Desire Lines

  Chapter 6

  “So, my darling,” Kathryn’s mother says several days later when she finds her sitting at the kitchen table in boxer shorts and a Women’s Studies T-shirt, reading the paper. “Do you know what time it is?”

  Kathryn glances at the clock. “Eleven forty-five.”

  Her mother looks at her.

  “What? Did the time change?”

  “It’s eleven forty-five,” her mother says. “The morning’s almost gone.”

  Kathryn looks at her over the top of the paper.

  “You’ve been here almost a week now, Kathryn, and I wasn’t going to say anything, but I just can’t stand by any longer without telling you what I think.”

  Kathryn lowers the paper and folds it slowly, avoiding her mother’s eyes. “Fine. Go ahead.”

  “Well …” She takes Kathryn’s empty mug off the table. “More coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I think I’ll have some.” She goes over to the counter, takes down a Maine Black Bears mug, and fills it from the pot. “This is what I have observed,” she says, opening two packets of Equal with her teeth and pouring them in. “You stay up late watching talk shows—”

  “Does the noise bother you?”

  “That’s not my point. And then you sleep late every morning. You wander down here around eleven or eleven-thirty, and then it’s afternoon before you’re dressed, and half the day is gone.”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “Don’t you think there’s a problem here? Look.” Her mother comes over and sits in the chair beside her, setting her mug on the table. Kathryn inches her chair away. “It’s no secret that you’re depressed.”

  All at once a flock of emotions, seemingly from nowhere, wings its way through Kathryn’s brain.

  “And I think you’re hiding.”

  “From what?”

  “Yourself. Your expectations of yourself.”

  “Oh, Mom—” Kathryn starts, but her mother cuts her off.

  “Listen, I know what’s going on. When your father left me, the jerk, I—”

  “This is hardly the same thing. Paul and I agreed, mutually—”

  “Bull-oney. Nobody ever agrees mutually,” she says. “Something happens, one person pulls away, and the other one gets self-protective and pulls back too. And Paul was having an affair, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, but that was just a symptom.”

  “Whatever. All I know is that divorce does terrible things to your sense of self. Your esteem.”

  Kathryn lets out a short laugh. “Have you been buying those self-help books again, Mom?”

  “That kind of cynicism is just what I’m talking about.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “Face it. You’re listless.” Her mother slowly wags her head. “Being in denial is not going to help.”

  “Look, Mom, I appreciate your concern, but I wish you’d just leave me alone, okay?”

  “No,” she says, leaning closer, “I will not leave you alone.”

  “Why are you treating me like a child?”

  “Because you’re acting like one.”

  Kathryn covers her face with her hands. “Do me a favor. Please get off my back. Just for a little while. Please.”

  “All I want is for you to be—”

  “I know, I know—”

  “Don’t you interrupt me!” Her mother’s voice is fierce.

  Kathryn takes a deep breath.

  “I am sorry about what you’ve been through,” her mother says angrily. “I’d have given anything for the last few years to have worked out differently for you. I know it hasn’t been easy. But this is just no good. You’ve got to work through it. You are twenty-eight years old, Kathryn. I run into girls from your class all the time, and they’re having babies and teaching school and buying houses and planning for retirement and generally acting like adults. But you don’t seem to want to make any hard decisions.”

  “You don’t call getting divorced a hard decision?”

  “I call it inevitable. That marriage was doomed from the start. You weren’t in love with him, you just kind of fell into the relationship because it seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, so far, it seems to me, inertia has been the driving force of your adult life. You fell into a job in Washington that you kind of liked, then you went to graduate school, which you didn’t finish; you got yourself married and settled in Charlottesville, which you kind of liked, got a job that you kind of liked … and then, when things didn’t work out, you abandoned it all and came back to where you started—with no clear idea of what you want, no plans, no goals for the future.”

  Kathryn looks at her mother steadily, and her mother looks back.

