These days, Helen looks around the places she goes to, and nothing seems worth noting, or even quite there. These days, she comes into her study, sits at the desk, starts up the computer, and drinks coffee while she tries to avoid looking at the blinking cursor, that electronic tapping foot. Sometimes she moves to her little white sofa to read from volumes of poetry she used to find inspiring, and sometimes she reads from her own previously published novels. Irrespective of what she reads, though, when she goes back to sit before the computer, there is the same stubborn emptiness, the same locked door. So she shuts the computer down and leaves the room, pulling the door firmly closed behind her. Her study, once bright with bouquets of flowers and Post-it notes and various ephemera meant to inspire whatever story she was working on (once she strung a clothesline across her office and hung vintage dresses on it, items her main character would wear), that study has now become a mausoleum. The framed book jackets on the wall and the gold trophy Dan gave her when she published her first book rebuke her; the three fetish stones she always believed brought her luck have been revealed as the false idols that they are; daily, they gather more dust.
Financially, she is fine: she and Dan created for themselves a nice nest egg. It is in other ways that she is not. “You still have Tessa,” her mother told her shortly after Dan died, and Helen nodded, recalling the friend of the mother who lost her child on that day so long ago, the friend who offered the same words of consolation. But love for one child does not make up for the loss of another, and anyway, the love of a child is a very different thing from the love of a husband.
Naturally, she had expected great sorrow and disorientation after Dan's sudden death. But she had expected, too, that she would eventually get better, becoming one of those women whose well-managed grief endows them with an enlarged capacity for empathy and kindness and perspective, and with a newfound ability to manage things they never could manage before. Instead, in the time since Dan died, Helen's feeling of disconnection and helplessness has grown worse month by month, if not day by day. Now she thinks she has reached a kind of crisis point, and she is afraid.
Last time she and Midge had lunch, Helen tried to explain how she felt. She said, “Honest to God, Midge, I feel like I'm moments away from everything just … imploding. I can't even think, I'm not thinking right. I forget words, whole thoughts. I wake up at night and I don't know where I am. I mean, I know I'm at home, in my bed, but I don't know where I am.” She cleared her throat against the embarrassing tremulousness in her voice.
Midge waved a hand that held a heavily buttered piece of French bread. It was unsalted butter, and Midge had remedied that with characteristic gusto—when she shook the saltshaker, grains had flown so far as to land in Helen's lap. Now she spoke around her bite of bread to say, “Oh, well, that.”
“No, not that,” Helen wanted to say. “This.” But what good would it do to try to explain? Midge was the kind of woman who had no problem knocking down walls in her house—herself. She knew how to upholster sofas, how to change the oil in her car. As a young woman, she had climbed mountains in a way that required driving spikes into rock, and run marathons, and gone through men like Kleenex until she finally found one who could stand up to her. Helen and she had agreed early on in their friendship that opposites really did attract, and anyway, they were alike in many ways, too—their love of food and cooking and gardens and books, of sappy movies, of old people and children, of trench coats and white orchids. So Helen shook salt on her bread and smiled and shrugged, as though she agreed with Midge that all this angst was really rather amusing, at least in daylight, in a pretty little French restaurant, sitting opposite your best friend. She tried to act like it was all to be expected, and, once expressed, was no longer anything to be afraid of—it was a boogeyman jerked out from under her bed, a bad dream whose power slowly dissipated with the turning on of the bedside lamp. It was just problem number 445.173 in some fat medical diagnosis book, something for which there was surely a pastel-colored pill that, if it didn't fix you, made you not care that you couldn't be fixed.
“What's Amanda up to?” Helen asked, but the lightness in her tone was glaringly false.
