Up Island (8 page)

My God, she’s only a few years older than I am; what is he
thinking
of? Aren’t you going to do something? Can’t you fight a tacky little trailer park slut? If he thinks he’s ever going to see his granddaughter again, he’s out of his mind. Not while he’s with her. My baby’s not going within a hundred miles of that piece of trash. My God, she sounds like a washer-woman…”

Caroline was her daddy’s girl, just as Teddy had always been my boy, my miniature Tee. It had always seemed natural, comfortable, an almost Wally and June Cleaver arrangement. Only then did I see what it might mean, how the crippling old patterns had repeated themselves. I stared at the phone in my hand in horror. Had I really done that to my children, perpetuated upon them the same vicious dance that I had been caught up in? If so, what else had I done, what other damage had I wrought, or let be wrought, without realizing?

“Can’t you fight her?…”

Caroline’s words stung my ears long after I had soothed her sobs with promises of a visit and hung up. Fight her?

Fight who? How? I did not know how to fight anyone, certainly not this mythic creature, this arcane Sheri, without scruples or vulnerability, as intent as a young shark on the one thing she wanted: my husband. I had never known how to fight, only propitiate, only accommodate, only enable. It had always seemed enough. Poor Caroline. If anyone was going to march out and get her daddy back for her, it was not likely to be her mama.

62 / Anne Rivers Siddons

Much later that year my father said to me, “I never could understand why you didn’t get angry. If it had been me, or your mother, we’d have blown the bastard sky high. I thought for a while that you were protecting the kids, and maybe even us, but it seemed to me it went further than that. I admired you for it, but I wondered.”

Anger? Dear God, of course there was anger. In those first awful days, when simply getting through one until it ended and became another was all I could seem to accomplish, I felt enough anger at Tee and Sheri Scroggins to blow the world apart. Oh, not always, by any means; there were long periods of pure, sheer pain that humbled and silenced me like a flailed ox, and there were intervals of crazy gaiety, of idiotic confidence that he would come back to us. These came mainly in the mornings when I woke, having forgotten for a few hours that catastrophe had struck, and when I first remembered it seemed simply so silly, so unimaginable, that I could only stretch and smile and think, “What have I been so worried about? Tee hasn’t left us. How stupid.”

And sometimes I just drifted in the soft cocoon of seductive listlessness that lay always just outside my consciousness, like a fog bank waiting to roll in. It became increasingly simple to let it.

But under it all lay the anger, red and bottomless, waiting to immolate the only world I had known. It licked at me mainly when the fact of Tee’s betrayal collided with someone I loved—Teddy, Caroline, my parents. Then, I clenched and knotted everything inside me so that I could tamp it down, beat it back, chill its heat. Then is when I let the white fog come. Because I was afraid, I was terrified: I could not blow UP ISLAND / 63

up the only world I had, the world of The Family. What would I do without it, who would I be, how would I live, who or what would provide the context for The Family?

“I guess I was afraid,” I said that cold night to my father, and knew of course that I had been mortally, endlessly afraid.

Naked and alone in space, no world around me? Anything was better, anything more bearable.

So in the best traditions of my grandmother Bell, I buried all of it deep. For me, that meant avoiding everyone but Teddy. I could not even see my parents after that first nighttime visit, could not run again to my father as I had then.

Not yet. I gave Lilly the week off and canceled all my meetings and unplugged the phone. I stayed home and cleaned and polished silver and did endless laundry; I baked and mended and scrubbed patio furniture and cooked from-scratch meals for Teddy and me that neither of us ate. On one level it was infinitely comforting to get in touch with my house and my things again, handling them as I had not since the first days of our marriage, before we had help. I remembered how I had felt then, so full of joy that my blood prickled. Look at me, I did not think but might have, moving efficiently among the furniture of my life, what a good wife and mother I am.

What a good woman. My price is above rubies. What could happen to me?

On another level, this caressing of my lares and penates put off the day when people came battering back into my life and it tumbled on again. I knew that. I figured I had about three days, four at the most, before the calls and visits began.

At the end of the third day, I turned the phone back on.

