“Yah. Some of her girlfriends from New York are staying here,” he finally says. “Everyone’s just sitting around the kitchen. They’ll be here. Sure. S’long.”
He replaces the receiver.
“That was Miranda Kriss,” he says. “She lives across the street, but she’s over near Annapolis and she just heard about Sukie, so she’s driving back to D.C. She says she’ll be here in an hour or so unless the Bay Bridge is fucked. Any of you know Miranda?”
We all shake our heads.
“But you know who she is?”
“Of course,” Elaine answers impatiently. “She brought Max’s girlfriend into the picture while pretending she was Sukie’s friend.”
“What makes her think she’s welcome here, anyway?” Joanne frowns.
Slowly Jeff unfurls his lanky body and stands up.
“Yah. Well, she’s a real bimbo, and I sure as hell don’t want anything to do with her, so I’m going to split.”
“But you’ll come back, won’t you? Tomorrow? Or Monday?” Joanne asks.
Jeff circles around the table, touching each of us gently on the backs of our necks or shoulders.
“Actually, no,” he says. “I’m just gonna do a fade now and take a pass on the funeral. As long as Max and the kids are coming back tomorrow …”
We all stand up, protesting and arguing with him, but in the next instant he is gone, leaving only an enormous vacuum in his wake.
Each of us feels stunned by his departure.
“He’s … he’s a nice person,” Elaine finally says, looking down the empty hallway toward the front door.
Joanne and I consent with our silence.
CHAPTER 7
I am tired.
The Hot Flash Flashcards from the past that keep appearing before my mind’s eye are exhausting me. I am beginning to feel like an accident victim whose life runs fast-forward from beginning-to-end before the ultimate darkness descends.
“Look. I’ve got to take a shower,” I say, rising slowly out of the chair. “I never got one this morning.”
In truth, I want to be alone.
Upstairs, I draw myself a bath, but while waiting for the tub to fill I return to Sukie’s bedroom and begin to canvass her desk. There are stacks and stacks of typed pages spread along its length. I survey the cover pages and eventually begin reading a segment dated April 1983. Immediately I get hooked and return to the bathroom to turn off the water so I can lie on Sukie’s bed and read another section of her journal.
APRIL 1983
Late one Saturday afternoon I walk down Connecticut A venue to Childe Harold’s, an imitation pub I’ve always liked. Although there’s plenty of action there at night, it’s not really a singles bar and in the afternoon it’s actually quite docile. Nevertheless, I still try to make a dramatic entrance because I long ago accepted the implicit challenge of any drinking establishment and automatically create a mental image of some fictitious female in extremis. Then, when I enter, I am able to project an air of urgency for an anonymous and often oblivious audience to magnify the meaning of my arrival.
I probably acquired my I’m-being-driven-into-this-bar-by-circumstances-beyond-my-control compulsion from seeing too many cocktail-lounge intrigue movies back in the late forties. I can never just sit down at a bar, buy a drink, smoke a cigarette, pay the check and walk away. Instead I must compose a furtive face and frightened attitude suggestive of some illicit mission—lacing leisure time with B-movie melodrama to make a boozy afternoon seem more dramatic.
Mounting a stool as if swinging into a saddle, I order my first Salty Dog and study the squadrons of shiny glasses and columns of whiskey bottles marching in duplicate across the mirrored wall. A sign above the bar reads: WASHINGTON AREA DARTING ASSOCIATION. Over the stereo, Stevie Wonder is singing Happy Birthday to Martin Luther King. My heart is rinsed by a solution of pain.
Elaine once told me that whenever I arrive someplace, I always look as though I’ve just returned from some mysterious adventure. Maybe once that was true, but not now.
Walter once said to me, “I bet you never walked into a bar alone and stayed that way for more than five minutes.” He was right then, but not now.
Now I can sit alone for hours and no one even bothers to speak to me.
