The Bride of Catastrophe (21 page)

“Do you have a résumé?”

She laughed. “What would
I
put on a résumé?”

“Your job experience?”

“I don't know how to do that kind of thing,” she said.

“But, you're an English teacher. You teach kids how to write letters, how to organize essays.”

“Oh, that's completely different,” she said, then added, “I suppose you know how, though.”

“Well, I mean, I can try.”

“You write the letter,” she said, with great excitement suddenly. “
You
can do it, Beatrice, I know you can. You'll know just what to say.”

“Except the actual information.”

“I can fill all that in later,” she said.

“Well, you'd want it to be the basis of the letter.”

“Really? No, there are forms you follow.” (Spoken with an English teacher's authority.)

“You write it out, Ma, and I'll go over it with you, okay?”

“It won't work, Beatrice, I know it won't. Nobody wants
me
,” she said now, in the voice of a woman who'd been around the block a few times and was qualified to sneer at the notions of credulous Little Bo Peep types like myself. “Even my own children prefer their father! He
never
loved you, but you love
him
! I know all about rejection, this is nothing new for me. All my life—
all my life
, Beatrice, I've let people use me and step on me and just push me out of the way when they're done. I'm damned if I'm going to be your sister's doormat too. She can reject me, fine, let her go her own way, but she should know what she's done. It's fine—fine—if Dolly doesn't love me, but
I like myself
.
I like myself
, do you understand? That much at least I've learned.”

“Ma,” I said, “Dolly didn't mean—”

“Beatrice, there comes a time when it doesn't matter what you mean or don't mean, when you are judged on the morality of your actions, it's that simple.”

“Does that time come when you're thirteen years old?”

“Anyone who is old enough to make a decision like that is old enough to be held accountable,” she said flatly, but when I didn't reply, her voice went dead.

“But I forgot,” she said, “you're on his side too.”

And despite, or perhaps because of, my calming noises and murmurs of reassurance, she went on and on, building to such a pitch that I imagined her flinging herself against the walls and floors, before subsiding finally into the sharp sobs of a lost little girl.

“What am I going to do, Beatrice?” she asked, begged really. “What's going to happen to me?”

Oh, she was telling the truth of her feeling—that she was starving and alone, marching away from warmth, love, hope, marching through the snow with hatred at her heels and death before her. She'd felt this, for whatever reason, all her life. No soldier is more heroic than the mother who wakes out of her usual nightmare into her usual rage and grief, and sets it aside, to make a tender and patient and hopeful world for her children. In the time of Country Day school and bursting bladder, I'd come out to the car once and told her I'd never be able to hold it until I got home. “What's your reading homework?” she asked. “
The Yellow River
, by I. P. Freely?' And I said, “Don't make me laugh!” though already the urine was rising between my thighs and she looked over and said “Oh no, not volume two,
Swept Away
!” And we laughed, and nothing else mattered, it was spring and I was six years old, the sopping embodiment of all her dreams, proof that she'd transcended her madness and done good in the world.

I was her equivalent of sunlight, and if I failed to blaze out for a minute? She reacted as an aborigine would to an eclipse. As long as I was very, very careful, very, very good, though, I counted among the gods.

“Don't cry, Ma,” I said now. I wanted to be the sunlight, to fill the room up with butterflies for her. I curled into myself as if her pain were in my gut, whispering the great motto of ineffectuality, the prayer over the head of every disappointed child: “Don't cry.”

“Don't you
dare
tell me not to cry!
You've
never had to face anything like this, never. Oh! ‘
Don't cry.'”

Anger, thank the heavens. Anger would keep her from crying her substance away. She hung up and I sank onto the bed and sighed. Maybe she'd stomp out of the house now and go look for a job. Maybe everything would turn out just fine.

Maybe, but there went the phone. It was my father, and immediately, I remembered how much I liked this poor guy, who was so absolutely cheerful in the face of penury and divorce that he could sing three verses of “Come-a-ti-yi-yippie-aye-ay” into a pay phone before he even said hello.

They were at the Palm Beach Motor Court, in Laramie, Wyoming. “How are things back east?” he asked, and I began to answer, but it turned out that this was actually the first line of a frenetic monologue on the rugged beauty of the West, the generosity of the people there, the steak, the sagebrush, the whiskey—ah, the whiskey—but here he lost his thread, and after a moment he took up again somewhere in the midst of an elegy: there had never been a happier family than ours, did I know that? Well, if my mother couldn't recognize it, he was better off without her. Fine, fine if she didn't love him (his voice broke), but surely she shouldn't expect his financial help then.

“I think they call that prostitution out here, honey,” he said, and while I was trying to follow his logic he put Dolly on the line.

“How are you?” she asked, seeming to expect a lengthy and serious answer. They were doing very well, she said. Her savings would last them for at least a month. They were going to rent a little house—
unfurnished
—she said proudly, and I smiled.

“Have you talked to Mama?” she asked. “Is she okay?”

I felt a weight drop in my gut as if I'd swallowed a plumb bob.

“She's fine,” I said, “she's going along step by step, you know. So what's it like, Wyoming?” I asked, to get off the subject.

“Well,” she began, and in the one hesitant syllable I heard her little-sister's reverence, her sense that I was an august, austere figure, a judge or Buddha to whom one must speak only one's most illuminating thoughts—and her stubborn resistance to her own natural tendency to admire me. After a moment of reflection, during which I imagined her watching a tumbleweed roll down a long deserted street, she said wonderingly: “It's sort of like the moon.”

When I was making enough money, I thought, I'd bring her to live with me. Under my wing, under Frank's roof, in this neighborhood where everyone tended his quarter acre as if Hartford had the world's most fertile soil, coaxing persimmons or bok choy or whatever fruits they most longed for into bloom—she would thrive. I pictured her figuring an algebra problem at the kitchen table while I stirred the soup at the stove. I made Hartford sound like the promised land for her, a cheerful polyglot metropolis where the cafés were strung with plastic lanterns and each national community had its own bakery and dance hall.

