Falling in Love

by Stephen Bradlee

  I put my arm around her but she was somewhere else. After a while, I just left her alone. Once again, it was Ernie. Everything bad in my life always seemed to come back to Ernie. Now I had even more reason to do what I had always wanted to do but never did, and now never could, kill that bastard.

  But as I walked home, I realized what I else had to do.

  The house looked the same. The white picket fence looked recently painted. A few more blooming flowers along the fence. I had always marveled how at how such a lovely-looking house could contain such horrors. But I knew that whatever demons still remained in there for me, I would have to face them before I could move forward with my life. Every time I had left that house, even just to go to school, I had run from it. For once in my life, in slow measured steps, I wanted to walk away.

  On the porch was a pie with a golden crust. Beside it was a luscious-looking chocolate cake. I didn’t pick up either, afraid that Aunt Dottie would think I had brought them, or more likely that I was falsely trying to take credit for bringing them.

  I knocked on the door and Aunt Dottie quickly answered it. She looked the same as I had always remembered her: wearing a prim dress, her graying hair in a bun, her face in a frown.

  She looked surprised. “Sherry? What are you doing here?” She glanced around for my suitcase, worried that I would use Ernie’s death as an excuse to move back in with her. She looked relieved that I had no baggage.

  Without a hug or a word, she turned and walked back into the house. The living room was like a time trap, looking exactly the same as it always had. Not one picture or bric-a-brac had changed.

  She spoke softly. “I just made a cup of tea. Do you want one?”

  “No.”

  She was waiting for me to ask for something: money, to beg to come home, something. I realized that we had never had a real conversation, just an assortment of platitudes or angry accusations.

  Dottie tried small talk. “Mildred Fairfield swears she saw you on the TV. Said you were helping that horrible murder mother. I told you’d never help her and even if you wanted to, you weren’t capable of doing it.” I knew that any answer would be the wrong answer. “We are in a prayer group every Thursday, asking God to give her the electric chair.” Again I said nothing. She looked perturbed. “I didn’t really expect you, especially after that crazy call of yours. Making amends. You? Amends?” She looked down. “But I suppose it will be good to have some family at the funeral.”

  “I’m not going.”

  Aunt Dottie shot me a surprised look. “What? You came all this way and now you’ve already decided not to go to the funeral? I wonder when God will ever give you some sense.”

  “I was hoping my mother might come.”

  Aunt Dottie shook her head in dismay. “Sherry! You know I haven’t had her number for years. You just never think!”

  “I have it.”

  “You?”

  I pulled the crumbled slip from my pocket, handing it to her.

  She looked nervous as she held it. I knew that the last thing she wanted to do was to call my mother. Aunt Dottie hated her but she couldn’t admit it because in her mind, my mother hadn’t pawn me off on her but rather it had been God’s will. But she had never stopped feeling rage at my mother, and at me.

  Aunt Dottie bit her lower lip and fiddled with her hair. “I suppose she should know.” She walked over and dialed the phone. A young voice answered. “Is Bibby there?” The voice sounded confused and Aunt Dottie said, “No, don’t hang up. I mean Barbara. Is Barbara there?”

  She tightly gripped the phone and then I dimly heard the voice I had been waiting all my life to hear. “Bib? It’s Dot. Yes. Years.” Aunt Dottie cleared her throat. “Ernie died on Sunday.” She coughed softly and then said, “Of course not. I wouldn’t expect you to come.” Aunt Dottie fidgeted and then said, “I didn’t. Sherry had your number.” She looked over to me and asked, “Do you want to talk to her?”

  What a question!

  I took a deep breath, walked over and hesitantly took the phone.

  “Hello, ah, Mom,” I said.

  “Ah, Hi,” she replied, sounding very nervous. “I’m sorry about Ernie.

  “Right,” I said softly. I didn’t want to talk about Ernie.

  She coughed. “How did you get my number? You must have worked pretty hard.”

  “I guess.”

