She Was Like That

by Kate Walbert

  “Let’s hear how far we’ve come,” Big Sister had said. “To hear your words in the voice of another is extraordinarily empowering,” she said. “Let’s celebrate our commonalities,” she said. Then she invited Maggie Sykes to step forward to recite—in random order, please—the minutes, Maggie Sykes making what appeared to be a unilateral decision to push through the circle and stand smack on the bull’s-eye. She raised her notepad to an easier reading distance and, with shaky hands, cleared her throat.

  “Beverly P.,” she boomed, “having to do with invisibility, childhood in fortress of tied sticks—symbolic?—circumstances of mother’s hospitalization; Chick—abortions, Georgie’s homosexuality, self-esteem? undermining, like a trick knee; Laura S.—the questions asked in the workplace, advances (re: sexual) by older brother (Harrison) inappropriate vis-à-vis boys will be boys, or, possibly, criminal?; Laura R.—laundry, et cetera; Maggie—definition of frigid? what is considered normal?; Laura S.—we are our own enemies, listen to us!; Sara—graduate degree bullshit? academy bullshit? abortion, entire discussion bullshit? our privilege to ask, our privilege of speech, our privilege of voice re: Sister; Sister—industrial-military (son in Indochina) complex; Dorothy—hollow bone.”

  The words “hollow bone” were the last read before Maggie Sykes lowered her notes, the o’s dissipating like smoke rings, wafting over the group as they were instructed to sit down and resume their former positions.

  “I thought I was dead,” Faith continues. “I thought I had come to die. I did die. I was out of myself. I was in a corner shouting and no one could hear me, and then I screamed and screamed and screamed and no one could hear me, and it was only after they took me off the stuff, I mean took the needles out, Annie in the nursery, that I saw they all had plugs in their ears. Every one of them. Plugged ears.”

  * * *

  How the day ended is a bit of a fog, though Dorothy knows that she lined up with the rest to thank Big Sister and to shake her hand, and that she had inexplicably hugged Laura Rasmussen, feeling a sudden kinship and promising to invite Laura and her husband to dinner. Sister she tipped five dollars. “Unnecessary,” Sister said, though she folded the bill and tucked it into the shoulder of her uniform.

  Dorothy walked out into the last of the June day, the brightness disarming, assaulting, even, as if all of them had been huddled in a cave. Chick bent just beyond, deadheading a pot of daisies, flicking the dried blossoms into the yard like so many spent cigarettes. Beside her the dog gnawed the tennis ball.

  Perhaps Chick had already forgotten her guests, or maybe they had just disappointed her. Hard to tell, really—she was pretty, Chick, and a terrific golfer: practically a scratch handicap, regional champion three years running. She would win several more tournaments before leaving the area, asked to resign from the club, its rules firm on the question of divorcées. Still her name remained for years on the trophies outside the ladies’ lounge before one by one her titles were defeated.

  Why Dorothy thinks of all of this now, she has no idea: it seems inappropriate to daydream here, Charles in his box before her, Lucy and Claudia and even Frank returned with their own families, sitting like so many cowed supplicants on either side of the pew. But then, everyone has been remembering something: business colleagues, golfing buddies, a cousin, more like a brother, limping up to tell childhood stories; now their old pastor drones on, reciting predictable passages. She will be the last to go, it’s been decided, though for the spouse to speak is entirely against protocol, they have said; it would be fine, they said, if she never uttered a word.

  She is happy to break protocol, she tells them. Entirely delighted. Break, break, break, she says. Smash smash smash. Besides, she says, who but she could recount that Charles was a terrific dancer?

  * * *

  “Now here’s a talent!” barked Vivian Foxe. “Absolutely terrific!” she shouted, as Dorothy and Charles waltzed in the way she had taught them.

  But first, the couples—a few who looked familiar, and Chick and Georgie, whom everyone sort of knew—were led into the club ballroom and told to form a circle. Vivian Foxe held up a finger for silence, then clicked over to the stage and unsheathed a record album, fitting it onto the turntable. She lifted the arm as the record revolved, timing the needle to the groove. In an instant, scratches etched the quiet—then, remarkably, the music. The music! she might tell them. Sounds without words! There were chords and phrases, refrains, rifts, and solos building, then not, then dismantled and built, again, and again, the all of it filling the voluminous ballroom, sweeping them up as a tide would, spilling them onto a different shore: Charles in his military tuxedo, she in sequins and gloves.

