Any Woman's Blues (22 page)

I had for some time believed that her healing powers would have been as strong in the Middle Ages as in the twentieth century. Sybille was ferociously psychic, almost to the point of being telepathic. A poet in her soul, she dispensed a form of analysis that was two parts chicken soup, one part metempsychosis, and the rest wise-woman-of-the-woods. Sybille, as her name indicated, was a witch. Her black eyes and long black hair said so. Her saffron robes said so. And her little cottage, perched at the edge of a waterfall and filled with cats and crystals, said so. She lived about fifteen minutes away from me, under the mock-Tudor thatching of what had once been a mock mill house on a mock millionaire’s estate. The mill wheel still spun beneath our sessions. The cats leapt from chair to chair. On one chair there was a pillow that said, in needlepoint:

That was the sort of shrink Sybille was.

 

 

I drive to the airport with Lily and Natasha to get Mike and Ed. We are all in a state of high excitement about seeing the girls.

Divorced mommies learn, eventually, to put mother love in the icebox for weeks at a time—when the babies are with their daddies—or go mad. And I had learned my lesson well by now. When Mike and Ed were away, I put them out of my mind—if not out of my dreams. I learned to keep them near yet far. I learned to suspend feelings. This trick will be necessary in the afterlife, if there is one. For, of course, we are already
in
the afterlife: it intersects with our world, threading in and out of our days like a candy ribbon. Some days we are serene and all-knowing, other days frantic and caught up in the mortal coil. I seem always to have been obsessed by the myth of Persephone, as if somehow I knew that I would live a life in which I needed her wisdom to cope with the chronic departures of my daughters. They come and go—to Hades and back again—and when they return, it is always spring.

We wait at the airport in the crush of people—relatives roiling in familial frenzy, bored limo drivers smoking and loitering with the glazed, indifferent eyes of those who are going to meet strangers. They carry big paper lollipops with these strangers’ names. But the family members carry their passion and expectation: flashing eyes, auras of anticipation and anger—whole family histories read in their pacing feet, their troubled brows.

Airports have always affected me deeply, made me want to cry. All these arrivals and departures, losses and restitutions! All these people going off to hang suspended above the ill-fitted fragments of their lives! So may puzzles! So many departures!

In our age, travel has become a drug. There are people who grow so used to coming and going that they find it impossible to stay still. If they are not boarding a plane and going somewhere, they feel somehow bereft—like a gambler deprived of his chips, or an addict of his needle, or a sexoholic of her marble cock.

The twins!

They come through the arrival gate looking three inches taller than they did two months ago, unkempt, dirty-faced, with untied shoelaces—just like two ten-year-old girls who have been with their father.

“Mom! Mommy!” They shout almost in unison. The joy on their dirty faces at that moment is wondrous to behold. And my heart: it seems to burst its membranes, to expand, to convulse around their coming. The waters break. I am awash in tears, which then I wipe and hide. My little cookies, my big-small girls, my little chips of DNA whirling forward through the universe. My double darlings, my double dollop of chocolate chip ice cream, my two little puppybodies, fragrant with musky nympharoma, my bubble-gum Reebok babies, with the double dirty smile.

“How was the flight?” I ask, just to have something to say, when there is nothing to say—just hugging. We hug. We hug and hug and hug. The whole Amazon commune hugs. Five women hugging each other.

“Airplane food sucks the root,” says Ed.

“Aaagh,” says Mike, doing a ten-year-old’s imitation of vomiting.

“What did you eat?” asks Lily—that being her domain.

“The usual swill,” says Mike.

“Yeah,” says Ed. “The usual mystery meat . . .”

“You guys sure have grown,” says Natasha, who seems to have grown herself, even at thirty. They all seem to grow three inches when they leave me, all except Lily, who, like all our fairy godmothers, remains comfortingly the same.

“How was Dad’s house? What did you do?” I ask. We walk to the baggage claim.

“Daddy has this new girlfriend, who keeps giving us
baths,
” says Ed.

“Yeah,” says Mike. “She’s bath happy.”

With Dart gone, I am suddenly stung by the news of a new girlfriend. Does the heart
never
heal?

“Bath happy?” I ask. The twins look as dirty as ever, coming home from their father’s house. Mike’s auburn hair has the remains of a wad of cut-out bubble gum matted into it, and Ed’s auburn hair hangs limply around her dirty face. They both have backpacks overflowing with all the stuff a ten-year-old girl considers essential to life on this or any planet: bubble gum, emergency chocolate, a favorite soiled stuffed animal (Mike has Trapper Bear; Ed, William Shakesbear), a notebook to record impressions (“California is grate. I miss Mom”), several Judy Blume, Norma Klein, and Roald Dahl books, T-shirts with witty sayings (“Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here”).

“Where’s Dart?” asks Ed.

“He usually comes to get us, doesn’t he, Mom?” says Mike warily.

I had not counted on this part of the Dart-gone problem. Well, might as well tell the truth. I always tell the kids the truth—in the gentlest way I know.

“He’s gone to California,” I say, “to look for a job in movies.”

“Oh,” says Mike.

“You mean you guys broke up,” says Ed.

“We saw it coming,” says Mike.

“Yeah,” says Ed. “He was out of order.”

“You deserve better, Mom,” says Mike.

I am left with my mouth hanging open.

 

 

It is bliss to have them home. We ride. We shop. We walk through our raspberry brambles, picking the brilliant red berries that gleam like little clusters of Venetian glass. We cuddle in bed at night among the stuffed animals.

The twins have decided to move into the guest room so as to be nearer to Mom—they seem to know I need them as much as they need me—and at night I climb into the water bed between them, smelling their nymphic smell, feeling their puppybodies with the brash newborn fingertips of the just sober.

