The News From Spain Part 3

She talks to Cath occasionally, and Cath says, from the safe distance of Denver: "It's time for her to live closer to one of us."

(Rebecca is tempted sometimes to say: Okay, Cath, I've arranged to have Mom med-flighted out to you.) Harriet gets a urinary tract infection, another leg infection, bronchitis.

She has been sick now for so long, this has all been going on forever. Rebecca wishes it would all just stop-but the only thing that will stop it is Harriet's death, and she doesn't want that.

She asks Harriet one afternoon-it's when Harriet is in the hospital with bronchitis, and Rebecca has driven down to Connecticut to spend the afternoon with her (just the afternoon: she wants to be back in Cambridge again by bedtime)-"Aren't you tired of all this?"

"Yes," Harriet says. "But I don't want it to be over, because I want to know the end of the story."

"What story?" Rebecca asks.

"All the stories," Harriet says.

"You're so sad," Ben says, rubbing the backs of his fingers against her cheek when she gets home from the bookstore one evening.

"My mother's in the hospital again. Septic shock. Another urinary tract infection, which I guess they didn't catch fast enough. I'm going to drive down there tomorrow."

"I'll make you a drink," he says, and then he calls her one of the incredibly silly pet names, which for the first time fails to delight her. It seems irritating and ill timed. "And then I'll run you a bath," he says.

"A bath sounds good."

"And I'll come watch you take it."

"Come talk to me, you mean?"

"No. Watch you."

That's an aberration, not a revelation, she thinks. Being objectified, when she just wants to be accompanied.

"You're so sad," he keeps saying. It starts as sympathy. A week or two later it's cool, a diagnosis. Then it becomes a criticism.

He starts wanting the underwear to be kinkier. And he wants her to wear it every time.

He used to talk a lot about divorcing Dorinda. But it's been months now since he's mentioned it.

Rebecca asks him about it one night, as they are lying in bed, happy, she thinks, naked, with sc.r.a.ps of underwear scattered all around them.

"I would love to marry you," she says, with a boldness that is new and luxurious for her. She's echoing something he has said to her many times by now. "I hate it that you're still married to someone else."

He is silent. Then he says: "You knew I was married when we started this."

She tries to get out of it without too much self-abas.e.m.e.nt. She knows the uselessness of asking questions. She manages to sound less desperate than she is-but still, it's more desperate than she would like to sound.

Women ask for explanations, over and over, when love goes. There is no explanation. The explanation is: It's gone.

The whole thing, from the time they met at the little movie to the end, took sixteen months.

Back in her apartment, she's cold. It's a cold spring, wet, dark. She doesn't cook, she doesn't sleep well, she doesn't read, she doesn't see many friends. She gets her hair cut to just below her jawline, knowing it's an angry, m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic thing to do, but hoping that it will somehow make her feel better. (And also because she can't bear now to attend to it: shampooing, brushing.) She talks to two people, her a.s.sistant from the bookstore, who has had something of a front-row seat for all this-she used to raise her eyebrows at Rebecca all those months ago when Ben would come in, buy books, and leave without saying anything-and an old, kind friend from the school where she used to teach. Both of them are kind, in fact, but both of them seem to be saying without saying, "What did you expect?" (In fact, they're not saying this. They've been watching Rebecca all this time with some concern, because she has seemed so engulfed in Ben and remote from everything else, but they have also been rooting for her, wanting it to work. The "What did you expect?" is coming straight from Rebecca herself, spoken in a voice not unlike Harriet's.) Summer comes, then fall. Rebecca still can't walk by the store that sells the chocolate eggs.

"What's wrong?" Harriet asks over the phone. Her voice is feebler these days, hoa.r.s.e.

"Nothing," Rebecca says. "I'm just tired."

"You want to hear something s.h.i.tty?" Harriet asks.

"What?"

"They've stopped giving me physical therapy. They say I'm not making any progress. I said, 'Well how the h.e.l.l am I supposed to make progress if you stop giving me physical therapy?' But you want to hear something wonderful?"

