Tuesday Night Miracles

by Kris Radish

  She sighs and makes the effort:

  Meeting a new friend during the last assignment. It was beyond fun, but I already told you that, and it was like getting lost. Once I stepped out of the car, things started to happen. Kelli’s helping me with the dishes.

  When she pauses, after writing all about the evening in even more detail than the last report she’s already sent in, she manages to fill up most of one page with sincere comments. Grace stops to sip some coffee and wonders if she can squeeze by with what she has written.

  She can almost hear Dr. Bayer saying, “Well, Grace, you could probably fill up a notebook if you really tried. And please do not get angry about this.”

  Some nights like this, when she’s already sleep-deprived and realizes the rest of the week is going to not so much cascade as crash through her world, Grace feels a kind of exhaustion that immobilizes her. Her entire body aches, her eyes burn, and it feels as if a major form of arthritis has invaded every bone in her body. It seems as if work and the overcrowding at the hospital never ease up.

  Years of singleness weigh her down so that she can’t move. Single mother, single breadwinner, single homeowner, single disciplinarian, single supervisor, single everything. And now this one single class that feels as if it’s going to tip her right over an edge that’s only a half step away.

  Karen constantly reminds her that this, too, shall pass. But that’s a small finger of hope in what she perceives as her deep sea of endless responsibility. And she’s supposed to find strings of happiness?

  There is a very small part of Grace that wishes she could be honest in her notes about her real life, as she momentarily acknowledges the one event during the past three weeks that truly brought her to the door of emotion, and the one Dr. B. was looking for. It was a simple request from her oldest daughter, Megan: Can I please bring Jenny home for Thanksgiving this year?

  What kind of mother has to think about that? What kind of mother questions who and why her daughter loves? What kind of mother gets so angry when her daughter asks to bring her girlfriend home that she breaks a glass in the kitchen sink? What kind of mother bad-mouths men so much that her older daughter runs in the opposite direction?

  In a real moment—and there have been plenty of those during the past few weeks—Grace is absolutely terrified of her behavior. She believes that is what has kick-started her rolling headaches. She’s a mother, and mothers are supposed to be an example. This mother of two does not want to be like her mother—an overbearing my-way-or-the-highway kind of perfectionist—even as she is afraid of losing her mother’s love for the mistake that sent her to anger class.

  Grace does not bother to finish the last two inches of coffee in her mug. She says, “To hell with it,” gets up, throws the notebook into her briefcase, and then forces herself to lie in bed, where she tosses and turns for three hours, listening for Kelli’s bedroom window to open.

  She’d love to catch that son of a bitch of a boyfriend climbing into Kelli’s room tonight. That would be one way to keep her anger kettle simmering on high and help her flunk the class. How easy it is to forget the sweet moments she’s had in her life the past couple of weeks, like the night she and Kelli did the dishes and they talked without hesitation or worry, the easy way she fell into a friendship with Bonnie, or the realization that she can recapture things she used to do for herself, like needlepoint.

  While Grace begins her bedroom guard duty, Kit is slipping out of her own bedroom and tiptoeing into the kitchen. Peter came home, had one glass of wine, dove into bed exhausted after another double shift, rolled over, and fell into a snoring coma.

  Kit was about to be pissed off because of the snoring when she remembered that she hadn’t written one entry in what she is calling her happy-face log. She at least had a log. It was a lovely leather journal that her daughter, Sarah, had given her years ago for her birthday and that had never moved off the shelf, where she put it the moment her daughter left the room.

  Introspection, she remembers thinking, when Sarah gave her the journal. Who has time for something like that? Of course, that was back when she had a real life. It was before she took a leave of absence from her job as a graphic-arts designer at a downtown advertising and marketing firm. It was before her mother died, and before she was laid off the first day she went back to work. It was before she discovered her boss had hired a recent college graduate to replace her, at probably half the salary, and then blamed the layoff on the economy, which was total bullshit, because things had picked up so much her friends there were working overtime.

  Now all she has is time and worry, and then a little bit more time. Even as Kit knows those are the not the kinds of things Dr. Bayer would love her to put into her log, she sits at the table staring at the empty pages and wishes she could write those things down instead. She stares for quite a long while.

  Then she starts looking around the kitchen as if the stove or cookie jar will walk over and begin writing something for her. When she discovers a wine bottle nestled against the toaster next to the stove, she takes this as a miraculous sign.

  She gets up, fills a lovely clear long-stemmed glass as close to the top as possible, and shuffles back to the table without spilling a precious drop. And then she tries really hard to be a good girl and write something:

  The sound of my husband coming home. The smell of coffee in the morning, especially if I’m the one who didn’t have to make it the night before. An empty clothes basket, which means all the clothes have been cleaned and put away.

  Kit takes a break and then enjoys a large sip of the wine, which she holds in her mouth like liquid gold while she reads through what she has written. Then she swallows, lies to herself, and says, “I’m sure this is exactly what the lovely doctor wants to see.”

  Suddenly there is a loud rattle coming from the vent near the front door. This has happened for the past five years every time the furnace kicks in. It has been five years since her then seventeen-year-old daughter accidentally bashed the vent when she was showing her friend a karate move that went bad.

