Becoming Lin

by Tricia Dower

  Jackie nods at her, says, “You’re most welcome. Everyone is always most welcome.” She closes her eyes again. Her husband turns on a tape recorder. The room goes quiet enough to accent the whir of the tape and her asthmatic breathing until a voice like grinding gears erupts from her. “Everybody comfy, everybody’s tukhes on a soft seat?”

  “Yes, Rhonda,” the regulars say in unison.

  Lin stifles a laugh. Rhonda must be from Long Island.

  Angel leans over and whispers, “She greets us the same way every week.”

  Jackie, suddenly animated, lowers the recliner’s footrest and peers around like a scout. The voice says, “May you have nothing but joy this evening. Who’s first?”

  Angel says, “My friend, Lin, if that’s okay with everybody else?” The others all nod.

  A stab of stage fright. A list of possible questions. Is there a God? What’s the point of war? Does someone come into my apartment when I’m away? Why didn’t Eldon Jukes kill me? Where are Helen and Carl? How is it you know stuff we don’t? Lin regrets her heavy black sweater in this overheated room. Angel said everybody gets only one question per session. If Lin were alone with Jackie/Rhonda, she might ask a pathetic, whiny question like: What’s happening to me? She settles on one she hopes is more selfless. “Angel told me you said we create scripts for our lives. What duty do we have to be sure our scripts don’t harm innocent children?”

  Jackie’s eyes fix on Lin with a hard look. The voice coming from her throat says, “Name and location of this child, please.”

  “I’m speaking of children in general,” Lin says.

  “You can’t outfox this vixen,” the voice says. “I need the child’s name and location.”

  Lin’s face goes hot. She wants to say, if you’re all-seeing, you know. She slumps against Angel and whispers, “Do I have to say he’s in your apartment?” It doesn’t feel safe.

  Angel whispers back, “Only the town and state.”

  “Tavis Brunson, Hopkins, Minnesota.”

  “Aha, okay, I have him now.” Jackie smiles, or is it Rhonda? “A dumpling, a sweetheart, an ancient soul. You’ve written many scripts with this one.”

  “I have?”

  “Would I lie to you?” The voice tells Lin any script she and Tavis have written together can only increase his knowledge and understanding. She leans an elbow on the recliner and rests her chin on her fist. Her mouth forms a smug smile. “Can we talk? I suspect you’re more afraid of losing him than you are of harming him. You forget you are eternal. If you people didn’t go so meshuge over time, you’d realize a thousand years are like yesterday. He has always been with you and always will be.”

  Lin bends toward her, hands on knees. “I should explain the situation. My husband and I live apart at the moment and Tavis is with me except on weekends. What should I be doing to help him adjust to this?”

  “There’s no should or shouldn’t,” the voice says. “Only experiences to stretch your consciousness. Look for the story you’re telling each other and you’ll have your answer. Next?”

  On the drive home, Angel says, “The way Rhonda makes you figure out stuff for yourself can be infuriating. But she says that’s how we grow.”

  Lin says only, “Hmm.” Eight bucks would’ve gassed up the Fury.

  40

  Fri, Apr 7/72

  T asked why I slept in the “guess” room last nite. I said to be closer to you. He said because monsters got in? R said, See what you did? He took T to Grace’s after breakfast so we could continue tormenting each other. He looked as bad as I felt, said he’d been up 1/2 the night praying for guidance, wanted me to know it’s OK w/him if I drop out of church until I get my faith back, like it’s something I pawned. They’d take it out on you, I said, & I couldn’t bear that. He told me again that if I go, T stays & I’ll have to support myself. I went into T’s room & stared at the dent in his pillow where his head had been, buried my nose in its sweet, sweaty smell & tried to imagine a day w/out him. What a mess I’ve made of things.

  She shifts her clothes to the downstairs bedroom, tells Ron she’ll be there every night, aspiring to an Emancipated Adult ego state, but he’s not to worry. She’ll continue serving as housekeeper, cook and nanny.

  “You’re acting childish,” he says.

  “How else would I act?”

