by Karen Day
I began calling them up, one by one, to talk about their essays. I left Max for last. Vanessa, I pointed out, needed more details about frosting Christmas cookies with her cousins and Abby didn’t have a thesis. Then it was Sophia’s turn. She hurried up to my desk, her essay clutched in her hand. She wore black leggings and a long, blue sweatshirt, and when she sat in the chair next to my desk, her brown bangs bounced before settling back against her forehead.
I read her essay about her vacation at her grandmother’s house on Cape Cod. It was awfully good and I had little to offer in terms of improving it.
“You had a wonderful time.” I smiled.
She giggled and nodded. She’d gone sledding and ice-skating with her cousins, aunts, and uncles, and it sounded like a big party, a week of celebrating. I smiled at her and then looked at the essay again.
“But then I had to come back here.” Her smile turned into a cringe.
“Is something wrong?”
She shrugged and looked down into her hands, folded in her lap, as she whispered, “I have to go to the dentist today. I hate the dentist!”
“Me, too,” I said. “Anything else wrong? Maybe here at school?”
Her eyebrows wrinkled in concern. “Like what do you mean?”
“Well, I noticed that you and Talia were really close before break and now you aren’t together as much, and I wondered if everything was okay.”
“Why wouldn’t it be okay?”
“Well, you weren’t playing on the playground today.”
She smiled. “That was because she doesn’t like to play house and I don’t like to play tag.”
Just like that. So matter of fact and to the point.
“We’re still best friends,” she said. “We both have lots of best friends.”
I nodded and sent her on her way. Because really? A ten-year-old had just made complete sense of something I’d bungled for months.
* * *
That night when I got home, the sun had already gone down and the streetlights were on. Flipping on the kitchen lights, I watched how the black and white floor tiles showed the clusters of dust bunnies and how the windows reflected and distorted the refrigerator, the stove, the counter, and me. People transfer things onto each other, Lee had told me. As I stood there in my boots and coat and saw Sophia’s doe-like eyes in my mind, I thought, oh, God, of course.
How embarrassing, how obvious? Part of me knew what I’d done—I worried about Lee and me as I watched Talia and Sophia—but I couldn’t, for whatever reason, stop myself. No wonder Sophia didn’t understand what I was asking.
Oh, Lee.
That weekend in college when I visited her farm, we went to the river so she could film the train tracks. It was cold and windy and overnight snow had covered the fields and the small clump of trees next to the tracks. Lee was on her stomach, filming, when we heard tire squeals and a man’s voice. We ran back through the trees to the road. About twenty yards from Lee’s car, a man stood next to a different car. He turned to us, distraught, and said, “They came out of nowhere.”
Up ahead, two geese were on the side of the road, one sitting, the other honking and strutting. Lee ran past the man, slowed, and dropped to her knees. I followed and saw that the smaller goose wasn’t sitting but lying on the pavement, half of its body crushed. The other, bigger goose, his breast cream colored, his colored feathers dull in the gray light, honked at his friend, then at us, as he strutted. Why had they been in the road? Why hadn’t he taken better care of his friend?
Lee started to sob, uncontrollably. And I soon became more worried about her reaction—I’d never seen her cry like that—than I was with the goose.
The man shrugged at us as he got in his car and drove away. I didn’t want to stay and watch this, either. “Come on, Lee. There’s nothing we can do.”
Lee wouldn’t move until finally I reached down and pulled her up. When I asked for the keys, she gave them to me and climbed into the passenger seat. Tears running down her cheeks, she watched out the back window as I drove away. At the time I remembered thinking that this was sad, but inevitable. Geese could survive the cold, avoid coyotes and foxes, and find food in the winter, but how could they defend themselves against cars? They’d let their guard down. They weren’t paying attention. And now look. Their lives changed forever in an instant.
“I bet the goose is in shock and so maybe it’s not in so much pain,” I said.
She turned and stared out the windshield. “That poor goose.”
“It must be awful to die like that.”
She shook her head, violently. “No! The other goose! Did you see him pacing? He didn’t understand what happened. What will he do, stay there? For how long? Forever? All alone? He’s all alone! That was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen!”
I glanced at Lee, worried again. I hadn’t thought to feel sorry for the other goose. Nothing I said seemed to help until finally, an hour into our drive back to school, she fell asleep against the car window. By that time, the intensity of her emotions and how undone she was by this had made me angry. I didn’t like this feeling one bit. And I remembered being frustrated with Ben when, after telling him about it, he said, “But why were you mad at her? It sounds like she was really upset.”
I was angry because it felt like too much. It felt familiar. It felt like my mother.
I leaned against the counter and put my hand across my heart. We repeat important relationships from our childhood, Lee said. When she was feeling so neurotic and needy, she reminded me of my mother. And I resented it. Why hadn’t I ever realized this? Maybe because on the surface Lee and my mother didn’t appear that much alike. Lee was more outgoing, thoughtful, and not as selfish. But like my mother, she had the capacity for big feelings that could be overwhelming. And like my mother, she looked to me to take care of her.
