Elegies for the Brokenhearted (25 page)

The years go by, they wear you down. The life you've always imagined for yourself—the ease, the luxury, the excitement—seems far away, chimerical. You grow bitter. You believe you have suffered like no one else, that you have been cheated, and you mean to have your revenge in whatever little ways you can find. You park in handicapped spaces, throw trash out the window of your car. You drive recklessly, impulsively—several times you back into parked cars, then speed off without leaving a note. Your rules of order are self-righteous, Darwinian. In apartment buildings, when you share a washing machine with other families, you interrupt another person's cycle and remove their clothes and pile them, sopping wet, on top of the washer so you can start your own load. Once, when a craving for an apple pie seizes you, you put the girls in the car and race to the grocery store, you hustle over to the pastry section to find an old woman examining the last apple pie. She holds it up, inspects it, turns it this way and that. She makes a move to place it back on the shelf but then reconsiders and puts it in her cart, and you stalk her until she wanders away from her cart and you swoop down and steal the pie.
You snooze,
you say,
you lose
.

You are bad with money. You forget to pay the bills and the lights go off, the heat shuts down, you go to turn on the faucet and it shudders, seizes. Then you call up the electric and gas and water companies and give them an earful.
I got kids,
you say.
I got a kid who wants a drink of water here, what the hell am I supposed to tell her?
You are always charging clothes on your Filene's card, wearing them, and then returning them as defective.
I washed this once,
you say to the salesgirl,
just one lousy time, and look, it's all pilly!
Nothing thrills you more than arguing with the employees of the stores you patronize. You bully them until they cry, and when their supervisors appear you do the same. Your voice rises into a shriek, and the other customers dart away. “Lady,” the managers say, “please. Please.”

You can't keep a job. You are easily bored and impulsive, and walk out of work every six months. Your boss says something discourteous—“Get your ass in here!” he yells from his office—and you march right into his office and remind him that you are a human being, goddammit, and that every human being deserves to be treated with a minimum level of respect. Then you come home, thrilled with yourself, and recreate these scenes for the girls. They sit on the couch watching you.
“A minimum level of respect,” I said. You should have seen his face. I think he shit his pants! And then I stand there at my desk packing up my things, cool as a cucumber, he comes out and says he's sorry—he doesn't want anyone to hear him so he's standing there whispering, but I don't even look at him, I just shut off my typewriter and put on its cover, real slow, and I take all the company pens out of the desk and put them in my purse—you know how I love those pens—and he's standing there telling me not to go, he'll give me a bonus, he's sorry, but I just walk over to the elevator and press the button and wait like nothing's happening, I've got all the time in the world. You should have seen the other girls, the looks on their faces, they never liked me but they like me now, let me tell you, they're singing my praises.
Later, though, when the thrill has worn off and you find yourself, once again, without a job, you sit on the couch and drink, you cry, you hold your head in your hands.
Shit,
you say.
Shit, shit, shit.

When you are feeling low you walk through department stores and sit down at makeup counters and have yourself made up by the saleswomen. They gather around you, touch your skin with creams and lotions and powders, they make you up like a doll. “Oh, look!” they say to each other. “Oh look how beautiful.” These are older ladies with clownish makeup and liver-spotted hands, with thinning hair they tease and spray into little peaks. You should be a movie star, they tell you.
I know,
you say.

The girls get older, they change. They lose interest in you, they grow tired of your moods. One screams at you, the other one stops speaking. When you arrive home from work it is to an empty apartment. The girls are out with friends, or prowling through shops, or at the library, they are God knows where. You sit alone, in the peace you always claimed you wanted, but it is far worse, this quiet, than anything else.

 

F
or a time you are seized by an obsession with money. It's the eighties, and there seems to be money everywhere (
Dallas
,
Dynasty
,
Falcon Crest
) and you can't for the life of you fathom why some of it isn't yours. One night, in a bar, you meet Bud Francis, sole heir to the fortune that is Francis Housewares and Electronics, and when he takes you to meet his parents you size up their house, a small mansion with pillars flanking its front door—pillars! Someday this will all be Bud's. Someday, you decide, this will all be yours.

