But it's happening again. As Ella reads, Helen begins to laugh and cannot stop. She can feel Tessa staring at her, and now she is squeezing her arm, whispering, “Mom. Mom. Mom!”
“I can't help it,” Helen whispers back.
Tessa pulls a Kleenex from her purse and Helen shoves it into her face. Finally, she does stop laughing.
When the audience applauds for Ella, Tessa says, “I can't believe you laughed at her!”
“It wasn't at her; it was nerves!”
“Well, calm down,” Tessa says, looking at the stage, where Jeff has just come out.
He lays his papers on the podium, adjusts his tie, and begins. He describes a road trip he once took with his parents, his place in the backseat, and despite the brevity of the piece, it is full and rich. At the end, Helen sees Maureen lean over to say something to the person who came with her, sees her nodding and smiling.
“That's the prologue to the novel he's writing,” Tessa says, with a kind of proprietary pride.
Now it is Claudia's turn; and Helen checks the audience once more for Kate Demian: she is nowhere to be seen. Helen fixes her gaze on Maureen Thomas, who listens attentively to Claudia, but there is something in the set of her shoulders, in her crossed arms, that makes Helen think she will not be asking to see any more work. Claudia reads from the beginning of her book, and when she has finished there is a brief moment of silence before the applause begins. Maureen turns to her companion, her chin lowered, one eyebrow raised, and now Helen knows that she will not be asking to represent Claudia. Helen supposes she shouldn't be surprised, but she is. She stares into her lap and applauds, then looks up at Claudia and applauds harder.
thirty-four
HELEN SITS IN HER OFFICE, CLEANING OUT FILES. SHE HAS DECIDED to turn this room into a guest/reading/television room. Sprawled all around her are pages with ideas for stories that no longer make any sense to her. It occasionally was a problem before, coming across fragments she'd written in the car, in the middle of the night, or standing in line at the grocery store; it was a problem finding those fragments and then trying to remember what she meant by a cage full of flowers or ironing underwear or phone call and the Mustang convertible. But it never mattered before; her head was so full of ideas that she didn't need those prompts anyway—she saved them in case she ever ran out of ideas. But now that she is out of them, these scraps of paper don't help. She understands that it was never the specific ideas anyway; rather it is the ability to write at all that has left her.
She sits back in her chair, inspecting a paper clip as though it is a rare artifact. She recalls visiting E.B. White's writing shed, and the comment she made to Dan afterward about how White's inability to access words must have been the greatest loss he endured. How idiotic that notion turns out to be.
Odd to feel embarrassed sitting by oneself in one's own home, but that is what she feels now. She used to harbor the illusion that without Dan, she would write so much better, so much more. Of course she would be lonely and in many respects unfulfilled, but wasn't it loneliness and discontent that fueled the better artists? Without her anguish, what would Frida Kahlo have been? Even Dorothy Parker—didn't she need whatever kept her glued to the sofa, drink in hand, staring at the phone? Helen used to think, oftentimes with bitterness, that once you were married, you were permanently on call. If you had children, the problem was compounded. Never mind the supposed advances the women's movement brought; it was women who felt most keenly the obligations to children; they were hardwired to put others first.
How many Sunday mornings, full of a kind of self-importance, did she tell Dan, “I'm going up to my study to work—I just got an idea. You're on your own.”
“Okay,” he would say, quite agreeably, yet she would read into it a kind of petulance or regret. Inevitably, she would be unable to work after all, and she would come down from her study to be with him, images of martyrs burning in her brain. So yes, how embarrassing, how scorchingly embarrassing to remember this! For what she sees now is that her love of Dan and Tessa, her obligations and ties to them, is what provided her with her life's work—and Dan knew it. It is true that she wrote before she even met Dan, she wrote from that first day in the basement as a way to understand the world and to find comfort, but it was Dan who encouraged her to turn from writing fragments to writing stories and then novels; it was Dan who got her to publish, Dan who got her to turn what she loved into what she did. Her family, Dan first, but then Tessa and Dan, were not only the place she came down to when she was through working; they were the place she took off from.
