Helen goes again to sit at the kitchen table. She wishes she smoked; she'd like to shove a cigarette in the middle of the uneaten cake on her plate.
It comes to her that a good long-term relationship can have its downside. If the great ideal of being accepted completely for oneself is achieved, where is the room for growth? Rather than protecting her so much, Dan should have complained about her most glaring faults. Then she might have had the opportunity to change, while working with a safety net. Now he is gone, her inadequacies are revealed—not only revealed but amplified—and she will need to do her psychic homework by herself. She starts to get angry at Dan, to blame him for her overdependence, her foggy way of moving through the world, and then realizes the inanity of it. At least she's not as bad as the woman she once met who confessed she had no idea where the thermostat was until after her husband died. Such women still exist. Literature and popular culture want to make women cowgirls whirling lassos over their heads, but such women still exist.
She tidies the kitchen, then goes up to her study and turns on the light. She regards her desk, the books on the shelves, the clock with the second hand going round and round. She stands staring at her computer, her arms crossed. Then she switches the light off and heads up to her bedroom. She keeps volumes of poetry beside her bed. She'll go there. Flannel pajamas, lamplight, the spare and exquisite execution of language. Maybe later, another piece of cake.
eighteen
“DID YOU READ THE REVIEW OF JILL COSSEN'S BOOK IN THE NEW York Times?” Saundra Weller asks. They are in Panera, across from the library, waiting for Nancy Weldon. Helen has agreed to meet the two women for a snack.
“I did,” Helen says. “I thought it was wrongheaded and unfair. Practically sadistic.”
“I thought many of her points were well taken, actually. But can you imagine reading that about your own book?”
“I can, in fact.” Helen has long preached that one must separate the creative part of writing from the business of it; over and over, she has said that the writing part is all about heart and risk and honoring your truest intentions, and the business part is all about, well, business. But it's hard to stay true to yourself when you can be so demoralized by a few lines in print from a critic more interested in school-yard bullying than in thoughtful analysis. She wonders, sometimes, what those critics feel after they've written such indictments. She wonders if they lean back in their chairs and—
“Hello?” Saundra says.
Helen starts. “Sorry. What did you say?”
“I was asking if there was anyone in your class who has shown the tiniest bit of promise.” She looks about to see if Nancy is coming yet, then leans closer to Helen to say, “Because I have to tell you, most of mine are utterly hopeless, as predicted. But I have one who's actually quite brilliant. A woman named Margot Langley. And she reminds me of … Well, dare I say. But it's true; she reminds me of a young Alice Munro or Penelope Lively. That kind of observational power, that kind of depth.”
“What's her name again?”
“Margot Langley.”
Helen sits back in her chair. “That sounds familiar. Has she been published already?”
“Oh, no. No. But believe me, I'm going to make sure all that changes.”
“Margot Langley …” Helen says, and then suddenly remembers. The letter she got deriding her books. It could be a coincidence. But no, because Saundra says, “She knows you, actually. She said she'd read a few of your books. Or … Well, she read one, and looked at a few others. She read Telling Songs.” Saundra takes a drink of her cocoa, stares over the top of her cup at Helen. Waits, spider to the fly.
“Huh,” Helen says, nodding, willing her face to stay absent of any expression. Then, seeing Nancy headed for them, she offers the woman a bright smile. After Nancy sits down, Helen says, “Saundra was just asking if anyone in my class showed promise. I think they all do.”
Then, turning to Saundra, she says again, “I think they all do.”
• • •
“May I stand to read?” Henry asks.
“Of course,” Helen says.
“I think it lends a little something to your piece if you stand up and read it. We always used to stand to read when I was in school. Elocution, you know.”
“That hurts,” Ella says.
“Elocution?” Henry says, standing, adjusting his shoulders.
“Yes! And you have to wear a diaper and get strapped down and you can't even move.”
“Do you mean electrocution?” Helen asks.
“That's what he said!”
“No, he said elocution.” She is about to launch into an explanation when Billy the murderer says, “They sound the same, fuck it, just read.”
