The Art of Mending (12 page)

It is a family photo that a stranger must have taken, somewhere around the mid-sixties. We are all outside, at a park. There is a big wicker basket on a picnic table behind us. I remember that basket. It had a wooden top and a lovely dark-green pattern of trim—little x’s—all along the edges. It must have been a cool day; the sky is overcast, and we are all wearing light jackets. Steve and I stand smiling before my father, leaning back into him. Steve has a baseball bat at his feet; I hold a stick that I must have meant to use for roasting marshmallows. My father, smiling broadly, proudly, has one hand on each of our shoulders. Caroline stands before our mother, and it is one of the rare times she is smiling. Our mother stands straight-mouthed behind her, arms crossed tightly across her chest, like a little kid in a store who’s been told,
Don’t touch.

18

STEVE AND I WENT FOR DINNER TO A FAST-FOOD BURGER
joint at the airport. It was Tessa who’d tried to call him earlier—she’d come down with something, and although she didn’t feel sick enough to go the doctor, she was in need of some caretaking. Steve was only too willing to fly home and tend to her. He finished his hamburger, scrunched the wrapping into a tight ball, fired it at the nearby wastebasket, missed. He laughed and went to pick up his trash and deposit it from closer range. “About my yearbook aspiration to be a basketball star?” He sat back down, looked at his watch. “I should get to the gate pretty soon. God, what a trip this has been! You come home for a simple family visit, and all hell breaks loose. How are you doing with all this?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I’ve got Pete and the kids, and . . . you know, my life at home.” I folded my napkin in half, then in fourths, offered a quick smile. “So.” Not the real answer. The real answer was, I didn’t know how I was doing. I felt numbed by all I’d been told, and I went back and forth about what to believe, sometimes minute to minute.

“How can you suffer abuse like that and not tell someone—a teacher or a minister—a friend? Not that she had many friends. But you could tell
someone.
What about you and me? If we couldn’t see what was happening, why didn’t she just
tell
us?”

“You heard how much help she got from Dad and the doctor. And the three of us weren’t exactly close. Anyway, she told me she actually believed it was her fault, that she caused that behavior in Mom.”

He shook his head. “Even so. I just don’t see how you can keep being around a person who treats you that way and not say something. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know.” I stared at the table next to us, at the three little children sitting with their parents and eating their hamburgers. They were remarkably quiet and well behaved. One of them held a sock monkey, and she offered it a bite of her burger. Seeing this, something suddenly occurred to me.

“Steve? I wonder. Maybe what happens in these situations is the opposite of what we think.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you ever read about those monkeys they used in an experiment to measure love?”

“You can’t measure love.”

“Well, I know; I don’t think so either. But this was
.
.
.
did
you read about them?”

“Not that I recall.”

“I saw it in the newspaper. What happened is that researchers in a primate lab put baby monkeys in with crazy mothers—cloth mother monkeys that had soft bodies so they could cuddle, but they were all booby-trapped. They would unexpectedly do something awful when the babies clung to them. One shook the baby violently, and one blew air out really hard on top of the baby’s head, and one had brass spikes embedded in her chest that would all of a sudden pop out. You know what the babies did when those things happened? Clung tighter, if they possibly could. Or if they were thrust off by the force of what was done to them, they got up and ran right back.”

Steve stared at me. “How can anyone work in a place like that?”

“Steve. The point is, the babies
clung tighter
when they were abused!”

“Caroline didn’t cling tighter. She’s really cold with Mom.”

“
Now
she is. But remember when she used to idolize her? When she used to buy her all those presents and—”

“We’re not monkeys, Laura.”

“Sure we are.”

He stood, pushed in his chair. “I’ve got to go. Want to walk with me to security?”

I walked beside him quietly, and then, just before we reached the line, I told him about a woman I once lived next door to who was sexually abused by her father in ways too horrible ever to repeat. And yet when I went over one day to borrow some coffee from her, there the man was—sitting on the sofa, reading a book to his two-year-old granddaughter. And the woman introduced me to her smiling father like she adored him. “So there you are,” I said.

And Steve said, “Okay, I’ll call you soon.” He hadn’t heard a word I’d said. Too full of things to listen anymore. Or too tired. Or something. And I didn’t blame him.