"What?"

"When Ralph comes over, he moves my legs for me. And he makes me do arm exercises. So I don't atrophy."

The nursing home calls.

"We're calling to let you know your mother is in the hospital again-she had a fever, and so we sent her over to the ER."

The hospital calls. Harriet has another urinary tract infection that has gone undiagnosed-she can't feel any pain, because of the paralysis-and once again she's in severe septic shock. They're putting her on antibiotics.

Harriet calls. Her voice is weak and shivery but animated, excited. "Oh, my G.o.d-did you hear about the tunnel?"

"What tunnel?"

"It collapsed. Turn on the TV. It just happened, at the height of the morning commute, they said."

"Where was this? What city?"

"I don't know. It was my roommate's TV, so I couldn't hear very well, and then the nurse or someone came in and shut it off. But it sounded awful. People were killed, they think some people may still be trapped in their cars. You need to turn it on."

"Mom, we don't even know where it's happening."

"It's in a commuter tunnel. The main one that leads to the city, they said. Or maybe it was the bridge that collapsed, the bridge that leads to the tunnel. But everybody goes through the tunnel."

That night the hospital calls. Harriet's fever isn't coming down. They're going to try a different antibiotic.

Early the next morning, Rebecca is trying to decide what to do-call in the a.s.sistant, or close the store for the day, so she can go to Connecticut? Stay here and keep in touch with the hospital and Harriet by phone?-when the hospital calls again and someone tells her in a clear, soft voice that Harriet is dead.

She sits there.

She needs to call Cath. (Who will say, "Do you think we need to do a funeral?") She needs to call Ralph. (Who will cry. Who will be heartbroken. Who will now begin to decline very fast.) She wants to call Harriet.

It has all gone on for so long without Harriet dying that Rebecca lost track of the fact that Harriet was going to die.

Guilt: if she hadn't gotten tired and distracted-if she hadn't let herself be so easily dazzled-if she had not relaxed her vigilance, this would not have happened.

Even in the moment, she recognizes this guilt as irrational, bogus; but it pierces anyway.

Harriet died when Rebecca wasn't looking.

She sits there.

She wants to call Harriet, more pa.s.sionately than she would have believed, an hour ago, that it was possible to want that, or to want anything.

The only other person she finds she wants to call-and of course she can't-is Peter.

She will, though. Not now. Not until almost a year from now.

She will wrestle during that time with questions having to do with forgiveness. Can she forgive herself for what she did to him?

(For the most part, yes. The two of them made their polite, inhibited, explosive mess together, she believes; it ended the way it might have been expected to end, although the particular trigger could not have been predicted.) (But oh, the folly of that particular trigger.) Can he forgive her? No way to know. She puts off the phone call for so long partly because she is afraid to find out.

She keeps pitting his final "Don't call me" against his penultimate "Don't call me again unless you mean it," trying to figure out which one carries more weight.

And she gets tangled in that "unless you mean it." Which she didn't even really hear in the coffee shop when he said it; which she has discovered in her memory since then. Unless she means what? She can't define it explicitly, the thing that Peter insisted she had better mean-but she does feel she understands what he meant by that insistence, and it gives her hope.

By the time she finally does call him, she will know that she means it, even though it will be a scary phone call to make, and even if she still won't be capable of saying clearly what exactly it is she does mean.

Harriet would have been quick to tell her, accurately or inaccurately. To guess, to a.n.a.lyze, to explain, to make predictions. Harriet was always the one who wanted to talk about the news, from Spain, or from the Vatican, or from some uncertain city where something had collapsed-from any place, really, where anything of interest might be going on.

The News from Spain.

THE OTHER GIRL.

She was small, sullen, dressed in a short skirt and white vinyl boots, wearing pale lip gloss.

She was the only other girl in the boys' school.

