She Matters

by Susanna Sonnenberg

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” she said.

  How could I have not known the very thread-and-needle of her character? I told Christopher, asked him, “Did you know?” I’d let only my own experience define her—the warm dessert in ramekins, an incidental photograph, her children’s clamor, Clay’s teasing. “But this,” I said, as I revised her, added in trauma. This changed everything. This was everything, wasn’t it? No, he hadn’t known. Clay wouldn’t have told him, the times they went fly-fishing, taking Clay’s muddy Jeep. They didn’t get near death or damage. They talked fishing, an infinite examination of spring run-off on the nearby rivers, hatches and nymphs, the cold-day habits of browns versus cutthroats. The few times they went to the Silver Dollar on Railroad Street, light yellow beers on the scarred oak bar, they didn’t talk about women or anyone, unless someone had published. They did not review the past, which they’d shared in classrooms, growing into the men they’d become. Clay kept them on course, as men.

  I was happy Christopher had him, their once-a-month occasions, because he didn’t attach easily. He left that to me, although my voracious appetite for people startled him, and he was baffled at the energy I had for varied relationships and heavy confidences. Introverted and keen for solitude, he let me be the flash, our outward engine. I loved to hear people talk about their changes and despairs, sudden loves and tortured histories. For Christopher, though, the parallel male could be welcome; or unmissed.

  After Mary told me of her orphaning we didn’t mention it.

  • • •

  Clay and Mary returned. They bought a roomy house a few blocks from ours (we’d moved within city limits when I was pregnant), central for parties and music jams. There was a drum kit in the living room and a piano in the dining room, canvases painted by successful friends. Mary put unusual colors on their walls, burnt mustard and autumn green, and kept the pink ’50s bathroom as it was. Her giant prints hung here, glassed and framed. They had terrariums, frogs, finches, fish, a cage with a heat lamp for the kids’ snake. The kids’ friends bubbled in various rooms. They got a new dog, a giant, who collided with arriving guests and always had to be put out back, Mary dragging at the collar as Clay poured the drinks. Clay had claimed the garden shed as an office, speakers mounted on the wall. He had a real job and complained affably, sighed, “That’s the price of Missoula, man. Everyone’s willing to pay.”

  I didn’t talk writing with Clay anymore. He had many more books, had come out into the literary world proper, and this made me shy, with an envy mixed in, so sharp it could constrict my throat in his presence. It was unspoken between us, he was one sort of writer and I was another, and out of social grace and genuine affection we avoided exploring that. Clay wrote about broken couples and the hard outdoors, in third person; I was trying to write about my family, a revealed experience of myself as a girl, what became of me. I wrote to uncover something, and I hadn’t found out what. I couldn’t risk Clay’s rhetoric if we talked about writing, his good-natured, entitled coercion.

  Mary and I grew closer, spent unstructured time together, stopped by each other’s doors. When Jack was born, she loved coming over, just to hold him. Years can go by like this. Years did. We seemed to talk of everything, the mundane and the serious. I met her siblings, one after the other, as they visited; I came to her openings; we traded copies of good novels. Mary invited my children to her kids’ birthdays and put a glass of wine in my hand when we arrived. The year Jack was not yet two, she made sure there was a party favor for him, even though he wouldn’t have noticed. But we never went near the disastrous. I was proud of my maturing abilities with boundaries, respected privacies better instead of interpreting them as rejections. I did not demand the secrets, left agony alone.

  Hard trouble came into my marriage, private confusions. Christopher and I were dealing with them, but it was slow, aggravated work and I grew oblivious to my friends’ matters. One evening Mary asked if she could come over. She sat at the kitchen table and talked about Clay, said they had troubles, new distances. Her news was hard to take in, a surprise in the midst of my own problems. Then, after a frantic season between them, their marriage ended.

