She Matters (20 page)

I said, “Yes.”

Rachel looked at her lap. I felt disgraced by the ringing “yes.” I said, “You just, you seem to be struggling. You seem afraid. The world isn't . . . I want, I wish you could enjoy this. She's fine, you know. Could you— Do you need help? So you can experience the pleasures in this, not just all the fears.”

Later I wrote her a letter. “I know I don't really understand everything you're going through. You need to deal with whatever's going on.” “To be honest,” she responded, “you write me that letter every time we see each other, and I'm sick of it.”

I do? I thought, as I tried to remember past letters but couldn't. Okay, good for her. We'll make something new, gloves off. It didn't happen.

She did not impart to me details of the help she found. Why should she have? I wasn't being a friend, I was a bully, even out of concern and love, unable to stifle my ancient terrors, to ignore history's lens of a crazy mother. My own obstinate parenting rules, my choices to protect my sons—they might have looked a fretful mystery to the outside world. Her newborn had had massive surgery. I would never know what that had wrought, what that changed in a mother's breast.

• • •

“Why are you still friends?”

I was at another friend's house, having a drink and reviewing the visit, trying to puzzle out the intensity of my reactions to Rachel. The question bothered me.

“We just
are
.” I explained Rachel's sweet temperament, her sly scrutinies, our shared cultural humor. During the visit, we'd been in the car, a trip to the grocery store that had momentarily calmed her, and I'd looked over at her deeply familiar face, felt the abiding river of affection between us and what a gorgeous, teeming history that was. Yes, our history, I'd thought, our
knowing
through all those years, knowing everything that happened, and with whom, and which challenges changed us. That's not a small thing.

“I love her,” I said, but I couldn't think of one thing I still did to show her.

“I can't believe you told her she was a bad mother.” This friend didn't have kids but she knew you don't do that, ever. No one does that.

• • •

Rachel never confronted me about calling her a bad mother—I doubt she forgot about it—and my own shame made it difficult to revisit the moment, confess error. I don't know how to repair the mistake. She knew me well enough, loved me enough, perhaps, to understand I didn't mean her, that I wasn't talking to her. Perhaps she understood that our interior traumas defined so much of our characters that we could never bridge some essential chasm.

Rachel's father died. She didn't call me until weeks later, and as I absorbed the news, terribly sad to hear, I was even sadder that we had no more clear course. We were unsure of our closeness; maybe I didn't deserve her family news. Our long, bountiful intimacy had slid into awkward, sporadic connection. We have not yet found our way back.

If my mother had said, “Do you think I'm a bad mother,” had spurned the shoplifting, given up sexual compulsion and coke, if she had managed herself in order to see who her daughter was, if she had asked from her sluggish highs, from her devilry and madcap seductions, her thoughtless, childish wreckage,
Am I a bad mother,
I would have answered. She would be buttering a raisin pumpernickel roll in a beautiful restaurant, or tying the sash of her hotel bathrobe in a sunny bedroom.
Am I a bad mother, Sue?
Yes. Shut up and sit still so I can unleash my exhausted certainty: you are a bad mother. If only I'd known how to fit that defining anxiety into its proper place.

W
hen I met Mary, she was too sad to speak, but I didn't know that. I was twenty-seven, and I thought she was shy, a shy woman, when my focus was anyway on men, maleness. Mary was married to Christopher's grad school friend, Clay, who could fill any room to its corners with oratory, and loved to. None of us could get a word in. Our first evening, dinner at their cabin, Clay shooed back the dogs and gave Christopher the clasp and release of men's affection. We all shook hands. We'd been in Missoula two months, broke and not writing our books as we'd planned, just working at thin jobs, when Christopher heard that his former friend was here. I liked them. I liked the dogs who rushed the doorway when we arrived, and the academic shabbiness, worn rooms littered with books. We all knew these sorts of rooms, our faint kingdoms of creative sprawl.

