The News from Spain

by Joan Wickersham

  Incredibly, Harriet didn’t die. Her cancer never came back. She kept having more surgeries: to insert a catheter for the chemo drugs under her chest wall, to remove it again because of recurrent infections, to remove scar tissue in her abdomen, to remove more scar tissue. Rebecca kept driving down and spending time with her mother.

  The glow wore off.

  What a disconcerting thing to feel, to acknowledge! It wasn’t that she was sorry Harriet was still alive. It was more that she couldn’t keep it up: the attention, the rapport, the camaraderie, the aimless joy of just hanging around with her mother, watching the news. She had burned herself out, just as Peter and her friends had warned that she might; but looking back at the time when Harriet had seemed to be dying, she couldn’t imagine having managed it any other way.

  Harriet started feeling that Rebecca wasn’t visiting often enough. It was true, she was coming down less often. But, oh, that “enough.” That tricky guilt-laden word that doesn’t even need to be spoken between a mother and daughter because both of them can see it lying there between them, injured and whimpering, a big throbbing violent-colored bruise of a word.

  “What about Easter?” Harriet asked—plaintively? Coldly? In a resolutely plucky way that emphasized how admirably she was refraining from trying to make Rebecca feel guilty? It could have been any of those ways of asking, or any of a number of others, all of which did make Rebecca feel guilty, and angry, and confused about whether to say yes or no. Part of the burnout took the form of an almost frantic protectiveness of her own time whenever Harriet wasn’t sick. If her mother needed her, she dropped everything and went; if her mother didn’t need her, she wanted to feel free to say no.

  Harriet, on the other hand, seemed to feel that the time Rebecca spent caring for her didn’t count. Hurting, drugged, frightened, throwing up—that’s not what Harriet called spending time with her daughter. (The watching-the-news part was engrossing, and sometimes fun, but it was more like a jailhouse party, a desperate entertainment concocted by people who have very little to work with.) Harriet wanted to travel with Rebecca—to go on a cruise to Alaska or the Panama Canal. Or to see Moscow and Saint Petersburg, for heaven’s sake—all those mythical places that you could now, suddenly, actually go to.

  Rebecca had no desire to travel with Harriet, and she was getting ready to start her bookstore, looking for space, making a business plan, applying for loans. “A bookstore?” Harriet said. “With your education you want to start a store, and one that doesn’t even have a hope of making money?”

  “It’s what I care about,” Rebecca said.

  “I worry about you,” Harriet said. “What is your life adding up to?”

  Rebecca was hurt, furious. What did a life, anyone’s life, add up to? Why did Harriet feel she had a right to say things like that? (In her head, Rebecca wrote the script for what a mother should say in this situation: “That’s wonderful.”) They had one of their old fights, made worse by the fact that Rebecca hadn’t realized these old fights were still possible. The recent, long entente around Harriet’s illness had lulled Rebecca into a false sense of safety. She felt ambushed.

  Then Harriet sent Rebecca a check, for quite a lot of money. To help with the bookstore, she wrote on the card.

  “You can’t afford this,” Rebecca said.

  “It’s what I want to do,” Harriet said.

  Then she got sick again.

  Pneumonia—not life-threatening, but it took a long time to get over. Rebecca drove down, and made Harriet chicken soup and vanilla custard, and lay across the foot of Harriet’s bed watching the vigil outside the Fifth Avenue apartment building where Jacqueline Onassis was dying. They watched while John Kennedy came out and told the reporters that his mother was dead.

  “Poor Jackie,” Rebecca said.

  She was remembering how much her mother had admired and pitied Jackie in the years after JFK’s assassination, when Rebecca was growing up.

  But, “What’s poor about her?” Harriet said. “She’s been living with another woman’s husband.”

  • • •

  So this has been going on for years. Harriet ailing and rallying. Rebecca showing up and withdrawing. Living her life between interruptions—which, she herself knows, is not really a fair or accurate way to characterize it. Harriet has been sick a lot, needed her a lot; but most of the time she has not been sick or needy. Most of the time, Rebecca is relatively free. Maybe, then, it’s that Rebecca doesn’t feel that she’s done much with her freedom. That each interruption points up how little has happened since the last one.

