Domestic Affairs (21 page)

I wrote Lloyd a letter (easiest of all to be brave on paper) telling him that I was getting married. He wrote back to say he’d always be my friend, but that he probably shouldn’t call me anymore. If he were in Steve’s place, he wouldn’t like it.

I heard from him, after that, only on Vivien Leigh’s and my birthday every year, and at Christmas, when he’d send Audrey a red and white Oklahoma Sooners jersey in her current size and some hugely extravagant toy. (An enormous stuffed elephant. A deluxe baby doll with thirty-piece layette, packed in a wicker suitcase. That one came on a Christmas we had so little money we gave her balloons and bubble-blowing solution. Steve wrote to Lloyd after that to say please, no more presents.)

Over the years, in various periods of hard times, we’ve sold most of Lloyd’s presents to me, though I still have the bird-call records and the personalized Cuisinart. I still think of him now and then (when I’m grating carrots, and sometimes, rereading an old book, when I come upon a reference to Tammy Wynette or red-winged blackbirds, underlined in red). And sometimes, when I’m feeling fed up with my real-life, nine-year-old marriage to a man I love who gives me meat thermometers and dish towels on my birthday—a man who loves me, but is not about to keep a scrapbook documenting my life—I think about how much easier it is to carry on a romance with someone if you’ve never met him.

A few years back, over a period of several months, I used to visit a woman in the state mental hospital. Sometimes I drive past that hospital on my way to buy groceries or to take one of my children to the doctor. I feel almost like an escapee, the relief is so great, still, that I’m on the outside.

I first read about Linda in the newspaper. Years before, her father had killed her mother and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. When later he was released from the state hospital, and within the year, found dead of a gunshot wound, his death was ruled a suicide. For months Linda had waged a protest with the authorities until finally they agreed to exhume the body. Sure enough, there was a bullet wound in him that proved it was a murder, and the one who shot him was the daughter who’d insisted they investigate. They found Linda not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced her to the state hospital. Which is where I sent her the letter saying I’d like to meet her and write a book about her story. She said sure, come.

I was living, then as now, in this house in the country, with Steve and Audrey, who was just a baby. It was a couple of years since I’d lived in the city, working as a newspaper reporter—but I still liked to talk about my old days as if I were a character on
Hill Street Blues.
Never having quite as many stories as I would have liked.

But now I was spending my days picking strawberries and making jam, with a baby strapped to my back and no shoes on. There were, in fact, rough edges in my life: the constant eruption of little battles that mark the early days of a marriage and pass, if one survives them, into truce or much more serious warfare, greater pain or deeper intimacy, and sometimes both. And there was a difficult, often stormy father in my life then too—my own beloved, infuriating, alcoholic parent whose calls I avoided and didn’t return. That woman locked inside the state hospital was nothing like me, and the father she killed—a burly, violent, gun-loving small-time businessman—was nothing like mine, who liked, when drinking, to sit in the living room late into the night, conducting Mozart horn concertos played on a scratched record. Still, reading this other woman’s story, I drew comparisons between Linda and me, imagined her story addressed mine and held larger implications about fathers and daughters, madness and sanity. I don’t remember what else I said about her case, but it seemed to make sense at the time—enough that a publisher was going to pay me a sum out of which (there was always an uneasiness surrounding this) I would pay a percentage required by Linda.

So I used to visit her. Unlike most people in state mental hospitals, she looked good. She was about ten years older than I: mid-thirties. She’d known her share of successes in the world: achievement in sports, excellent grades, and a few semesters at a medical school. She had good teeth, good skin, a good figure.

Because she was, at the time, the only woman in the state to be committed on criminal charges, there was no women’s forensic ward to place her on. So Linda, with her books and Johnny Cash cassettes and her calligraphy pens, inhabited a world of women who never got out of their bathrobes and didn’t always make it to the toilet on time. Tapes I made with her are hard to make out, chiefly because there was always so much yelling going on around us. Some of the women on that ward had been there twenty years and just sat in chairs all day, staring straight ahead. Signs along the hallways, decorated with some staff members’ attempts at rendering Snoopy, instructed patients on subjects like “Five steps to a cheerful outlook” and listed days of the week.

