The Milk of Human Kindness

by Lori L. Lake

  Sometimes, the only person you are hiding from is yourself.

  ***

  ABOUT CARO CLARKE

  Caro grew up mostly in Alberta, Canada. She studied medieval history, then abandoned academia for true love and London, UK, where she still lives with her spouse, Fiona. She has published poetry, short stories, and a novel The Wolf Ticket (Firebrand, 1998). By day she is an unassuming web consultant; by night she continues to add to her website www.caroclarke.com. Her next novel, My Home is on the Mountain, is about to enter the world in 2011.

  Winterreise

  Fiction by Caro Clarke

  MAGGIE WAS ABOUT to sit at her favourite table when she heard sobs. She looked around the coffee shop to see if anyone else was rising. How strange—they all seemed absorbed by the Schubert on the loudspeakers. She took her coffee and went to the back.

  “I couldn’t help noticing...”

  The young woman raised her head from a wad of coffee-shop napkins. Her eyes were swollen, her face blotched, her mouth a tight hook.

  “Oh, my dear,” said Maggie. “What’s the matter?”

  The young woman put the back of her hand against her cheeks. “It’s nothing—it’s—” an effort at a smile crumbled. “Oh, you know— Sometimes—y-you just want your mom.”

  Maggie settled in the chair opposite, favouring her bad knee. “From your accent, I think that your mother isn't to hand.”

  “Chicago.”

  “That's a shame. Why not talk to me about it, whatever it is?”

  “I couldn’t, I—”

  “I’m a good mother-substitute,” said Maggie. “I’ve got two girls of my own.”

  “I really...can’t.” The young woman’s face betrayed her; Maggie dared to pat the hand holding the napkins, saying, “Give it a try. I’ve probably dealt with more than you can imagine.”

  The young woman’s uncertain glance paused at Maggie’s silver hair, at the soft skin of her neck, at the lines around her eyes. She hesitated, then said, “It’s my—my—” a breath, “girlfriend.”

  “Hmm,” said Maggie encouragingly.

  “She wants to split up.”

  “Hmm?”

  “We’ve split up.” The young woman’s eyes flooded and she disappeared behind her napkins. “She’s left me.”

  “Why?” asked Maggie.

  “I d-don’t know!”

  Maggie offered the packet of tissues she carried for such situations. “Someone else?”

  A violent shake of the head faltered, stopped. “She didn't say she'd— yes. She has.”

  “How long since she left?”

  “A week. It’s only really hit me now—that, you know, it’s true.”

  “You used to come here?” asked Maggie. “With her?”

  “All the time! I didn’t—I never meant to be here today, but we always come on Saturday mornings and I was on auto-pilot and then I sat down and she wasn’t here—and—and it was real.”

  As the young woman wept, Maggie surreptitiously read the tear-blistered notepad aslant on the table. Dear Sophie, it said, then my darling Sophie, I can’t, something washed out, then anything you want, ending with always be you, a shaky signature Jess and a P.S. left unfinished. Strange these days to see someone writing a real letter, Maggie thought. So much more satisfying than sending an email and, thank goodness, more easily not sent.

  Time to distract. She asked, “How long were you together?”

  “Nine m-months. Almost ten. I thought—I should have known, I just—I mean, when she moved in with me, she didn’t bring all her stuff. She only needed a backpack and a c-couple of boxes to move out. She never even planned to stay.”

  Maggie thought the darling Sophie had probably spent her final week spiriting away her belongings. She asked, “Are you stranded?”

  “What—for money? No, it’s my apartment. I covered the rent anyway.” Jess’s mouth twisted as she controlled herself. “I guess that’s lucky for me. I thought this was—that she was—”

  “Forever?”

  Jess nodded.

  “You met at college? Your last year?”

  “How did you know?”

  Maggie nodded at the scarf slung over the third chair. “College colours. But I think you’re not a student now.”

  “No, I’m working. We met in the spring, just before exams. She’s still there. A grad student. She moved in as soon as I got an apartment. I was so happy—” Jess’s face crumpled. “I love her, I’ll always love her.”

  “I doubt it,” said Maggie.

  “What?” Jess looked up from her tissues.

  “I’d be surprised,” Maggie clarified. “It rarely happens with a first love.”

  “Uh...” Jess looked as if she had been hit with cold water.

  “When you’re young, it seems as if summer will last forever. Then winter slaps you in the face. I remember when my eldest girl came face to face with her first winter. It was heartbreaking.”

  “Lots of people fall in love and stay there.”

  “Lucky them, relocating to the tropics,” said Maggie. “Most of us don’t. We get gloves and woolly hats.”

  “I can tell when winter’s coming: it’s fall and the leaves turn colour. But I didn’t know Sophie was going to walk out on me. I mean, we’d just finished painting the apartment—”

  “Painting can cover up more than blank walls.”

  “I like making a home,” said Jess. “I like cooking breakfast and being, you know, a couple.”

  “But she found out she didn’t?”

  Jess’s head jerked in pain.

  “Maybe nest-building was all you had to offer—”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  “—or maybe it was all you had to offer each other. I know couples who've turned serial DIYers to hide that fact.” Maggie took a sip of latte. “How was the sex?”