Lying in bed with them at night, I think of all the times I nearly left them motherless, raging at my own motherlessness, trying to spite Elmore or Dart or Dolph or Theda for my own self-pity, thinking someone could be sorry if I drove, stoned, into a tree. And someone would:
me.
And these two little someones I hold in my arms.

 

 

How sharp is the regret of early sobriety! All those wasted years! All those wasted nights I was too drunk to feel my daughters’ flesh with fresh fingertips. I used to read to them, glass in hand, clowning drunkenly for them as I read Roald Dahl or Judy Blume or Norma Klein. Who was the loser? No one but me. I missed my life.

Lying there, I would try to total all the bedtimes I had missed, all the hours, minutes, seconds, blotted out in the brain cells. Impossible. Now I had such clarity that at times the world seemed unreal. Every second seemed alive, inhabited with animals, vegetables, minerals, molecules. Alive! The whole earth alive hurtling through the cosmos and I rocking in the water bed with my daughters in the womb of space-time. And no longer alone.

“Mom, can you cook?” says Ed.

“Why?”

“Daddy says you can’t cook,” says Mike.

“Of course I can cook. Watch.” And I stab one arm out of the water bed, pick up the telephone, and call the pizzeria.

The twins laugh and laugh. Forty-five minutes later we are all sitting in the wobbly water bed, demolishing an almost-hot extra-cheese pizza.

“We missed you, Mom,” says Mike.

“Yeah,” says Ed. “You’re the greatest mommy in the world.”

“Thank you,” I say, looking up.

I understand what it means to be twice blessed, twice born.

And Lily comes in to scold us for pigging out on pizza in bed.

 

 

But some days, reality is too much to bear. I dream of Dart. One night, he is with me—his golden, muscled shield of a chest gleaming. I see and smell it in my dream. For some reason, he is wearing my pearls—ropes and ropes of them. He dives into the sea. And when he surfaces, the pearls have lost their luster and are eaten away to reveal plastic beads at their hearts.

“Baby, I’m sorry,” he says sheepishly. “I love you.

You’ve always been the woman in my life—but I’m not strong enough to love you well.”

Another night, I find a letter from Dart among my things.

I start to cry, remembering the eternity we had before we lost our paradise. And I remember how sweet and tender Dart could be before things went awry. I have been trying not to remember that, because it is easier not to remember.

Then something about the letter hits me—
work.
Dart has barely mentioned
work
in his hourly breakdown. “Instructing the help” is what he relates to. It is as though he has done a description of his
father’s
life. This letter is the equivalent of Ven’s greeting cards, my sane mind says.

“When is Dart coming back?” Mike asks one day, going to bed.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“We figured you guys had another one of your fights,” says Ed.

“I don’t think he’ll be coming back,” I say.

“Oh, Mom,” says Ed.

“I’m glad,” says Mike. “I was always scared of him.”

“Me too,” says Ed. “Ever since he took down Mike’s pants and spanked her.”

“He did what?” I asked. “When?”

“Just before we left.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We didn’t want you to worry, Mom,” says Mike.

“Yeah,” says Ed. “You’re such a worrywart.”

“What you need, Mom, is a
rich
husband,” says Mike.

“Someone with a Porsche,” says Ed.

“Or a Rolls-Royce,” says Mike.

“Or a BMW,” says Ed.

“Someone
rich,
” says Mike.

“Yeah,” says Ed.

“If they’re all jerks, might as well get one with
money,
” says Mike.

“That’s dumb,” says Ed.

“Men don’t like it when you have all the money,” says Mike.

“But what about liberation?” I ask.

“Men don’t like it,” says Ed.

“And they still run stuff,” says Mike.

“I’m sorry, Mom, they just do,” says Ed.

“But we have to
change
that,” I say.

“Forget it, Mom, and take their money,” says Mike.

“Get one with a Porsche,” says Ed.

—
Calvin Carter

 

 

D
anny Doland from Dallas drove a Porsche. Danny Doland from Dallas was tall, fat, fifty, funny, and absolutely
loaded.
Danny Doland was the answer to a ten-year-old’s prayers.

“Marry him,” said Mike.

“Yeah, Mom,” said Ed.

I was introduced to Danny Doland on a blind date. By an old lover of mine named Tyler Levinsky, who had recently married the shiksa of the year. (Another one: the category is crowded.) Tyler was fit, fifty, rich (though not as rich as Danny): he was in the antiques business. He wanted to see me conveniently married off to one of his cronies so that we could take trips as a foursome and he could intermittently visit my bed. It was doubtless for that nefarious reason that he introduced me to his partner, Danny, who collected everything from Important Art to Rare Books to Major Antiques to Fine Wines and was willing to consider acquiring
me.
It never occurred to me that there was anything strange about a newly sober person falling in love with a wine collector. Why not? I thought. I could resist all those euphoniously named châteaus. And Danny was intelligent, generous, Texan, a great raconteur. Prior to becoming an
antiquaire
he had been a publisher in London. (His money was old—for Texas—inherited, and still green.) He was well read. He was witty. He had published Nobel laureates and trash novelists alike, and he could do the most fabulous imitations of both. (He would, for example, drape himself in a leopardskin scarf and do a Jackie Collins. Or he would do the perfect I. B. Singer singsong.) As if these literary credentials were not enough, he had a glorious estate in the Berkshires, once owned by a friend of Edith Wharton’s—an Italianate villa near The Mount, called Lunabella. Lunabella had its own conservatory, its own indoor swimming pool (which connected with the outdoor swimming pool by a secret passage), its own ballroom (with a painted, vaulted, starry sky). Edith Wharton had invited Mr. Fullerton there, but he had never come.