Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  Caroline sat on the tweed couch feeling alternately alarmed and pleased that she hadn’t divided her list into categories. Would Hannah kick her out? But Hannah hadn’t seemed to care about the list last week. Doing the list hadn’t pleased her. Telling her jokes hadn’t. For God’s sake, what did she want?

  Caroline’s glance shifted to the gray stone Venus on the windowsill. Swollen belly, hands resting on huge breasts. Seemed like a dykey object to have in an office. Was that why Hannah hadn’t been shocked when Caroline came out to her? She was a lesbian too? No, that was ridiculous. She was far too respectable. Besides, she’d mentioned some repulsive husband. Caroline didn’t care for the idea of Hannah with a man. But she was probably too old to sleep with anybody.

  What’s it to me whether Hannah sleeps with her husband, Caroline reflected. She’d better stick to the topic at hand—herself. Should she reveal her meditations on Pink Blanky? It seemed a bit much.

  Hannah walked in dressed in a wool skirt, navy blazer, and pinstriped shirt open at the throat. And no shoes. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” Caroline nodded toward the Venus. “That thing’s neat. Where did you get it?”

  “Bought it at a stall in a market the last time I was in London. It was a blustery day, and she looked so exposed I felt I had to rescue her.” The last time she’d been in London had been for her grandmother’s funeral, at Christ Church down the street from the house on the Heath. Probably she bought the statue in a vain attempt to replace the old woman. A portable mother figure that would never die.

  “How come you have it in here?”

  How come you want to know, wondered Hannah. “The originals of those statues were used in fertility ceremonies. The community held the image of a fruitful female in their heads, and then their flocks and herds and crops and families prospered. And that’s more or less what I do in here. So I keep it around to remind me.” She sat down and rested her stocking feet on the rush footstool.

  “What?” Caroline thought they were doing therapy in here, not hocus-pocus.

  “What what?”

  “I don’t see what you mean.”

  “I hold an image of a healthy happy coping client in my mind, and that’s what I work toward. If I held the idea of a depressed dependent client in my mind, then that’s what I’d work toward.” Hannah shook a brown cigarette from a pack of Mores on her desk and put it between her lips.

  “I disagree.”

  “You disagree that’s what I do?” Hannah raised her eyebrows. The lady was combative today. Good. Hannah could use a nice set-to. She was still a bit agitated from her sodomist.

  “I disagree it’s that simple.”

  “Well, that’s certainly your privilege.” She’d had enough success with her methods not to have to defend them. “It’s also your privilege to stay depressed if you want to.” Flicking her lighter, she drew the flame into the tip of her cigarette.

  “Want to?”

  “It’s your choice.” Hannah exhaled a steady stream of smoke into the beam of weak winter sunlight coming through the window.

  “Choice? If you really look at this world, you can’t help being depressed.” Apparently Hannah had never been depressed. She didn’t know how it felt for the air to turn too heavy to breathe.

  “That all depends on what you see when you look. What do you see?” Hannah arranged both arms along her chair arms, hands hanging over the ends.

  “Injustice, brutality, war, hunger.”

  “True. But it’s also a place of incredible beauty and intricacy. Inhabited by some people capable of great generosity and decency.”

  “Tell me about it.” Didn’t this woman read the papers?

  “I just did,” said Hannah. “Why are you so pissed off today?” Caroline’s mouth looked pinched, and there was a slow blue burn to her eyes.

  “Who’s pissed off?” Hannah had dumped on her jokes last week, and she was right to. They were here to deal with Caroline’s depression. Caroline was determined to keep it businesslike. Hannah seemed to have some skills, and maybe Caroline could benefit from them, but she didn’t have to start liking her. She’d regard these sessions as visits to the dentist, appointments with the plumber.

  “You want to know why I think you’re pissed off?”

  Caroline heaved an impatient sigh.

  “Because you’re starting to like me.” She looked at Caroline matter-of-factly.

