Caroline said nothing, stared into the space before her.
“Didn’t you?” Steve asked, and I could see his wariness, his regret at revealing yet another thing he got from our parents that Caroline might not have.
Still, she said nothing.
“Did you?” he asked me, and I shrugged and nodded: yes.
Finally, Caroline said, “I didn’t go to summer camp.”
“Yes, you did!” I said. “We all did, just that one summer; we all went to different camps, remember?”
“You and Steve went,” she said. “I didn’t. I went to a hospital.”
“For what?” I asked. Now, this I would have to have known. Why would I not have known this?
A long silence. And then Caroline said, “Because my mother came after me with a knife, and I was having a hard time dealing with it.”
I sat wide-eyed and then felt a grin come on my face, an unfortunately misplaced expression of absolute astonishment, of horror. I covered my mouth.
“Okay, that’s it,” Steve said, and stood up. Then he sat back down. “Jesus, Caroline! I know you’re lying! You went to summer camp! You came back with . . . I don’t know, didn’t you make a wallet or something?”
“Yes. At the hospital.” She turned to Steve. “You and Laura weren’t home. It was Sunday and we were going to have fried chicken for dinner. Mom was cutting up the chicken with a big butcher knife, and she got mad at something I said and raised it up over me. She said, “I swear . . . I swear,” and the knife was shaking in her hand. I was crouching on the floor, my arms over my head. The radio was on in the kitchen; I could hear some men talking and laughing. And then Dad came in the room and yelled her name and she spun around and said, “What? What do you expect me to do with her?”
I said, “But why, Caroline? Had you done anything to—” I stopped and wished I could grab back the words. Blame the victim. Great. I started again. “If this is true, why do you need us to verify anything? Why don’t you just . . . I mean, there must be records.”
“Remember the fire at St. Mary’s?”
I did remember now: the summer of my junior year of high school. It was a spectacular fire; you could smell smoke miles away. “Yes,” I said quietly.
“So. What I have is my memory of being there for a while. That’s all. I don’t remember the names of anyone who treated me. And no one but Dad knew I was there.”
I saw my father in his hospital bed, almost telling me about someone being in the hospital and then deciding not to. Is this what he meant? Oh, Dad, I thought.
“It was after I came home that she finally stopped doing things to me. I think it scared her.”
“But Caroline,” I said, “how could they send you back home when you were in such danger? Why wasn’t our whole family investigated by social services or something?”
“Because at a family meeting at the hospital, Mom denied everything. And the doctor believed her. And Dad said I had a tendency to exaggerate, a pretty wild imagination. That I seemed to gravitate toward the melancholy, the melodramatic—wink, wink.” She leaned back in her chair, made a gesture of futility. “After that meeting, Mom went home and Dad took me to the hospital cafeteria to buy me an ice cream. Pretty cheap payoff, huh?”
“Oh, man.” Steve rubbed his head. I thought I knew what he was thinking: But you did gravitate toward those things. It was, of course, what I was thinking as well.
Caroline smiled coolly. “I’m sorry this is so hard for you. And I’m not being sarcastic, I really mean it. But could you . . . I would like, finally, to feel that I can be supported by my brother. You are my brother.”
“Well, what then, Caroline? What do you want me to do?”
She leaned forward. “Say you believe me. That’s all.”
He looked around the room, shaking his head. “You know, this is like—”
“Fine,” she said. “If you can’t, you can’t. At least I tried.”
“I didn’t say I don’t believe you!” Steve said. “I just said . . . I’m just trying to tell you it’s a shock, that’s all!”
“It is, Caroline,” I said. “I can say that I do believe you; but it’s really hard to take in. We thought you were in camp. They told us we were all going to camp!”
Steve’s cell phone rang. He reached instinctively for it but let it go. We all sat still, listening to it ring a few more times before it stopped.
“Well,” Steve said, “I just want to say I’m sorry for anything I might have done to make it worse. I know I never paid much attention to you—or to Laura, either, actually. I guess I was off in my own world.”
“I guess we all were.” I asked Caroline, “Are you staying here tonight?” Maybe after a few hours, we’d be looser, better able to talk.
“No. Bill and I are trying—”
“Oh, good. I’m glad, Caroline.”
“Let me finish. We’re trying to work out the details of a divorce agreement.”
Steve and I looked quickly at each other, and I assumed we were sharing the same thought: Oh, no, not more! I remembered seeing a film once where one bad thing happened after the other; things just kept getting worse and worse. “That would never happen in real life,” I said to Pete afterward. “Something good would be in there somewhere.”
Fatigue in Caroline’s face was mixed with a kind of relief. I supposed the good here was that she had finally revealed the abuse she endured to the people she needed to tell. Except for one: the person responsible for it.
