One True Thing (26 page)

It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for as I wandered through Mrs. Forburg’s rooms; I remembered how empty it had seemed after the hospital wagon came and the attendants efficiently, almost magically, took the body away. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

During those weeks in Mrs. Forburg’s house, much of my life was predictable. In fact it was much like the life I had lived those last few months tending my mother, and yet it felt so empty by comparison. There was no center to it, no point. It was an empty housewife’s routine of sweeping floors, folding laundry, even watching soap operas. I cooked and cleaned and read; I simmered casseroles and made pies. But there was no one, nothing, around which all this activity revolved. It was simply the white noise of my life, the way to make the time go by least painfully. I was like a mother whose children have been killed in some horrible accident and yet who continues to put a pan of brownies on the table on a trivet every afternoon at three.

One night I went to put out a bag of garbage, to leave it at the end of the short drive off the graveled country road where the McNulty brothers would get it in the morning. They would throw it into the back of the truck they took to the dump, where they were as constant a sight, with their low foreheads and dirty watch
caps, as the big oily-feathered birds who picked with sharp beaks at the orange sections spotted with coffee grounds, smeared with mayonnaise and lettuce.

I had put another bag there earlier, and by the light of the nearly full moon I could see a racoon with its pointed snout buried in one corner of the glistening green plastic. It whirled to greet me, baring its little yellowish teeth, nothing cute or cartoonish in its ratlike eyes and scrabbling hands, and then it ran across the road and into the dark. I saw that it had spread its booty around the mailbox post, an untidy heap of bones cleaned to gray whiteness like the moon, a tuna can, a small jar that had once held tartar sauce, a half lemon now reduced cleanly to a bowllike bit of yellow peel, two greasy paper towels like dying flowers.

I began to work off the twist tie of the bag I was holding so I could put all the things inside it, but as I stooped to pick up the first bone, my ankle went awry, slipping sideways, and I fell heavily into the grass and dirt and began to cry, long rattling gasps that held my chest down like a hand on my sternum. I sat and wept, my face lifted to the sky as though the moon might warm it. A chicken bone, the fragile ribs and cartilaginous center bow of a breast, was beneath the heel of my hand, and I picked it up and threw it with all my might, hearing no sound as it landed in the scrubby weeds on the other side of the road.

“Goddamnit,” I cried, and I tried to get to my feet, but Mrs. Forburg was behind me, bending stiffly to put her hands on my shoulders.

“It’s just the Goddamn mess,” I said. “Look at it.” I moved my hand in a wobbly arc and finally brought it up to my chest, feeling my breathing catch and slow, catch again.

“Go inside,” she said. “I’ll do this.” And I did.

Sometimes I helped her with her homework, editing senior essays with a red pen, grading the true-and-false tests. True, they said, Shakespeare began a sonnet “Death Be Not Proud.” True, they said, Mr. Darcy is a character in
A Tale of Two Cities
. True, they said,
Silas Marner
was written by a man named George Eliot.

It’s funny, isn’t it, what will make you break? Your lover moves to London and falls in love with a news reader for the BBC and you feel fine and then one day you raise your umbrella slightly to cross Fifty-seventh Street and stare into the Burberry shop and begin to sob. Or your baby dies at birth and five years later, in an antique store, a small battered silver rattle with teeth marks in one end engraved with the name Emily lies on a square of velvet, and the sobs escape from the genie’s bottle somewhere deep in your gut where they’ve lain low until then.

Or the garbage bag breaks.

Wrong, wrong, wrong went my big red checks on the test papers, and then I got to
Silas Marner
and George Eliot and I pressed my hand to my face, trying to keep everything inside where it belonged. I walked, head down, to the one small bathroom in Mrs. Forburg’s house.

“You can’t keep it all bottled up,” she said when I came back out.

“Sure I can,” I said.

“Do you want tea?”

“No. What I really want is a drink, but that way lies disaster.”

