The Art of Mending

by Elizabeth Berg

  “Fine with me,” I said. My back hurt too.

  Caroline leaned against the bench and smiled at the sight of a mother pulling a wagon by us, two sleeping children in it. She looked at her watch. “Eleven o’clock. They conked out early, huh?”

  “They’ve probably been here since six,” I said. Seeing a pattern I liked in the leaves of the tree across the way from us, I pulled a small sketch pad out of my purse and did a rough drawing. It was the overlapping quality I liked, an edge next to an edge next to an edge.

  Caroline looked over my shoulder. “What’s that for?”

  “I don’t know. Something.”

  She sighed. “Always working.”

  I looked up at her, surprised. “I’m not always working!”

  “Yeah, you are. You’ve always got your nose to the grindstone about something. Always.”

  “No, I don’t!”

  “Oh, don’t get so upset. It’s not a criticism. It’s just an observation. You’ve always been that way. Busy, busy, busy.” She tossed back her hair, now hanging in loose curls, and pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head. “It’s getting cloudy. Do you smell rain?”

  “No.” I did, actually, but my anger made me want to disagree with her. I was thinking about what she’d said: Busy, busy busy. Was I? I stretched out my legs. “So what are you going to talk to me and Steve about, Caroline?”

  “Not now.”

  “Just tell me what it’s about.”

  “I did tell you. I want to compare notes. I have a lot of bad memories, and I need to know, finally, whether . . .” She crossed her arms over herself, then crossed her legs. If she were a turtle, I thought, she’d pull her head in. But then she looked directly into my eyes. “This is what it is,” she said. “I just feel like I can’t get past some things until I talk this out with someone who was there when I was growing up.”

  I started to say something but didn’t. Instead, I nodded. Sort of.

  “I know,” Caroline said.

  “What?”

  “I know you think I’m a pain in the ass.”

  “Oh, it’s not that,” I said. “I just . . . well, frankly, Caroline, I worry about you. I mean, when does it ever just get easy for you? I wonder if you need to just stop thinking so much. Feeling so much.”

  “I don’t decide to feel what I do. It just comes. I wouldn’t mind not feeling so much, believe me.”

  I turned toward her, attempting a tone of compassionate reason. “But . . . can’t you decide what to do with it? Can’t you—?”

  “Laura, I’ve come to a point where I just have to know some things. That’s all. I can’t even work anymore. I’ve become obsessed with finding out what happened to me that made me so . . . well, I just feel like if I can find out some things, if I can validate them, I can finally head in a different direction. I won’t feel this terrible sense of . . .” She teared up. Then, tightfisted, she stared straight ahead. When she spoke again, her voice was angry. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I don’t think you can understand what I’m talking about at all.”

  “Oh, come on, I—”

  “No. It’s not the same for you, Laura. We’re so different. We always have been. I love you, but we’re just . . . different.” She looked down at her hands. “I’ve been seeing a therapist. I started a few months ago; I’m going twice a week. At first I was getting nowhere. I’d walk out of there feeling guilty that I was spending a hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour for nothing. Well, not for nothing. For trying to entertain a woman who was supposed to be helping me. But what finally happened is that I stopped goofing around and started doing some real work. It helps. Before I went, things had gotten really bad. I hadn’t even been able to get out of bed on some days, I just . . .” She looked over at me. “I couldn’t get out of bed.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t tell you things like that. I don’t tell anybody in the family things like that! Do you? I mean, for one thing, I know when you feel bad, you don’t exactly get immobilized and lie in bed all day. You’d never do that. You’d leap up and make a cobbler.” She reached out to touch my hand. “I mean that in a complimentary way, okay? I really do.”

  She was right. I was more like Maggie, who, the last time she was sad, painted her garage and then, in a fit of good neighborliness, painted ours as well.