  Grace phones, says she’s spoken to Ron about giving more attention to Lin’s needs. “I told him his father was often too tired to listen to my problems or answer my spiritual questions. He was my pastor, too, as Ronnie is yours.”

  If Lin has any pastor at all, it’s Artie.

  One week goes by in a thundercloud of silence. Then another. Ron is often no more than a thud of footsteps on the stairs, a door closing, a sneeze. She tries to get up first in the morning so the sound of him through the guest room walls—showering, brushing his teeth, spitting—won’t set her nerves on fire. A Wild Kingdom episode puts her off meat and everything else tastes dry as bark. She says: “Breakfast, boys!” “Lunch, boys!” “Dinner, boys!” Recalls Mother’s anguished the hired help doesn’t eat with the family years ago, on the day Daddy moved out. Sits with her own family while they eat, chatting as though she’s been lobotomized, ignoring Ron’s “super” after the most ordinary of statements, a word she suspects he’s picked up from the youth group he advises. Once Tavis is in bed, she retreats to her room and tries to articulate her feelings in her journal. But her mind is bewildered, her hand crabbed with pain. She manages only half-sentences of broken letters.

  When she can’t sleep and the ache of uncertainty is more than she can bear, she phones Artie, sits cross-legged on the kitchen floor in her nightgown, cradling the receiver, talking low. He fills her in on the antiwar efforts he continues to pursue with an optimism bordering on lunacy. Ron dropped out of the clergy activist group some time ago but Artie’s still involved. Although the Honeywell Project has lost steam, he keeps in touch with some of the members. It’s Artie who tells her an international Methodist conference has called for peace in no uncertain terms. Ron hasn’t mentioned it but, then, why would he tell the housekeeper, cook and nanny?

  Sometimes Artie has an uncanny sense of what she needs to hear, like the night he reports the shelter has taken in an eleven-year-old boy whose father murdered the child’s mother in front of him in an alley outside their apartment building. “When the cops showed up,” he says, “the dad held a knife to the kid’s throat until an officer sneaking up behind felled him with a bullet. You can’t have a normal childhood after a situation like that.”

  She tells him about Eldon Jukes, the story spilling from her in a breathless stream. “That’s one prison of a tale,” he says. “It may take a long time for the girl still trapped in it to feel safe enough to break free. Be patient with her, okay?”

  When she does sleep she dreams of entering one-way streets the wrong way, of running down fire escapes, getting trapped in buildings that turn out to be mazes.

  Grace drops by to say, “What you have is a sickness of the spirit. The cure is to hand over your will to God and accept your responsibility to Him and your family.” Lin takes out her anger at Grace’s sanctimony on Ron, says if God’s in charge, He must want all of this to happen.

  Tavis develops an imaginary friend named Johnson who requires a plate and a chair at meals. Johnson’s a scaredy cat, afraid of monsters, thunder and clowns. Several times a day Lin has to say, “Be brave like Tavis, Johnson” and leave a light on at night because Johnson’s afraid of the dark. Ron says she has brought this on by sleeping downstairs and confusing Tavis. She says it proves he needs to be with other children in daycare. Secretly she applauds her son for having an imaginative private life. Whenever Johnson wets the bed, she doesn’t tell Ron, surreptitiously changes the sheets and gives both boys a quick bath.

  One night Ron catches her coming out of the bathroom wearing only a t
owel. “Look at your collarbones,” he says. “One of these days you’ll turn sideways and disappear. If you think a hunger strike will soften me up, think again.” She doesn’t know what she thinks but she likes the thought of taking up less room, becoming light as smoke, each pound lost a slice off of her unworthy self. She’s down to ninety-six pounds. “Even Twiggy weighs more than you,” he says. “Twiggy is taller,” she says. He threatens to have her hospitalized on suspicion of mental illness. “If you don’t start eating more I’ll do it, Lin, I swear it. They’ll declare you an unfit mother.” She shrugs and slips into her room where he can’t see, starts shaking so violently she bites through her lip trying to keep her mouth still. She makes a point of eating more than usual after that when he’s watching, anxiously checks the Tribune want ads. The only job she qualifies for is Salad Girl.

