Other Women Read online

  Other Women

  Lisa Alther

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  A BIOGRAPHY OF LISA ALTHER

  For Nancy Magnus

  Heartfelt thanks to the following friends, without whom this book wouldn’t exist: Nancy Magnus, for our endless discussions of therapeutic technique and the meaning of life; Carey Kaplan, for extensive assistance and unstinting encouragement; Richard Alther, Blanche Boyd, Stephanie Dowrick, Alice Reed, Bill Reed, and Shelton Reed, for careful readings and fruitful suggestions; Bob Gottlieb and Martha Kaplan, for their usual sound editorial sense; and all the above for their kind support on days when this project felt to me like the worst idea since nuclear warheads.

  “Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddied? You are the one who must grow up.”

  —Dag Hammarskjold

  • PART ONE •

  • 1 •

  Caroline switched off the ignition of her red Subaru, gripped the steering wheel with both gloved hands, and gazed across the parking lot down to Lake Glass. Raindrops rolled like tears down the windshield, and dripped off the bare gray branches in the yard. “God is crying,” she used to explain to her younger brothers on rainy days in Brookline. “For all the sad and suffering people in the world.” Once-vivid leaves lay in sodden heaps around the tree trunks. Lake Glass looked cold in the fading afternoon light. It was hard to believe that a couple of months earlier power boats had dragged water skiers around it. Gusts had driven sailboats across it. Swimmers had churned through those murky waters, and fishermen had lounged on the banks. Soon the lake would freeze solid, the way chemical solutions used to crystallize in test tubes during her laboratory experiments at nursing school in Boston.

  In her dream last week the lake was already frozen solid, and dotted with acres of human heads, mouths wide open in silent screams. Faceless men in army uniforms marched among them, halting to split some open with bloody axes. The ice was strewn like a packinghouse floor with brains and gore and shards of bone. Caroline woke up with her mouth wide open, her hair soaked with sweat. For a moment she was unable to move or to think. Gradually she realized she was in her own bed, in the cabin in New Hampshire she shared with Diana. She climbed out of bed and went into the next room. Her sons and Arnold, their black Labrador puppy, lay asleep, breathing noisily. Diana and her daughter, Sharon, were asleep upstairs. Caroline rubbed the floor by Jackie’s and Jason’s bunk beds with her big toe. Wood, not ice, and the boys’ heads were evidently still attached to their necks.

  The next day a little boy was wheeled into the emergency room, his head split up the back, his light brown hair matted with blood. His father had grabbed him by the feet and swung him against the edge of a stone fireplace for tracking mud on the rug. As Caroline stared at the wound, her mouth fell open and her limbs went rigid. Brenda, an Emergency Medical Technician name badge shaped like an ambulance pinned on her uniform pocket, was too busy snipping away the clotted hair to notice Caroline’s paralysis. But Caroline finally understood that she had to do something about herself. It was one thing to awaken terrified in the night, but something else again not to be able to perform your job. She had two sons and no husband, had to keep bringing home paychecks. Even if what she really wanted was to lie swaying among the blue gill on the lake floor, seaweed entangling her hair, as a skin of thickening ice above shut off all contact with this repulsive world in which people tortured and maimed each other with pleasure.

  A couple of weeks earlier, as she chopped kindling in the woods beside the cabin, she watched a man in waders, a red plaid wool shirt, and a green Homelite chain saw cap walk across the brown meadow to the lakeshore. He assembled a cairn of small stones. Then he dropped each stone into his waders—and lumbered into the lake. When his head disappeared, leaving the green cap floating on the gray water, Caroline first grasped what he was up to. It took her a few moments to shake off her admiration and race to the cabin to phone the rescue squad. For several hours she sat on the hill and watched scuba divers scour the lake floor, amphibious wasps in their sleek black wet suits and yellow tanks. The man had been clever: this was the deepest part of the lake. The rock ledges dropped off abruptly into hundreds of feet of frigid water. A gray state police boat circled slowly, trolling with grappling hooks, the snowcapped White Mountains as a backdrop. Along the shore sat relatives, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken beside beat-up Chevies. A child with Down’s syndrome lurched back and forth along the shoreline howling mournfully. Leave him alone,

  Caroline kept thinking. For Christ’s sake, leave him alone. She was sorry she’d told anyone in the first place.

