The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  At The Courant, though, I could see I really had a chance. The arts editor was so tweedy, even his beard seemed to be flecked, and his office smelled like Sweetriver: his pipe and the old books piled on the radiator. I was wearing a very tight shirt (I’d noticed that people paid better attention to me when I wore tight shirts), and I sank into the chair across from him, feeling as if I’d finally come home.

  “It’s been so long since I had anyone to talk to!” I said, giddily confiding my take on Wilde and the fin de siècle, humbly acknowledging my want of luridness, explaining that I thought the English language in general did not allow for the same lushness of decadence as French. When he checked his watch I talked faster, trying to squeeze everything in, saying how even though I’d never studied Shakespeare, I’d nearly memorized Lolita and Portnoy’s Complaint. How I missed Philippa, missed the person I was when I was with her. Bubbling on, I felt I’d almost regained myself, but just as I was quoting Saul Bellow on Sweetriver girls—“Cold sweets won’t spread”—I felt myself being helped into my coat.

  I was not, apparently, “seasoned as a reporter” yet.

  It was fate, I told myself, that was all. Really, public relations was the field for me, and had I been hired at The Courant, I’d never have seen the ad for an administrative assistant at Wings to Fly promotions. About public relations I knew only one thing: that my mother, for whom private relations had been so troublesome, held this profession in her highest regard. She pronounced the words “public relations” with portentous reverence, as: “He’s in public relations.” So I had come to associate this profession with men who swashbuckled across continents with great long strides—the kind of man I was trying to become.

  Just by saying the words “public relations,” I seemed to become slightly more substantial, and as I walked down Belfry Street, the last cobbled street in the city, toward Wings to Fly, I knew I was going home. The brownstones with their carved lintels and leaded windowpanes, the gas street lamps fitted with electric bulbs—any minute I’d see Emma Bovary drawn by on her way to an assignation.

  Yes, Wings to Fly was solid, it was real. I entered through the beveled glass door and smiled at the receptionist, who told me someone would be with me shortly. An hour or so later, a tall, slender man with a halo of silver curls came whizzing through the revolving door and fixed on me like a hawk on a vole.

  “Why do you think you’re the best person for this job?” he asked.

  It was right out of a movie, so I knew what to say: “Because I’m smart and I’m a hard worker, and willing to learn the business from the bottom up,” I snapped out, quick as a quiz-show contestant.

  He blinked. “Oh, all right,” he said, looking confused. “I’ll be in touch.” Then he turned his head and whispered “maybe,” quickly, guarding himself against cosmic retribution, and disappeared up a flight of stairs. I reeled away into the dizzying heat outside.

  Dizzying heat, dizzying hunger: as my money ran down, I’d stopped eating at Louie’s, then I’d virtually stopped eating. I had a can of tuna, a few pieces of toast, and some celery every day: less than two dollars’ worth of food, so I could count the gnawing in my gut as proof I was saving money, living within my one-hundred-a-week means.

  The sun blazed down on me, and I found myself singing—the way people whistle through a graveyard. “I was a stranger in the city.” There, a song about a person adrift, unconnected, who “viewed the morning with alarm … When suddenly, I saw you there.” One was alone, confused, hungry, and then there was love, and everything was all right again. How beautiful—how transitory—loneliness seems in movies, with sad music in the background and the camera watching over every scene. The way Philippa used to watch over me.

  A man and a woman walked past without seeing me, to examine a menu card in a restaurant window. I felt like I was watching them through glass—they were part of the world I’d meant to join, with its clear definitions and well-marked pathways, its long menus of delicious offerings.

  “She-crab soup?” he asked.

  “No, got to be gazpacho, on a day like this,” the woman said, turning away. Her fingernails were pink as shells, her hair lay smooth at her collar; she was not wondering what was wrong with her, that she wanted gazpacho when the menu offered she-crab; she did not assume her date (date; a word from the language of her world, wherein men and women innocently, easily, took up relations with each other, as in, “I have a date tonight,” then easily separated, as in “we decided to break up,” freed in this way from swimming the ocean of glue I recognized as love) would discern, in her wish for gazpacho, a hidden shame that would instantly repulse him.

