Songs Without Words (24 page)

part three

27

I
t was so foggy on the freeway that Liz stayed in the slow lane, heart hammering, wondering if it had been a mistake to go out. She couldn’t see anything but the road just ahead, and she flinched whenever a pair of headlights loomed up behind her. She began watching for exits, for a way down out of the hills, down to the streets of Hillsborough or Millbrae, where she would be able to see houses and find a safe way home. She would not take such an exit, but she watched anyway.

It was the first week of January, and she was on her way to have dinner with Sarabeth. They had talked a few times over the holidays, and for quite a while once Liz was back from Tahoe, but they hadn’t seen each other since…
since.
Liz was eager to get things back to normal.

The fog lifted as she approached Colma, and she sped up, feeling for a moment that she could leave her fear behind, though of course the feeling of it stayed with her, beating through her bloodstream. Again, the thought that she should have stayed home. How did agoraphobia start? She had begun thinking differently—or maybe just more—about mental problems. What defined paranoia? Or obsessive-compulsive disorder? She could not go to bed until the kitchen was spotless.

In the city, she parked in her usual garage and walked the three long blocks to the Thai place. She passed people slouched in doorways holding signs that asked for money. There were times when the truths of the world—its reports on the multitude of ways there were to suffer—pressed in so hard that she felt she couldn’t bear it. What did it mean that she did bear it? What was the wall inside her made of that it kept such truths away?

At the restaurant she was seated and ordered wine. She hoped it would be OK, seeing Sarabeth. Their phone conversations had had a strained feeling. Would seeing her feel strained, too? The part of Liz that hated the fog, that hated the way she feared the fog, hated this, too.

The door opened and Sarabeth rushed in. Evidently it had begun to rain; Liz watched as she struggled to close an umbrella, head bent to the task, though Liz also had the impression that she was hiding.

At last she looked up. Her face was tiny and white, her hair curling wildly around it. As she searched for Liz, she bit her lip.

Liz raised her hand, and Sarabeth saw her.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, rushing over. “I couldn’t park.”

“You’re not late.” Liz stood, and they both hesitated for a moment before they hugged. Sarabeth felt thin, but it was hard to be sure—she pulled away quickly.

She shrugged off her coat and then, avoiding Liz’s eyes, looked over at the hostess stand. “Duh,” she said, and she carried the coat away.

She
was
thin, and when she came back, Liz saw that there were dark crescents under her eyes.

“Sit,” Liz said.

Sarabeth pulled out her chair and sat. She said, “So how’s it been so far? School, I mean.”

Today had been Lauren’s third day back, and as on the first two she had moved slowly and reluctantly through the familiar morning rituals of getting ready. On the other hand, each afternoon she’d seemed easier than the previous, and tonight, as Liz was getting ready to leave, she even complained a little about her homework. Liz took it as a good sign that she would mention school at all.

“You know, I’m not sure,” Liz said. “I can’t really tell. And I can’t imagine ever trusting my judgment again anyway, so—” She shrugged and reached for her wineglass.

“You will,” Sarabeth said.

“What?”

“Trust your judgment again.”

“No, I won’t!” Liz had spoken more emphatically than she’d intended, but this was the truth: she would never have full confidence in herself again.

Sarabeth looked alarmed, and Liz knew she should say something, but what? This was exactly how she’d felt on the phone. She had a script in front of her, but she couldn’t quite read it. Couldn’t speak it.

The waitress approached, and for a while there was business to occupy them: Sarabeth’s wine order and then the question of whether or not to order dinner now, too. Liz hoped they would, then swallowed the wish when Sarabeth told the waitress they needed more time.

“How are you?” Sarabeth said when the woman was gone.

“How are
you
?”

Sarabeth’s eyes filled, and Liz felt bad; she’d sounded testy, turning the question around without answering it. Why couldn’t she be a nice, reasonable person? She leaned forward and said, “Really, how
are
you? You look thin, have you been eating?”

“I’m fine,” Sarabeth said. “Tell me more about Lauren. Was she OK about therapy Monday?”

At Tahoe, Lauren had said she didn’t want to go back to Dr. Lewis, but on Monday morning she’d just nodded complacently when Liz reminded her she had an appointment after school.

“She was fine with it. It was kind of strange, really, given how adamant she was over Christmas.”

“Maybe she didn’t mean it.”

“Like it was a pro forma thing?”

“Or a test.”

Liz took a sip of wine and thought of Tahoe, how flat Lauren had seemed. On the phone Monday morning, returning Liz’s call, Dr. Lewis had suggested the flatness might have been Lauren’s strategy for coping with the time till school started again—anesthetizing herself because she was anxious. Which had made Liz feel it might have been a mistake to go to Tahoe in the first place. She remembered the first day up there, how she’d chosen not to ski and then spent the entire time worrying, puttering around the kitchen with her mother and Kelly when what she really wanted was to get to the slopes herself, hitchhike if she had to, to see how Lauren was. She’d skied the entire rest of the time, freezing, her legs killing her, but with Lauren never far away.

