Elizabeth Buechner Morris
Forsaking All Others
This is the saddest story.
It started when my husband encouraged me to take a poetry writing class at our local community college. I’m not sure why he thought I should enroll in Carl Frank’s class. He knew Carl, of course, from the Club, but as to my own literary creativity, well, until then it was confined to letters. I was always writing letters. I wrote out of selfishness, usually. I loved getting letters from my Aunt Louise, in her loopy script on heavy cream-colored stationery. Her messages were not newsy, there not being much to say about her long days at her retirement home, but loving, and always with the same sweet salutation: “My darling Niece, my darling Violet.” Letters from my brother were terse and focused, unlike his conversation style, which took you around Robin Hood’s barn and back again before making a point, and that point obfuscated by qualifiers. I wrote to old friends, reeling out my life story, as they did to me. Writing to each other was a safe way to share our stories, telling just the parts we wanted known, occasionally asking for help or for confirmation for an act already taken.
My mother used to say, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” I say it to my daughters too; so, how could I not enroll in the class when Bill encouraged it. There were twelve others in the class; only one was a woman my age, and I sat next to her the first day of class.
Sometimes you just hit if off with someone. I don’t think it’s necessarily because you are alike, but rather because you have the same needs. That’s how it was with Grace and me. We would meet half an hour before class and eat a sandwich on a bench outside Academic B, where our class met. It wasn’t a bench exactly, more like a low wall defining a garden that was never planted. Academic B and all the other college buildings were built with Catholic brick, as my uncle used to call it: yellow, shiny and cheap. Window shades were faded, often ripped. Plantings were sparse, and tended toward bushes cut squat and square. It wasn’t an atmosphere to inspire poetry or anything else for that matter. In the beginning we talked about our class and our classmates, wondering how we could relate to Gum Popper, Eyebrow Piercer, Boots, and Tattoo Boy; doubting if we had the ability to affect The Slouch to become one of the gang. Soon we got more personal, sharing abbreviated biographies.
As late summer became fall and New England’s October chill robbed the trees of their leaves, Grace and I continued our bench picnics amongst the swirl of dry leaves and fast food wrappers.
“What is it I’m supposed to do now?” Grace asked me one day. She told me a complicated story about her son, his Spanish teacher and the school’s principal. All three told differing versions of an incident involving a Saturday night break-in and robbery of some third and fourth year Spanish exams. She wasn’t sure which was the true story, and even more unsure of her role in the drama unfolding. Her son, John, who said he was at the movies that night, was every mother’s dream son, a leader to his peers and a joy to his family.
The principal was highly respected in his position, and a personal friend of Grace and her husband’s. He had had a late night call from the police that a patrol had seen two figures near the school, one in a red and black checked jacket, exactly like John’s, just before a broken window was discovered. The principal rushed to a conclusion, and called Grace.
The Spanish teacher was her son’s favorite teacher. That he was homosexual should have had nothing to do with the issue. But, of course it did. He reported that he’d been the last one in the department to leave – around 4:30.
“What is it I’m supposed to do?” she repeated. She supported her son, which seemed the right thing to do, and, in fact, was the right thing. But, regardless, the result was cheerless. The manager at the movie theater confirmed her son’s story; the Spanish teacher lost his job when it was discovered that he had a freshman boy with him in his classroom much later Friday night when the school was supposedly locked for the weekend. A senior girl was suspended, when the exams were discovered in her backpack. The principal apologized to Grace and her son, but the damage had already been done to their friendship.
“What is it I’m supposed to do?” That question became a feature of our deepening, trusting friendship.
The lady who cleaned for me twice a month called one day to tell me that $100 was missing from her pocketbook. She always left it on the chair by the door while she cleaned. Had one of my kids been home from school that day? I couldn’t remember. If one were home, would she rifle through Mrs. Roberts’ bag? “What is it I’m supposed to do?” I asked Grace. Both my girls were capable of lying, although I usually trusted them. Would I get a true answer if I confronted them? Doubtful. Should I involve the police? Or, should I give her $100? Or, even, should I tell her it wasn’t my problem. Grace helped me consider all the possibilities. We both knew this was one of those distressing incidents that couldn’t end well. The next time Mrs. Roberts came, I gave her $100 in cash. Neither of us could meet each other’s eyes. Mrs. Roberts had kids too.