  • • •

  Mary stayed in the house, and the kids went back and forth to Clay’s apartment. We never saw him. No more grilled meat, impromptu parties, brown bottles of local beer on the kitchen table, no more Etta James turned loud, with Clay’s intractable opinions the comfortable boom over us all. Mary came to me, a sudden solidity to our friendship, and I welcomed her in the middle of dinner, or late at night, or when I was writing: of course come over. I took her in my arms, her collapsed sobs. I would be the steady, needed friend, would not bother or dismay her with the concerns in my marriage (anyway, we were headed toward repair; I felt irrationally disloyal). Trained by years of therapists attending me, I knew unadmitted sorrow, its deep well, and I knew how to listen. I witnessed her devastation, her harried spirit, and she felt accompanied as I hoped she would. Absorbed, she did not notice my shock, as I realized how vaguely all our years and conversations had only hinted at a couple’s bargain. Again I revised her, added crucial, invisible information. I watched every dark stage—anger, objection, ravagement. She called in despair when the divorce papers came through. She was walking from the lawyer’s office to her car, holding them in her hand. Calm, helpful, I waited for her realignment.

  I hadn’t been through divorce, but I did understand loss as an inescapable refrain, the not-having. Our parents—hers dead, mine impossible, daughters left to blister in the elements. Always, we talked about art through this, art as the third party in our sad congress. A big book of Kertész or Brassai or Cindy Sherman on her coffee table, I’d open it, and Mary, unable to help herself and still crying, would look close and consider aloud the composition and depths, the arrested image. We revered the uses of the hidden self. Even upset, she would have to stand, couldn’t stop herself, and reach from a high shelf a more obscure work, so that she might show me the connections, the force of influence. Then tears. Then wine, and wine and tears, and sighing into the exhausted end of the evening, when I promised on my way out to call the next day. “You’re a good friend,” she said, patting my arm, distracted by sadness. I was.

  That year she forgot my birthday. I didn’t want to mind; great friendship should transcend the petty. In contrast to her seismic ordeals, what was my brief event, regular and yearly anyway? Except I did mind—all these days and hours of being here for you, I thought with high school petulance, and you forget me. About six weeks later she stopped midsentence. “Did I forget your birthday? I did, didn’t I?” “That’s okay,” I said, acting adult. “I’m sorry,” and she was, and I felt better, but I stopped being so available. It didn’t occur to me that this was actually a more authentic way to engage.

  • • •

  I wanted everything out, swept away. A mania of decluttering had come upon me, a revolution. My closets were wide open, drawers pulled from their beds. Stuffed garbage bags waited to go to the thrift store, piled at the front door. I was in a madness to unbind myself from objects. For two years, shaping a book about my mother out of intolerable memory, I’d been immersed in private history, debris collected, organized. The tiniest specifics, the interior agonies, had been recast as art.

  I’d finished the book and needed my living self back. The written self had to be dismantled and the writer disarmed, so I could be in the world. I put my deliberate hand on every object in my possession, as if climbing a rope ladder from an inky mine. I decided whether to keep a thing, throw it out, give it away. I couldn’t stop talking about it, boring my family, but Mary was interested. In eight, nine, ten weeks of daily work I’d decluttered my house. Not just a broken turntable, an ugly rug, clothes that had fit me briefly, but I’d also cleared the back of the car of the torn atlas and cracked CD cases; the makeup drawer of ten-year-old lipsticks and sour-smelling foundation; the rattling excess amidst the silverware. I tossed books inscribed by my married Engl
ish teacher with his suggestive euphemisms. I sorted twenty years’ worth of file folders, shredded a decade of credit card statements.

  “You did? What else?” said Mary. We sat in her living room.

  “I found one box filled with phone bills from my apartments in New York, in the eighties.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I had two dozen copies of my high school literary magazine!”

  And the elegant but harmful clutter, more difficult to consider, to discard—the antique writing secretary from an ill-matched boyfriend, the guilty booty of a shopping trip with my grandmother. The tiniest clutters, safety pins and buttons mixed in with dimes and a flash drive and a loose watch battery in a cracked saucer on my dresser. I felt the unhaving as moral nakedness.

  “I want to be surrounded by nothing.”

  She looked around the room. “I hate this house,” she said. “I feel bad every time I walk in.”

