Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  “Well, it was mutual. But you were besotted with Arlene, don’t forget. You spent most of your spare time waxing her car, as I recall.”

  A door upstairs slammed so hard the whole cabin shook. Jason screamed, “I’m telling Mommy!”

  “Please don’t,” Caroline said, closing her eyes in prayer. She and Diana exchanged long-suffering glances. What would she have done all these years without Diana as co-mother?

  “I was besotted with Arlene. But in a different way than with you—for one thing, Arlene didn’t laugh much.”

  “She sure didn’t. ‘Ladies, you have a mission.’ Remember? But I used to be terribly jealous. Of you both probably.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have bothered.” Caroline was picturing Arlene, her bulk and her bun, her grim mouth opening like a knife puncture to announce in a broad Boston Irish accent, “Ladies, you have a mission: to relieve human suffering. My mission is to show you how.” Caroline floated through the days of emptying bedpans, changing dressings, making beds, on wings of purpose: If she herself survived the holocausts, she’d be one of the few citizens of the postnuclear world with the skills to save others. She’d salve their burns, stitch their gashes, wipe sweat off their brows as they perished of radiation sickness.

  Then she remembered the last time she ever talked with Arlene, in a deli over a pastrami sandwich. Arlene said, “I don’t know what you want from me, Caroline, but you’ll have to find it somewhere else. I’m a very busy woman.”

  Caroline’s warm feelings from dinner with Diana began to drain away like a jaw going numb from Novocaine.

  “I wonder what she’s up to now,” said Diana, green eyes finally settling like two flies on Brian’s yellow rose.

  “God knows. Probably still molding young missionaries.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “I don’t mean to. She was good to me. For as long as it lasted.” Caroline studied her hands. Her nails needed clipping. No, they didn’t. She clipped them so she wouldn’t hurt Diana during lovemaking. But they weren’t doing that anymore. She could grow them long as letter openers. The numbness spread across her face. Her stomach clenched into a fist.

  It’s over, Caroline reminded herself. Like Marsha’s smile, like Rorkie’s toilet paper, Arlene was long gone. Lovemaking with Diana was finished. Yet according to Hannah, she used these painful memories to feel lousy in the present. Resolutely she dismissed Arlene in her white stockings and bulging white uniform, and Diana naked on her back in bed reaching out for Caroline. She summoned instead the image from that afternoon of Hannah’s eyes locking with her own in mutual amusement. She smiled faintly, the numbness halting its march down her neck toward her shoulders. Like a dozing driver trying to wake herself, she shook her head abruptly.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Diana.

  “This afternoon I was complaining to Hannah about not being on the basketball team in high school. She said, ‘It’s not too late to be a star. Why don’t you hire a lot of short people?’”

  Diana smiled. “Funny lady.”

  “Did I tell you two of her kids died in their beds from carbon monoxide poisoning?”

  “God, how dreadful.” Diana peeled a piece of wax from a candle and melted it in the flame. “I don’t know how a mother would survive that.”

  There was a loud crash and the sound of running feet upstairs. “Try me,” muttered Caroline.

  “You’re awful.” Diana tried not to smile. She nodded toward Brian’s rose. “Is she pushing you to date men?”

  Caroline looked at Diana. “She doesn’t push me to do anything. Except to feel better.”

  “Are you in love with her yet?”

  Caroline said nothing, holding her face blank.

  “Look, I’ve done therapy. I know how it works. You fall in love with the therapist and copy her every twitch.”

  “What’s it to you anyway? I thought we weren’t having this kind of relationship anymore. I thought you had a new child bride.” She slammed down her cat mug harder than she intended, sloshing coffee onto the rust tablecloth.

  Diana lowered her eyes, then tried to shrug. “Well, it’s nothing to me really. I just hate to see you leading that poor man on. After all, I’ve been to bed with you, Caroline. And you’re no heterosexual.”

  “I’m sure Brian would appreciate your sudden concern.” Caroline tilted a candle to let wax dribble down the side.

  “Now you’re getting sarcastic. But it’s something to think about. Because you’re not being fair to him. You’re just using him while you try to parody Hannah.” Diana tipped her own candle and gathered the hot wax into a little ball. “What do you see in him anyway?”