  She runs her bookstore, quite successfully. She tried opening a second store in a nearby suburb, but it did not do well; the experiment was stressful but not disastrous; after a year she closed the new store, paid back the loans, and felt relieved.

  She’s been seeing Peter for a long time. They enjoy each other. They trust each other. They spend a few nights together most weeks, but both of them like having their own apartments. His kids went away to college; his ex-wife remarried, and so did Steve. Early on—a couple of years into their relationship—Peter asked Rebecca how she would feel about getting married. That was how he did it: not a proposal but an introduction of a topic for discussion. She said she wasn’t sure. The truth was that when he said it, she got a cold, sick feeling in her stomach, and that was the thing she wasn’t sure about and didn’t want to look too closely at. This lovely, good, thoughtful man: What was the matter with her? She was nervous, and also miffed that he seemed so equable about the whole thing, that he wasn’t made desperate by her ambivalence, that he wasn’t knocking her over with forceful demands that she belong to him. On the other hand, she wasn’t knocking him over either.

  Then his book on Richardson was finished, and published. He brought over a copy one night, and she had a bottle of champagne waiting, “Peter, I’m so happy for you,” and she kissed him, and they smiled at each other and drank, and she kept touching the cover of the book, a very beautiful photograph of the Stoughton House on Brattle Street. “Peter,” she said, and he smiled at her. Then he went into her kitchen to carve the chicken, and she began to flip through the book. She turned to the acknowledgments page, and her own name jumped out at her: “… and to Rebecca Hunt, who has given me so many pleasant hours.”

  It was understatement, wasn’t it? The kind of understatement that can exist between two people who understand each other? (The kind she was always wishing for, and never getting, from Harriet.)

  What did she want: a dedication that said, “For Rebecca, whom I adore and would die for”?

  Here was something she suddenly saw and deplored in herself, something she seemed to have in common with Harriet: a raw belief that love had to be declared and proved, baldly, loudly, explicitly.

  She saw the danger, the wrongness, of this; yet when Peter came in from the kitchen, carrying the chicken over to the table Rebecca had set in front of the fireplace, she said, “Pleasant? Is that what I’ve given you—many pleasant hours?”

  “Some unpleasant ones too,” he said, humorously, nervously—he saw, suddenly, what was coming, and he was trying to head it off.

  What came, though, that night, turned out to be not so bad. Rebecca was able to rein it in; she didn’t need to harangue him, or freeze him, although they talked less at dinner than usual. Peter said, “You know, I’m not sure what made me choose that word, but it was probably not the right one.”

  “That’s okay,” Rebecca said, and it was, really. What they had together was pleasant.

  But still the word continued to bother her, whenever she thought of it. The fact that it appeared to be lauding, but the thing that it praised was a limitation. Thanks for not getting too close to me. Thanks for not getting too deeply under my skin. Peter had disowned it somewhat, said it might not have been the right word—but Rebecca thought that it was probably not so much an aberration as it was a revelation: one of those sudden, sometimes accidental, instances when everything is brigh
tly lit and you see where you are. Long ago, in her marriage, there had been moments like that. Rebecca had had a friend back then named Mary, whom she’d since lost touch with; they’d been close for a couple of years when they’d both been trying to keep sinking marriages afloat. One night they had sat on the front steps of Rebecca’s apartment building, talking about their husbands, and Mary had said, “You know those things in the beginning—the things that bother you and you tell yourself, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter’? I’m realizing now: all of it matters.”

  Rebecca and Peter, of course, aren’t at the beginning. They’re more than ten years in. And isn’t that the problem, really—that they are so far in, and yet not far in at all?