It is a family photo that a stranger must have taken, somewhere around the mid-sixties. We are all outside, at a park. There is a big wicker basket on a picnic table behind us. I remember that basket. It had a wooden top and a lovely dark-green pattern of trim—little x’s—all along the edges. It must have been a cool day; the sky is overcast, and we are all wearing light jackets. Steve and I stand smiling before my father, leaning back into him. Steve has a baseball bat at his feet; I hold a stick that I must have meant to use for roasting marshmallows. My father, smiling broadly, proudly, has one hand on each of our shoulders. Caroline stands before our mother, and it is one of the rare times she is smiling. Our mother stands straight-mouthed behind her, arms crossed tightly across her chest, like a little kid in a store who’s been told, Don’t touch.
18
STEVE AND I WENT FOR DINNER TO A FAST-FOOD BURGER joint at the airport. It was Tessa who’d tried to call him earlier—she’d come down with something, and although she didn’t feel sick enough to go the doctor, she was in need of some caretaking. Steve was only too willing to fly home and tend to her. He finished his hamburger, scrunched the wrapping into a tight ball, fired it at the nearby wastebasket, missed. He laughed and went to pick up his trash and deposit it from closer range. “About my yearbook aspiration to be a basketball star?” He sat back down, looked at his watch. “I should get to the gate pretty soon. God, what a trip this has been! You come home for a simple family visit, and all hell breaks loose. How are you doing with all this?”
“Oh, I’m fine. I’ve got Pete and the kids, and . . . you know, my life at home.” I folded my napkin in half, then in fourths, offered a quick smile. “So.” Not the real answer. The real answer was, I didn’t know how I was doing. I felt numbed by all I’d been told, and I went back and forth about what to believe, sometimes minute to minute.
“How can you suffer abuse like that and not tell someone—a teacher or a minister—a friend? Not that she had many friends. But you could tell someone. What about you and me? If we couldn’t see what was happening, why didn’t she just tell us?”
“You heard how much help she got from Dad and the doctor. And the three of us weren’t exactly close. Anyway, she told me she actually believed it was her fault, that she caused that behavior in Mom.”
He shook his head. “Even so. I just don’t see how you can keep being around a person who treats you that way and not say something. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know.” I stared at the t
able next to us, at the three little children sitting with their parents and eating their hamburgers. They were remarkably quiet and well behaved. One of them held a sock monkey, and she offered it a bite of her burger. Seeing this, something suddenly occurred to me.
“Steve? I wonder. Maybe what happens in these situations is the opposite of what we think.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you ever read about those monkeys they used in an experiment to measure love?”
“You can’t measure love.”
“Well, I know; I don’t think so either. But this was . . . did you read about them?”
“Not that I recall.”
“I saw it in the newspaper. What happened is that researchers in a primate lab put baby monkeys in with crazy mothers—cloth mother monkeys that had soft bodies so they could cuddle, but they were all booby-trapped. They would unexpectedly do something awful when the babies clung to them. One shook the baby violently, and one blew air out really hard on top of the baby’s head, and one had brass spikes embedded in her chest that would all of a sudden pop out. You know what the babies did when those things happened? Clung tighter, if they possibly could. Or if they were thrust off by the force of what was done to them, they got up and ran right back.”
Steve stared at me. “How can anyone work in a place like that?”
“Steve. The point is, the babies clung tighter when they were abused!”
“Caroline didn’t cling tighter. She’s really cold with Mom.”
“Now she is. But remember when she used to idolize her? When she used to buy her all those presents and—”
“We’re not monkeys, Laura.”
“Sure we are.”
He stood, pushed in his chair. “I’ve got to go. Want to walk with me to security?”
I walked beside him quietly, and then, just before we reached the line, I told him about a woman I once lived next door to who was sexually abused by her father in ways too horrible ever to repeat. And yet when I went over one day to borrow some coffee from her, there the man was—sitting on the sofa, reading a book to his two-year-old granddaughter. And the woman introduced me to her smiling father like she adored him. “So there you are,” I said.
And Steve said, “Okay, I’ll call you soon.” He hadn’t heard a word I’d said. Too full of things to listen anymore. Or too tired. Or something. And I didn’t blame him.
I went out to the rental car I’d taken over from Steve, put the key in, and then sat there, thinking. I remembered something else about those monkeys. The abused babies were so preoccupied with reaching their mothers, they had no energy for friends, no time for trying to bond with anyone else. They were on a kind of psychological island, stuck with something that would never give them what they needed. The article ended by saying that every mother has the assurance that her baby will love her. But a baby has no assurance at all of being loved in return.
Tomorrow I would buy a cell phone. Times like this, I really did need one. I would call Pete, and when I heard his familiar voice, I would close my eyes and listen only to him.
BACK AT MY MOTHER’S HOUSE, I wandered around the quiet rooms, looking at the place in a way I hadn’t for a long time. When I lived there, I saw it one way: home. It was a fact as irrefutable as the nose on my face. It was a personalized haven where I could get my needs met, though surely I didn’t think of it that way. Rather, I thought of it as a repository for my things, a place where Velveeta cheese was kept on the refrigerator door and extra bottles of Pepsi in the laundry room. There was a big metal box of Band-Aids in the medicine chest, a never-ending supply of clean towels stacked in the linen closet. There was a desk in my room at which I did my homework, a living room where, in the evenings, my father sat in his chair under deep yellow lamp light with a library book, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his legs crossed in a way I came to find effeminate.
