This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! (4 page)

W
hile there’s only so much you can do to fudge the math, nobody makes an issue of bouncing baby Skipper’s arrival, seven and a half months after your wedding day. And just in time for Christmas! You’ve got what you wanted, Harriet: stockings festooning your hearth. And you got a lot more in the bargain, too: a colicky infant who doesn’t sleep and never stops filling diapers, a ruined figure, a husband who’s never home. You’ve got endless nights in steamy bathrooms and endless days of domestic toil. Somehow, though it seems impossible, you didn’t see this coming. Suddenly your life is filled with talcum and baby oil and laundry soap. Pee and poop and spit-up. Tide, Wisk, Cheer, you’ve tried them all—yes, even All! You’ve tried reading magazines while Skip is
napping, even television. But nothing seems to whisk away the tide of despair. Nothing seems to cheer you. All of it is futile.

Filing deposition notices suddenly doesn’t look so bad next to the tedium of homemaking. Drafting court appeals was never this thankless. And this is nothing compared to what you’ll endure with Caroline. When you get a moment’s leisure, you’re cagey. Just look at you, Harriet, pacing the house, displacing pillows, rearranging furniture. Looking for purpose. When all else fails, you go shopping.

Yearning to be noticed, you experiment with hairstyles, cinch your waist with fitted jumpers, and when that doesn’t work, you starve yourself. Look at you, with your plate of turnips. And, by God, it works! Your figure returns! But nobody seems to notice, not the butcher, not even Bernard.

But like everything else, it’s only going to get worse, Harriet. Within three months, Bernard will be around even less, landing a job as plant manager at Blum Bearing, where he often works two shifts. When he comes home exhausted, he takes a mild interest in the child for about ten minutes, eats the warmed-over dinner you’ve set before him, and then hides behind his newspaper for the rest of the evening.

In bed, he turns his back to you, and you wonder what you’ve done.

You understand the pressure he’s under, the weight of responsibility he must feel. And yet you’re powerless to share this responsibility. The best you can do is pick a good melon and keep the linoleum clean, launder his work clothes, and
stock the refrigerator. Depleting as they are, these accomplishments feel empty.

Oh, but let’s not forget the joys of domesticity, Harriet! Here you are, decked out in curlers and a terry-cloth bathrobe with baby Skipper in the ER shortly after he swallowed the paper clip. You berate yourself for being a useless mother, who can’t even keep her child out of the hospital. All you can do is scour his poopy diapers for the next three days, looking for the offending object.

And here you are again, in the same bathrobe and curlers, consulting with firefighters who have responded to your frantic call regarding the smoking Maytag. Five armored giants rush into your laundry room with axes only to return minutes later, slightly deflated. Turns out, the machine is simply overworked.

This is your life, Harriet, what it’s become.

But do not lose heart. Things will get better after the first year: Skip will hit his sleeping stride, start taking the bottle, the colic will subside, you’ll find a reliable babysitter in Cindy Blum. Bernard will take a full week off next Christmas. But by then, Fourth and Union, and the joys of your former life, will already seem a long ways away. That other Harriet, the self-realized one, has gone on without you.

W
hen Harriet arrives home from Sunny Acres, she’s thrilled to discover Skip’s silver SUV in the driveway in spite of the fact that it’s parked perilously close to her dahlias. She thinks guiltily of the creased fender, for which Skip—like his father, a zealous maintainer—will surely expect an accounting.

Halfway up the drive, Harriet’s stomach tightens as she spots Caroline peering out the kitchen window. Smiling stiffly, Harriet issues a little wave. Suddenly, her thoughts are racing. What will she make for lunch? Does she have time to bake something? She hopes the living room isn’t a mess. Sandwiches, she can make sandwiches. They can eat outside on the patio! Maybe they’ll stay the night. Oh, what a surprise!

She finds Skip in the living room in front of the TV, eating
dill pickles straight from the jar. Snapping off the television, he swings his feet off the coffee table and sets the remote aside.

“Hello, dear, what a surprise!” she says.

He walks to the kitchen and bends down to hug her. At fifty-five, with flecks of gray marking his wavy hair above the ears, he still manages to look boyish in his purple UW hat and running shoes.

“Hello, dear,” she says to Caroline, who makes no move to hug her.

At forty-eight, with sallow cheeks and scarecrow hair, Caroline looks like Skip’s elder by at least five years.

“What are you two doing here? I had no idea!”

We thought we’d pop by for a visit,” says Skip. “We both had the day off, so we figured, you know, let’s drop in on Mom.”

“How wonderful! Oh, but I do wish you would have called ahead, dear, so I could prepare something. Let me make you a sandwich.”

