“I’m going to wash every one of those suckers in Woolite,” he growled.
I loved him so much I thought I would die.
Last night we were lying in the same bed miles apart.
Nothing had happened, but everything was wrong. On one level there was mutual irritation for no particular reason and below that were layers and layers of hostility. I felt despair like a cancer in my soul because I was unable to readjust the balance between us. I also felt grievously disadvantaged. Jeff’s behavior had thrown me entirely out of joint. I felt old and ugly, unable to operate on even the most minimal level with him. I felt unequal. Less than Andrea.
We lay in the sofa bed and watched Paul Newman in WUSA.
Jeff didn’t speak. He wouldn’t speak.
I applied myself to watching television.
The silence increased.
I watched the television more furiously.
After some fifteen minutes, I looked over at him and asked how he felt.
“Fine,” he answered.
When the next commercial came on, I felt more desperate and asked, “What’s happening?”
“Nothing,” he said, not very nicely.
He kept dozing off, snoring softly, comfortably.
I rolled on my side and looked at the wall clock.
It was 11:35. I was still watching the clock when it turned into a quarter of twelve. Suddenly I was inspired. I did not have to stay there in Jeff’s apartment when things were not going right, when nothing felt right. I could simply get up, get dressed and get out.
That discovery surprised me. I reached over to reclaim my clothes from the floor. My jeans were stiff from the cold. My boots felt hard. He had woken up again and began to watch the TV. I stood naked in the blue light and pulled on my shirt.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
Escape was both plausible and preferable.
“We should maybe see Reds tomorrow,” he said sleepily.
“Sure,” I answered and then I left.
Inside the car was safety. Even the dark streets—with their real threats—seemed manageable as opposed to the psychological imbalance in Jeff’s apartment. I parked my car and ran home up the block, staying away from the bushes and shrubs of neighboring houses.
I love to watch him get dressed.
He keeps his socks and underwear in the side table near his sofa bed. There are several packages of unopened boxer shorts in the drawer which he always has to remove and hold while digging for a pair of socks that match. There are also several pairs of new socks still stuck together by their labels. These, too, he always holds aloft. For some reason it touches me enormously that he remembered to buy himself new underwear that he doesn’t really need all that badly yet. I like that very much.
Everything in his medicine chest has its own proper place. If a cough-drop box is tall and thin, it’s parked vertically rather than horizontally. His few kitchen cupboards are also well organized. His narrow little broom closet is outfitted so that it also serves as a tool chest. Every space in that single room is utilized, organized and compartmentalized.
What does this mean?
That’s easy.
I am crazy for this guy. Nuts about him.
With his love, I begin to recover. Slowly he revives me.
Now both Dr. Annie Austen and Jeff are nagging me to write a novel. They keep asking me leading questions. They seem to be in collusion, except they’ve never met.
Anyway, I have this idea and I’ve already started working on it.
CHAPTER 18
Elena, now reduced to a tropical storm, hits Washington early Monday morning. We are already in the kitchen drinking coffee when the storm sounds begin.
I had come downstairs at 6:00 A.M., in search of some time for reflection, only to find both Joanne and Elaine already seated at the kitchen table. Joanne, still dressed in last night’s outfit, has clearly not been to sleep yet and the whisker-rub burnishing her beauty this morning amounts to an announcement that she’s spent the night with Jeff making love and—perhaps—a baby.
“You want leaded or unleaded?” she asks, rising to show me a pot of rewarmed coffee as opposed to some fresh that is still dripping through its filter.
“I’ll wait,” I say, avoiding her eyes.
Having just read Sukie’s account of Jeff’s lovemaking, I feel shy, but Joanne is too blissed out to notice my awkwardness.
When the rain starts, Joanne opens the back door and the three of us step out onto the porch—Elaine and I in our nightgowns. Holding our coffee cups like hymnals in both hands, we watch hot flashes of lightning streak across the steel-gray sky. Rusty thunder growls in response and long raindrops, warm as tears, blow against our faces.
