by Kim Wright
“A chemist is what the British call a pharmacy,” Jean tells her.
“I know,” says Angelique. “It’s just that’s what Nico used to call a meth lab. It’s funny, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” says Jean. “Is it funny? If you say so, then I believe you. I never seem to understand jokes.”
Eleven
Our afternoon’s walk will be an arc along what Tess calls the coastal wall, which is easy enough to spot, even from a distance, although I don’t yet hear or see the ocean. I’ve read enough to know that the shore of southern England features sharp drops to the sea, exposing broad expanses of stone or chalk, like the white cliffs of Dover. So we’re now entering a dramatic and forbidding landscape, nothing like the gentle hills we’ve trod so far. And although we’re barely an hour into this second segment of our walk, the path is already less hospitable, and the ground is dotted with boulders that have erupted through the soil. The breeze carries the iron-rich smell of brine and kelp, and seagulls are circling in the distance, crying out to one another in the high cool air.
“What do you call a group of seagulls?” Claire asks me.
“A pod, a herd, sometimes a rookery,” I say. “That’s a tricky one. Most people say flock, but that’s not technically right.”
“All right,” says Silvia, cracking her knuckles in front of her, not waiting for permission to begin. “We’re going back to an autobiographical story, I’m afraid. It’s about how marriages change over time, go in and out of seasons. And it’s about how things can sometimes come full circle, just when you least expect it. It’s my story, as true as I can remember, but I’m going to tell it as if it were someone else’s. In the third person, I mean. I think that will make it easier for me. And I would furthermore prefer that you not interrupt me. Save your questions and comments for the end, just as we did this morning with Valerie.” It’s the first sign that maybe she’s not as utterly at ease as she always seems to be.
“The story lies within the domain of the storyteller,” says Tess.
“The third person?” asks Angelique. “What does that mean?”
“That I call myself ‘she’ and not ‘I,’ ” says Silvia. “It’s just distance. Sometimes distance helps.”
“There’s nothing wrong with distance,” Claire says. “And Tess is right. It’s your story. You should tell it any way you want to, isn’t that the case, ladies?”
We nod. In the distance, the gulls scream.
The Tale of Silvia
They met in college, the year she was a junior and he was a senior. They were both music majors and they were seated beside each other in the string section of the student orchestra. First and second violin.
Just like the violins, everything about their courtship seemed preordained. They were so much alike. Both tall and slim, from the Midwest. Quiet, outdoorsy, the children of teachers. Talented enough to be able to make careers out of their music, but not talented enough to be stars. Or maybe it was more a matter of temperament, that neither of them had a star personality. Their names were alliterative, Silvia and Steven, and when you’re young and inexperienced in the world, even a silly coincidence like that can pass as evidence of destiny.
After graduation they married, just as everyone expected them to, and began ticking items off the list. A modest Methodist ceremony, a starter home in a subdivision, the birth of twins. A boy and a girl—marvelous efficiency, that, getting the whole thing behind you in one fell swoop. Then came the minivan, the trips to Disney, half-marathons, rescued cats. In the tenth year of their marriage, they moved from Kansas to Texas. A different latitude, a brighter light, but the same time zone.
Shortly after their arrival in Houston, a relative died. A distant but childless one, the best kind, and the unexpected inheritance, falling like manna from heaven, meant they could afford a bigger house. But luck is such a tricky thing, is it not? Looking back years later, Silvia would sometimes wonder if this was where they first got off course—with the purchase of this larger house, the sort that they could never have afforded on their own. Their presence in the new neighborhood always felt a little dishonest, for it placed them among richer, older couples who held different sorts of jobs and, more to the point, it implied a value system that never quite fit. It was the smallest shift in direction, but you know what they say. A pilot altering his course by a single degree can take a plane to Phoenix instead of Denver.
