Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  “All of this sounds as if you have lifted off the roof to the house where I grew up,” another man said, “and looked down at my own life.”

  There was relief to finding people like herself. As the priest talked, as other people told their experiences and feelings, as she could share them, she found guilt began to erase itself, a burden lifted; layers of the past began to peel away. All around the church there were exclusive towns, with well-tended lawns, big houses, and so much pain inside people they did not create for themselves.

  In a circle, they stood with their arms around one another. People unashamedly had wet faces. “Our father who art in heaven,” they began.

  “Keep coming,” the priest said. “Remember, don’t let the past dominate your thoughts.”

  Tonight she would not stand about and chat. She felt like being alone another time with a silence that would begin to break. She would never know what might have happened differently with William and Hal if she had talked more, but Laurel understood reasons that drove her to save Hal. Her impetus needed to be put to more productive use. She had never spoken up to William, Hal, or her mother out of fear of rejection. Always she had expected to be an abandoned child. Hal had made this a reality. Once he left, she had cried as never before in her life, out of the marrow of her bones, out of the deepest recess of her soul. But for more than him. She had cried not only over the past but longing for it to come back, no matter its pain. The priest’s last words took hold. But she could never forget. Always she would be a person with scenes of the past overlaying themselves in her mind’s eye, colorfully in the present. Yes, she had been willing to be a victim because she had grown up as one. It was the only role she knew, and fit comfortably. She would not be one again, but she felt the role slipping away as if she had lost a companion.

  She reached the door as someone behind her whispered, “He’s a recovering alcoholic,” about the priest. She shook his hand. “I’ll be back,” she said. “If I’d known these things before, my whole life would have been different.”

  “So would mine have been.” The priest smiled wryly.

  She drove back over suburban roads wondering if under different circumstances he would have been a man who gave himself to God.

  17

  She was meeting her mother for lunch at Bloomingdale’s. Seeing her across the room’s subdued light, Laurel straightened up and walked to where her mother waited at a table. She could see her diamond ring flashing as she held a cigarette. In her other hand, her mother held a small rubber child’s ball. What was she doing?

  “Are you limping?” Mrs. Wynn asked when Laurel sat down.

  “No.” In her chair, she felt pains shooting up her buttocks. “What are you doing?”

  Mrs. Wynn gave a small smile. Her long nails enclosed the ball with its swirled colors. They reminded Laurel of pastels, sherbets. “The cancer society women brought it by this morning.” She went on squeezing and squeezing to demonstrate. “I’m supposed to do this to strengthen my arm since the operation.”

  “Oh.” Laurel was relieved her mother had not regressed to some form of childhood. She had sympathy about the mastectomy. Still, there was a familiar core of resentment about her mother saying the operation was Laurel’s fault. If Laurel had not moved back to Delton when she did, Mrs. Wynn said, she’d have gone for a biopsy earlier. “I couldn’t have an operation by myself. No one to look after me.” Having been alone in the world now for five years, Laurel had a tougher spirit. And she understood the past much better now after Children of Alcoholics sessions, and the need she had had to be a willing victim. But no more. A competitive spirit had begun to rise. She stared directly at her mother saying, “No one but you, Mother, would have had seepage around a nipple for so long without going to a doctor. He said if you’d come sooner, you wouldn’t have had to have a breast removed. I could have come back from Delton. You could have come there for the operation.” Because no matter what had happened, no matter that she had returned, there was a feeling, still, of being on Mount Everest by themselves: a feeling that the truest friends were back where they came from, doctors they could have depended on better. She had accepted a sense of being displaced about living in the Northeast.

