by Lisa Alther
“You’re his mother,” he said, clearing dishes from the table.
“Yes, but he could have waited a few weeks until the glow tarnished a bit.” She gathered up the soiled napkins.
“But that’s the whole point. You know that.”
She did know that. She knew Simon had to push her away because they’d been so close since Helena left. Though he could have pushed her away more delicately. She remembered Mona’s announcing one day when she was seven, as she tried to skip stones on the lake, “Mommy, I hate you.”
“Oh yes? Why?” asked Hannah, looking up from her book.
“Because I love you.”
As she scraped leftovers into plastic bowls, Hannah pondered the weird mix of attraction and repulsion in a family. Like the competing energies in an atom that bound the electrons together, yet prevented them from collapsing in on each other to form a black hole.
“If I know it and you know it,” she said, wiping counters with a sponge, “why doesn’t he know it?”
“He probably does on some level.” Arthur was washing dishes in the sink, his sleeves rolled to his elbows.
“You ought to be a shrink, darling.”
“I was, in my fashion. What do you think I did all day? Divorces, assaults, the whole bit. Same as you.”
“Funny, I never thought about it that way. Do you miss it?”
He laughed. “Hell, no. I’ve done my bit for suffering humanity. Let Simon and Joanna take over. I want to exit with a smile on my face and a par on my scorecard.”
“Simon and Joanna can’t take over. They haven’t the time. They’re too busy getting their hearts broken and mended.” She wondered what it would feel like not to be needed, after a lifetime of it. Marvelous probably. She ought to try it sometime. Or would she feel lost, like an old brick wall stripped of the ivy that had held it together? Certainly on days when she was in a bad mood, doing therapy cheered her up. If she retired early, she might have to subscribe to Punch or something.
“I wonder what that poor young woman made of all that,” said Arthur, sitting down on the couch and picking up the paper.
“I doubt if she noticed anything but that lump in Simon’s trousers all evening long.” Hannah sat down beside him and lit a cigarette.
“Well, I thought she was charming.”
Hannah glanced at him. “You think any female under forty is charming.”
“Who said anything about under forty?”
“But you’ve always gone after chicken, my darling.”
“Just once. And it was the smartest move of my life.”
Hannah smiled and put her hand on the wide-wale corduroy that covered his thigh. “Well, I didn’t like Estelle.”
Arthur smiled. “You never do, my dear. But that hasn’t stopped Simon yet.”
“I am predictable, aren’t I?”
“You’re just a lioness who can’t accept that her cubs are bigger than she is now.”
“I accept it. I just don’t like it sometimes.”
Smiling, Arthur shook open his paper. As Hannah watched the open fire in the stone fireplace and listened to waves pound the lakeshore, she recalled sitting in a deck chair holding the sleeping baby Simon as ocean swells on the North Atiantic lifted the gray troop ship to the sky. The wind swirled, tugging at her head scarf. She sat there knowing at any moment a torpedo from a German U-boat could send them spiraling to the ocean floor. The indifferent gray sea surging on all sides would register no more than a few bubbles. When she focused on Hitier, torpedoes, and ocean floors littered with ship wreckage, terror flooded her. And if she kept it up, Simon would wake up, feed on her terror, and whine fitfully. With deliberation she focused on Arthur’s smiling face, the bottle of wine they’d soon be splitting, and the sensation of his flesh moving insistently in hers. Panic gradually transmuted into warm well-being. Then she erased Arthur from the chalkboard of her mind and retained the soothing warmth. In that frame of mind, it made very little difference to her whether they wound up on the ocean floor or in port at Bayonne, New Jersey.
As he turned the page of his paper, Arthur leaned over to kiss the side of her neck. She patted his thigh, realizing this was what she tried to convey to clients—that they could use her to achieve tranquillity, but that they then had to recognize the achievement as their own. A plaster cast could allow a broken bone to heal, but if you left it on too long, the leg muscle began to deteriorate.
