Songs Without Words

by Ann Packer

  Brody took a long draw on his drink. In the mirror over the bar he saw the couple nuzzling, the man’s hand so far up the woman’s leg that he couldn’t have had more than an inch to go. They were having an affair, of course. In Brody’s experience this happened when someone wasn’t moving fast enough, when someone couldn’t get the hungry look out of his eye. An affair or a garage band, those seemed to be the options. Or a sports car. Russ had bought a Ferrari just months before his separation was announced.

  “What’s up?”

  He turned and there was Bruce, looking a lot better than Brody felt: showered, maybe even shaved.

  “There he is,” Brody said. “I figured you weren’t asleep. What can I get you?”

  Bruce asked for a Scotch, and they sat and drank for a while, talking about tomorrow, their strategy for jump-starting negotiations again. It was one-forty when Brody got to his room. He brushed his teeth in the spotless bathroom, pulled down the sheets on the pristine bed, and climbed in.

  He’d had a second drink, and he was a little woozy. Heat blew from the vents under the window, and he felt how dry the air was, could almost feel how dry he’d be by morning, his nasal passages, his throat. He got up and went back to the bathroom for a glass of water.

  He blinked in the sudden light, then looked at his reflection. His face was changing: softening, falling. He was getting jowls, and his chest hair was almost white. He imagined Liz climbing into bed, three thousand miles away; Joe up in his bed; Lauren in hers. Thinking about Joe and Lauren when he was away: this always made him ache a little.

  He turned off the light. Getting back into the hotel bed, he thought again of Lauren’s nasty tone at breakfast: They were kidding. He understood that his not saying anything had made it worse than it was. It had been like telling her: I’m afraid of you, I can’t control you, I can’t—I still can’t help you.

  He had failed to help her. Her life had brought her to its own edge, and he had failed to step in and help her. He didn’t want this to be true, but it was.

  When Brody was away, Liz felt returned to a much earlier time, a time when he’d traveled less but worked much more. His years at start-ups—she’d often felt that he was much farther away than Mountain View or San Jose: hundreds of miles, thousands of aeons. Winter afternoons like this one, she made blanket forts with the kids: crawled inside with them and staged tea parties, Playmobil rodeos, Thumbkin sleepovers. Sometimes in those years he didn’t get home till two or three in the morning, and he’d climb into bed next to her and seem for a moment like someone she didn’t know. And then: I’m finished, he said, three or four years ago, and she knew right away what he meant. No more craziness. No more seventy-hour workweeks, no more Valley rules. They opened a bottle of champagne that night to celebrate.

  But had he done it? Truly? She wasn’t sure.

  She let things go a little when he was away. Round Table last night, Chinese tonight—though tonight there was a good reason. She cleaned up quickly, dropped Joe at his science partner’s, and drove with Lauren back to the high school.

  “Women’s History Project,” the notice had said. “An evening of discussion and taking stock.” Lauren’s social studies teacher had organized this end-of-semester event as a kind of conference or colloquium, complete with focus groups, talks, and miniseminars. The participants were supposed to be the class’s students and their parents and grandparents, but as Liz followed Lauren to the auditorium, she saw several other mother-daughter pairs and not a single boy or man.

  Lauren’s middle-school friend Jessica and Jessica’s mother, Linda, were standing in the lobby. “Look,” Liz said, “there are the Youngs. Shall we join them?” She’d always liked Linda, hadn’t seen her in a long time.

  Lauren stood still, not speaking, her arms crossed over her chest.

  “Lauren?” Liz said.

  “You can.”

  “Oh, that’s OK. I just thought you might want to.”

  Liz tried to remember if this was a class Amanda was in. Would there be anyone here Lauren could comfortably approach? Getting in the car after school today, she’d seemed dull, listless. She’d been quiet through the afternoon, quiet through dinner.

  “We can go in,” Lauren said now, but she didn’t move, and after a moment Liz herself led the way to the double doors.

