She Matters

by Susanna Sonnenberg

  On their way to a party, Marlene and her husband could only stop for a drink, half an hour, an hour, they were saying in the hall as they took off their coats and greeted my stepmother. I waited for Marlene to see me, as shy as a new student, and we put out our arms, pressed shoulders, ladylike and gracious but not more. We gathered our chairs in the bedroom, my father our focus, the way he liked it. We made light conversation, a convivial mood, holiday reports. How grown I felt as I handed Marlene her wineglass, then a glass to her husband. Of course, I was grown, past forty, but I wanted her to see all that had happened, all I’d become, to review the years she’d missed. I talked with her husband, partly afraid that my eyes on her would betray old worship and make me foolish, but now and then I looked, willing the appearance of my familiar reckonings, and she was still there, girlish and a little flustered, too, and it charmed me.

  • • •

  Marlene walked toward the table, and I stood. We looked into each other, took the measure, sat down. “Have you eaten?” she said. I’d read the menu. A sandwich cost $27. I objected on principle. “Oh, Susy, please have the sandwich, please.” Okay. I let her take me to lunch. I needed an immediate mother. My stepmother the day before had exiled me from the apartment for good, no explanation beyond, “This is too awkward.” I can’t remember where I slept, helped by some receiving friend. My stepmother, whom I’d loved for thirty years and had believed loved me, had thrown callous ill feeling at me through this whole thing, and disorientation ruled my latest interactions. But it was too much, not for now. I’d think about it later.

  There was catching up, my children’s lives and Marlene’s, our work, but mostly, we talked of my father, a confidential and vivid closeness. I imagined how we looked, not friends, but a mother, her daughter. Marlene forged ahead with the beloved and the obnoxious, memories of my father rising and blending together, just as mine were, ungraspable details I wanted to catch before they evaporated. As if they’d evaporate.

  “Do you know what he called my husband? After I got married?” she said. “A golden retriever.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “My husband didn’t like that,” she was laughing. We had more wine. We tattled on my father with intense affection, profound knowledge.

  “You know he adored you.”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “But we had a hard time the last couple of years.” This was hurting terribly. My stepmother had chosen the day after he died to tell me I’d wounded him. That he’d been disappointed, waiting for me. Nothing could help me digest her choice, her need to dispatch her rage.

  “He never stopped talking about you.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “Susy. He was so proud of you.”

  She said it simply. In the week my father died, it was the only time anyone said this. Marlene, again and at the right moment, wound his humanity with mine, made us father and daughter, daughter and father.

  As We Both Know

  When I agreed to move to the big blank of Montana with Christopher, I asked him to come with me as I said my good-byes. I wanted to introduce him, have people see he was it. We drove around the East Coast, my inventory of friends in Boston, Providence, New Haven, family members in New York. In Sag Harbor, April and Marina pulled us into the kitchen, sat us at the broad table and asked to hear everything. “Tell us!” We loved to tell that story, only a few months old.

  As I talked, April listened with acute attention. “So beautiful!” she exclaimed at the slight asides, the passing detail: I had to wait for Christopher to unlock the car door . . . He’d just come back from a run, when . . . She revered each step in the dawning of love, the joining. She gazed at Marina, whose ranging, coppery curls and red lipstick made her the focal point of any room. We all stared, the delicacy and sleepy, erotic energy, those wrists. Love shaped April, decided her. April and Marina exalted sex as sacred and did it saying cunt and pussy, spilling mock secrets, letting raunch erupt. “Stop it! Oh, don’t!” Christopher blushed, already uncomfortable at playing the fourth to our three. It’s good, I wanted to tell him, when women say the real everything, allow each other, wield dirty talk as part of living; but I was startled, too. Marina lowered her eyelids, and April touched those curls. I leaned forward and loved them.

