Other Women (9 page)

Arnold was daintily chewing one of Jason’s new blue Nikes. “Stop it, Arnold!” she called.

“Jason, don’t let him chew up your new shoe, honey.”

“He can if he wants to, Mom.”

“No, he can’t. I paid for those shoes, and I’m not-was She halted, already bored with the upcoming lecture. “Jackie, would you please put some more wood in the stove for me, honey. It’s getting chilly in here.”

As Jackie stood up slowly, eyes fixed on the TV, Caroline returned to her memories of Pink Blanky. Usually she dragged it with her wherever she went. But one morning her mother persuaded her to leave it behind when she went to nursery school.

She folded it careand laid it on her pillow, patting it reassuringly. A11 morning long, as she cut and pasted construction paper, she kept clutching at thin air for Pink Blanky with her left hand. When she got home, Maureen announced she’d needed cleaning cloths and had cut Pink

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Blanky into four pieces. Caroline climbed into bed for her nap in a state of shock. As she pulled up the patchwork quilt her mother had purchased by mail from the blind wife of an Appalachian sharecropshe assured herself that this quilt would also safeguard her from fire in the night, thieves in the closet, monsters under the bed, Japs on Okinawa, and British rule in Ireland.

But the quilt smelled like the cedar chest where it lay in summer, rather than mildew, snot, and saliva. It lacked Pink Blanky’s limp threadbare kneadability. Sucking on its corner was like sucking cardPink Blanky would yield to the caresses of fingertips, but the quilt just lay there like a tin washboard. As she sought safety in its stiff, clean folds, she thought wistfully of the disgusting delights of Pink Blanky, who now lay surrounded by her father’s old jockey shorts. How had she caused this? She should never have left Pink Blanky behind, even if its presence did make her look like a baby at nursery school.

If she hadn’t clung so insistently to Pink Blanky, maybe they’d still be sleeping together. I know what you want and you can’t have it. If you didn’t let them know you wanted something, they wouldn’t have to take it away. She shoved a thumb in her mouth and fell asleep, comforted by this insight into the curious workings of the adult world.

A couple of nights later, she sneaked at midnight to the cleaning closet, rummaged through the dust rags, and rescued two of Pink Blanky’s four pieces. Racing upstairs to bed, she caressed one piece. It was smooth and stiff, coated with floor wax. Grabbing the other piece, she buried her nose in it. It smelled of lemon oil furniture polish. She began to cry. Not only could Pink Blanky not save her from the loss of its magical protection, it couldn’t even save itself from this humiliating dismemberment and exile. She had to face it: Pink Blanky was merely mortal.

The next morning she shoved the pieces under her mattress, but Maureen found them when she was changing the damp sheets. As she carried them away, Caroline buried her teeth in Maureen’s forearm.

Maureen had four stitches and returned to Galway with many bad memories of the New World.

Caroline was sent to her room for the rest of her life.

Maureen was replaced by Esther from Poland, who told bedtime stories in broken English about being a teenager in Buchenwald.

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Caroline studied her sons as they gazed with adoration at Gabriel Kotter. Jason periodically asked her to marry a man like Gabriel Kotter so he could be Jason’s dad.

“You’ve already got a dad,” Caroline would point out.

Jason would screw up his face with distaste, and Caroline could no longer summon enough loyalty to Jackson to reprimand him.

Jackie and Jason had both had special blankets, but giving them up hadn’t been a big deal. They just gradually lost interest. Maybe they felt secure enough with her not to need substitutes?

Maybe she wasn’t such a flop as a mother after all? She speculated on how much she’d damaged them by dragging them from house to house. Out of Jackson’s neo-Tudor manse in Newton, and into David Michael’s van with a scene from Mao’s Long March painted on the back window.

To the Somerville commune, then up here to this cabin in the woods. Each time they made a bad grade or fought with a friend, she assumed it was her fault for burdening them with so much instability. Of course she herself had spent her first eighteen years in the same rambling Victorian heap in Brookline, and she was no paragon of mental health. Good mother. Could she add that to her list?

She thought about her list as she opened the oven door and poked the baked potatoes with a fork. If Hannah could tell her to divide it into categories, evidently she’d seen some herself. But what? Kind, honest, ungenerous, possessive, wimpy … .

