The News from Spain

by Joan Wickersham

Underwear. He likes it, so he buys it for her and she starts buying it for herself. Tarty, expensive stuff. And nothing in her objects—not the feminist part, not the shy part, not the part that is aware of weighing fifteen pounds more than she did in college.

  Her hair. It’s long, it nearly reaches her waist; she’s always worn it up, or in a braid. He wants it down. She sits on the bed between his thighs with her back to him, and he brushes her hair, crooning to her. And she loves it—she, who has always disliked having anyone touch her hair since childhood, when Harriet used to yank a brush through it and say impatiently, when Rebecca flinched, “You have such a tender scalp.”

  Pet names for each other. We won’t even put them in here, because the ones they make up are so incredibly silly.

  Italian chocolate eggs with toys inside. He hands her one after dinner on one of the first nights he cooks for her. She thinks, Oh, how nice, a chocolate egg. When she unwraps it and breaks off a piece, she discovers a small plastic capsule inside; when she opens that, she finds six plastic pieces; when she puts the pieces together, they make a tiny pterodactyl holding a jackhammer. Oh, he says, the pterodactyl road crew ones are the best.

  Jealousy. He is separated but not divorced. Rebecca sees the wife around Cambridge, a narrow pretty greyhound of a woman, with a face that is at once anxious and arrogant. She looks rich. She is rich, because Ben is rich. Five years ago he sold his dot-com company and made the kind of money that can scatter people all over an expensive city in big houses: one for himself, one for his parents, one for a son and daughter-in-law, and then another one for himself when he moved out of the first one and left his wife alone there. That had happened a year before Rebecca met him. Rebecca hates seeing this woman—Dorinda. After a sighting she always has a sense of belated, alert panic, the kind you feel when you narrowly miss having a traffic accident. She sees Dorinda in the supermarket, and Dorinda’s eyes hold hers for an instant and then sweep coldly away. Is this just one person registering the presence of another, unknown, one? Or is it the snubbing of a rival? She asks Ben if Dorinda knows about her. Ben says he’s mentioned to Dorinda that he’s seeing someone but that they’ve never discussed whom. Implying that they do still discuss some things. What things? What do they talk about? How often? How married are they? There is also another, much earlier, wife: Carol, the mother of Ben’s three grown children. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard. Rebecca doesn’t know what she looks like and is not bothered by her as she is by Dorinda, though it does worry her some that there are two of them, two of Ben’s former loves cast adrift in the world. Does it mean she will one day be a third? Is he a serial discarder? No, she tells herself: he is fifty-seven, he’s had a life. Rebecca is forty-five, and has a past of her own. Her quantity is equal to Ben’s: two. Steve, who had grown less and less interested in sex, and eventually told her that it would be okay with him if she wanted to go out and have an affair; and then Peter.

  She has of course by now broken up with Peter, who, she thinks, barely seemed to notice. In fact, it’s Rebecca who has failed to notice. She is so far gone, so deeply drunk on love, that she doesn’t notice how surprised and hurt he is; how aware he has been, over the years, of his own caution and reticence; how miserably, suddenly, certain he is that their long civilized mildness was fatal and largely his fault; how far from mild he is feeling now. He’s angry at her but angrier at himself.

  “We could still see each other sometimes,” she said vaguely, cravenly, at the end. (She was thinking that it had been so friendly all along, maybe it could just keep being friendly.) “I’ll miss you.”

  “No. Don’t call me. Don’t call me again unless you mean it,” Peter said; and then he amended it to: “Don’t call me.”

  It was very clear and clean, Rebecca thought at the time. They had met for a cup of coffee in Harvard Square, and they were done and she was walking home within fifteen minutes. She was relieved that there hadn’t been a scene, but also not surprised. She did feel sad: she would miss him. She passed the store that sold the chocolate eggs, and went in and bought one to hide somewhere—Ben’s slipper, the piano bench. They’ve taken to stashing them all over his house for each other to find.

  What does Harriet make of all this? Nothing. Rebecca hasn’t told her. She doesn’t know what Harriet would say, but she knows she doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to hear anything from anybody.

