Frequently I dream about twins, about theatrical performances or about helicopters. Often in my dreams a helicopter is following me, fluttering above my head as I run down some dark, mean street. Sometimes there is machine-gun fire from the helicopters; other times the pilot tries to use the landing glides, like knives, to decapitate me.
In the middle of the night, when I wake alone, I review the names of all the great people I know were insomniacs. I hold this sleepless army in great esteem because they remained alert to their isolation. This must have been clarifying for them because insomnia offers an opportunity to run through one’s repertoire of regrets. It is a stage on which to relive egregious errors.
I miss my mother.
I think about Blanche DuBois. I remember the Chinese lampshade she carried around to cover any naked light bulbs she encountered. I recall her nervous rearrangements of her hair to make it fall forward and hide her face. In the past, people often thought me most attractive when I felt I looked my ugliest. Sometimes I felt too ugly to have sex. Other times I felt so ugly that sex was the only way I could express my self-contempt.
If I don’t see myself in mirrors or windows, I forget about how I look. Once in bed I can read, write entries in my journal, listen to music, feel cozy and content. But when I walk into the bathroom and see myself in the mirror, I cringe before the unbearable shabbiness of my future. I study my reflection, stunned by the unfamiliar countenance of a middle-aged woman. I only remember my young face, the one I wore from fifteen to forty, so that now its changes seem incredible to me.
I lay on the sofa thinking I could hear snowflakes falling outside. I remembered a Conrad Aiken story in which a character thought he could hear snow falling and I wondered if I was finally going mad. Desperately I tried to remember the end of that story, but I couldn’t and the fictional snowflakes kept falling inside my head.
I was afraid of losing my mind, my children, my wallet. Max said he would give me money for another six months. It took me three weeks to call a lawyer.
Sex with Max was both simple and complicated. I can’t believe I’ll never feel his hands on me again. If he were dead I could accept it. But he is three blocks away, touching another woman.
“Get out of my life,” he said to me over the telephone a few nights ago.
Several weeks after Max left, I called Diana in New York. She said that even if I had three husbands everything would still be exactly the same. I would still be home alone all day and have to go to the grocery, the shoemaker, the liquor store or the post office. I would still have to look for free-lance assignments. I would still have to do what I do. But her analysis, didn’t quiet me. I continued to flail about.
I found a psychiatrist, Dr. F. Karel, who prescribed several major tranquilizers for me. I took them with vodka. The combination totally disinhibited me. Within six weeks I was hooked on heavy doses of Prolixin, Valium, Elavil and sleeping pills. I began drinking a quart of vodka each day. I had blackouts and memory lapses. I gained nine pounds. My skin broke out; my hair refused to curl. I got deep dark circles beneath my eyes and developed a racking chest cough.
I paced the house, poured vodka into my breakfast coffee, ate peanut butter on toast, and trembled when I walked up the stairs. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep, read my mail, take a shower or get dressed. Sometimes I fasted for four or five days; other times I felt starved and ate ravenously right from the refrigerator, slapping slices of American cheese on Wasp white bread and coating everything with mayonnaise.
Gradually I stopped recording the checks I wrote. As my identity dissolved, my signature became unrecognizable. Within the first month after Max left, the bank returned fourteen of my checks. Finally I went to speak with one of the officers. Mr. Proctor seemed sympathetic and said he would clear my checks himself. Later I heard about a doctor who was so afflicted by anxiety that during an attack his signature became a straight flat line so that no pharmacist would fill his prescriptions.
One day Dr. Karel said, “Sukie, if you don’t stop acting out, you are going to lose your children, your friends, your reputation, and whatever money there is. Believe me—if you don’t stop acting crazy, you’re going to lose everything.”
I didn’t believe him until it happened.
People kept telling me to be nicer to myself. I didn’t know what they meant. Finally I decided it had something to do with flowers. Whenever I thought about the past, I had an urge to tuck some flowers in with my memories. In my imagination, I gathered hyacinths and anemones to weave around my thoughts.
I’m forty-five, look thirty-seven, and feel twenty-nine. I don’t know which is worse. Because I’m forty-five, there are some days when I no longer feel like holding in my tummy. Some mornings I think, What the hell? I’ve been holding in my stomach for as long as I can remember and now I shouldn’t have to do it anymore. But by nightfall I always feel my old sense of sexual responsibility return. Of course I have to appear slim and young, interesting and interested, composed yet available. That is my duty. To whom, I do not know.
I discovered a pattern I hadn’t known existed. In the mornings I wanted to live, but at night I wanted to die. Thoughts of suicide made me sleepy, while ideas of homicide woke me up. In the mornings, before Max left, I always wanted my freedom; at night I cherished my security. Once he was gone all I wanted was to feel safe again—even for a short while, even for a single day.
We. Elizabeth Hardwick called we a “teabag of a word.” I like that image but I never liked tea. For me, tea was always too closely associated with sore throats and tummy aches. Its smell always made me feel queasy. After Max left, the word “we” made me ache because I felt so singular. The sight of a couple put me into a panic. I felt as if no one would ever hold me again.
