Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  “I’m a lesbian,” Caroline announced, sounding more certain than she felt, since things with Diana hadn’t worked out any better than with Jackson or David Michael.

  Hannah shrugged. Oh yes, she thought, and what did you have for breakfast? All of a sudden she recalled where she’d seen Caroline: on TV and in the local papers, lobbying for abortion rights at the state legislature a few years back. She’d been impressive standing on the capital steps in Concord with the sun in her eyes, confronting the taunts of her opponents with humor and conviction.

  “Would that be a problem for you?” Caroline asked. Surely someone so respectable would be appalled to be trapped every week with a living breathing queer.

  Is it a problem for you, wondered Hannah, pursing her lips and shaking her head no. Homosexuals seemed to feel this revelation was a big deal. Probably it was for them. Probably it had gotten each of them rejected several times.

  “How old do you feel?” asked Hannah. She’d just pictured Caroline as a frightened infant, tapping into the horrors loose in a world at war, and the anxieties loose in her fatherless household; being handed over to indifferent maids; trying to be still and quiet and “good” so that somebody would care for her. Hannah remembered her own babies, gazing up from her swollen breasts with dark blue eyes, reaching out to clasp her little finger with tiny pink hands, smiling toothlessly, wanting only to adore and to be adored. The babies who weren’t able to charm someone into falling in love with them—she saw them as adults all day long in this office. At least her own babies had never had that particular problem, however else she’d failed them later on.

  Hannah lit another cigarette and switched off her emotions, glancing out the window beside the couch to the smashed taillight on her new Mercury. It felt like the time Simon knocked out Nigel’s front baby tooth during a fight over a tricycle, and Hannah had had to accept that the world of disintegration had claimed her perfect little bundle. “Maintenance,” her husband, Arthur, often insisted. “Life is nothing but maintenance.” Jonathan’s Scout had escaped without a scratch. An unfamiliar red Subaru station wagon with a “Club Sandwiches Not Seals” bumper sticker sat beside her Mercury.

  Caroline was gazing at Hannah, disconcerted. Horror at her perversion, yes. Outrage, fear, curiosity. But not indifference. She tried to consider her age. “I feel like a seventeen-year-old, trapped in a decaying thirty-five-year-old body.”

  Hannah studied Caroline, who clutched upper arms with opposite hands. Quiet, still, and good. Witty and self-effacing. Obedient and entertaining. These would be her ploys. The aggression and rage had gone underground, where they could blast a hole to China.

  “Try eleven, going on twelve.” She knew she couldn’t get away with telling Caroline she was probably eighteen months old emotionally. Though not on the capitol steps in Concord. There she’d been every bit of thirty. These two aspects cohabited. The trick was to introduce them to each other.

  Caroline frowned. Eleven? For this I’m paying thirty-five dollars an hour? Where does this bridge-playing chick get off? These goddam suburban housewives with their boring little split-level lives. Caroline knew all about that scene—the sailing yachts on the lake, the cocktail party flirtations, the attention devoted to matching flower arrangements to place mats, the play groups and car pool and coffee klatsches. She’d done that trip with Jackson in Newton for eight years. And she’d ended up immobile, face down on the plush rose-colored living-room carpet, agonizing over the corruption of such a life when American tanks were rolling through Cambodian jungles. Jackie and Jason pulled her hair, poked Tinker Toys in her ears, and rode horsey on her back, but she was too busy picturing American helicopters napalming Vietnamese children to respond to her own.

  “Glad you came?” asked Hannah with a smile. She had to establish who was running this show if the show was to happen at all. On the capitol steps Caroline could be in charge, but in this office Hannah had to be. Someone about to explore a swamp needed to know her scout had a general idea where the alligators hid out, or she’d be too terrified even to begin.

  Hannah realized she had to get either a smile or a yes pretty soon, or Caroline wouldn’t return. Usually she didn’t care if they returned, but she was challenged by Caroline’s timid truculence. It reminded her of her own stance at the same age, after the children had died, when she’d shake her fist at the universe and defy it to yield up some meaning. But she now knew that it simply wasn’t necessary to live with Caroline’s current level of misery.

