by Lesley Kagen
Her heart breaks for him, but she can’t commit to another drawn-out conversation about his Russian soon-to-be ex-wife that is punctuated every few minutes with, “You catch my drift?” because she and the kids, and hopefully Will, are going to catch a matinee—Wayne’s World.
She backs out of the kitchen, sticks her head in the game room, tells the kids to meet her at the car in five minutes, and goes off to look for her husband. She finds him and Connie deep in conversation in his office. They appear startled when Tess asks Will, “Ready?”
He rubs his finger under his nose and tells her, “Sorry. I can’t come. Connie and I have an urgent diner matter we need to tend to.”
Tess catches herself before she can make a baby-animal noise. She shrugs, says gaily, “Oh. Okay,” and heads down the hall alone. Mewling.
With her son off to one of his card-playing lollapaloozas, and Will managing the busiest dinner of the week at the diner, Tess has her daughter to herself on Saturday night.
They’re snuggled up on the den couch, basking in the warmth of the fire, and watching a Lifetime movie about a crime-solving psychic. During the commercial breaks, Haddie tells tales about her boyfriend, Rock, the joys of Asti Spumante, and how she’s sure that one of her professors is coming on to her because he keeps bumping into her “accidentally” in the dark room.
Tess is lost in the joy of having her daughter speak to her in more than one-syllable words. She is hesitant to bring her eating up, but Haddie, who she’d thought had been making some progress, had only picked at her food the past couple of days. As her mother, she thinks it’d be irresponsible not to say something, but she doesn’t want to overstep and is unsure where the boundary line has been drawn. She finally settles on a topic that doesn’t take eating, or lack thereof, head on, but might lead to further discussion. “Tell me more about the new doctor you’re seeing. Chandler?”
An unpredicted cold front blows in. The heart-shaped votive candles atop the fireplace mantel flicker when Haddie jumps off the couch and growls, “Don’t go there,” like she’s warning off a stranger who dared to venture onto private property. She spent the remainder of the evening locked in her room. Tess spent it outside the door begging to be let in.
Late Sunday morning, the Blessings load up their daughter’s carry-on and camera bags and drive to Billy Mitchell Field. Mom accompanies her into the airport while Dad circles. At the check-in counter, Tess starts to cry, she can’t help it. Haddie huffs in disgust. She thinks her mother is making a scene because she doesn’t want her to leave. While that’s true, it’s not the whole picture. Since Tess feels responsible for her eating disorder, she’s weeping because she’s relieved that Haddie would be far from her grasp so she couldn’t hurt her any more than she already had, but she also desperately wants to press her daughter to her chest so she would feel the bandages and know her suffering, and those dual feelings of needing to take care of and needing to be taken care of are too much to contain.
Haddie gives her mother a courtesy hug, says, “I’ll send you the pictures I took at the Sadie Hawkins dance,” and climbs the steps to Concourse A, like she’d been hired for the weekend and her job had been completed.
On the drive home, the inside of the car is crypt quiet until Will hits the freeway. “You get the results of the lymph node testing tomorrow. Do you want…?” He almost asks if she’d like mashed potatoes and pot roast for supper tonight.
Bless his heart. How was he supposed to know that’s exactly what she’s craving?
Tempus Does Not Fugit
1:27 a.m.
Tess jerks awake with the Hearse song echoing in her head.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle in your snout.
They eat your eyes, they eat your nose,
They eat the jelly between your toes.
In a few hours she’d find out if the cancer was dining on any other part of her. Was it feasting on her liver? Gnawing on her bones? Consuming her pancreas?
She reaches across the bed to brush her lips against Will’s stubbly sleeping cheek and stroke his less-silver hair, grasp his curled sleeping hand to her bandaged chest, and for a moment she feels peaceful and saved.
For godssakes, Theresa. Have a little self-respect.
1:46 a.m.
