Other Women (15 page)

Maureen used to read them “The Little Match Girl,” and Caroline got it into her head that her mother went around to street corners handing out matches for orphans to sell.

“Do you think they’ll like this all right?” her father asked as the saleslady rang up the Chanel No. 5.

Caroline looked up at him from where she squatted by the battered carton handing him bottles.

She wasn’t accustomed to his asking her advice.

“Mother loves it. So do 1. I’m sure they will too.” She studied his ruddy, lowly face.

Hannah implied he caused her pain. But she recalled him in terms of his absence. He was hardly ever home. And when he was, he was on the phone, or reading depositions, or lying in bed moaning with colitis. She couldn’t remember their ever having a disagreement, or even a conversation.

Washington Street was jammed with holiday shoppers who moved from window to window outside Filene’s and Jordan Marsh. Caroline, her father, and the boys halted before a display in which mechanical mice in red bow ties scurried through presents under a huge Christmas tree, ,z an alarmed mother in a nightgown threw up her hands time after time. Caroline sniffed the sample of Chanel No. 5 on her wrist and thought about her five senses. The more she entangled them with another person, the more rapidly a bond turned into bondage. As long as she merely yearned with her eyes, as she had at Jackson in his white lab coat and tie in the corridors of Mass General, she was okay. She had entertained fantasies about what his skin would feel like, but they stayed inside her fevered brain. Actually talk to a person and detachment became more difficult. Snatches of conversation recurred to you .eaffhen you weren’t prepared. When your sense of smell became in-

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volved, your troubles really began. Everywhere you went, you picked up hints of the person’s cologne or aftershave, which triggered memof the face or voice.

Lately she’d become aware of Brian Stone’s English Leather. This wasn’t a good sign. To touch the person was to feel the slack go out of the chain, as when a wrecker is about to tow your car to the junkyard. And God help you if your tongue began to insist on tasting the person’s sweat and saliva. When all five senses were fully engaged with those of the other person, you were done for. The two sets of senses began to spin their own tangled webs of intrigue, with no regard for the best interests of those originally employing them.

As they were carried along by the crowd to a second display window in which harnessed reindeer did a softshoe on someone’s rooftop, Caroline reflected that that was why this celibacy shit was so difficult. It was like drug withdrawal. Diana was at her mother’s in PoughkeepShe and Caroline had never spent a Christmas together, and now they probably never would.

It hadn’t seemed worth ruining everyone else’s Christmas over. If you were black or crippled, at least your family still loved you. But if you were homosexual, you went it alone, as despised by your family as by the rest of society. They created you in their crucible, then loathed you for turning out as you’d been proMaybe that was why there was a note of such desperation to her and Diana’s perplexing relationship.

Each other was all they had.

But of course now Diana had Suzanne any way she wanted her. They were meeting in New York for New Year’s. Caroline tried to decide if they’d check into a hotel. It was none of her business anymore, but it still felt like her business.

When Brian asked her out for New Year’s Eve, she accepted. And Diana raged around the cabin like Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s

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f Virginia Wool

“Why are you acting like this?” Caroline asked. “I thought you wanted us to date other people.”

“So who’s annoyed?” snarled Diana. “Other people doesn’t mean men,” she added from the next room.

In the first flush of new love, she brought Diana to Brookline, thinking her parents would be relieved to know she’d finally found

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happiness. Her mother, tall and angular, eyed Diana with tight-lipped, narrow-eyed disapproval and spent the weekend at her office. Her father chatted with them uneasily about abortion rights, then slipped out to his office, leaving them with the Vietnamese maid who’d fled the collapse of Saigon. She spoke no English except words like Lemon Pledge, Drano, and Comet. Trying to talk with her was like watcha TV commercial. “Need Vanish now,” she replied koanlike to every query.

Walking home from the NITA, Caroline, her father, and the boys passed Caroline’s old high school, a sprawling red brick place where she’d been in a four-year anxiety state over the labels on her clothing. Rorkie, the leader of her crowd, decided who was in or out. Caroline imagined her marching up to an “out” and ripping the Villager labels off her blouse and sweater.