  “Your mother tells you you cried a lot in the night?”

  “Yes.” This was the most incoherent conversation Caroline had ever had. How could it help her feel better if she couldn’t even follow it?

  “You do realize that’s just her version? Maybe you cried a few times, like all babies, and it seemed like all the time because she was so busy and tired and lonely and scared.” She remembered those years when her own house was crammed with babies as one long night full of children’s nightmares, tears, and vomit.

  Hannah watched Caroline’s strained face register the struggle to identify the truth about her past. But there wasn’t any such thing—only Caroline’s own personal truth, shared by no one, but valid for her nonetheless.

  It suddenly sounded to Caroline as though Hannah was on her side. Unnerving, because they had nothing in common. Caroline couldn’t even play bridge.

  “Why did you pick me?” asked Hannah.

  “You’re about the only shrink in town I don’t already know. And most of the others are in worse shape than I am.”

  Smiling faintly, Hannah glanced at the clock on her desk. “So how do you feel about our working together?”

  “How do you?” Caroline certainly wasn’t going to express interest first. One of her earliest memories was of Maureen, the orange-haired maid from Galway, hissing at her in her crib, “I know what you want and you can’t have it!” Caroline couldn’t recall what she’d wanted, but she’d learned since that you don’t show what you want, because then you deprive others of the satisfaction of denying it to you. You had no business wanting anything anyway if you had food on the table and a roof over your head, when half the world lacked even that.

  “I feel very comfortable with you,” said Hannah.

  Caroline looked up. Slowly she uncrossed her legs and arms, and rested her arms by her sides on the tweed couch. “Well, I guess I’d better think it over and give you a call.”

  “Fine.” Hannah suppressed a smile. She’d just gotten her yes from Caroline’s body, which was now sprawled on the couch in a posture that said, “All right, I’ll try, but it isn’t going to help.”

  Hannah replied silently, Yes, it will too. You just don’t know it yet.

  Driving out of the parking lot, Caroline shoved a cassette from the hospital library on new developments in burn therapy into her tape deck. The sunset, blotches of scarlet and purple, reflected off Lake Glass as though off a mirror, which was where the lake had gotten its name, back in the eighteenth century from trappers and loggers. Tourists marveled over these sunsets, but Caroline had to squint even to look at one. Because the sky looked the way her brain felt—bruised and mangled, a cut of raw beef pounded flat by a cubing hammer. She’d felt like this a lot. But of course there had been a lot to feel bad about—Selma and Watts, Kent State and Watergate.

  Too late, she realized she’d run the stop sign at the entrance to the lake road. A driver crossing the intersection had thrown on his brakes and was blaring his horn. Jesus, one way or another she was going to kill herself off.

  This therapy stuff was a big waste of time, Caroline decided as she headed home, south down the lakeshore. She was a nurse, she could diagnose her own malaise: she inhabited an insane asylum called earth. Do something about that, and she’d be fine. But what could anybody do about this ghastly world? She, her parents, most of her friends had spent their lifetime trying to stanch the hemorrhages of misery from the body politic. But wars still raged, tyrants ruled, and
torture flourished.

  She pulled into the driveway of the two-story log cabin, which had been built from a kit of giant Lincoln Logs by Diana and her ex-husband, Mike, during their back-to-the-land days. It fit snugly into the contours of the hillside so that both stories were at ground level with views along one side of the lake and mountains. Mike had simply walked out one day five years ago, announcing that he had to find himself. He followed his star to Ann Arbor, where he now ran a men’s clothing store.

  The sunset was bathing the honey locusts out front in shades of purple. The swollen clouds behind the curly branches reminded Caroline of those Jonestown corpses on the news last night, bloated on poison grape Kool-Aid. This was the worst time of day for auto accidents and domestic violence. The ER was chaos from sunset through twilight.

