Other People Manage E-Book

Ellen Hawley

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 265

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

'A quietly devastating novel about our failings and how we cope' Patrick Gale It's Minneapolis in the 1970s, and two women meet in the Women's Coffeehouse. Marge is a bus driver, and Peg is training to be a psychotherapist. Over the next twenty years, they stay together, through the challenges any couple faces and some that no one expects. Then one day things change, and Marge has to work out what she's left with – and if she still belongs to the family she's adopted as her own. Other People Manage is a novel about hard-earned but everyday love. It's about family and it's about loss. It's the kind of novel that only someone who has lived enough of life could write - frequently funny, at times almost unbearably moving, but above all extraordinarily wise.

Leseprobe

For Ida

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

1

Back when Peg was still alive, back when we were both so young that neither of us was going to die, she told me about the five stages of grief. We’d each lost a parent when we were young – her father when she was fourteen; my mother when I was twelve – but even so we talked as if grief was something neither of us knew personally. This was in the seventies. The five stages were exciting and new, and that was all we let them be in that moment: something she’d studied in one of her classes; something we could talk about. When I try to remember the stages now, I come up with denial, bargaining, something else, another something else and acceptance. No matter how often I come back to fill in the blanks, I can’t name the missing stages, and that seems oddly right. I live in one of those empty stages. Denial didn’t work, there’s nothing left worth bargaining for, and I’m damned if I’ll accept it. If I did, would Peg come back and drink that last cup of coffee with me after supper? That gap, that missing step, suits me.

Maybe it’s the don’t-care stage. The federal building gets blown up in Oklahoma City and I should care but no part of me really believes it matters. O.J. Simpson goes on trial, but his wife’s murder is nothing beside Peg’s death. If half the country was sinking into the sea, I might care, but only enough to make sure I was on the part that sinks.

I haul myself up off the couch, feeling the force of gravity working very personally against me. It doesn’t want me upright. It wants me slammed flat against the planet, and that doesn’t look like a bad place to be, really – it’s natural, it’s nonpolluting, it’s organic. But I promised myself I’d go through Peg’s clothes today. That’s what you do when you’re flattened by gravity and by grief. You set yourself tasks. You set goals. Get out of bed. Go to work. Wash the dishes. Wash the car. Take the clothing that once belonged to the person you’ve loved best in your life and give it to people who never knew she lived and don’t give a shit that she’s dead. Reach your hand down your throat, tear your heart out, and throw it onto the fast lane of the I-94. The five stages of grief. One, two, five. Time’s up. Move on.

I sigh, releasing air and some tiny fraction of the pressurized regret that lives inside me, and I start up the stairs, feeling the light stab of my left knee each time it lifts me from one step to the next. I’ve always been big – tall, wide, solid, easily the size of most men – and it took me a long time to come to terms with my size. Now that I have, finally, wouldn’t you know my knees have developed opinions of their own.

Peg’s clothes are in the spare room, opposite the bedroom we shared. The house was built when people owned less stuff, when one narrow closet to a bedroom was plenty, thanks, so Peg hung her clothes in the spare room, leaving me the more convenient closet, and it’s only now that I notice this, and notice that I never thought to say thanks, just hung my clothes up like that was my right. I thought of myself as the person who took care of her, and didn’t notice the things she did for me. I have an impulse now to move them all, Peg’s clothes to my closet and mine to Peg’s. For the sake of balance, maybe. Or penance. Or to improve my character now that there’s no one left in the world worth improving it for.

I open the closet and stand with one hand on the frame and one on the door, and I can’t think what to do next. Under my hands is the woodwork we stripped and stained when we first bought the house, scraping off layer after layer of paint, the chemical stripper eating through our rubber gloves until we stopped wearing them, and who can say it wasn’t that decision, to unearth the original woodwork, that ended up killing Peg.