“I went to school there,” she informed Jackie and Jason, who were balancing along the curbstone.

“Were cars invented back then?” asked Jason.

Caroline’s mother was lying on the couch in a wool suit with her shoes off. “Hello, dear, how nice to see you,” she murmured.

“Hello, Mother.” Caroline bent and kissed her forehead, smelling Chanel No. 5. Her hair, which Caroline remembered as silky chestwas mostly wiry gray now. Her mother had fine features and high cheekbones. Her blue eyes narrowed to make her seem suspicious and critical. Caroline recalled pleading when she was ten, “I’ll do anything you want, Mother, if only you’ll stop being angry.”

And she replied, “But I’m not angry, dear.”

Her mother had seemed breathtakingly glamorous to Caroline as a child. Sometimes people on the street would say, “You look just like your mother.” And her mother would reply, “I’ve never seen the resemblance myself.”

Caroline would feel as though the cracks in the sidewalk had just yawned open.

“How are you, Mother?” asked Caroline, realizing all of a sudden that Diana had those same fine features and high cheekbones, though not the silky chestnut hair. And when Diana’s eyes narrowed, it was with lust.

“As well as could be expected, considering.”

“Considering what?”

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“Considering it’s Christmas, which is a depressing time of year.”

“I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down until time for church,” said Caroline’s father, loosening his too-narrow tie.

“Are you tired, dear?” asked Caroline’s mother.

“I am a bit. I went to Dorchester to talk to the parents of a first offender this morning. And I was out this afternoon buying presents for the secretaries.”

“I spent the day collecting clothes for a rummage sale.” She closed her eyes and rested her forearm on her forehead.

“You must be tired too.” He rubbed the ridge of scar tissue above his eyebrow.

“Oh no, not too bad,” she said wanly. “But you look tired, dear.”

“Well, my bowel is tightening up.” He removed his jacket and hung it on the newel post.

“Go have a rest. I’ll bring you some tea.”

“No, you’re tired, dear. Let me bring you some tea.”

Caroline had forgotten about the Great Exhaustion Sweepstakes. It had always been understood that those who spent their days relieving human suffering were more evolved and deserved to be waited on when they got home. But problems arose on the maid’s day off.

“I’m not tired,” said Caroline wearily, hitching up her gray cords. “Why don’t you both lie down and I’ll make the tea?”

“But you must be tired, dear,” said her mother, glancing up from the couch, “after your long drive. Why don’t you lie down and I’ll bring you some tea?”

“But I’m not tired and I don’t want to lie down!”

“I was just trying to be nice.”

“I’m sorry. Please let me bring you some tea, Mother.”

“No,” she said coolly, turning on her side with her back to Caroline. “I don’t want any tea.”

Caroline’s skin crawled with anxiety. She restrained herself from begging to make tea and ushered the boys into the playroom so her parents could rest in peace, as she had Howard and Tommy so often all those years ago. But Jackie and Jason began playing Space Invaders, not medical missionary.

As she brewed herself some tea in the kitchen, on the harvest gold stove that had survived a warehouse fire, she felt tightness in her

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shoulders. She shrugged a few times to loosen the muscles. Why was she so exhausted? Probably from all those shopping crowds.

Sitting in a pew at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, as she had most Sundays of her life until she moved into David Michael’s Somerville commune, Caroline glanced at Jackie and Jason, who sat on either side of her, wearing blazers and ties and looking perplexed by the hocus-pocus going on around the altar as communion was readied. When she was married to Jackson, she went to this church alone because he was usually either at the hospital or on call. The boys had been christened here. But when she left Jackson, she also left the church, adopting David Michael’s scorn for anything organized, and discovering she enjoyed sleeping late on Sundays and waking to loveand breakfast in bed.

