The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (6 page)

“Fear of the marketplace” is the technical definition of agoraphobia, which is a pretty good handle considering that a grocery store is one of the overstimulating places people like Tessie find extremely difficult to cope with. There are stacks upon stacks of multicolored packages and smells that don’t go together like German potato salad and Lysol, shoppers shoving around squeaky-wheeled carts, music without soul, and so many decisions to make.

Sure, the news has hit my friend hard, the way it would any woman, but she is not like other women, is she. She can’t go running home to her husband’s loving arms due to their current lack of closeness. She’ll not tell the children either. Nor can she find comfort in her religious beliefs since she doesn’t believe in God anymore. And since she has avoided people most of her life because she was too frightened that they’d discover how “abnormal” she is, she has no close friends other than her sister, who she currently does not have a relationship with.

After Tess arrives in the parking lot of Olsen’s Market, she reminds herself not to get ahead of herself. If she gives in to the overwhelming fear she’s feeling, her already traumatized mind will automatically categorize the Market as a danger spot and she’ll never be able to shop here again.

“Don’t flash back. Don’t panic,” she’s chanting. “Get out of the car.” She thinks she can manage that, but only if the woman in the tan minivan parked next to her stops throwing off one of
those looks
—nose elevated and nostrils flared as if she’s gotten a whiff of something beneath her. Her hair is done up like Tess’s mother’s too, in one of those neat French twists. Is she hearing Muddy Water’s
I Just Want to Make Love to You
and wondering why as well?

It’s your cell phone, you nitwit
, her mother grouses.

Tess rifles through her lucky purse and flicks a half-digested lemon drop off her cell phone. It’s Haddie. She takes a deep breath, puts her Brownie smile back on, and says, “Hi, honey.”

“Where are you?”

“Olsen’s. Do you need anything?”

“Broccoli. And frozen yogurt. Make sure it’s the absolutely no-fat kind.” She doesn’t give her mother a chance to respond before she adds on, “You there? Can you hear me?”

Tess could ask the same of the girl who starved herself until she vibrated with hunger, or foraged through the pantry and stuffed herself sick. After everyone else turned in for the night, Tess would lie in the dark and listen for the creak of the bathroom door down the hall and the dull clunk the toilet seat made when it hit the tank knowing that Haddie was about to dig up the food she’d stashed in her stomach like it was loot from a robbery.

Tess went to Will for advice, but he rarely has much to add to a conversation. When had that changed? Or had it? Because there was a constant stream of chatter going on in her head, she’d found his tight-lipped stoicism both sexy and calming when they’d met, but what starts out as a virtue in a marriage can often take a turn for the worse, can’t it. His contributions to the discussions of their daughter’s disorder were to offer either a sad look, a scratch of his head, or a suggestion that Tess handle it.

Lord knows, she tried. Resorted to everything a mother with a daughter in imminent danger would. Reason, bribery, begging, threats, magazine articles, talk shows, throwing out the bathroom scale, taking away privileges, and fear-inducing doctor visits. When nothing seemed to do a bit of good, she finally told Haddie, “If you don’t want to talk to Dad or me, you
have
to talk to someone who can help us figure this out.” Therapy with Dr. Drake had helped
her
slow her skid over some of the most treacherous patches. “I’ll find a shrink.”

“I don’t need your help,” her daughter said with a snarl. “I can find someone myself.”

Tess was only partially relieved that the burden of figuring out what was going on with her daughter would no longer fall entirely on her shoulders. Since she’d consulted a multitude of practitioners over the years—one suggested that meditating on blue crystals would cure her panics, and another, an elderly Scottish gentleman she called McShrink, insisted that lying naked on his tartan couch would be a wonderful metaphor for baring her soul—she was well-aware of the pitfalls. Sorting through the feelings of a vulnerable person is akin to locating the right wire to snip when defusing a bomb, and if Haddie chose the wrong therapist, she could be picking shrapnel out of her already-wounded psyche for years.

