The Other Side

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by Mary Gordon


  Ellen grew genuinely fond of Marilyn only when she brought her bastard baby home. She liked Marilyn as a hippie, with her sandals, peasant blouses, and unshaven legs, her baby slung in front of her or carried on her back. Had Ellen liked her then to spite Theresa? She said: “It’s a good thing, you’ve gone looking for adventure.” She liked having a descendant with dark skin; she’d powdered Jeremiah’s brown behind as if it were a new fruit she had heard of but had never come across. She’d liked all of Marilyn’s husbands, all three of them. She admired them for their imaginative failures. She defended them against Theresa’s acid comments and Ray’s abashed, shamefaced apologies and Vincent’s worry they would do Marilyn harm. She liked them as voluptuous and healthy animals, for all Marilyn’s husbands had been quite good-looking; handy too, around the house.

  Why was he holding her bare foot? Why was he on his knees before her in the kitchen? Why was he cutting her toenails? What did it mean about the two of them? She thinks of her grandparents’ physical life. The various components of it, food, dirt, animals, children, childbirth, menstrual blood, fluids of sickness, sex. It isn’t difficult to think of Vincent and Ellen as lovers. Easier for Marilyn to think of them as lovers than her parents, with her mother’s horror of disorder. Soil. Theresa had told them to eat nothing at their grandmothers’. She isn’t clean, Theresa had said.

  All the delicious foods, the warm sweet puddings, heavy breads, carrots spilling their moisture into meat and taking in that juice, all those succulent foods were made dangerous by the mother’s word. Theresa would come into her mother’s kitchen, take the dishes from the cupboards, and wash them before she put them on the table. Did she do this to enrage her mother? No, though that was part of it. Theresa believed in contamination. She would bring her children up in modern life, safe from her mother’s filth.

  Marilyn smooths one of her grandmother’s braids, in homage to her grandfather’s devotion to her. He was, he is devoted to you, she thinks. How did you make him be like that? And why haven’t I?

  She wonders if any woman could now. Devotion. She wonders what the word could mean. A wholeness of attention. Fixed regard. The body’s posture: bending towards. Here I stand, bending towards you. There is nothing you cannot ask.

  She thinks of her grandfather’s body. Sexual even now. Women responded to him, knowing his sympathy for them. The women at the home with him. The poor nun that Cam made fun of.

  All of us, even Sheilah, we all felt favored in his sight. But we were wrong. Only his wife was favored.

  He wasn’t a good father, she thought. The children of lovers are orphans. Someone had said that to her once. His devotion was to the body, the idea, the past and changing present of the physical existence of his wife. This had robbed his children of a childhood. Each one of them was starved. She didn’t know about Dan’s father. But about the daughters she knew. Magdalene, Theresa: the daughters had been starved. You saw the hungry look around the eyes, the mouth.

  Vincent had liked Theresa. But as a child, she must have seen his gaze fixed on his wife. Which the harsh child Theresa never had forgiven. Never would forgive. Theresa could never share regard.

  Marilyn thinks of her mother’s harshness, of her frightened father, flattened out. How could a daughter of Theresa’s inspire devotion?

  She wonders if Cam has. With this lover, Ira Silverman. She’d never thought it would happen to Cam, she’d thought it was what made her different from Cam: she had a sexual life, Cam had chastity. She had abundance, Cam was spare. Cam was honorable, she was physical. Cam’s honorableness had desexed her, as Marilyn’s physicalness had made her weak. Ashamed, Marilyn thinks: I’ve loved Cam all my life, but I was glad that I had something she didn’t. Now it doesn’t split apart, the world that they divided up. The crack, neat, down the center, so the crystal breaks apart in perfect halves, no longer stays straight. It’s ragged. Marilyn is without a man; she runs the Clinica de Salud, she’s a force in the community—its physical as well as its political life. And Cam is happy with a lover. Cam is like Ellen now: the beloved of a man.

