Book Two
Ellen Ballman
It is seven years before I can open the boxes I took from Ellen’s house. It is 2005, and I am still on the same page, I am still wondering exactly what happened.
“Moribund on the sofa”—what did that mean? Half dead, already dead, well on the way to being dead? Was she in a coma? Did she know someone had come for her? Did she hope to be saved? How does someone live to be sixty and end up so alone? I go through the few papers I have—her death certificate says she died at 3 A.M. in the emergency room of the hospital. Who called the ambulance? How long was she in the emergency room? She must have been a little bit alive when she got there, otherwise the DOA box would have been checked. I think of calling Atlantic City 911 and asking for a transcription. And why am I remembering someone saying something about her being discovered by a Chinese deliveryman?
Seven years after the fact and it is as fresh as when it happened. It seems that this is the nature of trauma—it doesn’t change, soften, go dim, mutate into something less sharp, less dangerous.
Even now I want to call Ellen and ask what it was all about. Did she kill herself? Sort of. She chose to check herself out of the hospital against medical advice and went home to die alone on her sofa. Her fear of fear, her dislike of doctors, her underlying anxiety were certainly contributing factors.
I remember the birthday card—“This card is being sent early as I am not sure I will still be here on the 18th of December. I go to Jefferson Hospital on December 4 for a kidney procedure. What the outcome will be I do not know.”
I remember calling Ellen, half annoyed, half concerned.
“I canceled the procedure,” she said.
I never understood what the procedure was for; the closest thing I got to an answer was something about blood flow to a kidney and that she’d seen a lot of doctors—including one in Atlantic City who sent her to someone in Philadelphia—but she was scared to have anything done down there, to be alone in the hospital, and I knew I was supposed to say, I’ll come and take care of you.
Part of me thinks that if she’d asked in the “right way,” I would have helped her, and I am annoyed with myself. What does it matter how she tried to ask? She was afraid and she’d probably never gotten good results with asking—probably in part because she didn’t know how. So instead of getting what she wanted, she continually got what she didn’t—she pushed people away.
And I cannot escape the nearly biblical connection of the kidney—I was adopted into my family on account of my mother’s son Bruce dying of kidney failure. Is it my fault that she died? Was I expected to give her a kidney? Just after her death, I called her doctor in Atlantic City; in death I was to her what I couldn’t be in life. “This is Ellen Ballman’s daughter, I’m looking for some information.” I paused, waiting for him to say, “Ellen Ballman was unmarried and had no children. I have no idea who you are.”
“A transplant would have saved her,” he said, without prejudice. There was nothing in his voice implying that it should have come from me. Without prompting he went on to say that the kidney she needed would not necessarily have to have been my kidney. Had they talked about it—did he know who I was? Had he asked her, Do you have a family?
“I don’t know why she checked herself out of the hospital. I don’t know what she was thinking. Her condition was treatable—she could have been saved.”
After she died I wrote letters—to the brief list of friends her lawyer gave me, to the friend who called to say she was dead, to her niece in California, and so on. I wrote to them, telling them who I was and that I would very much like to hear more about Ellen, their memories, experiences, anything they wanted to share. I dropped the letters in the mail and nothing happened. The only person I heard from was Ellen’s Polish cleaning lady—who didn’t speak English. The woman she worked for on Tuesdays called me and together they left a message on my answering machine. It was a message left in translation as relayed by her Tuesday employer—the cleaning lady is heartbroken, she loved Ellen, she had no idea she was so sick. The cleaning lady had gone to Poland to visit her family; “she was away but now she is back.” I should call her anytime. I should come visit. She loves me very much. The Tuesday employer also left her name and phone number—“Call anytime,” she said. I couldn’t bring myself to call.
It is human nature to run from danger—but why did I have to be so human? Why could I not have been more capable, a better biological daughter? Why did I not have the strength and perspective to both protect myself and give? I failed her—I was so busy protecting myself from her that I didn’t do a good enough job recognizing the trouble she was in. I expected her to ask for what she needed in the way that I thought was appropriate. I could not see her selfishness with perspective, could not see that this was a woman in enormous pain, could not escape myself, my own needs, my own trapped desire. What does it matter how she asked? I should have given. I should have given despite not wanting to give. And what self was I protecting—does bracing oneself against something offer any protection?
People tell me how to feel. “You must be relieved,” they say. “You must be confused.” “You must be ambivalent.”
I failed her. I didn’t pay enough attention to the last letters, to the last time we spoke. She had called telling me to “hurry up and call your father, he may not last long.”
The idea that she was calling about him, that she and he had a relationship that extended beyond me, was galling. And that he was my father and had made me prove it, only to then not talk to me, and now I should hurry and call because he may not last—that these people who had so suddenly arrived might now so suddenly disappear was all too much.
My mother is dead. My mother called to tell me my mother is dead? This is the dissonance, the split, the impossibility of living two lives at once.