Light from their neighbor’s garage is shining through the top of their bedroom window and illuminating the oil painting above their bedroom door. Tess had created it from a snapshot Will had taken when he surprised her with a trip on their twentieth wedding anniversary. He’d wanted to whisk her back to their honeymoon suite at the Holiday Inn in Paris, Illinois, but her fear of leaving home had set deeper roots throughout the years and Will had to settle for the Gay Paree Motel in Wisconsin Dells instead.
In the painting, Tess is floating on a corn-colored air mattress in the unnaturally blue motel pool. She’s trimmer than she is now, and chestier than she ever was. Amusing Will is one of the ways she shows him how much she loves him, so she’d given herself astronomically large breasts with flying saucer-sized nipples visible through the skimpy swimsuit fabric so he’d cock his eyebrow and say like a French alien, Ooo…la…la…take me to your leader.
Tess had taken up oil painting shortly after she’d informed her psychiatrist that driving down to the Chicago comedy clubs to perform was taking too much of a toll on her and her family. Dr. Drake agreed, but was concerned that removing her only source of creative expression might affect her mental health. “Perhaps you could take up something that doesn’t require an audience, or a dance partner.” She had always loved art so she suggested painting, and Drake was all for it.
When she talked the idea over with Will, he took the bull by the horns and found an interesting class at a place a few miles up the road. Dressed in a goofy-looking smock and a beret Will had given her, she eagerly drove off the following week toward Lemon Hill, the town a few miles north. Like Ruby Falls, it was famous for its historical landmarks. Amongst them, a renowned artists’ and writers’ colony named Greendale. One of the other places of interest in the town was Meadowview, a posh private psychiatric facility that Tess avoided driving by at all costs.
The two-hour art class was held every Tuesday afternoon in one of the quaint cottages strewn across Greendale’s grounds. The instructor was a fine-looking German gentleman named Alec Strobel. Once his students became lost in their canvasses, Alec would meander around the room sharing—in a melancholy voice that reminded Tess of Marlena Dietrich—memories of the women he had known, the women he had loved, and the women he had lost. Somehow he always managed to end each of his recollections with, “Ach. It is de vomen’s job in life to zuffer, nein?”
There’d be a lot of head-bobbing in the class right about then because most of the middle-aged gals had ceased to find a sense of accomplishment in scrubbing floors and ironing. Other than the class, their only creative outlet was dreaming up excuses so they wouldn’t have to, as they say in Alabama in mixed company, “Pound the snow leopard,” with their equally disenchanted husbands.
Mixed in with the seven “normal” women was a psychiatric patient name of Marcy Marie Gates, a faded girl with pale skin and bleached-blue eyes, who looked like she’d been run through the wash too many times. She was younger than the rest of them, twenty-five, at most. After Marcy Marie was escorted into the cottage by a caretaker from Meadowview, she would make a beeline for Tess, (naturally), set up her easel, and ask her every fifteen minutes on the dot, “Do you like my painting, Miss Tess? Is it beautiful, Miss Tess? Do you love it with all your heart, Miss Tess?”
My friend didn’t know what kind of awfulness Marcy Marie had had to endure, but she could feel the agony shoot out of her fellow student like a missile that honed in on her gut. She would tell the girl, “I like your painting very much. It is beautiful, and I do love it with all my heart,” which wasn’t true since she couldn’t look at Marcy Marie’s work without crossing her eyes. She was too afraid the pain
tings would get branded into her brain. (There were just so many shades of black the troubled girl could use before the canvas began to look like it should be framed in lost souls and hanging in the foyer of artist Edvard Munch’s house.)
Tess quit the class after a few months because it’d become too difficult to paint with Marcy Marie’s depression breathing down her neck. Watch your step, Blessing, it’d begun to whisper. Your paintings may be pastel colored now, but I got a tube of gray in my pocket that can be put to good use.”
2:12 a.m.
I say from the chaise lounge where I’m guarding over my friend, “I think you mighta forgot to check on Snakey Nine today.”
She gasps, throws the covers back, and reaches for the flashlight she keeps next to the bed. Forgetting all about the cutting that’d been done on her chest, she jogs down the hall, opens Henry’s bedroom door inch-by-inch, tiptoes in, and shines the light on the aquarium. The snake is nocturnal and should be moving about.
