Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  Her father in his too-narrow tie and lapels sat beside Jackie. He’d been excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and very nearly from his own family, for failing to raise his children as Catholics. As a child, Caroline had often wished she were Catholic, like Marsha, like the neighborhood kids, like the most popular kids at school. She coveted Marsha’s prayer cards and rosary, her candles and catechism classes. She watched enviously when Marsha took candles from the holders on Caroline’s dining table, crossed them over her own throat, and described how on St. Blase’s Day the priest did the blessing of the throat so no one would choke on fishbones. The Catholics had blessings for anything that could go wrong. The priest even blessed Marsha’s mother’s new Amana range against grease fires and short circuits. Of course none of this helped Marsha. Though maybe the priest had simply forgotten to insure against careless Bunny Bread trucks.

  Caroline had never seen this particular priest before. Tall and stooped in his black robe, he looked like a crow at rest as he perched at the lectern and delivered his sermon: “…just like the Israelites, who were unable to receive the living word of God from Moses as he came down off the mountain. They were dancing around a golden calf, having forgotten the instructions from their Lord God: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Just so do we fail to experience in our hearts the arrival of the newborn Christ. So preoccupied are we with gifts, food, and family. And not just at Christmas but all year long. We are obsessed with our relationships and our achievements, our new cars and the decoration of our houses, our golf scores and the labels on our clothing….”

  From the way he said “we,” Caroline could tell he was just humoring them. He knew he himself had transcended all this. There was a reason she’d stopped going to church.

  “…and put aside all the false idols of your own making. For just a moment, look into your naked soul, unadorned by the tawdry trinkets of this sinful world, and see what you can find….”

  Here was a boy who knew how to take all the fun out of Christmas, reflected Caroline, glancing at her mother in her hat and veil, who sat beside Jason eyeing him grimly as he scribbled infinitesimal amounts on the pledge cards in the hymnal rack. Did her mother cause her pain, as Hannah implied?

  They walked home through the cold night, along Cypress Street past darkened storefronts and through circles of light from street lamps, footsteps muffled by new-fallen snow. Caroline glanced at her parents, bundled in overcoats, their breath steamy white, both slightly stooped from carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders for all these years. How had they kept on decade after decade? She herself was about to give out after only a few years. Maybe she should join the Catholic Church at long last. Attend altar guild meetings at Our Lady of Sporadic Mercy. The saints in the pictures in Marsha’s house and church—St. Sebastian full of arrows, Jesus on the cross with thorns ripping his forehead, St. Stephen bruised and bloody from stones—were always looking upward, as though they saw something that cheered them up. As though they’d managed to make peace with the savage ways of their fellow citizens.

  On Christmas morning they sat around a cedar tree Caroline’s father had bought at half price the night before from a man eager to shut down his lot to go to mass. Jackie took an envelope with his name on it off the tree and ripped it open. Inside was a partially filled March of Dimes card. He looked at it questioningly, turning it around and over.

  “You fill the blank slots with dimes from your allowance,” said

  Caroline’s mother, who sat on the sofa in her brown satin robe. “When it’s full, you mail it to national headquarters.”

  “Neat,” said Jackie, glancing under the tree for another gift.

  “Won’t it be fun to help some crippled child walk again?” asked Caroline’s mother, sipping her coffee.

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “He certainly doesn’t seem very excited,” said Caroline’s mother.

  Caroline felt a twinge of anxiety. Jackie wasn’t showing enough gratitude. Her mother would think she’d reared a greedy ingrate. “I’m sure he is,” said Caroline as Jason opened an identical card and displayed even less enthusiasm. They’d asked for cartridges for their video game. Evidently no trucks carrying such cargo had wrecked lately in the Boston area.

  Inside the UNICEF card addressed to Caroline, her mother had written the usual message—that the card represented a donation to the charity of her choice. Caroline had been told that other families sat around on Christmas discussing the merits of the Buffalo Bills over the Dallas Cowboys because of their running offense. Her family had always discussed the superiority of the Salvation Army over Planned Parenthood because of low administrative costs.

