Blackberry Winter

by Maryanne Fischler

  Such came to be the case on this evening, and soon the only sound in the room was the music God was providing. It sounded to Emily as if the noise outside were getting louder, perhaps the wind was picking up. What a safe, secure feeling it was to be in a warm, cozy room with a beloved companion while the wind did whatever it chose outside.

  Brian was thinking very similar thoughts. He too was struck by the contrast of the wind outside and the peacefulness here within. He thought about the contrast between himself now and himself as little as a year ago, and saw an analogy. “I used to be like the wind, sometimes just meandering along, sometimes raging, but never really at peace,” he thought. “She brings such joy to my life, such serenity. I have to keep her with me always.”

  And in the darkness, he reached for her, and she came willingly. Although he whispered, his voice seemed to fill the quiet room. “I love you, Emily. I will always love you.”

  The physical contacts between Brian and Emily had been very innocent, out of step with a society that had gone in one lifetime from a debate on whether nice girls kissed on the first date to a debate on the proper way to avoid contracting a sexually transmitted disease. Brian had not been active in the dating world in years, but he remembered that he had had more intense physical contact with girls in junior high than he had with Emily. It went without question in his mind that he wanted her very much, and that he was sometimes frustrated in her reluctance to get any closer. He knew, however, that he walked a thin line. She was so fragile, so shy, and in her own way, so young, that he must not seem aggressive, or make her uncomfortable with his touch. The attempts he had made to discuss the subject with her added to his frustration. He hoped that time would improve the situation, and that she would learn to trust him enough to allow him to get closer.

  Much of this was on his mind on this particular evening. As he kissed her, he sensed a warmth that he had only occasionally felt from her before. Then he was aware that the tips of her fingers were inside his shirt, brushing softly against his chest. It was a small gesture, he had had more erotic experiences than this before Emily was born, but there was in it a sweetness, an expression of tenderness, that made it an act of love.

  Morning came, but not the sun. A solid gray sky met the cold steely sea, and a promise of rain hung in the air. As Brian and Emily ate a huge breakfast, they discussed their plans for the day.

  “I know it’s probably a stupid way to spend vacation time, but why don’t we just stay here at the hotel and work on a crossword or something. I think there’s going to be a downpour before long,” Emily said.

  “I don’t think being on vacation means you have to be on the go every minute,” Brian said. “After all, the idea was to have a change of scenery and get rested. Your plan sounds good to me.”

  It turned out to be a good day. They enjoyed watching the rain when it came. During a brief let-up in the storm, they had another walk on the beach.

  “People who spend a lot of time on the sea say that it has a personality, that it has moods just like people do,” Emily said. “On a day like this, the sea seems sort of melancholy, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, I guess it does. Are you melancholy, Emily?”

  “Oh, no. I’m enjoying myself immensely. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but I always do with you.”

  “Well, you certainly have been saying nice things lately. You’re really very romantic sometimes.”

  “And what about the other times? I’m almost afraid to ask, but what about them?”

  “Well, sometimes you seem to be very distant, as if you’re not really aware of me, as if you’re in a different place, a sad place. Then I wonder what you could be thinking about that could make you so sad.”

  “Do you really wonder, or do you think you know?” He looked at her quite intently as he asked.

  “Well, I figure you’re probably thinking about the war.” She knew she was taking a chance that he didn’t welcome discussion on this subject, but he had asked the question.

  “Yes, when I’m sad, it’s usually because that’s what I’m thinking about. War is a sad and ugly business. They don’t tell you about how ugly it can be before they send you. They talk to you about duty and your obligation. They tell you to go over there and make sure our boys make it home, they don’t tell you how exactly you’re...” he stopped all at once, as if remembering where he was. It was like catching yourself just as you were about to say a profane word in church. “You don’t need to hear about this.”

  “Maybe I do, and maybe you need to tell it. Maybe as long as you hold it inside, it will always have the power to hurt you.”

  “I can’t talk about it, not to you, not yet.”

  Emily didn’t say anything for a long while. The rain started again and they made their way up the beach as quickly as Brian’s limp would permit. They were pretty well soaked when they parted to go their respective rooms. They agreed to meet in the lobby in an hour and find a good restaurant for dinner. Brian was early, and watched her as she got off the elevator. It was obvious to him because hers was a face he had studied so well that Emily had been crying.

  They decided to try an Italian restaurant they had passed on their approach to the hotel the day before. It proved to be better on the outside than on the inside. The food was pedestrian, and the service very slow. They did have fun amusing themselves watching a group of elderly ladies, Brian guessed a bridge club, out for a night on the town. Brian did a running commentary on the whole scene, making up plausible names for each character and inventing dialogue. Emily was in stitches.

  “Oh, look. Mildred there has decided that a bottle of Chianti is just the thing to perk up the party. But Agnes thinks that a nice Rosé would be better. The waiter is called upon to arbitrate, but he’s no help. He thinks that really good wine is what comes in gallon size jugs. So, they order both.

