Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  As she broke off the lobster’s tail with both hands, she examined her new idea from different angles, like a prospector inspecting ore to determine whether it was fool’s gold or the real thing. She nodded to herself. Arthur glanced at her and smiled, eating coleslaw from a small paper cup with his fork. Whatever she proclaimed over the years, she’d been prejudiced against homosexuals. She’d accepted homosexuality as a valid response to certain factors in childhood. But she’d privately regarded her monogamous marriage to a man as more “normal.” But Caroline, say, was no more “abnormal” than any heterosexual client, or than Hannah herself. She was bright, kind, competent, attractive, and funny. Try as you might, you couldn’t dismiss her as a sad sack or weirdo.

  Carefully wiping her fingers with a towelette and removing her plastic bib, Hannah remembered wanting to touch Maggie’s face with her fingertips during therapy, wanting to bury her own face between Maggie’s breasts and feel Maggie’s hands on her flesh. And now all these healthy young lesbians sat in her office describing their sex lives in graphic detail, and wanting her sexually as a standin for Mummy, whether they were aware of it or not. She’d have to be disembodied not to feel drawn physically to some. Especially toward the end when they were feeling better, and crediting that to her. Probably a sculptor felt toward a completed statue as she did toward a terminating client, proud as hell to observe the serene form that had emerged from a cold gray block of misery. But she’d never acted on these attractions. Caroline had had boyfriends and husbands, yet still sought out women. What was the difference between them?

  One difference was that Hannah was an only child whose mother adored her. She knew this from her mother’s letters to her grandmother. Her grandmother had also doted, in her own remote way. But her father had deserted her for Trinidad, and her grandfather had spent all his time in the City, so that she could scarcely recall what he’d looked like. Hence her longing for a man. Which had set in very early indeed, in that gardener’s shed in Sussex with Colin.

  As she and Arthur, encased in sweaters and parkas, walked along a cliff path above crashing waves, icy spray stinging their faces, she thought about Colin with his pale blue eyes and pasty complexion. When she became pregnant from their sessions on the stone floor, he dutifully married her and took her back to Bow, to the horror of everyone she knew. He went to work on the docks, and she decorated their small shabby Victorian row house in a street off Roman Road. Hannah had only ever seen the East End riding through it on the bus loops she took as a girl. Actually living there after Hampstead and Sussex was like living in a foreign country. In Hampstead greengrocer shops were papayas and mangoes, salsify and kohlrabi, delicacies from every corner of that empire on which the sun never set. (Lucky, since the sun was never in evidence in England itself.) In Bow were cabbages, Brussels sprouts, potatoes, and apples. In Hampstead bakeries were cream cakes and scones, croissants and a dozen types of fresh bread. In Bow were white bread and doughy apple tarts. In Hampstead there were small specialty shops whose owners asked in modulated voices about her grandparents’ health. In Bow were raucous street markets where people laughed and shouted, argued and bargained, calling each other duckie, darling, luv, and girlie. In Hampstead were Englishmen. In Bow were the dregs of the empire—Cockneys, and one lone Australian whose hybrid accent they mocked.

  She enjoyed it at first, once she recovered from the horror of unwanted pregnancy and forced marriage—and her grandmother’s fury at both. She hung the mimi spirit on the kitchen wall, and it seemed more at home in Bow than in Hampstead or Sussex. After Simon was born, she spent long lazy afternoons nursing him by the coal fire in the sitting room. On warm days she’d put him in his pram in the tiny garden, set off from the neighbors by high fences, while she pulled weeds and coaxed flowers. Or she’d push him in the pram to Victoria Park, where she’d nod pleasantly at the other mothers, trying not to open her mouth so they wouldn’t discover she wasn’t really one of them. Or she and Simon would stroll to the shops on Roman Road to buy things for Colin’s tea, when he came home in his high black Wellingtons, his pale boy’s face dirty and exhausted, his would-be furniture maker’s hands chapped and grimy.

  But Simon had colic and cried a lot, and Colin soon began going to the Duke of Chichester pub at the end of the street in the evenings. Hannah began to nag him, since she longed for someone to talk to after spending all day with a tiny baby. Colin began to long for a woman who didn’t nag. He found such a woman, or several, and was gone even more. So that Hannah was lonelier and nagged more. The standard scenario on both sides of the Atiantic, which Hannah had heard from so many clients since. Though at the time, rejected by Colin, isolated from her neighbors, and spurned by her Hampstead and Sussex friends, her misery seemed unique.

