Helen Hath No Fury (2 page)

“I don’t see what’s wrong about discussing our reactions,” Tess said. “It obviously struck nerves, so maybe—”

“But Denise did all this work—” Clary tried.

In their partnership, Helen leaned toward the visionary end of the spectrum, the designs and fabrics, and Clary was the one who handled the cold, hard facts of doing business. It was in character that Helen would declaim and Clary would try to get us back on track.

It was in character for us that her attempts had no effect.

Helen looked at her partner with unfocused eyes, as if all she’d registered was noise, not words. “Nothing’s changed, either,” she said. “No offense, Denise, but politicians preaching hypocritical family values are as oppressive to women as Edna’s society was. Why aren’t any of them saying ‘impregnate a woman, go to jail’? It’s all about punishing females men have treated rottenly.”

“This isn’t about today’s value systems,” Denise said. “Edna’s personal was not the political.”

“But it was; it is! It always is!” Helen said.

“Really, Helen,” Clary murmured. “Can’t we listen to—”

“Can’t you see it yourself? That’s what it’s about! Men looking for women to blame through the centuries. And they still are. But what if Edna had spoken up instead, let other women hear new ideas? I wanted her to be brave.” She sipped her wine and seemed to visibly cool down. “Sorry,” she said. “Some things infuriate me.”

Denise smiled brightly at me. “You’re quiet tonight.”

I hadn’t realized how much of an observer rather than participant I’d been until she mentioned it. “I was thinking about what Helen said. One of my classes is reading
The Scarlet Letter
, so that idea of looking for a woman to blame through centuries—”

“The Scarlet Letter.”
Susan interrupted me with enormous authority. “The Colonial variation on the theme—but Hester didn’t die. She went to live in Europe and got rich, didn’t she? So there goes your theory, Helen. And then there’s Polly Baker.”

At mention of the name, all side conversations stopped for universal groaning.

Susan looked stunned, but she shouldn’t have. Last meeting, she’d told us much more than anybody wanted to know about Polly Baker, the heroine of a practical joke once played by Benjamin Franklin. Polly supposedly was a Colonial woman tried for fornication after the birth of her fifth illegitimate child. At her trial, she spoke on her own behalf so eloquently that one of her judges married her. Together, they produced fifteen more children.

People took Polly seriously for nearly two centuries,
and now she supposedly had an important role in Susan’s unfinished mystery.

“You told us about her. We listened. And listened. Don’t start!” Although Roxanne delivered the lines in humorous fashion, it was obvious she meant it. We all meant it.

“But she’s relevant!” Susan said. “Love outside of marriage, punishment—except she triumphed.”

“Susan, she never existed.”

“I say we rename our group the Polly Baker Memorial Reading Circle and be done with it,” Tess said, provoking applause. “I mean what else do we have in common?”

“Well, some of you have workmen in common,” I said with a smile, hoping to get us off a debate about Polly Baker. The flagstone for Helen’s solarium hadn’t arrived, so the contractor had moved his crew to Tess’s house, where they were enclosing and insulating a porch. I was aware of such details because they made me aware of how different my life felt from some of my book-club mates’. Mine was free of building materials. That felt significant.

“No, seriously,” Tess said. “We’re different ages, different jobs, different lifestyles, different tastes in reading and men and politics—but we all always have Polly. Apparently.”

“You’re making fun, but I like it,” Susan said, head high. “We could have pins and T-shirts made. She’d be our mascot.”

“If you’d finish the book.”

“Can we please talk about
this
book?” Denise asked. Her eternal politician’s-wife politeness was wearing thin. “Let’s get back to Edna.”

By now, interest was lagging. Two women examined the fabric on the newly re-covered sofas. Susan and
Clary looked annoyed; Tess, who worked with the mentally unstable and was therefore comfortable with uncontrollable groups, looked bemused; and Denise kept checking her watch.

At which point, Helen sighed and had another hearty dose of white wine. “I’m glad I don’t have to drive anywhere tonight,” she said. “And I apologize for taking the floor or the soapbox and ruining the discussion. How about if I get coffee and dessert while you all talk? Without me in the room, there’s a chance you’ll get to hear all that stuff Denise prepared.”

