Other Women (22 page)

Diana hesitated. “Do you think we should?”

“Haven’t we gone cold turkey long enough?”

Caroline sat down in the gray plaid easy chair beside the phone table and took a sip of wine.

“God, I couldn’t bear it if we got back into all that old junk again.”

“Me either. But let’s assume we won’t.”

They’d gone from trying to do everything for each other to doing nothing. Surely there was some happy middle ground. They hadn’t had a meal together in weeks.

“All right. I’ll come down there. But only if I can bring the salad.”

“You’re on, babe.”

The boys and Sharon dipped their rye bread in the soup, making a swamp of the rust-colored homespun tablecloth Caroline had woven when she was living with David Michael in the Somerville commune.

Brian’s yellow rose sat in its specimen bottle in the middle of the table,

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flanked by two beeswax candles. Diana was carefully avoiding acknowledging its existence.

“There’s chocolate chip ice cream in my freezer,” Diana told the children. She wore a gray sweat suit and green terry cloth headband, just back from losing to Suzanne at racquetball.

Her red hair was spiky from dried sweat.

“Hey neat!” said Jason. They raced upstairs with the thundering of a small earthquake.

“Anything to get them in a different room from me,”

said Diana, pushing back her chair and stretching out her legs.

“Jesus,” said Caroline, putting her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand. “It’s like living with a dairy herd.”

Diana smiled sourly. “You’re in a good mood.

I bet you saw Hannah today?”

“Correct.” Caroline ignored the unpleasant edge to Diana’s voice. “Want some coffee?”

“I’ll make it.” Diana got up.

“I’ll make it. You’re the guest.”

“I thought we were going to give this routine a miss.”

“All right, you make it.” Caroline sank back into her ladderback chair.

“So what’s new, stranger?” Diana measured coffee beans.

“Report cards. Did you see them?”

“Yeah, pretty dismal. But if we ground them, we’re stuck with them underfoot more than ever.”

Caroline smiled. “How come nobody ever tells you what parenthood is like beforehand?”

“The species would go to extinction.” Diana was grinding the beans in the hand grinder.

“Hannah and I talked about Rorkie today, my friend from high school.” The kettle began whistling like a factory at high noon.

“Never heard of her,” said Diana, pouring water into the filter.

“She’d rejected me by the time I met you.”

“Rejected you?” Diana handed her a tan mug with cats on it.

“Yeah, my Christmas card was too Protestant, so she and her friends rolled my yard with toilet paper.”

Diana choked on her coffee. Caroline grinned.

But she hadn’t

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been amused that morning she looked out her bedroom window at the toilet paper woven through the budding elm trees. Spelled out in toilet paper on the front lawn was

CITIZENSHIT AWARD.

“Rorkie rolled Caroline!” buzzed through the halls at school. Caroline convinced the nurse she was sick. She walked home and spent the afternoon unthe toilet paper, like popcorn chains from Christmas trees. It felt like the end of the world. Only gradually did she realize the world didn’t end so easily.

“Where do you think she is now?” Diana propped her chin on her fist and gazed at Caroline with her green eyes.

“She’s probably had twelve children and a hysterectomy.”

“Maybe she runs a toilet paper concession for Boston rest rooms.”

“Let’s hope she’s profoundly unhappy.” It sounded as though Sharon were beating Jason’s head on the shag carpet upstairs. He was screaming epithets Caroline had never even heard of.

“How could someone like that be happy? Imagine the kind of mind that gets off on tormenting people.”

“Yeah. I guess viciousness is its own punishment.” Caroline folded her arms across her stomach, remembering Rorkie in study hall one afternoon with a huge purple bruise along one jaw.

Caroline passed her a note asking, “What happened to your face?” Rorkie’s reply read, “My father hit me with a Four Roses bottle.”

After a while Caroline passed her a note that said, “I’m really sorry.” Rorkie’s reply said, “I’m used to it.” Applying Hannah’s formula, Caroline realized Rorkie treated her classmates as she herself had been treated.

“I’m starting to feel it’s my fault because I was so privileged and she wasn’t,” said Caroline.

“That’s the most convoluted logic I’ve ever heard.

You must be a real challenge for Hannah.”

