She Matters

by Susanna Sonnenberg

  • • •

  For Thanksgiving, Rachel took me home to Connecticut; my Honda, my gunned gear shifts, her hand rising to the dash now and then. We played a Woody Allen stand-up cassette until we were gasping, I almost had to pull over. I’d never felt my body so fully occupied by free delight and hilarity. I talked about Jason, our reflexive breakups and predictable reunions. She kept her eye on the wheel, on the road. Let her watch, I thought. Let’s see what she does with recklessness. She didn’t say much about her parents, except biography. She named their hometowns, her father’s enlistment dates, kept herself out of the way, a narrator detached. When I talked about my parents—the brief mention of my father, the marathon confusions of my mother—I rolled out whole stories, contempt and resigned comedy my high-wire act over more conflicted emotion.

  As we arrived, her mother emerged to greet us in the driveway. The house stood over us. I’d been unaware of suburbs, the shush and halt, the way everything was settled by legible street signs. Her mother took us through the garage, into the hallway that led to the kitchen. We were to do nothing, she was saying, except recover from our hard work. I loved the whiff of lawn mower fuel, and chicken roasting this early in the afternoon. This was a foundation, this was a house, with a mailbox and a mat that curled around the base of the toilet and a bird feeder out the kitchen window. I inspected it all, an exultant anthropologist. There was a sewing room and a screened-in porch. The front doorbell, which I tried, went ding dong. After supper her father sat in the TV room, and I went in and asked him to show me the old army pictures and Rachel’s baby pictures. I was excellent with parents. Rachel stayed at the table, pulling at her strands. “Wait’ll you see this,” he said, energized, hunting through a cabinet. He put a home movie in the VCR, fussing with the controls and his reading glasses, and I called to her, “Look at your tiny red barrettes, I remember those!” She wouldn’t come, I could not involve her.

  At night I tossed off sweater and T-shirt, stood, upper half naked, rummaged for my pajamas, and Rachel reddened and turned away. She put a Lanz nightgown over her head, let it drop from her shoulders, and slipped her clothes off beneath the flannel, a trick of modesty I’d never seen, even at boarding school. In her bed, we whispered, still a habit from the time not so long ago of sleepovers, voicing the hopes darkness invited. Before we were up in the morning, I heard a car pull in, the trunk thump shut, a screen door open and spring back. Her mother called to us, “Girls!” and I got right up and went down to see what was happening in the kitchen. Bags of groceries brimmed on the floor by the fridge. Her mother chopped carrots and red onions into tiny dice. She whipped them with a strong arm into the cream cheese for our bagels, which she’d sliced and toasted. She set one before me as I slid into a chair. Rachel came down later, fully dressed, and didn’t eat.

  We didn’t leave for walks or shopping. We stayed in the house and let it govern us. Hour after hour in the TV room, “Funny Girl” and “Annie Hall.” I loved the green- and gold-flocked wallpaper along the stairs, the comfortable, sloppy kitchen with the stacks of Entenmann’s boxes on the crowded counter. The sounds of her mother’s business seemed to inhabit each room, bills being ripped open, drawers closed, the radio dial adjusted. What was that, I thought, watching every move. What does that do? Her mother, as she talked to me of redheaded cousins and recent bar mitzvahs, washed onion skins down the disposal, flipping a switch, not even looking. Sunday I was depressed to leave, to resume the serious chore of study, and I held on to Rachel’s mother, who insisted I come back; and I would come back many times in the next five years. Rachel kept her distance, coat buttoned and messenger bag held close. She accepted quick pecks from her parents. Once in the car, she said, “They love you.” I thought she was talking about me, my success, but she meant them, what they required. She was inspecting some mechanism, trying to understand them, and I waited, but she didn’t say more.

  • • •

  In the spring, my mother brought her new boyfriend to Boston for the weekend. “He wants to meet you!” she said, and I knew he’d heard the same. My mother liked to promote her plans before anyone involved had reviewed them. When I asked her to slow down, or when I said, “Really? He really wants to come to Boston?” she’d say, “You’re going to adore him, I know it.” I hated the sense of being molded for her uses, set up for her parade. The boyfriend was rich, so they stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, glamour on the Common. Just a few towns apart, my mother and I could share the instant thought. Mostly, we spent the time together, but when I wasn’t with her, she’d phone—The girl on the local news, look at her teeth; the color today of the Charles River, what do you think? Call me back. In a weekend, I learned the Ritz phone number and the name of each polite concierge who answered and connected me to her suite.