  Caroline was astounded. Like her? She didn’t even know her. She hadn’t been angry before, but she was certainly getting angry. “The real reason I’m angry is that when I told you I was a lesbian, you changed the subject. It took me a long time to face that, and you just shrugged.” She remembered her horror when she woke up naked in bed with Clea, whose golden hair fanned out across the pillow like harvested wheat in the summer sun. She’d made love with a woman. She’d taken to it like a hog to mud. She practically wore David Michael to a stub in the ensuing weeks trying to prove that she wasn’t a pervert. Surely lesbianism couldn’t descend unheralded onto such a vigorous heterosexual. But it had. Which was why Hannah kept fleeing the topic.

  “I didn’t know you still trusted me so little,” said Hannah, glancing out to the parking lot. Jonathan stood talking to a man leaning on a shovel who’d just scraped ice off the sidewalk. Sometimes she wished she had a nice straightforward job like shoveling snow.

  Caroline felt a stab of remorse. Hannah wanted to be trusted, and Caroline had let her down. But what did trust have to do with anything? “What makes you think I don’t trust you? What I just said?”

  Hannah nodded, drawing on her cigarette.

  “See? You did it again. Changed the subject.”

  “I didn’t change the subject. I was trying to address what was really going on.”

  “What was really going on,” said Caroline, “was that I was trying to talk about my sexuality, and you changed the subject.”

  “What was really going on, from my point of view, was that we got pretty close last week, and now a reaction has set in.” Hannah felt at an unfair advantage. She’d been through this so many times. Whereas to Caroline it was all new, real, and in earnest.

  Was this true, Caroline wondered. Hannah told her last week she was kind and gentle. But she hadn’t really meant it. It was a ploy, something to do with that stone Venus. “Why can’t you just accept my lesbianism?”

  Hannah laughed and shook her head. “But I do accept it, Caroline. You make love with women, and I make love with men. Fine. Who cares?”

  So she did screw her husband, reflected Caroline. Men? Who besides her husband? Maybe she wasn’t as respectable as she looked. What about those bare feet? “You don’t really think it’s fine.” Caroline knew that a woman who hadn’t felt desire for another woman regarded lesbianism as an inferior form of sexuality, fit only for the unfeminine and the immature. This was incorrect, but you couldn’t tell hardened heterosexuals anything. They had biology and the pope on their side.

  “Who else in your life hasn’t thought it was fine?” asked Hannah, putting her cigarette between her lips and leaning forward to shrug off her blazer, which she folded and lay on the desk. The sunlight through the window was baking her left shoulder.

  As they sat in silence, Caroline reflected that hardly anyone knew, to think one way or the other. David Michael had been appalled and had done his best to dissuade her from a life of bourgeois decadence, but she never saw him now. Jackson probably had a clue because on the rare occasions when he showed any interest in Jackie and Jason, he grilled her about her living arrangement. Her parents carefully avoided that topic. She was going home for Christmas, but without Diana. There was no one in her life who thought lesbianism was fine except her lesbian friends. Which was why she spent as much time as possible with them. Though she’d had some lunches lately with Brian Stone, who kept dropping by the ER admissions desk in his scrub clothes while she was on duty. His sad dark eyes were starting to take their toll. She felt a growing need to cheer him up, bolst
er his shattered ego, make everything all right. A time or two she found herself wondering if lesbianism could be just an interlude in a lifetime of rampant heterosexuality.

  “What are you so afraid of?” asked Hannah.

  Caroline looked up. “Why would you assume I’m afraid?”

  Hannah pursed her lips and shrugged, stubbing out her cigarette in Nigel’s stone.

  Caroline heard words coming from her mouth without her permission: “That I’ll open myself up to you and get clobbered.”

  Hannah drew a sharp breath. Caroline’s candor, when it came, was painful. She left herself wide open. Hannah said nothing, unbuttoning and rolling her shirt sleeves to her elbows. Wanting Caroline to feel her wish to confide, cling, collapse—feel it, expose it to the air, find it didn’t frighten or appall Hannah, and needn’t Caroline herself. Caroline put on a brave show of tending everyone else. Doing for others what she wished someone would do for her.

