• • •
Once, Ellen cried. I sat curled with the phone on our basement steps, away from the family activity in the kitchen, and at first I didn’t recognize the sound. A sputter, an extended sigh, and then it was clear what sound it was. We had long before agreed without acknowledgment that she was the grounded listener and I was the explosive confessor. For ethical quandaries I went to Ellen, where I found refuge in her serious, procedural thinking. Her order, her rules; they helped me keep myself together. I remember what she disclosed that day, what prompted her uncharacteristic tears (Ellen crying! Ellen unguarded!) and that she said, “Please don’t talk about this to anyone,” and that in her pain she became clear and supple and visible, which was lovely. I remember the satisfaction of having her recognize my empathy. She let me in.
• • •
It was the anniversary of my mother’s accident. A few years earlier, she had suffered a car wreck, spent time in a coma, and nearly died. Our impossible relationship already in tatters, I had chosen not to go to her but to stay nested in the protections of my town, my home, my children’s regard. I chose—as I had over years of Thanksgivings and boarding-school Christmases—my friends. Ellen, compassionate, sensitive listener, had accompanied me through the galling puzzle of that decision, witnessed the wrenching problem and irreconcilable pain, always with her steady, neutral gaze. I couldn’t track exact dates with my mother, one of the effects of her lifetime of lying, so I hadn’t been preparing for this date, but my body felt anniversary unease, reminding me, You chose this isolation. That spring day I felt dangerously unloved. I needed to be included anywhere, at some table.
Christopher was away and I was alone with the boys, who were out of school on break. A lot of my friends were out of town. Ellen was around but overseeing a big conference. I knew she had public-speaking anxiety, that even in her established legal brilliance, scrutiny and exposure were hard for her. Being her friend, I wanted to ease things. I called and asked, could the boys and I come for dinner (that unspoken law between two families—the smaller crowd travels), could we spend the evening with her and Laurence and Thomas and the baby? I’d bring a couple of dishes, a salad, I said, a baguette. But I didn’t say, “I’m thinking of my broken daughterhood.” I needed a loneliness cure, a way to escape for a day, for a night, the reverberations of family damage; also I wanted Ellen to feel her friend’s support, my desire to help move her through the big work weekend. Both were true; the first a little truer.
“Let me think about it and call you back,” she said. I felt irritated.
“Of course,” I said, polite. Call me back. She always had to call me back, on her schedule, her terms. I didn’t want to wait, I wanted a yes, a now, a come in. But Ellen never said those things. I knew that.
She called. “I would love to have you and the boys over,” she said, conscious precision. “But not today. I have a lot to handle.”
Ellen was calm and clear, with textbook boundaries. I knew I was supposed to respect them, find comfort in the cool accuracy, which, when the friendship hummed along its chosen track, usually I did. But today I was distraught, vulnerable beyond reason, and at her definitive no, I felt defeated: she heard me ask for one particular thing, and she denied me. Why, when I needed a cure for the deprivation lapping at me, did I look to the restrained friend? That was my problem. Why did my good friend step away as I showed need? That, I felt, was hers. I was, at the time, endangered by depression, increasingly isolated in a terrible state, but I didn’t know how to confess I was sinking. I wanted to cry, Please come and get me.
Christopher returned home, school resumed. Ellen did not call to make the dinner plan and, feeling exposed in my primal loneliness, I didn’t call her. All at once we went silent, stopped making dates for the kids. It was so strange for us not to talk for even two days, let alone two, then three weeks. Hard and strange, and obvious. Was she mad? Had I pushed too far? I had, I knew that. I’m sorry, but you . . . Back and forth, I argued her part, then mine; her rebuttal, my petulant rage. Things muffled and unsaid, things I’d never called her on, were knocked loose and scattered in the open. Why do we exchange so many phone calls to make plans? I would not be the only one to accommodate our friendship anymore, wouldn’t bargain for her convenience and safety. If she had made concessions for me, as she surely must have, I refused to appreciate them.