My heart kept racing, lurching forward, day after day. I told myself that nothing warranted such panic. No one had died. No one was sick. I could still count my blessings. But the silence of the telephone was a trembling reality that shattered me. My husband, my friend, my children’s father, didn’t love me anymore. I found it impossible to believe.
I have stopped going outside. The notion of going outside seems like the equivalent of a jailbreak to me. My self has become my prison—my prism of self-pity—and I don’t want to leave it. Actually, I am afraid that if I went outside I would perhaps see some city-scapes—littered alleys, woebegone children, bag ladies, derelicts or crazies on the bus. If by chance I look out my bedroom window and see a couple hunching close together as they walk along my street, I stare down at them in agony. I study their intertwined hands, their arms wound around each other’s waists, until they disappear around the corner. Then I feel my loss again with a piercing pain that leaves me breathless.
I do not want to start over. I want things to be the way they used to be. I want the past back. I want my old life returned to me intact and totally unchanged. I want the children to stay small cute sizes and never grow up. I want them always to go to the same school so they can walk back home together forever. I want Happy to stay inside the house so she won’t get run over.
I want life to be like it was when I was a child and could recognize any dog that walked past my house, knowing it belonged to the Olsens on Vincent or the Carlsons who lived six blocks away on Queen. Or, if that’s too much to ask, I just want everything to be the way it was when our kids were babies. I’ll even take back all the stress if lean have the rest. Just give it back to me, God, please.
The whistle on my teapot has stopped whistling. Last Sunday I forgot I had water boiling, so it evaporated and the bottom of the teapot melted all over the top of the stove. Now I use a scratched old saucepan to make my instant coffee.
It’s like my phone calls. Lately, a lot of my phone calls consist of postponements, cancellations or wrong numbers. Even the man who inspects the furnace each summer telephoned last week to change his visit from July to August.
I live in a house in the middle of a city, yet I have raccoons in my walls. Since there
is a city ordinance forbidding the killing of raccoons, my exterminator won’t do a thing about them and I can’t find anyone else who will. All I can do is listen to the raccoons scratching inside my walls every night, all night long.
My coordinated quilt no longer matches the sheets. For some reason the quilt faded faster than the linens so they no longer look like a set.
My GE iron no longer presses the small wrinkles out of my clothes. Tucks around the collars of my blouses have become quite troublesome.
Someone lost the little keys to the locks on my front windows so I can’t open them anymore. I constantly feel deprived of fresh air.
My favorite dress, a two-piece black velour, is wearing out. The backside is growing sheer. The jacket still looks good but it doesn’t cover the rubbed-away section on the seat. Also, the bodice has grown tighter so the waistband rides up on me. Without this dress, I might just stay at home forever.
I received a carbon copy of a charge slip from an Exxon gasoline station in a town where I’ve never been. My shaky signature is on the carbon, but I don’t remember ever visiting Hershey, Pennsylvania. Hershey, Pennsylvania? Why would I go to Hershey, and if I did, was I drunk or did someone take me there and not tell me where we were? Did I get a chocolate attack in the middle of the night or is all of this just a metaphor? If so, for what?
I put my ficus plant out on the back porch to get a little more sunlight and someone stole it. Now, if I go anyplace, I keep looking for it. I know I would recognize it anywhere, even if it was mixed in with a bunch of other ficus or replanted in a different pot. To make matters worse, the roots of both my jade plants have begun rotting. I think human cancer must look like those gnarled clumps of squishy flesh.
After hours of loneliness, I would sometimes dial his number. Often he left on his answering machine even if he was home; “Screw you,” the machine would say to me.
My humanity has begun to shrink like a woolen scarf mistakenly thrown into the washing machine. Inside I am shriveled up and misshapen. Panic prevails. I am aware that other people still seem to be engaged. There are processes, businesses, negotiations, plans, deals, relationships and affairs.
I believe I married too young, but I also believe that now I am too old to be betrayed, abandoned and deserted.
For a while Max and I had circular telephone conversations every day. We would rehash our lives.
You did this, you didn’t do that, he would say.
You did this, you didn’t do that, I would answer.
Then he would say, I did do this, but you wouldn’t do that.
Now he says he has finally stopped smoking, that he is exercising daily and eating only health food. He is happy, he says, very happy. He says, “There was no other way for you and me. What happened had to happen.” Now his life is simple and straightforward. He goes to his office only three days a week. He is developing a new syllabus for his classes. And he is happy living with her. He says, “She is very, very dear.”
At night he is with the one who is very, very dear.
Why had I never taken walks with him, reached out to hold his hand, leaned across a table to touch his face at a restaurant, sat beside him at a party? Why had there never been any of those impulses, any of those stirrings?
Hurt. People must fear love after a hurt like this.
Outside the orbit of a man, I lack gravity, the force that tames my soul and holds me in place.
In the past, I always tended the wounded. Now that I am hurt, I can find no one to help me. I never knew there was a time limit on rage and grief. People will take only so much and then no more. People get sick and tired of other people being sick and tired. They are bored by my obsession now. A lot of people think I’ve become a midlife crazy. Some of my dearest friends, no, most of my dearest friends, don’t want to hear about it anymore.