Mary kept their baby daughter on her hip as she took corn bread from the oven and ladled out pork stew, set the four bowls on the table, which was arranged against the night's window and lit by a small lamp at one end. She stretched her neck away, unconscious and practiced, when the baby grasped for her pendant earring. The boy, age four, bumbled near his father, who focused on us, his newcomers. Clay was still standing after we'd sat down, a wine bottle ready in his grip—the flavors, he exclaimed, of the excellent green chilies and the best hominy, you're gonna love it.
Mary tucked the baby into the high chair and pulled it close. He berated movies, musicians, novels, and made us laugh and long to one-up him, as if that were possible. He ranged over subjects—the grading of the dirt road that passed their cabin, James Joyce in Zurich, the politics of game licenses, the upstart shock of the new Target built out by Costco. He said, “We first got here, and that area was wide open. Farms and fields.” He meant when they'd met as undergraduates two decades before. They had left for bigger cities, but this town called them back, and Clay was ready on any civic topic. For months after meeting Clay and Mary, I thought of Missoula as his.

• • •

In the next two years the couple was regular, if not intimate, in our lives with spontaneous dinners and weekend hikes, picnics on the river with the Bitterroot Mountains massing beyond us. They told us about better fishing spots, demystified local idiosyncrasies. “You can drive in Montana with an open bottle?” “Yup,” Clay said. “Gotta love it.” Both were artists, and Clay made their scant money. A book contract, a teaching gig. I talked writing with him, and I was writing, too, newspaper pieces and movie reviews, although it would be ten years before I'd produce a book. His book came out. Christopher and I, envious, congratulated him, and meant it. We'd seen his duty and discipline, knew he'd earned this. Every morning he retreated, leaving Mary to run their affairs. A photographer, she had curated collections and shown her work, although she was now occupied with children and household. If pressed after dinner, she might retrieve a flat box from under the stairs and lift off the lid, her old prints, while Clay changed CDs at the stereo. She flipped fast, and I had to make her go back. I absorbed the pictures, giant color portraits of strangers' cluttered
bedrooms but with no people, spirit echoed by eccentric private evidence. She had captured some worthwhile loneliness, and I wanted to investigate, but I also wanted to flee, find boisterous warmth to temper the ghostly absence.

• • •

Clay and Mary were moving away, and we were sad. Our first friends, the first we had come to know as a couple. Their child was the first child we'd delighted in.
“Actually,”
the boy would say, his face grave, “ferns were the triceratops' favorite food.” “How about the
Tyrannosaurus rex,
did he eat ferns, too?” “
Actually,
he was a carnivore. He ate dinosaurs.” We'd house-sat for them, taken care of their dogs, spent the days they were gone cloaking ourselves in their concerns and testing joint life. Christopher and I were not living together. He needed slowness, so we'd been laying out careful plans for
one day
. The first night we stayed there, as Christopher paced the creek, I wandered inside, considering responsibilities I would have if we'd established all this. I stood in the boy's room with my hand on the railing of the toddler bed and imagined him waking, the morning window casting light on his blanket, and how he would rise in these blue dinosaur pajamas, the cold floor, come to breakfast and his parents' voices. That was the time Clay and Mary forgot to tell us the dogs' names. One of them had a tag, the commanding, rangy male, but the other, a smaller tagless female, ran far into the woods on our walk and could not be called because we couldn't shout, “Dog! Dog!” She didn't come back until the next night, our day lost to anxious waiting.

Clay and Mary bequeathed us their cabin. In a great gesture, which seemed of mild consequence to them, but would effect a most significant change for us, they gave our names to their landlord, who shrugged with easygoing indifference and transferred
the lease. The day we moved in, zigzagging across the gravel from the borrowed truck to the empty house and back again for another box, we said, “We should put on Steve Earle, we should make pork stew tonight, isn't it time we got a dog?”

It was impossible to accept our full right to a place where we had been hosted so many evenings, Clay's mournful, masculine soundtracks, his masterpiece of paella, the patter of their son's ideas. Mary stood
here,
whisking the cream before she served chocolate soufflé from this oven, and Clay cajoled, pronounced last-call witty sarcasms as we stepped through
this
door into the cold October air, the April air, at the end of those nights. On the drive to my place, the lit cabin receding, we praised the creek and stove and run-about dogs, the artist life, Clay and Mary's fine example of family.

