Other Women (2 page)

Except ones like smashing the taillight of her new Mercury in the parking lot that morning. She inquired into the phone about the cost of replacing it. She’d backed into Jonathan’s Scout while trying to quell the irritation she felt on days when a new client was scheduled. It was a strictly mechanical thing: her routine was being disrupted by an unpredictable element. But each time the irritation felt real and personal, and this morning she’d been feeling impatient with the timidity of this woman’s voice on the phone. Was she going to be one of those women who asked to be stepped on, and then complained that there were boot prints on her back?

She glanced at Caroline. Tall and slim. A graying Afro. Nice tan. From skiing or from a trip south? A lady of leisure? We should all be

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so lucky. Don’t be a martyour, she reminded herself. You like your work, apart from not liking to starve in the streets. Navy blue parka and Frye boots, faded jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. A tiny ivory sea gull on a gold chain at her throat. Those clothes are too youthful for her. She looks like a student, but she must be thirty-five.

Where is she stuck? By what? Please not another wilted flower child. She’d already seen one that morning-Chip, a cross between Che Guevara and Peter Pan, a bearded, overalled refugee from the sixties who clutched his tattered idealism around himself like hobo rags. In a permanent funk that the world hadn’t improved in the last fifteen years just because he wanted it to. He seemed to feel he couldn’t get his own house in order until he’d tidied up everyone else’s.

The woman was standing with her hands on her hips, her weight on one leg. An athlete. Probably a lesbian. I wonder how long it will take her to tell me. I wonder if she knows.

Hannah’s eyes registered information like a mother hen scanning the skies for a hawk. This need of hers to know what was going on at all times was awesome in its voracity. But she’d been taken by surprise too often. Four years old and your mother dies of typhoid. Abandoned by your father at five.

Nineteen, and your husband is killed in battle.

Two children dead in their beds from carbon monoxide.

No more surprises in her life if she could help it. Which she knew she couldn’t.

Caroline felt impaled by the woman’s blue eyes. Their expression wasn’t unkind, just relentless. Not unlike her voice aver the phone last week. A clipped British accent. This woman didn’t mess around. She had a big reputation around town. Several nurses she and Diana worked with thought Hannah Burke was Wonder Woman. But Caroline had been expecting a mix of Mary Poppins and Aunt Jemima, not a gray-haired housewife in a polyester pants suit with a gaze like a police interrogator.

I can always split, Caroline assured herself. One lousy hour, and I walk out her door forever. Let her refer to herself just once as a healer, and I’m off like a shot. Last week at the Wellness Clinic, in the converted tannery at the top of town, a bearded man in a “Love Me-OTHER

I’m Italian” T-shirt had gazed at her with a meaningful smile: “I hear you, Caroline. Thank you for sharing with me. I feel really good about this hour.

How has it been for you?”

Please God, get me out of here, she’d prayed.

And God had. Only to land her here with this woman with eyes like blue laser beams, who’d just lit her second cigarette, a thin brown brand. She was coughing like someone auditioning for a black lung commercial. So apparently she didn’t have it all together either. Besides, she’s short, Caroline reflected. I can handle her.

Alarm bells went off in her head. This was what she’d told herself when she first met Arlene, and Diana, and Jackson, and David Michael. That she needed to reassure herself indicated she was in some doubt. And in fact she hadn’t “handled” the others-each had disrupted her life in a major way.

Caroline followed Hannah down a shadowy corridor past several closed doors. On Hannah’s door was a sign that read, “Thank you for shutting up while I smoke.” Caroline plopped down on a brown tweed couch, glancing around at piles of books and papers on the desk and bookshelves. Photos of several towheaded children with missing teeth were pinned to a cork bulletin board along with a scramble of greeting cards, memos, children’s crayon drawings, pictures torn from magazines. Objects hung on the white walls-a primitive painting of a creepy-looking little demon or something, an abstract black-and-white photograph. The ferns hanging in the windows, framed by elaborate Victorian molding and orange plaid curtains, looked limp and pale. If Bach stimulated plant growth, would witnessing misery all day stunt them? Caroline stifled her need to offer to take them home, set them in the sun, and feed them fish emulsion.

