by Karen Day
“Thank you.” She reached for her tea without looking at me.
“Ben just called,” I said. “He can’t come. He has to work.”
She nodded, as if this made sense, and stared at her typewriter.
I turned to go—she wanted to work—but stopped and stepped in front of her. My shadow fell across her typewriter and notebooks and when she looked up at me and frowned, I felt my heartbeat speed up. What a funny thing. When my mother was lying on the bathroom floor or strung out on the couch, when she needed me to take care of her, I was welcomed. Now, when she was stronger and feeling better, not so much. I thought about last December, sitting in Ben’s parents’ kitchen and watching his mother, dressed in a pink cashmere cardigan and a plaid skirt, a white apron tied at her waist, making dinner, while her husband sat in the living room nursing a gin martini. Somehow the traditional parental roles were converted in our family. My mother was more like Ben’s dad—the primary breadwinner whose work in the world was so important, so revered, that little was required of him once he got home. I still had no idea who he really was.
“Did you want something, Clare?” she asked.
Where did she get that black dress? It was new and so were her earrings and the clip in her hair and yes, I did want something. I began fiddling with the spoon on the tray. I wasn’t sure this would go over very well.
“Dad said you read the letter that that woman gave me in the writing center,” I said. “And I just want to know what you thought of it.”
She nodded slightly as she looked at the paper in her typewriter. “People are constantly inferring things about that novel. It’s a lightning rod for attention.”
“But I’m wondering about the things she said.”
She wouldn’t look at me. She was concentrating on the paper, her lips moving as she read what she’d written. And this made me angry. Because Lucy would be back in my cubicle any day now, and I didn’t want her to accuse me of not delivering the letter or tell me more about how close she’d been to my mother.
But I couldn’t ask if she stole the story. I didn’t know why it felt so hard to form the words. But I wanted to know. Now. “Mom?”
“Do you honestly believe that poor woman’s story?” she asked.
“That’s what I’m asking. You never talk about this.”
She took off her glasses and tossed them onto the picnic table. “I never talk about it because it’s uninteresting. Who cares? The characters and plot in a novel come from a variety of places but once they go through the mill of an author’s mind and end up on the page, it’s all fiction. It’s all the author’s creation.”
She wasn’t answering the question. My arms hung heavy at my sides, and I began drumming my fingers against my thighs. Finally, I blurted, because I couldn’t stand it anymore, “Do you remember having her in class? Did you take her story?”
She picked up her glasses, put them on her face, and readjusted the paper in her typewriter. “I do remember her. She was a troubled, unfortunate person. And no, I didn’t steal her short story. I don’t even remember a short story.”
Something about the way she said I don’t even remember, as if Lucy wasn’t worth her time, as if she couldn’t be bothered, landed like a giant thud in my stomach. I wanted to believe her. But as I stood there, arms at my sides, and still she wouldn’t look up, I felt a cold sweat across the back of my neck and anger seep into every pore of my body. Goddam it. My mother was lying.
CHAPTER 19
The next day when I came home from the Vineyard I found a letter waiting for me from Lee. My heartbeat surged as I stared at the familiar handwriting. Lately I’d felt better—I hadn’t cried in weeks and my head wasn’t muddled—and wasn’t sure I wanted to open the letter. But staring at the handwriting, I suddenly missed her so much that I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.
I glanced down at Ben’s running shoes on the newspaper next to the door and then into the kitchen that he’d kept so clean while I was away. I turned the letter over in my hand. I didn’t have to read it, at least not yet. I stuffed it into my backpack, changed clothes, and hurried out the door.
At the coffeehouse, Diana was behind the counter. She looked up when she heard the bell on the door and smiled. “You’re back! How was it?”
I slipped my apron over my head and tied it behind my back. Sometime over the last year Diana and I had settled into undeclared yet set roles. She was the talker, I was the listener. “Great. How are you?”
She closed her crossword puzzle book. “Terrible! I haven’t had a customer in four hours. Four hours! And the last two days were worse.”