  Her mother kept demonstrating how she flexed her arm by squeezing the ball. Patrons at another table were watching, their munching temporarily suspended. Laurel wanted to laugh. She watched the network of old skin on her mother’s arm like fish scales and knew someday she would have them herself. But her mother didn’t look eighty. She had more fashion sense than Laurel felt she had and was never dependent on someone to help her. How had she acquired it, being the country girl she once was? Her mother looked into the distance as if thinking about her operation. And suddenly Laurel thought that she stared into an abyss, into the grave and beyond. What must it be like to have so little time left to live? she wondered. She had herself a diluted sense of so much of life being over as she neared sixty. She could see her mother alone in her apartment talking to a stranger from the cancer society. She was more acutely aware of the silence of her mother’s apartment, now that she was herself alone, and more acutely aware of her mother’s making some kind of life on her own as a widow. She emptied a glass of water in nervous apprehension over their time together.

  “Don’t drink all that water. You won’t be able to eat.”

  Laurel stared at the glass. “It is drunk,” she said.

  “It’s all that jogging that makes your hip hurt.”

  “Maybe it’s sitting over the typewriter.”

  “Doctors now say jogging is bad for women. You’d know that if you’d read.”

  “I read, Mother. I just reread Madame Bovary.”

  “Or watch television. There was a talk show the other morning about jogging. You need to keep TV on for company now that you’re alone.”

  “I don’t want it on for company.” Laurel put the rim of the glass between her teeth.

  “What did you say?”

  She repeated and then she said, “You need a hearing aid, Mother.”

  “I can hear everybody but you. You mumble. Everybody says so.”

  “Who is everybody?”

  “And Rick,” Mrs. Wynn said. “He mumbles too. Rick thinks he is just so-o-o—” and she made an airy gesture with her hand, not knowing what she wanted to say.

  So intellectual? Laurel said to herself. This was still a stigma to her mother.

  “I don’t think Rick will ever get out of school.”

  “It takes a long time to get a Ph.D.”

  She looked up in relief when the waitress appeared, a big-bosomed woman in a tight pink uniform. On an eye level with those bosoms, Laurel tried not to stare or to think about the pouter pigeon who took her husband away. While her mother and Rick constantly assured her she was better off without Hal, and while she felt a great sense of relief about no longer being caught in her life with him, she was still so lonesome. Since starting sessions with Adult Children of Alcoholics, unlocking a silence she had lived with so long, she could not help wondering how things would have been with William or Hal if she had spoken up more. But she did not dwell on the past any longer.

  The waitress presented them with large pink menus. “Ladies. The special soup today is gazpacho.”

  “What did she say?” Mrs. Wynn hissed across her menu.

  “The special soup is gazpacho.”

  “Ugh. Green peppers give me indigestion.” She stared up at the waitress with a little smile as if to say, What did she think about that?

  The waitress said, “The special entrée is chicken with piquant sauce. And for dessert Bloomie’s pink peppermint ice cream.”

  Laurel winced over the word “Bloomie’s” as she had winced at “ladies.” The words made her feel she was a matron with time to kill, though she had spent a lifetime trying not to be like her mother. However, her mother was right about one thing. It was a common occurrence for people to return to the source of their pain; in marrying Hal, she did m
arry someone like her father, as if to acquire once more what she remembered from childhood. Her tendency toward alcohol was common for the children of alcoholics too; it came down through the genes.

  As Laurel said, “I’ll have tuna on pita bread,” she remembered learning from William’s family not to be redundant and say tuna fish.

  “Why do you want tuna fish? You can have tuna fish at home.” Her mother removed her reading glasses and waited for an answer.

  “Mother, just let me order. What do you want?”

  “I don’t want anything.” She told the waitress conversationally, “It’s a waste of time eating out. I feel like I’m just throwing away money, they give you so much food.”

  “I’ll get more water.”

  Laurel watched the waitress walk away. “Mother, decide before she comes back.” She dreaded drinking another full glass of water. Her mother, as if she heard command, read the menu.

  Long trickles of water were poured into her glass. The waitress had freckle-spotted and brown-spotted hands. Like my own, Laurel thought. But she wouldn’t hide them in her lap and put them on the table. She had tried to squelch the squirming in her stomach. “Have you decided?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ve ordered.”

  “I’ll give you ladies more time.” Again, the woman went away on her softly clad feet.

  “Think of something, Mother.” Laurel drank water.

