by Wally Lamb
Carole had dated a little before she’d gotten sick, but postmastectomy she did not. She felt self-conscious about her absent breast, and on top of that she had gained weight, thanks in large part to the stress brought on by Jesse’s various dramas. And kids were a liability to a woman trying to date; she loved her children more than she could say, but what man in his right mind would want to date someone who had a Lane Bryant wardrobe, a single breast, and three children, one of whom had a drug problem? No, she had faced it: she was going to remain single, and so be it. As much as she’d like to claim otherwise, she loved Mike and only Mike, the man with whom she’d created four children, three of whom still walked the earth. She pictured that love as a perpetual flame, like the one Jackie Kennedy had designated for the grave of her slain husband. President Kennedy: another husband who had stomped on his marriage vow. No, Carole would always love Mike, she admitted to Rosalie Rand, but she remained bitter about his betrayal.
Jesse, like his mother, harbored a powerful resentment of his father and refused to have anything to do with him, not even that Saturday night when Mike drove down from Connecticut on a moment’s notice—the night when Jesse was arrested for possession of crystal meth and needed, if not his dad, then the lawyer and the bail bondsman his dad had gotten him. Not even the night when Mike arrived, white as a ghost, and stood at Jesse’s bedside in the emergency room, sobbing and apologizing. He’d driven like a bat out of hell down I–95 after Carole had called to tell him Jesse had tried to end his life by hanging himself with his belt in that filthy apartment where he lived with the woman who owned all those cats. “You’re the invisible man. I don’t even see you standing there,” Jesse had told his father, slurring his words, and then falling into a deep, tranquilized sleep.
Conversely, Morgan and Alyssa visited their dad and his fun young wife, Ellen, for a one-month vacation every July. In 2001, Mike and Ellen took the kids to Disney World; the following year, the four of them went to a dude ranch in Wyoming. Morgan, who, after his move to New Jersey, had remained a loyal fan of UConn basketball, was also allowed to fly back twice a year by himself to Connecticut. (Carole would not even discuss Thanksgiving or Christmas.) Morgan arrived at Bradley Airport each October for “Midnight Madness,” the official kickoff of the Huskies’ season, and then again in March, when he and his dad would drive down together to Madison Square Garden for the Big East championship. Because of Mike Seaberry’s status at UConn, Morgan got to pin a badge to his shirt pocket and attend press conferences and Husky Hospitality Receptions, where he could stare up at, and even converse a little with, the players. He would bring his Sharpie pen and his memorabilia to these gatherings, and so he became the proud owner of autographed cards, mini-basketballs, team pictures, and posters from the likes of Ray Allen, Kevin Ollie, and Rip Hamilton, each of whom had gone on to successful careers in the NBA. Jesse, home from rehab in 2002, had hacked his way past the password of his mother’s computer and offered his brother’s signed sports memorabilia collection for quick sale on eBay. He’d gotten three hundred and twelve dollars for it, most of which he later shot into his arm. Carole, who had learned from the other addicts’ parents in her therapy group that enabling only made matters worse, urged Morgan to press charges against his older brother. But Morgan was resolute in his refusal to do so. Despite everything, he still loved and looked up to his big brother as he always had, and still kept his favorite photo on his bedroom bureau: the one Mike had snapped of his sons, ages five and nine, on the Ferris wheel at the Woodstock Fair. In the photo, the brothers sit, hip to hip, wearing UConn T-shirts and those trendy bi-level hairstyles that, back during the Depression, had been called bowl cuts. Arms around each other, the brothers laugh, open-mouthed, Jesse with his surfboard-sized second teeth and Morgan still in his baby teeth. The crossbar has been snapped safely shut, and the hairy hand on the left side of the picture grips the lever that is about to propel the wheel forward. The brothers anticipate their exciting and terrifying ascent.
In his junior year of high school, Morgan was named a soccer team tri-captain, and he was the track team’s best hurdler. He had decided not to participate in a winter sport, so that he could take part in the Drama Club’s production of Of Mice and Men. Mrs. McCloskey cast him against type in the role of Curly, the sadistic nemesis of George and Lenny, the leads, and audiences were impressed that such a nice kid could play a creep so convincingly. Morgan was a class officer that year, too—treasurer—and, in May, was named to the king’s court at the junior prom. (His date, Emily Nickerson, was prom queen, and Emily’s mother, who was vice-president of the PTO, had confided to Carole Alderman that Morgan had only missed being king by three votes.) That same spring, Morgan was inducted into the National Honor Society. He held membership in the Politics Club, the Latin Club, the Hunger Relief Committee, and the Gay-Straight Alliance, which had successfully lobbied for the right of two senior girls, avowed lesbians, to attend the senior prom as a tuxedoed couple. Morgan’s SAT score that spring was an impressive 1540, up eighty points from his PSAT score earler that year.
Carole Alderman told Rosalie Rand that her two younger children “validated” her. Her husband might have left her, and her firstborn might be beyond saving, but she must have done something right, because her daughter, Alyssa, was the sweetest, most helpful girl in the world, and her son, Morgan Alderman Seaberry, had been listed in the 2002–3 volume of Who’s Who in American High Schools. His, she knew, would be a limitless future.
