For Love (43 page)

Just over the line into Pennsylvania, she stops to use the toilet in a rest area. The foyer is half filled with milling weekend travelers heading home. Heavy people – why are people in
rest areas so often heavy? she wonders. Several of them have bright, painful-looking sunburns. Still, there’s something pleasurable in the bustle, the sense of being in motion among them.
We’re all
going
somewhere. But it’s more than that. Lottie wishes there were someone she could tell.
I’m going back
. She’d like to say it aloud.
I’m
going home
.

In the bathroom, she splashes water on her face, wipes it with the rough, stale-smelling paper towels. When she comes out, she’s aware of the aroma of coffee and thinks for a moment of
having a cup. But then, she tells herself, she’ll just need to stop again sooner.

She goes into the little front room off the lobby, full of vending machines, and sees that, as she’d hoped, one of the machines dispenses No Doz along with other over-the-counter drugs.
There’s another woman in here, buying candy. After Lottie’s bought her No Doz, she watches this woman dropping quarter after quarter as though she were feeding a giant slot machine,
pulling the handle, which releases, with a heavy thud each time, a huge Milky Way. She does this six or seven times.

After she leaves, Lottie buys a candy bar too. She may get hungry. At the last minute, she gets a can of Coke also. Handy to wash down whichever drug she needs to take. She drives to the pumps
and has the tank filled. Might as well, even though it’s still got some gas left.

On the road again, it’s truly dark; the sense of sky is gone. Lottie’s been driving an hour or so when she realizes she’s hunched over the wheel, that tension is radiating from
her jaw through her whole body. She makes herself sit back. Her leg aches. She adjusts the seat. She tries the radio again. There are several religious services in progress now, a lot of country
music, a replay of a Democratic debate. She finally settles on some static through which she can faintly hear sweeping orchestral music. It may be Brahms; but then suddenly a bit of melody makes
her think it’s the sound track to the movie
Giant
, something she wouldn’t have said she’d known.

The road lifts and drops. The terrain here would be different if she could see it. She remembers it from the trip east: hilly, and beginning to be farm country. The cars around her have thinned
out, just an occasional light ahead or behind, and Lottie is aware of the glow from the dashboard. She thinks of Jack again, driving on the straight section roads of the Midwest in his adolescence,
the way the lights would have reflected up on the tired faces of the older men in the band.

Where was she when he was that age? Eight, ten, running wild, a wiry small girl with scabs on her knees who still liked to boss the other kids around, who didn’t realize that her day as
leader, as queen of the block, was almost over. In a few years, she would be wearing the wrong skirts, long and straight and too tight. She would have on too much makeup, she would sport a ponytail
with spit curls, her nails would be a frosty pink. And five or six years after that, long after she thought she’d put both of those Charlottes behind her, Derek’s mother would look at
the dress she was wearing as she came down the curving staircase in the White Plains house and say crisply, ‘I think something a little less revealing would work better at the club,
Charlotte.’

Derek: he’d smiled openly up at Lottie from behind his mother. He’d liked the idea of her discomforting his parents, making his mother and her friends nervous as they tried to have
bridal showers and ladies’ lunches for her. That was part of the point of Lottie – of Charlotte – for him. She thinks of him now, – tall, blond-going-to-gray, his face
pulled tighter, more skeletal in age, instead of pouching into deep tired lines, as Jack’s does. His comment comes back: that he has the chance to do it right this time.

She smacks the steering wheel. Here’s what bothers her. Not just what that suggests he feels about Ryan, but the arrogance in assuming he has control. Sure, you might do it right, she
should have said. Or you might make a whole new and incredibly inventive set of mistakes.

She should have said no such thing.

The music has changed by now on the radio. It is more sprightly but even less clear. Lottie turns it off.

She’s in trouble, she’s in trouble, with this tooth.

If she hates Derek so much, it must be that she hates herself as she was with him. And that is true. It makes her angry that she let herself be fooled so readily by his ease, his smoothness. His
wardrobe. Al had tried to warn her. ‘Think of it, Lottie,’ he’d said. ‘What does it mean that he’s nominally the only humanist in the house, and he was the last one to
realize you were human?’

