She Matters

by Susanna Sonnenberg

  We were on. I dialed her number. I loved a new beginning, launched myself at candidates, hoping for the perfect companion. Until Missoula and its adventure of revised identity, my main company had been men. Usually, they’d been lovers first, then became my close friends. I knew how to make men last, trusted their allegiance and their reliable limitations. Women didn’t last. Unable to help my hope and longing at the start, I opened myself, gave away everything, immersed in a woman as if I wished to disappear. Things blew up, or we lost focus on each other. I never saw it was a pattern, the fruitless lesson. Each friendship ended, like a fabulous limited run.

  Patricia took me to Blue Mountain, a hike that gave us a view of the Missoula valley. Little rocks spit out from under my new sturdy boots as we worked our way higher, and then we stopped, out of breath, the vista at an angle to the river below so that stands of trees aligned to erase the new developments and tracts of box stores, revealing soft hills, the gaping sky. She told how she’d met her husband, Mark, laughing at how young she’d been. I told how I’d met my boyfriend Christopher six months earlier, and now here I was. Here I was, living where he wanted to, in Montana. We compared favorite Alice Munro stories, which had affected us when, our desperate admiration. Let’s read each other, we said, flattered by the other’s interest.

  “You guys should come to dinner. Sunday?” The friendship would hurry and deepen. On that night she opened the door, releasing a fragrant spell, smells of roast chicken, sauces. Mark clapped our shoulders and pulled us in. He poured us all scotch, turned the blues music up. At his friendly questions, Christopher and I explained ourselves, and the two of them remarked, their opinions noisy and enjoyed. Ice melted in the glasses and made room for itself. I stood before their wall of books and recognized editions. Patricia and I had started our collections at the same cultural moment. That bright red Cheever, the accumulated Norton anthologies of college, the sporty Vintage trade paperbacks of first apartments. Far from my home city and reliable friends, I could trust the books and the lovely woman who had hung on to them, and who wrote fiction, wanted to feed us, laughed big at embarrassments and literary gossip. “Tell me more,” she said. “What were the Paris Review parties like? You’ve met so-and-so? What’s he like?” She couldn’t believe I’d volunteered to evacuate such a world.

  Patricia lived where she’d been born. Her parents had been born here. She’d grown, gone away, come back, and inhabited a town peopled by doctors and florists and mechanics who’d walked the halls of the high school when she did; lawyers, professors, bakers, engineers whose brothers had been arrested after parties; arborists, farmers, journalists, real-estate agents, and landscapers whose sisters had divorced her cousins. She shrugged at the casual exposure, felt happily known.

  In our early days, Patricia loved to do “big city” things with me, as if we were our own dolls. She’d suggest places for cheap lunches, seeing if I liked them, enjoying the fresh take a newcomer could get away with. Service always took awhile, me at first in an urban huff, but I copied her manners and learned the local way. She often walked the neighborhood mile from her house to her parents’, which was on the National Historic Register. In summers the whole family went to a cabin. You picked huckleberries until dark, she said. You floated the rivers, tubing, casting. I’d never heard of huckleberries, or morel mushrooms, didn’t know these river terms. She tended tomato plants in the sunniest spot of her yard. In spring she gave me garish orange poppies dug up from her garden, shaking earth from the roots as she handed them over. “Just put them in anywhere,” she said to dubious me. “They’ll do great.”

  • • •

  A year and a half later I was waiting for her at a rear table, impatient, a bitter day in late winter. The restaurant was dark and almost empty. Patricia was late. From the table I watched the white space where the windows looked onto the street. A silhouette broke through the whiteness, her shape grew distinct. She was undoing scarf and layers as she hurried in.

  “Hi!” she said. She was too cheerful to resent, bending to kiss me, breathless from the cold. “The sun’s out! How are you, sweetie?”

  “Okay.”

  She dropped her gloves and hat by her feet, sat, laced the strap of her handbag over her chair. I waited. Again, but as if for the first time, she said, “How are you?”

  “Not good,” I said. “I have to— I’m having an abortion.”