Henry stirs and mumbles, “Mom.”
She needs to come up with a reason to be in his room other than disposing of the dead reptile. She kneels on the side of his bed and whispers, “I thought you might’ve left your window open and I came to check.” When Henry doesn’t respond, she realizes that he’s not awake. He called out her name because he’s dreaming about her and…damn, that gets to her.
She’s about to run back to her bedroom and hide under the sheets, but I intercede. “Instead of lying here and compulsively checking the time or having flashbacks or wondering which part of your body the cancer is consuming or riding yourself for not checking on the snake earlier or wondering if Will is messing around with Connie or doing any of the other twenty-two things you do to torture yourself, why don’t we head downstairs for a cup of tea in the sunroom?”
Tess reluctantly agrees that might be a better approach.
After she lets Garbo loose in the backyard and brews herself a cup of decaf Earl Grey, she wanders into her special room. Being surrounded by Haddie’s photographs, Henry’s basketball and soccer trophies, and a few Georgia O’Keefe prints she loves makes her feel safer, almost loved. Will’s first diner dollar hangs on the wall above the desk in a gold frame. Her children’s bronzed baby shoes flank her pencil cup. Since she visits the sunroom often in the middle of the night, the desk lamp with the green glass shade is always left on.
Relaxation is more what I had in mind, but she slips her new To-Do List out of the pocket of the once-green chenille robe and smoothes it down on the desk. The paper is tear- and tea-stained.
TO-DO LIST
Buy broccoli.
Hope that Haddie gets the help she needs from a better therapist.
Set up vocational counseling appointment for Henry.
Convince Will to love me again.
Get Birdie to talk to me.
Bury Louise once and for all.
Have a religious epiphany so #8 is going to be okay with me.
Die.
She started to cross out number seven because what she’d experienced during the surgery felt divine, but could she count it as an epiphany? Tess wasn’t sure, but she almost never was. She was the prime suspect in the murder of her intuition. She needs to spend more time analyzing the experience the way she’d been taught by psyche investigator Dr. Drake. She needed to sift slowly through her thoughts and inspect them for reliability.
With head in hands, she stares down at the list. “My mother’s right. I’m good for nothing. I let everybody down. Even the stupid snake.”
I pluck a Kleenex out of the box on the edge of the desk and hand it to Tess, who is feeling let down by me. She’s wishing again that I had more to offer other than reassurance, companionship, and love. Don’t actions speak louder than words? What good was I if I couldn’t bring the snake back to life, reunite her with her sister, give Connie Lushman a chronic yeast infection, and dispose of her mother’s remains?
She’s stroking Garbo’s head with too much ardor and her leg is bouncing beneath the desk. Her hopped-up brain needs something to focus on other than working on her not-so-new-anymore To-Do List that isn’t dwindling the way she’d like it to.
I give her hand a quick pat and say, “We’ll go directly to the pet store first thing tomorrow to get Snakey Ten, I have a lot of faith in your sister, I can’t do much about Connie’s nether region, but believe me, you’ll be rid of your mother when the time is right.” Best to change the subject now. “In the meantime, how ‘bout we come up with something to take your mind offa things?”
She swipes at her tears with the sleeve of her cows-sipping-café-au-lait-on-the-Champs-Élysées nightie that needed washing a week ago, and points out the window into the clear night. The light of a three-quarters moon is illuminating her flock of snow angels. “Make more?”
I wrap my arms around myself and shiver.
“Empty my drain?”
“Sounds like a ball, but I’ve got another idea.” I stand, bow at the waist, and offer her my hand. “May I have this dance?”
The last thing she wants to do right now is trip the light fantastic, but she is far too polite to turn me down. “We need music,” she says.
I follow her into the den where she thumbs through the extensive vinyl record collection. When she finds what she wants, she drops the classic Muddy Waters album onto the turntable and lowers the volume so it doesn’t wake the boys. “You lead,” she says.