  “Let’s begin!” Vivian Foxe shouted, clapping her hands. “Ladies’ choice!”

  And as she reached for Charles’s hand, the note she still held—she had forgotten!—slipped like a secret message to the polished ballroom floor. “I am a hollow bone” is what it read, though now, remembering it, Dorothy wonders what Lucy had meant to tell her, wonders what any of them were trying to say.

  SHE WAS LIKE THAT

  Sharon Peterson angles to the empty space in front of the hydrant and brakes, hazards engaged, wipers at high speed.

  “Hey,” she calls across the cluttered front seat, window cracked though the rain rakes in—the storm too sudden, too much: one of those late spring tempests out of nowhere.

  “What?” This Ginny: drippy, frazzled: Sharon a stranger. “I’m sorry, what?”

  Sharon releases the lock and pushes the now-wet papers to the seat well, papers she’ll let dry and grade later or maybe, next week, or maybe, not at all. “Avanti!” she says. She pulls up the handle and pushes open the door.

  “God, thank you. Wow. That’s really nice,” Ginny says, getting in. She shakes closed her three-dollar umbrella, no match for this weather. “Wow,” she says, turning to Sharon. “You are so nice,” she says. “Really,” she says, as if someone has disagreed, slamming the car door shut like at any moment Sharon Peterson will change her mind.

  But Sharon Peterson won’t change her mind. She feels her heart soar, its wings muddied, true, and yet somehow closer to the sun or rather a certain warmth. This is the best thing I have ever done, Sharon Peterson thinks as she puts the car in drive, as Ginny buckles up.

  * * *

  Serendipity, spontaneity, recklessness: Sharon Peterson’s mother would have called it a break for freedom. She had once done the same, boarding a Greyhound for Penn Station close to 5:00 A.M., ending up near the lions on the steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library, not such a long walk from Port Authority she said once home, near midnight, and besides the day was grand. She ate a tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat she had packed for the road and a paper bag of peanuts purchased from the vendor at the first crosswalk, a man, she liked to recall, who pushed back the pocket change she held out to him. “Too beautiful a day for money,” he said.

  Divine, the City, she said: All those different-color people. And the tulips!

  So, there’s her mother by way of example, and Woolf, of course: always Woolf. The Virginia of the constant wanderings: trench coat buckled or rather sashed, her breaks for freedom less exotic or far-ranging, her breaks for freedom meandering the gloomy streets of London in search of, what? A pencil? Sharon pictures her this way, Woolf’s face the face from that famous photograph: hair in a chignon, nose sharp, eyes wise even in profile or at least, cast down, away from the photographer, the view: dun-colored windows; or, rotting fruit in the apple orchard, a graffitied brick wall; maybe, the bloody butcher passing or the fat cook; maybe, the insolent child with the pony wondering what all the fuss is about, why this woman in her long skirts as if: important.

  Sharon knows the essay cold, could recite it at length, trotting out Woolf, her Woolf, like a brilliant, dotty auntie summoned from her garret study down the creaking stairs. First the swoosh of that long skirt, the soft button-up boots on the stairwell treads, and then the tremendous pre
sence: Sharon asking Woolf to recite whatever she might deem necessary for spiritual backup in the classroom, as others in her department summon the Gospels or Zora Neale Hurston: Woolf her in-house intellectual; her proof that a meandering mind might better explicate the mysteries of life than a mind that seeks to reach its point.

  “What if your Woolf is not my Woolf,” the impertinent one, Tina, had asked just yesterday, the spring light slanting into the Milbank classroom in the way the spring light has slanted into the Milbank classroom for years, Sharon preferring this seminar room above the others for the light and the one round wooden table, heavy-legged, oak, scratched with the meanderings of a thousand Woolf descendants.

