Lovers Fall Back to the Earth

by Cecelia Frey

  During the first weeks after the accident, her mind was in the excruciating pain of the present. She did not think of the past in any but a superficial way. She could not fathom ensuing days. That phase was bad enough but when she came out of that first state of shock and remembered the horror of her past, the horror of herself, her wickedness in thought and deed, especially in thought, and realized that there would be more days, years of days, she knew that she was in real trouble.

  “I went to Europe soon after.” Helena turned her eyes toward Esther who sat slumped, looking like a large pink fluffy pillow tossed carelessly on the edge of the bed.

  As children and as young women, the two sisters had been close. Helena had been born into a world in which Esther existed. From Helena’s beginning they had shared nearly every waking moment. When they went to school, they walked together. They had other friends, but they always returned to each other. In their teen years, they swam together, learned to cook together, went to movies together, even dated together. When they married, they visited back and forth, both as couples and singly. They went on shopping sprees and had their teacups read. Helena was as fond of Delores as she might have been of her own child. When Helena went to the Coast, she took strength from the fact that Esther was in the world, not terribly far away, that she could see her sister in a few hours if she absolutely needed to, that she could speak to her by picking up the telephone.

  Amanda had been born into a world in which the close relationship of Helena and Esther was established. While she had attached herself to both sisters, it was Helena, as the one closest in age, with whom Amanda had the stronger connection. A sensitive nature to begin with, Amanda was especially susceptible to Helena’s tyranny, her dictatorial pronouncements on what was and was not acceptable in the matter of dress, hairstyles, deportment. Helena did not acknowledge her own imperious disparaging nature, and since she, herself, was perfect, it was her duty to set the world right. She simply could not help herself. Not only did she want the people she loved to be efficient and competent, she wanted them to be without flaw. It caused her real pain to see Amanda leave for the Coast with Reuben, two hillbillies, as she saw it, with their worldly belongings tied onto a trailer like a tin can to a dog’s tail.

  Thoughts of Amanda were always with Helena. They had become the background fabric of her mental life. She saw Amanda in a variety of poses and actions, but the vision that most often appeared was of a girl sitting over homework at the kitchen table in the house in which they had grown up, her long golden hair falling about her shoulders like a shining cape, the fine skin of her brow furrowed with concentration.

  “Amanda was so beautiful,” Helena murmured, her thoughts breaking through her silence. “So intelligent, so full of promise.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “I said that to her in the car that terrible night. She thought I was criticizing her for not doing more with her life.”

  Esther was silent.

  “Maybe I was. Why oh why oh why was I so hard on Amanda?”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself now.”

  Helena looked toward Esther. “How about you? After you got home. How did you manage?”

  “At first it was terrible. Terrible. I couldn’t believe it. My mind simply could not comprehend that Amanda was no longer here. She was proof that there was goodness in the world. She cast a sort of net of blessing out into the world. Then goodness was gone. Her blessing was gone. But then it came to me. She’s still here, I’m not sure how. But I feel her presence, her blessing all around me.”

  “It’s wonderful. Belief.”

  “I haven’t told George all this, not in detail. I’m not sure he’d approve. But he was quite relieved when I stopped crying so much.”

  “You and Amanda, with your tears.”

  “Amanda was worse than me. She cried as only the saints can cry. She offered up her sorrow for the world.”

  “I didn’t cry much. Even now, I can’t seem to cry. That was something Amanda said to me in the car that night, how I never cry. She was right. I won’t let life have the satisfaction of drawing tears out of me.”

  “Perhaps crying would help. Perhaps tears would be a release.”

  “Perhaps, but you can’t force tears.”

  “Mine seem to come without me willing them at all. But Amanda’s death seems to have entered another place in my mind now. In the back of my mind. It’s not immediate any more. It’s gone into the past. It’s become a dull ache, rather than the sharp pain it was at the beginning. Reuben feels the same.”

  “You’ve heard from Reuben?”

  “I phone him from time to time.”

  “And they’re managing?”

  “Oh yes. I believe Reuben has a new friend.”

  “So soon?”

  “It’s been two and a half years.”

  “Still, you’d think he might have waited a while longer. He and Amanda had such a good marriage. They were so involved with each other.”

  “It’s because they had a good marriage that he’s able to have a relationship with someone else. He has so much love to give, of course he would find someone to give it to.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t be as evolved as you. I’m just a lowly homo sapien full of the base emotions of malevolence, jealousy, rage. I can’t believe Reuben has forgotten so soon.”

  “He hasn’t forgotten. He has the children to think about. He must go on, whether he wants to or not. He needs to create a life for the children. The little one is only four. He needs help, and she seems willing to help. The children like her.”

  “Maybe you’re right. At the funeral, he looked so lost. ‘We were kids together,’ he said. He looked at me with those clear blue eyes of his. ‘What am I going to do without her?’ he said. Seems that he’s found a solution to that question.”

