by Ann Packer
In a moment Ivan opened it. “Lauren?”
“Go away.”
“Do you want to talk?” He locked the door open, pushing the doorstop into the bracket on the wall. “It’s hard to see a friend so down.”
“He’s not my friend,” Lauren said. She was near tears again, furious. “He’s not my friend!” she yelled.
Ivan gave her a sympathetic look, and she flung herself onto her bed and buried her face in her pillow, waiting for him to go.
But even once he was gone, she was still there. She sat up after a while. Went to lunch. Went to group. In art she doodled with her colored pencils, making rainbows and hearts and four-leaf clovers, as if she were some dopey little kid. Dr. Lewis appeared for her session, and she followed him to their meeting room. He was incredibly geeky. He’d have been laughed out of her school. He wore horrible plaid shirts—orange and green, say, or purple and brown. Purple and brown! Maybe he was color blind. He had really dorky shoes, too, loafers with tassels. He wore a wedding ring, and she figured his wife was a bigger dork than he was, someone who would wear a ski turtleneck as a top, someone who would wear a fake tortoiseshell headband. Probably they were each the only one ever to have liked the other.
“How are you feeling?” he said once they were seated.
“Fine,” she replied, as always; she didn’t know why he wouldn’t get the message.
“How was the weekend?”
“Fine.”
“Your day today?”
At this she just shrugged.
He picked up his clipboard and flipped through the pages. She planted her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand. He always kept her for exactly fifty minutes. This struck her as unfair, because a lot of people got through therapy in much less time.
“So you got a call from Amanda?”
“Who are you, my mother?” She hadn’t quite meant this, and she shook her head. “I mean, what, do you have a record?”
“I remind you of your mother?”
“No! You’re nothing like my mother.”
“What’s she like?”
“She’s fine.” She stared at him, at his ugly plaid shirt. He wore a tie with little squiggles. He didn’t speak, just waited. “She’s nosy, if you really want to know.”
“Maybe there are things you want to keep hidden.”
“There are not!” she exclaimed, but all at once she was thinking of Lucas in the lounge this morning, beckoning, and the tears in his eyes and on his cheeks. Fuck if she wasn’t about to cry again. Then she was crying.
“I think there are some things that are really painful for you,” Dr. Lewis said. “Lots of teenagers feel they need to keep painful things hidden.”
Lauren shook her head, but something had happened, something between her and Dr. Lewis, just now; she had no idea what it was, but she couldn’t say no anymore, she just couldn’t.
“I cry all the time,” she sobbed.
“I think that’s what sad people do.”
“I’m not sad,” she said, but then she looked up and saw him watching her, and she said, “I am, I am, I am.” And she lowered her head and put her hands over her eyes and said, “I am.”
Not quickly, not smoothly or continuously, Lauren began to make progress. Monday evening she wept again, but differently. She was miserable. She hated school, hated herself. Liz’s heart broke as she listened, then broke again as Lauren fell into her arms and wept harder. It was toward exactly this—Lauren admitting her unhappiness—that Dr. Lewis had said they were working; what Liz hadn’t anticipated was how painful it would be.
On Tuesday Lauren showed her and Brody a drawing, and again Dr. Lewis was present. They were in a small room, sitting on chairs around a Formica table. Liz had a squeezed feeling in her chest that she was trying to ignore. She wanted to be calm. Whatever Lauren needed, that was what she wanted to be.
Lauren set the drawing on the table and turned it so they could see. She’d drawn four figures with the general shapes of humans, but they’d been heavily charcoaled, the shading filling in and jagging over the outlines.
“They don’t have faces,” Brody said, and Liz shot him a hard stare. What was he thinking, saying something like that? She looked at Dr. Lewis, tried to read his reaction, but his face was neutral, as always. It was funny: he wasn’t good-looking in any of the usual ways—he was too thin, and he had eyebrows so sparse his eyes had a spooky, naked look—but he was attractive anyway. Maybe because he seemed so wise.
