The Art of Mending (7 page)

10

ANTHONY WAS RIGHT: I HAD TO GET A CELL PHONE. I
was standing at a bank of phones in a hall adjacent to a road-stop restaurant. I was squeezed between two callers: one a young dark-haired woman hunched over the receiver who apparently was attempting to have a secretive conversation, the other a wiry trucker sucking hard on a cigarette and yelling that he couldn’t possibly arrive on time, no, he could not possibly arrive on time; where was Phyllis, put Phyllis on the line, she was the only one in the whole place that knew what was really going on, where was goddamn Phyllis?

On the way to Caroline’s, I had suddenly wanted to talk to my friend Maggie, to hear a voice from home saying that everything there is fine, everything there is still the same. I thought if I could hear her voice, I would be better able to visualize my house: the late-afternoon sunshine that makes an ellipse of light against the living room wall, the folded piles of fabric on my sewing table, the wooden spoons standing at attention in my kitchen, the doors to the kids’ rooms open halfway. I’d be able to see the hydrangea blossoms heavy on their bushes in the backyard, the treehouse that Hannah reads in. In addition to comforting myself with such images, I wanted to tell Maggie what had gone on, to ask her what she thought I should do. She was very good in situations like this.

But she wasn’t there.

If there is one thing I can’t stand, it’s being in dire need of talking to a girlfriend and having her husband answer the phone and say she’s not there. Then you have two problems: the person you so much need to connect with is not available,
and
you have to rearrange your emotions to converse with a man. There is not a thing in the world wrong with Maggie’s husband. Doug is affable and generous and a good cook to boot. But he is of the Y-chromosome school of emotional receptivity. So instead of trying to tell him what was going on, I took in a deep breath, turned down the anxiety flame, and said, “Okay! Well, I’ll just try later.” And then, in as friendly and even a tone of voice as I could muster, I said, “So what are you doing home in the middle of the day?”

“It’s Saturday,” he said.

And I said, “Oh. Right.”

When I hung up, I stood for a moment in front of the phone, my arms crossed. It occurred to me to call Caroline and leave her a message letting her know I was on my way, that I’d be there soon after she arrived. But I didn’t.

I got back in the car, started the engine, then turned it off. I rolled down the window, rested my forehead against the steering wheel, and closed my eyes. I’d only wanted to come home and go to the fair, just like always. Instead, I felt like I’d walked into a room where the door had slammed shut behind me, then disappeared altogether.

A FEW BLOCKS AWAY FROM CAROLINE’S HOUSE,
I pulled into a 7-Eleven. I’d decided I did want to call before I showed up; it seemed only fair. But when I tried her number, I got her voice mail. It was possible that she hadn’t arrived yet, but that seemed unlikely. It seemed more appropriate to imagine her lying in bed, fully clothed down to her shoes but under the covers, the way she sometimes was found after a bad day in high school.

I bought a package of Twinkies, always our favorite as kids, and a
National Enquirer. A little joke, ha-ha; here you go, Caroline, now let’s finish talking and get this over with.

I pulled into her driveway and parked behind her car. Caroline lived in a beautiful old Victorian that she’d bought when it was a wreck—raccoons had been living there. But she’d loved the bones of the house and saw its potential immediately. Now it was the nicest place on the block.

I went up to the front door and knocked quickly, then tried opening it. Locked. I called her name once, twice. Nothing. I rang the doorbell; then, shading my eyes, I looked in the uncurtained windows of the living room. And there she was, sitting in a chair with her purse at her feet, staring right back at me.

“Open the door,” I said.

She didn’t move.

Louder, I said, “Caroline! Open the door!”

She got up slowly, came to the door, and opened it. Then she went back to her chair.

I came in, closed the door, and moved to the sofa near her. The mantel clock ticked loudly in the silence. Ticked questioningly, I felt, speaking for Caroline:
What–do–you–want?
I leaned forward, touched her hand lightly. “Hey.”

Nothing.

“I brought you something.” I pulled the Twinkies out of the bag, the
National Enquirer.

She wouldn’t look.

