One True Thing (2 page)

An election year was coming up when I was in jail.

The police officer came by my cell. I knew his name was Skip, although his name tag said he was really Edwin Something-or-Other Jr. I had seen him last at the town Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in December, when my mother’s tree was the nicest tree, with its gaudy decorations and big red bows. He had been on the high school basketball team and had sat out every game. His broad back had been a bookend on the bench, a short kid named Bill on the other side, both of them waiting for the team to come back from the floor so they could feel again the nervous jostle that made them part of the action for a few minutes. My brother Jeff probably knew him. He was one of the boys who lived outside of town, in one of the Cape Cod houses that punctuated the corkscrew country roads.

The county had a lot of them, out where the corn grew in summer taller than any farmer, and tomatoes and zucchini were sold
from little lean-tos with a plywood shelf out front. Sometimes, in August, the zucchini would be as big as baseball bats, and, because no one wanted them, the kids would use them to beat the trees in the softer light of the surrounding forests. The only zucchini worth having, my mother always said, were the tiny ones with the blossoms still attached.

Montgomery County had acres and acres of farm and forest, and then a wide avenue of junk, auto-body shops and Pizza Huts and discount electronics places and mini-malls with bad Chinese takeout and unisex hair salons. And at the end, when you’d come through it all, you arrived at Langhorne. It was the perfect college town, front porches and fanlight windows, oak trees along the curbs as big around as barrels, azaleas in the spring and hydrangeas in the summer and curbside piles of leaves in the fall. Langhorne had a shoe store full of loafers and a jewelry store with trays full of signet rings; it had a bookstore run by an elderly couple named the Duanes, Isabel and Dean Duane, who had retired from a busier life in the city and who seldom consulted
Books in Print
because they already knew everything that was in it. They were rather like the people in Langhorne, the Duanes—they knew everything about what was going on in their little world.

The jail was not in Langhorne proper. That was how the people who lived there always referred to it, “Langhorne proper,” so that you would know who lived on one of the oak-lined streets and who lived in the slapdash houses and trailers outside of town. The jail was over by the gas stations, the storage facilities, the Acme and the Safeway.

The policeman, Skip, who had played in one quarter of one game his senior year, came in to check on me that night because he was concerned that I might be terrified, lonely, weeping. He was concerned that I might be unhinged by the fact that I had been in jail for nearly four hours and my father had not arrived to post bail, to say “Dark day, darling?” in that way that made my few friends go wild about him, his blue eyes, his arch and charming manner, his aphorisms. When the police had first put me here
they had waited for him to come bursting in the door, with his long stride, swearing in Englishisms: “What in bloody hell is going on here, may I ask?” My father was the chairman of the Langhorne College English department and he was famous for his Englishisms; they went down exceptionally well when he would speak at the Langhorne Women’s Club or the Episcopal Book Club on
David Copperfield
(“Minor Dickens, Ellen, strictly minor—
Bleak House
is too rich for their systems”) or
Pride and Prejudice
. My father had called me Little Nell when I was younger.

My mother sometimes called me Ellie.

But my father did not come to bail me out, and so the young policeman came to watch over the scared woman he expected to find in the cell. He was apparently amazed to find me asleep beneath the fluorescent lights, my knees drawn up to my chest, my hands joined beneath my cheek as though I was praying. Or at least that’s what he told the
Tribune
.

I saw the story after my brother Jeff and Mrs. Forburg agreed that it was best for me to know what was being said about me. “Shocked,” the story said Skip was. “Disbelief,” they said he felt. He said that in school I had always been a cold person, superior and sure of myself, and he was right. He said that I was smart, and that was right, too.

But he was smarter than I was about some things, and he knew that a girl in jail, a girl just barely old enough to refer to herself as a woman when she wanted to make sure that you knew she was not to be trifled with, should be rank with fear and adrenaline, up all night contemplating the horror of her position. Especially a girl charged with killing her own mother.

Instead he found me sleeping, a faint smile on my face.