“I wonder,” he said thoughtfully, “if this picture was a way for Lauren to explore some feelings without words.”
Exactly, Liz thought. She wished he would talk more; she hoarded what he said, went over and over it in her mind. She longed to corner him with questions, and it was only the sheer unmanageable number of them that kept her from doing so. Lauren making progress meant Lauren coming home soon, which was both exactly what Liz wanted and also terrifying. What should I do if she says this? What should I say if she does that? The idea that she was a skilled parent had dissolved, exactly when it was what she most needed to be. Skilled? She was hapless, uninformed, inadequate. She had friends who’d gone through this kind of thing postpartum, the feeling that to be a mother was going to take resources they just didn’t have, but she had not felt that. It had been just a matter of taking care. The world of care, it turned out, was vaster than she had ever known. She didn’t think she could do it.
When she and Brody got home he went straight to the family room couch and aimed the remote at the TV. She stood watching him for a moment, then began stacking the bowls and platters that people had left, full of food, on the porch. Her friend Julie had offered to get them back to their owners, and she carried them to the front hall and set them by the door, so she’d remember to put them outside in the morning.
She headed up the stairs to find Joe.
“Enter,” he said in response to her knock, and she was briefly cheered, or charmed; he could do this, surprise her with evidence of some kind of elastic inner life.
He was on his bed with a book, lying on his stomach with his saggy jeans showing a couple inches of boxer waistband. His shoes were on, but she didn’t really care—she didn’t want his life to be a cacophony of correction.
She sat at the foot of the bed. “What are you reading?”
He looked over his shoulder and turned the book so she could see: Catcher in the Rye, of all things. He was just a little way in. She wondered if he’d known before he started what it was about.
“Is that for English?”
“Just reading it.”
Sarabeth had read it at his age, over and over again; for a while there, nearly everyone she knew was a big phony.
Liz had been harsh with Sarabeth on the phone Sunday—she knew she had. She’d barely slept Saturday night, tossing and getting up for water and tossing some more. When Joe told her Sarabeth was on the line, she was lying down, not sleeping but in a lulled state. She’d almost asked him to take a message. Clearly she should have.
“Do you know any big phonies?” she asked him now.
He thought for a moment. “Mrs. Graham.”
“How so?”
“‘OK, persons, let’s get into our small groups for some Civil War brainstorming.’”
“How is that phony?”
He scooted toward the head of the bed, turning and leaning against the headboard. He had Brody’s sapphire eyes and smooth, beautiful skin. This boy of hers, this boy. Were many women as moved by their sons as she was by Joe? It wasn’t the kind of thing she discussed with other mothers.
“Well,” he said, “first of all, ‘persons.’ I mean, we’re people. But she’s also so hyper, like if she doesn’t call it brainstorming we won’t go, we won’t be motivated. It’s like: We’re in school, just tell us what to do.”
“Annoying.”
“Yeah.”
She hesitated. “What’s Holden’s sister’s name again?”
“Phoebe,”
he said, but a guarded look came down over his face, saying Don’t.
She had to. “Yours will probably come home in a day or two.”
“She will?”
Liz nodded.
His face stayed in neutral, but he’d set the book down and now he picked it up again and held it in his lap, forefinger between the pages marking his place.
She said, “How are you doing, sweetie?”
“OK.”
“I know we’ve already talked about this, but—it’s no one’s fault.”
“I know.”
On top of his bookcase were some family photos she’d put in special frames for him when he was younger: one with little wooden train cars along the top, another with a baseball and a soccer ball glued onto opposite corners. In the train frame the four of them were on the beach in Carmel. In the sports frame it was Christmas Day, and Lauren and Joe were posed on brand-new bikes, and Joe was looking at Lauren while Lauren beamed.
What should she say to him now? What would Dr. Lewis say?
