by Lynne Hugo
He must have needed someone as badly as I. Why else would we be discussing such things when all we’d shared were cafeteria meals, lingering over iced tea and a walk back to the staff quarters building? We’d not so much as kissed. Not that I had any desire to kiss him, but I guessed I was willing if it would prevent his disappearance. He looked at me meaningfully, but what I got stuck on were squinty eyes and hairy lips that suddenly sickened me. It was too much too quickly, but I couldn’t back away.
“DON’T YOU THINK HE’S good-looking?” I asked my mother when Josh excused himself to the bathroom before dinner.
“His beard is scraggly. I always liked the clean-shaven look,” was all she said. The first meeting was not going well. I felt it, with the antennae I’d developed over the years with her, rather than knowing it in any rational way. She was being too polite, distantly warm. He was trying too hard. I was in the middle, wanting too much for it to work.
Later, when he put his hand on my leg as we sat next to each other on the sprung blue couch twice conquered by Mr. VanFrank, she looked at me with bullet eyes until I shifted my weight and recrossed my legs in a way that caused him to move his hand.
“Your mother doesn’t like me,” Josh said as the bus jostled us from the city back out to Rockland. “What was so bad about what I said about Nixon?”
“Calling him Tricky Dick, maybe…” I didn’t want to get into it. Mother’s politics were erratic if she gave a thought to the world. She’d loathed John Kennedy until he was dead and then she nearly burned down the house lighting candles for him, but I rarely had to concern myself with managing the wider world. The war in Vietnam had largely been a nonevent for us; since the draft didn’t affect Roger, Mother was inclined to believe whatever the president of the moment said about it. “It’s not that, Josh,” I sighed. “It just takes her time. She doesn’t take to people quickly.”
“It’s more than that. She just really doesn’t like me. Why? Did she say anything to you?”
“Not really.”
“He’s all right, I guess,” was what she’d said. “Someone should have taught him not to bang his teeth on his spoon when he eats soup.” And, “I’m surprised that his hemming and hawing doesn’t get on your nerves. I like a man who has a definite opinion.”
“So what…synagogue? Do you attend?” she’d lobbed at him, setting him up.
“Well, I’m really eclectic in my religious tastes.” He’d taken a swing and missed.
“I think it’s important to honor one’s own heritage,” she’d served again.
“Yes, yes, indeed it is. I plan to join one just over in Spring Valley.” He conceded early, having learned.
I surprised myself by seeing him a few more times after mother met him, but it petered out quickly. Maybe he got tired of my fending him off, my practice of chastely angling my face at just the right moment so his mouth fell off center, sort of partly on my lips and partly on my cheek. When his hand slid from my waist down to my hip and then began to creep around me like kudzu, I pulled back and said, “Josh, we really shouldn’t,” as though I, too, wanted that intimate touch.
What it came down to was that I really didn’t think enough of Josh. Had I loved him even a little, the relentless chastity I claimed on moral grounds wouldn’t have been so easy. That very chastity was why I could, in the end, give him up. He never had my body, and he certainly never had my soul; Mother still had that.
14
JUST LISTING THE WAYS IN WHICH my notions of marriage were wrong would make a chain of words that could be looped around the institution numerous times. And I didn’t learn anything to correct them from my summer with Joshua. I was never able to overcome the small shudder that went through me when he mashed his lips hard against mine, or worse, tried to wedge his tongue into my clenched mouth, all of which just fueled my worry that I wasn’t normal.
At Christmas, Mother, Roger and I spent better than a week then with our much-touted family traditions—carols on the record player, a motley crèche, tree ornaments we’d made in elementary school alongside too-bright, fragile store-bought ones, and Mother’s invocation of heavy symbolism regarding various miracles she anticipated in our lives. It seemed an enormous amount of work to fabricate the wonder she expected in our eyes, part of the whole business of creating Christmas for her.
