Other Women (23 page)

Hannah was sitting in her chair, stocking feet on the rush footstool, when Caroline walked in and handed her a loaf of rye bread wrapped in Saran Wrap. Hannah looked at it.

“I made it.”

“Thanks,” said Hannah, tossing it on the desk behind her among the books, papers, and coffee cups.

She felt bad about not responding more warmly to what looked like nice bread. “Sit down.”

Caroline sat down. That bread had taken three hours. She’d given Hannah the most perfectly shaped loaf of the batch.

“So what’s up?” Hannah put clasped hands behind her head, elbows out.

“Nothing much.” Caroline folded her arms across her chest. She was sorry she bothered to bring the damn bread. Children in Chad were starving, and Hannah tossed it aside without a second glance. She was just a spoiled American. Except she was British .

. .

“How was your week?” asked Hannah.

“All right.”

Hannah leaned forward to light a cigarette, inhaling deeply, then looking at the thin brown cigarette. All this effort she expended helping clients break their habits, like Caroline’s of trying to control people through taking care of them. How come she couldn’t break her own?

Caroline was looking down at the tweed sofa cover, noting its

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weave and feeling humiliated. Maybe Hannah made bread night and day herself. Maybe she was swamped with moldy old bread from other clients.

Maybe she was allergic to rye.

“What’s wrong?” asked Hannah, remembering the time she brought Maggie a sandwich. Roast beef on whole wheat with Russian dressing, lettuce, and onions. She’d spent hours trying

to decide what Maggie would like. Maggie looked at it for a long time. Then she put on the glasses that hung around her neck, looked up, and asked, “What am I supposed to do with this?” Hannah felt as baffled as Caroline now looked.

“Don’t you like rye bread?”

“I can’t eat it. I’m on a diet. But Arthur will love it.”

“Who’s Arthur?”

“My husband.”

Caroline glared at her. She hadn’t made that bread for some creepy man. God, what atrocious manners. At least she could pretend to be delighted.

“What did you think I’d say?” asked Hannah.

“I thought you’d be pleased.”

Hannah shrugged. “And now you’re upset because I’m not?”

“Who’s upset?” She was studying her palm intently, noting the spot where her lifeline ominously veered off into several branches.

“You are.” Hannah laughed. “You should see your expression. You look like someone took away your lollipop.”

Caroline looked up. She was

thirty-five years old, for God’s sake.

Hannah thought she was childish? How adult was it to be rude? She studied Hannah’s face-kind, with a wry smile-and remembered Hannah was out to help her. “I feel like a fool.”

“You feel foolish because I didn’t react the way you wanted. You want to control my reactions so you can feel okay about yourself. Wouldn’t it be easier just to eliminate me and feel okay without relation to what I do or don’t do?”

“Fuck it, Hannah! Why do you have to turn everything into such a big deal? I was just trying to be nice.”

“Uh huh, the way you and Diana are nice to each other? Trying to outnice each other?”

Caroline clutched the sofa, looking as though she might tear the

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place apart. Hannah was impressed. What had happened to the meek woman who’d sat across from her all those weeks? “Look, you bring me bread. Then I bring you a pork roast. Then you bring me a Black Forest cake, and I bring you English trifle … . his

Caroline smiled reluctantly.

“Okay. I get the point.”

“But thank you for the bread.” Hannah reached behind her to pat the loaf with affection.

“You’re welcome. Enjoy it, because you aren’t getting any more.”

They laughed. Hannah put her stone ashtray in her lap. Caroline released her grip on the sofa and stretched out her Levi’d legs, her snowmobile boots as cumbersome as an astronaut’s.

“What were you up to this week besides kneading?” asked Hannah, drawing on her cigarette.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this teacher at nursing school named Arlene.” Caroline glanced out the window and could scarcely see Lake Glass through the swirling snow. It felt like looking into a paperweight.

“Oh yes?”

“I guess you’d call her my mentor. I thought she was fantastic-as a nurse and as a person. I thought if I imitated her, I’d be fantastic, too. She was huge-tall, big-boned, tough, with this gigantic bun on top of her head. She used to say, “Ladies, you have a mission.” his “Did you have a relationship with her?”