You can see that smile in the pictures they took the next morning, after I appeared in court, charged with willfully causing the death of Katherine B. Gulden. The courtroom artist didn’t capture it when she drew me, with my court-appointed lawyer at my side, his pale-blue suit giving off a smell of sizing as he sweated in the small, close room.

(I remember thinking that anyone represented by a man in a pale-blue suit was doomed for sure. And his dress shirt was short-sleeved. “Going up the river,” I thought to myself. “In for the long haul.”)

But in the late afternoon, when the strip mall across from the municipal building was in shadow and my bail had been arranged—$10,000 cash and a pledge of a four-bedroom Cape with a finished basement—when I finally left the Montgomery County jail, the smile I had had while asleep was still on my face, just a little half-moon curve above my pointed chin and below my pointed nose.

On page one of the
Tribune
I smiled my Mona Lisa smile, my dark hair braided back from my forehead, my widow’s peak an arrogant
V
, my big white sweater and a peacoat flapping over dirty jeans, a smudge faintly visible on one cheek. And I knew that even the few people who still loved me would look and think that here was Ellen’s fatal hubris again, smiling at the worst moment of her life.

Some of them did say that, as the days went by, and I never answered them. How could I say that whenever I went out in public and someone leapt into my path, a Nikon staring at me like a tribal mask on an enemy’s face, all I could hear was a voice in my ear, an alto voice over and over, saying, “Smile for the camera, Ellie. You look so pretty when you smile.”

And my mother spoke, alive again inside my brain, edging out Becky Sharp and Pip and Miss Havisham and all the other made-up people I had learned so long ago from my father to prize over real ones. She spoke and I listened to her, because I was afraid if I didn’t her voice would gradually fade away, an evanescent wraith of a thing that would narrow to a pinpoint of light and then go out, lost forever, like Tinker Bell if no one clapped for her. I listened to her, because I loved her. She’d asked so little of me, over the course of our lives, and I wanted to do this one small remembered thing, to smile for the camera.

At the end I always did what she asked, even though I hated it. I was tired to death of the sour smell of her body and the straw
of her hair in the brush and the bedpan and the basin and the pills that kept her from crying out, from twisting and turning like the trout do on the banks of the Montgomery River when you’ve lifted them on the end of the sharp hook and their gills flare in mortal agitation.

I tried to do it all without screaming, without shouting, “I am dying with you.” But she knew it; she felt it. It was one of many reasons why she would lie on the living-room couch and weep without making a sound, the tears giving her gray-yellow skin, tight across her bones, the sheen of the polished cotton she used for slipcovers or the old lampshades she painted with flowers for my bedroom. I tried to make her comfortable, to do what she wanted. All but that one last time.

No matter what the police and the district attorney said, no matter what the papers wrote, no matter what people believed then and still believe, these years later, the truth is that I did not kill my mother. I only wished I had.

I
remember that the last completely normal day we ever had in our lives, my brothers and I, was an ordinary day much like this one, a muggy August-into-September weekday, the sky low and gray over Langhorne, clouds as flat as an old comforter hanging between the two slight ridges that edged the town. We’d gone to the Tastee Freeze for soft ice cream that day, driving in Jeff’s battered open jeep with our arms out the windows. My brothers were handsome boys who have turned into handsome men. Brian has our father’s black hair and blue eyes, Jeffrey our mother’s coloring, auburn hair and eyes like amber and a long face with freckles.

Both of them were tanned that day, at the end of their summer jobs as camp counselor and landscapes I was pale from a summer spent in a New York office on weekdays and house-guesting at Fire Island weekends, spending more time at cocktail parties than on the beach, where melanoma and Retin-A were frequent talking points among my acquaintances.

Afterward I wondered why I hadn’t loved that day more, why I hadn’t savored every bit of it like soft ice cream on my tongue,
why I hadn’t known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it’s not normal and everyday any longer. And nothing ever was, after that day. It was a Thursday, and I was still my old self, smug, self-involved, successful, and what in my circles passed for happy.

