He heard Liz on the stairs, and in a moment she came in. She said, “Wow.”
“‘Wow’?”
“I’m so tired.” She stood in the middle of the room, and he saw the last ten days on her lined face, in her disheveled hair. He felt exhausted himself, and determined not to say so.
He muted the TV and looked at her. “She needs to come home.”
“She’s going to.”
“Do we disagree?” he snapped. He knew he sounded pissed off, but he didn’t care: he was sick of her attitude, so patronizing. “I don’t think we disagree, and yet—”
“And yet what?”
“You’re doing it again right now!”
She stared straight at him. She wore a V-neck top, and the skin it exposed looked dry and creased. Her throat, her neck—she loved to be kissed there. She would giggle, twist, writhe. Her body had not changed much; her legs were as fine as when she was thirty. He hated her, though—hated her guts.
After a little while she came over to the couch and held out her hand. He took it. She pulled, and he stood and followed her to their bedroom, watching himself as if from a distance, curious more than anything else about what would happen next. What happened was that she undressed him and undressed herself, and they both got into bed. What happened after that was that he lay there while she stroked his abdomen, his thigh, his penis. And then, in an instant, he was rock hard and on top of her, and he pushed into her with a hope that it would hurt, and he thrust hard when he heard her gasp. He put a hand over her mouth and held it there while he pumped—four times, maybe five—and then exploded into her, his mind going black for the briefest wonderful moment until he came back to himself, and his body lost the feeling of satiety second by quick second, and his fury pulsed back through him.
“Jesus,” she said, but he didn’t wait for more—he got up and pulled on his clothes and left the room.
19
S
arabeth began eating scrambled eggs: once a day, twice, even three times on one occasion, though she only picked at the third plate, vaguely disgusted. It was atavistic; it went back to the time right after her mother’s death. She had entered the Cowper Street kitchen one evening to find that the gifts of food that had seemed so endless had in fact ended. The refrigerator contained condiments and sour milk. The bread box held one last greenish banana muffin. Even the staples were nearly gone: all that remained in the soup cabinet was a single tin of lobster bisque that had been there for something like a decade.
Up until then she and her father had been scavenging among the donated food and the dwindling staples, sometimes together but more often alone; she had even found him early one morning eating cold beef stew straight from a Tupperware. She saw on this evening that it had to stop. They had to deal. Real cooking was for the moment beyond either of them, and so she bought and scrambled eggs: with milk or without, plain or with chopped tomatoes, with grated cheddar or a pad of cream cheese. She learned that her father liked his eggs very dry, and she discovered that if she got hers out of the pan early and put them on a prewarmed plate that she set over simmering water, they could both eat them as they liked.
That endless but fast-disappearing year when she was in eleventh grade, and her mother was dead, and he had not yet decided to move away: what a strange, impossible year it had been. Mostly they avoided each other, she upstairs and he down, she at school and he at work, but from time to time they went to a movie together, often an old Hitchcock movie being screened by one of the film societies at Stanford, and in the dark, staring up at the beautiful and troubled face of Joan Fontaine or Ingrid Bergman, they were joined in something vast and unspoken.
The transfer to Baltimore happened quickly, went from unlikely possibility to done deal in mere weeks. The therapist Sarabeth saw when she was in her twenties had remarked that it had been a kind of preemptive strike on her father’s part, to leave Sarabeth before she could leave him, and though Sarabeth argued that he’d wanted her to go with him, she supposed that in some way the therapist was right. It hadn’t felt like a strike, though. It had felt like mercy.
They packed the house in August, during a heat wave. Her mother’s clothing was already gone, and they emptied the kitchen cabinets into boxes, sorted through books, labeled furniture
BALTIMORE
or
STORAGE
or
GOODWILL
. It was into a carton marked
STORAGE
that the silver candlesticks had gone, along with a fancy Limoges vase that Sarabeth’s mother had bought for herself at Gump’s, in the city. The vase seemed to stir something in her father. He picked it up and rotated it, looking at it this way and that. He said, “This made her happy for almost a week,” and Sarabeth stood there hoping he wouldn’t say more, nearly holding her breath until he put the vase down again and began wrapping it in newspaper. That evening, she slid her bare feet into flip-flops and carried her belongings across the street to the Castleberrys’ house.
Thursday morning she watched for Jim’s car, thinking she had neither the energy to tour with him nor the courage to cancel. When he arrived, she kept her eyes focused straight ahead, away from the Heidts’ house, as she headed down the driveway to the car. Needlessly, since the Volvo wasn’t even there.
“How are you?” he said as she got in.
“Fine.”