  “Now the food is arriving, and everybody thinks that the other lady’s dinner looks better than hers, so they’re going to subdivide. Everybody gets one of Gertrude’s ravioli. Geraldine is cutting her lasagna into eight portions. Sauce is flying everywhere. Everybody needs another glass of wine. Better order another bottle of Chianti, no Rosé, oh both.

  “Now it gets really interesting. They have to decipher the check. Millicent has no intention of paying for Cora’s spaghetti. Bernice didn’t get any salad, so she thinks she should get something taken off her bill. Then of course there’s the tip. The service did seem a little slow, but what a nice young man, and oh so cute. All of this is made more difficult by the fact that they’ve polished off four bottles of wine between them, and math was never their strong suit anyway.”

  “Oh, Brian, stop.” Emily was laughing, and trying to do it quietly. “We’ll be old some day too, you know.”

  “I’m already old,” he said smiling.

  “Oh, you are not either. You’re much too... oh my, I’m getting addled, and I didn’t even have any wine.”

  “What were you going to say?”

  She leaned over conspiratorially and said softly, “You’re much too sexy to be old.”

  He burst out laughing and said, “Why madam, I’m shocked. I am forced to ask the nature of your intentions toward me.” He then continued in a different tone, “That’s one of the nicest things you’ve ever said to me.”

  When they returned to the hotel, the rain was coming down harder than ever. They were soaked for the second time that day just in the time it took to get from the car to the door. Emily went to her room to change yet again, and agreed to meet Brian in his suite when she was finished.

  When she arrived she found him on the phone, bidding goodbye to whoever was at the other end.

  “What does Paul have to say?” Emily asked.

  “Now how did you know that’s who I was talking to?”

  “Who else would you be talking to on your vacation but your best friend?”

  “He sends his love and wants to know if you’re enjoying being water-logged.”
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br />   “Paul is very dear, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “Paul is very dear. He’s also very wise.”

  “And what does he, in his wisdom, think of us?”

  “I’m not completely sure. I know he’s very fond of you. And I know that he considers me lucky to have found you. I suspect that he thinks we are neither of us as open with one another as we pretend to be. I suppose that’s true, isn’t it?”

  “I guess it is. There are things I want to know about you that you don’t want to tell me. There are things about me that I find it difficult to talk about. I guess we’re both frustrated. We know the relationship can’t grow if we don’t open up to each other, but opening up hurts too much. So what do we do?”

  “Maybe we need to get some professional help.”

  “I’ve already tried that,” she answered very matter-of-factly.

  Brian was astonished. “What do you mean?”

  “First I went to a therapist that I just picked at random. I didn’t like him one bit. He mostly just sat there and let me ramble about things that made no difference. What did I think my problem was? Like as if I knew. If I knew the answers to his questions, I wouldn’t have needed him. Then I saw this woman who talked a lot about repression and dysfunctionality. She acted as if she had no doubts about what my problem was, even though she had just met me. So don’t talk to me about professional help.” There was a disproportionate level of anger in her voice.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about any of this?” There was no anger in Brian’s voice, just puzzlement.

  “Because it hadn’t done any good. You don’t talk about your experiences in psychotherapy either, I’ve noticed.” There was an edge on her comment that cut to the quick.

  Brian was shocked by the tone of the remark, and struggled to stay calm, “That was a long time ago, Emily. I don’t think it’s pertinent now.”

  “Brian, why don’t you just get mad? I made a really nasty remark just now, and you obviously didn’t appreciate it, so why don’t you just cut loose and get mad?”

  “That’s what your father would do, isn’t it? And if I behaved like your father, you’d know how to do deal with me.”

  Emily looked at him in pure amazement. She walked to the balcony door and stared at the falling rain until she had thoroughly digested what he had said. “I honestly never thought of it that way. Maybe you’re right. I can’t deny that I have had trouble dealing with your anger on those rare occasions when I have caught a glimpse of it. You’ve never for one minute consciously reminded me of my father, but then, maybe everybody reminds me of my father when they’re angry. But does that mean that you can’t give yourself the freedom to get mad at me? There must be about a zillion things I do that drive you crazy, but you’re trying so hard not to be like my father, that you never get mad. We’ll never get anywhere as long as we keep trying to be what we think the other one needs us to be. We keep coddling one another and not forcing one another to talk about painful things, and so those things that we don’t talk about keep tearing away at us and at what we could have together.”

  “What we have together is good, better than anything I could have envisioned a year ago. Maybe time will help. You’re not thinking of giving up on me are you?” He said it with a flippant tone of voice that masked the real fear that she might actually be thinking of doing just that. He was relieved to hear what she said next.

  “Not by a long shot. I can’t believe that anybody as messed up as I’ve been could have a relationship with someone as terrific as you. But we have to work at making it better.”

  There was no answer for her argument. He wanted to improve their relationship as much as she did, but was more interested in the end result than in the process. In fact, the process scared him almost as much as it did her. “Why does the past have to matter so much? Why can’t we just let it go and live our lives and...”

  “And live happily ever after?” she interrupted.

  “Well, why not?” he asked in a tired sort of voice.