  “Which are you going to pick this year, Caroline?” asked her mother, extending her arm along the back of the sofa. Caroline studied her satin robe. It seemed so elegant when Caroline was little, something Loretta Young would wear. Caroline had watched it fall open at the throat as the maids set her mother’s hair and rubbed her neck. Now it looked as though it ought to be donated to the Boat People Relief Fund rummage sale.

  “I’ve been thinking about Amnesty International.” She sat cross-legged in her down bathrobe on the beige Route 128 carpet.

  “Bunch of masochists,” her father, wearing his red plaid wool robe, said from the corduroy armchair. “Spending their lives discussing how horrible torture is.”

  “But it probably is,” said Caroline.

  “But who’d want to make a career of researching it?”

  “But that’s what you do, Dad—spend all your time rescuing people.”

  “So do you.”

  “I never said I wasn’t a masochist.”

  He smiled. “Masochists, are we? Maybe so. But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do what I can to make this world less of a hellhole.” He was rubbing the scar above his eyebrow.

  Caroline nodded. “But isn’t that what Amnesty’s doing?”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Jason knelt on the rug by the tree, tearing open a present as though shucking corn. Holding up a pair of L. L. Bean boots, he said with suspicion, “Hey.”

  “Got them at a sale,” said Caroline’s father. “Good as new. It’s amazing what some people give away.”

  Caroline inspected them. They were Jason’s own outgrown boots. His initials were inside in Magic Marker.

  “Try them on,” her father said.

  Jason pulled them on, a perplexed expression on his face, and walked over to his grandfather.

  “What sale?” asked Caroline.

  “The Boat People Relief Fund rummage sale.” He leaned over and felt Jason’s foot. “They fit just fine.”

  “Too tight,” muttered Jason, glancing at Jackie questioningly.

  “Yes sir, just fine,” said Caroline’s father, slapping Jason on the shoulder.

  Jason screwed up his face and looked at Caroline. This was nothing new to her. She and Jackson had been married under a funeral tent erected by a client of her father’s who ran the Ready Funeral Parlor. The boys might as well become acquainted with their heritage. “Did you thank Grandpa, Jason?”

  “Thank you, Grandpa,” he said in a bewildered voice. He came over and plopped down in Caroline’s lap. She put her arms around him, feeling the warm flannel of his Dr. Denton’s under her hands.

  “You’re welcome, Jason. I hope you enjoy them.”

  “By the way, how is poor Jackson?” asked her mother. She always preceded his name with that adjective.

  “Fine, as far as I know. He and his wife had another baby this fall.” Resting her chin atop Jason’s head, she remembered wanting to rest her head in Hannah’s lap. She looked at her mother, self-contained on the sofa in her satin robe. Caroline couldn’t recall ever resting her head in her mother’s lap, or sitting in it as Jason was now in hers.

  “Are you still living with that woman?” asked her mother.

  “Diana. Yes.” She restrained an urge to add that they weren’t lo
vers anymore. No need to let a dead cat out of the bag. Whether her parents knew they’d been lovers was unclear. It had never been acknowledged. Nor had her divorce, David Michael, Clea, her depressions. What had been discussed during this visit was the fate of humanism in the twentieth century; interracial knife fights at South Boston High; the threat posed by killer bees and aerosol cans; relief efforts in behalf of families involved in a West Virginia mining disaster; starvation in Chad, and floods in India. Personal disaster was insignificant by comparison.

  Her mother looked so unhappy from the mention of Jackson and Diana that Caroline felt a need to cheer her up. “Mother, how many therapists does it take to change a light bulb?” She could use this as an opener for telling about Hannah. Surely they’d want to know about such an important development. But maybe it would upset them to hear she’d been unhappy?

  “One, but the bulb has to really want to change.” She watched with pleasure as her parents’ faces softened into smiles.

  “Speaking of which, I’ve gone into therapy myself.” Too late she remembered they didn’t approve of therapy. They belonged to the Bootstrap School. They’d think she was a wimp.

  “Why?” asked her father, looking up.

  “I’ve been depressed a lot,” she said in a low voice.

