Chapter Twenty-one #2
“It’s a dozen lovely memories like that one that keep me sober. In college, Jere used to call me E.D. for easy drunk. Two drinks and I start thinking strip-and-go-naked is a perfect game.”
“E.D? E.D.? Oh, this is too good. I’m twenty-seven years old and I haven’t gotten drunk with my sister since before it was legal. Tonight we’re changing all that.”
Nora laughed. “The last time I drank, I drove into a tree.”
“Don’t worry—I won’t let you drive,” Ruby promised.
Caroline laughed. “Okay. One drink. One.”
Ruby did a little cha-cha-cha toward the kitchen, then threw back her head and said, “Margaritas!” Before Nora had figured out how to start another conversation with Caroline, Ruby was back, dancing into the living room with glasses that could have doubled as Easter baskets.
Nora took her drink, then laughed out loud when Ruby went to the record player, picked an album, and put it on.
We will . . . we will . . . rock you blared through the old speakers. Ruby had the volume so high the windows rattled and knickknacks seemed to dance spasmodically across the mantel.
Ruby took a laughing gulp of her drink, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and slammed the drink down onto the coffee table. Then she snapped a hand toward Caroline. “Come on, Miss America, dance with Hollywood’s worst comic.”
Caroline frowned. “That’s not true.”
“Dance with me.”
Shaking her head, Caroline grabbed Ruby’s hand and let herself be pulled into a twirl.
Nora cautiously sipped her cocktail and leaned forward, mesmerized by the interplay between her daughters.
They were standing side by side, both sweaty from dancing, and they looked so happy and carefree it actually hurt Nora’s heart.
These were the adult versions of the girls Nora had borne, the women she’d imagined her daughters would have become if their mother had never left.
The girls danced and drank and laughed together, bumping hips and holding hands, until Caroline held up her hands and said breathlessly, “No more, Ruby. I’m getting dizzy.”
“Ha! You’re not dizzy enough, that’s your problem,” and with that proclamation, she handed her sister her margarita. “Bottoms up.”
Caroline wiped the damp hair off her face. It looked for a moment as if she were going to decline.
“Oh, what the hell.” Caroline drank the rest of her margarita without stopping, then held out the empty glass. “Another one, please.”
“Yee ha!” Ruby danced into the kitchen and started up the blender.
On the stereo, the next album dropped down, clicked on top of the first one. With a whining screech, the arm moved to the beginning and lowered.
It was an old album by the Eurythmics. Sweet dreams are made of these pulsed through the speakers.
Caroline stumbled unsteadily to one side and held her hand out. “Dance with me, Mom.”
Mom. It was the first time Caroline had called her that in years.
“If I step on your foot, I’ll break every bone.”
Caroline laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m anesthetized.” The last word came out hopelessly mangled, and Caroline laughed again. “Drunk,” she said sternly, “drunk.”
Nora grabbed her fallen crutch and limped over to Caroline. She slipped one arm around her daughter’s tiny (too tiny; frighteningly tiny) waist and used the crutch for support.
Caroline pressed her hands against Nora’s shoulders. Slowly, they began to sway from side to side.
“This is the last song they played at the senior prom. I had them play it at my wedding, remember?”
Nora nodded. She was going to say something impersonal, but then she noticed the way Caroline was looking at her. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked gently, tightening her hold on Caro’s fragile waist.
“Talk about what?”
Nora couldn’t help herself. She stopped dancing and released Caroline’s hand, then touched her daughter’s cheek. “Your marriage.”
Caroline’s beautiful face crumpled. Her mouth quavered as she released a heavy sigh. “Oh, Mom . . . I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“There’s no—”
Ruby spun into the room, singing, “Margaritas for the senoras.” She saw Nora and Caro standing there, and she stopped in her tracks. “Jesus, I leave you two for five minutes and the waterworks start again.”
Nora shot her a pleading look. “Ruby, please.”
Ruby frowned. “Caro? What is it?”
Caroline took an unsteady step backward. She looked from Nora to Ruby and back to Nora. She was weeping silently, and it was a heart-wrenching sight. It was the way a woman wept in the middle of a dark night with her husband beside her in bed and her children sleeping down the hall.