When he’d called last night, she’d been in bed already, at seven-fifteen.
Were you asleep?
he’d said. Now he watched as she arranged herself in the seat, put her purse on the floor, buckled up.
“No offense,” he said, “but I don’t believe you.”
She wondered if she could tell him: about Lauren, about Liz; about how horrible she felt, how desperate to call Liz again, and how afraid. She looked at him, Jim in one of his trademark colorful sweaters, all swoops and jags of green and tan and brown, and while she had always been able to tell him anything, she was too ashamed.
She said, “It’s just Billy misery.”
“Honey, since when? I’m so sorry, what happened?”
“Nothing. I was in Rockridge at this one stop sign, and I just—”
“You had a relapse?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, honey.” He reached for her hand and held it. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because it’s so boring. It’s pathetic.”
“It’s not, it’s the human condition.”
She was able to smile at this, and he gave her hand a little shake and let go to put the car in gear. He said, “Let’s go on tour, shall we? We’ll have ourselves a morning, all right?”
The sky was pale with cold, and pedestrians hurried along the leaf-strewn sidewalks in layers of sweaters and knit hats, the Berkeley version of winter wear. Jim told her about a harpsichord concert he and Donald had attended, about a friend of theirs who was giving up on the Bay Area and moving to Oregon. At a huge house in the hills, the group of realtors that often included Peter Something didn’t include Peter Something, and Jim said, “He broke his leg.”
Sarabeth tried to seem interested, but she couldn’t even remember Peter Something’s face. She had first noticed him during Billy: decided he was cute and moved on. Post-Billy, cute became more interesting. She found out that he was single. But she’d never even spoken to him.
“Rock climbing,” Jim added. “Do you get that?”
“I guess. The challenge?”
“Yeah, but the discomfort. The terror.”
“Some people are into that.”
They toured the house, got back in Jim’s car, drove to the next property. Jim’s niece in Southern California was about to have a baby, and he told Sarabeth about his sister’s near-daily phone calls to update him on the condition of her daughter’s cervix. “She will never live this down,” he said. “That’s a promise.”
After the last property, he excused himself to make a phone call, and Sarabeth leaned against the car and waited for him. She felt the chill of the air, looked at the thinning winter trees, and there was something so familiar about how she felt: it was as if she were hearing music she’d known long ago and forgotten. A song, maybe, but what were the words?
Jim came back. He said, “Do you have time to look at a new listing with me?”
It was an apartment in Adams Point, a third-floor condo with all the character of a Days Inn motel room. The owner had bought it after getting divorced, only to decide that she couldn’t live without a yard. Sarabeth didn’t understand how that could happen. How could you not know that about yourself?
Her name was Helen. She wore the kind of baggy black pants and tunic that Sarabeth thought of as no-clothes—the kinds of things you wore when you had given up. In a sad attempt at style, she’d tied a colorful batik scarf around her neck, but this highlighted rather than overturned the general impression of misery. Was Sarabeth, by chance, projecting? She was, of course.
“This is going to sell so fast,” Jim said as the three of them stood together in the entryway. “The only tricky thing is that there’s another unit coming on, but I don’t think it’s nearly this clean. Come on,” he said to Sarabeth, “wait’ll you see.”
Helen had owned the place for two years, but it looked like two months, two weeks. The furniture was all new and so bland as to defy the idea that an actual person had chosen it. The walls were worse: hung with framed reproductions of Impressionist paintings that were so familiar you didn’t even see them.
Sarabeth smiled at Helen. “It’s lovely.”
“Thank you.”
The kitchen was a galley with nothing on the counters but a folded red dishtowel. The bathroom could have been taken from a plumbing showroom, right down to the unused soap. It wasn’t until they got to the bedroom that Sarabeth saw anything interesting: a rather lovely antique rolltop desk. It made the room way too crowded, but it would work well in the living room—an improvement for both spaces.
“So where are you going?” Sarabeth asked at the door, and Helen retied her scarf before responding.
“I’m not sure—a little cottage, maybe.”
Sarabeth got a look from Jim. They said goodbye to Helen and descended the stairs in silence. In the car she turned to him. “What was that?”
“I’m exercising good boundaries. She wants to sell her condo, I’ll sell her condo.”
“And then she’ll be on the front page of the
Chronicle,
fished out of the bay under the bridge.”
“Sarabeth!”
She fastened her seat belt. Her own age, that’s what she was thinking. Helen was about her own age.
“Did you take me there to show me how much worse my life could be?”
“No!” he exclaimed. Then he looked over at her and sighed. “Well, maybe a little.”
She stifled a giggle. “Oh, God.”
“What?”
“It could be.”
