Songs Without Words

by Ann Packer

  “Does it matter?” the woman said, and though this was obviously just a nasty woman in a nasty mood, Sarabeth was embarrassed and hurried from the store.

  She got in her car and started the engine. Clearly, she had to force herself to do the work she already had. Maybe the problem wasn’t that she had no energy; maybe it was that her old designs bored her. Surely she could deal with that. When audiences asked Joni Mitchell to sing old songs, she said, “People didn’t ask van Gogh to paint ‘Starry Night’ again.” As if she were van Gogh! Sarabeth took comfort in the fact that she knew she wasn’t van Gogh. Or Joni Mitchell, for that matter.

  “Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it.” The line stayed with her as she drove home, and she realized she was thinking of The Raj Quartet, which she had read over and over again in her twenties. It was set in India, during the Second World War; two of the main characters were a pair of sisters named Sarah and Susan, and where Sarah was thoughtful and full of reason, Susan was flighty, possibly hysterical. She ended up marrying a terrible guy, what was his name, the military guy who lost his arm….

  Sarabeth’s boxed set of The Raj Quartet was on a bookshelf in her bedroom, and when she got home she took out the second volume and flipped through the pages. The military guy, the military guy…he had an inferiority complex because he hadn’t gone to public school back in England. At last she found him, Ronald Merrick. Oh, he was horrible. But pitiful, too.

  She went outside and sat on her filthy porch, then went in, found a broom, and swept it off. What it really needed was mopping, or better yet painting, but she sat down again and closed her eyes against the bright sun. Sarah and Susan. Elizabeth and Jane. Dolly and Kitty. Meg and Jo. She’d always been fascinated by sisters in books, especially paired sisters, with their insistent dichotomies: blond and brunette, innocent and experienced, sweet and sour, beautiful and plain.

  Creative and smart.

  She squeezed her eyes tight and then opened them. The two little girls of the Heidt household had appeared on their patio with Popsicles, and she stood up and brushed herself off and went inside. In the kitchen she filled a glass with water and sat at the table. Anna was in her shoulder bag, and she opened it, thinking that if she were better prepared people might be likelier to come back. She read the chapters she’d read aloud Thursday night, then she skimmed here and there until her eye fell on a passage about Seryozha, Anna’s son. He’d been told, after Anna went away with Vronsky, that she was dead.

  Among his favorite occupations was looking for his mother during his walk. He did not believe in death generally and especially not in her death, though Lydia Ivanovna had told him and his father had confirmed it, and therefore, even after he was told that she was dead, he looked for her during his walks. Any full-bodied, graceful woman with dark hair was his mother.

  Sarabeth thought of the picture she’d had in her mind, months ago, of a woman walking with a girl, the pair of them like something from a movie; and then she thought of Anna’s suicide.

  Anna was going to throw herself under a train. Sarabeth knew this at her core, and yet, here and now, she was surprised by it. This had happened with Madame Bovary, too; she remembered arriving at Emma’s death and realizing that she’d somehow managed not to know it was coming. Suicide, these books were about. Not adultery.

  She turned to the end of the book, looking for the scene; she had read Anna only once before, in college. She had to search and search, finally locating it not at the true end but fifty pages shy. Then she read, barely breathing, and at the end she knew two things: that Anna had given Seryozha scarcely a thought as she moved toward her death, and that, as she let herself tumble toward the train’s giant wheels, she was horrified by what she’d done.

  33

  The day arrived for Liz and Brody to meet with Dr. Lewis. The appointment was for eleven-thirty, and after Liz dropped the kids at school she went home and wiped the kitchen table, then sat down with a notepad and pen so she could write out her questions. Outside, the wind was huge, blowing in a new storm that was predicted to last for days. She could hear the rattling of tree branches and, less frequently, the whimper of the wind itself.