It’s vibes, I think—self-contempt rather than self-confidence. Even losers love winners. Even a cat can look at a queen, Mama used to say when I was little.
But now I am bankrupt. I feel as if I were once incredibly rich and then suddenly lost all my money. The idea of lost wealth never moved me before because it was too remote from my experience. But now I can understand the metaphor of money lost—the decreased potential, eroded power, missed opportunities and numbed expectations.
I believe that from this time forward everything for me will be division and diminishment, necessary losses rather than any embellishments.
Loss has become the theme of my life. Gone now are all the casual engagements, the accidental but inevitable encounters, the spontaneous spiderweb of associations and activities I always took for granted. Gone now is the invisible network of friends that served as my springboard, my lovely launching pad into life. All that was natural, easy and casual has evaporated. My center and my perimeters are blurred. Space, congestion, drift and definition have disappeared. Former affluence is all but forgotten. Men are only memories now.
From above the bar, Janis Joplin has begun singing her heart out about Bobbie McGee and an enormous emptiness blooms and blossoms within me.
Last week I called Elaine in the middle of the night, sobbing hysterically. She waited patiently until I got a grip on myself. Then I unleashed my longings for love.
“Look,” she finally said. “We’ve had our flings and we’ve had our love affairs.”
My heart paused in its pounding.
“What do you mean?” I demanded, immediately resentful, immediately determined to establish the differences between her and me.
“Those days are over,” she said. “There are other things for us to do now.”
“Like what?” I ask, helplessly frightened. Perhaps Elaine could survive alone, but there was no possible way I could.
“Like work. Like doing some support stuff for Nicaragua. Like going out to help Brenda with her new baby.”
“Are you kidding?” I groan, feeling panic flutter and flower inside me. “That’s it? That’s all there is?”
“That’s right. What were you expecting?”
“Well, I don’t know. Something else, something more.”
“Well, there isn’t any more anymore.”
“There has to be.”
Elaine expelled an ugly laugh. “Look, you can fix up your house, spruce up your wardrobe, take a vacation. There’s still things to do. It’s just different now that we’re alone.”
I began to cry. “I want more,” I sob. “A lot more.”
“Then find it,” she said.
She was finished. She had no more patience.
Elaine has always been militant about everything. Since she was my first friend at Chicago, I learned a lot of politics from her. But even back then she taught me things in a commandeering way. She always believed she was in possession of the truth so there was no room for any disagreement and since she was right ninety percent of the time, I let it be. But now that she’s gotten older and more bitter, she sometimes scares me with her totalitarianism. Since she’s no longer anchored, she’s somewhat like a loose cannon aboard a ship on a stormy sea.
Her rage toward Nathaniel is no greater than mine toward Max, but her anger is much more comprehensive and indiscriminately anti-male than mine. Even at my worst, I don’t feel or speak that way. Yet most everything Elaine says is true. I just don’t like saying all the things she says. And I don’t like to hear them said either.
Once when my life was very busy, I installed a call-waiting system on my telephone. The first day I had it, I heard the click indicating that a call was waiting so I switched lin
es.
It was a breather.
A heavy breather.
I couldn’t believe it.
Telephone repairmen always used to ask me if I was Italian. For some reason I would say yes and then button my blouse up higher.
Now there aren’t even any more telephone repairmen to come out to my home.
Once we went to a party that was held at the Golden Parrot Restaurant. It turned out that our waiter was an ex-student of mine. He told me I could have all the free drinks I wanted so I drank twelve piña coladas. Drunk out of my mind, I became frantically flirtatious and embarrassingly loud—laughing and joking and teasing everyone. I was very happy. When the dinner ended I invited everyone back to our house and led a giggling daisy-chain walk down Connecticut Avenue. As soon as we reached home, Monique and I curled up on opposite ends of the couch and fell asleep.
How drunk we were.
