The first time I met her, eleven years earlier, Adele annoyed me because my house was not being painted. The painter was dating her. Adele dropped by on a sunny day in her loose jeans and sat down on the front steps. The painter, Sara, climbed down the ladder, and from the kitchen I could hear the swishy murmur between them, the laughter’s song, the silent pauses. Sara sat Adele down on the front steps, both hands around her face, and they made out. I was pregnant, which accounted for my many bad moods, for my impatience with people who were not completing tasks I’d hired them to do. This dewy girl, this trivial what’s-her-name, was in my way. After an hour, she pulled herself up, and Sara walked her to the gate, her hand over her ass. I was glad to see her leave, maybe today Sara would paint the front door, but they stopped and kissed more showy kisses.
When I came outside later, Sara turned down the radio so she could tell me, anyone, about her delicious romantic find. I looked at the window trim. So what, Adele was an art student, so what, she came from blah blah and planned to study blah blah? “She’s ten years younger than we are,” I told Sara. Adele did not seem a serious person, hanging around just to make out. Who seems serious, when you’re thirty and pregnant? You think you are the only one capable of a meaningful decision.
Later—this was after they’d broken up—Adele appeared at the clinic. Before sunrise she would escort women from their cars into the building. For hours she put her body between the patients and the protestors. Anyone who helped with abortion was heroic to me, and I regretted having called her unserious. When she saw me she’d smile her calm, starry smile.
When I was pregnant with my second child, Christopher and I went to the midwife’s basement office. We’d returned to this comfortable realm for the reassuring instruction, the sympathetic company, and for the film of Brazilian women squatting to give birth. Seven or eight couples dotted the rug, each claiming a double place.
Adele entered with a man, who spoke only to say his name, Joe. Were they together, I wondered, or was he a donor? They sat across from us, Joe against the wall. Adele eased back into him, resting between his legs. Twins, she said sheepishly, radiantly. Her conviction was brave and gorgeous. Interested in each person, she proved a dedicated listener.
The women looked from one to the other, knowing what the men didn’t know. We knew the heartbeat and interior graces, compensation for our own clumsiness; the beatitude as we renounced our bodies, our noble little parasites the higher calling. We knew, without saying, the watery rollover, tremor, seismic shudders, the steadiness of the baby’s hiccups, the reliable stab from a kick to the kidney, and the intensity of orgasm primed with massive doses of estrogen. We ignored the men, let them prop us. Adele was the one who asked to hear their experience, and then they spoke.
I ran into Adele in the Good Food Store. Her births, news shared rapidly between the classmates, were legendary for their ease, and for being the only multiple among us. She was—they were—taking up an aisle, the twins bound into some sort of double baby carrier held to her by padded straps so that each baby obscured a hip. I was hardly coping with the demands of a baby and a child four years apart, and I felt aghast on her behalf—nursing times two, sleeplessness times two. I think I made a joke, and she did, too, our first private equality, and there was just so much baby. Adele, only in her early twenties, seemed unbreachably able, a sanguine girl-mother.
We started to get together, find mornings. We made chai in her kitchen, Adele with the wooden spoon in the pan as I added the milk. We settled on the floor, mugs beside us, her old Rottweiler asleep on the couch. Now and then she reached up to him to smooth his ears. Daniel, four years old, looked at books, chewed pretzel sticks, while the babies crawled into each other, her daughters and their huge smiles, climbing her, Jack a pumpkin in my lap. We talked about the small and numerous disagreements with the men. They had been our closest friends. We once sought their counsel, cared to advise them. She still wanted to, patient with Joe and herself, able to guide them back to any fraught subject after a day or two. Leaving her house, I always felt I might now possess a clearer heart.
That birthday I answered the door to find Adele with a small bouquet. She showed her relaxed smile, her offered love. It set off my panic—what will I owe and when? But Adele seemed to trust that her good faith would germinate and feed the world beyond friendship. Who lived so unselfishly, with altruism and pure concern? She did, which took me a number of years to determine, not because she was hard to trust, but because I didn’t believe in such magnanimity. Adele required of me a leap of faith.
