Circle of Grace, page 18
Well, more than a few. To be honest, she had left out most of the details and almost all the pain.
It was one thing to write in the journal, to be able to think through what she was going to say and word it carefully. It was quite another matter to face them directly, when they could see the expression on her face and look into her eyes. If she went to this little reunion Grace had concocted, she was convinced they would know something wasn’t right. Even after all these years.
And they were bound to ask questions.
-22-
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE
All the next day, as she listened to clients and facilitated group sessions, Liz couldn’t seem to shake a shadowy sense of foreboding. Grace’s invitation—what Serena called “the gift”—had stirred up unwelcome memories like algae at the bottom of a pool, and now her mind was clouded and confused. If she just kept quiet, maybe the muck would settle again, and she wouldn’t have to face the issues that were floating to the surface.
She tried to tell herself what she told her patients—that you could, eventually, get beyond the pain and change the patterns. Still, the mind stored experiences in a kind of moving spiral, and when some unexpected event triggered the recollections, you needed to confront the situation head-on and deal with it again. Emotional health seemed to be a “three steps forward, two steps back” proposition. Revisiting old traumas didn’t mean you weren’t getting better—it simply meant that you weren’t quite as finished as you thought.
Liz’s last appointment of the afternoon—her three o’clock, an inflexible, unhappy woman who blamed her husband for her personal neuroses—had canceled. Serena wouldn’t be done until five. They usually drove together unless one of them had an evening session, so Liz had a couple of hours to herself.
She ought to be typing notes or transcribing group session tapes or reviewing files for tomorrow’s appointments, but instead she cleared her desk and sat listening to the faint noises that came through the walls and the closed door. The click of the secretary’s computer keyboard, the ringing of the telephone, muffled voices from Serena’s office next door.
She leaned back in the desk chair and shut her eyes, her mind still circling around the memories that had been haunting her all day. The paperwork could wait. She needed to figure out what she was really feeling about Grace’s invitation, about her reluctance to return to Asheville, about the shame that had descended on her when she thought about making the trip and facing the three of them once more.
During graduate school, Liz had discovered that if she just centered herself and let her brain take the lead, confusing or disorganized ideas would eventually align themselves into some kind of order and bring her to the clarity of perspective she was seeking. It was rather like defragmenting a hard drive. She simply had to wait a bit, and the data files would shift around to where they belonged.
Faces floated behind her closed eyelids. Serena. The new therapists. Current clients, and past ones. Her roommates in Asheville. Tim. Voices echoed in her ears—snatches of conversations, comforting words, angry shouts.
The chaos began to take on an order, and then, as the fog began to dissipate, a series of memories pressed in upon her.
Halfway through the joint fund-raiser for D.C. area nonprofit organizations, Liz caught a glimpse of him across the crowded hall—a tall, rangy man with sand-colored hair and a wide, winning smile. Young Clint Eastwood meets young Robert Redford.
Over a dozen heads he caught her eye, then grinned and nodded and began to thread his way through the mob in her direction.
Liz had never been a romantic. She had always shunned the idea of love at first sight—or love of any kind—as nothing more than juvenile fantasy, hormone infatuation. But at this moment, much to her chagrin, she could hear a faint echo in the back of her mind, a string quartet hidden in some distant alcove, playing a romantic interlude.
She shook her head sharply, and the music screeched to a stop, a needle sliding across a record’s grooves. “Get a grip, Liz,” she muttered under her breath.
But he was still coming toward her. Now she could see that his eyes were a clear pale blue, and that a smattering of freckles peppered the bridge of his nose. He closed the gap between them, smiled down at her, and won her heart with his very first words:
“Do you hate these gatherings as much as I do?”
Liz nodded mutely and felt his hand seize her elbow. She let herself be ushered out the double doors onto the deck, and sank down in a wrought-iron chair. The splendor of the city spread out before her—the lighted monuments, the clear, starry night overhead—and behind her, the babble of conversation, indistinct, like the gabble of geese on a lakeshore.
“Ah, that’s better.” He sank down in the chair next to her and leaned his elbows on the glass-topped patio table. “I’m Tim Delancy.”
She shook his outstretched hand. “Liz Chandler.”
“I know.” He didn’t let go. His grip was warm and strong and oddly familiar. Liz had a sudden rush of déjà-vu, the eerie feeling that she had been sitting there, holding hands with him, all her life.
“You know?” she parroted idiotically. “How—?”
“I do my homework,” he said with a shrug. “You’re maybe new to D.C., but as far as I can tell, you’re the best thing that ever happened to this town.”
“I wouldn’t say—”
“Of course you wouldn’t. That’s what separates you from ninety percent of those do-gooders in there.” He motioned with his head toward the party, still in full swing behind them. “Most of these people are here to salve their conscience with their checkbooks. I’m not complaining, mind you. Your work—and mine—couldn’t go on without the guilty scruples of the Washington elite. I’ll take their money without a qualm, and gladly. But we both know that money isn’t the primary moving force of social justice. Passion is.”
