“You started it, you know,” I say, crawling over him, propping up my pillow next to his, leaning on his padded shoulder. “Why didn’t you leave well enough alone, Marcus?”
I know even as the words are coming out of my mouth that none of this is his fault. My consolation is I know he knows it too.
“I had no idea what you’ve had bottled up inside you for so long, honey. I thought you might have had a disagreement with your mom about something to do with the wedding and were holding an unreasonable grudge. I swear my mother knows more about this wedding than your mother does. The only person I’ve seen you involve in the wedding plans to any degree is your grandmother.”
“The first wedding I ever went to was my aunt’s; have I told you that? Dad’s sister. You’ll meet her Friday. I was only five when she got married. Dad was a groomsman, and I sat beside Mother, holding her hand, utterly enthralled by the music, the candlelight, the dress. Mother bought me a bride doll that Christmas. I mean, really, how many girls get bride dolls these days? But I was thrilled. I’ve been thinking about my wedding and the man who would be waiting for me at the end of that center aisle for a very long time. Gram gave me some suggestions, but the truth is I’ve had this wedding planned for years. There wasn’t all that much to do, really.”
“But we’ve got a problem now, wouldn’t you say?”
“Wouldn’t you say I’ve had a problem for a long time? Of course now we’re all wonderfully aware of it. But we’ll just have to work around it. I think we can if you get me those sleeping pills.”
“How about some ibuprofen?”
“You’re funny.”
“I’m serious. When my dad can’t sleep, he gets up and takes one and falls right to sleep. It must relax him. You could give it a try later.”
“I want something serious.”
“When you get ready for bed, you can take an ibuprofen, two even, and let me hold you until you fall asleep. Then I’ll take an ibuprofen myself and go to bed. This has been one long day.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know you are.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You should have said something to someone a long time ago.”
“I couldn’t.”
I explain about the people waiting for me in the van that day and the long week of camp. “I was supposed to come home on Saturday morning, but Dad came to get me Friday evening. Mother had miscarried that morning. Dad was so sad. And Mother, well, she was crazy.”
I sit up straight so I can look at him. “I mean,
really
crazy. She didn’t come out of her room. Ever since I was old enough to know anything, my mother had taken her shower and made her bed before she fixed breakfast. It was rare for her to spend time in her room until she and Dad went to bed after the news each night. But after she lost the baby, she hardly left her room for six or seven months. Heck, she hardly got out of bed. Or opened her blinds. If I ever got a look in there, the room was always dark. That’s how I remember it anyway. When she was herself again, I couldn’t imagine telling her what I had seen. I couldn’t imagine talking to her about much of anything at that point. I had Dad. I had my friends.”
“But maybe you misinterpreted what you saw. You were what? Thirteen?”
I shake my head. “I was quite old enough to understand what I saw.”
I stand up and head for my dresser. “I’ll get ready for bed. I think there’s probably some ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet. It’s early, though. Want to play Connect Four? Or gin rummy? Or you could go get your DVD player and we could watch a movie.”
“Get ready. I’ll keep
you company until you’re ready to sleep.”
“Thanks.”
I get the things I need from my dresser and closet, walk into the bathroom, shut the door, and lean against it. I love Marcus. I feel like going out there and asking him to elope with me tonight. But I know I’m too sad for this to be my wedding night.
“Marcus,” I say through the closed door, “I’m going to take a quick shower.”
I turn on the water and wait for it to get hot. I strip off my clothes and throw them in the hamper, step into the steamy confines of the tiled shower, and let the water “minister” to me. That’s how it feels—like a ministry. I stand with my back to the hot water and let it stream over me and over me and over me. When I have stood here long enough, I begin to experience the slightest measure of relief, and I turn and offer my face to the rush of soothing water and let it wash away the torrent of tears—tears which, without warning, have been sent on a mission of mercy.
“I didn’t even tell you, God,” I whisper through the water and tears. “You knew, of course, but it seemed like a kind of treason to actually mention it to you. I should have told you anyway. I should have told you.”