  “Gazpacho it is,” he said, and they went looking for gazpacho, and I went back to the air-conditioned lobby of the Gold Building and did what lost people have to: called my mother.

  “Hello?” I seemed to hear her desperation in the one word. Which might have been exactly why I’d called her, as now I’d have to act self-possessed and might actually believe myself, if I was convincing enough.

  “Hi!” I said, “How are you?” But when she heard my voice, hers turned to dry ice: so cold it burned.

  “Hello, Beatrice,” she said, with a very small, ironic laugh. I wracked my mind, trying to imagine what I’d done, but decided I was being silly.

  “How are things going?” I asked. “Kind of rough, huh?”

  She laughed again—no end to the indignity. “You have to ask?” she said. “But obviously you do, so let me tell you: I have no home and no job, a little child who needs me, whom I can hardly afford to feed. My life is over—I gave it away to a man who abandoned me, children who didn’t love me. But thank you, Beatrice, for your concern.”

  “Ma,” I said, in the most consoling voice I could manage, “it’s not over, it’s not. You can trust me, I know things are going to get better for you—for all of us.” I heard a soft power in my cadences and began to feel what I was saying—as if there were a very strong and capable person in me, someone the terrified, disintegrated version of myself could rely on.

  “Unlike your father,” she said, “I have no one to take care of me. For instance, when I go out for groceries, I walk. It’s two miles each way to the Grand Union. I do not have a car to wreck, but no one has thought to rent a car for me.”

  “Did someone rent a car for Pop?”

  “Your sister!” she said, with a stricken, if triumphant, cry. “She gave him money to rent a second truck when I don’t even have a bicycle, when I—” She gave a stifled little cry and I could see her pressing her knuckles into her mouth to keep from embarrassing herself.

  “Ma, they were stuck on the highway. They couldn’t just—”

  “They abandoned me,” she roared. “And apparently you knew all along that she was funding this trip with her savings? What else do you know?”

  There was a long silence, while she tried for self-mastery, or maybe for the perfect poisoned dart to blow at me. I was nearly relieved when I heard the click that meant she’d hung up on me. I knew what I had to do now, it was clear.

  I had one dime, one hope left—NOW HIRING WORD PROCESSORS; ALL LEVELS. 555-3027.

  “I’m a terrible typist,” I told the woman who answered. There was something knowing in my voice, I thought, something quite authoritative. “That’s why I thought, with my background in English literature, that something in the word processing field would be—”

  So of course she hung up on me too.

  Two

  A TIDE of vertigo swirled over me. I’d probably have fainted, but the image of hundreds of insurance executives stepping over me on their way out for happy hour acted as a whiff of smelling salts might have, in the age I ought to have fainted in—Victorian. Instead I touched my forehead to the cool glass wall of the phone booth, closed my eyes, and waited for inspiration. Unfortunately the vision that rose in splendor before me was a cheeseburger. I’d stopped carrying money, lest I be tempted to spend it, but I had a bus token in my pocket, and I p
ressed it tight into my fist, standing at the stop as if the curb was a precipice that dropped off into empty space, thinking: Home, take me home.

  And thought not of the old house, the fields worn threadbare over the granite beneath, the moths under the porchlight, but my matchbox apartment, tiny and perfect, a Fabergé egg upholstered in turquoise—my own. The bus came toward me like a big, friendly animal, the doors hissed open, I ascended, I was safe.

  Frank was there as I walked up the street. He was leaning against the house, starting his next cigarette as he ground the last under his heel, but when he caught sight of me, he took a step forward into the sunlight and cleared his throat with a rich, complex cough.

  “You got a job, Bee-trrrus?” he asked, “or you looking for job?” I was taller than Frank, but he was standing on the top step, and this, along with his smoker’s throat and his thick foreign tongue, gave his question a terrible gravity.