The dozen or so people who had accepted my invitation sat across the room from us and continued their conversation, trying to ignore our occasional happy snores. When the telephone rang I awoke, reached for the receiver, and said hello. I was silent for a moment and then, as people turned to look at me with concern, I said, “I’m sorry. I’m drunk and I can’t wait for you.”
Then I hung up.
“Who was that?” Max asked.
“My breather,” I said and fell promptly back to sleep.
Apparently the telephone kept ringing after that until Max finally took the receiver off the hook.
When I used to go out for lunch I would always order two Salty Dogs from the bar and a chef’s salad. Then I would ask for blue cheese dressing on the side—not because I feared Ending my lettuce swimming in a pool of pink calories, but because I’d discovered you usually got more dressing if it came separately in a paper cup or creamer on the side. It was my way of beating the house and paying them back for using cheddar instead of Swiss cheese in the salad or cutting their tomatoes in slices rather than chunky quarters.
Depending upon my mood I smoke Merits to feel virtuous or defiantly tear off the filters for a hit like the kick of a Camel.
Now time mocks me. The past haunts me. The present provokes me and the future taunts me. My husband’s betrayal has become my constant companion, always arguing for my attention. Only the hope of hurting him back can distract me from my obsession.
But there are no paybacks. That’s the first thing. You don’t get reimbursed for nice things you once did and you don’t get revenge for the bad things others did to you. Nobody ever said that life was fair, but certainly no one ever mentioned just exactly how inequitable things could get. Even justice leaves a lot to be desired.
I used to have everything. I don’t want to sound like an aging Hollywood actress, and indeed “everything” is relative—but still, in retrospect, it does seem as if I had a lot We had unique, unusual children—handsome, intense, and yet very well adjusted. They were like beautiful jewels set into the bracelet of our marriage.
Now I feel as if I have nothing.
I spend each day like a dollar.
First I drive David to school.
Next I go to see Dr. Karel.
Then I drive to “my group.”
Then I meet a friend for lunch.
Then I have a few more drinks.
I shell out the hours like coins from my purse.
Once I got an obscene call from a woman. It hurt my feelings more than any male crank call I ever had. I listened for a while before hanging up and then fretted for a week about who it could have been, afraid it was some woman I knew. I kept feeling that if I could remember the voice I would recognize it. I thought that the way she said the words and phrases sounded much different from the way a man says them. Somehow from a woman those words seemed more obscene.
Freedom, Janis sings, means nothing left to lose.
Not so long ago, novelists frequently borrowed that line to spin out their own complaints. They used it as a starter, the same way they used Tolstoy’s line about happy and unhappy families.
I have come to understand that it is only my compulsion to transcribe my pain that smothers any suicidal impulses. The creative process is not all that mysterious. Put yourself at the drugstore and as soon as you think of toothpaste you will also remember mouthwash. Same for writing and music and painting. If you hang around long enough, you’ll remember everything and begin to compose.
Before, when I was drunk, I used to feel beautiful. Now when I’m drunk I feel sad. And hungry. The vision of a toasted tuna fish sandwich floats into my head like a balloon in some comic strip. I know I am hungry. I haven’t eaten for a long, long time.
I hear the staccato sound of rain outside Childe Harold’s. A crowd of people enter the restaurant, noisy and drunk. They invade the place, clothed in collusion, emitting, like a heady perfume, the aroma of some earlier party they’d attended. Sitting down at a nearby table, they break into loud laughter and I feel an almost irresistible urge to run over and join them.
Why do I always feel that there has been some wonderful party somewhere to which I wasn’t invited?
Friends who used to congregate around my table at Childe Harold—silently quarreling for space and inclusion—are gone now. I sit alone at the bar.
Maybe it was the abortions.
There were three of them.
I hadn’t wanted any.
Of all the possible grievances I might have wielded, those were the only ones I never used. Somehow I couldn’t use them—even as ammunition—because I could not bear to bring them up.
Perhaps he felt their psychological energy simply because I left them unmined.
Sometimes years went past and I never thought about them.