  I was in my early twenties when I first knew them, long before I’d met Christopher, and I liked their act of “April and Marina.” How lovely it was to observe, to applaud, and how blushingly, beautifully, they invited the witness. One of those couples, perfectly coupled. They knew they were an example, took that seriously. I was living in Sag Harbor, the strange job with the movie producer, and they’d bring me to the beach, Marina’s towel in the middle, conversation as her head turned to me, then April, then me. We ate sandwiches of watercress and cheese and sat up to peel fruit. April wore long-sleeved linen to shield her freckled skin. After a few months, plenty of beach, and couscous for dinner or miso soup laced with seaweed, months of affectionate argument, advice, me charging over to their house for a dose of them or to borrow a book, I understood that Marina was simpler, a bright burn. April had shadow mixed in, a whole spectrum.

  April worked at my father’s magazine, another brilliant redhead in his small kingdom, but she was unusual for being sexually unassailable. He enjoyed her mind and willing vulgarity, and he published her poems with enthusiasm, proud to start her career. Then he began to mock her earnestness, both to her face and out of earshot, and her emotional purity, and her deeply felt intention. He had no room for those. He started to ignore her life, which puzzled me, and must have done worse to her, the promise of belief withdrawn. His scorn grew fiercer, his derision pointed, which made her more my sister. Where did she go wrong, I wondered. Did she wonder?

  She didn’t stop loving him. He baited her, insults delivered in his lilting, flirtatious purr, and she’d erupt with laughter, batting him back down. With fierce generosity, she teased him, able to celebrate his whole way, his every way. She accepted imperfect selves, or at least my father’s, something I couldn’t. Only a saint, an acolyte, could do that, I thought, someone bathed in holy distinction. April embodied grace while I was still transfixed by the grace of Marina’s performance, and my own.

  • • •

  April knew grief, her underwriter. She knew torments, leaden histories. I heard many, many details, entrusted to me in her sure voice, serene as an intangible harp, but I didn’t store them. They were too much. Anyway, she seemed to be storing them. I benefited from the thoughtful woman she’d become, the startling poet, as she dosed me with canny assessments, eyed my new friends and lovers, held steady against my father. In Sag Harbor I’d arrive in the wet afternoons and tuck up on the deep cushions of the couch, as she sat on the floor, leaning back, her head propped by the side of my leg. Marina was elsewhere on the phone, her pretty voice in a separate room. April talked about Merrill, Lowell, and Adrienne Rich, their humanity, about Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, about conversions, suicides, about meaning and God and the face of cruelty, about longing. She talked about ecstasy. She thought importantly but within reach, disciplined mornings at her desk, surrounded by the inscriptions and quotations she’d transcribe onto torn slips and back with colored paper. These were tacked around the room at eye level, the inside of herself turned into beautiful landmarks. I looked down at the handwriting on her white pages, at her piles of maps. She’d made each torment into something calm, each calm step a useful one. Everything served.

  • • •

  Christopher and I had been in Montana six months when someone told me April and Marina had broken up. But April’s last letter came a few weeks ago! I worried what would become of her. She was the boyish one, her haircut boxed against her head, her shirts buttoned, jeans formless, and her plain gait; but she was the one so easy to bruise, her rapt face about to crumble at any second. The peaceful kitchen was dismantled, the books peeled from every shelf in the house and crated, arrangements made. I was angry. A beautiful building had come down in my neig
hborhood, my path altered.

  She moved into the city after falling in love with her married therapist, an adventure she related in frequent letters to Montana, which were hard for me to read. I’d put years of effort into undoing my English teacher’s harm, into assessing power’s damages. Exploding with fresh happiness, she wrote me the minute details—the first, blunt mutual admissions, the first time she met the husband and the little boy, held the infant, the business of hauling stuff to a new apartment, having room made for her in a family. She was driven to mother the children, fulfilled. Grounded now with Christopher, I practiced stern emotional safety, our religion. We discussed April’s mistake. It seemed so clear that she’d put herself at risk, self-defeating. I wanted to offer her my support, the way she’d given hers to me, but I didn’t approve of her choice. There was no other way to put it. I didn’t approve.