After months of this twilight I requested a date. We met at a coffee place downtown, the heavy wooden tables piled with people’s schoolwork and laptops, the good cheer from the baristas’ counter. I sat by the wall and watched for her, conscious in a tough, angry way that this betrayed her. She didn’t like being on display. She came through the door, and when she neared I stood and hugged her. Physical affection had never been in our regular language, but today, after this bizarre separation, the reality of her body and mine signaled that we could overcome whatever bad flame burned in my head, where I was alone. This would be the real two of us. Real would be much better.
We sat with our prop cups of tea.
“The day I asked to come for dinner,” I said. “I wonder if you knew how upset I was, before I asked; what was going on for me.” Therapist-careful.
She let me talk a long while. Listening. She listened well.
I said, “When I ask for something specific, I mean, I don’t, it’s not easy for me, but when I do . . .”
Then she said, like a teacher, “I appreciate you telling me this. I respect your feelings.” I waited. She was done, my heart sank. Ellen, clear-eyed, always ready for honest acknowledgment, wouldn’t even agree we had a dilemma. She wouldn’t participate.
“I miss you,” I said. “And I love you.” She straightened. “And, and I don’t want our relationship tied exclusively to our children.” I was flailing. I missed her strength, her steadying judgment. “I’ve been depressed, Ellen. I needed”—What?—“to talk to you, not with the kids, and so . . . and I’ve never been able to be alone with you.”
“Well,” she said, “my time.”
“But I should count!” I regretted my force. “If our friendship matters, there should be time for it.” I was pushing at her, exactly what I knew not to do. It had gone badly before. I imagined, with enduring dread, her sighing to Laurence about Susanna’s narcissism. I always dreaded this when I spoke up for something I craved. But the friendship, I thought, should not be denied specialness. That’s what made a friendship. That, and private repair.
She held her hands to herself, her bag on her lap; she sighed.
“We’ve known each other a long time,” I said. “You, me, we know each other better and better. Right?” I wasn’t even sure what I was asking anymore.
“I need to get back to you,” she said. “Thank you for calling me, and for the tea.” Undrunk. The formality stung.
We parted outside. I moved to hug her, trying to hear more from her, anything, and I had my face in her hair.
She stepped backward, held my gaze. “I think you’re very brave,” she said. Whatever, I thought. I knew I wasn’t, not really. I hadn’t said how plain angry I was; and I hadn’t copped to the bind I’d put her in—Susanna’s unanswerable need versus Ellen’s locked boundaries. I was still hoping—this was pure me—that if I found the right words, expressed my true problem, I would somehow unleash the generous waters. I hadn’t asked for what I really needed her to give me, because you can’t ask for everything; you can’t ask your friend to fill up the holes left gaping by two selfish parents.
In a few days she e-mailed. “It feels very difficult to have a hard issue affecting our relationship that we can’t fully process. I’m sad that this has been so painful and I hope we can find a way to reconnect.” I was tired of her guarded script, this antiseptic order.
“She won’t help fix this,” I told Christopher, bruised as I read. This is not, as you can see, what she said. She was looking, in her way, for our repair, but in my way, pure Susanna, I felt abandoned and couldn’t rise up out of it. Look, she
offered to reconnect, but I never responded to the e-mail. Feeling unheard in my terms, I gave up on hers, and inside me, where I possessed the friendship’s certain riches, I shut her off.
• • •
I wish I had Ellen back, miss us. I wish I had Abby back, unhappy at any bounty lost in my life or taken away. I miss the rewards of long-term work and company, our tiny in-jokes and half-conscious intuitions. I don’t know how we recover, or if we should, and that seems to me like my own inadequacy. Other people make up, forgive, keep going. Why was I so rigid? Was I? We’d reached a crisis, the friendship needed tending, both of us. I want some eloquent way to tell Ellen I knew this about myself—that I pushed at her and thus pushed her away. I knew I demanded a lot, challenged her safety; I knew I still wanted the friendship, or a fresh version, because our rewards of candor and afternoon levity were rich; that she must get something from me, too, and I wanted her to say that. We both like complicated relationships, wouldn’t have trusted any other kind, yet I pressed at her anxieties, and she pressed at mine. We forged a compulsive magnet.
