by Tricia Dower
“Don’t you dare, we have a big day planned.”
“Do tell.”
“I’m taking him to the toddler playgroup at my church.”
Grace thinks Tavis doesn’t mix enough with other children, that he’s socially and linguistically immature. The linguistic judgment is unfair. He has a considerable vocabulary for a child his age. So what if he doesn’t use it flawlessly. She pushes her annoyance aside, tilts her head. “Did he behave for you today?”
Grace waves the question away. “Of course. Time for tea before I run you home?”
Her confidence can rankle.
Mugs in hand, they stroll through her deep narrow garden. The hostas are still having their moment. Purple coneflowers leaning on wooden stakes flank the stone walk. Yellow roses flaunt their blowsy beauty, not too many specks of rot on their leaves yet. Tavis plunks himself in the sandbox Grace installed as soon as he could sit by himself.
“You’re thinner every time I see you,” Grace says. “Anything wrong?”
“According to Redbook, I’m the perfect weight for my height.” Lin has lost fifteen pounds over the last year. Not an alarming number if you divide it by months. After Cambodia and My Lai, Kent State and Jackson State, it didn’t seem right to nurture herself when so many were dying. Now she simply isn’t hungry anymore, doesn’t have the cravings that once gnawed at her nonstop. She likes her sharper hipbones and flatter stomach. They make her feel less greedy, less sinful. “This morning Tavis leaned over the scale when I weighed myself and said, ‘It says Mommy’s old, right?’”
Grace smiles. “He’s a pip. Seriously, though, when we first met, you had those rosy, Deanna Durbin cheeks. You’re still lovely, of course, just beginning to look like somebody else. What’s Ronnie say about it?”
“He won’t let me fast on Wednesdays anymore. I reminded him a guy fasted for over a month last year in front of the White House and he was fine but that didn’t wash with Ron.” Eager to get off the subject, she points to low-lying plants midway up the walk. “What are those with the copper star-shaped flowers?”
“Stonecrop. Autumn Joy.” Grace snaps off a round, spongy leaf and holds it out. “Tastes peppery. Care to try?” Lin declines. Grace pops the leaf in her mouth. “I didn’t garden till I retired but I should have made time for it when we lost the girls. Having my hands in rich, dark soil would have comforted me.”
“How so?”
Grace crouches and sifts a handful of dirt through her fingers. “The metaphor of it, the soil receiving all those shriveled leaves, crushed flowers, desiccated insects, what have you, and forming new life from it in the spring.” She stands, brushes the dirt off her hands.
Lin asked Ron once if he’d felt his sisters’ absence in his life. He spoke of a vague sense when he was younger of having failed them somehow even though they died before he was born. Was he carrying the weight of his mother’s loss without realizing? She thinks back to this morning’s workshop exercise about victims, persecutors and rescuers, Dr. Klein saying rescuers often like having others dependent on them. “When Ron was a kid,” she asks Grace, “was he protective of others?”
“I’ve never given it much thought. He took a colored girl to his high school prom. I regarded that as more rebellious than protective. Of course, most ministers want to save people from something, if only a spiritually empty life. And nothing’s more seductive to a man than a woman who needs rescuing.”
Tavis leaves the sandbox and makes a running tackle at Grace’s brown tweed skirt. “Tavis’s motor is on,” he says. She manages to stay upright and laugh. He runs off after a squirrel that’s nosing the ground.
Grace says, “Well, that jiggled my brain. Here’s a memory. When Ronnie was eleven or so a TV cartoon caught his fancy. Crusader Rabbit, a knight who rode on a horse and rescued people in peril.”
“That figures. He and Tavis watch Underdog every Saturday.” She doesn’t mention they’ve dubbed her Polly Purebred. After the workshop and Grace’s comment about “a woman who needs rescuing,” it no longer seems cute.
On day three, Dr. Klein says, “A unique universe comes into being for each of us when we’re born, depending on what we’re told by those charged with our care. A losing universe can result from hearing we’re weak and stupid and when we grow up we’ll be poor and miserable—that sort of thing. A winning universe is the opposite.”
