Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  I sighed. “Sandy, I know you care and I don’t know what I would have done without you. But you don’t understand. My mother is…she has…”

  “I know. I know. She has serious problems, she’s suffered a lot and she needs you.” Her tone was just faintly mocking as she ticked off three fingers one by one before she went back to slicing vegetables. “You’ve told me a hundred times. No, a thousand. But you’re the one who doesn’t understand. Having problems isn’t a license for her to drain the blood out of you or keep you from having a life of your own.”

  I put my hands out, palms up. What did she want? “My own mother doesn’t know that I’m married. Is it so strange that that bothers me?”

  Sandy put the knife down and turned to face me. “And exactly whose fault is it that she doesn’t know? For God’s sake, Ruthie, it’s not like you haven’t tried to talk to her.”

  “Tell her, Sandy,” Evan called in from the living room where he was pouring wine. Sometimes it was more than I could bear, as though I were a skinny tree with whiplike branches encased in ice, weighted with layers of guilt and worry.

  “You belong to Evan now, anyway,” she said, carrying the salad to the table and getting the last word over her shoulder. Her hair was backlit by the setting sun which came through the living room window, and she looked like an angel. Her voice had its usual ring of authority and kindness at once, as though she always knew something that I didn’t, when really, it was the other way around. The knowledge left me lonely.

  “Sandy was right, you know,” Evan said later that night in bed, his head between my breasts muffling the tease he’d put into his voice. “You’re all mine, now. Surely you wouldn’t suggest that I’m not more than enough.” He took my hand and pulled it down to feel the size of his swollen sex. I could hear his heart, or mine, or the pulse of the darkness throbbing in my ears while his hands and lips searched out how to melt me into him again.

  I LOVED IT WHEN EVAN said, “You’re all mine,” at the same time it chilled me like a window left open for the arms of a storm to reach in. Two people claimed me wholly, body and soul. And I knew Evan’s declaration didn’t mean a thing; even if it were a fact, it wasn’t true. Even if I wanted her to, my mother wasn’t one to quit until she could claim victory. Sooner or later, she would pick the time, the place, the way. Then my punishment would begin—not the passive kind that was going on, but the phase of active suffering.

  “It’s not going to happen, sweetheart,” Evan said, too many times. “We’re together now…she’ll have to take us both on.” Sometimes he’d take off his glasses, the way he did to see better into my eyes, and hold my chin with his hand.

  He was wrong as rain traveling from the ground up, I knew, but after the first month, I stopped arguing with him. He wanted me to believe he could protect me; the notion was set in his mind like concrete. I wished I could just do what he wanted and count on him for my life. At the same time, that old primal tie to my mother kept tugging at me. That, and the scent of danger; nothing could be right until I somehow made it right with her and kept my promise.

  “IS THIS MRS. MAIRSON?” The voice on the telephone was hoarse, and the connection was poor. It took me back for a moment, wondering why Elaine would be getting a phone call at our apartment.

  “No, she doesn…oops. Did you want Elaine Mairson or Ruth?” But the phone clicked repeatedly, as though someone were trying to reestablish the connection, and then the dial tone droned.

  “Who was that, honey?” Evan called from the bedroom.

  “I don’t know, I lost the call. The first time someone asks for Mrs. Mairson, and I think it’s for your mother.” I laughed. “Sounded like a businessperson, actually, probably it was for you. Did that bank person call for you again?”

  “Not yet. I’ll try again tomorrow, unless that was him and he calls again today. They’ve got free checking, and if we can establish ourselves with them, it’ll help when we want to go for a mortgage loan.”

  “Whoa. I thought we were waiting until I’m finished school and you’re ready to look for a teaching job.”

  Evan looked at me strangely. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “I know you will. I’d just like to know what’s going on.”

  “Don’t you trust me? You concentrate on school. Taking care of us is my job.”

  So we were off onto another subject, Evan’s favorite these days—his ability to provide for us—and I never thought about the call until I caught up with Sandy at school on Monday. We often had lunch together at the snack shop; both of us were taking summer classes, hoping to cram in prerequisites before our senior year. “Someone called for you the day before yesterday,” she said, and bit into her tuna sandwich. “Damn. This is soggy.” She inspected it, peeling off some of the offending bread.

