Dad tries to keep busy. He doesn’t work away from home anymore, she is afraid to be alone. He will not leave the house without her. When she sleeps, he finds things to do, cracks that need caulking, fixtures that need polishing, bushes that need pruning. He is nervous and restless, he tries to read but only flips through pages and sometimes falls asleep in the rocker. He waits for her to get up again, and is relieved when she does, but nothing changes. They speak little, but his eyes thirst for her. He thinks only of her, only of her.
I tried to cheer her up. I chatted all one night and she managed to stay up past midnight, she was lively and curious; the next morning Franny showed her her photographs. That afternoon we played Chinese checkers for a couple of hours, and I took them out to dinner that night. She doesn’t complain about the restaurant, no matter how bad it is, if she has chosen it. When we returned, she asked me to help her decide where to hang some photographs I’d had framed for her. She’d been withdrawn and surly all afternoon, and barely livened up even for dinner. We talked about places, and decided on the TV room. Dad was sent for tape, hammer, hooks, and agreeably fetched them, looked eagerly toward her. “Where do you want them, Belle?” he asked in that loving solicitous tone that sets her off so dependably. “Oh, I don’t know, Ed!” she snapped, and I jumped up and pointed to the height. We went through the ritual—stepping back, how is that? Too high? A little to the right? and finally Dad was able to mark the height. Then he measured carefully for centering. He takes a lot of time. He is extremely precise. He does a beautiful job. But Mom was tired, or bored, or irritable, whatever, and she sighed irritably, “All right, Ed, you’re not hanging a chandelier!” and he expostulated, sputtered, “Well, I have to center it, I can’t just hang it anywhere!” He murmured further, defending himself under his breath. He tried to hurry, and as he went to hammer in the hook, it slipped from his fingers, it fell, it rolled, and he burst out cursing, “Goddamn it to hell, goddamn nail, goddamn, sh—sh—!”
Shocking. I stood up and went to him, I put my arm across his back, I said, very calmly, “It’s all right, Dad, we’ll find it.” I bent down with him searching for the tiny nail, stroking him with one hand all the while. There were tears in his eyes.
By then I was exhausted too—from the pain of seeing her like that, him like that. I had nothing left to offer. I couldn’t stand any more. The next day I drove up to Joy’s. I haven’t spent time with her alone in several years, and we had a lot to catch up on—as we both said when we greeted each other, determinedly cheery as ever. She is home, on vacation.
She is still living in the apartment, which looks cute now; she has been able to spend some time on it. When she finished college, she got a better-paying job, still local so she’d be near the children, who were nearing college age but still needed her presence, she felt. College was going to be a problem: Justin was unwilling to contribute toward the kids’ education, but he earned a decent salary, so they were not qualified for financial aid. They would probably not have gone if Joy had not been utterly determined that they should. She unhesitatingly admits she drove the kids so they would be able to get scholarships.
“I don’t care what they say about pressuring kids! They had to, they had to! I told them, do you want to work in a garage, be a waitress all your life? If not, WORK!”
How is it her children still love her so much?
They got into good schools, they got scholarships, but even so, the expense was too much for Joy’s woman’s wages. So she wrote Amy, who sent checks whenever she could. It was not easy for Amy either; her husband had been retired for years, and although they were well-to-do, James Selby, true father of his son, was incredibly mean with money.
Years ago, late at night when we were a little high and silly, Joy and I would make up stories about James dying. He would die and leave his large estate to Amy; she’d get out of Iowa and have some fun. We invented wonderful lives for Amy the widow—we had her in rickshaws in the Orient, logging in Alaska, spending winters in Monaco, and falling in love with a prince. Small p. But it was Amy who died first, in 1976, of pancreatic cancer, a cruelly painful way to go. The next year James remarried, a woman in her forties—he was close to eighty—who will no doubt inherit the lot.
“There’s no fucking justice, An,” Joy said, frowning.
I was shocked by her language. Joy never used to talk like that.