  “But this is a bad time for me,” she said, sounding even more nervous. “If you give me your number, maybe I’ll call you sometime.”

  “That’s what you said the last time.”

  “What?”

  “I called you when I was ten. You said you’d call me back.”

  “I don’t remember that,” she replied.

  “I can’t give you my number unless you’ll call. I couldn’t take that.”

  Her voice quivered. “I’ll try. But I’m really busy.”

  “Sure, you are,” I replied caustically. “I’ve lived my whole life without you. I guess I can keep going on alone, too.”

  Her voice cracked as she said quickly, “Okay. Nice talking to you. Bye.”

  Then the line went dead. “Bye,” I said softly and set down the phone.

  I shuddered with rage. A lifetime of waiting for my big call to her and it was a wrong number. “How could she?” I seethed. Tears burst out of me. But I wasn’t crying. I was exploding with rage. “What did I ever do to her? Damn her.”

  “Sherry!” Aunt Dottie disapproved of swearing. “Don’t be so foolish. Did you really think she was going to jump on a plane and come to give you a kiss and a hug?”

  “How about just some acknowledgment that I am alive?” I shot back. “Goddamn her.”

  “Stop blaspheming in my house!”

  I wiped off my cheeks and turned on her. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about her and Elaine? And Ernie and Elaine, and my father?

  Aunt Dottie looked stunned. “I have no idea what you are you are talking about.” She grabbed her hat. “I have to be at the funeral parlor.”

  I stepped in her way and demanded, “Tell me this. Did Grandma ever molest you or them?

  She slapped me hard on the face. “How dare you!”

  Pain shot across my face but I didn’t care. “Did she?” I demanded again.

  “Of course not!” Her face was crimson. “Your grandmother was a God-fearing woman. The only touching she did down there was with her strap, and I’m sure we deserved it every time.”

  “She beat you?”

  Aunt Dottie looked uneasy, then she softly admitted, “Well, mostly Ernie. Poor boy. Sometimes he had welts so bad, he’d take baths in Epsom salts to soothe them. I think he used to touch himself in there.”

  I couldn’t believe she had just said that! “How do you know?”

  She looked slightly dazed. “Once, Mother caught him. She whipped him so hard with that strap that he was unconscious and almost drowned. Bibby found him. She saved him.” Aunt Dottie was shaking. She rushed around me. “I have to go.”

  For the first time in my life, I heard her slam the door.

  I thought about walking one last time around the house, maybe go into the bathroom and see what I felt. It was unnecessary. I had gotten what I had come for.

  I glanced around the living room a final time, noticing once again how every picture, every piece of furniture, was perfectly in place with none sporting the slightest speck of dust. Then I went out the door and softly closed it behind me. I passed the pie and the cake still on the porch. Then, for the last time in my life, in measured steps, I slowly walked away from that house.

  Elaine was concocting her syrupy coffee before group. “I talked to my mother,” I informed her.

  “Okay,” she said softly. She’d probably known all along how it would turn out.

  “I had a hundred questions and didn’t ask one. She acted like I was a bill collector.”

  “You are.”

  “All that angst. All that energy. For nothing.”

 
Tears welled up. I fought them back and won. I hadn’t cried since talking to my mother. She would never know either way but I just didn’t want to give her any satisfaction.

  Elaine turned and hugged me. She didn’t ask if my mother had asked about her. Elaine knew that she hadn’t.

  All night, instead of sleeping, I felt my anger against my mother roiling inside of me. I knew that hating her would be more self-destructive so by morning, I had made a momentous decision. I would put my mother out of my life forever. She wasn’t really in it anyway. So I was really just ending my fantasy that my mother was, or ever would be, a part of my life.