  Hannah sought comfort from Simon, who picked up her anxiety and howled more loudly. So that eventually Colin was scarcely home at all. And when he was, it was to throw a brick at the screaming Simon, which missed by inches the soft spot on his head where his pulse beat. Another night as she begged him to stay home, Colin grabbed the walnut table clock he’d made for her in Sussex, threw it to the floor, and chopped it to bits with an ax. Later that night Hannah awoke to find the bed covers being pulled off her by Colin, who was urging his drinking mate to go ahead and “screw the posh bitch.”

  Blessedly, the war broke out, ending many such domestic dramas all across Europe. Colin was among the first to sign on to fight the Nazis, and among the first to decay in a shallow grave by the River Meuse. Everyone, even her fierce grandmother, took pity on her, alone with an infant, her man dead in battle. They complimented her on her courage. She spoke to no one of her relief to be rid of him.

  She’d earned this peaceful old age, she told herself, slipping her arm through Arthur’s and squeezing it. With a little luck and a lot of stamina.

  “Are you finished thinking?” asked Arthur, coming to a halt on the narrow rutted cliff path.

  She nodded.

  “Good.” He turned and kissed her as mewing sea gulls picked through tangled seaweed on the gray rocks below.

  • 4 •

  Caroline delivered the boys to Jackson’s wife at his house in Newton, the neo-Tudor monstrosity with fake half-timbering he’d bought for Caroline all those years ago. It had been a thrill matching upholstery fabrics to carpets, fretting over how many styles of furniture to mix so a room looked eclectic rather than just junky. Jackson had been as thrilled as she to be able to afford all the luxuries he’d done without as a boy growing up in a factory town.

  “We love to have Jackie and Jason visit,” Deirdre said from the doorway as Caroline and the boys stood on the herringbone brick sidewalk.

  Caroline studied Deirdre’s carefully coiffed auburn head and wondered if she’d stuck it in the oven yet. Deirdre would spend the week taking the boys to the Children’s Museum, the Musuem of Science, puppet shows, movies. Jackson might take them to Durgin Park and an ice hockey game. Otherwise, he’d be at the hospital. The boys, holding their suitcases, looked polite and expectant. Maybe this time their father would be transformed into Gabriel Kotter. By the end of the week they’d be beating each other to pulp in frustration that Jackson was still Jackson.

  “I really appreciate your having them, Deirdre,” said Caroline, kissing each boy on top of his head. “As always.”

  Driving down Route 9 toward Boston through the sparse evening traffic, she remembered Jackson’s shock when she told him she was leaving. They were cruising Boston Harbor in their sailing yacht.

  “But Caroline, I simply don’t understand,” he said, pulling down the brim of his dark blue Greek fisherman’s cap. “What is it you want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But haven’t I always given you everything you want? The house, furniture, clothes, cars, everything.”

  “Yes, you have, Jackson.” She sat in a captain’s chair sipping a gin and tonic. It was true. The Mercedes, the neo-Tudor house, this yacht. They’d been a kick after all t
hose years of harvesting stunted potatoes with her father.

  “Well, what’s wrong then?”

  “I don’t know.” Jackson had brought home the bacon with a vengeance, but she wanted the whole hog.

  “Name it and it’s yours. Do you want to build a new house? Have another baby? Go to Abaco? Anything, Caroline.”

  “But there’s nothing else I want.” She was as perplexed as he. How about a deluxe Cuisinart and a complete set of Julia Child cookbooks? No, she was sick to death of all that junk. She’d have sent it to the Cambodians if it would have done any good.

  “Then how can what you have not be enough? Is it sex? You seem happy with our sex life.”

  “It’s not sex.” She bit her tongue. It might be sex. She still liked it fine with Jackson on the rare occasions when it occurred, but it was admittedly more thrilling with David Michael. But possibly because it was illicit and took place in settings like the supply room at Mass General, where she’d begun doing volunteer work two afternoons a week in an attempt to assuage her guilt over the invasion of Cambodia.