  Would it look like an accident, she wondered, if she revved her engine and shot across this parking lot, over the cliff and into the lake? Then she remembered Jackie and Jason. Tall, skinny, shy Jackie, his joints as loose as a jumping jack’s, his voice starting to crack. And Jason, built like an armored truck, with a personality to match. Jackson was all wrapped up in his second wife and new babies. Jackie and Jason had no one but herself. She’d have to kill them too. But she’d put too much effort into keeping them alive all these years. It would feel as unnatural as picking green tomatoes each September before the frosts.

  Before Jackie and Jason existed, after Arlene and prior to Jackson (she catalogued the phases of her life according to what person disrupted her days and dominated her dreams; just now she was in her Diana Period), she used to assure herself that if things got too dismal on the evening news, she could exit early. Lined up on the dresser in her Commonwealth Avenue apartment were pill bottles she’d stolen from the Mass General supply room, and she studied them thoughtfully whenever traffic through the ER seemed too grim. But the arrival of Jackie and Jason had sealed off that escape hatch. She still had the pills, but she kept them on a closet shelf now, out of their reach. She no longer consulted the bottles daily to determine whether to continue to participate in such a disappointing world.

  She’d tried all the standard bromides: marriage and motherhood, apple pie and monogamy, bigamy and polygamy; consumerism, communism, feminism, and God; sex, work, alcohol, drugs, and true love. Each enchanted for a time, but ultimately failed to stave off the despair. The only bromide she hadn’t tried was psychotherapy. Members of the helping professions were supposed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But she’d recently been forced to concede that she was barefoot. Which was why she was sitting in the Lake Glass Therapy Center parking lot, planning her suicide and being late for her first appointment.

  She climbed out of her car and walked past a copper-colored Mercury with a broken taillight, bits of red glass crunching under her boots en route to the entrance to the large gray turreted structure that had served as a guest house when the town was a summer colony for Edwardian Boston.

  “I have an appointment with Hannah Burke,” announced a young woman in a faded Boston Irish accent to Holly, the receptionist.

  Hannah, standing behind Holly, looked up from her phone call. There was tightness around the woman’s mouth, bafflement in her eyes. God, she’s in so much pain, thought Hannah. But at least she’s attractive, if I have to look at her for however many months. The woman looked familiar, but Hannah couldn’t place her.
Putting her hand over the receiver, she said, “Hi, I’m Hannah. Be right with you.” She recalled the woman’s voice from their conversation over this same phone last week—faint, polite, apologetic…and somewhat belligerent. After the request for an appointment, Hannah had remained silent, waiting for her own answer. She never knew why she said yes or no to someone. Probably an instinctive sense of whether she’d be able to work with the person. If you cut your losses before taking them on, you could skew your success rate and feel more capable. But this time she said yes. If the woman had bothered to track her down, probably there was a reason, since Hannah didn’t believe in accidents.

  Except ones like smashing the taillight of her new Mercury in the parking lot that morning. She inquired into the phone about the cost of replacing it. She’d backed into Jonathan’s Scout while trying to quell the irritation she felt on days when a new client was scheduled. It was a strictly mechanical thing: her routine was being disrupted by an unpredictable element. But each time the irritation felt real and personal, and this morning she’d been feeling impatient with the timidity of this woman’s voice on the phone. Was she going to be one of those women who asked to be stepped on, and then complained that there were boot prints on her back?