She didn't smile when you were introduced. "I'll show you where the ladies' room is," she said; and before you knew it you were standing inside it with her. It was the kind meant to be occupied by only one person. "I'll wait outside," you said, and she said, "Why?" and lifted her skirt and sat down.

She was your age, thirteen. She was rich, you saw when you went home with her one day after school. A young blond man, who worked for her mother, picked you both up after study hall and drove you to her house. A big new house, like a ranch on a TV show-new wood, a huge staircase with too many spindly banisters, lots of red plush. There were horses, and there was an indoor swimming pool, and a pantry full of sweet things. She ate half a bag of cookies, coolly, standing there. "Shouldn't we go easy?" you asked. "Won't they mind?"

"Who's they?" she said.

She and her mother were both named Lily. Everyone called the mother Big Lily, and the daughter was Lily Joyce.

Big Lily ran a factory, which was somewhere else on the property. Big Lily owned so many acres that the factory was invisible; you never saw it. You never knew what it made either-something invented by Lily Joyce's father. She didn't talk about him, except to tell you once that he had shot himself ten years ago and that's when her mother had taken over the company.

Later the two of you went swimming in the pool-you in one of Big Lily's bathing suits, which, embarra.s.singly, fit you; Lily Joyce in a small white bikini. Chlorinated steam wafted up from the water; the air was hot and murky and stinging, and the light was thick and green. The young man came in and watched you and Lily Joyce swimming for a while. Then he pulled off his shirt and jumped into the water. He teased Lily Joyce and chased her and picked her up and threw her toward the deep end. She came down screaming, splashing, flailing to get away from him. He threatened to pull down her bikini top, and she laughed and laughed.

The next year Big Lily married him. He was twenty-two; Big Lily was forty-seven.

"What's it like to have him as a stepfather?" you asked.

"It's okay," Lily Joyce said, with no expression on her face.

THE MATH TEACHER.

He was brusque, but also enthusiastic. He came to cla.s.s every morning with wet hair, but it never dried, so maybe it was oiled. You could see the neat trails of the comb in it, like ski tracks in the snow. Sometimes in the winter, when you went for a walk in the afternoon-the boys were at sports, but there was nothing for the girls to do between lunch and afternoon study hall-you saw him skiing in the woods. He raised his ski pole to show he had seen you, a salute, and then went on, churning and sliding away under the fir trees.

He was German, or Scandinavian: pragmatic, blue-eyed. He had a crisp energetic encouraging way about him. You liked him but felt guilty around him; he seemed to think better of you than he should have.

In cla.s.s, he-Mr. Sturm-wrote big columns of numbers on the blackboard, underlining the answers and the equal signs so hard that the chalk squeaked. Then "There!" he would say, turning away from the board toward the cla.s.s. "Everybody get it?"

n.o.body did, but no one said anything.

"Any questions?"

There weren't.

HIS WIFE.

She wore her black hair piled on top of her head, a lofty, delicate structure composed of many soft, elaborate little puffs. A croquembouche, you realized years later, coming upon a picture of one in a magazine and instantly thinking of her. All of her was like that-something confected in a bakery. She smelled sweet, her white skin was powdered, her nails were tapered and polished pale pink; when she raised her finger in the cla.s.sroom, you could see the sun shining pinkly through her fingertip.

You were nervous around her at first, because you started in the school at mid-year and you had never studied a foreign language before. In cla.s.s the first day she said something to you in Spanish, which you didn't understand. Then she asked you in English to conjugate the verb "decir." You sat there while she smiled encouragingly, and finally you said that you didn't know what "decir" meant, and you didn't know what "conjugate" meant. The boys laughed. She swiftly told them, "You may not realize it, but you are being cruel and ignorant." You were grateful for, but embarra.s.sed by, this; it felt like too fervent a defense, too much championing over too little a thing.