  This memory does not anger Kit, even as she remembers how she wanted to kick Sarah’s own rear end for bending the damn thing. Sarah had just finished her third karate class and was showing off even though she was a total novice. Back then was she really that angry, or was she happy? Did she yell all the time or just some of the time? Has she turned out like her mother, her aunts, her sad grandmother? And why, why has she always been so hard on, so overprotective of, the daughter she absolutely loves more than life itself?

  Even with the old furnace rumbling in the basement, it’s too quiet for Kit to find comfort. She grew up with noise and boys and constant yelling and some absolutely stunning fights. Her friends, of course, loved to come visit, because the house was loaded with dark-haired Italian boys who learned how to flirt from their father. In the Ferranti family, the hot-blooded Italian thing was a constant reality.

  Kit drains all but one tiny ounce of wine from her glass when she thinks about her father. This, she admits, might be a lovely anger fertilizer. So much for happy-face time.

  “Asshole,” she whispers into her glass as she raises it to her lips and finishes it. “Thanks for turning your sons into jerks.”

  She looks down at the few words she has managed to write and wonders for a moment what it might be like if she were truthful, if she could dig that deep, if she took more than fifteen minutes to actually focus on happiness instead of anger. She shakes her head to chase away all those long-buried not-so-happy memories about her father.

  Kit hasn’t shared everything with Peter about the class. She can barely bring herself to recall his face when he came to pick her up from the police station. He tried quietly, and with nothing but support and love, to talk to her about anger issues, about their daughter, about her father, about the basket of family crap she had never allowed herself to empty.

  “Kit,” he pleaded, “there are things you need to think about. This one incident do
esn’t mean you have figured this out and that it will never happen again.”

  “Shut up, Peter!” she shrieked, as he jumped back. “You don’t know everything. You don’t know what it was like for me growing up like that.”

  Peter, strong, supportive, and ever patient, dropped his hands to his side and his head followed. He stood looking at his feet as Kit continued to yell and her anger rose up as if she were an erupting volcano.

  And then Kit shut him out and he started working more and the phone never rang and her boss lied to her and her daughter said she probably would not make it home for Thanksgiving and maybe not Christmas and no one in her family was speaking to her and she had to attend a dumb-ass anger class with three other women who probably want to run away as much as she does. Where’s the happy in that, Dr. B.?

  Kit stretches out her hands on the table and lays her head down on top of them. She falls asleep like that, dreaming about four angry women pulling a U-Haul loaded with weapons down the interstate toward the western horizon.

  Hours later, it is close to sunrise when a horn from a car on the street beeps her awake, and she jumps and almost falls out of the kitchen chair. Her neck is stiff, and when she twists her head to get the knots out she sees another open wine bottle on the counter.

  This time she looks at the bottle and realizes that it is the same type of wine bottle she used to attack her brother. It’s an Italian red, of course, and simply holding the bottle makes her take a huge step backward. She can see her brother’s face the night she attacked him, feel his hand on her arm, his breath pushing against her skin.

  At almost the exact moment that Kit opens up the back door and flings the bottle into the backyard, which makes her very, very happy, Jane, who is on her way to retrieve the newspaper from the front step, remembers she has not written one thing in the mandatory “everything is beautiful” log.

  “Damn it,” she says, slamming the front door and going back inside. “Homework. I forgot all about it, and it’s due tonight.”

  “What?”

  Derrick is filling up his travel mug with coffee and preparing to dash out the door. He’s dressed in a gorgeous black wool suit and he’s picked an off-green tie that makes his hazel eyes glow.

  “I remembered something I’m supposed to do for the meeting tonight,” she tells him, throwing the paper on the table. “That’s all.”

  Jane looks like a frumpy housewife. Her hair is flat on one side, she hasn’t put on makeup, and her bright pink and fluffy bathrobe makes her look like a wild bird.

  “That doesn’t make you mad, does it?” Derrick says, with a half grin.

  “Very funny,” Jane says, looking at Derrick with a gaze of pure affection.

  “Well, does it make you mad?”

  “That’s what I’m not supposed to write about. It’s a happy-girl journal.”

  Derrick is almost out the door before he dares to say, “The unhappy stuff could fill up a book. We’d never have enough paper anyway.” He ducks playfully, as if Jane might throw a punch.

  Before Jane can throw something at him, Derrick closes the door and jumps into his car. He used to kiss her goodbye. Sometimes, especially when he thought she was ovulating, he’d grab her and drag her back upstairs, ravish her wherever they fell, and he’d be late for work. Even when she was so busy selling real estate she could hardly blink, Jane often found the time to make something for breakfast, even if it was just toast, so they could have a few moments together.

  When did that all end? When did they become roommates instead of lovers? When was the last time she bothered to get dressed the way she used to when she actually had someplace to go in the morning? Will he someday be able to forgive her?

  “Look at me,” she whines, filling her own coffee mug and searching for something to write on that might resemble a happiness journal, whatever in the hell that might be.

