by Sue Miller
In the dark, she is abruptly appalled at herself. She doesn’t believe this; she, too, is greedy for everything. Like Derek.
Like Cam. At the thought of Cam, she feels again the rage that rose in her, hitting him. She sees his head, bowed under her fists.
What was it he’d said to her? That she’d never worked at love?
But had he? Had he?
His face that time in Chicago, so closed, so sure. That couldn’t have been love. And the way he looked the night they stripped the wallpaper, when he spoke of their parents so bitterly. His clear contempt for her too. How angry he is! How shut off. What did Elizabeth say? He feeds on himself. She thinks of his voice on the tape, so urgent, so lost in his own way of seeing things. He lied to himself about forgiveness, about love. He needed to think or himself that way. She said to Ryan that she didn’t know him. But she does, doesn’t she? He’s like her; she has that same rage, that coldness. It’s just that she doesn’t lie to herself as much.
But has she ever worked at love? As the names of towns rise up on the signs under her lights at the side of the road and then pass away, she thinks of lovers. The faces, the sex, the places where she had fights, where she kissed someone. She didn’t try very hard, not often. Maybe once or twice, when it really mattered.
But what is this, this long drive to Jack, if not effort, work? If not for love? She’s even grateful in some way for the pain. She’s glad that it’s costing her this much to come back to him.
In the dark stretches ahead of her lights, the road is silvery now in the moonlight, the sky has lightened once more with deepest night. She passes a sign for Mount Ronan.
Mount Ronan! She did a story here once. She lived here for a couple of days. This was a town famous for an abortionist. He was known for safe work. He’d done hundreds of women; Lottie herself knew several who’d made the pilgrimage. He’d kept a few motels and a couple of small-town restaurants alive for years. She’d gone to interview him in the late seventies, a couple of years after Roe versus Wade was passed. Lottie remembers him now. A handsome little white-haired man – Norman Rockwell could have used him as a model doc – living in a perfect white clapboard house with a front porch. He sat on a wide courting swing with Lottie while they talked. He’d retired by then; he couldn’t earn enough money in a standard gynecological practice to make working worthwhile.
He’d bragged to Lottie over lemonade about how well-trained his nurses had been, how clean his practice was. Lottie had asked him finally how it could have gone on for all those years without people in the town knowing.
‘Oh, they knew,’ he said. ‘Just if they didn’t want to know, they didn’t have to. If you’re careful, if you do good work, then nobody ever has to know, even if they do, you see what I mean.’ That was the angle she took in the article too – the complicity of upright people when public policy is bad.
How strange. She hasn’t thought of it, of him, in years. All that stuff she did on the road, the interviews, the research. A part of her life that’s gone from her.
She can’t stand the pain under her tooth. She turns on the radio again and finds another call-in show. They’re talking about self-esteem, this group. She concentrates on listening. She tries not to think, not to feel her pulsing jaw. There is another expert on, someone who has apparently developed just the right amount of self-esteem. There is the host, who seems to have an overabundance of it; there are the pathetic callers, trying for the soupçon that a moment on the radio will provide. This is why Freud hated America, she thinks; and he didn’t even know about call-in shows.
A woman calls who has been rebirthed; another new beginning, thinks Lottie. Like Derek’s, only from the other side. The woman speaks of her reexperience of vulnerability, of the loving support of her group, her leader: their soothing touch as she emerged – whatever that could mean – correctly this time.
Of course, this can be helpful, the expert says with condescension in his voice. For the likes of you, is the suggestion. In general, though, because the trauma, the shaming, the damage to self-esteem comes later, it’s usually better to focus on issues that occur later in childhood.
Lottie imagines her mother after giving birth, her mother holding a reddish bundle that is Lottie. Or perhaps Cameron. She might have been a loving mother to an infant; there is no way to know. Charlotte, Cameron: these romantic names. Surely they mean that she wanted something for them, something from them.