  She glanced at Caroline. Tall and slim. A graying Afro. Nice tan. From skiing or from a trip south? A lady of leisure? We should all be so lucky. Don’t be a martyr, she reminded herself. You like your work, apart from not liking to starve in the streets. Navy blue parka and Frye boots, faded jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. A tiny ivory sea gull on a gold chain at her throat. Those clothes are too youthful for her. She looks like a student, but she must be thirty-five. Where is she stuck? By what? Please not another wilted flower child. She’d already seen one that morning—Chip, a cross between Che Guevara and Peter Pan, a bearded, overalled refugee from the sixties who clutched his tattered idealism around himself like hobo rags. In a permanent funk that the world hadn’t improved in the last fifteen years just because he wanted it to. He seemed to feel he couldn’t get his own house in order until he’d tidied up everyone else’s.

  The woman was standing with her hands on her hips, her weight on one leg. An athlete. Probably a lesbian. I wonder how long it will take her to tell me. I wonder if she knows.

  Hannah’s eyes registered information like a mother hen scanning the skies for a hawk. This need of hers to know what was going on at all times was awesome in its voracity. But she’d been taken by surprise too often. Four years old and your mother dies of typhoid. Abandoned by your father at five. Nineteen, and your husband is killed in battle. Two children dead in their beds from carbon monoxide. No more surprises in her life if she could help it. Which she knew she couldn’t.

  Caroline felt impaled by the woman’s blue eyes. Their expression wasn’t unkind, just relentless. Not unlike her voice over the phone last week. A clipped British accent. This woman didn’t mess around. She had a big reputation around town. Several nurses she and Diana worked with thought Hannah Burke was Wonder Woman. But Caroline had been expecting a mix of Mary Poppins and Aunt Jemima, not a gray-haired housewife in a polyester pants suit with a gaze like a police interrogator.

  I can always split, Caroline assured herself. One lousy hour, and I walk out her door forever. Let her refer to herself just once as a healer, and I’m off like a shot. Last week at the Wellness Clinic, in the converted tannery at the top of town, a bearded man in a“Love Me—I’m Italian” T-shirt had gazed at her with a meaningful smile: “I hear you, Caroline. Thank you for sharing with me. I feel really good about this hour. How has it been for you?”

  Please God, get me out of here, she’d prayed. And God had. Only to land her here with this woman with eyes like blue laser beams, who’d just lit her second cigarette, a thin brown brand. She was coughing like someone auditioning for a black lung commercial. So apparently she didn’t have it all together either. Besides, she’s short, Caroline reflected. I can handle her.

  Alarm bells went off in her head. This was what she’d told herself when she first met Arlene, and Diana, and Jackson, and David Michael. That she needed to reassure herself indicated she was in some doubt. And in fact she hadn’t “handled” the others—each had disrupted her life in a major way.

  Caroline followed Hannah down a shadowy corridor past several closed doors. On Hannah’s door was a sign that read, “Thank you for shutting up while I smoke.” Caroline plopped down on a brown tweed couch, glancing around at piles of books and papers on the desk and bookshelves. Photos of several towheaded children with missing teeth were pinned to a cork bulletin board along with a scramble of greeting cards, memos, children’s crayon drawings, pictures torn from magazines. Objects hung on the white walls—a primitive painting of a creepy-looking little demon or something, an abstract black-and-white photograph. The ferns hanging in the windows, framed by elaborate Victorian molding and orange plaid curtains, looked limp and pale. If Bach stimulated plant growth, would witnessing misery all day stunt them? Caroline stifled her need to offer to take them home, set them in the sun, and feed them fish emulsion.

  Hannah sat down in a padded metal desk chair and put her feet up on a rush footstool. Her hands hung off the chair arms, two fingers holding a brown cigarette. Caroline knew it would be inappropriate to describe what smoking was doing to her lungs, how smokers staggered into the ER coughing blood.

  “So tell me why you’re here.”

