All Is Not Forgotten

by Wendy Walker

  Tom’s parents came for Christmas every year, and the family decided that this year should be no different. They arrived midweek, just as school was letting out. Tom’s mother, Millie, was an intelligent woman with an exceptional sense of perception. This was disconcerting to Charlotte, who found it difficult to hide her secrets (we will get to that) when Millie was in town. Tom’s father, Arthur, lived more in his head than in his heart. He was a retired professor from Connecticut College. He was a stoic and, in this regard, got along very well with his daughter-in-law.

  Tom recalled the visit like this:

  I felt like a child again, like I wanted to run into my mother’s arms for a long cry and then sit on my father’s lap watching a hockey game. I wanted them to tell me everything was going to be all right—my mother with some complex analysis of the situation, and my father with a look that would make me get my shit together, no matter how bad things were. They were so great with Jenny. My mother took her shopping and talked to her about the future, about colleges and careers. She asked her all sorts of questions about her activities and her friends and what she might want to do over the summer. My father was also helpful. He kept Lucas busy, took him skating one day, built a Lego in the basement. Guy stuff. But I was looking at it from the outside, you know. I couldn’t be in it with them. It was too normal, too … calm. Inside, I was going wild. Kicking and screaming against the fate that the universe had handed my family. I would not accept it. I had failed to protect my daughter, and I would not fail at this. And yet I knew with every passing second that the chances of finding this creature were vanishing. I wanted to be a man. I wanted to feel like a man again. And I walked around silently and with a blank expression, looking like a strong man. But inside, I was a child having a tantrum. And part of me desperately needed my parents to see it.

  It was during this week that Charlotte starting having her dream. She knew the origins—some wildlife documentary they’d watched a few weeks back about wolves. In one of the scenes, a lone wolf chased a lone impala through the woods to the edge of a cliff. The impala, being deft and sure-footed, slowly made its way onto the steep rocky side of the cliff, while the wolf frantically ran along the edge, looking down at his meal, so close but unattainable. He didn’t give up for nearly an hour.

  In the dream, Charlotte watched this scene from a distance. Though she knew the ending, each time, she relived it as though the impala might just get caught in the woods before making it to safety, or perhaps this time the wolf would venture off the side of the cliff onto the rocks and find his own footing. As it played out, always with the same ending, her heart would pound wildly and she would awaken to find herself tangled up in sweaty sheets and fear.

  The dream was haunting in so many ways. The hunter and the hunted. Tom and the rapist. Injustice and Tom. The rapist and Jenny. Tom’s family and Charlotte’s secrets.

  I asked her which character she was in the dream, the wolf who loses his meal, or the impala who cleverly escapes but will always be in danger on level ground.

  I don’t know. It wasn’t clear in the dream. I mean, I always saw it from the distance, watching both animals. One running for its life. The other out to kill. So I can’t say from any feeling or perspective I had. But, I did think about it. It tortured me nearly every night when the Kramers were here that Christmas, and it continued on and off for weeks after they left. I suppose I could be the wolf, endangering my family and the entire life I’ve built. But then I think I’m actually the impala, running for my life. I do feel like that. Like I’m always one step away from being found out. It sounds paranoid, I’m sure, but I think Tom’s mother knew. I could see it in her eyes. And I hated her for it. I know she was helping Jenny. I should have wanted her to stay longer. But all I could think, all through Christmas Eve dinner and caroling and opening presents the next day and church and another dinner, was that I wanted her to get the hell out of my house.

  Charlotte had her secrets, but I believed there was more to her dislike of Tom’s parents, his mother especially. I mentioned her childhood earlier. I suppose this is a good time to elucidate, and I ask for your indulgence.

  Charlotte grew up in New London. For those of you not familiar with this part of the country, New London is home to the United States Coast Guard Academy and a naval sub base. The military is strongly present. Her mother, Ruthanne, was a promiscuous young woman who became a single mother at age twenty-three. She had not attended college and worked at a small factory, making decorative candles. Charlotte can remember vividly the smell of scented wax that would follow Ruthanne through the front door of their apartment after work. Ruthanne’s family lived in town. Her parents, after doing some readjustments to the dreams they’d had for their youngest daughter, were helpful at first. But they were not healthy folks—drinkers, smokers, verging on obesity. They were both dead before Charlotte was ten years old. Two years later, Ruthanne finally married. His name was Greg.

  This is Charlotte’s first secret, and it was well kept. She did not reveal it to me until I had earned her trust. And that was not an easy task.

  I was a beautiful girl. I had blond hair and blue eyes and my body was quite developed around that time. And my face, if you look at pictures, you can definitely see that Jenny is my daughter. My mother became the manager of the candle factory. They ran it twenty-four–seven, rotating the workers on day and night shifts. I guess they had enough customers that they needed to make all those candles. I’m sure it had something to do with the “illegals” they hired as well—maybe they knew there wouldn’t be inspections at night. My mother used to talk about the two payrolls, the one on the books and the one that was cash. Greg worked on and off as a carpenter. He used to tell my mother to keep track of the cash, don’t trust anyone. Especially the “illegals.” He had several tattoos. One of them was on his neck. It was a snake and then some words under it. “Don’t tread on me,” they said. He wasn’t a fan of the government. “The man” he used to call it. Anything that had any authority was “the man,” like some kind of hippie. He was an idiot.

