Other Women (17 page)

In fact she felt nauseated. As she cleared the table, the guests moved into the living room, and her father began to stoke the fire.

“How about same carols?” her mother was suggesting as Caroline entered the living room. These were among the few occasions on which she saw this cheery side to her mother. Usually she was exfrom having spent all day being cheery at the office. Jason was pulling his grandmother’s arm, trying to get her attention about something to do with the video game. She shook him off, whispering, “Not now, Jason. I’m busy.”

Jason plopped down beside Caroline on the Route carpet and looked up through his absurdly long Minnie Mouse eyelashes. “Mommy, I’m hungry.” He wrenched off his blazer and wadded it on the floor.

She patted his thigh hopelessly. He shoved a thumb in his mouth. He hadn’t sucked his thumb for years.

“Jason, why are you sucking your thumb?” asked Caroline’s mother as she handed him a carol book. “You’re a big boy.”

“Hungry,” he whimpered.

Caroline felt her stomach tensing. He didn’t know he was supposed to pretend he was fine even if he wasn’t. She hadn’t trained him properly.

Her parents were seeing her as the bad parent she in fact was.

“Hungry? But we’ve just finished dinner.”

Jason gazed at his grandmother over his fist, sucking the thumb with furious defiance.

“Look at Jackie,” said Caroline’s mother, gesturing to the fire-WOMEN

place, next to which Jackie stood looking awkward and shy, hands clasped behind his back. “He’s not hungry and he’s a bigger boy than you are.”

Caroline watched a tear begin to swell in Jason’s right eye. Why couldn’t the kid just play the game and get it over with?

“At least you’re not cold,” said Caroline’s father, joining them. “What about the millions of children all over the world right now who are cold as well as hungry?”

“At least he has a house and a

family,” said Caroline’s mother to Caroline’s father.

“Unlike several of our guests today.”

“And he has nice new boots,” said Caroline’s father to Caroline’s mother. “What about children in Kentucky who are barefoot at this very moment? Up in the snowy mountains.”

Caroline’s parents studied Jason, perplexed.

He jumped up, raced to the front door, flung it open, and dashed out.

“What in the world?” said Caroline’s mother.

Caroline knew she should do something, but she couldn’t think what. She was in the grip of an overwhelming inertia. All she wanted was to stretch out face down on the Route

carpet and let events wash over her like waves over flotsam at high tide. Instead, she unfolded herself and stood up, as though in slow motion. She went out the door and glanced around the yard in the light from the colored Christmas bulbs over the door. She trotted around the house, materinstincts on automatic pilot. No Jason. God, her parents must be thinking she’d reared little barbarians.

When she returned for her coat, the room was silent, the guests looking at each other and straining forward in their seats. Bertha had even stopped knitting.

“He’s gone,” said Caroline. “Jackie, please help me.”

They searched the neighborhood for fifteen minutes, calling for him into the dark. Damn kid. Why did he have to be so melodraWhy couldn’t he just do as he was supposed to, be quiet and polite and sing carols until time for bed? Finally they climbed in the Subaru and drove toward Cleveland Circle.

She was getting really worried. The terror she used to feel as a young girl when she last track of Howard or Tommy was setting in. Anything could have happened to him. Cities were full of creeps.

Jason was so young and vulnerable. Goddam it, where was he?

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A mile away they found Jason, shivering by a lamppost, shoeless, coatless, sucking a thumb.

Caroline got out and hugged him. Then she squelched a wish to hit him for terrifying her.

As he climbed in the car, he asked, “Mommy, can we go back to our own house now? Grandpa and Grandma don’t like me.”

Caroline said nothing.

The route back to her parents’ house took them past her old high school again. Caroline glanced at the darkened hulking old building feeling dread. When she led Jason into the house, she was aware her parents were studying him critically. He was an ill-mannered little boy, and it was all her fault.

“What was that all about?” asked Caroline’s father of the sniffling Jason as Caroline rubbed his frozen toes. All Caroline wanted was to be alone in bed, lying as still as possible. A grave would be even better. She eyed a doorway and pictured herself hanging silently in it-from a noose.