  “Let’s declutter it! I want to!” I had to. Her eldest was in college now, her teenage daughter hardly home. She let me. I came the next weekend with sponges, trash bags, and a clamp-on spotlight, and we descended wooden steps to her basement, the bottom of everything, and began. We worked for ten hours. We covered ourselves in the fine litter of memory, sharp mistakes, outgrown babyhoods. We forced our bodies up the steep stairs over and over, hefting warped boxes, broken trikes, single skis. We swept away the mouse droppings and bleached the floors. We wore masks and coughed. We named and examined and sorted as we uncovered one more moment of her life, five more, a hundred more.

  Mary thanked me a lot. She liked that I was there. I had torn through my belongings in private, but I realized, helping her, that I would have welcomed aid or witness. So hard for me, trusting help. I’ll do it alone, I’ll do it myself. It was easier to be the hero who got credit for changing the air inside her home, shifting her perceptions, than to wait for rescue, afraid of inevitable disappointment. The second day we worked in her bedroom. We cleared away the divorce paperwork, the wedding-present lamps and Clay’s books, hauled out the stuff he kept saying he was coming back to get. I missed him, too, the best of him, but I hoped she’d take the space for herself, speak up. At the end of the day she gave me a small oil she’d painted, strong, abstract colors, and I hung it across from my desk, where I see it now.

  • • •

  “Do you think you could come over?” Mary said. She’d gone back for a master’s degree, and she was in her studio, preparing for an important review. She didn’t have much time. “I could use your perspective.” I went to the old building on campus and found her workspace. She had scraps and photos pinned to her wall, arranged without much arrangement, an artist’s process visible. It was, as I could recognize from my own work, the laying out, before sense is made or the artist grasps her own intentions. But, her presentation ten days away, she required emergency coherence, and she was panicked. “What’ll I do?” she said, distraught and unreachable. We tried to sort through the images, objects, muddles, tried to extract some narrative, but her wreckage blocked progress, and we arrived at dead ends. “Well, thanks,” she said. “You always help.” Not this time, I thought.

  Mary didn’t make it, the review postponed, and I thought of her jumbled studio, the debris of ideas and starts, how she labeled it hopeless, went quiet. She could capitulate to chaos, a certain restlessness that could drive her friends crazy. She hunted in circles for her keys, couldn’t be counted on for directions. Deadlines and expectations didn’t help.

  • • •

  Once, some years after the divorce, Mary invited me over, an evening when her kids were with Clay. “I want to make dinner for you.”

  I refused. “Why don’t you come here?” I said. I would feed her. She was alone and I was ensconced and enfamilied, dinner prepared anyway at my house. Her effort on my behalf would put me in the uneasy role of being beholden. Wouldn’t it? No, said Christopher, there is also one more gift to give a friend, after the gifts of listening, helping, decluttering, calming, there is another gift. You can let her care for you. People need to do that, too. You’ll see.

  I accepted. I stopped myself from bringing both wine and flowers, opulence my safeguard. I chose a few stems of tigerlilies, to please her astute eye, and let her pour wine, quench me. She’d set plates on the table in her backyard. There was small traffic in the alley, dogs, garbage cans being arranged. The sun was at fence level, and we shifted our chairs to see without glare. As I tried to settle, she kept jumping up, going inside and coming out with the forgotten—the bread, the platter of asparagus, then the lemon, another bottle, while I held myself in my chair, allowing our roles to switch. Conversation felt awkward to me, but Mary, a long-dormant freedom alive in her face, was easy. She laughed at herself, asked me questions, asked for stories of the boys. With no trouble, no panic, she pondered her increasingly distant breakup. I forced myself to quiet my habit of advice and overview. Just be, Susanna. Just be with Mary.

  • • •

  The next spring Mary had her thesis show. I hadn’t seen her work in all that time, a whole year, consumed with my own major events. My father had died, I’d been away for weeks. I went with Christopher and the kids, in late afternoon. We walked into the few small rooms of the university gallery, the reverent space mastered by an artist, by art, clean walls glowing under useful spots.