And suddenly Lottie has a memory of her mother sewing, working on a costume for Lottie, a wide net skirt set with red hearts: Lottie was to be the Queen of Hearts. For Halloween? For a school play? She can’t remember. But she was on a chair in the dining room, the sun was streaming in, her mother knelt beneath her. She tapped Lottie with a yardstick when she wanted her to turn – she couldn’t speak; her mouth was full of pins. She taped Lottie over and over, on the belly, the hip, the buttocks, a little hard rap that Lottie felt as the knock of her heart in love. Because she had loved her mother so much then: the bent graying head, the sharply parted hair, the whitish scalp, the intermittent hard rap.
It had happened every now and then; Lottie remembers it now. It must have been like an awakening for her mother. What could have caused it, what could it have been? Her mother would have a project, suddenly. The television would not be on when you opened the door. Instead her mother would be humming somewhere in the house. She would be busy. There would be the smell of something cooking, of laundry being ironed, of wallpaper paste. The clickety-clickety of the sewing machine. What would it have felt like, Lottie wonders, to be her mother? To be so at the mercy of chemicals swimming in your brain.
Lottie can’t imagine, really. She only knows what it felt like then to be the child, slowly to learn to distrust what she loved most about her mother. She’d grown to dread the days that were different, because you couldn’t believe in them. Because they preceded the inevitable return to silence and inertia. Later she would be sarcastic in describing those moments. ‘She must have been getting ready for the Pillsbury Bake-Off,’ she would say. ‘Competing for Mrs America, no doubt.’
The man with self-esteem has completely faded by now, and Lottie presses the Seek button again. She lets it make its cycle four, five times, sometimes stopping it and trying to listen to a fading signal for a while. The only clear station has a religious service on, a black preacher whose organist punctuates every sentence with a vibrating chord. The congregation shouts over it, over the preacher too. They are all far gone; it’s like strange music, repetitive, ecstatic. After a while Lottie tires of it and turns it off. She drives in silence with the pain.
Jessica. The service. Lottie was surprised when the preacher read the lines about man passing away, the place thereof knowing him no more. Why would he speak such lines? she had wondered. Such cruel lines. Of course, she knows that it was to emphasize how ephemeral earthly life is, the difference between everything mortal and everything connected to God. But to read this to a grieving mother! Dorothea Laver’s voice sounds in her head, calm, slow, full of apology.
Maybe in grief you want such lines, though, maybe you cherish the absoluteness of loss, the sense of your own pain as the only connection left. Wasn’t that really what Dorothea Laver had called Cam for? For Jessica’s last words, if there were any, yes. But also for the confirmation. She wanted him to say, I was there and I saw she was dead. She is dead. Over and over. She is dead. She has died. The paradox that as long as we still feel the pain of that, as long as we’re able to lacerate ourselves with the fact of loss, we still feel some connetion. When the pain fades, so, finally, does the person. And the real loss, which begins exactly then, isn’t felt anymore. A betrayal. The way things are, and must be.
Jack had never had that with Evelyn, of course. She was dead, she had died, but the place thereof continued to know her. A version of her. He had told Lottie that the first stroke eliminated a lot of short-term memory and, for a while, speech and her ability to walk. But as she began to recover s
ome of that and they began to be hopeful, he realized that a whole layer of her personality had disappeared. She knew him, she knew the children, but she was childlike, her judgments and responses were shallow. He said that he felt enraged at her stupidity sometimes during that period, at her impulsiveness. And it was during this time too – almost a year and half – that he most wished she’d died.
After the second stroke, she was so reduced that he could only feel pity, sorrow. And he finally learned to feel love for the person she had become.
And now his pain. Now that Lottie has learned to feel love.
She thinks of the weekend he spent in Boston, of how unwilling she was to hear about his pain, to talk about it. She makes herself go carefully over the details of their time together, of their lovemaking, their fight. Her face, in the light of dashboard instruments, moves constantly – winces, frowns, is agonized – as the images play through her mind. She makes little noises and finally, hearing this, stops herself.