Exhaling cigarette smoke, Hannah recalled that she’d made it to Bayonne. All happened as she imagined—the wine and the flesh, and the pleasure in both. What wasn’t as she imagined was Washington, D.C., where the friends of Arthur and his former wife snubbed her. His children loathed her. His ex-wife was having a histrionic nervous breakdown for which both Hannah and Arthur felt responsible. His colleagues disapproved of the whole scene.
Arthur quit his post with the Department of War and opened a law practice in Lake Glass, his New Hampshire hometown. His parents tried to appear understanding, despite the fact that they couldn’t understand how their beloved son could behave so badly. Arthur paraded her in front of them just as Simon had paraded Estelle. Hannah, in an orgy of North Woods loneliness, began her career of baby production, with torrid cocktail party flirtations with Arthur’s old friends between pregnancies. After the horrors and heroics of losing Colin in battle, watching the Luftwaffe from Hampstead Heath, evading torpedoes on the North Atiantic, and enduring ostracism by the entire U.S. diplomatic community, simply living and loving with one man in sylvan serenity seemed insupportable. What a fool she was, she reflected. And yet no different from most people. Humans were problem-solving creatures, and where no problems existed, they created some so they’d have something to solve with their much-vaunted brains. Because if they didn’t, they were forced to confront the echoing stillness beneath all the hubbub, which was terrifying because it was unfamiliar. It seemed like emptiness at first. Only gradually did you realize it was everything.
Arthur put down his paper and smiled. Sometimes she felt like a hot-air balloon straining skyward. All the ropes had been cut except one—this white-haired man on the leather couch beside her, who’d just taken her hand. When he was gone, what could hold her here?
“Time to hit the sack?” asked Arthur.
“Sounds good to me.” She flipped her cigarette into the fire as she stood up.
Caroline sat on the tweed couch looking out at the parking lot, arms folded across her chest and one ankle resting on the other knee. Hannah studied her with narrowed eyes, wondering what would go on today. Her job required that she take whatever a client dished out. The client didn’t usually realize Hannah was the cook.
Caroline was in full-blown adolescence, testing to discover how to control Hannah. Loaves of bread hadn’t worked. Now, like a physician poking an abdomen for sore spots, Caroline was looking for ways to earn Mummy’s displeasure. Casual sex had been a flop. What would be next? At some point Hannah hoped there would be an angry clash. Maybe today. There was belligerence to the jut of Caroline’s jaw and the way she held her shoulders.
“So what’s happening?” asked Hannah, propping up her stocking feet and resting her arms long the chair arms.
“Diana and I went to bed together Friday night,” announced Caroline, uncertain whether to add the news about Brian as well.
“Oh yes? Was it nice?”
“For us it was.”
“What does that mean?”
“What?”
“For us it was.”
“Well, I know it’s incomprehensible to you that two women could prefer each other to men.”
Hannah smiled faintly. “It’s not remotely incomprehensible to me. There’ve been several women I’ve felt very close to.” If she were thirty years younger and hadn’t met Arthur, maybe she’d have gone Caroline’s route herself. Who could say?
Caroline looked at her ironically. She spouted a liberal line, but lived a safe, respectable life. She didn’t know what she was talking about
when it came to sexual passion between women. Once you felt it in all its fierce poignancy, it was hard to see how you could do without it, whatever the price. Could she herself do without it, was the question she’d been asking all week.
“Do you want to talk about that relationship today?”
“It’s not something I feel comfortable discussing with a heterosexual.” There was always the implication hets were doing you a favor, accepting you despite your infirmity. Fuck them. She didn’t want her love for women labeled a neurotic symptom that needed treatment.
Hannah shrugged and rested her chin on her chest, thinking what prigs clients could be. Caroline was still struggling with the part of herself that disapproved of lesbianism, and she was calling that part “Hannah.” Carefully Hannah focused on Caroline as she’d be in a few months, once she gathered together, Bo Peep-like, all the lost black sheep of her own personality. If Hannah managed not to kill her first.
