“I don’t know how you stand it,” Harriet murmured as Hannah studied Arthur’s hand, spread out on the oak pedestal dining table in the light from the Tiffany lamp, and decided they’d make the bid easily.
They’d played bridge with Harriet and Allen once a month far over twenty-five years.
Allen was a partner in Arthur’s law firm and had been a Deke at Cornell two
classes behind Arthur. Harriet had a silver Marie Antoinette hairdo and a small painted mouth.
“It makes me feel important.” Her
turtleneck was damp, but she didn’t want to take the time to change it when there were tricks to be won. She just hoped she didn’t smell.
“Is it worth it?” asked Allen, sucking on his pipe to get it going.
“Oh yes,” Hannah said, taking tricks rapidly. “I like knowing what everybody in town is up to. That way nobody can take me
by surprise. I like it almost as much as I like knowing that you have the king of diamonds, Allen.”
“Right,” he said with a smile, putting down his pipe to fling down the king and take the last trick.
As Arthur in his tatty green Mr. Chips sweater swept together the cards, Hannah looked back and forth between him and Allen. Whiteand distinguished, they got better looking with each passing decade. Whereas she and Harriet were sagging from repeated childand wracked with hot flashes, night sweats, and anxiety attacks. It simply wasn’t fair. Arthur came by his steadiness biologically. Women, with their hormone storms, were in constant flux. In therapy she often prodded the men to allow themselves a wider emotional range, whereas the women usually needed to discover the part of themselves that didn’t change along with the hormones each month. Until they found this inner pole star, they clung to relationships, or to anything else that seemed to promise external stability. Like poor old Julie with that creep Terry. But at least she could count on his beating her up every other week, as regular as clockwork.
She made a face at Arthur.
He gave a startled laugh. “What’s that for, my pet?”
“Because you’re so damn attractive. Isn’t he?”
she asked the Sullivans. She’d just realized that in any earlier era, Allen and Arthur
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would have had new twenty-year-old wives, and she and Harriet would be dead in their graves from puerperal fever. “You two are “older men,” but Harriet and I are little old ladies.” Everyone laughed.
“That’s a lot of garbage,” said Arthur, shuffling the cards. “There’s still lots of life left in you, old girl.”
“Take comfort from the fact that you’ll bath probably outlive us by many years,” said Allen, getting up to mix more martinis in the pine dry sink.
“Yes,” said Arthur, dealing. “And you can go on exotic cruises and pick up young deckhands.”
“Spare me,” said Hannah, picking up her cards.
“What are you smiling about?” asked Arthur.
“I remember Maggie told me she was walking home from a show one night down West Forty-third Street, and this prostitute came stumbling out of a seedy hotel calling for a doctor. So Maggie went upstairs with her, and there was this naked man lying on an iron bedstead. Gray-haired,
well-groomed, a businessman or something. Maggie checked him over and he was dead. When she told the woman, the woman looked at her and said, “Well, Doe, I thought he was coming, but I guess he was going.” his
“I bet she made that up,” said Arthur between laughs.
“I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“She was some lady.”
“She sure was.” As Hannah watched her three old friends chuckle and shake their heads, she wondered if the pain of losing them was worth all the good times they’d had together. It was an equation that was harder to balance as you got older. Because you knew for a fact, as you hadn’t when you were young, that before long your friends would start dying on you. Or you on them. One way or another, you had to part. It made one reluctant to let new people in. There was no way around it: Life was a painful experience. All pleasure faded, and everyone had to die. But meanwhile, there were compensations. For example, Arthur had just dealt her another fine no-trump hand. She sipped her martini to conceal her expression of delight from Allen, who played bridge like poker, reading people’s hands from their faces.
“Oh no you don’t, Allen,” she said, raising her hand in front of her face.
He grinned. “Sorry, babe. I’ve already read you.”
Hannah glanced at the others, sitting around the pedestal table under the circle of light, with a wind off the lake battering the winationight fallen, winter looming, senility pending. The gift from middle age was the ability to enjoy the moment without expecting it to last.
Jackie and Jason were so far ahead that Caroline could hear only the faint roar of a distant snowmobile and the swish of her own skis. She poled along in the boys’ tracks, watching the new snow sparkle in the sun-as though some planter had sown multicolored glitter. The wind had sculpted the drifts into scallops. As she took a deep breath, her nostrils stuck together from the cold. Today would be busy at the ER. Frostbite, fractures from skiing, back spasms and heart failure from shoveling.