Poetry class continued into the winter. We had two roles in class: fledgling writers and inexperienced critics of each other’s work. In the former, I hit a few bull’s eyes, but not many. I did get to the point where I trusted my ability to choose words, even though the rhythm and meter were often at odds. As critics, Grace and I both found to our amazement that neither body piercings nor tattoos stood in the way of fine, thoughtful language, although high-heeled cowboy boots and gum chewing did. Carl Frank impressed us both with his ability to stay focused. “Take a deep breath before you begin a piece,” Carl taught us. “Breathe in those same molecules of air once inhaled and exhaled by Shakespeare. Power your lungs and your brain with those vibrant atoms.”
By December Grace and I were forced inside to the cafeteria, a place with a smell so distinctive that we both spontaneously wrote poems trying to describe its scent. But smell is the mute sense, it lacks its own vocabulary, and we were both tongue-tied. Grace tried the list approach: disinfectant, armpits, burnt sugar, entrails. I worked with adjectives: sulfuric, smoky, slimy, but when I got to disgusting I knew I’d failed. The smell was like a scent-mark left by an animal too horrible to comprehend. But we had so little time together that we pressed Kleenexes to noses and claimed a table near the door to continue our conversations and intensify our friendship.
Before the Christmas break, Grace started talking about her husband. She’d barely mentioned Galen before, and I’d never met him. I knew they lived in a condominium complex, which gave me a vague impression of a man who couldn’t be bothered with home maintenance, and I knew he had a long commute and traveled a lot.
“What is it I’m supposed to do?” Grace began one day, stirring her lukewarm tea. We skipped class that day, for the first and only time, as she spooled out the sad history of Galen’s marital infidelities over the years. “I had one of my own,” she admitted, “a doozer, in fact. I always knew about Galen’s, I think he knew about mine. How could he not, he’s not stupid. I guess neither of us cared enough. I guess neither of us cares enough now. He says he’s taking a trip over Christmas. Dammit. I know what that means. He knows I know, and he doesn’t care. What am I supposed to do about Christmas? About the kids? About his dad and my mother, who come to our house each year? What is it I’m supposed to do?”
School recessed for Christmas break, and Grace and I didn’t see each other for several weeks. In the frenzy of the holidays I didn’t think about her problems; anyway, I seemed to have an unexpected one of my own.
The day after Christmas, unable to sleep, I took my customary morning walk earlier than usual. Bill had left for work even earlier. Coming out of the woods onto Farm Road from the hiking trail, I saw Bill’s tan Toyota flash past. Only the Jayne Farm was up that road, and only Polly Jayne, newly divorced, lived at the farm.
After the dark of the woods, the bright bowl of the sky took my breath. The sun was just up over the line of fields before me, but still below the scudding clouds which it tinted pink, blue, and violet. The sky, the sun, the colors were too intense, too big, and too chaotic. I rushed home to familiarity and order, never quite catching my breath.
Up until that morning, I would have said that Bill would characterize our marriage the same way I would. It was intact, it was solid, it was key; but the romance was on hold. When the girls were small and we were younger, we found time for each other in the interstices of a hectic life of parental obligations. We’d make soundless love on our side of the tent, camping in the state parks of New England. We’d collapse in the living room at night after the bedtime stories, the final kiss, the last glass of water, too tired to talk, glad for a quiet moment together. Bill would call me at home every day at noon from his office, and we’d talk over the details of our lives -- the obligations, problems, schedules, and joys. Each call would end with “I love you.” And, “I love you, too.” Having teenagers sapped our last reservoir of energy, and anxiety seemed to take the place of libido. We slipped into a new phase, helping each other blow off steam and search for answers, more partners than lovers.
Samantha had slapped me one day the previous spring; I still have a twitch there under my eye. I had for the hundredth time questioned the appropriateness of her dress for school – a midriff-baring skimpy shirt with a low-slung miniskirt. First she screamed at me, then she threw her orange juice across the kitchen, and then she flew out the backdoor, slapping my left cheek with the flat of her hand. “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”
I called Bill, and he came home at noon, his presence comforting me. He wrote a letter to Sam, leaving it on her bed. She stormed into the house after school like a late summer squall, all doors slamming open, then shut, the thunder of rock music thudding immediately from her room. Before dinner she came down, subdued, and we somehow coexisted in the kitchen, without actually communicating. It was a small and welcome step back to the familiarity of a home under siege, but in hand. I knew Bill’s letter took the approach of a family being a team forged by love. If I’d written her a letter that day, it would have been an eviction notice.