  “I only hope she’s competent. Reuben and Amanda lived in such confusion, on the edge, financially, emotionally, physically on their little scrabble acreage. They felt too deeply, about the world, about each other. Maybe the friend will help ease the confusion. He says Amanda is still there for him, supporting him, advising him. He actually talks to her. I’m sure he’s discussed the new friend with Amanda. Maybe the new friend was her suggestion. She wouldn’t want him to be lonely. She would want him to be happy. Likely the friend helps ease the pain.”

  “Well, I’m afraid it’s still a sharp pain for me. And likely always will be. My dream won’t let me forget. It keeps it all so vividly before me.”

  “That’s the same dream you told me about when I stayed with you?”

  “I keep reliving the accident. It’s more real than when it happened. When it happened, it was like a dream. A nightmare. Now the nightmare is real life. Whenever I have that dream, I wake up wasted, with no resources to get me through the day. Then I have to start all over again, building strength and energy. Sometimes,” she said, tentatively, as though testing Esther’s reaction, “I wonder if it’s worth it.”

  “Of course it’s worth it,” Esther cried, stretching out her hand. She stopped it in time, so that it did not drop to Helena’s shoulder but hung suspended over the prone figure as though pronouncing a benediction. “It has to be worth it,” she went on. “Maybe you’ll stop having that dream here. Here, where you’re safe and loved. You’ve come through the storm. You can start over. Think of this as a beginning.”

  How could she tell Esther that she didn’t have the strength for another beginning, that once she found Ben, once he released her, she would be quite ready to leave this planet? She couldn’t tell her. But it did not seem right to keep it from her, either. To partake of Esther and George’s hospitality, their generosity, while all the time planning to wound them, seemed another betrayal. “I shouldn’t have come here,” she turned her head away.

  “Of course you should have. Where else would you have gone?” When Helena
said nothing, she went on. “I don’t know much about your life, I mean what you’ve been doing these past two and a half years.”

  The man in the bar, thought Helena. Going up to his room when she was flat broke. Hitchhiking to some place on the Mediterranean with another man, one she had met in France. “I thought I was beginning a new life when I started travelling,” she said. “Then I met a man in Europe. I’ll tell you about him sometime. I thought he was a beginning. But then that didn’t work out and I went back to the Coast to begin again. And then I met Keith. Now that was a beginning all right, the beginning of a nightmare. You see what I mean. I don’t know if I can take another beginning.” Her lips felt cold. “I seem to have lost myself.”

  “I lost you, too, these last few years. When you were a student, I could visualize you going to class, lecturing, writing, perhaps doing research in the library. I could see you having friends over in the evening, making dinner for friends or going skiing. But when I didn’t know what you were doing, where you were, I couldn’t see you. I didn’t have a picture.”

  “Neither did I. I still can’t envision myself doing anything, accomplishing anything. I can’t see myself with any coherency. For a few months after I came out of the hospital, I couldn’t even cook myself a meal. I couldn’t see myself doing it, therefore I couldn’t do it. When I think of the last few years, I can feel myself bouncing off walls, reeling from one catastrophe to another, but all I can see is a confused blur.”

  “You must get back the picture of yourself. You must stay here. And not go away again. For a while anyway. This is the best place for your search. This is where you started. I’m so glad you’ve come home. You and I must find each other again, too. You must tell me how I can make you comfortable. What do you do all day? Have you gotten back to any sort of routine? Do you read? How are your eyes? After that surgery, you had trouble with blurred vision.” While she spoke, Esther’s right hand kept lifting out of her lap, half reaching toward Helena and withdrawing.

  Helena put out her hand and caught her sister’s in midair, bringing both their hands down to the bedcover. “You’re so good to me.” She made a conscious effort to look directly at her sister. Strange how, unless she forced herself to see the real present Esther, she always saw the sister of their youth. Which Esther does George see? she wondered. “Are George’s eyes giving him trouble?” she asked. “They seem to bother him.”

  “I know what you mean, the way they blink and shift. I keep telling him he must go for a check-up. He says he hasn’t time.”

  Helena closed her eyes and listened to the rhythmic throb of a vein in her right temple. “Everything here is in such order,” she said. “You have no idea how wonderful it is to come upon peace and order in this world. Your home is so lovely. You’ve created a paradise for George and Delores. And this bed! A real antique isn’t it? Victorian. And these cushions, you always liked rich brocade. Those Royal Doulton figurines on the dresser. They look so much like you.”

  “I wish I were that trim.”

  “It’s the manner. Elegant. You are every inch a lady.”

  “That word, I’m afraid, has fallen into disrepute.”

  “It shouldn’t have. What other word do we have for an exquisitely gentle woman? And even a crocheted cover on the tissue box on the dresser! I do believe it matches the crocheted toilet seat cover in the bathroom.”