Clay and Mary left things behind, and those became our daily things, old chairs, some kitchen stuff, stickers on the fridge, extension cords and
New Yorker
s. We put our bed in their bedroom, showered in their shower, used up the lightbulbs. The cabin—main level and downstairs, ten-sided and entirely fronted to the south with huge windows—was heated by two iron stoves, and Christopher chopped wood every day, the axe left after him in the stump, on call. Strips and strings of kindling skimmed the bare floor, debris grainy under bare feet. We bought slippers. We bought another broom, kept both at hand. Mary, I remembered now, had swept after the first dinner, the baby fussy at being set down. At Christmas we could only think to put the tree in the spot they'd had theirs. The windows at night reflected the inherited bulbs, our light blinking dim red, dim yellow, and green as we made love on the sofa. Christopher was made so happy by moving out of town and five miles up the canyon that, although I preferred accessible activity, city society, I embraced the solitude,
too. Living together, we instituted new habits, our habits. Agreements about grocery shopping, about how to angle the television. We were the ones now who talked about the graded road, the unplowed snows, the unruly brambles of pink wild roses that narrowed the driveway. When we eloped, I called to tell Mary. Our marriage, not a beginning but a deepening, had been sanctioned in these rooms by theirs.

• • •

In Mary's first independent hours, her little girl in preschool, she started to take pictures again, told me a little about it. While we talked on the phone, I'd stare across the cabin to the wall where we'd hung the photo of hers we'd bought. It was a large print of children at play, close on a young girl who sat on a rock, higher than the others, her face turned from the camera and hidden, damp greens, blonds and blues. Mary said she was photographing the densest, lushest Southern growth, massive, lurking fronds, the screens of invasive kudzu, what should not be there but had taken over to erase the known reality. She exploded the prints to enormous size to show the finest threads of close, leafy vein. When I saw them, I saw so much voiceless green, closing in, and through the foliage a bit of white plain sky. How sad she was, it dawned on me. Sadder than she could say.

One day, when we'd known each other three years and were separated by two thousand miles, she said, “My parents were killed in a plane crash.”

“Oh my god,” I said. Phone silence wielded its solemn tyranny. I said finally, “How old were you?”

“Seven.” I pictured my friend as a child.

“What— Then what happened?”

She'd been sent to live with her aunt, her kind uncle, many
cousins, like a girl in the books I'd used to love, when I'd wished in my own childhood for a magical release. Each time my disorienting mother went away, I'd wanted a plane crash, hoping she'd never come back. Mary had been that fabled orphan, sent to a farm where the animal need and constant activity overruled tragedy. And no one talked about the accident. No one, she remembered, asked how she was or remarked on her life's abrupt arrest. Faced with such large and real loss, I didn't know what to ask.

“Yeah, it's okay,” she said.

How could I have not known the very thread-and-needle of her character? I told Christopher, asked him, “Did you know?” I'd let only my own experience define her—the warm dessert in ramekins, an incidental photograph, her children's clamor, Clay's teasing. “But this,” I said, as I revised her, added in trauma. This changed everything. This
was
everything, wasn't it? No, he hadn't known. Clay wouldn't have told him, the times they went fly-fishing, taking Clay's muddy Jeep. They didn't get near death or damage. They talked fishing, an infinite examination of spring run-off on the nearby rivers, hatches and nymphs, the cold-day habits of browns versus cutthroats. The few times they went to the Silver Dollar on Railroad Street, light yellow beers on the scarred oak bar, they didn't talk about women or anyone, unless someone had published. They did not review the past, which they'd shared in classrooms, growing into the men they'd become. Clay kept them on course, as men.

I was happy Christopher had him, their once-a-month occasions, because he didn't attach easily. He left that to me, although my voracious appetite for people startled him, and he was baffled at the energy I had for varied relationships and heavy confidences. Introverted and keen for solitude, he let me be the flash, our outward engine. I loved to hear people talk about their changes and
despairs, sudden loves and tortured histories. For Christopher, though, the parallel male could be welcome; or unmissed.