Joy didn’t hear about Amy’s death until a month afterward, when James finally wrote her.
“Justin, the son of a bitch, could have let the kids know their grandmother had died, couldn’t he?” Her face was thin, ravaged. She was starting to get grey. Well, she was forty-four. I’d blown up into a moonface, Joy had burned away to a wand, charred and electric. “But I couldn’t have afforded to fly out for the funeral anyway, and besides, Justin would have been there….” She fished for a cigarette, then suddenly threw the pack away from her. “Damn! Why don’t I stop? When I look at Mother…Oh!” She lay her hands beside her on the chair. Her fists were clenched tightly. Her voice was thick with phlegm. “You know, Amy flew out here to see me once, years ago.”
“I remember.”
“I told you? Did I tell you what she said?”
“Generally. Something about a wife having to be solid and strong and uphold her husband in everything no matter what he was like. Duty, devotion, that sort of thing.”
“Yes.” She pondered, then looked up, a sweet child’s face again for a moment, the Joy I remembered. Then the moment passed—an aged child’s face it was. “An, do you think she was right? I think about it, I wonder about that a lot.”
“No, of course not! She was lovely, you could see her character on her face, and she was sweet, I remember her although I only met her once, at your wedding. But her way of thinking—well, she was trained in it, she believed in it, but it seems crazy to me. I mean, what is the reason women are supposed to sacrifice their own lives—you know, to not say what they think and not argue for what they want and believe—why should they? Why, what is the reason they are supposed to support men in whatever men want to do? It’s a kind of slavery.”
“She kept her family together.” She raised her hand to wipe her nose with a tissue, lowered it mechanically, a plebe eating square meals. Dull phlegmy voice, a tissue crumpled into a ball in her tense fist.
“Well, I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. It’s true her husband didn’t leave her, her son still phones on Christmas Day. But god knows what James was doing all those years, she may have been dutiful but he didn’t treat her well from what you say, and he sure didn’t wait long to remarry. More important, I wonder how he was to her when she was sick, when she was dying. …
“But the other way of looking at it is to see that her submission enabled her husband to go on being the bastard he is, and maybe even become a worse one. It also gave her son an example he has not seen any reason not to follow. After all, you’ve kept your family together too.”
“I’ve paid a horrible price. I’d hate to tell you how my life has been these past ten years. You know,” she gave a short hard laugh, “it’s really charming. I spend the first fifteen years of my marriage with Justin a nervous wreck, I was broken out all over, all over my body, I had a bad stomach, I was so tense, well I was miserable, I see that now…so I leave him. Great, huh? So then I spend the last ten years in hell, worrying about the kids, about money, about how we’re going to survive. If we were going to survive! The only good thing about the last ten years is that Justin wasn’t in them.
“I’m forty-four years old and I don’t know anything. I don’t know what’s right or wrong, what’s smart or stupid. I feel like a blind person. Whose life was worse, Amy’s or mine? See, she said—I’ve never forgotten it—she said, ‘Joy, dear girl, this world belongs to men. Women are here only on sufferance. It is essential that you recognize this. I urge you to do your duty as a wife, not because I believe that it is right that you do so, but because I believe it is necessary. If you do y
our duty, then no matter what Justin is or does, he will respect that. You have the right, and he knows it. And if he tries to leave you, or refuses you support, the law will support you. But if you abandon Justin—well, he is my son and I love him, but he is very like his father, and I know…I know,’ her voice broke then, and she was so dignified, so controlled, I was really shocked, ‘I tried to raise him differently, he was a sweet little boy, but I don’t know what happened, it must be the nature of the male ….”
“She stopped to blow her nose and clear her throat, she had a lace-edged handkerchief, I remember that, I couldn’t get over that, I don’t even own a handkerchief. It was blued and ironed and everything! That’s what she did, that’s what was in her life….”
“Like Mother.”
