Leaving Sophie Dean

by Alexandra Whitaker

  “Dancing?” But he was already striding away across the grass. “Let’s go!” he called over his shoulder, and without looking back he held his hand out behind him, ready to grasp hers. She watched his retreating back for a moment, then picked up her coat and books and ran to catch up with him, ignoring his outstretched hand.

  * * *

  “What a beautiful place!” Henry said about eight hours later, stepping into Sophie’s apartment. He busied himself with examining things and exclaiming over them, while Sophie smiled proudly, swaying just a little. It was a beautiful place… really an exceptionally beautiful place. Clement—Sophie started to explain about the marvelous, mysterious Clement, but then they were too sleepy, and then they were in bed, with Sophie nestling half dressed in Henry’s arms. “Go to sleep,” he said, tucking her head under his chin, and then they were asleep.

  But she woke up a few hours later with her ears ringing from the music in the bar and a sour taste in her mouth. Something had woken her, but what? Uh-oh, it was the room. Moving. Her sleep-blurred thought was that some careless disc jockey had left her apartment spinning on his turntable. Such negligence… it shouldn’t be allowed. She pulled herself up onto one elbow, and the room gave a sickening lurch. Shakily, she reached out to the bedside table to drink some water that she couldn’t remember leaving there and found it exceedingly good. Things were stiller now, barely turning. She guessed the turntable had been switched off at last, and it was just a matter of time before the apartment would wind down to a complete stop. Comforted, she slept again.

  When she woke, the sky was pale, she felt calm, and her mind was blank. Then the picture of the evening filled itself in: dinner in the North End, drinking, talking, laughing, dancing on Lansdowne Street, “cold tea” in Chinatown (beer in a teapot), apartment spinning, delicious water. She turned to look at Henry sleeping beside her, darkly handsome against the white sheets, and she was struck for the first time by what a shapely mouth he had, yet her stomach was leaden with dread. She eased herself out of bed, fished around for some clean clothes, and tiptoed away for a shower. When she came back out, her hair dripping, thirsty for tea, she found him standing fully dressed in the kitchen.

  “Oh, good morning,” she said, glancing away. “Would you like some tea?”

  He shook his head. “Come here.”

  She walked over, eyes down, and let him take hold of her hand.

  “Listen to me, Sophie. You have some problems right now, but I’m not one of them.” He pressed her hand and released it. She nodded, not lifting her eyes until she heard the front door close behind him.

  * * *

  “Can you imagine a more perfect thing to say?” Sophie enthused to Marion the next day, making a note in Marion’s file of the treatment she had just recieved: a bolstering of the Earth channels in order to calm Fire. Sophie had begun treating all her friends as part of a one-hundred-hour project Malcolm had assigned. She needed to work on twenty-five people four times each, keeping good records of every session, noting their symptoms, her diagnosis, her treatment, and its results, in order to prove she could follow a case through in a coherent manner. Viewing friends in terms of shiatsu was enlightening. Marion, for example, seemed less annoying now that Sophie could see her as just a case of too much yang in the pericardium. “Think of it,” she said, still kneeling beside Marion, clutching the file folder to her chest. ‘You have some problems, but I’m not one of them.’”

  Marion stirred on the futon and opened her eyes. “Sounds a bit peevish to me. That felt great!”

  “Oh, you don’t know him! He’s too bighearted for that. He really is the most… intriguing person.”

  “It was decent of him not to take advantage anyway.”

  “Take advantage!” Sophie laughed. “What are you talking about? I’m not a schoolgirl, I’m a thirty-six-year-old mother of two.”

  Marion propped herself up on her elbow. “I mean of the situation. You’re on the rebound, Sophie. It was wise of him not to get involved with you. Wise fellow.”

  “Oh, I suppose so.” That sobered Sophie, and the joy had gone out of her when she continued. “I’m glad we didn’t make love, because on some primitive level—God knows it doesn’t make any sense—I still feel linked to Adam.”

  Marion nodded. “Trust this animal instinct of yours. The body knows best, and yours is telling you that Adam is the only man for you.”