  I got the impression she might not be saying all she knew. “My mother? Sandy, you promised you’d let me know right away.”

  “Hold your horses. I have no idea who it was, but she didn’t leave a message anyway. Karen answered our buzzer—because I was in the bathroom and she figured it might be Mark. Whoever was on bells didn’t even know you’d moved out of the dorm. Too much trouble to look at the list, I guess.”

  “What did Karen say?”

  “She just gave Evan’s number—I mean your number—and said you could be reached there. Hey, we’ve only got twenty more minutes. Are you going to eat or not?”

  I wasn’t interested in my chicken salad. I leaned in over the booth to try to read her face and shut out the lunchtime commotion in the snack shop. “Sandy, do you think? Karen didn’t say I was married or had moved out, did she?”

  “No, I don’t think so. And as far as I know, Karen just gave the phone number. I didn’t quiz her for exact quotes. Did you start your paper yet?”

  “Barely. I’ve looked for sources, that’s all. It’s just that someone called Saturday and asked for Mrs. Mairson. I thought they wanted Elaine, you know, and while I was stammering around remembering that I was Mrs. Mairson, the phone clicked like someone was jiggling it, and then I got a dial tone.”

  “And you thought it was your mother?” Her ponytail swung when she shook her head. Her cheerleader look I called it, and today the round-collared white blouse she wore completed the wholesome-girl-on-the-Seventeen-magazine image, although after our freshman year she’d started subscribing to Modern Bride.

  “Not at the time. The voice wasn’t like hers, but I thought it was a woman.”

  “Get a grip on yourself, Ruthie. If it was your mother wanting to talk to you, she would have talked to you. You can’t live in fear of her. You look great today, you know? You’ve gotten really good doing your eyes—thanks to my genius tutoring—and that green shirt mat—” She stopped herself and studied me. That’s the kind of friend she was. She could read when I was obsessing, knew when she could distract me and when it was pointless to keep trying. “Ruth, honey. Look at me. Pay attention.”

  I did. She took a long sip of her soda, to lay down silence between us, to make me focus on waiting. Then she deliberately set it down on the chipped and nicked table between us, and let another five seconds pass.

  “You’ve got a wonderful husband who adores you and whom you adore. Your mother creates her own misery. I’m begging you not to do the same thing, not to waste your own happiness, whether it was your mother calling or not. And secondly, the mystery caller was probably the bursar tracking you down to collect a special fee you owe them for moving out…sounds like this university, doesn’t it? Or the librarian calling about your thirteen overdue books.”

  “I don’t have any overdue books.”

  “See what I mean? Like I said, get a grip. Your sense of humor is nonexistent anymore.”

  I knew what was wrong with Sandy’s argument. It was the same problem with how Evan saw the situation: they thought Mother had a choice about how she thought and what she did, and I was sure she didn’t, any more than the patients at Rockland chose their sickn
ess. Isn’t that the difference? Isn’t evil chosen and sickness not chosen?

  I forced a smile. “Okay, okay. You’re right. The overdue books are on Evan’s card, anyway.” Sandy, who’d never returned a library book on time in her life, rewarded me with her familiar warm laughter. “Ah. The true benefits of marriage,” she said. “Can’t wait.”

  BUT LESS THAN A WEEK later when I called Mother again, she did not hang up as soon as she heard my voice. Instead there was a long, swollen silence floating above the flowing river whoosh of the long distance line.

  “Mother?” I repeated. “Please don’t hang up. It’s me. Are you all right?”

  Again, a long silence while I felt myself go shaky as autumn, with a sourceless, unexpected chill. “Mother?” I tried again. “Please, will you talk to me?” Then the phone clicked down as if putting a period to the end of a smooth deliberation, not in an exclamation point of ragged rage like all the times when I’d not gotten out the second syllable of her name before the connection was broken. But I knew her language. I’d been schooled in the nuances of her silences. She had signaled me that she was ready to begin whatever she’d decided to do with me.