  One room contained her series of small photographs, each of a single object belonging to a friend. Each picture—a bowling-alley matchbook, say, or a doll’s shoe, or an old watch—was accompanied by a brief quote from its owner. Mary had illuminated one detail, rather than gathering up unwieldy collections. Some of the pictures and epigraphs were funny, some poignant, some simple and capable. The boys were inspecting a photo of an ancient franked train ticket, Amtrak reds paled from the ’60s. I went into the second room.

  Around the time my father died, Mary’s aunt died, too, the woman who’d raised her. The family home was excavated, possessions distributed from the Midwest, sibling claims honored. Mary had opened old trunks, pulling them from remote storage. She lifted out the dresses, the contents of a closet to which her slim mother never returned. Petticoats, dancing dresses, day dresses, topcoats, floor-lengths, nightgowns. A whole wardrobe, some pieces stitched by hand. Mary’s teenage daughter was bigger than the woman who’d chosen these clothes, been zipped up in them. Mary took them, enlivened by new material. She set each dress upon treated paper, then left it under glass for hours in the sun; natural chemistry to bring forth hidden elements, the veins of the fabrics. When she removed the glass and the dress, washed the paper with water, an ethereal impression remained. Repeated on the gallery wall, giant pages were arranged in quartets imprinted with the life-size shape, even the weave and the pattern, of tulle and taffeta and silk and cotton, wavy ribbons from sheer aprons, prim, crimped collars never to be ironed. A skirt fanned out across the width of the papers, as if on a dancer’s body, mid-twirl. I stopped before each silhouette, the blue-white residue of her mother. These cyanotypes were unlike Mary’s earlier work, a shocking leap, yet all her work was in them, an artist fully gathered, and I knew it. I knew her. Over eighteen years of care and slow knowing, the deliberate construction of friendship, I had witnessed the elements colliding inside her, reorganizing. I hadn’t known I was witness to this, just knew her, loved her, cared what happened.

  When Mary arrived at the gallery I was on the verge of tears—about her, I thought—and proud. I gripped her, everything between us intensified. We sat down on the gallery bench. She held my hand. I could offer Mary no more than gape and wordlessness. I knew her, the many shapes and directions of her, could feel all she had brought to bear in the making of such work. How startling to feel—to actually know—the scope of her loss, its roots and defining duration. I remembered the silhouettes of the mammoth Southern plants; the haunted empty rooms; the ongoing, anonymous grief she’d captured in her series of roadside crosses stretched over Montana, markers for the victims of c
ar accidents. I fathomed, I realized, the complete narrative of her work. Disaster, desertion; rescue, comfort. I’d listened to the conversation of an artist with herself. She was not silent. She roared, mourned. I told her this, or something like it, garbled by emotion, and she looked at me. “Susanna,” she said, in tears, “you’ve done the same.” The two of us shared friendship, motherhood, wifehood, womanhood, and even more—an unsayable volcanic core. We were orphans, and all this time we’d been trying to figure out how to make that beautiful.

  Naked

  My acupuncturist kept talking about Flora, this amazing massage therapist, gifted. Sylvia sorted her tiny needles and chatted, her middle fingers pressing along meridians until she found a point, pierced me. Flora painted, Sylvia said; she had an instinct for gardens; she wrote poetry. “You’d love her, and she’ll adore you.” Sylvia, who’d been proctoring my physical well-being for some time, urged me to book a massage.

  Flora resembled my father’s mother. Looking at her petite, stocky body in the first meeting, I kept losing my place, drawn back to the lost comforts of that grandmother, dead in my childhood. Flora could have been fifty, she could have been sixty. There was something perpetual and elemental about her. In a blue flowing top over white pants, she was fit, easy in herself, a seaside-goer. Although she talked in a honeyed accent, her Tennessee roots or South Carolina, I felt certain we shared some genetic link, which made me happy, and I asked about her people. She told a lot. She made eye contact and leaned forward with confidential joy. I have always been a sucker for women like that.