She started meeting with you in the afternoons to give you a crash course. Once you got the hang of it, you loved Spanish, memorizing lists of verbs, showing off to her what you'd learned since the last time. "... viviremos, vivireis, viviran," you would finish triumphantly, and she would say, "Muy bien, Marisol!" "Marisol" had nothing to do with your real name-a dull, one-syllable thud of a name, you thought-but you had chosen it from the list of Spanish girls' names she'd showed you on your first afternoon with her. "Don't I have to pick one that's sort of the Spanish version of my name?" you had asked.

"Why? Pick a name you wish your parents had given you," she said-and so became something else you'd always wished for, a kind of G.o.dmother. A woman who was not your mother, or an aunt, or one of your mother's vaguely impatient friends. A woman who paid attention to you as a girl. Your mother cared about different things: books, politics. "You can be anything," your mother told you fiercely; and you believed her-with an amendment, also fierce but too humiliating to be said aloud: You could be anything, except pretty. You didn't know how. Hair, skin, nails, clothes-yours were terrible, or at least inept. In those afternoons at Mrs. Sturm's house, you saw things-ruffles, rose-colored lipstick, a fur collar, a charm bracelet shifting and twinkling on a delicate wrist bone-that you didn't see at home, and certainly were not going to see anywhere else at the boys' school. You learned that prettiness was a possible thing to care about, even if you didn't have any idea how to achieve it.

Still, even as you yearned for it, you worried that it was, in fact, trivial-that she might be trivial. In cla.s.s, she would write on the blackboard, in her big, airy script, "Las noticias de Espana." You knew, from headlines on the front page of The New York Times, which was always lying around in your house, that there was actually news from Spain that year: Franco's death, elections, uncertainty about the new king's allegiances. Mrs. Sturm's news was news of nothing, news of fluff. "Esta semana es Las Fallas," she would write, and you would dutifully copy it down, imitating the curly tips of her capital E and the way she had of writing a's like the a's in printed books, fat little structures with curving roofs. She explained, glowing with gentle excitement, that the festival of Las Fallas involved the building and burning of large puppets! It was very festive! Perhaps someday you would all go to Valencia and see this for yourselves! Her news was full of festivals-this one was a ma.s.s-partic.i.p.ation drum festival, that one was a reenactment of a battle between Moors and Christians, fought over a papier-mache castle. Constant bullfights, lots of flamenco-but sometimes there were special bullfights and special dances-La Feria de Sevilla!

"Ole!" she said, standing at the blackboard, stamping her little heels, lifting her hands still holding the chalk in a graceful dancer's pose. The boys snickered, more than they would have dared to with a teacher who intimidated them but not as much as they would have with a teacher they disliked.

You didn't snicker, but you were embarra.s.sed for her-the nakedness of her fantasy of herself as a fiery senorita. You wanted to protect her. Look at me! she seemed to be crowing, innocently, like a naked child darting into the living room during a dinner party. You wanted to wrap her in a blanket and gently lead her out of the room.

After a couple of months you didn't need extra help with Spanish anymore. You'd caught up with the boys, and you were doing well in cla.s.s. But you kept going to Mrs. Sturm's house: she started having you and Lily Joyce over on Monday afternoons. "We women have to stick together," she said.

She gave you tea in translucent flowered cups, along with cookies that, like everything of Mrs. Sturm's, were small elusive feminine mysteries. What did they taste of? Lemon? Vanilla? Something pale and delicate. Something far removed from the hunky chocolate things you and Lily Joyce tore into together standing in Big Lily's crammed dark pantry.

THE BOYS.

There were so many of them. All those heavy shoes clomping down the stairs and along the corridors between cla.s.ses, all those tweed sport coats. During morning chapel, sitting there with your head bowed as the school chaplain said prayerful things in a stagey voice, you thought: There are two hundred and twenty-seven p.e.n.i.ses in this room.

TRYING TO DESCRIBE IT.

You couldn't. One weekend you were invited to a slumber party in the town you had moved away from earlier that year, where you'd gone to a regular public school. That night, when you were all sitting around in your pajamas, the girls-your old friends-asked you what it was like to go to school with all those boys.

"It's fine," you said.

"You must be so popular!"