“How are your sons handling all this?”
“All what?”
“Well, your love life seems in flux lately. Does that unnerve them?”
“My sons are fine. Don’t unload your issues on me.” Caroline glanced at the blue-eyed children on the bulletin board.
Touchy, thought Hannah, feeling herself turn a bit pale.
“Maybe you worry about my kids,” continued Caroline, “because you feel like a flop as a mother.”
There was a long pause. “You may be right, Caroline. God knows I’m not perfect. If you want to poke holes in me, we can do that all day long. Or we could do what we’re here for: talk about what’s going on with you.”
“How can you help me if you’ve got your own problems?”
Hannah was beginning to feel keyed up, as she did when important things started happening. “I have my blind spots like everyone else.”
“And you don’t like me noticing them, do you?”
Hannah laughed. “Not much. But what you say may be valid. Now do you want to get something done today or not?”
“Now you’re angry,” Caroline said hopefully.
“Taken aback maybe. Not angry.” Actually she was a bit excited, and struggling not to let it show. It was a propitious sign when a meek client turned into a brat.
“I almost canceled today.” At lunch with Brian in the hospital cafeteria, as Diana sat across the room laughing with Suzanne, the pressure to make sense of her life seemed too great. She didn’t know what she was doing. To explain it to Hannah was impossible.
“It’s not too late.”
“As long as I’m here, I may as well stay.”
“It’s up to you.” Hannah gazed out the window to the frozen lake, which was covered with a deep new snowfall that sparkled in the sun.
Caroline glared at her. “I’d like to talk some more about Jackson. And about David Michael, the man I left him for.” If she could figure out what went wrong with them, maybe she’d know whether something could work with Brian. And whether she wanted something to work. The tug of security, simplicity, respectability was strong. Especially if Diana was going to perform will-o’-the-wisp maneuvers indefinitely. The tug of Brian’s empty stone house was even stronger, if she really had to find new living quarters.
“Fine. Shoot,” said Hannah with a gesture of her hand.
“The boys are just back from Jackson’s, as a matter of fact.”
“How did it go?”
“As usual. He had tickets to a Celtics game, but he had an emergency at the last minute.”
“Does that sound familiar?”
“Like my own father, you mean? Yes, I’m starting to realize it does.”
“Good.” Hannah nodded.
“Do you know what he did to make it up to them? Bought them BB guns. Yesterday Jason shot the cat. I was so upset I called Jackson and said, ‘Here you spend half your life removing bullets from people’s chests, and you give your sons guns?’ He said, ‘Really, Caroline, do you have to be so hysterical all the time?’”
“Tell me some more about your life with him.”
As Caroline described her standard suburban marriage, and her standard countercultural muddle of an affair, Hannah focused less on the predictable details than on Caroline’s aggrieved tone of voice.
These two men had ignored, neglected, and betrayed her in all the usual ways. But Caroline’s tone of voice indicated a complicated interaction had gone on, that the men in question would have different versions. The closer a client’s account was to “objectivity,” the more detached the tone of voice.
“…I’ve been over this shit a lot lately,” Caroline was saying, “and it’s like a trip to the morgue to identify corpses. I’ve wasted my life being miserable over idiots.”
“But how nice,” said Hannah, “to have the rest of your life ahead of you, idiot-free. And misery-free.”
Caroline looked up from her study of her boot tread.
“You’ve experienced the misery for years. Now you can experience the joy by simply letting go of all that junk you’ve used to keep yourself feeling shitty.”
“You think I chose to waste all those years feeling shitty?” Caroline glared at her.
“Yes, I do. Not that you knew it. Feeling shitty was comfortable. You were used to it. It was familiar. But now can you face the terror of feeling good?”
The corners of Caroline’s mouth were twitching.
