Becoming Lin

by Tricia Dower

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing them again. I don’t think he was totally honest with me.”

  Gabe frowns. “And you believe I have some magic lie detector?”

  Ron twists to face her. “Why do you find it impossible to believe I did it out of love?” He turns back to Gabe. “I read her journal because I wanted to be closer to her. She’s burrowed herself so deeply into some private place I rarely know what she’s feeling. I wouldn’t have let her take our son when she left if not for my mother’s offer to hire a detective.” He turns to Lin again. “You should thank her, you know. You were unstable, could barely take care of yourself. I was afraid of what might happen to Tavis. Mom was, too.”

  “What did you suppose might happen?” Gabe asks.

  “I thought she might get ill. She was eating next to nothing. She’s still too thin. I was concerned about her safety, too. She’d never been on her own. Aggression toward women is deeply entrenched in our society, you know.”

  She turns to him. “Nice speech, Parson. You let Tavis go with me because you would’ve had one unhappy boy on your hands otherwise. You hired a detective to dig up some dirt, find a reason to get him back. You actually imagined I could be unfaithful. I was not unstable when I left,” she says to Gabe, “just suffering from cognitive dissonance.”

  Ron’s laugh is scoffing. “And that with only a bachelor’s degree.”

  Gabe leans forward and clasps his hands on his desk. “Try to be respectful, both of you. In my experience it works best. Why did you let Lin leave with your son if you were concerned about her stability?”

  “I wanted her to be happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. I helped her find an apartment, made sure she had enough money to live on. When we were first married I pushed her to finish college. She wouldn’t have done it on her own.”

  “Did you want to finish college, Lin?”

  “Not at the time. I wanted to help Ron in the ministry. I’m glad now for my degree, so turns out he was right.” She sighs and looks down. “He’s always right.”

  Gabe squints at her. “Is that true? Is he always right?”

  Lin flushes. “No.”

  “I suggest you both say what you mean and mean what you say.” He rests his elbows on the desk, his chin on his folded hands. “What did Lin’s journal tell you, Ron?”

  “She thinks I’m a prick.”

  “I never wrote that.” And she’s never heard him say that word.

  “You wrote I didn’t let you do what you wanted. That makes me a prick.”

  “Good grief, I started that eight years ago. I’m not the same person now.”

  “According to her journal,” Ron says to Gabe, “I ordered her to drop out of the Honeywell Project. I only made a suggestion. When she agreed, I thought she was just as scared as I was she might not live to see Tavis grow up.”

  Gabe says, “Do I need to know what the Honeywell Project is?”

  “I’m astounded you don’t,” Ron says, “but it’s probably not material.”

  “Good. Lin, how did you feel when you learned Ron had read your journal?”

  “Furious, of course.”

  “What else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What was so awful about him seeing what you’d written?”

  She gives him a disbelieving smile. “Don’t you believe in privacy either?” She takes a deep breath. “Here’s a bit of history. When we were first married, we prayed together twice a day. Not my idea, believe me. If I prayed for more patience, he’d want to know what was testing mine. If I prayed for somebody else and not for personal guidance, he’d ask if I considered myself above dependence on God. After five months of that, I started praying silently, told him it was so I could hear what God might have to say to me.”

  “You lied to get me off your back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, let me try again,” Gabe says. “How did it make you feel to have your privacy invaded?”

  She puffs out an exasperated breath. Either Gabe is dense or she studied for the wrong exam. What does he want? “Violated? Defenseless? Very, very small?”

  Gabe shakes his head at her tone, turns to Ron. “Is that what you wanted her to feel?”

  “Of course not. I didn’t intend for her to find out.”

  “What were you afraid Lin had written in her journal?”

  “I wasn’t afraid.”

  “What were you then, a voyeur?”

  “That’s insulting.”

  “In your profession and mine we typically respect confidences and privacy.”

  “True, but you see, she wasn’t confiding in me.”

  “It might seem like I’m beating a dead horse,” Gabe says, “but I’d like you to identify the fear that fuels your need to know, Ron. And Lin, the fear that fuels your need to keep your thoughts and emotions hidden.”