Yom Kippur, autumn, 1998. I am in Saratoga Springs, New York, at Yaddo, an artists’ colony. It is just a few weeks after the funeral. I go to services hosted by the local temple. I am alone among strangers, in a place safe for grief, and for me this is the memorial—“May he remember.” There is a part of the Yom Kippur service called the Yizkor—during which they read the names of all those related to the congregation who have died that year. I add her name to that list. The names are read aloud. There are other names before and after hers. Her name is called out, it is heard—equal to the others, it is not alone. Her name is said aloud, it is offered to everyone. I see other people crying and feel that I have done something, I have given her one thing she wanted, to be recognized, to be noticed. This is her Jewish funeral. I am holding a memorial service for a mother I never knew in a room full of strangers. We are embracing history and grief and all that has come and gone, and it makes more sense than anything has.
I am thinking about Atlantic City and walking out on the pier and how the clouds cracked open and rays of late-afternoon rainbow-colored light came streaming down. I am thinking about the time I sent her rose petals from the Yaddo garden. I am thinking of how she wanted everything and anything and how insatiable she was. I am glad I am there, alone, among strangers. I cry throughout the service. I am crying not just for her, but for myself, for every accident that has been a part of this, for every failing on everyone’s part, for the damned fragility of being human, for being afraid, ashamed. This is my atonement; I am confessing my sins, beating my chest, asking for forgiveness for what I have said and for what I have not said, for what I have done and for what I have not done, for those I have hurt or offended knowingly or unknowingly, for my errors of omission—this confession is known in Judaism as the Viduy. I am crying for how isolated I am, how alone, and how I have to go through life like this.
Did I ever say how precariously positioned I feel—on the edge of the earth, as though my permit could be revoked at any second?
The boxes. I come home from Yaddo and the boxes are in my apartment waiting for me, greeting me, nudging me to remember what I can’t forget. I cannot open the boxes. I am afraid of them, as though they contain something that might hurt me. Peeling the tape off them might unleash a virulent bacteria, just touching them might somehow infect me with her. I live with them like furniture, taking care to steer around them, to not let anything I care about come in contact with them, and then finally, more than nine months later, I put them in storage. I banish the boxes to the netherland of ministorage—before they go I mark them carefully in Sharpie marker on all sides, Dead Ellen 1–4. She put me up for adoption—I’m sending her to ministorage. She will join my tax records, my vinyl record collection, my dot matrix printer, my old typewriter, becoming a piece of my life I am unwilling to entirely unload but that is best kept off-site.
What is the half-life of a toxic box? When will I be ready to look inside—does the potential to rattle and shake lessen over time?
In the spring of 2005 I promise myself to once and for all deal with dead Ellen. I bring the boxes out of suspension, deliver them back to my apartment. Over time they have ripened; there is a certain smell to them—active disintegration. And again they sit, linger, become furniture. I stack things on top of them: suitcases, books, things of great weight. I am covertly holding them closed.
In the fall of 2005, twelve years after she found me, I take the boxes with me to Long Island for a weekend—just me and the four corrugated cardboard containers of dead Ellen. I take the boxes to the same small house where I stood in the yard and listened as my mother told me that my mother was dead. The house, then a rental, now is mine—a piece of something people call home. I take four boxes to the house on Long Island, a safe and controlled place—where like a bomb squad I plan to detonate them. I put the boxes on the kitchen table—my grandmother’s table. There is no escaping them now, no way around it.
I ask my family to stay home. I cannot do this with an audience, I have to be alone, able to sit with whatever I find. I need to not have to explain what can’t be explained—all that I am now of course trying to explain. I sit before the boxes, preparing to take inventory, giddy like a child playing the game of going through the mother’s purse, and then also feeling a more serious weight—I am the guardian, the keeper of what remains, and if I was not able to know her in life, perhaps I can crawl closer in death. Is there such a thing as intimacy after the fact? Will I find her in these boxes, will I know her any better after I am done? There is a piece of me that wishes I had taken more—perhaps if I’d taken ten boxes there’d be more of something, not just more of the same.
Box 1—the item on top is sheet music. “Hail to the Redskins.” I don’t know exactly why I was so surprised that this was the first item—was it because my biological father was a college football player, or that I could all too easily picture the two of them going to Redskins games while his wife was home with the kids? But it was especially interesting in light of other information I discovered: Ellen’s 1971 arrest for gambling—setting up a gaming table in the Sheraton Park Hotel and taking bets during a Cowboys-Redskins game—and an antitrust lawsuit that my father filed against the Redskins and pro football when he wanted to bring a new football team to town and ran into difficulty. And as soon as I see the sheet music, I also see myself at thirteen with braces in my bedroom in my parents’ house in Chevy Chase and my clarinet teacher, Mr. Schreiber, sitting beside me while I honked and screeched, stopping to lick the reed of my rented clarinet, wanting to get it right. Mr. Schreiber was the leader of the Redskins marching band—the Indian chief—who with a long headdress over his thick white hair would lead the band out onto the field at halftime.