With that in mind, Carole had begun planning a college application strategy for her highest-achieving child. Rutgers would be Morgan’s “safety” school, Brown and Princeton his “reach” schools. He’d likely get into some or all of the following: NYU, Wesleyan, Georgetown, and Cornell. Carole went online and took the virtual tours of several of these campuses. But Morgan, since his move to Red Bank, had had his heart set on attending a school not on his mother’s list: UConn, where he might sit in the student section at Huskies games and hang out at his dad’s on weekends. Carole objected rigorously, despite the fact that her ex-husband’s affiliation with the school meant a free ride, tuition-wise. “Party school!” she’d argued. “You’re Ivy League material!” She and Morgan had quarreled about this, Carole Alderman told Rosalie Rand, but that had been the only time, really, when she and her younger son had ever disagreed about anything. In the end, Carole had agreed, begrudgingly, to accompany Morgan to a UConn Open House during Columbus Day weekend. The foliage would be at or near its peak, she figured, and she could visit her old Connecticut friends who were undertaking the college selection process with their kids. That would be fun. And whatever arguments the presenters might use to sell Morgan on UConn, she could debunk these, point by point, as she walked alongside him.
But there was a complication: Jesse, recently released from the halfway house, was working at a chicken farm and living back at home, rent-free—just for the time being. Carole was not about to enable him long-term. Nor was she going to trust him in her house by himself for a three-day weekend. The last time she’d done that, she’d ended up with a two-hundred-dollar cable bill because of the smut he’d watched on pay-per-view. Well, live and learn, she’d told herself. This time, she had made his living there conditional on his coming along with them to Connecticut for the open-house weekend.
Mike and Ellen, who were delighted at the prospect that Morgan might matriculate at UConn, had invited them all to stay at their beautiful new four-thousand-square-foot home in Glastonbury. Carole had put her foot down and said she could absolutely not stay in that woman’s house, no matter how modern and cool and twenty-first-century it would be to become friends with the person who had stolen her husband away from his children. Instead, she had booked two rooms at the Comfort Inn a few miles south of UConn on Route 32. She and Alyssa could stay in one room, Carole told the kids, and Jesse and Morgan could double up in the other. “The motel is right near a mall!” she’d said, by way of counteracting Morgan and Alyssa’s disap
pointment about this alternate arrangement. “And it’s directly across from a McDonald’s! We can have breakfast there!” Jesse had raised vehement objections to being dragged along to some “stupid college propaganda thing” for the benefit of “Mr. Wonderful,” but was nevertheless on board for staying any place where he wouldn’t have to see his father, who, he firmly believed, had wrecked his life.
UNDER DR. PATEL’S GUIDANCE, MAUREEN devised a list of personal goals by which she might, by increments, reengage with the world. She posted these—there were nine—on the inside of our bedroom closet door. One by one, she began checking them off. She planted and maintained a flower garden that summer. She bought a digital camera and taught herself how to use it. She joined Curves for Women and exercised there four mornings a week. At Curves, she ran into her old friend, Jackie Molinari. Mo and Jackie had been nurses together at Rivercrest. Mo called me on her cell phone (she had a cell phone now) to tell me she and Jackie were going out for breakfast. “Great,” I said. “Awesome. Gotta go.” I was in the middle of my quick-change routine: shuck my bakery clothes, shower away the smell of grease, climb into my teaching khakis, and get the hell down to the community college, a forty-minute commute. My Oceanside students were, for the most part, sincere but obtuse. That week, we were struggling through essays by Montaigne, Emerson, and Joan Didion. Tired of circling the endless errors on their papers, I was also planning to give them a usage lesson on its and it’s; your and you’re; there, their, and they’re. In teaching, you have to begin where they are, you know?
Maureen began to read again—number five on her list of resolves. Before her posttraumatic stress, she’d been an avid reader—novels, mostly. Right after the killings, she’d try to read, but would stare at the words, unable to make sense of them. Later, after her comprehension skills returned, she had struggled to recall, from one page to the next, what had happened. Descriptions of violence short-circuited her. (For the same reason, she avoided television.) Books had become one more source of frustration and fear, so she’d stopped opening them. Now, with Dr. Patel’s coaxing, she tried again and found that the pleasure of reading had returned to her. She got herself a library card and checked out a book a week, sometimes two. That was cool. But then she signed up for the Preferred Readers program at the bookstore in the mall and began ordering stuff on Amazon. I had to put the brakes on her book buying. Dr. Patel had adjusted her fee because we were paying her out of pocket, but sixty a session twice a week still added up. Sixty a session was what we were paying the chiropractor, too, to alleviate her back pain, which, I was pretty sure, was in her head, not her spine. Sophie’s hip dysplasia had been diagnosed by then; the vet bills, plus her medication, were averaging about a hundred and a half a month. On top of that, Mo’s Accord started acting its age. She freaked one afternoon when it quit on her while she was driving back from the IGA, and a guy who she said looked like pockmarked Richard Speck, that nurse killer from way back when, stopped to offer assistance. My Tercel was three years newer, so we switched cars. The Accord died on me once, too. I was driving back from Oceanside, traveling fifty-five or sixty maybe, and the engine just stopped. God, you ought to have heard all the honking and brake squealing, seen all those raised middle fingers. That commute back from school was a bitch, anyway: me fighting sleep after a night’s worth of doughnut-making and a morning’s worth of teaching, and cars and buses are whizzing past me on the right and on the left, everyone itching to get to the casino so they could hand over their money to the Indians.