Tess
needed
to make sure that her daughter was in good hands. The only way to do that was by getting up close and personal with the woman Haddie had found in the Yellow Pages, so she insisted on accompanying her girl and her hostility to the third therapy session at psychologist Frieda Klein’s office on Milwaukee’s Lower East Side. Tess was familiar with this part of town. Her first apartment above the bike shop was right around the corner. She’d been ambushed by her inaugural anxiety attack just down the block. The university where she’d consulted with Dr. Ganges was a half mile north. The area had been gentrified some over the years, but when she parked the Volvo in front of a busy tattoo parlor next to a natural food restaurant, the aroma of pot and patchouli still lingered in the air.

Seated below a University of Oshkosh counseling degree that hung on the wall next to a half-dozen pictures of cats and a tie-dye quilt, Tess got things rolling during the therapy session in the smallish office on the ground floor of the converted Victorian house.

“Haddie and I use to be so close,” she told Frieda Klein.

The Birkenstock-wearing counselor gave her one of those cloying therapeutic smiles and replied, “Hmmm…maybe a little too close?”

Tess had no idea that there was such a thing as too much love, because there isn’t, and she was ticked as hell that the counselor had told Haddie there was. It was too late to stop the barely bridled rage racing up her neck on its way to her mouth, so she did what she’d been taught to do by Dr. Drake if she found herself in this kind of situation. She ran out of the office before she could shout something raw and ugly two inches from Frieda’s face.

On the drive back home, Tess carefully suggested that they seek the advice of another clinician with more traditional training. “Someone with a little less
ommm
and a lot more—”

“Frieda predicted you’d say that,” Haddie trumpeted.

“Oh, yeah? What’d she do? Throw the I Ching?”

When the flashback fades, Tess finds herself in Olsen’s floral department sitting legs akimbo at the base of one of the elaborate displays. Because she doesn’t experience the passage of time the way most folks do—the past and present flow more like a watercolor and less like a sharp-edged oil—she’s unsure exactly how long she’s been breathing in the smell of the greenery. It can’t have been too long because…is that Haddie shouting out of the cell phone, “Mom? Mom?”

“I’m here, honey.” She rubs the cell phone across her chest. “Sorry, bad reception. Anything else you want me to pick up besides the frozen yogurt, the absolutely no-fat kind,” she says. “How about…,” hot fudge sundaes used to be her favorite, “some low-cal whipped cream and—?”

“How about another mother?” Haddie hisses out before their connection goes dead.

All too aware of what is expected, newly diagnosed and further disheartened Tess knows she shouldn’t be sitting on the floor in Olsen’s Market. She’s gotta get a grip before one of the Ruby Falls ladies notices her.

When she moved into the Blessing family homestead shortly before she and Will had gotten married, neighborhood women had asked her to join them for tennis and PTA meetings, but because of her unpredictable condition—she could panic at any time and lose control of not only her mind, but her sphincter muscle. She would literally become scared shitless—she had to keep the gals at arm’s length. The women misinterpreted Tess’s fear as snobbery, her being part of one of the oldest families in town and all. Will had always been okay with her lack of social graces, even found it chest-beating charming that she’s so dependent on him, but lately the newly elected President of the Chamber of Commerce has been stressing the importance of getting along with the townspeople. “Maybe you could at least try to be a little more outgoing?” he’d recently requested.

The way his vivacious sweetheart Connie Lushman is?
Louise suggests.

“Tess?”

Someone
had
noticed her sitting amongst the flower containers and potted philodendron that she’d tried to use as camouflage. Stan Olsen. She peeks out of the leaves at the man whose tummy is swollen past the top of his black Dockers pants looming above her. The owner of the market is on Will’s bowling team—The High Rollers, which was so similar to
The High Life
that it never failed to bring back the day her father drowned.

“What’s up?” Stan asks winded. “You okay?”

Tess gives him her standard, “Oh, sure. I’m great,” because she discovered early on that while their hearts might be in the right place, folks really rather not know how she’s
actually
doing. She can’t tell Stan that she’s unbecoming whatever it was she’d become fifteen minutes ago. If she exposes her private parts like that, he’ll rush off in the other direction and might even call Will to report that she’s acting “unusual” in his store. Again. “Just felt a little faint. I skipped breakfast. Sorry for causing a gawkers’ block.”

Gossip mongering is an honorable hobby in a town as small as Ruby Falls, so nosy shoppers are slowing down their carts, or pretending to peruse the nearby gift-card carousel.