“Amen,” said Mrs. Forburg, who went to Al-Anon meetings twice a week in the basement of the Lutheran church, as she put a bowl of peanuts on the table. “Don’t get grease on my papers.”

“You guys always do that,” I said, struggling with a smile. “Even at college, you always call them ‘my papers.’ Why are you so fierce about the possessive?”

“I never thought about that before,” Mrs. Forburg said, eating a handful of nuts. “Maybe it’s because they’re the only tangible part of teaching. Except for you guys, of course, the finished product, but even that’s ephemeral. You watch the students work in class and you know that what you’re doing is taking hold, but there’s nothing really to show for it except this.” She held up a paper covered with red ink. “Bad example, but you understand my point. You look at the papers and you can see what sticks and what doesn’t. It’s one visible manifestation of how well you’re
doing what you do. That, and occasionally you’ll get a letter from one of them that lets you know you did a good job.”

“I should have sent you a letter like that. I was full of what you taught me. I mean, I lived on what I’d learned from you through four years of English lit.”

“Thank you, my dear. That’s what you always hope will happen, but it doesn’t really give you much to hold on to. I suppose in a way it’s like having children. No one really knows how good a job you’ve done unless, paradoxically, you’ve done a bad one and a child goes wrong. Otherwise, you’ve spent years on this work with precious little credit.”

I don’t know what I would have done without Mrs. Forburg during all those weeks. It was like living with a softer, more gentle version of my father, ever anxious to discuss the link between literature and life but not judgmental about opinions that diverged from her own. In the evening we had dinner together, watched the evening news, and talked for an hour or two afterward at the table in the kitchen, with the blinds always shut tight. When she went out to her meetings I watched television sitcoms and read mystery novels and talked to Jules on the phone.

“People aren’t supposed to ask about AA things, are they?” I asked one night after Mrs. Forburg had come home from her meeting.

“I don’t know about people,” she said. “You can certainly ask me about Al-Anon.”

“Why do you go?”

“Because it helps me to understand why I do some of the things I do,” she said.

“Sorry, I put that badly. You usually go to Al-Anon if you have a family member who is an alcoholic. Who’s the family member?” I raised my arms, palms open, as though to indicate the empty house, empty of photographs or mementos, too, so different from my mother’s house. “Sorry,” I said, “that was a nasty way of putting it.”

“Have you noticed you apologize a lot these days?” Mrs. Forburg said.

“Is that a way of evading my question?”

“No, it’s something you might want to think about. The answer is that my ex-husband was an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic. And my mother was an alcoholic. And I was, in the vocabulary of the addiction, the enabler who made it possible for all of them to go on drinking. I took care of my mother when she was drunk and then when she was dying, and I adored my father and made excuses for why he did what he did.”

“And your husband?”

“Oh, he was my father all over again—charming, smart, and crippled. You can find my story in any handbook on alcoholism. But knowing that you’re typical doesn’t go a long way toward making you feel better in your day-to-day life.”

“How long have you been divorced?” I asked. I could not remember Mrs. Forburg ever being married.

“Twelve years,” she said.

“It takes you that long to get over it?”

“That’s a naive comment from someone as intelligent as you are. It takes your entire life to get over some of the people you’ve loved, and some you never get over.”

“You always do that. The intelligence thing. It’s as though if you’re smart, you will understand yourself.”

“You’re right. That’s naïve of me. Particularly of me.”

“Is your father still alive?”

“He died three years ago. But if my head counts for anything, he’ll live forever.”

I understood that. I thought of my father all the time during those weeks. When I did not think of him, I dreamed of him. People were chasing me in those long, attenuated, slow-motion chases that are so common in dreams and, perhaps, more than we ever understand, in life. Sometimes my father would be one of them, sometimes he would be a bystander, sometimes he would try to help me but let go of my hand as I went by, our fingers slipping past one another like fish swimming parallel for a moment, then off in opposite directions.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I remember, I went downstairs
for a glass of milk and found him and my mother sitting at the table, the round oak table, beneath the sampler of our family tree: George and Kate in cross-stitch below a stylized line of grass and flowers, and then the three of us in the branches, full names, careful script in straight stitch.

