After brunch, I gathered things to carry to the sink but she stopped me.
“Leave them,” she said. “I like them there for a while. When you’ve gone, they’ll make me happy that you were here, that we ate together.” She walked me the three paces to the door. I loved her grounded feet, the unabashed royalty of her affection. She watched with me for the elevator, the hallway spiced with the flavors of ancient dinners, and oh! those topics we’d forgotten! next time! “Good-bye, honey,” she said, pleased and laughing. “I’ll see you tonight,” and then her voice changed to lullaby, her last good-bye a reassurance. I knew that I’d given her as much as I’d received.
In the full bookstore later, I looked up from the page and found April in the dense crowd, her steady look right on me, filled with love. I held this as I performed, then as I answered questions. There were strangers and forgotten colleagues and friends who had traveled from other states, and there were people outside on the cold street. Both aunts, all my cousins; childhood friends, high school acquaintances, lovers from college, and after; my agent, editor, publisher, publicist; my husband, my stepmother. Also in the room was the pervasive whisper of my mother, who might appear, but if she had, what would it have mattered? How could she have breached the fortress of friendship?
• • •
I am lucky that April forgave me. Our correspondence became central to my thinking, a place I unscrolled and wandered strange territory. I delighted in her letters, which were raw, a torrent of poetry, immediate crudeness, smart passions. I wrote to her about every little thing—a school play, sore muscles from pruning in the garden—and huge things, the unsalvable sting as Daniel, growing older, found me less interesting; my creative attempts and hopes. But mostly and voluptuously we spoke about desire and writing, the vulnerabilities and awakenings, the necessity of loving and fucking intensely, of writing. We recognized each other, paid tribute, allowed forbidden sentences. Hello, Comrade, she wrote; Dear Adventurer, she wrote. We mused on the ecstatic dangers. April loved to study the complications of ambivalence.
When I finally slept with someone else (I was away from Missoula, writing), the next morning I called April. I was fretting and afraid, also bursting from sex. “I know this is trouble,” I said, “but I had to.”
“I know,” she said. I rushed the details, and she gasped happily, stopped me for clarifications I was too scared to note—not about the event but about my heart and feeling.
“No, April, but this is terrible, a true disaster.” My voice was shaking, off-kilter. “I’m bad.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” she said, allowing the truth in that. “But, honey, you sound alive and joyous!” We pondered the competing pulses of life—the safe home, the happy cunt, the cherished children, the greedy artist. In a letter afterward, she wrote that she loved to see “the beautiful, drenched place that you are in, in bed and at the desk, which as we know are inseparable.” As we know.
As we know.
Over the next week it was April who encouraged my fiercest honesty, who witnessed my perplexed, unstoppable claim of appetite and identity. She prepared with me my courage, so that when I had the painful and unprecedented conversation with Christopher, I was awake, but not afraid. He and I made our new, extraordinary way, our marriage reimagined and reshaped, richer veins mined. April fortified me. I inhabited the messy self, and she loved me for “the way you live every scrap of it.”
It is morning, night’s tired exhale that has reached its thin light. It was all ICU, my father’s breaths and the seeming hours of pauses, my collapse in the cab, the phone call in Connie’s kitchen. I’ve brought my children to the airport, sending them home to Montana after the sudden New York week, allowed to pass with them through security and see them down the jetway. I have never done this before. Please stay in the gate area until the plane has taken off, I’m told, so I do that, set my bag on a plastic seat, and stand against the glass, facing the tarmac and my sons, who cannot see me. The woman next to me stares out, a tissue held at her chin, eyes riveted to the plane. She’s crying.
“You have a kid on it?” I say.
“I shouldn’t cry,” she says, holding up the Kleenex. “It’s the tenth time. He goes to his dad.”
“It’s always the same, hard every time?” I ask. “It’s my boys’ first time.”
“Oh, they’re fine, they like it,” she says. “It’s no problem for them.”
With silent natural need we put our arms around each other and watch as the plane pulls back and leaves workers to scatter and meander on the ground. There is more grief in her than just this, and there is more grief and catastrophe in me, but we don’t mention those, we stay with our airport script. The jet reaches the runway and speeds up, and we watch it lift its impossible weight, our three boys, and pierce the haze of yellow dirt and heat. “Good luck,” she tells me, shouldering her bag.
• • •
My sister and I have been together for the last five days, a rare occasion. She has three young children, lives up the Hudson, and we try to see each other when I get to the city; but it’s always been with kids, and our father. This is not my first sister, with whom I shared childhood, whose grueling rage defined her single brief visit to the hospital room. This is Hattie, my father’s third daughter, born when I was eight. In the last decade she and I have grown close, a tender advancing that means everything to me, more than I can say. More than I can write. I can’t call her “half.”