He started the car and headed back to north Berkeley, neither of them saying much as they drove. At one point his phone rang, and he silenced it without so much as a glance to see who was calling. When they arrived in front of the Heidts’ driveway, he put the car in park and pulled her close.
The Volvo was back. She said goodbye to Jim and stood eyeing the distance to her front door; then she took a deep breath and walked as naturally as she could past their house, past their back door, past their yard, and up onto her porch.
Inside, she went straight to her bedroom and lay down. Tonight was a Center night, and she opened
Anna.
Went back to what she’d read two weeks ago. Read ahead. She was ready. She saw herself as globally ready—
Anna
fully in mind, lampshade paper on order, a new listing to stage (barely). Globally ready and locally absolutely idle.
What if she called that Helen and said:
Who are you, what was your life, what happened?
She tossed
Anna
aside. Again, the idea of distant music, familiar and sad. A song without words.
20
S
he couldn’t get used to it. Her room, the family room, the kitchen; her mom, dad, brother—how could you live somewhere your entire life, go away for two weeks, and return a stranger? She wasn’t the stranger: they were; it was. It was her first day home, late afternoon, and she sat at the kitchen table with
Glamour
while her mom made dinner. “The Moves That Make Him Crazy”—she didn’t want to read that. She didn’t want to read “Movie Star Arms in 8 Weeks.” Why eight, when you got right down to it? Why not nine? Or ten?
Forget it, if I can’t have them in eight I won’t do it.
Her mom kept looking at her—over the salad spinner, a steaming pot, the wooden board where she cut bread. Lauren felt twitchy. She didn’t want to be alone in her room, but she didn’t want to be looked at, either. In group earlier this week a new girl had hidden her face in her hands and said, “Stop looking at me, stop looking at me.” Later, when Lauren had her session with Dr. Lewis, she told him about this, and he said, “You felt a connection with her. It’s hard to be looked at. But I think it’s also hard not to be looked at.” And at that Lauren had begun to cry.
“How’s it going?” her mom said.
Lauren looked up. Her mom looked like shit. And why did she have to ask questions all the time?
“Fine,” Lauren said, and her mom got this stricken look on her face, which she then tried to hide with a fake smile. It was all so bogus.
Lauren’s scars were a vivid, wet-looking red, four on her left wrist and two on her right. She could no longer remember doing it. All she remembered was being in her room beforehand while everyone was downstairs finishing breakfast and getting ready to leave. She hadn’t slept at all. All night, her two options had run through her mind, but when she thought of going to school she still thought of the other, whereas when she thought of the other, as horrible as it was, that was all she thought of. At around two she got out of bed to figure out what to wear in the morning, but searching for the jeans she looked best in and a sweater no one would notice, she felt the pull of the other as the only logical choice, the one that would solve all her problems, not just the current one about how she could face Jeff after the catastrophe of blurting out
I’m Lauren.
“There’s a difference between wanting to die,” Dr. Lewis had said, “and wanting to stop suffering.”
Lauren didn’t really have a right to suffer, was the thing. When she thought of Lucas, when she thought of Callie, even Abby—Lauren knew she had it lucky.
“Would you set the table for me?” her mom said. She was at the stove again, stirring whatever was in the steaming pot.
“OK.” Lauren closed the magazine and set it on the counter, then went to the place mat drawer. She had never really thought about it before, but her mom was sort of freakily well organized. And her dad—had he always been so pissy? Coming in from the hospital earlier today, he’d tripped over the little rug in the hallway, and you’d have thought her mom had put it there on purpose, the way he rolled his eyes at her and kicked it back into place. In the middle of the afternoon he’d left for a couple hours of work, and Lauren was pretty sure he was glad to go.
She distributed the place mats, got napkins and silverware.
Her mom said, “So how are you feeling about the partial stay?”
Starting Monday, Lauren was going back for partial hospitalization—days at the hospital, nights at home. Which part of how much that sucked did her mom not get?
“Whatever,” she said.
Her mom was still at the steaming pot. She looked at Lauren for a long moment, then she picked up the pot and carried it to the sink, where she released a cascade of steaming water and peas.
“What are you doing?” Lauren cried.
Her mom gave her a weird look. “Draining the peas,” she said, and only then did Lauren realize there must have been a colander in place to catch them. She was a basket case. Partial hospitalization? She never should have left.
The evening was slow for Brody, creeping. At dinner Liz worked way too hard to keep a conversation going, and as a result every word she uttered struck him as false. Christmas was coming! Robert and Marguerite were going to be in a big concert! Joe’s soccer team had won an invitation to a tournament over winter break! And of course they were going to Tahoe!
