“IZZY,” I SAID. “HELP me.”
“I’m a good one to help,” she said. But that afternoon she came to visit me. “Look what I did to my own life;” she said, taking her coat off.
“You didn’t do it.”
“That doesn’t matter. When it felt like the end of the world for me, everything I did was dumb-ass and useless. Like weeping all day, like psychotherapy, like wanting to kill myself.”
“You were abandoned.”
“Yeah.”
“In a way it was like death.”
“In a way it was worse. Just tell me, would you give Jay life, would you let him live, if you had the power, if it was with another woman, with her children? Think about it. Where you could only see him on Sundays when he came for your kids?”
“Yes,” I said.
She looked at me, narrowing her eyes. “Do you have something to drink?” she asked.
We sat in the living room later, facing one another. “Did you really want to?” I asked.
She lifted her head and drained her glass. “Did I really want to what?”
“Did you really want to kill yourself?”
“Sure. Yes. I thought about it a lot. I looked at myself everywhere: in mirrors, upside down in spoons, in the handle of the refrigerator door, in subway windows. I saw that same sad swollen face every time I looked. Good-bye, I said to that face. So long. God, it was sadder than real life. I thought, Eddie will be sorry. Then sometimes I thought, he’ll be relieved.”
“Did you decide on a method?”
“What difference does that make?”
“Well, I once read that it’s really a serious intention if you decide on a method. That shows a genuine desire to carry it out.”
Isabel motioned to me for another drink. “Gas,” she said dreamily.
We were silent for a while, each with her own mind pictures. I saw Isabel dead in the false cheer of her kitchen with its frilly curtains and its shining pots and pans. It seemed terribly ironic to die deliberately in the very room designated for the nurturing of life, a room with eggs and oranges and milk in it. We drank for a while in silence and then I asked, “Why didn’t you do it?”
“Oh, not for the reasons you think. Not for the sake of the kids or because I saw suicide as a futile gesture or a disturbed act. It was the lousy value system that stopped me, the old material greed. I had a bad cold for a few days. I could hardly breathe anyway. I thought, fine, this is a good time. Why not? And sometimes when I looked at my reflection I held my breath for a long time until it burst out of me and I was wheezing and gasping. I thought that I was rehearsing. It was almost thrilling in a way, the anticipation. All day long in that old green bathrobe, shredding and balling up damp tissues in the pockets.
“Then a woman from some place I never heard of, some church or synagogue, I don’t even remember, called up and asked if I had any old clothes to donate. ‘My clothes?’ I asked. ‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘That would be fine. Anything would be greatly appreciated.’ ‘What would you do with them?’ I asked her.
“She seemed surprised but she explained that the better things were distributed among poor families and that everything else was sold as rags with the proceeds going to good and charitable works.
“It was crazy. I thought of my gray dress. I thought of my yellow sweater with the iris embroidered on the pocket. I thought of some poor woman, illiterate, shoeless, bedraggled, wearing my brown coat with the beaver collar. ‘My things!’ I said. ‘My things!’ ‘Beg pardon?’ the woman said, ‘how’s that?’ and I hung up and got dressed and went to a movie.”
“My God,” I said. I looked into the bottom of my empty glass.
Izzy jumped forward and filled it, and then hers. She stared at me for a while. “I was always jealous of you,” she said.
“Me?”
“Because I wasn’t pretty. When we were kids. Because you had blond hair. Oh, how I wanted blond hair! And I was always such a horse.”
I remembered that Jay always thought of her as the antithesis of femininity with her shingled haircut and her big-muscled legs planted in that stolid stance. She reminded him of a gym instructor or a coach and he once said that he thought she carried a whistle in the canyon between those ballooning breasts. But I had known Isabel for a long time, back when her adolescent dreams of being only a wife and a mother seemed so simple and gently unambitious. After Eddie left, for a long time she was immobile and sad.
“A nice fat jelly-belly,” she said.
I lifted my hand in protest but she waved it away. “True, true,” she insisted. “But then when I saw her! I thought she would look like you, nice bones and all, small. I was romantic about her. But she looked like me!” She sighed. “You see, I’m the wrong one to come to for help. I talked about myself all day.”
I thought of all the things I didn’t know about her life, and yet she was my closest friend. Jay and I had closed ourselves off from other real intimacies. Our own friendship had always been enough. I leaned across the table and kissed Izzy’s cheek. “Listen,” I said. “Did you really go for therapy or did you just think about it?”
“Oh, I went all right,” she said. “I certainly went.”
I sat forward expectantly but she didn’t say anything else. “Well, did it help?”
“Not me. It certainly didn’t help me. You know me, Sandy. I’m just too hardheaded, too literal. I can’t even take the interpretation of dreams. If I dream of drowning, I believe that I’m dreaming of drowning. If my husband needed another woman, I couldn’t relate it to his childhood, to his mother. Who gives a damn about his mother? I didn’t want to know about his drives and his anxieties. I only wanted him to stop screwing around.”
“Yes,” I said.
“He wouldn’t go. That was the end of that.”
We sat quietly for a while, reflective, slumped in our seats.
“Sandy, I don’t know. Maybe it would help you to get through this. Maybe you should go.”
I kicked off my shoes and lay down on the sofa. “I’ll go to you,” I said. “Sit up and look a little Freudian.”
Izzy laughed. “What are you doing?”
“Shhhh. Quiet. I’ll tell you my life story.”
“I think you’re crazy.”
“Certainly. Zat’s vy I am here, Doctor.”
Izzy lit a cigarette. “Tell me about your childhood,” she said.
I shut my eyes and began to tell her. I told her first thoughts and first memories. I told her about my mother and my father and my first remembered image of the world. I forgot about the room we were in. I talked about death and love and anxiety and about all the hazards of being alive. I talked about awareness and denial and vanity and sorrow and happiness.
I talked and talked and the sun went out of the room and finally I looked up and saw that Isabel was asleep in her chair, one leg twisted under the other. She snored gently and her hands were opened palm up on the arms of the chair. I stood and tiptoed past her feeling slightly lightheaded but strangely refreshed.