The Breakdown Lane Read online

  Years later, when Panicked in Prairie du Sac would write to me, desperate because the half-dozen weeklong biking trips that Panicked’s sister kept taking with Panicked’s husband turned out not to have been a shared interest in sport but an affair, I would wonder how this woman had behaved before her lobotomy.

  How, I would marvel, could anybody not know?

  But you can. It’s possible. You can choose not to know anything you want not to know, if you want badly enough not to know it. And if you have a little help. A husband who lies, for example, not only next to you in bed, but through his teeth.

  Why did Leo get sick of me, our family, our food, our spir-it-u-al-ity-lacking life? It wasn’t because I spent too much money on makeup or ballet.

  I think he turned forty-nine and realized he was going to die, and wanted to negotiate this with the universe. I think he started to see his job as handholding instead of a quest for justice. I think the cuckoos who sent him literature like Beneficent Bounty, a cheesy magazine about sustainable agriculture and other great things a person could do to simultaneously rescue earth and soul, which he left lying all over the house, convinced him he was a hopeless bourgeois.

  I know this because the one thing I learned from my parents’ marriage was that it took work to stay together, and it was essential to remember what you loved instead of what drove you nuts, and to idealize your spouse. Maybe being a drunk helped.

  And I did. I tried very hard.

  And Leo did, too. He at one time brought me green tea every morning before he left for work (I worked from home by then). He made his one dish, bacon ravioli, which we all loved though it sounds putrid, every Friday night.

  See me for a moment as I once was, before I got too sick to wash my own hair. See us.

  Leo’s cousin once told Leo, “Julie’s pretty enough to be a second wife.” (I didn’t even like Leo’s cousin, Jeremy. It’s pitiful how much that comment still matters to me.)

  I was a wife who left notes on the pillow. Funny cards. For our twentieth anniversary, a new ring with a J and L so cleverly intertwined in white gold that no one but someone who was really looking for it could see it wasn’t just an abstract design. And Leo, Leo gave me a moose wearing ballet shoes, with a box holding diamond earrings tied to one paw, after letting me stomp around all day thinking he’d forgotten. I never went to bed without a pretty nightgown and brushed teeth. He never failed to carry in the grocery bags. I always wore something to the chancellor’s picnic just unusual enough to gather approving comments but not arched stares, size ten, loose, Katharine Hepburn slacks, crisp, man-tailored shirt. I kept my mane when my contemporaries gave up and got those sheared little flat-bottomed ice-skater bobs, finger-tossing it wild, or looping it into my dancer’s knot at the nape. See. A mother who never missed a play, a field trip, a game, a chess meet, or an excruciating band concert, who read Charlotte’s Web and each of the Little House books aloud three times over the course of ten years, and got a karaoke machine for the kids instead of a Hotbox or whatever they call those hideous, violent video-game machines. Got (way) involved in school. Was gainfully, if not particularly profoundly, employed. Planned the vacations. Wrapped the packages. Still played quotes and strip Scrabble with Leo in bed, as we had when we were newlyweds.

  And yes, I was conceited. Doesn’t that make sense? Even in a yuck way? I thought I was an interesting wife. A cut above. I lived in Wisconsin, but I was clearly of the Upper West Side. I thought it was, well, grace and an aura of self-possession that kept me from disappearing when the clock struck forty. Vigilance and not blind, dumb luck that kept my kids safe and accomplished. And yes, I did think the outsides mattered. (Sonofabitch, given what happened, I have no reason to think otherwise.)

  I was in fine shape.

  Fine shape.

  Not one single pound over the exact middle of the middle range of the actuarial tables.

  Not one gray hair. Okay, a few gray hairs, a tiny thicket at one temple, which Teresa used her hairstylist’s art to make resemble a small and perfect platinum fan.

  Cholesterol, 188.

  Yes, I got flanked—as one of the Civil War cavaliers in the books my father wrote would have said. Foes from within. Foes from without. Assassins’ stealth.