“Want a Twinkie?” I asked, and then realized the stupidity of it. The unkindness, really. “Caroline,” I said gently. “What’s going on?”

“I tried to tell you. You called me a liar.”

“I did not call you a liar.”

She looked over at me, smiled bitterly.

“I didn’t call you a liar! I simply asked you if you were
sure.
Come on, you told me this incredible thing, and I just was having trouble . . . I mean, you seem to think you can just—”

The phone rang and I stopped talking, grateful for the interruption. But Caroline made no move to answer it.

“Aren’t you going to get that?”

“No.”

The phone rang twice more, stopped, then immediately started again.

“Maybe it’s important,” I said.

“I don’t care. I’m not going to answer the phone.”

“Well, then, I will.”

I started to get up and she said, “Don’t! This is not your house. You are not allowed to use the phone.”

“Caroline. Dad’s in the hospital. It could be about him.”

“Dad is fine.” The phone stopped ringing again.

“I’m calling home, goddammit.” I went into the kitchen, dialed my parents’ number. My mother answered immediately. “It’s me,” I said.

“Yes?”

“I’m here at Caroline’s and the phone rang and we didn’t . . . we missed it. It wasn’t you, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t. What’s going on there? Is everything all right?”

I looked toward the living room. “Yes. It’s fine. We’re just talking.”

Caroline came into the kitchen, took the phone from me and hung it up. She turned the ringer off. Then, facing me, she said, “I told you not to answer the phone. I don’t want to talk to anyone. Including you.” She headed upstairs, and I heard a door slam. I stood still for a minute, then angrily followed her up. I opened the door to her bedroom and found her sitting on the edge of the unmade bed, her hands folded in her lap. Her closet door was open; I could see that Bill’s clothes were gone. It was true, then; they were separated.

My anger faded and I sat beside her for some time, saying nothing. Finally, she looked over at me, and I put my arm around her. It occurred to me that this might be the first time I’d ever done this. Her body was stiff, unyielding. Actually, mine was too. Some part of me wanted to stop then, to get up and leave. Drive back to my parents’ house and talk to my children about what they did that day, sit in the backyard that night to watch the crayon-colored fireworks that would be shot off from the fairgrounds. I wanted to shrug off all the things Caroline had said in the way I might an unpleasant encounter in a parking lot. But I saw the wrongness in that.

“I’ll wait,” I said finally. “Okay? I’ll wait right here until you’re ready. And then I’ll listen to you. I promise.” She nodded, and she might as well have been transformed into that sad and mysterious little girl who shared a family with me but who didn’t belong—not then and not now, either.

It is taken on Easter Sunday. My mother, a study in perfumed agitation, had hustled Caroline and me outside the house before church, saying we had to have our picture taken together in our identical outfits because our paternal grandmother had (sigh)
insisted.
Nana had sent us dresses made out of a filmy powder-blue-and-white polka-dotted fabric, as well as beribboned hats and white patent leather purses. We have been made to hold hands, and the expression beneath my smile is pained; I am holding only Caroline’s thumb, rather in the way you might hold a thumb you found on the ground. Caroline smiles her usual sad smile and holds her other hand up to her eye, her fingers fashioning a grip around her own imaginary camera. She, the one being photographed, is the one recording the truer image.

I remember that the moment the photo was taken, I dropped Caroline’s hand and ran toward the car. “Wait for me!” she called, but I did not. I claimed a coveted seat by the window and then wiped the hand that had touched Caroline against the skirt of my new dress, first front, then back, over

and over again. I think I might have used my purse to try to block anyone from seeing, but I can’t be sure that is not just my horrified adult self, editing.

Well, yes. That is what it is. Because now I remember that when Caroline got in the car she was carrying both her own purse and mine, which I’d left behind. She held mine out to me, all hope, saying excitedly, “Here, Laura, you forgot this! You forgot our new purse!” “I don’t want it,” I said, staring straight ahead. “I don’t even like it.” It was the possessive pronoun I objected to. From the corner of my eye, I saw her hesitate, then put the purse gently down on the seat between us. I saw her straighten it just the tiniest bit, then struggle to move herself into a comfortable position without disturbing anything.