  “I couldn’t tell anybody I knew, really. So I started seeing this therapist and we got into some childhood stuff, and I remembered some things that were . . . I remembered some things that were pretty awful. And then all of a sudden I started to doubt myself. I started to think maybe I was making it up, maybe this was some sort of therapy-induced fantasy. And I need to talk to you and Steve to see if you remember any of it as well.”

  “But you mean . . . abuse of you?”

  “Well, yes, basically. But of a very specific kind.”

  “Like . . . sexual?” An image of my father came to me: Best Loved Teacher, year after year, standing before a class of high school freshmen, their faces raised to him.

  “No. No.” She looked over at the roller coaster. “Look, we can’t get into it now. We need time. And also I want to talk to you about . . . I think Bill and I are getting divorced.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah.” She raised her eyebrows, smiled an ironic smile. “Eeeeyup.”

  “Well, Caroline, you . . . I mean, you sort of add this on! This is a big deal! They’re both big deals!”

  She stood and pulled her purse higher on her shoulder. “Here come the kids.”

  I stood up beside her. “I hate it when you do this,” I said quietly. I smiled and waved at the little group coming toward us. “I hate it when you start something and then just—”

  “You’re the one who pushed to talk about it. I wanted to wait until later.” She smiled widely at Hannah, now beside her. “How was it?”

  “Awesome! We’re all going again! Just one more time!”

  “Hey, Mom!” Anthony said. “Come with us! Please?”

  I started to say no, but then agreed to go. It wasn’t often that my kids asked me to do things with them anymore. I handed my purse to Caroline without asking if she’d mind holding it.

  It took awhile to get through the line, but finally we all climbed on board. Once, when the front car I was riding in with Hannah hesitated at the crest of an incline, when it took that agonizing pause before starting its mad descent, I looked over and spotted Caroline sitting alone on the bench, our purses in her lap. She looked so small. I suddenly remembered our promise to each other never to go on this ride again. And then it occurred to me that I didn’t forget it at all.

  Caroline is sitting on her heels in the dirt, wearing her blue dress with white rickrack trim. She is about seven years old. I am standing above her taking the picture: you can see my elongated shadow on the ground beside her, my short braids bowing out from the sides of my head like broken handles. I have caught Caroline burying something, and she will not tell me what it is. I say I am taking her picture because she looks so pretty, but that is not the reason. I am taking it so I will know where to look, later, when I sneak out and dig up what she is trying to hide. She smiles shyly, her hands folded in her lap, squinting in the bright light. I never do return to the site. I am not interested enough to go back and look for anything of hers.

  8

  WE WERE FINALLY GETTING CLOSE TO THE END OF THE long line for cheese curds when a tall and massively overweight man wearing dirty jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black leather vest cut in front of us. He was entirely nonchalant, sliding in as though we were holding a place for him. He was balding but had a long stringy ponytail hanging halfway down his back and many gold hoops on one ear. He reeked of beer. I looked at the kids and started laughing. But Caroline tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” she said. “You just cut in front of us.”

  The man turned around.

  “Caroline . . .” I said.

  “No! He cut in front of
us!”

  The man sneered, then turned away.

  “Excuse me!” Caroline said again, louder, and this time Steve said quietly, “Caroline. Let it go.”

  She looked at Steve for a long moment, and I saw the tension in her jaw from clenching her teeth. Then: “Fine,” she said. “I’ll wait for you outside.” She walked away and Hannah shouted after her, “Aunt Caroline! Do you want us to get you some?”

  She turned back, shook her head no, and disappeared into the crowd.

  “Whoa!” Anthony muttered.

  “She’s just a little nervous today,” I said.

  “She’s always like that! Seems like any little thing—”

  “Enough,” Pete said. “She was offended by this guy’s bad manners. She’s right—he shouldn’t have cut in front of us.”

  The man turned around, belched in Pete’s face, and put his back to us again. I saw Pete waver for a moment, as did I, and then we all exploded into laughter.

  When we reached the counter, I ordered cheese curds for Caroline anyway. She’d eat them. I knew her.