  “Looking,” I admitted, sure he’d evict me, half expecting him to hit me. What would happen to my mother if I didn’t find work and she couldn’t steady herself against my example? She’d slip over the brink she had teetered on all her life. And take Teddy with her, and—

  “It won’t be more than another week,” I began, assuming that he too saw each week as a fresh hundred-dollar bill.

  “I can get you job,” he said.

  I dared look up at him. His face was the kind you see in old pictures, of a grocer in the doorway of his shop—there was pride there and worry, sadness, resignation—compared to it, the face of the woman who wanted gazpacho might have been a carnival mask. He was concerned for me, and he wanted to help.

  It was a job at the hospital, where he’d worked until he retired. It paid well, there were good benefits and regular hours. I promised to meet him in the driveway, at 5:30 A.M. the next day, and went upstairs to eat, in celebration—four slices of bread and butter and an entire bag of carrots—all the food I had.

  There he was in the morning, cleanshaven and wearing a hat, an old man’s hat that was there only to be removed as a sign of respect. He held the car door for me and waited while I settled myself, with the awkward formality of a man on a blind date, and as we drove across the sleeping city, he told me about Poland, the war, and how he’d returned to Warsaw forty years later to find that everything he knew was gone. He spoke the way brokenhearted people do, as if life’s purpose is to make peace with despair and carry on.

  We arrived at St. Gerasimus Hospital, and went immediately to the sub-basement, to the Dietary Department, a vast, chromed Tartarus where a conveyor belt snaked among steaming vats tended by small, dark, uniformed women. Hat in hand, Frank presented me to the shift supervisor. “I’ll vouch for her,” he said, with a catch in his voice that sounded like pride.

  “Six A.M. sharp and wearing a hairnet and pantyhose,” she snapped, and the thing was arranged.

  Besides these items, I bought every single thing I’d ever wished for while musing amongst the liquefied celery in the refrigerator back at home: American cheese in thick perfect slices; pickled herring; peaches that glowed as if they each had a candle inside; a bag of caramels; a little brown chicken that had been turning on a spit. And a measuring cup (ours at home had fallen behind the stove, after which Ma disdained measuring cups, timid conventional people with their pathetic dependence on measuring cups, and rigid fascist types who were too good for a soggy muffin or a block of solid oatmeal), and … a soap dish! I could hear triumphant music swelling as I set my bar of soap on the raised ridges of my soap dish.

  The phone rang so promptly that I tried picking up the soap again to see if that would stop it, but no.

  “Great news,” Ma said. “I’ve got a job!”

  “Ma,” I said, “guess what? Me too! See, I told you we were going to be fine, I told you! So, where are you working? The nursing home?” There was always a shortage of aides there and she’d mentioned it as a place she might try.

  “No, not the nursing home, Beatrice,” she said, aggrieved. “A teaching job. I’m a teacher, remember?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “Well, Silber Country Day is creating a new position, just for me! Just right for me! English and humanities, for seventh and eighth grade.”

  “They called you up?”

  “No, I saw Sarah Randolph at the post office and she told me.”

  “And you called them up?”

  “Well, not yet, I wanted to tell you first.”

  “Is Sarah Randolph doing the hiring?”

  “Well, I’m not sure,” she said, “but it’s clear I’m the right person, and you know how much Sarah likes me. It’s the trustees who really matter in these decisions … believe me, that’s where the real power always lies.”

  “It’s not exactly a bird in hand, Ma.”

  “Well,” she said, “if there was one person I didn’t think would pour cold water on me, it was you, but I see I was wrong.”

  “I’m not pouring cold water, Ma, it’s just—”

  “Just what? Just that you don’t think I can do it! You just snap your fingers and there everything is for you, but why would anyone want to hire me? Of all people, I thought you’d be glad for me.”

  “I am glad!” I said. “I just don’t know exactly what to be glad about.”