“Listen,” Midge said, leaning over the table to speak quietly. “I don't mean to dismiss all you're going through. It's just that I don't always know what to say—or do—anymore. It's been almost a year. I know you're still hurting, of course you are, but I would think that by now you would be starting to normalize, at least a little. You seem so stuck, sweetheart. Not that you're doing anything wrong! Grief takes many forms, it takes varying lengths of time to move through, there are all those stages; everybody knows that. But maybe you need to find a way to change channels, you know?” She took a drink of iced tea, and it seemed to Helen that in this small act was evidence of the yawning difference between them. Midge's husband would come home that night and sit around the living room with his shoes off. He would find a movie for them to see that weekend. Midge would go to sleep beside him and wake up beside him, and she, like most people, took all of this for granted.
Midge was not experiencing grief. When you were, you did not remark upon it and then sip your iced tea. If you spoke about your pain in any truthful way, you clenched your fists in your lap. You looked out the window to find something to distract you, to stop a flow of thoughts that would quickly overwhelm you. Or you laughed that thin laugh that is not laughter at all but tears, rerouted. So on that day when Helen had lunch with Midge, she decided not to talk about her problem anymore. She decided to finally do something about it.
two
HELEN STANDS IN FRONT OF THE DOOR TO THE ANTHROPOLOGIE store on State Street. Does she really want to do this?
“Excuse me,” someone behind her says, and Helen turns to see a woman who appears to be about her age. Helen smiles and steps aside, then follows the woman into the store. She sees the woman go immediately to the checkout counter. Helen stands at the front table examining various Christmas tree ornaments, but mostly watching the woman to see if she is possibly applying for a job herself. Yes—she's just been handed an application.
Now Helen decides against asking for a job here. It's as though the woman doing it before her is doing it instead of her. It's a sign. Or she'll take it as one. It's astonishing how her mind vacillates these days, how difficult it is for her to come to a decision with any semblance of resolve. Last night, trying to think of what to have for dinner, she stood before the open refrigerator for so long the milk got warm. Then she made chicken enchiladas that she didn't eat because by the time they were done she didn't want them anymore.
Well, as long as she's here, she'll look around and buy her daughter a little something, for coming out to help her today. Not clothes! No, she's been told a million times not to buy her daughter clothes, even from stores she knows Tessa loves. “I just like to pick out my own things, okay?” Tessa said, last time Helen gave her daughter a blouse. Helen said all right, she understood completely, and she did; she'd almost never liked the clothes her mother used to pick out for her. Still, Helen took the blouse out of the box that day and held it up to Tessa. “This would look great on you,” she said. Nothing. “You should at least try it on.” Again, nothing. “Why don't you just try it on, and let me see how it looks?”
Finally Tessa exploded. “Mom! Mom! I want to pick out my own clothes. I appreciate your getting this for me, but I want to pick out my own clothes!”
“But do you like the color?” Helen asked.
Well. Never mind anything for Tessa. Maybe Helen will buy herself a candle for her office, she used to like lighting a candle while she worked. She used to like lighting a candle and then sitting down at the computer and letting her mind tell her a story, her fingers racing so fast across the keys she could hardly keep up. Occasionally she got complimentary letters from readers. Dan called it fan mail, and Helen would always say, “It's not fan mail, Dan!” but it was. It was! She used to be a scab-kneed little girl who put on her mother's
bathrobe and high heels and pretended she was a writer waving to her fans. And then she actually got to have fans. She got to stand up and read what she wrote to people who came of their own volition to hear her words. Really, it was a miracle, her old life. She didn't know it then. Not the way she knows it now.
A lovely young woman with blond hair styled into high pony-tails, wearing jeans and a ruffled dress, comes up to Helen. She has wide blue eyes like Tessa's. She seems to be in a very good mood. “Looking for anything special?” she asks gaily, and Helen wants to say, “Why, yes! I'm looking for a way to get my life back!” but instead she smiles and shakes her head no.