  23

  I WAS AFRAID TO TELL EVAN. He’d say, “She’s playing another stupid game. Don’t call again unless you tell her, ‘Look, when you want to talk to me, give me a call.’ Let her come to you for once. This is ridiculous and destructive and you don’t deserve it. We don’t deserve it.” It was that we he’d throw in that got me every time.

  “She doesn’t even know there is a we.” I’d tried to remind him more than once.

  “Bullshit. That’s what this is all about. Sweetheart, she needs to see a psychiatrist, she needs treatment.”

  “Oh, Evan. I can’t be torn between the two of you, I can’t handle it.” The conversations had begun to take on an aura of hopeless familiarity, Evan stuck with his lines and me with mine, like some script we were doomed to read.

  “I’ve not asked you to give up loving your family,” I told him one night over another spaghetti dinner. It was already dark by the time we’d sat down to eat, both of us tired from a long day, a long week.

  “My family has taken you in and loves you,” he retaliated. “They respect us. That’s all I want from your mother.”

  “You’re way ahead of the game. Your parents knew about our engagement, they were at our wedding. Can’t you see how hard it’s going to be to tell her? If things were…normal, it would be hard.”

  He erupted. “But my parents are the kind of people we could tell, for God’s sake. She’s the one who brought this about, not you, not us. Even your brother says that.” He threw his napkin on the table and got up. That was hard-line, tired-of-this-crap Evan speaking. There was gentle, supportive Evan, too, the one I’d married who sometimes still said, “We’ll bring her around together. I understand, and I’m here to help you.” There was no way to know which one would answer me if I told him about Mother listening to my warm-up pleas before she hung up, and so I did not tell him.

  I did the dishes by myself that night, though our habit was for him to wash and me to dry. Evan didn’t even make an excuse, just went into the study and read. That night I dreamed her more distinctly than I ever had in my life. It was so real a dream that sometimes I confuse it with memory, even now, when memory must be trustworthy or I will never sort out words like blame and waste and inevitability.

  In the dream, I was at home, in the driveway of the Jensen house, after a winter storm. The car was idling, its windows coated with a layer of ice, and I was using a scraper to chip at it. It took a long time to clear even an inch at the top of the passenger side windshield, which is where I’d started, to create an area from which I could pry underneath the thick opacity. As I worked down the glass, my mother’s face began to emerge. First there was the deep wave of brown hair, scarcely graying, over her eyebrow, and then the taut skin of her forehead with the two horizontal lines etched across it, the shorter one underneath, as though by a sculptor’s chisel. As I uncovered her eyes, she did not look at me, but stared straight ahead. Her eyes were not narrowed, not angry, but without a hint of light, and I was surprised at how small a part of her face they were. And then I was surprised at how pinched her nose appeared, and how thin her lips. I spoke to her through the glass but she did not stir or answer. The rest of her face emerged slowly as I worked on, like something wooden, jaw set, clenched and unyielding. The whole while I chipped and scraped to clear the window, she did not stir or respond to my wave or smile, though I knew she saw me.

  Now we see as through a glass darkly, but then…I woke with the passage in my mind, but I could not interpret the dream. Where was the magical, beautiful woman who’d made collages of found objects, baked gingerbread men, made up games to make us laugh, to whom God whispered His secrets? Hadn’t she sung “Amazing Grace” to the radiant ocean and been gilded in answer? But that had been the day we had let the fire go out. Had Roger and I done this to her, or had we made her up? Had she once been the mother we needed and adored, then changed? Deteriorated? Had I imagined the safety of her care, the joy of pleasing her when I was small? If she’d been all right once, couldn’t she be again? What was memory and what was desire? What was justification and who could be justified?

  It cannot be a surprise that I called her again, the same day the dream awakened me. I cut a class to be home well before Evan, so he would not catch me trying, so he wouldn’t hear me subjugate myself in a profusion of apologies and admissions.

