Black Chokeberry, page 2
Holding tightly to the rail, she leaned over to look down on the men fishing along the river wall. The men wore light jackets and sneakers, their navy blue NY Yankee hats pulled low over their eyes, the wool brims tightly curved into an upside down U. It was a cool fall day, her favorite time of year in Oswego. Henry stood behind her, wagging his tail. He wanted to get to the lake where he could bury his nose in the smell of dead mooneyes that had washed up on shore.
Her mother’s spot was still there, of course. Ellen focused on it, visualizing that frigid day forty-eight years ago when Mother, in her heavy wine-red winter coat, had stood quietly on the ledge a few feet above the rushing river, preparing to jump. Ellen imagined the scene, the men on the river’s edge smoking cigarettes and fishing just like today, not suspecting a thing. She could only guess at their shock when they saw her mother dive easily into the frigid water, barely making a splash.
Exactly how and why it all happened remained a mystery to Ellen and her two younger sisters. At the time she overheard her grandparents say the girls were certainly too young at three, five, and seven for a frank discussion. “We’ll just tell them their mother is sick and she’ll be home in a little while, when she’s better,” they said. Wanting details, Ellen would sneak out of her bedroom and tiptoe down the front staircase to listen as family members whispered to each other in the living room about the suicide attempt, trying to figure it out.
She picked up tidbits in the stories about the two brave fishermen, one who jumped into the river, grabbing her mother before she sank, and the other man who pulled her out of the dark green water. A third man ran to the corner store and called the ambulance, which took her mother to the Oswego Hospital where she stayed until Mother’s parents could arrange for her to go to a sanitarium on the lake near Rochester, an hour away. The expensive sanitarium was determined to be far enough out of Oswego to stop tongues from slicing up their daughter’s life, yet close enough for weekly visits. It was the first of twenty-one years Ellen’s mother would spend in and out of psychiatric wards, the grace of lithium finally stabilizing her schizophrenia.
Unable to cope with the situation, and unwilling to take on the responsibility of three young daughters, Ellen’s father had abandoned his small family when Ellen was nine. He moved to Fort Lauderdale where the weather was warm, and where he eventually found a nice enough woman who loved to drink as much as he did. Ellen and her sisters never saw or heard from him again. In 1970, Uncle Will called from Florida to tell them their father had died.
Ellen straightened up and gently patted Henry’s head. How many times had she walked this bridge as a child? Hundreds? Thousands? She stretched her legs and moved across the bridge, remembering how she had gone from home to home as a child, staying with Mother’s three sisters at various times and seasons. With each visit she had tried to dissolve into family routines as she settled into new beds, figured out how to negotiate the personalities of her cousins, and most of all, do what was expected of her. She stayed busy.
By the time she was eight, she had discovered the magic of books. With the turn of a page she could escape into family life on the prairie, drive around in a bright-red roadster solving crimes, fly high over the Atlantic, or engage the genius of a musical prodigy. It gave her an internal life she nurtured like a porcelain secret; by selecting books from different genres at the public library, she became Pocahontas in the summer reading group and attempted to emulate Bach and Chopin by working harder at the piano as she perfected her Burgmuller fingering exercises.
She loved the summer days in Fruit Valley when she’d tuck into the morning room at Aunt Maggie’s where no one was likely to venture in and tell her to go outside and play. At night she would get in bed to read, snuggling in with her mischievous cousin Mitzi, who eventually sent them both to sleep giggling from her hair-raising ghost stories. She rode bikes and horses, packed picnic lunches, swam and played golf at the country club with her pal Teresa, and in the heat of July went on trips to Canada and the Adirondacks with Aunt Maggie and Uncle Sean’s family. She was always deeply sad for days when the school buses roared into action and she had to return to town, to her city cousins—although the reunion with cousin Ginger made that worthwhile.
She had missed her sisters, who grew up together at their grandparents’ home on the east side, but nothing could change that. In time, picking up bits and pieces of adult conversations, Ellen surmised that her grandparents had decided three children were simply too much for them to take on in their seventies when Mother had become ill. They decided that Ellen would be the traveling child. And although it had stung when she heard it, Ellen knew she fit the description her cousin Gloria ascribed to her one holiday season as Ellen unpacked her red Amelia Earhart weekender suitcase next to her cousin’s bed.