She has them jot down words others used to describe them as “sprouts.” Words they’ve accepted as true. Lin writes: reckless, undisciplined, selfish, short, fat, ungrateful, brother killer. Also: smart, thrifty, conscientious, blessed with ash blond hair that won’t show the gray.
She asks them to record what they were told to expect from life. Lin writes: marriage, an ungrateful child, unfulfilled ambition, being “on call” for sex you don’t enjoy.
Good lord, that’s Mother’s universe.
She tries again but comes up with only the pointless passing of time, a future of monotonous, repetitive work with no lasting achievement. Not even terrorizing letters to get her heart racing and make her feel singled out, important.
Nothing’s as accidental as it might seem, Dr. Klein says. Even running out of gas.
Or accepting a ride from a stranger? Forgetting a pill?
It’s as if she’s looked into a mirror for the first time.
33
The day after attending Artie’s service in the swanky house, when he suggests she’s opening herself to nobler possibilities, she searches the Hopkins library for books about medium/spirit duos like Angel’s Jackie and Rhonda, comes home with Seth Speaks, supposedly dictated by a discarnate being to a woman in New York State. She curls up in Tavis’s bed, reading under the cruel overhead light until morning wriggles through the blinds.
There’s no past or future, the book says, only an Eternal Now. Angel seems to believe this too. Trying to imagine such a thing fills Lin’s brain close to overflowing. If it’s true, she’s continually meeting and leaving Ron, continually climbing into and out of Eldon Jukes’s convertible, continually doing whatever she has done and will do because there is no has done or will do. Seth’s book speaks of All That Is, a universe of universes encompassing all existence, each moment of existence constantly exploding outward in all directions. Lin pictures a perpetual cluster bomb bursting with life, not death, a colossal womb that can stretch to hold everyone. It gives her a sense of wonder she hasn’t experienced since giving birth, when an extraordinary moment cut loose her pain and left her longing for something she hasn’t been able to articulate, even in her journal. The intensity of it has sailed away like a paper boat. She chases after it now.
In the book, Seth says: close your eyes and sense your inner power. She gives it a try, shutting out a slamming door in the hallway, a high-pitched laugh from the path beneath Tavis’s window. She pictures floating in a womb as vast as an ocean, the sound of breathing all around her. Tries to call up that remembered sense of timeless connection. Focuses for what seems forever. Waits. Nothing. If she has any power, it must be infantile. She can’t be more than an embryo within the pulsating All That Is: the size of a pea, her heart beating for only a week, her eyes, ears and brain rudimentary, her body still without bones, arms, legs, feet, hands, fingernails, eyelids and lips. Discouraged, she closes the book, buries her head deep in Tavis’s pillow and drifts into sleep as the world around her rises.
That evening she calls to phone-kiss Tavis goodnight and tell Ron she’ll drive to Prairie Fire on Friday as he asked. She needs more time to erupt into her future self even if time is an illusion and the future is now. Monday morning finds her staring at Black Bear’s clock, her heart ticking away the hours until Tavis returns from his first weekend with Ron, her head still buzzing with notions of time and an ever-expanding All That Is holding every soul in its consciousness, each soul a mini-god erupting with life, creating fragments of itself.
&n
bsp; Radio hosts Boone and Erikson nudge such thoughts aside. Their mock operatic version of “Good Morning” from Singing in the Rain makes her want to be a soul fragment of Donald O’Connor. Up to seventy-five degrees by afternoon, the funny guys say. She starts her new job today, opts for the short-sleeved knit dress Aunt Libby sent her after she got thin as bones, the top a carnation-pink and black design, the skirt solid black. She grabs a sweater just in case, steps into chunky-heeled shoes good for walking. Tomorrow she’ll drop Tavis off at daycare before work. Today she has only to cross a busy boulevard to the bus stop by the Standard station.