“Probably.” There was that strained timbre to Diana’s voice again. Diana said she was jealous because Hannah cheered Caroline up. But surely Diana couldn’t want her to stay miserable just so she wouldn’t have to feel jealous? Caroline started wondering what Hannah did think of her-that she was a nut?

Did Hannah like her as a person, or was she just doing her job?

“Do you remember the first time we ever saw each other?” asked Diana, as Caroline got up to pour more coffee.

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“Yeah, we were watching Arlene give a bed bath, weren’t we? And she said if a male patient got an erection, to hit it with a spoon.” Caroline chuckled, picturing Arlene, large and solid like the leg of an elephant, a thick braid of hair wound into a bun that sat on her head like a cow pile.

“Yes, and you and I burst out laughing, and everyone else looked at us like we were criminals.”

Caroline remembered watching Diana throw back her red head, close her green eyes, and give a husky laugh. And Caroline knew she wanted to be her friend. After class each lingered in the corridor, trying to engineer an encounter. They went for lunch, and Caroline spilled her coffee on the Formica table in the cafeteria, in amusement over the bed bath. Diana held a bunch of green seedless grapes in one hand like a softball. From time to time, she raised the bunch to her mouth and took a grape between her lips. Caroline was enchanted, never having seen grapes eaten like that. “I probably loved you right from that lunch.”

“Well, it was mutual. But you were besotted with Arlene, don’t forget. You spent most of your spare time waxing her car, as I recall.”

A door upstairs slammed so hard the whole cabin shook. Jason screamed, “I’m telling Mommy!”

“Please don’t,” Caroline said, closing her eyes in prayer. She and Diana exchanged long-suffering glances. What would she have done all these years without Diana as co-mother?

“I was besotted with Arlene. But in a different way than with youfor one thing, Arlene didn’t laugh much.”

“She sure didn’t. “Ladies, you have a mission.” Remember? But I used to be terribly jealous. Of you both probably.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have bothered.” Caroline was picturing Arlene, her bulk and her bun, her grim mouth opening like a knife puncture to announce in a broad Boston Irish accent, “Ladies, you have a mission: to relieve human suffering. My mission is to show you how.” Caroline floated through the days of emptying bedpans, changdressings, making beds, on wings of purpose: If she herself survived the holocausts, she’d be one of the few citizens of the postnuclear world with the skills to save others. She’d salve their burns, stitch

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their gashes, wipe sweat off their brows as they perished of radiation sickness.

Then she remembered the last time she ever talked with Arlene, in a deli over a pastrami sandwich.

Arlene said, “I don’t know what you want from me, Caroline, but you’ll have to find it somewhere else. I’m a very busy woman.”

Caroline’s warm feelings from dinner with Diana began to drain away like a jaw going numb from Novocaine.

“I wonder what she’s up to now,” said Diana, green eyes finally settling like two flies on Brian’s yellow rose.

“God knows. Probably still molding young missionaries.”

“You sound bitter.”

“I don’t mean to. She was good to me. For as long as it lasted.” Caroline studied her hands. Her nails needed clipping. No, they didn’t. She clipped them so she wouldn’t hurt Diana during lovemaking. But they weren’t doing that anymore. She could grow them long as letter openers. The numbness spread across her face. Her stomach clenched into a fist.

It’s over, Caroline reminded herself. Like Marsha’s smile, like Rorkie’s toilet paper, Arlene was long gone. Lovemaking with Diana was finished.

Yet according to Hannah, she used these painful memto feel lousy in the present. Resolutely she dismissed Arlene in her white stockings and bulging white uniform, and Diana naked on her back in bed reaching out for Caroline. She summoned instead the image from that afternoon of Hannah’s eyes locking with her own in mutual amusement. She smiled faintly, the numbness halting its march down her neck toward her shoulders. Like a dozing driver trying to wake herself, she shook her head abruptly.

“What’s so funny?” asked Diana.

“This afternoon I was complaining to Hannah about not being on the basketball team in high school. She said, “It’s not too late to be a star. Why don’t you hire a lot of short people?”’ his

Diana smiled. “Funny lady.”

“Did I tell you two of her kids died in their beds from carbon monoxide poisoning?”

“God, how dreadful.” Diana peeled a piece of wax from a candle

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and melted it in the flame. “I don’t know how a mother would survive that.”

There was a loud crash and the sound of running feet upstairs. “Try me,” muttered Caroline.