  • • •

  In April’s new living room on the Upper West Side, she and I were on the rug with my red-haired boy. How wrong, April engulfed by the tumultuous city. She always liked the floor, truth there. Daniel was walking, and I felt eternally weary with the responsibility of him, having to know where his next foot would come down. I sought guidance: Can you show me how to be a mother? Can you? Can you? Can you watch me being a mother and tell me I am fit and right and good? I needed my old friend, in her infinite capacity for struggle, to give me that, but she was repeating the story of falling in love, relishing the thrill. Here was their bedroom, their bureau and shared drawers, here the black-and-white family scenes framed already in the hallway. “Go on,” I said. “Then what?” I pretended to share her joy, to approve the evidence that my dear friend had been violated by a therapist with awful ethics. My habit, my calling, in those days, was to match the other person jot for jot, be the mirror so she wouldn’t look away, but how indecent to fake April to her face, take advantage. April simply gave herself to you. She trusted that if she loved you, you were worthy of her enormous gift.

  The shrink arrived, had a good handshake, gave happy April a kiss, but I loathed her, appalled by her sloppy, professional breach. I could barely talk. Exploiter, I thought. Abuser. And now, at the end of the visit, time to leave them to their wrong kisses, I’d have to gather the baby’s bits and debris, stuff sticky objects in the diaper bag, push elevator buttons, walk out through lobby doors and into the wind chasing up Broadway. I wanted refuge. April didn’t have it for me. She sheltered others.

  I returned to Montana and couldn’t write to her. All I could think was haughty injunction: This is a bad idea. You’ll be sorry. I didn’t want to be that friend, because that wasn’t a friend. But then what? I wanted her to triumph over moral violation—as she’d always done—and she hadn’t. Our exchange of letters stopped, and I gradually noticed. It had been a month; then six months, et cetera. Christopher and I talked about our own terrible histories, protecting each other as if that were the single decree in the marriage oath. We named the abuses of trust we’d grown up with. We reviewed the exploitations of unfed hunger and sweet availability. I didn’t want April to be that girl, used in that way. I could only think “Don’t,” and I didn’t say it. When you stop saying to your friend the curse or hope you really think, then who are you? Who are you together? In a few ragged steps, I abandoned her.

  • • •

  I would count the years since I’d had that friendship. I knew no other woman who exclaimed with astonishment and reverence, let the ecstasy be named and up front, who was so feverishly open to the range of human mistake, always interested to explore it further. No one else had given me clues to real grace and sexual honesty, or had honored terror. I’d ask my father for news of April, because I missed her uneasily. I hoped he’d say she asked after me, and I waited. After a while, my physical memory of her dimmed, and I found when he talked of her that I was listening to a story of his friend, not mine. She became someone I’d met. April’s over, I’d think, and I’d mourn. Had she forgotten me, too, the way I looked and sounded and thought? Then the familiar judgment would present itself, this time not about her choice, but about myself, how I’d ruined something precious—well! she’d forced me to!—and I’d shove her from my mind, ignore failure. How long had I been gone from New York? How long had my father been teasing me to move back? She was part of all that, far away, the childish me I had renounced.

  • • •

  I flirted again, the impulse long shut off.

  I flirted with a man, someone I met through work. Being a mother was my principal purpose, a Susanna for those two people: they needed her, this Susanna. My marriage was straining, chafing, but Christopher and I were not worried about it, knew it would endure. We were good at talking. Now the kids were in school, the day’s hours open and mine. The flirtation grew bolder, hungrier. The hunger scared me, a stowed appetite looming up. The man lived in New York, we’d met once, the tantalizing lunch and the unspoken; hands frozen on the white tablecloth. E-mails held us together, held us in check and at the same time allowed strategic lapses.

  One day I stood in my kitchen, my body accustomed to the drugged arousal that had replaced conscious thought. Some deep plan was buzzing inside me—get to the computer, get more; what next heat would he bestow? I was shutting the fridge, and its chrome handle woke my hand, woke me, and then, I felt one pow blow of all I’d forfeit if the attraction wreaked its powers. I’d never known such hot fear.

  Aghast, I faced exposure—not just wife, not just mother to my sons, but the all; not just the devout notion of ethical safety, I was also this, this fucking mess, aching for true, dense, bold expression. I was unpredictable.