“You certainly are the gypsy child,” Gloria had said.
Ellen turned again to the river to watch one of the men reel in a fish, a nice, big lake trout. She could almost hear the sizzle of butter in the cast-iron pan where the fish would land for supper. Her mother had loved a haddock fish sandwich around the lake at The Stands, at either Mulcahey’s or Rudy’s, and then a maple-walnut ice cream cone at Stone’s Candy Shop for dessert, with a small box of chocolate raspberry creams to go. Ellen would take her to those places when they both came home for visits. Mother’s illness made conversations unpredictable. One minute she’d be fine; a second later her mind would leapfrog, taking her to places Ellen couldn’t understand. As a result, they never talked about anything meaningful. Ellen didn’t have to be told why her mother never returned to Oswego after being released from the hospital the year Ellen graduated from college. The town was too small and her mother’s life had been too big to ignore. Instinctively Ellen knew Mother was protecting herself from familiar streets and houses, from people and family and friends with their unsure stares, the questions in their minds showing up in their eyes. Mother knew she had no answers to give them.
Instead she chose to live with strangers. She was settled into a sheltered environment in the home of a middle-aged couple who were paid to watch over her in their home downstate, in Utica. Mother’s dad had created a trust fund for his daughter’s lifelong care, and with medication, Mother was well enough to do occasional hospice service. She told Ellen she enjoyed that work, the privilege of sitting and waiting quietly, sponging pale faces with cool water, her spirit unaffected by the shallow breaths of her dying acquaintances, her mind in neutral, praying for their release from terrible diseases. Her skill as a linguist in Latin, German, and Greek had been destroyed years before, her summa cum laude brilliance erased by her illness.
Ellen breathed in the river air deeply. Her mother’s life was an enigma, breathtakingly sad. The life everyone thought she would have had disappeared by the time she was thirty-four. And yet, it was a life with a sweet spot.
No matter what that damn disease did to her thoughts, my mother never lost the core of her soul. In a mental hospital, at someone’s bedside, or facing the stigma at home, she always brought gentleness with her. Her inherent kindness survived the terrors.
Her mother had died peacefully in an Oswego nursing home three years ago. When the call had come that Mother’s time was short, Ellen booked a flight from Nashville. She arrived late the next afternoon to find an empty bed in Mother’s room, with a neatly packed box of her clothes sitting on the dresser. The harsh battering of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease had taken their final toll in the early hours of the morning. She was eighty-six. Ellen always would regret that she had been too late to hold her mother’s hand at the end.
Hearing a shout from below, she looked down to see another large trout being carefully reeled out of the river. Two of the fishermen shuffled over to take a closer look, peering down into the water as if they expected to see more fish circling around, ready for the hook.
Look up here, you guys. I’ll volunteer for the hook. My life is in such a shambles that I’ll happily dive into that water and swim with the salmon until you yank me up or the current pulls me away.
But she wouldn’t be doing any swan dives today, and she knew it. In truth, nothing suicidal was an option even though she had toyed with the idea many times since her divorce. It would be too messy, too public, and her two sons would be horrified.
The most serious threat had come three weeks after she’d left Nashville for Oswego to begin again. News of Matt came in an e-mail from Ellen’s cousin Julie.
I just couldn’t stop laughing when I opened my e-mail this morning. Got the one from Matt about his wonderful new girlfriend! That didn’t take long. So much for broken hearts. Just a typical man . . . on to the next one before sunset. Didn’t skip a beat. You are well rid of him. Love, Julie.
That Matt was announcing the girlfriend to close relatives, and probably to everyone in the world they had once shared, was startling. He was making it clear that he was moving on, starting over—right away. He was through with Ellen, and it changed everything. Ellen realized she hadn’t believed, deep down, that she and Matt were really finished. That was nearly six months ago. Since then she’d dropped a ton of weight—the divorce twenty, her therapist noted. Some people said she never looked better; others said they hardly recognized her. She’d never been heavy, wearing a size ten for years. Now she was down to 119 pounds, a size four, and she knew she looked like hell. A five-foot-six skeleton. Her hollow cheeks and sunken eyes gave her that haunted look, the result of no fat in the upper or lower lids; tiny wrists and fingers couldn’t sustain her old rings or watches; her limp hair she changed from ash-blonde to an Irish red and cut short and spiky so it would have some style in lieu of texture and shine.