She smiles at this until she remembers her tough answer, something like: ‘It doesn’t seem to me that fucking me is the same thing as recognizing my humanity.’ Al didn’t
try again.

He’d come to their wedding, though. He’d gotten staggeringly drunk and fallen asleep in a kneeling position, with his head resting on the seat of a chair in the anteroom to the
men’s and ladies’ johns. Lottie had passed him several times, and it pained her to see him there, his wide ass presented to all who passed this way. She had a sense, by this time, that
marrying Derek was a mistake, but she seemed to be in the grip of a kind of inevitability constructed of invitations, and tickets for the honeymoon, and elaborately boxed silver-plated presents. A
little drunk herself, she’d bent over Al once, asked him please to get up, please not to kneel here anymore. He moaned. She started to cry then, holding his head. Thinking of it as something
precious, something dear, thinking drunkenly and sentimentally of Al as truer, sweeter than anyone she would ever know again.

Lottie has started to hum, a little moaning hum that intensifies with each breath. She’s in real pain, she realizes. She finds another Percocet, bites part of it off, swallows it down with
some tepid Coke.

Is she sleepy? She doesn’t know. The earlier Percocet has made her feel alert somehow; but also strangely peaceful. This is worrisome, this peace. This might be sleepiness in another
guise. She opens the box of No Doz and takes one of those.

Pills, pills. The secretarial job she had in the hospital when they first moved to Chicago. The doctors dumped their sample meds into canvas carts that sat at the ends of the hallways, and
Lottie, who was going to night school then too, had developed quite a little appetite for sample Dexedrine. She never even noticed the strength of the pills she took when she picked up the packets,
when she swallowed them. All she knew was that it let her stay alert, it made her snappy and nervy. During this period she began to fight back when Derek was sarcastic to her, when he disapproved.
And that changed her, permanently. Even after she quit the hospital job for a job at Roosevelt, where she could take courses for free, she remembered the way she could be when she was on Dexedrine
and she made that part of herself – never to be passive again, never to let him get away with it.

His eager look, asking her if she and Jack didn’t think of having a child. She could have slapped him. ‘We have a child,’ she should have said. ‘We have several children.’
Really, though, wasn’t it that she found something unseemly about his wish to have everything that a young man, newly married, would want? He should understand he can’t have it all
anymore. Isn’t there an age, after all, when you ought to settle for a little less?

In the dark, she is abruptly appalled at herself. She doesn’t believe this; she, too, is greedy for everything. Like Derek.

Like Cam. At the thought of Cam, she feels again the rage that rose in her, hitting him. She sees his head, bowed under her fists.

What was it he’d said to her? That she’d never worked at love?

But had he? Had he?

His face that time in Chicago, so closed, so sure. That couldn’t have been love. And the way he looked the night they stripped the wallpaper, when he spoke of their parents so bitterly.
His clear contempt for her too. How angry he is! How shut off. What did Elizabeth say? He
feeds
on himself. She thinks of his voice on the tape, so urgent, so lost in his own way of seeing
things. He lied to himself about forgiveness, about love. He needed to think or himself that way. She said to Ryan that she didn’t know him. But she does, doesn’t she? He’s like
her; she has that same rage, that coldness. It’s just that she doesn’t lie to herself as much.

But
has
she ever worked at love? As the names of towns rise up on the signs under her lights at the side of the road and then pass away, she thinks of lovers. The faces, the sex, the
places where she had fights, where she kissed someone. She didn’t try very hard, not often. Maybe once or twice, when it really mattered.

But what is this, this long drive to Jack, if not effort, work? If not for love? She’s even grateful in some way for the pain. She’s glad that it’s costing her this much to
come back to him.

In the dark stretches ahead of her lights, the road is silvery now in the moonlight, the sky has lightened once more with deepest night. She passes a sign for Mount Ronan.