She passed a huge gray dead elm. From its branches last winter an owl had swooped down and carried off afield mouse as she skied past.
Someone ought to cut the tree down. Limbs kept falling. One shaped like a giant wishbone hung over another near the top. One day it might land on someone’s head. Of course anyone trying to cut down such a huge tree might bring the whole thing crashing down on himor on an innocent hiker. Also, chain saws sometimes kicked cutting dense, tangled elm.
A couple of years ago a man in the ER lost a leg that way.
Suddenly it occurred to her she didn’t have to think about ravaging owls or amputated legs on such a beautiful afternoon. She could think instead about sculpted snow gleaming in the sun. Halting, she stood still. Hannah said whether you were depressed depended on what you saw when you looked around. You could see that dead elm as a potential accident, as a supply of firewood, as a natural
sculpture. She leaned forward on her poles and studied the tree. Hannah also said she used the memory of Marsha’s smile as an excuse to feel bad.
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Maybe there was something to this. No, it was ridiculous.
Hannah was a zombie.
It was time to return to the cabin for a fire. “Okay, guys, where are you?” she yelled. Ahead, one set of tracks went to the right, the other to the left.
Obviously a trick. Whichever path she took, the other boy would accuse her of loving him less.
The afternoon silence was broken by a hollow thumping. Her eyes traced the noise to the elm. Way up in its gray branches a woodpecker maybe a foot high with a bright red head drummed on the wishbone limb. She watched with astonishment as the huge bird threw down a shower of sawdust and dead bark onto the snow drifted against the trunk. It paused to turn its head, inspect its work, and devour whatever it was uncovering.
Shouting boys raced in on skis, poles flying.
Arnold leaped alongside them barking, his dark fur dusted with powdery snow. The woodpecker lifted off, circled with a raucous cry, then floated across the field toward the far woods.
“Look!” said Caroline. “A pileated
woodpecker. You hardly ever see them.”
“Big deal,” said Jason, pushing off with his poles like a slalom racer. “Race you home, dummy!”
Arnold barked happily, trying to grab a pole in his teeth.
Jackie glanced in the direction of the departing woodpecker, strictly from politeness.
As Caroline poled along back to the cabin in the boys’ tracks, she studied the view through the trees of the cabin down below, a plume of smoke waving from the chimney, windows flashing in the sun. Glistening white meadows stretched down to Lake Glass, which spread out to hazy mountains on the far horizon. And over all, a deep blue sky. She had to admit it was breathtaking. Tourists knew what they were doing flocking up here to exclaim over these views. It occurred to her she could make a shawl like that-tie-dye the warp in blues, grays, and purples. Weave bands of those same colors. It would be stunning. A landscape shawl. The loom was empty. She’d start this weekend.
Caroline sat watching the fire in her stone fireplace and thinking about her new shawl idea, as she drank a Michelob and listened
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to the boys play Space Invaders on their video game. Arnold lay dozing, firelight reflecting off his glossy black coat. He was pleased with himself, having just chewed Jason’s hockey stick to pulp. Wet ski socks hung steaming on the arms of a ladderback chair bethe fireplace. Caroline had a shoebox of photos in her lap, and from time to time she looked at one, trying to select a few for Hannah. Herself, her parents, Howard and Tommy, various maids and clients, Jackie and Jason, Jackson, David Michael, Diana.
Difbackdrops, at different ages, in different outfits. Ranks of ghosts. Even those infants and toddlers called Jackie and Jason no longer existed. They were big boys now. The earnest little girl named Caroline, the anxious nursing student, the harassed housewife, the rabid revolutionary, all had vanished. Yet apparently whatever made Caroline Caroline remained, because here she sat. Maybe that was what Hannah was trying to get her to define with that wretched list?
Whenever he lost at Space Invaders, which was often, Jason stumover, knelt beside her, and rested his head on her lap. She smoothed his auburn hair for about twenty seconds, marveling at the length of his eyelashes, before he raced back cheerfully for another defeat. Caroline realized as she gazed at the flames that was what
she’d
like to do, sit on the carpet by Hannah’s desk chair and rest her head in Hannah’s lap while Hannah smoothed her hair. God help us, she thought, jumping up.
