And now, the fire and the wine and the tentative voice of Julia and the storm moving away.
“Maybe the first thing to say is that I have a daughter, Lizzie.”
“Where is she?” Susan asked, thinking of her two sweet ones both far away in California.
“Well, that’s the big horror. I don’t know right now, I think in San Francisco. She’s addicted to, well—cocaine and prescription drugs for sure, and probably heroin again—the worst. Let me back up. My husband is Wade, Wade Tyler. He’s in Savannah. Oh, I never changed my name. I kept my name, Hadley. That became an issue later but Wade didn’t mind at first. Later, he said part of me never married. I’m still thinking about that.”
Both Susan and Camille frown, then smile encouragingly, not knowing what to expect next.
“Back to Lizzie. We had this hideous incident last fall. ‘Opioid OD,’ the hospital chart said. That’s opiates, like what the dentist gives when your wisdom teeth are pulled. You feel nice and woozy.”
“Oh, yes,” Camille remarks. “I liked the Percocet after my knee surgery.”
“When you’re addicted, it’s another story. Her meds were oxycodone and Xanax. She swallowed a full bottle. Her roommates, as addled as they usually are, got her to the emergency room. She survived.
“To go back to the beginning—Lizzie started on drugs when she was in high school. They say marijuana isn’t a gateway drug, but for her it was. She told me once that she took to it right away. One boozy party with pot and she says that’s for me.
“I hate talking of her this way—you’ll only know her as this pathetic junkie. When she was small she was bright and curious. A little buttercup who loved clay and books and horses lined up on the windowsill. We had the best life. I’ll never forget that anyway; I have fifteen pure gold years in a jewel box in my head. Wade is one of the chosen—if I believed in God, I’d say he was blessed. Every part of him is beautiful, down to his toes. I was the luckiest girl in Savannah, believe me. This sexy husband, this smart little girl who liked princess costumes and puzzles of the world. Now I don’t even know if I still love her. I think I don’t. I love the she before she became who she became, this inflated monster of my lovely daughter.
“But I can still glimpse Lizzie who’s always there—when we were out walking today I thought of her at St. Simons, where we used to go in summer. She loved body surfing. Finding sand dollars. A little love. We always had such great times with her.”
Camille shifts under her throw and Archie jumps down. She leans toward Julia. Susan puts her hand on Julia’s foot. “Oh, honey.”
“Flash forward, after the happy jewel box years to Lizzie’s blossoming addiction. You can imagine how we thrashed over what caused her to slide into drugs. There’s little to pin it on. Oh, Wade opened the door to her room when we came in early one night and found her half naked with her boyfriend. She was fifteen. Wade had a flying hissy fit and threatened the poor scrawny boy jumping into his Jockeys. I was on the stairs, disbelieving that this adolescent was speeding by me holding his pants and crying, and Wade yelling, ‘Dirty ass.’ ”
Susan and Camille can’t help but laugh, and then Julia does, too.
“Wade shook Lizzie by the shoulders and shouted ‘tawdry’ and ‘shameful.’ He spotted the bong and called her a little idiot. Lizzie didn’t speak to him for a week. That sort of thing. Not much. Not often. And we weren’t that worried. Most people try pot, grow up, and move on. I know we were good parents. She was adored. I forgot to say, my father is my rock. He doted on Lizzie, as did Mom, who died when Lizzie was eight. He’s always been generous to Lizzie. Of course now, we’ve made him stop giving her birthday and Christmas money. We stopped long ago. Wade got sick of his hard-earned going for her self-destruction. But then we felt guilty, thinking of her rent, her car insurance. She’d call, desperate. We gave in many times. I tell you, it’s a lose-lose situation.
“By eleventh grade, she started staying out too late, acting surly. We thought it was a stage. Senior year, a respite—she sailed through the SATs, did well in school, and we thought she was fine. Then her freshman year at Emory—she said she wanted to be a doctor—when she came home for Christmas holidays, I thought she looked odd. Her fresh, peachy skin had turned sallow. Even the whites of her eyes looked dull as an eggshell, no shine at all. I suggested girls’ lunch, then hair appointments, some shopping for gifts. She didn’t want to go but begrudgingly agreed. I remember, we were getting our nails done together and I looked over at her—stringy, unkempt hair, circles under her eyes, a listless look, not even trying to make conversation with the nice Vietnamese woman, and I thought, if she weren’t my daughter, I’d think she was a drug addict.
