Other Women (18 page)

Lately she’d begun to wonder how much longer it would take to work through this. Eventually she’d move on. But to what? Probably to an aluminum walker.

Sucking on her cigarette, she watched the tip flare and sputter in the dark. The wind whined through the cedars along the cliff. She was shivering.

Squashing out the cigarette, she stood up and walked to the greenhouse window. The cold had etched an icy forest of preferns on the panes. The pattern stood out in the moonlight like the rickshaw-pulling coolie on the lantern globe in that house on the Australian sheep station so many years earlier.

Sitting on her mothlap playing with her gold wedding band, Hannah used to watch moths flutter around the candle flame that illuminated the coolie, watch them immolate themselves with a sickening odor. Her mother, Maggie, Mona and Nigel … Grief

sliced through her like a scalpel.

Taking a trembling breath, she pressed her fingertips to the glass. If there was a design to frost crystals on window panes, she reminded herself resolutely, who was she to say there was none to human events, even if the shape wasn’t always detectable in the gloom?

Back in bed she wrapped herself around sleeping Arthur and waited for morning, pleased with herself for staving off the despair. Sometimes it took a pitcher of martinis and a nice slow scre tilde OTHER

Oh my God, thought Hannah as she

looked at Caroline’s face in the waiting room.

Numb and puffy, eyes squinting with pain. Back to square one. As they walked down the shadowy corridor, Caroline carrying her parka, Hannah observed the tightness in Caroline’s shoulbeneath her white uniform top and geared up for combat with Caroline’s devils.

Caroline sat on the couch in silence, examining the tread on her snowmobile boot with the fingers of one hand. From time to time she looked up and opened her mouth, but no words came out.

“Just say anything,” said Hannah. “It doesn’t have to make sense.” They continued to sit in silence.

Hannah was seeing that little baby, hanging motionless in her jump seat, trying to be inoffensive by appearing nonexistent.

Finally Caroline looked up and said, “I’ve lost it. I felt good last week. But it’s gone.”

“You may have lost it, but you can get it back if you decide to.” Hannah realized she was grateful for her own bouts of despair like last night’s, if only to confirm that the techniques she offered clients could work.

“You make it sound as though I enjoy feeling bad.”

“Is that what you hear me saying?”

Caroline didn’t reply. She felt too shitty to play Hannah’s word games today. Added to her despair was a new element: terror, that Hannah would find out Caroline had come to depend on her, sumher image and gestures to feel better when she woke up in an anxious sweat. Hannah would see her neediness and be repulsed. I

know what you want and you can’t have it.

Caroline couldn’t let her know how important she’d become to her. If she kept perfectly still and silent, Hannah wouldn’t be able to tell.

“So what happened in Boston? How did you lose it?”

Caroline sighed and folded her arms across her stomach. “It’s too boring.”

“You don’t look bored. You look like you’re in pain. How do you feel?”

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Caroline looked at Hannah’s blue eyes and felt exhausted, her poker-playing expression slipping like a denture wearer’s upper plate coming unstuck. “Not too good.”

Hannah shrugged, sat back, and lit a cigarette. Okay, feel bad if you insist, kiddo. She waited, watching Caroline sit as motionless as a corpse, concentrating on maintaining her own sense of wellbeing, and willing it to communicate itself to Caroline. Sometimes she thought anything that got said in here was irrelevant. What she really had to offer was an attitude, which a client picked up, if at all, by osmosis.

Studying Caroline’s anguish, she concluded that parents and grown children should make a pact to stay out of each other’s lives. Let the parents retire to Fort Lauderdale and play shuffleboard. Let their children set up households and repeat their parents’

mistakes, until they developed enough understanding of the difficulties of being parents to forgive their own. She didn’t see much of Simon and Joanna anymore, even though they all lived along Lake Glass. They checked in regularly, but not for long.

The tug of the past was too compelling.

Caroline started talking in a monotone about Christmas. Hannah heard another variation on what she already knew about Mother and Dad Kelley.

Therapy reminded her of the bell tower at Christ Chruch, down the street from her grandmother’s house in Hampstead. On weekends carillonneurs rang the changes, their equivalent of piano scales, a slight variation on the basic pattern being introduced every few minutes.