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” Caro said to both of them in a breathy, broken voice.
Ruby stepped toward her, hand outstretched.
“Don’t touch me!” Caro said. At the shrill desperation in her voice, she laughed. “I’ll fall apart if you touch me, and I’m so goddamn sick of falling apart I could scream.”
Caroline sank slowly to her knees on the floor. Ruby sat down beside her, and Nora followed awkwardly, landing on her fallen crutch.
Caroline took a big gulp of her margarita, then looked up. Her eyes were dry now, but somehow that only made her look more wounded. A little girl looking out through a woman’s disillusioned eyes, wondering how she’d stumbled into such heartache.
“Are you sleeping?” Nora asked.
Caroline looked shocked. “No.”
“Eating?”
“No.”
“Medications?”
“No.”
Nora nodded. “Well, that’s a good thing.” She held Caroline’s hand. “Have you and Jere talked about this?”
Caroline shook her head. “I can’t tell him. We’re always going in different directions. I feel like a single parent most of the time. And I’m lonely. God, I’m so damned lonely sometimes I can’t stand it.”
“You haven’t even talked to him about it?” Ruby said, leaning toward her sister.
Caroline turned to her. “You don’t know what it’s like, Ruby. You can say anything to anyone. It’s harder for me.”
“Yeah, but—”
Nora touched Ruby’s thigh. “She doesn’t need that now, Ruby.
There’s a time for the real world and consequences, Caroline knows that.
This is a time for letting her know that whatever happens, we’ll always be there for her.
” Nora gazed lovingly at Caroline. “I know what you’re going through, believe me.
You’re at that place where your own life overwhelms you and you can’t see a way to break free. And you’re suffocating.”
Caroline drew in a gulping, hiccuping breath. Her eyes rounded. “How did you know that?”
Nora touched her cheek. “I know” was all she said for now. There would be more to come, she knew, but now they had to lay all the cards on the table. “Is Jere seeing another woman?”
Caroline made a desperate, moaning sound. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Everyone always said Jere was just like Daddy. I guess I should have been afraid.” She sniffled and wiped her eyes. “I’m going to leave him, though.”
“Do you love him?” Nora asked gently.
Caroline went pale. Her lower lip trembled; the hands in her lap tightened into a bloodless knot. “So much . . .”
Nora’s heart felt as if it were breaking. Here was another legacy of her motherhood: she’d taught her children that marriages were disposable.
“Let me tell you what it’s like, this decision you think you’ve made,” she said to Caroline.
“When you leave a man you love, you feel like your heart is splitting in half. You lie in your lonely bed and you miss him, you drink your coffee in the morning and you miss him, you get a haircut and all you can think is that no one will notice but you. And you go on with a broken heart, you go on.” She took a deep, unsteady breath.
“But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is what you do to your children.
You tell yourself it’s okay; divorces happen all the time and your children will get over it.
Maybe that’s true if the love is really gone from your marriage.
But if you still love him, and you leave him without trying to save your family, you will .
. . break. You don’t just cry in the middle of the night, you cry forever, all the time, until your insides are so dry there are no tears left, and then you learn what real pain is. ”
Nora knew that what she was saying wasn’t true for all marriages, all divorces.
But she was certain that Caroline hadn’t tried hard enough, not yet, not if she loved Jere.
She closed her eyes, trying to think of Caroline .
. . but then she was thinking about her own life, her own mistakes, and before she knew it, she was talking again.
“You walk around and get dressed and maybe you even find a career that makes you rich and famous. You think that was what you wanted all along, but you find out it doesn’t matter.
You don’t know how to feel anymore. You’re dead.
Somewhere, your daughters are growing up without you.
. . . You know that somewhere they’re out there, holding someone else’s hand, crying on someone else’s shoulder.
And every single day, you live with what you did to them.
Don’t make my mistake,” Nora said fiercely.
“Fight. Fight for your love and your family. In the end, it’s all there is, Caroline. All there is.”
Caroline didn’t look up as she whispered, “What if I lose him anyway?”
“Ah, Caro,” Nora said, stroking her daughter’s hair, “what if you find him again?”