Twenty years before, when we first came to Washington, we had gone out to an Italian restaurant with a foppish young friend named Jerry. It had been a classic 1950s Italian restaurant: wooden booths, candles stuck in Chianti bottles frosted with multicolored melted wax, red checkered tablecloths and the thick smell of cheese and tomato sauce. Max and Jerry sat together across from me and I had leaned back against the chilled wood of the booth to rest my head.
Gradually, I became aware of the man sitting directly behind me. He was talking slowly but steadily to a woman. As I listened to him, I was overwhelmed by a desire to see what they looked like. Stretching upward and turning quickly, I peered over the back of the bench.
They were middle-aged. The man appeared to be a slightly depressed salesman. The woman was a nondescript housewife dressed in an awning-striped cotton smock.
The man was explaining to the woman why he was going to leave her and their children. He said he was tired of her whining and complaining. He said he was tired of the children’s constant demands. Also, he said, as if it were an afterthought, he had fallen in love with a woman who worked in his office. He was going to move into her apartment that weekend. He was going to give his wife and children four hundred dollars a month and he didn’t want any backtalk.
I saw the waitress deliver two plates of spaghetti to them before bringing menus to our table. Max and Jerry were deeply engrossed in a political discussion.
My heart was thundering.
I felt my breath growing shallow. The smell of pizza and meatballs was gagging. There were crumbs in front of me on our checkered cloth from the Italian bread Max and Jerry had crumbled. I saw butter frosting a knife that lay on the table. When the waitress came to take our order, I asked only for a glass of Chianti.
I must have known that some twenty years later the same thing would happen to me.
CHAPTER 4
“This is wild,” I say, shaking my head so my glasses slide down the sweaty bridge of my nose.
I am violently upset by the anguish of Sukie’s journal. Having avoided such emotionalism in recent years, I am now overwhelmed at being subjected to it under the present circumstances.
“What do you mean?” Elaine asks.
“Well, I just didn’t know Sukie had such a bad time of it. Actually I thought she was rather relieved to be finished with Max and finally free to do her own thing.”
“She told you that?” Elaine gasps, straightening up in her corner of the couch.
“Well, not exactly,” I waver. “I mean, I knew Sukie was angry at Max, but I didn’t think she was strung out like this.” I wave Sukie’s pages in the air.
“God, Diana. For a famous anthropologist, you certainly don’t understand much,” Elaine groans. “What about that scene in the restaurant with the ketchup? I know that actually happened. Sukie was devastated by her divorce.”
“Look. You know Sukie put on scenes in restaurants and bars. I mean she was upset, but she wasn’t as distraught as all that.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Just that it wasn’t really as bad as this makes it sound.”
“Look, Di, you didn’t see all that much of Sukie lately,” Elaine testifies earnestly. “I came down here a lot. Also, I think she confided in me more because I’d gone through the same sort of thing just a year before she did. It’s no fun being dumped even if you are a free spirit like Sukie. It still hurts. And it’s perfectly clear to me now, in retrospect, that Sukie actually had a breakdown after Max left her.”
“I don’t know if you should call it a breakdown,” Joanne interposes, looking dubious about such technical language being applied to Sukie. “She did sort of lose it there for a while, but it wasn’t exactly a breakdown.” She looks directly at me and then shifts into a discreet but meaningful voice. “She was doing an awful lot of drugs, though. Prescription shit.”
I nod, but Elaine is still looking at me indignantly.
“You know, Sukie might have told different stories to different friends,” I suggest. “She was a writer and she had a real sense of her audience.” I let my voice drift off so I won’t slide into any comparisons.
“I don’t think you know what it feels like to have your husband divorce you, Diana. You wanted your divorce. You’d outgrown Leonard. You were bored with him and wanted to be free to do your work. Besides, you’re different. You’re not as emotional as Sukie or me. You try to avoid feeling anything too intensely,” Elaine concludes with a sour expression.