I went out to the rental car I’d taken over from Steve, put the key in, and then sat there, thinking. I remembered something else about those monkeys. The abused babies were so preoccupied with reaching their mothers, they had no energy for friends, no time for trying to bond with anyone else. They were on a kind of psychological island, stuck with something that would never give them what they needed. The article ended by saying that every mother has the assurance that her baby will love her. But a baby has no assurance at all of being loved in return.

Tomorrow I would buy a cell phone. Times like this, I really did need one. I would call Pete, and when I heard his familiar voice, I would close my eyes and listen only to him.

BACK AT MY MOTHER’S HOUSE,
I wandered around the quiet rooms, looking at the place in a way I hadn’t for a long time. When I lived there, I saw it one way: home. It was a fact as irrefutable as the nose on my face. It was a personalized haven where I could get my needs met, though surely I didn’t think of it that way. Rather, I thought of it as a repository for my things, a place where Velveeta cheese was kept on the refrigerator door and extra bottles of Pepsi in the laundry room. There was a big metal box of Band-Aids in the medicine chest, a never-ending supply of clean towels stacked in the linen closet. There was a desk in my room at which I did my homework, a living room where, in the evenings, my father sat in his chair under deep yellow lamp light with a library book, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his legs crossed in a way I came to find effeminate.

After I left home, I saw my parents’ house another way: a place full of memories that dimmed year by year if not month by month, a place decorated in a way I would never consider, and then a place where I needed to be overly mindful of what my children were doing even after they were no longer young.

Now I stood in my parents’ bedroom, thinking about what their life together was really like. I recalled various things we kids witnessed—the kisses hello and goodbye, the stereotypical sharing of household tasks—and I wondered about what we didn’t see.

I moved over to their bed and sat down on it. What did they talk about before they went to sleep? Did they share corny rituals, as Pete and I do? Did they argue in hushed tones more often than we knew, turn angrily away from each other and pretend to be asleep until they actually were, then awaken in the morning with the psychic hangover that such resentment brings?

I took off my shoes and lay down on the bed, on my father’s side. His nightstand still held the things he had kept there: the brown alarm clock, a “man-sized” box of Kleenex, an ashtray in which he kept not ashes but pennies. I closed my eyes, whispered
Daddy?
Nothing but a silence so profound I could feel it pressing against my ears.

I went to my mother’s dresser and stared at myself in her mirror. This is what she looked into when she got up every morning. And what did she see now? Herself, alone, fifty years older than the time she bought this dresser. What a difficult transition she would have, going from a woman who was openly and exuberantly adored to one who lived in echoing silence. No one would be constantly complimenting, reassuring, and supporting her, as my father had. Or protecting her—perhaps egregiously. He was forever giving everything to her, and she was forever taking it with a kind of entitlement that used to make me furious.
Give something back!
I would think, but she did not, not really. She washed his underwear; she prepared meals; she stacked his mail on the dining room table. And she stayed beau-tiful.

I pulled open one of the top drawers. Bras and panties, folded neatly. In the drawer below that, negligees. This surprised me. I’d never seen her in one. I lifted the top one up, a light blue, with a matching peignoir. It looked brand new. Which accounted, I supposed, for my never having seen it. I was pulling out another drawer when the phone rang. I jumped, slid the drawer back in quickly, and went to the kitchen to answer it.

“What are you doing?” Maggie asked.

“You want the truth?” I sat down, smiling, grateful to hear her voice.

“Of course!”

“I was snooping in my mother’s drawers.”

“Find anything good?”

“Only a negligee. Matching peignoir.”

“Excellent score.”

“I think she just bought it. Isn’t that weird?”

“Nothing’s weird about what people do when someone close to them dies. And anyway, if she’s like
my
mother, it’s not new. It’s just that she never wore it. ‘Too good to wear.’”

“That wouldn’t be my mother’s problem. Speaking of which, what’s happening at my house?”

“Well, your mother made her famous coconut cookies today. Anthony brought me some. He said they’re famous because it’s the only thing she makes that tastes good.”

“That’s pretty much right.”

“And Hannah came home with a posse of girlfriends—I saw them all traipsing in as Anthony was heading out. So life over there is pretty normal, I’d say. How are
you
doing?”