11

CAROLINE AND I WERE SITTING OUTSIDE ON HER BACK
porch steps, eating salad and drinking Diet Pepsi. “What I really want is potato chips and Lipton Onion Soup dip,” Caroline said. “It’s the fair. It makes you want only junk food.”

“We can have that,” I said. “Let’s go and get some.”

“No.” She reached down to slap her ankle. “Damn mosquitoes.”

I looked at my watch. I’d been here now for almost two hours. “Caroline—”

“I know.” She finished her Pepsi and set the can down carefully, as though it were made of crystal. This opposed to my having crushed my own can with one hand, after which I’d burped and said, “See that? Supergirl.”

“All right,” Caroline said. “I’ll try to tell you. I’ll try again. Maybe it would help if I give you some background.

“A few months ago, I’d come to the point where I was beginning to feel paralyzed about doing anything for myself. It’s always been hard for me to take . . . well, to take. But it became extreme. Bill and I make good money, we own the house and our cars, I pay my credit card bills in full every month, and yet I find myself standing in a store holding up a blouse and wondering why I’m even looking at it, because I know I won’t buy it for myself.”

“Well, I do that too, Caroline. I think everyone does. You look at something you want to buy and feel guilty that you’re getting it for yourself. Especially women; we think it’s selfish if—”

“But it was more than that. It was this feeling that . . . it was the feeling that the world is not for me. Life. It’s not for me.”

I stared out across her backyard, watched two yellow butterflies chasing each other in circles. Look at that, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Of course I didn’t. Inside, I could hear my child voice saying, “Come
on.
Let’s
go.
”

“I kept feeling worse and worse—I couldn’t work, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read—I’d just look at the same sentence over and over. Things were terrible with Bill, and finally he’d just had it. He couldn’t help me and he couldn’t listen to me anymore, and frankly I don’t blame him. He said he wanted to be apart for a while, that then maybe I’d get some help. He’d been asking me to go and see someone for a long time, but I couldn’t.

“When he left, though, I finally did call a shrink. One of the things she told me to do was to find something to do with my evenings, to make sure I went out at least once a week. I signed up for a free class, memoir writing—something they were offering at the library. And it was the oddest thing. I found I couldn’t write my real life. I could only make things up. I felt afraid of telling a single fact, as though I couldn’t be depended on to get it right. Finally, I thought, Well, you know where you
lived,
for God’s sake. You know what the
house
where you grew up was like. And I’d start to write about it, but then I’d stop and I’d think, Wait.
Were
there trees along the boulevard in front?
Was
my bedspread blue? I talked to my therapist about this, week after week, and suddenly I realized where it was all coming from, all this self-doubt, all this censorship.

“We’d talked one day about the concept of shame, and I told her that every time I heard that word, I had a visceral reaction to it: I could feel my stomach clench, my heart start to race. She said, ‘Well, let’s explore that.’ And I sat there on her couch and I all of a sudden felt this rush of something
awful
coming, this freight train of emotion. I just came completely apart, started bawling. And then I began remembering things that happened to me. Triggered memories, they call it. They just kept popping up.”

I was quiet for a long time, thinking. Then I said, “I wish, for your sake, that I could remember her doing something like that. But I can’t think of one time she ever behaved that way. Which is not to say I don’t believe you, Caroline. I just don’t remember anything.”

“She didn’t do the worst stuff in front of you,” Caroline said. “I know that. But what I wanted to know from you and Steve is if you remember . . . smaller things. General things. If you can, it will help me to keep going. I just want to know that you saw something too. Do you understand? I don’t doubt what happened, but I seem to need something else to help me do something about it.”

I leaned back on my elbows and stared up at the sky. It was getting dark out. Clouds were stretched thin as gossamer, and stars were appearing behind them. Whole galaxies above us, whole galaxies within us.