Roger and I had minimal time to talk directly. The day before he was to leave we instinctively colluded to have some. At least I believed it was our old mind-reading and cooperation, but maybe it was just what it seemed: a fortuitous accident. Mother wanted to exchange the sweater Roger had given her before he left so he could see her wear it, and was going to the dress store in town. Roger had already said if she wanted him to spend time with her after dinner, she’d have to let him get packed and organized in the afternoon. It was the Roger who had a mind and life of his own and who said and did what he wanted. Openly. When she came looking for me to go with her, I pretended to be asleep. She shook me lightly. “Come on with me for company. They might not have the same thing in my size, and then I’ll have to choose something else.”
“Mother, I’d better stay here. I’ve got a bad headache and my stomach doesn’t feel so good.” It was code for getting my period.
“All right, then. I guess I’ll just go on by myself. You’d best take a nap so you’ll feel better to take Roger to the airport with me tomorrow. I’ll get the Midol.”
“I’ll be okay.”
When I heard her car clear the driveway, I was up. Roger looked at me knowingly and continued to fold clean Tshirts and boxer shorts, laying them on the kitchen table in two tidy stacks. “Feeling better?” he smiled. It felt like old times when we’d shared small seditions.
“Yeah. I guess I am,” I gave him his smile back, but kept my lips closed, afraid to risk the teeth of our recent history. I needed him. “Can we talk?”
“Sure. How’re you holding up? I heard you were dating someone.” Of course Mother would have told Roger.
“Were is correct. Past tense.”
“She didn’t like it, did she?”
“I don’t know. It really wasn’t her fault, I just…” I put on the kettle to make myself a cup of tea and so I wouldn’t have to look at him. Outside the window, the sky tried to keep a heavy load of unfallen snow to itself, but flakes were starting to escape here and there.
He stopped folding. “Ruthie, you can’t let this happen. Don’t you see yet? She’s sick.”
“The guy…Josh…just didn’t…it wouldn’t have worked. I didn’t like him all that much, anyway.”
Well, the last was certainly true enough. I wasn’t going to mention how the non-love affair died even before I went back to school. “Do you ever say no to your mother? About anything?” Josh had finally demanded, albeit mildly, when I told him—again—that I couldn’t see him because Mother wanted me with her over the weekend. (“Of course I do,” I’d answered. Liar.)
“The guy is beside the point. She…is…sick. As in disturbed.” Roger enunciated the words very slowly, as though trying to penetrate the fog around a mental defective, the same way the staff talked to Thorazine patients at the hospital.
“How do you know that?” I demanded. “Exactly who died and made you Dr. Freud?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Ruth. Grow up. She’s a virgin? You worked at a mental hospital. You think it’s just normal that she denies we even have a father? Or fathers? She’s not a virgin, she’s crazy. You and I both know she’s plain crazy.”
“I don’t think that. She’s just been hurt a lot.” Now I could segue neatly to my subject. I quit rummaging for a tea bag so I could face him down. “We have to help her.”
He shook his head and kept shaking it as he spoke. “Don’t you get it? We can’t help her. What you do isn’t going to make any difference.” The words were tumbleweed spinning in a vehement wind.
My voice went directly to indignant. “That’s it? How about all your promises? How about me? Sometimes I can manage, b
ut sometimes I can’t anymore. She gets…bad.”
“I know she gets bad. That’s the whole point. You don’t make her get bad and you can’t get her over it.” He was getting exasperated. Another T-shirt came up against his chest to be folded, but it surely wasn’t a white flag.
“Roger. Rog. We said we would be together. How can you just bail on us now?” I was starting to cry, making little effort to fight it down. It used to bother him when I cried.
“This is not about that or anything else,” a hoarse shout on the not. His ears flamed and the same red flushed his cheeks, and even his neck in the V between the open top buttons. “I’m not just jumping ship…”
“Yes, you are!” An answering shout, now furious tears running with the others.
“I’m not. I mean, I’ll give what I can, I’ll come home when I can, I’ll do what I can, but there’s no point. You don’t see that. There’s no point. You’re not going to make anything different.” His voice was sandpaper, angry.