One night, getting ready for bed, I asked Bill about his visit to Jayne Farm. “It can’t have been my car,” was his only answer. For the first time in our married life, he closed the bathroom door and took a shower before coming to bed.
When poetry started again in mid-January, Grace and I resumed our habit of meeting before class, now giving ourselves an hour together. Grace’s Christmas had been a disaster -- everyone at dinner pretending there was no empty chair at the head of the table. I had picked out two bottles of wine and had them delivered to her condo on Christmas Eve. “Vi, they were the high point of my season!” she claimed. All three of her kids took off on ski trips with friends, clearly not wanting to be home when Galen returned.
“The bastard,” she said, “he had the nerve to come home with a tan, a bikini tan. I’m sleeping in the guest room; he’s pretending I’ve done something wrong. It’s hell. The kids are out of the house as much as they can be, and almost invisible when they’re home. Kyle’s gone back to wetting his bed, and Jill won’t meet my eye or talk about anything in her life. It’s so sad. What am I supposed to do?”
I didn’t tell Grace about Samantha and Amy’s sweet Christmas present to me – a promise to paint the inside of my closet. But I did tell her about seeing Bill’s car and about his first-ever nighttime shower. She just closed her eyes, clamped her lips into a straight line, and sadly shook her head. When she opened her eyes, there were tears. She reached across the sticky cafeteria table and took my hand, stroking its back with her thumb. We sat that way for a minute, then left for class.
The gum chewer had written a long poem over Christmas break, she called it an epic. It was about spending one summer on a farm and the primal hungers that place awoke in her. Her endless verses were filled with descriptions of the fecund smell of newly-dug potatoes, the sweet tongue-tip taste of honeysuckle, the voluptuous feel and smoldering sexiness of thick cream left to warm in the sun. She lost my attention when she compared fresh spring onions to peacocks’ tongues. “Not peacock tongues!” Grace exclaimed softly, sitting next to me.
Later, as we picked our way down the icy path to our cars, she told me that peacock tongues was Galen’s favorite comparison for anything that was beyond the limits of ordinary pleasure. “He used to call certain parts of my body peacock tongues, back when we were in college together, and he was captain of the tennis team and I was a timid freshman.”
When I got to the cafeteria to meet Grace the next time, she was sitting by the door, straight in her chair. She hardly seemed to be breathing. With her was Bev, the gum chewer. “Bev is just back from Cozumel. She has been telling me about the snorkeling.” I shot a glance at Bev, noticing for the first time her fading tan. The girl stood up from the table to go, and slung her backpack onto one shoulder. Trinkets were clipped to its zippers and straps just like the packs of my teenagers: a mirror, a rabbit foot, beads, and a miniature Barbie.
A small breeze followed her out the door, not enough to fan a breath into my gaping mouth.
“Oh, no, Grace, no. I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” she said. “The sad thing about it is that there is more to life than sex, more even than love. There are food and shelter. There are memories and responsibilities. There are families intertwined by blood and tradition. There are routines: sharing the morning paper, rolling the communal tube of toothpaste, cursing at the hoarse threats of the neighbors’ dog. There are bank accounts and mortgages in dual names. There are photo albums. There are dependencies. Does Galen know who gets Christmas cards, or even where to find the address book? Do I have a clue where our safe deposit box key is or what is the exact shade of yellow paint on our house? The only good thing about marriage is that it’s better than the alternative. The way I look at it, it’s a lifelong maintenance plan. I’ll look the other way, again, and let him get away with it once more, both ends of his candle burning, while neither end of mine has even a spark. You’d better do the same.”
I wrote my final poem that night and left it on Bill’s bureau. Its last lines were:
I am destitute and could sell your love to turn time back,
Back to innocent days of daughters precious enough;
Back to love, resilient, rising, joyous, and rightful.
He never mentioned it. But like his letter to Sam that day, its implication must have found fertile ground. I moved into our guest room that night. What else was I supposed to do? But one night, later in the week, Bill came to me, late, late. We lay stiffly next to each other, feeling each other’s heat even though not touching. I wished I could turn back the clock. Probably he wished the same. He told me he couldn’t sleep. I lay still.