As she furiously scrubbed potatoes for supper, she assured herself there was no way she was going to do that tired old transference trip again. She was afraid of getting clobbered, she’d heard herself tell Hannah. Well, it was a valid fear. Witness all those faces, now dein the photos.
After supper jenny and Pam arrived for poker, and Diana came down from upstairs. They evicted the video game to the boys’ bedbut the bleeps continued to bounce through the living room as the four women sat at the gateleg dining table, which they’d covered with green felt.
“So the last of the great therapy holdouts is getting her head shrunk?” asked Pam, adjusting her hand-tooled leather eyeshade.
“Yup.” Caroline was having trouble with Pam’s new hairdo, almost
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a brush cut in front, but long in back. She’d known Pam for five years with a wild tangle of hair that almost hid her pale blue malamute eyes. They’d all four met while working on an abortion referral project in the bad old days before abortion was legalized. They’d scrounged money, driven sobbing teenagers to Canada, talked hysterical housewives out of douching with Black Flag, picketed wet T-shirt contests. Together they’d faced down anti-abortion groups on the statehouse steps and interviewers on the evening news. But one day Caroline sent a welfare mother to a doctor in New Jersey for a saline abortion.
He administered the injections and turned her out on the street. She checked into a Holiday Inn and miscarried, sobbing and screaming at Caroline over the phone while holding the dead fetus in a bloodsoaked bed. Caroline dropped out of the project and descended into despair.
As the image of the woman alone in the motel with her dead fetus floated through Caroline’s head, she felt a funk gathering like pigeons around popcorn.
She reminded herself she didn’t have to think about that shit any more than she had to see the dead elm this afternoon as an eventual accident. She shrugged a couple of times in imitation of Hannah. She was surrounded by old friends in a warm cabin with a glass of cold Michelob before her. All was well.
“So how is it?” asked Pam.
“Fine,” said Caroline. “I feel sheepish for having said so many awful things about it.”
“You were pretty obnoxious,” said jenny, dividing up the poker chips and taking their money. Jenny and Pam were close friends and occasional lovers. They devoted themselves to working for wages as little as possible, and to conducting as many simultaneous love affairs as they could. By not working they felt they did their bit toward undermining the patriarchy; by sharing the sexual wealth, they did their bit toward building the matriarchy. Caroline found their philosophy appealing, but was unable to overcome her Boston Puritan heritage enough to practice it.
“But it was obvious you were so down on it because you were so drawn to it,” added jenny, who was wearing a Red Army cap with a red star on the front, acquired on a recent trip to China with her
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parents and a group of Presbyterian missionaries from Georgia, one of whom jenny claimed to have bedded in Nanjing.
“That sounds like the assessment of someone who’s done a lot of therapy,” said Diana, turning up cards to determine who would deal first.
“Years and years of it. I was a regular therapy junkie. My parents spent a fortune on my shrinks, hoping I’d get cured of my perversion.
Instead I spent my sessions trying to seduce my female therapists. And succeeding once, I might add. She wanted us to stop therapy and continue the affair. I pointed out that one of my presenting symptoms was my inability to sustain a sexual relationship. She threw her letter opener at me, and it stuck in the wall beside my head. As I left, she was dialing her therapist for an extra session and muttering that at least now she understood countertransference.”
“Is that a true story?” asked Pam, dealing seven-card stud. “Or are you being apocryphal?”
“I’ll let you know when Caroline’s finished,” she said with a sly smile, tossing her ante into the pot.
She reached over and took same peanuts from Pam’s pile, as though they were a married couple of long standing.
“Go right ahead and enjoy yourself, girls,” said Caroline. “I know I deserve it.”
Caroline watched the fire, sipped her beer, and won at sevenstud as they chatted about who was sleeping with whom. The funk had departed as abruptly as it appeared. What a luxury it was to spend time with old friends with whom it was okay to talk about nothing much. They had watched each other’s hair go gray, each other’s stretch marks sag, each other’s disposable incomes shrink with inflation. Snow floated by outside the winThe odor of damp wool socks wafted over from the fireplace. Enemy lasers bleeped in the next room. The boys’ voices accused each other of cheating and lying. A visceral feeling of wellbeing crept over Caroline so stealthily she didn’t have a chance to fend it off. The ghosts hovering behind her became wispy and faded. Whoever and whatever were here and now were enough. More than enough-an unexpected gift from nowhere. Like the