She hadn’t a clue. Good sense of humor, she was going to add. But Hannah hadn’t liked her jokes. Or rather, she responded to them, then told her she was wasting her money. Fine. She wouldn’t tell any more. Let Hannah sit there all day like Buddha, getting exhausted by other people’s problems.

She remembered saying to Hannah that she felt she had to do what other people wanted for them to like her. Would she tell Hannah her problems just because this was what Hannah wanted? But she didn’t care whether Hannah liked her. Then she recalled telling Hannah she did care. Why the hell had she said that? Because she really didn’t. That Betty Furness look-alike meant nothing to her. She’d add “liar” to her list.

Was it even true she felt she had to do what others wanted for them to like her? She thought about Jackson, his pager strapped to his belt like a mountain man’s hunting knife. When she finally voiced OTHER

despair over the fact that she never saw him, he stayed at the hospital more than ever. What about David Michael? She pictured him drawon a joint, his ponytail tucked under an operating cap, a fleck of marijuana flaring in his mustache. When she complained about his other women, he took up with Clea, one of her best friends, who lived right there in the Somerville commune. Whenever she failed to be long-suffering, people withdrew. But Diana had withdrawn too, and Caroline had always tried to do everything Diana wanted. Including this god-awful celibacy.

As Caroline tore up lettuce leaves and tossed them into the wooden salad bowl, she resumed her memorial service for Pink Blanky, the only object of her adoration whose departure had been involuntary. No, that was incorrect. What about Marsha? Caroline remembered pedaling her tricycle down the block one summer afternoon, grieving over Pink Blanky. She was pedaling with her eyes closed, hoping to fall into a manhole or get hit by a bus. Probably she would without Pink Blanky to protect her. It was all her fault.

She’d left Pink Blanky home alone with a murderess.

A girl riding a red tricycle in the opposite direction pulled in front of Caroline and said, “Don’t cry, little girl. I can be your friend.” She had a short ponytail on each side of her head, like pig’s ears, tied with narrow pink ribbons.

It turned out Marsha knew everything worth knowing except what penises were for. She knew which neighbors’ gardens you could pick flowers from without getting caught; how to crush the flowers to manperfume (which you put in emptied pill capsules and forced the younger neighborhood children to buy); why there were cracks in sidewalks; how to fasten playing cards to tricycle wheels with clothesto make flapping sounds as you rode; why certain graves had sunk in the cemetery down the street (grave robbers had stolen the coffins); where baby brothers like Howard came from (you bought them at a hospital), and why you shouldn’t hurt them. Caroline ceased to be a scaredy cat who couldn’t even get to the bathroom alone at night. Marsha was the Lone Ranger, and Caroline was Tonto. Marsha was the Cisco Kid, and she was Pancho. Marsha was Roy Rogers, and she was Dale Evans. Their tricycles were stallions, and they rode them all the way to the end of the block.

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Practically the only thing Marsha hadn’t known was how not to die when hit by a Bunny Bread truck in sixth grade. Caroline had known to trust no one, even when the light was green in your favor. If she’d been with Marsha that afternoon, instead of at a meeting of a school club Marsha couldn’t join because her grades weren’t high enough, Marsha wouldn’t have been run over. Caroline hadn’t even wanted to join a club that didn’t want Marsha too.

Marsha’s feelings had been hurt.

The neighborhood kids spent a lot of time searching the crosswalk and curb where Marsha had been bit for bloodstains. When Caroline walked by, they’d call for her to come look at a pebble they insisted was one of Marsha’s teeth. But Caroline could see it all too clearly in her head already-Marsha’s body bloody and mangled, limp and lifeless on the concrete.

Caroline saved her baby-sitting money and bought a potted lily for Marsha’s grave. Esther had been replaced by Geraldine, who told bedtime stories about fleeing Mississippi after her husband was lynched by the Klan. Geraldine, head wrapped in a flowered scarf, agreed to take Caroline on the bus to Marsha’s grave. But she looked at the lily and said, “Have mercy, child, you don’t want no real flowers. Shoot, that old thing’ll rot just like her. You want you some plastic ones that’ll stay pretty from here to yonder.” So she and Geralstopped off to buy some purple plastic hydrangeas. As she looked at the marble headstone of a lamb, Caroline reminded herself that Marsha’s death was her fault. She hadn’t been with her that afternoon. She hadn’t known until too late that Marsha needed her protection as much as she needed Marsha’s.

When she got home, she locked herself in the bathroom with a box of Uncle Ben’s Rice.