  She wrote: “1. Should I talk to M. and D. about how they are with her? 2. Should I encourage her to be more social?” She stopped and read what she’d written, then crossed out each “I” and wrote “we.” Then she went back and crossed out the first “we” and changed it back to “I.” She considered. She put a “3” below the “2,” then set down her pen and rubbed her eyes. She knew there were other things she wanted to ask him, but what were they? “Prozac dose OK?” she wrote after the “3,” then she crossed out the entire line, made a new “3,” and wrote: “Is her Prozac dose where it should be?” Then she said, out loud, “This is ridiculous,” and she crumpled up the paper and tossed it aside.

  She had dreamed about Joe last night—she’d just realized. She had dreamed about him as a little boy playing with building blocks, which he had habitually done in the very corner of the family room at which she was now looking. Joe at three years old, or four. She could see him clearly, his munchkin smile and stubby little hands. She could see the blocks, too: red, yellow, blue, and green. Joe’s blocks. And yet—was this true?—they’d been Lauren’s. Yes, they’d been Lauren’s to start with, a gift Lauren had received at the time of Joe’s birth.

  Sad but with toys. Who had said that? A woman Liz had known when the children were very young, Rachel something. Her husband was a lawyer, like Brody never home. She and Liz had been pregnant at the same time, she with her third and Liz with Joe, and when the babies were born and twenty-two-month-old Lauren started getting gifts from everyone who sent things for Joe, this Rachel told Liz that she’d asked people not to send things to her older two this time because the oldest, when the second had been born, had gotten dozens of presents, and they were really just an unsuccessful distraction, making this sad little girl sad but with toys.

  God, it was the most ordinary things that caused the greatest misery.

  Liz left the kitchen and went into her bedroom. Her desk was littered with papers that needed her attention, but she reached past it for her yoga mat. She unrolled it at the foot of the bed, kicked off her shoes, and lowered herself onto her back. She lay with her feet apart, arms at her sides. She had not lain like this in—how long had it been?—two months. She could feel her abdomen pulling at her lower back. She was so soft now—soft where she had once been firm. Did Diane wonder what had happened to her? She brought her legs into her chest, but the waistband of her jeans dug into her belly. Slowly, like the old woman she’d become, she rolled onto her side, got to her knees, and stood. She turned to the bed, hesitated a moment, then pulled back the covers and got in.

  She lay on her side, facing her nightstand. She had not turned off the Krups, and from the kitchen came the smell of burned coffee. Her clock said 9:27, and if she left for Burlingame now she could shop first. But did she feel like shopping? It was January—“poor month,” as she and Brody used to call it—and last week she’d taken Lauren to Burlingame Avenue after therapy and said yes to three pairs of pants and two tops.

  4. Should I buy her new clothes? 5. Should I spend hundreds of dollars buying her new clothes that won’t do anything but make her feel better for a day or two?

  She reached for the book she’d been reading, a collection of essays about terrorism. Hand on the cover, she changed her mind and rolled to her other side. One of the pieces was about a Palestinian woman whose son had been a suicide bomber. It had broken her heart.

  Brody’s pillow was still in the place where he’d left it, askew, a dent down the middle. He was having trouble sleeping these days; she could feel it. She’d wake in the middle of the night and from the sound of his breathing know he’d been awake for a long time.

  She sat up and plumped his pillow, then stood and made the bed carefully, smoothing out the wrinkles. Right after New Year’s she’d ordered some luxur
ious new sheets from a catalog having a white sale: pale yellow Egyptian cotton, 420 thread count. She was sad but with bed linens.

  In Burlingame Brody parked just behind Liz’s van. He longed for a cup of coffee, but there wasn’t time. In the building the stairs creaked as he climbed them, not a California sound.

  He took a couple of turns down a hallway and found Liz in a tiny waiting room, a magazine open on her lap. She looked up when she heard him. “Made it,” he said. He leaned down to kiss her, then took a seat in a canvas director’s chair. He reached for a magazine but changed his mind. He could tell Liz was nervous; she kept clearing her throat, as if she were about to answer the phone.

  “Here he comes,” she said, and it was as if she’d conjured him: Dr. Lewis opened the door right then.