  Climbing the steps, she stopped abruptly. On the landing was a ragged bundle. An infanticide? Two weeks of back newspapers? She tried to examine it without touching it. A huge bird. She turned it over with the toe of her boot. A Canadian goose, its white breast brown with caked blood from a bullet wound. She drew a sharp breath. Her relationship to nature had always been problematic. A diseased raccoon once crawled out of these woods to expire at her feet. One afternoon she picked up a puppy staggering alongside the road and drove it to the vet, who informed her it was a rabid fox. Snakes swallowed toads nearby as she lounged in the grass in summer. Owls swooped down from trees onto scurrying field mice when she snow-shoed in winter. In spring wild cats pounced on shrieking fledglings beneath her open windows. She tried not to take it personally.

  Removing a glove, she placed her hand on the feathers. The flesh was cold. She picked it up by a wing and heaved it to the ground, too tired to deal with it in the twilight. As she wiped her boots on the doormat, Diana called for her to come in.

  “Did you know there’s a dead goose on the doorstep?”

  Diana looked up from the couch, where she sat knitting a dark green turtleneck sweater for Sharon. Still wearing her white uniform pants and top, she looked exhausted and rumpled. Her curly red hair was even more scrambled than usual, and there were dark circles under her green eyes. Good. Maybe she was having trouble sleeping alone too.

  “Honestly,” Caroline told her, standing in the doorway, hand resting against the jamb.

  “How come?” Diana’s hands subsided into her lap.

  “You’ve got me. It’s got a bullet hole in its chest. I guess it just fell out of the sky.”

  “How unpleasant. What do you think it means?”

  “Don’t fly too low over a hunter,” said Caroline.

  Diana smiled. “Come in. Sit down. Do you want some wine?”

  Caroline hesitated, wondering if she should go downstairs to her own apartment. It was hard to figure out what was okay between them these days. They’d gone from being best friends in nursing school, to being pen pals while serving as the little women for big men, to being roommates, to being live-in lovers, to being—what? The past weeks had felt like living on the San Andreas Fault. One thing was certain: Working together all day and sleeping together all night had been too much togetherness. Especially for two nurses. They fought constantly over who got to bring the other coffee in bed, who got to babysit the kids during parties, who got to tend a vomiting child in the night. Joan of Arc would have had to drive them both away to die on her own hard-won pyre. Jesus Christ would have found Himself on Golgotha without a cross; one would have taken His place while the other stitched His wounds.

  Their relationship wasn’t working, they finally concluded, because each had an equivalent need to be needed. In relationships with men, each had been exploited to her heart’s content. But with each other life was a constant struggle to outnurture. The cabin filled up with their greeting cards. Banks of flowers were always dying on the tables. Each put on ten pounds from the candies and pastries the other brought home, which were dutifully devoured to please the donor. During lovemaking each would wait for the other to climax first, until both lost interest altogether. They fought over who got the most burnt toast, or the lukewarm second shower. They would have fought to be the last off the Titanic, or the first off Noah’s Ark. Eventually they were compelled to address the issue of what to do about two people in whom thoughtfulness had become a disease. Diana felt the cure involved learning to do without doing things for each other, including holding each other through the night.

  “So how did it go?” asked Diana, handing her a glass of white wine.

  “She’s a nice woman, but I’m not going back.”

  Diana hugged her with one arm. “I’ve never seen you so decisive. See what a little therapy can do?”

  They stood with their arms around each other, looking out the picture window past the locust trees to the mountain range beyond the lake. It undulated to resemble a reclining female torso. In the old days merely looking at it had triggered bouts of lovemaking on the beige shag carpet. Caroline rested her chin atop Diana’s head. Hard to believe someone so small could trigger such overwhelming feelings. But of course thousands had gone to their deaths for Napoleon. She found herself studying Diana’s large breasts, which strained against the fabric of her uniform top. Off limits now. How were you supposed to make that switch from one day to the next?

  “You know,” said Caroline, “I like celibacy fine. The only part I don’t like is not having any sex.”

  Diana laughed. She’d said she hoped Caroline would bear with her. Maybe she’d get over it. And maybe she wouldn’t. In the meantime, they were to fall back on their friendship of many years, the safety net under a high-wire act. Caroline had replied, “Yes, of course we can still be friends. Not very good friends, but friends.”

  “What’s she like?” asked Diana, pulling away and walking to the couch.