Hannah sat down in a padded metal desk chair and put her feet up on a rush footstool. Her hands hung off the chair arms, two fingers holding a brown cigarette. Caroline knew it would be inappropriate to describe what smoking was doing to her lungs, how smokers staggered into the ER coughing blood.

“So tell me why you’re here.”

Presumably the same reason anyone’s ever here, Caroline thought. The world’s a mess, and I want to be dead. “Well, I’ve been depressed a lot.” She wondered how to convey the atmosphere inside her head.

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The morning after Diana decided they should stop being lovers, she’d woken at dawn, alone in her double bed, and watched the mother-ofsky, streaked with angry red.

And thought about the infected flesh of a baby girl in the ER the previous day, whose father had been burning her with cigarettes. After cleaning and binding the angry wounds, she suggested other methods for getting the baby to stop crying, and the father stomped out, insulted.

Caroline had spent sevnights since

dreaming of a vast ice field, with the severed limbs of little children frozen beneath the surface. Last week the ice field had been littered with shattered human heads. She was falling to pieces. She’d lost so much weight that bones were appearing she’d never known she possessed.

Wimp! she snapped at herself. War, starvation, nuclear weapons, torture. Only an idiot wouldn’t be depressed in a world like this. Whenever she or her brothers whined as kids, their mother would drive them down to the Salvation Army in Dorchester. As they watched the hungry and homeless wander in, she’d inquire, “And you think you’ve got problems?”

Hannah drew on her cigarette and watched the struggle begin-between a new client’s wish to trust her and maybe get some help; and fear of getting hurt, based on past experience. Caroline was sitting with her legs crossed and her arms folded across her chest. She wasn’t about to let anybody in.

“What are your depressions like?” asked Hannah.

Caroline studied Hannah, who was exhaling a shroud of smoke. If you’d seen one depression, hadn’t you seen them all? Was she paying good money just to educate this expert on depression? “I have bad dreams. I wake up sweating in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. I have a grinding feeling in my stomach most of the time. I cry over dumb things. I snap at the people I care about.

I lie face down on the floor and can’t move.

I feel like a pustule somebody ought to pop.” She gazed out the window opposite her, past the ailing ferns to the gray lake. Maybe that guy in waders was still walking around down there somewhere. The temptation to join him in his stroll was strong.

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Yup, thought Hannah, sounds like the big D.

“Tell me about your family when you were a baby.”

Caroline frowned. Apparently she hadn’t conveyed how awful she felt. How could you, anyway? Either someone knew what you were talking about, or she didn’t. Evidently Hannah Burke didn’t, or she wouldn’t react so blandly. Family? If she wanted to wallow in all that Freudian shit, she’d have gone to a psychoanalyst. Her misery had to do with a life sentence in this hellhole of a world. She began talking in a monotone about being born during World War II, about her father’s departure for the South Pacific and capture by the Japanese, about her mother’s work for the Red Cross.

Hannah felt herself flip the switch that, on her good days, allowed her to listen without relating what was said to herself. She stripped away the details of Caroline’s early experiences as though shucking corn, focusing on the ear, not the individual kernels. Upheaval, an absent father, a remote anxious overextended mother, younger siblings whom Caroline tried to mother, a succession of melancholy maids. Not an unfamiliar story for Caroline’s class and generation.

Caroline had dropped her stance of polite boredom and was struggling to remember what she’d been told about those three years when her father had been halfway around the world in battle and POW camps.

“dis

. . my mother always says what a good baby I was during the day. I’d sit so still in the grass that bees would crawl around my fingers, inspecting the crumbs from my cookies but never stinging. She’d put me in a jump seat, suspended from a doorjamb, and I’d just hang there, holding my pink blanket and sucking my thumb. But in the middle of the night I’d scream bloody murder.”

Caroline paused to watch the woman watching her with those icy blue eyes. In her dark blue polyester pants suit, she looked fresh off the contract bridge circuit. Fuck this

self-indulgent shit, Caroline thought. Millions of people starving out there, and I’m blathering to some foreigner because I feel a little down. What does my playpen behavior have to do with the resurgence of fascism in western Europe? This woman is too

respectable. She wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about if I said, “I don’t like this world. I don’t want to lit into it better. I just want to be more comfortable with not fitting in.”