  In the ensuing silence, Gabe scratches his nose with his pencil eraser. Ron’s body looks tense with misery. Lin stares outside the window at a shrub with waxy emerald leaves, looks down at the sun-splashed floor and ponders Gabe’s words. Was she ever open, even as a child? She vaguely recalls being exiled to the porch for not keeping her voice down, recalls someone calling her willful. Who was that?

  Ron speaks first. “It’s possible I was afraid she was happier without me. I might’ve thought that if I could get past her guardrails, know her thoughts and what she was doing, I could change to be more what she needed.” He looks at neither Gabe nor Lin, stares straight ahead. His scraped-bare voice threatens to pull her in.

  “I’ve always been a private person,” she says. “I can’t tell you why.” A years-old image comes to her of Mother cloistered away, hiding her pain.

  “We should talk about the assault,” Ron says.

  She turns to him wide-eyed, her stomach pitching and rolling. “That’s not relevant.”

  “I disagree,” he says. “I believe it’s why you keep yourself from me and from God, why you fend us both off like enemies.”

  “I know nothing of this assault,” Gabe says. “Do you want to talk about it, Lin?”

  “No.” She closes her eyes and breathes deeply. They have no right to her tears. She stands. The effort to speak is immense. “Is our hour over?”

  Gabe says, “It can be. I’d like to share something with you first. Ten years ago my wife and I were this close to divorcing.” He measures the distance with his fingers. “If you’d told me then that we could be as happy as we are today I wouldn’t have believed you.”

  That she and Ron could be happy again in this life is like one of Rhonda’s dark fantasies.

  Ron, his face sagging with fatigue, asks to go first at their next session. “I want to apologize for my behavior last week,” he says, addressing Gabe. “It’s humiliating for me to seek counsel from someone else. I reacted defensively because of that and I’m sorry.”

  To Lin he says, “I shouldn’t have brought up the assault so crudely. If I’d been more willing to expose myself, I would’ve said that after I learned about it, I wanted you to never be hurt like that again. I tried to shield you from it. That’s not the same as rescuing. Protecting you is baked into me, what makes me a man. If you take that from me, what am I?”

  She looks at his long, wiry body and tenderness rises into her throat. He told her once he’d shot up earlier than most boys his age and his height made teachers treat him as though he should be more responsible than other kids. He must have carried that with him ever since. She wants to tell him it’s not all up to him. She reaches over and touches his hand.

  He gives her a smile full of sorrow and regret. “Right now I just want to do what’s best for Tavis. I have a proposal if you’re willing to listen.”

  She swallows hard and nods.

  He wants to move into the two-bedroom apartment Lenny reserved for the
m. If Lin stays where she is, Tavis’s life will be disrupted as little as possible. He can spend one week with Ron, the next with Lin and so on, go to Tree House Kids before and after school, see his friends no matter which apartment he’s in. They can have dinner together as a family once a week if she’s okay with that, can write it all up in a contract. He says constancy is important for Tavis.

  “What would we tell him?”

  “That Mommy and Daddy aren’t ready to live together—I’d like to add yet—but that we both want to live with him.”

  Gabe says, “Shall we explore your son’s possible reactions to that?”

  Lin says, “No.” She suggests she and Ron go for coffee and talk about it on their own. She doesn’t want to play Therapy anymore, doesn’t want Gabe Lindberg listening in on her life one minute longer.

  57

  The hot passenger seat stings her bare legs. Her lavender sack dress sticks to the skin between her shoulder blades and Ron’s hair has crinkled up in the heat. He looks more like a kid in his madras Bermudas than he does a new father. She glances sideways at him, most of her attention on the burgundy canvas infant bed straddling the front and back seats. The baby fans his fingers over his cheek as though dismayed.

  “I assume Mother survived sleeping upstairs,” she says. Their bedroom is like a kiln in the summer and the past few days have been equatorial. They migrated to the guest room when Lin stopped making it to the bathroom in time at night. They’ll stay until she can bear sleeping more than twenty steps away from Tavis.

