She Matters (19 page)

When Daniel was three, and I was thirty-four, I went to visit her in El Paso, where she'd moved for a job at a magazine and met her husband. I'd missed out on the particulars of the courtship, which fell during one of our inconsequential periods of less contact, our respective focus more intense on our own necessities. He was nice. Apart from their wedding a few years earlier, before I'd had a baby, Rachel and I hadn't spent a full day together since college, so I suffered the travel with my toddler and didn't mind the effort. I wanted to see her in this new place. I hoped she was at home.

Rachel's mother had died some months before, news that ran me through with sadness, but far away with a baby and still weakened by a first bad year of postpartum depression, I couldn't get to the funeral. As I deplaned in El Paso, as I forced apart the stroller's clasp on the jetway and settled my son, tucked his stuffed sheep under his unconscious hand, I wanted to make up for that, give Rachel belated tenderness. And I felt grateful that I'd be with a true friend who was excited about my son's central, redefining role in my life. Rachel always asked me to tell everything about him. She understood that he
was
me, I was him. Motherhood was like new oxygen now, a revolution. Friends were being sorted out, who would endure and who would recede, but with Rachel, who had lasted so long, there was no question. She was already part of me.

No: what I really needed to know, to rewrite, was my previous definition of the word
mother.
My own mother would not serve, and I had backed away from her. Rachel, who'd seen the mess I'd come from, proudly called me a good mother. She would see in my son my concerted efforts, the placated anxieties. She would help me be proud of myself.

In the airport, something was wrong. Rachel took no time for the hug, stepped out of my reach. Where was our click, our
way
?
Her gaze jumping, she repeated questions about baggage and travel. She'd purchased a car seat for Daniel, a gesture I appreciated—I tried to say so—but it had to stay wrapped in the plastic, she explained, so she could return it after we'd gone. She was preoccupied, I didn't know why, as I struggled to reconfigure my mood, my needs and old happiness.

“You okay?” I said in the car.

“No juice in the car, okay, Daniel, no getting it dirty? No juice?”

Daniel said, “Juice? Juice?” He said it to himself the rest of the way.

Rachel worried, Was he thirsty, could he wait, would we have to stop? He's fine, I said, it's fine. She didn't notice me respond. She switched worries: he might chew on the plastic, swallow it. The hospital, she said, was not too far from the house. Nonsense concerns jostled in my head—What did she mean?
How
far was the doctor? Her worry rocked us back and forth. I stopped trying to protest. Just let her be what she needs to be, I thought, a discipline I was trying to practice with everyone, and with myself. At the house, it'll be better. She drove a maze of short back streets, paced by stop signs, our journey abrupt and slow at the same time. We could not sink into our usual pleasures. We couldn't get anywhere.

We stayed inside the house, the windows sealed. A constant hum announced the air purifiers. She worried about our room, that Daniel would suffocate or choke, that the Texas heat would desiccate him. “He won't choke,” I said, a firm rebuke—
Are you listening to me?
But her conversation was with herself. Everything here, she said, was susceptible to fading and inevitable deterioration. “I can't even sit on the patio.” Her husband spent a lot of time out there. I missed the Rachel who danced, who recited our
movie dialogue, and I wanted to kid her out of these strangling anxieties, but it was dawning on me, with a dense sadness, that this was a task beyond any friend's purview.

After I'd settled Daniel the first night, we sat on the couch, our backs against the armrests. Her husband was out and the house was still, except for the tremor of the purifiers, which ran under our feet. We ate good pineapple sorbet she had taught herself to make, and I was impressed. I asked about her mother's funeral. She sped through details, a numb account of guests, aggravating missteps of the rabbi. “I miss her,” I said. No maternal presence ever forgotten. I hadn't seen my mother in more than a year, since my son was eighteen months old.