  Her face then. I saw the change. The ashen shadow, the tense retreat. Christopher was my closest friend, but he was, by definition, too close for this. I needed a woman, someone who understood the body’s rebellions in a way he could not, its sneaky devastations. She was concerned for me, mustered support, but her distress loomed. I ignored this. I had to speak my own trouble, my double disaster of accidental pregnancy and intentional abortion. I’d already had the preliminary appointment, was forced to stay pregnant one more week, stew with unsayable anger and fear, with the ruin and confusion in my marriage. Patricia had been married much longer. She’d show me the point to all this.

  “Don’t do it,” she said. This startled us both. I actually pressed against the back of my chair. “I mean, but are you sure this is the right choice?” I wondered if I’d misjudged, mistaken our mutual literary admirations and social pleasure for allegiance.

  “We’ve decided, we have to,” I said. We did have to, a decisionless decision made in days of compressed, obsessive hours. Our relationship wasn’t steady enough, it would have to find more definition. I was resigned, not yet brokenhearted.

  “It’s just—” She started to cry, her turn. Trying for so long, wanting badly to get pregnant, nearing forty. I felt the affront of my decision, then longed for magic—let me transfer the pregnancy, you make the baby. Please relieve me of this mission.

  I think what happened at that table was that she hated me. She saw me squandering the precious. I saw she couldn’t help me, that in our rawest moments, no matter our goodwill, we weren’t better than casual friends. We made a gap then—her longing, my burden, the blankness in between. We forgot our food, strangled through the hour, parted. I called her the evening after the abortion, and she was kind. To honor my mood, my act, she was kind, but I knew she didn’t want to talk any more about it, so I didn’t.

  A year later, at her baby shower, I hated her. It had been a complicated year, as Christopher and I had recovered from the abortion, reconsidered parenthood, decided to try. I’d swallowed my anger—Now you’re ready?—and I got pregnant. I felt urgent and possessive in the first weeks, guarding gestation without joy. But a few days before the shower I miscarried, and I was so sour and gone, hated all fertile worlds, especially Patricia’s, filled with her mother and father, her friendly sister, her longtime friends. I dropped my present in the pile, sulked in a chair across the room as she opened them all.

  In another year, Patricia threw my baby shower, bottles of sparkling cider to mimic champagne open along her kitchen counter. It was a sweet afternoon, women I admired and liked welcomed into the house, directed to the enormous, happy me by Patricia with her determined, boundless generosity, which only faltered between us when we’d been arrested by pain’s inexplicable hand.

  • • •

  Patricia, Liza, Judith, Susanna. We gathered each Monday morning, ten o’clock. I couldn’t wait, up since five or six, dragging through the repetitions with my sunny baby, my energy devoted to the mental catalog of his clean clothes, his diapers in diminishing stacks by the changing table. Hoist him, change him, nurse him, sponge him, hoist him, nurse him. He couldn’t do anything without me. At ten I’d be with Patricia, Liza, and Judith, all of us collapsed and loud, and someone would bring coffee cake. Women to notice, nod. Someone would have had a worse night than mine. Someone would tell a tale on her husband, or scald him, and then I could say the same, or be glad for not having to. I’d become part of a quartet, which was a responsibility, a privilege, that didn’t feel natural. Patricia had invited me to join the playgroup when Daniel was still in a
rms, meet her two dear friends. Clubs seemed tedious to me, book clubs, knitting groups, artificial associations that demanded you relinquish independence, specialness. When I wanted a friend, I wanted her across a table. Confide, reveal, dish, commiserate, then go. For strife, I coped on my own or with one dedicated other, didn’t want a chorus. Also, I was suspicious that the playgroup women—this prominent Liza and Judith—ate away at my friend’s allegiance to me. “That’s not really my thing,” I said. Patricia, with her faith in communal reliance, scoffed. “You’ll love them,” she said. She possessed an abiding belief in the happy outcome.

