Twenty-Two

AUGUST 23

Dear Diary,

MEN !!!

Lindsey’s sworn off them—inhumans of the male persuasion. Sick of succumbing.

She’s ready to blast off to one of those sci-fi feminist utopias where they maintain a peaceful population through parthenogenesis or cloning. Y bother with nasty Y chromosomes? Ix-nay to the non-X! No more miraculous births via violation by divinely horny swans, bulls, or other Godly manifestations. So stuff it with your goddamned visitations….

Lindsey slams on the brakes, once again halting partway down the long grassy drive to the Friedland Folly. Prime male target ahead: Arlen. He’s grumpily agreed to a talk about Opal before she’s released from transitional care.

Lindsey closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, tries a calming mantra. Getting out of her Subaru, she walks into the hay field, the lush long grass of early summer shorn now to a rough dry stubble that catches at her sandals. She doesn’t hold great hopes of breaking through with Arlen, but her own stubborn code of integrity insists she at least fill him in on the meeting with Opal’s counselor.

Fran had arranged for the three sisters to meet with Vera, the counselor, after Opal refused yet again to file a report about Arlen’s physical abuse. Vera, a motherly sort in flowing layers of lavender, seemed to be grappling with the failure of Opal’s daughters to present a “united front” in this latest crisis. Instead, she faced a row of contentious chairs: Fran, still growling with her teeth sunk into the opportunity to punish Arlen; Joanie, chronically glazed-over with the exhaustion of baby Kendra and the guardianship issues; and Lindsey arguing the fairness of at least informing Arlen of the legal consequences if he ever attacked Opal again and they reported him.

“Great! So then he’ll just get sneakier about it? And threaten Opal even more, if she rats on him? We need to get her away from him, now. Once she gets used to an assisted living unit, she’ll be way better off,” Fran had asserted with her usual surety.

Lindsey, irritated: “Aside from the question of whether they can afford that, how do you know what’s better for her? Look what happened when she had her mental breakdown and we tried to get them to change. They made it pretty clear they didn’t want any part of it.”

Joanie, rousing briefly: “But they sure want us to come running when they call with one of their emergencies. They don’t get it that we’re tapped out. And they better not expect us to take them in when they finally crash and burn.”

That’s the one thing they all agreed on: No one is masochistic enough to take these crazymaking parents into their homes. To hell with guilt trips.

Well, almost. Lindsey feels enough daughterly duty to brave the wrath of pit-bull Fran and fill Arlen in on the situation. Who knows, maybe he’ll step up and graduate from the emotional maturity level of a three-year-old to four, or even five.

And, as Lindsey steps through the prickling stubble toward the green, watered front yard, she remembers the gentle touch of her mother’s fingers on her shoulders.

Yesterday, on her daily visit to the transitional care unit, she’d found Opal propped upright in bed, issuing Head-Nurse instructions to the aide about the proper way to fold hospital-corner sheets. When Lindsey rolled her eyes at the young man, he just winked and said, “She’s feeling better today.”

“Now sit here beside me and tell me about your trip with this new boyfriend.” Opal was on a roll, enjoying the attention at the facility, almost sounding like her old self as she patted the bed beside her.

Lindsey’s determination to stay perky collapsed around her. She broke into tears.

“Hush, now,” Opal said. “Let me give you a shoulder rub. My patients always liked that.”

So there they were, Opal the one in post-op rehab, insisting on giving her daughter a massage.

“Thanks, Mom,” Lindsey whispered, turning to hug her.

Opal patted her back. “I’m glad somebody still needs me. Maybe I’m not so useless, after all.”

Lindsey brushes at her eyes now as she steps from dry shorn hayfield onto the expanse of manicured lawn Arlen still insists on maintaining, driving himself to exhaustion to keep up the display. She takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders. Maybe he’s had time to think while he’s been on his own.

But by the time Lindsey corrals her cranky dad from his shop to sit down for a lemonade, then wades through piled-up fishing gear, muddy boots, and a week’s worth of dirty dishes to get to the fridge—the cleaning gal having refused to set foot in the house alone with Arlen—it’s not looking good. She suggests they take their glasses out to the deck, where he plunks down in a webbed chair and glowers.

“Goddamn, you’d think some of you yahoos might come out and give me a hand here! I can’t keep up with all the yard work and the house.” This, after he took off on yet another fishing trip the day after Opal’s surgery.

“Well,” Lindsey notes in a reasonable tone, “all of us are about maxed out right now, especially adding in trips to see Mom in the hospital and that care unit. You might try calling Marianne and apologizing for yelling at her last time. Maybe she’d come back and do some cleaning before Mom gets home again.”