Probably a better idea, Helen thinks, and nods at Henry to go ahead.
“Okay, so I just call this ‘First Kiss.’” He pulls down his cardigan, adjusts his squealing hearing aid, and begins reading about being a soldier, fresh off the farm, eighteen years old and yet to be kissed. The girl in the backseat of the Studebaker. Her perfume, his cologne, those colliding scents. Helen sits back and listens, and begins to see those young people on that dark night, parked in an empty lot behind a liquor store. She sees the girl's pin curl waves, the shine of his army insignia in the dark.
It's getting easier in the group. They know each other; they trust each other; each week, they try harder, and each week, they get better. Next time they meet, they'll need to talk about the graduation reading; for now, she turns her attention to Henry's revulsion as the girl crams her tongue into his mouth, his observation that her tongue conjured up images of fat rolls of bologna hanging over the butcher's counter, his admission that he feared Hitler less than the moment he would have to pull away and face this girl and say something. Henry's piece elicits a round of applause, and the tops of his ears pinken with pleasure.
The rest of the students read their work joyfully absent of the fear and hesitancy that were so often present at the beginning. Donetta was in fourth grade, on the school playground, when she was suddenly smooched by a sixth grader, and then lived in fear that she was pregnant until she was set straight by her older sister. Hector, twelve years old and seeking shelter in a drugstore doorway from a rainstorm, leaned over and kissed the woman he would later marry. Billy kissed his pretty cousin in the basement of their grandparents' house and she promptly gave him a bloody nose; Jeff was first kissed—on the mouth, lingeringly—by one of his mother's friends, when his mother had gone out of the room for something. He was twelve; the woman was in her thirties. Afterward, she had put her finger to her lips and winked—Don't tell—and he had not, until now. Helen had ached for him, hearing this story, for all it suggested about how his life had been since. It occurred to her for the first time that an overly good-looking man must suffer many of the odd hardships of an overly attractive woman. She listened to him read in his quiet, gentle voice, noticed for the first time a cowlick at the back of his head, and liked him even better.
For Claudia, it was a popular jock in high school who kissed her on a bet, and at first, when he cornered her at her locker, she thought she was being robbed. Ella, at ten, had kissed a seven-year-old girl whom her mother had recruited to play with her. The little girl began to cry and asked to go home, and Ella got the strap. My daddy counted when he hit me and whoa! I counted, too.
“When was your first kiss?” Ella asks Helen, after she has finished reading.
“Oh, no,” Helen says. “I'm the teacher.” She remembers it, though, a hot summer night when she was nine, a group of neighborhood kids playing hide-and-seek, a boy who hid with her in the bushes suddenly turning her head and kissing her and her sitting frozen, wanting to run away from him, but not wanting to be tagged out of the game.
She gives her class their next assignment: Eavesdrop on a conversation; then use it to inspire a conversation between two characters you make up. Through dialogue only, give the reader an idea of how each person looks. She watches them eagerl
y scribble their assignment down, and becomes aware of some kind of spreading warmth inside her. At first she is alarmed, wondering what that is. But then she recognizes it. Happiness.
nineteen
HELEN SPENDS ALL MORNING ON THE PHONE. SHE STRAIGHTENS out a problem on her Visa bill; she makes a doctor's appointment for her annual physical; she buys tickets for Midge and her for an upcoming play at the 16th Street Theater; she has a brief conversation with her father, carefully avoiding asking him how he feels, since lately, the question seems to annoy him. Just as she's ready to take a shower, Midge calls and they have a conversation full of things that make them laugh, and then the sound of them laughing makes them laugh, and then they get into quotes from Blazing Saddles, and Helen looks at her watch and realizes they've been talking for forty-five minutes. No wonder her ear hurts. She remembers how anxious she used to be to get off the phone in the mornings, if in fact she ever answered a call at that time. She remembers the frustration of trying to explain to people that when she was writing she was working. Even if you made your living writing, it seemed hard for people to think of writing as really working. A colleague once told Helen he had begun saying, “Think of me as a surgeon, performing operations at home. There are times when I just can't be interrupted.” Now, though, she is gifted by the pleasure of a leisurely conversation with a friend, by sitting at the kitchen table in morning sun, laughing.