  Several weeks in, I did love them—Judith’s harried warmth, her voice laced with resigned Jewish humor, Liza’s intense face inquiring as she checked my expression up and down; our delicious and dense loose laughter. The three of them had daughters, girls older than Daniel and already walking. The daughters could squat, open cabinets, pick up one black bean at a time, one goldfish. Their nakedness appalled my eye, no penis. The playgroup lasted through our next pregnancies, then past those babyhoods. Once two writers and early friends, Patricia and I became a crowd. In the space of five years, we’d become a quartet of mothers, each with two children—twelve of us massed into a living room in winter. In warm weather we met on the grass in the park, handing the bottle of sunblock around, working the many limp arms with cream as we talked. We talked. We talked in cars and in parks, we talked at birthday parties, at weddings, relegated to the periphery as we bounced our restless children in weary arms. I found us interesting in the very things that otherwise made us infinitely dull. Tasha’s meltdown in the parking lot? Tell! Tell of the perplexing hives on Frieda’s back, your worry over Maddie’s teeth, the bully at day care, the dingy smell of stubborn pee. Describe the appointment with the specialist, the rudeness of the pediatric nurse—What does she know—the dreary bathroom mess at day’s end, the pink vomit after a wasted dose of antibiotics, the defeated glance at the kitchen floor; the preposterous neglect of the laundry room, pets, sex life. Tell what you said when you called poison control, and then what they said. You did the right thing. I would have called, too. How tired are you? When did you last pee?

  We reminded one another to drink water, to keep appointments, we reminded the others of our degrees and achievements—Liza the scientist, Judith the educator—the desired careers that had taken root, then been put on hiatus or abandoned as we obeyed the mystifying compulsion to bear children and tend them. With equal heat we could talk about the anthrax scare or the manufacture of strollers; we talked of news stories—that mother who drowned all her children in the tub (“How horrible,” “How could she?” “Oh, I could see it . . .”); or of certain, future dangers: People would break our children’s hearts, unimaginable cruelty in our gigantic new business of love. Prom, we said. Driving, we said, laughing so hard, as if they’d ever be larger, as if they’d ever zip their jackets or use a Kleenex. We talked and talked, and when our babies in a roaring foreground were cranky or truculent or unfit for common errands, we scattered fragments of that talk, hands on their backs, our attention filtered, diluted, exasperated, but no one missed a Monday morning.

  I’d never had such friends, women to count on, who counted on me. It sounds simple, a natural equation, but I hadn’t succeeded at it before. A code emerged. One woman would gather another’s child in any situation. Emergency, hurry, helping. We swept each other’s floors, after Cheerios, frozen blueberries, then put the broom away. None of them could have done a single thing I’d have protested, and they granted me the same absolute permission. What a thing, balance with women. I didn’t wonder who liked whom better, who got more; camaraderie reassured me. Collective strength prevailed. I liked baking the apple cake on the fourth Mondays, everyone at my house, liked talking about ingredients and allergies and recipes. I liked the sight of our breasts, three or four of us nursing at the same time, the room quiet, except for our voices, delicate and pitched to reverberate through our chests, another calming trick to mothering that I could see at work around me. We hoisted car seats, strapping in extras for the afternoon while someone went to her shrink, while my husband and I went to our shrink. Christopher and I had become workers, united in dry tasks, neither noticing what the other did, just needing the other to do it. I saved romance for Patricia, Liza, and Judith, thinking up cards for them, or corn chowder, coaxing out their triumph or woe, sharing the hardest, storing my best till Monday.

  Our husbands were undone from us, phantoms of some former interest. I had nothing to say to men. Men! I could barely fathom their use, now that we’d made children. The men didn’t speak our minutiae, or pass hours gathered with toddlers and strangers’ babies, overhearing bad parenting in waiting rooms and supermarket aisles. They did not gentle the kids’ stiffened legs as we did, lifting them from the carts. What else could be important? Today, I could say to my three friends, on the weariest, hopeless days, I fed my family. That is enough, they said back. That is so much.