  She rummages through the tidy built-in desk drawer at the far side of the kitchen until she unearths an old appointment book with a competitor’s logo on it. “Bastards,” she snarls, walking to the table.

  Writing about happiness is about as appealing as fishing or cleaning her own house or bumping into a former colleague. Jane taps her pen over and over while her shoulder dances until she thinks she might dent the table. She wonders what in the hell the hippie doctor expects. Who keeps a frigging happy log?

  She would like to stick the entire class—log, battered child abuser, the chick in scrubs, and wild Kit—right where the sun does not shine, but she figures it’s just a game. A game she has to win in order to get what’s left of her life back.

  She knows that she could cooperate. She could lie down, roll over, and see what happens. Just yesterday she managed to have a normal and very sweet conversation with the little paper-delivery girl. It was a child, and she was even nice to her! Just like the YWCA assignment. Maybe it’s just that every other thing is going to drive her nuts. Maybe eventually this will all end and everything will fall back into place. Maybe.

  Jane grabs the pen, yanks her cellphone out of her bathrobe pocket, looks at her calendar, and starts the journal on the very day Dr. Bayer sent the email telling her to do it. This is easier than she thought. She makes it up as she goes along and is feeling very clever:

  Sept. 26—Husband says he loves me.

  Sept. 28—Old clients call who might be wanting to find a new house.

  Sept. 29—A stress-free day with no interruptions.

  Jane takes a break for some coffee, and because she has absolutely no idea what to write next. Maybe there will be something in the paper that makes her happy and she can lie about it. Jesus. Keeping track of happiness?

  Jane makes it to page three before she gets seriously upset. Before she can even finish the article about how the power in real estate has shifted so much into the hands of the bankers, she rips the paper into shreds with her hands so that it could only be used to start a small fire or as confetti.

  “Fuck you, Dr. Bayer,” she says only seconds after she carries the tiny pieces of paper to the front porch and shoots them into the sky.

  While Jane has been tearing up the newspaper, Leah Hetzer is on a city bus, passing through the outer edges of the old Greek neighborhood not so far from downtown Chicago on her way to the employment office. She has already gotten her children ready for school, washed all the dishes in the shelter kitchen, had a private talk with her counselor, like she does every morning, and is just now remembering that she hasn’t written one thing for her journal assignment.

  The happiness assignment! Leah is devastated. She so wants to charge through this anger class to prove to Dr. Bayer, her counselor at the shelter, and mostly to herself that she can get through this, that she is not an evil woman, that she will never, ever hurt her children again.

  “Leah!” she says to herself. “What is wrong with you? This was so simple.”

  The bus rattles to a stop, it seems, on every block. While at least a dozen people file in, she tries hard to think what she could jot down about what makes her feel good if she had paper.

  The one thing that pushes into her mind full force, and that she so wishes she could write down, is herself. When she allows herself to think about it, Leah is disappointed in herself. The years she hesitated, put her life on hold, couldn’t seem to be bold and take a risk. That makes her sad, but maybe sadness is a step toward happiness? Leah has been working through some of those issues with her counselor, and she feels as if she’s been slowly opening Pandora’s box.

  What is going to jump out next? Her mother? Her father? The years they abandoned her when she needed them the most? The wrong choices? Her sham of a marriage? The hundreds of desires she has never cashed in? And Dr. B. wants happy?

  An elderly woman waddles toward her, gripping the seats with her hand until she flops into one of them and lets out a breath that speaks for itself. Leah’s response is instinctive, kind, generous.

  “Are you okay?” she asks the woman.

&nbs
p; “Oh dear, yes. Thank you. I’m just fine. My hips are shot. Take care of your hips, sweetheart.”

  Leah smiles and promises that she will. Is this what she will look like when she grows old? Will she have lines wrapping the edges of her entire face? Will her hips hurt? Now that she isn’t going to be beaten to death in an abusive relationship, will she grow to be an old, open, honest woman, too?

  The woman notices Leah staring. “Is everything okay, dear?”

  There is something so lovely about the energy of this elderly woman that Leah is tempted to shift her own hips, drop her head into this woman’s lap, and tell her every single detail of her life story. She imagines this woman has a few stories of her own to tell. She has most likely lived through the Great Depression, the loss of a spouse, her best friends, perhaps even a child. The veins in her hands look like vines descending past her wrists and disappearing into the sleeves of her worn green jacket. Who loves this woman? Why is no one driving her to where she wants to go? Why is she on the bus?

  Leah forgets about herself, which is what she always does. She thinks about this woman and her tired hips and how hard it must have been for her to make the first step and then walk down the aisle. She imagines the woman is en route to the drugstore to pick up some medicine and this simple trip will exhaust her so that she will spend the rest of the day in bed. What can Leah do?

  “I’m fine, yes, I’m fine, but what about you?”

  The woman smiles and then ushers a small laugh through her ill-fitting dentures. “Aren’t you sweet! You have such very kind eyes. Has anyone ever told you that? Your soul is dancing right there next to your pupils.”

  Leah is taken aback. She opens her eyes even wider.

  The woman leans in, touches her gently on the arm, so that Leah can feel how soft and warm her skin is.