Marsha’s mother was an ex-nun who’d left her order because it denied her an electric heating pad when she developed arthritis. Marsha had often told Caroline about doing penfor being bad, like you waved at football games. As pennants for causing Marsha’s death, Caroline sprinkled a layer of rice on the tile floor and knelt on it with her arms outstretched, like Jesus on the cross. After several such afternoons, her knees rubbed raw, she ran out of rice. She considered watching “American Bandstand,” but instead took her allowance to the store for more rice. Because if she wasn’t

someone who deserved punishment for causing her best friend’s death, who was she? No one.

As Caroline flipped the pork chops and began slicing apples into the iron skillet, she speculated on whether those purple hydrangeas were still on Marsha’s grave, fresh as the day they were bought. After Marsha came Rorkie, then a series of gruesome boyfriends, then ArJackson, David Michael, Diana. Ever since Pink Blanky, she realized, there’d been someone she’d endowed with its wisdom and benignity.

As she set the tan stoneware plates on the table, which were among the few relics other than Jackie and Jason from her marriage to Jackson, she remembered Hannah’s saying this afternoon that she was a kind and gentle person. Was there any truth to this?

After all, the woman had a Ph.d. and a British accent. Even if she did run around barefoot.

Looking up from the floor in front of the TV, Jackie asked, “What’s so funny, Mom?”

She realized there was a bemused smile on her face. Oh God, no. Please not another Pink Blanky surrogate. “Nothing,” she snapped.

Dressed in a nightgown and rose flannel robe, Hannah sat in an armchair by the Franklin stove in her bedroom reading

Love Comes Fast

and drinking a dry martini. She could hear the rustle of Arthur’s

Wolf Street journal

in the living room. Her paperback was tattered and dog-eared, having passed through the hands of three friends who traded gothic romances with the enthusiasm with which her children used to trade baseball cards. She’d begun reading romances years ago, to find out what many of her female clients saw in them. She quickly understood they devoured them to convince themselves of the glamour of dreary marriages and boring or abusive husbands.

Having disthis, she also discovered she too was hooked. The damn things turned her on. Clients often complained their relationships went stale, as though it were their partners’ faults for not being transformed into exciting new people every few years. She’d reply, “That’s why God gave you an imagination.”

Maggie used to chide her for her taste in reading matter. One morning when Hannah stopped by Lloyd Harris, she found Maggie watching “The Price Is Right” on TV “Aha, I caught you!” said Hannah. “I’m not supposed to read romances, but you can watch game shows?”

“My dear,” said Maggie in her quilted bed jacket, “when you’re dying, you can watch anything you like.”

Hannah lingered over the last several pages, pleased

hove Comes Fast

was ending as she’d known it would: boy gets girl, boy fucks girl, boy and girl display every symptom of living happily ever after. She 6o

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laid the book on the floor and lit a cigarette.

Closing her eyes, she felt the warmth from the stove.

Another reason she read romances instead of Madame Bovary

was that they had happy endings-unlike many of her clients. After listening all day to reports of child abuse and wife beating, rape and incest, she was too tired for any more realism. She needed stories in which good guys got what they wanted-and bad guys what they deserved.

Standing up, she stretched and walked to the window, which had a panel of stained glass across the top. Cold seeped in around the caulking. Way down the lake the lights of town lent a faint aura to the night sky.

Simon and Joanna were down there somewhere, doing whatever they did. They’d formed in her womb and clung to her skirts for years, and now they bounced checks, cooked quiches, played racball, and conducted love affairs entirely without her assistance. She looked at the portraits on the wall of Nigel and Mona. She couldn’t so easily imagine their current state, though God knows she’d tried. Wherever they were, she hoped they too were managing all right without her.

She studied all four pictures, painted from photos by a man in town. Each child her product, yet each so distinct. Simon, goodlooking and bossy, with the features and gestures of a father who vanished when he was one-the same fair hair and pale skin, the same arrogant tilt to his head and jut to his jaw. Nigel, a slight, wacky little boy in thick glasses who used to run down to the lake at dawn to skip stones, terrifying her when she found his bed empty. Once she sent the uniformed game warden down to find him, hoping it might frighten him into staying in bed in the future. He fell to his knees, raised clasped hands, and said, “Arrest me, sir!” Mona, pudgy and cuddlesome, friend to new children at school, savior to injured pets.