We’re waltzing to The Thrill Is Gone. I thought I’d succeeded in calming her some, but then she sighs, and says into my shoulder, “Will doesn’t want me anymore and I don’t blame him for going back to Connie.”
“I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion if I were you.” I stuck close to him last night. I had my suspicions, but I wanted to see with my own eyes what he and Connie have been up to. The two of them did have their bodies pressed together. “You don’t have any proof.”
“What about the long blond hairs?” When she gets up enough nerve to confront him, she’s planning to wave the ones she keeps in an envelope in the mud room cupboard triumphantly in his face so he can’t accuse her of making one of her erroneous assumptions. “And the perfume?”
“They work together in a busy restaurant,” I say as we move around the room. The heaviness that she’s feeling in her heart doesn’t reach her feet. She really is a lovely dancer. “They’re bound to brush up against one another.”
“Nice try. I work there too and I don’t come home with black hair on my blouse smelling like Juan and french fries. And Otto keeps track of everything that goes on in the diner and I heard him singing to himself, ‘Connie has a boyfriend…Connie has a boyfriend.’”
I come to an abrupt halt and hold her at arm’s length. “C’mon, Tessie. Really? Otto? The man who wears shingle kilts and believes we’re under attack from the Planet Argon?” The way a mother wishes to spare her child pain, I’d love to tell her what’s going on between Connie and Will, but it’s contrary to one of the most basic tenants of an imaginary’s life: “There are no shortcuts to your friend’s destination. Do not interfere with their journey.” (I’m aware this sounds like one of Birdie’s Hallmark cards, but that doesn’t make it any less true.)
“Our wedding anniversary is coming up in May,” Tess says. “If the cancer has spread…,” I take an extra-strong hold of her, but she resists and steps back, “I need to go to the sanctuary.”
The subterranean space is separated from the finished side of the basement that holds the big TV and beanbag chairs by a door to the past that she steps through often to worship the happy childhoods that are kept here. The overhead bulbs shine down too harshly upon what she holds precious, so she lights the three votive candles in red glass holders that she keeps at the ready on one of the storage shelves near the door.
Will was raised in the house, and sometimes on nights like these, when nothing else seems to work to take her out of herself, she comes down here and digs up souvenirs of his boyhood that his mother packed away in container
s to keep time from nesting in them. If you don’t count Birdie, Louise’s ashes and her constant nagging, and the pictures Tess inherited upon her gammy’s passing, there is little left of her childhood except for the reruns that play in her head.
She lifts the top off the plastic box marked William—1957-1960. There’s a laminated school report that his mother was so proud of with a childish drawing of the diner below the title printed in Will’s little-boy hand—My Daddy Makes the best Hamgers in the Hole World. She digs down farther and buries her nose in his little baseball glove. Willie played shortstop.
Remnants of Haddie’s and Henry’s early years have been lovingly preserved as well. The blue blanket she brought her son home from the hospital in. Her daughter’s lacy baptismal dress, she was so chubby. Their tiny white baby socks. Henry’s Go, Dog, Go book. Haddie’s earliest photographs of her mother and father shot from such a low angle that Will and Tess look like beneficent giants.
She thought the memories would bring comfort the way they usually did, but tonight they’re having the opposite effect. She’s barely able to blow out the votive candles, and says raggedy, “I can’t catch my breath,” as she dodges around the boxes, shoots up the stairs, and straight out to the deck of the house.
It’s below zero and the sky is sprinkled with stars. Garbo is looking up at Tess, who is looking up at the northern sky. The cold air hitting her tight lungs opens up her breathing some, but she’s still struggling. She points at Orion the Hunter. “Like father, like son,” she gasps. “Henry doesn’t need me anymore either.”
“Now ya know that’s not true. Henry Orion adores you. He just ain’t showin’ it at the current time.” I’m gonna get in Dutch. I’m not supposed to do this sort of thing, but she’s feeling so forlorn and what are friends for? I spin her toward the house, point up to her son’s bedroom window, and say to the heavens above, “Please enlighten her.”