She was left with the image of a humiliated little boy running barefoot through a winter night.

“Do you understand why what happened was so upsetting for you?”

“I was terrified something awful had happened to Jason.”

“And?”

“I thought my parents would think I was a bad mother to have raised such a rude child.”

“And?”

Caroline frowned and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

These sessions were like a TV game show. When Caroline guessed the right answer, she’d hear an inaudible buzzer.

Hannah raised her eyebrows.

“How Jason felt was how I felt as a child in that household?” Caroline heard herself say.

Hannah pursed her lips. Bingo. “Did you?”

Caroline was stunned by what she’d just said. She had a happy privileged childhood.

“Take another look at those photos,” Hannah said.

Caroline sat in silence, gazing out the window to Lake Glass. Hannah felt a twinge of envy. Her clients got to see the lake. She got to see the parking lot. Was this any way to run an office?

“You’re entitled to feel pissed off, you know,” said Hannah. “I would have. Lousy gifts, not enough food, a houseful of loonies.”

“They’re good people.”

“If you say so.” Caroline wouldn’t touch her anger with a ten-foot pole.

“They mean well.”

“But it’s not good enough, is it?” If Caroline wouldn’t get angry at her parents, maybe she’d get angry at Hannah.

“I realized I’ve treated Jackie and Jason like that all these years.”

“Whom did you learn it from?”

“I’ve been a terrible mother. I didn’t defend Jason-not over the gifts, or the food, or the broken game. I was only concerned with whether my parents would see me as a bad mother.”

“Rubbish. You’re doing beautifully.” Rather than face her parents’ imperfections, she was playing up her own. In these regions of the soul, all events were simultaneous: Caroline was at once the infant and the thirty-five-yearold mother.

“How would you know? All you know is what I tell you.”

“My friend, I pass many a delightful hour in here with child abusers. If child abuse is your ambition, I’m afraid you’re a dismal failure. Look, at least your son was able to run out of the house. He didn’t just hang there in his jump seat trying to be good. You must be doing something right.”

Caroline felt a flicker of gratitude.

Hannah always insisted on seeing her failings as virtues. But it was just a technique. Having something to do with that Venus. Her eyes rested on the gray stone statue on the windowsill. She smiled wanly.

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“What’s so funny?” asked Hannah.

Caroline nodded toward the statue. “Her expression is so calm and kind. I think I have Venus envy.”

Hannah gave a startled laugh. A touch of color had returned to Caroline’s cheeks. Still grinning, Hannah asked, “What do you suppose your parents get out of filling their house with loonies?” She knew the answer from observing herself at various times: They got to avoid contact with their own family, and they got to feel sane by comparison. But she wanted to find out how far Caroline had come.

“I wish you’d stop calling them loonies. They’re sad troubled people with nowhere to go.”

Hannah shrugged, pleased Caroline was feeling enough better to get irritated. That corpse imitation was unnerving. “Maybe they should get together and set up a fund for the neglected offspring of servants of humanity. Might give them a sense of purpose.”

Caroline’s face began to twitch. Hannah tried to think of something even more obnoxious. What would it take to get Caroline angry at someone besides herself?

She felt like a banderillero planting darts in a sluggish bull.

“Something I’ve just realized,” said Caroline.

“Maybe it’s not just me who’s crazy. Maybe it’s them too.”

Bravo, called Hannah silently.

“Scapegoats always feel whatever goes wrong is their fault.” She drew on her cigarette and waited to see if Caroline would accept this label.

Caroline blinked. Scapegoat? That didn’t sound right. Those were people who got stoned or crucified or something. The worst that had happened to her was that she hadn’t gotten her fill of turkey.

“When my two children died from carbon monoxide poisoning,” said Hannah, lowering her gaze to a spot on the carpet damp from Caroline’s boots, “there were even a few friends who implied it was my fault. People need to believe in cause and effect.

Random disaster is too scary.” She watched this information sink in.

“Your children died?” Caroline stared at the photos on the bulletin board of the towheaded children with missing teeth and Hannah’s eyes. Jesus.

