Set Me Free (32 page)

“No, it’s not. Stay.” Helen stood. “Just give me a few minutes to catch my breath.” She went about making a pot of tea, and
as she did so, she began to laugh at the absurdity of the whole affair. She hoped she could pass herself off as sober. She
didn’t want to embarrass herself, though it seemed like she’d already done a pretty good job.

“I’m sorry,” Amelia said again as Helen placed a hot mug in between her cold hands.

“Next time leave a note on the door or something. Or lie on top of the bed. How’s that?”

Amelia nodded, and her face dissolved again.

“Oh, it’s not that big a deal. It’s funny, really. I promise. We’ll be laughing about this for years to come. I couldn’t have
choreographed a more ridiculous scene myself. Oh, now, Amelia, don’t cry…”

Amelia was unreachable. Finally, Helen got her to speak but couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Amelia hiccupped the
words: “It’s just. That I ruin. Everything.” And started to cry all over again, this time uncontrollably.

Helen held the girl in her arms until her sobs abated some. And then Amelia told her about the argument with Elliot, and mentioned
a boy named Wes, and told her about the trip to Victor’s grandmother’s, and Lydia hating her, and how no one would ever speak
to her again. She began to babble about what a terrible person she was. Ferdinand licked Amelia’s tears. Helen held her and
asked, “Does your father know where you are?”

Amelia nodded into her.

“Good.” Helen had never held a child like this before, so close, so needed. Even though Amelia no longer had the body of a
child, she was holing into Helen like a three-year-old into her mother. Helen could smell the girl’s scalp. She realized that
neither of them had ever had this, the burrowing in that most women had with children of their own. She was reticent to move
at all, because it was a nice, foreign sensation, to be necessary, to soothe, to comfort.

Then Amelia sat up straight. It jolted Helen’s body back into itself—her back was aching, her foot was asleep—and she expected
Amelia to say something further about why everyone hated her, to dissolve all over again. But her voice was steady when she
said, “You knew my mom.”

“Yes,” said Helen, “I knew her.” So it was time for this.

“I need to know. I know what you’re going to say, that it’s my dad’s job, but he never tells me anything. He won’t talk about
her. All I know is that her name was Astrid and that she died in an accident when I was a newborn. That’s it. I’m sixteen,
and that’s the only thing I know about my mom.” Tears welled up in Amelia’s
eyes, but they didn’t spill over. She’d gained control. “Please. Please help me.”

Helen withdrew her arm from around Amelia and folded her hands in her lap.

Amelia was gaining courage now. “My dad gets so sad whenever I mention that she existed. I’ve tried to ask him, but he doesn’t
even have any pictures of her. He left them behind when he moved us west. So then I think he moved us west because he wanted
to get away from the sad memories he had in the East. Then I think they’re
my
memories, and he didn’t have the right to take them from me. He didn’t have the right to leave those pictures behind.” Helen
could feel Amelia’s eyes searching her face, begging. “I’ve never met anyone else who knew her.
Please,
Helen. I’ll never mention it again. I promise.”

A part of Helen had known, on the first day she decided to come west, that this very conversation with Amelia was inevitable.
She knew what kind of father Elliot was (the kind of man who “protects” his child from difficult things), and she knew what
kind of woman she was (someone who believes that truth is an unrivaled salve). Until this moment, she hadn’t given this implicit
agreement any thought. It had been wordless, the pact, and it was only now, in hearing Amelia’s “please,” that the necessity
of telling truths was revealed. As though “please” were a magical word used to unlock a vault of terrible memories. Helen
hadn’t known, until this moment, that she had made a pact in the first place. But now she saw it. There it was. She was doing
something necessary on behalf of the Astrid she had known and hated and envied and been broken by. For the Astrid who had
borne a beautiful baby Helen could not bear. It did not matter anymore whether Helen had wanted a child in the first place.
It did not matter that for so many years, Helen had blamed Astrid as the person who had taken her one chance for a child.
What mattered, for the first time, was the child. This child. The one Astrid had borne, the one Helen sat beside right now.
The child deserved some answers.