  The first night it happened, my mother was at work. I was seventeen. We lived in this little shithole apartment with one bedroom and thin walls. The kitchen was nothing more than an electric burner and microwave. We didn’t even have a proper oven. There was one bathroom with a tiny shower that ran out of hot water every morning because the neighbors were also “illegals”—they must have had six or seven people crammed into that place. Greg disliked “illegals” almost as much as the government. He used to walk around, talking to himself. He and my mother shared the bedroom and I slept on the sofa, so I had nowhere to go when he came out of there. I heard a lot of crazy shit coming from him.

  Anyway, I would be lying if I said I didn’t see it coming. Women just know. Maybe men do, too, but I’m not convinced of it. We can tell when there’s a shift, when a man has decided he wants to fuck us. I’ve felt it with guy friends in college. I’ve felt it in crowded bars. I’ve felt it with colleagues at work. And I felt it with Greg. I did my best to ignore him, stay out of his way. I started wearing more clothing, pants instead of skirts, flat shoes, turtlenecks. It didn’t matter. It never does, does it? Like I said, once a man has decided he wants to fuck you, there’s no getting him off that position. So the night it happened, I had come home from work. I was a waitress at a diner a couple of nights a week. I remember being really upset about a customer. I truly can remember every minute of that night—how this customer yelled at me for bringing him pie with ice cream on it when he’d said no ice cream. He was right and I said I was sorry, but he asked to see my manager, kept yelling, wanting his meal for free. I started to cry. I thought I was going to be fired. My boss told me to go home. God, it sounds so stupid now. It turned out the guy did this every time to try to get a free meal.

  “That would be upsetting to any seventeen-year-old,” I told her.

  I suppose. The point is, I came home crying. Greg was there. We sat on the couch and he liste
ned to me talk for a long time. He got us each a beer. He told me everything would be okay. And I actually felt comforted by him. I let my guard down.

  The rest of the story requires some graphic detail, but I believe it is important. I apologize if it is hard to read.

  Greg smiled at her and stroked her hair. I imagine he had convinced himself that she wanted him as well, even behind the turtlenecks and the long pants. People believe what they want to believe. Her heart started to pound wildly, but she didn’t move. He stroked her face. He moaned. It sounded like the word “ahhhh.” He studied her eyes like a lover. He reached under her shirt and touched her breast. He moaned again and she felt his hot breath on her face as he leaned in to kiss her.

  Charlotte remembers feeling frozen. He had comforted her and she wanted more. Not like this. Not with her body. But that was all that was on the table, so she remained still, frozen between her need to be comforted, to be loved, and her repulsion. She said he looked like a wild animal who had caught its prey. Exactly—the impala and the wolf. He bit her earlobe, hard, and reached his hand inside her pants and between her legs. He leaned her back until they were lying together on the sofa. She could feel his erect penis against her thigh. His finger went inside her. It felt good, like nothing she had ever experienced before. Charlotte had not yet kissed a boy.

  You’re wet, he said, laughing. You’re wet, you little whore.

  He seemed then to have the strength of two men and the arms of an octopus as he reached for her hair and slid off her pants, so quickly, like he had superhuman abilities. His knees were between hers. His erection on her stomach. And then, slowly, he teased her thighs apart and slid down, his erection running along the inside of her thigh. She remembered the “ahhhhh.” His hip bones pressed into hers as he penetrated her. And when it was over (apparently in a matter of seconds), he pulled out of her and positioned his body so she was up against the back of the couch. He kissed her neck and moaned. Then he manipulated her clitoris with his fingers until she had an orgasm, which happened even through the repulsion. The body is a machine. We forget that sometimes.

  They became secret “lovers.” The need in Charlotte that was filled by these encounters eclipsed her conscience, her morality, her will. Greg bought her gifts and took her to the movies. They exchanged looks at dinner and “made love” on the sofa when Ruthanne was working the night shift. Charlotte knew it was wrong, and she was still, in many ways, disgusted by Greg. But, as she explains it, she could not stop herself.

  I am ashamed of this. But it’s the truth. Feeling a human body that close to me. Feeling skin against my skin. Being kissed and hugged and held. And then there was the sexual pleasure, which I could not control. I don’t know. Maybe it was about the sex. Maybe I was a little whore. But at the time, it felt like love.

  It took about six months for Ruthanne to admit to herself what she was seeing and feeling when she was in their company. By that time, Greg was fully unemployed and reliant on his wife. I imagine there was never any doubt about what would happen, though to Charlotte, it felt like her heart had been torn from her chest.

  Ruthanne sent her daughter to live with Aunt Peg in Hartford. Peg was older than Ruthanne by six years and had managed to land a husband in the insurance business. They had three children, all away at boarding school, and they reluctantly agreed to do the same for their niece. Charlotte never went home again.

  Tom did not know about her life with her mother and Greg.