I offered to help. The house was so large, the kitchen seemed a commuter-train ride away. A long way to carry ten coffee cups and, if Helen was true to form, almost as many varieties of sweets. Susan also joined us.

“You girls,” Denise said. “The Three Musketeers.”

Which we were not, but earlier in the evening when we’d been up on the roof, Susan had made a comment—I couldn’t even remember it now—that made Helen and me laugh. And Denise had commented about that, too, as if we were a clique. “Right back,” I said, and followed Helen through a series of gorgeous rooms.

From then on, we did actually talk about the book. Sometimes even in turn. And listened to Denise’s research about Kate Chopin’s life and philosophy plus critiques of this work—the damning ones when it was first published and the reconsiderations eighty years later when the work was rediscovered. And then we talked again about personal reactions to Edna’s comfortable but closed-tight world, her short climb out of it, and then her downward spiral.

Finally, we planned the next meeting. We were reading the newest Barbara Kingsolver, in which I was pretty sure nobody killed herself for the sin of having had sex.

The evening nearly over, Helen’s mood grew less dark.
She lifted her coffee cup in a toast. “Here’s a promise,” she said. “Next meeting, I will not get on my hobbyhorse, whatever horse that might be. I promise that I won’t say a word.”

Unfortunately, she kept her promise.

I
WAS HAVING THE SORT OF DREAM WE ONLY DREAM OF
having. I was at a picnic beside a light-sparked lake. I wore a long white summer dress. My feet floated above the lush grass, and I was being discreetly adored by a man with deep, dark eyes.

I was Edna at the start of her romantic dream. Edna, thrilling to new love, to music overheard, unaware of the dark edges of the picture, innocent of how her story would end.

A discordant blare rocketed me from Edna’s world to mine.

Nobody I would accept as a friend would call at this hour. It had to be the champion of dawn chatterers, my mother, and I definitely did not feel like an early-morning session with her. It was possible that I’d had too much wine the night before at book club.

Nothing like getting depressed before you’re fully awake.

The noise had stopped. Mackenzie must have picked it up.

Couldn’t be my mother, I remembered. She had talked my couch-potato father into joining her on a cruise. He’d agreed, because having your hotel float along with you was as close to not-traveling as traveling got.

But ship-to-shore phone calls had to be prohibitively
expensive. Plus, there currently wasn’t even a major nagging issue. We’d reached détente. She’d finally understood that I was neither leaving Mackenzie—in pursuit of further education or further men—nor, in her terms, “moving forward” with him. And most heretical—that I was not upset about the status quo.

“Mom,” I’d said in desperation, “I’m
happy
with my life. Happy teaching. Happy with Mackenzie. Happy single.” And I was. After much upheaval and blithering, life felt balanced, in place, and quite fine, thank you. Mirabile dictu, she heard me.

Unfortunately, hearing it shorted out her hardwiring. She was programmed so that all circuits led to marriage, all roads (after she dusted, resurfaced, and decorated them) to the altar, the sole location of Happy Endings. All else was prologue, not the story itself. At a loss as to what happened next, she set out to sea.

I put the pillow over my head, a signal to Mackenzie that no matter who was on that line, I wasn’t taking calls at this hour.

He didn’t ask. I opened my eyes and saw the man sitting on my side of the bed. His bright blue eyes were a shock—a part of me was still in that humid dream with the dark-eyed man.

“Time to get up,” he said. “You heard that alarm.” He placed a mug of coffee on the night table. He looked great, as fine an image of a paramour as had been the dark-eyed dream man. White suit or white terry towel-wrap, it’s all the same if they provide coffee in the morning.

“Delicious,” I said after a sip. “My thanks and compliments to the chef.” I relaxed into real life.

“Have a good time last night?” he asked, standing up. “Sorry I couldn’t wait up. I was wiped out.”

I summarized the evening’s highlights while I watched
him dress, put on his public persona. “Helen seemed odd,” I said. “Overly agitated about what Edna should or shouldn’t have done.”

“Did you remind her it was fiction?”

