Authors: Jill McCorkle
“Your grandmother, honey. Grandma Marilyn in South Carolina.”
There was a long silence, and then the child began to speak rapidly, filling them in on all that was going on in her life. “Mom says you used to teach junior high,” Margot said, and she and
Sid both grinned, somehow having always trusted that their daughter-in-law would not have turned on them as Tom had led them to believe.
Then Susan got on the phone, and as soon as she did, Marilyn burst into tears. “Oh Susie, forgive me,” she said. “You know how much we love you and the kids.”
“I know,” she said. “And if Tom doesn’t bring the kids to you, I will. I promise.” Marilyn and Sid still believe her. They fantasize during the twilight hour that she will drive up one day and there they’ll all be. Then, lo and behold, here will come Tom. “He’ll see what a goddamned fool he’s been,” Sid says. “They’ll hug and kiss and send Snow Bunny packing.”
“And we’ll all live happily ever after,” Marilyn says.
“You can take that to the bank, baby,” he says, and she hugs him close, whispers that he has to eat dinner before they can go anywhere.
“You know I’m a very good driver,” she says, and he just shakes his head back and forth; he can list every ticket and fender bender she has had in her life.
The intervention day
is next week. Tom and Bunny plan to stay with Sally and Rusty an hour away so that Sid won’t get suspicious. Already it is unbearable to her —this secret. There has only been one time in their whole marriage when she had a secret, and it was a disaster.
“What’s wrong with you?” Sid keeps asking. “So quiet.” His eyes have that somber look she catches once in awhile; it’s a look of hurt, a look of disillusionment. It is the look that nearly killed them thirty-odd years ago.
There have been
many phone calls late at night. Rusty knows how to set up conference calls and there they all are, Tom and Sally and Rusty talking nonstop. If he resists, we do this. If he gets angry, we do that. All the while, Sid dozes. Sometimes the car is parked crooked in the drive, a way that he never would have parked even two years ago, and she goes out in her housecoat and bedroom slippers to straighten it up so the neighbors won’t think anything is wrong. She has repositioned the mailbox many times, touched up paint on the car and the garage that Sid didn’t even notice. Sometimes he is too tired to move or undress, and she spreads a blanket over him in the chair. Recently she found a stash of empty bottles in the bottom of his golf bag. Empty bottles in the Pepsi cooler, the trunk of his car.
“I suspect he lies to you about how much he has,” Rusty says. “We are taught not to ask an alcoholic how much he drinks but to phrase it in a way that accepts a lot of intake, such as ‘How many fifths do you go through in a weekend?’ ”
“Sid doesn’t lie to me.”
“This is as much for you,” Rusty says, and she can hear the impatience in his voice. “You are what we call an enabler.”
She doesn’t respond. She reaches and takes Sid’s warm limp hand in her own.
“If you really love him,” he pauses, gathering volume and force in his words, “you have to go through with this.”
“It was really your idea, Mom,” Sally says. “We all suspected as much but you’re the one who really blew the whistle.” Marilyn remains quiet, picturing herself like some kind of Nazi woman blowing a shrill whistle, dogs barking, flesh tearing. She can’t answer; her head is swimming. “Admit it. He almost killed you when he went off the road. It’s your side that would have smashed into the pole. You were lucky.”
“I was driving,” she says now, whispering so as not to wake him. “I almost killed him!”
“Nobody believed you, Marilyn,” Rusty says, and she is reminded of the one and only student she has hated in her career, a smart-assed boy who spoke to her as if he were the adult and she were the child. Even though she knew better, knew that he was a little jerk, it had still bothered her.
“You’re lucky Mr. Randolph was the officer on duty, Mom,” Tom says. “He’s not going to look the other way next time. He told me as much.”
“And what about how you told me you have to hide his keys sometimes?” Sally asks. “What about that?”
“Where are the children?” Marilyn asks. “Are they hearing all of this?”
“No,” Rusty says. “We won’t tell this sort of thing until they’re older and can learn from it.”
“We didn’t,” she whispers and then ignores their questions. Didn’t what? Didn’t what?
“The literature says that there should be a professional involved,” she says, and for a brief anxious moment, relishes their silence.