She sat where she was, and after a while his body seemed to relax, and he began to read again—or pretended to, anyway. How would it be when Lauren got home? What were they trying to get to? She heard him turn a page. If she could just sit near him while he read, if she could just stay for a few more minutes.
The image of Lauren’s drawing lingered in Brody’s mind. People with no faces—no detail at all, just messy shading. Her drawings were usually so careful and precise. She drew a lot of plants, studied the leaves in the backyard and captured the stems, the veins. Years ago it was pictures of animals.
He remembered a time when she was four or five and so shy that the arrival of company would literally bring her to her knees. She’d put her hands on the floor and crawl over to him, maybe meow a little as she rubbed against his lower leg. “Got a new kitty?” the company would say.
He glanced at the French doors, the black night behind them. The days were growing shorter and shorter. Tonight he would go again, to the tennis courts at the high school; he’d gone every night since the first time, last Wednesday. Late, long after Liz and Joe were asleep. The first few nights he went to bed first, then got up once Liz was sleeping soundly. After that, he just stayed up. “I’m not really tired,” he told her. He sat in front of the TV, or with a book, but in fact he was waiting for her to be gone. Begone, he thought one night as she lingered in the family room doorway, talking on and on about something that didn’t matter. Be gone.
His shoulder was worse than it had ever been. One night, warming up, he’d thought he shouldn’t continue—his shoulder hurt that much. Another night a cop pulled up, got out of his car, and strolled to the fence. Something rose up in Brody—a wish to meet the cop in some dark encounter—but the cop just watched Brody for a moment and then said, “Insomnia?”
He heard Liz on the stairs, and in a moment she came in. She said, “Wow.”
“‘Wow’?”
“I’m so tired.” She stood in the middle of the room, and he saw the last ten days on her lined face, in her disheveled hair. He felt exhausted himself, and determined not to say so.
He muted the TV and looked at her. “She needs to come home.”
“She’s going to.”
“Do we disagree?” he snapped. He knew he sounded pissed off, but he didn’t care: he was sick of her attitude, so patronizing. “I don’t think we disagree, and yet—”
“And yet what?”
“You’re doing it again right now!”
She stared straight at him. She wore a V-neck top, and the skin it exposed looked dry and creased. Her throat, her neck—she loved to be kissed there. She would giggle, twist, writhe. Her body had not changed much; her legs were as fine as when she was thirty. He hated her, though—hated her guts.
After a little while she came over to the couch and held out her hand. He took it. She pulled, and he stood and followed her to their bedroom, watching himself as if from a distance, curious more than anything else about what would happen next. What happened was that she undressed him and undressed herself, and they both got into bed. What happened after that was that he lay there while she stroked his abdomen, his thigh, his penis. And then, in an instant, he was rock hard and on top of her, and he pushed into her with a hope that it would hurt, and he thrust hard when he heard her gasp. He put a hand over her mouth and held it there while he pumped—four times, maybe five—and then exploded into her, his mind going black for the briefest wonderful moment until he came back to himself, and his body lost the feeling of satiety second by quick second, and his fury pulsed back through him.
“Jesus,” she said, but he didn’t wait for more—he got up and pulled on his clothes and left the room.
19
Sarabeth began eating scrambled eggs: once a day, twice, even three times on one occasion, though she only picked at the third plate, vaguely disgusted. It was atavistic; it went back to the time right after her mother’s death. She had entered the Cowper Street kitchen one evening to find that the gifts of food that had seemed so endless had in fact ended. The refrigerator contained condiments and sour milk. The bread box held one last greenish banana muffin. Even the staples were nearly gone: all that remained in the soup cabinet was a single tin of lobster bisque that had been there for something like a decade.