• • •
When their daughters were five, Adele and Joe married before the Mission Mountains on a blazing day in July, a bright sky, a high heat. I’d driven up from Missoula on my own. When I rounded the pass, emerged from the high-shouldered section of Route 93, the Missions stunned me, always did, and my car, pulled by the force that governed the valley, seemed bird-size.
Unfolded chairs made a wreath around the outdoor altar, and the vistas in every direction caught up together the sky, rock, valley bowl, the limitless grasses. Stately peace spread open before us, and beyond and behind. Kids ran about, alighting for a moment on mothers’ laps, then off in their packs again.
The ceremony began. Rather than turn to their friend who presided, Adele and Joe faced us, and each spoke. They told us how we mattered and made them strong, gave them a home, taught them resilience. You care for us, they said, and we love you. I’d never heard anything like it, this inclusive ceremony. Adele defied definitions, added to them, broadened them, and illuminated what only the kindest friend could, which was a way to accept oneself.
• • •
So I asked Adele to help me with the abortion memory, feeling a bit of a fraud, guilty at taking up her time. I didn’t believe in my own use of the word ritual.
Warmly and at once she said, “I’d love to do that for you.”
I didn’t know what specifics to request, how to proceed. But I knew I could show Adele my ineptitude, and she would hear my unkempt longing. She would find the gravity, see to the reverence. She came to my studio during her lunch hour.
“What are the important elements of this for you?” she asked.
“Um, water? The woods? Somewhere that’s . . .” I felt ridiculous. “Sacred?” Sacred?
“Do you have a place in mind? I know some places.” I nodded. “There’s a stand of cedars, it’s not too far.” That was good. She said, “And what about an offering?” Completely blank, I started to cry, confronted by the skepticisms of a broken-apart family and overwhelmed by the borrowed strength of a tender woman who called me her friend.
• • •
She drove, and we went way up Rock Creek, past many spots Christopher and I used to fish when we’d first explored Montana, freshly arrived together. I’d decided that was the place. We’d known nothing then of this heartbreak and conflict that would weave into our lives, hadn’t even a glimmer. We thought, We’re in love, but we’d been cutouts, not yet even the firm molds that would be filled. I didn’t go fishing with him anymore. I was talking about him to Adele, exasperated and complaining—he chews, he clears his throat, he snores. “I hate feeling this,” I said. “That nothing he can do is right, how distant he seems from the man I loved.”
“Maybe there’s another way to see him,” she suggested after thinking about it. “To ask him what it’s like.”
“I don’t want to hear him. I want to stay angry.”
“Maybe,” she said, “staying angry doesn’t really help you.”
She parked by an ancient wooden fence, gray and bleached pale by sun, and we got out. Yellow butterflies clung to the ground in lacework around our feet, and the enchantment began. From the backseat I retrieved the small clay figure I’d made, the “offering.” I’d had to go to a pottery studio to buy the clay, a weighty brick with a plastic coating to keep it moist. I hoped Christopher wouldn’t see me bring it in from the car, I didn’t want to explain it. Outdoors
beside the house one afternoon, I’d let my hands shape whatever came, and a feminine form emerged, which embarrassed me as trite, some sort of rounded, reclining woman. It had dried in the sun, and on the seat it left chalky brown dust. We headed across the creek over an old bridge and into the snows hidden from the spring sunlight in the deeper part of the canyon. I stopped talking. Soon we were up to our thighs, pushing into drifts, and getting wet. I didn’t want to work hard, still resisting the mission, its seriousness, but with Adele next to me, I did work. She let me walk on, pick the spot, and we came to rest at the bank a ways up, a place where the water was loud, the stream running hard with spring runoff. Red, brown, and green rocks, mixed with gray, were visible on the bottom.
We looked down at the water. I didn’t know if I should start, how to be. “What do you need to say?” Adele asked. “You can say whatever it is.” I knelt on the tough ground. My abortion had happened ten years before, no close to its harrowing chapter. To Christopher I’d pretended the episode was over, the sour memory the only remains, but I still felt the muscular truth, the places in my body that had held, had fought, had released. I always felt them.