She was constantly in danger of a sudden meltdown, like the one a couple of days ago. She had been in the hardware store buying a small hammer when, who knows why, she was suddenly exhausted by it and started sobbing, wet stains dripping down the front of her favorite green Club Monaco T-shirt. She couldn’t stop crying. She shuffled along, finding herself paying for the hammer, her shirt lightly soaked by the time it was her turn. At the cash register Jake Burnside stumbled all over himself trying to understand what anyone in his store had done to make her cry.
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” Ellen said, her face like stone, tears dripping off the edge of her nose onto the counter. Jake grimaced as he saw her body fluids dotting his counter. Not wanting to upset her further, he leaned back slightly, looking down under the counter to make sure his Lysol and roll of paper towels were handy. Behind her the people in line bobbed left and right trying to see what was going on. Ellen didn’t care if they saw, what they saw, or how they felt about it.
“She all right?” a woman asked. She pushed against the Formica counter, leaning over to get a good look. “What’s going on, Jake?” Jake didn’t know. He wanted to tell her women were just nuts.
“Not a thing’s wrong, Mabel.”
He handed Ellen her change, winking and smiling stiffly as he gave her the hammer in a brown paper bag. “We’re all checked out now, aren’t we?” Ellen hadn’t been able to laugh or cry about that crazy incident. It was just who she was now. She couldn’t trust herself to behave anymore.
Tired of the bridge, Henry pulled hard on the leash. Ellen turned to let him know she’d pick up the pace and caught sight of a sailboat gliding through the break walls on its way out to the lake. She smiled for the first time in three days. Sailboats were chariots of the gods. Strong and swift, yet so vulnerable to the violent whims of wind and tide. They survived even after capsizing and filling up with water, just by being right-sided and bailed out.
There’s a metaphor.
Several weeks ago she’d run into an old high school friend, Elliott Beck, and he told her the twenty-one-foot Lightning, the boat that Ellen’s Uncle Samuel sailed for years, was now his. She had learned to sail on Lightning. She wanted to think it was Elliott now on his way out for an hour’s ride, the lake a fickle lover, the need to catch the wind at any moment a discipline and a fearful joy. Lucky Elliott, safe home.
“All right. We’re off, sweet Henry. Let’s get you some stinky mooneyes, shall we?”
Henry nearly danced across the bridge.
Ellen slid off her corduroys and slipped into her sleeping pants. She had four more pairs of the light cotton flannel bottoms in the drawer, all washed so many times it was like wearing her favorite T-shirt on her legs. She pulled the chocolate-stained white shirt over her head and threw it into the bathroom hamper, then picked up her toothbrush and toothpaste from the drawer by the sink.
You are pathetic.
She pushed at her sunken cheekbones, moving in closer to look at her teeth. Still blazingly white after nights of sleeping with a mouthful of custom molds filled with bleaching agents last year—she was briefly thankful. Her skin was so pale, she wanted to rub her cheeks to bring up some quick color. But she didn’t dare; a couple of weeks ago she had done that and small black-and-blue bruises rose up after the pink disappeared. Finishing quickly so she wouldn’t have to look at herself anymore, she went into the laundry room and pulled a fresh white long-sleeved shirt from one of the stacks on the dryer. She stared at the three precisely folded piles of short- and long-sleeved white T-shirts. They were almost comical in their sameness, none with any artwork or clever sayings on them, no this-is-where-I-went-to-college or Hard Rock Café London imprint.