She tosses the paper clip into a drawer, and begins to throw away more pages, and more, then suddenly stops. She picks up the phone, and dials. Then she starts pulling pages out of the trash.
About six months before Dan died, Helen and Midge went to see a psychic Midge had told her about. Midge went first; then Helen. The woman used a beat-up pack of tarot cards, and the last card she pulled from it showed a woman standing on a beach weeping into her hands, many empty goblets turned on their sides before her. “This is your future,” the woman had said, and Helen had said, “Hmm. That doesn't look too good.” She was embarrassed, she remembers, disbelieving; and she wanted nothing more than to hurry up and get this over with, then flee past the crummy black curtain and into the crummy waiting room, where Midge sat—right after this, they were going out for a nice lunch to celebrate Midge's fifty-ninth birthday.
“That's right,” the woman said. “It is not good in the direction she is facing. But look here.” She tapped the card with one of her dirty fingernails, showing Helen the upright, full cups behind the figure of the woman. She leaned closer and spoke quietly. “All she has to do is turn around. Love always presents itself for your consideration, if not in one way then in another. You have to learn to see it. Then you have to learn to take it, which is harder.”
“Okay!” Helen said. “Well, thank you.”
“If you want,” the woman said, “I can offer an additional prayer for you, and burn sage. Ten dollars.”
“No thanks,” Helen said, laughing, and when she got into the car with Midge, she said, “Don't ever take me to one of these places again!”
Midge backed out of the parking place and then looked over at Helen. “You'll see,” she said. “What she says always comes true. Sometimes it takes a while, but it always comes true.”
Now, as Nancy Weldon answers the phone, Helen sits up straight in her chair. “Nancy? It's Helen Ames. I know I said I wasn't interested in teaching next year, but it turns out that I am. Is it too late?”
“Of course not!” Nancy says. “Oh, I'm so glad. So was it the news about Claudia that changed your mind?”
“What news?”
“You don't know?”
“No, what news?”
“Well, I … I don't know if I should tell you. I thought surely you knew. I'm so sorry.”
Helen leans forward, closes her eyes. “Did something happen to her?”
“Well, yes. But I don't want to spoil the surprise!”
“Oh, it's good news!”
“It's very good news.”
“Did Maureen take her on? Is she going to represent her?”
“Oh, dear,” Nancy says, laughing. “I think you need to call your student.”
Outside, Helen sees a truck pull up. A man gets out with a huge bouquet and starts up her sidewalk. She tells Nancy she'll call her back, and goes to answer the door. She signs for the flowers, then reads the card:
Dear Helen,
I am in New York City interviewing agents, as Kate Demian wants to publish my book next fall. I can think of one other person who will be as excited as I am. This comes with such gratitude, and love.
Claudia
Helen tries Claudia's number: no answer. She calls Nancy back to share with her this happiest of coincidences, then asks, “When did Claudia meet Kate Demian?”
“At the reading, apparently. I just found out today.”
&nb
sp; “Kate wasn't at the reading!”
“She was,” Nancy says. “She arrived late and sat way in the back, in the sound booth, in fact. You left before she came out. She went straight over to Claudia, introduced herself, and asked for the rest of the manuscript, which she read that night in the hotel. She called Claudia the next day.”
Helen can't help herself. She asks, “Did Kate ask to see anyone else's work?”
“She did not.”
“Margot Langley?”
“Nope. She complimented Ella, asked for Claudia's manuscript, and left.”
Helen reaches out to touch the petals of one of the half-open roses. “Huh!” After she hangs up, she'll celebrate by having a glass of champagne. And by throwing out the letter she got from Margot Langley. She's finished with it, now.
thirty-five
“THIS IS GREAT,” HELEN TELLS TESSA, SCRAPING THE LAST OF THE apple crisp from her bowl. “Where's it from?”
Tessa points to Jeff.
“You made it?” Helen says.
“Mom. Mom. Mom,” Tessa says. “It's not 1950. Men cook. They do child care and housework. They even talk about their feelings.” She gets up and starts clearing the paper plates from the table. Helen stands to help, and Tessa points a finger at her. “Sit down.”