“Ellen’s got the life,” said Jeff, who’d been asking about the magazine where I worked. “She gets paid to be a wiseass for a living. You go to parties, you talk to people, you make fun of them in print. It’s like getting paid to breathe. Or play tennis.”

“You could get paid to play tennis,” I said. “It’s called being a tennis pro.”

“Oh, right,” said Jeff, “with our father?” He sucked the ice cream from the bottom of his cone. “Excuse me, Pop? Mr. Life of the Mind? I’ve decided to move to Hilton Head and become a tennis pro. But I’ll be reading Flaubert in my spare time.”

“Is it possible for one of you to make a life decision without wondering what Papa will find wrong with it?” I said.

My brothers hooted and jeered. “Oh, great,” said Jeff. “Ellen Gulden renounces paternal approval! And only twenty-four years too late.”

“Mom is happy with anything I do,” said Brian.

“Oh, well, Mom,” said Jeff.

“Jeffrey man,” someone called across the parking lot. “Brian!” My brothers lifted their hands in desultory salutes. “What’s up?” Jeff called back.

“I’m history here,” I said.

“You were history here when you were here,” said Jeff. “No offense, El. You’re a hungry puppy, always were a hungry puppy, and the world don’t like you hungry puppies. People are afraid you’re going to bite them.”

“Why are you talking like a cracker radio commentator?” I said.

“See, Bri, Ellen never relaxes. New York is her kind of place. An entire city of people who never relax, who were antsy in their own hometowns. So long, hungry puppy. Go where the dogs eat the dogs.”

The light was dull yellow because of the low clouds, like a solitary bulb in a dark room. The asphalt was soft in the driveway under our feet, the smell of charcoal drifting over Langhorne the way perfume hung over a cocktail party in the city. Our father came in late in the evening, but we were used to that: he stood in the den for a time, leaning against the doorjamb, and then he trudged upstairs, oddly silent.

Not odd for the boys, with whom he had the strained, slightly mechanical transactions that many fathers have with their sons. But odd for me. I had always felt I knew my father’s mind, if not his heart. Whenever I came home, from college and then later, on visits from the city, he would call me into his study, with its dark furniture and dim sepia light, would lean forward in his desk chair and say, simply, “Tell.”

And I would spin my stories for him, of the famous writer I had heard read in a lecture hall, of the arguments about syntax I had had with editors, of the downstairs neighbor who played Scarlatti exquisitely but monotonously on the small antique harpsichord I had once glimpsed through the door of his apartment.

I often felt like someone being debriefed by a government apparatchik, or like Scheherazade entertaining the sultan. And often I made stories up, wonderful stories, so that my father would lean back in his chair and his face would relax into the utter concentration he had when he lectured to his students. Sometimes at the end he would say “Interesting.” And I would be happy.

Our mother was in the hospital that day, and as it always did, the house seemed like a stage set without her. It was her house, really. Whenever anyone is called a homemaker now—and they rarely are—I think of my mother. She made a home painstakingly and well. She made balanced meals, took cooking classes, cleaned the rooms of our home with a scarf tying back her bright hair, just like in the movies. When she wallpapered a room, she would always cover the picture frames in the same paper, and place them on the bureau or the bedside table, with family photographs inside.

The two largest pictures in the living room were of my mother and father. In one they are standing together on our front porch. My mother is holding my father’s arm with both her own, an incandescent smile lighting her face, as though life knows no greater happiness than this—this place, this day, this man. Her body is turned slightly sideways, toward him, but he is facing foursquare to the camera, his arms crossed over his chest, his face serious, his eyes mocking.

Back when we were still lovers, Jonathan had picked up that picture from the piano and said that; in it my father looked like the kind of man who would rip out your heart, grill it, and eat it for dinner, then have your wife for dessert. Allowing for the difficult relationship between Jonathan and my father, the relationship of two men engaged in a struggle for the soul of the same woman, it was a pretty fair description.