“Son of a bitch! Apologize to that cow? She’s the one who—”

“Wait.” Lindsey practices the traffic-stop gesture. “You can do what you want about the house. What I came out here to talk about is what Mom’s counselor told us.”

He narrows his eyes, gives her a suspicious look, and takes a gulp of his lemonade.

Lindsey sips her own, then takes the plunge. “Dad, you need to know that it’s not okay to push Mom around. She’s too frail. You can’t grab her and shake her, push her down. You ought to know that, but I’m going to spell it out—”

“Goddamn it!” Arlen thrusts up from his folding chair and onto his feet, slamming his glass onto the deck table and sloshing lemonade. “I told Joanie that was bullshit! I didn’t do anything to her. She just wants everybody to feel sorry for her sorry ass!”

Lindsey grits her teeth. “Look, Dad, I don’t know what happened. But Mom said you shook her and said you were going to cut her up in pieces, and if she decided to report that, then you’d be in big trouble.”

“That useless old bitch!” Arlen’s face is red now, vessels swelling in his neck.

“Don’t you ever call her ‘useless’ again!” Lindsey snaps.

“Don’t you tell me what to do, goddammit! Think you’re so smart with your prissy college degree!” He steps closer, looming over her.

She tries not to grip the aluminum chair arm. “Sit down, Dad.”

“No! You get the hell out of here!” He grabs the glass from her hand and throws it across the deck to shatter against a tree trunk.

Lindsey stands up to face him, takes a deep breath. “I came out here to do you a favor, but maybe I shouldn’t bother.”

“Favor! You call this a fucking favor?” His hands are fisted, face looking like it’s going to explode, and he takes another step closer, bearing down on her.

His face looks like Nick’s, right before he’d go on one of his rampages. Lindsey catches a quick breath, heart pounding, and a panicky voice is telling her to cut and run. But something else holds her there, facing Arlen down. She stands her ground, staring into his eyes, and finally he shakes his head, takes a step back, turns and looks out over the field.

She blows out the breath. “I told them it’s only fair to let you know what would happen if you got reported for domestic violence. They’d take away your right to go into Canada on your fishing trips, for one thing.”

“Like hell they would!” Arlen swings back around to face her.

Lindsey holds out her “Stop” palm again. “That’s what Mom’s counselor told us. And you’d have to attend weekly group counseling sessions on anger management. Which wouldn’t be a bad idea, anyway. Dad, I don’t think you have any idea how much damage you did to all of us. The way you’re still hurting Mom.”

His hands are fisted again, shaking, and Lindsey tenses, ready to dodge a blow. He raises his fists, then opens them, glares at his hands, flings them out in frustration. “You don’t have to live with her! All she does is whine and fuss and act so goddamn pitiful I can’t stand it.”

There’s a confused little boy in him—the one who got beaten by his father with a two-by-four—ready to cry or strike out at the world.

“Dad, I know. Mom drives us all crazy sometimes.” She adds, “The thing is, you might feel like shaking her, but you can’t do it. You’ve got to start thinking about what you’re doing. Count to ten. Whatever.”

He’s turned away again, staring out at the field. Lindsey waits, but it looks like that’s all she’s going to get from him. She takes another deep breath, realizes she’s shaking with adrenaline release.

“We’re looking for someone to come out and help Mom around the house once she gets home, drive her to her appointments. That’ll take some of the pressure off you. So you think about this.”

Still no response. He seems to have sagged somehow inside his coveralls, and she sees a tremor in his hands.

Lindsey’s eyes are burning. Maybe this is as close as they can get. “Okay, Dad. You take care of yourself.” She turns and heads down the drive, and no word from Arlen follows her.

Lindsey’s hands are shaking on the drive home, and she grips the wheel to try to still them. She eases into the clogged traffic on the outskirts of town, looks around her, realizes it’s Friday afternoon rush hour. And she still hasn’t heard the biopsy results.

Great. Another cheery weekend to look forward to.

She pulls over to the shoulder to call the clinic, but just gets a recording telling her to “leave a message.”

Something snaps. “Damn it! I’m not leaving another fucking message!” She pulls back into traffic, darts between honking cars to take the turn for the medical center instead of her neighborhood. She pulls into the clinic lot that’s practically empty, jumps out, and pushes through the glass door ten minutes before closing time.

“I’m sorry, we can’t take any walk-ins—”

“I’m a patient of Dr. Osborne’s.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” the receptionist repeats. “Doctor’s gone home for the day, and we’re closing up.”