  It was breathtaking, too much awareness to hold alone. April, I thought, craved. Uppity and know-it-all, I’d judged her. I hadn’t let her luminous light cast itself on my waiting upheavals. Eight years earlier I hadn’t anticipated the heart’s implacable wants and the dangerous strain of longing. Nor could I have understood the futility in the attempts to reconcile what would never be reconciled. I had thought April just gave in, let herself be used, and I’d punished her in the way I’d been taught: I dismissed her.

  After dropping the boys at school I went to the bakery and took a sunny table, a plate with a blueberry muffin, a cup of coffee. I opened a notebook and wrote “Dear April.” I understand better now, I wrote, not everything, not properly, but a little bit, have edged closer to ambivalence. You were struggling, I wrote, to live fully. Forgive me.

  I wasn’t looking for absolution over my crush, its reckless peril, but for a way to tell her, “I get it.” I wrote several pages but didn’t send them. I was scared she’d ignore my letter; so I held on to my sure loss rather than risk a new pain. I’d sacrificed eight years of friendship out of ignorance: You don’t deserve April, I was thinking. It was, of course, a different debt that worried me, other people I was terrified might vanish.

  • • •

  Anyone I’d ever known received an invitation to my New York bookstore reading. My father, in his palatial wheelchair and easily tired, couldn’t come. I’d tell him about it, my stepmother would tell him. I was waiting for him to mention my book, acknowledge its contents. April, her name right there on my laptop screen, wrote back with congratulation and her news. After eleven years, she’d left the shrink. Her teaching career was good, her writing rich, she was the essential stepmother to two teenagers. “When you’re here, come have brunch in my studio.”

  I brought bagels from H&H, and she received them as if they were rare and deeply special. She’d always been good at reverence, and I was drinking this in. It used to mean little to me. We’d all teased her, my father, even Marina. Back then, I had to get going, argue, match my father, be on, see things, go to bed with people, no reflection. I watched her hands around the white bag and saw how the simple act was made complex and sacred.

  She set the bagels on a square of cutting block next to a tomato and a red-waxed piece of cheese. There was the knife. I sliced the tomato as she split the bagels and toasted t
hem, fussed at the kettle. We shared the kitchen space. I looked around, slowed myself. Unless you’ve lived in New York, you’ve never imagined daily life in a room of only a few footsteps, but I recognized the real-estate coup, the splendor of high windows presiding over a wide street and the triumph of sealing out the noises from below with an air conditioner. Her walls were papered here and there in her hand, the careful transcribing of words that belonged to reactionaries, dear friends, Neruda, Cavafy, Sanskrit translations. Yoga had replaced romance and everything, besides poetry and her stepchildren. I listened with a mixture of respect and creeping boredom, which I transformed into learning because her scrupulous mind interested me: April would think differently about yoga than anyone else did. Her body was much changed, formed anew by the discipline, muscular yet more yielding, and visible. Startled each time I looked at her, I kept commenting on her body. She joked that she had dresses now. She opened her closet and showed me one.

  We spread plates on the patch of floor and sat on pillows, lifting the food, setting it back down, lifting the napkins. It was a quiet room, where we could be noisy with filling in and catching up. People had died, things that mattered had been written, since we’d last sat together. People had been born. My father had remained important to her, and we compared affectionate and aggravating stories of him. I confessed about the man and the one kiss, which I’d told no one. April asked for the specifics and the unconsidered. She talked about the new woman she loved, who didn’t love her yet, and about her much-broken heart; grief; I talked about my sons, my stumbling marriage, my father’s sharp silence; grief. I told her of the letter I hadn’t sent her, and she pushed for the heart of the matter, calm no matter the revelations. I admitted my shame at abandoning her, my watchful protective judgment. “I was wrong,” I said. I came clean, and we were restored to each other. The friendship had only been in hibernation. I’d let years of such generous acceptance and investigation slip past, what we could have shared: You will never do that again. She asked me to read the opening of my book to her, closed her eyes, then at the first sentence she burst in to note the verb tense, picked up each word and looked at it, which flattered me. She made me feel I had created a perfect thing from dread pain. I felt appreciated in my own precisions.