She looks at some of the sweaters—every now and then there's one that would look nice on someone her age. She finds a soft blue one that she thinks maybe her mother would like. She never would have thought to buy her mother anything from a store like this, but things are different now; she feels she knows her mother better. A few years ago, she asked Eleanor to write her autobiography for Helen's Christmas present, and her mother did: she set up a TV tray in the little den where she and Helen's father, Franklin, spent their evenings mostly ignoring the television in favor of reading, chatting with each other, and whistling to their parakeet, Iggy, in an attempt to distract him from what Helen's mother calls “romancing” his plastic ball. Helen saw the bird flailing away at it once, and, in an interesting reversal of roles, stood blushing before the cage while her parents chuckled.
When Helen requested her mother's life story, her mother wrote in a green spiral notebook for almost a month. After the first few evenings of this, Helen's father asked, “What are you doing, Eleanor?”
“I'm writing my life story,” she said—or shouted, more likely; Helen's father was losing his hearing. He had hearing aids, but he kept them in his pocket.
“What are you doing that for?” Franklin said, and Helen's mother told him that their daughter had requested it. Her father sat still for a long moment, watching his wife write line after line in her neat Palmer script, and then he leaped up to get his own notebook. That Christmas, Helen received autobiographies from both her parents, and she told them in complete honesty that they were the best gifts she'd ever gotten: they helped her lift the stubborn scrim through which most children view their parents and see them instead as real people. There they were by the popcorn stand at the back of the dime store, meeting for the first time. There they were exchanging letters during the war years, getting married on an army base with a handsome first lieutenant serving as maid of honor, settling into a new house that still smelled of sawdust. Helen intends to one day provide Tessa with such a document, hoping against hope that her daughter's response won't be, “Mom. Why are you giving me this?”
On the sale rack, Helen finds a pair of pants and a sweater that she likes, as well as one that she is sure Tessa will like; she's sure of it, it is exactly her style. She won't give it to her. Instead, she'll wear it, and if Tessa admires it, then she'll give it to her. There's more than one way to skin a cat, she thinks, then wonders if anyone ever says that anymore. How many things in her past are now virtually unknown by people her daughter's age? Not long ago, on the phone with Tessa, she said, “Well, you never miss your water. …”
“What?” Tessa said.
“You never miss your water.”
“What are you talking about?”
Helen laughed, incredulous. “‘You never miss your water till your well runs dry?’”
“Okay,” Tessa said. And then, “Who has wells?”
Helen goes to the dressing rooms at the back of the store to try on the clothes. When they don't work out (Size 12, my eye, Helen thinks, inspecting her butt in the mirror) the young woman who takes the clothes from her seems genuinely sorry, and asks if Helen would like help finding something else.
“Oh, no thanks,” Helen says. “I don't really need anything. Well, not clothes, anyway.”
“There are some great-smelling new candles out there,” the woman tells her, and Helen says thank you, she'll look.
The woman is right, there are some wonderful-smelling candles, but Helen is not about to pay forty-eight dollars for the one she likes best. Why have candles all of a sudden become so popular, thereby making them so expensive? And why do the ones in nice stores seem so much more desirable than the ones at, oh, say, garage sales, when they are essentially or even literally the same thing? She takes her second choice, which also has a lovely scent but is less than half the price. Then, as long as she has saved herself so much money, she buys a candle for Tessa, too. Then one for her mother, and one for Midge.
As she waits in line to pay, Helen watches the people in the store. Mostly it's young women shopping, but there are some men sprawled out on sofas waiting for them—talking on cell phones or text-messaging, yawning, lazily checking out the other women. Here and there are women Helen's age: one looks at dishes, one is trying on a necklace featuring birds that Helen likes very much and wishes she'd seen first; she's sure the woman is going to buy it because she's shopping with a friend and friends always talk each other into buying things they don't need. If they're friends at all. She and Midge have made an art of it. When they are shopping together, Helen will come to Midge with some expensive article in hand, reveal the price tag, and Midge will say, “Get it. Life is short; we'll be bedridden soon. Get it,” and Helen will buy it. Or Midge will say, “I love this, but I just don't need it,” and Helen will say, “So?”