Just before you marry Bud you take the girls to meet his parents.
Meet your new grandma and grandpa,
you tell them. You show them around the house. The upstairs bathroom, all marble and granite, is bigger than the girls' bedroom. There are two separate sinks in the vanity, side by side, facing a mirror that runs the length of the wall. The older girl, the beautiful one, stands at the sink, turning its gold-plated handles on and off, on and off, as if in a trance. She starts to cry. “Mom!” she says. “There are two sinks!” To learn that life is like this for other people—that it has been all along, just not for her—is too much. She stands looking at herself in that wide mirror, blubbering. “It isn't fair!” she says.

Life,
you tell her,
isn't fair
. As you say this you sense already that things won't work out with you and Bud—you will never live in this house.

 

W
ith your next husband, Walter Adams, it is as if you've decided to reverse every instinct and inclination you've ever previously pursued. Initially you don't even consider Walter to be a romantic prospect—he is merely a connection that proves useful. When you first meet him, and learn that he is a mechanic, you tell him that your car (a Buick Skylark, which you've custom-painted a bright flaming red) has been rattling, a mysterious ailment that no other mechanic has been able to treat or even diagnose. He tells you to bring your car by his house, and you do, the very next day.

As he works on your car you look around his house. Everything in this man's life is impeccably ordered. His shoes are polished, his clothes are pressed and neatly hung in the closet, his floors are swept, his books and records alphabetized. Nothing is in confusion or disarray. His keys hang by a hook just inside the front door and you imagine that he hangs them, unfailingly, every time he enters the house—he has probably never misplaced his keys in his life. After Walter finishes with your car (he fixes it!) you smoke a cigarette with him on the front porch, and you are mesmerized by the calm that surrounds him. He moves languidly, purposefully. He even smokes in a way that strikes you as refined. Not hungrily, greedily, like other people you know, but very lightly, letting the paper burn, the ashes collect at the tip for whole minutes, after which he taps them, an inch long, into a cut-glass tray. You want to disappear into Walter's life, this small bungalow with its gleaming floors, its manicured lawn, you want to live in this house the way children want to disappear into fairy tales.

In the following weeks you learn that Walter is a twenty-year veteran of the military, where he worked as a machinist. For ten years he lived in Germany, and he seems to have brought back with him the habits and pacing of the Old World. He spends entire evenings listening to records, reading books, playing chess. He fills a bag with breadcrumbs and takes long walks, stopping here and there to feed the birds. You learn things when you are with him: art, music, history, politics. Suddenly it seems there's another world than the one you've been living in—better, brighter, more intricate—and you want to know its secrets.

When you marry Walter—a simple ceremony at the court-house—the older girl moves out, moves in with your parents. She is tired of this, she says, tired of moving around, tired of you getting married. The younger girl stays with you but seems unmoored—without her sister she doesn't know what to do. She starts taking long walks, she disappears into books. You trouble yourself, sometimes, with the question of whether you've damaged them, all of this moving back and forth, all of this change, but it is not a question you can afford to think about. You are pregnant again, and you intend to do things right this time.

Then things turn. Cruelly, they turn. Your brother dies, and while you are still thick in the grief of losing him, you deliver your child—another daughter—prematurely. When she dies it is as if the life you were trying for, the simplicity, the beauty, has died with her. Aspersions have been cast on you, on the marriage, on the very idea that such a union might succeed, that happiness was possible. When you leave Walter Adams you don't even have to explain. You simply look at him, and he looks at you. You leave wordlessly, over a number of days. You go back to your old ways.

