A Woman's Place

by Barbara Delinsky

  My jaw dropped. I snapped it back up. “Sleazy? What about stacking the deck against me with lies? What about confidential medical records showing up in Dean Jenovitz’s file? What about Adrienne, for God’s sake?”

  He took my arm and tried to steer me to the door.

  I snatched it free and held my ground. “If there’s more to that story, it’ll come out. In court, if it comes to that. I’ll raise Adrienne and more, Dennis. I’ll do whatever I have to get my kids back.”

  “You’re a vindictive bitch.”

  The way he said it stole my breath. Fast as I could, I stole it back. “It’s called self-defense. I wasn’t the instigator here. I wasn’t the one who brought up the past. You did those things, Dennis, and for the life of me I still don’t know why. What was so horrible about our marriage that you had to end it this way?”

  I heard a sound from above. My eyes flew up the staircase and down the hall just as Johnny disappeared.

  I started up the stairs. Dennis called my name, but I ignored him. When I heard his footsteps behind me, I started to run. I turned into Johnny’s room in time to see him looking frantically around for a place to hide.

  I caught him, wrapping him tightly in my arms. My heart was in my mouth. I pushed it aside enough to urge a soft, “Talk to me, John. Tell me what’s bothering you most.”

  He fought to get free, but I wasn’t letting him go.

  I weathered his struggles with my cheek to his hair. “I know this is hard for you,” I said. “It’s hard for me, too.”

  “Let me go,” was his muffled reply.

  “Not until we’ve talked. We haven’t been able to do that, you and me. Either someone else is around, or you have homework to do, but I want to talk with you, Johnny, I need to talk with you. We used to talk all the time.”

  “You lived here then,” he said, still muffled, now angry, too.

  “Lots of things were different then. There are times when I’d give anything to be able to turn back the clock.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Because I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because there are legal issues involved. That’s part of what makes this so hard.”

  I instinctively tightened my arms around him when he yelled, “If it’s so hard, why is it happening?”

  Good question, I wanted to say. Then I caught myself. I could throw my hands in the air all I wanted, but the truth was that I had made some very basic mistakes. I had decided what my family needed without giving Dennis equal say. I had been wrong to do that.

  “This is happening,” I said, “because Daddy needs some things that I can’t give him.”

  “He needs us. Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I breathed against his hair, “God, yes. That’s the biggest part of what’s so hard. It bothers me not to be here when you get home from school. It bothers me not to have dinner with you, and breakfast with you. I want to be with you all the time, just like Daddy does.”

  He had stopped struggling enough so that I could gentle my arms and let them soothe without fearing he would escape.

  “You tell me that if I want something, I should go for it,” he said. The anger had given way to confusion. “Why don’t you?”

  “I am. You just don’t see me doing it. I spend a good deal of the time when I’m not with you thinking about the best way to resolve this.”

  “Why doesn’t the judge want you with us? Did you do something wrong?”

  My hand went still on his back for an instant, before resuming its gentle kneading. “No. Nothing illegal or immoral.”

  “Did Dad?”

  I glanced back. Dennis was at the door. But even if he hadn’t been listening, I wouldn’t have slandered him in front of Johnny. “Daddy loves you as much as I do. What we’re trying to work out here, is how best the two of us can love the two of you without the two of us living in the same house.”

  “But we’re a family. Families work things out. Why can’t you and Dad?”

  Again I glanced at Dennis. He looked tired and, to his credit, upset, but I didn’t feel the need to soothe him that I once had. I was distanced. It struck me that it was by choice. My choice. Because there were two sides to every coin. Just as I had failed to satisfy Dennis’s needs, he had failed to satisfy mine.

  Could we work out our differences? “I just don’t think we can.”

  “Then we’re not a family anymore?”

  “We are. Just a different kind. Two, actually. Two families.”

  “Are you and Daddy always gonna fight?”

  “No. The fighting will be over pretty soon.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we settle in and get used to a new order of things.”

  “I want things the way they were.”

  “I know,” I said and kissed his crown. There had been times in my childhood when I was desperate to make things the way they had been before my father had died. I remembered that pain.

  “Don’t you?” he asked, bringing me back to the present. I must have waited a few seconds too long to answer, because his voice rose in pitch. “Won’t all of us ever live in the same house again?”

  Gently, sadly, I said, “Probably not.”

  “This sucks!” he cried and started to struggle again. I held him, tightening my arms when he tried to pull away, wrestling to keep a hold when he squirmed. Finally, he abandoned the fight and started to sob.

  Though my heart was breaking, I kept as tight a hold on him as before. I moved with him as I had when he’d been a baby, though then the cause had been more simple, either hunger, discomfort, or fright. Not only had life grown more complex, but Johnny had grown more controlled. Who had taught him not to cry? Had I? Or Dennis? Or his peers?

  “Let it out, Johnny,” I whispered. “You can cry with me all you want. I’ll love you just the same.”

  I actually think he would have cried even if I hadn’t given him permission. The emotion had built too high. The dike had been bound to burst.

  When I saw the first easing of the flow, I said, “It’s okay to be unhappy sometimes. It’s okay to be angry and confused and scared. Those are normal things to be feeling.”