Hattie and I took a break one day from the ICU and wandered up Lexington to H&M, propelled by a mutual simple hunger for clean clothes. We were so tired, but I danced in the store to the aggressive pop song, made her smile. We bought the same loose tank tops and wandered back. “One sec,” she said. She went to a low wall near the hospital entrance and sat, pulling her tobacco pouch from her bag. I sat next to her. Even as we longed for each other, for sistering and good connection, we always practiced a certain formality, as if both aware that our relationship—sane, crucial—was our responsibility alone. We had no shared references of childhood experience, no shared mother. We had to make this. But, with blood’s deep mystery, we knew each other, too. In the cafeteria, she’d watched me open a sandwich, cover the tuna with potato chips, and close it again. She murmured, “Texture girl.” No one had ever noticed the habit or knew that this was exactly what it meant, this was me. She rolled her cigarette. Everything was allowed this week. She drew a drag in and held the cigarette to me, and I took it from her hand. One taste, a pleasant dizziness, and I gave it back. We’d never sat as two grown women alone together. At my father’s bedside, this awful week, we’d shared with each other a strange holiday, sustaining.
• • •
I walk out of the airport, have to find my way back to the city. I’ve never been in that fatherless city. On the train I nearly choke, breath and sobs mixed, unleashed now that my children are gone. A man who stands near me, uncomfortable, asks if I’m okay, I nod sobbing yes, he looks elsewhere. In Penn Station, the density around me in all its sticky business presses close, hurries hard. I pick my way among people, eyeing and hating them, in awe of their goals and morning starts.
I’m supposed to meet Hattie and our stepmother at my father’s apartment. It’s only 8 a.m., and I have beaten through so many recent hours. I’ll go to Seventy-second Street, two express stops, I can manage. Thronged and hot, hot gusts from the vacant tunnels, the pulse of bodies on the platform, I send April a text and she answers, “Just awake. Come.” I have to be with her. Not with Hattie right now, the matching daughter struck down, nor with my stepmother, who has been, all week, barricaded in her furies. Not with my children, sweetening good-byes and loss for them. With bravest April, patron of grief, unafraid. One day this week she’d taken Daniel and Jack for the ten hours I spent at the hospital. She’d calmed and fed them, taken them to the Natural History Museum, paid them kind attention, made certain they trusted that their mother would be herself when she returned. They love her now.
I wedge myself and suitcase into the subway car, nearly asleep with all I don’t want to feel, and nearly laughing with the insolent surge of too much feeling. Inside my head, I talk myself in and out, up and down, make nonsense lists that lead me to nothing.
At Seventy-second I haul my bag up the stairs, released into the sunny middle of Broadway, and turn in April’s direction, the way opposite the apartment my father no longer inhabits. I hurry, peeling away the block until I’m at her building. Upstairs, she’s left her door cracked, and I push in. She looks out from the bathroom, toothbrush in her mouth, a hand up. We stare, I don’t speak. We let the about-to steady us. I stand in the middle of the room, April’s sunlit surfaces and faded colors and the notecards on the walls with her powerful scrawl. I should be sweaty, but my body feels nothing.
Finished in the bathroom, she comes close. We kneel on the carpet, facing, two halves of something fitting, or trying to. We sit and stretch our legs, an empty diamond between us.
I say, “He died last night.”
It’s the only time it will be the first time I say this. Tomorrow I will have to say, “My father died the night before last,” which won’t mean what I’ll need it to mean. We drop into each other to cry and clutch at this. Shoulders pressed into shoulders, I feel her wet face with my cheek. She has lost her old friend, her champion and great editor. She has lost more than my children have, who didn’t know my father well, more than my husband has, who always stood outside our relationship. And something other than what I have lost. Am losing. Together, we don’t stop this. It’s a particular kind of comfort. The comfort of not being comforted. I do not worry that my wrecked heart will be mishandled. I do not have to fix it up quickly.
April reaches to her desk for a handkerchief square, which she holds to me. “It’s only because of your father that I even have a handkerchief,” she says. She smiles, crying. “He taught me to be an English gentleman.” We laugh and I blow my nose, and at the same time we weep.
“Tell me,” she says. She knows that the events of death, which I have stored for nine hours, must be gathered. She knows narrative will be important. I talk through every moment in the slow wash of clarity. “And then,” I’m saying. “And then,” and she’s nodding. When I’m done speaking to her open, constant face, she gets up, leaves me resting my back against cushions.
She says, “Have you eaten?”
I consider this. “I should.”
She says, “Hold this,” and puts a peach in my hand. The rounded fruit flesh gives against my fingers. A morning peach. It is this morning. She blends yogurt and blueberries, slices of another peach, and hands me a glass filled with a pale purple. I tell my throat to open: take this in, stave off the empty, screaming high.
In her bathroom, my guts open up, cramps and loose shit that don’t stop. I don’t care. I wonder what I care about. I know I have to leave. I wash my hands and say good-bye. There is no other human possibility except April, who can grieve and laugh, too, who can keen and eat. She holds me up and holds herself, and she can space apart the exquisite in this anguish. I wonder if she knows how crucial she is. She does, which is her gift. She doesn’t disavow the force we make, the ways we climb into places not yet defined or moored, and expand there. Not many people can do this together. As we both know.