  And the worst thing about it, Sophie thought, is that she might be right. Just as compulsive liars sometimes tell the truth and monkeys occasionally do type Shakespeare’s plays, it wasn’t impossible for Marion to give sound advice.

  * * *

  But Florence’s take on the situation was quite different. When she heard about it after her shiatsu (calm Wood, disperse and tonify Metal), she leaped up from the futon and began to pace Sophie’s kitchen. “If you can’t have sex with good-looking people who turn up in your bed, you might as well be dead. You know that.”

  “I still feel bound to Adam. And it makes me furious! He doesn’t give a damn about me, and yet all I could think when I saw Henry asleep by my side was, ‘Thank God I haven’t been unfaithful to Adam.’ Unfaithful to Adam! What could be more pathetic? What am I going to do?”

  “How’s the divorce coming along?”

  “Slowly. But a handful of legal papers isn’t going to change how I feel.”

  “No, I know. Papers are worthless. A friend of mine got divorced from this guy, and he was taking it really hard, so she said, ‘Look, what is marriage, anyway? Only a piece of paper.’ And he said, ‘No. What’s only a piece of paper is the divorce.’”

  Sophie groaned. “Don’t.”

  “But he’s right in a way. Bureaucracy isn’t going to do the job. You need a sharp, gleaming knife—or a rusty hacksaw! You know, we don’t have nearly enough ritual left in modern life, and human beings need ritual to help them through tough times. I bet you I could devise a ceremony to sever that bond for good.”

  Sophie felt a twinge of foreboding. “Time is a great healer,” she said faintly.

  “No, time is too slow. We need a fast, efficient ritual, and since our society doesn’t provide one, we’ll just have to invent our own. How about if I perform an exorcism to free you of this man once and for all? And firebomb those last guilt feelings so you can enjoy a robust sex life?”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “I think it could be really therapeutic.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  “What’s the guy’s name? At least I can send him killer thought waves.”

  “Adam.”

  “You’re joking. The first man. The original asshole.” Florence continued to pace the kitchen floor, thinking hard. “I’ve got it! How about if we just slap him around some?”

  “Look, Florence, how can I explain this?” Sophie put her hands over her eyes and looked inward. “I have a gigantic boulder of anger blocking the entrance to the cave I dwell in—that’s what it feels like. The light and the air are blocked out, I can’t breathe, I can’t move. I’m trapped in the darkness behind this massive lump of stone.”

  “Dynamite. You need dynamite. Look, have you ever told him what a shit he really is? I bet you haven’t, you’re so well brought up.”

  “I went to his office one day.… But it seemed like the charge went off in my hands. I got more hurt in the explosion than he did. This time I want to be under cover when I push down the plunger.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. You need to express your anger, and you want to do it from a safe distance. Then I think you should write him a letter. It may sound tame, but it doesn’t need to be. Sit down here with a pen and paper after I leave and think of every last thing you’d like to tell that bastard. You know, if you don’t get this poison out of your system, you’ll end up with irritable bowel syndrome, to say nothing of cancer. Suppressed rage is dangerous stuff. So you transfer it all onto paper and protect your health.”

  “But wouldn’t that be just
another worthless piece of paper?”

  “Not if you write to kill. Think of your pen as a knife and plunge it into his body again and again, like those crimes you read about: ‘Six Hundred Stab Wounds, Face Mutilated Beyond Recognition.’ You’re not going to send the letter. It’s just to purge your psyche, so you can really cut loose—make it so they’ll need dental records to find out who he was.”

  Sophie swallowed. “I could try, I guess.”

  “Great. I’ll leave you to it.”

  Letter writing as an alternative to irritable bowel syndrome was new to Sophie. She wrote hesitantly at first, with lots of crossing out, but then more rapidly, muttering to herself with increasing heat until she felt like a surfer riding a huge wave of anger, exhilarated. She used lots of paper, circling the good phrases that emerged and transferring them onto fresh sheets. As the letter took shape, its tone evolved from red-hot to white-hot. Then a deceptive coolness began to appear on the surface, and she fostered that until she produced a double-burn effect: first the scorch of the icy exterior, then a searing plunge into the molten iron at the heart—at which point she took a deserved break.