  As the dawn crept between the window shades, I began my house cleaning, my life cleaning. I grabbed the low-cut dresses still hanging in my closet and stuffed them into a large garbage bag, then tossed in an old half carton of cigarettes. While heading out the door, I grabbed my mother’s copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses from the bookshelf. In the stairwell, I jammed the overflowing bag down the garbage chute. I clutched the poetry book. Taking out the picture of my mother and Elaine on the riverbank, I stared at it. I thought there should be some kind of a ceremony, or something. I wondered how I should feel about throwing away the only two things that had connected me to my mother. I just felt sad that I would never see her, never talk to her, never ask her a lifetime of questions still locked inside me. Move on, Sherry. End the fantasies, about some Prince Charming, about your mother, about yourself.

  I dropped both the book and the picture down the chute. With no hope of ever seeing my mother, I felt more alone then ever and felt sad that group and Dede may turn out to be the only family I would ever have.

  That Friday night at the coffee shop, I admitted as much to Elaine. “The one thing that I’ve wanted more anything else in my life is my own family, a husband and children that I could love and who could love me. I want to be the best mother I possibly can but what if I never am one, or if I’m the worst? How will I ever know?”

  “Whoa! Wait a minute. First you work on a relationship,” Elaine reminded me. “If you can achieve that, you can think about more.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “It’s a huge risk, Sherry,” Elaine admitted, “but so is the reward. You would have a real relationship—for the first time in your life.

  “Okay, let’s make believe that I was ready for a relationship. Is there a guy out there ready for me? Where would I meet him?”

  “I can’t believe that no one at work or at the gym or at Hunter has hit on you.”

  “They have,” I admitted. “But I tell everyone I’m working a lot of overtime and going to night school so I don’t have time for dating. After a couple of tries, they move on. But those are now safe places for me. I couldn’t handle it if I told some guy about my addiction and he dropped me like a stone and then spread it all around. I’ve walked down too many halls in my life amid a symphony of “slut” whispers.”

  “I can’t see you going out with someone now who would be that juvenile.”

  “And what if I’m not ready for sex? How long is he supposed to wait? What if I’m never ready for sex? That would certainly inhibit having children.”

  Elaine smiled. “Sherry, you’ve been ready for love for a long time. You just have to remember the difference. Are you attracted to anyone in group?”

  “Gregory. How pathetic is that?” Elaine laughed. Every woman in group was attracted to Gregory. “And group is my family. It would be almost incestuous, and I’ve had enough of that in my life, too.” I stood up. “Forget it. I’m not willing to risk falling in love, and put my recovery in jeopardy. Okay, so I’m probably never going to be a wife, and I’m probably never going to be a mother. But at least, hopefully, I’ll be sober.”

  I went home and hugged Robie so hard that he shot out the window and didn’t return until the following night, for dinner, of course.

  The following Friday, I realized that my desperate need for a family was messing with my head. As Elaine and Gregory and I headed for the coffee shop, I thought I saw a man looking at the church. I blinked and he disappeared. But he had looked exactly like Paul. Obviously, I was going a bit crazy. But all I could do was try to calmly keep on going through life and try not to get so crazy that I couldn’t handle it.

  When I first got sober, I had counted not only the days but sometimes hours, minutes and seconds. After managing to last a few months, I kept only a daily count. Yet, despite being very good at math, it still came as a surprise to me when I realized that in one week, on a Friday no less, I will have been sober for an entire year. I hadn’t had sex with anyone, including myself, for 358 days.

  I stayed in my routine, working as much overtime as possible, relishing my boring life and carefully watching out for any temptations. In group, I had heard countless stories of people who had neared that one-year mark, only to then slip. Even though I was as self-destructive as anyone on earth, managing a year of sobriety had to mean that I wasn’t a total failure. Scoring one championship winning goal and 365 days of abstinence didn’t seem like much in 26 years of a life. But it was two more successes than I had accomplished in the first 25 years.

  To mark the event, I wondered if I should share my story and asked Elaine how much pain might be involved.

  She laughed. “A lot less than acting it out. Some people need that pain as a reminder.”

  “I don’t think I can do it.”

  “Sherry, you never have to share. Don’t put any added pressure on yourself.”

  I finally decided that sharing was out. I couldn’t take reliving all that pain.