Today. Tomorrow. Yesterday. Now. Later. Soon. How can time be an illusion when we form barely a thought without it, she wonders as she snags a window seat. A guy built like a wrestler drops a Tribune on the seat beside her and says, “Okay if I sit here?” She almost blurts out I’m married then chides herself. He isn’t asking for a date. He scoops up the paper, smothers his seat and spills over onto hers, his shoulders wide as a door, his bulging thigh against her skinny one. He doesn’t apologize, reads his paper as if he presses up against strangers all the time. She plasters herself to the window and watches the street come alive. A stout man sets out a menu board in front of an asparagus-colored café. A hand turns an auto repair sign from Closed to Open in a window stacked with cans of motor oil. A man in khaki raises a flag in front of the Sons of Norway. Two women in shorts jog on a path around Lake Calhoun, the water in the morning light iridescent as spilled mercury. Whenever the driver brakes or pops the clutch, the bus lurches and she’s a kid again, suspended atop the Ferris wheel at the Jersey shore as riders get off below, fear and pride pressing on her chest.
The bus is standing-room-only by the time it bullies its way onto congested Hennepin. They pass a theater showing What’s Up Doc? Minutes later, another with Harold and Maude. Northfield has just one theater, ambitiously named the Grand. Prairie Fire has none unless you count Old Western Wednesdays at City Hall. Closer to downtown, buildings compete for bragging rights. The white granite Basilica of St. Mary dwarfs the huge, Gothic limestone Hennepin Avenue Methodist. The curious wedding cake of a tower with Foshay in giant letters has lost its tallest status to the Godzilla-like IDS Center looming in the bus window, the ascending sun bouncing off its glass skin.
She taps the Wrestler on the shoulder. He heaves himself into the aisle to let her pass. She excuses her way through the standing riders, their morning scents a spicy and floral confusion, and steps off at Hennepin and 7th, a ten-minute hike to work she practiced in July. The city feels new this morning, re-imagined. Yesterday she pretended everything in the Seth book was true. As she lined the kitchen cupboards with flowered paper, strolled to town and back, soaked in a bath and danced to the radio in front of the mirror, she tried to feel each moment exploding from her like a sun flare. She felt only the absence of Tavis like phantom pain from an amputated limb.
People hustle by today, heads down, heels clacking, their explosions, if any, as undetectable as hers. A bakery truck rumbles by. She looks up, up, up at a billboard for Grain Belt Beer and people scurrying across a skyway as if from one life to another. If she had a hat, she’d toss it in the air like Mary Tyler Moore. After Prairie Fire, she’s ready for the clash of colors and honking horns, the array of offerings in mere blocks: a candy store with a bubble-gum-pink awning, the hotel touting its bar that has peanut shells covering the floor, a crowded cafeteria, two jewellery stores, a Chinese restaurant, a business school, Woolworth’s five and dime, the Dayton’s where she bought her first serious winter coat.
No new coats for a while. Rent, daycare and bus fare will chew up her monthly take-home of three hundred and forty dollars. For the rest she has to lean on Ron. Pride persuades her it’s support for Tavis, not herself. Ron has agreed to kick in over a third of what the church pays him. Even with that she’ll be squeezing nickels. But she won’t have to sit on a sidewalk with a fistful of yellow pencils like the shaggy-haired man she’s coming up on, crutches beside legs bent like chicken wings. A button on his brown corduroy jacket reads Vets Against the War. She crouches until even with his wild eyes and asks him how much.
“Whatever’s fair, miss,” he answers. Fair is not in her power to give. She takes a pencil, drops fifty cents in his cup: the price of a dozen eggs.
“God bless you,” he says.
Unlikely.
34
Wed, Nov 10/71
I had an epiphany today. TA is the path to self-enlightenment.
The Transactional Analysis workshop merely skimmed the texts. It takes her weeks to read them cover-to-cover, the revelations in them carving out a new space inside her. It’s humbling to discover she operates out of a “dependent child ego state” most of the time with periodic forays into self-righteous, “critical parent.” Worse to accept she didn’t break away from Mother and Daddy in the bold, autonomous way she thought she had but simply transferred their authority over her to Ron.
It’s not his fault she realizes one morning, making hospital corners with a freshly laundered sheet. He’s played the part she cast him in, taking Mother and Daddy’s place in deciding what’s best for her: finish your degree, don’t be alone with strange men, no grocery shopping without me, no driving in heavy traffic, no walking on the county road, no more Honeywell Project.