Once he brought up the subject and I looked at him angrily and said that maybe the right-to-lifers had a point. He walked out of the kitchen.
I take my address book out of my purse and read it to review which friends I have lost. I go in alphabetical order. It’s funny. At this point in my life, the A’s are most important to me. I suddenly realize I am carrying my past around like an old address book in my purse.
There are dormer windows in the front of Childe Harold’s. They are level with the street so you can see feet going past, shoes shimmering in the light from outside. Colored flasks set upon the window ledge refract the light. A blond girl is silhouetted against one window, waiting for someone. Beyond the paned glass, rush-hour cars have begun jamming up on Connecticut Avenue, bottlenecking in the late afternoon.
I shiver. I have had four Salty Dogs. I am becoming drunk, anesthetized. The vodka creates a moat between my pain and my perception of it, making me a numb place to rest a bit while awaiting my amnesia. I have begun to welcome the blackouts that come more and more frequently now. Although they are frightening, I embrace them with gratitude.
A few weeks ago the names of dead people started surfacing in my Rolodex every time I used it. They began coming up like bodies on deserted beaches during the summertime. After a while I decided to discard the cards of my dead and wounded. I pulled out the ones for Paul and Ruthie, Orlando and Ronni, Jackie and Larry, and three of my father’s brothers. I had no card for my mother because I knew her number by heart. Ha ha! I couldn’t even do that one last tidying-up chore for her. Anyway, at the last moment I just couldn’t bear to throw away the written names of my loved ones, so I turned them around backwards and hid them at the end of my Rolodex.
But once I’d started, I felt compelled to keep plucking out antiquated cards like yellowed leaves off a plant. Next I did the wounded-divorced families. That took even longer because I had to write out a couple of single cards for every single couple. Ha ha! Ha ha! In some ways, this chore hurt even more than discarding my deceased. Many old familiar friends are simply gone now. Marriages broke up and partners moved away or went to live with someone I didn’t know. Previously stable children, whose car-pool schedules I knew by heart, ha ha, had suddenly gone into orbit and, like spies, never slept more than tw
o nights in the same place.
Such rearrangements in my friends’ lives forced me to make enormous reality adjustments. The universe I had once known was gone, but it remained clearly etched in my mind—remembered as irresistibly rich and deliciously secure. I no longer even know the addresses of friends who once shared my life with me. We no longer “no” each other. Ha, ha. Ha, ha.
I saw the card for my daughter tucked in under the A’s between my plumber and her dentist. Is that what it’s all about? Does a child you carried within you, and loved with a passion beyond any other, eventually become just another entry in your Rolodex?
Last night I sat down at my typewriter determined to relieve some of my pain by shifting a few of my thoughts onto paper. Some people lift weights without elevating their souls. I write page after page without ever saying what I mean. I cannot recreate the pain. I can only provide environmental evidence about the physical landscape in which the pain occurred.
One night last week the doorknob on my bedroom door came off in my hand and I couldn’t get out. I pounded for a long time and finally David heard me. He used a butter knife to wedge the door open.
I had felt entombed—locked inside my own mind. Panic had pummeled me; the next day I had bruises on my body although I don’t know how I got them.
Right after Max moved into his apartment, he began turning off the bell on his telephone so I could ring him incessantly and he wouldn’t hear. I remained accessible although he no longer wanted access. He remained unavailable. The injustice and inequity of this situation choked me. Rage rose up like bile in my soul.
Perhaps he had always been unavailable.
I suppose clinically they would call me manic-depressive. Actually I’m so used to it now I just experience it as feeling emotionally busy most of the time. Of course it also depends on which pills I do. Ten milligrams of Valium first thing in the morning lets me get going. Depending on what needs doing that day, I take half to three-quarters of a Tenuate Dospan along with several cups of black coffee before noon. If there’s not much going on, I take another half Valium and look around for someone who likes to drink at lunchtime.
Hot Flashes Page 11