“I just want to know my biopsy results. Look up my chart. Lindsey Friedland.” She takes a deep breath. “The nurse said she’d leave a message. I don’t want to wait another weekend.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but the charts are on the nurse’s desk, and she’s done for the day. You’ll just have to—”

Lindsey leans forward, slapping her palms on the counter. “Go get my chart and let me look at it. I have a right to see my medical records. I’ll sign a waiver.”

The receptionist opens her mouth, looks at Lindsey’s face, and hurries into the back. There’s a muffled sound of conversation, someone protesting. Some more muffled talking.

A new woman comes out of the back, wearing a white jacket, holding a manila folder. She steps around into the reception area, gives Lindsey a wary look.

“Lindsey Friedland?” She glances at the opened chart.

Lindsey nods.

“Birth date? Social security number?”

Lindsey provides them. “I just want to know the biopsy results.”

The woman thumbs through papers. “Okay. Here we go. August twentieth. Benign calcification. No indication of malignancy.”

Lindsey sags, lets out a long breath. “Thank you.” She doesn’t bother to ask why they had the report all week and couldn’t be bothered to call her.

The woman looks up, into her eyes. She smiles. “You’re welcome.”

Summer’s winding to a close, those lovely long evenings and all the sensual promise of hot sun and cool waters shriveling away into approaching fall. Tonight Lindsey feels old and worn out. After the confrontation with Arlen, the delayed news of the biopsy report has left her deflated, exhausted with all the emotional dramas. Not bothering with dinner, she crawls under the bedspread and closes her eyes.

She finally gives up on trying to sleep, sits up and opens the Rumi poetry book. She doesn’t believe the poems are about only spiritual love. Those pesky rampaging emotions again:

You wreck my house and now my heart….

“Oh, God!” Lindsey mutters. “I give up. Just lock me up in a padded cell. I’ll go quietly.”

Preserving these centuries-old traditional designs is more than a job for these women. They’re weaving together the warp and weft of yesterday and tomorrow, creating the evolving Now of the village. Renewing its life. These beautiful women know their place—in the best sense of that phrase—and you can see the strength of that knowledge in their eyes.

“Arrgh.” Lindsey rakes her fingers through her hair and scowls at the computer monitor. She can’t seem to come up with the words to capture that knowing in the eyes of the mothers and grandmothers she’d visited in Guatemala. On impulse, she’d fired off an article proposal to the online Feminist Fair Trade journal, and now they want the piece right away.

She blows out a breath and glances at her notes again. HighJinks, ignored all morning, stalks into the office and jumps onto her desk, scattering papers and heading for the keyboard.

“Bad boy!” Lindsey scoops him up.

He starts purring, mission accomplished.

There’s a knock on the front door.

Cradling HighJinks over her shoulder, Lindsey leans down to hit Save, then heads for the door. Pulling it open, she freezes.

Nick’s standing on the porch, holding a bouquet of dahlias.

Lindsey’s gut goes into that up-down lurching plummet as her stare fixes on the vivid coppery, crimson, yellow, and purple spiky blooms. The same kind of flowers they’d picked by the dozens for their outdoor autumn wedding. She catches a sharp breath, grip tightening reflexively on HighJinks still clinging to her shoulder. He yowls in protest and digs in his claws.

“Ouch! Damn!” Lindsey flinches, pain searing through her just as a hot flash triggers on a rolling wave of fire from the base of her spine upwards. Face flushed, she turns to disentangle the cat from her T-shirt and set him gently on the entry rug.

Nick squats, holding out a hand toward the Siamese. “Hey, big guy,” he says softly.

HighJinks has gone still, sniffing the air of Nick’s gone-strangeness. Then he steps over to him, rubbing against his hand, his legs. Nick looks up at Lindsey and slowly smiles.

He’s undeniably handsome, face tanned and graying dark hair grown out a little longer now, feathering down the back of his neck, and he’s looking healthy and fit in his worn jeans and t-shirt. Lindsey fights off a pang of remembrance, the old intimacies. She summons her caution, along with a golden orb of protection from her meditations.

Nick pets HighJinks and rises, offering the flowers to Lindsey. “Hi,” he says.

“Thank you.” She gingerly accepts the flowers.

“Can I come in?” He gestures toward the open doorway.

She hesitates. “Let’s walk in the garden.”

His sideways smile twitches. “All right.” Then, tilting his head toward the dahlias, “You should put those in water.”

She closes her eyes for a second, takes a deep breath. “Okay, just give me a minute. I’ll be right out.” She quietly closes the door on him, goes into the kitchen for a vase, and plunks the flowers into it. Then, not sure she wants anything from him in the house, she carries them out to the back porch and sets them there. Slips on her flipflops and heads around the house to the front yard. She visualizes that golden, glimmering light all around her, deflecting any threat. She’s strong now. She’s okay.