  Emily thought about it for a while and then said, “I wonder if you all have blackberries in Vermont. I should have asked your father, he would know. You know how sometimes after fall has started, you have one of those days where it’s warm and sunny and people call it Indian Summer? Well, sometimes long after spring has started, you have a spell of real cold weather, and people where I come from call it blackberry winter. It seems that blackberries do their best ripening when you get one of those cold spells. People who don’t like the winter recognize that sometimes you have to suffer through just a little bit more of it if you want to enjoy the taste of really sweet blackberries. Well, that’s us, Brian. We’ve both had times in our lives when we suffered, when we endured sadness and loss and the cruelties of life in a world of sinners. And now when we think that it ought to be spring, that we ought to be able to put suffering behind us, we find we have to revisit it just once more, to taste the bitter again in order to find the sweet. It’s time for a blackberry winter.”

  Brian knew that everything she’d said was true. He knew that the past and the bitterness he carried would always be between them. It was ironic to him to think that by supposedly sheltering her from the ugliness of his experience, he had in fact built a wall that she could never penetrate. “Where do I start?”

  Emily took a deep breath; it was a scary sort of triumph. “Why don’t you tell me about when you got hurt?”

  “Okay.” It was the last thing in the world he wanted to talk about. “I went into the army fresh out of medical school. I went wherever they needed me, wherever they were short-handed. I was in a Humvee between units when we passed a wounded man on the side of the road. I stopped to see if I could help. That was the last thing I remember. A look of intense pain swept across his face as he recalled what happened next. “Apparently there was an IED. I should have been more cautious. Anyway, I woke up the next day, and my hand was gone and my leg was in trouble. They took it off two days later. When I was finally well enough to be shipped home, they sent me first to Bethesda and then to a veterans hospital in Pennsylvania.”

  “That’s where you met Paul?

  “Yes. You have to understand, everything that I really cared about in my life was gone. I didn’t see how I could practice medicine. I couldn’t imagine ever being close to a woman again. I thought of myself as a freak, it made me sick at my stomach to look in a mirror. In my own mind, I was only half a man.” After a pained pause, he continued, “I was assigned to Paul because I tried to kill myself.”

  Every time a relationship takes a step forward, it’s because one of the parties takes a risk. Usually such risks are taken without thought, and it is only if the venture doesn’t turn out well that it is seen as having any element of risk to it. But in Brian’s case, he was aware of the risk he had taken. When you want to touch a wild fawn in the woods, you have to reach out a hand, and sometimes, they get scared and run away. As he made his painful confession to Emily, he held his breath to see if she would bolt. She was plenty scared, but not about to run.

  “Thank God for Paul. How did he convince you that life was worth sticking around for?”

  “Well, he pointed out that there were several types of medicine that I could still go into. He also gave me the standard line about how there was the perfect girl for me out there somewhere. See,” he said with a little grin, “I told you he was wise.”

  She smiled back at him until another thought occurred to her. “It must have been hard on your parents.”

  A dark look crossed his face, and she could see that he was getting angry. It was an odd kind of anger, however, for it was clearly directed at someone who wasn’t in the room. “I suppose it was. I refused to see them. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as my father.”

  “Why?”

  “I went over there because of my father. I still have trouble believing that I did it. He had written me off; he didn’t approve of my lifestyle from the time I went to colle
ge on. I was working my way steadily through the female population on campus. I did pretty much the same thing in medical school. He thought I was disgusting and profligate and a disgrace to the family name. I guess there was some truth in that opinion. Anyway, it stuck in his craw that I had been having a wonderful time here at home with God knows how many women while my countrymen were dying for democracy over there. He was in Korea, but never saw any action, and I think he always felt guilty about it. He shamed me into enlisting, talked about it as a chance to redeem myself. I really wanted his approval, I wanted him to be proud of me again. It was obvious to me that if I didn’t do what he wanted, he would consider me less of a man. Of course, he told my mother that if I enlisted I’d probably get some easy assignment to a residency at a military hospital in Hawaii or something. I remember when I told them I was being shipped to Iraq, she was in shock. I heard them arguing about it late into the night. She told him, ‘If anything happens to him over there, I’ll never forgive you.’ And I’m not sure she ever has.”

  “And you’ve never forgiven him either?”

  “No, I guess I haven’t.”

  “When I think about the way your father was when they visited, the conversations that he dominated with his incessant small talk, the sort of haunted look on his face every time he looked at you, I suspect that he has never forgiven himself.”

  “I imagine you’re right. That’s what Paul says.”

  “So what are you going to do about all of this?” she asked, looking at him thoughtfully.

  “I’m not sure. I guess it’s about time I made some sort of peace with him.”

  “I’m glad you told me. A lot of things make sense now that didn’t used to.”

  “Do you think of me as a coward now?”

  “A coward? Heavens no. You served your country bravely, were wounded in action—why would I think...” She stopped, and realizing that it wasn’t his service that he was referring to. “No, of course not. I can think of lots of times when I would have done away with myself if I’d had the means. It’s true that I have to believe it’s a sin to give up on life. It’s a sin to essentially tell God that your life isn’t worth living, to take the decision of life and death into your own hands. But it’s not my place to call you a sinner, that’s between you and God. As far as being a coward, I think you’ve got a lot more courage than I do. You’ve had such awful things happen to you.”