That week had been a chaotic one in my life. Max had said he wanted to go away for a while to work on his book before he left on a week-long trip to Europe. He said he would find a motel or cabin in West Virginia. I thought it was a good idea and on Monday morning he left early to pick up a rental car. When he stopped back home to say goodbye, he kept watching the clock. I remember wondering why he was concerned about the time. I was laughing when I kissed him goodbye.
I spent the next four days researching an article about the diplomatic change-overs at the Nicaraguan and Iranian embassies following their revolutions. On Sunday night there was to be a large wedding party for Brenda and Phil at my house. Max came back from West Virginia on Thursday but left early Friday morning for an international academic meeting in London.
Over a hundred people came to the party on Sunday night. One of Brenda’s younger friends brought his roommate along and the young man came over to greet me. He was puppy-dog friendly and finally asked if he could have my daughter’s telephone number. He said he’d met her and Max in West Virginia the week before and wanted to call her. I gave him Carol’s number without thinking twice. It took me the rest of the night to understand the meaning of what he’d said.
Max returned home the following Friday. It was a rainy October night. Because David was home studying, we went out for a drink at an almost-empty restaurant called Garvin’s Laugh-Inn, on Connecticut Avenue.
As soon as we sat down, Max started talking about the conference he’d attended in London. I drank half my Salty Dog and then asked him whom he had been with in West Virginia. He looked at me silently for a very long time and then said, “It doesn’t matter.”
He was speaking truthfully, he always did.
“It does to me, “I said. “I can’t believe you were there with a woman. A young kid who came to the party for Brenda and Phil said he had dinner with you and Carol in West Virginia. Except Carol wasn’t there, was she, Max? I can’t believe you’d try to pass off some whore as our daughter.”
Silence.
“Who is she?”
He didn’t respond.
“I can’t believe that after all these years, after everything we’ve been through, you can still do something like this.”
“I love her,” he said quietly.
“You love her?”
Silence.
Clichés crowd to my lips. “How could you do this? Why?”
“I love her.”
“Who is it?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It does. Who is it?”
We went over it again and again, like scratching an itch, cracking a knuckle, picking a scab. He was stubbornly silent. I ordered two more drinks and lost more ground. He stayed cool and sober while I got messier and sloppier as my rage mounted.
“Who the hell is she?”
Silence.
Louder. “I said, who the hell is she?”
“Her name doesn’t matter.”
“Well what does?”
“That I love her.”
“Oh shit.”
Silence.
I unbuttoned my blouse, reached inside and pulled out my left breast. Then I sat perfectly still and finished my third drink.
“Oh fuck,” he said. “Cut it out.”
I left myself exposed.
“This is what I can’t stand,” he said earnestly.
“I’ve never done it before.”
“You do other things just like it. Now stop it. Someone will see you.”
Our part of the restaurant was completely empty. When I saw the waitress coming through the kitchen door at the far end of the room, I twisted my breast back inside my blouse.
“What’s her name?”
“It’s Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth?” Terror seized me. “Elizabeth from across the street? You’re lying.”
“It’s true.”
“You fucker.”
Everything I had ever liked about him turned ugly before my eyes.
“Give me two more Salty Dogs,” I called out to the waitress in a rude voice. “Do you love her?” I asked.
“I told you. Yes.”
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“You fucker.”
“Go away for a few months,” he said judiciously. “Go to Europe.”
I lifted the bottle of ketchup off the table and poured it down the front of my blouse.
“I can’t stand your craziness,” he said.
I gulped down the first of the two drinks the waitress set on the table. When I’d finished the second, I got up and ran out of the restaurant and into the street.
Cars screeched and scattered in different directions. I stumbled down the center of Connecticut Avenue, seeking headlights that veered away before I could catch them. I could hear Max calling me and once, turning around, I saw him dodge a car in the middle of the boulevard in an attempt to reach me.
Suddenly a tall thin black woman was standing beside me, holding me with strict authoritarian hands.
“What’s the matter? What’s he doing to you? Do you know him?”
“Yes, he’s my husband.”
“Come along.” The woman maneuvered me between several moving cars and then between parked ones until we reached the sidewalk.
“Is that blood on you?”
“No, it’s ketchup.”
“I’m a plainclothes policewoman,” she said gently.
I sank against the woman’s slim strong body.
“I’ll take you home,” she said.
She put me in her car and drove the few blocks to my house very slowly. I wanted to ride in that car with her forever. She must have known. She parked and we sat together in silence outside my house for a while. Finally I got out. I said thank you. She said, “Be cool.” I said goodbye.
He was home already, in bed in his pajamas.
I stood in the doorway staring at him until suddenly I lunged across the room to begin hitting him, pulling his hair and thrashing his chest with my furled fist. Rage was driving me forward. The alcohol running through my system was mixing with my rage. I no longer knew what I was doing.
It was strange. From the moment he confessed his infidelity, I knew we would never be together again. Perhaps if there had been a glimmer of concern, if I had felt any love emanating from him as we sat in that restaurant, things might have been different. Unfortunately, it was over before I knew we weren’t a “we” anymore. Because our marriage ended so abruptly, I’ve never been able to remember what must have been our last good time together.
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