Caroline hesitated. “You mean

sexual?”

Hannah nodded.

“Well, no. I mean, she was twenty years older than me.”

So? thought Hannah.

So was Hannah, Caroline realized. And she had wanted to rest her head on Hannah’s breast, feel Hannah’s arms around her. She recalled maneuvering to stand close to Arlene during training sessions, and the tingle of excitement when Arlene’s hands corrected hers as she changed a dressing.

Caroline said in a dazed voice, “Now that you mention it, I would’ve gone to bed with her. But I wasn’t a lesbian then. Neither was she, as far as I know.” That she would have liked to make love with Arlene seemed so remote she hadn’t even considered it before. It WOMEN

should have seemed even more remote to this respectable bridgeplaying non-lesbian.

“So what happened?”

Caroline described her graduation, and Arlene’s apparent pleasure at Caroline’s new job at Mass General. At first Caroline was worried: If she wasn’t around to wax Arlene’s VW and sharpen her pencils, maybe Arlene would lose interest in her. The nursing school was en route to Caroline’s apartment from the hospital, so she stopped at Arlene’s office in an old sandstone building on Commonwealth Aveevery week or two. A surly young woman named Dusty, two years behind Caroline, was usually present, sometimes sharpening pencils. Caroline and Arlene would chat and part, agreeing to have supper soon. Caroline was good at her job. She felt like a karate master, poised to cope with any horror that might roll through those ER doors. Good practice for a nuclear holocaust. She was quickly promoted. She stopped to tell Arlene, and to suggest a time and place for the longproposed dinner, feeling bold now that they were colleagues in this business of relieving human suffering.

They met at a sit-down deli near the hospital one afternoon after work. Arlene shifted her large frame in the small bentwood chair and toyed with her fork with fingers like hotdogs. “Look, Caroline, I don’t know what you want from me,” she said. “But you’ll have to find it somewhere else. I’m a very busy woman.”

Caroline stared at her.

“Don’t look at me like that.” Arlene patted her huge bun, removing and replacing some hairpins.

“Like what?” Caroline asked in a faint voice.

She was correct: If she didn’t do things for Arlene, Arlene had no use for her.

“You’ve done pretty well out of this relationship.

You got your fancy job at Mass General.”

“That must have been painful,” said Hannah.

Caroline felt herself going numb. She couldn’t recall feeling anything.

“Caroline, who else in your life used to say, “I’m a very busy person”?”

Caroline frowned.

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Hannah wanted to tug at her ear as though playing charades: “Sounds like … his

“I give up,” said Caroline in a flat voice.

Hannah sighed. Why did this stuff take so long?

“It sounds to me as though that was the message your parents were always putting out.”

Caroline frowned again.

“Does it occur to you that you pick people because

they put out that message? And if they don’t, you try to manipulate them into it?”

“What?”

Realizing she was going too fast, Hannah tried to figure out how to backtrack.

“But I didn’t give a shit about that job,” said Caroline, saving Hannah the effort. “I’d done it all to be more worthy of her friendship. I couldn’t believe she didn’t know that.”

“Did you just hear yourself?” Hannah shifted in her chair, propping one hand on the chair arm.

“Yes. I mean, no. What?” Caroline narrowed her eyes in concentration.

“You feel you have to figure out what people want and do it, for them to like you.”

“Is that what I said?”

“That’s what it sounded like to me.”

“Maybe.”

“Do you see where it comes from?” Surely she couldn’t avoid seeing much longer? Feeling impatient, Hannah lit another cigarette.

“My parents?”

Hannah nodded encouragingly. She realized if Caroline had guessed wrong, she’d have made no response, which was a response in itself. “You say you did well at nursing school and in your job just to please Arlene. But I suspect you had reasons of your own as well. It sounds to me as though you’ve always been competent and assertive.” Caroline blinked. This assessment clearly didn’t fit her picture of herself as a messy drag. “So did you leave it like that with Arlene?”

“I said, “But I thought we could be friends once I stopped being your student.” And she said, “Things have been bad between you and me for a long time.” This was news to me. Christ, I adored the woman. We finished our pastrami sandwiches. Out on the sidewalk I said,

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“Thanks for all your help.” She said, “Not at all.” And climbed on the trolley. I vomited in the storm sewer and walked home. That’s the last thing we ever said to each other.”