  “What is it then? Hell, I even let you do those weaving classes and that volunteer stuff. Even though you’re sometimes not home when I am. Maybe you should quit. What is it you want?”

  “I don’t know.” All she had was a vague sense that if she didn’t leave, it’d be Oven City. “I want to do something real.” Something that would still the churning in her guts every time she sat alone at night waiting for Jackson and watching the mayhem on the evening news. Weaving wasn’t real, it was fun. Volunteer work wasn’t real either. She did the garbage the nurses didn’t want to do, but she had skills and training that were going to waste.

  “Real! What’s more real than two sons who need you? Than a husband who loves you?”

  She knew he was right. For a time the movement of his flesh in hers, the memory of past sessions, the anticipation of future ones, had been enough. For a time it had been enough to hold her sons to her breasts and watch their pale tummies swell on her milk like inflatable pillows. For a time matching pot holders to dish towels had been enough. But Jackson was never home now. The babies were little boys, and all she saw of them was the dust their tricycles stirred up as they pedaled away. The wallpaper she’d picked so carefully eight years earlier was now dingy and peeling, but she had no interest in replacing it. It was time to move on. She’d lost her sense of purpose. She needed it back. And David Michael was holding that out to her.

  “Maybe I should make an appointment for you with Dr. Sauer-man. He could prescribe some antidepressants.”

  “It’s too late, Jackson. I’m already gone.”

  “What are you talking about, Caroline? You’re sitting right here on my fucking boat. Do you have to be so goddam intense all the time? Look, if you think you’ve got problems, you ought to meet the patients at the hospital I deal with every day of the week….” His pager began beeping, and he spun around in his swivel captain’s chair to rev the engine for his race to the nearest phone.

  As she sat on the pitching deck clutching the arms of her captain’s chair and watching Jackson’s stern Captain Ahab profile, his set jaw and implacable eyes, Caroline was seized with terror. What was she doing? Was there any way to retract what she’d just said? She’d renounce David Michael, give up the volunteer work, use the loom for kindling. It was her fault this marriage was so dismal. No wonder Jackson never came home. What did she offer him to come home to—a boring, dreary, depressed wimp. She wanted to fall on her knees before his white tennis shoes and crew socks to ask forgiveness, as he savagely spun the steering wheel from side to side dodging the wakes of other boats. If Jackson wasn’t in her life, there’d be no one to see her as a boring, dreary, depressed wimp of a housewife and mother. And if she wasn’t that, who was she? Caroline went to a Boston health club Pam had told her about, in the basement of a brick office building somewhere near the Prudential Center. She stashed her clothes in a locker in a dressing room with gray carpeting, showered, and ducked into the empty cedar sauna. Lying on her towel on the top shelf in the dim light, eyes closed, she thought about the day she walked away from that half-timbered house in Newton, loading the boys and several suitcases into David Michael’s van, with its scene from Mao’s Long March on the rear windows. Jackson stood in the front doorway looking stricken. He had begged her to stay. The pager on his belt was beeping, and he didn’t even notice. David Michael put an arm around her shoulders to assist her into the van, eyeing Jackson at the other end of the herringbone brick sidewalk like a rival stag. As they drove away, she kept wondering what she was doing leaving behind a fancy house filled with every object a person could want, and many no one could possibly want. It’s not enough, she reminded herself, not knowing what she meant. What she was going to was far less from the point of view of creature comfort. David Michael lived in a squalid commune in a huge white frame house in Somerville with a dozen other people whose idea of a good meal was sautéed bamboo shoots.

  When she first encountered David Michael, he was liberating drugs for the People’s Free Clinic from the Mass General supply room, disguised as staff in light green scrub clothes, his ponytail tucked under an operating cap, his Fu Manchu mustache damp with nervous perspiration. He grabbed her shoulders and described his clinic with urgency, to dissuade her from reporting him, using phrases like “the alienation of the people from the health care delivery system.” He talked about the lack of human empathy on the part of the medical establishment, about its members’ commitment to a hierarchy that ensured their advantages. Everything he said was an indictment of Jackson. Caroline stood there paralyzed by his hands on her shoulders and his fierce dark eyes gazing into hers. By the end of his presentation she’d agreed to help him.

