn’t know how hard it was, when you grew up that way—sometimes things just got out of control. That was why Pat went to work at the women’s shelter—because she knew it all, she understood, she really could help. When she was at the front desk everyone felt safer—she wasn’t one of the poor shrinking violets like Susan who quavered when they tried to ask the simplest question and practically asked to be pushed around. Pat protected them, lied for them—once she had knocked a pursuing husband down the stairs! And then, one by one, they betrayed her: they went back, they loved those husbands all the more, they turned around and blamed her, Pat, saying she’d blown everything out of proportion, that she hated men, that yes, they were bruised, they had, certainly, fallen, but it was more a slip than a push—who can tell what’s happening in the thick of a fight? Everyone makes mistakes, everyone gets angry, just because he waved the knife and said, “I’ll put this through your black heart, you bitch!” didn’t mean he didn’t adore her. Or, more to the point perhaps, it didn’t mean he didn’t need her absolutely, as badly as if he’d been a tiny, lonely child. And Susan made a cradle of her arms to shelter some tiny, lonely child in her imagination and began weeping again.

  Imagine how Pat felt, Susan said, when she remembered her parents, the way, once her father was done with her mother, he’d come after her with his belt, as if his anger was so enormous, it could never be assuaged. You had to sympathize, you had to see how brave Pat was, how staunch and true, you had to love her, and with love came anger, tearing jealousies, misapprehensions—in love one must be doubly understanding.

  Lee had set the breakfast things out, orderly as a Japanese garden, on the sideboard as always. I put the teakettle on—I was going to let Susan talk herself out, comfort her, draw her out, sneak into her heart and see if I could fix everything there, but I felt Lee’s silent presence in the doorway.

  “What happened?” Lee asked, pulling her bathrobe sash tighter, bending over to Susan to look at her face in the light. “My God, Susan. Beatrice, she needs socks, and a robe, or something … can you get her something warm? Where’s Pat? Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine,” Susan said cautiously. I felt a change in her, the slightest turn toward the ordinary, the expected—with this calm voice she would move her story a little closer to the center, toward the stories we’d heard before. “We had a fight, that’s all. I got mean—I do sometimes, I just get mad—and we had a scuffle. I’m so sorry I woke you. I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.”

  “You get the things, would you?” I asked Lee. “I’m just making tea.” I wanted her out of the room so I could gain Susan’s trust, but no sooner was Lee down the hall than Dolly appeared in her place, wearing my nightgown, which left her thin legs exposed.

  “What is it?” she said, and Susan looked up.

  “Susan, this is my sister Dolly,” I said, grateful as always for my long study of Emily Post. Introductions should give an entrée into conversation: “Dolly, this is Susan, our neighbor, she works for the phone company.”

  “Glad to meet you,” Dolly said, standing like a flamingo again, looking from one to the other of us in puzzlement—was this just an ordinary night for us? What did we do, really? Why did we live like this, on the edge of shame? Dolly had absorbed my father’s feelings; he’d passed his dread of me on to her. Here, in the middle of the night, all life was reversed so the dreads were realities, and hope, calm, comfort were shadows we couldn’t really believe.

  Lee came back with some clothes, which Susan let rest in her lap like a strange, foreign gift she didn’t know how to use. Lee and Dolly kept silent—the deepest sense, for both of them, was that words were dangerous and might shatter the fragile peace. I believed fragile things deserved to be broken. So they withdrew and I took over, pouring the tea out with a confidence I’d forgotten I could feel. The extremity of everything, bare feet on asphalt, doors pounded on in the night, sobs tearing up from something infinitely deep—these things were familiar to me, as was the silence that necessarily surrounded them. It was like being home again.

  “Put the socks on,” I said softly to Susan, and she obeyed, pulling Lee’s sweater on too and wrapping it tight around her. Softer still, I asked, “Shall we call nine-one-one?” I knew it would have been wrong to say “the police.”

  Susan said nothing, but seemed to be listening. Then she shook her head. “There’s no emergency,” she said wearily.

  “Do you want to look in the mirror?” I challenged her.

  She laughed. “You don’t know the half of it,” she said. Suddenly her voice was full of life: “I wish you could hear what she says to me—‘I’d like punch your teeth right down your throat, you filthy whore’—she sounds like a sailor. She even looks a little like a sailor, don’t you think?” and she giggled: “Bowlegged! Oh, no, I’ve seen a lot worse than this, let me tell you.”