  Jess choked. “My mom would never ask me that!”

  “It’s the heart of things, isn’t it?”

  “We—” Jess flushed. “It was great at first. But since the new term—she started saying we were too middle-aged. Too suburban. She had—this idea of herself,” said Jess tentatively. “You know, a free spirit.”

  “She reminds me of my eldest,” said Maggie, nodding. “Passy doesn’t like being held down. She insists on her independence. Heaven forbid she should be stopped from going wherever she wants to! But when something happens, she races home to all those dull domestic comforts. The difference is that your ex”—she saw Jess flinch at the word— “has run from one nest to another. Passy’s never played fast and loose—at least not that I know of, though she teases my neighbour’s boy, which isn’t right, because he’s on a short leash.”

  “Sophie was never cruel. That’s why I’m so—so shocked.”

  “She’s still a student. It’s a child’s life. You’ve left that behind.” Maggie looked at her. “Maybe too quickly. At your age, you should still be exploring the world, establishing your territory, enjoying yourself. What is it that you do?”

  “My job? I work at a picture library. We supply photos to newspapers and magazines.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Sophie said it was boring. It isn’t, you know. We sell work by all the great photographers. I studied one of them at college. I do some art myself—digital stuff. Nothing serious.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not that good.”

  “You think so, or you know so?”

  “Now you sound like my mom. It doesn’t pay anything.”

  “But if you love it?” asked Maggie. “The stillness and focusing on things? My Sarah’s like that. She can stare at something for hours. She notices every single detail. Passy teases her when she’s absorbed, but I know she’s seeing things, or seeing into things, in a way that’s beyond me.”

  “Is she an artist?”

  “In her own style.” Maggie smiled. “I really don’t know what she’s doing half the time, but I trust her instincts, even though I sometimes
lie awake at night until I hear her door swing shut. She has this curiosity, this need to watch the world.”

  “I’m an observer, too. It was Sophie who made things happen. Her friends were always over at our—my—place.”

  “She supplied the social life?”

  “She was fun.” Jess wept again, but Maggie noticed that the tears stopped sooner. “I never learned to make friends—I come from a big family, I always had my sisters—”

  “Sisters are the best friends you can have,” said Maggie. “I see that every day at home. My two are very close. Even when they squabble, next minute I’ll find them in the kitchen sharing a treat.”

  “My sisters and I were like that. We sort of brought each other up.” Jess gulped. “We always got on. I miss them. I was going to move back home after I graduated, but Mom said to stay where I was myself and happy, even though she doesn’t really like me being, you know, a lesbian. So I stayed here for Sophie. I’m such an idiot!”

  “Your mother sensed what you needed.”

  “I don’t know. We don’t talk much about feelings. She says you have to learn life by yourself—but I don’t want to learn this!”

  Maggie handed her fresh tissues and waited until she mopped up. “Winters don’t last forever. Spring always comes.”

  “When? When for me?”

  Maggie considered her. “About six months, maybe eight.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “And after at least one lover.”

  “One—? No way! That’s horrible.”

  “Rebounds happen,” said Maggie. “People can’t live in perpetual winter.”

  “So they, what? Take a spring break?”

  “Exactly. It’s the sign that your spirit isn’t broken, that you’re getting ready to leave the cold behind.”

  “I can’t live that long feeling like this—I want it to stop.”

  “I don't think so,” said Maggie. “If it stops, it means you’ve stopped loving Sophie. And you don’t want that, not yet.”

  Jess hid her head behind drooping hands. “I can’t.”

  “Sophie took the easy way,” said Maggie meditatively. “It's all why suffer when you don't have to? But everything needs its season.” She cocked her head to Schubert's melody still falling like snowflakes from the loudspeakers. “If you face your Winterreise—your winter journey— you'll learn that you can survive this, and worse than this.”

  “Is that what you say to your kids?”

  “When they get into their own kind of trouble, yes, I try to tell them how long it will take to mend. They don’t understand, of course—but then, they see time differently. To me, six months is nothing.”

  “Is that all life is? Learning to deal with pain?”

  “Didn’t I mention spring?” asked Maggie. “I promise it's there. For instance, my Sarah and I weren’t always close. Then she had a car accident and I had to take care of her for quite a while. We both learned about each other. Before, I'd tried to make her do what I said. Now, I just want her to be herself. Before, she used to be out that door no matter what, but now we can spend all day together, simply enjoying each other’s company.”

  “I remember having pneumonia,” said Jess slowly. “My mom had to take time off work. She was burned about it.”

  “Not about that. What we mums get angry about is having to make hard choices. She wasn’t mad at you.”

  “It seemed like it,” said Jess.

  “It seems to me that your mother made a hard choice between having time with you or supporting you.”

  “She didn’t choose: she had to. My dad left.”

  “It’s always a choice,” said Maggie. “Don’t take hers for granted.”

  Jess began to speak, then stopped. “That’s something I never thought of.”

  “Would I be right if I said that she was always there when it was important?”