  “Where do things stand these days with Peter?” Harriet is always asking. She means: Why don’t you marry him? Or, if you don’t love him enough to marry him, why don’t you move on and find someone else? (Both questions are unspoken; but the second, nevertheless, carries all the buried force of an ultimatum: if you’re too stupid to appreciate Peter, give him up, and then you’ll be sorry.)

  She asks again on the Halloween when Rebecca visits her at the nursing home: the day of the bombing in Spain, the lamejuns, when Harriet is supposedly “adjusting.” It’s about a month after Peter’s book has been published; he has sent down an inscribed copy for Harriet, which she holds in her lap, stroking the picture of the Stoughton House.

  “Things don’t stand anywhere,” Rebecca tells her. “Things stand where they always stand.”

  She goes down again a month later, for Thanksgiving. She would like to take Harriet out for dinner, but this is impossible, because Harriet can’t go anywhere except in an ambulance or a wheelchair van, either of which would cost several hundred dollars. So they sit in Harriet’s room and eat nursing-home turkey, with very wet stuffing. Then there is pumpkin pie—not too bad—and dark chocolate pastilles, which Rebecca has brought because Harriet loves them.

  “I had a very strange conversation with Cath,” Harriet says. “She called me, and she asked me why, when you girls were little and I would take you to a Broadway musical, why wouldn’t I ever buy you the original cast album when they were selling it in the lobby.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said I didn’t remember. Which is the truth.” Harriet looks at Rebecca, puzzled. “Do you think she’s in therapy?”

  This makes Rebecca laugh, and after a moment Harriet snorts, too, and the two of them end up wiping away tears, trying to collect themselves.

  The legs of Harriet’s stretch pants have ridden up, and Rebecca notices a bandage on her calf.

  “It’s infected,” Harriet tells her when she asks. “It got bumped on the wheelchair, and I asked them to put some antibiotic ointment on it, but they never got around to it.”

  They play Scrabble; Harriet is still pretty good. From somewhere down the hall, a woman begins to moan. The same words over and over: Take me home. Please, please take me home.

  “She does that all the time,” Harriet says, her hand hovering over the box of tiles. “I don’t know if she thinks her children are in the room with her, or if she’s talking to God.”

  “Either way,” Rebecca says, somber, not even sure what she means by “either way.”

  But Harriet makes it explicit. “Either way, she’s not crazy to want it; and either way, it isn’t happening.”

  A man has been coming into Rebecca’s bookstore every couple of weeks. He buys a lot—no specific category, he just seems generally ravenous: novels, poetry, history. He is short, probably in his late fifties, with silver-rimmed glasses and a large shaggy graying head and a big square jaw that reminds Rebecca of a lion. He grins at Rebecca when he pays. They don’t talk. Their not talking, which might at first have been shyness or reserve, has begun to feel deliberate, erotic. His name, on the credit slips, is Benjamin Ehrman.

  Already Rebecca can tell the story two different ways. One ends with them getting married. The other ends with her looking back over a cratered battlefield of a love affair and wondering: What were you thinking?

  Harriet calls late one morning, practically in tears.

  “What is it?” Rebecca asks.

  “I’m still in bed. They haven’t—when I woke up I said I needed the bedpan. And the aide told me it was too much trouble, I should just … go, and they’d come clean me up. So I did, but that was a couple of hours ago—”

  Rebecca looks at the clock hanging on the wall of the bookstore. It’s eleven-thirty. “I’ll call you right back.” She hangs up, and then calls the nursing home and asks to speak to Harriet’s caseworker. She describes what Harriet has just told her, and ends by saying, “That is not okay.”

  “No, it’s not,” the caseworker agrees smoothly. “You’re right. But sometimes they can make it sound worse than it really is; there may be a little more to the story. Let me go look into it.”

  Rebecca’s hands are shaking. “I don’t think my mother is confused about what’s going on.” She keeps picturing the caseworker in her Halloween costume: her eye patch, her blackened tooth, her little plastic dagger. And she says again, “This is not okay.”

  She hangs up and calls Harriet back. “The social worker is sending someone to help you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Mom. I’m sorry.” They stay on the phone until Harriet has to hang up because, she says, “Here everybody is, all of a sudden.”