  • • •

  Just because we were friends, Patricia let me attend the birth of her second child. When I’d asked, she hadn’t hesitated. “I’d love it,” she said, as if I’d come to her with a great idea. “Let me check with Mark.” Daniel was a year and a half old, and I’d been trying to make sense of the reordered self. I’d already done so much of that in Patricia’s encouraging company, becoming a mother. She trusted me, which made me feel trustworthy. Mark called me when her labor started. I drove fast, slammed into a parking spot. I needed to be back in the delivery room, to revisit this gamble and inside-out undoing, where my boy had changed me. How could that be an ordinary room? The hospital door slid open for me, time machine, on my way to my crucial friend.

  Patricia didn’t greet me. Next to her Mark looked up, said hi. I went to the elevated head of the bed and pressed my forehead to hers. “You’re doing it,” I said. We knew the body’s dire work.

  She moved deeper into labor, and Mark whispered at her ear, face turned against hers and hers altered by the fury of intent. I couldn’t hear, but I watched his words form. Her arm in Mark’s grasp, his hand inside her thigh, her head tilted to him, her chin squarely into her sternum. The couple’s gravest truth, never meant for exposure. It backed me away, this haunting privacy beyond friendship. The baby’s head crowned, and he was properly born, and there was a sweep of activity, paparazzi movement around them.

  Patricia was gone into the baby, and as I quieted my absurd emotion, the little-girl feeling of What about me, I knew I should leave. He’s beautiful, I said, kissed her. I made my way to the car and sat cupped in the seat. The ecstatic adrenaline of a birth was buzzing through my body, and I cried. I cried for all I’d lost when I gave birth, the unbidden changes, and for all I’d gained with the enormous, replenishing love for my son. And I cried, amazed by the friend who would share her private efforts with me, without worry. Uninhibited with her intimacies, Patricia assured me of a way to be the right woman and right friend. She didn’t demand more or prepare for less. She gave me a closeness I hadn’t known how to have without its being awful. How could I thank her?

  • • •

  When Patricia’s father died, I understood that it was major, or rather, I had a mere sense. By then, our kids were in middle school, uninterested in one another, which seemed incredible to us, the linked mothers. We no longer met on Mondays, sometimes went weeks without calling, but at the service I found Judith and Liza right away, and we moved as one to sit in the last pew, we still-whole daughters, each with two parents. How is she, have you talked to her, we said in low asides. I did last night, I left minestrone, I took some groceries over. This was our benediction in the face of our friend’s pain. Our radiant, optimistic Patricia had crossed over, fatherless. She’d lost big. The eulogies began, and we stopped our talk, watched her closely. I realized we were going to lose, too. She guided us.

  • • •

  Once, after Patricia gave a reading—I wasn’t thirty yet, she wasn’t forty—I ask
ed for a copy of the piece, and read it many times, marveling at tricks I wished to try. She used to come to my readings, sit in front, cheer afterward her unabashed cheer. In the next years, motherhood’s inescapable assignments and the struggles of our marriages made us forget writing, how we had first studied each other, enjoyed each other and connected. Now our husbands earned most of our incomes, our independence thinned by their money, trumped. Something had happened to us. And Mark and Christopher, they also were writers, and we said to each other how proud we were, how jealous. We wanted what they had, their selfish time, their closed doors and concentration, their bodies ignored by the babies. We knew something of writer unions that other friends didn’t get, the artist husband, the artist wife vying for praise, for success, wanting to outdo each other, pretending not to want that. A room of one’s own, we often said, if only. After the first babies, Patricia and I stopped talk of our writing, that sacrifice a greater sorrow than the dozen others parenthood demanded. We washed out each other’s sippie cups, dropped off library books. At the Monday gatherings we could look at each other over the heads in need of a shampoo and bemoan our loss without a word. At least the kids are worth it! We love them so! And then we could say, but only to each other, we could whisper, Maybe they aren’t worth it. What about me, where have I gone?

  • • •

  Patricia’s back. I see her at the high school, her enormous smile visible at a distance. We stop and hug in the hallway, read each other’s faces.