I thought back to our growing-up years, trying to remember a time when Caroline was purposefully slighted by my mother. But I really couldn’t. I’d been aware of the fact that, after a certain point, Caroline’s attitude toward my mother switched from idolatry to contempt. But that had happened with all of us when we went through adolescence; with Caroline, it had just been more dramatic—no surprise there. Finally, I said, “I guess I didn’t pay much attention, Caroline.”

Saying that, I suddenly wondered what it really meant. Why was I so firmly entrenched in my own world? What went on in our house that made me look so determinedly away from everything but my own fantasies? Was it possible the shrink I saw in college was at least partially right, that something wrong in my family made me seek comfort elsewhere? But couldn’t everyone look back at life as a child and start blaming their parents for what was wrong with them? Frankly, I was really, really tired of that song.

“It’s kind of hard, Caroline, trying to remember anything from so long ago. I mean, stuff from my life alone, to say nothing of yours. I remember specific moments, but whole years are just . . . lost.”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“But why do you need Steve’s and my corroboration anyway? You said you know this happened.”

“I guess it’s that I need to feel I have allies in my brother and my sister, that I’m not alone in what I need to do. If I don’t confront Mom—and Dad too, I guess—I’ll never get past all this. I have to tell them about what I remember. And that it was wrong.”

“Oh, God.”

“Laura, you don’t know.

“She came into my room one Saturday. I had just started third grade, and I was sitting at the window, looking out at the leaves. It was fall, and they were really beautiful. She asked me why I didn’t go outside. I said I wanted to be in. I said, Look at the leaves, they’re so pretty and they’re dying. She got sort of impatient and started messing around with the stuff in my room, rearranging it. Then she said I had to go out, that I was just mooning around and there was no reason for it, it was a perfectly beautiful day. I said again I didn’t want to, and I asked why the leaves had to die, why did things have to die, and she grabbed my arm and started pulling me out of my room. And I remember I yelled
help,
I yelled
help
really loud, and she just went berserk. She started slapping me and kicking me and saying to shut up, just shut
up.
And then she ran into her bedroom and slammed the door and started sobbing—I could hear her all the way in my room. I went and knocked at her door, and then I went in, and she was lying on her side holding a pillow up against her stomach. She said I made her do these things, why did I make her do these things? I remember I tried to get on the bed beside her, I was so sorry, and she lifted up her head and said in this awful, low voice, ‘
Get out of here.’
I went back to my room and stayed until dinnertime, and when I came out it was like nothing happened.”

“But . . . where was I that day?”

“You were gone somewhere,” Caroline said. “Probably over at a friend’s house; you were a good girl with a lot of friends. You were forever going over somewhere and baking with someone and then bringing home stuff for the family. Look what I made! Little Miss Martha.”

I pictured myself standing in Sally Burke’s kitchen, laughing and licking chocolate-chip cookie dough from beaters while Caroline sat at the edge of her bed staring at her hands, afraid to move. “Oh, Caroline. I don’t see how you can stand any of us. I can’t believe I was oblivious to all this. That we all were. Didn’t anybody ever even—why didn’t you tell Dad?”

She shook her head. “Well, as I told you, Mom had me convinced that the bad things she did to me were my fault. She truly did. I was so ashamed of the fact that there was something in me that made her behave in this terrible way. I knew she wasn’t like that to you or Steve, so it had to be my fault. I did try to tell Dad one day, but it was useless. You know how it is; you can’t say anything bad about Mom to Dad. I’m sure he thought I was making it up. He probably thought I’d gotten in trouble for something and had been mildly punished in some way or another, then had exaggerated wildly about what happened. I
was
prone to drama, as you recall.”

I refrained from correcting the tense. “But . . . didn’t you have marks or something?”

“I had bruises every now and then. But so did you. Only yours came from another place.”

“Well, I just . . . I have to say, Caroline, if all that had happened to me, I think I’d just walk away from our parents. Cut off relations.”