  She made tea for herself and sandwiches for the boys, then checked the clock. Nearly time to go get them. She sat down again to reread with as much neutrality as she could muster. She pursed her lips thoughtfully when she came to the end. Fat. The thing was chubby. She crossed out half the text and reread. That was it; two hours’ work had resulted in one concise but thrillingly wounding paragraph. She recopied it neatly and slid the final draft into an envelope, which she was about to seal when a happy thought occurred to her. Digging around in the bathroom, she at last found what she was looking for and slipped it into the envelope as well. A hokey touch, a bit of self-indulgence, but it made her smile, and that was all that mattered. She licked the envelope, addressed it in a confident hand, and propped it up in plain sight. It looked magnificent. She felt better then, and suddenly very hungry. Leaning against the kitchen counter, she gazed peacefully over the rooftops while she ate one of the sandwiches she’d made for her sons. It tasted unusually good. Delicious, in fact.

  Children at the seashore know that when you dig a hole in the wet, packed sand, the sea rushes in to fill it up. Something similar happens with cruelty and kindness in the human heart. Having devoted the afternoon to inflicting pain on Adam, Sophie was suffused with warm feelings for the rest of humanity, which allowed her to go ahead and do the important thing she had been meaning to do for days, just as soon as she could screw up the courage. Hugo gave her an opening by asking whether he and Matthew had to kiss Valerie. “She gets lipstick on us. It’s yucky and hard to rub off.”

  She knelt and put her arms around them. “You don’t have to kiss her if you don’t want to. But she’s only trying to be nice, so you could try being nice, too. You know, Valerie is part of your family now, and she doesn’t have any children of her own, so it’s lucky for her to have you two, ready-made.”

  “When are you coming home, Mommy?” Hugo asked.

  “I am home, baby, and so are you. This house is yours and Matthew’s and mine, you know that. Valerie lives with you at Daddy’s house, because Daddy likes her and wants her to live there. And that’s okay. People should live wherever they want, with whomever they like. Don’t you think?”

  Hugo nodded, but Matthew asked, “Doesn’t Daddy like you?”

  This was the key moment, and Sophie was equal to it, managing to produce a happy-sounding laugh. “Of course he does, baby! I’ve told you before—we just want our own houses, that’s all.” She knew that made sense to Matthew, who sometimes wished he had his own room. She looked at Hugo, but he had drifted over to the fishbowl, humming.

  “Can I feed Fishtag?” he asked.

  Topic closed, goal accomplished, permission granted to love Daddy’s girlfriend. Feeling rather light-headed with the selflessness of her mission, Sophie glanced at the letter for moral support and caught her breath in surprise. The envelope was actually glowing, lit by a slanting ray of late-​afternoon sunshine.

  * * *

  Christmas was not the ordeal Sophie had feared. The children spent Christmas Eve at her house and Christmas Day at Adam’s, ferried between the two by Marion, who came to Sophie’s house with Gerald for eggnog on Christmas morning and dropped the children off at Adam’s on her way home. The boys showed no signs of distress, only delight at having two trees and two sets of presents. They came to her again for New Year’s Eve, their father rightly supposing that she had no plans for the evening, and she devised an early celebration involving sparklers on the porch and the presentation of two picture calendars: forest animals for Matthew, sea creatures for Hugo. Matthew used the squares of January to hop farm animals across in a board game he invented, and Hugo colored his squares in, both of them lying on the rug in their pajamas and humming contentedly while Sophie reviewed the system of diagnosis based on the correct balance of the Five Elements. For some time she pondered the characteristics of Metal: the season fall, the flavor pungent, the lungs, the large intestine, the color white, and weeping—wondering if Metal were not perhaps the dominant element in her mother… or in Adam. Then she went over the notes she had taken in class before Christmas.

  One sentence leaped from the page, written in block letters. She had asked Malcolm if there were a particular tsubo that helped a person to cope with change. He had frowned and said he couldn’t think of one exactly like that, but the question was an interesting one because—and this is what Sophie had written in capital letters and underlined—“The ability to accept change is a pretty good definition of health.”