“I’m sorry,” I said for the first time. I was self-conscious. Adele moved away. “I let you go.” The sound of my voice was wrapped in water as I placed the clay into the current. There was room to say more. “I’m sorry, Christopher. I’m sorry, Susanna. Good-bye, baby. I set all this down, and I’m saying good-bye.” I rested on my knees in the melting snow and watched the heedless creek reshape the contours of the figure. Silent, Adele sat on a low rock. I returned to her and settled, and she put both arms around me. Against her, I cried, draining the angers, the sorrows. Not even Christopher knew them. They existed in the words, the water, the murmured recognition, between women.
• • •
I did not go back up Rock Creek for the anniversary the following spring, or the next. The March date came and went, softer. It’s been a few years. Christopher goes to fish there, as he always has, but I’ve never told him where I took Adele. I don’t need him to know. He knows I changed something and that that changed something for us. In the school hallway at the sight of Adele, I am steadied every time. I picture the winter’s gaunt riparian brush, the clearing snows and the place on the bank where the water hurries past, where this calm and unprejudiced friend blessed my first ceremony.
Real Estate
We shared a circle that senior spring, really at the last minute. Loosened by all I’d accomplished and antsy to go and show off in the open world, my attention for the last of college was scattered, the people see-through. I wasn’t taking on new friends here. Amidst our huddles of playgoing and bargoing, Connie was the firm column in the theater crowd, her words the sharpest and most ardently argued, infallible entertainment. My playwright boyfriend was the classicist, his roommate the jester, Neil the handsome actor, Tina the pure angel on stage; but Connie, the dramaturge, would say the wonderful, ghastly thing, stop the whole room, and get it right, and then slam down her dissenters. I didn’t want to consider her powers, because I was supposed to be the smart, insolent woman. But she did not mimic fearlessness. She bristled, commanded, and we knew that Connie—her work—was special in a way that transcended envy. She and Jim were already together, but I never thought of her in a couple. My boyfriend resented her lauded recognition and her prodigious skills, her drive. “She’s amazing,” he’d say to me, not happy. “What a mind.” He encouraged me not to think well of her.
I look at that twenty-one-year-old me, susceptible to his thin impersonation of love, his bitter, thin authority, and I hate how little I cared to heed my instincts—about him, about Connie—how readily I ignored a remarkable woman. It was easier to be scared of her, to step out of her way and nurse my own meek jealousies.
A few months after college, Connie’s name appeared on the opening credits of a TV series. We’d heard rumors too watery to take seriously, but look! Oh, hey, we know her! We watched the popular show, my boyfriend riveted, his scorn the soundtrack. I joined him. Who did she think she was! Who deserved that level of success already? Connie—paid God knows what—betrayed the rest of us. We couldn’t bear our striving to look childish.
I broke up with that man eventually, lost a thousand-dollar deposit on a wedding dress left unclaimed at the bridal store. Events filled my years, and I was pushed on to fresh pursuits of jobs, friends, apartments, men, travel. I married after moving to Montana, and I had a baby. Before a trip to New York with our infant son, we put out the word for a place to stay. Another friend knew that Jim and Connie, who were not coming back from LA anytime soon, had a brownstone, and in a rush of impersonal messages left between me and Jim, we were granted permission to use it, a New York rescue. They had a boy, too, red-haired like our son. We could use his crib, his bath toys. Feel free.