  But no, Marilyn thinks, she doesn’t have what Ellen had. Neither of us does. She has something, but not the whole. She can’t sit with her mate out in the garden and call out his name, saying: “Bring me the sweater from the back of that chair. Is the light on in the kitchen?” She can’t come to holidays, throwing off her coat, brushing the snow from his collar, scolding, “He’ll catch his death one day. He never wears a hat.”

  She can’t have any of that, the wages of legitimate and sanctioned coupling. Her sterling cousin now is an adulteress. Adulteress, a word that shines, metallic, luminescent, charged.

  But Marilyn is happy for her. She thinks of poor Bob Ulichni. And of Magdalene. The weights dragging her cousin down. Cam deserves some kind of simple happiness.

  Marilyn thinks that it has always been she, after desire took its course, who bent her body in the posture of attention to the man. She has bent, curved, hollowed out her body to make a shape accommodating to the men, the errors, of her life.

  She knows she will again.

  Marilyn uncurls her grandmother’s hand and lays it flat on the nylon sheet. She thinks that no one in this world could get what Ellen got. For a moment she is angry at her grandmother. Jealous of her. But she thinks of her grandmother’s pleasure, her belated pleasure, in her, Marilyn’s, life, of her grandmother’s surprising support, of her affection for these grandsons-in-law, and these children of different fathers. She holds her grandmother’s hand. She thinks of her children in the new house she has bought them. Not a nice house, she knows that, but they’re happy there. Without a man. All of them like it better that way. A weight has been lifted off them, the presence of the angry husband. The punishing father.

  Her children. She wants to tell her grandmother something about the children. Ellen moves her head. Opens her eyes, seems to understand that she is seeing something. As if understanding, for the moment, were within her grasp.

  Marilyn wants to say how good they are, the three of them, her children. Good children, Gran, she wants to say. Are they happy? Who asks that now? Who could tell?

  She says to her grandmother, bending towards her ear: “You had a life. That’s what I want for them. That’s all I want. That they have a life.”

  She goes to the back steps to have a cigarette. Her brother, John, is there already, smoking. Of the whole family, only the two of them still smoke. The kinship pleases her, it is something that they share, although she’s seen, in working in the hospital, terrible deaths from lung cancer. She should know better; she should, stop; she should urge John to stop; there is nothing on earth good in doing what they are doing. Yet she’s glad they’re doing it.

  She leans her head on his shoulder and he flinches at the touch.

  She wants to say: How has all this happened to you? You used to have so much.

  “Don’t jump, it’s only me,” she says.

  He laughs or grunts. His teeth are terrible.

  She wants to say: I remember your white teeth, those square teeth, they were bluish white.

  “She all right?” he says.

  “Resting.”

  “It’s good, your being here. I don’t trust that other one. What the hell did she do to the old lady to get her hooks into her that way?”

  She sees his anguish at the presence of Mary Davenport, who offended Vincent. Of her taking up the family space. Or else he never would have said “the old lady.”

  “You see it sometimes,” she says. “Ellen confuses her with someone from her childhood. She doesn’t see who she really is.”

  And you, she thinks, what do you see? And how do you live?

  “I’d like you to come out again sometime,” she says. “Stay longer, though. Stay in the new house. The kids would love to see you.”

  He came once. She never knew why. Something she couldn’t give him.

  He drove all the way across the country and then stayed one day. She want
s to say: What happened, that time you came? What did you want that time?

  She doesn’t say it. She sits silent, smoking.

  He says, “Yeah, well, I’ve got this new job now. Tough getting time off when you’re starting.”

  He was married that time he came to California. Better off.

  What happened to that marriage? No one knows. That marriage, thinks Marilyn. We use the word that in front of the word marriage as they never would. Our parents. Our grandparents. As if marriages were replaceable. As if they were interchangeable. You got another, and you went on with your life. Which was the case. So you were right to say “that” marriage, implying another one.

  It was easy for them all, the family, to act as if it hadn’t happened, that marriage. But not for Marilyn. She’d liked the wife. The wife. How can I call her that? Jo, her name was. Josephine? Marilyn never knew.