“Even Mother doesn’t blue her handkerchiefs anymore. She washes and irons them, but she doesn’t blue them.”
I laughed. “You’re right.”
“Anyway, after a while she continued, she said, ‘I don’t know exactly what he will do but I am sure he will make you suffer. I don’t know exactly how because I never took such a risk. But my vision, my nightmare—is you and the children penniless, homeless, in desperation.’
“I was crying by then, and she came over and put her arm around me. ‘I hope that will not happen. I love you and I adore my grandchildren,’ and she started to cry again. ‘And I sense I will not be allowed to see much of them if you and Justin—if you cannot make it up. But if you can’t,’ and by then she was sobbing, ‘let me know. Write me. I always see the mail first in the morning, even when James is home. I can help you, a little, and I will. I have my own little nest egg. I may seem totally subservient to you…’”
Joy broke off. “Remember how he used to snap his fingers at her at the dinner table when he wanted something?”
I shook my head. “I never saw that.”
“Well, he did. Totally subservient!” She shook her head as if she were trying to shake a flea out of her ear. “Yes, well, she said she wasn’t. She said she had her own way of protecting herself. She said that tight as he was, she was able to put away a few dollars in a bank account every week, and that she’d been doing that for thirty years. She used to hide her bankbook in with her Kotex pads, because she knew he’d never look there.”
Both of us giggled.
“But after she went into menopause, it was a real problem where to hide it!”
We both burst into laughter.
Joy laughed long and hard, a laugh that moved into hysteria. Tears came into her eyes, laughter-tears. Then she stopped, wiped her eyes, and continued: “So she said, ‘So my dear, I have something, and I want it to go to you and the children. Promise me you’ll let me know if you need it. Promise!’ I promised. I was sobbing by then, we were clinging to each other. I felt as if we were conspirators or something, I felt that we could have been living in 1600 or 1000 or anytime at all in the past, that it was always like this for women, that we were simply repeating what had happened a million times before…it’s always the same, it never changes.”
“And did you? Ask her to help?”
Her ravaged face sank further into tiredness. “I had to. I didn’t want to. But I had to.”
Amy had helped, just as Mother and Dad had helped, and Joy’s kids went to college. But Amy died before they finished.
“By then, the kids were in gear. They knew. They had summer jobs and part-time jobs, and they managed to work themselves through.”
There was a provision in Amy’s will that her savings were to go to her grandchildren, but when she died there was nothing left in the account. James did not offer to help his grandchildren. It was as if they were not his grandchildren. Justin by then had married again and had a new baby.
“That money was for her protection—in case James left her, or left most of his money to Justin,” Joy whispered, “and she broke herself helping me.”
“Someday,” she was blowing her nose now, “I told the kids we’re going to drive out there and go to the cemetery and say good-bye to her properly. And lay roses on her grave….”
Another bout of nose blowings, clearings of throat. “She loved her grandchildren more than Justin loves his children! I can’t get over that!”
I pondered. “The thing is, you got out. Amy didn’t. So you went through hell for twenty-five years; she went through it her entire married life. A different kind.”
“I suppose.” She didn’t sound convinced. She stood and poured more coffee in our cups. She spilled it, her hand was trembling. “Mom and Dad have been wonderful to me too. Great. Terrific. Couldn’t be better. It’s sort of reconciled me to…everything.”
“Reconciled you?”
She shrugged. “It made me feel she cares about me after all. Maybe even loves me. You know, I never felt Mother loved me very much. I was like Daddy. There was Mother and you—and Daddy and me—and we were outside.”
“Yes.” I couldn’t lie. “Mother isn’t great at loving anyone. She wasn’t given love—oh, that isn’t true, I know Grandma loved her, I remember how she used to look at her—but she wasn’t given something, she wasn’t given emotional sustenance I guess. And so she couldn’t give it to us. Like the baby rat that isn’t washed clean, you know?”
She didn’t.