  Several of them pierce themselves with small, metal rods through their ears and eyebrows and tongues—Tina of this lot. She lisped when she spoke, her eyes a challenge. On the midsemester evaluations Tina wrote: Professor Peterson is neither exciting nor horrifying. She is as bland as a sock. Although it was anonymous, Sharon recognized the tone.

  * * *

  Another passenger, Miranda, now sits in back, a baby strapped to her chest, a Fairway bag on her lap like a toddler. She was caught off guard, she had explained to Sharon and Ginny, her phone dead, the subways flooded and God knows.

  Yes, Ginny said. That’s it exactly.

  And then they brake again. The guy has stepped from the curb and is swaying like the last duckpin. He appears to want to flag an occupied cab—is he a tourist? Difficult to tell. The rain falls in watery sheets as if staged rain in a theatrical production. People run like all get-out, catapulting over puddles, huddling into clots in doorways as delivery guys wearing garbage bags pedal past on shaky bicycles.

  “Where’s the fire?” Sharon Peterson calls.

  “What?” the guy says, closer.

  “Quick,” Ginny says.

  “Really?” the guy says. He’s getting them all wet.

  “Hurry up,” Miranda says from the back seat.

  “Great,” the guy says. “Okay,” he says. Miranda resettles the Fairway bag as the guy scoots across, introducing himself as Fred Vegas, as in the town; Miranda, Miranda says, as in the tragedy.

  “This is my daughter, Little Miranda,” she says. “Sometimes I call her el Diablo.”

  “I’ve got three,” Fred Vegas says.

  “Three’s the new two,” Miranda says.

  “Music?” Sharon asks. “Or would everyone prefer news?”

  She loves the “everyone” and could idle all day. She adjusts the side view and waits for the traffic to let up before pulling back onto Amsterdam—difficult to see what’s what in this foggy glass and a full car to consider. Passengers! The traffic’s horrendous but Amsterdam looks clear, she tells them. Nothing like Amsterdam, she says. She was on Madison earlier and, really? Madison? What’s with Madison? she says. It’s all about the West Side. Take the intersection of Peter Jennings Way and Columbus, or Humphrey Bogart Place and West End; Edgar Allan Poe Street and Broadway. All the artists and the Canadians are on the West Side, she tells them. Who’s over there? Dag Hammarskjöld?

  “Duke Ellington,” Fred Vegas says. “My parents were swing dancers. Duke Ellington Boulevard, around 106th and Broadway. West End.”

  “Exactly,” Sharon says, slowing to comply with the light, the radio on the station Fred Vegas has suggested, no one voting news, please never again news, the music jazzy, a breeze—saxophone or clarinet or French horn. Sharon eyes the corralled automobiles behind her: a temporary, nervous peace, all of them eager to accelerate again, to get there. And then she checks her back seat passengers. Fred Vegas has turned his attention to Miranda to converse in parent—the business of discipline, getting in/getting out, sleepaway camps, lice checks.

  Somebody honks. “Highty-ho,” Sharon says, finding she is blocked. A stalled car in front of her overrun by crisscrossing pedestrians: at any moment one might leap on the hood and do an Irish jig or hit the fender and somersault through the air. Just last block a man in a winter coat stood in the middle of the bike lane, arms outstretched, head back, as if a chicken in the rain. “It’s called driving,” she yells, swerving to pass the stalled car. “It’s called using your brain,” she yells.

  Her passengers go quiet. All right. A few blocks of thought is entirely called for; this can happen in the rain and often does. Call it contemplation. But at Eighty-ninth she can’t stand the silence. “Fred Vegas?” she calls back. “Knock knock?”

  “Present!” Fred Vegas says.

  “Where would you like to be delivered?”

  “Who cares?” he says, as Miranda leans in. “I read in San Francisco,” she says, “drivers put some sort of crazy thing on their hood—a furry mustache, something—that means they wouldn’t be averse to you flagging them down. It costs something but still. Very California. Funny.”

  “I’ll accept no currency,” Sharon says as Miranda leans back, although not before she offers mints.

  “Would the front seat occupants enjoy a mint?” Miranda says.

  Sharon stretches out her arm, opening her palm in the way of her father on cross-country trips—she had forgotten: her father insisting as she hoarded her small bag of potato chips or strings of black licorice, his favorite.