Her father in his too-narrow tie and lapels sat beside Jackie. He’d been excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and very nearly from his own family, for failing to raise his children as Catholics. As a child, Caroline had often wished she were Catholic, like Marsha, like the neighborhood kids, like the most popular kids at school. She coveted Marsha’s prayer cards and rosary, her candles and catechism classes. She watched enviously when Marsha took candles from the holders on Caroline’s dining table, crossed them over her own throat, and described how on St. Blase’s Day the priest did the blessing of the throat so no one would choke on fishbones. The Catholics had blessfor anything that could go wrong. The priest even blessed Marmother’s new Amana range against grease fires and short circuits. Of course none of this helped Marsha. Though maybe the priest had simply forgotten to insure against careless Bunny Bread trucks.

Caroline had never seen this particular priest before.

Tall and stooped in his black robe, he looked like a crow at rest as he perched at the lectern and delivered his sermon:

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. . Just like the Israelites, who were unable to receive the living word of God from Moses as he came down off the mountain. They were dancing around a golden calf, having forgotten the instructions from their Lord God: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

Just so do we fail to experience in our hearts the arrival of the newborn Christ. So preoccupied are 100 OTHER

we with gifts, food, and family. And not just at Christmas but all year long. We are obsessed with our relationships and our achievements, our new cars and the decoration of our houses, our golf scores and the labels on our clothing … .”

From the way he said “we,” Caroline could tell he was just humoring them. He knew he himself had transcended all this. There was a reason she’d stopped going to church.

“dis

. . and put aside all the false idols of your own making. For just a moment, look into your naked soul, unadorned by the tawdry trinkets of this sinful world, and see what you can find … .”

Here was a boy who knew how to take all the fun out of Christmas, reflected Caroline, glancing at her mother in her hat and veil, who sat beside Jason eyeing him grimly as he scribbled

infinitesimal amounts on the pledge cards in the hymnal rack. Did her mother cause her pain, as Hannah implied?

They walked home through the cold night, along Cypress Street past darkened storefronts and through circles of light from street lamps, footsteps muffled by new-fallen snow. Caroline glanced at her parents, bundled in overcoats, their breath steamy white, both slightly stooped from carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders for all these years. How had they kept on decade after decade? She herself was about to give out after only a few years. Maybe she should join the Catholic Church at long last. Attend altar guild meetings at Our Lady of Sporadic Mercy.

The saints in the pictures in Marsha’s house and church-St. Sebastian full of arrows, Jesus on the cross with thorns ripping his forehead, St.

Stephen bruised and bloody from stonesalways looking upward, as though they saw something that cheered them up. As though they’d managed to make peace with the savage ways of their fellow citizens.

On Christmas morning they sat around a cedar tree Caroline’s father had bought at half price the night before from a man eager to shut down his lot to go to mass. Jackie took an envelope with his name on it oft the tree and ripped it open. Inside was a partially filled March of Dimes card. He looked at it questioningly, turning it around and over.

“You fill the blank slots with dimes from your allowance,” said

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Caroline’s mother, who sat on the sofa in her brown satin robe. “When it’s full, you mail it to national headquarters.”

“Neat,” said Jackie, glancing under the tree for another gift.

“Won’t it be fun to help some crippled child walk again?” asked Caroline’s mother, sipping her coffee.

“Yes, I guess so.”

“He certainly doesn’t seem very excited,” said Caroline’s mother.

Caroline felt a twinge of anxiety. Jackie wasn’t showing enough gratitude. Her mother would think she’d reared a greedy ingrate. “I’m sure he is,” said Caroline as Jason opened an identical card and diseven less enthusiasm. They’d asked for cartridges for their video game.

Evidently no trucks carrying such cargo had wrecked lately in the Boston area.

Inside the UNICEF card addressed to Caroline, her mother had written the usual message-that the card represented a donation to the charity of her choice.

Caroline had been told that other families sat around on Christmas discussing the merits of the Buffalo Bills over the Dallas Cowboys because of their running offense. Her family had always discussed the superiority of the Salvation Army over Planned Parenthood because of low administrative costs.

“Which are you going to pick this year, Caroline?” asked her mother, extending her arm along the back of the sofa.

Caroline studied her satin robe. It seemed so elegant when Caroline was little, something Loretta Young would wear. Caroline had watched it fall open at the throat as the maids set her mother’s hair and rubbed her neck. Now it looked as though it ought to be donated to the Boat People Relief Fund rummage sale.