“I’m a lesbian,” Caroline announced, sounding more certain than

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she felt, since things with Diana hadn’t worked out any better than with Jackson or David Michael.

Hannah shrugged. Oh yes, she thought, and what did you have for breakfast? All of a sudden she recalled where she’d seen Caroline: on TV and in the local papers, lobbying for abortion rights at the state legislature a few years back. She’d been impressive standing on the capitol steps in Concord with the sun in her eyes, confronting the taunts of her opponents with humor and conviction.

“Would that be a problem for you?” Caroline asked. Surely someone so respectable would be appalled to be trapped every week with a living breathing queer.

Is it a problem for you, wondered Hannah, pursing her lips and shaking her head no. Homosexuals seemed to feel this revelation was a big deal.

Probably it was for them. Probably it had gotten each of them rejected several times.

“How old do you feel?” asked Hannah. She’d just pictured Caroas a frightened infant, tapping into the horrors loose in a world at war, and the anxieties loose in her fatherless household; being handed over to indifferent maids; trying to be still and quiet and “good” so that somebody would care for her.

Hannah remembered her own babies, gazing up from her swollen breasts with dark blue eyes, reaching out to clasp her little linger with tiny pink hands, smiling toothlessly, wanting only to adore and to be adored.

The babies who weren’t able to charm someone into falling in love with them-she saw them as adults all day long in this office. At least her own babies had never had that particular problem, however else she’d failed them later on.

Hannah lit another cigarette and switched off her emotions, glancout the window beside the couch to the smashed taillight on her new Mercury. It felt like the time Simon knocked out Nigel’s front baby tooth during a fight over a tricycle, and Hannah had had to accept that the world of disintegration had claimed her perfect little bundle. “Maintenance,” her husband, Arthur, often insisted. “Life is nothing but maintenance.”

Jonathan’s Scout had escaped without a scratch.

An unfamiliar red Subaru station wagon with a “Club Sandwiches Not Seals” bumper sticker sat beside her Mercury.

Caroline was gazing at Hannah, disconcerted.

Horror at her perversion, yes. Outrage, fear, curiosity. But not indifference. She tried OTHER

to consider her age. “I feel like a seventeen-year-old, trapped in a decaying thirty-five-yearold body.”

Hannah studied Caroline, who clutched upper arms with opposite hands. Quiet, still, and good.

Witty and self-effacing. Obedient and entertaining.

These would be her ploys. The aggression and rage had gone underground, where they could blast a hole to China.

“Try eleven, going on twelve.” She knew she couldn’t get away with telling Caroline she was probably eighteen months old emotionally.

Though not on the capitol steps in Concord. There she’d been every bit of thirty. These two aspects cohabited. The trick was to introduce them to each other.

Caroline frowned. Eleven? For this I’m paying thirty-five dollars an hour? Where does this bridgeplaying chick get off? These goddam surburban housewives with their boring little split-level lives. Caroline knew all about that scene-the sailing yachts on the lake, the cocktail party flirtations, the attention devoted to matching flower arrangements to place mats, the play groups and car pool and coffee klatsches. She’d done that trip with Jackson in Newton for eight years.

And she’d ended up immobile, face down on the plush rose-colored living-room carpet, agonizing over the corruption of such a life when American tanks were rolling through Cambodian jungles. Jackie and Jason pulled her hair, poked Tinker Toys in her ears, and rode horsey on her back, but she was too busy picturing American helicopters napalming Vietnamese children to respond to her own.

“Glad you came?” asked Hannah with a smile. She had to estabwho was running this show if the show was to happen at all. On the capitol steps Caroline could be in charge, but in this office Hannah had to be. Someone about to explore a swamp needed to know her scout had a general idea where the alligators hid out, or she’d be too terrified even to begin.

Hannah realized she had to get either a smile or a yes pretty soon, or Caroline wouldn’t return. Usually she didn’t care if they returned, but she was challenged by Caroline’s timid truculence. It reminded her of her own stance at the same age, after the children had died, when she’d shake her fist at the universe and defy it to yield up some meaning. But she now knew that it simply wasn’t necessary to live with Caroline’s current level of misery.