Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories (5 page)

He tried to pass off his collapse in the men's room as a bout with the flu, but word had already leaked out. Colleagues and acquaintances were suddenly and distastefully intimate, an astonishing number pulling him aside and confessing that they too were on antidepressants and it was nothing to be ashamed of. Merely a chemical imbalance. Hey, the stuff doesn't even give you a good high, they would joke. Any sizable gathering would produce at least one more person who felt compelled to relate his personal journey through the slough of despond or to itemize the contents of her medicine cabinet. "I wasted months in therapy talking about my dreams," one young paralegal confided. "Frankly, I don't have the time for all that navel-gazing. I'm just so much more productive now."

Apparently, he had passed through some contemporary rite of passage and now had to endure the attentions due an initiate. Even those of the evangelistic receptionist who pressed a Post-it note into his hand with the name of a book that had changed her life. He wanted to protest the presumption that his life needed changing, but instead he nodded and thanked her, doing his best to conceal his impatience. Of course, he should expect some uncomfortable jogs before his days settled into the old grooves, but he looked forward to the time when he could finally put this whole business behind him and get on with the rest of his life.

We are all chameleons in my family, always adaptive, always reflecting back whatever environment we're in. Of indeterminate Anglo ancestry, we're mutts, with not even the identifying marks of a Scot's plaid or a German weakness for bratwurst. Our religion mutates safely among interchangeable Protestant sects. Our history tells a story, though not, strictly speaking, our own.

Look back two hundred years and you will find us somewhere in the picture, blending into the scenery. Our ancestors fought in the American Revolution and the Civil War, always on the winning side. We still have great-uncle Howard's sword. Then we moved west with the railroads. There are photographs of us dressed in coveralls and straw hats, sowing wheat across the plains of Kansas. We are posed in front of tepees in North Dakota, the small children in starched petticoats standing next to a Sioux chief. During World War II, we worked in the shipyards and manned the lookout towers, and after V-J Day we all moved to the suburbs.

My own small part in our history began in 1957. I was the first child of a young couple who bore a striking resemblance to Jack and Jackie. She was slender and quiet, always poised in her matching heels and pillbox hat. He was a go-getter, as handsome as a quarterback, smiling into his future. Their pictures appeared in the local newspapers above articles about the Chamber of Commerce and the Junior League's spring fashion show.

I was supposed to be a boy, but since I was not, they changed my name and had another child fifteen months later, also a girl, and then there was a miscarriage that we don't talk about.

Here is a color Polaroid of us. My mother, my sister, and I are all dressed alike because we are girls and it is Easter Sunday and our mother has made us each outfits. Because it is the late sixties, the fabric is a bright, flowery cotton brought back from a Hawaiian vacation. We stand in a row, each of us clutching our purses with cotton gloves. My sister is the one who will not smile for the camera. This is the only clue that we are not entirely as we would like to appear.

A few years later, my mother begins to resemble Mary Tyler Moore, and my father grows a mustache in imitation of Robert Redford. Our pigment darkens into burnished tans. Predictably, we have taken up skiing. Après-ski, we drink Chablis and eat quiche in the lodge. This was taken in Aspen or Sun Valley. My close-lipped smile hides a tangle of braces.

I am by now in the flux of adolescence and perfecting my genetic mutability, an honor student who hangs out with unsavory types in parking lots. I sing in the youth group choir on Sunday mornings, still hung over from the night before. I have come to realize, without being told, that my survival depends on being all things to all people, so I lie about my age and my whereabouts and my friends. My sister, less agile, gets caught smoking dope and is suspended from school.

It is nearing the eighties: my father drives a Mercedes, my mother starts up an interior design business, and my sister gets pregnant and keeps the baby. I graduate from a small liberal arts college, with a double major in drama and poli sci. We haven't seen each other for weeks, but we leave messages next to the phone. When my father meets the younger woman, we get divorced like everyone else. Even our few tragedies feel impersonal, borrowed.