Just after Helen hangs up from Midge, the phone rings again, and she picks it up, saying, “Raisinets!”
Silence.
“Uh-oh,” Helen says. “Midge?”
“Nope. Tom Ellis.”
“Oh, sorry. Sorry. I was just talking to my girlfriend and we were revisiting scenes in an old movie.”
“Blazing Saddles?”
“Yes!”
“I'm just calling to see how you're doing. What you've been thinking about the house.”
“Well, as I told you, I want to give it a few weeks.” It stuns her to realize how little she's thought about the place, lately. “We're okay for a bit longer, right?”
“Sure. I'm keeping an eye on it, as I promised. I also just … Okay, the truth is, I wanted to see if you were okay. It can't have been easy for you to—”
“I'm fine.” She doesn't want to think about that house or Tom or even Dan. Her heart is light in a way it hasn't been for a long time: she feels like she's been walking with an egg balanced on a tablespoon and she wants nothing to break her concentration. She wants to go and meet Tessa for lunch at a restaurant and she has to get the directions from MapQuest. Not that that always helps. Her sense of direction is roughly equal to her skill with numbers. If she's out for a walk in her neighborhood and a car pulls over with someone seeking directions, Helen says she doesn't live there. “Just visiting,” she always says gaily. And oftentimes if she drives somewhere she's been many times with someone else in the car, she will suddenly forget how to get there. “What are you frowning about?” Midge asked, last time this happened. She was taking Midge to a boutique she particularly liked and had visited often.
“I'm not frowning,” Helen said.
“Are you lost?” Midge asked, and Helen said no. But she was.
She tells Tom, “You know, I was just on my way to meet Tessa for lunch and I've got to run,” she says. “May I call you later?”
“Sure. You can call me anytime.”
“I … Well. Thank you. I appreciate that.”
“You're welcome.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
She laughs. “Good-bye!”
He laughs, too, then says, “So long.”
Still she stays on the line.
“Hang up!” he says.
She does. And then she smiles the whole way upstairs, thinking, Who does that anymore, lets the woman hang up first? Who does that kind of thing?
She finds the little French restaurant Tessa wants to go to, and prints out directions. Then prints them out again, in larger print.
Helen gets to the restaurant twenty minutes late and apologizes to her daughter. “I got lost,” she says.
Tessa says nothing, shakes her head.
“What? I did! You know I'm not good with directions!”
“How could you get lost? This restaurant is three blocks from my apartment!”
“Okay. I'm going to explain this to you again.”
Tessa holds up a hand. “No need.”
“Well, apparently there is. When I try to get somewhere that's unfamiliar to me—”
“Mom. Mom. I know what you're going to say. You're going to say that it gets all messed up in your mind, north, south, right, left. The grid rotates in your mind. You're going to tell me about how all people are good at some things and bad at others. You're going to say that you can't help it. Forget I said anything. I'm sorry. I won't say anything else ever again about your sense of direction. Or lack thereof.”
“Fine.” Helen picks up the menu.
“Though how you can get lost when you're three blocks from—”
“Okay, you're paying,” Helen says.
“I know. I intended to. To celebrate my new job at SanFrancisco magazine.”
Helen puts her menu down. “What do you mean.”
“I don't have the final, final word,” Tessa says. “But all signs point toward my being hired.”
“Oh! Well, that's … It's amazing that you found a job so fast. Good for you. That says a lot about your talent.”
“Thank you.”
“But can I just … Are you sure you want to do this?”
Tessa looks straight into her mother's eyes. “Yes.”
“Oh. Okay.” She opens her menu, cannot read a word. She stares at the page and asks, “When would you start? If you're hired?”
“I'll start in a month.”