It takes concentration to avoid your close friend who lives just over the bridge, half a mile away, and the effort was at first its own busy trial, another of the aggravations, which now I was free to count up. I knew Fridays she’d come into Bernice’s Bakery, because often I was there when she did, our routines coinciding. So, I noticed with a spiky, helpless sadness that she no longer did it. She’d made a decision to change her routine, because of us. Many Fridays I sat at a corner table, looked out at the negative space.
But I was also relieved, because the energy I’d devoted to careful Ellen and our careful friendship could now go elsewhere. I didn’t have to be watchful anymore, hold my affections in check, allow for her to trade a million calls, or remember that she disliked cauliflower. I didn’t have to speak in whispers, muffle my full voice, a habit she got me into in front of the boys. I was ready to shed aspects of that friendship; I was ready for more risk. If we begin again, will it be a reinvention? Perhaps in our few e-mails we’re constructing a careful edifice, entombing a shattered friendship. We can’t unknow the other’s inevitable ways, but we’ve let a lot of time go by, clearing a space. We were one thing, and we’re not that now; we may forge a third act, or we may not. I don’t know.
• • •
Ellen sends a casual e-mail. For the first time in two years she admits something of herself. She has gotten an African gray parrot (she attaches a photo), “if you can believe it,” she writes, which tugs at me, our lost intimacy, our knowing as a strong, daily habit. Ellen had always had an abhorrence of birds, and she knows I’ll see, as only a longtime confidante could, that the shift she’s made is significant. She chooses to show me she is changing.
Uncertain how to respond, I let a week go by. I drive her son home, saying I’d like a look at the parrot. I go up Ellen’s front steps with the boy. I’m nervous, scared to present myself with no plan. When she opens the door, the sight of her, the first time we’ve stood before each other in two years, dissolves a great deal of the buttressed wall. I want to touch her, feel her hand. It’s like seeing someone you’d been in love with, whom you’d talked yourself out of, or thought you had. A meaningful gladness comes over me, much stronger than the goodwill I’d prepared. I can feel, even under the lapses and the struggle and the tacit clashes we couldn’t surmount, how much we gave and traded, understood, the ways our corresponding energies fueled the other’s; how much room we made for each other as we each inhabited our unavoidable natures. Our rupture, which in pain I’d tried never to inspect, seems a tragedy, quiet in a busy world but one of my own great epics. I stand waiting, as if she will say, Yes, Susanna, now. Come in.
Ritual
I see Adele in the public spaces of our town. We stand in the school corridor, waiting for our children to emerge from their classrooms. Almost daily we start a conversation with resumed warmth, but it’s often rearranged by another parent whom Adele welcomes. She extends an arm, brings the parent close, wants to know how she is. Sometimes, with no chance to catch up, first- and second-graders a rush between and around us, we just embrace, but it’s a generous pause in my day.
After twenty years in Missoula, nearly, my days contain these brief and crucial flirts, gestures of belonging. A row ahead at the movies, say, is a surgeon I consulted, with his girlfriend, the receptionist at Daniel’s high school. His ex-wife gets her hair cut where I do. I wave outside Food Farm to the woman who owned a bookstore. Now she does massage. I pull over with a flat tire, and the person who stops to help used to run the food bank where I volunteered. The rustle of people in this small city is a flag of stitched and overlapping roles, coincident eras. My dentist used to be married to my neighbor; my pharmacist dropped off a prescription after I left it on her counter. We bring Jack to the walk-in clinic, and the doctor is a woman I once knew, who left for med school, and whose son, it turns out, is in calculus with Daniel. When I leave the house I prepare unconsciously for the pleasant social exhaustion of an intimate city. In the school hall, we wait for children who didn’t exist when I first came to live here. We made people, joined city council; we’ve all adopted cats and dogs from our shelter. I have lived here long enough that important friends have moved away, that friends I liked and saw a lot have faded into acquaintances, that grudges remain although I’ve forgotten their source. Friends’ teenagers take holiday jobs at the mall, or show up in the community musicals, unexpected singers. I drive past fields where the kids remind me they played Little League, and what I remember, guiltily, is the sun in my irritated eyes and the hungry hours on aluminum bleachers with a blanket. I greet three or four people within a downtown block. I know their names; I’ve forgotten names. And a few women, a rare few, are bound to me by key experience and disclosure, by admiration, by uncomplicated love. Adele is one of these. We are not best friends, although we have confided. We are dearly connected.