  “Well, I can’t promise that won’t happen,” Hannah finally replied, lighting another cigarette, “because someone who’s determined to get clobbered will see a clobbering even when the other person intends nothing of the kind. But let’s set this aside for a while. How was your week?” Jonathan sometimes encouraged massive explosions, like emotional electroshock, but Hannah preferred to deplete the stockpile little by little. Most of her clients still had to function in the everyday world, and they couldn’t if they were in pieces.

  Caroline slumped into the sofa, the armpits of her white uniform clammy. “I thought a lot about transference.”

  “What about it?”

  “About why I’m not going to do it again.”

  “What was it like for you before?”

  “Do you think it’s possible to transfer onto objects?”

  “Sure. People transfer onto anything. Ideologies, pets, shoes, pills. This world can seem a very scary place. Most people search for someone or something to make everything all right.” Mary Beth yelled in the next room. Hannah glanced at Caroline, who didn’t seem to have noticed.

  Caroline studied Hannah in her oxford cloth shirt, her eyes squinting from cigarette smoke that drifted on the sunlight through the window. Maybe she understood more about the misery of the world than she let on? “I had this pink blanket when I was a kid, and I used to think if I covered myself with it, the knives of invading murderers would be deflected.”

  Hannah nodded. “Sounds like a useful item.”

  Caroline smiled.

  “What happened to it? Or do you still have it?” Mary Beth yelled again. Hannah frowned. What was this, Yankee Stadium?

  “The maid cut it into cleaning cloths.”

  Hannah grimaced, closing her eyes. “That’s bad.” She tried to avoid value judgments, but she was remembering how her children clung to their bottles, stuffed animals, and blankets, anchors in a turbulent sea of objects. Simon used to stand mournfully in front of the washer while his blanket went through the cycle. Each child had disrupted at least one vacation by forgetting a cherished object and insisting they turn the car around to retrieve it. She bought Mona three identical stuffed lambs because she was always misplacing one and getting frantic. Nigel had dragged around a pink plastic bottle for years.

  She glanced at her gray stone Venus, then at her mimi spirit. Was their function any different, however much classier their appearance? Whatever got you through the night. She glanced at her brown cigarette. If she gave these things up, what unattractive habit would she replace them with? Maggie used to say in her Eastern European accent, “My dear Hannah, effryvun is queer for somezing.” The trick was to get someone to replace fucking his son with stamp collecting.

  “That must have been painful,” said Hannah.

  Caroline thought this over, looking out the window. Lake Glass was doing its thing, reflecting in its still waters the sun overhead and a solitary bird in flight. It must have been painful, though she couldn’t recall feeling anything. “I was thinking this week about my best friend when I was a kid….”

  As Caroline talked, Hannah reflected that Caroline’s reality was a vacuum of fear, insecurity, and longing for affection and protection—which she’d attempted to fill with a parade of people, objects, and projects. The color guard in Hannah’s similar parade included her parents, her grandparents, Colin, Arthur, Maggie. All dead now except for Arthur.

  “Do you realize,” asked Hannah, “that your feelings for Marsha were the same as for your blanket?”

  “Yeah, the other night it hit me that I’ve felt like that towards a bunch of people. Time after time. Like angina attacks.”

  Hannah smiled and nodded. “Very good. And so what happened with Marsha?”

  “She got hit by a bread truck and died.”

  Hannah flinched. Caroline’s expression was so bland that Hannah wondered if she’d ever mourned her friend.

  “I should have been with her that day. She’d probably still be alive if I had been.”

  Hannah shrugged. “Whatever happens, happens. I think your pattern of feeling responsible for disaster was set much earlier.” If you’d caused World War II, subsequent disasters must seem like small beer.