Caroline glanced at the Kleenex on the chest.

Another new box. Apparently a lot of crying went on in here. Caroline was damned if she’d cry. She described to Hannah how each day for several weeks she stood in a doorway across the street from Arlene’s second-story office window after work and watched Arlene at her desk as students came and went. One evening Caroline, her eyes on Arlene in her office, sidled over to Arlene’s VW and looked in. On the seat was a box of yellow Kleenex. The door was open, so Caroline grabbed the box and faded back into the doorway. Arlene stood up and moved over to her window. Looking out into the dusk, across the commuter traffic up Commonwealth Avenue, she looked tired and sad. She folded her arms across her stomach. Her shoulders sagged, and her head drooped.

Maybe she was missing Caroline as much as Caroline missed her? Caroline fought an urge to run up there and tell her jokes.

Arlene appeared to jump slightly. Her arms fell. Her back and head straightened. She smiled. Dusty appeared at her side, gesturing excitedly. They turned and left the office.

Shortly they emerged from the building and walked to the VW, Dusty talking and gesturing, Arlene smiling.

As they drove off, Caroline pulled a yellow Kleenex from Arlene’s box and tried to cry. But her tears wouldn’t flow. The next day she stole some pill bottles from the Mass General supply room. She lined them up on the dresser in her apartment and stared at them every morning, deciding whether to continue for another day. If she wasn’t parrot to Arlene’s Florence Nightingale, who was she? No one.

As Hannah listened, elbow propped on chair arm, chin propped on fist, she examined the dynamics of the rejection, knowing she herself was next in line. Mummy, Pink Blanky, Marsha,

Rorkie, Ara couple of men, Diana …

God knew who else. At some point, as Caroline continued to feel better, she’d try to get Hannah to reject her too, so she could move on, free of the dependency. Hannah wasn’t sure how. She herself had tried every trick in the book with Maggienot showing up for appointments, going to another therapist in midstream, accusing Maggie of planning to retire.

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She tried to imagine Arlene’s version for some clues as to Carotactics: “I taught this kid everything I knew, and it still wasn’t enough. She kept hanging around. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted.

She’d already landed a good job, was getting paid more than me. She kept implying I wasn’t doing enough . .

.” Hannah had seen it time after time in couples therapy. The two people’s accounts of an event were scarcely recognizable. The husband thought he’d offered to take out the garbage, and the wife thought he’d criticized her housekeeping.

“Did you get paid more than she?”

“I guess so. I never thought about it.”

“Wouldn’t it piss you off if some kid who’d worked for a few months was getting paid more than you, who’d worked for twenty-five years?”

Caroline was startled by Hannah’s language. She talked like a barmaid, but in that fancy British accent. “But that wasn’t my fault.”

“None of this is anybody’s fault. It’s just how the world works. People can be noble and generous, but we can also be petty. You’ve got to protect yourself from other people’s pettiness.”

Caroline said nothing. Arlene jealous of her success? What a bizarre notion. Arlene was a big strong competent woman.

“Do you see any parallels?” asked Hannah.

“To what?”

Hannah raised her eyebrows.

“To my family?”

Hannah smiled. Raised eyebrows had come to equal her family. Like one of

Pavlov’s dogs, Caroline was so responsive to subtle clues signaling approval. “How old were you when your brother was born?”

“About four, I guess.” Nine months after her father’s return from the South Pacific, to be specific.

“So you’ve begun walking, talking, growing teeth, using the toilet, going out to play, feeding and dressing yourself. And Mummy replaces you with a charming and helpless little baby. Must make you want to shed all your achievements as quick as you can.”

Caroline frowned. That was what she’d felt, all right: that she wanted to be Arlene’s student again instead of a supervisor at Mass General. But had she felt this toward her mother? She couldn’t remember.

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“Haw do you feel about your brothers?”

“I liked them a lot. Still do. I took care of them.” But according to her mother, a few days after Howard’s arrival home from the hospital, Caroline gathered all his clothes and toys into a pile and asked, “Can we take him back to the hospital now, Mommy?”