I run my fingertip around the rim of my glass, somewhat injured by Elaine’s analysis. My self-distancing is both conscious and conditioned. I grew up in a family that abhorred emotion. In middle age, I simply reactivated my own original predisposition to avoid obsessive behavior.
“A twenty-year marriage is hardly a one-night stand,” Elaine continues even more fiercely. “You know, to this day, every time I read a good book I get an almost irresistible impulse to throw it in a Jiffy Bag and send it to Nathaniel. I know what sections he’d like best and what would make him laugh. I could even underline it for him if I had to. I’ve got his point of view in my head. And I know it must have been the same for Sukie. Don’t you realize what that kind of split does to a person? It’s crazy time for the resisters—the ones like Sukie and me who don’t want a divorce. When a marriage breaks up after that long a time, it’s like a death.” She begins to cry softly.
“I think that’s a fair statement,” Joanne concurs. She is pushing her thick hair away from her face, nervously hooking it behind her ears. “But still, I know I mostly saw Sukie in New York when she came up to work with me, but I never thought her marriage was all that central to her identity. I mean, when we were really working hard on some article together, we always had such a great time—just banging around my apartment in our jeans and sweatshirts and pounding the typewriter and laughing and eating and drinking pots of coffee. Sukie could get high off writing. We both could. Or maybe it was just the coffee. But we had such great times. And to me, it never even felt like she was married. I mean, I do know she had a lot of … men friends in New York and that she was … pretty independent.”
Elaine turns to look at Joanne as if she’s just desecrated the flag.
“Anyway, it’s all sort of … moot now,” I whisper with my lips quivering. “It doesn’t seem to make much difference now that she’s dead.”
“Oh, yes it does,” Elaine argues. “Because it tells you how her life ended and what it was like right before the end. You’re always trying to generalize everything, Diana. You’re always trying to apply your own point of view to our whole generation.”
“Oh Christ, let’s not fight now, Elaine, okay?” I ask impatiently. “Let’s not do a Rashomon. What difference does it make? Just forget it.”
I get up to fix myself a second, stronger drink and thankfully think of freshening Joanne’s and Elaine’s. They both seemed pleased by my gesture and accept it as some sort of apology. Clearly we all want to stay together until our anger dissipates so we can draw some comfort from each other.
But I do see things differently from the way Sukie’s other friends see them. By training I’ve been disciplined to detect generational forces and societal patterns within individual behaviors. Academically I practice discerning the common causes and concerns of discrete, highly variegated groups. Anyway, in this instance I am part of Sukie’s generation; I too am an adult Depression Baby so I am personally aware of the sources and forces that influenced us. Indeed, from the time of our birth into families that had neither enough food nor space for us, many of us wondered if we were really “wanted” or just “accidents.” Why would our desperate and frightened parents voluntarily have added another dependent to their struggle for survival?
Although Sukie may have appeared super-confident, enormously talented and totally charming, essentially she could never feel secure because she was her mother’s daughter. Psychologically and financially buffeted by complex historical circumstance
s, our mothers believed they needed male breadwinners to avoid ending up on breadlines. They were probably right. Our mothers’ generation was quick to forfeit independence and personal fulfillment in order to assure some, security for themselves and their children. Consequently their major bequest to us was an imprecise—but imperiling—sense of helpless dependency.
Professionally, I believe Sukie’s sense of loss was culturally as well as personally dictated. Depression Babies often responded to deprivation as if it were a call to arms. Like many other Americans born during the thirties, Sukie could get high off her losses. Challenges mobilized her for battle. Adversity inspired her to greater efforts and any uphill fight created a sense of drama that heightened her already intense determination. Many times I saw Sukie wrap some setback around herself like a ragged security blanket to give her confidence in the face of disadvantage.
Suddenly I feel another hot flash begin to mount. The skin below my neck starts feeling prickly and a rush of warmth spreads upward like a rash toward my face. Arching my arms, I lift the heavy weight of my hair up to the top of my head so that a little cool air kisses the back of my neck.