“People are away. It’s summer.”
She shook her head. “I heard Lorenzo on the phone the day before yesterday. He was telling the landlord that he couldn’t afford a rent increase. And he’s worried about this new coffee place, two blocks over. It’s part of a chain called Starbucks.”
I smoothed the front of my apron. No, this was too great a place to be in trouble. We should work harder. Why hadn’t I found a good scone recipe? And maybe we needed to advertise. “Where is he?”
She took off her apron. “He said he had an appointment and that he’d be gone for a couple of hours. If we go under, I’m in trouble. I need the money. I can’t survive on just the salary from my other job.”
I would be okay, seeing that I didn’t pay rent to my parents. But I worried about Diana and Lorenzo, if we closed, and I didn’t want tutoring to be my only job.
What did Lee write in her letter?
After Diana left I swept the floor, wiped down the chairs and tables, rearranged the sitting area—the couch looked better against the wall, not floating in the middle of the room—scrubbed the counter and sink, and cleaned the window. And still no customers. I put my backpack on the counter and pulled out my books. I opened Lady Chatterley’s Lover and tried to read but kept thinking about Lee’s letter.
Had she yelled at me?
I went back to my book. Focus! It was fairly scandalous when it was published, and my professor practically salivated when he introduced it in class. But what turned me off was not the abundance of sex, language, and long diatribes about class differences. I was tired of reading yet another book about men returning, damaged and broken, from war. My mother, when asked once why she wrote so much about this topic, said, “It’s a horrific task we ask men to do. In killing a human being, man is essentially killing a part of himself.” But when is enough enough?
In the novel, Constance Chatterley’s husband, Clifford, returns from war paralyzed from the waist down. He can no longer satisfy his wife, sexually or emotionally, and she slips into an affair with the gamekeeper. She can barely contain herself, that’s how good the sex is, but it gets her into trouble—pregnancy, scandal, and divorce.
I’d never say this in class, but I thought the bliss Constance got from sex with the gamekeeper was unrealistic. Was it really that great? Or was Lawrence writing about his own fantasies? Sometimes I thought books, and male writers, made sex out to be better than it truly was. I glanced at the window as a couple hurried by on the sidewalk and remembered Christopher as he traced my collarbone with his finger. Fooling around with him had been blissful. But Ben was so hardworking, loyal, and good. That I didn’t feel irrepressible passion with him was a small price to pay, wasn’t it?
The bell on the back of the door rang and I looked up to see two young girls hurry to the counter. They ordered iced teas to go. As I made their drinks, I listened to them giggle and talk. They were going to meet the tall one’s boyfriend and his friend. It was a setup for the other girl. They were older than Marta, maybe just out of middle school, and their bodies looked it. Chipped pink polish on their fingernails. Long, gangly legs under baggy jean shorts. Freckles. Thin lines of sunburn on their shoulders from where they’d missed applying sunscreen.
I watched as they began to whisper, their heads touching and their tan arms intertwined, and I turned away to give them privacy. But they weren
’t paying the slightest bit of attention to me. They were too engrossed with each other.
Like Lee and me. I thought about one night—there were so many like this—when I was asleep in the cold dorm on the third floor of the sorority house and Lee woke me in the middle of the night. The shades on the windows were closed and the room was so dark that you couldn’t see the fifty beds lined up, one after the other. But somehow I knew it was Lee shaking my arm. I woke instantly.
“OhmyGod!OhmyGod!” she said. I smelled coffee on her breath and felt the electricity charging through her. “I’ve been thinking about you all night! Remember the guy with the beard at the lecture last week who kept asking tough questions and we couldn’t figure out what his story was?”
I leaned on my elbow, trying to find her in the dark. In the bed next to me, Amy moaned and rolled over. I whispered, “Of course.”