“Interesting what buttons fiction can press,” I murmured. He was moving close to warp speed. “In a rush?” I asked.

“Pretty much.”

“Then I’ll see you tonight. I’ll be home. Book club meets but once a month.”

He bent and kissed my forehead. “Bad timing. I promised to meet an old buddy for dinner. Used to work together, but he quit and went to law school.”

That was something Mackenzie had once talked about doing.

“He just got married.”

That was not something Mackenzie talked about doing.

“Remarried. Re-remarried. This is his third.”

“What an optimist.”

“For a smart guy, he’s incredibly stupid.”

“I take that to mean you know his new wife.”

Mackenzie shook his head. “But neither does he. He never does, till it’s too late. He did this last time, too. Meets somebody and goes gaga. She says she wants to get married right away, he signs on, and then all the stuff he would have learned by dating her, he gets to learn about in divorce court. Incredibly expensive. But here he’s done it again.”

“I hope you won’t let him know how you feel about this marriage.” About any marriage. The word had hardly ever been spoken in this household, except by my mother, and then only via long distance. We’d surely never had an actual discussion of the institution, and
till death do us
part
meant he’d stay with me until another homicide made him rush off.

“This is the third wedding gift. Luckily, his wives keep stripping him of all his earthly possessions, so I can keep on giving the same thing.” Another nose-tip kiss. “You’re not upset about tonight, are you? It was the only time he had. I didn’t want to make it couples, because I’m not eager to meet this one. I’ve met the other two—both pretty, needy, not the brightest bulbs, clingy, and twenty-two. This new one’s twenty-two, as well, and I’m sure all the rest is the same, too. He’s a devotee of the if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed, try, try-again theory.”

“No problem.” I liked that we each had autonomy, that there was no guilt in having our own schedules, friends we saw on our own. The status quo was a pleasant, undemanding, in fact consoling, equilibrium we’d reached after a few years of ups and downs about where our relationship was headed, how it was doing, and whether it should exist at all.

My mother’s face, her expression doubtful, hovered above the bed. I blinked, and she was gone.

“You’re the greatest,” Mackenzie said.

I don’t trust that phrase. In general, I’ve found it to mean I’ve been tolerating something I shouldn’t have been.

He sat down on the side of the bed again and took my hand, studying it as if it were a brand new artifact. “I’ve been thinking.”

It’s odd about thinking. It’s a good thing to do, and hearing that someone we care about has been doing it should fill us with joy, but it does not. Instead, it combines with being “the greatest” and produces tensed neck muscles and a sense of imminent doom.

Mackenzie saw my expression change and laughed. “Nothing bad! In the light of Tom’s wives, I’m grateful you’re nothing like them. That you’re you. I’m happy
we’re … well, we’re here. Where we are. Together.
Easy.
Nobody pushing for anything else, anybody else. You and me, the way we are—this is good.” He stood again. “I won’t be late. Maybe I can fast-forward him through the courtship and wedding details. I’ve heard it all before.” And then he did, indeed, leave.

I sat drinking my coffee and digesting my early-morning compliments, wondering why the latter stuck in my throat.

Why was Mackenzie so deliriously happy with my reluctance to be married? With our nondiscussions of it? He was happy because I didn’t push or nag him into his friend Tom’s follies. Happy because I wasn’t the idiot girls Tom kept marrying.

It wasn’t great being terrific in comparison to ninnies, it wasn’t ego gratifying being the greatest out of a field of wretched non-greats, but it was nice that Mackenzie was a happy man. Happy with me. That we were a happy twosome, because I was happy, too. I had what I wanted, too. I knew that because I had told my mother just that countless times.

I was happy!

Nonetheless, thoughts about my—our—his happiness made me first uncomfortable and peeved, and finally, totally, inexplicably, disgruntled.

How could he say such a thing? Feel such a thing?

It was one thing to consider our arrangement satisfactory, to be contented with it. But it felt like a whole other thing—an infuriating thing—to
think
about it and become
ecstatic
about not being married to me!

Happy.

Which he so obviously was.

What a lousy thing to wake up to.