  And yes, I was the perfect medium, the well-prepared agar for this virus. Hominidus Gillis Julieannus, I could ignore, as a guy once said, the plank in my own eye even as I searched for the sliver in another’s. Your instincts are always right, I would tell people forty-seven times a year. Listen to them, no matter how lonely it feels, or whom you may think it might hurt.

  The irony of that. It kills me.

  It burns me.

  And I haven’t even gotten to what this really is about.

  How can I write about that?

  What this really is about is not me at all.

  It’s about the willful trashing of three great kids.

  I can barely think about it.

  That’s why I babble about slacks and rings and picnics.

  I can’t stomach telling you about their burden. What they went through that I know about, and worse, what they went through that I don’t. Gabe, Caroline, Aury. My rock, my lost angel, and my baby.

  I’m so sorry.

  Not that it makes a difference, but I’m so sorry.

  “My conscience or my vanity appalled.”—Yeats.

  “What a maroon!”—Bugs Bunny.

  When I consider the extremes to which my illness and Leo’s defection drove my older children, I cringe. When I think of Aury’s contorted, tearful, lost little face…I loathe myself.

  In my column, I told people every single Sunday that they weren’t allowed to feel guilty about things they didn’t cause. But the kids couldn’t help it, and neither can I. I feel more guilt about what I did to them, and it wasn’t deliberate, than about what Leo did to all of us. I could imagine other people’s children suffering the pangs and pains of guilt, the fallout of their parents’ misdeeds and misfortunes. But not mine!

  And yet.

  The old adage says that every police officer, turned coin-side over, would be an outlaw; every psychiatrist, daft; every judge, a scoundrel. This said, how many of those who dispense wisdom possess it to any special degree? Or do they really, unawares, need it most of all?

  All those warnings.

  Still. Most suspected infernos really do turn out to be a toaster on stuck. Most stalkers in the covered parking lots are…just shoppers.

  But sometimes they aren’t.

  Two equal and opposite things can happen simultaneously. You can make a living as a mountaineer and fracture your skull tripping over a curb.

  Once upon a time, not so long ago, I thought of myself as the woman least likely to be served a big, bitter dose of my own medicine, the least likely actually to champion that old sauce I ladled out to my readers in a dozen different ways a dozen times a year—whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!—figuring that the least these poor mopes deserved was some kind of life raft.

  Did I ever really believe it?

  Nah.

  Well, I was wrong.

  End of story.

  Beginning of story.

  Everything truly interesting happens in the middle, don’t you think?

  TWO

  Numbers

  EXCESS BAGGAGE

  By J. A. Gillis

  The Sheboygan News-Clarion

  Dear J.,

  I dated one man for 17 years, since the first day of freshman year of college. It was the perfect relationship. He told me all the secrets of his soul. I felt beautiful when I was with him. We had a ton of friends in common. When he moved to Arizona, because of the climate and a job, our bond continued, and I was sure that one day, he would ask me to marry him. I would not hear from him for a month or two, but then I would get a letter telling me he was going to visit, and it was as if we’d never been apart. Then, last spring, he wrote to say he’d fallen in love, with someone he met through his work, an
d that he never realized that what we had was a great friendship, not love of the marrying kind. I was crushed, but I forgave him. He invited me to his wedding, and I went happily. Now, though we have talked a few times, his wife is uncomfortable with our friendship. He says I need to stop calling except on special occasions, and get on with my life. But I’m 38 now, and I wonder if I’ll ever find anyone who’ll know me as he did, especially since most men want children and I’m getting to the age where that’s a problem, and even more, if someone I loved so much could forget me so easily, I must be pretty forgettable. I feel such a great gap in my own heart, all the places he filled, that I can’t seem to get past it. Do you think counseling would help?