On the floor is a neat row of Peg’s shoes, toes pointing past me into the center of the room, and hanging from the bar, all neat and ready to put on, are Peg’s clothes – the blacks and olive-greens and wine-reds that Peg liked to say didn’t show stains so she wouldn’t have to admit that she looked good in them, and knew that she did. Things that seem so important when there’s a person to walk around inside the clothes and that don’t matter a damn when there isn’t. How strange that Peg owned this stuff, cared about this stuff, and then left me stuck with it all when she died. The wire hangers poke stiff corners into the shoulders of her shirts, making them too thin and too lonely to touch, but I do manage to take a hand away from the woodwork and set it on Peg’s jacket, which is on a hook inside the door instead of pretending to drape around a body. It’s one of those fuzzy fall-weight things, thick under my fingers, and comforting. I gather it against my face, thinking first, This is a very odd thing to do, and then, half by way of agreement and half by way of disagreement, This is grief. I don’t weep, but it does seem like I should at least want to. What I feel, though, is nothing – absence, blankness, emptiness. I half hope Peg left a whiff of herself behind, but after she stopped burning incense I never associated any particular smell with her. What I smell here is nothing more personal than cloth and staleness. The smell of Peg’s absence. I let the jacket’s weight fall back onto its hook, fish a wadded kleenex out of one of its pockets, and raise it first to one eye and then to the other, blotting them before they have time to leak. The texture is woody and stiff. I imagine the germs of some long-forgotten cold pulling themselves out of dormancy and swimming across the watery surface of my eyes, struggling upstream through the tear ducts to reproduce in perfect detail a set of symptoms I can’t remember Peg suffering through. If cancer could be caught this way, I’d still hold the kleenex to my eyes and offer myself as a host. Not because I’m hungry for death but because I’m not attached to living anymore. And because this is the closest I’ve felt to Peg since she died.

When I first met Peg, she had an ex, a three-night stand who was still standing, that first night, at the edge of the Women’s Coffeehouse dance floor. The Coffeehouse was less a place to drink coffee than one of the few places where two women could dance together, and the ex’s eyes followed every move Peg and I made. She was a small woman, the ex was – short, slight, neatly put together. If looks are what decide these things, she could have found someone else, she didn’t have to let her life freeze at the moment Peg left her. That was all I registered about her that first time: small, not bad-looking, no real threat.

“I know it sounds paranoid,” Peg said during a slow number. “The thing is, she follows me. It makes me completely crazy.”

She had her arms around my neck and we were swaying more or less in time with the music. Neither one of us danced well, but some signal had passed between us, something that neither of us had under control, and dancing was the way to keep the connection open. Who knows why these things happen. It was the right time. We were the right people. On my side, some switch had flipped not long before I met Peg, and at thirty it hit me that I wasn’t going to be eighteen for the rest of my life, and it made me understand that I was lonely. Even this soon after I met her, I understood that she had something solid about her, something I could trust. And she had an energy, as if she could make anything she looked at matter. If dancing was the way to keep her looking at me, I was happy to dance. Her hands rested on my shoulders, we swayed back and forth, and I felt like I hadn’t really been alive until that moment. I’d been whacked by the universe’s magic hammer: Clonk, you are now fully conscious and streaming with joy, and so it will stay for ever and ever amen.

Beside us, a couple was doing spins and dips and actual dance steps while Peg and I swayed in place. The taller woman had a tight-cropped Afro and gorgeous cheekbones, and the shorter one had red hair that flowed past her waist. They were stunning, both together and separately, and they danced like they’d known it all their lives. They were Coffeehouse regulars, and anytime they weren’t dancing they were leaning toward each other across one of the tiny tables that lined the walls, as if they could hardly stand to let a slab of wood separate them. Week after week I struggled not to stare at them, but they were so damn beautiful that I stared anyway.

“Ignore her,” I said in the direction of Peg’s ear, talking not about the couple but the ex. “Let her watch if she wants to.” Because I thought I understood the situation. Because our purest ignorance comes to us in the form of answers and certainty. The dance floor was crowded and I slid us toward the center, away from the ex, away from the couple with the beautiful looks and the dramatic relationship and the fancy dance steps. I couldn’t imagine anyone preferring to watch us when they were around. The solution was so simple.

Hey, bring your problems to Margie. She solves them all.

Peg came up to my shoulder and she was round and comfortable to hold. She also had a voice that had gotten caught behind her nose somehow, making it too small and too silly for the person she was, but when you’re first in love it’s all charming. Later, if you’re still in love, you stop noticing. It was Peg’s voice. It made me happy to hear it.