The last time my mother had visited Missoula, toppling with overexpensive presents for the baby, her manias dictated and tangled by medications, she seemed to forget me before the ride to the hotel from the airport had ended, single-minded in her need to score painkillers. I was trying to list plans, but she asked if I knew a doctor, any doctor, who could see her right away. She asked again, then again, musing about medical expertise in Montana.
Addicts are like this,
I thought as I drove. Stupid you, I said to myself, always ready for her to be some other way, the vain wait. Each visit, every time. Children of addicts are like
this,
accounting for the tiniest disturbance and new twitch, but hopeful. Amassing hurts, but hopeful, hopeful. My mother didn't care to leave her hotel. Her back hurt. She called me twice a day to her room, where she took my baby, set him on her bed, pushed her face into his so that he had to turn his head to escape her ravenous gaze. Nine prescription bottles were bunched on the bathroom counter, various pharmacies. I hated that each time I went to pee, I counted them.

Then I knew my paradox: I could keep hoping and get nowhere,
because we'd always be like this; or I could change myself and end us. So, a few days in, I rallied terrified courage and told my mother to go. I didn't want her anymore, like this, conniving and addicted and rioting, would have to face the broken heart instead; she switched her ticket and left, unimpressed by my dilemma. But I understood that I'd reached some new kind of finish, and whatever grief awaited me at the deprivation of a mother, I'd handle it. I'd have to; I was done.

Rachel that first night ignored my fondness for her mother. She let me praise and reminisce, and then tears streamed down her face, her hands up to cover herself.

“I'm so sorry,” I said, thinking we shared.

“No,” she said, “you don't know.” She made an angry disclosure I'd never heard in the years of our friendship. What she said was private, and so quick and bare I was hardly sure of it. Busy soaking up her mother's mothering, I'd missed my friend's pain and trouble. Rachel had disguised them, as she'd returned our happy focus again and again to me. I set down the dessert and reached my hand for hers, but she ducked, picked up the bowls and disappeared to the kitchen.

Rachel took us out each day, thoughtful excursions she planned for Daniel—the zoo, the Border Patrol Museum with the old cars and uniforms, and she snapped pictures of him, found his delicious purity with her lens, what I always wanted others to see. But each trip stuttered at her overwrought interaction with an ATM or a public bathroom, her sheer worry. On our last full day I wanted to walk Daniel around the neighborhood, see the pink desert willow blossoms, but Rachel tried to talk me out of it. The pollen count. The aridity that aged you on the spot, dehydration inevitable. The strangers out there, you just never know. I felt confused, as she darted among excuses. I tried to identify the problem to
solve. Finally I realized that she didn't want the door opened and unmanaged air to balloon into her living room. I began to want to hurt her with my energies, use whatever was at my disposal to make her notice me. It was an ugly thing to confront in myself, but I was worn out with trying to respect the manufactured plights, accommodate them. The college desire to shake her up a bit, bring her a little reckless fun, had shifted into a mean mission, a nasty impulse. I grabbed Daniel and walked out, leaving the door open. Years before, Rachel had met my transgressions and youthful stupidities with affection, ardent curiosity, even delight; now I could not interpret her anxieties. I balked at such outright panic displayed, and, unable to help her, I judged.

Her formless anxiety was prefacing my thoughts with fear. I had to get outside, breathe that suspect air deeply, encounter other people. She would hover at the bathroom door as I stayed with Daniel, who was potty training. He couldn't shit for four days, until we were on the airplane. As I wiped his bottom in the cramped lavatory he said, “Why doesn't Rachel like poop in her house?”

• • •

After that, the friendship stalled. The conversation the night she cried seemed not to have happened. I didn't know how to move in this mire, be heard, nor how I could ask for more details or offer help. We spoke less and less often. Her wounds were unadmitted, impenetrable, and she was mute on matters of grief and loss and anger. Articulating mine had become my life and work. I needed to forget the visit so that I wouldn't feel how close she was to some weird edge from which I couldn't rescue her.

Rachel got pregnant. I wondered how she'd withstand the bodily mutiny and uncertainty. She didn't talk about the pregnancy,
but right before labor she called, and she was scared. Real and scared, in a real voice. I'd never heard her like this, no jokey dismissals or vague, unmerited fear, and my hopes lifted. She wasn't barricaded. Close your eyes, I said, imagine a peaceful place, where you are relaxed, and we thought of the Cape, described its beauties, the stretching ocean. “And that pink bedroom,” she said. But she knew things would go wrong.