“But I can prove that not everyone betrays her, not everyone is like that.”
“And then?”
“I can make up for bad things that have happened to her. I can help.”
“And then?”
He was infuriating me. He could say, “And then?” forever, obviously.
“How can you just give up on someone you love?” Those were my words, but really, I was pleading, not asking a question.
“It’s called reality.” Now he got softer, explaining life to his forty-watt bulb sister again.
“It is not reality. Reality is that she hurts and we can help.”
“You just don’t get it, Ruthie. You’re my sister and I love you, but you just don’t get it. You can’t always help. That’s the truth whether you want to see it or not. There’s just no point in going down with her. Couldn’t you talk to someone? At school? There are people to talk to, you know.”
Shades of Mr. VanFrank. Only Roger was smart enough not to suggest Mother might even be tricked into getting any kind of help. So what would Roger’s nifty see-a-psychologist-at-school idea accomplish? I didn’t need therapy, for God’s sake, I needed help with Mother. Why didn’t Roger get it? “She’s not going down. I won’t let that happen,” I said.
He shrugged. “Okay. So maybe she doesn’t go down. She won’t go up, either. And neither will you. I’m not saying people shouldn’t do what they can, I’m just saying there’s no point in drowning yourself in a futile effort to save someone who’s been underwater for years.”
“I see you take your religion seriously.”
“Welcome to crucifixion, Ruthie.” He held his hands straight out parallel to the floor in a mocking gesture, then suddenly withdrew them. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. All I mean is that I don’t think there’s anything we can do. I’m sorry.”
I just stood there spilling tears, not even wiping them as I looked at Rog, square and massive in the late afternoon slanting sun, remembering how much I’d loved him, how much I’d believed in him. Now he was lost. As I remember it now, that’s exactly the way I thought of it—he was lost and had been since the night in Denver when the good blood between us turned poison. Once I got hold of that, as I stood there arguing and crying, I began sliding back in time to where life had shone with a magnificent clarity. It’s like if a partner resigns from a business you started together—and starts challenging its founding principles. Human defensiveness gets revved up so loud the noise drowns out whatever doubts might have been whispering their worries in your mind. And if the business was your whole life? Everything you believed in, sacrificed for, thought you required? Well, you’ll ignore plain logic, plain common sense, plain-as-your-nose evidence that maybe he’s right. Instead you make up reason to believe, gun that engine, pretend you don’t hear what’s in your own head.
Of course, I see it now: the noise just gets louder and louder, the doubts start shouting to be heard, and then comes the explosion.
That’s not what I saw at the time, though. What I saw then was he was selfish, she was in need. She believed Jesus would save her; I believed I had to. So I went back to school at the last possible hour in January, a full week after Roger left, and resumed my practice of cutting at least half of Friday or Monday in order to get home to take care of her. Roger called every week; sometimes I spoke with him briefly, sometimes not. I did whatever Mother wanted. Usually it was chores, but sometimes she would ask me to see a movie or help her pick out a new purse. I’d get groceries, cook some food ahead, carefully labeling it on shelves in the refrigerator. “You’re a good daughter. What would I do without you?” she said one evening, hugging me to her. It was enough. I was a good daughter. As the year progressed, I discovered her checkbook was in disarray and began balancing it each month. By the end of the school year, I was billing the parents of flute students whose parents had caught on to the fact that Mother had quit keeping track of her life.
15
DURING THE COURSE OF OUR summer internships, Sandy and I had decided to room together the next school year. My first year’s roommate had made friends with other girls and was moving to a suite with them. There’d been no animosity between us; there’d been nothing, which was the whole problem. I was secretive, went home all the time and shunned college social life considering it frivolous, while Mary had joined and gone to freshman mixers. This left me with no real connection, no one with whom it was natural to say—or to say to me—“Let’s room together next year.” I’d ended up checking the “no preference” box on the housing form where it asked about roommate selection, and had been assigned to share a room with a transfer student, so the switch was an easy matter for me.