P
ERVERSITY WAS OBVIOUSLY THE THEME OF THE DAY
. Perversity and annoyance.

My annoyance with Mackenzie fed right into my annoyance with my students’ low-keyed behavior, particularly my fourth-period class, the one right before lunch. Their stifled yawns and mechanical responses to all remarks about
The Scarlet Letter
made me yearn for the noisy babble that had irritated me the night before at my book club. Enthusiasm, even when slightly berserk, was preferable to apathy, even if, as now, the indifference is good-natured and tolerant.

I should have been grateful for that. It was spring, the semester was running out, they could have raised all manner of hell and gotten away with it, but that wasn’t their mood today. But instead of gratitude, I rankled at their expressions.

The most interest they showed was when the PA system squawked its way into the middle of what I was saying, and a boy whose voice broke almost each syllable asked the swim team to meet in the front hall immediately after school.

I wished the swim team would take the PA system along with them and drown it.

None of my class was on the team. We didn’t need to hear the annoyingly blurry blast of sound. It wasn’t
much of a team anyway, but Maurice Havermeyer, headmaster of Philly Prep, was determined to boost our school’s athletic reputation. “Go, Philly,” the pathetic adolescent said in a voice with no inflection, except when it cracked. “The office wants to remind you this year, every grade level’s outstanding athlete will receive a special Philly Prep trophy. Remember Dr. Havermeyer’s new school motto:
‘Mens Sana in Corpore Sano.’
Which means ‘a sound mind in a sound body.’ Thank you.” We heard him say, “Where’s the switch? How do I turn it off?” He wasn’t going to last long as an office aide, even though he had pronounced the Latin relatively well.

Should I tell the kids the motto wasn’t Havermeyer’s and wasn’t new? I looked at my motley crew. Perhaps, having given up on the sound minds, Havermeyer was settling for relatively functioning bodies.

The kid found the off switch. End of excitement in the classroom.

I couldn’t understand their not liking
The Scarlet Letter.
It wasn’t difficult going and it was surely a story of passion and civic wrath—a story with sex at its core—that should appeal to a teen. But sometimes I wonder whether the kids I teach are capable of empathy. Too often, they are the diametric opposite of my book group. They’re unwilling to venture into another person’s psyche, particularly if the person is, to them, “foreign” in age, situation, or historical period. This doesn’t bode well for the future of the world.

Poor Hester Prynne. As if it weren’t bad enough that the Puritans treated her like dirt, so did my contemporary kids. Bubbling with hormones and longings themselves, they nonetheless dismissed Hester, not as a sinner, but as worse—irrelevant. “That was then and this is now,” their uninvolved response said. “Why should anybody care?”

The weather wasn’t helping, either. My classroom windows were open, so that full-strength eau de spring encircled each and every student. Me, too, I admit. Thinking was difficult in the sweet, druggy atmosphere, and if any of it was going on behind those glazed faces, it most surely wasn’t about the effect of Puritan mores on an unfortunate young married woman.

I wondered what—or who—filled each mind in front of me. Times like now, as I looked at a room’s worth of faces, or if I paused in a hallway between classes, I became aware of how many lives and stories were crammed between the walls that defined us, how everyone’s separate trajectory crisscrossed the others’ in an endless emotional cat’s cradle.

And each hour, teachers like me tried to weave all those strings into a single tapestry featuring Hester Prynne or algebraic theorems. As if
Philly Prep Student
were a species, with each member having the same qualities. No wonder the attempt so seldom worked.

Spring whispered tolerance—on my part, too. Teenagers and seasons were what they were, and what sense would making a ruckus about it be?

We successfully lurched through the hour, and only once did I backslide and wonder whether a single word, let alone idea, had gotten through to 90 percent of the class.

As they stampeded out, I marked my book where we’d ended the discussion today and made notes of topics to reintroduce. Nothing like false optimism to get one through her days.

I gradually became aware that a student was still in her seat, dawdling with her book bag. “Any problem?” I asked. I smiled and waited, briefcase in hand.