  “Where did you get that?” Miranda asks.

  Sharon keeps her eyes on the double-parked Poland Spring truck—coals to Newcastle but still the men diligently unload, quickly unload. “What?” she says, although she knows exactly: the tattoo, a Chinese character on her pulse point or what Carl had called her inseam, faded now but still there, a weak blue.

  “It means forgiveness,” she says, although it doesn’t, actually. It never did.

  * * *

  Three boys on her side and three girls on his; people commented. She and Carl became a popular couple, the Brady Bunch. But the children grew and scattered as children will, someone always relocating to Asia or London, Hong Kong (banking); holidays a work of art: exes elsewhere. She started her Christmas lists in July. Of course, she should add, no, or rather, not exactly. Things are always not exactly. First, too many fights. Drugs. Once they opened the front door to see the doorman holding Casey, passed out cold, in his arms. He lifted her up to them as if in offering and even at the time Sharon had thought of the Pietà, had thought there was something oddly angelic about Carl’s middle child, a slip of a girl, white as carved alabaster against the doorman’s dark suit, a thin strand of brown hair caught in her mouth. She had retched for hours in the powder room. Neither of them said a word.

  But here she was going on, she said to the stranger. What must he think of her? Sharon looked around the middle-of-the-day bar; one of those invisible places on every block, the kind never seen until accidentally found. This one of the many forgettable places after Carl’s death—how had she made her way to York?

  She reached for her drink, watery. “Look at that,” he said and she knew but did not turn to look. Wouldn’t expect that, the stranger did not continue. He had his own problems. Must be a story in that, the stranger did not say.

  She let him be, pretending to watch the television hanging above the bar, the one on the far end; the near-end television too close. On the television something was happening somewhere that required everyone’s immediate attention. The whirl of it nauseated her. She should have had breakfast or dinner, even, but she had reached the age of cheese and crackers, occasionally a bowl of Grape-Nuts: all those years, all those children, all those students and papers to grade. Casey in the doorman’s arms, that sweet face, the strand of brown hair. Chicken parts washed and grilled, washed and broiled. She would rather eat a good book. Thomas Hardy for dinner, Willa Cather for dessert. Mrs. Dalloway her Thanksgiving meal: her Virginia; her wanderer.

  * * *

  “ ‘What kind of deal can you give a senior?’ I asked when I walked in.”

  “You didn’t!” Fred Vegas says. Sharon has pulled to the far corner of Ninety-sixth and Amsterdam, the bus stop, to finish the story—they asked for details!
She had found the tattoo parlor in Brooklyn, a grimy storefront wedged between a Chinese restaurant and a neon pizza parlor. Old news, the affair, but she had somehow forgotten to mention it to Carl.

  Sometimes you just need a dramatic gesture, she says. Sometimes you need to do something. She believed Carl would appreciate the permanence, and anyway, anyway, didn’t she have to confess before he forgot who she was and forgot who he was? It was an experiment in education, she told him; the unexamined life and so forth. Nothing more. A visiting fellow, one of those wry Swedish types—Woolf chose women, she chose a man, but either way, it had to do with exploration, no? Meandering? A Break for Freedom?

  Think of all the things you miss when you know too clearly where you’re going, I told him.

  She does not add how Carl sat in his favorite chair in the maid’s room off the hallway, the one they had converted to a den, near the globe on the stand that, before all this, all that, they would nightly consult for dinner—spinning the globe blind, any body of water default Japanese. It’s such a tiny island, Carl would say. We have to increase its odds. All other countries fair game: They’d traveled to the outer boroughs for Tibetan and Bengalese; Queens for Greek, Indian. Once they drove clear across the GW Bridge in search of Chilean.

  There is a heavy, humid silence in the car among her passengers, as if at any moment a white orchid might bloom from the dashboard, or a raincloud burst overhead.

  “Well,” Fred Vegas finally says, “I like,” he says. “Very au courant,” he says.

  He reaches forward to shake Sharon’s hand, his smile wide. “It’s been a pleasure, Professor Peterson. Thank you for the ride.”