“Who will stop the rain?” Joanne whispers. “How can we bury Sukie in the rain?”
Elaine looks at her sullenly.
Ten minutes later the storm stops as casually as it started, leaving the heat unimpaired and the humidity still heaving, undiminished, around us.
Only then does Happy leave the shelter of the back porch to traipse down the stairs and daintily cross the wet grass to use the garden. We leave her there when we go inside.
Sukie’s Aunt Rosetta arrives alone at seven-thirty. She is wearing a housedress and carrying a totebag full of cake and cookie pans, small sacks of flour, heat-disfigured sticks of margarine, a rolling pin and other baking paraphernalia. After making herself a cup of tea, she claims a large area of counter space and begins rolling out dough like a highway construction crew paving a blacktop.
Elaine and Joanne go upstairs to dress for the funeral, but I remain glued to my chair, watching Rosetta’s deft motions like a little girl jealously trying to absorb some skill through osmosis. In truth, I am totally focused on the fact that neither Loren nor Lisa has telephoned yet to inquire about our situation here or about the funeral arrangements. I am shocked for Sukie’s sake, if not for mine, because they had always cared deeply for her. Though I try to ignore them, stirrings of anger and betrayal have begun to invade the lowlands of my soul.
So it is really out of total self-absorption that I say the most outrageous thing to Rosetta. The words slip from my lips like smoke from a cigarette.
“It’s hard being a mother, isn’t it?”
And though I immediately dig my teeth into my bottom lip, my silly rhetoric has already flown off to hit its target.
“Well, of course, I wouldn’t know.” Rosetta’s mouth scissors out the words. “I am not a mother. I was never married. I only know from Sukie’s mama, who was much more than my sister-in-law. She was my friend, my best friend. I know from her that raising a daughter was frightening. There was a lot to worry about … and fear.” Rosetta increases the elbow action to her rolling pin. “Sukie’s mama could not have survived this unnatural disaster. She was always afraid of disaster.”
Rosetta lifts her head for a moment to look through the window above the sink. The import of what she has just said, and the way she now appears profiled against the window, gazing into the past, ignite a burning flush that starts locket-low on my neck and rushes upward to scald my face. Helpless, I surrender to the heat and the flashback it brings.…
None of us wanted to do any of the things our mothers did—nor anything the way they did it—during the postwar years.
Oh no. We would never keep coasters conveniently located for guests to set beneath their highball glasses to protect the surface of a distressed cherrywood freeform cocktail table on which sat a silver Ronson cigarette lighter, a leatherbound photograph album (that twirled like a Rolodex, displaying our baby pictures) and a fruitwood Lazy Susan (religiously oiled after each use, just like our wooden salad bowls) which offered a variety of fifties-ish dips starring the brand-new onion-soup-mix-and-sour-cream variety.
Oh no. We would never own a kidney-shaped, organza-skirted, mirror-topped dressing table carefully cluttered with a casual assortment of fat-bottomed atomizers and fancy, alb
eit often empty, perfume bottles reproduced in reverse on the mirrored surface. We would never sit upon a seat upholstered in the same fabric as the dressing table—whose skirts parted like those of a cancan dancer to offer legroom or an indoor parking space for the stool—as our mothers did when putting on their makeup. Oh no. We do not collect or treasure such trivial, distracting possessions or make such a production of drawing on our public faces.
Nor do we collect the coins our husbands empty from their pockets and heap or scatter on bureau tops late at night from which they retrieve only quarters or better the next morning before going to work, leaving us the pennies, nickels, and dimes to be stashed away in some large jar like our mothers used to save up for some special or secret purchase. No. We do not mend our men’s socks, reinforcing sheer spots on the heels or toes by planting a red strawberry pincushion beneath the vulnerable places to plump them up for preventive patching. Nor do we stop runs in our nylons—rinsed nightly with Lux in lukewarm water and hung on a towel over the shower-curtain pole to dry—with dainty dabs of colorless nail polish.