  Week after week David Michael appeared in his green scrub clothes on her volunteer afternoons. She’d let him into the supply room as he glanced nervously up and down the corridor, his mustache damp and quivering. She’d guard the door while he filled his gym bag. Afterwards they’d sometimes sit and chat in the front seat of his forest-green van in the parking lot. She learned he was from a wealthy family in Marblehead and had gone to St. Paul’s, Harvard, and Harvard Medical School. Now he repudiated his class privilege, which he felt had been seized by a robber baron great-grandfather in the New England textile industry at the expense of thousands of workers. By providing free medical care in the slums of Somerville, David Michael was trying to right a century of family wrongs. He was modeling himself on the barefoot doctors of Mao’s revolution.

  His family thought he was nuts. Caroline thought he was wonderful. As she listened to him, so intent and dedicated, something stirred deep within her, her capacity for idealism which had been lying dormant during all the years of blind acquisition in Jackson’s neo-Tudor palace.

  One afternoon David Michael drove her in the van to the People’s Free Clinic, in a storefront office on a shopping street in Somerville. The walls were covered with silk-screened posters about Cambodia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Chile. Starving children with dull eyes and bloated bellies gazed down from photographs. The row of folding chairs was filled with winos, bag ladies, welfare mothers holding infants. Caroline felt she’d come home. “It’s fantastic,” she said as David Michael showed her the examining rooms. He introduced her to a nurse named Clea, whose long golden hair hung down her back like a satin cape.

  Clea said, “David Michael’s told us about you. Are you thinking of joining us? We could use your help.”

  Caroline glanced at David Michael, unaware until then that he had plans for her. She wasn’t averse to them. She felt an undeniable attraction to people who referred to themselves as “we.”

  Afterwards David Michael took her to his corner room at the rear of the second story of the commune, which they entered through a window after climbing a fire escape. They smoked a joint in the dark cluttered cubicle, then made love on the unmade bed, a mattress on the floor. David Michael took his time—long slow strokes that
left her gasping. With each stroke he almost pulled out before starting back in, until she was clutching at his hips to keep him in. He grinned down at her.

  Later, as the late afternoon sunlight filtered through the American flags that covered the windows, as their sweat dried and chilled them, Caroline reflected that this might shoot her marriage all to hell. And she was glad.

  The next time David Michael came to Mass General, he fitted a chair under the door handle so it wouldn’t open. After filling his bag with supplies, he backed her into a corner, removed her underpants, and thrust into her standing up. She was so faint with lust that she couldn’t continue standing, so he collapsed into the chair with her straddling him and moving up and down.

  After she moved into a room at the commune, with Jackie and Jason in the room next door, David Michael not only supported her wish to reclaim purpose, he insisted on it. Her first night there, as they lay in each other’s arms on the mattress on the floor of his room, with the American flags at the windows stirring in the draft, he explained that their relationship, their meals and living quarters, were important only to give them strength to work on behalf of all the people. A certain number of orgasms each week were essential to free them from bodily preoccupations. A certain number of joints and Quaaludes were essential to maintain the peace of mind that enabled them to be effective healers. Caroline was enchanted. She was no longer a boring dreary depressed wimp. Like Clea, she was a skilled healer, a servant of humanity, a Clara Barton who’d found her Civil War____

  Caroline sat up and dumped a dipper of water on the hot rocks in the corner of the cedar sauna. The water hissed and rose as a cloud of steam. She lay down, inhaling the hot vapor, and recalled how she’d loved working at the People’s Free Clinic at first. Her sense of purposelessness faded in the confusion of trying to scrounge rent and supplies for the clinic, rent and food for the commune. When she wasn’t at the clinic, she was weaving in her room, or trying to market what she’d woven. Or cooking and cleaning. Or making supply runs to hospitals, food runs to supermarket rubbish bins. Or meeting with welfare workers about various patients. Or making love with David Michael and listening to his plans for a chain of free clinics all across Boston, and then across the nation. Jackie and Jason were tended by whoever was around. Sometimes they went to a community day care center. Her life became one long meeting—house meetings; staff meetings; day care meetings; meetings to organize marches against the Vietnam war, rent strikes against landlords; meetings to discuss alternatives to the nuclear family, alternatives to the health care delivery system, alternatives to capitalism, alternatives to monogamy, alternatives to alternatives. She, Clea, David Michael, and the others were one big happy family. Once again she’d filled the void.