We didn’t talk about the ex anymore that night, and we didn’t talk about her later that week, when Peg invited me out for coffee. She told me about school instead – about the five stages of grief, in fact – over banana cream pie and coffee at the Lincoln Del. She was working on a master’s degree in social work and already, as an intern, working as a therapist. Later, when we’d been together for a while and I could see her as human-sized, she told me social work was the budget option. If she’d gone into psychology, she’d have needed a PhD before she could do anything useful, but all I heard at the time was “therapist”, and I must have let what I was thinking show on my face, because she laughed and said it was okay, she couldn’t read minds. I believed her enough to lie and say I hadn’t thought she could.

I caught a glimpse of her right then as if I’d been sitting across the room, admiring a stranger. She was happy, she was smart, she knew the secrets of the human soul. She lived a life that was larger, deeper and more intense than mine. Except for the voice, life had been kind to her. If I hadn’t been sharing her table, tucked inside the glowing circle of her knowledge and her luck, I’d have envied her for all of it. I couldn’t see why she’d chosen me but I wasn’t going to argue.

I’d started driving bus just a few months before I met Peg, and since not many women drove buses then, I used that to show off to her. I told her that sitting behind the wheel made me feel as if I was strong enough to bench-press the bus itself, all thirty thousand pounds of it. And I did usually feel that way, but I couldn’t help comparing what I did to a master’s degree, to her work as a therapist, and everything I was saying flattened out even before I said it.

“I know it’s not rocket science,” I said.

“It beats hell out of working in an office. And I’m willing to bet it pays more.”

“I never did office work.”

That launched her into a story about having worked for an advertising agency that refused to fix a half-busted typewriter until she threw it off the desk and shattered the plastic housing.

“They replaced it,” she said. “Right after they replaced me.”

We laughed about that. You let enough time go by, you add some caffeine, some sugar, a new relationship, and the next thing you know losing a job is a riot. Outside the window the snow lay two, maybe two and a half feet deep, but we were caffeinated and sugared and warm. I was sitting with someone who’d tossed a typewriter off a desk on purpose.

The talk got softer from there. She talked about her father, I talked about my mother, and our losses formed a link: we had these holes in our lives. I don’t know what she believed, but I was sure we could fill them for each other. I’d found love. History would stop now. There was nothing left to record. We would be happy forever after. So I told her about my father’s dark, airless house, and about his silences. I didn’t tell her that sometimes, more than ten years after I’d last set foot inside it, I still had moments when I felt like that house was going to drag me back, when I’d have to work sense by sense to convince myself that the world was richer than my father had ever let himself know. I’d taste, smell, touch, notice, stretch my hand out and move some small object from one place to another and tell myself, See, I can always change something. I wasn’t exactly hiding those times from Peg. They fell away from me right then as if they’d never happened.

In exchange for my father’s house, she told me about her own father, who spent fifteen years working at a job he hated, trapped there by bills, by kids, by an accumulation of seniority, by the conviction that nothing else would be any different. In the last week of his life, when he couldn’t get out of bed without help and reality had gone halfway liquid on him, he was trying to punch the clock one last time, begging Peg to help him find his time card. She told me about the kids she’d grown up with, who were punching clocks themselves by now, and knee-deep in babies and bills of their own. She didn’t say that was what she was running from, but I understood it all the same. We were both in flight.

She leaned toward me across the table and her face went soft with some memory.

“My father—” she said.

She didn’t go on right away, just let her eyes track off into the distance, and I understood that she’d loved her father, and that she missed him.

“He used to sing. Not like perform or anything. It was just something he did when his mind was someplace else, but he had this really lovely tenor.”

We smiled at each other, holding one conversation about our parents and a separate, silent one about ourselves.

“He had this one song that I never heard anyplace else.”

I nodded. In another moment I’d have said, I wish I could have heard it. The conversation was slow-moving, full of pauses and gaps where we could look at each other, or look away. It left me time to turn my words over in my head and learn their shapes before I said them. I wasn’t in a rush to get them out.