This is it – her finger points at the dark road ahead: she couldn’t bear to be at the mercy of his feelings anymore, of his sorrow. In her experience, she realizes, either you’re in control or you’re at the mercy of someone else, you’re lost. She had felt that, a kind of living death, with Derek. Somehow he set the terms – because Lottie had still been Char Reed when she met him. Because she was trying to get to be who he was, trying to get to be like him. Low self-esteem, no doubt about it.
Now, suddenly, she sees, she feels, that it is this same Char Reed she has been dragging after herself all along, even into her marriage with Jack. Even now, driving back to him. She has felt changed, over and over in her life. She has marked the changes: Char to Charlotte to Lottie. Char Reed to Lottie Gardner. She has reinvented herself once, twice, three or four times, shed the past like a snake shedding a useless papery skin. Rebirthed herself. She smiles grimly in the upward light of the dash. Didn’t she and Cam talk once about that very thing?
She has felt the old lives fall away: her mother, the enclosing house, Derek and her struggle to catch up. Like shedding lovers, Al and Derek and Avery and all the others. She has seen herself as a different person each time, spinning free into the false promise of a clean slate, a fresh start. She hasn’t been willing to acknowledge the refining of a self that has never changed, that has been there through all the choosing, the grabbing, the discarding: the needy, frightened girl who chooses quickly and quickly throws things away, because she cannot bear to be chosen. To be discarded.
Even now. Even this trip, this romantic gesture, this gift she is making of herself: isn’t it, really, another way of setting the terms, of insisting on a shape?
This is what Lottie is thinking.
But this isn’t what Lottie is thinking either. Because one clear thought passes into an opposite and equally clear thought. The contradictions pile up. She is tired, she is in pain. There is just a jumble, finally. The sense of false understanding, of confusion and vulnerability at the core; all of it driven by the steady and growing pain from her tooth.
She’s in Ohio now. She’ll need some gas soon. Her headlights sweep an exit sign with the symbol of a motel on it – a bed. She begins to signal. A bed. This is what she needs. She’ll take a whole Percocet and stop this pain. She’ll sleep, she’ll wake free of pain to a new day, a new start. The end of these morbid thoughts.
There are two motels to choose from, but Lottie is suddenly so tired, so hungry for the pill she imagines will release her, that she pulls, without thinking of comparing them, into the one on her side of the road. It’s a Day’s Inn, like a dozen she’s checked into before, all of it familiar: the shape of the plastic key holder in her hand, the cheesy chandelier in the lobby, the drive around to the unlighted parking lot at the back, the sudden sense of country air as you step out of the car. The same concrete staircase to the same balcony girdled by the same spare, wrought-iron rail.
In the bathroom under the fluorescent light, she fumbles in her pocketbook, finds a whole Percocet, and takes it. She checks to see how many are left. One and almost a half. She washes her face. She comes out into the room and tries the television, sitting on the foot of the bed to change stations. There’s only snow and noise. She peels back the covers and lies down. She holds herself, making a gentle mewing, rocking from side to side. As soon as she feels the Percocet start to work, she turns the light off.
Pain wakes her, a solid pressure, no longer throbbing. It owns her before she remembers where she is, what she’s doing or why. She touches the tooth with her tongue. The gum below responds. She can feel that it is swollen, hard. She moans aloud.
When she slides the curtain back, the sky is a pale, dirty gray. In its watery light, she squints at her watch. Four-thirty. She goes to the bathroom and uses the toilet. She rinses her mouth with water that tastes wrong, that tastes of iron, Lottie thinks, or some other mineral. She takes a No Doz and another half of a Percocet. Her face is starting to swell along the jawline, but even so she can’t believe how little it has changed. She looks tired, older, puffy, but you can’t see the vise of pain her head is gripped in. She drinks another glass of water, warm this time, hoping this will dissolve the pills faster. She imagines them floating in her stomach, a little white circle and an approximate half circle. She is trying very hard to imagine anything but the pain. She shrugs her sweater around her shoulders, slides into her sandals, grabs her purse, her car keys. At the door she looks around. Nothing else is hers. There’s no sign of her having been here except for the rumpled bed.