  “Said she slept better than she has in years,” Ron says. “First time she’s been warm enough. Something to do with her internal thermostat.”

  “Too bad.”

  He reaches over and gently cuffs her arm. “You promised.”

  Lin doesn’t want her here. She’s undependable. Grace offered to help but Mother insisted and Ron asked Lin to accept graciously. He considers Betty Wise courageously fragile.

  She’s waiting for them in the gaping front door. Over a year since the third letter but Lin still cracks open the door just enough to enter and leave quickly, as if evil could waft straight in. Mother doesn’t know about the letters. She looks girlish in a red-checked sundress and white sandals, giant barrettes cinching her fading blond hair. Her face has the crusading zeal it did a decade ago when she bullied Lin into losing weight. “You look like a pat of butter in a hot frying pan,” she says. “I’ll get you an iced tea as soon as I cool this little fella off. Don’t want prickly heat and cradle crap at the get-go.”

  Lin feigns shock. “Did you say crap?”

  “Yes, Snow White.” She takes Tavis from Lin and lays him on the living room couch, removes his white cotton bonnet and unwraps his Peter Rabbit receiving blanket. He looks defenseless in a puny undershirt and a diaper the size of a hanky. His eyes search. His fists part the air. Mother kneels before him. “Ah, you know your grandma, don’t you, Blue Eyes?” Lin hasn’t heard this crooning voice before, hasn’t seen Mother so loose. It’s as if the muggy air has steamed her open.

  “The nurse said all baby’s eyes are blue at first.”

  “Yours were green right away.”

  Lin and Ron exchange indulgent smiles. He takes her suitcase to their temporary bedroom. She perches beside Tavis, doing her best to avoid her stitches. Her weight sends him rolling. She moves him to a safer position, his ribs flimsy under her nervous hands.

  “He’s stuffing his fist in his mouth,” Mother says. “When did he last eat?”

  “Just before we left the hospital.” Her milk didn’t come in until two days ago and Tavis’s blind seeking mouth would suckle every minute he’s awake if she let it. She worries he isn’t getting enough. Mother’s question doesn’t help. One hand on his tummy to keep him from shifting, she eases back into the couch, longs for the hospital’s donut cushion.

  “Keep an eye on the baby while I get you some iced tea,” Mother says.

  As though I wouldn’t. As though he’s hers. She places her ear on Tavis’s chest and listens to his butterfly breath. How can such a tiny heart keep beating?

  She’s not all that sorry Mother’s here, has dreaded being alone with Ron since a realization in the hospital slapped her square across the face: she’s never been in love before now. It’s a wonder Ron can’t tell by looking at her. The delirious tenderness she experiences when she holds Tavis, the will to fend off a rabid dog for him: that must be love. It possesses her like a fever. She wants nothing more than his smell on her day and night. With thumb and forefinger, she encircles one of his chicken-bone legs, imagines someone malicious enough to snap it in two. The world is a dangerous place. She silently chants Rumpelstiltskin, Rumpelstiltskin as she did the past few months whenever the thought of being responsible for a tiny person’s survival sat on her chest and cut off her breath.

  Mother returns with iced tea in a sweating glass, sits on the edge of an armchair and squints at Lin who’s still swollen from birth. “I was just three pounds overweight when I came home with you.”

  Lin cools her forehead with the glass. “Yeah, but they kept women in for ten days then.”

  Mother’s laugh erupts as if let out of a jar. “Good point. They let us dangle our legs off the side of the bed after five days and here you are home already with this little egg still warm from the nest.” She gently grazes Tavis’s cheek with a knuckle and jealousy grips Lin. She tips her head back and drains her iced tea. It’s too cold, makes her teeth hurt.

  A Dutch psychiatrist who visited her psych class last term said a person’s emotional growth could be stunted if she’s criticized, ignored, neglected, abused, or emotionally rejected early in life. As he reeled off the characteristics of an emotionally infantile person, she thought: That’s you, Lin. Uncomfortable in social settings: check. Indecisive, overly sensitive, needs to please others, self-conscious: check, check, check, check. She doesn’t want to blame Mother for all her faults. Neither does she want to continue repressing, until it oozes out of her pores, her fear that Mother didn’t want her. So she risks the question. “How did you feel when I was born?”