64 / Anne Rivers Siddons

The calls came, from my mother first: “Will you
please
call us? We’re worried sick about you. If you don’t call us today, we’re coming over whether you want us or not. Do you need a doctor? Is Teddy all right? Have you talked to…you know, Tee, yet?”

From my father: “I trust you to let us know when you want to talk, baby. But don’t shut us out much longer. There’s nothing so bad we can’t find an answer to it. Love you.”

From Sally and Kevin in Washington, in tandem: “What’s going on down there? Has Tee lost his mind? Do you need anything? Want to come up for a while? Want us to come down there and kill him? Call, Molly. We’re worried.”

From Caroline’s husband, Alan: “When do you think you could come see us? We want to know you’re okay, and I’m worried about Caroline. I’ve never seen her like this. You’d think her dad had died. She can hardly take care of Melissa.

It would help if her father would call or come by himself; if you talk to him, will you tell him she’s drowning? Or give me his number; I’ll tell him myself. What a godawful thing to do…”

From my committees and boards and panels: “Don’t worry about a thing. We’re coping splendidly. Why don’t you just take the summer for yourself and let us do some of the work now? Only, if you think you might want to take longer, do let us know; we’ll need to make some plans for the fall.”

Translation: “If you’re going to be divorced by fall, maybe you’d better think about passing the torch. We love you, but you’re not going to be who you were, and we need all the strength and bucks behind us we can get.”

The luster and largesse of Coca-Cola rarely stands UP ISLAND / 65

behind ex-wives. A new divorcée would be a millstone indeed.

From Livvy: “Okay. I know. Burrow in. You have two and a half more days and then I’m coming over and get you.”

From Sheri Scroggins every day, on the answering machine, since I hung up whenever I heard her voice: “This is not helping anything, you know, Molly. We feel for you, but it’s only making things worse, you hiding like that. We really need to talk. Tee is in terrible shape.”

From Tee, once, also on the answering machine for the same reason: “Molly, please call. Please answer. This can’t go on. It’s not fair to any of us. Sooner or later we have to sort things out. I’ll come by myself. Or meet you someplace…”

From Ken Rawlings, our longtime lawyer and longer-time friend: “Molly, please understand I’m not calling in any official capacity. I’m sorry as hell about this whole thing. But it would be in your best interests to talk to Tee, and the sooner the better. You can afford to be generous, babe, you’re holding all the cards. I love you both, and wish to hell this hadn’t happened, but since it has, be the gal I know you are and call Tee. Or me. We’re going to take care of you.”

“Are you going to?” Livvy said on the morning of the fourth day. True to her word, she had been on my doorstep at nine.

I knew she would be.

“What, call Ken? Hell, no. Or Tee, or the Eel Woman, either. I know what they want, but it’s going to be harder than that for him to…you know.”

“Get a divorce. Say it. D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Well, if you’re not going to call Ken, you better call somebody. A lawyer, I mean. If you don’t know any divorce guys,
66 / Anne Rivers Siddons

I can recommend somebody who can eat Ken Rawlings for breakfast. And he doesn’t have a thing in the world to do with Coke.”

“Why? I’m not giving Tee a divorce. Not for that little nothing. Not for some little…piece of ass. He can beg until doomsday, they both can. There’s not going to be any divorce, and I’m not talking to anybody.”

She took a deep breath and blew it out again.

“Why would you want to hang on to somebody who’s done this to you? How could a divorce be worse than this?”

she said. “What are you afraid of? You’re the smartest woman I know; there’s nothing you can’t do. You’re going to have all the money you need, and the house; anything you want, if you’re at all smart about it. That’s where the good lawyer comes in. Tee doesn’t have a leg to stand on. You must know that.”

“But what if it’s just a fling, what if he gets tired of her, or her of him? It’s bound to happen, Liv; I can’t think what on earth they could have in common but bike shorts…”

“It’s not a fling. I’ve heard the talk from other people besides Caleb, Coke people. People who know them both. Tee may well indeed get sick of her, or her him, but the fool is bound and determined to marry her first. And even if they split up…Molly, could you live with him again after this?

Could you really do that?”

I looked at her. I knew that I was never going to make her understand. And if not Livvy, certainly no one else. But, yes, I could live with Tee again after this. Because otherwise I wasn’t anyone and it was too late to begin searching for another self, and what if I never did find one? You can’t go through the world a spectre, so mutilated that more than half of you is gone, so

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lacking in substance that people can look right through you.

