Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  As she hung up her plaid shirt, Caroline looked across her closet shelf to the cluster of pill bottles in the back corner. She shoved a pile of sweaters Diana had knit for her in front of them.

  Walking into the dark living room, she stumbled over a hockey stick and stubbed her toe on the gateleg of the dining table. She didn’t need a calendar; she knew what time of year it was by which sports equipment she tripped over in her living room. Last month it was soccer balls and cleats. Currently she was lacerating herself on skate blades. Before long she’d be dodging baseball bats and catcher’s masks. Unhooking the boys’ video game, she moved the TV into her bedroom. She piled up pillows and crawled under the huge gold and brown afghan spread Diana had knit for her. As she sipped her coffee, she watched a movie about two career girls on the make in New York City. She realized she’d seen it before. The good-looking one got Jimmy Stewart and the other one got promoted to editor. If only once the girls would get each other. But probably that was asking too much of Twentieth Century-Fox. Didn’t David Michael once say they were owned by a conglomerate that also marketed infant formula? She switched channels to a documentary on drought in the sub-Sahara. Her brother Howard was in Chad at that very moment with an international relief agency. Howard had been a scrawny little boy. It made sense he’d grow up to be a famine fighter. She looked at the little children with their swollen bellies and fly-coated lips and eyes for as long as she could stand it. Then she turned off the TV and fell asleep.

  She dreamed she was lying in a putrid swamp surrounded by poisonous snakes, her eyes and lips covered with insects that were half bee and half leech. They clung to her and stung continuously. Her face throbbed and burned. Jim Jones appeared through the tangled vines and matted trees in his red robe and sunglasses. He carried a syringe and a pitcher of grape Kool-Aid. He injected her as she struggled to escape. Hannah Burke appeared. She dismissed Jones. Then she methodically plucked the insects from Caroline’s face.

  Caroline sat up, flesh burning, hair soaked with sweat. The sheets were tangled and damp. The clock read 3:00 a.m. She took several deep breaths, determined not to run upstairs to Diana. She got up and brewed chamomile tea. Sipping it in bed, she itemized the ways she’d failed that week—screaming at the boys for pasting autumn leaves all over their clothes as camouflage in their war games; throwing the blender at Arnold for climbing on the dinner table and running off with the pork roast; losing her car keys so Diana couldn’t get her car out to have dinner with Suzanne, the new young nurse on the children’s ward who gazed at Diana with mindless adoration. Caroline was not a nice person. She was selfish, impatient, and jealous. She was a bad mother, a worse friend, and a hopeless lover.

  Shivering, she turned on her electric blanket. She and Diana had generated so much warmth together that they never needed the blanket. But these last weeks it had been on nonstop.

  The house was still without the mumbling, sighing, and tossing of the sleeping boys, the growling and twitching of the dreaming puppy. Before long they’d be gone for good. Jackie and Jason, Diana, they’d vanish, just like Arlene and Jackson and David Michael, leaving her here alone night after night, as snow piled up outside the windows and buried her in an icy cocoon. Her stomach clenched. But what had she ever been if not alone? She must have known that even as a baby. Probably that was why she’d screamed at night. Since then she’d come together with people for illusory moments of companionship, only to watch them fade away like cinema images as the house lights go on.

  The sky outside her window was black, but she was awake for good. She got up, put on her down bathrobe and slippers, and sat at the loom in the corner, on which she was weaving place mats in shades of brown and black. Her napkins, place mats, and tablecloths always sold best, ever since she’d started weaving in Jackson’s house in Newton. She’d done so many she was getting sick of them, but she couldn’t think what to weave instead. She could weave at night only when the boys were away because the thud of the beater woke them up. But weaving was the only thing that could stave off her despair. When her feet and hands finally found their hypnotic rhythm, she had no time or attention for her own misery. She’d always woven in stealth, like someone sneaking away to perform unclean acts, because pursuing a private pleasure seemed irresponsible in a world full of collective agony.

