by Tracy Barone
Lilacs
Cici likes air travel. She finds it soothing to be in the capsule of neither here nor there. But first class isn’t what it used to be. She’s had to tap her champagne glass twice to get the stewardess’s eye and decides to switch to vodka and orange juice. For the first time since Cheri was a small child, Cici feels like she was actually able to help her. She would like to have stayed longer but she knew she’d done as much as Cheri would allow. It doesn’t get easier. She thought that maybe with age she wouldn’t feel the referred pain that comes from seeing your child suffer. She was wrong. If she could, she would take Cheri’s burden away, breathe in her loss and expel it like smoke. But she can’t do that for Cheri any more than Sol could do it for her when she lost the baby. You were once my salvation, she could have whispered to Cheri, you gave me a reason to live and now you must find the same for yourself.
Why does she think of the right thing to say only after the fact? She felt she had said both too much and too little to Cheri. A child does not want to know the intimate things that go on between her parents. How could she tell Cheri that she was also to blame for the woman with the emerald ring? That after her baby died, she became numb to pleasure she knew Solomon wanted to give her but she could not receive. Or give to him. She turned her face away, pretended for so long that one day the mask she was wearing had become her face. She had put so much of her love and energy into being a mother, wanting to do better than her mama. She had only one child; there was plenty of room in her heart. But she had not left enough room for Solomon. She knows this now. But then, she was so young. She understood so little.
She could not tell Cheri about Solomon’s confession. She would like to erase that memory and focus only on the fact that they found happiness again. Solomon had shown her that he was still the man she had fallen in love with. He’d awakened something in her that she had given up hope of ever feeling again. But she found herself able to speak of only the small things to her daughter. For such big things, she could never find the words. You did nothing. It might have taken Cici years, but she did do something. If I could forgive Solomon, so can you, was what she meant to say. “God forgives us so we can forgive each other,” Father Joseph told her and Solomon when they sat across from him in his office at the church. “Are you prepared to do that, my children?”
She was not prepared when Solomon confessed. He had been on a phone call at work when his eyes suddenly went dark. She had raced to the hospital. He was sixty-six years old. His veins were bad; the phlebitis could give him a stroke and kill him. He was getting special attention, surrounded by doctors who said he was lucky—it was only a miniature stroke. A TMI, she was sure, but she was saying it wrong because Cheri corrected her. They did not want to worry Cheri; she had told her afterward, when most of his eyesight came back. She had seen him struggling with his gout, his swollen legs, but he was always so strong. “Doctors make the worst patients,” he’d told Cici when she worried about his health. Now the man with all the answers, the proud doctor she’d married, was like a little boy in his hospital gown. She slept on a chair by his bed and would wake up in the middle of the night and find his hand searching for hers. She got in next to him; his arms looped around her waist and his head rested on her neck.
The next morning, his sight had come back in one eye and the doctors said he could go home. “I have to tell you something,” he said as they were packing to leave. “It’s over with her. It has been for a long time, but I needed you to know.” Cici could not have said when, exactly, but she’d sensed Sol’s attention was slowly returning to her.
“I made a mistake,” he continued. “I’m not proud of it or of how I handled it. I never loved her the way I love you. But it wasn’t just the two of us.” For a moment, Cici could not breathe. He and the Emerald Woman had a son. And that boy was going to be a man; he was soon to be in college. “It wasn’t planned,” he said, and she’d snorted. She did not want to hear any more. Was it worse or better that he’d stayed with the woman because they’d had a child? She could not give him his own child. Was this why he’d sought out someone else? As much as she tried to block them, these thoughts crept in with cat’s paws later. But for now, she needed Sol to stop talking. She held up her hand.
“If you don’t want me to come home, now or ever, then I will have to accept that. But I needed you to know the whole story.” How could her husband have a child that was not hers? In all her years of thinking about the Emerald Woman, she had somehow never imagined such a thing. Men wandered, had affairs. Not children. Because he had confessed, was she supposed to forgive? Was that what his eyes were pleading? She had to ask herself: Could she imagine a life without Solomon? “We are going home,” she said.
Cici wraps the cashmere throw that she brought around her, glad that nobody is in the seat next to her. Never once had she considered a life without Solomon. They had the glue of their marriage: beautiful homes to run, food she knew to buy and cook for him, the suits she picked out and packed and unpacked, the daily calls, his always knowing what to do, how to fix things. Her papa had died when Cici was so young, but she remembered the look on her mama’s face the day it happened, a look that said the world would never be the same, would never feel like a safe place again. Solomon had kept Cici’s world safe.
It is hard to remember the gradual way the shoot of forgiveness surfaced. She had not gone looking for it. To celebrate the fresh start, he had bought her a gift—lilacs, just like the ones he’d planted for her in Montclair. He knew to get tight clusters with the purple buds just awakening. Where had he found lilacs in winter? “Nothing is impossible,” he had said, but not about the lilacs. A perfect spray sitting there on her white plate at the dinner table. Someday, when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold. Frank Sinatra crooning on the stereo. Croon. Solomon had taught her that word back when his touch made her shiver as if with fever. When her teeth were white and her knees unwrinkled and her heart tender. “You are my home,” he said. “I only ever wanted you, us, as we were.” He poured her some wine, an excellent vintage. “I only ever wanted to make you happy, Cici. The houses, the jewelry, these were things I could give you when you didn’t seem to want everything else I had to give. More than anything, I wanted to know that you still wanted me. When you cut up my clothes, I thought that you’d scream and threaten to leave me. A declaration would have stopped me in my tracks.”