Before I said those particular words, though, Peg pulled herself up a notch and started to sing. In the middle of the Lincoln Del, with people at the other tables clinking their forks against their plates and the waitresses ping-ponging back and forth with coffee and ketchup, with all that bare open space around us and the windows staring out onto a Minnesota winter, she held my eyes and fuckin’ well sang to me, an old-fashioned, scrolling kind of song in her small, trapped voice, not whispering the words the way I would have but singing them, with as much assurance as if she’d had her father’s pure tenor.

Come, my beloved, haste away,

Cut short the hours of thy delay;

Fly like a wounded hart or roe

Over the hills where spices grow.

The clinking of dishes and the conversations around us died down. A waitress stopped near the kitchen door and stared at us. Someone clapped a few times, then stopped when no one else joined in, and a man behind Peg said – louder, I think, than he meant to – “Sweetheart, don’t give up the day job.”

The woman he was sitting with made an angry, shushing sound at him but Peg laughed as if he’d given her a standing ovation. She turned in her seat to call “Don’t worry” in his direction.

When she turned back to me, she was still grinning. “I didn’t inherit his voice,” she said. “As you might’ve noticed.”

How could I not be in love?

“You know, what I wish I’d asked is where he learned that song, what the story behind it was, because he wasn’t a come-my-beloved kind of guy. But you don’t think of things like that. Not till it’s too late. And I’d gotten to the age where it embarrassed me, his singing. Where anything my parents did embarrassed me. I wish I’d had the chance to let him know that – you know.”

I nodded, not because I did know but because I wanted to, and because that seemed like enough.

“That I’d remember it,” she said. “That I’d carry it with me.”

That weekend we went to a movie and then to Peg’s place for coffee. She lived in one of those big Victorian houses that had been chopped into cheap, odd-shaped apartments, and she led me upstairs, talking about the house – the curve of the banister, the stained-glass window that had been stolen from the downstairs hallway one night, the way the landlord had replaced it with plain glass and what else could he do, really, but the house had lost some of its magic. When she opened her apartment door she pushed it too hard, slamming it into the foot of her bed, and the smell of incense rolled out and over us, as heavy as anything I’d ever inhaled in a West Bank head shop.

We already knew we were going to end up in that bed together, and it made us shy and awkward. She shrugged her jacket off and took mine from me, but instead of hanging them up the way I’d expected she tossed them on the floor in a corner, making it look like the freest and most normal thing in the world – the gesture we’d all make if only we could.

“I like to think this was the parlor,” she said, nodding by way of explanation to the stained-glass panel that showed above a window shade. “All those ladies floating through in their beautiful dresses.”

“All those ladies crippled by their corsets.”

“You’re being unromantic.”

I couldn’t help myself, though. I felt easy enough with her to argue. I felt uneasy enough to argue.

“A parlor would’ve been on the first floor.”

“I like the idea. You don’t want to take it too seriously.”

The room was a fair size, whatever it had been, with a high ceiling. Probably a bedroom. Peg lit a stick of incense, then went into the bath-mat-sized kitchen and started clanging pans around and washing cups for coffee. I leaned against the open doorway, admiring the curve of her shoulder, the angle of her arm. She wasn’t beautiful. I knew that and I didn’t wish for her to be anything other than what she was. I felt easy with her. I liked the way she threw herself at things, the way she’d opened the door too fast so it slammed into the bed. I liked the way she banged around the kitchen. I liked that she held on to her idea of the parlor even though it made no sense. I liked that she argued with me. It let me know that when she did smile I could believe she meant it. I hate it when women pull their lips back and grimace because they think it’s charming, or walk around with lukewarm I-won’t-threaten-anyone smiles. Someone always pays a price for those smiles.

It went beyond attraction, what I felt for Peg.

She dried the cups she’d been washing – elegant, mismatched things marked with chips and hairline cracks – and set them next to the stove, where a pan of water was almost at a boil.

“It’s instant,” she said. “I ran out of the real stuff. Is instant okay?”

“Instant’s fine.”

It was fine – it was what I drank at home – but I’d have been happy to drink salted water with her.