  “I think this goes way back, Kathryn,” she says finally. “I think this has to do with Jennifer. And I think it’s time for you to start working it out.”

  INERTIA, KATHRYN THINKS, lying on her bed that afternoon, staring up at the ceiling. What a strange word. Who’d have thought her mother would come up with it? She likes the sound of it—inertia—a far-off echo, a secret, a lulling whisper in her head. She hasn’t tried to name this disconnection she’s been feeling; she hasn’t dared to pin it down. Having a word, and such a word, to describe it is somehow comforting. She likes that it characterizes actions, not feelings; it covers her without defining her. It’s safe.

  For the first time in a long time, she thinks back to that night by the Kenduskeag. After Jennifer left, she and Will had made their way down to the river, just the two of them, leaving everyone else behind. “Will you remember this?” he said. “Will you remember me?”

  She wonders sometimes what would have become of them if nothing had happened, if they’d all simply gone off to college as they expected to after that last summer in Maine. Maybe she and Will would have continued to see each other whenever they could for a while, and then the phone calls and the visits would have dwindled, and finally she’d have found out from a friend at Princeton that he was gay—or maybe he’d have told her himself. Jennifer would have gone to Colby, as she’d planned, and Kathryn to Virginia, and the two of them would’ve stayed friends, coming back together in the summers between school years, sleeping on the floor of each other’s dorm room on occasional weekends. But then they’d have gotten caught up in their separate lives and separate friends and forget to call, and eventually they’d have been standing on the shores of each other’s lives, squinting hard into the distance to see to the other side.

  Instead, things fell apart. Jennifer’s sudden absence destroyed the fabric that had held everyone together. The police were secretive, then hesitant, and finally admitted there’d been no leads. Kathryn moved through college in a kind of daze, forming friendships cautiously when at all, making respectable grades, avoiding loud parties, keeping herself organized and managing her time efficiently. Everybody who knew about Jennifer’s disappearance remarked on how well Kathryn was doing, how quickly she had “bounced back”—as if what she did and how she appeared had any relation to how she felt.

  For a long time the guilt was enormous. She felt guilty when she laughed, when she made a new friend, when she momentarily forgot. She’d be walking down the street in the middle of the day and the sun would be shining and a child would laugh and she’d be wondering what to make for dinner, where she might find some thin-stalked asparagus, whether she had a lemon in the fridge, when something would trigger a memory—a glimpse of blond hair, a low, throaty laugh, a dim recollection of Jennifer at fourteen encountering asparagus for the first time, leaving behind a small mound of fringed tips. At times like this Kathryn would stop short, her thoughts dissolving like an Etch-a-Sketch, her stomach caving in on itself like a hill of sand.

  During her sophomore year she spent a semester in London. She read eighteenth-century British poetry and took to wearing black from Marks & Spencer. In the late afternoon, around teatime, she would leave her cramped, ugly flat and walk through the damp streets, smelling the rain tha
t was never far away, looking at the grim, pale faces of Londoners too long on the dole. Yet she felt perfectly at home. She began losing weight, first because the food at the college was so bad and then because she learned to savor the feeling. She was shrinking, disappearing.

  She began smoking cigarettes to stave off hunger, and wore black eyeliner and layers of clothes because being thin made her cold. Her London friends noticed the change, but thought it was cool; they joked about how fresh-faced Kathryn Campbell had been transformed. Her unhealthy glow was like a lighthouse beacon, drawing castaways. But she wasn’t capable of offering shelter; she had a hard enough time giving solace to herself. Instead she willed men toward her and then, before daylight, left them. It helped, she knew, to be so light. Somehow it was easier to leave and feel no remorse when your mind was dizzy with hunger and the weight of your body left no imprint on the bed.

  When she returned to the States at the end of May, her mother and brother barely recognized her. She slipped off the plane, dressed in tatters and pale as the moon. Her mother stepped back in horror; her brother stepped forward, impressed. “Wow, Kath,” Josh said appreciatively as she came toward them, “you look like a freak.”