“I have these old friends, from college, they’re letting us stay,” I told Christopher, but in Brooklyn their furnishings, framed posters, book collection, spoke of nothing more personal to me than catalog content. I couldn’t say to Christopher, “Yeah, Connie’s always loved Italian pottery.” I didn’t know her, hadn’t even seen her since an indifferent, mass good-bye at graduation nine years before. She worked ferociously, profusely, had some unnerving drive, and I’d heard that Jim took care of their son and everything else. What to make of it, the aggressive reversal: the woman doing this and the man that? The woman seizing wide latitude. Something felt faintly dangerous, an unnamed treachery, uncomprehended, but—Thank you for the house! We slept in their bed, ground our coffee in their grinder and washed towels in their machine, where Jim had taped up a kind note of instruction. We kept their keys in our pockets and ran up and down their red Brooklyn stoop as if, for ten days, we were them. What if we made Hollywood money? What if these magic towels and rugs belonged to us? At the end, we bought a bottle of excellent wine (one we’d never have purchased with our real dollars) and put it on their dining table. I left the bright, literate note you write to people you don’t plan on knowing. By the time we boarded the plane, we’d dismissed our unuseful fantasies.
• • •
On a ravishing day when the wind was high and all the air cleaned, I drove up and up into the Pacific Palisades. I’d come to LA with baby Daniel to visit my friend Steffie, who said she loved babies, and really did, welcomed mine. She’d borrowed a high chair for our visit and squeezed it into her small kitchen. Such friends had principal status in my straitened life. Most of my old friends, men especially, did not disguise their boredom, and they expected me and us to talk about them. I didn’t have the energy. Steffie, raised in the Midwest with brothers and sisters, who doted on new nieces and nephews, was actually interested in what my son would eat, or if he sunburned easily. She was unbothered by where I changed him, and she spoke to him. We had often laughed at our disparate upbringings—my urban sarcasms and entitlements, her lakeside summers, family weddings—but now I felt, in stupendous, unsayable terms, grateful for her plain faith in bonds, for her example of loyalty. I felt I was becoming someone she recognized, that she liked me better than ever this way. At the same time I faced the rough problem of diluted identity.
That morning Steffie needed to work at home, and I was touring around Venice with my agitated baby, his collapsed stroller in the trunk of the rental car. Our disrupted routines—nap now instead of then, read now, nurse now—left me anxious and exposed in a colossal city, where my friend glided, stony muscles revealed by workout clothes or backless dresses, her penned eyeliner in place all day, a velvet thread. Once, I’d lived in LA, some other me, had had the low Hollywood assignment of D-Girl. I had sped on and off the freeway arteries, eaten Asian salads at outdoor tables, my fruited iced tea always refilled. This was after the playwright boyfriend, and then the banker boyfriend, when I was trying on independence with a mania fueled by my first significant salary. Steffie and I had lived together in Santa Monica, a stucco bungalow. We threw a party, and people came, which seemed to us
, the morning after, like the real miracle. They came for us. We were noticeable. What did I matter now, beyond the range of my baby’s adamant reach? The identity of mother had stolen up behind me, made me renounce plans, ideologies, wardrobes, allowed me no time to shape new ones.
I know! I thought, and called Connie’s house. Old friends could show me something of my origins. Unflappable Jim said, Come on over, as if I’d be petulant not to. I drove and parked, disbelieving at the address, the trail of numbers part of California’s big arrogance. The rosebushes in front of the house were perfect, the hard breeze brightening them. The white fence at knee height was movie-set perfect, almost suspect. Connie as the woman with flowers in fat bloom? I couldn’t even picture her outdoors, our briefly mutual life limited back then by classrooms and temporary quarters, rehearsal spaces dark with stage black. Here was her husband, who tended the baby and baked and was wonderfully calm, who commented with no malice on the idiocies of Hollywood and sudden wealth, and on the funny sorority he shared with mothers at the playgroups. He enjoyed the shock of his splendid house. Their son was at a playdate, and Jim was giving his own solitary hours to us, to someone else’s baby. He took me from room to room, and he joked about the length of the tour, the numerous closets with their recessed bulbs, the soft wool carpeting upstairs. The baby was heavy and hot in my arms, his skin stuck to mine by sweat. Jim brought us into the stylish kitchen and poured us apple juice, ice cubes from a dispenser. It was a house to make you sick with envy, if it belonged to your best friend, who’d achieved that much more than you had, while you both pretended neither of you noticed her rewards. But Connie and Jim were not my best friends, not even close friends. I just knew them. They were information.
She Matters Page 20