“Rusty is a professional,” Sally says. “This is what he does for a living.”
Sid lives for a living
, she wanted to say, but she let it all go. They were coming, come hell or high water. She can’t stop what she has put into motion, a rush of betrayal and shame pushing her back to a dark place she has not seen in years. Sid stirs and brings her hand up to his cheek.
Sid never told
the children anything. He never brought up anything once it had passed, unlike Marilyn, who sometimes gets stuck in a groove, spinning and spinning, deeper and deeper. Whenever anything in life —the approach of spring, the smell of gin, pine sap thawing and coming back to life —prompts her terrible memory, she cringes and feels the urge to crawl into a dark hole. She doesn’t recognize that woman. That woman was sick. A sick foolish woman, a woman who had no idea that the best of life was in her hand. It was late spring and they went with a group to the lake. They hired babysitters round
the clock, so the men could fish and the women could sun and shop and nobody had to be concerned for all the needs of the youngsters. The days began with coffee and Bloody Marys and ended with sloppy kisses on the sleeping brows of their babies. Sid was worried then. He was bucking for promotions right and left, taking extra shifts. He wanted to run the whole delivery service in their part of the state and knew that he could do it if he ever got the chance to prove himself. Then he would have normal hours, good benefits.
Marilyn had never even noticed Paula Edwards’s husband before that week. She spoke to him, yes; she thought it was Paula’s good fortune to have married someone who had been so successful so young. (“Easy when it’s a family business and handed to you,” Sid said, the only negative thing she ever heard him say about the man.) But there he was, not terribly attractive but very attentive. Paula was pregnant with twins and forced to a lot of bed rest. Even now, the words of the situation playing through Marilyn’s mind shock her.
“You needed attention,” Sid said when it all exploded in her face. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“Who are you, Jesus Christ?” she screamed. “Don’t you hate me? Paula hates me!”
“I’m not Paula. And I’m not Jesus.” He went to the cabinet and mixed a big bourbon and water. He had never had a drink that early in the day. “I’m a man who is very upset.”
“At me!”
“At both of us.”
She wanted him to hate her right then. She wanted him to make her suffer, make her pay. She had wanted him even at the time it was Paula’s husband meeting her in the weeks following in dark, out-of-the-way parking lots —rest areas out on the interstate, rundown motels no one with any self-esteem would venture into. And yet there she had been. She bought the new underwear the way women so often do, as if that thin bit of silk could prolong the masquerade. Then later, afterwards, she had burned all the new garments in a huge puddle of gasoline, a flame so high the fire department came, only to find her stretched out on the grass of her front yard, sobbing. Her children, ages four and two, were there beside her, wide-eyed and frightened. “Mommy? Are you sick?” She felt those tiny hands pulling and pulling. “Mommy? Are you sad?” Paula’s husband wanted sex. She could have been anyone those times he twisted his hands in her thick long hair, grown the way Sid liked it, and pulled her head down. He wanted her to scream out and tear at him. He liked it that way. Paula wasn’t that kind of girl, but he knew that Marilyn was.
“But you’re not,” Sid told her in the many years to follow, the times when self-loathing overtook her body and reduced her to an anguished heap on the floor. “You’re not that kind.”
. . .
People knew
. They had to know. But out of respect for Sid, they never said a word. Paula had twin girls and they moved to California, and to this day, they send a Christmas card with a brag letter much like the one that Sally and Rusty have begun sending. Something like:
We are brilliant and we are rich. Our lives are perfect. Don’t you wish yours was as good?
If Sid gets the mail, he tears it up and never says a word. He did the same with the letter that Paula wrote to him when she figured out what was going on. Marilyn never saw what the letter said. She only heard Sid sobbing from the other side of a closed door, the children vigilant as they waited for him to come out. When his days of silence ended and she tried to talk, he simply put a finger up to her lips, his eyes dark and shadowed in a way that frightened her. He mixed himself a drink and offered her one as they sat and listened with relief to the giggles of the children playing outside. Sid had bought a sandbox and put it over the burned spot right there in the front yard. He said that in the fall when it was cooler he’d cover it with sod. He gave up on advancing to the top and settled instead on a budget and all the investments he could do to ensure college educations and decent retirement.