A declaration—where were the words back then for all the emotions she had held in? “It was not my duty to tell you to stop,” she said. She thought of her mother and sister. “Men slow down when they are older,” Genny had said about her Ettore when he had his women, “they come home again.” A declaration. Now, that evening, she’d found the words. She shouted and called him a liar and a motherfucker, screamed that she should have taken a whack out on him when she could. When she was exhausted and about to call to Cookie because the dinner would be cold and she was probably drunk, watching TV, he stood up and took her in his arms: “We can’t go back to where we began—we are both different people than we were twenty years ago. But I want to share who I am now with you. But you have to be willing to share yourself too.” He touched her cheek with his hand. She could see the passage of time, reflections of all the men she’d known or thought she’d known in his face. He talked about how he would retire and become a doctor again, work in a clinic for no money. He was going to help the people who most needed helping. “I am going to be a better man, just let me show you.” And the way you look tonight. And then his hand was on her back like a knife, cutting the buttons off her dress. His breath on her ear: “Forgive me. Please, forgive me.”
“Are you all right, ma’am?” The stewardess is leaning over, handing Cici a tissue. Cici nods her head; she didn’t even realize she was crying. She pats her eyes and then checks herself in her compact, fixes her makeup. There is still an hour left of the flight; she settles back to try to nap. “A woman is born with only so many butterflies,” her mother had said
when Cici told her she was in love with Sol. “When your heart is broken by a man, when he hurts you, he steals one. Don’t let your butterflies go easily, Carlotta mio—one day you may be left with none.” The last gift Solomon gave her was a gold necklace with a mother-of-pearl butterfly, tiny diamonds around its wings. It had been too painful to wear that necklace after he died, but now she thinks she can. And one day, when she passes it to Cheri, she might just find the courage to tell her a little bit more.
Ashes Are Heavier Than You Think
Cheri hesitates outside the door to Michael’s office. She’s been back in there only once, to put the box of his ashes on his desk because she had no idea what to do with them. Michael, with all of his obsessing over her watching him go into the fire and detailed instructions for his memorial/premiere party—right down to the cocktail recipes—was mute on the subject of his mortal remains. She’d told the lady at the funeral home no to putting Michael in a columbarium, an urn, having him made into a ring, or hanging him in a portrait; she’d just take him to go. But now she has to reenter HMS Bay, since Bertrand wants her to send him The Palmist files from Michael’s computer. She’s been putting off the task for long enough, and she certainly doesn’t have the excuse of being too busy. She’d said no to Samuelson’s invitation to take back her classes “with modifications” and could no more listen to news about the Iraq museum’s losses than she could revisit her book or write anything more than a grocery list.
She cracks a window to relieve the stuffiness. A breeze blows in, riffling a movie poster on the wall that’s come untacked on one side. The afternoon light looks dusty. The plain brown box of ashes is right where she left it, by Michael’s computer next to a vase of deeply dead lilacs. As a parting gift, Cici had filled the house with “new life.” Cici’s fluffing up HMS Bay felt like a violation, but Cheri has to admit that it’s thanks to her mother that putting on pants is now an almost daily occurrence. The air no longer smells of nag champa or sickbay or, she realizes sadly, Michael. Are you ready?
When she sees Michael’s face come to life on the screen, it startles her. Like he’ll come up behind her saying, “What the hell are you doing on my computer? And by the way, did you read my journal?” She fast-forwards through The Palmist video files, catching bits of what he says. Images move in time-lapse; his eyes sink deeper into his face, he goes from sitting, to being propped up in a hospital bed, to lying down. His voice grows thin and raspy. “How do I live while dying?” The light is crepuscular; his face is partially shadowed. She lets it play: “The dirty little secret is that I had a fantasy that I’d find the answer out there. And I’d be healed. But whatever anyone said to me, it all boiled down to: believe. My rational mind wasn’t having any of that. ‘Fake it until you make it’…if I had a nickel for every time I said that. Then I remembered what I’d witnessed with this monk in Thailand. He was a meth addict dying a painful death on the streets, his face covered in sores. He had gangrene. I asked him how he had lost his way. He said that there was no way to lose, that everything—good and bad—was all experience. ‘Nothing to do, nothing to change, everything is perfect as it is.’ If we accept what is, then there’s no conflict. No conflict, no suffering. No suffering and we are at peace. I could tell looking into his eyes that he knew this, not in his mind, but in his heart. Despite his miserable circumstances, this man had dignity. And, finally, I got it. It’s not about the mind; it all comes from the heart.” Cheri has no stomach for this. She powers down the computer, then yanks every last tentacle from the wall. Bertrand can have the whole damn thing.