“Oh.” Is this the only word she can say? “Well, congratulations.”
“Not yet. One more person has to agree to the hire; but it seems like there'll be no problem at all. He's just out of town right now. But after he comes back and gives the final word, then you can congratulate me.”
“Yes. I will. And … where will you live?”
Tessa opens her mouth, then closes it. “Okay, Mom. Not in the house. I get it. Okay?”
“I've been thinking a lot about it.” Lie. “I just … I don't see how I can keep it, Tessa.” Lie. “I'm sure if you think about it, you'll understand.” Lie.
Tessa opens her menu. “I've got to get something quick. I have a lot of work to do.”
“Me, too.” Lie.
Two days later, Helen goes to the mailbox and pulls out the usual assortment of garbage. But here is a letter, familiar handwriting on the envelope. Tessa. Helen opens it on the spot, the door still open, the cold air blowing in. Inside is a blown-up portion of a map, a few streets in downtown Chicago. There is a large X at the center, beside which Tessa has written, I live here. She has included a note on a yellow, floral-shaped Post-it that Helen bought her, thank you very much. The brief message reads, Mom, Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to memorize this map. A quiz will be given at my place after your class next Wednesday night. Dinner will be provided. By me. Regrets only. T.
Helen studies the map. Hah. Easy. She throws the map away, starts to go to the cookbook shelf to find a recipe for dessert Wednesday, then doesn't. Instead, she sits at the table and reminds herself that State goes north and south; Madison goes east and west. That or the other way around. Then goes up into her study to decide upon the next exercise for her class. For her other, grateful children.
twenty
“WHAT DO YOU THINK I SHOULD DO, MIDGE?” HELEN ASKS. “BE honest.”
It is 10:00 A.M. on a Monday morning, and Helen is lying on her bed with the phone, letting her toenails dry. They look awful. She gave herself a pedicure after she paid the bills this morning and decided she must start cutting out extravagances, but now she sees getting a pedicure is a necessity. For one thing, manicurists actually get t
he polish on the nails.
“I don't know,” Midge says now. “If our daughter moved to San Francisco, I might move there so my goddamn arthritis would calm down.”
“It's damp in San Francisco, you know, it can be very damp.” Helen does not add what she is thinking: Wouldn't you miss me?
“If you don't move there, I think you should let your daughter live in the house and pay you rent. I never really understood how you could sell it, despite all the reasons you told me. It sounds like Tessa will have enough money to do that if she gets the job. Why not let her live there? Not that I'd let Amanda do that, if it were me—I wouldn't let her live there; she'd wreck the place in half an hour. But Tessa's not like that, and if she were my daughter, I'd let her live there. And then I'd visit a lot, especially in the winter.”
“I'm not letting Tessa live there.”
“Didn't you tell me one of the reasons for holding on to the place was to see if Tessa could get a job and afford to live there?”
Helen says nothing.
“Helen. Isn't that what you told her? Isn't that what you said?”
Helen studies the swirls of paint on her ceiling. “Do you ever do your own pedicures?”
“Why don't you take a trip out there again yourself?” Midge says. “Just go and spend some time in that house, by yourself, and then see what you think. Even if you decide to sell it, at least you'll have been able to say good-bye to it.”
Helen's throat tightens.
“Helen?”
“Um-hum.”
“Are you crying?”
“Nope.”
Midge speaks gently. “Seems like you should go out there, though, huh?”
“Uh-huh. Yup.”
“So …”
“I will.”
“When?”
“I'll go, I said!”
Helen awakens at four in the morning and cannot go back to sleep. Might as well get up and make some coffee. She goes downstairs and sees what looks like water pooled on her kitchen counter. She moves closer, puts her hand to it, looks up. There is a bulge in the ceiling, and drops are falling from it. Burst pipe! she thinks, recalling last winter when temperatures plummeted and homeowners were advised to crack their faucets. But it hasn't been that cold, has it? She stares at the bulge, positions an aluminum bowl under the drip, and listens to the steady plunk, plunk, plunk.
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