Helen already knew she would spare the girl the hardest truth of all. She would be kind, then leave the rest to Elliot. She
knew this was perhaps not the best way. Perhaps not the way she would have handled it in the past. But she could not bear
to see what it would do to tell the girl what her mother was. She needed to nudge the girl along, so Amelia could find out
for herself what had truly happened.

Amelia was giving up. Helen could feel it in her, the despair building, for every second Helen kept quiet. But Helen thought
long and hard about what she was going to say before she said it.

“Your mother and I were not friends. I wish I could say that we were, because that might make things easier for you. We were
in love with the same man. Practically everyone I knew was in love with your dad. I know it’s impossible for you to imagine
anyone ever feeling that way about him, but your father and I were in love in our day. We met at Columbia. We stood up against
the war. Your father, well, you know this, but imagine the charisma he has now, doubled, tripled, quadrupled. He motivated
people. He got people to
do
things. He got me to fall in love with him.

“After college, we moved into a communal apartment on 102nd Street and Broadway. That’s on the Upper West Side, the same neighborhood
you were born in. In those days, people got married very young—listen to me, I’m talking like an old woman. But I suppose
that’s the truth. Elliot married me because it meant he got his inheritance—and no, now, I know more about this than you do.
I know that it wasn’t
only
because of that. At the time, I didn’t know it was about that at all. I thought love was enough. But I got older and wiser,
and I saw that I was the kind of girl your grandfather wanted your father to marry. I may not have had the kind of breeding
Elliot’s mother had envisioned for her son’s bride, but your grandfather noticed immediately how loyal I was. A good girl.
Your grandmother died before I met your dad. But your grandfather was wonderful to me. I wish he hadn’t died before you were
born. He always made me feel welcome in the Barrow family,
even though I was the daughter of a single, Jewish, working-class woman from New York, and they were these very upper-crust
Boston Wasps. We loved the Mets. They loved the Metropolitan Opera.

“In any case, when I married your father, I guess I didn’t think about what it meant. I don’t think either of us did, truly.
What I thought about was being wanted. I hope you don’t mind me speaking to you like an adult, but I think you need to hear
this, because someday someone will want you like that, and you will have to know if you are strong enough to bear it. I thought
I was. I thought I could be who Elliot wanted me to be—someone who would help him in his vision for changing things. But I
was already interested in theater by then, and I began to see that I was not a leader in the causes Elliot fought for.
He
was the one who wanted to stand outside prisons and hold candlelight vigils.
He
was the one who wanted to picket outside nonunion supermarkets. But I wanted to grow up. I wanted a career.

“Anyway.” This was the hard part. “Astrid. She moved into the commune about six months before I left Elliot. She was a nice
girl, very sweet. Very beautiful. Long hair like a curtain. Tall, like you. Striking blue eyes, like yours. I wish I could
tell you more about where she came from or what she was really like. But in those later days, I felt so far from what the
commune believed in that I didn’t spend much time with those people at all. I really only used the commune as a place to sleep,
which was dangerous, because they were the kind of people who could turn against you quickly if you were not living the ‘right
way.’ The irony is, Elliot fought hard to keep me from getting kicked out. Even though he was the one who wanted me to leave.

“I came home one afternoon and found Elliot and Astrid making love in my bed. They were happy. Seeing them there together
made me realize I hadn’t been happy for a long time. They’d obviously fallen in love. So I left your father. I left the commune.
And that was the last time I saw your mother.

“I can tell you this. Your father and your mother moved out of that commune the instant they knew they were having you. They
set up a home together because they loved each other and they loved the thought of you. They couldn’t wait for you to come
into their lives. Trust me. I know how badly your father wanted a child. Even though I didn’t know Astrid well, I saw how
happy she was with Elliot. He made her happy. Your mother loved you, Amelia, I know she did.”

Helen could see Amelia sorting through all this new information. “Why are you so nice to me, then? Why would you come help
my dad if he was so terrible to you?”