Her weekly talks with Marlene—she’d cut the Dr. crap—is her only social life. She is sick of herself, of being in this house.
As she lifts Michael’s computer onto the counter at the UPS Store, she thinks she is done with inertia. Peanuts and bubble wrap—hell, yes. Insure it for the highest amount possible, and get it there as fast as possible. Why not say yes? She didn’t have to stay in Chicago. She could start over, move to another state or out of the country because she had no ties and, for the moment, no job. Buy all the guns she wanted and go around the country to every three-gun competition there was and call that her life. Yes to telling Samuelson take your handcuffed job and fuck it. She has money and doesn’t need to be ashamed of it or hide it from anyone anymore. Hell, if she could figure out something she was inspired to research, she could fund her own trips, or even become a donor, greasing the wheels on any number of projects. She walks home feeling the late-summer sun on her face like a warm slap telling her to wake up and get on with her life.
“It’s okay to feel relieved. Even excited at the prospect of new beginnings. That’s understandable, even necessary,” Marlene says. “You’re familiar with the pink-cloud syndrome, I’m sure.”
Cheri is distracted by the ass prints on Marlene’s faux-suede couch. Looks like there was a couple here before her. Shouldn’t the good doctor rake the couch to clear it, like in a Japanese stone garden? “I’m sober and can conquer the world?” Cheri says. “And after the pink cloud comes the crash of reality. Not really into Big Book–speak.”
“I wasn’t referring only to your being sober. Loss isn’t a cold that lasts for a few days and is gone. But I want to return to Cici’s visit first,” Marlene says. “It sounds like she showed some real emotional honesty. It couldn’t have been easy for her to tell you she’d lost a child before she adopted you.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Cheri says and then pauses. “Now that I think about it, my entire childhood was spent filling a void I didn’t even know existed and could never fill anyway. It’s ironic because before Michael died, we’d gone to a funeral for a baby. I was unhinged. They all kept insisting it was a ‘celebration of life,’ that we needed to be grateful for the hours the baby was here on earth. What bullshit. If my math is right, Cici adopted me right after she lost her own baby. One puppy dies so you rush out and buy a new one?” Cheri meets Marlene’s gaze. “It was like there was this shadow child the whole time I was growing up.”
“A shadow child…that’s quite common to feel when a child in the family dies and everyone must go on. Usually there’s a lot of guilt. Especially if your mother didn’t have time to process the death. Was her baby a girl?”
“A boy. It’s funny—when I was a kid, people mistook me for a boy. Cici was always trying to girl me up. I thought it was to make me look more like her, but maybe it was so I didn’t remind her of him? She put so much on me. I was her everything; it felt like she was stalking me with her love. Her happiness was all tied up in her being my mother—Sol was jealous of that. She told me that she got very depressed after the baby died. It sounded like she was nearly suicidal…”
“So you were her salvation.”
“Or consolation prize. Maybe it was better I didn’t know. You need a flow chart in my family to know who knew what about whom at any given point. Moments of emotional honesty are few and far between.”
“Did it change anything, when Cici told you that she knew about Catherine?”
“They say kids of divorce secretly wish their parents would get back together. Well, it was the opposite for me. I always wanted them to get a divorce and be done with the lies.”
“And why do you think they didn’t?”
“Her whole identity was wrapped up in being the wife of a rich, important man and living on the Upper East Side. Bought off with baubles. I didn’t exactly hide my feelings about her…choices.” Cheri hesitates for a moment. “But what do I know about my parents’ relationship? She said she was happy with Sol in the end; maybe he told her he’d broken up with the woman and they had a come-to-Jesus moment. Give all the credit, and the blame, to the Catholic Church. As much fun as it is deconstructing my family mythos, it doesn’t change what happened.”
“As an exercise,” Marlene says, “what if you stepped back and looked at them not as your parents but just as two flawed people, doing the best they could at the time? If you can separate your expectations of them
as your parents from who they are as people and see them in a larger context, then it’s easier to let go of not getting what you needed from them.”
“Does it all come down to not getting what you need from Mommy and Daddy?” Cheri doesn’t hide her irritation. “I’m a grown woman. This is what I hate about therapy. It all boils down to whining about your relationship with your parents. I want to deal with today. I want to get over this patch.”
“You know how to go out in the world and accomplish. When you’re ready to do that again, you will. And what you ‘do’ may look and feel very different when you’ve actually dealt with your grief. Past and present. Right now, your work is to let the empty spaces be empty.”
Cheri sighs; another version of nothing to do, nothing to change. “Well, I’m thinking about doing that somewhere else. Getting out of town for a while.”
“I’m going to point out that there’s a pattern here,” Marlene says. “When things get too tough emotionally—”
“I knew you’d say that. Taking a break isn’t the same thing as running away. I haven’t a clue what I want in any area of my life, but I’m not going to figure it out until I get some perspective.”
“Do you have something in mind?”
“My friend Taya has a house she never uses in Malibu and is always saying I can come stay there. I hate the sun almost as much as I hate the West Coast, but it’s far away from here.”
“Sometimes you have to go to the least likely place in order to find what you’re looking for,” Marlene says, “especially perspective.”