  Presumably the same reason anyone’s ever here, Caroline thought. The world’s a mess, and I want to be dead. “Well, I’ve been depressed a lot.” She wondered how to convey the atmosphere inside her head. The morning after Diana decided they should stop being lovers, she’d woken at dawn, alone in her double bed, and watched the mother-of-pearl sky, streaked with angry red. And thought about the infected flesh of a baby girl in the ER the previous day, whose father had been burning her with cigarettes. After cleaning and binding the angry wounds, she suggested other methods for getting the baby to stop crying, and the father stomped out, insulted. Caroline had spent several nights since dreaming of a vast ice field, with the severed limbs of little children frozen beneath the surface. Last week the ice field had been littered with shattered human heads. She was falling to pieces. She’d lost so much weight that bones were appearing she’d never known she possessed.

  Wimp! she snapped at herself. War, starvation, nuclear weapons, torture. Only an idiot wouldn’t be depressed in a world like this. Whenever she or her brothers whined as kids, their mother would drive them down to the Salvation Army in Dorchester. As they watched the hungry and homeless wander in, she’d inquire, “And you think you’ve got problems?”

  Hannah drew on her cigarette and watched the struggle begin—between a new client’s wish to trust her and maybe get some help; and fear of getting hurt, based on past experience. Caroline was sitting with her legs crossed and her arms folded across her chest. She wasn’t about to let anybody in.

  “What are your depressions like?” asked Hannah.

  Caroline studied Hannah, who was exhaling a shroud of smoke. If you’d seen one depression, hadn’t you seen them all? Was she paying good money just to educate this expert on depression? “I have bad dreams. I wake up sweating in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. I have a grinding feeling in my stomach most of the time. I cry over dumb things. I snap at the people I care about. I lie face down on the floor and can’t move. I feel like a pustule somebody ought to pop.” She gazed out the window opposite her, past the ailing ferns to the gray lake. Maybe that guy in waders was still walking around down there somewhere. The temptation to join him in his stroll was strong.

  Yup, thought Hannah, sounds like the big D. “Tell me about your family when you were a baby.”

  Caroline frowned. Apparently she hadn’t conveyed how awful she felt. How could you, anyway? Either someone knew what you were talking about, or she didn’t. Evidently Hannah Burke didn’t, or she wouldn’t react so blandly. Family? If she wanted to wallow
in all that Freudian shit, she’d have gone to a psychoanalyst. Her misery had to do with a life sentence in this hellhole of a world. She began talking in a monotone about being born during World War II, about her father’s departure for the South Pacific and capture by the Japanese, about her mother’s work for the Red Cross.

  Hannah felt herself flip the switch that, on her good days, allowed her to listen without relating what was said to herself. She stripped away the details of Caroline’s early experiences as though shucking corn, focusing on the ear, not the individual kernels. Upheaval, an absent father, a remote anxious overextended mother, younger siblings whom Caroline tried to mother, a succession of melancholy maids. Not an unfamiliar story for Caroline’s class and generation.

  Caroline had dropped her stance of polite boredom and was struggling to remember what she’d been told about those three years when her father had been halfway around the world in battle and POW camps. “…my mother always says what a good baby I was during the day. I’d sit so still in the grass that bees would crawl around my fingers, inspecting the crumbs from my cookies but never stinging. She’d put me in a jump seat, suspended from a doorjamb, and I’d just hang there, holding my pink blanket and sucking my thumb. But in the middle of the night I’d scream bloody murder.”

  Caroline paused to watch the woman watching her with those icy blue eyes. In her dark blue polyester pants suit, she looked fresh off the contract bridge circuit. Fuck this self-indulgent shit, Caroline thought. Millions of people starving out there, and I’m blathering to some foreigner because I feel a little down. What does my playpen behavior have to do with the resurgence of fascism in western Europe? This woman is too respectable. She wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about if I said, “I don’t like this world. I don’t want to fit into it better. I just want to be more comfortable with not fitting in.”