“Three associations just for Lithuanians, for example,” I said. I'd noticed Lithuanians in particular because Ross was of Lithuanian descent, causing Philippa and me to do some research on Eastern Europe.

“Well,” Dolly said solemnly, “You ought to join one, Beatrice.”

I felt a kind of drowning sensation then: shame. She'd heard my tone, when I flew out of the closet at them that day, but she hadn't understood the words. Lesbian, Lithuanian—what did it matter? She recognized that I was declaring allegiance to something outside the family, something strange and probably terrible for which I was standing up with pride. So, then, she would stand behind me, she didn't need to know more. She was going to embody our parents' ideals, even though they themselves had never upheld them.

How I wished I had just shrieked
fuck you
at them, like any normal, rebellious daughter. I wanted to make manifest all the shame in that house, but our terrible secrets were not the villainies one finds in the newspaper, things like incest and physical cruelty, but weaknesses—ignorance, fear, paralytic uncertainty—that kept us from growing and changing and taking part in the world. So we ended up living together in a cauldron and exercising our miseries, with amazing ingenuity, on each other. I couldn't name our sins, so I found something else that dare not speak its name.

Three

I
WASN'T
going to be like them, crippled the way they were. I had honest work with a time clock and a paycheck and sore feet.

“This is the salt-free broth, this is the fat-free broth, and this is the salt-free, fat-free broth,” the supervisor explained, nodding toward three chrome vats in which these identical solutions were boiling. “A heart patient could die from a single cup of fatty broth, and salty broth can seriously harm a stroke victim or
anyone
with high blood pressure. So this is a good spot for someone like you.”

For someone who spoke English, she meant. My colleagues were mostly Filipino or Vietnamese. Daisy, who worked across the belt from me, had Down's syndrome.

“There, look. You've already missed one,” she said. The trays were lurching by at a terrible rate and I seized a ladle of broth, but as I rushed to pour it into the cup I scalded my hand instead. Flinching, I spilled more of course, dropped the cup, and brought my hand to my mouth as if it were a sad little creature that could be consoled with a kiss.

“
Now
you've ruined the whole tray,” the supervisor said, lifting the napkin from its puddle and holding it in front of my face like a soiled undergarment. “Reverse the belt!” she barked. Three trays had gotten past me brothless, now.

“Concentrate,”
she said. The forward motion began again, and, though my innards shriveled with each tray that came toward me, concentrate I most desperately did. When I missed one, Daisy would shake her head and point to the errant cup like a drill sergeant. My left hand was blistered and trembling. Now, when the broth burned my hand I felt a vengeful pleasure in seeing the clumsy thing punished. If it continued to betray me, it was going to starve with the rest of me, did it not understand?

“Get it right, get it right,
get it right!!
” Daisy screamed suddenly, and flung her dishrag, on which she had been obsessively wiping her face—at me. It landed in the salt-free vat, folding itself gently on the surface, then sinking, until the supervisor, who had come running upon hearing Daisy's shrieks, fished it out with her tongs.

I was gleeful at the prospect of seeing Daisy chastised, but she went after me.

“You are a probationary employee. People like you never work out. Daisy becomes anxious when there's a change of routine. Do as you're told or you will find yourself back on the street with your sandals and your degree.”

Daisy shot me a malevolent glance. She knew full well how despicable it was to get things wrong all the time; here was her chance to feel contempt from the upper side.

Wounded, I became haughty. Fine, let them hate me. I was only there to begin my meteoric rise. I watched a tray of bright wiggly Jell-O make its way around the room in someone's hands: it was the only beauty I could see, and when it was carried behind a partition, I felt as if some last candle had guttered out and left me alone in the dark.

*   *   *

THE PHONE
rang in my dreams for a long time before I realized it was a real phone, and even then I tried to reach it without breaking into consciousness. I put it to my ear (1:14
A.M
. the clock said; it gave the only light in the room) and heard a stifled cry—my father's. I clenched myself against this, the way you do when you see a creature split open on the side of the road, and listened from some high distance as he said how he'd imagined growing old with his wife, looking back over the photo albums together. Now he felt he'd wasted his whole life; he didn't know where to turn.

He'd imagined this all in a season of hope, when he was my age and the world was in front of him. There
was
a photo album—it ended on my first birthday. After that, we could never find the camera.

“I—when I asked her to marry me, the look on her face. I've never seen such, such—” He broke off in a sob, and started up again, more plaintive than anguished.

“
She
was the one who wanted to buy the ping-pong ball factory,” he said. “It wasn't my idea, she thought of it—now it goes under, and it's all my fault. And she says that's why she's leaving, so she can blame me, but she was dreaming of that boy all this time. She felt as if
something wonderful was pouring out of his eyes, into hers
—all that time she was writing to him, longing for him. I can't bear it, I don't know what to do, I can't cope.”

He'd lost his home and his family and he had only this phrase from a TV commercial to describe his feeling. It was like fighting a war with a can opener. Somewhere, Philippa was reading, she was looking at something from one side and the other, she was asking herself how Balzac would view it, what Woolf would have said.

“You'll make yourself sick,” I said. “Stop now. Stop and just rest. Where's Dolly? Asleep?”

“Yes,” he said, with a sigh. He'd protected her, she didn't know she was alone with a desperate man.

“You sleep too, Pop. You'll feel better tomorrow. Things always seem different in the daylight.”

“I know,” he said, his voice broken, “it's wrong of me to tell you all this … but I don't know where else to turn. A man can't live like this, sweetie, a man needs the feel, the smell of a woman he loves.”