I move to New York to become an actress. What better use of my inherited talents than this? I mouth other people's words with agility, I can simulate anger and joy and horror. I am as comfortable on stage as in my own living room, more so actually. When I go to auditions, the long line of my family trails invisibly behind me. They're a little nervous. They've never had an actor in the family, though come to think of it, someone on the paternal side was in a silent film once. While I'm belting a show tune, I hear them whisper in my ear. They tell me I'm a little flat. I blow the audition, but they say they're proud of me. No matter what I do. They ask me if I've met anyone famous yet. They wonder when I'm going to be on
The Tonight Show
.

When I join the Screen Actors Guild, I have to change my name. Not because it sounds ethnic, but because it sounds so perfectly generic that someone else in the union is already using it. While I'm at it, I change it completely, first name, last name, even the initial in the middle. I erase my identity and pull a new one from thin air. For months after, I keep forgetting who I am.

I begin to sleep with men who tell me I remind them of someone, their daughter or their old girlfriend or someone they can't quite place. In actuality, they've seen me on television, selling credit cards and peanut butter and cough syrup. If not a star, I do well enough to incur envy. My agent returns my calls. I make money. I spend it. I spend some more. When I've had a stressful day, I leaf through mail-order catalogues. It soothes me, the glossy photos of chinos and anoraks and polos, the people wearing them who look vaguely like me, maybe a little happier. I call a 1-800 number and order sweaters, in celery, in cactus, in dusk. I meet someone and we drink blue margaritas.

Given all this, this surfeit of normalcy, how to explain the eight months when I cannot get out of bed? How to explain the inarticulate terrors of morning, the black slumps round about four? I cannot trust my own judgment on such matters, so I follow the masses wending their way into therapy.

The first session, she asks about my family. She invites them into the room, and they come piling in. They take up every chair and nudge me over on the couch. We're all uncomfortable, but we make an effort. When asked to confront our inner workings, we try. We tell what may be the truth, what we think she'd like to hear, and we wonder if we are boring her. She believes us to be hedging, resisting the awful secret truths of her calling. We fumble to oblige her, we search for something that sounds original and genuine, we weep in frustration.

At last, through the graces of a new movement, we are given the words to express our emptiness. We are the soul-murdered children of blank-aholics. We love too much. We have past lives more colorful than this one. We are each of us creative. We are each of us unique. We decide to become Native American. We remember a Sioux ancestor back there somewhere. We buy bundles of sage and turquoise-studded bracelets. We dance with wolves. We feel our shape shift, our history elide. We're back in the saddle again.

It was silly to feel what she was feeling, Elaine told herself. She was forty-nine, too old to be an orphan.

Elaine had just spent another afternoon and evening at her mother's. After four weekends of sorting and packing, they had worked their way down to the basement, the midden where for several decades the family had carted and dumped all artifacts no longer used but of some dubious value. Her mother was paring down; she had sold the house and bought a condo in Durham.

"What about these?" Elaine asked, holding up a pair of cow salt-and-pepper shakers she remembered from her childhood.

Her mother gave them hardly a glance. "Goodwill."

"How about this?" Wrapped in yellowed tissue was a ceramic crèche that had appeared on the front hall table every December for decades.

"Goodwill."

And so on and so on, through boxes of old vacation slides and photo albums, a croquet set, canning jars, souvenir ashtrays and spoon rests, a rock tumbler for polishing agates, high school yearbooks, the linen christening gown she and her brothers had been baptized in, the old brown sleeping bags with deer and ducks on the flannel lining.

And then her father's metal tackle box. Elaine found it in the growing sprawl of To Go items. Each tray was neatly labeled in her father's hand and filled with flies and hooks and flashers, spools of thread and bits of line.

"You're not really thinking of throwing this away?" Elaine urged.

"I can't imagine what I'm going to do with fishing tackle. Somebody else might as well get some good out of it."