Steven was the band director at the local high school, while Silvia taught piano lessons and played accompaniment for the community theater. As parents of twins so often do, they became adept at swapping off tasks. Their innate Midwestern practicality helped them develop a stratagem for every hour of the day and Steven called it The Plan. The Plan covered bedtimes and homework and household budgets, even the correct way to pack the car for road trips.
It was a good life and they congratulated each other sometimes late at night, or driving home from parties where they had been forced to behold the Technicolor unhappiness of other, less fortunate couples. The Liz-and-Dicks of the world, they would call them. The Scott-and-Zeldas. Those couples who shouted, threw wineglasses, declared bankruptcy, and went into rehab, the people who wept and slept around. Those who seemed determined to have big messy lives, while their own lives, Steven and Silvia agreed, were exactly the right size.
And then, after seventeen years, the impossible happened. Steven fell in love.
The woman was the president of the Band Booster Club at the high school where Steven taught. Her children were close in age to the twins, who were fifteen by this point. Their daughters, in fact, had been to each other’s birthday parties. Her name was Carol.
Carol had not been part of The Plan.
And yet, now she was here. Startlingly and unavoidably here, like a tree that falls through your roof during a storm, so that you suddenly look up from your bed and see something you never expected to see, like the sky. Carol appeared to be an ordinary enough woman, at least to most people. She certainly seemed ordinary to Silvia, who’d been aware of her existence in that slight peripheral way you know people whose kids are the same age as your kids. But she’d never taken any particular note of her. Carol . . . well, Carol was a bit of an Edith. She didn’t look like a threat. She wasn’t younger or thinner or more accomplished than Silvia, and that was part of the problem. As dreadful as it may be when your husband leaves you for a twenty-two-year-old bubble-breasted blonde, at least there’s an explanation for it. He’s an asshole, an upgrader, a man stuck in a midlife crisis, the punch line of an unfunny joke.
But when Silvia told her girlfriends Steven was leaving her for this woman, this Carol, one of them blurted out, “Her thighs are bigger than yours,” a sentence which tells you everything you need to know, I suppose, about what life was like in an upper-middle-class suburb of Houston, Texas, in 1982. And it was true. Whatever special powers Carol possessed, they were not the sort that were visible to the naked eye, and yet Steven had told Silvia, quote: I’ve never felt this way before. I can’t describe it. Just to be in the same room as her is enough.
And then he had added, with the kind of gentle cruelty that only a man who has recently fallen in love can muster, And Silvia, my only hope is that someday you too can know how this feels.
It was this last bit, of course, that was inexcusable. In all the subsequent years that passed, Silvia never told anyone that he said that, not until now, when she is walking through the English countryside with her friend Claire—who, as it turns out, has also had her secrets—and this pilgrimage of sisters. It’s the most embarrassing part of an embarrassing story, and so on that day back in the early ’80s when she told her girlfriends Steven was leaving, she omitted what he’d said on the way out the door. Just to be in the same room with her is enough. She didn’t want other women to know that she was married to a man who would say such a thing, or that she had chosen, even back in college, such a thorou
ghly ridiculous sort of person. So she held this last part deep inside her chest, this confession that confessed too much. It was bad enough that Steven no longer loved her, but then he had to go and imply that he had never loved her—at least not in the huge and all-encompassing way he now loved Carol. She told her girlfriends everything else, but she did not tell them the worst.
Moving on. If Silvia’s life in the 1960s and ’70s with Steven had been one sort of cliché, then her life in the ’80s and ’90s was another. She did not find it hard to rebound from her divorce. In the upwardly mobile neighborhood in which they now lived, multiple marriages were the norm and, in fact, staying with your original spouse seemed to indicate a shocking lack of imagination. Most people were on their second, third, or even fourth run at wedded bliss, dragging any number of stepchildren and half siblings in their wake. Her girlfriends would come over on the Fridays when Steven had the kids and they would drink too much wine and watch romantic movies and curse the boys of their youth. After the children left for college, some friend or another would come over almost every night. They would have potluck dinners, each woman bringing whatever she found in her refrigerator or swinging around a drive-through for a domed salad. There was no judgment among them. They did not pretend. Silvia cut her hair, lost weight, adopted two more cats. She was up to five now, which was a dicey number, a sign she may have been on the verge of utter withdrawal from polite society.