She looked at Sarabeth again. “
Are
you eating? I haven’t seen you this thin in a while.”

“I am now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Here she is,” Sarabeth said, and she looked up as the waitress arrived at their table.

By habit, Liz opened her menu. Appetizers, Soups, Curries, Noodles, Rice: she imagined ordering something different this time, pad thai, for example, or
green
curry beef. She looked up and saw that Sarabeth was waiting.

“The usual?” Sarabeth said, and after a moment Liz nodded.

When the waitress left, she fingered the base of her wineglass. What was happening at home right now? She reached into her purse and looked at the face of her phone, worried she might have missed a call. But it just said
CINGULAR
, as usual.

“What did you mean now you’re eating?” she said to Sarabeth. “When weren’t you?”

Sarabeth colored. “In December for a while.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Sarabeth.”

“Really, nothing.”

“Sarabeth.”

“It was no one thing,” Sarabeth said. “And anyway, I don’t want to—” She hesitated, and Liz reached across the table and touched her fingertips.

“Whatever it was.”

Sarabeth sighed and began telling a story about going to a play in Billy’s neighborhood, and something about the neighbor children, and a missed appointment with Jim, and then some reckless-sounding intrigue with Mark Murphy. As she spoke she seemed to relax, her face losing its drawn look, her voice lowering a little. Liz tried hard to stay focused. Whatever was happening at home right now, however Lauren was: Liz was here.

“He looked so wiped out,” Sarabeth said, referring to Mark. “
The
darkest circles under his eyes.”

“Mmm,” Liz said. With a new baby—she didn’t doubt it.

Sarabeth leaned forward suddenly. “Do you think it’s weird that I didn’t have sex with him?
Why
didn’t I?”

“Because you didn’t want to make the same mistake twice?” Liz said, but she regretted it right away. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. It sounds to me as if you were trying to protect yourself.”

“He brought a condom over,” Sarabeth said. “The second time. It was kind of sad—he showed it to me like he wanted to admit what he’d been thinking.”

“That’s not the kind of protection I meant,” Liz said, and then she sat there like a stone while Sarabeth’s eyes widened in surprise. There was a tingling on the rims of Liz’s ears, and her lips felt strange.

Sarabeth looked into her eyes, then quickly looked away again. She wore several slim silver chains around her neck, and she used her forefinger to separate them. Liz took a slow breath in, then released it even more slowly.

“Tell me about Brody,” Sarabeth said. “And Joe. How are they?”

What could Liz say? That they were fine and also entirely ruined? Brody’s shoulder was killing him, and she was sure it was stress, but when she asked how he was doing he brushed her off. “Getting through,” she managed. “You know.”

Sarabeth clasped her hands in front of her chest and leaned forward. “Are you mad at me?”

“Don’t be silly.”

Sarabeth’s eyes filled again, and she closed them and pressed her fingertips against them for a moment.

“Maybe
you’re
mad at
me,
” Liz said.

“What reason could I possibly have to be mad at you?”

“I have a reason?”

“I
failed
you,” Sarabeth said, and Liz felt a wave of fury.

“What happened happened. What do you want me to say?”

“See, you are mad.”

“Oh, Sarabeth.”

Sarabeth put her face in her hands, and Liz was filled with remorse. What was her problem? She reached across the table and hooked a finger around Sarabeth’s pinky, and now Sarabeth began to weep.

“What’s going on?” Liz said.

Sarabeth shook her head.

“What? Sweetie.”

“It’s just”—Sarabeth raised her head and gave Liz a desperate look—“I had a really hard time.”

“When? Tell me.”

“Starting that day. That weekend.”

Liz tried to remember what Sarabeth had said earlier, about the timing of going to the play in Billy’s neighborhood. Hadn’t there been something about the Sunday when Brody called her with the news about Lauren? A feeling of the story came to Liz, of how the time line of the story had in some sense been the story. But…was this actually happening? Was Sarabeth stationing her own misery in the field of what had happened to Liz’s family? Was she saying she’d sat on the knowledge of Lauren’s trouble, done nothing, because she was upset about having gone to Billy’s neighborhood?

She was. She was even saying something about how she’d been alone with her pain because Liz had been busy. That
Liz
had failed
her.

“I can’t believe you,” Liz whispered.

Sarabeth’s eyes widened. “What?”

“You’ve been wanting to tell me this since then, haven’t you? You’ve been waiting.”