  She wants to be utterly alone with Ben: she wants to drink him, eat him, climb inside him, run away with him. She’s never felt this way about anyone.

  What she has always thought, watching friends of hers disappear into similar love affairs in the past, is “Uh-oh.”

  But who is ever able to apply to her own current love affair a word like “similar”?

  She gets calls from the nursing home. “I’m just calling to report that your mother fell this morning. She slid down out of her wheelchair. She wasn’t hurt.”

  “We’re calling to let you know that your mother is in the emergency room. She has a pretty high fever, and the doctor was worried she might be dehydrated.”

  She calls Harriet. “Mom?”

  Harriet says she’s okay, or she’s tired, or she’s mad that they didn’t take action sooner, or she knows they’re short-staffed and that it’s not their fault, or that they’re a bunch of stupid uncaring assholes who just want her money. Rebecca murmurs and soothes, gets indignant, calls the nursing home to complain, suggests to Harriet yet again that they hire a private aide to keep a closer eye on her (which Harriet has always refused to do, because as it is the nursing home is gobbling up her money and once it’s gone she’ll have to go on Medicaid and have a roommate, the idea of which she finds abhorrent).

  Rebecca is so competent by now whenever there’s a crisis. She always has been—but it’s different now, more automatic, because she has Ben. When something happens with Harriet, she does what needs to be done, but it feels more like Honor Thy Mother than it does like running into a burning building to save someone you love who is trapped inside.

  “And you’re sure you don’t want me to look for a place near Boston?” Rebecca asks.

  No, Harriet always says, because of Ralph.

  She talks to Cath occasionally, and Cath says, from the safe distance of Denver: “It’s time for her to live closer to one of us.”

  (Rebecca is tempted sometimes to say: Okay, Cath, I’ve arranged to have Mom med-flighted out to you.)

  Harriet gets a urinary tract infection, another leg infection, bronchitis.

  She has been sick now for so long, this has all been going on forever. Rebecca wishes it would all just stop—but the only thing that will stop it is Harriet’s death, and she doesn’t want that.

  She asks Harriet one afternoon—it’s when Harriet is in the hospital with bronchitis, and Rebecca has driven down to Connecticut to spend the afternoon with her (just the afternoon: she wants to be back in Cambridge again by bedtime)—“Aren’t you tired of all this?”

  “Yes,” Harriet says. “But I don’t want it to be over, because I want to know the end of the story.”

  “What story?” Rebecca asks.

  “All the stories,” Harriet says.

  “You’re so sad,” Ben says, rubbing the backs of his fingers against her cheek when she gets home from the bookstore one evening.

  “My mother’s in the hospital again. Septic shock. Another urinary tract infection, which I guess they didn’t catch fast enough. I’m going to drive down there tomorrow.”

  “I’ll make you a drink,” he says, and then he calls her one of the incredibly silly pet names, which for the first time fails to delight her. It seems irritating and ill timed. “And then I’ll run you a bath,” he says.

  “A bath sounds good.”

  “And I’ll come watch you take it.”

  “Come talk to me, you mean?”

  “No. Watch you.”

  That’s an aberration, not a revelation, she thinks. Being objectified, when she just wants to be ac
companied.

  “You’re so sad,” he keeps saying. It starts as sympathy. A week or two later it’s cool, a diagnosis. Then it becomes a criticism.

  He starts wanting the underwear to be kinkier. And he wants her to wear it every time.

  He used to talk a lot about divorcing Dorinda. But it’s been months now since he’s mentioned it.

  Rebecca asks him about it one night, as they are lying in bed, happy, she thinks, naked, with scraps of underwear scattered all around them.

  “I would love to marry you,” she says, with a boldness that is new and luxurious for her. She’s echoing something he has said to her many times by now. “I hate it that you’re still married to someone else.”

  He is silent. Then he says: “You knew I was married when we started this.”

  She tries to get out of it without too much self-abasement. She knows the uselessness of asking questions. She manages to sound less desperate than she is—but still, it’s more desperate than she would like to sound.

