Chapter 11. This Is Only Temporary
This Is Only Temporary
Here were four women stuck together under trying circumstances who never would’ve come together as friends on the basis of personalities or common interests. Each one of us was very different, and what made us different, one from the other, was exactly what at least one of us couldn’t bear. I thought Janet was a slut; she thought I was a mouse. Meredith thought Morgan devoid of culture; Morgan thought Meredith a poseur; we all thought she was dirt lazy. Morgan’s political thinking was anathema to me, to her mind I was a socialist—if I had an FBI file, I knew who had made the call. Meredith never stooped to clean; we knew Morgan was a closet drinker; that Janet on occasion went out without her brains or protection; and anything that aroused suspicion turned all heads and pointed all fingers directly at me.
The house was owned by an unsighted couple—the Heits—who had moved down to Virginia after retirement about two years before to be near their son. They had let the daughters of two acquaintances of theirs rent the house for the time being—not certain they wanted to sell—a strictly informal and certainly not permanent arrangement. But these women shortly afterwards and on the sly advertised in The Register for others to take their place without telling the Heits, one moving to her own apartment, the other traveling around England. A rotation of down-and-outers in and out followed, the ranks swelling to four to decrease each party’s percentage of rent, all ties to the original connections long gone. There was no lease; at any point the Heits could pull the plug—and we would be out on the street. With trepidation each month we sent them our little package of rent checks, an assemblage of ever-changing names, hoping they wouldn’t notice, hoping the spell wouldn’t break. The type of situation only the desperate would accede to. But of course none of us planned on being here for very long, only a couple more months at the most, only a couple months more. We held no long-term interest. It was only an unlucky trick of fate that landed us here. We watched for our knights, in the form of money or men, to come and rescue us.
Janet had the large bedroom and had been here the longest, a little over a year. She had initially secured an entry position with a public accountancy firm right out of school, on her way to management heights, then was rudely laid off. She lived semi-comfortably on unemployment, nursing a strong sense of injury, turning down several jobs that did not meet her criteria, using the economic slap in the face as an excuse for bad temperament. Mainly she dated men, lots of them, and it was not nice to realize that she brought strangers to sleep with into our house with the regularity of a cat bringing half-eaten mice to the back door. She had bonny brown eyes that could turn sharp and cold, and a low sexy voice. The girl-next-door, but with a mean streak.
Meredith was here because she was separated from her husband. They were undergoing marriage counseling and she needed her own space. She was short, with a chubby face, constantly gathering her long dark curls on top of her head then letting them fall back down in dramatic fashion. Her husband was short and skinny, and sported a voguish wedge haircut. They were from Lewiston, Maine. Meredith was here doing graduate work in psychology. Adam drove a van for a courier company. As a couple they were in constant crisis, Adam coming by to show his suffering, give her money, go out, break up, drive them to their sessions (he had the car). He didn’t have much use for the rest of us. Meredith's confidence in her all-knowingness on all subjects did little to change my impression that those drawn to psychology were crazy on a particularly irremediable level.
But my especial aversion was to Morgan and her genuflection to the all-mighty buck. Morgan knew Janet’s younger sister and came here to camp out after graduating from the University of Connecticut, but only until she could pick up a job in New York, probably with a bank or an oil company or something of a similarly money-making nature. Until then, well, I’m sure she thought, ‘This is so weird,’ but she was saving her money. She would go directly condo from here.
I didn’t understand why she had chosen to cool her heels here, but eventually discovered she had no social skills and no friends. Fairly horse-faced to the unkind eye, she had to settle for a well-groomed look: pale skin and a shoulder-length bob of light brown hair, pulled back with barrettes. Morgan and I fell out after she discovered how I’d voluntarily impoverished myself; a financial ravaging she would have as soon undertaken as I would have slashed a knife through a Rembrandt canvas. I realized then she had nothing except that which she bought. She never went out on the town with us, preferring to sit home in the comfortable chair working the daily crossword puzzle, drinking her glass of wine, filling in the blanks on paper and inside until it all became consolingly complete. You’d never see her pour that second, third, or fourth glass; it appeared she nursed her drink, but her room held the evidence that she would take with her when she went out the next morning, throwing the tell-tale bottles in municipal trash cans.
* * *
The house was an endless parade of people and crises. To one used to a crypt-like level of privacy and quiet, there was nothing like that here. This was the time when women were urged to pursue careers almost single-mindedly. It had the drive and the cachet of the breakthrough. We knew of almost no one who actually lived in the same city as their boyfriend or husband, except Meredith, and she was supposedly separated. Nobody stayed in the place where they were born or where they went to school; we all migrated toward the jobs, toward adventure. We no longer had the luxury of being absent in these areas with no questions asked. Which was good. On the whole, I think we all did pretty well on the career side, feeling our way, pushing against resistance toward what it was we wanted, and that was great; we’d never go back.