“Where did this old quilt come from?” he asked, stroking its edge.
“My mother made it for Samantha’s fourth birthday. Remember, that was the summer she refused to wear anything but underpants. My mother made her a story quilt, which she called, ‘The Empress’s New Clothes’.”
I felt Bill tremble next to me; he seemed unable to get his breath. A sob fractured the stillness, followed by more and more. By the palest wisp of early dawn, after hours of confession and devoted assurances, he’d comforted me, and I’d comforted him. It was a step back to normalcy and a step forward to a more vibrant relationship, but it was only the first step. It would take concentrated effort to put this out of our minds. We would have to reclaim tenderness and make time for our yearnings. And we would.
Before going down for breakfast, we picked up the old quilt from the floor and made up the bed in the guest room, then waked the girls, our daughters, precious enough.
Years passed. Our girls went to college and Samantha married, settling nearby. Bill retired and became active in his university alumni association; I volunteered as a docent at the Historic Society. Together we worked with Habitat, building locally and going several times to Central America. We both took bit parts in local amateur theatrics group, enjoying the cast parties as much as the performances.
We remembered the events of our parenting years vividly, but for the most part the attendant emotional memory languished.
At the rug cleaner’s one morning I ran into my old friend. “Grace? Grace! It’s been years – twelve, thirteen? Let me look at you. Tell me everything; bring me up to date. Are you writing?”
“I can’t talk now. My father-in-law lives with me; I can’t leave him for long – he’s old and sick. I’ll meet you tomorrow at two at the bird sanctuary. We’ll take a walk.”
I could hardly sleep that night, remembering how Grace had sustained me during my most anxious moments and wondering about her marriage to Galen.
She was sitting on the stonewall when I drove up. I could see she was thinner and grayer; I also sensed an unease, a restlessness as she jumped down to greet me.
As we strolled the path encircling the pond, she told her story. Galen had moved his father into their condo, then had moved himself into an apartment in the city, leaving Grace to care for the old man. “The deal is that my father-in-law pays my mortgage and taxes, and I get to be his slave. That’s why I was at the dry cleaner’s yesterday, dropping off a Navajo rug that he’d soiled – a rug bought long ago on a family cross-country driving trip. Those were the days!” She stopped her narrative for a moment and slowed her pace around the pond, then continued, “All three kids live on the West Coast now. They never come home; why would they? I’m lonely, resentful and angry. I hate the condo; it doesn’t seem like home any longer. Every morning I vow I won’t take it anymore, but I can’t figure out how to unravel this mess.”
We sat on the stone bench overlooking the small pond. Two male mallards poked among the weeds, making soft reedy noises, at ease in our presence, domesticated.
I wept for my friend, and she took my hand in hers, stroking its back with her thumb, as she had once years before, comforting me. “I sealed off my heart a long time ago,” she said. “I’ve no tears left.”
She asked me about Bill and my daughters.
When I could speak, I told her about the girls’ lives and about Bill’s retirement. “Do you remember your advice to me years ago? You told me to look the other way, to find consolation in what I had. You knew what to do then, and I trusted you. You shaped my future, Grace.”
One of the mallards ruffled its chestnut breast. The other tilted his ducktail upward, dipping his head for a morsel. We sat quietly together watching, remembering. Grace spoke, “I looked the other way too often, and shaped my own future. And now I’m doing it again.” She squeezed my hand hard, “What should I do? I just don’t know.”
I had an idea. “Bill and I are taking another assignment with Habitat in Belize; we’re leaving next month and will be gone for six months. We’re looking for someone to live in our house.”
I heard her sharp intake of breath. “What about my father-in-law? What am I supposed to do about him? He can’t be alone. You wouldn’t want him in your house.”
“No. But he’s Galen’s father, not yours.”
Something startled the mallards, and both flew to the other side of the pond, settling there with a contented bustle. Grace stood and tucked in her shirttails. “Vi, would you give me a hug? I haven’t had one in months.”
We held each other tightly, gratefully. “Can you stay with me a little longer, to give me courage?” She pulled out her cell phone. “I’m calling Galen right now.”
©2008 by Elizabeth Buechner Morris