“I—”

“You probably wanted
me
to come see
you
!”

“I never asked you to!”

“You did,” Liz exclaimed. “You wanted me to come see you. And you know what? You didn’t have to ask. You knew I’d find out. Asking or not asking, you always want something!”

Sarabeth stared at her and Liz stared back. She felt that this was their truth, hers and Sarabeth’s—that what she’d just said was the only true thing she could say about the two of them, and Sarabeth knew it. She looked at Sarabeth’s crumpled face, and she said: “I’m not your mother.”

28

U
p in Tilden Park, the nighttime sky was hammocked with low fog. It was gray and gray and purple, and it clung to the treetops like spiderwebs or wasps’ nests stuck to old wood. Sarabeth had not wanted to go home, and so she had driven up into the woods, to this place where a woman shouldn’t be alone after dark.

The trails were squishy with mud, and the air under the trees was as damp as it would have been if it were raining. She walked until she was out of breath, and then she sat on a bench. All around her were the smells of the wet earth, the leaves. The bench was wet, and her skirt grew damp, followed soon after by her ass. She turned sideways and lay back, and she exhaled and watched the cloud of her breath float away. Away, away: she was in some sense gone herself, far from the agony of what Liz had said. How this could be she didn’t know. How she had avoided crying, had left the restaurant and found her car, she didn’t know. On the bridge she had imagined herself weeping on Nina’s doorstep, collapsing into Jim’s arms, but she had steered away from those possibilities. Here and now, they all seemed irrevocably distant, the people she knew: as far away as Earth was from the moon. The planets, the heavens…how sad it was that she had never thought of her mother as an angel watching over her, a guardian of her experience.

But how ridiculous: Lorelei could never have done that, never have been that. And Sarabeth didn’t believe in stuff like that, anyway. Mystical phenomena, messages embedded in the everyday. “It was meant to happen.” The truth was that nothing was meant to happen. Things just did.

She lay on the bench and stared up at the fog. The quiet itself seemed like a sound. She remembered being in Tilden Park one night during college—high on mushrooms, standing naked under a tree. She was with her boyfriend Timothy. Being undressed together felt different here: they were at once shier and emboldened, and they touched each other and separated to look and touched again. She learned that a hand on her breast was one thing in a bedroom, something else entirely when she and her lover were on their feet outside, moving slowly, stopping to watch. They were Adam and Eve. The expulsion from the Garden, the Fall—these took the form throughout the relationship of doubting feelings. She was uncertain, and that was the bed she made, the bed she lay in with him. Is this it? she kept thinking—after sex, during breakfast, in the car on the way to visit his brother at Davis. Then, one day, she was alone at the library, bored with a science textbook, and she realized this
was
it—all there was and all there was going to be. No great change was going to come over him; he was not going to become someone else. She broke up with him.

But the problem had been in her. She understood that now. It had been in the fact that she had wanted more, she had wanted him to make her life marvelous. She saw Liz’s face across the table at the restaurant, heard Liz’s voice saying
You always want something,
and she sat up quickly. Pinpoints of light swarmed before her eyes. Her shoulders began to shake, and in a moment she was sobbing. It was horrible, what she was, horrible: someone who always wanted something. Liz was right—she
had
wished Liz would come to her during that week in November. She had wished it without really even knowing she was wishing it. She knew it from how ashamed she felt now. She remembered lying on her couch one Sunday, looking at her bird picture and talking to Liz—it was
come to me
she had wanted, and why? So Liz could see her, so Liz could see how terrible she felt. It sickened her to think of it now. She had used Liz, hadn’t she? She had used Liz for years, as a cauldron, a repository for everything that hurt, and it had been too much, she had been too much.
I’m not your mother.

Was a mother a cauldron? What had she poured into Lorelei that had made her so ill?

But this thinking was dangerous, as she knew all too well: the bottomless bog of whose fault it was. Of causality. “The guilt, the guilt,” she and her suicide sister used to say—like “the horror, the horror.” “Did I drive her to it?” “I may not have driven him to it, but I didn’t stop him—I wasn’t enough to stop him.” All of this was true and best forgotten.

She didn’t know where she’d left her car, but she stood and began to walk. Her feet and legs were wet, her ass was wet, and she was cold, cold. She stumbled on rocks and brushed against bushes, but on she walked. Uphill, so that soon her breath came harder. She began to sweat lightly, a film at her hairline and between her breasts. There was the real and the metaphorical: the fact of her muscles and bones, their actualness, their ability to transport her; and this insistent new idea that she, her body, was a vessel for something that could pour out and fill other people, overwhelm them, poison them. That she was toxic.

She touched the trunk of a tree, felt its rough, creviced bark. She leaned against it and then slowly lowered herself to the ground. She had never felt worse.