The proprietor, who prides himself on his outstanding customer service, asks Mrs. Blessing loudly enough to impress the flock of gathering ladies, “Should I grab you something out of the deli? Cole slaw? Roast beef? They’re on special today.”

She says as she gets to her feet, “No, thanks. Really. I’m good,” but Stan doesn’t seem to be buying that. So she tries to signal him that the conversation is over by staring down at the rest of the list that she’d written on the piece of paper she tore off the hospital gown:

1. Buy broccoli.
   
2. Make sure Haddie gets the help she needs from a better therapist.
   
3. Set up a vocational counseling appointment for Henry.
   
4. Convince Will to love me again.
   
5. Get Birdie to talk to me.
   
6. Bury Louise once and for all.
   
7. Have a religious epiphany so #8 is going to be okay with me.
   
8. Die.
   

Tess steals a glance at Stan. He hasn’t budged. Sure that she only turned him down because he hadn’t offered her the right food group, he nudges his tortoise-shell glasses back to the bridge of his nose with his middle finger, which is something she’d seen him do when the other High Rollers were putting pressure on him to make a crucial spare. “How about something sweet instead?” he says. “The bakery made cream-filled coffee cake this morning. I know it’s your favorite.” He reddens, like he took her love of the pastry personally. “My treat.”

“Thank you, Stan, that sounds wonderful, but please, don’t bother,” she says. “I’m feeling much better now and oh, goodness, look at the time! My family is probably worried sick about me!”

Fat chance.

As usual, Will has gone all out. Sunday dinner is a Waldorf salad, rosemary roasted chicken, broccoli in a cheese sauce, and mashed potatoes without one lump.

As Tess and her family pass the heaping bowls back and forth in the chandeliered dining room that she’d decorated in pale greens and peaches, she’s considering how Will’s self-esteem is drawn from the same font as his father’s, and his father’s before him, as far back to the days when one of the Blessing men was anointed “Cookie” on a wagon train that broke down on the Missouri Trail.

Feeding folks is not only the way her husband makes a living, it’s how he demonstrates his love and devotion to his family. After Haddie got dumped the day before prom, he told her, “Awww…let me fix you a grilled cheese with tomato sammy.” And when Henry came home after a soccer game red-faced over a botched goal, Will wordlessly whipped together a pepperoni pizza. And down at the diner? Buttons just about pop off his vest when he swings by his customers’ tables to soak up their compliments. “Hey, those pigs in a blanket were fantastic! And the mock chicken legs! You outdid yourself tonight!”

Tess breathes in the smell of the pink carnations—the perfect funeral flower—that her husband had set in the center of the dining room table, and imagines her impending ceremony. It would be lavish, of course. Will is a Blessing, after all, a descendant of a founding family known for their big-hearted generosity. The extravagant coffin he’d select would be lowered into the ground after a well-attended Mass. Afterwards, when the mourners return from the cemetery to gather at the house, someone he has known all his life will wish him yet again their sincerest condolences. He’ll thank them with his gap-toothed smile and one of his business-as-usual trademark winks, point over their shoulder toward the dining room at the heirloom silver bowls overflowing with Gramma Blessing’s potato salad and trays stacked with cold cuts and Depression glass plates piled high with cakes and homemade pies and lemon squares.
Have you had a chance to check out the tuna-noodle casserole?
the widower would ask one of the mourners.
It’s outta this world
.

Unlike Will, Tess’s eroded sense of worth is stoked by her family, and only her family. Occasionally she misses the buzz she got from working the clubs in Chicago and riffing with the other comedians backstage, but she cut back on appearances after Haddie was born, and gave up the gigs completely after Henry’s arrival. She doesn’t for a moment regret making that decision. And no matter how strained things are between them now, she knows that they love her too. If she dies from this cancer, which she’s positive she will, her babies, her always audience, will miss her. They’ll feel abandoned. The same way she and her sister had after their daddy had slid into his watery grave.

She wonders as she cuts into her perfectly cooked chicken breast if Haddie and Henry will haunt Ruby Falls’ Evergreen Cemetery the same way she and Birdie had haunted Holy Cross in Milwaukee on those humid mid-August afternoons after their father had drowned.