  She thought about those bizarre clinging, stinging insects in her dream. Hannah Burke had helped her remove them. But it was just a dream. Was there really any point to another appointment? What could Hannah do about the human condition? You just had to grit your teeth and make the best of it. Or bow out. She thought about the pill bottles behind her sweaters. Out of sight maybe, but not out of mind.

  Grimly she pedaled her loom and threw the shuttle back and forth through the warp.

  • 2 •

  Hannah drove through town, across the falls, past the renovated factories which now housed specialty shops, restaurants, a health club, condominiums, offices. Lake Glass had evolved as an outpost for fur traders and loggers. Transport down the lake proved inefficient, so factories were set up to process the furs and timber in situ—a tannery, a shoe factory, a furniture factory. When the factories were lured south by cheaper labor, the town took on new life as a summer resort for the wealthy of Boston, drawn north by the remoteness and beauty of the lake. When Hannah and Arthur arrived thirty-five years earlier, the town was sleepy and dumpy, full of dilapidated factories and deserted summer cottages. After London it felt to Hannah like exile to Patagonia. In its current incarnation, the town hosted tourists and skiers, and had also acquired a couple of electronics firms. A small private college had grown into a university. The streets were crawling with well-dressed strangers; the restaurants were crammed with exotic delicacies—falafel and knishes, burritos and sushi. In some ways Hannah preferred the dear dead Patagonia days.

  Heading north through the ranch houses of the electronics executives, Hannah watched the sky above the lake perform its time-lapse pyrotechnics. The colors faded in and out so slowly that each configuration seemed permanent. But if she pulled over for a nap, she’d wake up to pitch black. Sunsets annoyed her. She’d driven this road twice a day for twenty years, ever since Mona and Nigel died. After three thousand hours of watching sunsets, she’d discovered they were shell games. All that turmoil, and in the end nothing was left. Much ado about nothing.

  As she turned onto the lake road, she remembered her left rear blinker was bashed in. What was that new client’s name? Why did she have such a hard time with names when she could keep a couple of dozen life histories straight at once? At a staff party recently, as she began to introduce Arthur to Mary Beth, the new young counselor at the office, she couldn’t remember Arthur’s name. He studied her with amazement. She’d only known him for thirty-eight years.

  Caroline, it was. Yes. She tried to imagine being an infant arriving as war engulfed the globe. If you couldn’t delight your parents with your appearance, at least it could be your fault that Daddy was going away, that Mummy was frantic. Ever after you’d carry around a vague sense of responsibility for disaster. If you couldn’t locate ready-made disasters to feel guilty about, you’d concoct your own.

  Her son Simon was in the same boat. Colin, his father, left to fight in Belgium before Simon was one, and never returned. Simon had been a frail, anxious little boy, and was now a tyrannical adult, who ran his Federal Housing Agency office like a penitentiary. The flower children. An entire generation sensitized as infants to loss and terror, as adults acting out their indignation in the streets on behalf of the dispossessed, who were actually themselves. You didn’t have to be run over by a tank to be harmed by a war.

  Glancing at the savage sunset, Hannah recalled the sunset she’d watched with Arthur from Hampstead Heath, not long before Caroline’s father was sweating it out in the South Pacific. London, steeped in blood red, spread out below them to the Thames. Arthur was with the U.S. Department of War, negotiating delivery of equipment to replace what Britain had le
ft behind at Dunkirk. She’d met him several weeks earlier at a diplomatic reception her grandmother had dragged her to, to cheer her up in her plight as war widow. What she noticed first were his straight white teeth, which gave him away as an American even if his uniform hadn’t. His flat accent was also American, though she couldn’t then identify it as a New England one.

  She and Arthur sat on the grass on a hill in the Heath, wrapped in his olive army overcoat, greasy newspapers from fish and chips rustling in the autumn gusts. Then it was dark, and the Luftwaffe arrived to dump its load of fireworks. They watched in grim silence as sections of London and assorted Londoners were blown to bits and consumed in flames. Then they walked hand in hand past the deserted fun fair, down through the Vale of Heath, feet scuffling among clumps of damp leaves. She wore Arthur’s overcoat with the sleeves turned up, a bit like Charlie Chaplin.