Up until then she and her father had been scavenging among the donated food and the dwindling staples, sometimes together but more often alone; she had even found him early one morning eating cold beef stew straight from a Tupperware. She saw on this evening that it had to stop. They had to deal. Real cooking was for the moment beyond either of them, and so she bought and scrambled eggs: with milk or without, plain or with chopped tomatoes, with grated cheddar or a pad of cream cheese. She learned that her father liked his eggs very dry, and she discovered that if she got hers out of the pan early and put them on a prewarmed plate that she set over simmering water, they could both eat them as they liked.
That endless but fast-disappearing year when she was in eleventh grade, and her mother was dead, and he had not yet decided to move away: what a strange, impossible year it had been. Mostly they avoided each other, she upstairs and he down, she at school and he at work, but from time to time they went to a movie together, often an old Hitchcock movie being screened by one of the film societies at Stanford, and in the dark, staring up at the beautiful and troubled face of Joan Fontaine or Ingrid Bergman, they were joined in something vast and unspoken.
The transfer to Baltimore happened quickly, went from unlikely possibility to done deal in mere weeks. The therapist Sarabeth saw when she was in her twenties had remarked that it had been a kind of preemptive strike on her father’s part, to leave Sarabeth before she could leave him, and though Sarabeth argued that he’d wanted her to go with him, she supposed that in some way the therapist was right. It hadn’t felt like a strike, though. It had felt like mercy.
They packed the house in August, during a heat wave. Her mother’s clothing was already gone, and they emptied the kitchen cabinets into boxes, sorted through books, labeled furniture BALTIMORE or STORAGE or GOODWILL. It was into a carton marked STORAGE that the silver candlesticks had gone, along with a fancy Limoges vase that Sarabeth’s mother had bought for herself at Gump’s, in the city. The vase seemed to stir something in her father. He picked it up and rotated it, looking at it this way and that. He said, “This made her happy for almost a week,” and Sarabeth stood there hoping he wouldn’t say more, nearly holding her breath until he put the vase down again and began wrapping it in newspaper. That evening, she slid her bare feet into flip-flops and carried her belongings across the street to the Castleberrys’ house.
Thursday morning she watched for Jim’s car, thinking she had neither the energy to tour with him nor the courage to cancel. When he arrived, she kept her eyes focused straight ahead, away from the Heidts’ house, as she headed down the driveway to the car. Needlessly, since the Volvo wasn’t even there.
“How
are you?” he said as she got in.
“Fine.”
When he’d called last night, she’d been in bed already, at seven-fifteen. Were you asleep? he’d said. Now he watched as she arranged herself in the seat, put her purse on the floor, buckled up.
“No offense,” he said, “but I don’t believe you.”
She wondered if she could tell him: about Lauren, about Liz; about how horrible she felt, how desperate to call Liz again, and how afraid. She looked at him, Jim in one of his trademark colorful sweaters, all swoops and jags of green and tan and brown, and while she had always been able to tell him anything, she was too ashamed.
She said, “It’s just Billy misery.”
“Honey, since when? I’m so sorry, what happened?”
“Nothing. I was in Rockridge at this one stop sign, and I just—”
“You had a relapse?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, honey.” He reached for her hand and held it. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because it’s so boring. It’s pathetic.”
“It’s not, it’s the human condition.”
She was able to smile at this, and he gave her hand a little shake and let go to put the car in gear. He said, “Let’s go on tour, shall we? We’ll have ourselves a morning, all right?”
The sky was pale with cold, and pedestrians hurried along the leaf-strewn sidewalks in layers of sweaters and knit hats, the Berkeley version of winter wear. Jim told her about a harpsichord concert he and Donald had attended, about a friend of theirs who was giving up on the Bay Area and moving to Oregon. At a huge house in the hills, the group of realtors that often included Peter Something didn’t include Peter Something, and Jim said, “He broke his leg.”
Sarabeth tried to seem interested, but she couldn’t even remember Peter Something’s face. She had first noticed him during Billy: decided he was cute and moved on. Post-Billy, cute became more interesting. She found out that he was single. But she’d never even spoken to him.