Home Safe (4 page)

five

T
HE PHONE RINGS, WAKING HELEN UP. SHE PUTS HER HAND OVER
her eyes against the strong sunlight coming through her bedroom window and lies still, listening to see who's calling. Steve Parker again. “I don't know if you got the message,” he says, “but I really need to talk to you, Helen. Please call.”

While he recites his number, she reaches for the phone, but then doesn't pick it up. She's got morning voice; it's after ten o'clock; she'd be embarrassed by her sloth. She'll call him later. She's beginning to be annoyed by his persistence. He's an accountant; can't he figure out whatever he's calling about by himself? What does she pay him for? What help can she possibly be? She feels herself getting angrier and then stops; she's blaming Steve for her husband still being dead. She looks over at the other side of the bed, reaches out to touch the uncreased pillowcase. Odd the way she looks every day to see if it is still so pristine. She knows it will be; yet she looks to see if it is. Sometimes she thinks coming to terms with Dan's death is like a log being rammed into a door. Eventually, it will get through. Until then, she will awaken each day and the first thing she will do is look to his side of the bed.

She sits up and stretches, then casts about inside herself to see if today, if
today
, she feels a little bit like working, if she feels that
something
might be in her that would like to come out. Nope. The very notion of going into her study makes her stomach tense.

So. What to do. Call Midge, who was not home last night, and so Helen left a message about her experience at Anthropologie; she left what she thought was a very amusing message, considering.

But now Midge does not seem all that amused. “Listen,” she says, after Helen asks if she got her message, “don't be offended, but I just have to say this. Anthropologie? You're almost sixty years old! Why would you want to work
there?
Why don't you stop being so self-obsessed and volunteer for some organization that really needs you? Give
back
a little.”

Helen, wounded, sucks in a breath, clenches the phone tighter in her hand.

“I didn't mean that to be as harsh as it came out,” Midge says. “This is tough love, okay?”

“I do give back! I give lots of money to all kinds of—”

“I don't mean checks in an envelope,” Midge says. “I mean you should give of
yourself
. Volunteer to stack cans at a food pantry. Deliver Meals on Wheels. Walk dogs at a shelter. There are a million places to volunteer! Teach someone to read, for God's sake!”

“I can't do that,” Helen says. “Every time I try to volunteer, they tell me they need a certain commitment, and when my life is
normal
, I
work
a lot, and I can't tell what day is going to be a really good writing day when I won't want to stop. And I also
travel
a lot for public speaking. I have a speaking gig in a few weeks, as a matter of fact. Though I'm thinking of canceling it.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm a fraud, that's why.”

“You're not a fraud,” Midge says. “If you can't write for the time being, so what? Go out and live some life. That's what will give you the seeds to sow for the work you will come to do.”

It occurs to Helen to ask Midge if she's having a Kumbaya moment. Instead, she looks out the window, where a bird has landed on a branch of a tree outside. The bird stares directly ahead, as though at her, cocking its head left, then right.
How about it? How about sowing some seeds?

“Midge, it's … I
need
writing. Not the success, the success just makes me feel weird.
Grateful
, but weird. Writing to me is … It's not just the way I make my living. It's always been the place where I
put
things. It's my solace in a world that … God! It just seems like such a terrible world!”

“It
is
a terrible world,” Midge says. “Also it is one of incalculable beauty. You know that.”

“I have forgotten that,” Helen says and hears the bitterness in her voice.

“That's why you have to do something to remember it.”

“I have to go,” Helen says.

“No, you don't. You're just pissed off.”

Helen doesn't answer. She bites at her lip and watches the bird, who suddenly lifts off from the branch and flies away.

“Aren't you?”

“Well, I have to say, Midge, that you don't seem to be very supportive of the fact that I seem to be losing my mind! I really feel like I am!”

“Hmm,” Midge says. “Now, why would I ever want to be supportive of you losing your mind?”