Many times I was the only visitor on the floor. The first fifteen minutes of my visit were often taken up by her questions about the business aspects of our arrangement. She knew just what kind of car she wanted to buy with part of her earnings when she got out: a Pontiac Trans Am.

Then we’d settle down to her story, beginning with childhood: tap-dancing lessons and target-shooting practice, times when her father hit her mother, intimations of sexual abuse. We got along well. I never felt any particular warmth from her and I always felt she was evaluating my behavior pretty closely, but of course that’s precisely what I did with her. When you’re having a conversation with a person in a mental hospital you measure everything she says, so a remark about the orderlies having it in for her sounds paranoid, and if the person says, “I could’ve killed him,” you can’t help but think that maybe she could have.

Making the transition from inside the hospital back to Steve and Audrey was always hard. I’d break into a run when was I out the door, and often I’d cry driving home. And often, too, I’d get into a silly argument with Steve afterward. I’d make some remark about Linda’s psychiatrist, how the nurses and orderlies hated my being there. Steve said I was spending too much time at the hospital.

The big issue surrounding Linda at the time, she told me, was that everyone at the hospital suspected her of using drugs. She said she wasn’t. But her doctors gave orders that she couldn’t have any money in her possession.

That was a terrible blow. Linda needed to buy cigarettes, and liked, once a week or so, to order a lobster dinner delivered from a local restaurant. It got to the point where most of what we talked about when I came was the money business, and every time I’d take a dollar out of my wallet to buy groceries, I’d think of her and feel something approaching guilt. Then one day she asked me if I’d smuggle in a hundred dollars for her.

At first, and for a long time, I said no. I have always been one to obey rules. But here in the hospital, Linda used to say, resisting authority was a healthy sign of sanity. When a person stopped fighting, that was the moment you knew she’d be spending the next twenty years staring at the Snoopy posters.

What she said made sense. Also, our work together was going less and less well; we hardly ever talked now about anything besides how much money she’d get for the book and who should play her in the movie. I guess I felt that if I would just bring her the hundred dollars and be done with it, she’d trust me.

It wasn’t easy, smuggling in those two fifty-dollar bills. A female attendant searched me every time I came. The day I brought the money I was in a cold sweat, and even after I’d managed to turn it over to Linda I couldn’t calm down. When I got home that day Steve told me I was going crazy.

I’m not completely sure even now of all the reasons why everything fell apart after that. A few days later I was called into the office of a hospital administrator who said he’d been given reason to think Linda was using drugs again, and no one could figure out how she got the money. I said I didn’t know, and he believed me.

Linda’s brother called me, wanting his share of royalties from my still-unwritten book. I drove up north to the motel he ran and spent an evening dickering over figures at his kitchen table. From where I sat, the stuffed head of a huge buck deer killed by the dead father seemed to be staring me in the eye.

A couple of days later I sent Linda a letter telling her I couldn’t go through with the project. I sent back the money I’d been paid for the book, and to make up the lost income I wrote a whole lot of magazine articles about marriage and babies, sounding like an expert on both. My father, who had moved away by this time, and hardly ever called me anymore, died in his sleep, and I realized, touching his face as he lay in his casket, that of the many feelings I had for him, wanting him dead was never one.

I had told Linda, when I quit the book, that I’d still come and visit her. But I never went back.

My friend Beverly is a mother of two boys, ages three and ten. She’s a singer and songwriter, a crackerjack seamstress, a deeply religious woman. She loves her home, she loves her husband, and she believes strongly in the importance of a home-cooked dinner on the table for her family. No one, meeting her six months ago, would have said, “Here is a person with a deep void in her life. Here is someone who needs a hobby.”

But three months ago (“on a whim,” she says, and because she figured it would be fun for the children) she and her good friend Jane took their boys to a place called Funspot for an afternoon of roller skating. Everybody had a good time. And you might have thought that would be that.