  “Depressed?” said her mother. “Who isn’t depressed? How could you not be with all the dreadful things going on in the world? Did you read in the paper about Vietnamese troops amassing on the Cambodian border? That could be World War Three.”

  Caroline sat in silence. How could she have forgotten the trips to the Salvation Army? She adjusted her poker-playing face. Then she noticed what she was doing. She glanced around the room at the doorways. From which jamb had she hung in similar silence as a baby?

  “People like us have no right to be unhappy,” her father said. “We have food, shelter, clothing, good health, relative safety.”

  Caroline knew her parents were right. One individual’s despair wasn’t important in the light of Vietnamese troops poised to invade Cambodia. If she were Cambodian, she might be starving, homeless, raped, murdered right now. Depression was a luxury of the American middle class, just as David Michael always used to insist. She should be grateful to have the leisure in which to feel so awful. Guilt over her ingratitude wrapped around her like Dracula’s cape.

  “One more thing,” her mother called to the boys as they departed to the playroom to hook up their video game and try out the cartridges Diana had given them. “We got carried away and invited more people for dinner than we have food for. So could I ask you three please to eat small portions and skip dessert?” They all nodded.

  “Who’s coming?” asked Caroline, recalling past holiday dinners, jammed with her parents’ clients. Her father had been known to scour the streets on Christmas Day searching for people with nowhere to go. Once he brought home a hitchhiker named Bradley, who entertained them by swallowing a spoon, a skill he developed in jail. He’d swallow a spoon, they’d rush him to the emergency room, and he’d escape when no one was looking. How he retrieved the spoon wasn’t explained. A regular named Lionel, a tall sad man with a tic, had no family to eat holiday dinners with because he murdered them all by putting laxative in their food over many months. A woman named Bertha used to sit on the couch and open and close a pair of scissors all afternoon.

  “You don’t know most of them,” her mother replied.

  “What’s happened to the old gang?”

  “Bertha’s coming.”

  “Does she still play with those scissors?”

  “No, she took up knitting.”

  “That’s a nice thing you’ve done all these years, Mother. Now that I’m an adult, I realize how much work it is.”

  Her mother’s shoulders sagged under the brown satin robe. “Well, poor people. Life isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s easier for us than for most.” Every chair in the house was crammed around the mahogany dining table. Caroline had a son on either side, and her parents presided at either end. Bertha had knitted throughout the meal, on what looked like either a narrow blanket or a wide scarf in shades of red and brown. Occasionally she put down a needle to stuff a hasty bite into her mouth, never taking her eyes off her handiwork. A tattered man who lived somewhere in the Park Street Under MTA station sat next to Bertha and tried unsuccessfully to strike up conversations about people he’d seen electrocuted on the third rail. A woman from her mother’s office wore her hair on top of her head in a large bun, which she’d encircled with holly like a Roman emperor with his wreath of laurel. The barmaid from underneath her father’s office kept flicking her crystal goblet with a long mauve nail, to hear the tinkling noise like a tiny jingle bell. Caroline found herself staring at the polished nails, thinking the fingertips had been severed, like those of the drill press operator who’d come into Peter Bent Brigham during her ER rotation at nursing school.

  Bradley, the spoon swallower, had been replaced by Sidney, who had the illusion he was a magician. He kept laying his linen napkin across the turkey and mumbling spells. Jackie and Jason watched with wide eyes, worried it would vanish while they were still hungry. But each time Sidney whipped off the napkin, the turkey was still there. He’d retreat into himself in a funk, rehearsing spells, trying to see where he’d gone wrong. A mother in a baby blue argyle pullover and plastic Pop-It beads was trying to prevent her son from thrusting his drumstick obscenely in and out of the turkey’s neck cavity.

  Caroline glanced at Jackie and Jason in their sports jackets and ties, their hair parted and slicked down. She’d never seen them so quiet. For one thing, the other little boy had demolished their video game. When he couldn’t get his lever to function as he wanted, he simply tore it out of the box. Caroline recalled that feeling of bafflement on holidays, never knowing who’d be there, knowing only that they had nowhere else to go and that her family could afford to include them because her family was so fortunate.