I glance at Elaine and Joanne. In their floral print sun dresses, they look like crumpled bouquets flung down and forgotten upon the sofa.
“Listen,” Joanne begins.
But then the telephone rings. Since I’m the nearest, I lift the receiver. At first all I can hear is the sound of distance—rushes of air or waves of water.
“Hello?” I say loudly several times. Finally I hear Max’s distant, but still strong, baritone voice.
“Diana? Diana, is that you?”
“Hello, Max.”
“What happened?”
“She had a cerebral hemorrhage. She died right away. She was in the press gallery at the Senate.”
“Oh God. The doctors couldn’t do anything?”
“It was too late. Do the kids know?”
“Yah. I just told them a little while ago.”
“How are they?”
“Awful now. They were great before.”
“How are you?”
“I’m not sure. How ’bout you?”
“Okay. Elaine and Joanne are here too.”
“Thank them for me. I’ve got a flight to New York in about an hour, but there’s only one seat, so the kids aren’t coming back until tomorrow. I get into Kennedy around seven in the morning and I’ll catch the first plane to D.C. When’s the funeral?”
“Monday, I guess.”
Max is silent as he absorbs the fact that nothing has been arranged.
“Is Sukie’s dad there?”
“He’ll be coming tomorrow or Sunday.”
“Okay. I’ll see you before noon.”
“Have a safe trip.”
I hang up and repeat the conversation to Elaine and Joanne. Then we all stare at each other. For a long while we remain silent. We finish our drinks. We suck our ice cubes. We stare off into space. Each of us is physically and psychologically exhausted. We are also facing some major blockages. We are not yet ready to believe that what is happening is really happening. When we finally decide to go to sleep, Elaine says she’ll fix the couch and stay in the living room because it’s so cool. Joanne decides to use the guest room, so I take Sukie’s.
The second floor of the house is much hotter than the first and Sukie’s room is stifling. It is also a mess—not dirty, just confused. She hadn’t made her bed before she hurried off to die. I turn on the air conditioner in the window and look around. Somehow everything seems more complicated than it used to be. I get the feeling that Sukie had been attempting to integrate the disparate parts of her existence and that the various strands had been drawn together here in her bedroom.
The head of the big sleigh bed is set against the double bay windows, and the mauve-colored sheets, sprinkled with pale yellow flowers, are tangled with a cotton quilt of irregular plum patches. The combination creates immediate chaos. Sukie’s bookend bedside tables hold matching lamps with mauve shades. In fact, mauve is everywhere, bleeding and blending into the faded Oriental rug that covers the bleached wood floor.
I try to think of Sukie in relation to that color and finally decide she must have adopted Elaine’s affection for it. We have all been friends for so long that sometimes we internalize each other’s preferences. Each of us has occasionally bought a dress that was clearly intended—by style, design, color or, even worse, size—for someone else. Eventually these “mistakes” get forwarded to the appropriate person and we all joke and tease about them: “Sukie thought she was Diana and bought a white angora turtleneck.” “Brenda thought she was Joanne and bought powder-blue suede slacks.” “Elaine forgot she didn’t have pierced ears and bought those gorgeous gold hoops she gave Myrna for Christmas.”
On one side of the room stand a dresser, a large Victorian wardrobe, and a stout wicker hamper missing its top so that the jumble of laundry inside is visible. On the other end of the room is a desk created by a long board propped atop two metal filing cabinets. On it sit Sukie’s old Selectric, crowded ashtrays, and mugs filled with stagnant white coffee. Magazines, books, newspapers, and piles of papers conspire to create even greater commotion on either side of the typewriter.
I begin to look around for some fresh linens. The knowledge that Sukie slept in her bed this morning makes the sheets seem contaminated. When I pause to think about it, the only disease Sukie had was death itself, but I still want to change the bed. In the closet I find some folded linens on the top shelf before being waylaid by the sight of Sukie’s wardrobe.