Sandy, on the other hand, had plenty of friends. Blue-eyed, naturally blond, with long, curly eyelashes, high color on fair skin and a small, straight nose, she was so model-pretty that it would have inspired resentment among other girls had she not been so unaffectedly outgoing. Instead, and utterly unlike me, she was sought after. What made us a perfect match as roommates was a purely practical issue. I was gone for three days of every week and she was masterful at sneaking Mark into the dorm before, during and after parietal hours—as they were called then. I didn’t care that they used our room, I didn’t even care if they pushed our narrow sagging beds next to one another and used the double bedsheets that had disappeared out of Sandy’s mother’s linen closet. It wasn’t that Sandy particularly understood my situation with Mother. She was just an uncritical person, and didn’t question me, as Mary had regularly, at least during the first month or two. Also, it was to Sandy’s advantage, something she’d obviously figured out before she suggested we change roommates.
If it hadn’t been for Sandy, our tiny room would have resembled a convent cell. “Home” was, according to Mother, strictly construed as referring to wherever she was, and for that reason, making a dorm room homelike was almost disloyal. It might have meant I intended to spend significant time there. Sandy, though, homemaker hormones flying like sparks off her engagement ring, set out to create a little haven for her and Mark. Cheerful print curtains complete with a valance and harmonizing green bedspreads, bookcases, plants, Monet prints—framed thanks to her father—on the walls, all appeared that first weekend we were back to school. Then a hot plate (strictly forbidden in the regulations) and a set of four matching mugs showed up on a special little table with a selection of teas, instant coffee and cocoa. Boxes of cookies were in the table’s cupboard, but only when Sandy’s mother didn’t send homemade ones. A record player and albums were in a corner with our reading chairs and a pole light Sandy brought from their rec room at home. Her mother even “dropped by” (from New Jersey) with two huge floor pillows she’d “picked up on sale at Bloomies, because they’d look so cozy.” When she left she hugged me before she hugged Sandy and said goodbye to her again, moisture glistening in the corners of her eyes. “Have a wonderful year, you two,” she called as her high heels clicked down the hall. “Don’t forget to call, honey,” she
added to Sandy.
All Sandy’s efforts, aided by her parents and their cash, added to the nicest room on the floor, a prefeathered nest. On weeknight evenings, I loved the draw of Sandy and our cheery room on the other girls. They came to see her, I knew, but I got to sit in there and laugh and belong—when, that is, I didn’t have to be in the library cramming to get my schoolwork done before Friday. It was like straddling two worlds: home, where I was carrying increasing responsibility for the most basic functioning, and school, light and lighthearted because of Sandy.
And Sandy’s Mark. How sweet he was to me, probably in gratitude for my regular disappearance, but he never made me feel that was the reason. “Nice sweater, Ruth,” he’d say on Friday, if he was there before I left. “Looks good on you.” Or, “How’s your stat class? Sandy sure hates it. You know, I can give you a hand with analysis of variance if you want. Sandy gets it now, but maybe not well enough to teach it to you.” How could I not fall a little in love with a guy like that? He offered to fix me up with fraternity brothers, but I was always going home for the weekend. I’d largely abandoned my Prince Charming fantasies after Joshua, anyway.
By spring, I was a sisterly coconspirator with both of them and had let down my guard more than I ever had with anyone except Roger. A few times I had gone out for burgers or pizza with them on Friday evening before taking a late train home; they’d ride the subway to Grand Central with me so I wouldn’t be alone and then turn around and go back uptown to Columbia, to their weekend. The three of us would sit over beer and discuss poverty or war or the war on poverty and then the conversation would segue without warning to what shade the bridesmaids should wear in their wedding and whether to have the napkins be a matching pink, or if, as Mark said, that would be plain effeminate. After an evening of that comfort, it was hard to leave, to get on the train and go home to Mother, never knowing if I’d be greeted with tears or rage or silence or, occasionally, a smile.