  Regretful in Rheinville

  Dear Regretful,

  I do think counseling would help. It’s possible that you saw this relationship in a very different way from the way your sweetheart did. It was clearly the center of your emotional life and the periphery of his. As wounded as you feel, he is right when he says that you need to get on with your life. It’s rare that two people who have been in love can preserve a friendship, at least until a great deal of time has passed. Your focus needs to change. You can still have a full and wonderful relationship, and as a woman who had a child at 42, I know even that is possible. Dwelling on the past, even though it was a long and important past, is only going to take you around in circles leading back to self-doubt. This was not your fault. Find a counselor who specializes in women’s relationship issues, and do move on.

  J.

  In the beginning, there was Leo.

  The end product of a family who’d built their heritage on four hundred years of hard work, cruel bigotry, and absolute loyalty, he had character. In other words, he had no excuse.

  In the other corner, me.

  You know all about me.

  Leo and Julieanne, cut from different bolts, decided to stitch together a garment called marriage.

  The simple history of us came what seems like thousands of years before my final diagnosis, before about eighty doctors told me I had everything from chronic fatigue syndrome to parasites to locomotor ataxia caused by a brain hemorrhage to catatonic depression.

  But any woman can be dumped, although it is unusual for the dumper to describe a carefully planned path as “accidental.” And “nothing to be ashamed of.”

  It’s not unusual for a woman—angel, harridan, sickly, or snooty—to be royally dumped. It is a cliché, not original enough even for one more country-western song. The great ones have all been written. Dolly Parton did a terrific job in two minutes and thirty seconds in “Jolene.” Or if your brow is higher, you can read all about the betrayal of a haughty beauty unjustly brought low in The House of Mirth.

  What makes this story different from those is this: Since those things were written, a whole lot of things are supposed to have changed between men and women.

  Take the acceptance of aging. Men are supposed to accept the changes that go along with a woman’s getting older, just as they accept the changes in their own bodies. Breasts that no longer leap to attention at an even slightly carnal glance, well, those are still good breasts. They are the breasts that perhaps have nurtured children. They may have cradled a man’s head as he confessed his grief or frustration, as he could to no other person on earth. When the frantic oscillation of early passion has slowed to a gently swinging pendulum, that’s supposed to be okay now, because the sacredness of a long and honest partnership outlasts even the delicious scrimmage of new sex.

  This shift in manners and values is, however, bullshit.

  For nothing has changed—only, as Alice might have said as she climbed back through the looking glass, the names of what those things are called.

  We loved each other like crazy, Leo and I.

  We also sort of wanted to spite our parents—who expected Leo to marry Shaina Frankel. My parents expected me to marry…up.

  It began at college.

  Mother and Father (okay, that was what we called them) had gone to NYU. For them, there was no point in any institution of higher learning unreachable by the A line. I rebelled. Their very best little girl rebelled. I chose the University of Colorado in Boulder. “Why would you want to sequester yourself on some dusty mountaintop?” my father asked, picturing Boulder as an outpost on the Pony Express with teepees for classrooms and tumbleweed blowing through the dusty track between storefront saloons. I explained that I wanted to scale peaks and wear blue jeans and dance in scarves and leg warmers under the tutelage of Rita Lionella, the legendary modern-dance instructor who had returned from New York to her birthplace and who headed the dance department there. This trilling fell on the deaf ears of a man who could fly to London as if he were taking the crosstown bus, but considered driving to Provincetown equivalent to traveling through the Cumberland Gap in a Conestoga wagon. Father believed climbing the steps of the West Side Y to the tennis courts was all the elevation a normal person needed.

  I won, although I already knew I was not going to be a “real” dancer. The ABT and even the Winnipeg Ballet were dreams I’d left behind when I hit five eight and a hundred and thirty pounds. A practical girl, I wasn’t willing to live on cigarettes and pepper vodka to dance for three years in the corps of the Houston Ballet, which I did manage, for one summer. Still, I wanted someday to do local theater, perhaps teach dance or teach English at a small college, English lit being for me a medium as familiar as water to a gill-breathing creature.