This was not so much the problem as the fact that we still wanted the other side as well—to have love in all its seduction, but it was not considered quite proper to speak about. Oh, of course people still spoke about it, talked about it all the time, obviously, but it was no longer part of the official cant. But we still wanted to be loved; we hated to let the romance go, even if it was fake—a quartet of eighties girls whose bright balloons of grand expectation got tangled up in the dark branches of their longings and desires.
We used to think this not quite right—a sign of weakness—so we pursued our beau ideals furtively, and secretly felt the others were either hypocrites or sneaks. We were comfortable, did a good job at being rational, reasonable—why wouldn’t we?—but we wanted those sparks as well, and thought that this must be the reason we were inferior, or at least why men thought us so. Maybe we didn’t really believe men were capable of love on the same level as us, that gave them a leg up, but also left us thinking deep down we were the superior sex. Yet we still wanted them, that was our defect. But wanting both sides of the coin, the whole coin, was exactly the right thing, the natural thing, the human thing. To be able to see this and work toward some balance—it took a long time for some of us to realize this.
* * *
Upstairs in my room one evening, thinking of Michael, dreaming back in time, my mind hovered around how fond I’d been of him, how that could still pull at me, but how I never loved him without reservation, never loved him as he and everyone should be loved at least once; how it was wrong to go and right to leave, but sad, too; a gentle bittersweet sadness. Too tired to go to bed, not unpleasantly suspended in this weary melancholy, I was jarred out of it by an unearthly commotion downstairs—high-pitched, frightened screaming splitting through my wistfulness. I sprang off the bed, and after a moment of panicked indecision, crept down the stairs with not a little trepidation.
Adam was outside on the front porch, on the other side of the front door in a drug-induced rage. He had managed to jam his hand through the narrow opening he had kicked open, only the thin door chain keeping him at bay, his fingers grabbing onto Meredith’s hair. That safety chain was the only thing keeping the demons outside and Meredith alive at the moment, and I watched the metal links strain and shudder as Adam kicked and threw his weight against the door, jerking his wife’s head with every attempt. He had had enough of the separation, of Meredith calling the shots, and after an evening of stoking his rage with chemicals and alcohol, had come to claim his.
Meredith was desperately trying to keep calm and talk him down from his hysterical raving, a hard stunt indeed, considering he was on a plane beyond reason. Janet had already come into the front hallway and was standing a few feet behind her, arms crossed, frowning, appraising the situation like a coach talking her charge through a routine. “Do you want me to call the police?” she asked at one point in a tone one uses to ask guests if they want something to drink. I remained frozen on the stairs.
Head jammed against the doorframe, trying to pry off Adam’s stranglehold, Meredith was adamant that she could handle this and begged us not to interfere, to leave them alone. She could do nothing but beg on all counts now. Unfamiliar with violence of this kind, I stood mesmerized not knowing what to do. Finally, Meredith got him to release her for a second—she would come outside if he would let go—and as he loosened his grip, she slipped out of his grasp, grabbed the door and slammed it repeatedly on his hand until the pain broke his blind anger, and she and Janet got it locked. The whole neighborhood could hear him wailing drunkenly and self-pityingly on the other side.
“Baby, baby, why are you doin’ this? What d’you fuckin’ want?”
I went back upstairs badly shaken. But I couldn’t sleep, and later when it seemed quiet, I snuck back down and saw the two of them sitting huddled out on the front stoop, talking; the front door, so possessed and terrifying earlier, decommissioned and standing mildly open, just the storm door between the safety of the house and all the swirling outside furies. I was really angry for having been subjected to that. They were from Maine; I didn’t think people from Maine acted like that.
The next day Meredith apologized to the two of us. (Morgan swore she had slept through the entire thing.) I was still upset, but Janet appeared to mainly take it as a black mark against Meredith that she couldn’t control her men. We didn’t want to have to start dealing with that shit. Adam would no longer be allowed in the house, Meredith declared. And that was true; he never set foot in the house again as far as I knew. Whenever he came to pick her up, he stayed in the car parked outside. Meredith used to keep him waiting for up to an hour, and Adam sat sullenly behind the wheel like a dog waiting outside a store for its owner, silently taking the punishment; it was impossible to fathom whether he understood why what he did was so wrong. It became ridiculous after a while, to the point where, although I would never openly admit it, I began to feel sorry for him, sitting out there, permanently denied access to higher ground.
Image: Tangled up on higher ground. Source: Kritzolina, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, edited by J. Weigley