I watched the snow melt from my boots and form puddles on the tiles. It had been four weeks since Lee and I talked in Manhattan and in that time I’d gone over our conversation hundreds of times. I always came to the same conclusions. I was too afraid to go back to Florida. I didn’t know if I had the courage to live an examined life. I wasn’t ready to forgive myself.
I glanced back out the window.
Mikey. Jittery Man’s name was Mikey. All this time, all these many years later, I finally learned his name. But did it matter? Because Lee said that Florida wasn’t the source of her problems. And what I’d said to her wasn’t the problem, either. Growing up with no money, feeling dropped by my parents, being taken advantage of by my track coach, and not being able to trust anyone. Those were the real problems. How she grew up. The things that happened to her as a child.
Why didn’t I ever talk about this kind of thing anymore?
I tossed my coat onto a kitchen chair and hurried into the living room where we had a large, antique bookcase. I wanted to read something by Freud. I searched the shelves, my fingers tracing the bindings, but the only college books I found were from my literature classes. Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The Catcher in the Rye, Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch. I let my fingers linger on a first edition of Listen, Before You Go and pulled it off the shelf.
The first time I read it, I was surprised that people liked it so much. The long conversations between Whit and Phoebe were boring and nothing seemed to happen. And how could this book be about war when there wasn’t a single battle or army? The second—and last time—I read it was in high school and I better understood the subtleties, symbolism, and foreshadowing. I understood that I had to read between the lines. But I was still terribly upset by Whit’s suicide.
I turned to that section, when he and Phoebe were behind the garage and Whit put the gun in his mouth. But I was so surprised that I lowered myself to the floor. There was an entire page after the suicide that I didn’t remember.
I started to read.
Phoebe stared at the red specks stuck to the garage wall. She heard the faint gurgling of blood as it left
the hole in Whit’s head and seeped into the mud. She felt herself falling and falling and the sky darkening and the air thickening. And then she was in a hole, black and stifling, the walls crushing her thin chest.
She had watched as he slowly raised the gun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. She had watched as if this were a show on television.
Something terrible had happened to her brother.
And she would live in this hole forever because she had been his keeper, the chosen one, and yet she was no better at helping him than the Army or the doctors at the hospital or the pink-faced, sweating lieutenant who had stood in their living room and told Whit about all he had to look forward to. If only he’d let go.
He couldn’t let go. Because he was dead but alive, he’d told her. And now she finally understood what that meant. Shame burned into her cheeks.
But then she saw light in the corners of her eyes and suddenly the room was flush with it, and she was in the house and staring at the wall. How had she gotten here? She looked down at her shoes, caked in mud and splattered with tiny flecks of blood and bone. She hadn’t wanted these ugly black and white saddle shoes. She’d ached for penny loafers, like her stylish cousins, but her mother had refused.
This memory, this desire, filled her with relief. Because how could she be dead but alive if she felt desire? She wouldn’t live like that. She didn’t have to live like that. So she decided never to tell anyone what she saw and how she’d failed. She’d work, yes, work was the way to do it, at keeping this day at bay. At always keeping this day at bay.
Years later she wouldn’t remember this rationality. Or the hole. Or the decision she’d made. In fact, she wouldn’t remember much about this day at all.
There was nothing minimalistic about this passage. It was about as explicit as could be. Had I missed it? Or did I just not remember it?
All these years I thought I was supposed to be Phoebe, that my mother had wanted me to take care of her as Phoebe had taken care of Whit. But really, she was Phoebe, the little girl who’d witnessed her grandfather’s suicide and felt traumatized and ashamed at not being able to save him. She’d been writing about herself, all along. Was she trying to make sense of what had happened? Was she trying to explain herself? Apologize?
Had my mother lived an examined life, had she talked through this terrible event, would she have had an easier time? Would she have been happier? Would she have not needed to write a book that seemed to give her more anxiety than joy?
Maybe if I’d known all this, she wouldn’t have seemed so confusing. Maybe if I’d known her better, I wouldn’t have believed Lucy over her.
I was ashamed, too. I abandoned Lee that night. I said those awful words to her. And now I refused to help her by going back to Daytona. I’d let that terrible night in Florida—all of it—hang like a noose around my neck. But if it was true that that night wasn’t the source of trouble for her, then did that mean it wasn’t the source of trouble for me, either? How could this be?
I looked at the snow piled on the sill outside the living room window and thought about recess a few days ago when I’d tried to roll a giant snowball toward the snowman that the kids had made. But it was too big and impossible to budge. So, I left it there because it would have been too much work to take it apart and carry it to them in pieces.
What was the point of taking your life apart, unearthing it, examining it, carrying it around in pieces, anyway? You can’t change the past. Can you?
My mother was Phoebe and Phoebe was my mother.
Where did that leave me?
Maybe I’d wanted to believe that I was Phoebe because I was looking for a way, any way, to connect with my mother. And if I could be Phoebe and take care of my mother, save her, then she’d feel connected to me, too. I’d be important to her.