Nick’s crouched beside the thorny wild-rose and Oregon grape hedge, pulling a crab-apple twig through the grass for HighJinks to pounce on. He tousles the cat’s head and stands as Lindsey comes over.

“I think he remembers me.” He nods toward HighJinks, rubbing on his legs again.

“Of course.”

Nick looks at the twig he’s broken off the tree, shrugs, and tosses it under the branches. “It could use pruning, anyway.”

“No doubt.” Lindsey glances around at all the overgrown plantings, everything going wild and threatening to take over the stone walkway. “One of these days I’ll have to hack a path to the front door.”

He steps over to the wild fuchsia bush they’d started from seeds they’d gathered on a trip to southern Chile. “It’s doing really well. I wasn’t sure it was going to make it through that winter when we got all those hard freezes.”

Lindsey touches a cascade of dangling purple-and-red blossoms. “The hummingbirds and bees are really going for it.” She hesitates, then asks, “Do you want some apples? I can’t keep up with them.”

“That’d be great.”

She leads the way down the drive to the back yard, grabs a sack from the porch. Nick’s already moved deeper into the yard, standing by the raised vegetable beds he’d built and then never tended. He leans over to look at the dried stems of some mountain penstemons he’d started from seed, planning a rock garden. Another project that never got off the ground.

“Damn, you let the penstemons die!” He touches one of the branches like a miniature tree’s, and it breaks off. “Don’t you remember what a pain they were to get started?”

“I remember.”

“You should have called me, I would have taken them where I could keep an eye on them.”

Lindsey bristles. “I’ve had a few things on my mind, other than taking care of your specimens. You should have taken them when you left.”

He spreads placating hands. “Yeah. I guess I forgot.”

Lindsey leads the way past the garage to the old orchard, where the apples are starting to drop and litter the overgrown grass. “Pick whatever you want. I keep trying to give them away.”

Nick takes the sack from her and picks a few apples from the lichened old MacIntosh, as Lindsey plucks one and bites into it, savoring the tart crispness. He starts to move on toward the younger red delicious tree, then stops short at the peeled yellow-cedar trunk with its two reaching arms that they’d salvaged from a river log jam and rooted in cement here. It was the start of another hopeful project to mount the “vulvular” cast-leaf birdbaths they’d made together, install a trickling fountain to fill them.

Nick reaches a hand and runs his palm over the cedar, then moves on to pick more apples.

Lindsey’s caught in the play of filtered sunlight over the smooth yellow wood, the strangely runic patterns down the trunk that were probably the tracks of some burrowing creature but now look like the intertwining trails of raindrops, or tears. Maybe there’s some message in the markings. Maybe it was always there, but Lindsey was too blind to see it. Blind and deaf to the warnings from her heart, from the way the world had gone muffled and silenced around her in those years with Nick.

She turns away, steps over to where Sombra is dozing in the dappled shade of the blueberry bushes. She sits crosslegged beside the cat and strokes her warm fur, picks some berries and pops them into her mouth.

Nick joins them and sets his bag down. Sombra startles, hisses at him, and runs toward the house. Lindsey shrugs.

Nick clears his throat. “It’s good to see you, Lin. You look great.”

“You look like you’re doing well.” She picks a few more berries.

“Things are smoothing out at work. You were right, I needed to work on my anger. I’m doing better with that.”

She gives him a surprised look. He meets her gaze, gives her his crooked smile, this time flavored with irony. “You were right about a lot of things. I didn’t realize what I was throwing away.”

She goes still, watching him, wary. What has he come here for?

“You’re so beautiful, you’ve probably got guys beating down the door.”

She snorts. “Hardly.”

“You don’t have a boyfriend?” He sounds surprised. “I always figured you’d be marrying again pretty soon.”

She frowns. “I had a lot of….” She starts to finish with “healing to do,” but realizes it’s none of his business. “I’m not ready for that.”

“Yeah. I guess I wasn’t, either.” He picks some berries.

“What about your girlfriend?”

He looks down at the berries in his palm, jiggles them in his grip. “Didn’t work out.” He pops the berries into his mouth, chews, and swallows. Then shrugs. “Amy’s too young. Immature. And she had that early-thirties thing going on, the biological clock ticking. She was pushing for having a baby, even though I’d told her from the start I wasn’t into that.”

“It’s not a rational thing. So that’s why you split up?”

“Not really. I mean, I cared—care—about her. So I finally agreed to try having a baby, and then she got cold feet. Dumped me.” He shakes his head, pokes a finger into the grass beside him. “It’s really for the best. It wouldn’t have worked. She’s a sweet person, but she doesn’t have that… complexity you have, Lin. I miss that. And all the history we have.”