She measured the powder and poured water on it, sending steam cascading upward. I loved the way her hand held a folded dish towel around the saucepan’s handle, her wrist disappearing into the cuff of a flannel shirt. I loved the quart of milk she took out of the refrigerator. I was ridiculous and I knew it and I didn’t care.

We carried our coffee to the apartment’s two chairs, which faced each other in front of the window. She sat in a wooden armchair, leaving me a frou-frou, armless, ruffled thing that was too small for me but was upholstered in faded purple velvet and made me feel like I’d fallen in with displaced royalty. Peg was someone who gathered up whatever she found and made a home out of it, and I loved that too. All I’d made for myself was a place to camp, and until now I’d taken a kind of pride in not wanting more than that, but sitting in Peg’s uneasy velvet chair I understood for the first time that I could allow myself something more – that I was hungry for something more.

Between us sat a round wooden table, a small, Victorian-looking thing that balanced unevenly on a single stem and splayed feet. I set my cup down and it weighted the table toward me, pulling the tide of coffee to the landward side of my cup. I picked the cup up and sipped coffee off the top. It tasted of incense, as if I’d sipped the heavy air of the room. I was having trouble, sitting that close to her bed, thinking of a single topic that two human beings could talk about, and I took another sip of incense-flavored coffee to fill the time. She stared into her own cup and I wondered if it would be okay to simply reach across the table and touch her. Her shoulder was round and full and calling to me. I didn’t reach for her, though. It was too important that I get this right.

I set my cup on the table, rocking everything back to my side. I had a half-formed thought that we should talk about ex-lovers, moving through our histories until we’d each summed up the most recent one and said how much we’d been hurt by the breakup, after which we’d be so overcome with sympathy that our chairs would tip us gracefully in the direction of the bed. Before I figured out how to bring up either her exes or mine, though, she took refuge in the topic we’d done so well with before: family.

“You have any brothers or sisters?” she asked.

I was disappointed. I was relieved. I was still thinking we had to find a topic related to the bed.

“Not a one,” I said. “You?”

At which point I remembered her father being tied to his job by children, plural, but if she remembered having mentioned that she didn’t let it show.

“Sisters. Two of ’em. Younger.”

I smiled as if this meant something special to me.

“Much younger, actually. I feel like I’m halfway their mother. We were—” She made a gesture with her hands that worked like a shrug. “By the time they were old enough to know what was going on, my father was sick, my mother’d given up the mommy routine. Things pretty well fell apart at home. And there I was, most of the responsibility and none of the power. I can’t tell you how much fun it was.”

She pushed herself up, crossed the room and lit a stick of incense, holding me suspended in the middle of the family collapse.

“I don’t mean to whine. It’s not like it was easy for my sisters either. I mean, they still call me as if I could fix stuff for them. Deena gets into trouble at school” – she raised a hand as if she was waiting to be called on – “she calls me. Mom has a fit about something, hey, maybe I could talk to her and that’ll make it right. The time Jude broke her finger, my mother was I have no idea where, so guess who got to drive her to the emergency room. And guess who didn’t have the insurance information. Guess who isn’t her guardian. The thing is, whatever I do, it doesn’t help. It’s all still a mess. Nothing changes.”

I was nodding a quiet beat, understanding that she was allowing me into something that mattered to her, understanding that if I could swim this river of anger and sadness with her it would carry us to the bed as surely as the ex-lovers would have.

That sounds like I didn’t care how she felt, but I did. I cared about everything she wanted to tell me, but that didn’t mean my thoughts were pure. She was still standing by the incense burner and I went to her, hesitated, put my arms around her, and she melted into me as if I were the source of all the comfort the world would ever offer her. Instead of pulling her toward the bed, though, I let her go and told her what I’d managed not to say about my own family. I told her about my father’s drinking, and then about my mother’s, although my mother’s was more or less an afterthought since I’d had so many extra years to watch my father dance with the bottle. It had nothing to do with what Peg had just told me, but in the odd logic of the moment it also did. We came to each other with these histories clanking behind us, these tin cans tied to our tails. Talking about them did nothing to bring us together on that bed, though, and we sat down and were awkward again for a few seconds.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, knowing it did. “I don’t know why I brought it up.”