  She remembered the cards in his suitcase. Had he wanted her to see them? She’d sat on the single bed, her twelve-year-old Vincent’s bed, as John unpacked. She’d shoved the suitcase over, lying on the bed, resting her head on her propped arm like a happy teenager. She was always glad to see him. For a little while he didn’t seem like a ruin. She saw the cards on top of the neatly folded shirts. Hand-drawn messages on index cards. “Don’t miss us too much. We miss you.” And the other, “Daddy. John. We love you with all our heart.”

  Jo’s children called him Daddy. Marilyn was happy at that. She thought he must have a life.

  She thinks of Jo’s looks now. Poor Jo. She had the kind of hair that meant a man would treat her badly. Murdered hair. Dyed, dyed, and dyed again, each time a desperate color.

  Marilyn walks now with her brother up and down her grandparents’ back yard. He was supposed to care for it in the time Vincent has been away. She sees that he hasn’t done a good job and wonders if the sprouting weeds will be a source of agitation for her grandfather when he comes home. Vincent is almost ninety years old. Has he decided in the last part of his life that he will give in to the tendency of the world to destroy order? Or has his refusal to give in to this kept his back straight and his fingers competent? She’d like to stop walking now, stoop down, and pull up weeds. But she’s afraid that it will hurt her brother, so she doesn’t.

  She thinks about a barbecue they had for her, John and his wife, Jo, on the patio of their apartment in Virginia. It had the heavy desolation of apartment complexes built on the cheap to suggest contained, professional existences: childless lawyers who will live here for the period of their establishment until they have grown ready for the larger house, with its responsibility of sloping lawn. The truth is far from this. The truth, she’d learned from being there, the truth that hung above the flat, inadequately insulated roofs so that the air brings the tenants no refreshment, even on the clearest days, is that these are the homes of single or re-married mothers who are waitresses or clerks at the cable-TV office or the Office of the Warden of the County Jail. Or of divorced men, refusing to hang up even one picture or to buy one dish towel. Rowdy groups of boys in their early twenties, menswear salesmen, television salesmen in department stores in closed-off malls. A year, two years after their completion, these places—called Dutch Garden, Tudor Village, Tara—all decay. The bad building, the cut corners, rise up like the family insanity that can no longer be concealed. The Styrofoam tiles fall from the kitchen ceiling; the tin lighting fixtures bend; the beige linoleum cracks and buckles underfoot. The fake brick of the patio becomes undone in the first winter. Fights break out in the parking lot. Men take off in their angry cars, leaving no forwarding address. The women and the children, torpid from abandonment, sit around the greenish swimming pool.

  The day that Marilyn was there, at John and Jo’s apartment, John cooked hot dogs on a hibachi. Jo opened the sliding doors and brought out mustard, paper plates, and mayonnaise. She was wearing cut-off jeans and a red-checkered halter. Her hair was caught up in a clip. The shorts cut cruelly at her thighs. Her stomach hung over the too-tight waist; her midriff rippled and her breasts looked choked by the built-in brassiere of the check halter.

  John looked up at her. “You look like hell,” he said, and turned away, back to his cooking, and to light a cigarette.

  Three years later, in her grandparents’ garden, Marilyn decides to pull a weed. She should have told her brother not to speak to his wife, to anyone like that. Not to his wife, who was so good to him, who loved him. She should have warned Jo he would leave her, that it wouldn’t be her fault, that there was nothing she could do or had done. It would happen. One night he wouldn’t come home from work. One morning he would drive away and that would be the end of it. She should have said something, not just stood up as she did, asking if she could do anything to help, saying how much she loved a barbecue, how lucky they were to have this nice patio. She should have stood up then and said: “This is hopeless. This is terrible. Do something.”

  John sees her pulling up the weed.

  “You think I’m as fucked up as everyone else. You think I can’t even pull up their fucking weeds right.”

  “Don’t get paranoid,” she lies, “I pulled a weed.”