  “Dad’ll be mad,” he said in a broken little voice.

  “Dad won’t be mad. He’s feeling lots of those things, too. He may not talk about it, but he is. But things will get better, Johnny.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  “How?”

  Johnny had been appeased with a second, firmer, “Because I know,” and so had I, but only until I got him into bed and kissed him goodnight, kissed Kikit goodnight, then got into my car and drove off. By the time I was back at the lighthouse, I was thinking of all the things that could go wrong and needing a little reassurance myself. When I picked up the phone to call Brody, though, I didn’t get a dial tone. I pressed the disconnect button. “Hello?” Pressed it again. “Hello?”

  “Claire?”

  I thought I had heard my sister’s voice in every possible emotional state, but this one was new.

  “You have to come, Claire. She’s comatose. They don’t know how long she’ll last.”

  fourteen

  Rona hadn’t exaggerated this time. I flew out on Sunday morning to find that the doctors shared her pessimism. No dramatic medical twist had brought on the coma. Connie had simply slipped into it. Just as simply, she didn’t have the strength to pull herself out.

  Rona looked devastated. She had taken the call in bed the night before, had thrown on a warm-up suit, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and raced to the hospital, where she had spent the night. When I arrived, she was standing beside Connie, clutching the bed rail.

  “Thank God,” she breathed. “I thought for sure she’d die on my watch, just to make me feel guilty the rest of my life. Bad enough that she won’t say a thing. Do you think she knew I was here all night?”

  I stood at the door trying to find the wherewithal t
o enter. Loss was heavy in the air. In normal times I might have borne the weight of it more easily, but I was already depleted by what had happened back home. I was feeling weak and frightened. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see my mother this way.

  She was nearly invisible in the bed. Her skin blended in with the sheet, both inert, both lifeless. She was leaving us, I knew, and felt the same tiny panic in my belly that I had felt as a child when she left us each morning, not to return until night. That was where the similarity ended. I wasn’t a child anymore, and she was leaving for good.

  “Claire?”

  With an effort, I tore my eyes from Connie and focused on Rona.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, sounding frightened.

  I paused, swallowed, nodded. “Just shaky.” Then I forced myself past the door, went to the bed, and leaned down. “Hi, Mom. I’m here. See, even sooner than I said.” My voice broke on the last word. Her face was pale and waxy. No matter that I knew she was close to death, no matter that she hadn’t looked like herself for weeks, I wanted the old face back. “Mom?” I called softly. My hand hovered over hers, awkward in a second’s doubt, then lowered. I felt skin and bones, cool, smooth, surreal. I gave a little shake. “Mom?” She didn’t respond. I tried another shake. “Mom?”

  “The doctors say we should talk to her,” Rona said in little more than a whisper inches from my ear. She had crowded in beside me, which would have felt awkward, too, if I hadn’t been feeling the need to lean on someone. True, I had never thought to lean on Rona. But I had never felt so light and weak.

  “They say she might be able to hear,” Rona went on in that whisper, “so I’ve been telling her all the things I’ve done in my life to please her, but she won’t nod, or smile, or even open her eyes and stare at me. She used to be great at staring. It was a sure sign that she didn’t like whatever it was I’d done.” She gave body to her voice, pleading, “Come on, Mom. Stare at me now. I dare you to.”

  I squeezed Rona’s wrist. Then my hand found the railing and held tight. “I talked with her yesterday morning. She sounded stronger at the end of the conversation. How was she during the day?”

  “I didn’t come in the morning. Maybe that upset her, but I was here for a while in the afternoon. I read her half of Vanity Fair. I’m really not a terrible daughter.”

  “No one said you were.”

  “Maybe not in as many words.”

  We fell silent. I couldn’t take my eyes from Connie’s face. It was hollowed out, deathly quiet. The only sound I could hear was the faint beep of the machine that said she was still alive.

  The nurse came and went twice. We didn’t move.

  “She looks so pale,” I finally whispered. “I wish I knew if she could hear.”

  “What would you say if you knew she could?”

  “I’d tell her about the circus.”

  I paused, then did just that. I told her about the lions, the horses, and the elephants. I told her about being terrified by the trapeze artists and delighted by the clowns. I told her about Hoodsies, and cotton candy, and the purple alligator that Kikit had bought. At the end, I told Rona, “It was a good circus. She would have liked it.”

  “She hated the smells.”

  “She never smelled the smells.”

  “What?”

  “She never went to the circus.”

  “Never?” When I shook my head, Rona said, “Funny. I thought she had.”

  We continued on for a while in silence, then I kept the vigil alone when Rona left to get coffee. I talked softly, calling Connie’s name, touching her hand. I had expected that Rona would take her time, what with me there, but she was back in under ten minutes with coffee for us both.

  We drank it without speaking, threw the cups in the trash, kept standing close. Awkwardness had given way to the need for human warmth. We were family, all that was left of the core unit now that Connie was edging away.

  “How’s everything at home?” Rona whispered.

  “Lousy,” I whispered back.

  “Want to tell her?”

  “Want to, but won’t.”