  So one day, I came out of the backstage, after the winter recital. I had done a solo turn to Afternoon of a Faun, and I was furious because I had been good. I had been good, and my parents had been in Switzerland. They’d sent roses, all of which I had given to the other girls, who thought of me as a benevolent princess. My hair was still painfully drawn back, my eyes still painted into golden almonds with kohl and gilt. And there was this boy. A boy in a black leather jacket, with what looked to be black leather curls and a reluctant one-sided smile.

  “Hi,” he said, “you were great,” and then, as if he thought I might walk away after thanking him, he added, “You know, I was the only male in there who wasn’t a boyfriend or a father.”

  “You like ballet?” I asked, wondering if this cute guy was either gay or a fellow New Yorker.

  “No, I sweep here,” he said. I thought he had a speech impediment and starting walking. I was a little pig.

  It turned out that he knew this.

  “I sweep the floor,” Leo added, breaking into a trot to catch up with me. “All round here. Outside all the rehearsal halls.”

  “Do you wait tables at sororities, too?” I asked. I knew scholarship students did. Belatedly, I was considering joining one, though I already had enough credits to be a junior. I lived in a crummy apartment and had learned that divine independence was really having to make new pudding every time one of your roommates got stoned and ate all four servings.

  “I’d rather sweep, frankly,” Leo said.

  “Why? Waiters get free meals.”

  “I’m not that fond of stuck-up bitches. And I don’t think anybody whose first name is Spenser deserves to be waited on.”

  I studied him. “I’m a stuck-up bitch,” I said, allowing one strap of my leotard to slip.

  “No,” he said, again with that fishhook smile, “you can be stuck up and still not be a bitch.”

  “Who says I’m stuck up?”

  “I know people. I know you name-drop. I know your dad has Kurt Vonnegut over to his house….”

  “That’s just because they’re the same age and he lives down the street—”

  “It’s still name-dropping.”

  “Oh, well,” I tossed back at him, “thanks for coming to my recital to preach moral hygiene to me. Happy, uh, sweeping.”

  “Let me sweep you off your feet,” Leo said.

  I winced at the line, “Ouch!”

  “Well, I can do better. Listen. I came because it was the only time I could watch you dance without pretend
ing to work. You’re…so beautiful it hurts to look at you.”

  “James Jones,” I said.

  “Close enough,” said Leo.

  “Who’s stuck up?” I countered.

  “Oh, I’m stuck up in a different sense. I have a high IQ. My parents are poor but proud. My mother is a Holocaust survivor. She was two, and her whole family escaped, but it still counts.”

  “You’re a reverse snob, then.”

  “Exactly. And that’s ever so much better, moral-superiority-wise.”

  “Jack Lemmon.”

  “Well, Billy Wilder.”

  “So what’s your major?”

  “Not dance.”

  “Neither is mine. I love it, but I’ll end up forcing kids to read Nell Harper.”

  “Known to the world as Harper Lee.”

  “Shut up!” I told him, laughing, “I’m not used to guys I can’t fool.”

  He wanted to be a poet. He was majoring in business administration.

  We went to the Kafé Kafka for sticky buns and tea. Never made it to the table.

  We fell into bed. The tea with milk we’d taken away in paper cups grew a gelid overcoat through the long, long night. I was as eager to be devirginized as I was to learn to rappel down a real mountain. (We ended up doing both those things together, for the first time. Leo said that night he’d been around the block, but later confessed he’d stopped at the cross-walk.) We tried ably to coach each other, and the morning after my recital, neither of us could walk without pain. I personally wanted to stand up in English 303 (Swift, Pope, and Fielding) to cry out, I’m changed! It took a week for the scabby irritation (we called it ‘kissing chin’) to clear up.

  Two months into our affair, a word we never would have used to describe what we felt, which was Love Everlasting, Leo wrote,