  Women ask for explanations, over and over, when love goes. There is no explanation. The explanation is: It’s gone.

  The whole thing, from the time they met at the little movie to the end, took sixteen months.

  Back in her apartment, she’s cold. It’s a cold spring, wet, dark. She doesn’t cook, she doesn’t sleep well, she doesn’t read, she doesn’t see many friends. She gets her hair cut to just below her jawline, knowing it’s an angry, masochistic thing to do, but hoping that it will somehow make her feel better. (And also because she can’t bear now to attend to it: shampooing, brushing.) She talks to two people, her assistant from the bookstore, who has had something of a front-row seat for all this—she used to raise her eyebrows at Rebecca all those months ago when Ben would come in, buy books, and leave without saying anything—and an old, kind friend from the school where she used to teach. Both of them are kind, in fact, but both of them seem to be saying without saying, “What did you expect?” (In fact, they’re not saying this. They’ve been watching Rebecca all this time with some concern, because she has seemed so engulfed in Ben and remote from everything else, but they have also been rooting for her, wanting it to work. The “What did you expect?” is coming straight from Rebecca herself, spoken in a voice not unlike Harriet’s.)

  Summer comes, then fall. Rebecca still can’t walk by the store that sells the chocolate eggs.

  “What’s wrong?” Harriet asks over the phone. Her voice is feebler these days, hoarse.

  “Nothing,” Rebecca says. “I’m just tired.”

  “You want to hear something shitty?” Harriet asks.

  “What?”

  “They’ve stopped giving me physical therapy. They say I’m not making any progress. I said, ‘Well how the hell am I supposed to make progress if you stop giving me physical therapy?’ But you want to hear something wonderful?”

  “What?”

  “When Ralph comes over, he moves my legs for me. And he makes me do arm exercises. So I don’t atrophy.”

  The nursing home calls.

  “We’re calling to let you know your mother is in the hospital again—she had a fever, and so we sent her over to the ER.”

  The hospital calls. Harriet has another urinary tract infection that has gone undiagnosed—she can’t feel any pain, because of the paralysis—and once again she’s in severe septic shock. They’re putting her on antibiotics.

  Harriet calls. Her voice is weak and shivery but animated, excited. “Oh, my God—did you hear about the tunnel?”

  “What tunnel?”

  “It collapsed. Turn on the TV. It just happened, at the height of the morning commute, they said.”

  “Where was this? What city?”

  “I don’t know. It was my roommate’s TV, so I couldn’t hear very well, and then the nurse or someone came in and shut it off. But it sounded awful. People were killed, they think some people may still be trapped in their cars. You need to turn it on.”

  “Mom, we don’t even know where it’s happening.”

  “It’s in a commuter tunnel. The main one that leads to the city, they said. Or maybe it was the bridge that collapsed, the bridge that leads to the tunnel. But everybody goes through the tunnel.”

  That night the hospital calls. Harriet’s fever isn’t coming down. They’re going to try a different antibiotic.

  Early the next morning, Rebecca is trying to decide what to do—call in the assistant, or close the store for the day, so she can go to Connecticut? Stay here and keep in touch with the hospital and Harriet by phone?—when the hospital calls again and someone tells her in a clear, soft voice that Harriet is dead.

  She sits there.

  • • •

  She needs to call Cath. (Who will say, “Do you think we need to do a funeral?”)

  She needs to call Ralph. (Who will cry. Who will be heartbroken. Who will now begin to decline very fast.)

  She wants to call Harriet.

  It has all gone on for so long without Harriet dying that Rebecca lost track of the fact that Harriet was going to die.

  Guilt: if she hadn’t gotten tired and distracted—if she hadn’t let herself be so easily dazzled—if she had not relaxed her vigilance, this would not have happened.

  Even in the moment, she recognizes this guilt as irrational, bogus; but it pierces anyway.

  Harriet died when Rebecca wasn’t looking.

  She sits there.

  She wants to call Harriet, more passionately than she would have believed, an hour ago, that it was possible to want that, or to want anything.