“Nah, it’s all right, Ma, I just had a few pickles. I’m good.” “Caroline, honey, let me make you a sandwich. You look so thin.”

“Gee, thanks, Mom. You always know how to make me feel good about myself.”

“Honey, I didn’t mean it like that. C’mon, I’ll set up the patio. I do hope you’re staying the night? We can rent a DVD!”

“Look, Mom,” says Skip. “The thing is, we didn’t just pop by for a visit.”

“Oh,” says Harriet, crestfallen. “You mean, you’re not staying?”

“We can’t, Mom.”

“Surely you can at least stay for dinner?”

“Mom,” says Skip. “I got a call last night from Father Mulligan.”

“
Mullinix
, dear. Where on earth did he get your number?”

“He told Skip about the phantom WD-40,” says Caroline, lowering herself into Bernard’s recliner.

Skip sits down on the sofa, and immediately leans forward. “He said you were acting really strange, Mom. He was worried.”

Harriet feels herself blush, at once from embarrassment and irritation. “I was exhausted,” she says. “I served downtown all day at the prayer station. There’s no air-conditioning down there. Did Father Mullinix tell you that? I was overheated. But I’m perfectly fine now, I assure you.”

It comforts her to know that Skip genuinely worries about her.

“Mom,” he says. “We’re just concerned. He said you thought you had dinner with dad at the Bon Marche.”

“Frederick and Nelson.”

“Right. Frederick and Nelson.” Skip doffs his cap, runs a hand through his thick hair. “Mom, Frederick and Nelson closed twenty years ago! I don’t even think that old buffet did dinners.”

“I saw him, Skip, with my own eyes. I touched him.”

“Mom, I had a dream my hands were made of soap. But look, they’re not!” He submits his outthrust hands as evidence.

“It’s not the same thing.”

“It is, Mom. It was a dream.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“Okay, what then? A hallucination?”

“Not exactly,” says Harriet.

“Whatever it was, Mom, it has nothing to do with reality.”

“Fine, maybe it doesn’t mean anything. There, are you satisfied? But just suppose I took a little comfort in it, how about that? Well, then, I suppose you two would want to deprive me of that, wouldn’t you?”

“Mom, that’s not how it is,” Skip insists, fishing a fresh pickle from the jar. “What have we deprived you of?”

“He’s right,” says Caroline. “We’re just concerned about your well-being.”

“Oh, stop Caroline. Like you were concerned with your father’s well-being?”

“Mom,” Skip says. “This is different. Dad was incapacitated.”

“He’s reaching out,” says Harriet. “Don’t you see? That’s what this is about. I’ve been thinking long and hard about it, and I’m sure he’s come to help. Maybe to guide me.”

“Let’s hope not,” says Skip.

“That would be a first,” mutters Caroline.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means he was never much help while he was alive.”

“Take that back, Caroline.”

“Oh, c’mon, Mom. You did everything. You cleaned, you
cooked, you did every single thing he ever told you to do. The Major just sat around polishing his belt buckles and reading newspapers.”

Though Harriet appreciates the affirmation, it annoys her that she should have to defend a protocol designed specifically to eradicate obstacles for her children. Why should Harriet apologize when she tended to every runny nose and broken bone, prepared every meal, consoled every heartbreak and disappointment, all so that Caroline and Skip could enjoy a better quality of life than her own? It breaks Harriet’s heart that Caroline squandered every opportunity, that she sabotaged her life with bad decisions. It breaks her heart that Caroline never gave her grandchildren and that Caroline’s unofficial “foster daughter” is, and always has been, something of a problem, much like Caroline herself. But what breaks Harriet’s heart the most is that things might have been different. She might have saved Caroline. Or Bernard, for that matter.

“That doesn’t change the fact that he was your father,” says Harriet. “Or that I failed him.”

“He was a bully, Mom. Quit saying you failed him. You were his servant, his nurse, you were practically his mother. The only meal Dad could cook was toast.”

“And beans,” says Harriet.

“Fine, and beans. I mean, who gets to be ninety years old and never cooks a single meal for himself besides beans and toast?”

“He made tapioca pudding, too. Oh, Caroline dear. I know
you had your differences. But you’re nearly fifty years old. Isn’t it time to forgive your father?”

“Why, because you did?”

“I fell apart, Caroline.”

“He’s the one who fell apart.”

“C’mon, you guys,” says Skip, brandishing his pickle like a traffic wand. “We’re not getting anywhere here.”

“Where are we supposed to be getting to? Is this another intervention?”

“Settle down, Mom.”

