Pay the Piper (37 page)

She was sorry never to have experienced the girl he was going to bring along. Before that time could take place, she had moved to Delton.

By the time she returned home from jogging on the beach, she decided her life would come down to Chris and a few other men who took her out to dinner or whom she cooked for. She would continue with the singles group that went to the Hartford Symphony, despite the dreary cheese and wine gatherings afterward. She had joined PEN: Poets, Essayists, and Novelists. She did not know why she hadn't joined years before. She could volunteer for a committee. Despite their gatherings being downtown in Manhattan at night, she would keep going. No matter that she had gone in to readings and turned around and come directly back to Connecticut never having said a word to anyone, because she did not know how to start up conversations at such a gathering where she knew no one. She would never recover from all that had happened to her. She went off with a singles cross-country skiing group and got frostbitten. Her toes were never going to be the same. She rubbed them, taking off her jogging shoes. The day, while exhilarating, had been frightening. She had never been cross-country skiing in her life and took off with the group on a five-mile tour. When she went back to her car, she could not open the door, her fingers were so stiff. Her toes were frozen in her boots. She stood helplessly off in New York State. Suppose something devastating happened requiring medical attention. Family to call? There was no one but her mother. She was no one to any of the other people, already in their cars and driving away through a frozen afternoon. A long while she stood trying to unlock her car, finding herself in a parking lot alone, until she could move her fingers.

Driving alone again through nighttime suburban streets, Laurel told herself this was the last new event. She had found out about Adult Children of Alcoholics by running a finger down the alphabetical list of clubs in the biweekly Soundport paper. Not only singles seemed to be looking for companionship. Beekeepers. Computer lovers. Gravestone lovers. Whatever got you through the night, she supposed. Jim Beam bottle collectors. Rabbits. Whales. And she went back to point A.

She supposed she was going to be late because she really did not want to go. She went around through Soundport's dark but familiar streets and on to a neighboring town, to a Catholic church. There was always something so hushed and holy about them, she dreaded entering. But the church itself was dark. There were lights in a basement room, and she could see people sitting in rows of chairs. Another entrance; another room full of strangers. She might have been less conspicuous had she arrived on time; at the door, she wavered and finally went in.

“Come in.”

A priest stopped speaking and nodded.

A woman patted an empty seat in a circle of chairs, and she sat down. She thought of an old child's game in kindergarten where she skipped around a circle of chairs to the teacher's playing of a yellowed piano. A chair was removed, and when the music stopped, there was a scramble for the chairs remaining. Someone had to be left out. She remembered standing there with nowhere to sit, feeling personally rejected. She was never able to scramble for a seat, being an only child and not used to fighting for something. She remembered how in her own house she had shrunk from Doreen.

“A child in an alcoholic environment grows up with a sense of rescuing,” the priest had continued. “Technical rescuing, it's called. In such homes children take responsibility for the drinking. They grow up with a poor self-image. I am not worth love, a child thinks. I must merit it. In such families, the children take on varying roles. There is the lost child. There is the rescuer who is the hero. There is the wit, the entertaining one. There is the nurturer.” The priest stopped and smiled. “That's why you find among Irish Catholic families so many children become nuns and priests.”

“Suppose you were an only child?”

Laurel was surprised by her daring. But in three years as a single, she had come out of herself. She had to, facing classrooms of students, facing strangers.

“Then you played all the roles,” the priest said.

Among other people in the room, there were sighs or soft muttered comments. “I always tried to make my parents happy,” a woman said.

“Tried,” the priest said. “But we can't make anyone happy but ourselves.”

Yes, she had been silent trying never to be trouble, Laurel thought; wouldn't she then be loved? Often she did assume blame for her parents' bitterness and their quarreling. All along their lives had been their own. Never to share feelings meant looking elsewhere for things to be better. She had gone about seeking love, escaping even to Mama, who wrote lovely letters before Hal was out of prison, and who she thought would be a mother unlike her own. I went over the rainbow, Laurel thought, but never got back home like Dorothy, though I tried and tried.

“There is a wall of isolation in alcoholic families,” the priest was saying. “It's difficult to break the conspiracy of silence that goes on. No one must know what is happening inside the walls of the house. The inhabitants don't talk about it to one another.”

A woman spoke in tears. “I was always so afraid to bring friends home. I never knew when my mother would be lying out on the floor drunk.”

“I was always trying to figure out what normal was.” A man looked inward. “It led to a lot of erratic behavior in my life, to a lot of moving.”

“All of this sounds as if you have lifted off the roof to the house where I grew up,” another man said, “and looked down at my own life.”

There was relief to finding people like herself. As the priest talked, as other people told their experiences and feelings, as she could share them, she found guilt began to erase itself, a burden lifted; layers of the past began to peel away. All around the church there were exclusive towns, with well-tended lawns, big houses, and so much pain inside people they did not create for themselves.

In a circle, they stood with their arms around one another. People unashamedly had wet faces. “Our father who art in heaven,” they began.

“Keep coming,” the priest said. “Remember, don't let the past dominate your thoughts.”

Tonight she would not stand about and chat. She felt like being alone another time with a silence that would begin to break. She would never know what might have happened differently with William and Hal if she had talked more, but Laurel understood reasons that drove her to save Hal. Her impetus needed to be put to more productive use. She had never spoken up to William, Hal, or her mother out of fear of rejection. Always she had expected to be an abandoned child. Hal had made this a reality. Once he left, she had cried as never before in her life, out of the marrow of her bones, out of the deepest recess of her soul. But for more than him. She had cried not only over the past but longing for it to come back, no matter its pain. The priest's last words took hold. But she could never forget. Always she would be a person with scenes of the past overlaying themselves in her mind's eye, colorfully in the present. Yes, she had been willing to be a victim because she had grown up as one. It was the only role she knew, and fit comfortably. She would not be one again, but she felt the role slipping away as if she had lost a companion.