  “People came out here from London in the fourteenth century to escape the Black Death,” she announced, to fulfill her grandmother’s instructions to “show Arthur London.” His American manners were so different from Colin’s East End ones. He asked her opinions and waited for replies.

  “I guess things don’t change much from century to century.”

  “I suppose not.” She was wrestling with herself over whether or not to “give in.” It was a very short wrestle indeed. Colin was rotting in a grave along the Meuse. Her grandmother was in Somerset with Simon. Most of London huddled in underground stations. She didn’t know then that Arthur had a wife in America. And neither was certain of surviving to see another day in which to regret the events of that night. In a world gone mad, the sensation of flesh on flesh, sweaty and insistently alive, was the only thing that made sense.

  When they reached her grandmother’s brick house at the edge of the Heath, with deserted houses on all sides, Arthur asked, “How come you didn’t clear out with the rest of your neighbors?”

  She looked at him, tall and solid in his American uniform. He would take care of her, as her father and Colin in their British uniforms had not. “Because I was hoping if I stuck around,” she replied, lowering her eyes, “you might take me to bed.”

  His soft brown eyes looked alarmed, but a wry smile spread across his face as he murmured, “Brave woman.”

  They went inside, pulled down the blackout shades, and made love by candlelight, in the mahogany Victorian sleigh bed from her girlhood.

  She pulled her Mercury into the driveway. Walking up to the remodeled yellow Victorian summer house, she wondered for the hundredth time if she and Arthur ought to move to something smaller. When Simon and Joanna finally got places of their own in town, she and

  Arthur had closed off half the rooms to save heat. No point in paying taxes now on bedrooms and a playroom for children who no longer existed. But there were memories connected with the place. The hidden meadow enclosed by birches where Nigel had been conceived one hot May afternoon. The huge twisted cedars along the cliff above the lake, which the children planted as seedlings. The rock caves where the children hid to smoke cigarettes stolen from her pocketbook. The marsh where they staged roiling mud fights. Memories and some photos were about all she had left of Mona and Nigel. She and Arthur used to talk of moving so as not to be reminded constantly of that horrible night. But she was reminded constantly in any case. And she eventually concluded that the horrors were offset by the memories. So here she and Arthur remained, half their house empty and unused, the ghost limb of an amputee.

  Arthur took her martini from the refrigerator freezer as she walked in and handed it to her after she hung up her London Fog. “How was your day?”

  “Fine, thanks.” She relaxed into his embrace. It was pleasant to find she still got hugged, even if her answer to his inevitable question wasn’t “terrible.” As they sat down on the brown leather couch in the cathedral-ceilinged living room to watch the sunset’s finale, she lit a cigarette with matches from Ron’s Steakhouse in Kansas City. She inspected the matchbook, which featured a bull’s head with a wide smile and a winking eye. A charming young colleague had used it to light her cigarette at dinner during a conference last month, just before asking her to sleep with him. She’d been surprised and flattered. She didn’t often affect young men who weren’t her clients like that anymore, now that she was into the heavy maintenance decades, with teeth, eyes, lungs, and stomach all giving faint warnings of eventual collapse.

  She gave the invitation a moment of serious consideration, based on the three martinis she’d just drunk. Then she pulled herself together and replied, “If my life were different, Charles, I’d say yes in a minute. But since it’s not, please accept my thanks and my sincere regrets.” If she wanted to complicate her life, there were easier ways than an affair with a married man from Toledo.

  “And please give my best to your parents?” added Charles.

  “Exactly.” Hannah smiled and toyed with her cigarette in the ashtray.

  “Don’t say I never asked you.”

  “I won’t, Charles.”

  “I thought you were quitting,” said Arthur as she inhaled deeply on her cigarette.