  “It’s not like you’re such a hot shit about it. Your property always looked like a piece of shit. Every house you ever lived in looked like a piece of shit.”

  “You should see this one, Johnny. This one is the worst.”

  She will not let him hurt her. No: he has hurt her. She has not made her surroundings beautiful. Will not, her husbands have told her. Cannot, she has always said.

  She won’t let her brother see that he has touched her shame. Or afterwards remorse will make him shameful. Shame causes him to suffer and strike out. The ripples of his shame will cause a tremor to go through the family house. Who knows what object the tremor will cause to shatter or break.

  Go on, she tells herself. Go on to something else. But what? Like a roulette wheel, her mind spins blindly. Can she bring something to rest, a topic, an idea that won’t cause him anger or remorse? Her brother, like a burn victim, must be approached with care. Only a few intact spots can be touched.

  Animals, she thinks, he likes animals. She remembers that he has a dog.

  “How’s your dog?”

  “Good.”

  She sees there isn’t much conversation possible on the subject of animals. Not with him.

  “He does OK while you’re at work?”

  “Jesus, Marilyn, what the fuck do you think? What do you want him to do? Go out and get a job himself? He hangs out in my room. Mom doesn’t want him in the living room. She doesn’t want him shedding on the broadloom.”

  Broadloom. Her mother’s word. The fierce saving for it: pennies stolen from the family pleasure. And the pride, the interdictions: Don’t walk on it with your shoes on. No food on the broadloom. Forbidding her father to smoke in the room with it. The yearned-for, unapproached God. And her brother is still there.

  She has nothing more to say to him. She wants to help, but she will never be of help. There is no helping him. She knows that. He knows it. When she tries, it only makes it worse.

  “I’m going to go back in to Gran now.”

  John shrugs.

  He wants to say, “Don’t go because of me,” but he knows it wouldn’t come out right, she’d think he was just being a shit. Sarcastic, trying to sound smart. He wishes he could make her understand that he knows he made her go, but he didn’t want to. Now he understands why he didn’t pull up the weeds. Now he knows that he was right. His mother should have done it. Got down on her goddamn knees and pulled the weeds out of the ground if she cared so much about her parents. But not her. Couldn’t get her out of the church to do anything that anybody cared about. Now he remembers why he didn’t pull the weeds. It wasn’t his job. It was his mother’s.

  He wishes he could make her do it. He’d like to push her down to her knees, shove her nose into the dirt, make her get her hands dirty. Say, “You could do one goddamn thing for your family. Why shou
ld I have to do everything?” He knows there’s no way he could make her. The two of them could stand in the same spot until the end of the world and he could never make her.

  But it’s her job. He’s not going to do it now.

  He sees his grandfather’s face. His grandfather will be disappointed in him. He feels furious. What right does the old man have to be disappointed? Then he remembers Vincent’s asking him and his saying yes, he’d do it. “Yes, Granddad,” he said, “you don’t have to worry, I’ll handle it.”

  But he hadn’t handled it. And now his grandfather will be disappointed. Of all the looks he makes people have on their faces, this is the one John can’t stand most. He wants to run away again so he won’t have to see that look on his grandfather’s face.

  He kneels down on the stones. Maybe if he works very hard he’ll be able to do it. He knows he can; he’ll just work really hard. He pulls up weeds, some with white flowers, some with oblong pointed leaves. Twelve of them are on the ground, uprooted, taken care of. Then he hears his mother’s voice. He sees her standing on the grass above him.

  “Better late than never,” his mother says.

  What does Theresa think as she stands looking at her kneeling son?

  Is she sorry for his failures, that he can’t make a life?

  Is she ashamed and worried that perhaps she has had some part in it? Does she believe the science, gossip, journalism of the age that points its finger at the mother? At the first sign of rebellion, bad grades, drug abuse, sexual deviation, financial disgrace, the mother is examined under the cruel public light of her children’s history and has no chance of ever being judged free of fault. Has she felt stupefied by this glaring, public light?

 

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