After dinner, Joe asked for a ride to Trent’s, and Brody took him; he and Liz had agreed in advance that forced family time would be a mistake. Liz had rented some movies, and when Brody got back, Lauren chose one for the three of them to watch.
Much later, after Joe was home again and everyone else was asleep, Brody left his laptop, where he’d been trying to catch up on work, and made his way to the garage. He’d taken to leaving his tennis shorts and shoes in there, a change he felt sure Liz had noticed, though she hadn’t remarked on it. They were on a shelf above the dryer, and he reached for them, shucked off his khakis, and pulled them on. He slid his feet into his tennis shoes without bothering to change his socks. Dark socks for tennis—what an iconoclast he was.
“Where are you going?”
He turned, and there was Lauren, standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Honey,” he said. “Gosh, I didn’t hear you.”
She was flushed and tousle haired, her nightgown sweeping the floor.
He said, “Can’t you sleep?”
“I was thirsty.”
“Want some water?”
“What are you doing?”
There was nothing for it: he had his shorts on, his shoes. “I’m just going to hit some tennis balls.”
“In the middle of the night?”
He turned away. The garage was a mess, or seemed so because of the bench Liz had abandoned, which sat on newspaper in the middle of the floor, partially painted, perhaps never to be completed. One evening he’d brought it up, meaning to offer help of some kind—a hand in moving it out of the way if nothing else—but she’d seemed furious at the mention of it, and he hadn’t gone on.
“Yeah,” he said to Lauren. “In the middle of the night.”
“Where can you hit tennis balls in the middle of the night?”
The realization of what he was going to have to say hit him hard. He did not want to do this, did not want to utter the word “school.”
Instead he said, “What would you like to drink?”
She lifted her shoulders. Her nightgown, he realized, was a castoff of Liz’s—it was possible he himself had given it to Liz one Christmas. “Lanz” came the brand name out of nowhere. He remembered now that Liz had worn these nightgowns—Lanz nightgowns—for years, so unsexy they were almost sexy. A longing for her swept over him, but in her presence these days he felt something like its opposite. Maybe not revulsion, but something close.
“Juice?” he said to Lauren.
“I’ll get it.”
She moved away from the doorway, and he hesitated a moment, the darkness outside the garage calling to him with its promises. He left his racquet on the dryer and went up the steps to the kitchen.
She stood in front of the cabinet where the glasses were kept. Her hair hung past her shoulders, blondish brown, tangled. She wasn’t moving. Had she truly wanted to kill herself?
Kill
herself?
“Laurie?” he said.
She bowed her head, and in a moment her shoulders were shaking. He crossed the room and turned her, pulling her close. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s OK.”
Pressed against his chest, she shook her head. “I can’t go back.”
He thought of the other kids: anorexic girls, a boy with a vacant face, another ranting about bin Laden. “It won’t be much longer,” he said. “I promise. Just a week or two.”
“To school,” she cried.
He stepped back, hands on her shoulders, and looked into her face. She was terrified.
“Why?”
“Because it’s horrible,” she wailed, and she covered her face and wept. “There was this girl—she cut herself all the time. She used scissors if she couldn’t find a knife.”
“What?” He was shocked. “Didn’t anyone do anything? Go to a teacher or something?”
“Not at school, at the hospital! I mean, she didn’t do it at the hospital—that’s why she was there.”
She was tired, exhausted—he’d only just realized it. He needed to calm her down, get her back to bed.
“Laurie,” he said.
“You were going to my school, weren’t you?” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “To hit the balls.”
He hesitated. “Yeah.”
“It’s OK.” She moved to a box of Kleenex and plucked one out. “I don’t care.” She blotted her eyes and blew her nose. “But I want to go to the hospital all the way until Christmas, OK? Please? Otherwise I might have two or three days of school right in the last week. I don’t want to go back for a few days and then have a huge break.”
“I can see that,” he said. He knew his insurance wouldn’t cover it, but maybe he could work it out. “I’ll look into it, OK? I’ll try to make it work.”
She stood still for a moment and then crossed the kitchen and poured herself some orange juice. She drank it in an unbroken series of gulps and set the glass near the sink. “I’m going up,” she said.
He heard her on the stairs, heard a creak from her bedroom floor. Going in there that first day, when he came home from the hospital; he’d left to fetch Joe but had stopped at the house. Her room had been unusually tidy, just her backpack in the middle of the floor and a pair of jeans slung over a chair, as if she’d intended to go to school. He had stood there for a long time, not entirely unaware but not really aware, either, that he was postponing, little by little, the moment when he would first see the bloody bathroom.