“A while back. From a faulty exhaust on our furnace.”

“I’m sorry.” Caroline felt suddenly sheepish. She was unloading

her troubles on someone who’d been through something like that?

She remembered the trips to the Salvation Army. You think you’ve got problems?

She glanced at the children on the bulletin board and felt guilty for hating them so much.

“Thank you. But the point is, awful things happen.

You can’t control that. But you can control how you respond.” With a lot of practice and effort, she added silently, remembering her seizure of despair last night, and all the years of numbness and nightmares. Hannah rubbed the bridge of her nose. Then she noticed what she was doing-plagiarizing Caroline’s stress gesture. This modeling process worked both ways. Just as long as she didn’t pick up sodomy with young boys or heroin addiction.

Caroline studied Hannah’s face as though seeing it for the first time-the patina of wrinkles like a piece of fired pottery, the curly gray hair and sharp, clear eyes. If Hannah could get through the death of her children, presumably Caroline could get through a failed dinner party with her parents.

“How do you feel?” Hannah didn’t want to send someone back out on the street for another week feeling as bad as Caroline looked when she came in.

“Better,” said Caroline, realizing it was true.

The funk had lifted like the lid of a coffin. She drew a deep breath, her first in several days.

“And one of these days you won’t even need the example of someone with more to cope with than yourself to feel better.”

Brian ushered Caroline into the Eliots’

house, a low-slung natural wood structure with lots of glass, furnished with what looked like the latest in dental chairs. Chrome gleamed in lights that seemed too bright. Sitting on a hill overlooking Lake Glass, the house could have been featured in

House Beautiful.

Randy Eliot owned the local Peugeot dealership out on the highway next to Lake Glass Lanes.

For Christmas his wife, Connie, had given him silicone implants in her breasts. Connie wore a low-cut red satin gown that served up her amplified breasts like cheese balls. Caroline tried not to stare at them as Connie shook her hand and took her coat.

Caroline had been anxious all day over what to wear and how to act. It had been years since she’d been to a party involving anything other than women in Levi’s and running shoes. In the back of her closet she found an emerald-green velvet cocktail dress from her days with Jackson, so outmoded it was just coming back into style. She couldn’t imagine how she’d had the foresight to save it.

Wedging herself into it, she hoped her body would conform to its coverings and replicate proper dinner party behavior.

Brian brought her a Scotch and water, and she clinked the ice cubes in her glass and nodded as he discussed the fuel ratio in the carburetor of the new model Peugeot with Randy Eliot and a NationInsurance man in a bow tie named Curtis.

Randy, Curtis, and Brian were evidently in a racquetball league together, and they moved on from Peugeots to three-wall serves.

A tall man in a red blazer with an elaborate college crest on the

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packet walked up to Caroline and murmured in her ear, “Smashing dress.” A button on his lapel read “Beer Drinkers Get More Head.”

“Thanks.”

“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

Probably I gave you an enema the last time you were in the hospital, thought Caroline. “Have you?”

“I’ve got it.” He was studying her cleavage thoughtfully. “Weren’t you in the finals of that tennis tournament at the club last summer?”

“No.” Was this for real, or was it a come-on? She simply couldn’t remember how to play these games. She felt as out of it as if she’d been dumped in Tibet without a translator.

“I could have sworn it was you. In the doubles semifinals with Betsy Burns.”

“Nope.”

“I haven’t been able to take my eyes off you since you walked in the room,” he said in a low voice with a guilty glance in Randy’s direction.

“Who, me? Look, would you excuse me? I have to find the … ah, powder room.” Did this man know there was a famine in Chad? That a woman had been carried into the ER last night with the initials of the six men who’d raped her carved on her thighs?

“I love your house,” Caroline told Connie as they stood beside a chrome and glass table spearing shrimp on toothpicks.

“Thank you. How do you know Brian?”

“I work with him at the hospital.” Caroline was concentrating on looking directly into Connie’s eyes and ignoring the reports of her peripheral vision on Randy’s Christmas gifts, which were swelling out of Connie’s red satin bodice.