  “Liz, Brody, hi, it’s good to see you.” He looked younger here than he had at the hospital, less experienced, a bit tentative. Then again, he wasn’t wearing a tie. Or his white coat.

  He shook hands with Brody, then shook hands with Liz and held out his arm. “Please come in.”

  In his office they all sat down. Lauren spent hours here, and Brody wondered: Which chair did she use? Did she stare at the clock, waiting for the minutes to go by? “Dad,” she’d said at breakfast this morning, aware of this meeting. “I want to stop going.”

  “So,” Dr. Lewis said. “I’ve talked on the phone with Liz, but it’s been a while since we all met. How are you both doing?”

  “Fine,” Brody said, and at the same time Liz said, “Maybe a bit better,” and Dr. Lewis clasped his hands together and leaned forward.

  “How is that for you? That you’re in different places?”

  Brody felt a wave of irritation: he and Liz were not the patients. “How’s she doing?” he said. “In your view.”

  Liz turned to him. “He asked a question.” Then she looked back at Dr. Lewis and said, “It’s hard. For me, anyway.”

  “Most couples struggle with this,” the doctor said. “I don’t know if that’s helpful, but it’s very common to feel angry when there are differences in how you’re handling things.”

  “I said ‘fine’ as a pleasantry,” Brody said.

  There was a long silence, and then at last Dr. Lewis shifted, changing the cross of his legs and interlacing his fingers. “Well then, how are things at home?” he asked, and Liz began to talk: about Lauren’s lack of energy, about her quietness, about how in many ways life felt just the same as before she—Liz hesitated—as before what happened. No, she said in response to a question, Lauren wasn’t seeing friends out of school, though she talked on the phone with Amanda from time to time. Should she push Lauren to get out more?

  Dr. Lewis hesitated before he spoke. “It would be nice to see her interacting with her peers, but that may not happen for a while.”

  Another silence.

  “I wanted to ask you,” Liz said. “My parents are kind of awkward with her, and I was wondering if I should talk to them about it.”

  “Awkward?”

  The corners of Liz’s mouth went inward. “My mother can’t really look at her. I mean she does, but it’s unnatural. She keeps her distance.”

  “It sounds like she’s anxious.”

  “We went to the beach,” Brody said, speaking before he’d really decided to. “She was pretty cheerful that day, don’t you think?”

  “That was six weeks ago,” Liz said.

  Dr. Lewis looked confused. “Wait—this is your mother-in-law?”

  “No, no, Lauren,” Brody said. “It was just the four of us.”

  “Before Christmas,” Liz added.

  Dr. Lewis took this in, and then he sat there silently, just sat there—Brody hoped he didn’t do this to Lauren. At last he looked at Liz and said, “Regarding your parents, I suspect more contact would be the best medicine.”

  “Right.”

  “Local grandparents can create certain…issues in situations like this. But of course they can also offer a lot of support.” He gave her an encouraging smile and then turned to Brody and said, “It must have felt nice to have a family outing.”

  “Should we do more of that?” Liz asked brightly.

  “I think you’d enjoy it,” Dr. Lewis said, and Brody longed to get up and leave.

  Liz began talking again, something about the counselor at school and a comment she’d had, and Brody wanted to cut in and ask Dr. Lewis to talk to them. The minute hand crept on: toward and then past the halfway mark. Finally, after a silence, Liz clasped her hands together and said, “So do you think it’s helping?”

  “The treatment?” Dr. Lewis said. “It can be hard to assess this early, but I think she feels safe here. I’m hopeful.”

  “This early?” Brody said.

  “This early in the treatment.”

  Brody glanced at Liz. “This is early? She was hoping she could stop soon. How much longer were you thinking it would take?”

  “I think that depends on the goal.”

  “We’d kind of like her not to slash herself open again!” Brody snapped, and Liz gaped at him. “What?” he said. “You disagree?”

  She shook her head quickly.

  “That’s the goal,” he said to Dr. Lewis. “Any questions?”