Only, two days later, Beverly left her three-year-old with a babysitter and returned to Funspot at ten
A.M.
, alone. She took a private lesson with a fellow named Russ. She goes twice every week now—as much as four hours at a time. She’s bought herself a skating outfit and good skates. She even dreams about skating. “It has changed my life,” she says, her eyes fairly burning.

We are in her car when she tells me this. We’re making the thirty-mile drive to Skate World (the new rink she’s graduated to). We have each left children at home, and husbands in charge of making dinner. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon—the hour I am usually chopping vegetables and putting on the potatoes—and I am (I can hardly believe it) headed for Skate World.

“Up and floating,” says Beverly. “That’s the essence of roller skating.” I sit a up a little straighter in the seat listening to her, and ask what it was that possessed her to make this surprising change in her life.

“Well,” she says, “it just makes me feel so—free.”

All day long, she’s taking care of children. Doing laundry, running errands, tending to all the little pieces of business that seem so unimportant by themselves but add up to a way of life.

And then she gets to the rink. Puts on her sheer-to-the-waist pantyhose and her little black skirt and her white skates, steps out on the floor, and rolls away. “It doesn’t feel like you’re exercising,” she says. “Your wheels just keep moving, and you have to follow. You’re flying.”

I ask her what she thinks about while she’s skating. “Nothing,” she says. “Not even my children. When I’m skating, all I do is skate.”

After it’s over, that’s when she does her thinking. “I’m learning all these things,” she says. Not just about skating either. “I’ve come to see you don’t have to be arrogant to hold your head up and keep your back straight. I feel so proud at the way I keep improving. I actually believe I’m good. And it carries over into all the rest of my life. When I’m singing, I close my eyes and say to myself, ‘Just pretend you’re skating.’ And then my voice just opens up.”

When she was a young girl, she competed as a gymnast, and she showed a lot of promise. In her junior year of high school she was chosen for intensive pre-Olympic training, but that was the year her family had to move to Belgium. On the day of her last meet before leaving, she was injured doing warmups and had to miss the competition. “I never knew whether I could’ve won or not,” she says twenty years later. “That always bothered me.”

In her adult life she continued to do a little gymnastics now and then, and sometimes she’d roll up the rug in her sewing room and do an interpretive dance, all by herself, to Ann Murray singing “You Needed Me.” She danced it for her son one afternoon, and, watching her, he wept. But other than that, she says, her exercise these past few years has been pretty much confined to running up and down stairs.

We get to the rink. Inside, nearly everyone seems to know Beverly. There’s an eighty-three-year-old man named Pete (he doesn’t do Mohawk turns the way he used to, but he still skates). There’s Mike, in his early thirties, and legally blind, who started skating five years ago (forty hours a week, after work) and does the Glide Waltz as if the wind were carrying him. Little girls with skinny legs and fancy skating skirts, who merely laugh when they fall. Gray-haired women—one, named Mary, with a flower in her hair. I am surprised, for a second there, to see a vastly overweight woman, well into her fifties, emerge from the dressing room in a short purple skating tunic. Then she puts on her skates, and she’s transformed. She takes off, suddenly weightless.

There’s Oliver, a sort of oddball character. “Oliver wishes he had a partner for the Mirror Waltz, and he hates being short,” Beverly had told me. Sure enough, the first thing he does is ask me how tall I am. It is the first time in my life I’ve lied about my height. (I shave off an inch, but I’m still too tall. Plus, I can’t skate.)

But watching Beverly out there working on her figures (tracing and retracing a pair of circles, trying to keep her outside wheels on the black lines, while Pete and I look on and nobody breathes), I long to try. I rent a pair of boots and stagger out onto the floor. The organ plays “Melancholy Baby.” And Beverly was right: I am not thinking about fertilizing my rose bush or what to make for dinner tomorrow, or reminding myself to get the winter clothes into mothballs. I am not worrying about how on earth I’d manage at home if I broke my arm here tonight. I’m not even thinking about how much Audrey would love it here. I suppose anyone watching me would see a thirty-two-year-old woman in a pair of old jeans, hobbling around the floor. But in my head, I’m thinking, “Up and floating. Up and floating. Up. Floating.”