“You still love him that much?” she said softly.

“I have no idea if I love him at all,” I said. “But there’s not going to be any divorce.”

She sighed, but said no more about it. We went to lunch at R. Thomas and talked to the cheerful, molting birds and drank wine and ate veggie pizzas. I felt almost normal, just a little fey and quivery, as if I were recuperating from a debil-itating illness. Everything was eerily bright, and strange. But other than that, it was okay. I thought I could probably do the visits now.

As if on cue, they began that evening.

Mother and Dad rang my doorbell at six o’clock. I peered through the peephole, prepared to pretend I was not at home until whoever it was left, and saw one of my mother’s flam-boyant hats with my father’s face looming over it, behind her. I could not see Mother’s face, but Dad’s was still and blank, as if he was having a passport photograph taken. My father was an essentially private and rather formal man who did not believe in dropping in on people, not even an abandoned and possibly suicidal daughter, and I felt a smile twitch at my lips. I opened the door.

Mother swooped in, carrying an armload of flowers wrapped in florists’ waxed green paper. She laid the flowers on my console table and hugged me fiercely, standing on tiptoe and knocking her hat askew in the process.

“The mountains have come to Mohammed and are taking her out to dinner no matter what she says,” she said into my shoulder blade. “How are you, darling? We just can’t let you hide out in here any longer.”

Over the waggling hat I looked at Dad. He
68 / Anne Rivers Siddons

winked, and managed a grin, more a spasm, really. I could see the worry about me in his eyes, and in the deeper lines around his mouth.

“Hi, baby,” he said, and at the sound of his voice something swelled and warmed behind my eyes, and I felt tears sting in them.

“Oh, now,” Dad said, trying to find a place to hug me that wasn’t engaged by my mother.

I backed out of her embrace and gave a great, rattling sniff and managed to smile at them both.

“Here come the marines,” I said, and we all laughed more loudly than the words deserved.

“Oh, darling, you look like death warmed over,” my mother said in her throaty tremolo. “When have you washed your hair? Or had anything to eat? You run right up and shampoo and shower and put on something pretty, and we’ll have a decent dinner and some wine. Dad says he’ll take us to the Ritz. We’ll just sit out on the patio and wait for you.”

“Mother, I—”

“Let me take my girls to dinner,” Dad said. “It’s been a long time since I had you both to myself.”

There was such a look of helpless anguish in his eyes that I gulped the stupid tears back again and said, “I’d love that,”

even though I could think of nothing that I wanted less to do. I knew that it would make him feel better. Forward motion was my father’s antidote for all crises; stasis was the ultimate anathema to him. And who knew? It might make me feel better, too. At least the Ritz-Carlton’s dim, opulent dining room was apt to be safe. It was more a corporate haven than an Atlanta couples’ watering hole. The only Coke faces I was apt to see were those of clients, and they were not likely to remember me.

UP ISLAND / 69

I installed them with drinks on the little walled patio—shabby after several days’ neglect—and went upstairs to bathe and change. I shampooed and blow-dried my tangle of hair and dragged a comb through it. My mother was right.

It was weeks late for a trimming. Medusa hair. My eyes in the bathroom mirror looked huge and blanched of color, as if I had bobbed for a long time beneath the surface of water.

Drowned eyes. The start of a tan I had gotten a few weeks back, swimming at the club in a spell of hot spring weather, had faded. I looked pale and sodden, as if I had just been pulled from water.

I plodded into the bedroom and put on a red silk shift and high-heeled sandals, added a slash of red lipstick that made me look as if I had been eating bloody flesh, and put on and then discarded the pearl choker and earrings Tee had given me for our twentieth anniversary. I did not, somehow, want jewelry, especially not this. It seemed almost obscene. When I went back downstairs my mother pursed her lips and stared at me for a long time, and said, “Well, it’s a start. A haircut and some color and a little nip through Jenny Craig will make you feel a lot better, and then your old mother is going to take you shopping. You’ve only let yourself go a little; there’s not a thing that can’t be fixed. What we need now is an agenda.”