Kendy
I need to talk to Maisey, and I will talk to her, but not now. She will not want to talk to me tonight. I guess it’s fair to say she hasn’t really wanted to talk to me for a long time now. Regardless, if talking to her tonight would help her, I would pray for the strength and wisdom to do it, brace myself for the task, knock on her door, and ask,
Maisey, may I come in?
What a terrifying thought.
Walking to our bedroom, I hear quiet voices in Maisey’s room. Marcus must be with her, doing what he can to help.
Please, God, let him help her through this wretched night.
As for me, I have a plan. There’s nothing worse than being without a plan (understatement has always appealed to me). I think I might be able to sleep if I run on the treadmill for thirty minutes minimum, follow that with a nonnegotiable shower, and begin another book I tucked away for after the wedding, one that might engage me more than the one I’ve been staring at today. I doubt Gabriel García Márquez has won a Nobel Prize for nothing.
I get on the treadmill and do a forty-five-minute cycle of running and walking, and then I take a long, steaming hot bath. It is more relaxing than a shower, and more time-consuming. Next on my agenda, I wrap my exhausted and squeaky-clean self in a robe and lie on the chaise with the new book. When I’m settled in, I’m relieved to see it’s ten o’clock, a reasonable time to think about going to sleep before long.
I pick up the Márquez book Paula gave me. She thought I might be able to read the book even though she couldn’t drag herself to the end of the first chapter. I begin, but I abandon it by the end of the first page, not because it is tedious but because it begins with death. They say misery loves company, but I really don’t think I can handle any more misery tonight. Besides, a phrase in the very first paragraph startled me, and I closed the book, as much as anything, to ponder its aptness:
the torments of memory.
Ah yes.
I hear the television in the living room. Luke must be watching the news. Will he come to bed when it’s over or watch Letterman’s monologue? I get up from the chaise and prepare the bed for the night. I’ve always hated going to bed without Luke, but I get under the covers, turn out the light, close my eyes, and hope sleep will come. Is this becoming a pattern—the wish for sleep?
I open my eyes and stare at the ceiling.
Nancy Ogden comes to my mind. I haven’t seen her in years, but here she is invading my thoughts on this horrific night. Not without reason, I suppose. She isn’t Ogden anymore. She was on husband number four the last time I saw her, and her latest last name escapes me. It would have been expedient for Nancy to have kept her maiden name all along.
Nancy, Paula, and I usually had the same lunch shift, and we often ate together in the school cafeteria. We spent most of our short lunch break listening to Nancy and her fantastic tales. We called her Wild Woman to her face, and she loved it. There wasn’t a teacher in the building who would let her plan a wedding shower, because her idea of entertainment would not include guests taking a three-by-five note card and blessing the bride-to-be with a favorite recipe or a tried-and-true tip for marital bliss. Nancy had the phone number of a male stripper in her billfold, and she wasn’t afraid to use it to spice up a ho-hum wedding shower—provided it wasn’t being held in a church fellowship hall.
Nancy would never think in terms of “torments of memory,” though she apparently had hundreds of memories that should have tormented her. She spent many a weekend barhopping after her marriage ended, and a few before the divorce papers were drawn up. She told Paula and me that by the time she was thirty, she’d had enough experiences, good and bad, to last four women a lifetime. (It is overstatement that appeals to Nancy.)
When Clay Laswell was nothing more to me than Luke’s uncle and one of the best superintendents a teacher could have, he was Nancy’s fantasy. Between husbands one and two, and two and three, Clay was her main topic of conversation.
“There he is,” she said the day we really began to notice her fixation. He was walking across the lunchroom with two other official-looking men in nice suits and waved at us as he passed.
Nancy picked up her napkin and began fanning herself. “I need me some of that,” she said.
I gasped.
Paula said, “Are you
crazy?
!” She had long since forgotten the effect Clay had on her the first time she met him.
In some ways Wild Woman fascinated me—no one else in my life could make me gasp—but she tended to irritate Paula.
I finally found my voice. “Nancy,” I said, “Dr. Laswell is a happily married man.”