  You can understand now Charlotte’s need to repair her house. I imagine there are those of you thinking more of this, that perhaps Charlotte’s insistence on giving Jenny the treatment was because she had something in her past that was sexually perverse. But you would be wrong. Charlotte saw that night on the sofa as a seduction, an act of desire and the beginning of a love affair. Still, she understood that her relationship with her stepfather was “unconventional” and “morally questionable.” It is for those reasons that she did not share this story with anyone—not even her husband.

  But this is not the secret that Charlotte feared her mother-in law could see.

  Chapter Six

  Getting back to Jenny and the night she sat on her bed—

  Tom’s employer was Bob Sullivan. Bob owned twelve car dealerships throughout the state of Connecticut and had a net worth of over twenty million dollars. His face could be seen on any number of billboards on I-95 from Stamford to Mystic, and throughout every town that still allowed them. You would remember seeing him up there, his full head of black hair, determined eyes, big white smile, and rounded nose. Bob Sullivan was a self-made man, the kind whom magazines liked to write about. The kind who was so bursting with himself, it seemed a miracle he didn’t explode like a struck piñata and litter confetti across the sky. Bob Sullivan lived in Fairview. He had a “plus-sized” wife and three sons who were being groomed to run the family business. He always drove the latest model of something, BMW, Ferrari, Porsche. He ate a paleo diet and drank red wine without constraint. He was generous but also ambitious, with his sights set upon a seat in the state legislature.

  And he was having an affair with Charlotte Kramer.

  We tend to think we know why people have affairs. Their marriage is bad, but they can’t leave because of the kids. They have sexual needs that aren’t being filled. They’re victims of seduction, their self-control overcome by human desires. None of these were true for Charlotte.

  Charlotte Kramer was two people. She was the Smith graduate with a degree in literature. She was the former assistant editor of Connecticut magazine and now the stay-at-home mother to two lovely children, the wife of Tom Kramer, whose family were scholars and teachers. She was the member of the Fairview Country Club who was known for her impeccable manners and extensive vocabulary. She had built her house carefully, and it was a good, moral, and admired house.

  No one knew the other Charlotte Kramer, the girl who’d slept with her mother’s husband and was forced to leave home. No one knew that her relatives were uneducated alcoholics who lived hard and died young. She was the girl who took off her clothes every night for a man nearly twice her age who smelled of cigarettes and poor hygiene. No one knew any of this—except for Bob Sullivan. Charlotte had put that girl in a cage. But over time, that girl had started to rattle the bars until she could no longer be ignored. Bob Sullivan was Charlotte’s way of recognizing her, of keeping her calm in her imprisonment. It was her way of being whole as she lived half a life as Charlotte Kramer of Fairview.

  When I’m with Bob, I’m that girl again. That dirty girl who gets turned on by bad things. Bob is a good man, but we’re both married, so what we’re doing is bad. I don’t know how to explain it. I have worked very hard to live a “right” life. Do you know what I mean? To not think the bad thoughts and stop myself from having the bad behavior. But it’s always there, this craving. Like a closet smoker, you know? Someone who’s mostly quit and who would sooner die than have the world know she smokes, but then she sneaks one precious cigarette a day. Just one. And that’s enough to satisfy the craving. Bob is my one cigarette.

  You may judge Charlotte Kramer for her one cigarette. For having secret cravings that she cannot control. For not telling the whole truth. For not letting her husband know his whole wife. And for your judging of Charlotte Kramer, I shall have to judge you a hypocrite.

  No one, not one of us, shows the whole self to any one person. And if you think you have, then ask yourself these questions: Have you ever pretended to like something awful your wife cooked? Or told your daughter she looked pretty in an ugly dress? Have you made love to your husband and faked a sigh as your thoughts ran elsewhere—to your grocery list, perhaps? Or praised the mediocre work of a colleague? Have you ever told someone everything would be all right when it wouldn’t be? I know you have. White lies, black lies, a million lies a million times every day, everywhere, by every one of us. We are all hiding something from someone.

  This may cause you to feel disheartened. Maybe
it will make you pause when your wife tells you she believes you’ll get that promotion, or your husband assures you that you are well liked on the PTA. The truth is, you will never know the truth, and if you did know, you would probably be fighting to save your marriage. I may appear a renegade. A miscreant. But no relationship can survive the naked truth, the whole truth. No. Once a couple have confessed their true feelings to each other, whether in private or in couples therapy or even to friends with big mouths, the game is over. Don’t you see? Don’t you know this in your heart of hearts? We love people for who they are and how they make us feel. We can usually tolerate their faults and even keep them to ourselves. But once we see any reflection of ourselves in their eyes that is not the one we want to see, that we need to see to feel good, the backbone of the love is broken.

  Tom was never given a chance. No reflection Charlotte saw in his eyes could ever be trusted, because he knew only the one Charlotte who had been revealed to him. Bob Sullivan, and only Bob Sullivan, knew them both.

  Charlotte and Bob met during the day in the small pool house at the very edge of the Kramers’ yard. There was a dirt road that was used by the pool company and mostly concealed by trees. Even in the winter, it was possible for Bob to park and not be seen from the road. The yard was fenced. They had been very careful. They both had a lot to lose.