  “I wish—well, she couldn’t be. She missed my high school graduation because of renovations and when Holly had her first concert—”

  “The really important things.”

  “Like us being sick? Yes, for that. And she sure dropped everything when Amber got arrested for drunk driving.”

  “My two are on my mind every single minute of the day,” said Maggie. “Even when I’m not with them. Especially when I’m not with them. It’s no different between you and your mum.”

  Jess’s mouth trembled. “She—I guess so. If she was here now, I guess she’d be telling me the same things you are—okay, not everything, not about sex on the rebound—”

  “She’d be thinking it,” said Maggie. “And I think she’d have something to say about your flat, too.”

  “Don’t tell me I’ve got to move!”

  “You need to reclaim it. Buy it new curtains. Re-arrange the furniture. Paint every single wall again.”

  “I can’t paint Sophie out!”

  “You can,” said Maggie. “Not today, probably not even this month. But it’s too easy to make a shrine out of loss. I know. I had a third girl, my youngest. She died.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!”

  “It was years ago,” said Maggie. “The other two didn’t really know what had happened, only that Steffie was gone and they were sad. I admit I made an altar of Steffie’s things: her toys, her blanket. I’d find one of her hairs and couldn’t throw it out.”

  Jess gave a breath of inarticulate sympathy.

  “At the beginning, you can’t help it,” said Maggie. “That’s how grief is. But eventually you put it away. I’ve learned that the sooner you can start, the sooner it helps.” She pushed away her coffee mug and leaned forward. “Now, what about Christmas?”

  “Christmas?”

  “It’s not far away, is it? You were going to spend it with Sophie?”

  “Yes, I’d planned a traditional—and—and Sophie was going to make—”

  “Can you afford to go away?”

  Jess nodded, blinking hard to stop tears.

  “Why don’t you go home?” asked Maggie. “You could use some real mum-time.”

  “Are your kids spending it with you?”

  Maggie laughed. “They always do. I buy the biggest turkey I can find and every year they eat so much that they fall asleep on the sofa just as I'm settling down to watch the Queen. Strangely, when I sneak into the kitchen for a midnight feast, there they are with room for more!”

  “You all sound really close,” said Jess mistily.

  “Christmas is for family,” said Maggie. “Any kind of family. Go to your mother this year. You need her. Maybe next year you’ll be spending it with your true love.”

  “I thought I’d found her,” Jess said stonily. “She doesn’t exist.”

  “I’ve noticed that people who’ve been raised with love tend to find it waiting for them when they grow up.”

  “How will I know when I have—when I really have?”

  “Because that's when summer never ends.” Maggie sat back. “First things first. You have to walk through this winter. Your sisters are only emails away—have you been in touch with them yet? No? Have you phoned your mother?”

  “She’s so busy with the new store—”

  “She’ll make time,” said Maggie.

  “You—yes. I should call them. Her.”

  Maggie looked at the clock. “I'm afraid I have to go now, but it’s time I did, isn’t it? You’re probably talked out. Will you be all right?”

  “I think so.” said Jess. “I’ll remember—to wrap up warm.”

  “Good girl.” Maggie eased to her feet, patted Jess’s shoulder, and left the shop.

  All the way home, she replayed what she had said. There were so many kinds of mothers in the world: the ones who loved like wool and the ones who loved like linen, the ones who stood over you like roofs and the ones who stood beneath you like bridges. It was hard enough to know which one to be when the daughters were your own. She hoped that Jess would be brave. She hoped she had helped.

  “I think I di
d a good job,” she said to herself as she unlocked her front door. “I hope so.” Dropping her library books onto the hall table, she called, “Patience! Sarah! Mummy’s home!”

  And her two Siamese cats bounded down the stairs to greet her.

  ***

  ABOUT KATHERINE V. FORREST

  Katherine V. Forrest's 15 works of fiction are in translation worldwide and include her eight-volume Kate Delafield mystery series and the lesbian classics Curious Wine, An Emergence of Green, and Daughters of a Coral Dawn, the first novel in her award-winning lesbian-feminist utopian trilogy. She has edited numerous anthologies, and her stories, articles and reviews have appeared in national and international publications. She has conducted seminars and taught classes in the craft of fiction, most recently at Stanford University.

  Honors and awards include four Lambda Literary Awards, the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle, the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation, a profile in USA Today, and receiving the 2007 Trailblazer Award from the Golden Crown Literary Society for her lifetime of achievement. Senior editor at the storied Naiad Press for ten years, she is currently supervising editor at Spinsters Ink and editor-at-large for Bella Books. During her almost three decades of freelance editing she has worked with many published authors, and has also edited or co-edited numerous anthologies. She lives in California with her partner of two decades and their two personality-plus cats.

  Jeanie

  Memoir by Katherine V. Forrest

  WHEN I WAS fourteen, my adoptive mother was taken from me by a cancer which had begun five years earlier in her left breast and spread to her spinal cord. She was forty-two. Eighteen months later, my father, age forty-four, died of a heart attack. Having been surrendered to these parents for adoption when I was an infant, I had in effect lost two sets of parents by age sixteen which, as someone has mordantly pointed out, makes me very careless indeed.