“You keep talking about how all these terrible people failed you,” said Hannah. “Your pink blanket was destroyed, and Marsha was run over by a truck. But it sounds to me as though you left the others. They did things you chose to regard as rejections and betrayals, but you were ready to go. You took on new strength, and they couldn’t cope because they wanted someone they could dominate. They failed you. But in their terms, you failed them: you didn’t remain submissive and adoring.” Hannah loved summarizing clients’ disasters from a different perspective. A judo throw, using their own momentum to turn the tables. “This pile of corpses you talk about,” she continued, “you could instead see it as a compost pile. Ask yourself what you learned from each person that allowed you to develop into the fantastic woman you are today. Your parents gave you their sensitivity to human suffering. Arlene helped you become good at your work. Jackson gave you babies and belongings. David Michael taught you about politics….” The whole point, it seemed to her, was to figure out that none of these was enough to give life meaning.
“Joy?” sneered Caroline, that word finally registering.
Hannah noted that her entire speech had washed over Caroline unabsorbed. She wasn’t ready to see herself as anything other than a pathetic, wronged victim.
“Yes. Joy.” Snow slid off the roof, blotting out the sun through the window for an instant and landing with a thud.
“Joy? While millions of people are starving to death?” Caroline uncrossed her legs abruptly and leaned forward.
“Oh, for God’s sake. Look, this life is like a diamond on black velvet. One aspect defines the other. You know the black velvet from every angle. Now allow yourself to see the diamond.”
“Diamonds? Garbage! You’re just talking a lot of elitist crap! How much joy do you think someone in a Chilean jail feels? How about the baby I saw in the ER yesterday, whose mother stuffed her in a rural route mailbox because she couldn’t afford to keep her? Joy, my ass!” Caroline realized she’d sold out again, sitting here being lulled into passive acceptance of the status quo by this suburban matron, while the world continued to careen toward destruction. Deciding to copy Hannah’s example and subside into domestic serenity with Brian Stone while the Chinese swept into Vietnam. While entire towns in Utah were perishing of leukemia from fallout in the fifties.
Hannah shrugged and studied her mimi spirit. It was one thing to prod a mimi spirit out from a rock ledge. It was something else again to teach it to dance and make love, instead of tearing the place apart. There was enormous tension in the room. Hannah felt very much on edge. To feed Caroline’s flames she said in a
bland voice, “Do you realize every time you feel threatened, you launch into this cosmic number?”
Caroline glared at her and unleashed a diatribe about world hunger, spouting statistics like bubbles from a hooked fish: “…twenty-one children somewhere in the world are starving to death every minute…”
Hannah observed her own irritation flaring like coals on a banked fire. My dear young woman, she said silently, you appear to assume I’ve never left my own backyard. Can you even conceive of a life that spans three continents and close to six decades? Do you think I’m not aware of what you’re saying?
She reminded herself if she engaged on this level, she was done for. The real issue was that Caroline, like Simon parading Estelle the other night, needed distance from her own feelings of dependency. And a focus for the accumulated rage of a lifetime. Her cosmic routine was her number-one defense, an extremely effective one because everything she was saying was undeniably true.
Caroline was now educating Hannah on torture. She felt a driving need to convey to this smug woman in her polyester pants suit that reality was not as she saw it from the window of her cozy ranch house: “Hannah, your life of comfort and affluence is built on the bowed backs of millions of suffering people. Here we sit in a fascist nation that’s looting the world, congratulating each other on being nice people. It’s obscene. You’re nothing but a suburban sellout!”
Hannah allowed herself only to raise her eyebrows. You didn’t lash out at the injured, however provocative their behavior. Anyhow, this harangue sounded like the death rattle of this particular tape. It was about to be erased, which was why it was putting up such a furious struggle.
“…ninety percent of violent crimes are committed by men,” Caroline was saying. “All day long I bandage up women and children whom men have raped, knifed, beaten, shot, strangled. And you yourself live with one of those fuckers, Hannah. You say you love him. You repose under the tent of benefits his white American male privilege provides—at the expense of the rest of us. You try getting through life without a man to protect you from the violence of other men. Then see if you can talk to me about joy!”