  The only other person she finds she wants to call—and of course she can’t—is Peter.

  She will, though. Not now. Not until almost a year from now.

  She will wrestle during that time with questions having to do with forgiveness. Can she forgive herself for what she did to him?

  (For the most part, yes. The two of them made their polite, inhibited, explosive mess together, she believes; it ended the way it might have been expected to end, although the particular trigger could not have been predicted.)

  (But oh, the folly of that particular trigger.)

  Can he forgive her? No way to know. She puts off the phone call for so long partly because she is afraid to find out.

  She keeps pitting his final “Don’t call me” against his penultimate “Don’t call me again unless you mean it,” trying to figure out which one carries more weight.

  And she gets tangled in that “unless you mean it.” Which she didn’t even really hear in the coffee shop when he said it; which she has discovered in her memory since then. Unless she means what? She can’t define it explicitly, the thing that Peter insisted she had better mean—but she does feel she understands what he meant by that insistence, and it gives her hope.

  By the time she finally does call him, she will know that she means it, even though it will be a scary phone call to make, and even if she still won’t be capable of saying clearly what exactly it is she does mean.

  Harriet would have been quick to tell her, accurately or inaccurately. To guess, to analyze, to explain, to make predictions. Harriet was always the one who wanted to talk about the news, from Spain, or from the Vatican, or from some uncertain city where something had collapsed—from any place, really, where anything of interest might be going on.

  The News from Spain

  THE OTHER GIRL

  She was small, sullen, dressed in a short skirt and white vinyl boots, wearing pale lip gloss.

  She was the only other girl in the boys’ school.

  She didn’t smile when you were introduced. “I’ll show you where the ladies’ room is,” she said; and before you knew it you were standing inside it with her. It was the kind meant to be occupied by only one person. “I’ll wait outside,” you said, and she said, “Why?” and lifted her skirt and sat down.

  She was your age, thirteen. She was rich, you saw when you went home with her one day after school. A young blond man, who worked
for her mother, picked you both up after study hall and drove you to her house. A big new house, like a ranch on a TV show—new wood, a huge staircase with too many spindly banisters, lots of red plush. There were horses, and there was an indoor swimming pool, and a pantry full of sweet things. She ate half a bag of cookies, coolly, standing there. “Shouldn’t we go easy?” you asked. “Won’t they mind?”

  “Who’s they?” she said.

  She and her mother were both named Lily. Everyone called the mother Big Lily, and the daughter was Lily Joyce.

  Big Lily ran a factory, which was somewhere else on the property. Big Lily owned so many acres that the factory was invisible; you never saw it. You never knew what it made either—something invented by Lily Joyce’s father. She didn’t talk about him, except to tell you once that he had shot himself ten years ago and that’s when her mother had taken over the company.

  Later the two of you went swimming in the pool—you in one of Big Lily’s bathing suits, which, embarrassingly, fit you; Lily Joyce in a small white bikini. Chlorinated steam wafted up from the water; the air was hot and murky and stinging, and the light was thick and green. The young man came in and watched you and Lily Joyce swimming for a while. Then he pulled off his shirt and jumped into the water. He teased Lily Joyce and chased her and picked her up and threw her toward the deep end. She came down screaming, splashing, flailing to get away from him. He threatened to pull down her bikini top, and she laughed and laughed.

  The next year Big Lily married him. He was twenty-two; Big Lily was forty-seven.

  “What’s it like to have him as a stepfather?” you asked.

  “It’s okay,” Lily Joyce said, with no expression on her face.

  THE MATH TEACHER

  He was brusque, but also enthusiastic. He came to class every morning with wet hair, but it never dried, so maybe it was oiled. You could see the neat trails of the comb in it, like ski tracks in the snow. Sometimes in the winter, when you went for a walk in the afternoon—the boys were at sports, but there was nothing for the girls to do between lunch and afternoon study hall—you saw him skiing in the woods. He raised his ski pole to show he had seen you, a salute, and then went on, churning and sliding away under the fir trees.