Liz gazed at him, mesmerized. Then she came to her senses and frowned.
“And exactly what do you know about my work?”
“Everything.” He rested his chin in one hand. “I know that in college you majored in psychology and political science. That you worked with Coretta Scott King in Atlanta. That you’ve been arrested on several occasions for nonviolent protests. That you currently serve as crisis counselor and free therapist for the Sexual Violence and Domestic Abuse Center.” He grinned slowly, seductively, revealing white teeth with one slightly overlapping incisor. “And that you probably don’t have the faintest idea who I am or what I do.”
Liz nodded slowly. A flush crept up her neck. “I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize.” He waved her concern aside. “I’m currently working with the Fair Housing Council, but I’m getting ready to take on the directorship of a new program, the Hope House Coalition. It’s an umbrella effort to coordinate a number of nonprofit organizations, to minimize duplication and consolidate services. We’ll be overseeing the city’s food banks and homeless shelters, and—if I can get the funding—starting up a new venture called the Payback Project, to help lower-income families buy homes without cash equity.”
“It sounds wonderful,” Liz said out loud, but her mind said: He’s wonderful.
Tim smiled and drew his chair closer, as if he’d read her thoughts. He captured her hand again.
“It always strikes me as ironic,” Liz said—babbling, she knew, but she couldn’t seem to help herself—“how in this city, in the shadow of the wealthiest and most powerful government in the world, people still sleep under bridges and raid food from garbage cans. It’s a travesty. A mockery of this nation’s claims of equality and justice.”
She sounded like an idiot. Silently she cursed herself, stumbled to a halt, and fought for air. He was so near, so close she couldn’t breathe. Her mind was starved for oxygen, that was it. She was losing brain cells by the thousands. If only he wouldn’t concentrate all his attention on her—
“Go out with me,” he said in a whisper.
“Excuse me?”
“Go out with me,” he repeated. “I want to get to know you better.”
“When?” she said stupidly.
“Tonight. Tomorrow. The day after that. All the days of my life.”
Six months later they were married at the Lincoln Memorial, on the steps where Martin Luther King had given his “I Have a Dream” speech, with the reflecting pool at their backs. The Great Emancipator gazed mutely down at them from his enormous chair, and—fanciful as it might seem—Liz almost felt him nod and smile, as if pronouncing a benediction on their union.
On the day she said I do, Liz was thirty-five years old. Never had she expected to marry a man like Tim Delancy—if truth be told, she had never expected to marry at all. Where most people had personal boundaries, Liz Chandler had counties, multiple square miles of private space separating her from others. She knew Tim loved her and she loved him—as much as she was able to love, anyway. And she respected him enormously, yet nevertheless it proved difficult for her to trust his love for her.
But he was gentle and compassionate and undemanding, both in the bedroom and out. Eventually she was able to tell him about her mother’s desertion, and he held her while she wept over the betrayal. At last his tender declarations of love and commitment broke through her walls, and she gave herself to him, heart and soul and mind and body.
Even if she had been searching, she couldn’t have found a more perfect life partner than Tim. He was exactly what she had been looking for all her life, without even knowing she was looking. A man of integrity and authenticity, intelligent and persuasive, generous and compassionate and…good. A man whose calling to equality and social justice equaled her own. Tim Delancy knew what he believed, and lived it, no matter what the cost.
Liz had never before understood, even theoretically, what a glory it could be to love completely and be loved in return, to be in harmony with another human being—spiritually, intellectually, emotionally. Under the warmth of Tim’s affirmation and affection, she blossomed, a tight-budded rose finally opening its face to the sun. Her characteristic cynicism faded into the background, and she was happy, totally and unreservedly happy, for the first time in her life.
Liz soon discovered, however, that love and shared values were not enough to build a life together. She spent long and grueling hours at the abuse crisis center, a job whose rewards didn’t show up in the monthly paycheck. Tim was working equally hard to get the Hope House Coalition off the ground, and being paid a similar pittance—what he jokingly referred to as “bringing home the bacon bits.” They were behind on all their bills, eating macaroni and cheese four nights a week, barely scraping by. But the struggle was worth it for the difference they were making.
Then the eviction notice came. They were required to pay their back rent and a month in advance, or in thirty days they’d be out on the street. Liz checked their assets: They had exactly two hundred sixty-nine dollars and thirty-two cents in their checking account. If something didn’t change—and soon—they were likely to find themselves homeless and destitute, on the receiving end of their own services.
“I have an idea,” Tim said that night over a dinner consisting of their last two cans of clam chowder and a fifty-cent loaf of day-old French bread. “It’s a last resort, but I’m afraid we’re there.”
“Let’s hear it,” Liz said. “I’m fresh out of options.”
“All right, here it is: If you were to switch to private therapy, you could make enough money to support both of us.”
Liz let out a heavy breath. “Leave the abuse center?”
“I know private counseling isn’t your idea of making a difference, but you’d still be contributing to the causes we’re both passionate about—just not directly.” He took her hand across the table and stroked it. “I’d do it, babe, but I don’t have the salable skills you have. The only thing I’m trained to do is run a nonprofit agency.”