"It's not as though you're going into the Witness Protection Program, Mom," Elaine snapped. "You don't have to leave it all behind."

"I'm trying to do you a favor, missy. When I die, you won't have to feel guilty about throwing things away. I only wish my own mother had done this. Do you know I found boxes and boxes of used lightbulbs in the attic? All the filaments burned out. She hadn't thrown out a lightbulb in twenty years."

"There's a difference."

"It's all just stuff," her mother pronounced, and that was that.

So Elaine ended up feeling guilty about the boxes of rescued history she carried to her car at the end of the day. It was mostly sentimental junk; still, her mother's breezy disregard prickled her nerves. She had spent the day trying to be an adult and failing, and now she was tired and grimy. A quick stop at the store, then she was going to go home, make herself a grilled cheese sandwich, take a shower, and go to bed.

And that was when she saw her ex. At that moment, Neil was sailing his cart through the brightly lit produce section, checking a list against the rows of polished and misted fruit, squinting in concentration, his tongue thrust into his cheek. Typically, he was oblivious to everything except the task in front of him. He threw a dozen oranges into a bag and then strode to a pyramid of corn, where he began ripping back husks and tossing the imperfect ears aside.

She noticed others watching him, too. He was still handsome, but not movie-star handsome. In photographs, he might easily be overlooked. But people gravitated to Neil. His confidence was magnetic. He was a pied piper, at the forefront of countless fads that had washed across Eastlake over the years. She had seen it happen again and again. Neil had been the first person in their neighborhood to take up cross training and the first one to throw it over for free weights. Later there was Rollerblading and touring the wine countries by bicycle.

When they were young, Elaine had been afraid he would die of a heart attack before he was thirty and leave her widowed with two small children. She had never known anyone with so much energy. He might get called in on an emergency in the middle of the night, and still see two dozen patients the next day. Then he'd come home, take the edge off with a five-mile run before dinner, and
she
was the one who was exhausted, having spent the day following a toddler around the house. In his wake, she always felt tired and inferior. Eventually, she had drifted to the rear of the conga line and been replaced by a younger, sturdier model who needed less sleep.

Already, there was a knot forming around the bin of corn.

She didn't feel up to talking to him tonight, so she decided to skip the tomatoes she had come in for and headed toward the frozen desserts aisle instead.

In the first months after the divorce, she had avoided their old restaurants, the drugstore, the dry cleaner, anywhere they might cross paths. She avoided the neighborhood where he'd built a new house, and kept a sharp eye peeled for his BMW and the little red Miata his girlfriend, Nicole, drove. Even so, they lived in a small community and she bumped into him now and again. A year later, she had more or less grown used to it, although she was surprised she hadn't seen his car in the supermarket parking lot.

They were out of Chunky Monkey. She was reaching into the smoking interior of the ice cream case when she heard her name at her back. Neil was behind her, his cart filled to the brim. He looked pleased to see her, although she could tell from the way he furtively appraised the carton of Chocolate Mint in her hand that he was making an effort not to lecture her on fats. He made a generous living replacing arteries.

"What do you know? I never would have picked you out as a night shopper." His smile was broad and innocent.

"How are you, Neil?"

"I'm fine," he said, as always, but there was an unfamiliar hesitancy in his voice. She ignored it. She had her own problems. Besides, she probably already knew his. Their children kept her abreast. Nicole had skipped town back in March and, according to the credit card statements that still came to Neil's house, had returned to California.

"Have you tried this?" he asked. He had moved to the far side of the aisle where the fresh yogurt machine stood. He was filling a Styrofoam tub from the nozzle marked Raspberry Swirl. "This is my favorite flavor. And you don't even have to feel guilty."

"I like my guilty pleasures."

He smiled, good-natured but puzzled. "You don't know what you're missing. I eat this every night. Here, taste." He squirted a little onto a plastic spoon.

"No, thanks."

"C'mon, just a taste." He held out the spoon as though he were trying to tempt a fussy infant.