  The stage was set up with a microphone on a stand, and there were circles of folding chairs on the auditorium floor, six to eight per group. A woman Liz took to be the teacher stood on the steps up to the stage, talking to a couple of girls.

  “Wow,” Liz said, “very professional.”

  “Liz!”

  She turned, and there was Pam Silk, another mother from the middle-school days—someone Liz hadn’t always liked. She was one of those people who seemed to regard busyness as a contest you could win. “Three kids,” she was always saying. “You can’t imagine how big a difference that third one makes.”

  Now she approached, saying, “Long time no see! And Lauren—your hair looks so cute.”

  “Thanks,” Lauren said, and then, “I’m just going to go down there,” and before Liz could follow, or ask her to wait, she took off for the front of the auditorium.

  Pam moved closer and lowered her voice. “I’ve been thinking of you constantly. How are you? Are you OK?”

  “I am,” Liz said. “Thank you, yes.”

  “Alexis was really upset,” Pam said, shaking her head. “Really upset.”

  This was not a conversation Liz could have. She craned her head back and forth as if she were trying to make out what was happening at the front of the auditorium. “It looks like things are getting started,” she said. “I guess I’ll—I think I’ll head down there.”

  Pam colored slightly. “Oh, absolutely,” she said. “Isn’t this fun? I told Alexis, there’s no way anything like this would’ve happened when we were in high school.”

  Liz made her way to the front, smiling when she saw an acquaintance but keeping a purposeful look on her face. She stopped at a folding chair and feigned interest in the contents of her purse.

  Terri Mayfield arrived at her side.

  “Terri, thank God.”

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I wasn’t sure Amanda was in this class.” Liz glanced around, but Amanda was far from Lauren, standing with a group of girls Liz didn’t recognize. She turned back to Terri. She’d been an angel during Lauren’s hospitalization, dropping off dinners in disposable dishes, leaving messages of love and concern that insisted Liz not call her back unless she really wanted to. “I’m glad to see you,” Liz said.

  The teacher moved across the stage to the microphone. She welcomed the visitors and explained the format: first small groups, with the students asking questions and making notes; then a few short papers, to be delivered by individual students; and finally several concurrent discussions on a variety of subjects. “We’re here,” she concluded, “to explore the question ‘Where are we now?’” She looked out at the group in the auditorium, perhaps forty girls and women ranging from adolescent to quite elderly. “Though another question might be: ‘Where are they?’”

  Everyone laughed, and Terri leaned toward Liz and muttered, “I know where mine is.”

  “Wouldn’t you think some of the boys would have come, though?” Liz whispered back.

  “If only for the extra credit.”

  Liz chuckled, but she felt a little disappointed; she hadn’t known Lauren was getting extra credit for attending. Mom, she’d said. Do you want to go to this thing with me?

  Lauren was standing outside a circle of chairs, and when the crowd broke Liz joined her and took a seat.

  The girls had typed up questions. “Do you work outside the home?” “Who does the housework at your house?” “Respond to the following with a score of 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘strongly agree’ and 10 being ‘strongly disagree’: I am where I want to be in life. I felt free to make choices when I was 20. 30. 40. My daughter/granddaughter is likely to h
ave a career. My daughter/ granddaughter is likely to have a family.”

  The mothers’ answers were recorded on yellow paper, the grandmothers’ on green. Lauren wrote with her head bent, then doodled on an extra piece of paper when another girl was up. Liz stole a look at the doodles: curlicues, parallel lines, nothing of real substance. She wondered if Lauren was drawing for real these days. She remembered a Saturday evening in October or early November when Sarabeth found a sketch of Lauren’s on the kitchen counter. A sketch of a leaf. Later, Liz had taken it to a folder where she kept drawings of Lauren’s that seemed in danger of disappearing, and when she opened the folder to put it inside, she noticed that the previous one she’d put there had been from months before.

  I’m not your mother.