  “He’s a nice man, Diana. He’s gentle, thoughtful, attractive.”

  Diana looked at her ironically. “He’s a man, isn’t he?”

  Caroline lowered her head, arms spread out on the rust tablecloth. “It’s easier, Diana. I’m getting older. I’m not sure I can take the strain of defying society anymore.” Her voice was tired.

  “It’s easier to deny your true self? Is that what Hannah’s teaching you?”

  “Who says my true self is queer?” Caroline looked up, eyes narrowed with pain.

  Diana glared at her. “Look, babe, you got me into this.”

  “Yeah, and you took a lot of persuading, too.” Glaring back, Caroline recalled the first time they made love—on the shag carpet in

  Diana’s living room, late at night after two bottles of wine, after weeks of struggling to keep their hands off each other. In the morning we can blame it on the wine, Caroline remembered thinking as she buried her tongue in Diana, and felt Diana’s hands lock around her head, refusing to let her reconsider. But Diana was right. She’d been more experienced. She probably did have some kind of responsibility. But fuck it, Diana was on her own now.

  “You know,” said Caroline, “every time you use Hannah’s name there’s this tension in your voice. I keep wondering if you really want me to feel better.”

  There was a long silence, broken only by Jackie’s imitation of a submachine gun upstairs. Diana had collected more wax and was molding it into globular shapes. She looked up, green eyes flashing in the candlelight. “Can’t you see I’m scared?”

  “What of?”

  “If Hannah helps you see what a neat woman you are, why would you want to be with me?” Her face looked haggard in the candlelight.

  Caroline felt a rush of emotion. “Because I love you, Diana.” They looked into each other’s eyes as intently as during lovemaking. Diana reached over with both hands and took one of Caroline’s.

  “You can’t believe I’d be with you unless I needed you?” Caroline asked.

  Diana slowly shook her head no.

  “That’s a nurse for you,” Caroline said softly, adding her other hand to the heap on the table. “Diana, do you think we’ll be lovers again?”

  Diana looked startled. “Nothing could surprise me about us. We’ve been through every permutation in the book.”

  “Well, I want us to be,” said Caroline. “I’m tired of these games.” There. She’d said it. She felt her shoulders tighten. I know what you want and you can’t have it.

  “That makes the vote two to zero.” Diana looked pleased. “Now if our brains would just shut up and let our bodies do what they’re so good at.” She added, “Please don’t give up on me, darling. This thing with Suzanne will pass.”

  “I’d give up on you if I could,” Caroline said, looking into the candle flame. “But apparently you’re stuck with me.”

  “Good.”

  “For whom?” She looked at Diana with sudden belligerence.

  “Look, you’ve got Hannah to lean on. Who do I have?”

  “Suzanne, it looks like.”

  “She’s young. She’ll move on.”

  “Oh, goodie. And then I can have you back?”

  “No promises.”

  “Fuck you.” Caroline got up to do the dishes. Was that all there was to it
, she wondered as she ran water in the sink and fended off Diana’s attempts to scrape the dishes. Asking for what you wanted? It seemed too simple. What if Diana had said, I know what you want and you can’t have it? But she hadn’t, Caroline realized, a smile spreading across her face, dispelling the remaining numbness.

  Hannah was sitting in her chair, stocking feet on the rush footstool, when Caroline walked in and handed her a loaf of rye bread wrapped in Saran Wrap. Hannah looked at it.

  “I made it.”

  “Thanks,” said Hannah, tossing it on the desk behind her among the books, papers, and coffee cups. She felt bad about not responding more warmly to what looked like nice bread. “Sit down.”

  Caroline sat down. That bread had taken three hours. She’d given Hannah the most perfectly shaped loaf of the batch.

  “So what’s up?” Hannah put clasped hands behind her head, elbows out.

  “Nothing much.” Caroline folded her arms across her chest. She was sorry she bothered to bring the damn bread. Children in Chad were starving, and Hannah tossed it aside without a second glance. She was just a spoiled American. Except she was British…

  “How was your week?” asked Hannah.

  “All right.”

  Hannah leaned forward to light a cigarette, inhaling deeply, then looking at the thin brown cigarette. All this effort she expended helping clients break their habits, like Caroline’s of trying to control people through taking care of them. How come she couldn’t break her own?