  Her mother put her arms around her and squeezed, and all of Kathryn’s muscles tensed. “You’re a bag of bones,” her mother whispered. “Hugging you is like hugging a tired old woman.” She held Kathryn’s face in her hands, and Kathryn looked away. “What have you done? What have you done to yourself?”

  Kathryn shrugged, her bony shoulders moving up and down in a sigh.

  “You’re a different person,” her mother said.

  “Jet lag,” she murmured.

  Kathryn slept for three days in the room she’d grown up in, with the shades drawn and the door closed. Every few hours her mother came in to check on her, pull up the sheets, touch her forehead with cool, soft hands. In her dreams she saw the same images over and over, a series of snapshots fading in and out: footprints disappearing into the grass, an open window, an outstretched hand, miles of highway, a shallow grave. These pictures became a kind of visual mantra. She didn’t know why she had seized on them, but in an odd way they comforted her. They helped her face the fear that was gnawing at her inside.

  On the evening of the third day, as her mother and brother were sitting down to dinner, Kathryn appeared in the kitchen wearing nothing but a long T-shirt and underwear, and announced that she was hungry.

  Her mother leapt up to fix a plate, and Josh leaned over and pushed Kathryn’s long hair away from her face. “About time,” he said. “I was beginning to think you’d gone missing, too.”

  Chapter 7

  The next morning, a warm, sunny day, Kathryn drives out to see Rosie Hall, a friend of her mother’s and her sometime therapist, who practices in a little cluster of beige-colored prefab buildings in an industrial development on the edge of town. Kathryn was doubtful when her mother suggested she call Rosie, and she’s even more doubtful now, looking around the empty waiting room—a cramped space with two folding chairs, a country-style woven rug, and a cheap wooden table holding a lamp, a collection of magazines spread out in a fan, and a dying spider plant.

  On the phone the secretary had said, “Lucky you, we can squeeze you in today! Rosie has to pick up her son Jeff from baseball practice at five, so you’d better come a little before four.” Kathryn’s been waiting ten minutes, sitting in one of the metal chairs, leafing through a three-month-old Personal Quest, and there’s no sign of Rosie.

  “Nice day out there, huh?” the secretary says from behind a short divider.

  Kathryn looks up. “Yeah.”

  She shakes her head and goes back to typing. “But I guess you can feel lousy in all kinds of weather.”

  Kathryn looks up again to see if she’s joking, and the secretary gives her a sympathetic smile. Kathryn glances at her watch.

  “She’ll be out in a minute,” the secretary says. “She wants to make sure everybody gets their money’s worth.”

  As if on cue, the office door opens and a tall, shy-seeming man with a prominent Adam’s apple, a faded flannel shirt, and heavy work boots emerges. “Thanks, Rosie,” he calls back. “See ya next week.” He nods to the secretary. “Doris.”

  “Be seeing ya, Lance. Take care.” Doris waves him out the door and turns to Kathryn. “You can go in now.”

  Standing up, Kathryn puts the magazine back in its place in the fan and steps through the door. She finds herself in a large, empty room with no windows, beige carpeting on the floor and walls, and a wide lozenge of humming fluorescent light on the ceiling. Big square pillows and foam-stuffed baseball bats are scattered around the floor. On the wall a hand-printed poster declares, in green block letters, ROSIE’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO-GOOD, VERY BAD DAY ROOM, with names signed in different colors around it: Amy, Angie, Dick, Gretchen, Mike, Sue. Another poster, a faded cartoon of a turkey, says DON’T LET THE TURKEYS GET YOU DOWN.

  “This is where we do group.” A short, softly rounded woman with large pink-tinted glasses and curly brown hair appears in the doorway to the next room.

  “Why are the walls carpeted?”