“Don’t be so sure. I have a friend, a guy I met at my group counseling session. And once a month, on the first day of the month, he goes to see his father, who was remarkably abusive—both physically and emotionally. He goes even though he knows that every time it’ll be like getting shot in the heart. His father insults him for a while and then basically ignores him. Eddie knows what he’s headed for, but he can’t stop going. And I understand why. It has to do with himself, what Eddie’s giving
himself.
”

“But what
is
he giving himself? He’s just sticking his finger into the light socket! There are such things as toxic parents.”

“Yes, but . . . let me ask you something. Do you like your feet?”

I pulled my bare feet away self-consciously. I thought she knew that I hated my feet: I have little toes that look like cornichons, according to Pete. And that’s a kind analogy. More like slugs, Anthony says. And my fat big toe curves over as though it’s trying to commiserate with the little toe. “No.”

“Ever had a pedicure?”

“No!”

“Why not? It could help.”

“Because then I’d have to show someone my feet close up for a long time.”

“Well, why don’t you cut them off?”

“My feet?”

“Yeah.”

I half smiled. “What are you talking about, Caroline?”

“You’ve always hated your feet. Why don’t you just cut them off?”

Fine. I would play along. “I need them to stand on. To walk.”

She nodded. “Exactly.”

I sat still for a moment, then said, “All right. I get it.”

“I need Mom to admit to what she did, so I can forgive her. Then I can stand. Then I can walk to where I need to go, if I may extend the metaphor.”

“Right. I understand.” I leaned back on my elbows. “You know one of the things that’s really hard about this, Caroline? That you waited for so
long.
”

“Yeah. I met a woman who told me about how she finally came to love her mother, who made our mother look like Mother Teresa. She said she was able to love her mother when she began to get more sure of herself. And you know when that was?”

“When?”

“When she was fifty-nine.”

I laughed. “Okay. Okay. So what now, then? How do I help?”

“Well, you can start by trying to believe me.”

“I do believe you!”

She stood, stretched. “I appreciate your saying that. But here’s what I know. Partly you believe me, and partly you don’t.” I started to protest and she held up her hand to stop me. “That’s why you asked me about marks.”

I looked away. She was right.

Her voice softened. “It’s okay. It’s hard, I know. And I know this will all take time. Everything about it will take a long time. I just hope that in the end . . .”

“I hope so too, Caroline.”

“We should go in before we get bit up any more.”

“Let’s go to the grocery store,” I said.

“What do you need?”

“I want to help you get something
you
need: chips and dip. I figured we’d start small.”

“I don’t know if Rainbow is still open.”

“I’ll see.” I went into the house and picked up the phone. “Hey, Caroline, you have messages on here.”

“It’s just Bill. He calls every night. I’ll call him back later.”

“He calls every night?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, good. That’s good, isn’t it?”

Nothing.

“Caroline?”

“What.”

“That’s good, isn’t it? That he calls every night?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s good.”

I called information, then the grocery store. “They close in twenty minutes,” I yelled.

Caroline came into the house, the screen door banging behind her. “Let’s go!” It was the first time in so long that I’d seen her look happy. And of course it wasn’t the food.

ON THE WAY BACK TO MY PARENTS’ HOUSE,
I thought of all Caroline had told me. When our family sat down together at dinner on a random Tuesday night, was it possible she was recovering from some sort of horrible event only hours before? What had been held in her silences?

When I was a few blocks away, I turned off the radio. I wanted to think about how much I should tell my parents. I decided on as little as possible: I’d just say Caroline would be over tomorrow afternoon, that there were some things she would like to talk about with the immediate family. I had no idea what I’d do with the kids. As much as they like the fair, they don’t like to go two days in a row. I’d have to ask Pete to take them somewhere. There was no reason for him to be around during all of this. I tried not to pay attention to the pinch of resentment I felt; this wasn’t how our time here was supposed to go. We were supposed to have fun.

When I pulled into the driveway, I saw the dim figures of people sitting outside. It was Pete and the kids, arranged in an intimate little semicircle, waiting for the fireworks, I supposed. I greeted them, dropped my purse, and sat on the grass before them. I pulled my knees up to my chest, rested my forehead on top of them, and drew in a long breath. I could finally relax. I looked up, smiling.