After I left home, I saw my parents’ house another way: a place full of memories that dimmed year by year if not month by month, a place decorated in a way I would never consider, and then a place where I needed to be overly mindful of what my children were doing even after they were no longer young.
Now I stood in my parents’ bedroom, thinking about what their life together was really like. I recalled various things we kids witnessed—the kisses hello and goodbye, the stereotypical sharing of household tasks—and I wondered about what we didn’t see.
I moved over to their bed and sat down on it. What did they talk about before they went to sleep? Did they share corny rituals, as Pete and I do? Did they argue in hushed tones more often than we knew, turn angrily away from each other and pretend to be asleep until they actually were, then awaken in the morning with the psychic hangover that such resentment brings?
I took off my shoes and lay down on the bed, on my father’s side. His nightstand still held the things he had kept there: the brown alarm clock, a “man-sized” box of Kleenex, an ashtray in which he kept not ashes but pennies. I closed my eyes, whispered Daddy? Nothing but a silence so profound I could feel it pressing against my ears.
I went to my mother’s dresser and stared at myself in her mirror. This is what she looked into when she got up every morning. And what did she see now? Herself, alone, fifty years older than the time she bought this dresser. What a difficult transition she would have, going from a woman who was openly and exuberantly adored to one who lived in echoing silence. No one would be constantly complimenting, reassuring, and supporting her, as my father had. Or protecting her—perhaps egregiously. He was forever giving everything to her, and she was forever taking it with a kind of entitlement that used to make me furious. Give something back! I would think, but she did not, not really. She washed his underwear; she prepared meals; she stacked his mail on the dining room table. And she stayed beau-tiful.
I pulled open one of the top drawers. Bras and panties, folded neatly. In the drawer below that, negligees. This surprised me. I’d never seen her in one. I lifted the top one up, a light blue, with a matching peignoir. It looked brand new. Which accounted, I supposed, for my never having seen it. I was pulling out another drawer when the phone rang. I jumped, slid the drawer back in quickly, and went to the kitchen to answer it.
“What are you doing?” Maggie asked.
“You want the truth?” I sat down, smiling, grateful to hear her voice.
“Of course!”
“I was snooping in my mother’s drawers.”
“Find anything good?”
“Only a negligee. Matching peignoir.”
“Excellent score.”
“I think she just bought it. Isn’t that weird?”
“Nothing’s weird about what people do when someone close to them dies. And anyway, if she’s like my mother, it’s not new. It’s just that she never wore it. ‘Too good to wear.’”
“That wouldn’t be my mother’s problem. Speaking of which, what’s happening at my house?”
“Well, your mother made her famous coconut cookies today. Anthony brought me some. He said they’re famous because it’s the only thing she makes that tastes good.”
“That’s pretty much right.”
“And Hannah came home with a posse of girlfriends—I saw them all traipsing in as Anthony was heading out. So life over there is pretty normal, I’d say. How are you doing?”
I contemplated telling her everything but decided against it. “I’ll tell you about it when I come home. Another couple of days here ought to do it.”
“Well, I just wanted to check in.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“I wanted to know if you were all right. Are you—really?”
I hesitated, then said, “Yes.”
“Just don’t want to talk about it?”
“I guess not, Maggie. Not yet.”
“Okay. Well, I’ll see you soon. Call me anytime you want. Any time.”
As soon as I hung up, the phone rang again. I picked it up, laughing, said, “What?”
“Hello?”
Steve. “Oh, hi!” I said. “I thought you were Maggie. Are you home?”
“Yeah, I am.”
“How’s Tessa?”
“She’s got the flu, but it’s the dry variety.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You know. No body fluids.”
“Oh. That’s good.”
“Listen, Laura, I want to tell you something. I took a nap on the plane, and when I woke up, maybe even before I woke up, I was thinking about . . . well, I remembered something. And I wanted to tell you to tell Caroline.”
“Me? Why, what is it?”
“Okay, this was . . . I don’t know, I guess I was about five, because I remember Caroline was in first grade, and Mom got a call from the school nurse, and she had to go to school to get Caroline. And she was really mad. I went along, of course, and all the way she was muttering about how she guessed she knew her own child. But we picked up Caroline and she really was sick, so pale, and she just lay on the backseat of the car all the way home, didn’t say a word. I remember thinking there was something kind of off, but I didn’t know what. Now I think . . . you know what I think it was? I think maybe Caroline told Mom she was sick that morning, and Mom made her go to school anyway. And I think the nurse must have yelled at Mom.”
“But Steve, why don’t you tell Caroline all this?”
“Aren’t you going to see her again tomorrow afternoon?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Just . . . tell her I remembered those things, okay? For what it’s worth. Tell her I don’t think she’s crazy. I don’t want to get into some huge—I just want her to know I don’t disbelieve her. Would you tell her?”
“All right.”
“And I’ll . . . you know, I’ll call her sometime soon. I will.”
The Art of Mending Page 13