  She was boasting. Something had happened to her, she was at the center, and we were witnesses to her life. She was richer, in experience, than we. It wasn’t much, maybe, but it was something, something she was not going to let us take away.

  “Is there film in the camera, Lee?” I asked. At least we could take some pictures to show her the next time, remind her that this had happened before.

  “I’ve got mine,” Dolly said.

  “Bring it, honey, will you?” I said without turning, keeping still so Susan wouldn’t startle and flee.

  But the phone rang. I looked up at the clock: 1:15 A.M. For the first two rings we stayed still, as if pretending we didn’t hear. As it continued it seemed to become more insistent, and Susan hunched in on herself, covering her face.

  “It’s not that late in Wyoming,” Dolly said, leaning toward the phone as if its power was too much for her to resist.

  “Answer it,” Susan said suddenly, with absolute authority as the center of the drama.

  It was Pat, as we must all have known. She did sound chastened, apologizing for the late hour, asking in a voice of well-rehearsed, innocent concern whether I might have seen Susan. She had gone out earlier and hadn’t returned, and she was ordinarily so reliable, it made Pat worry.

  Susan took the phone from my hand.

  “Baby, I’m right here,” she said, and I knew my chance had passed.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Susan said, “I know I was wrong.” There came a wail from Pat, a cry of wounded rage we could all hear. Lee and Dolly and I turned and tiptoed away to the living room like the three blind mice, though we didn’t need to go. Susan had forgotten us, as she crooned a lullaby of forgiveness into the phone. There’s great strength, in forgiving, and she sounded more confident than she ever had before.

  Lee and Dolly struck up a real conversation
, trying to leave Pat and Susan in privacy, though I’d hoped to overhear them. They started by bemoaning lost jewelry. Lee had been trying to skip stones off the Acadian rocks and seen a bracelet go flying into the waves; Dolly had lost her ruby ring down a storm drain—this went on until I hated them both, for their lack of ferocity, their determination not to intrude, which was wrecking my chance to get to the heart of it all. I heard Susan avow her love to Pat, and when I turned back, Dolly’s eyes were shining—she was talking about flying, a subject she hadn’t dared discuss with me. But then, Susan was in front of us, thanking us in a way that seemed to plead that we forget it all, and she rushed out the door as if she couldn’t bear one more minute away from home. Downstairs the door locks opened and shut with reports like gunshots, and the house was returned to its midnight silence.

  “There’s nothing you can do in a situation like that,” Lee said. “It’s their private business.”

  “They seem okay,” Dolly said. “Everyone has a little fight now and then.”

  “I think Pat might really hurt her someday,” I tried, but Lee pointed out that Susan was not only a foot taller than Pat, but eight years younger, and so the case was closed.

  “No one can ever really see inside anyone else’s marriage,” I said.

  “Well, it’s not a marriage,” Dolly said, puzzled.

  Lee pointed out that Susan was a free agent, and we all agreed that we should honor her wishes and forget it.

  And, having agreed not to discuss the only thing that mattered at the moment, we found ourselves in an awkward relation. “I’d better get to bed, the bus goes early,” Dolly said.

  * * *

  LEE’S SOCKS and sweater fell into the black hole. Susan couldn’t have returned them without admitting what had happened, and for us to ask about getting them back would have seemed terribly rude. I saw Susan buying milk at San Juan’s a week later, but when I asked how she was, she said she was fine, just fine, in a tone of perplexity as if this were a prying question. Later I saw her dodge through traffic, trying to cross Park Street to avoid me. After a while I learned to give her a quick friendly nod when we passed, as if she was someone I’d met at a party once years ago. That frozen night, the ghostly vision of her stumbling through the cemetery, came to seem like something from a dream. How could such a thing have happened in our world, our refuge from the violence of men? It wasn’t possible; it didn’t make sense, and the incident was washed out of memory day by day until all that was left was a slight uneasiness at the sight of Pat’s car with its WHAT PART OF NO DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? bumper sticker, parked in the handicapped space at the Y. Months later we went to the grand opening of the Wives and Mothers Thrift Shop, which had been set up to support the battered women’s shelter, and there were Lee’s things all nicely laundered and displayed. We bought them back for $3.75.