“Instinct? It just hit me. I talked to Wade and he agreed that she seemed out of it and alienated. She didn’t want to string popcorn for the tree, or help decorate. I was worried that she was run-down or getting a cold because she was sniffling. Later, I learned that was a prescription drug sniffle. She didn’t eat the holiday dinners she used to love. She didn’t even buy gifts for anyone.
“Christmas Eve, we were getting ready to go to my dad’s for dinner. She’d left her coat and her handbag downstairs. While she was in the shower, I opened it. Pills, envelope of pot, and a bottle of white powder. I told Wade and he went ballistic and banged on the bathroom door. ‘What the hell is going on…’ and so forth. Short version, we didn’t see her even at spring break, until the summer when she arrived home, having flunked out.
“Therapy. Community college. Therapy. But she kept disappearing. A spiral. Wade was devastated; we both were, and he was really good, trying everything to help,”—she paused—“with only an occasional outburst of anger, which resulted in her going off with some of her seedy-looking friends for days. Wade has what I later learned to call an ‘anger management problem.’ I was just as mad at her as he was, but I took the helpful, tell-me-what-can-I-do-to-help, we’re-so-concerned, walk-all-over-me-once-again approach, which didn’t work any better.”
“This is the worst, Julia.” Camille feels again her own helpless rage when Charlie got his seventeen-year-old girlfriend pregnant their junior year. Charles had remained calmer than she, meeting the girl’s parents, discussing abortion, adoption, all the impossible options. Then the girl miscarried and Charlie didn’t date for the rest of high school. What a nothing incident in comparison.
Julia gets up to stir the beef, then plops back down on the sofa. “Well, it gets worse but I am not going to play this violin much longer. Lizzie quit community college and lost all her Emory friends and even her high school friends, who’d straightened up by then and joined sororities and majored in psychology and pre-law. Next, she went to a small experimental college in Arizona. That didn’t work out. She hated the ‘fucking desert.’ Next we heard she’d walked away from there and landed in New Orleans. She called saying she wanted to try Tulane and please send tuition money, she was fine now and realized what a mess she had been and she was coming home soon and could we go sailing? We sent the money. Well, guess what?
“Fast forward. We’ve got her in rehab three times, once without her consent, and that went nowhere. The other two times, she agreed but left the New Orleans place after two weeks of detox. Then it was California. Everything loose rolls West, my daddy says. She stuck with the super clinic outside San Francisco for only a month. She walked out all clean, we thought, insisting she was fine. Insisting on not staying another day in that hellhole. And no, she was not coming home. Within two weeks police stopped her as she drove away from a lowlife bar with some doofus. They were speeding in more ways than one. The police frisked them. He was arrested for possession of whatever he had; she was held overnight and let go. One more valentine ripped in half.
“By this time, we had no denial and little hope left in us. We rushed here and there to help when she hit various walls. Hit them she did. We were plowing the ocean.
“In San Francisco she waited tables and worked in a terminal care center and lived with a bunch of other dropouts in a storefront in the Tenderloin, the druggie haven. Now and then one of her friends would call us and say she was really worried about Lizzie, that she was going home with all kinds of men she met in bars, and AIDS was rampant. That she was having blackouts and didn’t remember the night before.
“Lizzie didn’t keep in touch. After all we meant to each other, she was living an alternate reality, totally swallowed by her stupid addiction. We’d had a big life, the three of us. A real life!” Julia bites her nail and stares into the fire.
“We tried tough love, tried being supportive, being nonjudgmental—you have no idea how hard that is. Yes, yes, it’s the drugs talking. But she’s listening! What part of her won’t wake up? She’s devious. Manipulates us. Lies. We all three landed in her vicious, vicious cycle.
“I feel like she’s the center of a roundabout and I have to circle it no matter what direction I need to take. She likes drugs. She doesn’t want to quit. Sometimes she does. She cries for hours. She blames everyone but herself. She has this ironic humor—everything for her happens with quotation marks around it. She maintains that she functions well and of course she doesn’t. She’s a smashup on the freeway.