Liz hated the idea of giving up nonprofit work for private practice, but something had to give. They couldn’t go on this way. And so, with a sinking heart, she conceded. While he was out in the trenches, fighting for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised, she resigned her position at the sexual violence center and went to work at Brook Green of Virginia, an upscale counseling clinic, charging eighty dollars an hour to listen to the recurring neuroses of upper-class society matrons.
At first it was sheer torture. But her reputation as a therapist grew, and after a while Liz finally did attract some clients who genuinely needed her help. She began to feel a little better about herself once she was actually doing some good. And having a decent paycheck coming in was easy to get used to.
Still, being on the fringes of the battle against injustice gnawed at her. All her adult life she had been passionate about being a voice for those who had been silenced—the weak, the poor, the abused, the ostracized of society. Now she could only sit on the sidelines and applaud her husband’s work. She was no longer part of the solution, simply the financing behind the solution. One of the do-gooders with a checkbook.
Her impotence galled her, but there wasn’t much Liz could do about it. At Tim’s insistence, they had bought a small arts and crafts bungalow in Arlington and were in the midst of renovations. It wasn’t an opulent place by any means, but real estate in the D.C. area was obscenely expensive, and in addition to the mortgage, the plumbers and carpenters and electricians had to be paid. The bills kept coming in, and the expenses kept rising.
Liz felt trapped, and she chafed at the bit to get out of private practice and back into the fray again. But as time passed and the renovation costs were paid off, she grew to love the Arlington bungalow, the old neighborhood with its towering trees and safe sidewalks, the sounds of children playing in the park at the end of the street. She grew accustomed to being the primary breadwinner, rationalizing that she was, after all, contributing to the cause of social justice by supporting Tim in his work.
And eventually she no longer bothered with any rationalization at all….
Liz paused in mid-thought, opened her eyes, and straightened up in her desk chair.
That was it—one part of it anyway. One of the reasons she was so reluctant to accept Grace’s invitation and go to Asheville for her little reunion.
In her college days, and long afterward, she had been uncompromising about social issues. As Tim had noted the first night they met, she had protested the war in Vietnam, had put herself on the line for civil rights, had even been jailed a time or two for civil disobedience.
She had loved Gandhi, had read every word he had written—some of it three or four times. She had been fervent about his principles of passive resistance. She had practically idolized Martin Luther King, and at one time had even declared herself willing to sacrifice her own life for the principles she believed in.
Instead, she had sacrificed the principles.
Not really, a voice inside her head argued. The clinic operates on a sliding scale, and you do a good bit of pro bono counseling. You’re still contributing, just not in the same way you once were.
It was true, all of it. She still cared, still did what she could. But what a pittance it seemed in comparison to the all-consuming fire that once blazed in her veins.
And how would it look to Grace and Lovey and Tess, who had listened to her blustering about civil rights and the plight of the poor? They had bailed her out of jail, supported her as she tilted at windmills, even toasted her at graduation as the one among them who would change the world.
But the world hadn’t changed. Prejudice and poverty, intolerance and injustice, violence and corruption and the abuse of power—all the evils that existed thirty years ago still blighted the emotional and political landscape. The System still prevailed, exploiting the weak and oppressing the outcast and bringing no solace to the helpless.
Her logical mind told her that there was only so much one person could do. And yet Liz still felt like a failure. The crusader who had copped out. A rebel without a cause.
-23-
A MEETING OF MINDS
A soft knock sounded on Liz’s office door, and Serena poked her head in.
“You busy?”
“Not really. I was just doing some thinking.” Liz arched her eyebrows. “Vastly overrated, the value of contemplation. Makes my head hurt.”
“Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” Serena grinned. “My four o’clock’s just arrived. I should be able to clear my desk by five-thirty or so. You want to go out for dinner?”
“That’d be great. I don’t feel much like cooking.”
“Me either. Let’s go straight from work. Karin Buckley called in for an emergency session at noon, so I didn’t get any lunch.”
“What’s the big crisis?”
Serena chuckled. “Her mother’s coming to visit.”
“Oh yeah, that definitely qualifies.”
“I’ll buzz you when I’m done. See you later.” She shut the door behind her, and Liz listened as her footsteps receded down the hall.
All things considered, Serena Marchand was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
Four years after Liz went to work at Brook Green, the posh counseling center was pulling in so much new business that the practice branched out. Money flowed like the Potomac River at flood stage. The entire facility underwent extensive renovation, supervised by an eccentric and outrageously expensive decorator. Another suite of offices was added, and three new counselors hired.
One of them was a slim, dusky-skinned young woman, fresh from her Ph.D. program and newly licensed, looking like a teenager with her blue jeans and tennis shoes and spiky dark hair. The younger clients adored her, and by the end of her first six months she had become the resident—albeit unofficial—expert on neglected little rich kids, problem students referred by private school headmasters, and angst-ridden adolescents.