Almost all of Tessa's dishes are packed; one box has been left unsealed to accommodate those things that were used to make dinner. Tomorrow morning Tessa and Jeff will load the U-Haul and then head west. Helen offered to help with that and was instantly rejected; so this will be their last time together. “Excited to go?” she asks Jeff.
He looks over at Tessa. “I can't wait.”
Tessa's head is bent, but Helen can see her smile.
“When are you going to come out and visit?” he asks.
“Oh, I'll be there.”
“You're welcome to stay with us.”
“She can stay with Tom,” Tessa says, and then, seeing Helen's face, “What?”
“I don't think we're quite at that stage,” Helen says.
Tessa looks at her watch, as though in half an hour she might be.
Helen excuses herself to go to the bathroom, where she stands looking into the mirror. This morning, talking to Midge on the phone, she wept about Tessa's leaving even as she said, “I know it's good. I know it is.” Then she said, “But first Dan, then my dad, then Tessa … It just feels like a little too much.”
“I know,” Midge said. And then she told Helen about a retreat she had once gone to where there was a big discussion one night about how hard it was when your children grew up. A woman said, “Why can't they just stay those little people standing up in their cribs every morning, so happy to see you?” And there was a long silence, during which Midge supposed people—herself included—were visiting those memories of their children when they were young and when nearly everything they did delighted you. “But then,” she said, “this other woman said, ‘But what if it really did happen that way? Wouldn't it get boring? Wouldn't you get awfully tired of changing diapers and cutting up food into pea-size pieces? Wouldn't you walk into the nursery one day and say, Why don't you just grow up?’ She said, ‘I know it's trite, but isn't it really true that life is so beautiful because it's so fleeting and fragile?’ And this one guy said, ‘No!’ and everyone laughed. But it is true. You'll miss Tessa so much because you love her so much. Aren't you lucky?”
Helen hesitated, then said, “No.”
“I'll see you at the movies tomorrow,” Midge said. “And let me just say now, if you yell at me about putting too much butter on our popcorn, I'm going to put on even more.” Midge had suggested a double feature tomorrow: she knew Helen's heart would be heavy, and both of them believed in cinematherapy.
After she hung up with Midge, Helen went to her bedroom and sat in a chair, a quilt wrapped around her. Snow was predicted, and Helen decided maybe she'd take a cab to Tessa's, she really hated driving in snow anymore.
She stared at a painting on the wall, an abstract that Dan had bought when they spent one day looking at art galleries in Milwaukee. Every time she looked at it, she saw different things. This time, she saw the face of a girl, looking up. Storm clouds. A line of open boxes. A starless night. A canyon, wide at one end, but narrow at the other.
She sat upright and flung the quilt from her shoulders. An idea had suddenly come to her that was so obvious it made her laugh. She went to the phone and called Tom and left him a message. “I just made a decision I think you'll be happy about,” she said. “I hope you will be. Call me.”
Now Helen stares into Tessa's bathroom mirror, trying to think of the right way to make her announcement, and decides on the direct approach: less room for argument. She comes out of the bathroom, sits in a chair opposite the sofa where Jeff and Tessa sit, and puts her feet up on a box. “I wanted to let you know, I've found a buyer for the house in Marin.”
“Who?” Tessa asks, and Helen says, “You.”
At midnight, Helen closes the book of poetry and lays it flat against her stomach. Outside the flakes are falling furiously; there'll be a lot to shovel in the morning. She looks forward to it, in a way; she has begun to like the feeling of accomplishment shoveling brings, the way that a path is so quickly forged.
Tom called her back shortly after she got home from Tessa's and said he was delighted by her decision. He told her that if Tessa ever had any problems, she could call him and he'd help her—he knew the house inside and out, quite literally.
And then he told her something else. When he and Laura had decided to get married, he'd been going to build a house for her—one that just happened to look much like the one he'd built for Helen. The artisan tile in the bathroom was one Laura had selected; it had been Laura's idea to put birth signs in tiny lights in a bedroom ceiling. It was Laura who loved tree houses and it was because of her that Tom suggested one to Dan.