She flushed. “I’m sorry. I’ll be … I’m just …”

“Take your time.” Her flustering confused me. This
was not Petra Yates as I knew her. She was a pretty youngster, and unlike most of her classmates, she seemed to accept the idea that she was attractive. Not that she’d say so, of course, but she wasn’t scrunched and bowed and hangdoggy the way too many of her classmates were, hiding their bodies and faces. Nor did she flaunt the many charms nature had bestowed, but there was a whiff of general, all-purpose defiance that made me sure it was a lot easier being her teacher than her parent. Except for now.

She dropped her pocketbook, a lumpy fabric sling that clunked to the ground, sounding as if it contained scrap metal. “Sorry!” she said, “I’m such a … I keep … I don’t know what’s wrong with me!” She looked perilously near tears.

I tried to lighten the atmosphere even though I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten so dense—was I that much of an ogre? “Better hurry or you’ll miss lunch,” I said mildly.

“Could I stay here instead? I won’t touch anything. Please? I don’t feel like being with … I feel … I just need to …” I thought she might have just crossed the line between looking near tears and producing them, but while her bottom lids glittered, she made no move to swipe away the moisture.

I looked more closely. Aside from her nose, which had become rosy, she was pale and drawn, with dark circles under swimmy eyes. Several of my students had that look now—the pollen count was way up. But Petra wasn’t sniffling. “Something
is
wrong, isn’t it? How do you feel? Are you well?”

She backed off a step. “I’m fine,” she mumbled before gulping three times, then inhaling deeply, letting the air slowly escape.

“I’m not so sure of that. Maybe the flu? How about you have the nurse check you out. I’ll walk you.”

“I’m fine. Tired. Please, could I sit here during lunch?”

The day before, I’d had to wake her up at the end of class. Unfortunately, that wasn’t sufficiently unusual, especially in spring, to have made it stand out in my mind until now. The point was, she’d been lethargic for a while.

“If not the nurse, then promise me your family doctor.”

She rummaged in her oversize bag for a tissue, with which she blew her nose and wiped at her eyes. “Sure,” she said. “But really, I’m fine.”

“I don’t think so. You’ve been groggy in class lately.”

“Spring,” she whispered, but not as if she truly believed that was a reason.

“You’re not—” I stopped myself.

Her eyes widened. “Not what?”

“Taking anything? Some … substance that might make you sleepy?”

“You think I’m on drugs? Or alcohol?” she said. “In the morning? In your class?”

I had, but now I grabbed for a face-saver. “Antihista-mines,” I said. “Some of them make you drowsy.”

“I’m fine,” she repeated, but she looked almost too tired to utter the words.

“Maybe you’re not eating enough. Are you dieting? Maybe that’s what’s dragging you down. Skipping lunch and all.”

“I’ll leave,” she said. “Sorry I asked.” She headed for the door, feet dragging.

“Petra, listen to me. You’re not yourself. Your parents must be concerned, too.” Not enough, I thought. Why weren’t they keeping their child home, getting her whatever medications she needed? It had taken me too long to see that she was ill, but I could understand my being slow
on the uptake. I had over a hundred teens to monitor, and I saw them for less than an hour a day.

“Don’t bother my parents about this. Please?”

“If you’re this way at home, I wouldn’t think anybody else would have to tell them a thing.”

Petra’s mother had died ten years earlier, and her father had married a woman who accompanied him to school conferences, but I felt she did so for reasons other than Petra’s welfare. She’d corrected me when I referred to “their” daughter. “Petra is Bill’s daughter by his first marriage,” she’d said crisply, interrupting me. It seemed clear she’d married him, not his children, even though they’d been about five and three at the time. But in truth, that moment’s roughness had been the only unpleasant impression I’d gotten. An ordinary couple, at least one of them sufficiently concerned with Petra’s welfare to show up at every open house and school night. And here was the girl, blue-ringed eyes wide with fear at the prospect of “bothering” them, telling them she was ill, as if this were something she’d caused—

It hit me from all directions that perhaps she
had
caused the situation.

Her paleness and exhaustion.

Her expression when I mentioned the cafeteria or lunch.

Her emotional distress about Hester Prynne.

“Oh, Petra,” I whispered, “are you? …”

She didn’t answer, but looked me in the eyes, so that her answer was clear. “Please,” she whispered. “I can’t … they can’t know.”