I am not capable anymore today and don’t remember red or green, the rules I’m meant to follow. “Walk me there?”
“Of course, honey.”
She delivers me in front of my father’s building, passing me to some other mourner, with whom I’ll ride the elevator, and I ready myself for the next of this un-day. That part will demand skills and graces I don’t think I own, underwritten by her hold, her tears, the food she put into me.
In the next days I come to her often. She has pressed a set of keys into my hand. “Whenever you want to be here, just come.” She brings tea to me, and I let her, which is hard. “I know, honey,” she says. “We’re both mothers, that’s what we do, that’s where we’re safer. But can you? Accept this right now?” I accept. Memories churn and flood my mouth with more of my father, and more, unstoppable, and April listens, or she cries, adds her pieces of him, which in hunger I collect. Over the following months, she will call me right back, she will stay on the phone, she will conjure him for me in ways familiar and in ways I never knew. She’ll witness my wail and collapse, my venom, astonishment, my slow changes, and she’ll say, “You’re beautiful.” In her studio, the first day, the next day, the next, April takes my bag from my shoulder, sets it aside, guides me to the carpet, talks to me in her serene voice. She makes us fried eggs at the stove, orange yolks spectacular in the whites, delivered from the black skillet onto the plates that rest beside the window, and she brings the plates to the floor. We eat.
Thank you
This book was written with crucial support from Nancy Washburn and Tim Washburn, Marta Pierpoint and Ross Tillman, and Karin Stallard; and from Theresa Rebeck and the Lark Theatre Company, One Writer’s Place, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Corporation of Yaddo. It is my privilege and great fortune to be guided by Nan Graham, my generous editor. I thank her for her faith and unflagging attentions. Thank you to Eric Simonoff, my agent, devoted ally and friend, whose words of encouragement always steady me. I am grateful beyond measure to Andrew Peterson for his tremendous love and generosity. And thank you, Ezekiel and Otis. My life with you is rich, sweet, and so happy.
A SCRIBNER READING GROUP GUIDE
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SHE MATTERS
Susanna Sonnenberg
Introduction
She Matters is an exquisitely observed memoir told through the lens of female friendships. Tracing her life from early childhood through the present day, Susanna Sonnenberg examines the girls and women who have perplexed, devastated, sustained, and shaped her. What emerges is a highly intimate study of the rich bonds and complications of friendship.
Topics and Questions for Discussion
1. Sonnenberg covers more than forty years and writes about twenty friendships. Which of these women would you want to be friends with? Is Susanna aware of the ways in which she is a challenging friend?
2. In the chapter “Roommate” Sonnenberg writes, “My mother had taught me that sex—sexual touch, innuendo, sexual acts, sexual interest—was the way to know another person truly, connection guaranteed”. How does this influence Susanna’s ability to forge friendships? In what other ways does Sonnenberg’s mother shape her ability to develop and maintain close connections with women?
3. Sonnenberg writes about Annabelle’s antique furniture in “Annabelle Upstairs”: “I was clouded by envy I had to beat back, how she belonged to these objects and through them understood her own belonging”. How does the notion of belonging shape Susanna?
4. Friendships often change when one friend has a baby. How is Susanna affected by her friends who are mothers? How does becoming a mother affect her relationships with other women?
5. Some of the friendships described in She Matters burn out, and the one with Claire in “Kindling” ends with an outright breakup. Is there a common reason why these friendships fall apart? Have you ever had a friendship end? Some of the friendships don’t last, such as Nina’s in “Within Reach” and Flora’s in “Naked.” Why does the author choose to include them in the book? What power do they still have?
6. Sonnenberg’s first book, Her Last Death, chronicles her experience of growing up with a difficult and destructive mother, a subject she revisits in the chapter “Women Are Like This,” where she describes her childhood “home of women.” In She Matters she writes, “What I really needed to know, to rewrite, was my previous definition of the word mother”. How does she go about this monumental task? Which friends help her redefine mother? Has she forged a mature “home of women”?
7. What role does marriage play in the friendships Sonnenberg describes? Once she marries, what role do her friends play in her own understanding of marriage?
&
nbsp; 8. Sonnenberg writes of her friendship with Nina in “Within Reach” that she is “unsure of the mistakes and what I failed to fix”. Do you harbor lingering doubts, regrets, or questions about certain relationships?
9. Adele in “Ritual,” Connie in “Real Estate,” and Marlene in “The Four Seasons” support Susanna through difficult transitions. How do friendships sustain you in times of crisis?
10. Some of Susanna’s friendships burn as passionately and fervently as love affairs. What distinguishes a friendship from a romance? In what ways are the two alike?
11. In “The Root Cellar,” Sonnenberg describes a dangerous situation. How does Susanna consider her own circumstances compared with her friend’s? How does Sonnenberg feel about this now?
12. Sonnenberg looks back over a lifetime. How do you reflect on your own friendships as you read She Matters? Do you remember people you’d forgotten? Do you remember the person you once were?
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