“You vacuumed under some sofa cushions at your father’s wake. You made a few calls to the insurance company. But when did I ever ask either of you for help? Darlings, if you really want to help me, fix that garage door, and pressure-wash those steps. Clean the gutters. If you want to comfort me, how about sending an Easter card? Or reminding my grandchildren that I exist?”

Caroline looks away.

“Okay, Mom,” says Skip. “I get it.”

Skip takes Harriet’s elbow and leads her the first few steps to the sofa. Halfway there, she breaks free.

“My goodness, a few phone calls, a couple trips to the dump—that’s all I ever asked.”

“Mom,” says Skip. “The thing is, look: we just think this cruise is too much right now. Caroline, back me up here. We really think you ought to call Mildred and postpone the thing. Maybe in a few months, when—”

“Absolutely not,” Harriet says, surprising herself. “I intend to honor your father, no matter what the two of you might think of him. He bought this cruise for me; he intended it for the two of us, the least I can do is go on the darn thing. And I’m taking his ashes with me.”

“Mom, is that even legal?”

“Don’t try to talk me out of this, Skip.”

“But Mom, you—”

“Please. Let me do this.”

Her children exchange glances. Caroline shrugs.

“And Mildred, she’s good to go?” says Skip.

“Yes,” lies Harriet. She knows it may be her only chance.

“You’ll take it easy, right?” he says. “Promise?”

“I promise.”

Skip looks to Caroline for approval.

“Why are you looking at me?” she says.

T
hen, after a few wearisome years of domestic drudgery, a few years sequestered in your little house, in your little neighborhood, with your little problems, something happens. The outside world calls. On the north end of downtown, they’ve erected a futuristic wonderland, a marvelous, humming other-world full of possibilities, punctuated by a six hundred foot exclamation point. It’s impossible not to get caught up in the excitement. Suddenly your life, by mere extension, does not seem so small.

Is that a smile, Harriet Chance?

Look at you, on the global stage! All the world is taking notice of you and your gorgeous city, drinking you up like a Sloe Gin Fizz. The traffic jams are horrific. The lines are soul-crushing. But there is magic at the end of each one.

There you are, Harriet, on the amazing Bubbleator, Skipper, nearly three years old, clutching your hand tightly, World’s Fair lariat cinched securely around his neck, smiling up at you. At 130 pounds, you’ve never looked better. And look at Bernard, fit as ever, his arm, strong and able, around your waist, as the Bubbleator ascends into the unknown. The future is on everybody’s mind, and you’re on a rocket ship speeding toward middle age, but suddenly you’re okay with that.

Maybe, like everyone else on the Bubbleator, you’re no longer taking your future for granted. A single phone call, a little red button, and poof, it could all disappear. Have you finally embraced domestic life, Mrs. Bernard Chance? Have you released your independence at long last? Have you finally stopped tracking the progress of that other incarnation of yourself, the one who didn’t bow to the expectations of society, the one who didn’t opt for the easy way out, the one who wasn’t going to have children until she was thirty?

Or have you simply lowered your standards?

It helps that Bernard has started to notice you again lately. He’s showing signs of tenderness, displays of affection. Rarely does he pass you in the hallway or in the kitchen without some physical communication—the grazing of an elbow, the touch of a hand, and yes, even a pat on the fanny. What’s more, he’s taken an interest in Skip now that the boy can talk. Together, they go to the Montlake landfill on Sunday, where they sit in the Buick and eat BurgerMeister fries, marveling at the perfectly good things people throw away.

Perhaps it’s that promotion to general manager that has put a little spring back in Bernard’s step. Weekends, he’s sporting a Hawaiian shirt, to which he attributes good fortune. If not a friend, you’ve found an amusement in Margaret Blum. On Friday nights, the four of you, Gene and Bernard, you and Margaret, dine together at the Blums’ house in Madison Park. You play cards: pinochle, poker, bridge. You drink Zombies and Stingers and Pink Squirrels. And sometimes you surprise yourself with your candor and familiarity.

By the time you get home to release the sitter, you’re already missing your little Skipper. Some Friday nights, you wobble to his room and listen to the excited sound of your own breathing in the darkness as you watch him sleep. You want to pick him up and hold him, caress the downy hair on the back of his neck. You want to wake him from his sleep, so you can hear the singsong of his little voice, so you can answer his thousand questions. There, there, that’s all you needed, Harriet: a little space once in a while to decompress, a little time for abstraction, a little distance from which to count your blessings. And yes, a few Zombies never hurt.

If the hustle and bustle of Fourth and Union still seems a long ways off, so does the thankless malaise of last year.

It’s the good life, Harriet Chance, drink it up!