Yet in many ways we are still our mothers’ daughters. We still suspect that pigeons carry polio, that it’s healthier to blow-dry our hands in a public toilet than to use the roll of toweling that might rewind and recycle itself, and that it is dangerous to play a radio in the bathroom. We believe it is important to call ourselves from a hotel lobby shortly after checking in to verify that the operators have us correctly located in the right room, and that it is prudent to peek back inside a mailbox to make sure our letters have actually dropped down and disappeared so they can’t be retrieved by a random thief happening to pass by and look inside.
Like our mothers, we believe Clinique is the proper cosmetic for us, that it is essential to own one piece of “important jewelry,” that it is best to wipe front-to-back rather than back-to-front, that it is nice to wash off the hand soap in the guest bathroom when company is coming and that it is appropriate for a woman to fall on the floor to cover a de-elasticized half-slip, runaway sanitary pad, dead mouse cat-delivered into the house, or a pile of dog doo-doo on the carpet. Although we will deny it if men say so, our mode of thinking remains discontinuous—the exact opposite of a legal brief.
Suddenly the back door is flung open and Kate Constant, the once-famous black folksinger who inexplicably lost her voice, bursts into the kitchen looking extravagantly beautiful and dangerously upset. She is wearing a multicolored Indian dress, enormous earrings and an Afro that frames her head like a halo. Close to forty, she looks like a teenage girl.
“How can this be happening?” she demands in the deep, throaty tones that have replaced her once-soprano voice. “I mean, what in the name of God is happening?”
I watch this glamorous creature, whom I’ve never met and only know through Sukie and the media, lean up against the refrigerator and start to cry. She lets the tears skip down her sculptured cheeks unimpeded as she stares at me.
“Who’re you? One of her gang from New York?”
The image of Sukie describing us as her “gang from New York” makes me begin to cry. At first my sobs are quiet, soft and manageable, but then they pick up momentum and I begin to keen and grieve aloud perhaps for the first time. Over the sound of my own cries, I hear Kate Constant inquiring about a glass of wine and Rosetta introducing herself as she pours her one.
“Did you know,” Kate Constant demands, detonating each word like an explosive, “that Sukie was the first person I met in Washington who even thought to invite me over? I mean, she just stuck a note in my mailbox asking me to come here for dinner. She was the only one who wasn’t afraid of me because I’d lost my voice. So I lost my voice. So what? She’d lost her husband. We were both hurting, right?”
Keeping her dark cheek pressed against the white enamel of the refrigerator, she fidgets with some imitation-fruit magnets stuck to the surface. Her explosive eyes continue to spit angry tears.
“I met most of my friends right here,” she says emphatically. “Right here in this kitchen. Including the guy I’m living with now. I mean, we’re looking at some major influences here, some major changes Sukie made in my life. And then I turn my back for a minute, for two days, I had dinner here Thursday night, and she dies.”
Then, with silent but dramatic style, Kate Constant recrosses the kitchen, reopens the screen door, and runs outside to lean against the porch railing, rocking and wailing with grief.
I sit paralyzed in my chair, holding my cold coffee cup, watching Rosetta spread raspberry jam on a floury stretch of dough, and listening to Kate’s moans float back into the kitchen.
Oh, how many times have we looked into the face of a friend as if into a mirror to see who we were? How often did we look into a friend’s eyes to discover the truth? How often did an experience feel paltry—a decision impossible—until we shared it with our favorite confidante? How many times have we felt the rich rush of pleasure as a friend raced forward to meet us—open and unarmed to offer sanctuary within her embrace, with never any need for explanation?
Female Depression Babies are addicted to friendship—our one act of faith throughout feckless times when again and again we made that great leap forward toward another woman. Despite cynicism and sarcasm, disillusionment and despair, we seldom disparage those dear sweet friendships we won with our own love for another. For us, the best relief from life was the presence of a friend who seldom asked us for more than we could give. From what depths of our agnostic souls did we extract the strength to offer and receive such gifts? And what else did we learn from all the novels we’ve read—all the stories crafted by sisters who told cruel tales about the way we live now—but of salvation through friendship—the extension and acceptance of it which never ceases to stun and … fulfill us.