“She’s thirty-five now, so it’s been an awfully long haul with all this. When she overdosed in San Francisco, we hardly could admit it to ourselves, but she meant to. She left a note. It said, I’ve never spoken this, not even to my father, the note said, What’s the point? There is no point. We were broken in half and terrified. But something else broke, too. I just froze toward her. What’s the point? My anger was gigantic and Wade was about to pop. We tried to act calm. Surely this would be the turnaround of all this madness. We brought her home. She was trembling on the plane and looked like a zombie. She spilled her water. She pressed her forehead to the window. Banged it a couple of times. I tried to anchor her with happy memories. ‘Remember that time we flew to New York? It was your first flight and…’ She stopped me right there. ‘Do we have to go down memory lane?’
“We hoped she had hit the proverbial bottom they say you have to hit. We found the best help, once again, but she made fun of the doctor, who tried to get her to make a list of things that could inspire her to change. Something in me started to hold back; my illusions were stripped. The weirdest part: I became bored with it.
“She drank coffee by the gallon and sat by the back kitchen window rocking back and forth and looking out at the garden. She read self-help books Daddy brought over, then tossed them in the trash. One afternoon she went out for a walk and came home high and mean, totally unlike the vulnerable rag doll we brought home from the hospital. She’d sold the jewelry my mother left her. We found out later she’d ordered Xanax and Klonopin on the Internet. She used Wade’s computer! She even took the kitchen money out of the sugar canister. Being at home was driving her crazy, she let us know. She was taking the first thing smoking on the runway back to San Francisco. That’s the last we’ve seen or heard of her. I found a letter in her wastebasket. It was addressed to Honor Blackwell in San Francisco. I Googled the address—a purple slum house in a not-horrible neighborhood. The letter said, I’m heading back. Turn down a bed for me, then trailed off and she’d thrown it away. When I look at the sky and see contrails dissolving, I think, that’s Lizzie.”
“No wonder you love Hugh’s quiet, empty house,” Camille says. “You’re brave, really brave, to break away from what’s tearing you apart.”
“I guess. But the Wade part—I wasn’t brave. When she left the last time, Wade and I were destroyed and wildly relieved and guilty about that. You might say we had our own toxic cocktail going. You’d think we’d cling together, but the opposite happened. We began to give up, maybe on each other as well? Every time I looked at his handsome mug, he reminded me of our failure, and his rants to me against Lizzie became unbearable. All the where-did-we-go-wrong discussions! I couldn’t mouth the words anymore. I started working longer hours, loving my job even more than before.
“Lizzie is the victim of drugs, but you know what? We are her victims. She’s about killed our spirits. Sometimes I think she’s like someone running randomly, slinging around a sledgehammer. Let it fell whom it will. Did I use whom right then?”
Camille says yes.
“Please, pour me a big glass of that wine, Susan!”
* * *
—
The oven dings. They look at each other as if they’ve been jarred awake. “Your famous beef!” Camille says.
Julia shrugs out from under the mohair throw. “Let’s have a long dinner. There’s more to say but not at the table.” She looks flushed and alert.
Okay, Camille thinks, we know the worst.
This will be good to get over with, Susan thinks.
Susan lights the candles as Camille slices bread. They serve themselves bowls of the rich stew as they talk about dogs, the farmers’ market, politics, and cars. The bread is excellent for dipping into the warm broth.
* * *
—
Susan leashes Archie and takes him out while Julia and Camille clear up the dinner dishes. The stars are bright again, the moon gone.
“Before we go to bed, I want to get the shrimp into the marinade,” Julia says. She’s brought the prepped ingredients in a jar. “Delicious shrimp salad, grilled crab, and asparagus—that takes care of tomorrow night quite nicely.”
“Julia, you’re a girl after my heart, thinking during one meal of what’s for the next. There’s plenty of my lemon cake for dessert.”
“We have fresh orange juice. I might make a sorbet.”
Archie visits his favorite bushes, while Susan texts her daughters. At Sand Castle. Thinking of selling. What do you advise?