She was talking about the panel on Soviet and US relations, sponsored by the sociology department. Lee and I had started attending random lectures around campus—sometimes the subject matter was so dense that we had no idea what the speaker was talking about—because we worried about how myopic Greek life could be (our minds are turning to mush!). During the panel discussion, an old, white-bearded man who spoke with an accent kept harassing the Soviet expert. Afterward, Lee and I talked about him for hours. She thought he might be a turned Soviet spy. But I saw incredible sadness on his face and speculated that something terrible had happened to him and his family.
“I met him tonight!”
“What? Where?” I whispered.
“He came to the theater,” she said. “He sat by himself in the back. I saw him from the production room upstairs.”
“What did he see?” I asked. Amy moaned again.
“Star Trek.”
“Star Trek?” I said. “I wouldn’t have imagined him seeing that—”
“Shush!” Someone from a bed across the room sighed loudly.
“My shift ended when the movie was over and so I followed him.” Lee lowered her voice. I groaned. “I know, I know! But it’s okay. So, listen. I followed him over to Kirkwood and into the square, and then suddenly he turned and stormed back to me and demanded to know why I was following him.”
“Oh, God, Lee! Why would you follow a stranger—”
“Shush!”
Lee lowered her voice further. “I told him about seeing him at the panel discussion and that I imagined he’d escaped from the Soviet Union or that he was a spy. I think I really caught him off guard because he relaxed, and we went and got coffee at Donuts Delite and he told me his story. Oh, my God, Clare! You were right. Stalin wiped out his whole family. And he was sent to a labor camp!”
“Who the hell is talking?” An angry voice boomed from across the room. “Lee and Clare again? Is that you? What time is it?”
“I’ll tell you more tomorrow,” she whispered. And then I felt her move away.
Whatever happened to that man? And did Lee still think about him, too? I stared down at the iced teas in front of me. Sometimes when I remembered things, like now, they felt so far away. From a different time. When I was a different person.
“Excuse me!” A voice from behind me. “Are the drinks almost ready?”
I turned to the girls with their drinks and felt such an urge to warn them about something although I didn’t know what. Not until they opened the door and the warm July air swept into the room did I know what I wanted to say. Be careful! The world is dangerous. Men are dangerous. And most of all, be careful with each other. Don’t let anything, not a boy or a bad decision, come between you.
The door slammed, and as I watched them pass in front of the window, I felt an unbearable pull inside of me. I glanced back at the counter. And then I walked over to my backpack, took out the letter and started for the back room. I sat at Lorenzo’s desk and opened it.
Dear Clare,
Every time I think about Amy’s wedding or see something on the news about Chicago or Lake Michigan, I think about that night on the beach. I’m sorry that we’re in a bad place now but I’m not sorry that we argued. I think it was a long time coming. I think our friendship will survive it.
I’m writing to tell you that I’m leaving for Thailand on August 1. My last day of work will be July 28. This is a big risk and I know you’re worried about it. But I’ll tell you that I’ve been asleep these last couple years and I’ve finally woken up. I want this more than anything.
You can reach me at the address at the bottom of the page after August 5. Patricia says that mail takes a while but it’s reliable.
Life is too short. I don’t want to be so afraid anymore. I don’t want to be afraid of anything. If we don’t take chances with our lives, then what’s the point of living? I meant what I said about finding answers.
I’d love to see you or talk to you before I go. I’ll miss you, Clare. I miss you so much right now. Please call or write back. Okay?
Love, Lee
I read the letter again, then twice more and each time I felt sick to my stomach. She was, to put it in Ducky’s words, following her dream. I was so angry or envious or sad—maybe all of them at once—that I started to cry again.
For the next couple of weeks, I thought about calling Lee but couldn’t. I started several letters but never finished. I had trouble sleeping and couldn’t eat. Every day I cried. Sometimes it happened when I was on the T, sometimes while in class. I couldn’t tell anyone, especially Ben, and not just because he was so busy. He’d told me that I was the nicest person he knew. And what I’d done wasn’t so nice.