 

B
ut now you are approaching forty, and your old ways no longer suit you. You move in with a golf pro, ten years your junior, but instead of making you feel younger, he makes you feel older. You are tired in the mornings—your eyes are puffy and there are circles underneath them. Your skin has begun to loosen. You have gained weight in your hips. You sleep less and less, and finally develop a nearly complete insomnia. You spend two years in almost total sleeplessness. At night you lie on the couch flipping channels, and in your exhaustion you are overcome by desperate urges. You wish to purchase the things you see advertised, you wish to travel to the places you see on screen. You consider moving to a remote location, where no one knows you. You consider swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills.

One night on television you see a preacher pacing around in front of a congregation. His name is Les Witherspoon, and he fairly gleams. He is dressed in a shining silver suit and his hair, which is a bit overgrown, is touched with silver. He has a strong jaw, a sharp nose, a sweeping brow—he has the face of a president, something that could be carved on Mount Rush-more. You have never seen a man of God in quite this light. You are used to priests in their shapeless robes, their long, somber, celibate faces, but this man is virile, this man is ecstatic. “Jesus!” he cries, and you hear the word as if for the first time. You hear the word spoken as something other than a curse.

You are about to change the channel—your interest in Les is nothing more, you think, than the passing curiosity in an attractive preacher—but just then Les asks a question. “Are you one of the long-suffering?” he says. He looks into the camera and it is as if he is looking directly at you. “Are you adrift, aimless, do you wander from one thing to the next to the next, and every time you're sure you've figured it out, you're on the path now, but the path just takes you around in the same old circle?”

Yes,
you think.
Yes. Yes.

“I'm here to tell you,” he says, “no more. I'm here to show you the way. Which is God's way.” One of the preacher's more influential techniques is to ask his audience to imagine themselves on their deathbeds. “Go on,” he says, “someday it's bound to happen. Go on and think of it now, close your eyes and think of it. You've lived your whole life through, you're looking back on it, what do you see?”

You close your eyes.

“I guarantee,” says the preacher, “the troubles in front of you now are not the things you'll be thinking of at the end. No, they are not. Feel them fading away right before your eyes. Now, I ask you, once you let all of that go, what do you see?” For a moment your mind is blank. But then what appears to you, to your horror, is something you haven't thought of in years: the white-haired woman in the mental hospital, coming for you, on top of you, her vicious face, the moment your life was taken from you, the most alive you've ever felt.

“This is the moment God was with you,” says Les. “And if you've lost your way since then, it is not too late to go back to the person you wanted to be, to make a new life for yourself. Join me,” he says, “join our church and the work that we do every day, to bring true meaning to the lives around us.”

Les Witherspoon's church is in Atlanta. A person would have to be crazy, you think, to drive all that way to sit in a church. And yet already you are moving about the dark house, stuffing a bag full of clothes, going through the golf pro's closet and drawers and cabinets, looking for the money he keeps rolled up here and there, in the tips of his shoes, in the toes of his socks, in the pockets of his golf bags. You move about as if you're a marionette, as if compelled by some higher force. You leave the golf pro snoring in his bed—you are gone before sunrise.

At church you sit up front, and Les Witherspoon takes a special interest in you, as you knew he would. Several times during his sermon he looks directly at you. After services he makes his way over to you. He sees the scars on your neck, reaches out to touch them. “Sister,” he tells you, “forgive me, but a miracle is happening here.” He closes his eyes, trembles, presses his fingers into your flesh. “On the night God first spoke to me I closed my eyes and what I saw were two white birds in flight against a white sky, just like this, and I've seen them ever since whenever I pray, and what God is telling me now is that you are someone special, you are a gift He is delivering to me.” He raises his hand in the air.

One of your more bizarre characteristics is an ability to mimic, in tone and diction and accent, the speech of other people, and when you open your mouth to speak to the preacher what comes out is a sermon similar to his.
I was led here,
you say, raising your hand and pressing it against his.
It was a higher power that drew me here, that spoke to me, and I didn't even know what I was doing or where I was going, but the force of it led me here to you, and the moment it touched me it lifted me up out of my despair and since then there has been nothing but light.