“Risk new friendships” was number seven on Maureen’s list. Her first year of NarcAnon, she automatically said no whenever anyone at the meetings invited her to go out for coffee afterward. But Dr. Patel nudged her to respond to some of these overtures—the ones from people to whom Mo was drawn. That was how she became friends with Althea, the watercolorist, and Nehemiah, who was HIV-positive and ate macrobiotic, and Tricia, who worked for a caterer and was “a riot.” Mo spoke often about this trio, although I never met them, or knew what they looked like, or what their last names were. One Saturday night, the four of them drove down together to Madison. Amy Tan was giving a reading at R. J. Julia. I’d read Tan and wasn’t working that night. I would have liked to have gone, too, but I wasn’t on the guest list. Mo came back after eleven, aglow, clutching her signed copy of The Bonesetter’s Daughter. The reading had been great, she said; Amy Tan had been charming and funny, and Mo had even gotten to pat her adorable little dog.
“You know something?” I said. “NarcAnon’s like your netherworld.”
She had gotten into bed a few minutes earlier and was already on page 9 of The Bonesetter’s Daughter. “My netherworld?”
Having gotten her attention, I extended the simile. “Yeah, and these mysterious addicts you hang with: they’re like hobbits or something.”
She closed her book, placed it on her nightstand, and turned off her light. Her disembodied voice mumbled that I should get some sleep.
“You know what’s hard?” I said. My eyes had adjusted, and I was looking at her back, her blanket-covered head.
She didn’t answer.
“About your NarcAnon buddies? And your list of goals? It’s always about you. What’s good for you. Never, you know, about what’s good for us. I mean, nine goals, and I’m not in any of them?”
“Caelum, you’re in all of them,” she said. “If I can get better, we can get better. And I’m making gains—you know I am. But I need you to be patient.”
“You,” I said. “You, you, you, you, you.”
The next day, when she returned from her appointment with Dr. Patel, she informed me that I needed to stop referring to her friends as hobbits.
Oh? Why was that? I asked her.
“Because it trivializes them. It minimalizes their struggle to maintain sobriety, and my struggle, too. Those meetings have taught me what bravery is, okay? I had a long talk about it today with Beena and—”
“Beena? You two are on a first-name basis now? Gee, maybe Beena can hang with you and your posse next time Amy Tan and her dog are in town.”
I know, I know. A case could be made that I was being a jealous jerk. I was drinking again—not that that justified anything. That night when I’d dumped all her pills and all my alcohol down the sink? I’d abstained for several months after that. But I’d started up again. It had begun with a beer or two while Alphonse and I were watching a game, a glass of wine with dinner. Then two or three glasses. Then a stop-off at the package store and a right turn toward the hard liquor wall. It wasn’t like I was stumbling around drunk or anything. Not like I was turning into my father. But between the Mama Mia and the teaching and paper-grading, I was averaging sixty, seventy hours a week, just so we could tread water. I’d get home from Oceanside, and I’d be both exhausted and keyed up. So I’d pour myself a drink or two to take the edge off. Mellow out a little. Because in the next seven hours, I’d have to squeeze in sleeping, eating, and getting through my students’ papers, then head over to the bakery and start churning out product. I was careful not to pressure her about getting back to work; I knew she wasn’t ready. But it wasn’t easy working days and nights. A couple of drinks made it a little easier.
In the plus column, we had a sex life again. Sunday mornings, mostly. No teaching or baking or NarcAnon on Sundays. The dogs would start bugging me around sunrise, so I’d stumble out of bed and down the stairs. Let them out, let them back in and feed them. Brew us coffee. I’d come back upstairs, mugs in hand, and she’d have gotten ready for me: hair combed, teeth brushed, and naked under the covers. So it was nice, those Sunday mornings. Different, though. A little too deliberate. And there was the orgasm issue. Before, she’d been able to get off pretty regularly. Now, it took her a lot longer, and a lot of those Sunday mornings, she couldn’t get there. I mean, after a while I’d be getting carpal tunnel and/or tongue fatigue, you know? Then she’d push my hand or my head away and stick me inside of her, and I’d have such a case of blue balls
by then, I’d be done in seconds. “Aah, oh, I love you,” she’d go, and it would remind me of that restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally, when Sally demonstrates to Billy Crystal how good women are at faking it…. What was that actress’s name? The one who played Sally? The one who, in real life, cheated on Dennis Quaid with that other actor. The Gladiator. Couldn’t remember his name, either.
So what does that tell you, Sherlock? I asked myself at the bakery one night, when I was thinking about all this.
Tells me I identify with the wronged husband.
Right you are!
You can do that, you know, if you work the graveyard shift solo: have conversations with yourself. It’s not like the doughnuts are going to talk to you.