Lindsey’s gazing into the shifting leaves as a breeze stirs light and shadow. She can’t hear them whispering, feels strangely out of her body, the world gone muffled.

“Lin.” Nick reaches out to take her hand, tug gently at it. “I’ve thought a lot about what went wrong with us. I’m willing to work on it, if you’d give me another chance. I still love you.”

From that strange, insulated distance, Lindsey turns her face to look into his eyes. He means it. He’s opened something inside himself, and he’s offering that.

For a horrifying moment, she’s tempted. Tugged by his touch, by all the shared intimacies, like the cedar tree a foundation already laid. Longing for an end to loneliness. And the habit of loving, the innate attraction, is still alive in them. But that doesn’t mean she can trust it. Trust him. Or herself, to hold firm.

“Nick.” She reclaims her hand from his. “Do you remember when we talked about whether or not we wanted kids?”

He raises his eyebrows. “I guess. I didn’t think you wanted them, either.”

“That’s not quite it.” She braids her fingers, gazes down at them. “We talked about it for a while, when we were still in Oregon. It was getting to the point when it was time, if we were going to do it. You don’t remember that?”

“Oh. Right.”

“Finally I decided against it. Why do you think I made that decision?” She raises her face to meet his perplexed gaze.

“Well, partly our lifestyle,” he says. “I mean, we wanted to be free to keep traveling, go backpacking, jump on our bikes when we felt like it. Frankly, I can’t really see you giving all that up. Are you saying now you regret it?”

She shakes her head. “No. I realized it would be a mistake to have children with you, Nick. You were so angry, so often. And I know exactly when I made the decision. It was the first time you kicked Sombra. I realized our children wouldn’t be safe.”

He stares at her, his face flushing, darkening. He bursts out, “I never kicked Sombra! I don’t believe this shit!”

“I know,” Lindsey says wearily.

He jumps to his feet, pacing away from her toward the apple trees. He stands with his back to her. Presses his fists against his head. Gives himself a shake and takes a deep breath, visibly fighting for control.

Lindsey climbs hastily to her feet, groping for that shredded golden shield of light, ready to run.

He turns and paces back to her, stands stiffly. “Okay, I get it. This is still about punishing me for that affair, isn’t it? Make up all this shit about throwing the cats, try to smear my name, even with my family. Christ, how did I let myself forget all that?” His face has gone red, and it’s déjà vu all over again, back with Arlen looming over her.

Lindsey takes a deep breath, says quietly, “Nick, I hope you can hear yourself. You need to go now.”

“What? Don’t you pull this shit on me!” He reaches to grasp at her arms.

She takes a step back from him, plants herself and puts up the Stop hand. “That’s enough, Nick. You need to go. Now.” She hopes he can’t see her shaking.

He clenches his fists, opens his mouth, snaps it shut. Turning away, he kicks at the bag of apples and stalks off down the drive. Familiar sound of a motor revving too fast, then he’s burning rubber down the road.

“Whoa! Slow down!” A startled cry from the driveway, then a call, “Was that Nick? Lindsey, you okay?”

Lindsey hurries toward the voice, sees it’s Crystal coming down the drive with a little gift bag, looking alarmed. The acrid smell of tire rubber hangs in the air.

“Crystal! Just in the… nick of time!” She takes a deep breath, still shaking, then steps closer to give Crystal a hug.

“Easy, now.” Crystal pats her back. “Did he hurt you?”

“No.” She takes another breath, eases back. “He just showed up out of the blue, I guess he wanted to make up. Then started acting like a jerk again. I told him to go.”

“Good for you, beautiful Goddess!” Crystal beams, then pulls a small spray bottle from the gift bag. “Perfect timing with that horrible burned smell.” She hands it to Lindsey.

“What is it?” She sniffs at the fresh citrus scent.

“Cleansing natural lemon and orange oils in spring water. I use it for a lift or purifying my space.”

“Perfect!” Lindsey beams. “Let’s spray the yard!”

“Yes!” Crystal claps her hands. “Then we’ll circle the house.”

Lindsey starts with the bouquet of dahlias Nick brought. She’s tempted to throw them in the trash, then she smiles and takes the vase to the orchard, sets it atop the cedar stump. She intones a mantra and sprays the lemon mist over the flowers. Then, laughing, she kicks off her flipflops and runs barefoot over the grass toward the house, spraying purification as she goes, Crystal dancing along. Encircling her home with the scent of golden sunlight.

“Good-bye, Nick,” Crystal sings.

“Hello, life,” Lindsey adds.