  When we came outside, we saw her sitting at a picnic table piled high with other people’s litter. She was on her cell phone, frowning. She held up a hand to indicate that we should be quiet. Busy, busy, busy, I wanted to say to her. But when she snapped the phone shut, she said, “That was Mom. Dad’s at St. Joseph’s Hospital.”

  The image of my mother appeared, dressed in the robe she’d had on that morning, waving away my concerns about my father.

  “Do we have to leave?” Hannah asked.

  “Yes.” I took her hand and started walking quickly. Ten minutes to get to the exit, at least. Another fifteen to walk home—that would be faster than trying to get a cab through this traffic. I’d told her it was his heart and she’d said to leave him alone. I’d known it wasn’t right. I’d known it and I’d listened to her anyway.

  “Is it okay to eat my cheese curds?” Hannah whispered, and I nodded a tight yes. It would take fifteen minutes to get to the hospital, if there was no traffic.

  During the quick and silent walk home, I did not think of my father. Instead, I thought of Caroline, of all the times she’d come home from school, crying. Or come in from outside, crying. The way she would moon over a book where some horse died. The way she would go to sad movies over and over. I was so tired of her theatrics, her fragility, her deliberate forays into melancholy, her complicated secrecy—not just now but always. I worked myself into a pretty nice state of anger at her, which kept me from having to think about what my father might look like right now. I had lived this long and had only seen a dead man once. He was lying on the floor of a shopping mall, right outside the entrance to Penney’s. His face had been gray-blue, his mouth slightly open. There’d been a woman kneeling beside him who was attempting CPR, in vain. Her purse and shopping bags lay scattered about her; and one of her shoes had come loose off her heel. “He’s gone,” she’d kept saying, but then she would give him another breath and pump on his chest, counting aloud in a high voice that shook a little.

  I’d thought, This morning, he picked that shirt to put on. I’d thought, I wonder why he came to the mall today. And then I’d walked away. I’d told myself that it was because it was indecent for people to make a ring around the man, gawking at him. But the truth was, I’d left because I couldn’t stand looking at him and realizing people die. As soon as I turned away, I’d told myself to forget about him. And I had. I’d gone into a store three doors down and looked at bath oil, and then I’d bought some. All the way home, I’d imagined not the sudden loss of another soul on earth but rather how nice it would feel to be submerged in warm water, breathing in the scent of white gardenia. It had been so easy to erect my barricade against fear, against pain, against knowing. Now it seemed that my house had blown down. I was about to meet the wolf.

  AUNT FRAN WAS SITTING IN THE WAITING ROOM of the ICU when we arrived. She was wearing light-colored pants with circles of dirt stains at the knee—clearly, she’d been working in her garden when she was called. She shared a love of gardening with my mother, but there the similarities ended. Where my mother was stunning, Aunt Fran looked . . . friendly. The same could have been said of Steve and me; it was only Caroline who inherited my mother’s great beauty. I was “pleasant looking”—I’d heard that all my life—with widely spaced brown eyes and even features. I used to have a good body, but now I suffered the usual humiliations of getting older. Steve looked like an All-American boy, even at his age.

  There was another and more important difference between my mother and my aunt. Where my mother was uptight, Aunt Fran was unfailingly relaxed and open. I had loved visiting her as a child. I used to ask her why she couldn’t be my mother. I’d concocted a fantasy whereby she in fact was my real mother; she just gave me to her sister because she had too many other children. But I preferred being around Aunt Fran. She let you crawl onto her lap, she read to you with clear enthusiasm, she told jokes, she let you eat cookies between meals, she sang loudly along with the radio, she helped you build sheet tents and cardboard forts, she asked you about your life because she really wanted to know the answers.

  Once, she’d been lying out in her lawn chair on a hot summer night, and her fourteen-year-old son and I were sitting in the grass on either side of her. We were drinking lemonade from aluminum tumblers with little terry-cloth wraps that kept your hand from getting too cold. We’d just finished brownies that Aunt Fran had whipped up on the spur of the moment: just like that, no problem, made from scratch, no recipe. “Tell me about the stars, Eric,” Aunt Fran had said. And he had, and she’d listened to him in wonder, her eyes wide and staring upward into the darkness above her.

