Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

by Nancy Christie

  No mother ever believes she has done her best. Her memories are filled with moments when words had risen unbidden from somewhere deep inside, fueled by frustration and anger. Words spoken to hurt the one she loved the most. The wrong words that can never be recalled.

  “Mom.”

  I didn’t recognize her in the darkness. The landlord had promised to replace the light bulb on the landing, but somehow, he had never gotten around to it. So I carried a torch to light my way.

  “Sara?” I turned the wavering beam on the small figure near the stairs.

  I knew it was my daughter, and yet, so much was different. I hadn’t seen her in nearly six months. She had dyed her hair shoe-polish black, and wore it pulled back from her thin face, looking so much older than her 19 years.

  I remember how I used to braid her golden-brown hair into one long plait. It was so thick that the elastic band could wrap around it only twice, and the curls kept slipping free to twist with a life of their own around her neck.

  “Could I come inside?” and I realized that I had been staring at her, but not really seeing her. I was seeing instead my daughter, my little girl—not this unhappy stranger with torn jeans, holding a dirty denim jacket smelling of cigarettes and worse.

  “Yes, of course,” and it wasn’t until she passed by me to enter the apartment that I saw the tattoo on her shoulder—a small spider web with a fly caught in the center.

  “I’m having a baby. And don’t lecture,” she added, holding up a hand to try to forestall my words. But she was too late.

  “A baby? Are you crazy? Don’t you practice safe sex? What about AIDS? And who’s the father? Do you even know who he is? How could you do this?”

  I knew, as soon as the words left my mouth, that it was wrong, all wrong—that all I was doing was driving her away. But I couldn’t stop. “I suppose you want me to help you get out of this mess, just like always. I don’t hear from you for weeks on end until you want something. When are you going to take some responsibility for your life?”

  “I don’t want anything from you. I can do this on my own. I just thought you’d want to know!” She pulled her coat closer around her. “I’m leaving. I knew this was a mistake.”

  “Sara, wait!” but the door slammed on my words.

  I knew I was right, that the issues I raised and the accusations I made were valid and legitimate, but that was cold comfort. My response certainly didn’t help the situation. What I should have done was kept quiet, let her talk, tried to reach her.

  When I wasn’t being confronted by her, I could be reasonable, compassionate, understanding. But when she was there before me, all the anger stored up inside me poured out in a torrent of thoughtless words.

  Maybe it wasn’t really anger but pain. Maybe, deep inside, I hated the fact that she had the power to hurt me and so I tried to hurt her in return.

  After that visit, she stayed out of touch for several weeks while I tried to come to terms with the news, wondering if she would be okay, if the baby would be born healthy, if they would both come home so we could start afresh. But a late-night call ended the fruitless speculations.

  “Mom, I’m in the hospital. I lost the baby.”

  “What happened? Are you all right?” I was pulling on sweat pants over my nightgown, rummaging for my keys amid the debris on my nightstand.

  “I’m fine. I don’t know what happened. It just happened.”

  There was a note I recognized in her voice—defiance and fear wrapped up into one. She’d been doing drugs—even without clear evidence, I knew my suspicions were correct. A mother’s sixth sense, I suppose. Maybe that was what had caused the miscarriage. Or perhaps God had intervened, not willing to subject an innocent child to an unprepared new mother, and a grandmother who had obviously failed the first time around.

  “Where are you? I’ll be right there.”

  “I don’t want you to come. I’ll be out tomorrow. They had to give me some blood but I’ll be okay. I just thought I’d let you know.”

  That was it. The connection was broken. I sat on the edge of my bed, rumpled sheets bunched behind me, and looked at the notes I had been making before I had fallen asleep.

  Call obstetrician. Find out about pre-natal classes. Clean out spare bedroom.

  I threw the notes away. I didn’t need them anymore.

  Life went back to normal, so to speak. I didn’t see Sara—she left town, without leaving me a forwarding address.

  “I’ll write you when I get a place” was the message she had left on my answering machine. No mention of which direction she was heading, no indication which part of the country she was running to. All I knew was that she was running away—away from me, and, I suppose, away from all the decisions she had made so far.

  She ran a long time—almost a year.

  “Mom.”

  I was groggy with sleep, having gone to bed too late the night before. The clock read 4:30, and it took me a minute to understand who was calling me at that ungodly hour.

  “Sara?”

  “Mom, I just called to tell you that I’m in L.A. with some friends.”

  Los Angeles? Friends? Whom does she know across the country from us?

  “I’ll call you when I get back. Okay?”

  “Sara, wait!” but she had hung up before the words could travel the long distance from the East Coast to the West. It was two years before I heard from her again.

  When there is silence between us, I am overcome with grief for her—for the choices she has made, for the life she is living. Late into the night, I lie awake and wonder at which point she had missed the path, and whether I could have brought her back if I had paid more attention, been more attuned to her needs.

  They say we are responsible for our own lives. They say that, despite the best love and attention, some children will stray, and that parents should not accept blame for decisions their offspring make. They say that sometimes, the best we can do is to give them time.

  Time. I do not give her time so much as surrender it to her, fighting tooth and nail to stop the slow procession of days and nights when Sara is someplace unknown to me.