  “Why? What’s your hurry? You don’t have anything to go home for. Nobody to cook for tonight.”

  She didn’t understand why this woman wanted to inflict pain; Laurel looked into her lap and knew there was nothing she was going to do about it this late in time. An old woman sat opposite her, and it was too late to tell her what she thought. Too late to express the rage she felt. She tried not to look at herself walking into her house with the sense of emptiness and betrayal she always felt, and she tried not to wonder what quality of emptiness her mother’s death would leave. In the end, she might mourn only a mother she never had.

  It was strange sitting across the table from death; it was written on her mother’s face—something she longed for, she said. If she had cyanide, she would kill herself. There are ways if you wanted to do it, Laurel longed to say. Her mother worried all the time about her future. Who was going to take care of her business when she died; what was Laurel going to do with all the junk in her apartment? If only she could have died during her operation, Mrs. Wynn mourned. And Laurel had no comfort to give her. She would like to tell her mother to stop thinking about herself, but what was she to think about instead?—she had never prepared herself for anything except bridge. She could only wonder if she loved her mother, or if she even liked her. She did not feel obliged to do either thing because this woman was her mother. She did not feel that her reactions had anything to do with geriatrics; they had to do with her mother as herself, with the personality she had always had, with the person she had always been. Only now, with the sessions Laurel had been going to, she had learned not to blame herself for the past, not to accept guilt, not to be shoved around. Understanding reasons for past behavior, Laurel could forgive herself a passive role among other things. Not only did she feel herself well, she felt herself more well than a lot of people she knew who’d never thought anything was wrong with themselves.

  “Decide, Mother,” Laurel said with an airy gesture of her hand. Then to her astonishment and amazement, she realized this was an exact copy of the way her mother often raised hers. She had even heard in her voice an inflection that sounded like her mother’s. She would grow on and on to be more like her as she grew older. She heard her talking about her own mother as she walked about her apartment, Laurel’s grandmother. “I’m getting to be just like Momma,” Mrs. Wynn kept saying, meaning her nervousness and a way she had of flicking the side of her skirt. It is inevitable, Laurel thought, that I shall keep getting like her. Therefore, I must fight harder against it; she swore to herelf.

  The remaining water in her glass ran over her nose and tickled it. She let her nose remain buried. She thought of the things her mother’s desperate loneliness had driven her to. She knew a change had to take place and that she was the one who would have to take charge of it. Her mother talked about cleaning her apartment and yet dust lay everywhere. Mrs. Wynn was “too nervous” to have help come in. She wore greasy or dirty clothes, saying she “didn’t give a damn.” A way of thumbing her nose at life, Laurel supposed. She tried to pay her mother a compliment; maybe her crustiness was a way of making herself know she was alive. It was a pain in the neck to other people.

  Her mother had fallen into the habit of dropping by her doctor’s office and sitting in his waiting room. She managed to look chagrined, saying this was a way of being with other people. As pitiful as that was, Laurel thought. How could she solve her mother’s life, her problems? The doctor told her to wash her clothes, to comb her hair, and that she was “crazy.” He had been supplying her with Valium for years. He sent her to a psychiatrist, and now the psychiatrist was supplying her mother with antidepressant pills. Drugs to a drug-dependent person, Laurel thought. What could she do about doctors who prescribed pills and walked off and left other people to cope with the patient they had created? Why didn’t doctors think? She thought of being moved to pity by a homeless woman asleep in a subway station in New York in a puddle of her urine and how she’d tucked money into her hand. When she came home, one of her mother’s friends called to ask, “What is wrong with your mother? I saw her at the grocery and she used to be always so well-groomed. She didn’t have any makeup on, her hair wasn’t combed. Her dress had spots.” She hadn’t known how to transfer her pity for the woman in New York to her own mother.

  “If you’re not hungry, Mother, why don’t you have a frozen fruit salad?”

  “Ugh. That’s nothing but ice. It gives me a headache to eat it.”

  “How about cottage cheese and fruit platter? That’s light.” She was not going to let her mother rile her, she had decided.