Caroline sat up in the spool bed from her girlhood, suddenly wide awake, flesh burning.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to recall what she’d been dreaming. Something about rowing in a leaking boat with Jackie and Jason in an effort to escape a nuclear fireball. The sun was white hot, and the water still as glass. They reached a beach, but every time the boat landed, a man in an ill-fitting army uniform pushed them back out to sea and threatened to split the hull with a bloody ax.

Wiping the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand, she tried to quell her anxiety. She used to lie in this bed and cover herself with Pink Blanky for protection. But where was her pink blanket when she really needed it? She was definitely losing it. She tried to rememwhere she’d put Hannah’s phone number. But she couldn’t call in the middle of the night. But by daybreak she wouldn’t need to call because either she’d feel better, or she’d have killed herself.

She tiptoed into Howard’s old room to be sure Jackie and Jason were still breathing. Kissing them, she inhaled their healthy boy smells. How often had she put everyone else’s interests ahead of theirs, she wondered. Leaving them long hours with unfamiliar baby-sitters

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while she worked late. Ignoring their requests for time and attention so she could save the world. Slaving for suffering humanity while her own sons suffered.

She’d done the same to Diana-worked late, canceled dates, rushed out in the middle of intimate dinners, expecting her to understand that patients’ needs came first because she and Diana were blessed with such a rich love.

But maybe Diana hadn’t understood. Maybe that was why she’d withdrawn. Maybe that’s why she called Caroline a taker. Maybe Suzanne

put Diana ahead of sufhumanity. Caroline was a lousy mother, and an even worse lover. Diana was right to have left her. Her stomach clenched rhythmically like labor pains.

She remembered Hannah’s saying she was kind and gentle. But what did Hannah know? That was what she was being paid to say.

Climbing back into her bed, she struggled to picture Hannah, her quiet strength and composure. Her calm face, graying hair, and blue eyes. She gave an exaggerated version of Hannah’s shrug.

It had worked last weekend to banish the woman miscarrying in the motel room. If she tried, she could rid herself of that vision of little Jason, barefoot and coatless, shivering all alone in the dark. She shrugged several more times, searching desperately for the state of mind that went with such a gesture.

Hannah’s feet hit the carpet next to Arthur’s and her four-poster bed. Grabbing her throat, she ran for the bedroom door. By the time she reached the living room, she was fully awake and able to stop herself from flinging open the door to Simon’s old room to shake him awake, as she had from time to time when he was a teenager. At least if storm troopers arrived to carry him off, he’d think it was just his crazy mother having her bad dream again. She remembered that Simon wasn’t even home. He and Joanna had come out on Christmas Day but had returned to their apartments in town after a turkey dinner.

Hannah sank into the leather couch and lit a cigarette with tremhands. Drawing the smoke deep into her lungs, she closed her eyes and tried to relax into the cushions, which felt icy through her nightgown.

The dream came less often, but no less convincingly. In it, she awoke with a band of pain around her forehead. She staggered to the bathroom and vomited.

On her way back to bed, thinking she had 8u, she checked the children, as she had since they were infants, to be sure they were breathing. And Nigel and Mona weren’t. Their faces were cold to her frantic fingertips, and slightly blue in the moonlight. In disbelief she raced around throwing open windows. As frigid air howled through the house, she fainted. When she came to, she vomited on the Oriental carpet in the living room. She crawled to the phone, called the operator, and then passed out again.

She drew on her cigarette and exhaled. Slow suicide, these cigarettes. But smoking them, she could at least control her intake of poisonous fumes and die at her own chosen rate.

The wind swirling off the lake was rattling the storm windows. She could hear waves slapping the gray rocks along the shoreline. She inhaled the fresh scent of the balsam tree in the corner, which was also dying quietly.

The town rescue squad arrived that night and rushed them to the emergency room at Lloyd Harris. From which only three of the five emerged on foot. A freak accident. Impassible, the furnace dealer said. An east wind had driven the exhaust down the chimney. The rescue squad left the door unlocked, and before Arthur could get home from his business trip to Des Moines, the antiques were stolen. She felt sure, life being the ongoing delight it was, one day in someone’s house she’d look into a corner and see her pine cupboard.