  “Who?” Caroline restrained her wish to dump her wine on Diana’s curly red head.

  “Hannah Burke.”

  “Smart. Nice. But suburban.” Caroline studied the tapestry above the couch, which she’d woven for Diana several years earlier. The Garden of Eden, both people women, both smiling and eating apples.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Going for safety and comfort. No political analysis. Protecting herself from reality.” Caroline plopped down beside Diana, sloshing wine onto her own hand.

  “Well, you’ve always insisted on staring down the horrors. Sometimes I wish you’d just poke out your eyes and have some fun.”

  Diana insisted Caroline took pleasure in her depressions, regarded them as evidence of superior perception. Caroline couldn’t entirely deny this. “With you as my Seeing Eye person?” asked Caroline, blotting the spilled wine on her jeans.

  “Right.”

  “As you know, I’d rather be your Seeing Eye person.”

  “I think we’ve been over this before,” said Diana. Her grin looked like the grimace of a patient receiving an injection.

  “Ad nauseam. Oh yeah, I came out to her.”

  “That was fast. How did she react?”

  “She didn’t seem particularly interested.”

  “How disappointing.”

  “Yeah. It was.”

  Diana stood up. “Want some soup?”

  “No you don’t. You’re not feeding me.”

  “It was worth a try.” She sat back down and reached for her knitting.

  Caroline shrugged off her dark blue parka, then walked on her knees past Diana’s spinning wheel, a relic from the grueling days with Mike when she raised sheep and processed her own wool. Caroline turned on the Sony to find Walter Cronkite tracing the life of Jim Jones. His flock called him Dad. As she crawled back to the sofa, she learned that the main industry in his Indiana hometown was casket-making.

  “What I can’t figure out,” said Caroline, sinking back into the sofa as a frazzled denture wearer disclosed her most embarrassing moment, “is why it turned out so badly when Jones apparently meant so well.”

  “It’s like Arnold,” said Diana, scratching her own back
with a knitting needle. Arnold, the new puppy, was having difficulty grasping toilet training. “His intention exceeded his aim.”

  Smiling, Caroline gave Diana a quick kiss to one side of her mouth and headed for the stairs, leaving Diana, hands frozen in midstitch, looking taken aback by the abruptness of the departure. But if she stayed, Caroline knew her hand would stray over to one of Diana’s breasts.

  Caroline turned on the lamp on her bedside table and glanced around the room. Her loom stood in the corner next to a picture window that looked down to Lake Glass. Exterior walls of logs and chinking, interior walls of pine paneling. These downstairs rooms were supposed to house the six children Diana and Mike had planned on. Diana and Caroline knocked down a couple of walls and turned them into an apartment for Caroline, Jackie, and Jason.

  Caroline pulled her Lanz nightgown out of her pine chest, studying the framed collage of obscene French postcards Diana had done for her, which hung on the pine paneling above the chest. Her cheery demeanor was slipping like an ill-fitting toupee. Miss Congeniality offstage. It was a strain to be cooperative in enterprises to which she couldn’t see the point, like therapy and celibacy. But her role in life was to help others feel better. Her parents used to come to the dinner table exhausted from their welfare work, and she’d tell every new joke she could think of, whatever her own prior mood. It had been worth it to watch them smile reluctantly, then laugh. As satisfying as watching the color return to patients’ faces as you resuscitated them.

  Her apartment was uncharacteristically silent because Arnold, Jackie, and Jason were sleeping over at friends’ houses. All she could hear was the hum of the refrigerator and Diana running a bath upstairs. She pictured Diana in the tub, head back, eyes closed, faint smile on her lips. The water rising slowly over her pale freckled skin, which was smooth as butter to the touch. They used to lie in the bath together, the head and back of one on the other’s chest and abdomen. She removed the gold chain with the ivory sea gull from around her neck. One afternoon last spring she and Diana sat in the thick new grass holding hands and watching hundreds of sea gulls descend on a neighboring farmer’s newly manured field to feast on worms and insects. Diana and she defined the different groupings as rival sororities and laughed themselves sick inventing stories about their machinations. The next day Diana came home from town with the ivory gull.