Chapter 5 #2
I tell him about Pauline, who is not cruel in any way you can put a finger on, who is in fact often gracious, who has called me sweetheart my whole life, and who has spent the last twenty years steadily and politely reminding me that I am the lesser daughter in a household that only had room for one.
I tell him about Graham. About Graham, specifically, and the way Graham has, since marrying Pauline, taken it upon himself to be the family's voice for me.
About the family lunches at which Graham would order my meal, she'll have the salmon, she doesn't like the rich sauces.
About the family vacations at which Graham would tell the waiter at the hotel restaurant which wine to bring to my place, the sauvignon blanc, she doesn't drink reds.
About the way Graham would, every time I came home from college, ask me when I was going to stop hiding behind those books and find a real life, in that warm patronizing voice that always sounded reasonable and always made the back of my neck prickle.
I tell him about the conservatorship word.
I have not used it out loud yet. I had not, until I told him, even let myself think it as a word.
But it had been sitting at the back of my mind since Pauline's phone call on Wednesday afternoon, because there had been something in the we are worried about you that had not been about worry.
There had been the small particular emphasis of a woman who is trying out a piece of architecture to see if it would hold.
I tell him: I think they are going to try to have me declared unfit.
I do not know if they will succeed. I do not know if they will even file. But I think they are going to try.
He has not interrupted me once.
I have been talking for an hour.
The tea has gone cold in both mugs.
The lamps are on. The sun has gone all the way down outside the south windows and the library is a small lighted island in the blue of an early-summer evening, and I am sitting in a wingback chair with my knees tucked under me and my mug cold in my hands and I have, I realize with a small startled inward gasp, just told this man more about my family than I have told another living human being in two years.
I look up at him.
He is looking at me.
He has not moved. He has not interrupted.
He has not made any of the small noises men make to fill the space when a woman is telling them something painful — the small mm-hm, the small I'm sorry, the small that's terrible.
He has just been sitting in the wingback with his hands folded in his lap and his pale eyes on my face, and he has been listening with the kind of attention that is not a technique.
The kind of attention that is a posture.
The kind a body can only do if it has decided, somewhere deep underneath itself, that this is what it is going to do for as long as the talking lasts.
He waits.
He waits to make sure I am done.
I nod, finally. Just a small one. To tell him: I am done.
He says, then, slowly, like he has been holding the sentence in his mouth for the whole hour and shaping it:
"You're not too quiet."
He looks at me.
He says, "The world's too loud. And anyone who doesn't see that you're the strongest person in the room isn't paying attention."
I do not — I will tell the truth — I do not start crying because I have decided to.
I am not a crier in front of people. I have spent my whole life perfecting the art of not crying in front of people, and that art has been the central skill of my emotional life since I was approximately seven years old.
But the sentence he has just said reaches some seam that has been holding inside me for so long I had forgotten it was a seam, and the seam goes, and the cry comes up the way I imagine grief comes up for people who have lost somebody — not as a decision but as a tide.
It just arrives. It does not ask my permission.
It does not ask for tissues. It does not ask for warning.
I cover my face with my hands.
I cry. I cry in a way I do not entirely recognize.
It is not pretty crying — there is no pretty crying, but there is the kind women learn to do that does not disturb the room, and that is not the kind I am doing.
I am doing the other kind. The kind that comes up from underneath.
The kind that has been waiting twenty-six years for the room to be safe enough.
I feel him stand up.
I feel him move.
I do not know what he is going to do and I am too far inside myself, for that one moment, to track it. I think, very dimly, that he is going to come over and put his arms around me, and I do not know whether I would let him, and I am not entirely sure yet whether I want him to.
He does not. He does not come over.
He goes to the desk.
He comes back with the box of tissues I keep behind the circulation counter — the one with the little ceramic dachshund on top — and he sets the box on the small round table between our chairs, within reach of my hand.
He sits back down in the wingback. He does not say anything. He does not touch me.
He just sits there.
He sits there for the entire time I am crying. He does not look at me. He does not look away. He looks at the windows, the lamps, the bookcases. He sits with the same posture of patient attention he had when I was talking. He is not in a hurry. He is not, I realize, going to leave.
He is just going to sit.
The crying takes — I do not know how long.
Eventually it stops. I take a tissue. I wipe my face.
I blow my nose, with a noise that under normal conditions would humiliate me and under these conditions does not.
I take another tissue. I press it to the corners of my eyes.
I take a long shaky breath. I let it out.
I look up at him.
He is watching the south windows.
He says, without looking at me, "Are you all right?"
I say, "Yes."
He nods.
He says, "Do you want to keep talking, or do you want to be quiet?"
I think about it. I am honestly not sure which I want. The question is the gentlest thing anyone has ever asked me, because it is the first time in my life that anyone has bothered to ask which one I was in the mood for.
I say, "Quiet, I think."
He says, "Okay."
He picks the Berry up off the floor. He opens it to where he was. He reads.