“So?” she said. “I’m not out to marry the guy.”
What
was
she out for exactly? Her worldview seriously collided with ours.
“Listen,” she told us, “I’m just saying he’s hot. You two are too uptight. You’re going to be sitting in a nursing home one of these days, wishing you had some outrageous adventures to look back on and savor while you’re rocking away on the front porch.”
She laughed then, grabbed her tray, and told us she’d see us later.
I hit Paula when she mumbled something I never expected to come out of her mouth: “Not if we see you first.”
I reminded her that Nancy could be a lot of fun and that she was a very good teacher, amazingly adept at keeping her private life out of the classroom. Time for chitchat was running out, and we crammed the last of our vanilla ice cream into our mouths before the bell rang us back to fourth-grade students who couldn’t wait to get on with their education. That’s what I always said to my class when we reconvened after lunch: “You look like a bunch of kids who can’t wait to get on with your education.” They always laughed.
Grabbing my tray and heading for the stainless-steel counter to drop it off, I had one last thing to say about our fellow fourth-grade teacher: “Nancy just needs the Lord, Paula!”
“Well, now that’s an understatement if I ever heard one.”
“No, Paula,” I said, hurrying to class, “it really isn’t.”
“Conversion doesn’t seem imminent,” she said. “Do you suppose you should warn Clay?”
“No need,” I said. “I’m pretty sure he’s immune to Nancy’s kind of charm.”
I was right about that.
But did I know, even then, that he wasn’t immune to every temptation? Did I know that most of us, even the admirable, even the converted, are susceptible to one kind of charm
or another? I’m not sure I did. That understanding may have come later.
I wonder if Nancy has discovered yet how foolish her words to live by were. I wish beyond what I could possibly say that I had no “outrageous adventures” to look back on.
Savor?
Hardly. What I would give to erase those memories as easily as I erase math problems and story starters off the whiteboard in my classroom.
What I would
like
to look back on is a life marked by integrity and loyalty and faithfulness—no exceptions. How satisfying that would be! I suspect that the “no exceptions” addendum might make such a thing rare, but that suspicion does not help to ease my grief. So, yes, the phrase I just read in the Márquez book shocked me with its familiarity. He has articulated what I have experienced:
torments of memory.
I hear the door click. Luke is making his way toward the bed in the dark. He stops and slips out of his jeans and T-shirt before pulling back the covers and getting into bed with a minimum of movement. He does not look for me but settles into his side of the bed, turning to face the other way. Was it only a few hours ago that we lay here, touching so tenderly? I long to touch him now, to curl up behind him, feel the heat of his body, and hold him like he has so often held me. But I’m frozen in place, afraid to move, afraid to speak.
“Luke,” I finally whisper.
“What?” he answers, and I’m amazed to realize he was almost asleep.
“I’m sorry.”
He turns to lie on his back, looking at the ceiling as I have been doing. I hold my breath, wondering if he will say anything else, wondering what it will be.
“From what you told me, Kendy,” Luke says, “I knew such a thing had happened.” His voice is kind but weary, like a doctor talking to a patient who has received devastating news, a doctor who has known tragedy himself.
“But it’s hard to hear it,” he adds. “Hard to see it flashed on the screen of my mind, to hear the agony in our daughter’s voice, to realize what her undetected discovery has done to all of us.”
We lie here, staring at the ceiling as though an answer for what we can do is written there. After a few minutes I reach over and put my hand over his, but only for a moment. Then, because there seems to be nothing else to say, we roll over, face opposite walls, and wait for the panacea of sleep.
The children’s prayer comes to my mind. The last line of it has always struck me as macabre. Grandma taught me the prayer and had me recite it as soon as I could talk, and many a night I fell asleep hoping this wasn’t the night I was going to die. Granted, I was a strange child, but that was a prayer I never taught Maisey. Still, lying here tonight, wondering if sorrow can be intense enough to kill, I find myself altering the line ever so slightly and praying it for the first time since I was a child:
If we should die before we wake, I pray thee, Lord,
our souls to take.