Sandra sat alone at her dining room table. An older home was hers, and she had respected the style of its life in some of the rooms. A formal dining room. No one had those anymore. They are hard to remodel around, so she had just left it, empty most of the time, but tonight she had set up her solitary dinner there, as the shadows fell on the deep periwinkle walls, the sun receding behind heavy curtains in mauve damask with gold highlights, gold tie ropes, and a new quasi-Victorian dinner table and scalloped-top chairs in velvety forest green. Vance would not have felt out of place there.
The remains of her meal were set aside, the saucepans still full of what should have been dinner for four but was going in the refrigerator, en route to the garbage.
The whole question of what to do about Tiffany went around and around in her mind. She worked at it, a practiced hand.
Think too much about the multiple dangers threatening a child and you become ineffective. There has to be the subtle balance of the mother’s worrywart imagination, the reasonable flow of what the child usually does, and a gut sense of how the world was going to function.
The question was Tiffany’s mental status.
About fifteen books on psychotic episodes were spread on the table in various stages of underlining, post-it notes, shock and disbelief, as well as an ashtray full of cigarette butts.
It was too late to smoke. It was over. People don’t smoke anymore, except for limited pockets in subgroups, bureaucrats among them, forever entrenched in the seventies, in her case, an East Coast high school teaching corps that started smoking in college and reinforced each other through stained fingertips, orange skin, lost teeth, raspy voices, and the telltale cough. Some of the oldest had already succumbed to cancer, yet the sense of the smoking lottery went on, and being still going meant you had simply won.
Sandra reasoned that the butts in the ashtray were not as bad as empty bottles of wine.
Mom initially wanted to just let go and trust everything with Tiffany to turn normal, that is to say, a bit more club drugs than advisable, but overall, nothing drastic — and go on with her well-earned retirement from direct parenting.
But then she reckoned with how screwy things can get with a crazy, and weighed the whole business with a seasoned sense of rectitude.
Was there any danger?
She ransacked her memory for how her Aunt Linda had actually been in those times when it was not okay to go over.
The family gossip had tales of a woman becoming monomaniacal about something that didn’t have any real weight in what needed to be done but became the only thing the family did for nearly a month. It was never a useful mania, like cleaning out the garage, but an unexpected, inconvenient one, like pie crust.
One time Linda had become convinced that her school mate Karen had stolen the county fair prize for best apple pie out from under her nose. It was her pie that had won, not Karen’s. She was the one with the latticed crust, not the fluted, and the pies had been switched, the name plates obscured, Karen had done the nasty with the judge, and somehow the ribbon was sunk in a pile of corruption.
And here was she, thirty years later, ready to rise from the ashes of destruction, make her celebrated pie crust, take it over to Karen with a smirk – and demand the ribbon.
The screeching and the sirens might or might not yield the coveted ribbon, and her husband’s sad apologies would probably head things off when it was clear that Linda had gone “off” but was essentially harmless, so let’s not worry about the ribbon.
“Can we go home now?”
“I’ve been ready to go home for hours.”
They would make the four-hour drive with the pie on Linda’s lap, the explanations plaintively repeated, the car going seventy miles an hour and beyond, and no one better give Ted a ticket. He was going to slam on the hood of the car and maybe make that deputy sheriff mad.
Linda would never let on that the ribbon was not rightly hers, would refer to it repeatedly over the next few weeks, rest in the afternoons with a mountain of tranquilizers and a hot rag on her head, and the whole thing would go down until the next time.
Mom weighed the ghost situation with that in mind and had no idea who was going to be Ted except her.
Sandra saw now that Linda’s disability was part of the marriage. That was a different era. Lithium, Mellaril, Thorazine – these were the meds they had, and they didn’t so much work as pacify.
There would come a day when Linda could not face the endless, delicate, ironclad routine of homemaking.
The case with pink foam curlers in graduated sizes she would have to unsnap. Her wet hair laden with green setting gel, she would have to make the first part, to the right of her crown, taking a drag of her cigarette with her beautiful long pink fingers. Grab the hank, wrap it around the designated curler, snapping it shut. Grab the second hank, curl it likewise. The third. Take a drag of the cigarette. Move to the larger size of curlers. Check the back of her head with the normal size magnification of the hand-held mirror. That one is a little crooked and should be fussed with. Maybe even redone. And so on, adding layer to layer of the beauty routine: a setting cap, face masque, and steel-reinforced slimming pants.