I had hoped that I was wrong, that I had jumped to conclusions. But her expression told all. It wasn’t my misconception. It was, quite literally, hers.

“What am I going to do?” Her eyes welled over. “I can’t … I don’t …”

I put my hand on her shoulder and guided her back to the desks. “Let’s sit down.” She looked likely to faint otherwise, even though I didn’t think women did that anymore. On the other hand, Petra wasn’t a woman. She was fifteen years old. A schoolchild. A pregnant one.

From our desks, we stared at each other. I sighed. I felt part of a sad but ancient ritual. How many women had sat like this through history?

“I wish I were dead.” Her voice sounded hollow.

“No! Oh, please, don’t think that way. Don’t let yourself think that—”

“Everybody would be better off.”

“Petra, that isn’t at all true, and this isn’t the end of the world. There are—”

“That’s what you think! What am I supposed to do—be a Hester Prynne?”

“This isn’t the seventeenth century. We aren’t Puritans.”

“I’m fifteen.” It was more moan than words.

“Are you positive about this?”

“I bought a kit. I bought two kits. They both said I was.”

“And you haven’t told your parents.”

“My father would kill me.”

I remembered the quiet, soft-spoken insurance broker. “Oh, Petra, of course he wouldn’t.”

She looked directly at me now, her eyelashes wet with tears but her expression grim. “He said he would. He said it a hundred times. He said young people today have no morals and if any daughter of his—”

“It’s an expression, that’s all. Your father didn’t mean it literally.”

She looked at me and said nothing for a long while, and when she finally spoke, her voice was honed to a bleak edge, devoid of hope. She would explain her situation because I’d made it necessary, not because explanations
could make anything better. “He says if my sister or me, if we ever … he said if we couldn’t control ourselves, if we … with boys before we’re out of his house, then he’d throw us out of his house altogether. That we’d have to live with my grandmother, his mother, up in the Poconos. He says he wouldn’t have any more to do with us.”

“Do you think he meant that?”

“I know he did, because Valerie would love getting rid of my sister and me, having my dad all to herself and her kids, so don’t think she’d stop him. And my grandmother—I’d rather die than live with her. She hates Patsy and me. Particularly me. Says my mother was a … a … that she trapped my father into marrying her and that we inherited her badness. She’s always quarreling with my dad about us, and then afterwards, when we’re home again, he gets into one of his fits about how we had better not prove her right, do we understand? My sister and me, we went there once for the summer—guess what, it was Valerie’s idea. It was the worst time of my life—she was always screaming about straightening us out, hitting us with belts and sticks because we were wild. My father didn’t discipline us properly, she said.”

“Did you tell your father?”

Petra’s expression was polite, but distant. “He said we must have deserved it. He never contradicts her even if he gets angry about what she says to him. He never contradicts Valerie, either.” She laid her head on the desk.

“How long ago do you think this happened?” She was wearing a baggy shirt and baggier jeans, and I had no idea what her contours looked like.

She sat back up. “I don’t
think
, I
know!”

It took me a beat to realize I’d implied that she was constantly sexually active, and she obviously wasn’t. I
felt old-fashioned, but still reassured and irrationally relieved. “March,” she muttered. “March third.”

Two months ago. “You haven’t mentioned the … the father.” I could barely shape that last when I knew it most likely applied to somebody who himself hadn’t finished growing.

She shrugged. “He doesn’t go here.”

“His school wasn’t what I was getting at.”

“Why? You think I should get married? I’m fifteen! He won’t care, anyway—he has a girlfriend, he goes to college. He doesn’t know me! I was at a party. Somebody brought whiskey. He was there without his girlfriend. I don’t know why or how things started and then … they kept going. I was sick later on. I thought … I hoped that maybe that meant nothing could have happened. I never saw him again. I just want to forget all about that night!”

I didn’t say any of the obvious responses, especially that forgetting was the one option she did not have. We sat, or I sat and she slumped, in silence. I could not think of what should happen next.

What a sadly appropriate name she had. Petra. Stone. For a girl caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.