“Well, if a female rat has a baby, the first thing she does after it is born is lick it clean. But experimenters have taken away the baby rat before the mother has a chance to do that…”
“Cruel!”
“And if the baby is female and has babies of her own, she won’t lick them clean. They’re imprinted so early! Anyway, I guess what you don’t get you can’t give.”
“I didn’t get it and I gave it.”
I stared at her. This was true. “But you had problems. Remember, years ago, after Julie was born, you asked me once if I was afraid I didn’t love my children? And I said no, I was afraid they wouldn’t love me?”
She laughed. “But that was before Jenny was born.” She stretched her arm toward me and I handed her a cigarette. She leaned back and lighted it. Her face was calm, smiling. “My kids were so wonderful! I didn’t know how to love them, really. I was always anxious, like I had to be told what to do, how to be a mother, or read it in a book, because it didn’t come to me naturally. But when Jenny was born, my kids—well, they’d spent summers with Amy, often, and she loved them…so they’d learned, I guess. Anyway, the kids just loved her up, they held her and cooed over her and played with her and loved her so much and I watched them and I saw…and she loved them back, oh god how her eyes would light up when they came in from school! That’s how I learned, I learned from my kids. Thank god I had a third child, I never would have known….”
My voice came out low. “I was too jealous of you to love you like that when you were little.”
“Well, you would be!” she flared. “Given the way Mother is. She sets us against each other—you know, she praises you to me and me to you. She’s really possessive of Dad. You know for a while there, he was coming over here all the time to fix things for me, just for something to do, you know, he’s so bored. And she’d come too, but she couldn’t stand it. He was so happy, and of course I was very nice to him, I made a fuss over him, well it is great the way he fixes things….”
“Yes.” When I was nine years old, I began to love my father….
We sat in silence.
“Mother loves you,” I said finally.
“I know. She just makes me feel I’m shit. All the time.”
“Well. If it’s any consolation to you—I’m not sure it is, I’m not sure anything could be—there’s a cost for what she gives me. She has me in this bind: she wants me to do things for her, be something for her, but if I become attentive, if I go out often and stay for a few days, she gets as nasty to me as she is to Dad. And whatever I do is not enough, she makes sure I know it is not enough, it can’t help. And I die, it does something terrible to me to look at her looking at me that way: saying did yo
u imagine this could help? Well, you know.”
“Yeah. Like that dress you gave her for her birthday. That dress is gorgeous! What is it? Feracci or something?”
“Lucca Ferelli. I mean, I knew it was very dressy, but I thought she’d have something splendid to wear on Christmas, or some special occasion, and I knew from the cut that it would fit her.”
Joy twisted her mouth. “It was really beautiful. And what did she say? ‘What do I want with this?’ Something like that.”
I nodded. “She said, ‘What do I want with this?’ as if it was a piece of shit. Then she saw my face and said, ‘Where would I ever wear it?’”
Joy sighed.
“But she keeps asking me in her own silent way, to do something, to save her… and I want to, I would if I could. But she’s inconsolable. Oh, I love her. You know that. You love her too. We all do. Profoundly. She doesn’t know what she does to us. She thinks she doesn’t matter, she is sure she doesn’t matter to us. And so she makes you feel it doesn’t make any difference to her that you love her…. And it doesn’t—her sorrow, her desolation, are all that exist…. She lies cold in the center of my heart like a gravestone.”
“She does in mine too,” Joy said quietly.
But does Joy lie in bed at night whirling down down into a black abyss of pain? Does she lie there wishing to get to a place where nothing matters, where she can sleep deeply, restfully, and never wake up? Does she spend her nights fighting off the desire to die and her days pretending she doesn’t feel it? Does she whirl down into the black hole, lie there in that pain, that incredible pain, sharp and aching at once, piercing every organ starting with the heart moving outward through the body, flowing into the arms and legs, penetrating the genitals, shoots of pain, of aloneness, knowing the aloneness, recognizing it, it is familiar from childhood, it is the only thing that feels safe….