“Well yes, dear Liza, there is considerable relief involved. And no, I don’t feel guilty about feeling relieved. Thank God I’m a simple person, relatively speaking. And I find that I simply follow the good advice that I’ve been giving to widowed or dumped-on friends from time to time over the years. Exercise, keep busy, entertain, try to make new friends. Honestly, darling, I’m really all right. Yes, of course I’m eating properly, what an incredibly silly question.”
This particular conversation was between Caroline and Liza—but it could have been between Caroline and any one of her daughters, all of whom are being as Caroline sees it far too solicitous. Far too concerned about their mother’s widowed condition.
And so for their comfort she gives them this litany of mostly lies, the only truth being that Caroline is quite all right—in her own fairly eccentric way—and that she does not feel guilty about being all right.
She does not do any exercise, because she hates it. All her life, Caroline now believes, she has exercised against, as it were, the naturally large soft shape of her own body, against that body’s natural direction and toward the pleasure of some husband (or, while she was married to Jim McAndrew, those lovers). She has jumped around and stretched and pulled, played tennis and badminton and skied, has even attempted golf. All for those men, essentially; the only exercise that she really enjoys is walking, which she now does quite a lot. She does not think of walking as exercise.
And she does not keep busy, except on specified days when she works as a volunteer cook at the Women’s Shelter, in a church basement a few blocks away. (Horrid work, Caroline thinks: slicing and chopping and clearing up in an ill-equipped, ill-smelling, very small space. The other volunteers seem carried along by a sense of mission. Not so Caroline, who thinks she can hardly stand it, and wonders why she does.) Otherwise she lolls about, which is exactly what she has always told everyone else not to do. She often goes back to bed with a nice cup of tea, a nice book. Not exactly what anyone would call keeping busy.
Nor does Caroline “entertain,” or “see people,” and God knows she does not try for new friends (to the people at the shelter she is polite, never warm or cordial; “Doing good work does not necessarily improve people’s characters,” she has said to Liza).
“I’ve seen people, most of the people I know, quite recently. All those parties when we first got back, I saw everyone we knew, several times. And now everyone’s been so terrifically nice and kind, honestly, it’s obscene, all those flowers. But it just doesn’t seem to me that I have to see the people themselves. All that business of going out to dinner. The truth is, I don’t feel much like talking about Ralph, or being careful not to talk about him, if you see what I mean.” Again, to Liza.
The only untrue part of that statement is minor, concerning the flowers: Caroline actually does not find their abundance obscene, she adores having all those flowers. She carefully attends to their needs for fresh water, for trimmed or mashed stems, in some cases liquid food. Of course she recognizes that the amount of money spent on such an abundant floral display might have done more human good, spent otherwise; however, it was not, and so she might as well enjoy the flowers. Which she does, and she does all she can to make them flourish, and last.
“My daughters are not only terrifically solicitous, it seems to me quite hysterically so, they are also most wildly anxious to tell me all about themselves. I suppose in fact they always have been, but these days it does seem more pronounced, they go on and on. And on.”
Caroline does not literally speak those words to anyone; she has no present friend with whom she is on such terms. Nor does she have the sort of sentimentality that would encourage conversations with a dead husband. It is perhaps to some ideal, imagined friend (as a child might have, as Caroline as an only child undoubtedly did have) that she voices these semi-complaints about the confessions of her daughters.
And in the meantime she goes on listening.
Sage says, “It’s all so curiously depressing. I had no idea, I always thought I wanted to be successful, and now I am, I guess, but this doesn’t feel like success. It’s more like being hit by something on the street, some terrific burden that I don’t know what to do with. Cal’s been a big help, and in another way Stevie too, but still, I don’t know, I keep thinking that this is not what I meant to do. Do you see what I mean at all?”
Liza’s problem, very curiously, is somewhat similar: she has just sold a short story, her first, to a very trashy magazine. For three thousand dollars. Initially she sent it off to The New Yorker, from whom (from a pleasant-sounding woman) she got an encouraging letter. Another first: she is used to printed rejections. And then in her dentist’s office she happened to read the trashy magazine, simply called You, and there was a story by a good writer, one she has long admired. And so rather whimsically she sent off her own story, and to her vast surprise they took it. For all that money.
Liza, though, is considerably more lighthearted than Sage about this strange success, as well as more objective.