Such a simple set of questions. Helen wouldn’t have been able to answer them even a month before. Now she knew. “I’m older.
I can see it as a story that happened to someone long ago. And I feel lucky. In those days, I believed I would never love
again. I believed I would never survive. I believed I would never have anything to give another person. But I kept living,
and pretty soon I realized that life gets good sometimes and it gets bad sometimes. I realized it wasn’t the only story I
was going to get to tell.”

“And my mother? What happened to her? I mean, I know she died in an accident, but I want to know everything.”

This was to be managed very carefully. “That’s something you need to ask your father.”

“But he won’t tell me. He’ll never tell me. I know he won’t.”

“Ask him.”

“I can’t.”

Helen took the girl’s hand and clasped it tightly. “You take all the time you need. Ask him about her when you know you’re
ready. And when you’re ready, I promise you. I promise you he’ll tell you everything.”

We each make promises we cannot keep.

Once upon a time, the skinny woman was no longer a skinny woman. Yes, she was still slender, but her bones no longer made
her sad. She did not look at herself in the mirror and think: “A bag of bones.” She had come to accept her body, though only
a short time had passed since she’d found the husband rolling in bed with the different woman who was like a bird. Already
the discovery seemed decades old. At first leaving the husband had been like trying to breathe in a place without air. Soon
enough, the no-longer-just-skinny-woman realized the terrible truth: not breathing was the same as dying. Dying seemed like
an opportunity for a while. But when she saw how much the dog needed her, she began to see dying as an inconvenience. As she
fed and walked and threw sticks for the dog, she saw that, at least in the dog’s eyes, her death would be a tragedy. So the
woman decided to keep her breathing up. The air was sticky and sweet and thick. It was a city’s summer air, which is lumpy
and full of the smells of others. She hesitated to let it in her lungs. But she watched the dog and tried to be like him.
She taught herself to inhale and process and exhale the sticky maple syrup that had replaced the air in what was now her life.

Let us begin to call her the satin woman. Once she started breathing in the maple syrup, and life opened with a sweet daily
measure of hope and opportunity, the skinny woman began to notice that her skin was softer than it had ever been before. From
head to toe, she began to have an extraordinary luster. She exuded confidence, and even she began to notice the way people—men,
especially—looked at her. They looked at her the way she had noticed people looking at the husband in days gone by. Every
day
she became the satin woman more and more. Every day the world slipped off her like rain off the eaves of a well-designed roof.

She was not going to stay a satin woman. Up until this point and, in fact, for the rest of her life, she had been and always
would be in a state of fluctuation between the skinny woman and the satin woman. These states of being were two extremes of
the pendulum’s swing. Sometimes the pendulum swung over a matter of days. Sometimes it took decades. But if it went one way,
it would always go back. The satin woman knew nothing about this. She thought, now being made out of satin, that she would
never have to be skinny again. She did not see that she was given both options so that one day, when she was older and wiser,
she could choose to hover in the sweet spot between them both. She did not see that both states of being were equally good,
that though the skinny woman was scared and unhappy, she was also clearheaded and brave, and that though the satin woman was
witty and elegant, she was also vain and shortsighted. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us not be distracted from
the story at hand.

The satin woman had started meeting with a group of actors every week, reading plays by dead men who wrote about the human
condition. The satin woman loved the moments when ancient words would soar from her. She loved feeling that these words made
her bigger than her own small self. She loved inhabiting the hearts and minds of others. And she loved being part of a group
of people who were working toward making something, not taking something down. She remembered how the clan she had belonged
to with the husband had only pretended it was a clan. Instead of making a good feeling that was bigger than itself, all the
clan seemed to make was a set of angry whirlpools through which each person daily descended. It was as if the clan started
the day braided together like a thick, useful rope and ended it a frayed set of weak strings. To be part of the clan, you
had to believe that the world was in a state of deadly hopelessness. You had to believe that the clan (and only the clan)
had the power to change this world. You had to believe change came through anger. That meant the satin woman, when she was
still the skinny woman and living with the clan, had felt terrible and alone at the end of every day. While remembering
how this felt, the satin woman looked around at the group of actors she was now a part of, and she smiled. She started every
day as a single strand. She ended every day braided into something thicker. She ended woven into a tapestry. What can I say?
It was the early 1980s. She listened to a lot of Carole King.