She liked herself better when she took risks, found Ron sexier when they took them together. She had more moxie their first few years, she’s sure of it. She would’ve gone to that march with Carl and Helen even if Ron hadn’t. She didn’t let the first three pernicious letters harass her into silence and passivity. But Tavis was in her world when the fourth came and that made a difference to Ron. To her too, to be honest.
As she fluffs a pillow, grips it with her chin and stuffs it into an embroidered case, her mind opens to the sheer-as-a-cobweb possibility that civil rights and antiwar protests are Parental lectures doomed to fail. Injustice won’t disappear in the world unless it disappears from everyone’s hearts. And that won’t happen unless everyone learns what she’s learning.
Smoothing out the orange chenille bedspread Grace gave them for their fifth anniversary, she thinks back to before Eldon Jukes, when life held infinite possibilities and she vowed to leave big footprints in the snow. To matter. To be someone. Maybe all girls have yearning fantasies, then settle for the smallness of the lives they get.
Next evening, seated at the oak desk in their bedroom, Ron close by in his leather chair, she reads him a passage about the Parent-Child nature of religion from I’m OK—You’re OK. He keeps his eyes on a book called Ball Four, responds with what sounds like polite indifference. “I hope you don’t think I require a child-like acceptance of religious dogma as an act of faith from anyone in Open Door.”
“I don’t know what you require.” She’s assumed certain things about his beliefs and rarely probed them. Who was she to doubt he had the answers to the questions that matter? “If you read this book, we can talk about how to use it in church. I could share my workshop notes with the youth group. If I’d known this stuff earlier, my life might’ve been different.”
She might’ve been sympathetic to Mother, less needy of a ride from Eldon Jukes or rescuing by Ron.
He keeps on reading.
“Ron?”
He sets his book upside down on the floor and stands, a put-upon look on his face. “Two points,” he says, his hands deep in his bathrobe pockets. “First, divine grace is God’s way of saying You’re OK. It’s all the psychology a person needs. Second, transactional analysis is only a theory.”
“I’d say God is a theory too, wouldn’t you?”
He gives her the forbearing look she knows too well. “It concerns me how susceptible you are to ideas from a book.”
“Like you and the Bible?”
His face reddens. “The Bible was inspired by God.”
A chip of her respect for him falls to
the floor. She thought he’d be more open. “Who’s to say I’m OK—You’re OK wasn’t too? Did God stop inspiring people thousands of years ago?”
He shakes his head, his face tight.
Tavis cries out for a glass of water.
Ron aims a finger at her like a dart, says, “I’ll go.”
She wonders why she’s not sorry for upsetting him, why she’s alive inside with a strange new music.
That night she dreams she’s in a talent show, on stage, posing like a child, finger in mouth, wearing a short, flouncy dress and no panties, for crying out loud. She says, “Hawo, my name is Linda.” The all-female audience laughs when she glances offstage as if for approval. She points to her forehead and recites, “There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. And when she would pee, she’d make a mess of me.” The women laugh again. She tells them her father would’ve killed her for saying that when she was a kid.
Ten days later she phones Artie on the pretense of inviting him to Thanksgiving dinner. She knows he’ll turn her down. He dishes up turkey for “his kids” at the shelter every year. In truth she has called to whine about Ron’s reluctance to discuss TA with her.
She can hear Artie fogging his glasses and wiping them on something, buying time.
“Don’t do anything rash,” he says. “We didn’t study that shit in seminary. He’ll come around eventually. I might have trouble with it too if you were my wife. I’m no prize, in case you were thinking otherwise.”
She’s mortified to have been so transparent.
35
Mon, Sept 18/72
I’ve tiptoed in a dozen times to look at T sleeping. So relieved he’s back. Crazy w/jealousy wondering if soul fragments of him are living somewhere w/out me. He was so cute at dinner, patting my arm, saying good job, Mommy honey, when I told him I’d made it to my 1st day of work on time. Embarrassing how proud I am of that. Reach out your hands & take all the responsibility you want, R told me when I said he was protecting me from it.