  Ron returns from the spring conference of Minnesota clergy with a softer edge. He asks to speak with her one evening, an unusual request. It’s been a month since she started sleeping downstairs and they’ve exchanged few words after dinner. They put Tavis to bed and sit on the back steps under a violet sky, the warm, earthy-smelling air promising summer. She sits a step below him so their hips and legs won’t touch, recalls nights as a kid on the front stoop in Stony River, watching people and cars go by. There’s little to see at the back of the parsonage besides the woods. The rotary clothesline lists to one side, rusting. A garden bed she neglected to clean out before winter has transformed itself into a shelter for garter snakes that slither in and out of the decayed plants.

  “Time to mow,” he says, reaching down and breaking off a handful of purple clover, easing the awkward tension between them. He tells her Bishop Washburn recited statements that will go in a book of resolutions. “One of them actually calls what we did in Indochina a crime against humanity.” He unfolds a paper he’s brought out with him, shaking his head in amazement. “And listen to this. We have sinned against our brothers and sisters, against the earth and our Creator.” His voice breaks, the voice that can bring her to her knees if she lets it. “We have paid our taxes without protest; we have closed our eyes to the horror of our deeds; we have driven families from their homes into endless lines tracking across the pockmarked earth.” He pulls out a handkerchief, blows his nose. “Long time since I’ve been so moved.”

  “They could’ve written that years ago,” she says. “It was as true then as it is now.”

  “I know, I know, but the church has been as divided as the country. What moved me is how unequivocal the statement is, how the voices of peace prevailed over the others somehow.” He lays a hand on her shoulder. “But that’s only part of what I wanted to say to you. Artie was at the conference, of course. I never told you I’ve been jealous since the day you met him. I know you find something in him you don’t in me. I’ve hated him for that. Contemptible, isn’t it?”

  She turns, looks up at him. “There’s nothing…you know…between Artie and me.”

  He looks at her expectantly but she doesn’t go on, doesn’t know what she could say that wouldn’t wound him.

  He clears his throat. “He told me that during the bishop’s talk he thought about how intrepid I’d been to come out against the war as early as I did. He spoke against it even sooner, so he was praising himself as well—he’s not the humblest guy I know. Anyway, it struck me it was you who gave me the courage to speak out when I did and that I’d gone off on that Freedom Ride to find myself before committing to the ministry while you never had such a chance.”

  “I didn’t give myself one.”

  “No, you cast your lot with me and lost.”

  She shakes her head, says, “No,” but he holds up a hand.

  “Let me finish. Washburn gave a short homily about Christian marriage on the last day and it was as if he’d written it for me. He said it’s not love if the person you love doesn’t feel free. He also said God has a different plan for every marriage. I don’t know what God’s plan is for ours but if you need to live without me for a year, then I want that for you.” His voice cracks again. “And I won’t stand in your way if you want to take Tavis.” Tears shimmer in his eyes.

  She sucks in a breath. “No conditions?”

  “We’d have to talk about where you’ll live, of course, and who’ll take care of him while you’re at work and how often I’ll see him.”

  “Well, sure. But you’d let him go with me,” she says slowly to clarify, “even though you think I’m nuts.”

  He waves her words away. “I don’t think you’re nuts. I just want you to stop losing weight. Maybe time away will heal you. I had a long talk with Mom yesterday. She said, ‘God sent this woman to you. Keep praying until you understand why.’”

  “Grace said that?”

  “Yes. She wants to help us make this work. She’ll rent out her place and move into the parsonage while you’re gone. Keep house for me and take over for you in church.”

  Lin smiles to herself. Grace will have her little boy back.

  “I do have one request, a condition, if you will. Come back upstairs until you move.”

  It occurs to her that life is one long string of negotiations. “I can do that,” she says.

  “Super.”