My father had had a big balloon glass of brandy in front of him. I could smell it, sharp but with that lingering sweetness. He was wearing an Irish fisherman’s cardigan, bulky with cables, and his sports coat hung on the back of the chair. He was leaning back on the back legs, which we were never allowed to do because my mother said it was bad for the chairs.

“Ellen, an opinion,” he said, letting down the chair with a clunk and leaning forward to cup his brandy in his hands. “Did you see the story in today’s
Tribune
about the apartment complex they are proposing to build down from the college?”

“No,” I think I said. Was I thirteen then, or fourteen? Did most girls my age read the paper?

“Here,” he said, handing me a section of newspaper that had been on the floor below the table. “Background.” His words were very crisp, in the way they were when he had had a good deal to drink.

The story said that the state was proposing to build a complex of twenty-four apartments for low-income residents, on a wooded site directly behind the quarry.

I looked up.

“Your mother,” my father said, “finds this perfectly acceptable.”

“That is not what I said, Gen,” my mother had said.

“Perfectly acceptable. Here you have a lovely wooded area which will be raped for the sake of building some crackerboxes for people who, within weeks, will have left old cars on the lawns and written their names all over the walls. Your mother does not find this troubling.”

“That’s not what I said, Gen.”

“Well, what was it you did say?”

“I said that everybody has to live somewhere.”

“There you have it, Ellen. Words to live by: everybody has to live somewhere.”

“I’m going to bed,” I said.

“So am I,” said my mother.

“No one wants to engage in civilized debate in this household,” my father said.

Do I remember this correctly or do I remember it now as I wish it had been? When I remembered those occasions in those weeks, I remembered myself aligned with my mother against my father. Can any of that be true? Or was it just the trick of the light, that when she was alive shone on him alone and now shone only on the place where she had once been, nothing but Jesus rays and dust motes and a circle of silver on the ground? All my stories have alternate endings now, like “The Lady or the Tiger.” There is the ending where I am brittle and clever and he looks at me over the rim of his half glasses, the blue of his eyes bisected by tortoiseshell, and his mouth curves just a little at the corner and I know that I have done the right thing. And there is the other ending. My mother’s ending.

“There you are,” he said, “words to live by—everybody has to live somewhere.”

“I’m going to bed,” said my mother.

“And you, Ellen?” he said.

“I’ll stay down here for a while,” I said. “Do you want another brandy?”

One night I had a dream that I was driving our car, sitting on a telephone book so that I was high enough to see over the dashboard, and that I hit the deer and he said, “Very careless, Ellen,” but you could tell by his smile that he was not really angry. And my grandfather got the gun and we went back but the deer was gone and in its place was a woman in a nightgown, her face turned away. “Who’s that?” my grandfather said, but neither my father nor I recognized her.

I
liked my lawyer. Not my first lawyer, the one who stood beside me at my arraignment, when the edges of my fingers were still black with the ink the police used to fingerprint me. Not the lawyer whose name, as nondescript as his clothes and his observations, was Smith.

But the lawyer who took over my case, who was paid for by Jeffrey with money that I only realized afterward, when the need for lawyers had long passed, was equal parts the money left Jeff by our Gulden grandparents and contributions from a handful of families in Langhorne who had been friends of ours and who believed that I should not be prosecuted. Most of them, I think, believed that I had killed my mother, but they believed I had done it out of kindness. Jeff told me that Mrs. Duane would only repeat, “If you had seen her pushing that wheelchair …” as she wrote him a substantial check on the bookstore account.

The money was not enough, I knew that. Jonathan had once told me he could expect to bill out at $300 an hour if he made partner in the firm he most coveted, the one with the atrium full
of ficus trees and the private dining room with the nouvelle American chef. And I knew that Robert Greenstein would spend hours on this case even before it came to trial. His office had no atrium, no chef. He ate chicken salad from paper bags on the green blotter of his desktop; I ate with him on a few occasions.