• • •
When I had the abortion, Missoula was still strange, eighteen months’ residency hardly a viable tenure. I had no close friends here. I found out I was pregnant—an accident three months into marriage. For any other burden or transition Christopher would have been enough, but we were pushed apart by mutual devastation, had turned unfamiliar and silent. I needed warming, someone in front of me. The phone didn’t serve, its connection only a trick. On a winter day I went to lunch with a woman I knew slightly (Patricia, I’ve told you about her), yearning for the right companion, but when I said, “I’m having an abortion,” the light left her face and she told me not to do it, and we were each embarrassed. She tried to explain—hadn’t meant to sound that way, wasn’t judging, the years she’d been hoping to get pregnant. So I went to the preliminary appointments on my own, offered bare inner arm for the blood tests, read the forms by myself. Alone I attended to the mad, unceasing noise in my head as I recalculated weeks, days, this choice or that one. We made our decision, which is a story for another time. Christopher came with me for the abortion itself, but I told him he had to stay in the waiting room. I didn’t want to look at him.
Always, Christopher made me glad and loved me, and I loved him, but each year I got into unconscious trouble around the anniversary, and hated him. How doltish and inept he seemed filling a doorway, how puny on the other side of the bed as he stood taking off his glasses, checking the alarm on his clock. I hated his pillow. I’d watch him and allow contempt to fill me, startled by my longing to do him inexplicable violence. Then I’d remember the date. His body, dumb and comfortable with maleness, would never have to give away what mine had. We’d endured the decision, done that together, and that part—the hard, hard education of being in a couple—I didn’t regret. We learned respectful compromise, were prepared by it to face lesser conflicts, but in the long weeks of late winter leading up to each anniversary, I started my furious retreat and in my mind unmarried him. The burst of the actual date made me miserable, and I stormed around. As we got into bed, deliber
ately oblique, I’d say, “It was today, you know.” Mutter. “The anniversary.” I forced his confused look, his searching query, “Which anniversary?” so I could blow up, fling him away. I was isolated in this eddy of memory that wouldn’t release me.
Ten years of that. I was talking one afternoon with my friend Donna, who had hired me as an abortion counselor soon after my own abortion. I’d needed to go to work in a clinic, work with women and for women, forget men. Somewhere in age between my mother’s and my father’s, Donna had watched me hesitate, attempt, stumble, stand. We had a teapot and cups on my table, a plate of bruschetta, shards of garlic shining with green olive oil. Abortion was a vivid and regular subject between us, and I adored her frank acknowledgment, straight language, our aggressive push away from shame. Beneath all our conversations ran her interest in my well-being. I was slowly learning to seek that, allow it.
“How are you, my dear?”
“It’s almost the anniversary, not great. I get kind of crazy. Really angry.”
“Crazy angry—that’s always productive. Have you ever done anything, a ritual?”
I flinched. “No.”
“Have you thought about a ceremony?”
“No.”
My parents, their parents, the aunts and uncles, had disdained ceremony, secular and intellectual instead. I’d never attended a funeral for a grandparent. My sister and my half sister had both married, but I’d attended neither wedding, nor included anyone at mine, which had been more a civic task than a ceremony. I could run up against the family mistakes anywhere: ritual seemed an unworthy idea, ridiculous, common.
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“You don’t have to do it alone, you know,” Donna said. She was leaving for a trip, but as we parted she told me, “Find someone.”
I grew more awake than usual to the approaching date, intrigued in spite of myself by this idea. Inarguably, the right person was Adele. As if she couldn’t help it—and the longer I knew her I saw she could not—Adele made people feel safe, acceptance her well-known forte. She conducted workshops in the schools on racism, trained the police department in sensitivity. The scope of experience moved her, the ugliness and mistake born of fear didn’t faze her.
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