  “I probably was. I quit all the time.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “I had a new client today whose father was a Japanese POW. It got me to thinking on the way home about that night on the Heath.”

  Arthur smiled. Hannah loved his wry smile, the wrinkles around his eyes that got more indelible with each passing decade. More wrinkles, less hair. Otherwise he was pretty much the same as all those years ago on the Heath, when she first felt such passion for him. He still had all his Ipana-white American teeth. But when she was younger—and dumber—she sometimes regarded his reliability as boring. Excitement in those bad old days consisted of chasing men at parties in other people’s living rooms, men whom she treated as cavalierly as Colin and her father had her. But when Mona and Nigel died, it was Arthur’s steadiness that got her through—and that was when she began to regard staying power as a virtue, and one Arthur had developed slowly and painfully in his private struggle to come to terms with having left behind one family in order to form a second with her.

  “One thing does lead to another.” He sipped his gin.

  “Did you think about consequences?”

  “Are you kidding? With bombs falling all around me? You’d have to be crazy to turn down a gorgeous woman groping in your greatcoat at a time like that.” He caressed her cheek with the back of his hand.

  “Me groping?”

  “Well, it certainly wasn’t my idea. After all, I was a married man.” He draped his arm across her shoulders.

  “You didn’t bother to tell me.”

  “Would it have made any difference?”

  “Probably,” she replied primly.

  He laughed. “Tell me about it. Well, it’s worked out okay, I’d say. You don’t even talk too funny anymore. If only you’d get rid of some of these plants. It’s like living in an oxygen tent.” He nodded toward the greenhouse window, beyond which the mauve sunset was losing its struggle against the night.

  “So what do you think is going to go on in here?” asked Hannah, sitting back in her metal desk chair and lighting a brown cigarette. Caroline was wearing a rumpled white uniform and white shoes. Evidently she was a nurse. Or a Good Humor man. She looked sallow, with dark circles under her eyes, as though her mascara had run, only she wasn’t wearing any. Hannah hadn’t been surprised to hear her voice over the phone again. But Caroline had sounded both surprised and reluctant. Hannah remembered early in her own training analysis insisting to Maggie that she was absolutely fine and was in Maggie’s office only to earn her degree. Maggie’s mouth twitched, but she managed not to smile.

  “I don’t know,” replied Caroline. “I assume you’ve got techniques and stuff.” Please don’t make me be a chair or beat a pillow, she thought, recalling accounts from Jenny, with whom she played poker every week, who was an acolyte for the Growth Movement. I don’t want to own my wild child or
explore my beingness. I just want to wake up not wishing I were dead.

  “No, we’re just going to have an extended conversation.” She watched Caroline rub the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger. Then Caroline gave a wan smile. A good omen. Usually clients took their miseries so seriously that you couldn’t get a smile out of them for weeks. “What’s the most painful thing that’s happened to you lately?”

  Caroline sighed. How could she choose? Celibacy? A dead goose on her doorstep? Norman Rockwell’s death? “The Jonestown thing, I guess.”

  “Why is that so painful for you?”

  “Well, I mean, aren’t nine hundred cyanide-soaked corpses rotting in the jungle painful for you?”

  “It’s not too pleasant. But I’m not one of them. And I don’t have to think about them for very long unless I choose to. And I don’t. So why do you?” She considered the symbolism and gave a nod of respect to Caroline’s unconscious.

  Caroline looked with weariness at Hannah in her red plaid Pendleton skirt and sweater. It was a mistake to have come back. She’d thought that dream was a message from her unconscious, but clearly her unconscious was as out to lunch as usual. Hannah was hopeless. She lacked a political analysis. You didn’t need one to play bridge. “It tears me up, the gap between what they were trying to do and how it all turned out.” Jones as a young man, with all his concern for the downtrodden, sounded not unlike herself, her parents, her classmates at nursing school, her colleagues at the People’s Free Clinic and the abortion referral service and the ER. The same wish to serve and to save. What had gone wrong? What always went wrong?