“Oh, you just … Look, I know you want me to be King Kong, but I'm
not
King Kong. I'm the princess and the pea, okay? I would feel the pea, I swear. I don't
want
to feel the pea, but I
would
feel it! Did you ever hear of Gregor Mendel? Some people—”

“Oh, stop using the theory of
genetics
as a rationalization. Get dressed and meet me at the Museum of Contemporary Art in an hour,” Midge says.

“How do you know I'm not dressed?”

“Took a wild guess. I would also wildly guess that you haven't washed your face or combed your hair. Or even looked at the newspaper, as usual.”

“Okay, in fact I do look at the newspaper, and I usually elect not to read it. Why should I read it! It would only make me feel worse. Why don't they have a Pollyanna column, where the only news there is
good
news: humanitarian triumphs, small gestures of goodwill, recipes, who cares, just
one
place where you know you can go and read something and not feel
assaulted?”

“Maybe you should write such a column,” Midge says.

“Maybe you should remember that I
can't write.”
Helen fumes quietly for a moment, then says, “Fine, I'll meet you at the museum. What's there?”

“An exhibit that's live people, and all they do is kiss.”

Helen recalls a time she was sixteen and made a bet that she could kiss for ten minutes without stopping. She did it, she kissed a really cute boy she'd been very much attracted to, but the kiss lost all its passion after about thirty seconds and became an act roughly equivalent to cleaning out one's ears. Why in the world would a museum feature such an exhibit? She starts to ask Midge that, but then decides to find out for herself. Somewhere inside her weary brain, a little light flickers, then holds. “I'll see you there,” she says.

Helen takes a long shower, using a great variety of the products she has available due to the largesse of her daughter. What Helen truly believes is that she could use 409 to wash herself and her hair and it would be fine, but in the area of beauty products she is a hypocrite. As she is in many areas of her life. She wonders sometimes how many people live lives congruent with their deepest beliefs. She wonders how many people go running off to seminars intent on changing their lives, then come home and fall back into the exact same patterns. Most people, she suspects. That's why those seminars make so much money, people keep failing to achieve their lofty ideals. And what about the people who teach those seminars? They're just as hypocritical as anyone else, Helen is sure of it. She thinks of her mother, telling her once that she didn't believe in therapy because psychiatrists were the craziest people of all. Helen herself has doubts about the efficacy of therapy: she tried it once, years ago. But she didn't like the way she would wake up on appointment days feeling perfectly fine and then have to dredge up some discontent so as to justify the time and expense. She quit after only three sessions, saying that the reason she was leaving was that she was moving. “Oh?” the therapist said. “Where to?” “Cleveland,” Helen said, knowing nothing about the place and hoping the therapist didn't, either. Serene, that woman was called, unbelievably—Helen thought she must have given that name to herself on a mountaintop ceremony in California attended by other women therapists, all of them naked but for wildflower garlands, and
not ashamed
. It has always seemed to Helen that California is the place for outrageous acts of freedom, and only California. A bunch of naked therapists renaming themselves in Illinois? Never.

She steps out of the shower and wraps a bath towel around herself. What to wear? What effort such a decision now seems to require!

She selects a pair of black wool pants and a gray cashmere sweater. When she comes down into the kitchen to get her keys, she sees the red light blinking on the phone. Two messages; another call must have come in while she was in the shower. “Tessa,” Helen says, out loud. She likes to predict who the calls are from and she is often right. This has scored her points with Tessa, who still sort of believes her mother is psychic. Helen does little to disabuse her daughter of this notion; she thinks it offers her a kind of power she would not have otherwise.

She is not psychic this time, though; the second call is from someone she doesn't know, saying she got Helen's number from Donna Barlow, a mutual friend who is also a writer, and that she wants to talk to Helen about teaching a very unique kind of writing workshop—Donna did it and just loved it, and thought Helen might enjoy it, too.