* * *
—
Archie dashes to his bed by the fireplace and the three women decide to call it a day, too. Susan stays in the great room, searching the Internet for comps for her house. She’s on another mission as well. Camille selects a Joanna Trollope novel off the shelves and heads to her bedroom. She opens the window to hear the receding tide scooching through shells. Julia just wants to sleep. A memory surfaces, her wedding. A police siren outside the church blaring throughout the entire ceremony. A portent? She has not cried since she left Savannah. Now she cries.
Thursday—Colin’s “on” week in London. After years of fierce commuting on Monday and Friday from Florence to London and home, he has enough Italian work to stay at home every other week and all weekends. Still, who likes to commute? I’m a stay-at-home. My life = my work, my work = my life. That’s why I fit well here. The Italian way—work to live, not live to work.
With so much solitude, I’m bound to accomplish a lot, yes? Well, this is one of the most sociable places on planet earth. I have to fight for time. There’s always something delectable cooking at my neighbors’ and friends’ houses. Always someone stopping in to drop off chestnuts and ricotta still warm and a bottle of homemade vin santo. When Colin’s away, I linger longer in town, read more, go to movies, invite girlfriends over for lunch, sometimes join the monthly book group for lunch at Trattoria Danzetti if I’ve had time to read the Italian novel.
The only way I can walk as much as I do every day is by listening to books. I put up with the earbuds (that remind me of the plugs I had to wear in the heavily chlorinated pools of my childhood) because the kilometers race by when I’m involved with Hilary Mantel, Edith Pearlman, Virginia Woolf, or those scratchy voices of the modernist poets reading their work at the dawn of recording.
The trouble is—I often meet people on the roads and must stop, press pause, chat, pet their dog. Today I met Grazia just as I closed my gate. She stopped her car, got out for the ritual kisses, and asked me to go to her house for advice on renting it. Grazia teaches violin at her aunt’s house in town. She wears long crêpe skirts, scuffed bo
ots, indeterminate tops, and she juts out an ample bosom. For the violin to rest on? Her black-bean eyes dart and sparkle. When she smiles, she flashes perfect teeth, refrigerator white. She smiles now.
“They will surely be Americans. I’ve put the website into English because the Americans will pay the most. What will they expect? You will know. Please come and tell me.”
As we step into the foyer, the first thing I say is, “Air the place out for days!”
“I know all that. I hardly come here since…Two Romanian women will clean head-to-tail. What do I do to make the American like the house? So someone will want to buy it and I won’t have to worry.”
We walk from room to room. “You’d have to be tone deaf and oblivious not to love this place, Grazia. Don’t worry. Your parents had lovely things. You might put away some of the china?”
“They’re not pleasing to me, the dishes. I prefer my own plain white.” She pulls out drawers full of table linens with monograms, oversized silver cutlery, thin platters decorated with fish, some with flowers. “All old.” She looks bored. Since she grew up here, she doesn’t even glance at the dining room fresco that delights me every time I get to see it. She didn’t even photograph it on the website advertising the house for rent. Italians do take art for granted. (Another reason to love it here.)
Between the two windows some fanciful artist created a trompe l’oeil garden scene that must have replicated what you actually saw from the adjoining windows. He (maybe she) painted a balcony with a stone balustrade overlooking boxwood rows, tall topiary balls, and an arching rose arbor covered in white and pink blooms. (Rampicante is a word I love. The Italian word has more force than rambling. All those emphasized syllables impart vigor to climbing roses or wisteria or honeysuckle.) A path down the middle of the fresco leads the eye into the view of hills, layers of hills, blue going darker, the cones of the two extinct volcanos you see from the windows. A smart and fun painting. The view from the real windows is blear now, but the witty replica may inspire someone who finally buys this place to re-create the original garden. Most interesting is this: off to the right side two figures are seated, looking out at the view beyond a balustrade. You see the people only from behind and they are in shadow, only a suggestion of a woman wearing a rose-printed shawl, a man with his head tilted, contemplative. They must be the original owners (the S monogram) looking out at their splendid garden. On the other side, a black and white bird perches in the leaves of a potted orange tree. “Do you know who painted the fresco?” I ask.
Women in Sunlight Page 7