  Well, what do you know? Old Jake-O was right.

  * * *

  Sophie and the boys wished Dorina a happy New Year when they stopped at her door to pick up Bertie and bring him with them to the park. The boys were devoted to the dog and considered him as good as their own; in Sophie’s view he was all the better for not being theirs.

  The park was teeming with children playing with scooters and bikes and remote-controlled cars, squeezing the last bit of newness out of their Christmas presents. “Now, remember, Matthew, if Bertie runs off, just let him go. He can take care of himself. You just keep yourself safe.” Because we all know I can’t come to your rescue, she added unhappily to herself. “Murderously ineffectual” was the term she had come up with one sleepless night, to describe herself.

  Matthew promised, and he and Hugo raced off to the slide with Bertie yapping at their heels. Someone called Sophie’s name. It was Florence, sitting with her West Indian housemate, Mercy, a large woman with good carriage and a don’t-mess-with-me voice, whom Sophie had come to like very much on her two or three visits to the Life Boat.

  “—and Darwin has got nothing to do with it!” Mercy was saying.

  “Well, it’s my natural selection,” Florence said stubbornly.

  “Hi, Flo,” Sophie said, joining them. “Hi, Mercy. Happy New Year.”

  Mercy nodded. “Happy New Year. I’ve been telling Florence here that I don’t like that stupid name she thought up for our house—the Life Boat! It’s riddled with negative connotations, like we’d be drowning without it or like our real ship sank and this is only a temporary measure—like we’re floating around waiting to be saved! I don’t know about Florence, but living as we do is my first choice.”

  “Okay, then you think of a name, smart aleck,” Florence said. “But it has to be evocative of women and children. Go on, I’m waiting.”

  “I got one for you—‘home.’” Mercy stood up. “I’m going home. To make some ginger beer. Nice to see you, Sophie. Rachida, Malik, come on! Emerson, where’s Josie?” She set off gracefully across the park in search of her flock, her head held high.

  “So did you write the letter?” Florence asked when they were alone.

  “I did.”

  “Wow, I wish I could see it.”

  “Too personal, I think.”

  “No, I don’t mean read it, just see
it. Behold it. Touch it. See if it burns!”

  “Well, I’ve got it here.” Sophie pulled it out of her bag. “I had it on the shelf in the kitchen, and, Florence, I swear, it was as if light shone from it. It lit up the whole room! Then I started carrying it with me, for company, like a fetish. Does that sound deranged? Here it is. My juju.”

  “Ow!” Florence tossed the envelope from hand to hand, yelping. “Red-hot!” Then she winced and mimed sucking blood from her finger. “And it cuts to the bone!”

  Sophie laughed. “I’m proud of it, actually. Short but to the point.”

  “And heavy! I think it may contain some type of occult artifact.”

  “That would be telling.”

  “All ready for the exorcism ritual, then? Here we go. Shut your eyes.”

  “No need, Flo. I’m feeling better.”

  “No you’re not. Don’t ruin my fun. Now, tell me one thing. Did you change your name when you got married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Obscene custom. To what?”

  “Dean.”

  “And now you’ve gone back to your real name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. That makes it easier. Now, shut your eyes and concentrate. Go on, I’ll keep an eye on the kids, I promise. I’m going to do some chanting.” She began to hum tonelessly but broke off to say, “The fact that this ritual is ridiculous in no way undermines its effectiveness—you do see that, don’t you?” Then she got back to her chanting, which went on so long that Sophie relaxed, quite lulled, and eventually she became aware that words were emerging from the sound: “Leav-ing So-phie Dean… Leav-ing So-phie Dean…” Florence fell silent, then whispered, “And now for the final stage of the ritual. Are you ready to shed your shackles?” Sophie nodded, her eyes still closed, and Florence said very softly, her lips brushing Sophie’s cheek, “Then bid your married self adieu.” Sophie was considering what it would feel like to really do that when she heard the crunching sound of Florence’s tennis shoes sprinting away across the gravel, followed by a metallic creaking sound like a—