  “Mother?” Silence, but no click of disconnection. “Mother, it’s me. Please talk to me. I’m so sorry you’ve been hurt. Please forgive me. I think I understand what you’ve been going through.”

  She spoke for the first time. “You have no idea what I’ve been going through.” Her tone was dead, without inflection as she spit the words out slowly. Then she hung up.

  I recognized the pattern, as I had the last time when she’d only listened a while. She would punish me this way a few more times, to make me long for the real punishment of her rage which would come before any reconciliation. Strange to say, I took encouragement from the familiarity, though there was no map for telling her about my marriage. I had no idea how I would do that, only that I had to put one foot in front of the other to get back home first. The spurt of separate strength I’d called up to marry Evan had dissipated.

  I knew to wait a couple of days before I called again, to demonstrate that I’d taken in her pain. Again, I came home early for the certainty of privacy. I sat on Evan’s and my bed, the double bed which had been almost the only piece of furniture we’d had to buy, so well had Evan already furnished the apartment. I’d picked out a sea-green spread, and hung a print of a beach that reminded me of Ben Chance’s dunes above the bed. A woman in a wide-brimmed straw hat was looking out at the sea, while a small girl knelt, intent on what was perhaps a shell, in a foreground of sand. Something in the picture was wistful and reminiscent, perhaps of the first days we’d spent at the Cape, when Mother had been happy and time seemed to stretch out like a hopeful road. I looked at the picture before I dialed and tried to claim that hope.

  “Mother?” I tried. Silence. “Please let me come home to see you.” I heard her intake of breath.

  “All right.”

  “Oh, Mother. Thank you so much. I am so sorry for all the pain I’ve caused you.” It was a start. “When may I come?”

  “I have things to do. You may come Friday and plan to stay.” Her voice was impenetrable. Evan would not be happy, I knew; weekends were important to him, our time together the thin filling between the thick slices of long weekdays, my classes and his job.

  “I’ll be there. Thank you so much.”

  “I’ll need to know exactly what train you’ll be on. I’m going to leave the car at the station for you.”

  “I don’t mind walking, Mother. I certainly don’t want you to walk or have to come get me.”

  “I said the car will be at the station f
or you, but I want to know exactly what train you’ll be on.”

  “I can check the timetable right now, if you like.”

  “Do that.”

  I set the phone down and ran to the kitchen where I’d stuck the current timetable in the drawer with the telephone book. “There’s an express that gets in at 7:32 Friday evening,” I said, out of breath from rushing so she would not reconsider and hang up again.

  “I take it you’re planning to attend classes that day?”

  I realized she might have been testing whether I put seeing her above all else, but it was too late. “Not if you’d like me to come early Friday.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I expect you’ll be on the 7:32, however, and that you will come directly…here. Do you understand?” What I was supposed to understand, I thought, was that she deliberately did not use the word home. That would be a term I’d have to earn, but that was nothing new. I thought it was still possible.

  “Of course, Mother. I will be on the 7:32 and come directly…there.”

  24

  ALL DAY FRIDAY I FELT SWEATY and afraid. I’d made an error thinking I could go to classes and retain anything. I avoided lunch with Sandy, claiming I’d not finished some required reading and was going to hide out and get it done instead of eating. The night before, I tried much the same with Evan, telling him I had a mound of homework. What I’d really done was close the door to our bedroom, enduring the faint sounds of the television in the living room, and try to script and rehearse what I would say to Mother.

  I hadn’t told Evan I’d called Mother again or that I was going to see her. I didn’t think I could manage his being angry or entreating me not to go, but it was more than that; I was trying to separate myself from him as much as I could. I had a superstitious notion that if I let him touch me or even talked with him—especially about her—when I arrived, Mother would smell Evan on me, the way a mother bird knows if a hatchling has been handled by a human, and won’t accept it back into the nest. I’d hoped to slide into bed before Evan finished his show, and pretend sleep, but Evan hadn’t been about to cooperate. He must have heard me getting ready for bed. I was brushing my teeth when suddenly, he was there behind me in the bathroom, sliding his hands around me from behind, taking a breast in each hand like a piece of ripe fruit.