  Caroline was looking down at the tweed sofa cover, noting its weave and feeling humiliated. Maybe Hannah made bread night and day herself. Maybe she was swamped with moldy old bread from other clients. Maybe she was allergic to rye.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Hannah, remembering the time she brought Maggie a sandwich. Roast beef on whole wheat with Russian dressing, lettuce, and onions. She’d spent hours trying to decide what Maggie would like. Maggie looked at it for a long time. Then she put on the glasses that hung around her neck, looked up, and asked, “What am I supposed to do with this?” Hannah felt as baffled as Caroline now looked.

  “Don’t you like rye bread?”

  “I can’t eat it. I’m on a diet. But Arthur will love it.”

  “Who’s Arthur?”

  “My husband.”

  Caroline glared at her. She hadn’t made that bread for some creepy man. God, what atrocious manners. At least she could pretend to be delighted.

  “What did you think I’d say?” asked Hannah. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

  Hannah shrugged. “And now you’re upset because I’m not?”

  “Who’s upset?” She was studying her palm intently, noting the spot where her lifeline ominously veered off into several branches.

  “You are.” Hannah laughed. “You should see your expression. You look like someone took away your lollipop.”

  Caroline looked up. She was thirty-five years old, for God’s sake. Hannah thought she was childish? How adult was it to be rude? She studied Hannah’s face—kind, with a wry smile—and remembered Hannah was out to help her. “I feel like a fool.”

  “You feel foolish because I didn’t react the way you wanted. You want to control my reactions so you can feel okay about yourself. Wouldn’t it be easier just to eliminate me and feel okay without relation to what I do or don’t do?”

  “Fuck it, Hannah! Why do you have to turn everything into such a big deal? I was just trying to be nice.”

  “Uh huh, the way you and Diana are nice to each other? Trying to outnice each other?”

  Caroline clutched the sofa, looking as though she might tear the place apart. Hannah was impressed. What had happened to the meek woman who’d sat across from her all those weeks? “Look, you bring me bread. Then I bring you a pork roast. Then you bring me a Black Forest cake, and I bring you English trifle….”

  Caroline smiled reluctantly. “Okay. I get the point.”

  “But thank you for the bread.” Hannah reached behind her to pat the loaf with affection.

  “You’re welcome. Enjoy it, because you aren’t getting any more.”

  They laughed. Hannah put her stone ashtray in her lap. Caroline released her grip on the sofa and stretched out her Levi’d legs, her snowmobile boots as cumbersome as an astronaut’s.

  “What were you up to this week besides kneading?” asked Hannah, drawing on her cigarette.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about this teacher at nursing school named Arlene.” Caroline glanced out the window and could scarcely see Lake Glass through the swirling snow. It felt like looking into a paperweight.

  “Oh yes?”

  “I guess you’d call her my mentor. I thought she was fantastic—as a nurse and as a person. I thought if I imitated her, I’d be fantastic, too. She was huge—tall, big-boned, tough, with this gigantic bun on top of her head. She used to say, ‘Ladies, you have a mission.’”

  “Did you have a relationship with her?”

  Caroline hesitated. “You mean sexual?”

  Hannah nodded.

  “Well, no. I mean, she was twenty years older than me.”

  So? thought Hannah.

  So was Hannah, Caroline realized. And she had wanted to rest her head on Hannah’s breast, feel Hannah’s arms around her. She recalled maneuvering to stand close to Arlene during training sessions, and the tingle of excitement when Arlene’s hands corrected hers as she changed a dressing.

  Caroline said in a dazed voice, “Now that you mention it, I would’ve gone to bed with her. But I wasn’t a lesbian then. Neither was she, as far as I know.” That she would have liked to make love with Arlene seemed so remote she hadn’t even considered it before. It should have seemed even more remote to this respectable bridge-playing non-lesbian.

  “So what happened?”