Peg gave me the kind of look you give someone when you’re sitting near the bed and working your way toward it.

“Tell me one good memory you have of them,” she said.

It took me a minute. I was closer to the bad ones. They were more comfortable.

“We had this next-door neighbor,” I said. “You know the type. Hates kids, ball lands in his yard he’d set his house on fire before he’d give it back. I’d leaned my bike on his fence and he came out and started yelling at me, and I mean he scared me – I was maybe seven, eight years old. You know, little. Anyway, my mother came out, slamming the screen against the side of the house, pointed a finger at him like she could shoot lightning out the end of it, and she yelled that he wasn’t ever to talk to me, he wasn’t to so much as look at me, I was her kid and if he had a problem with me he could damn well take it up with her.”

I stopped talking for a minute, remembering the feel of my mother’s arm pulling me tight against her and the safety I felt leaning there, as if nothing could ever hurt me again.

“It’s funny, because when something happened the first thing she usually did was blame me.”

Peg nodded, and waited in case I had something more to say.

“She was fierce,” I said after a while.

“I like fierce women.”

It sounded sexy the way she said it, and like a compliment to me somehow, which made us both grin and then get embarrassed so that we picked up our half-cold coffee and sipped at it, but then we set it aside and touched – hands, an elbow, a shoulder, a cheek – and moved to the bed, throwing all its velvety cushions on the floor in a scattering of peacock colors and India prints, and we began as ancient and natural and awkward a series of acts as the human race knows. Each time we unbuttoned, unzipped, untangled, we got embarrassed all over again, as if we’d forgotten each other’s names, and each time that happened I thought maybe she wasn’t ready, maybe I wasn’t ready, maybe we were about to ruin everything, and then something would catch us again – a breath of air; a current; a gale – and I stopped thinking for another stretch of time and let the wind carry me.

I was half a second short of taking flight when the phone rang and I felt a shift in her attention. I dug my fingers into her shoulder.

“Let it ring.”

I was panting. I was damn near begging. The truth was that I couldn’t take flight with just anyone. It had been a while since I’d slept with anybody, and if I couldn’t make it that night I didn’t think I’d work up the courage to try with her again.

She came back to me, though, reinhabiting her hand until I flew, and I loved her in that moment in a way I’d never loved anyone before. In a way I never expect to love anyone again. The phone rang and rang, and I wrapped myself around her and laughed.

“Someone’s persistent,” I said, when I was ready to think about something more than the two of us.

She reacted. I couldn’t have said how exactly, and I had no idea what it meant, but I could feel the sharpness of it.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and she pulled me back to her, closing the space I’d made when I started talking.

Much later – the damn phone was still ringing – I got out of bed to lift the receiver, hang it up, and take it back off the hook. I crawled into bed again, put my arms around Peg and felt her skin soft against my breasts. I kissed the curve where her neck met her shoulder. I was as pleased with myself as if I’d figured out a practical method of space travel.

We lay in the dark for some time before either of us felt the need to say much.

“I wondered how we’d get to this point,” I said eventually.

“Hah, there’s self-confidence for you. I wondered if.”

I was getting all rosy again and I kissed her shoulder, not because I wanted to make love again right away but because it was a language we could speak now. She ran a hand over my hair, but partway through the gesture it changed and she palmed my skull as if she wanted to keep me from turning away.

“I have to tell you, I wasn’t sure we should do this,” she said. Her voice was sober and struck me as dangerous. “I’m still not sure.”

My brain said, It’s too late, but the words stayed shut up inside. I looked at her – round face, brown eyes, a thread of hair falling crossways over her forehead, all the bits and pieces exactly the same as they’d been before but all of them changed somehow, all the energy gone out of them.

She moved her hand off my skull and I felt as cold without it as if she’d left me bald.

“I owe you an explanation,” she said.

“You do?”

“Of what’s going on. You remember Megan.”

More statement than question. Megan. Who the hell was Megan?

“From the Coffeehouse.”

Right. The dance floor, with the couple I tried not to stare at doing dips and twirls beside us.

“Your ex?”

“She’s not my ex. She’s not my goddamn anything. I didn’t go out with her long enough to make her my ex. I barely know the woman.”