  He had begun by saying, “Well, our sun is a star,” and Aunt Fran had gotten all excited and said, “Really? Really?” I’d listened to the rest of what Eric said, and the whole time I’d had a thought flitting around my brain like a moth repeatedly bumping into the light: This is what a family really is. This. This. This.

  Mostly, when you were around Aunt Fran, you enjoyed a buoyancy of spirit: There was nothing wrong. There had been a thickness in the atmosphere at our house, a vague and ongoing sense of something amiss. It was the kind of thing you didn’t particularly notice until you were away from it. But once, when I’d asked Aunt Fran yet again if I could live with her, she sat me down for a serious talk. I was seven, but she treated me as though I were an adult. She told me my mother loved me very much, even if it did not seem obvious to me. She told me my mother had had a difficult time with their mother. “It was like Mom was jealous of Barbara,” Aunt Fran had said. “And as far as she was concerned, Barbara couldn’t do anything right, not one thing. My mother was all right to me, but it was very bad, the way she treated Barbara. It broke her spirit. Your mother does the best she can. You have to realize that people have reasons for the way they behave. All I can say is it’s lucky your mother met your father. I don’t know what she would have done without him. I love her with all my heart, but I couldn’t save her like your father did.”

  It had been easy to believe my grandmother had been cruel to my mother; my memories of that grandmother were not good ones either. There had been about her a sense of constant disapproval. You could not touch her white porcelain poodle with the little puppies chained to it. You had to take your shoes off before you came into the house. If you drank from anything but a glass, you were a heathen. Once, in her bathroom, I’d seen a douche bag hanging from the shower rod. When I’d asked my grandmother what it was, she’d whisked it away angrily, saying, “What is the matter with you? What kind of person would ask about such things?”

  When I was around five, I’d been alone with her one day; I don’t remember why. But I’d come upon her when she was staring at herself in the mirror, and I was startled by the look of relaxed pleasure on her face. When she’d seen me, she turned around and regarded me with her usual expression, a half smile that was not really a smile. It was the forced pleasan
try of the overburdened saleswoman who asks how she can help when what she really wants is just to go home. “What is it, Laura?” she’d asked. “It” wasn’t anything; I’d just been wandering around the house. I’d simply wanted to be by her. But with my grandmother, there had to be an agenda. If you were doing nothing, you were up to no good.

  The only time she touched us kids was when we were leaving—then we got a quick hug, her face directed away from us. It was like being pressed to a wall. I’d known she was warmer to Aunt Fran’s children, and for a while it had bothered me. But soon enough I gave up on her altogether; we all did, and Steve and I always made vicious fun of her in the backseat every time we drove home from her house. Caroline laughed at what we said, but she wouldn’t join in. Neither of our parents ever reprimanded us for our behavior at those times; rather, their relaxed posture seemed to suggest they condoned it.

  My grandmother died when I was twelve, just nine months after her husband, who was really nothing more than a shadowy presence. At her funeral, I’d played hangman with Steve. As far as I was concerned, my only grandparents were my father’s parents. My mother had wept for days after her mother’s death, and when I’d asked her why she’d said, “Now there’s no chance of anything changing. Do you understand? I’m not sorry to lose her, as she was. I’m grieving for what can never be. I’m grieving for me.”

  Now, before anyone could ask how my father was, Aunt Fran put down her magazine and said, “He’s absolutely fine. The tests don’t show a thing. They’re going to keep him overnight just as a precaution. He can go home tomorrow.”

  I slumped onto an orange plastic sofa. “Oh, good. Good.” Again, the image of my mother in her robe. I told you.

  “I’m going to go talk to the nurses,” Caroline said, and Steve told her to wait, he’d go with her.