  She wondered what Hannah was doing right then. Was her house also full of the homeless? Was Hannah correct that her parents caused her pain? She wasn’t feeling so great, but that certainly wasn’t their fault. And she could see for herself how the sad people at this table gazed at her parents with admiration. Her parents had served on the school board and the city council. They’d been heart fund volunteers. They’d raised money for the community ambulance. They were good people.

  Her mother was right: there wasn’t enough food. The boys had copied Caroline’s example and taken only a thin slice of turkey, a small spoonful of mashed potatoes, and a few peas. The rolls were gone before reaching, their side of the table, and the pies went just as quickly. The abstinence required no effort on Caroline’s part. She wasn’t hungry. In fact she felt nauseated. As she cleared the table, the guests moved into the living room, and her father began to stoke the fire.

  “How about some carols?” her mother was suggesting as Caroline entered the living room. These were among the few occasions on which she saw this cheery side to her mother. Usually she was exhausted from having spent all day being cheery at the office. Jason was pulling his grandmother’s arm, trying to get her attention about something to do with the video game. She shook him off, whispering, “Not now, Jason. I’m busy.”

  Jason plopped down beside Caroline on the Route 128 carpet and looked up through his absurdly long Minnie Mouse eyelashes. “Mommy, I’m hungry.” He wrenched off his blazer and wadded it on the floor.

  She patted his thigh hopelessly. He shoved a thumb in his mouth. He hadn’t sucked his thumb for years.

  “Jason, why are you sucking your thumb?” asked Caroline’s mother as she handed him a carol book. “You’re a big boy.”

  “Hungry,” he whimpered.

  Caroline felt her stomach tensing. He didn’t know he was supposed to pretend he was fine even if he wasn’t. She hadn’t trained him properly. Her parents were seeing her as the bad parent she in fact was.

  “Hungry? But we’ve just finished dinner.” />
  Jason gazed at his grandmother over his fist, sucking the thumb with furious defiance.

  “Look at Jackie,” said Caroline’s mother, gesturing to the fireplace, next to which Jackie stood looking awkward and shy, hands clasped behind his back. “He’s not hungry and he’s a bigger boy than you are.”

  Caroline watched a tear begin to swell in Jason’s right eye. Why couldn’t the kid just play the game and get it over with?

  “At least you’re not cold,” said Caroline’s father, joining them. “What about the millions of children all over the world right now who are cold as well as hungry?”

  “At least he has a house and a family,” said Caroline’s mother to Caroline’s father. “Unlike several of our guests today.”

  “And he has nice new boots,” said Caroline’s father to Caroline’s mother. “What about children in Kentucky who are barefoot at this very moment? Up in the snowy mountains.”

  Caroline’s parents studied Jason, perplexed. He jumped up, raced to the front door, flung it open, and dashed out.

  “What in the world?” said Caroline’s mother.

  Caroline knew she should do something, but she couldn’t think what. She was in the grip of an overwhelming inertia. All she wanted was to stretch out face down on the Route 128 carpet and let events wash over her like waves over flotsam at high tide. Instead, she unfolded herself and stood up, as though in slow motion. She went out the door and glanced around the yard in the light from the colored Christmas bulbs over the door. She trotted around the house, maternal instincts on automatic pilot. No Jason. God, her parents must be thinking she’d reared little barbarians. When she returned for her coat, the room was silent, the guests looking at each other and straining forward in their seats. Bertha had even stopped knitting.

  “He’s gone,” said Caroline. “Jackie, please help me.”

  They searched the neighborhood for fifteen minutes, calling for him into the dark. Damn kid. Why did he have to be so melodramatic? Why couldn’t he just do as he was supposed to, be quiet and polite and sing carols until time for bed? Finally they climbed in the Subaru and drove toward Cleveland Circle. She was getting really worried. The terror she used to feel as a young girl when she lost track of Howard or Tommy was setting in. Anything could have happened to him. Cities were full of creeps. Jason was so young and vulnerable. Goddam it, where was he?