  But when the day finally arrived, I figured I had to do something special. I couldn’t exactly knock back a drink. So after work, I went shopping for a birthday present.

  In a Soho boutique window, a dress looked lovely on the mannequin and I hoped that it might not look terrible on me. Unfortunately, I was taller than the mannequin so the dress was shorter. I tried pulling down the hem but I couldn’t get it passed my knees. Worse, while leaning over to pull on it, the medium-cut top looked very low-cut.

  I straightened up and for a long time I stared at myself in the mirror. Suddenly, I burst into tears and didn’t stop crying for almost a half-hour.

  Ever since confiding in Tina, the girl on the subway who wanted ‘desperately’ to be a sex addict, too, I hadn’t mentioned my addiction to anyone outside of group. But I felt that I owed it to Dede to tell her. If I was ever going tell her, my birthday seemed like an appropriate time. She had returned from New Orleans without Casey a couple of days before for her last sitcom callback and was waiting to hear if she had gotten the part. She had left me a message saying that she wanted to catch up but I suspected she was about to learn a lot more than she was anticipating. After a couple of hesitant half-dials, I reached her. “Hey, Sher. I’m really busy at the moment. What’s up?”

  “Nothing really,” I suddenly stammered. “I’m just having a sort of second birthday this evening. It’s not a party or anything, just—”

  “—Okay. Where? I’ll try to make it.

  “St. Augustine’s Church—”

  “—Church? We’re not church—oh, I get it, Sis. Of course, I’ll make it.” Before I even finished telling her the time and address, Dede was gone.

  I agonized over also asking Darcy to come. Finally, after I thought it was too late for her be able to make it, I called her, hoping she to get her machine. She answered.

  “Darcy, I know you’ve got about a million friends but you are the best friend I’ve ever had and tonight is sort of my birthday and I thought if you’d not busy, I’ll like you to come.”

  “Sherry, I’m honored. I’ll have to make a couple of calls. When is it? Can I be fashionably late?”

  “It starts at seven-thirty and if you’re late, you’ll kind of miss it. Listen, forget it. I’ll—”

  “—No way. I’ll make it.” She quickly took the address and then, like Dede, she hung up on me.

  In case, my dress tur
ned out to be a disaster, I wore a long coat. I didn’t see how I could wear the coat all night but I figured I could just leave group after five minutes. Outside, I saw only Claire sitting on the church steps, her head in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. She certainly wasn’t in any shape to give me advice.

  Inside, Gregory approached me. He had an incredible fashion sense as well as unsparing candor when he disliked something. I breathed deeply and feeling like some kind of weird stripper, I opened my coat. Gregory smiled and helped off my coat. He looked me over for a moment. “God, you look gorgeous tonight. I can’t decide if it is from a year of sobriety or that stunning dress.”

  I breathed again. As I sat down in the front row next to Elaine, she said that I looked “beautiful and special.” It was nearly seven-thirty and the regulars had arrived. Most of them sat near the front, depending on how much they needed to be surrounded by the group. As usual, the last few rows were empty, awaiting the arrival of any newbies who wanted to stay near the door for a quick getaway if their apprehension turned overwhelming.

  Then I heard someone singing a show tune and knew that Dede had arrived. She continued singing in a lower volume as she came down the stairs but was dead silent when she opened the door to see everyone turn and look at her. She gave me an encouraging wink and almost tiptoed to the end chair of the last row.

  During the Serenity Prayer, I heard someone sprinting around the church and I knew that very few people could run that fast period, let alone in high heels. Darcy had arrived. But I heard two sets of heels and wondered who could possibly keep up with her. Of course, it could only be one person. The door opened and Darcy and Paula strolled in. Without a hair out of place or one bead of sweat, they both looked fantastic. Darcy was carrying a Bloomingdale’s bag and Paula’s bag read Bergdorf Goodman. I was mortified! I’d forgotten to tell them that it wasn’t exactly a birthday with presents. Dede moved over and they sat beside her.