  Caroline described her graduation, and Arlene’s apparent pleasure at Caroline’s new job at Mass General. At first Caroline was worried: If she wasn’t around to wax Arlene’s VW and sharpen her pencils, maybe Arlene would lose interest in her. The nursing school was en route to Caroline’s apartment from the hospital, so she stopped at Arlene’s office in an old sandstone building on Commonwealth Avenue every week or two. A surly young woman named Dusty, two years behind Caroline, was usually present, sometimes sharpening pencils. Caroline and Arlene would chat and part, agreeing to have supper soon. Caroline was good at her job. She felt like a karate master, poised to cope with any horror that might roll through those ER doors. Good practice for a nuclear holocaust. She was quickly promoted. She stopped to tell Arlene, and to suggest a time and place for the long-proposed dinner, feeling bold now that they were colleagues in this business of relieving human suffering.

  They met at a sit-down deli near the hospital one afternoon after work. Arlene shifted her large frame in the small bentwood chair and toyed with her fork with fingers like hotdogs. “Look, Caroline, I don’t know what you want from me,” she said. “But you’ll have to find it somewhere else. I’m a very busy woman.”

  Caroline stared at her.

  “Don’t look at me like that.” Arlene patted her huge bun, removing and replacing some hairpins.

  “Like what?” Caroline asked in a faint voice. She was correct: If she didn’t do things for Arlene, Arlene had no use for her.

  “You’ve done pretty well out of this relationship. You got your fancy job at Mass General.”

  “That must have been painful,” said Hannah.

  Caroline felt herself going numb. She couldn’t recall feeling anything.

  “Caroline, who else in your life used to say, ‘I’m a very busy person’?”

  Caroline frowned.

  Hannah wanted to tug at her ear as though playing charades: “Sounds like…”

  “I give up,” said Caroline in a flat voice.

  Hannah sighed. Why did this stuff take so long? “It sounds to me as though that was the message your parents were always putting out.”

  Caroline frowned again.

&nb
sp; “Does it occur to you that you pick people because they put out that message? And if they don’t, you try to manipulate them into it?”

  “What?”

  Realizing she was going too fast, Hannah tried to figure out how to backtrack.

  “But I didn’t give a shit about that job,” said Caroline, saving Hannah the effort. “I’d done it all to be more worthy of her friendship. I couldn’t believe she didn’t know that.”

  “Did you just hear yourself?” Hannah shifted in her chair, propping one hand on the chair arm.

  “Yes. I mean, no. What?” Caroline narrowed her eyes in concentration.

  “You feel you have to figure out what people want and do it, for them to like you.”

  “Is that what I said?”

  “That’s what it sounded like to me.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you see where it comes from?” Surely she couldn’t avoid seeing much longer? Feeling impatient, Hannah lit another cigarette.

  “My parents?”

  Hannah nodded encouragingly. She realized if Caroline had guessed wrong, she’d have made no response, which was a response in itself. “You say you did well at nursing school and in your job just to please Arlene. But I suspect you had reasons of your own as well. It sounds to me as though you’ve always been competent and assertive.” Caroline blinked. This assessment clearly didn’t fit her picture of herself as a messy drag. “So did you leave it like that with Arlene?”

  “I said, ‘But I thought we could be friends once I stopped being your student.’ And she said, ‘Things have been bad between you and me for a long time. “This was news to me. Christ, I adored the woman. We finished our pastrami sandwiches. Out on the sidewalk I said, “Thanks for all your help.’ She said, ‘Not at all.’ And climbed on the trolley. I vomited in the storm sewer and walked home. That’s the last thing we ever said to each other.”

  Caroline glanced at the Kleenex on the chest. Another new box. Apparently a lot of crying went on in here. Caroline was damned if she’d cry. She described to Hannah how each day for several weeks she stood in a doorway across the street from Arlene’s second-story office window after work and watched Arlene at her desk as students came and went. One evening Caroline, her eyes on Arlene in her office, sidled over to Arlene’s VW and looked in. On the seat was a box of yellow Kleenex. The door was open, so Caroline grabbed the box and faded back into the doorway. Arlene stood up and moved over to her window. Looking out into the dusk, across the commuter traffic up Commonwealth Avenue, she looked tired and sad. She folded her arms across her stomach. Her shoulders sagged, and her head drooped. Maybe she was missing Caroline as much as Caroline missed her? Caroline fought an urge to run up there and tell her jokes.