  Liz felt the approach of a terrible feeling—of guilt, shame, and a miserable sense of righteousness. It was how she felt every time she thought of Sarabeth. The guilt was there, and the shame, but mostly she thought that after all the years she’d supported Sarabeth, she’d earned the right to expect Sarabeth to come through for her. Weren’t there things you just did—because you cared? There’d been times over the holidays when she’d felt terrible about how long it had taken her to call Sarabeth back, but she knew now that she’d been on the right track.

  “Liz?”

  This was Lauren: addressing her, oddly enough, by name. Lauren had her pencil poised, her yellow sheet ready. The others in the group were waiting.

  “I’m sorry,” Liz said. “Could you repeat the question?”

  “‘For you,’” Lauren read, “‘what is the most important issue facing women today?’”

  The most important issue—Liz tried to think. There were so many. Abortion rights? Equal pay for equal work? Universal health coverage? Funding for education? She thought, oddly, of the billboards in the city, rising up from the tops of buildings and seizing your attention as you gained the freeway, exhorting you to think of Verizon, Rolex, Old Navy.

  “Caring,” she said. “In general.” She looked around the circle, and a couple of the other women nodded. “That it’s not at the forefront,” she added.

  The girl next to Lauren posed the same question to her grandmother, and attention shifted to them. Lauren finished writing and returned to her doodle page. She drew a little girl’s daisy, shaded in the petals, then moved her pencil and spun a spiral from the inside out.

  Last night she had been hard at work on chemistry when Liz went in to say goodnight. “Hi, Mom,” she said, and then she returned to her work, and Liz ended up sitting on her bed for quite a while, just sitting and looking around, watching the way Lauren hunched over her desk, the way her heel jiggled under her chair. She looked at Lauren’s tangled hair and after a while realized that she was longing to brush it, and she thought back to when Lauren was in second or third grade, how before school each morning she’d say, “Can we French-braid my hair?” and Liz would say, “Sure we can,” and they’d stand together in front of the bathroom mirror while Liz ran the brush through Lauren’s hair, then used her fingers to separate the strands.

  What, Liz wondered, had happened to the word “we”? Where had it gone?

  She watched as Lauren slid her pencil into the clamp at the top of her clipboard and then brought her purse from the floor to her lap. Hand hovering over the mouth of the purse, she waited a moment and then reached in slowly, with an obvious concern for the disruption she might cause. In a while, Liz saw that she’d taken hold of a roll of mints. One of the grandmothers was talking about the environment, and without removing the mints from her purse Lauren fingered one out and quickly slipped it into her mouth. Then she looked at Liz and raised her eyebrows. There was a little smile on her face, and it took Liz a moment to realize why: it was a family joke that there were a few questions in the world to which the answer was always yes, and Would you like a mint? was one of them.

  She nodded, and Lauren freed another candy from the roll. In preparation to receive it, Liz moved her hand to the outside of her thigh, palm facing up. Lauren waited a moment, then moved her own hand to Liz’s and released the mint.

  “Thanks,” Liz whispered.

  It was a Mento—or would you say a Mentos? A hard candy shell over a chewy center. Liz’s hand sweated a little as she held it. In a moment, another girl would ask a question, and Liz would raise her hand to her mouth. As she waited, though, a memory came to her, a picture of herself with chocolate melting in her palm.

  She was eleven or twelve. Lorelei had planned a day in the city for her and Sarabeth, lunch at a special restaurant and then a matinee. That morning Liz crossed the street in a pair of brand-new cords and a sweater from Saks, and there, inside the Leoffler house, were Sarabeth and Lorelei dressed up in suits, Sarabeth’s a miniature version of Lorelei’s: tweed skirt, tweed jacket, small scarf knotted at the throat. “Well,” Lorelei said, “don’t you look comfortable, Liz,” and Sarabeth blushed and looked away.