She reached the door as someone behind her whispered, “He's a recovering alcoholic,” about the priest. She shook his hand. “I'll be back,” she said. “If I'd known these things before, my whole life would have been different.”

“So would mine have been.” The priest smiled wryly.

She drove back over suburban roads wondering if under different circumstances he would have been a man who gave himself to God.

17

She was meeting her mother for lunch at Bloomingdale's. Seeing her across the room's subdued light, Laurel straightened up and walked to where her mother waited at a table. She could see her diamond ring flashing as she held a cigarette. In her other hand, her mother held a small rubber child's ball. What was she doing?

“Are you limping?” Mrs. Wynn asked when Laurel sat down.

“No.” In her chair, she felt pains shooting up her buttocks. “What are you doing?”

Mrs. Wynn gave a small smile. Her long nails enclosed the ball with its swirled colors. They reminded Laurel of pastels, sherbets. “The cancer society women brought it by this morning.” She went on squeezing and squeezing to demonstrate. “I'm supposed to do this to strengthen my arm since the operation.”

“Oh.” Laurel was relieved her mother had not regressed to some form of childhood. She had sympathy about the mastectomy. Still, there was a familiar core of resentment about her mother saying the operation was Laurel's fault. If Laurel had not moved back to Delton when she did, Mrs. Wynn said, she'd have gone for a biopsy earlier. “I couldn't have an operation by myself. No one to look after me.” Having been alone in the world now for five years, Laurel had a tougher spirit. And she understood the past much better now after Children of Alcoholics sessions, and the need she had had to be a willing victim. But no more. A competitive spirit had begun to rise. She stared directly at her mother saying, “No one but you, Mother, would have had seepage around a nipple for so long without going to a doctor. He said if you'd come sooner, you wouldn't have had to have a breast removed. I could have come back from Delton. You could have come there for the operation.” Because no matter what had happened, no matter that she had returned, there was a feeling, still, of being on Mount Everest by themselves: a feeling that the truest friends were back where they came from, doctors they could have depended on better. She had accepted a sense of being displaced about living in the Northeast.

Her mother kept demonstrating how she flexed her arm by squeezing the ball. Patrons at another table were watching, their munching temporarily suspended. Laurel wanted to laugh. She watched the network of old skin on her mother's arm like fish scales and knew someday she would have them herself. But her mother didn't look eighty. She had more fashion sense than Laurel felt she had and was never dependent on someone to help her. How had she acquired it, being the country girl she once was? Her mother looked into the distance as if thinking about her operation. And suddenly Laurel thought that she stared into an abyss, into the grave and beyond. What must it be like to have so little time left to live? she wondered. She had herself a diluted sense of so much of life being over as she neared sixty. She could see her mother alone in her apartment talking to a stranger from the cancer society. She was more acutely aware of the silence of her mother's apartment, now that she was herself alone, and more acutely aware of her mother's making some kind of life on her own as a widow. She emptied a glass of water in nervous apprehension over their time together.

“Don't drink all that water. You won't be able to eat.”

Laurel stared at the glass. “It is drunk,” she said.

“It's all that jogging that makes your hip hurt.”

“Maybe it's sitting over the typewriter.”

“Doctors now say jogging is bad for women. You'd know that if you'd read.”

“I read, Mother. I just reread
Madame Bovary.
”

“Or watch television. There was a talk show the other morning about jogging. You need to keep TV on for company now that you're alone.”

“I don't want it on for company.” Laurel put the rim of the glass between her teeth.

“What did you say?”

She repeated and then she said, “You need a hearing aid, Mother.”

“I can hear everybody but you. You mumble. Everybody says so.”

“Who is everybody?”

“And Rick,” Mrs. Wynn said. “He mumbles too. Rick thinks he is just so-o-o—” and she made an airy gesture with her hand, not knowing what she wanted to say.

So intellectual? Laurel said to herself. This was still a stigma to her mother.

“I don't think Rick will ever get out of school.”

“It takes a long time to get a Ph.D.”

She looked up in relief when the waitress appeared, a big-bosomed woman in a tight pink uniform. On an eye level with those bosoms, Laurel tried not to stare or to think about the pouter pigeon who took her husband away. While her mother and Rick constantly assured her she was better off without Hal, and while she felt a great sense of relief about no longer being caught in her life with him, she was still so lonesome. Since starting sessions with Adult Children of Alcoholics, unlocking a silence she had lived with so long, she could not help wondering how things would have been with William or Hal if she had spoken up more. But she did not dwell on the past any longer.

The waitress presented them with large pink menus. “Ladies. The special soup today is gazpacho.”

“What did she say?” Mrs. Wynn hissed across her menu.

“The special soup is gazpacho.”

“Ugh. Green peppers give me indigestion.” She stared up at the waitress with a little smile as if to say, What did she think about that?

The waitress said, “The special entrée is chicken with piquant sauce. And for dessert Bloomie's pink peppermint ice cream.”

Laurel winced over the word “Bloomie's” as she had winced at “ladies.” The words made her feel she was a matron with time to kill, though she had spent a lifetime trying not to be like her mother. However, her mother was right about one thing. It was a common occurrence for people to return to the source of their pain; in marrying Hal, she did marry someone like her father, as if to acquire once more what she remembered from childhood. Her tendency toward alcohol was common for the children of alcoholics too; it came down through the genes.

As Laurel said, “I'll have tuna on pita bread,” she remembered learning from William's family not to be redundant and say tuna fish.

“Why do you want tuna fish? You can have tuna fish at home.” Her mother removed her reading glasses and waited for an answer.