When it's Helen's turn to pay, the clerk says she herself bought the sweater Helen has selected for Tessa. “It's for my daughter,” Helen says, and the clerk says, “Oh, she'll love it.” She tells Helen confidentially that the candle she picked out burns a lot longer than the more expensive ones and now Helen feels really on the ball. On the ball. Does anyone say that anymore? And what does it mean, anyway? If you're on a ball, aren't you nervous about falling off? She imagines an elephant in a cartoon, wearing a hat and a ruffled collar, delicately balancing on top of a huge, striped ball. There is the ringmaster with his too sparse mustache, cracking—
“Ma'am?” the clerk says.
“Sorry,” she says.
“I was just showing you this?” She points to a cleverly wrapped gift on the counter, and asks if Helen would like any of her purchases gift-wrapped. Helen says no, she wants to get home before the traffic starts, but she tells the clerk she appreciates the fact that the gift wrap is so charming. “I really like this store,” she says, smiling.
“You know, we're hiring for the holidays,” the clerk says.
“Well, I … Yes.” Helen smiles, shrugs.
“Would you like an application?”
“Okay,” Helen says, before she can stop herself. Christmas help is temporary. It's already November 15; she'll only work here for a few weeks. And never mind what Tessa said earlier; she would love it if she could use Helen's discount.
The woman hands her an application and Helen leans forward to ask quietly, “Do you like working here?”
The woman's face goes deadly serious and she says, “Oh. My. God. I love it. I came here from this other store? And this one is so much better? This is, like, the best job I ever had, ever.”
Well, Helen thinks. There's an endorsement. She starts to fold up the application to put in her purse, but then she sees how easy it is, how brief, and she goes to sit on a sofa beside a young man to fill it out. When she has finished, she hands it back to the clerk, who says, “Our manager is interviewing today? If you'd like to wait?”
Helen goes back to the sofa where she filled out the application and sits down. The young man has left. She glances over at the housewares department, at the dishes, the aprons, the linens, the furniture. She likes everything she sees. Really, it might be fun to work here, she wouldn't be the only older person, she could have lunch with the other woman who applied today, they might become friends; she and Midge and the woman could all go out to lunch and talk about … What? What kinds of stories would come from here? Maybe all that wi
ll happen is that Helen will stand around folding and refolding sweaters, checking and rechecking her watch.
And now, she suddenly feels foolish, nearly angry. An “interview” on a sofa stationed in the middle of the store for a job working with infants! What a silly idea, to think that she should apply here. What should she do, put her gray hair in ponytails and wear stylish jeans under short-sleeved, ruffled dresses that reveal her arm fat? (Hoppy and Gene, Midge calls her swinging flesh, but Helen has not quite gotten to that level of acceptance.) Should Helen speak in declarative sentences that sound like questions? Should she go countless times into trashed dressing rooms to clean out piles of clothes someone threw on the floor? Discuss with her co-workers the relative merits of nose rings? She looks over at the checkout counter, where the girl who helped her is now busy with someone else, and walks quickly out of the store. Then, remembering the sweater she bought her daughter, she calls Tessa to see if she can stop by for a minute.
“Oh, Mom, I'm sorry, but I'm on deadline,” Tessa says. “I can't stop working.”
“That's okay,” Helen says. “I just want to give you something. I have to get home. I don't even want to come in.”
“What do you want to give me?” Tessa's voice is guarded. She has told her mother over and over not to bring her things, she appreciates the effort, but she just really doesn't need anything—her place is small, she's trying to reduce clutter, she doesn't need anything. Nonetheless almost every time Helen visits she brings something: a coffee mug, a book, leftovers from Helen's dinners (she has still not learned how to cook for one), striped paper clips, a little pack of Paris-themed stationery, bed socks. At first, Tessa took these things graciously; then she began to sigh when she took them; these days, she sends the things right back home with her mother. Still, every now and then something slips through, and so Helen keeps trying.