  “Oh, no, you’re just like your father, you think I’m exaggerating, you never believe me. It’s one thing for you to have a degree, and a career.” (I could hear her slashing at herself with the word “career.” When she was young, careers had been for women who’d failed at love. She’d wondered what was wrong with her, poured her overweening ambitions into her children where they’d belonged, and when she looked up, motherhood was passé and she was unemployed.) “But not me, oh no, I’m not good enough, for me it’s an exaggeration…”

  “I—Ma—” How I wished I’d gotten the phrase “dietary assembly line” in at the beginning, because now it was too late.

  “It’s a terrible thing,” she said tragically, “not to be believed.”

  “I believe you, Ma,” I sighed, wondering what stubborn lobe of my brain had demanded proof before it issued congratulation. She needed to hear something in my voice, then she’d take courage, and who knew, then she might get the job, stranger things had happened. I knew what it was to be alone in hard circumstances, how much difference a kind word could make.

  “It sounds like a wonderful opportunity,” I said, but I didn’t sound very convincing.

  “I know, Beatrice, you have such a busy life, you don’t have time to listen to my troubles.” She was struggling to sound earnest, but bitter sarcasm seeped in everywhere. “I wish that just once, just once, a job, or a scholarship, or something, just one thing, would fall into my lap.”

  She fell silent, struggling with herself, and began again on a less accusatory tack. “I suppose I’m just too old, that’s all.”

  “Forty-two isn’t old, Ma.”

  “It’s too old, Beatrice!” she said, in tearful fury. “You cannot conceive how old I am, after twenty years of marriage to, to your father.”

  She had bought my life at the price of her own, for my sake she had married—well, calling her relationship with him a marriage was like calling Hitler’s march on Poland a parade! So that, being my father’s daughter, I felt as guilty as if, in my clothes closet, behind the Little B0-peep outfit my mother had so painstakingly stitched for my first-grade play, I was concealing a bayonet.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “Do you have a résumé?”

  She laughed. “What would I put on a résumé?”

  “Your job experience?”

  “I don’t know how to do that kind of thing,” she said.

  “But, you’re an English teacher. You teach kids how to write letters, how to organize essays.”

  “Oh, that’s completely different,” she said, then added, “I suppose you know how, though.”

  “Well, I mean, I can try.”

 
“You write the letter,” she said, with great excitement suddenly. “You can do it, Beatrice, I know you can. You’ll know just what to say.”

  “Except the actual information.”

  “I can fill all that in later,” she said.

  “Well, you’d want it to be the basis of the letter.”

  “Really? No, there are forms you follow.” (Spoken with an English teacher’s authority.)

  “You write it out, Ma, and I’ll go over it with you, okay?”

  “It won’t work, Beatrice, I know it won’t. Nobody wants me,” she said now, in the voice of a woman who’d been around the block a few times and was qualified to sneer at the notions of credulous Little Bo Peep types like myself. “Even my own children prefer their father! He never loved you, but you love him! I know all about rejection, this is nothing new for me. All my life—all my life, Beatrice, I’ve let people use me and step on me and just push me out of the way when they’re done. I’m damned if I’m going to be your sister’s doormat too. She can reject me, fine, let her go her own way, but she should know what she’s done. It’s fine—fine—if Dolly doesn’t love me, but I like myself. I like myself, do you understand? That much at least I’ve learned.”

  “Ma,” I said, “Dolly didn’t mean—”

  “Beatrice, there comes a time when it doesn’t matter what you mean or don’t mean, when you are judged on the morality of your actions, it’s that simple.”

  “Does that time come when you’re thirteen years old?”

  “Anyone who is old enough to make a decision like that is old enough to be held accountable,” she said flatly, but when I didn’t reply, her voice went dead.

  “But I forgot,” she said, “you’re on his side too.”

  And despite, or perhaps because of, my calming noises and murmurs of reassurance, she went on and on, building to such a pitch that I imagined her flinging herself against the walls and floors, before subsiding finally into the sharp sobs of a lost little girl.