She did not think of herself as happy. But she didn’t think of herself as unhappy either. She’d never used that type of language. And yet, at some point in the tenth or eleventh year of her singledom, Silvia began to consider the possibility that Steven had been right. That by leaving, he really had—just as he claimed was his goal—done her a favor as much as him. Yes, it had taken nearly a decade’s worth of distance, but at last she began to see things more clearly. She and Steven had never been a love match. Not at all.
Oh, they’d been well suited. Perfectly aligned and evenly yoked. But they had not been in love. Instead, they’d lived almost like brother and sister, two people who share the same memories, who have endured the same relatives . . . it was almost as if they had spent seventeen years riding in the backseat of the same car. A car driven by someone else, maybe that stern and joyless adult called “marriage,” and all they could say was, “Are we there yet?” knowing that if you have to ask the question, it’s proof you haven’t arrived. Even the circumstances of their first introduction, on that college campus so long ago, had begun to take on a new meaning to Silvia. She’d always loved telling that story—him on first violin, her on second—but now that she stopped to consider it, even that once-charming little detail seemed dark and foreboding.
The feminists had it right. She’d been playing second fiddle to that man since the day she met him.
And she furthermore saw, as she stood on the edge of that high cliff they call fifty—for Claire is wrong about that, it isn’t forty that rips a woman’s life into bits, it’s fifty. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that forty upends the circumstances of a person’s life, making them wonder if they’ve done the right things, but fifty parts your ribs and yanks on your heart, giving you the uneasy suspicion that even if you somehow managed to do those right things, it’s beginning to look as if you did the right things for all the wrong reasons.
Silvia had lost a breast to cancer by this point—yes, even that cliché was not denied her—and for the first time in her fifty years on earth she stood in the chilly shadow of her own mortality. Maybe it was this brush with death that had made her generous. For she could now admit that Steven had not only been right to leave, but that he had possessed more courage than her. He’d been the one willing to take the hit. Willing to be the bad guy to the kids and to their extended families, willing to lose his job at the high school when it came out he’d been trysting with the mother of one of his students. Through the years he’d paid alimony and child support without complaint and, even though it was his dead relative who had provided that long-ago down payment, he’d left her the house. Meanwhile she had been allowed to play the victim. To rest in the cushy role of abandoned wife.
And then Silvia saw a final additional truth: that she had been far happier single than she’d ever been when she was married.
Once she took a great breath and truly admitted she was happy, then her life began to open up all around her. She would bring a book and eat in any restaurant she pleased. Take organized trips like this one. Paint a wall red, decide she didn’t like it, and paint it over purple. She began to run full marathons, not halfs, and, since no one had required her presence during weekends for years, she registered with an agency that supplied backup musicians for traveling bands. The decision to take this thankless job was a bit of a whim, a way to brush up on the instruments she had let languish, such as her violin and cello, but she got far more work than she would have guessed. She would often arrive at a gig and not know what would be asked of her—classical, bluegrass, gospel, or rock. It was fun to fly by the seat of her pants for once, to risk making a mistake or looking foolish, to be the only gray-haired lady in the band.
And then the second unlikely thing happened. Silvia fell in love.
He was a black saxophonist in a jazz group, with the surprising name of Willem. Adopted out of Africa as an infant, raised by Dutch parents, a vagabond, an orphan, a child of the wider world. But by this time Silvia figured that if a man who seemed to be the perfect match could fail you badly, then the inverse might also be true. A man who looked all wrong might turn out to be all right.