  I asked Rachel, patient and keen to observe, if she’d come to brunch on Sunday, meet my bubbling mother of the legendary misbehaviors. In the tranquility of the elevator we looked around—this other Boston, old elegance, how unlike our functional campus, our cheaply built student housing. Down the serene hall we found my mother’s door ajar, her voice audible, that fake-sexy whisper for the room service waiter or someone on the phone. It didn’t matter who, boyfriend, sister, hotel manager. “Sue’s here!” she said and hung up. I moved into her outstretched arms. Her overdone affection was meant to impress my friend, initiate her. Rachel swayed by the door, unwilling or uncomfortable to step onto the wide-open of the carpet, as my mother flung greeting and inquiry at her. Rachel gave shy answers, lowered her head, and her hair fell forward.

  Maybe the rich boyfriend, who would eventually marry my mother and move her to Dubai, dined with us in the hotel’s restaurant, but I don’t remember him that weekend. After brunch, where my mother had ordered fresh-squeezed orange juice for all before we’d been handed the menus, we returned upstairs with her—she was big on being escorted, and she’d probably promised me some money. I was dying to review her with Rachel, let another’s perspective calm me, organize me. My mother, in the open-doored bathroom, peed, flushed, still asking questions of Rachel and interrupting herself as she used the sink. She emerged with a wooden hanger, hotel robe trailing from it. The breast pocket, embroidered Ritz-Carlton with the logo of a lion’s head, made an electric impression of blue against the bleached toweling. “Feel this, Sue, come on.” She lifted my hand and stroked it over the terry cloth. Rachel watched me surrender. “Heaven, isn’t it!” said my mother. She offered Rachel a sleeve and said, “Feel,” which Rachel did. Anyone instructed by my mother obeyed. “Rachel’s got great hair, doesn’t she, Sue? You’ve got great hair, Rachel. You know that, don’t you?” She pulled at my satchel. “Here, open up.” She bundled the robe and shoved it into my bag. “What about Rachel? Rachel, love, do you need a robe?” She went to the closet, scanned the floor. “We have two? Yes! And a shopping bag!” Rachel looked at me, checking how to play the game, or if this was a game. “I’m okay,” she said. My mother skipped to the bed, grabbed the phone, was insisting to Housekeeping that the suite had only one robe and she expected another right away. I shrugged. I was used to it; now you’ve met my family. On the way home, Rachel said, laughing, “I can’t believe you just stole a robe from a hotel.” “They can afford it,” I said, pleased by conspiracy with my truant mother, a way of being that was as natural and expected for me as the morning bagels and special cream cheese in Rachel’s Connecticut. From time to time Rachel would ask if I still had the robe, and I said, “Of course.” (It was very well made.) I wore it every night for years, enjoyed its pilfered luxury until it fell apart. That’s how Rachel knew my mother, prancing thief, irresistible, delinquent fairy godmother. Rachel didn’t see how weary I was of the dedicated, upbeat badness, of the permission I was always asked to bestow, of the temporary luxuries that were never earned. I didn’t know I was tired of faking.

  • • •

  That summer I moved into Esther’s apartment, which was above Rachel’s, the gray house a mile from cam
pus. Rachel, who had graduated, lived with a chemistry student from Colombia who was engaged and a young chef apprenticing in Boston. Every weekday morning Rachel went into the city, temping at design firms and PR agencies. Nearby was the right proximity for us. I loved Rachel’s antidote to my life’s early disorder, but her carefulness, those tiny perfume bottles she kept lined up, her white linen runners embroidered with little violets atop her dresser—it could be too much for me, airless.