  “Now you’re teasing. You always did make fun of what you called our bourgeois existence. I suppose that was Ben’s influence.” Esther hesitated a moment. “Are you going to see him while you’re here?”

  “I don’t know.” Liar, she thought.

  “Do you ever hear from him?”

  “I used to. Before I gave up the apartment. He’d phone. Leave a message on the machine. I never returned his calls.”

  “Maybe you should have.”

  “I was absolutely incapable of picking up a telephone receiver and choosing numbers. It seemed too big a thing to do, too large an action to take. How about you? Have you heard from him?”

  “No. I keep meaning to have him over for a drink. But you know Ben. He’s so prickly about what he calls superficial social situations. He seems to feel uncomfortable when form and decorum are called for. Whereas George rather likes them. He likes putting on the cap and gown and marching solemnly down the aisle and taking his position on the…”

  “So he doesn’t know I’m in town?”

  “I don’t think so. Unless George told him you were coming. They see each other once in a while at the university.”

  “I wonder if he’s happy. But, then, was Ben ever happy?”

  “George says he thinks too much.”

  “Yes. Ben was always processing something, even in the old Cave days.”

  “He had a brilliant future. Everyone said so.”

  “Which he destroyed. Going to class all doped up. Ranting like a maniac.”

  “He’s back there, as a sessional, but I believe it’s fairly steady.”

  “I hope he doesn’t make things difficult for himself this time.”

  “I certainly wish him all good things. I feel he’s still part of the family.”

  “He doesn’t want to belong to an institution, including marriage and family, and it would be against his principles to be successful in the worldly sense.”

  “George says he seems quieter, almost subdued. Likely he needs the money.”

  “Lack of money never seemed to bother him.”

  “But he must need some money.”

  “Ben took everything so seriously. We were all wild with questions of morality, but for him it wasn’t just talk and ideas. He tried to live the moral good. He set such high standards for himself.”

  “He sounds so grim. No wonder you left him.”

  “That isn’t why I left him.”

  “No, of course not dear.”

  “We were students with a capital S. How foolish we were.”

  “Yes, I could actually see you and Ben lobbing bombs at the establishment. Along with Reuben. I do believe Amanda quieted him down.”

  “They were true flower children. And now one wonders if any of it mattered. None of it seems to have made a lasting impression. Make love not war. What’s happened to that idea? And yet we were so fired up with ideas. Reuben and Amanda were so together on that. He was a good partner for her. And yet that was another thing I criticized, her choice of husband.” Helena was silent a moment, thinking. “At Amanda’s funeral, he wore a suit, not a particularly good one, a little shiny, but he wore one.”

  “Reuben?”

  “Ben. I’d never seen him in a suit before.”

  “It was good of him to go. Of course, he was there for you. He hadn’t seen Amanda in years.”

  “He went to see her the summer before … her last summer? Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “He did. She told me.”

  “I wonder why? You two had been separated for years.”

  “Apparently, he was in the neighbourhood and dropped in.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Ben.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. Does he have a woman friend?”

  “George hasn’t said anything but, then, likely he wouldn’t know.”

  “Who’d put up with him? At the end, he never spoke to me, he just sat around the house reading and smoking pot, lost in a haze.”

  “But wasn’t he going through a sort of trauma at the time? Because of his mother?”

  “That’s no excuse. That’s just the time he should have communicated. If you choose to live with another person, then you choose to take on the responsibility of sharing.”

  “Yes, communication is the most important thing, according to all the articles. That is one thing, George and I are totally open and honest with each other. I can read his mind like an open book. Perha
ps you and Ben were both too intellectual. With George and me only one of us is.”

  “Does that still bother you?”

  “No…” Esther’s reply was tentative.

  “Whatever you are, dear Esther, it appears that you are exactly what George desires in a wife.”

  “Yes … I suppose. I just hope he doesn’t feel that he’s compromised his life because of me.”

  “Why would he feel that? He seems to have the life he wants.”

  “Yes … He might have done more research, less administration.”

  “I don’t imagine he’s compromised any more than anyone else.” Helena’s voice was brisk.

  “No, but I’d rather he hadn’t compromised at all.”

  “That’s being unrealistic. Haven’t you compromised?”

  Esther thought a moment. “No. No, I don’t think I have. I don’t think I’ve had to. I’m the luckiest of the luckiest. Of course, we would have liked to have had more children, one more at least, but that wasn’t compromise, that was a medical problem, part of God’s plan for me.”

  Helena thought it wise to remain silent.

  Esther’s tone brightened. “How about Ben? What are you going to do about him?”

  “Do I have to do something about him?”

  “This can’t go on forever. You two being married.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems … abnormal. And what if you find someone else?”

  “That’s not likely to happen. I don’t care if I never have another relationship with a man.”

  “Are you serious? I know you’ve had some bad experiences, but I can’t imagine you without a man in your life.”