Then one day at work, studying at Lorenzo’s desk while the coffeehouse was quiet, I thought about something my professor had said, how D. H. Lawrence was “hamstrung” by his mother and how it showed up in all his work, especially Sons and Lovers. This kind of biographical analysis always made me suspicious. After all, I’d grown up with the mother of minimalism who always had a mouthful on this topic: What did the author’s experience have to do with the quality of the work?
But then I sat back in the chair and thought about that word, hamstrung. I knew what it meant. To be crippled or limited, in some way, from doing something. That was when I thought of Lee and me. Maybe we hamstrung each other. Maybe we were bad for each other. Maybe we shouldn’t be friends.
I needed to talk to someone about this. All of it. Before I went crazy.
I glanced at the calendar tacked to the bulletin board in front of me. Friday, July 29. In three days, Lee was leaving. I should call to say goodbye. I still had time.
I picked up the phone. But instead of calling Lee, I called Lorenzo’s therapist, Dr. Houseman, whose name and number were on the card next to the phone. I left a message and not more than fifteen minutes later she called back. Then it was set. Tuesday afternoon, three o’clock, at her office on Marlborough Street. I’d barely had time to think about it and it was done.
CHAPTER 20
On Tuesday, I was packing up after my writing center sessions—it was a tough day with three students all working on essays whose subjects were nearly incomprehensible to me—when Lucy appeared in my doorway. She stood there, silent, her black bag on her shoulder and her yellow hair looking longer and unrulier. She wore a different sundress, this one with red and yellow flowers.
I hadn’t seen her since early last month. For a while after her last visit, I looked for her whenever I was on campus. But when I didn’t see her, I hoped she’d given up or had moved on to something else. I put my notebook into my backpack and zipped it up. I didn’t want to deal with her today.
“I’ve been away,” she said. “But now I’m back and wondering if you gave my letter to Eleanor.”
“I did.”
“What did she say? Will she write me back? Did you talk to her about it?”
I was done with this. I pulled my backpack across my shoulder and stood to face her. She wore no makeup and her face was blotchy red. Maybe I should feel kind toward her—after all, I was almost sure th
at my mother had wronged her—but I was embarrassed and angry and tired of being in the middle of this.
“I gave her the letter and she said that it wasn’t true,” I said. “I doubt she’ll write you back. I’m sorry but there’s really nothing else I can say or do about this.”
“Haven’t you ever wondered why Listen, Before You Go is so different from her other novel?” Her voice was gruff and defiant and she seemed to stand taller.
“It’s not so different. She always writes about war.” This wasn’t entirely true. Listen had a young narrator, a simple sentence structure, and a freshness about it that was missing from her other work. I shifted my feet. I felt strangely protective of my mother. “She’s got a lot going on. I’m sorry. But I have to go.”
Lucy bit her lower lip as she squinted at me. I couldn’t tell if she was about to cry or rip my head off. She said, “She’s ashamed, that’s why she won’t talk about it. She’s ashamed because she lied about what she did.”
Who was she to blame my mother? And she wasn’t the model for Phoebe, either. I blurted, “I’m not delivering any more letters or messages. I’m sorry this didn’t work out but please leave me alone.”
I had to get out of here before I said something I’d regret. Before I made a mistake. I ripped my sweater off the back of my chair and started out of the cubicle.
She stepped in front of me. “Okay. I won’t come back. But if I were you, I wouldn’t forget this.”
“You aren’t me.” And then I blew by her.
Outside, the hot and humid air was thick with moisture. I began walking as fast as I could, my sandals slapping the pavement and my arms swinging at my sides. I walked for blocks, Lucy’s words pounding in my ears and her wild hair and hooded eyes, her tacky dress and big black purse, in my mind. I kept looking over my shoulder, worrying that she’d followed me. I expected to see her in the windows of the shops I passed and opening the door of a taxi and sitting in an outdoor café. Then I stepped into traffic and when a car, charging down the street, swerved to avoid me, the driver yelled out of the window. “Get your head out of your ass!”