Her feelings each and every year when spring came had nothing to do with any lingering feelings she might have had about the affair —she had none. Rather her feelings were about the disgust she felt for herself —and the more disgusted she felt the more she needed some form of self-medication. For her, alcohol
was the symptom of the greater problem, and she shuddered with recall of all the nights Sid had to scoop her up from the floor and carry her to bed. The times she left pots burning on the stove, the time Tom as a five-year-old sopped towels where she lay sick on the bathroom floor. “Mommy is sick,” he told Sid, who stripped and bathed her, put cool sheets around her body, cool cloth to her head. It was the vision of her children standing there and staring at her, their eyes as somber and vacuous as Sid’s had been that day he got Paula’s letter, that woke her up.
“I’m through,” she said. “I need help.”
Sid backed her just as he always had. Rusty would have called him her enabler. He nursed her and loved her. He forgave her and forgave her. “I’m a bad chemistry experiment,” she told Sid. Without him, she would not have survived.
On the day
of the intervention, the kids come in meaning business, but then can’t help but lapse into discussion about their own families and how great they all are. Snow Bunny wants a baby, which makes Sid laugh, even though Marilyn can tell he suspects something is amiss. Rusty has been promoted. He is thinking about going back to school to get his degree in psychology. They gather in the living room, Sid in his chair, a coffee cup on the table beside him. She knows there is bourbon in his cup but would never say a word. She doesn’t have to. Sally sweeps by, grabs the cup, and then is in the kitchen sniffing its content.
Rusty gives the nod of a man in charge. Sid is staring at her, all the questions easily read:
Why are they here? Did you know they were coming? Why did you keep this from me?
She has to look away. She never should have let this happen. She should have found a way to bring Sid around to his own decision the way he had led her.
Now she wants to scream at the children that she did this to Sid. She wants to pull out the picture box and say:
This is me back when I was fucking my friend’s husband while you were asleep in your beds. And this is me when I drank myself sick so that I could forget what a horrible woman and wife and mother I was. Here is where I passed out on the floor with a pan of hot grease on the stove and here is where I became so hysterical in the front yard that I almost burned the house down. I ruined the lawn your father worked so hard to grow. I ruined your father. I did this, and he never told you about how horrible I was. He protected me. He saved me
.
“Well, Sid,” Rusty begins
. “We have come together to be with you because we’re concerned about you.”
“We love you, Daddy, and we’re worried.”
“Mom is worried,” Tom says, and as Sid turns to her, Marilyn has to look down. “Your drinking has become a problem, and we’ve come to get help for you.”
I’m the drunk
, she wants to say.
I was here first
.
“You’re worried, honey?” Sid asks. “Why haven’t you told me?”
She looks up now
, first at Sid and then at Sally and Tom. If you live long enough, your children learn to love you from afar, their lives are front and center and elsewhere. Your life is only what they can conjure from bits and pieces. They don’t know how it all fits together. They don’t know all the sacrifices that have been made.
“We’re here as what is called an intervention,” Rusty says.
“Marilyn?” He is gripping the arms of his chair. “You knew this?”
“No,” she says. “No, I didn’t. I have nothing to do with this.”
“Marilyn,” Rusty rises from his chair, Sally right beside him. It’s like the room has split in two and she is given a clear choice —the choice she wishes she had made years ago and then maybe none of this would have ever happened.
“We can take care of this on our own,” she says. “We’ve taken care of far worse.”
“Such as?” Tom asks. She has always wanted to ask him what he remembers from those horrible days. Does he remember finding her there on the floor? Does he remember her wishing to be dead?
“Water under the bridge,” Sid says. “Water under the bridge.” Sid stands, shoulders thrown back. He is still the tallest man in the room. He is the most powerful man. “You kids are great,” he says. “You’re great and you’re right.” He goes into the kitchen and
ceremoniously pours what’s left of a fifth of bourbon down the sink. He breaks out another fifth still wrapped with a Christmas ribbon and pours it down the sink. “Your mother tends to over-react and exaggerate from time to time, but I do love her.” He doesn’t look at her, just keeps pouring. “She doesn’t drink, so I won’t drink.”