  41

  She arrives home from work on an October Monday to the deep sense someone has been in her apartment while she was gone. She feels it in her racing heart, senses it in the air, as though the molecules of oxygen have rearranged themselves. There’s a faint acidic smell. Masculine. Not Lenny’s sweat or the cologne he tries to mask it with. FBI? For a sickening moment she wonders if whoever entered might still be there, considers grabbing Tavis and getting the hell out.

  He’s pestering for dinner as usual, playing on her guilt for his having had only a cookie and a cup of juice since lunch. “Soon, soon,” she says, trying to slow her breathing and calm her shaky voice, disgusted with herself for being so fearful.

  The drapes are as she leaves them each day, agape on the side nearest Charles’s tree so daylight can feed the tiny veins in its leaves while she’s gone. She shoves the other side open and checks the sliding glass door: still locked. The useless tree stands there, a deaf, dumb witness. “Speak!” she wants to shout at it. “Tell me who was here.” She flings open cupboards and closets, roots through drawers like a madwoman. Nothing seems to be missing. Tavis asks what she’s looking for. “I have a hankering for chocolate,” she says, “and was hoping I hid some.”

  He says, “Me too” and she hurries him out the door, down the stairs, across the parking lot and over the boulevard to Tom Thumb for an Almond Joy, singing, “Sometimes you feel like a nut.” No need for him to be terrified too.

  Days remain bright but the light grows thin. The sense persists that someone invades her apartment when she’s at work. Lenny knocks one Saturday as she crams for insurance exams, trying to wrap her head around the concept of risk. He stops by once a week, always when Tavis is gone. She usually opens the door a crack, tells him she’s fine and sends him on his way. This time he insists on stepping inside, says he heard a scraping noise before she opened the door. She shows him the cement block. His mouth tightens like Daddy’s used to when she disappointed him. “You should’ve told me,” he says. He comes back later and installs a chain lock. Trying to be cagey? If he’s prowling around her place on the sly, he’s already seen the block.

  Despite her efforts to discourage him, the Wrestler attempts to engage her in conversation on the bus, his smile like what big teeth you have, Grandma. A flare of pride caught her off-guard one morning and she mistakenly boasted about Tavis. Since then he has made a point of asking if her “little boy” is happy. On the chance he’s a pervert, she varies her route to the bus stop so he won’t know where she lives.

  She springs for her own copy of Seth Speaks. The library won’t let her renew theirs again. She reads it as faithfully as Ron does the New Testament and
at night, so revelations can seep into her dreams, inject her with wisdom and make her more at peace. The thorny scientific nuggets give her something to reach for. Seth claims Minneapolis is a fertile area where intense mental images can easily manifest themselves in physical events. It has to do with electromagnetic energy. (Physics wasn’t her strongest subject.) She considers the possibility her thoughts bring someone into her apartment when she’s gone, dreads opening her door each evening lest she find some poor soul fragment acting out a scene her mind has materialized. Seth says it’s possible to see or hear all that has ever happened. She could be projecting horrifying things she’s seen or heard about over the years: Thalidomide babies with flipper arms, kids in iron lungs, brains exploding all over Jackie Kennedy’s pink Chanel suit, the FBI’s dirty tricks, the war, Eldon Jukes, Eldon Jukes, Eldon Jukes. Her imagination could even have created those malevolent letters. She pictures her fearful thoughts as spiders that could live forever if she lets them, like Anthony said about real ones. Whenever one crawls into her mind she smashes it with the cement block.

  November nights fall earlier and earlier, behind a still-brilliant Venus blazing low in the southwest. Lights go on at midday and the radio warns of frost. Looking out at the growing dark through the Policy Service windows, she feels like a stone sinking in deep water. Her year away is dwindling. Over two months gone and she doesn’t feel any more emancipated. She spoons out the hours without Tavis like vile-tasting medicine until she begins to appreciate, as Angel urges, how lucky she is to be free of fart jokes, stomping, sobbing and wee-wee grabbing for two days and nights a week. She begins to happily swallow the time it allows her to read, think and study. Easily passes Principles of Insurance and Insurance Company Operations. Cashes the bonus checks, wraps the fifty singles in foil and stashes the package in the freezer. The money would be safer in the bank but Ron gets the statements.