  Rachel laughed at her preferences and idiosyncrasies, a sign of health. She liked being teased, let me. She dated no one, never even looked—another idiosyncrasy? She blushed over Prince when we saw Purple Rain at the second-run theater, a heat in spite of herself. It seemed there had been someone, one camp summer, some kissing, but she said only enough to conjure the faintest sort of disappointment. I didn’t know—and by now she was one of my closest, most enthusiastic confidantes—if she was a virgin, such a key topic, the words virgin or virginity most of us managed to fit into every conversation. She modeled modesty. I threw myself into the outrageous orgy of Jason, not caring why Rachel let me keep talking about him.

  • • •

  For fifteen years Rachel and I went deep with our mutual ways of seeing and reading, mutual comic pleasures, love of art, Italy, all that, and we laughed so hard, with love, at our stark differences. After my graduation, we’d never shared a city again—I in London, she in LA; I in LA, she in St. Paul—but if we found ourselves in New York, a weekend coincidence, we’d catch up at top speed over rushed coffee and I’d come away revitalized by forgotten happinesses, by being known and unconditionally loved. Our voices lapsed into younger, sweeter versions. I liked who I was with her, who she let me be, looser, giddier, indulged. We corresponded with devotion, letters, frequent calls—she always sent antique cards and small meticulously packaged presents for birthdays, new homes, episodes of turmoil—lipstick in a shade I liked, thoughtful that way. I counted on how she held me in her heart.

  When Daniel was three, and I was thirty-four, I went to visit her in El Paso, where she’d moved for a job at a magazine and met her husband. I’d missed out on the particulars of the courtship, which fell during one of our inconsequential periods of less contact, our respective focus more intense on our own necessities. He was nice. Apart from their wedding a few years earlier, before I’d had a baby, Rachel and I hadn’t spent a full day together since college, so I suffered the travel with my toddler and didn’t mind the effort. I wanted to see her in this new place. I hoped she was at home.

  Rachel’s mother had died some months before, news that ran me through with sadness, but far away with a baby and still weakened by a first bad year of postpartum depression, I couldn’t get to the funeral. As I deplaned in El Paso, as I forced apart the stroller’s clasp on the jetway and settled my son, tucked his stuffed sheep under his unconscious hand, I wanted to make up for that, give Rachel belated tenderness. And I felt grateful that I’d be with a true friend who was excited about my son’s central, redefining role in my life. Rachel always asked me to tell everything about him. She understood that he was me, I was him. Motherhood was like new oxygen now, a revolution. Friends were being sorted out, who would endure and who would recede, but with Rachel, who had lasted so long, there was no question. She was already part of me.

  No: what I really needed to know, to rewrite, was my previous definition of the word mother. My own mother would not serve, and I had backed away from her. Rachel, who’d seen the mess I’d come from, proudly called me a good mother. She would see in my son my concerted efforts, the placated anxieties. She would help me be proud of myself.

  In the airport, something was wrong. Rachel took no time for the hug, stepped out of my reach. Where was our click, our way? Her gaze jumping, she repeated questions about baggage and travel. She’d purchased a car seat for Daniel, a gesture I appreciated—I tried to say so—but it had to stay wrapped in the plastic, she explained, so she could return it after we’d gone. She was preoccupied, I didn’t know why, as I struggled to reconfigure my mood, my needs and old happiness.

  “You okay?” I said in the car.

  “No juice in the car, okay, Daniel, no getting it dirty? No juice?”

  Daniel said, “Juice? Juice?” He said it to himself the rest of the way.

  Rachel worried, Was he thirsty, could he wait, would we have to stop? He’s fine, I said, it’s fine. She didn’t notice me respond. She switched worries: he might chew on the plastic, swallow it. The hospital, she said, was not too far from the house. Nonsense concerns jostled in my head—What did she mean? How far was the doctor? Her worry rocked us back and forth. I stopped trying to protest. Just let her be what she needs to be, I thought, a discipline I was trying to practice with everyone, and with myself. At the house, it’ll be better. She drove a maze of short back streets, paced by stop signs, our journey abrupt and slow at the same time. We could not sink into our usual pleasures. We couldn’t get anywhere.