I felt a bit sick, thinking that my mother hadn’t had me in mind when she wrote about Phoebe. And yet, another feeling was starting to grow. I thought about how present I tried to be for my students, how careful I was with their feelings, how hard I tried. I wasn’t a great or even good teacher. But I wasn’t a bad person. Maybe I was a good person who just made a couple of bad decisions.
I’d always felt that I’d lost something that night in Florida, a confidence or clarity about who I was and what I should do with my life. After all, how could I be the lifeline in the middle of the night if I’d failed so miserably with Lee? But if I was never intended to be that person in the first place, if this identification with Phoebe was a fantasy that I, and others, created, then how could I lose something I’d never really had? Maybe this night wasn’t the source of my problems, after all, either.
Lee had looked to me as a mother figure, she’d said, and blamed herself for what happened to our friendship. But I had a responsibility in this, too, didn’t I? I’d taken on the role of caretaker. I’d encouraged the attachment. What would our friendship look like if I no longer had to take care of her in that same way?
I thought of that ten-year-old boy in New York, abducted on his way to school, and how critical I’d been of his parents. But maybe they’d done everything right. Maybe it was just horrendous luck. Maybe there was a difference between saving people and taking care of them. Because it suddenly seemed to me that there were things in life that happened—sickness, death, choices made based on events that happened in childhood, being at the wrong place at the wrong time—that no amount of “saving” could prevent.
What a terrible thing for my mother, as a child, to have witnessed. Maybe Logan was right, after all. The writing and publishing of Listen, Before You Go aggravated our mother’s insecurity and egocentricity. But that book didn’t create her problems.
My poor mother. Maybe it was time to mourn the good parts of her and let go of the bad. Maybe it was time to forgive her.
I closed my eyes. And suddenly, I saw myself on the porch of our sorority house, a book on my lap, others around me. I was young, maybe only a sophomore, and I remembered looking up as Lee started up the hill toward us. When I stood and waved to her, she burst into a smile and ran, her backpack slapping her shoulders and her long black hair blowing behind her. It was warm that day, the sun high in the sky, the green grass bright and fragrant. She had something important to tell me. Maybe it was a realization she’d had in film class or a new take on the book she was reading for English. And I remembered feeling happy for this and that I’d never met anyone like her and that this kind of friendship was rare. It might happen only once or twice in a lifetime.
Lee wasn’t my mother and my mother wasn’t Lee.
How ironic that for so many years I thought I was supposed to help Lee but instead she ended up helping me. It was time to move on, just as she’d moved on. And it was time to forgive myself, too.
I closed Listen, Before You Go and put it back on the shelf. And then I reached for the phone. I was going to call Lee and say yes, I’ll go to Florida with you. Just name the date and time and I’d be there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much, much thanks to my editor, John Scognamiglio, and the amazing team at Kensington: Kristine Noble, Lorraine Feeney, and Paula Reedy. Thanks also to my agent, Ann Collette, for her patience and wonderful editorial eye, and to my readers and listeners: Linda and Jenny Gelda, Tui Sutherland (who found the “there” there), Jeane Whitehouse, Amy Jameson, Jenna Blum, Michelle Hoover, Jamie Holland Hull, Karl Vasiloff (a true lawyer’s lawyer), Alison Dinsmore, Elly Swartz, and mostly and especially and always, Kathy Read, my copilot in the importance of the role of the unconscious. Thanks to Ty Greenstein, whose music (Somewhere Different Now) sustained me for years while writing, and to Jessica Stern, whose novel, Denial: A Memoir of Terror, helped me find my characters. Thanks to Elizabeth Rochon, who selflessly dropped anything and everything to read chapters hot off the press and offer spot-on critiques. Thanks to my parents, Nancy and Jim Day, for always believing. And finally thanks to David, Dylan, Emma, and Elizabeth, who remind me every day that love is the greatest g
ift you can give and receive.
A READING GROUP GUIDE
I’LL STAY
Karen Day
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are included
to enhance your group’s reading of
Karen Day’s I’ll Stay.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. This is a story of female friendship but also one of mothers and daughters. How is the relationship between Clare and her mother different and similar to the relationship between Lee and her mom? Who else in the novel serves as a “mother”? And how do these mother figures fare compared to actual mothers?
2. Why are Lee and Clare friends? What makes their friendship unique from other friendships in their lives? Have you ever had a best friend? Are Lee and Clare’s problems within the friendship something you, in one form or another, experienced with a best friend? Why or why not?
3. The novel is set in the 1980s. Could the same story be set today? Why or why not? How would this story have to be different if set in a contemporary time?
4. Throughout the novel, Socrates’s phrase “the unexamined life is not worth living” is repeated in various situations. How do the characters interpret this? Does this interpretation change over the years? How and why? Is this something you believe? Why or why not?
5. Why does Sigmund Freud’s Rat Man case captivate Lee and Clare so much? How does Lee use it to help herself at the end? When Lee explains Freud’s theory of transference to Clare, do you better understand their relationship? How do you see transference working in your life and relationships?
6. The physical abuse in the novel happens to Lee and yet Clare tells the story. Why do you think the author chose to tell this story from her point of view? Do you wish you’d heard it from Lee? Why or why not?