I appear to be one amazingly simple woman. Or just a boring old simpleton devoid of taste and style. Then again, maybe I’m looking at the clothes of a woman who knows what she likes and when she finds it, never strays? That’s not me. Or perhaps this is the uniform of a woman so tired of life that she has lost her sense of fun. Getting warmer. At any rate, one observation is unmistakable: I only buy the best. Only soft, thin-gauged, all-cotton, well-cut, and finely stitched T-shirts from Club Monaco at forty dollars a pop. It hasn’t always been true, but I like the fact that I can do it now. When I was raising the boys and paying all kinds of household bills, I knew all about Fruit of the Loom. I was right there with the other moms trolling the racks in Wal-Mart looking for inexpensive underwear for myself, picking up a packet of Hanes Her Way comfort briefs, three for $3.99, a bra for $5.99, and T-shirts, three for $10. Not the end of the world.
It all changed when she hit her fiftieth birthday. Deeply affected by the hard reality that she was in the final phase of her life, with only thirty more years of living if she were really lucky, Ellen had made a sacred pledge to herself on that milestone birthday: only the best underwear and beautifully made soft T-shirts from now on.
More than that, she had decided to use really good luggage. She discarded her $19.99 black carry-on bag with the funny rollers and zippers that failed after a few trips. For her birthday that year she bought a dozen Club Monaco T-shirts, eight pairs of Victoria Secret underpants, six Bali bras she loved, and a full set of Hartmann luggage.
Sitting now on the edge of the bed in her tiny Oswego house, she reached into the nightstand for a Twix bar, unwrapped it quickly, snapped the twin bars in half, and popped one into her mouth, not caring that she had just brushed her teeth. Her nosy neighbor across the street would have a lot to talk about if she ever discovered both the monochromatic T-shirt drawer and this deep drawer stuffed with chocolate bars. Ellen could hear her asking, “What kind of grown woman piles candy bars into the nightstand, eats them in expensive white T-shirts, and stays skinny as a rod?” She wouldn’t know what to tell her, except to say the candy bars were the only thing that appealed to her besides milk and V-8 Juice, and the occasional egg and toast. Nothing else worked.
“The diet of the clinically depressed,” her therapist said.
She slid off her socks, wriggled her toes free, and tossed the socks across the room, missing the hamper by two feet. The old Ellen would have jumped up to get those socks and put them where they should be, pronto. Not today. She fell back on the bed, massaging her temples with long fingers, closing her eyes, feeling the relief of grayness, enjoying the melting chocolate on her tongue. If she wasn’t careful she’d fall asleep. She looked at her watch and sat up, running her fingers through her short hair. It was only four thirty, and while the early fall twilight suggested she could give up on today, she knew it would be foolish to tuck into bed at this hour. She’d only wake up around nine, then be wide-eyed and restless the entire night.
“Who wants a treat?” she asked. Henry’s ears rose up instantly to point position, his mouth open, grinning as he pulled himself up, tongue out, his eyes boring into hers. “All right, buddy, let’s go get you some munchies.” Henry sat as still as a Victorian portrait while Ellen pulled the bag of organic snacks from the cupboard. He ate his one meal a day at noon and loved these treats in between. Henry was panting lightly now, anticipating the crunchy oval cookies as well as the long dental stick, which he’d save for last. “Enjoy,” she said.
Leaning against the kitchen counter, she watched him snap at those hard cookies, little crumbs spewing out of the sides of his mouth as he chewed. He’d stand up and lick the floor clean when he was finished, never leaving a hint of detritus. She smiled as she watched him hold the dental stick between his front paws, coming in sideways to munch away its semisoft goodness. When he was done, he came over to say thanks.
Ellen snuggled his forehead, her hands rubbing his ears the way he liked it, around the base of the ears in a circle, gently, his big dark eyes never leaving hers. She was surprised when she heard a low growl rising in his throat. He angled his head side to side, his ears peaked, danger detected. An intruder? Not likely. Another UPS truck whining gears down West Fifth Street driving him nuts? A far-off boom of thunder only he could hear, terrifying him again? Henry broke away and slid wildly on the hardwood floor. He raced out of the kitchen, gained his footing as he hit the music room carpet, and charged through the living room until he landed at the front door, barking wildly as if he’d just cornered a cat. Ellen heard the doorbell ring. Moving quickly, she called ahead, telling Henry to quiet down, it was all right, and to stop barking! When she was nearly to the front door she wondered who’d be calling on her. She really didn’t know anybody in Oswego anymore—at least, not well enough for someone to just drop by unannounced.