I contemplated telling her everything but decided against it. “I’ll tell you about it when I come home. Another couple of days here ought to do it.”

“Well, I just wanted to check in.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“I wanted to know if you were all right. Are you—really?”

I hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

“Just don’t want to talk about it?”

“I guess not, Maggie. Not yet.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll see you soon. Call me anytime you want. Any time.”

As soon as I hung up, the phone rang again. I picked it up, laughing, said,
“What?”

“Hello?”

Steve. “Oh, hi!” I said. “I thought you were Maggie. Are you home?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“How’s Tessa?”

“She’s got the flu, but it’s the dry variety.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You know. No body fluids.”

“Oh.
That’s
good.”

“Listen, Laura, I want to tell you something. I took a nap on the plane, and when I woke up, maybe even before I woke up, I was thinking about . . . well, I remembered something. And I wanted to tell you to tell Caroline.”

“Me? Why, what is it?”

“Okay, this was . . . I don’t know, I guess I was about five, because I remember Caroline was in first grade, and Mom got a call from the school nurse, and she had to go to school to get Caroline. And she was really mad. I went along, of course, and all the way she was muttering about how she guessed she knew her own child. But we picked up Caroline and she really
was
sick, so pale, and she just lay on the backseat of the car all the way home, didn’t say a word. I remember thinking there was something kind of
off,
but I didn’t know what. Now I think . . . you know what I think it was? I think maybe Caroline told Mom she was sick that morning, and Mom made her go to school anyway. And I think the nurse must have yelled at Mom.”

“But Steve, why don’t you tell Caroline all this?”

“Aren’t you going to see her again tomorrow afternoon?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Just . . . tell her I remembered those things, okay? For what it’s worth. Tell her I don’t think she’s crazy. I don’t want to get into some huge—I just want her to know I don’t
disbelieve
her. Would you tell her?”

“All right.”

“And I’ll . . . you know, I’ll call her sometime soon. I will.”

“Okay. Give my love to Tessa.”

I hung up the phone and went outside, sat on the back steps, and looked up into the night sky. He wouldn’t call her. He was out of it now. I knew him. He’d be at his bar tonight, slapping the backs of his male patrons, charming the females. Talking about the White Sox and Daley. Not for him the mess of all this. I have a personal theory about why most men walk away from difficult emotional situations: It’s because they don’t have babies. It is bred in them to leave the dwelling place to hunt and gather, to be outward-oriented; it is bred in women to lie down and give birth and stay home in order to care for the small world they have delivered into the larger one. Men conk things on the head or are conked themselves; women work out the kinks of the inner life.

I wished the fair weren’t over. I wished I could sit outside and watch fireworks, blossoms of light in the darkness that would carry me up and away from myself. Instead, I thought of Caroline, of the life she had lived in this house: murderous rages and then a pork-chop dinner that night, with a mother whose face gave away nothing, with a father blinded by love, and with two siblings focused on anything but her. After such a dinner, days of relative peace, perhaps weeks. But I wondered if those peaceful times were any easier to bear, since she must always have been waiting for the next thing to happen.

I needed out of there. I looked at my watch—still early. I’d drive over to the huge bookstore a few blocks away, have an iced coffee, and look at some science books. There was a client who wanted a quilt made into linking chains, “kind of like DNA,” she’d said. “You know what DNA looks like?” What it looks like is interesting. What it does is fathomless. But it is only a part of what makes us into who we become.

IN THE COFFEE SHOP OF THE BOOKSTORE,
two women about my age sat at the table next to me. “I think it’s hormones,” one of them said. “I’m just feeling so emotional. On the way here, I saw a blind man trying to cross the street. I wanted to help, but I didn’t want to offend him if he didn’t need me. So I just watched him for a while. He was listening to the traffic so carefully, his head cocked, and—anyway, finally I just took his arm and said, ‘It’s okay to cross now,’ and he smiled at me—this radiant smile—and it made me feel like bawling. I don’t know why.”

“It
is
hormones,” her friend said. “I have days like that, when my skin feels peeled back, when I feel completely exposed. And on those days, I cry over everything: Hallmark commercials, dropping a dish . . . it’s those damn hormones.”