The air outside smells fresh, and Lottie stops for a moment on the long balcony. She’s looking over the parking lot to a line of trees, black against the whiter sky. She recalls the freshness of the sea air outside her mother’s nursing home, the abundance of floral odors inside. Manufactured air. She thinks of her mother, of her own feeling that perhaps she could call forth from that leftover husk something that was meant for herself, some sense of what she’d meant to the woman who once lived inside those bones, that flesh. Of who she’d been to her. Apparently, she thinks, you will have to live without that knowledge.
She starts the car and drives to the gas station next door. While the attendant fills the tank, she goes inside and buys some coffee from a machine in a lobby not unlike the one in Pennsylvania. There’s no one else in the restaurant. The dining room here is closed, corded off. A lone worker, wearing a jaunty uniform hat, is moving behind the aluminum steam counter, setting things up.
The sky is a lighter gray when she comes out. She pulls back on to the local road, then the access road, then the highway. She opens the coffee and sips at it. It’s too hot. She sets it carefully on the flat console between the two front seats. After a while she tries the radio again. Anything to escape the sense of enclosure with this pain. There is a lot of silence, a lot of fierce static. She finally gets a country music station and turns it up, loud.
She tries to sing along, guessing at the rhymes. She’s bad at this, never imagining ‘hand’ and ‘ring,’ for instance, would work. But she concentrates hard, listening intently, visualizing the singers. She’s able to drink the coffee after a while. She holds it in her mouth briefly before each swallow, and its warmth soothes her swollen gum for a few seconds. The sky slowly lightens behind her, a gassy yellow. She looks at the speedometer. She’s going almost eighty. She brings it back down to seventy-five. When the country music finally fades, she jumps stations for a while again. She’s driving through flat gray terrain – fields, farmhouses. Here and there she passes a farmhouse with breakfast lights glowing in a downstairs window.
She’s hungry too. She finds the candy bar in her purse and breaks off a piece. She chews gingerly on the left side of her mouth, finally allowing a sugary nugget just to dissolve slowly. When it’s gone, she breaks off another piece.
Gradually all that’s been grayish in the world around her takes on color – green, mostly – and the sky is bright in the rearview mirror. The sun bursts over the horizon behind he
r. She’s humming steadily. When she can’t stand it anymore, she eats another half a Percocet. She has one half left now. It is six-fifteen.
She tries to force her mind to focus on something outside herself. She thinks of Carol, giving her the pills. A nice woman. Of Ryan with the baby. The sudden sense it gave her of being pushed aside. The way it will be. Taking her place in line.
Lottie has escaped this. Escaped thinking about it. Even with the cancer, she never allowed herself to dwell on it. She made plans, she exercised. She swore she wouldn’t die.
She and Cam have escaped it.
No, not Cam. He said – it’s true he said – that he, like her, had mothered himself; but he has also somehow been able to care for their mother. He remembers their father. He lies to himself about where he is, but he has known very well all along where he came from, where he’s going. Lottie is the one who thinks of herself as sui generis, her own mother. And even her own child: hasn’t she used Ryan’s childhood as her own? Lottie the paramecium. Divide and conquer. Be there, in every generation. ‘Immortal Lottie.’ She smiles grimly through the very mortal pain in her skull.
The dead girl. The accident. Jessica.
It is Jessica, it is Jessica and Cameron and even Elizabeth who have brought her here, to this place, this moment. She feels, suddenly, that she owes them something, something she can’t repay.
And now, in a strange kind of penance, Lottie makes herself think of exactly how it was, the car turning into the driveway in the rain. Jessica – drunk, pretty Jessica – stepping forward. She makes herself imagine Cam, thinking only of Elizabeth, only her, on the drive over, how certain he must have been that he could get control again, that he could win her back. How lost in that thought.