  She picks up a foam bat and swings it, hard, at the wall. It bounces off. “So nobody gets hurt.” She smiles. “You must be Kathryn. Come on in.” Kathryn follows her into a dim little office containing three old, overstuffed chairs, a cluttered desk and straight chair, and a bookcase filled with books, most of which, it seems to her at a glance, are self-help. “Sit wherever you like,” Rosie says.

  Kathryn looks around. One chair, large and lumpy and low to the ground, has broad arms and a floral print; another is a rocker, with a stuffed leather seat; and the third, covered in red chintz, is a wingback. She feels like Goldilocks. “Is this a test?”

  “I don’t know. Could be, I guess!”

  Kathryn narrows her eyes at her. Reaching out tentatively, she squeezes the arm of the wingback. “I’ll take this one.” She sits down and sinks low in the loose stuffing, struggling to sit upright. Finally she wrenches herself up.

  “Not quite right?” asks Rosie.

  Kathryn motions toward the lumpy floral.

  “That’s people’s favorite,” she says. “I guess it’s kinda womblike or something. Why don’t you take your shoes off and make yourself comfortable?”

  Kathryn slips off her shoes and sits in the low chair, tucking her legs under for ballast. Rosie takes a pad and pen from her desk and pulls the straight chair up close. Kathryn shrinks back into the cushions.

  “So,” Rosie says, chuckling, “you chose the floral. What do you think that means?”

  “Hmm,” Kathryn says. “I think it means that Baby Bear is going to come home and find me in his bed.”

  Rosie shakes her head and writes something down on the pad.

  “What are you writing?”

  She looks up. “I wrote humor-slash-evasion.”

  “Oh, come on,” Kathryn says, “did you really expect me to take that question seriously? Okay, I’ll take it seriously. I chose the floral because rocking chairs make me nervous and the wingback has no springs. And I notice, by the way, that you’re in the straight chair.”

  “Why do rocking chairs make you nervous?”

  Kathryn looks at her watch.

  “Are you feeling that this is a waste of time?”

  She stands up and begins backing away. “Look. I—I think maybe this was a bad idea. I’m obviously not in the right frame of mind, so maybe we should just—”

  Rosie puts the pad on her lap and sits forward. “Kathryn,” she says calmly, “your mom’s paying for the hour. Why don’t you just sit back down—for goodness’ sake, you can sit on the floor if you want to—and relax, and we’ll see how it goes.”

  She shakes her head skeptically. “I don’t know.”

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” Rosie says. “We’ll start over. We’ll start now. You’ve just come in the door, you’re choosing the chair you want, and we have a whole hour ahead
of us to talk about what’s going on in your mind.”

  “Don’t you have to pick your son up at baseball practice?”

  “Oh, it won’t kill him to sit on his fanny for a few minutes,” she says. “Now. What are you doing back in Bangor?”

  “so.” ROSIE LEANS forward, propping one arm on the other, her hand on her chin. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Your marriage is finished, but you’re not sure you ever got it off the ground to begin with. You don’t know what you want to do with your life and feel incapable of finding out. You’re living with your mother at a time when everyone your age seems to be getting on with their lives. And your ten-year high-school reunion is coming up in a couple of weeks.”

  “Pretty grim, huh?” Kathryn says.

  Rosie taps her fingers on her chin. “It’s a lot to deal with, that’s for sure.” She pulls a day calendar off her desk. “How is Tuesdays, four o’clock?”

  “What do you mean? You mean permanently?”

  She laughs. “Lord, no. I’m not one of those analyst types who think it has to take years to see results. I was thinking more like a month or two.”

  “I don’t know,” Kathryn says. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. I might just stay a couple of weeks. I don’t know how long my mother and I can stand living together.”

  “Have you considered getting an apartment?”

  “No. I don’t want to … settle.”

  “You mean compromise, or settle down?”

  She thinks about this for a moment. “Both, I guess.”

  “Well, it’s pretty clear that you need to deal with this stuff. You can do it with me, or you can do it with someone else, but you need to do it.”