Helen doesn't teach. She doesn't teach because she has no idea in the world how she does what she does and therefore doesn't feel qualified to instruct others in the practice. For her, writing just happens. Or used to. Writing is like falling in love, she's often said. Or deciding what to have for lunch. Who knows how a person does that? And for heaven's sake, how can you instruct someone else in how to do it? “Think of walking,” Helen has often said to audiences at book signings, speaking to people who asked the inevitable questions about the writing process. “Think of how you walk without thinking about it. That's how you need to write. If you thought about walking—the neuromuscular component, the speed at which you should move, what length your stride should be—you'd never get anywhere, right? You'd spend all your time thinking about
how
to get there.” People would laugh and look at each other, but there were always some who crossed their arms in exasperation: she hadn't answered the
question
.

Helen looks at her watch, then quickly punches in the number to call the person who asked her about teaching, Nancy Weldon is her name. She'll let her know right away she's not interested, she'll get this out of the way.

“Helen Ames!” the woman, who apparently has caller ID, says. “How nice to talk to you! I just have to tell you, I really enjoy your books.”

“Thank you,” Helen says, and now feels bad about having to decline the woman's offer. Still, she speaks quickly, before the woman can say anything else. “Listen, I'm sorry, but I don't teach. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I can't. I'm a terrible teacher. Honestly. I tried it once and the people who came all but asked for their money back.” A true story. Early on in her career, Helen was lured to an island to teach a group of very wealthy women. She thought the best thing to do would be to show how she found her own inspiration, and so she crafted a number of exercises for the women to do, and brought in objects she thought might be seen as evocative—an old silver hairbrush, a blackened frying pan, a love letter from the 1930s, a pair of men's shoes, a floppy-necked teddy bear, one dusty wing of a butterfly. One of the exercises was to use all of these objects in a short story, and Helen had to practically sit on her hands to keep from doing this exercise herself. Already she saw the man who would wear those shoes, the corn bread cooking in that skillet, the towheaded child weeping because he'd accidentally torn the wing off the butterfly.

But it seemed that all the women wanted to do was to read from work they'd already done and have Helen praise it. And so Helen sat stiffly, trying to think of kind and insightful things to say and finally agreeing to put in a good word with her agent for the work of the worst (and pushiest) writer, when in fact she had no intention of doing so. “I'm a terrible teacher,” she says, again.

“Oh, I can't believe that's true,” Nancy says, laughing.

“Believe it, believe it,” Helen says. “Honestly, it's so very true.”

“Well, let me tell you a little about this before you decide for sure, okay?”

I
have
decided for sure
, Helen thinks, and feels herself getting angry. But she listens as the woman describes the kind of workshop she has in mind. Thus far, the people who would be in the group are an old man who lives in an assisted care residence, a middle-aged woman who works for an insurance company and lives downtown, a young woman who is mildly retarded and lives in a group home, a forty-five-year-old day-care worker from the West Side ghetto, a man from Evanston who does the news for one of the Latino television stations, and a twenty-year-old mechanic who lives in Lakeview. And they can add one or two more.

“Hmmm,” Helen says.

“This is a kind of experiment,” Nancy says. “It's something we've talked about a lot, how creative writing can help people understand one another's points of view. We wondered what would happen if you had a group of purposely disparate types, both from a literary and a sociological point of view. We've gotten a very nice grant from a humanities foundation so that we can try it for a year, and this is the second workshop, which would be starting the first Wednesday in January. It's once a week for six weeks, it ends with a really lovely celebration, and we can pay you—”

“I'm sorry,” Helen says. “I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I've got to run and meet a friend downtown. I just wanted to let you know my answer right away.”

“Would you just think about it?” Nancy says. “I'll understand if you don't want to do it, but would you just think about it? And let me make it easier: if you don't want to do it, you don't even have to call me back. I'll assume that if I don't hear from you by tomorrow night, you're not interested. Okay? I have other writers I can call, I know that Saundra Weller is dying to teach this workshop, but I just really think you'd be perfect for it. I think you'd enjoy it. We set the time to be in the late afternoon, from four until six, and from what I've read about you, you like to work in the early morning.”