  Since that last call I am, once again, waiting, passing time until Sara calls again. I have to hope I’ll hear from her; that one night, the phone will ring and Sara will be there. It’s hope that keeps me from changing her bedroom into a work room, that makes me buy her favorite cereal although the last box, unopened and more than a year old, was finally thrown out.

  Some nights, I plan the conversation: neutral, non-critical, supportive. “I’m glad you called. I’ve missed you. Will you be coming back soon? Are you okay?”

  Some nights, I remind myself that she is basically an intelligent person, and many other young adults make a string of bad choices before getting a handle on life.

  Some nights, I look at her baby pictures and cry.

  But I am always waiting for Sara.

  Beautiful Dreamer

  “Eleanor, Eleanor . . . you look beautiful tonight.”

  The words drifted into her mind, like leaves on an autumn breeze, settling softly in the forefront of her consciousness. She awoke to find the phone cradled between her cheek and the pillow, the insistent buzzing the only sound from the black receiver.

  Had there been a voice on the line? Or had she only dreamed it?

  She had had dreams before—the kind that would wake her like an alarm bell. Heart pounding, pulse racing, it would take her several moments to get her bearings and know where she was and that she had been dreaming.

  Sometimes, her mouth would be dry and her throat sore, as though she had carried on a long conversation with someone now absent. But she always knew when she had been sleeping. However real the dreams would seem—and at times, the line between reality and dreamland was very fine indeed—she always knew the difference.

  She was certain this had not been a dream.

  And yet, no one had ever called Eleanor on the telephone. No one had ever told her sh
e looked beautiful. No one talked to her at all—not to the real Eleanor, the one hiding behind the straight dull-brown hair, the plain face. They only talked to Eleanor-the-tenant, Eleanor-the-secretary, Eleanor-the-faceless person amid thousands of other faceless people of the city.

  But now someone had seen her. Someone called her by name and told her she was beautiful. With that single phone call, everything had changed.

  “Good morning, Miss,” said the flower seller, as he had said every day for the past five years as Eleanor passed his cart on her way to the bus stop.

  Usually, she nodded in return, or mumbled a fast “‘morning” as she passed him. She didn’t like talking to strangers, and although they had seen each other for half a decade, he was a stranger still.

  But this time, she stopped and smiled at him, “and her eyes were all lit up like she had some good news,” he said later to his wife, who only sniffed and muttered something about drugs.

  “How are you?” she asked, and, without waiting for an answer went on talking. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”

  He looked up at the sky, overcast and promising rain.

  “Oh, it’s a wonderful day!” she rushed on. “My goodness, there’s my bus!” and she dashed to the stop, the few beginning drops of rain hardly halting her flight.

  “A lovely day,” she repeated to the doorman of the building where she worked. “A perfectly marvelous morning,” to the receptionist, busy answering the phone and routing calls.

  Her enthusiasm lasted until lunchtime, fading only when no one came forward to talk to her, to tell her how beautiful she looked that day, to apologize, perhaps, for the late-night phone call.

  Today would be no different at all, she realized. It was just as if nothing had ever happened.

  “Perhaps it didn’t,” Eleanor told herself, and rubbed her temples as she felt the familiar ache. She knew from experience that, by five PM, her head would be throbbing and she would hardly be able to see. The doctor had said it was nerves and stress, and had given her some pink pills to take. But they didn’t seem to help.

  By nightfall, Eleanor could hardly stand the pain. She crawled into her single bed, pulling the thin cover over her, and prayed for rest, for sleep, for total oblivion. And when she awoke sometime deep in the night, her first thought was how wonderful it felt to be able to move her head without pain.

  But what was she holding?

  The receiver had grown warm to the touch. She must have been clutching it for some time. And the echoes of words remained, caught between her mind and the pillow.

  “You are so beautiful, Eleanor. You are what any man would want. I want you, Eleanor.”

  She shook her head to clear away the last vestiges of sleep and set the phone back on the hook.

  Who was calling her so late, so very late, in the night? Who believed her to be every man’s dream?

  The next morning, Eleanor found herself making small but foolish mistakes. She added sugar to her coffee cup, only to repeat the same action a few moments later. She forced herself to drink the sickeningly sweet liquid as a penance for her error.

  “I need to concentrate on what I’m doing,” she admonished herself aloud. Eleanor frequently talked to herself. If she hadn’t, the apartment would be as silent as a tomb.

  As for being forgetful, it had happened before. She had left stores carrying merchandise, and only her general air of bewilderment and surprise prevented the manager from charging her with shoplifting. Often, after work, she would arrive at her front door, only to find it unlocked and open since her morning departure.

  Sometimes, she would be so lost in her thoughts that she would travel the streets of the city, oblivious to her surroundings.

  But never had she heard voices, save her own and the ones belonging to real people in the real world.

  “He must be real—a real person,” she whispered. In the mirror, she saw, not a lonely woman, but a beautiful young girl—every man’s dream, every man’s desire.

  “He will call again,” and with that hope worn like a shield, she went out into daylight.