She called in the morning. “I delivered,” she said. She didn't mention a baby. She insisted she had nursing problems, first this one, then this other. I was sympathetic, but for several peculiar minutes I learned nothing of the baby, growing scared to ask, anxiety planted. The next day, another flat conversation, little mention of the new daughter. I debated a call to the nurses' station and finally made it. “I know you can't talk about your patients,” I said, “but I wanted you to know one of them's in trouble.” The nurse said nothing. “She's, I think she's at risk. I'm concerned about her ability to bond with the baby. Postpartum depression.” I knew that darkness, remembered not asking for rescue.

“We'll see,” the nurse said, unimpressed. “Thanks for calling.”

I saw, with the monstrous recognition of treachery, that I'd pushed beyond welcome or right. What an infraction, what a breach. Rachel was closed to my help, away in unnamable traumas that, I had determined, were rapidly racing to the surface. I believed I wanted to help, my clumsy method undermining my good intentions. I wanted for Rachel what had not been done for me, when I'd suffered my first maternal months of gagged despair. I loved her, my longest-lasting friend, wished her to be happy, peaceful, but more important than our friendship, there was now a little girl, poised for a mother's unreliable mess to engulf her. Susanna's anxiety versus Rachel's. I felt, urgently, that mine had to win. That little girl, that little girl.

“Something's
wrong
with her,” Rachel kept saying to me, or musing out loud. I ended every call more aggravated, less concerned. Rachel carried the girl back to the doctor many times, back to the ER, to be told that nothing was wrong. “See? She's fine,” I said, tight and desperate for her to calm down. “Should you call La Leche League maybe?” Then, three weeks later, emergency bloomed in full force, and the baby had open-heart surgery. Rachel and her husband spent their nights in the NICU, collapsed but alert, waiting. Rachel's anxieties rallied into this one certainty. One couldn't argue with her anymore.

• • •

When her baby was two, recovered and thriving, Rachel brought her for a visit to Missoula. I'd bought new towels, which I washed with new sheets in unscented detergent. I wanted to make Rachel comfortable, to let her rest in my welcome, even though I knew she'd protest comfort, find a way out of it. It was as if she had grown allergic to ease.

“Oh, Tillie can't eat that,” Rachel said within the first minutes, staring into the freezer, which I'd stocked with blueberries and waffles. Blueberries, she pointed out, were corrupted by pesticides—their large surface area. The waffles had traces of egg, and Tillie only ate low-fat yogurt, this one brand, she'd have to go to the store later, where was it? She set her daughter on her lap at the table and clamped an arm around her waist. She pushed away the plate of red grapes, explained avocado gave the baby hives, asked had the lentils been washed first? “Spit it out,” she told the girl, who'd got hold of a piece of fusilli in pesto and stuck it in her mouth. The food appeared at the tip of Tillie's tongue, and was swiftly dispatched by Rachel with a piece of paper towel. She was very sober as she asked where the garbage was.

The worries and instructions were constant, too much. I didn't understand the multiple serpentine explanations, or believe them, felt hostage to worry. My friend was scaring me. At night, Christopher and I wondered if we should call her husband, check this with him, her tightness and alarm. We'd noticed that the child couldn't be bothered with food, that she turned her head repeatedly to her mother's breast, waiting for Rachel to unbutton. Rachel would sigh and scoop her up and disappear for an hour, or two hours. Once, I came into the guest room and saw her fretting over her breasts and the baby, and it was the tensest scene of nursing I had ever witnessed. Tillie didn't seem to be there.

But you don't call, when it's your oldest friend, her family. Any minute, you keep thinking, things will right themselves.

• • •

It was the last of the three days. We packed up the car to go to the airport, Rachel's ladylike bags trim with hidden zippers, Tillie coaxed into the car seat. I was at the wheel.

Rachel turned in her seat to face me.

“Ready?” I was tense.

In that rare and real voice Rachel said, “Do you think I'm a bad mother?”

After days of thoughts that felt so treacherous, I was aching. I was blind and beyond reason. If I could get through to her, if I could make her see—