  Benjamin Ehrman comes in and buys the Oresteia and the complete Ecco Press set of Chekhov stories. Is he taking some sort of middle-aged Great Books course? Is he courting her, trying (successfully) to slay her with his taste?

  He pays. He smiles. He doesn’t say anything, not even thank you. At the point when any other customer would have said “thank you,” he smiles at her again.

  Oh, Rebecca, you tired, confused woman. You are so ripe for this kind of thing.

  She goes down to visit Harriet at Christmas. (She and Peter have never spent the holiday together; she always goes to Harriet, and he is either with his kids or off skiing in Utah. This year, the separation bothers her. Not in itself—she hates skiing—but the fact that there is no expectation that they will make a plan together. How could there not be, after all this time? On the other hand, doesn’t the ease with which they go their separate ways—the pleasantness of it—confirm that she is free?)

  She brings Harriet a beef tenderloin she has cooked, and she reheats au gratin potatoes and green beans in the kitchen microwave. The gray people in their straggly hallway flotilla watch, or don’t watch, as she walks by holding dishes aloft. One woman looks at her and raises a forefinger, like someone timidly hailing a cab. “Excuse me,” the woman says, “but is this Washington Square?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Rebecca says.

  “Do you know how to get there from here?”

  Rebecca shakes her head, and the woman smiles and shrugs.

  Harriet says of the dinner, “You can’t imagine what a treat this is.”

  “Yes I can,” Rebecca says. “That’s why I brought it.”

  Ralph’s children have taken him out for dinner—they all live nearby—but later that evening he comes to see Harriet. Rebecca likes him: he is blunt and loyal, and quick, like Harriet.

  Rebecca sits, trying to straighten out a piece of knitting (a red scarf, Harriet’s Christmas present to her, which, Harriet says, “should have been done ages ago but I keep screwing it up—you know I’m not domestic”), while Ralph and Harriet play anagrams on a table rolled up against Harriet’s wheelchair. They take turns flipping over a new letter and seeing if they can steal a word the other person has already made.

  Rebecca, ripping out rows of Harriet’s impatient thwarted knitting, is nearly in tears, watching them: the speed, the sureness with which they play. Ralph steals “risked” from Harriet, adds his own “T,” and makes “skirted.” Harriet steals “donuts” and makes “astound.”

  One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of January, Rebecca goes to the
movies by herself. She stands in line—a long one—not thinking of much. The smell of popcorn, and how sickening it is. The fact that the hole in the right-hand pocket of her orange wool coat has now become big enough that she ought to start carrying her loose change in the left one. Ahead of her in line a man is waving, beckoning, smiling. Benjamin Ehrman. She turns around to see if he means someone behind her; he grins, and points at her, and beckons again. So she goes to him.

  “What movie are you seeing?” he asks, and she tells him, and he says, “Me too.”

  She says, “So, you do know how to talk after all”; she feels like a jerk as soon as it’s out of her mouth.

  But, “I know,” he says. “One of us was going to have to break that silence.” That sounds meaningful, erotic, again; he defuses it by adding, “It was getting to be like those staring contests you have when you’re a kid.”

  So they go in together, sit together, are deferential about the armrest, are aware of exactly where each other’s hands are in the darkness. The movie is a “little” one that has received doting reviews. The audience is enraptured with it, laughing, sighing. Rebecca hates it. She looks over at him and he looks back and rolls his eyes at her. They don’t know each other well enough to agree to walk out—they don’t know each other at all, so walking out would mean going their separate ways. They stay, sitting there through the whole thing, grimacing at each other, sinking down in their seats, their shoulders growing conspiratorially closer as their silent agreement that the thing just stinks grows more and more intense. At the end they throw themselves out into the street, laughing. They go for coffee but order wine instead.

  A list of what shocks Rebecca, over the next weeks and months:

  Bed. That something she’s done a lot of and enjoyed in the past could feel so fiercely new.