She could have-what? She began to review her responses in obsessive detail, trying to see how she might have prevented the outcome. She should have smelled the exhaust, should have gotten up sooner, should have had the furnace checked out for this possibility.

How had she brought this on? What crime was she being punished for? She’d broken up Arthur’s first marriage. Mono and Nigel were a result of the breakup. Therefore, they had to be taken away from her ….

She knew this was crazy, what clients came to her about. There had been a time when she’d have picked up the phone and called someone, as she now suggested clients do with her, had there been anyone to call. But she quickly realized she was stuck with this horror. Even Arthur-as much as he mourned the children, as often as he comforted her in the numb months that followed-hadn’t been there that night. Her friends and colleagues looked at her as though she were the Ancient Mariner, a rotting albatross cradled in her arms. When she tried to speak matter-of-factly of the accident, they looked embaror pitying. Maggie came closest to hearing her out, poking at the wounds in her office at her house on Lake Glass. She forced Hannah to rehearse the events of that night time after time as though Hannah were a soldier with shell shock.

“Describe what they looked like,” insisted Maggie from her tapestry-covered wing chair, thick glasses concealing her eyes. “How did their skin feel when you touched them?”

“What are you-some kind of bloody ghoul?”

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“Tell me again about crawling to the phone, Hannah.”

“No! I won’t! Goddam you, Maggie!” At one point Hannah hurled the box of Kleenex at Maggie, who caught it and threw it back.

Once it was over, some of the horror had been depleted. But even Maggie had been ad libbing.

Her three children were alive and well, called every week and came to visit on holidays.

Having no one to call wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling to Hannah. In the Hampstead house, with her mother in the grave and her father in Trinidad, she often woke from bad dreams and padded into her grandroom to watch the old lady snore in her black eyeshade and ear plugs, longing to wake her up but afraid to. Loss and abandonment, guilt and terror. The same primal atmosphere her clients inhabProbably that was why she was such a good therapist.

Listening to the crashing waves, she tried to switch off her emotions. It was easier to silence them when she had to in order to perform her job. So she began to run through her clients from the previous week. Ed, the engineering student, had found himself an older woman, since his campaign to seduce Hannah had failed. He was flaunting it, yawning and sprawling open-legged on the couch with coy remarks about how little sleep he was getting.

Hannah felt her tense mouth soften into the beginnings of a smile. Caroline was with her parents in Boston.

She hadn’t phoned, so she must be getting along all right. Those parents of hers. To have a daughter like that and not dote on her. Her smile turned bitter as she realized Mona would have been only a few years younger than Carohad she lived. Then she reminded herself that therapy was like a trial with only one witness. Caroline’s parents’ versions of what had gone on in that household would be entirely different, from Caroline’s and from each other’s. And they’d all be telling the truth-each his or her own individual truth. Hannah had been outraged the entire time Joanna was doing therapy by the scenario Joanna constructed from their shared past, which involved negligence Hannah had no memory of. Finally she accepted that this was how Joanna needed to make her break from home.

Well, there wasn’t any such thing as an adequate parent anyway. It was an impossible job. If their parents had been present, clients felt WOMEN

suffocated. If absent, clients felt deserted.

How could one flawed mortal protect another from all the ghastly things this world dished out? She hadn’t been able to protect Mona and Nigel. Even if you could protect your children, you’d probably be doing them a disservice. She had a feeling this world wasn’t meant to be settled into like a comfortable old sofa; it was meant to be experienced, then discarded like an empty tin can.

She wondered if her clients had any idea how much she needed to see them become healthy happy adults, needed to know she was doing everything she could to help this happen. The process had been interwith Nigel and Mona, leaving her with all these thwarted instincts. It was like being pregnant with a dead fetus.

Somehow you had to get it out. She’d tried to get pregnant shortly after that awful night, with the pathetic notion of replacing the irreplaceable, but it hadn’t worked. So she’d gotten her degrees and devoted herself to rearing other people’s grown children.