  We stayed inside the house, the windows sealed. A constant hum announced the air purifiers. She worried about our room, that Daniel would suffocate or choke, that the Texas heat would desiccate him. “He won’t choke,” I said, a firm rebuke—Are you listening to me? But her conversation was with herself. Everything here, she said, was susceptible to fading and inevitable deterioration. “I can’t even sit on the patio.” Her husband spent a lot of time out there. I missed the Rachel who danced, who recited our movie dialogue, and I wanted to kid her out of these strangling anxieties, but it was dawning on me, with a dense sadness, that this was a task beyond any friend’s purview.

  After I’d settled Daniel the first night, we sat on the couch, our backs against the armrests. Her husband was out and the house was still, except for the tremor of the purifiers, which ran under our feet. We ate good pineapple sorbet she had taught herself to make, and I was impressed. I asked about her mother’s funeral. She sped through details, a numb account of guests, aggravating missteps of the rabbi. “I miss her,” I said. No maternal presence ever forgotten. I hadn’t seen my mother in more than a year, since my son was eighteen months old.

  The last time my mother had visited Missoula, toppling with overexpensive presents for the baby, her manias dictated and tangled by medications, she seemed to forget me before the ride to the hotel from the airport had ended, single-minded in her need to score painkillers. I was trying to list plans, but she asked if I knew a doctor, any doctor, who could see her right away. She asked again, then again, musing about medical expertise in Montana. Addicts are like this, I thought as I drove. Stupid you, I said to myself, always ready for her to be some other way, the vain wait. Each visit, every time. Children of addicts are like this, accounting for the tiniest disturbance and new twitch, but hopeful. Amassing hurts, but hopeful, hopeful. My mother didn’t care to leave her hotel. Her back hurt. She called me twice a day to her room, where she took my baby, set him on her bed, pushed her face into his so that he had to turn his head to escape her ravenous gaze. Nine prescription bottles were bunched on the bathroom counter, various pharmacies. I hated that each time I went to pee, I counted them.

  Then I knew my paradox: I could keep hoping and get nowhere, because we’d always be like this; or I could change myself and end us. So, a few days in, I rallied terrified courage and told my mother to go. I didn’t want her anymore, like this, conniving and addicted and rioting, would have to face the broken heart instead; she switched her ticket and left, unimpressed by my dilemma. But I understood that I’d reached some new kind of finish, and whatever grief awaited me at the deprivation of a mother, I’d handle it. I’d have to; I was done.

  Rachel that first night ignored my fondness for her mother. She let me praise and reminisce, and then tears streamed down her face, her hands up to cover herself.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, thinking we shared.

  “No,” she said, “you don’t know.” She made an angry disclosure I’d never heard in the years of our friendship. What she said was
private, and so quick and bare I was hardly sure of it. Busy soaking up her mother’s mothering, I’d missed my friend’s pain and trouble. Rachel had disguised them, as she’d returned our happy focus again and again to me. I set down the dessert and reached my hand for hers, but she ducked, picked up the bowls and disappeared to the kitchen.

  Rachel took us out each day, thoughtful excursions she planned for Daniel—the zoo, the Border Patrol Museum with the old cars and uniforms, and she snapped pictures of him, found his delicious purity with her lens, what I always wanted others to see. But each trip stuttered at her overwrought interaction with an ATM or a public bathroom, her sheer worry. On our last full day I wanted to walk Daniel around the neighborhood, see the pink desert willow blossoms, but Rachel tried to talk me out of it. The pollen count. The aridity that aged you on the spot, dehydration inevitable. The strangers out there, you just never know. I felt confused, as she darted among excuses. I tried to identify the problem to solve. Finally I realized that she didn’t want the door opened and unmanaged air to balloon into her living room. I began to want to hurt her with my energies, use whatever was at my disposal to make her notice me. It was an ugly thing to confront in myself, but I was worn out with trying to respect the manufactured plights, accommodate them. The college desire to shake her up a bit, bring her a little reckless fun, had shifted into a mean mission, a nasty impulse. I grabbed Daniel and walked out, leaving the door open. Years before, Rachel had met my transgressions and youthful stupidities with affection, ardent curiosity, even delight; now I could not interpret her anxieties. I balked at such outright panic displayed, and, unable to help her, I judged.