  She was lost to Liz—all the drive up and all through lunch—deep inside being Lorelei’s daughter. What did they talk about? Perhaps they didn’t talk. Lorelei refused them dessert, then ordered coffee for herself, sending the waiter back twice to look for cubed sugar. Finally, when she left the table to go to the ladies’ room, Sarabeth turned to Liz and said, “It’ll be better at the movie, I promise.”

  But it wasn’t. At the movie, The Go-Between, Liz sat in the dark next to her best friend, her best friend’s mother two seats down, and something about the day kept her from taking in anything about the story on the screen beyond the fact that it was alternately boring and embarrassing. Lorelei had bought a box of Junior Mints to make up for the denied dessert, but Liz didn’t like Junior Mints, and when they came her way she tipped out a candy or two to be polite, but then couldn’t bring herself to eat them. Inevitably, in the heat of her palm, the chocolate coating began to melt. She got nervous and then more nervous about how her hand would look when the lights came up, until at last, her heart racing, she reached toward the floor and released the candies. Then, as subtly as she could, she kicked them forward, under the seat in front of her, out of sight. Finally, she leaned forward and glanced at Lorelei to make sure her eyes were on the screen, and then she licked her palm until it was certain to be spotless.

  Lauren had returned her purse to the floor and was doodling again. Liz felt terrible. She wasn’t Sarabeth’s mother, and the habit of it, of pretending she was, had cost her family dearly: she’d grown certain of this. She’d have been a better mother to Lauren if she hadn’t spent so much time trying to be a good one to Sarabeth. Period. And yet thinking about that long-ago day, about her own tiny episode of fear, Lorelei sitting near her in the dark like some kind of not-mother, some kind of antimother, she thought it was wrong, it was almost criminal, that Sarabeth had been forced to do without.

  32

  There was her mortgage; there was her property tax bill. There was the fact that she needed new tires on her car. The remains of Sarabeth’s inheritance were supposed to be off-limits for everyday expenses, but as January progressed and her bank account dwindled, she considered making an exception. A thousand dollars—would that be so bad? She didn’t know what else to do. She’d made no lampshades in weeks, and she was losing listeners at the Center; the stalwarts said it was because the book was so long, but she knew better. She was boring.

  A new paper store appeared on Shattuck, and it occurred to her that the way back to work might be via design. She loved coming up with new ideas. At least she remembered loving it.

  Carta, the new place was called. She went on a day that was strangely warm, parking out front and wondering as she approached the door if they could possibly have anything she hadn’t seen at a dozen other stores. She said hello to the proprietor and sure enough: here were the eye-boggling geometrics she disliked, repeated rows of tiny bull’s-eyes, of dice or perfect daisies. And there were the ubiquitous giant fruits, the tone-on-tone stripes. Hanging near the back, though, was an unfamiliar
line, and she went for a closer look: very soft, almost silty sheets in pastel colors, with text printed on them in similarly pale shades. The type was fairly large, about a quarter of an inch high, and on one she saw “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure” and on another “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” and on a third “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Each went on, through the familiar words, to the bottom of the sheet. She sort of liked them.

  Paper stores made their money selling things other than paper: fine or silly address books, cellophane envelopes of confetti, expensive beaded picture frames. She fingered a flat plastic box of magnets bearing tiny photographs of pastries: éclairs and petits fours and meringues. The meringues were just the plain white kind, not nearly as good as the chocolate ones she used to make for Lauren and Joe. How they’d loved them! She remembered the two of them at her kitchen table, their legs dangling from her chairs. How were they? Lauren especially: did she know why Sarabeth hadn’t been around? Sarabeth thought of buying the magnets, imagined sending them to Lauren and Joe in an envelope with no return address. Impossible. She left them where they were and returned to the draped sheets of paper.

  “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” “Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it.” “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” She got Gatsby and The Good Soldier, but who was India?

  “Do you have a key?” she asked the proprietor.

  “A key?”

  Sarabeth indicated the sheets of paper. “The authors. The books. Do you know where each passage comes from?”