When Carol walks in, I disbelieve my eyes. Suddenly she is just standing there in the kitchen, a twenty-two-year-old, taller, slimmer Sukie, dressed in tired jeans, a denim shirt and dirty espadrilles.
Throwing an apologetic glance at me, she heeds protocol and first hurries forward to embrace her great-aunt. They cling to each other in awesome silence for several minutes. Then, overcome with emotion, Rosetta turns and runs out of the kitchen, apparently to regain her composure and not break down.
So Carol is left standing in the center of the room, Rosetta’s floury fingerprints on the back of her shirt. Her widely spaced, Sukie-brown eyes are full of loss and anger. Her silky dark hair is mussed and forgotten. Clearly she had time, first in Portugal and later on the long trip home, to experience her initial rush of emotions. Now she seems primarily focused on surviving the reentry into her home where her mother’s absence is centered.
“Poor Diana,” she murmurs, turning toward me.
I open my arms to her and she drifts into my embrace in a neat, controlled way. Never encumbered by Sukie’s kind of frenetic energy, Carol always hummed along on a quiet battery that had steady starting and staying power.
“Poor you,” I say, rocking her in my arms.
Although she rests her head upon my shoulder for a moment, she disengages quickly.
“I can’t pretend I’m not mad, Diana. I mean, I’m not going to put on any big act or anything. You know how my mother and I got along.”
“Oh, Carol, honey. You have to forget all that now.”
“No. I don’t have to do anything. Not anymore. Never again.” Carol steps back to face me from a formal distance. Her face is flushed with heat and anger. “My mother’s death was an act of revenge. She didn’t want David and me to go to Europe with Dad, so she literally died to get us back here.”
“Oh God, Carol,” I moan. “Don’t talk like that. Not now. Don’t do this to yourself. Just try to lighten up a little bit.”
Carol shrugs, walks to the sink, and fills herself a glass of water.
“I know she wasn’t really strong enough to arrange the timing of her own death, but she did a pretty good job of it.”
“I can’t believe you’re going
to act like this. Right now—right before her funeral,” I grieve.
The back door swings open and Kate Constant comes inside. One glance at my face causes her to spin around. Then she runs toward Carol.
“Oh, baby,” she groans. “Baby.”
Carol lets Kate hold her briefly.
“Where’s David?” Kate asks nervously, when Carol backs away from her.
“He and Neil are at my Dad’s. They wanted to shower and clean up before they came over. We left New York at four this morning, and the air conditioning in Neil’s car wasn’t working.”
“Baa-ad,” says Kate, reaching out to wipe a smear of flour off Carol’s cheek. “But you’ll have plenty of time to shower and everything here. You want some coffee or anything?”
Carol doesn’t answer. Instead she walks to the back door and looks out at the garden.
“My mom just freaked out when we told her we were going to Europe with Dad,” she continues dimly. “She kept making up excuses about David needing more time to get ready for college and complaining that she was getting left with all the shitwork like shipping his trunk and stuff. But it was all just a cover story because she was jealous. That’s all. And in the end, she won. She might as well have jumped off a bridge.”
“Hey,” Kate exclaims, shocked by Carol’s anger.
“You’ve got to stop this now, Carol,” I say evenly. “Let’s bury her first and then we can talk about your anger.”
Carol shrugs before she kicks open the screen door.
“Happy,” she calls. “Happy.”
The dog comes wheeling into the kitchen, skittering across the linoleum just as the front-door bell rings. Kate hurries into the hall and returns with Miranda, who is wearing a tight black jersey dress that cups her breasts and buttocks. Unhesitantly, Miranda hurries toward Carol, but Carol kneels down to fondle Happy and evade the embrace.
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