  “Maybe that would bring her around. Shock her out of it, y’know?” She gave me a moment’s fright when she raised her voice. “Mom? Can you hear me, Mom? Claire’s here. She came all the way to see you. Wake up and talk with her. It’s all right with me, really it is.”

  Connie showed no sign of waking.

  Rona sank back beside me. “She’s fighting me even now, keeping her eyes closed just to spite me.”

  “Maybe we’re taking the wrong tactic,” I said. “The doctor said we can tell her it’s okay to let go.”

  Rona looked appalled. “He told me that, too, but I can’t tell her to die.”

  “We wouldn’t be doing that. We’d be saying she doesn’t have to hang on if she’s too tired. It may be the merciful thing.”

  “But I need her. I need her to wake up. I need to tell her things.”

  I put my arm around Rona’s shoulder. She and I hadn’t seen eye to eye on many things in life, but I could relate to this pain. There was desperation in it, fear that the buzzer would ring and leave her knowing that she hadn’t tried her hardest.

  The best you can be is the best you can be, Mom had always said, the last time not two weeks before. So the lesson hadn’t been lost on Rona, either.

  “She thinks I’m shallow, but I really loved Jerry, and I really loved Harold, and they really loved me for a little while, and it felt so good. For that little while with each of them it was like I was the only other person in the world. I felt so good. So safe. Okay, so I didn’t work like she did and like you do, but does that make me a bad person?”

  Safe. I needed that, too. I had married Dennis for it. But Brody provided it. Did that make me a bad person? “No.”

  “Then why did she make me feel that way?”

  I had to work to keep my thoughts on Rona. “Maybe she was jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “You had luxuries she wanted but couldn’t have. Either couldn’t have, or didn’t take. She felt like a coward. You had guts. She envied that.”

  “She did?”

  I imagined so.

  Sunday morning became Sunday afternoon. Doctors and nurses stopped by, but other than make a show of fiddling with charts, machines, or drips, they did little. Connie’s minister dropped in for several minutes. Connie didn’t so much as blink.

  Rona curled up in the chair and slept for a while, then woke up and returned to her post at the bed rail. I kept expecting her to go home to shower and do herself up in her usual done-up way, but she wasn’t budging from the room other than to go for coffee or food. Once or twice she rinsed her face in the sink and brushed her hair, but otherwise she remained more unadorned than I had seen her in years. I found her more approachable this way, though that might have been my own need for company. I also thought she was even prettier this way and told her so.

  She sighed. “Mom always said that, too.” She closed her eyes, rolled her head around on her neck, sighed again. “So here I am at this late date, trying to please her still.” She opened her eyes and looked my way. “Do you ever think of dying?”

  “I try not to.”

  “No wonder. Your life is pretty full. But I think about it. I think about things I won’t have done that I will wish I had.”

  I felt a fast flare of anger. Connie had said nearly the same thing—but damn, it hadn’t had to be that way. She could have done more. She could have enjoyed life, instead of playing the martyr. She could have enjoyed us more than she had.

  I took a deep breath. The anger broke and scattered.

  “What do you wish you’d done?” I asked Rona.

  “Had kids.” She shot me a look that dared me to laugh.

  “That doesn’t surprise me. You’re great with mine. It isn’t too late. Mom would love it.”

  Rona leaned over, propping her forearms on the rail. “She thinks I’m too flighty.”

 
I leaned over and propped my forearms beside hers. “Do you?”

  She shrugged. “When you hear it enough, you come to think it, too, though, for the life of me, I don’t know why I listen.”

  “It’s not just you. I listen, too. Connie’s my rock.”

  Rona looked at me in surprise. “You’re her rock. You were always the strong one in the family, Claire. Argue all you want, but there it is.”

  “I could always count on her for unconditional support.”

  “Right. For support. But you were the answer person. The voice of reason. The doer. Much more than Mom or me.”

  I didn’t feel like the answer person, the voice of reason, the doer. I felt totally helpless, standing, sitting, waiting there for Connie to make her move. Life or death—it was her choice. Then again, maybe it wasn’t, which was as scary a thought as anything. It only confirmed my own helplessness. I wanted to think I had more control over life.

  So, was I a control freak?

  Rona and I might argue forever about who was the rock, but the fact remained that the foundation of my world was shifting. Here, back home—I felt the shaking and was left weak in the knees.

  More than once I wished Brody was with me. He was an answer person, a voice of reason, a doer. I would have leaned on him with relish.

  But this wasn’t a time for Brody. It was a time for Connie, Rona, and me. As the hours passed, as afternoon gave way to night and still Connie stayed with us, her face grew more polished, almost opalescent. I thought about the story of Grandmother Kate’s pearls, and couldn’t help but imagine that Connie was becoming one herself. It struck me that that was what death watches were about, a chance for family to pull together for a few last hours of peaceful communion, the creation of a final memory, a last pearl to add to the strand. In that sense, I was grateful Connie lingered.

  I made Rona go home that Sunday night for a few hours’ sleep while I dozed by Connie’s bed, but she was back well before Monday’s dawn. She had showered and changed into jeans and a sweater, still the ponytail and the naked face remained. She looked about eighteen.