This birdlike creature would alight in the matrimonial bed, with pink plumage at the head, a yellow green face, an impossibly tightened contraption at the hips. Sexual congress was not always elegant with all the gear in place, but then, it was part of the magic. Now, how do we get this off?
It was an inescapable fate to be a wife.
There were no other plans. It was the deep groove that everyone but soldiers, drifters, librarians, and the unmentionable fell into.
Men had a variety of jobs and professions. “What does he do?” was the first question out of everyone’s mouth, because that was the variety that was the spice of life, the determinant of the shape the entire social atmosphere would take, the mirror that people would become around him.
Especially women.
Every woman looked at him and calculated what it would be like to be a doctor’s wife, a lawyer’s, a plumber’s, a port overseer’s. Immediately leapt the imagination into the role of support. Immediately formed up his wifely counterpart in the mirror of society.
The variety in woman was not profession but the many factors of variation she brought to the only available profession, wife, and her hawklike oversight on him to be as she needed him, as her counterpart, or be mercilessly slashed, the fear of Not Measuring Up that was his own terror, his undoing.
How she did the things that everyone did. These she was judged on.
These she was in the color of the setting gel, the style of the curlers, the special touches on last night’s menu, the attire of the children.
The sheer majesty of man in being the causative power of an entire world, of being the focus, of being the solution to all necessity. How this was the current that tuned his entire self, right down to his nerves. He was larger than the other people – he dealt with men who were large, as well. It was part of him, and part of his profession was how his wife deployed Home in its support.
That was the deal.
By the early 1970s, and the entry of women into professions, this awe world of Homemaking was being eroded, and Linda herself becoming a relic. Everything she had done, everything she did, now open not to the constant hum of utility but to ridicule.
She was too febrile to be anything less, and too old to be anything more, and Ted was a hair’s breadth away from taking up with that young honey for real, and Linda now scrimping beyond scrimping, scrimping in destitution, now facing the only available profession for herself, that of low-paid something or other, shop lady, perhaps, and the end of Dippety Do, or its salvation.
The constant onslaught of the Now was enough to incite the impetus for a vacation of sorts, it seemed to everyone, or else they didn’t see the enormity of the burden of being Linda until it became too much and she went odd places with her apple pie.
She would be frying bacon by the time Ted got out of the shower. He would give her cheek a kiss and sit down to breakfast before grabbing his brief case and heading in to the office.
The nervous breakdown, the blip in the normal chemistry of her brain, as impossible as it was to avoid, was still a shift from the endless routine of pink curlers with green Dippy-do setting gel, casserole recipes with Bisquik, soap operas, and adultery. It was not that such a life was pointless. It’s that it had a particular shape that women today slip out of by having their own income – slipping out of marriage in the process.
Aunt Linda had had her marriage down to a fine art. Ted’s home had the perfect touch of inconsequential drama, as did his occasionally compliant secretary. The real routine was to deal with the animal that is male. That involved the hunt, the surrender, the implied and potential slap, the relaxed nothingness, the bills, and so on, in a safe web of routine in the relentless forward motion of time, all in a set was family.
Here Mom weighed in with the knowledge that, even if Tiffany had a similar genetic predisposition to what in that era was politely called “the nervous breakdown,” she didn’t have the constant downward pressure of a marriage that was coming to be outdated. She was Tiffany, and she was important because she had a career, her own money, and a life, and if she curled her hair, it was because she felt like it.
There is a lot of play in taking on crazy.
Mom knew she could do it – would do it – but that the cost would be more than she could plan for, and odd. Life never goes like you think, and, in the end, the payment would come skewompus, with both blessings and hurt, and she would know it.
So here Sandra sat, less stumped than before, and that was the point of the evening alone.
Tiffany was lousy at money but she made it, and boys could just get laid without all the fuss.
How down Tiffany was was the issue, and Sandra was on it, knowing that if she pushed too hard, it would go awry. So the interminable smoothness of a mother’s worry was hers, as she slapped the laptop closed and wondered what was up with Clay.