As always, it seems to me Sukie wore costumes rather than clothes. Everything in her closet seems selected for some hypothetical photo opportunity staged so Sukie could present different visions and versions of herself. There are severe tweed suits and blazers next to voluptuous velour jackets and skirts. There are blue denim coveralls, jeans, and Western cowboy boots, but also bronze dancing slippers and a limp lamé cocktail dress half falling off its hanger.
It is also apparent that the clothes in Sukie’s closet are organized by sizes. There seem to be sections for eights when she was slimming, tens for normal times, and twelves for use in case of emergency. Most of her dresses are Loehmann’s anonymous designer models with torn-out labels. We have always worn discounted designer clothes and know the location of every outlet store in the country.
I change the bed, grab my little suitcase, and go across the hall into the bathroom for a shower. On a hook behind the door hangs a rosebud print nightgown I recognize as the one Sukie wore the last time she stayed at my apartment. I press my face against the gown for a moment, to inhale the sweet smell of her body, and the cotton caresses my cheek in return. Under the shower, I cry while the tepid water sobs past my ears and weeps down my body.
Afterwards, wrapped in a big blanket of a towel, I stand before the medicine chest mirror and look at myself. Beneath my tan, I am tired and shaken. My face seems out of focus, like a poorly developed print of itself. What I call my khaki—they’re really sand-colored—eyes and hair seem more faded than usual after weeks at the beach. I believe eventually I will simply bleach out and disappear, rather than die.
Then, to abort any closer self-inventory, I exile the mirror by opening the medicine chest. And there is Sukie’s drug collection—all the little bottles of time-release crutches to which so many of us have been addicted at various times of our lives. Smiling, I remember the last time Sukie stayed with me in New York. At breakfast she’d asked for some Sweet ’n’ Low and I’d passed her two white saccharine tablets. Then, in silent amazement, I’d watched as she unconsciously popped them into her mouth like pills and swallowed them with a slug of coffee rather than dropping them into her cup.
We had a good laugh over that one; Sukie was a great laugher.
Instinctively I reach for one of the prescription bottles and, rather redundantly, read its label before extracting and swallowing two of the five-milligram Valiums. Then I palm the
bottle, knowing Sukie would want me to have it. Given our stressful lives, none of us was ever beyond stealing popular prescription pills from one another. It was the only thing—other than time—that we ever took wrongfully from each other.
Returning to Sukie’s room, I lie down naked on her bed so I can feel whispers of cool air from the window air conditioner. More and more frequently now I sleep naked because of nocturnal hot flashes that sting me awake like an electric heating pad, set on High, and forgotten in the bed. It always takes a while before I remember that I no longer have menstrual cramps, that there is no heating pad, and that I am drenched in sweat from a midnight hot flash that makes me glow like an iridescent object in the dark.
Staring up at the ceiling, I smoke one last cigarette and think about the section of Sukie’s journal I’d read. The existence of any journal terrifies me because I know that is where writers corral their wildest feelings and censor emotions too savage to publish even in disguised fictional form, Of course I do not want to know all the pain Sukie suffered. Yet, because her journal exists, I am compelled to read it and I hear what she says. Actually, what she is saying is not that different from what a lot of our other friends have also been saying lately.
We have lived through a lot. Born to depressed families, we grew up fearful during the Second World War, came of age in the fifties when our country had gone crazy from prosperity, and entered college, at the time of the Korean “conflict,” as the Silent Generation whose teachers were afraid to teach because of McCarthyism. We flourished during the civil wars of the sixties and endured the interminable seventies, only to find that the eighties began as a harsh and inhospitable decade for us.
Now a lot of us ache for a past we couldn’t wait to finish when it was still the present. One of the saddest things about our generation is that during much of our lives we were out of sync with our own life cycles. Because of this, many of us were destined to suffer divorce and solitude at an unconscionably early age and stage in our lives. This is just a fancy way of saying that lots of us have many regrets and don’t like being middle-aged singles alone once again. We still yearn with surprising nostalgia for the times when we each had a young family that folded like a fist protectively around us—a secure, but mobile defense shelter that could also be wielded offensively if necessary.
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