“It’s too funny, really,” she tells her mother. “How it all happened, I mean how I came to write it. But at some point I guess I was getting a little down on motherhood and life in the park. Anyway, I sat there in J.K. and I thought about all the guys I used to see around there, you know, old Sixties pals, and I thought it might be a kick to see some of them again. So I wrote a few notes, just saying I’d like to see them, if they were ever around. I don’t think I was really up to anything, but maybe I was.” She looks at her mother in a speculative way.
Caroline has remained impassive—although somewhat tempted to “share” her own experiences of maternal boredom, she does not do so. “Perhaps,” is all she says.
“Well, the funny part was that no one showed up. Not one answer,” Liza continues. “So, I began to think about how it might have been if a couple of them had. And that was my story. Honestly, it’s not as crappy as that sounds, though. You’ll see. And I have to admit, I was excited about the New Yorker letter, that woman really liked it, I think. Why does everyone venerate that magazine so? STILL. But they can’t write letters to everyone who sends them stories, I know they don’t. I do have mixed feelings about being in You, though. Maybe I should have tried somewhere else too. On the other hand, all that money is nice, I’m working on persuading Saul to take off for a week in Mexico. He still feels guilty about the time we were supposed to go away, the time we almost made it to Carmel.”
“Liza, that’s terrific, and I can’t wait to read your story.”
“It’ll look even better in print, I can’t wait for that. Even wedged among all the singles-condom advice and brand-new diets. But it is encouraging. I’m going to put myself on a schedule somehow, try to write every day.”
“You should, you know. You could use the money for help. Sitters, so you can work.”
“I’ve thought of that, in fact I know it’s exactly what I should do. You know I’ll never get Saul to Mexico.” But Liza laughs as she says this, as though referring to an amiable weakness.
A pause, and then Caroline asks, “Have you heard anything from Jill?”
“Only indirectly, from Fiona.”
“Well, me too.”
Fiona has clear and serious problems of her own, these days. In a word, Fiona’s is suddenly in a very clear decline. The regulars have fled to trendier, newer places, and new enthusiasts are few and far between. For all of which Fiona has various explanations.
“Aside from the fact that this is almost always what happens,” she tells her mother, “our basic problem is with the neighborhood. We’re too expensive for it. There’re not too many yuppies on Potrero. Yet. So people don’t walk by and think, What a swell restaurant, we’ll have to check it out, the way they do on upper Fillmore. People have to make a big effort to get here from Pacific Heights or Mill Valley, for Christ’s sake.”
And then she says, “But what does all this matter? The point is, we’re losing money hand over fist, so to speak. In a way it’s sort of funny, I mean I always knew this would happen. I knew that I was successful in a way that did not make sense. Those other women, like Alice and Patty, they really care about food, they know food in a way that I absolutely don’t. In fact at this point food bores me shitless, I hate it. I’d like to eat nothing but baked garlic and Acme bread and salad, that’s all I really like to eat.”
Caroline laughs. “Sounds very good to me; you know, I adore garlic too.”
“Maybe I’ll move to Sicily.”
A pause. “Why Sicily?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I just thought of it. In connection with garlic.” And then, “Well, that’s not quite true. I actually had this big love affair with a sort of Sicilian type, a married man, natch, very what we used to call prominent. You probably know him. Anyway, lots of talk about Sicily.”
“Oh.” A fairly long pause, before Caroline asks Fiona, “Well, how do you think Jill is, these days?”
“I guess about the same.”
Because she knew he would have hated it, Caroline had no funeral services for Ralph. Thus there was no specific, familial occasion at which she would have seen Jill. Still, the fact was, she had not seen her daughter for several months, and according to Fiona, who seemed to be in touch with her sister (her twin, Caroline sometimes thought the two of them so linked)—Fiona said a little vaguely that Jill was “sort of depressed, but really doing okay.” Caroline was instructed not to worry.
And Caroline for the most part very sensibly did not worry.
She assumed that Jill herself was worried over money. Such a perilous career, hers seemed to be, to Caroline, who understands very little of high finance, its wheelings and contortions. It all looks quite crazy, to Caroline.
And then there was the matter of that odd person who seemed to be a sort of acquaintance of Jill’s (Caroline hoped no more than that) who was murdered outside some club in the Mission District. That Buck Fister. Just when the Grand Jury was about to indict him for “running call girls,” a most unsavory phrase, and an ugly story all around. Amazing, Caroline finds it, that one of her daughters should know a person who was murdered! Not to mention that connection with what used to be called “white slaves.” Caroline can well understand Jill’s being depressed, brought down by any such involvement, however slight.