  Caroline pinched the bridge of her nose and frowned. This hadn’t elicited the sympathy she’d expected. Once again Hannah had just shrugged. “I was talking to a guy at the hospital yesterday. He smiled, and I felt this pang. I realized his smile was just like Marsha’s. I thought, God, the girl’s been dead over twenty years.”

  “She’s part of your program now. In that sense she’s still alive for you. But it’s got nothing to do with her. You use the memory of her smile as an excuse to feel bad.”

  Caroline looked at Hannah. Did she have any normal human emotions, or was everything just an intellectual exercise?

  Hannah observed Caroline’s look of indignation, one she was accustomed to. But it was one way to jar a client out of a twenty-year rut. She remembered feeling similar outrage one day at the hospital when Maggie, dressed in a quilted bed jacket, meal tray on the bed table before her, eyes clouded with pain, said, “One nice thing about dying is that you don’t have to be on a diet.”

  “Do you have any childhood photos?” asked Hannah, rolling down her shirt sleeves, suddenly chilled. Her internal thermometer was haywire today. Must be about time for some hot flashes.

  Caroline nodded yes.

  “Why don’t you bring some in next week?”

  Caroline frowned and said nothing. They were moving to another assignment, and Hannah hadn’t noticed that she’d failed to complete the last one.

  “It helps me if I can picture whom we’re talking about,” explained Hannah, knowing Caroline would do it if the request was made in terms of helping someone else. Poor sap.

  Hannah walked along the lake, which spread out still and silent to the snow-covered mountains on the horizon. The cold air stung her cheeks. As she wrapped her arms across her parka, she reflected that there was nowhere on earth she’d rather be. But she hadn’t always felt this way. Compared with London, rural New England had seemed, as it must have to Arthur’s forebears in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, like a barren wilderness inhabited by savages. In her first months here, recently wed to Arthur, she experienced the sudden stillness as emptiness. And she proceeded to fill that emptiness—with babies, belongings, and emotional intrigue. She thought about the many flirtations she conducted at parties—the glances and innuendos, the phone calls and notes, the displays of outraged innocence on the bedroom threshold. Time after time through these unsuspecting men she punished her father and Colin for leaving—and Arthur for not leaving as he was supposed to. Arthur watched it all with a wry expression and still didn’t leave. And she felt contempt for his weakness, not having the sense to realize that his staying came from a strength she knew nothing about. Besides, he couldn’t leave her. He’d given up too much to be with her in the first place.

  She filled the house with china, silver, linens, and antiques. She filled her closet with expensiv
e clothes. She insisted Arthur buy a Lincoln Continental and a sailing yacht.

  And then Mona and Nigel died, and the antiques were stolen. The children were missed. The antiques were not. Her previous life fell away like a dried-up husk. The yacht was sold. The silver was put into storage. She continued to wear the clothes, not noticing or caring as they went out of fashion. She avoided parties; and when she couldn’t, she avoided past and potential male prey.

  Her clients talked about the complications of their lives as though divinely ordained. They were unimpressed when she suggested they’d devised many of the complications themselves, and could therefore simply drop them. But five-year-old children knew this. On the shale beach where she now stood, she used to give her children sparklers on the Fourth of July. They traced elaborate designs on the night sky and yelled for her to come look. In no time the sparklers burned out, and the designs vanished without a trace. The children too. But thirty-five-year-old children had lost track of the fact that it was their hands that waved the sparklers.

  She strolled over to the flat gray rocks where her children had flopped and scrambled like small white seals. Ice coated the bare branches of the huge old oak at the water’s edge, from whose branches her children had swung on knotted ropes. Those had been frantic years, with four young children and a husband often away on business. She’d had very little idea what she was doing. Like Caroline with her pink blanket, Mona had clung to her stuffed lambs and Nigel to his pink bottle. She could recall times when she scowled at Nigel’s jokes and rebuffed Mona’s hugs. If she’d known then what she knew now about a parent’s impact on a child, she’d have behaved differently. But I didn’t know, she insisted to herself. How could I?