  “Scared stiff,” Mother says too quickly. “Stuck in Maternity with blacked-out windows. Waiting for the blooming Nazis or Japs to send us kablooey. I was luckier than some with a husband still around but even so . . .” She slowly shakes her head. “When your father did his war bit as a volunteer cop, I wanted to go to England and drive an ambulance. He wouldn’t let me.”

  Lin has heard the ambulance grievance before. “You don’t know how to drive, Mom.”

  Mother’s blue eyes flash. “I would’ve learned for that.”

  Tavis starts to fuss. Lin picks him up, wonders if the bruised tint to his eyelids is normal. “You must’ve felt guilty for bringing me into a world at war.”

  “Why? I didn’t start it.” She holds out her arms. “Give him here. You’re still shaky.”

  “No I’m not.” Lin nestles his floppy little body against her left shoulder and pats his back. “What if you get a pain when you’re holding him?”

  “I’ve been okay lately, knock wood,” Mother says, rapping her head with her knuckles. “Miranda’s a wonder. Honey and cinnamon in hot water every morning, turmeric root tea at night and the pains are piddling.”

  More placebos from that fraud’s magic medicine chest.

  Mother perches on the arm of the chair again. “She told me her father was a healer, not just a crazy drunk.” She stares into space for a long moment then jerks a little and frowns as if suddenly finding herself in a strange room. “Don’t worry, I brought my own honey and spices.”

  “You didn’t have to.” Lin twists her neck to kiss Tavis’s impossibly tiny hand. “Grace gave us a baby book. Did you keep one for me? I don’t remember seeing it.”

  “Times were different then. The doctor said not to ‘over-identify’ with you. That it would lead to spoili
ng. I wanted to do the right thing.”

  The answer, then, is no.

  Tavis’s baby book will be thick with details. He’ll know he came out fists waving and throat howling, as if to say let me at this world you mourn for. He’ll know his mother loves him. “What’d you think the first time you saw me?”

  Mother exhales as though she’s blowing a candle out. “That I had balled up the works. Your left eye was practically on your cheek from the forceps. Your father thought you were beautiful. That’s all I cared about. I was afraid he’d be disappointed you weren’t a boy.”

  When Lin was a kid, Mother seemed to make a habit of mentioning the boy she miscarried. It took someone only to say, “Just one child?” and she’d be off, recounting the whole sad tale, magnanimously adding, “Of course it wasn’t her fault.” Lin has never apologized. She considers it now but it comes to her like a mild electrical shock that it really wasn’t her fault. She protected her child in the womb. Why didn’t Mother?

  The following week passes like a drifting fog. Lin takes afternoon naps, dense with dreams, while Mother receives parishioners who stop by with layer cakes and what the locals term hotdish. Mother teaches her to test the baby’s bath temperature with her elbow. Lin watches her split open the spines of peas with her thumb and squeeze baked potatoes to see if they’re done and realizes that’s why she knows how to do those things too. Each night Mother makes her precarious way down the bedroom stairs in high heels for the dinner she’s cooked, talks so much at the table it’s as though somebody put a nickel in her and she can’t stop until it’s spent. Ron listens intently, sometimes with a puzzled expression, always courteous. Seeing that, Lin realizes with an ache that she does love him, just not the way she loves Tavis.

  On a rare mosquito-free night, he keeps an eye on Tavis while Lin and Mother plunk down green and white woven plastic lawn chairs out front under the cratered moon and pulsing stars. The air clings to the day’s heat and there’s not a hint of wind. Mother, smelling of Pond’s, speaks of her childhood in the easy way she might with a close friend and it feels like sugar on Lin’s tongue. She yearns to say she went somewhere unearthly as she pushed Tavis out and didn’t want to leave, wants to know if Mother experienced anything like that, has a hunch she wouldn’t dismiss it as a hormone-fueled hallucination. But asking would interrupt Mother’s reminiscences, risk disturbing this rare closeness between them.