Helen listened to him telling her this and realized that he built that house not for Dan and her, but for Laura. He had a fine reputation and was a generous man by nature, but what he had done in that little house was over the top and she'd known it the minute she saw it. Now she knew why. She knew, too, that it was possible Tom would never get over Laura, and, truth be told, she understood and sympathized with that feeling. She'll stay open to spending time with Tom for as long as they're both interested, but finding another man is not her priority now, and it might never be. She can all but hear Midge telling her not to get all “Hello, Young Lovers” on her—she said that to Helen before in the context of encouraging her to try to find another husband. “Dan would want you to remarry,” she'd said, and Helen had said perhaps that was true. And at some point she may want to. Or she may get cozy with the fact that she will live alone for the rest of her life, that she will be like the two old friends she saw coming from the Steppenwolf Theatre after a matinee one day. One looked to be in her eighties, the other in her sixties. They were both very well dressed and made up. They held hands, helping each other along a sidewalk that had been indifferently cleared. They talked and laughed, their heads close together, and went into a lovely restaurant, where they were enthusiastically greeted and shown to a table by the window. Helen imagined them toasting each other with a complex red wine, sharing an entrée, and then going home to small but elegantly decorated apartments in art deco buildings, each with a light in the window, each with real stationery in desk drawers, written on with fountain pens, the ink peacock blue.
She told Midge this, and Midge stared at her, then said, “Right. Or they might go home to their soulless new development condos and eat cat food for the rest of the week.” Then she'd said, “Oh, I'm sorry. I don't mean to sully your pretty little fantasy. I just don't want you to be alone for the rest of your life. I want you to be all right.”
Well, for now she is all right. She rests her hand over the volume of poetry and listens to the silence of the house, a blanket for her mind. The grandfather clock has wound down, the usual sound of airplanes is absent
because of the snowstorm; all is so very still. She thinks of Tessa driving off tomorrow to the house her father commissioned, and then she thinks of how Dan has never been given the credit he was due for its creation. She thought of many of the ideas for the house, and for this she has received praise; Tom built the thing, and he, too, has had his efforts recognized. But what about the generosity of spirit that had Dan sacrifice his own heart's longing in order to make real a dream his wife described for him one lazy summer afternoon? Perhaps his daughter's joy in living in that house will be continual thanks for the gift he gave. And it will complete his mission. His intentions will be honored differently from what he had planned, but honored nonetheless. Helen imagines a grandson playing in the tree house boat, his eyes the color of Dan's.
She gets out of bed, goes to her bedroom closet, and pulls out the box with the sextant. She unwraps it and again admires its elegant construction. She will keep it until Tessa gets to California; then she'll send it to her daughter and ask her to put it where it belongs, in a boat cradled by the limbs of a live oak, where it sails the imagination.
She peers through the sextant's telescopic lens. She knows that this instrument is used to create an artificial horizon when the true one is not visible, because of fog, or on moonless nights, or in a calm. It comes to her that she can't see her own horizon, but then who can ever see that far ahead?
This is her intention: to keep her focus narrow and true. And to come back to love in whatever form it takes. Inside, it is as though something unhitches itself, and settles. She puts the sextant on her bedside table, its eye directed outward, toward the west.
So quiet. She climbs back into bed and turns off the light. She pulls the blanket up over her shoulder, breathes out slowly. She closes her eyes and an image comes to her, a woman walking to a bookstore on a foggy fall night. Beneath her open coat, she's wearing a purple sweater with a gravy stain on the inner aspect of the left sleeve. An ill-fitting black skirt and brown cowboy boots. She has on dangly turquoise earrings, and one is twisted off to the side, caught in the woman's scarf. She has black hair shot through with silver and it's coiled on top of her head and anchored with a child's barrette. She's wearing a lot of eyeliner, no other makeup. She looks up into the sky and there is a full moon, and she thinks, Bomber's moon.
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