  “Don’t tell me how to order. I know how to order.” Mrs. Wynn plopped down her menu. “And stop squinting. Wear your dark glasses.”

  “I don’t want to wear them. They’re prescription and I’ll get dependent on them.”

  “Then stop squinting. It’s not going to do any good to get your eyes fixed if you keep squinting. If you want to have the operation, I’ll give you the money.”

  Laurel was afraid to take money from her mother, she was afraid of repercussions. All the time her mother worried about not having enough money for her old age; suppose she turned out to be nine hundred dollars short because of my operation? Laurel thought. When would I hear the last of that? Anyway, she went to a surgeon in a panic as soon as Hal left; while there, she said, “My husband thinks my breasts are too small,” and inquired about enlargement. Imagine that she would do that, she thought now. She had considered back then there was no sense telling the doctor her husband had already left her. “Your husband’s crazy,” he had said. “You have beautiful breasts for a woman your age. Why don’t you have your face lifted instead?” Well, thanks for nothing, she had thought, walking out, and decided she’d keep for now whatever God had given her. Why were women always being made conscious of their ages? She thought of rebuffs that had slapped her over and over since she had gone about trying to meet men. In Delton, an old friend had said, “You were so beautiful, you could have had anybody in Delton.” Then realizing his meaning, his words, he had looked embarrassed and had whipped out a folder and showed her pictures of his two young children by his second, young, wife. She had cooed over them.

  The waitress said, “Ladies, have you decided?”

  “Mother. Order.”

  Mrs. Wynn sighed hugely. “Just bring me the clam chowder.”

  “Large or small?”

  Her mother rolled her eyes toward the waitress. “You decide.”

  “Mother,” Laurel said.

  “Well, bring me the large.” Mr
s. Wynn leaned confidingly over the table behind the waitress’s back. “It won’t be anything but hot milk and potatoes. There’s never any clams in it.”

  Laurel curled her toes to the soles of her shoes and watched the blue smoke ring her mother blew toward the ceiling.

  “Maybe I’m not hungry because I smoke so much. I think my ulcer is back. From worrying about you.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I can’t help it.” Her eyes swam about behind her cigarette smoke. “I feel like all I’m doing is waiting to die.”

  “That is all you’re doing,” Laurel said. But she softened the words. “That’s all anybody is doing.”

  “I guess I’m never going to live to see any great-grandchildren.”

  “Probably not. And don’t put any pressure on Rick about that.”

  “Well, you just don’t know what it’s like living with depression.”

  “I wish the psychiatrist hadn’t given you that word. You’ve latched on to it too conveniently. And I don’t think you should take those antidepressant pills. He should be treating your head, not your body. He says they’re not addictive, but it seems to me they are. I can always tell when you’ve had one; you’re different.”

  Mrs. Wynn stubbed out her cigarette. “I think they are too,” she said. “I went to see him yesterday and told him I had to get off them. I told him I can’t stay in that apartment by myself any longer either. I’ve got to go somewhere. He wants me to go to the hospital to the psychiatric ward for several weeks.”

  “Mother, that’s great. I wish I could go too.”

  “You want to go? Why?”

  “I’d like to have somebody take care of me.”

  “Not many people are there my age, he said. Mostly, young people are there. They’re the ones who can’t take stress these days. A forty-year-old woman in town jumped out of her apartment window the other day.”

  My eighty-year-old mother in the psycho ward, Laurel was thinking. How did everything come about? “If they keep you on medication there, nothing will be gained. Tell them you want to get off pills. What’s the answer after that? You still have to come back to your same apartment, to your same life. Your friends who have died will still be dead. The ones who have gone to nursing homes will still be in them.” Laurel realized the loneliness of old age but thought she’d never live in an apartment. She’d always have a little house and a yard to putter in and a dog fenced in. Would she still be a pain to Rick? Probably so, she concluded. “What day are you going? I’ll take you. I’ve got to get my hair done. I want to look my best taking my mother to the nut house.”