Mount Ronan! She did a story here once. She lived here for a couple of days. This was a town famous for an abortionist. He was known for safe work. He’d done hundreds of women; Lottie
herself knew several who’d made the pilgrimage. He’d kept a few motels and a couple of small-town restaurants alive for years. She’d gone to interview him in the late seventies, a
couple of years after Roe versus Wade was passed. Lottie remembers him now. A handsome little white-haired man – Norman Rockwell could have used him as a model doc – living in a perfect
white clapboard house with a front porch. He sat on a wide courting swing with Lottie while they talked. He’d retired by then; he couldn’t earn enough money in a standard gynecological
practice to make working worthwhile.

He’d bragged to Lottie over lemonade about how well-trained his nurses had been, how clean his practice was. Lottie had asked him finally how it could have gone on for all those years
without people in the town knowing.

‘Oh, they knew,’ he said. ‘Just if they didn’t want to know, they didn’t have to. If you’re careful, if you do good work, then nobody ever has to know, even
if they
do
, you see what I mean.’ That was the angle she took in the article too – the complicity of upright people when public policy is bad.

How strange. She hasn’t thought of it, of him, in years. All that stuff she did on the road, the interviews, the research. A part of her life that’s gone from her.

She can’t stand the pain under her tooth. She turns on the radio again and finds another call-in show. They’re talking about self-esteem, this group. She concentrates on listening.
She tries not to think, not to feel her pulsing jaw. There is another expert on, someone who has apparently developed just the right amount of self-esteem. There is the host, who seems to have an
overabundance of it; there are the pathetic callers, trying for the soupçon that a moment on the radio will provide. This is why Freud hated America, she thinks; and he didn’t even
know about call-in shows.

A woman calls who has been rebirthed; another new beginning, thinks Lottie. Like Derek’s, only from the other side. The woman speaks of her reexperience of vulnerability, of the loving
support of her group, her leader: their soothing touch as she emerged – whatever that could mean – correctly this time.

Of course, this can be helpful, the expert says with condescension in his voice.
For the likes of you
, is the suggestion. In general, though, because the trauma, the shaming, the damage
to self-esteem comes later, it’s usually better to focus on issues that occur later in childhood.

Lottie imagines her mother after giving birth, her mother holding a reddish bundle that is Lottie. Or perhaps Cameron. She might have been a loving mother to an infant; there is no way to know.
Charlotte, Cameron:
these romantic names. Surely they mean that she wanted something for them, something from them.

And suddenly Lottie has a memory of her mother sewing, working on a costume for Lottie, a wide net skirt set with red hearts: Lottie was to be the Queen of Hearts. For Halloween? For a school
play? She can’t remember. But she was on a chair in the dining room, the sun was streaming in, her mother knelt beneath her. She tapped Lottie with a yardstick when she wanted her to turn
– she couldn’t speak; her mouth was full of pins. She taped Lottie over and over, on the belly, the hip, the buttocks, a little hard rap that Lottie felt as the knock of her heart in
love. Because she had loved her mother so much then: the bent graying head, the sharply parted hair, the whitish scalp, the intermittent hard rap.

It
had
happened every now and then; Lottie remembers it now. It must have been like an awakening for her mother. What could have caused it, what could it have been? Her mother would have
a project, suddenly. The television would not be on when you opened the door. Instead her mother would be humming somewhere in the house. She would be busy. There would be the smell of something
cooking, of laundry being ironed, of wallpaper paste. The clickety-clickety of the sewing machine. What would it have felt like, Lottie wonders, to be her mother? To be so at the mercy of chemicals
swimming in your brain.

Lottie can’t imagine, really. She only knows what it felt like then to be the child, slowly to learn to distrust what she loved most about her mother. She’d grown to dread the days
that were different, because you couldn’t believe in them. Because they preceded the inevitable return to silence and inertia. Later she would be sarcastic in describing those moments.
‘She must have been getting ready for the Pillsbury Bake-Off,’ she would say. ‘Competing for Mrs America, no doubt.’

The man with self-esteem has completely faded by now, and Lottie presses the Seek button again. She lets it make its cycle four, five times, sometimes stopping it and trying to listen to a
fading signal for a while. The only clear station has a religious service on, a black preacher whose organist punctuates every sentence with a vibrating chord. The congregation shouts over it, over
the preacher too. They are all far gone; it’s like strange music, repetitive, ecstatic. After a while Lottie tires of it and turns it off. She drives in silence with the pain.