  But as days passed, the secret lover was determinedly absent from her life. Each morning, Eleanor would awaken and wonder, “Will he call today? Will I see him somewhere—in a crowd, on a bus, by my apartment door when I come home—and our eyes will meet and we will touch?”

  She could hardly bear the suspense. She had taken to going straight home from work, not lingering at shop windows in case he phoned again, but the telephone stubbornly refused to make a sound.

  Perhaps it was over, she thought hopelessly. Memories of other stillborn romances moved through her mind as past hurts and long-buried desires ached within her. She was not so old, she thought resentfully, that her life should be only memories, and empty ones at that. Surely, she was entitled to one love affair.

  A month after the calls began, Eleanor was plagued once again with a headache, the worst she had felt. Barely able to function, she suffered through the long work day. At day’s end, she gratefully took her place on the bus heading home, resting her cheek against the grimy window, thinking only of her bed and soft pillow.

  And those little pink pills. Maybe she would try them again. Take four or six, instead of the two prescribed. Eight or ten—what did it matter, after all? All she wanted was for the pain to stop.

  Almost blacking out from the pain (had it ever been this bad before?), she found herself at home, in her bed, with no real memory of how she had gotten there or if she had passed anyone on the way.

  “Sleep,” she moaned, not bothering to take her shoes off or slip her dress from her narrow tired shoulders. She closed her eyes, fighting the waves of pain, and dropped quickly into oblivion, her breath so faint that her chest barely moved. But behind her closed lids, her eyes shifted erratically, following dream visions more real than the life she lived

  By morning the pain was gone but so was her hope.

  “There is no mystery lover,” she told herself as she drank her cold coffee. (Had she forgotten to warm it or had it just sat there on the counter so long that the heat had dissipated?) “He’ll not call again, I’ll never see him, it’s over. It never even began.”

  Not for the first time she wondered if those little pink pills could stop the pain of an aching heart. Could they obliterate the sense of loss and longing that plagued her? Perhaps tonight she would try them, she thought, as she closed the door behind her. Perhaps it was time to give up, give in, she decided on her way to the bus stop. No one would miss her anyway.

  Lost in her thoughts, she would have passed the flower seller had he not called out to her.

  “Your flowers, Miss,” and his voice jerked her around. He was holding a sheaf of deep red roses. She could almost taste the fragrance.

  “For me?” and, bewildered, she held out her arms to receive the flowers.

  “Yes, for you,” and his impatience caught at her. Why was he angry with her? She didn’t know anything about them.

  “But I don’t—” she started to say, when another customer called to him, and he turned, saying only “They’re yours,” before leaving her.

  They must be from him, she whispered over and over to herself. I’ve not gone mad—there really is someone and he had called me, and now, he’s sent me roses! Maybe tonight will be the night—maybe tonight I will see him!

  As she turned the corner, the flower seller turned to his wife and shook his head.

  “That lady, she is getting stranger by the day,” he said. “Last night, she was in such a mood—picked out the roses, paid me and said to hold them ’til this morning. Now, she acts like she doesn’t know anything about them. Is she crazy or what?”

  “Ah, what does it matter, Fred?” answered his wife prosaically. “Crazy or not, her money is as good as anyone else’s. Now, what do you want for supper?”

  The Kindness of Strangers

  “I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.”

  Mona remembered that line from a T
ennessee Williams’ play—A Streetcar Named Desire, she thought it was. She had caught it once on television, although the picture was so fuzzy and indistinct that she couldn’t really see the faces of the actors. But the words were clear and moving and very, very sad.

  They gave her an extra dose of her medicine that night, just so she could stop crying and fall asleep. And after that, they monitored her television viewing more closely.

  Not that she watched television all that often. The set was old and its performance erratic. Donated to the hospital common room by the grateful family of a now-deceased patient, the failing picture screen usually broke up into wavy lines, giving the impression that you were viewing the show through a rough and choppy sea.

  But at least the sound was adequate, and that was all that mattered. Mona figured she could always imagine how the characters looked: their hair, their eyes, the expressions on their faces. She had a good imagination.

  But in spite of what they said (and who they were, even now Mona didn’t know) she could distinguish fact from fiction, or reality from fantasy. Take the food, for example—the strange-tasting coffee, the sugar hiding the bitterness under the sweet.

  Someone—Kate, perhaps?—said there was nothing wrong with the food. It was all part of the sickness, Kate said. It made Mona believe things that weren’t true—terrible things, hurtful things. It made Mona accuse her of doing those horrible things.

  Mona knew better. She knew there was something in the food. But Kate (who was Kate anyway?) won and the doctors put Mona in this place to treat her for depression or delusion or some other D-word that was their explanation of the truth.

  That’s when Mona knew that Kate was nothing to her—no relative but a stranger, and not even a kind one. No one with an ounce of kindness would have put an old woman in a place like this, all alone.

  But, Mona told herself in the months that followed, she wouldn’t be in here forever. She had a friend on the outside (Was that a line from a Jimmy Cagney movie? Never mind. It didn’t matter.) who would get her out of this place. By herself, Mona would never get free. But with the help of the stranger-who-was-her-friend, she just might escape.