  Dr. Lewis waited—Brody had the infuriating sense that he was being given time to cool off. At last, lacing his fingers together again and speaking as if he’d weighed every word in advance, the doctor said, “Of course that’s of primary concern—I know you have a great deal of anxiety about that, and whenever there’s self-injury the treatment has to focus on the risk of repetition. But we also want to work on the underlying problem, which in Lauren’s case is a pervasive feeling of worthlessness. She’s quite depressed.”

  “Still?” Liz said, and she began to weep.

  Brody looked at his hands. The weeks since that horrible day in November shrank away, and he recalled arriving at the hospital to find Liz marked with Lauren’s blood and crying hysterically. He faced the doctor. “What can we do?”

  “You’re doing a lot,” Dr. Lewis said. “Both of you.” He glanced at the clock, and Brody saw they were down to their last few minutes. “The Prozac seems to have brought her to a place where she can function better. As she gains trust in me, I think she’ll feel more and more that she can tell me about some of the painful thoughts and feelings she’s having. We’ll look at them together and talk about them.”

  “And then she’ll feel worse,” Brody said.

  “No, she won’t!” Liz exclaimed. She looked at him with something like hatred. “She won’t.”

  “It can be very painful,” Dr. Lewis said. “No question. But there’s a good chance we can bring about some positive change. And the alternative can be very costly, as you’ve seen.”

  Brody lifted his hands from his lap, then let them fall again. He looked at Liz and then at Dr. Lewis and the clock. “This is hell,” he said, and after a moment Dr. Lewis nodded.

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “It certainly is.”

  Outside, the wind whipped against her, and Liz zipped her jacket and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. She had the beginnings of a headache behind the bridge of her nose, and her mouth was dry and sour tasting. Down the block, she saw Brody’s car parked just behind the van.

  “Are you going home?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  They began to walk. She held her purse close, thinking ahead to the relief of being alone. She needed time to remember the whole fifty minutes with Dr. Lewis, to ponder the meeting and figure out what she thought. At the van she stepped into the street, and Brody followed, then stopped at her door. He said, “It’s almost twelve-thirty.”

  She fished for her keys and pressed the unlock button on the remote. Chink went the locks. She opened her door and stepped up into the van, balancing her purse on the console. When she looked at him he was waiting to speak.

  “What are you doing for lunch?”

  “I’m not really hungry.”

>   He frowned and said, “She’s going to be unhappy.”

  “She is unhappy, that’s the point.”

  Now the skin at his temples seemed to tighten, and his face took on the look of something inanimate, like meat or clay. She imagined pulling at his cheek and having it stay pulled.

  “Liz.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. He started toward his car. He turned back just as she was closing the door.

  “It’s freezing,” she objected.

  With a frown he pushed the door to. He hesitated, then went around the front of the van and got in on the passenger side.

  “What?” she said.

  “What do you mean ‘what’? I’m not standing for this.”

  “What choice do we have?”

  “For this,” he exclaimed, waving his arm at her, at the space between them. Then he slammed his palm onto the dashboard and said, “He didn’t say how she’ll ever feel better! How!”

  She turned away and put her hand up to hide her face. What was she supposed to say to him? Why was it her job to make sure the right thing was done?

  “Liz.”

  She turned and looked at him. She saw how big he was, saw it so plainly: he had big, strong arms and big, muscular legs, and he was too large for the passenger seat of this minivan. She felt her pulse in her throat. She thought of the night when Lauren was still in the hospital, when he had pounded into her as if he had wanted to hurt her. Was that the last time they’d had sex? What would have happened if, instead of letting him leave, she had reached for his arm and said: Wait, stay and talk?

  His face was a face again, a thin veil of skin over muscle and bone and cartilage. She began to cry. She wasn’t up to the job of being anyone’s mother—anyone’s wife, anyone’s anything.

  He reached for her and then said, “Here, hang on.” He got out of the van and then got back in, in the backseat. He held out his hand, and she sat still for a moment, then slid her seat back and crawled over the console to sit with him. Rain began to fall, lightly at first, and then suddenly it was pouring. A woman ran by on the sidewalk, holding her purse over her head.