She and Willem have had seventeen years together, she tells us, as we walk along the seawall that flanks an unseen sea, a fine rain misting on our hair. There has been such perfect symmetry to her life. Seventeen years with the first husband, then seventeen alone, and now seventeen with the second. “I’ll spare you the math,” she adds. “I’m seventy-three.”
I’m surprised. I’d imagine we all are. Her face is weathered, but her body is young. She walks not only briskly but in a strong and unfettered fashion, her shoulders swinging easily with each step, her hips rising and falling in the smooth cadence of a woman who will never truly age.
Her children are long married now, she says. She has five grandchildren, two of them musicians, and three athletes. Through the years Steven and Carol have always come to their concerts and games, which isn’t surprising. The doting father became a doting grandfather. And it was at a soccer tournament for one of their grandsons that Silvia first detected the difference. She and Willem had been sitting near the field, and Steven and Carol had arrived late. Steven nodded at her as he always did when he passed and had headed up the steps to his favorite position in the bleachers, higher up than her and more centrally located. But on this particular sunny afternoon, he had taken Carol’s arm for the climb. Not to help her with the steps, but rather to guide her.
Turning her head to watch them making their slow and careful progress up the bleachers, Silvia’s mind had raced. Steven’s nod in passing had been just like all the others—or was it? Carol had looked vague. Steven had looked grim. And then it hit her.
She was sad for him. Alzheimer’s was a cruel disease.
Seasons continued to cycle. Basketball, the winter concert, softball, graduation, summer pops. And over the course of that year, Silvia watched Carol decline and Steven struggle to attend to her. By the Fourth of July swim meet, he couldn’t even leave her alone long enough to go to the snack bar or bathroom. One of the kids or grandkids would have to sit with them and even then if Steven rose to leave, Carol would cry out. A piteous animal cry of abandonment, announcing her fate to everyone within earshot. People would look away.
“He can’t bring her and he can’t leave her,” Silvia’s son tells her. “Pop is kind of stuck.”
She does not gloat. In fact, to her great surprise, the more she thinks of it, the more the story of her first husband’s lost love breaks he
r heart. Her son tells her that there are days when Carol doesn’t know who Steven is, days when she tries to run from him, or clings to him, days when she flies at him in fury and scratches his face.
“What’s going to happen to them?” she asks her son, and he says he doesn’t know. Steven won’t consider putting Carol in a home. He won’t ask for help.
And then came the day that Willem got lost in Costco.
At first it was no big deal. They had said they would meet over by electronics and she’d gone there and not found him and she had searched the store, aisle by aisle, until a call came over the loudspeaker, asking her to come to the snack bar. She found Willem pacing, both frightened and angry, blaming her for going to the wrong place. He insisted that they had said they would meet at the snack bar but his hands were trembling as he said it. She hastened to agree with him. Of course they had said they’d meet at the snack bar. It was her fault. She was the one who had gotten confused.
That was the first time, possibly a fluke, but soon enough there were others and then these incidents began to come with a telling regularity. Pans left on a hot burner, ignored traffic signals, outbursts of anger over a dropped cup, a tendency to call a particular grandson by his father’s name.
She could have spent a lifetime contemplating the irony without feeling compelled to do anything about it. Silvia had always been a bit of a slow reactor. Of course Steven would be the one who would come up with The New Plan. Because one day, at a Christmas concert a year and a half after she had first noticed Carol’s vagueness, Steven confronted Silvia in the lobby of the auditorium. She had been struggling with Willem, trying to get him to give her back the car keys. She wouldn’t let him drive anymore—that was entirely out of the question—but he liked to hold the keys as they sat in public places, playing with them like a toddler. On this particular day, he was a quarrelsome toddler and Silvia had been so preoccupied with trying to cajole him into giving up the keys that she had only been annoyed to see Steven approaching. He had Carol by the arm, just as she had Willem by the hand, and as she looked up, Steven had said, “Maybe we can find a way to help each other through this. We were always so good at handling the twins.”