“You’re awful.” Diana tried not to smile. She nodded toward Brian’s rose. “Is she pushing you to date men?”

Caroline looked at Diana. “She doesn’t push me to do anything. Except to feel better.”

“Are you in love with her yet?”

Caroline said nothing, holding her face blank.

“Look, I’ve done therapy. I know how it works.

You fall in love with the therapist and copy her every twitch.”

“What’s it to you anyway? I thought we weren’t having this kind of relationship anymore. I thought you had a new child bride.” She slammed down her cat mug harder than she intended, sloshing coffee onto the rust tablecloth.

Diana lowered her eyes, then tried to shrug.

“Well, it’s nothing to me really. I just hate to see you leading that poor man on. After all, I’ve been to bed with you, Caroline. And you’re no

heterosexual.”

“I’m sure Brian would appreciate your sudden concern.” Caroline tilted a candle to let wax dribble down the side.

“Now you’re getting sarcastic. But it’s something to think about. Because you’re not being fair to him. You’re just using him while you try to parody Hannah.”

Diana tipped her own candle and gathered the hot wax into a little ball. “What do you see in him anyway?”

“He’s a nice man, Diana. He’s

gentle, thoughtful, attractive.”

Diana looked at her ironically. “He’s a man, isn’t he?”

Caroline lowered her head, arms spread out on the rust tablecloth. “It’s easier, Diana. I’m getting older. I’m not sure I can take the strain of defying society anymore.” Her voice was tired.

“It’s easier to deny your true self? Is that what Hannah’s teaching you?”

“Who says my true self is queer?” Caroline looked up, eyes narrowed with pain.

Diana glared at her. “Look, babe, you got me into this.”

“Yeah, and you took a lot of persuading, too.”

Glaring back, Caroline recalled the first time they made love-on the shag carpet in

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Diana’s living room, late at night after two bottles of wine, after weeks of struggling to keep their hands off each other. In the morning we can blame it on the wine, Caroline remembered thinking as she buried her tongue in Diana, and felt Diana’s hands lock around her head, refusing to let her reconsider. But Diana was right. She’d been more experienced. She probably did have some kind of responsibility. But fuck it, Diana was on her own now.

“You know,” said Caroline, “every time you use Hannah’s name there’s this tensic i in your voice.

I keep wondering if you really want me to feel better.”

There was a long silence, broken only by Jackie’s imitation of a submachine gun upstairs. Diana had collected more wax and was molding it into globular shapes. She looked up, green eyes flashing in the candlelight. “Can’t you see I’m scared?”

“What of?”

“If Hannah helps you see what a neat woman you are, why would you want to be with me?” Her face looked haggard in the candlelight.

Caroline felt a rush of emotion. “Because I love you, Diana.” They looked into each other’s eyes as intently as during lovemaking. Diana reached over with both hands and took one of Caroline’s.

“You can’t believe I’d be with you unless I needed you?” Caroline asked.

Diana slowly shook her head no.

“That’s a nurse for you,” Caroline said softly, adding her other hand to the heap on the table.

“Diana, do you think we’ll be lovers again?”

Diana looked startled. “Nothing could surprise me about us. We’ve been through every permutation in the book.”

“Well, I want us to be,” said Caroline.

“I’m tired of these games.” There. She’d said it.

She felt her shoulders tighten. I

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

“That makes the vote two to zero.” Diana looked pleased. “Now if our brains would just shut up and let our bodies do what they’re so good at.” She added, “Please don’t give up on me, darling.

This thing with Suzanne will pass.”

“I’d give up on you if I could,” Caroline said, looking into the candle flame. “But apparently you’re stuck with me.”

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“Good. his

“For whom?” She looked at Diana with sudden belligerence.

“Look, you’ve got Hannah to lean on. Who do I have?”

“Suzanne, it looks like.”

“She’s young. She’ll move on.”

“Oh, goodie. And then I can have you back?”

“No promises.”

“Fuck you.” Caroline got up to do the dishes. Was that all there was to it, she wondered as she ran water in the sink and fended off Diana’s attempts to scrape the dishes. Asking for what you wanted? It seemed too simple. What if Diana had said, I know what you want and you can’t have it? But she hadn’t, Caroline realized, a smile spreading across her face, dispelling the remaining numbness.