The police have been quoted as saying that the killing looked “professional,” whatever that could mean; Caroline takes it to describe a crime beyond their capacity for solution.
But was Jill’s involvement in whatever was going on so very slight, Caroline has been unable not to wonder. Why, really, was Jill’s name in that man’s little black book?
Caroline has always had a very dark sense of this particular daughter, a sense of some wildness, some feral greed and a sexuality that is both rampant and slightly askew, “kinky” would be the contemporary word. But Caroline does not choose to examine this intuitive impression of Jill. She would be absolutely unable to say why she thinks this of Jill.
These days Caroline would much rather think of Portia, with whom she is at least for the moment very close—first, for the blood-strong reason that Ralph’s loss is one that they share. And second (more happily, much), there is Portia’s acquisition of the narrow, funny house in Bernal Heights, the house and its needful, long-neglected garden, about which Portia and Caroline endlessly, these days, converse. (Not to mention the cranky old cat, with her arrogant walk and her loud, endless comments on life.)
And then there is Portia’s new friend, the mysterious dark Hilda Daid, the young Lebanese lawyer. It is fairly clear to Caroline (again, she could not say why) that these two young women have now become lovers, and she rather believes that soon, any day now, Portia will make this announcement to her mother. It is called “coming out to your mother,” Caroline believes.
And she thinks, Oh dear, why is it that my daughters always have to tell me things? Why don’t they just let me guess?
This, then, is one phase of what could be termed Caroline’s new single life. Her post-Ralph life. Herself as a widow, a word she much dislikes and would never use. This is the phase, as she later thinks of it, of peace and self-indulgence. Of lying about with tea and new novels, magazines. A time of solitude, really, except for all those turbulent conversations with her daughters.
Sometimes, though, her whole balance seems to shift, and she feels herself very near an abyss of pain, of loneliness and longing. She feels the black loss of Ralph. She will wake then at night to his absence in her bed. To the total lack of his large, most loved and familiar shape. His body, now totally gone.
From such a night she will wake exhausted, and hopeless. Feeling old, and fat, and irrevocably alone.
At those times, of necessity she begins to follow some of her own prescriptions, starting with exercise. Walking six or eight miles a day (that much mileage is “exercise,” according to Caroline; just walking about in her usual aimless way is not).
A huge fogbank now has covered what seemed to be the start of true spring weather. Every day the papers predict that in a couple of days the fog will lift, and it does not. It is not very cheering weather, but perfectly okay for walking, Caroline tells herself.
She finds it hard, though, to walk with no object other than exercise, and so she invents distant errands: she walks far out on Clement Street to a nursery, in search of some new shade plants, and some summer-blooming bulbs for her garden, and for Portia’s. She goes over to Real Food on Sutter Street, a Portia recommendation. And sometimes she walks downtown, to Union Square.
Striding along with her usual briskness, arrested here and there by sheer curiosity, Caroline in a gradual way becomes aware that she does have an objective, though; she is in fact looking for someone, or something—all these very long walks have the nature of a search. Seeing that this is the case, that she is indeed looking (not yet knowing for whom, or what), at first she thinks, Well, what a silly old jerk I’ve become, I must be looking for Ralph, in some stupid unconscious way. How dumb.
But that is not true. Almost as soon as she says to herself, I’m looking for Ralph, Caroline knows that she is not. And she continues to wonder: for whom? for what?
Often, almost anywhere along the streets where she walks, Caroline encounters homeless people. Muttering old wrinkled black men; haggard, chalk-faced young women; old women with wild crazy hair and crazier pale eyes; middle-aged men in business suits with the shifty, humiliated look of middle-class failure. They reach out for money; some more enterprising souls have set up on the sidewalk, with signs (“Homeless and hungry, willing to work”) and cups. Caroline passes out whatever she has, which is sometimes very little—and then she begins to make a point of taking along more quarters and single dollars, as she starts out on her walks.
At some point she begins to understand that in a way she is always expecting to see, somewhere, the thin bent woman who went chanting past her house, a year or so back, just before everything began to happen, as Caroline now thinks of it. The woman who she came to believe was Mary Higgins Lord, former wife of the famous surgeon.
Or was she, after all, “Higgsie”? It begins to seem more and more possible that she was not, and as Caroline encounters this confusion, this possible mistake in identity, she becomes more and more anxious to find this woman again.
And of course does not see her, anywhere.