Under the sheet music is a faux leather portfolio of photographs. I reflexively take a deep breath—preparing for what comes next—but on account of the dust, I have a coughing fit and have to go get a drink. The photos are the work of Harris & Ewing—the largest photo studio in Washington, photographers of presidents and high society—and apparently several are of my mother as an infant. In the first two portraits she is about four months old—there’s one serious, one smiling—and then she is somewhere near two, in a white dress with a big bow in her hair, white lace-up shoes, delicate and delighted—again and always looking off to the side. And then a little older, maybe three or four, posing with a big beautiful Dalmatian. And again—maybe part of the same shoot—in lederhosen or a pinafore. There is the palpable sense of her as Daddy’s little girl—devilish glimmer in the eye, she is shy and she is charming and she is defiant—and I have the strange sense that she knows more than she is able to fully understand. She is not a baby but a girl, and still and always there is a tentativeness and a need for confirmation—one can see it all. And for me there is a dull familiarity, an inescapable, unnamable relatedness—we do not look alike but in common. There is something similar in the arms, in the cheeks and the eyes—we have the same eyes.
There is a Harris & Ewing portrait of Ellen’s mother—cool, crisp, cold, proud of herself if no one else. The fact that these photos exist at all speaks to a certain kind of prosperity. The average person in the early 1940s did not have portraits taken of themselves and their children. It also reminds me of something Ellen once said to me—“Let’s have our portrait painted.” When she said it, the words seemed to exist in another world. Did she once have her portrait painted? Was it something promised that never happened? There is another photo taken on board a ship by someone else, of Ellen’s mother and a woman I assume is her mother’s mother, Mary Hannan—sometime in the 1930s. And then there is another of Mary Hannan long ago—a youthful, beautiful young woman.
Mixed between the pages there are random snapshots—Ellen playing on the beach, with her brother deep in the background. There is one that I assume is her father and brother in the backyard of their house. And then Ellen at about seven or eight standing outside the house with her brother—he is in his military school uniform, fists clenched at his side, his mother the photographer’s shadow a dark outline on the sidewalk—and by now her father is gone. And then Ellen is on a sofa next to her mother—adolescent, chubby, and excruciatingly uncomfortable. The images are frozen moments of family relation; they are documents taken to serve as proof and memory when there is no longer anyone to tell the story.
Things fall out—dozens of unopened bills with the yellow forwarding stickers from the post office, Notify Sender of New Address. Hers was a life lived in motion, spiraling down, running, barely one step ahead of herself. Envelopes slip to the floor—insurance overdue notice of $530 and another from a collection agency for $13,043.75 due to the office of comptroller of revenue. There is a set of legal papers relating to the reopening of a case filed by a family on behalf of their children to recover damages suffered by lead paint poisoning in buildings owned and managed by the defendants—specifically and especially Ellen Ballman.
There is a letter from Security National Bank: “This is to advise you that because of an unsatisfactory relationship on your account, we must request the account be closed within 15 days of this letter.” There is a commercial gas and electric bill due for over $10,000. And an envelope with an autumn 1995 Mark, Fore & Strike catalog, Fun Casual Clothing Since 1951. The odor wafting up from the box stings—it’s a little mothball, a little hamster cage, a little asthmatic, and definitely something turned sour. There’s a letter from the Maryland Department of Public Works dated June 6, 1984, a citation for general nuisance, vacant lot conditions, overgrowth of tall weeds and brush, scattered bottles, cans, and paper, a rat running along the front of the lot. The address, 4709 Langedrum Lane, Chevy Chase, Maryland. It is a few miles from where I grew up—and a place not known for rats. There is a notice of cancelation of insurance and another notice for delinquent taxes on a property on Seventh Street in Washington, D.C.
Under the photographs and all through the boxes there are notes, scraps of paper with little rhyming poems scrawled in pencil and pen and always signed “JC” ( Jack). Who was he to her—a lover, an old friend, a friend of her father’s? I know from my research that he was arrested more than once for gambling, that he owned a dry cleaning store and later lived in Atlantic City. And I know how sad Ellen was when he was ill and after he died. How did they meet? He had a wife, Katherine—I see her name on some of the documents and I find a card from her to Ellen. Clearly, he cared a great deal about Ellen—he once wrote me a letter, attesting to the validity of Ellen’s stories about her mother.
The boxes are like a paper trail version of This Is Your Life. Inside one of the boxes is a smaller box marked Master Bedroom. I peel cracked cellophane tape off. Inside is an open metal file—in each compartment a manila folder, each folder trouble, a case in and of itself, literally. The rack is filled with file after file of real estate transactions gone wrong, buildings bought and sold, backup loans, trusts, deeds, dozens of letters to lawyers, lots of back-and-forth, motions to counter, depositions. Motion for leave to withdraw as counsel for plaintiff and for counterdefendant. There is nothing about this that is good news. At the back there is an old telephone message book—with duplicates. Call Rudy at work. Ms. Watson—important. Re Rose, verification was sent on wife last week. For Alex, re Lackey could he come by at 3pm today? It’s been years but I feel like returning the calls. Hi there, can you tell me about Ellen Ballman? How did you get to know her? Was she nice? Was she fair? Was she a good person? And then there is yet another file with a note on top. Please talk to Ellen about this! She’s annoying me to death about it. What does she want me to do except bring it to your attention!!! There is a piece of paper—on which someone has scrawled “For Your Information” and a notation that looks like “EB hours 300 as of 8-8-89.” (I take this to mean she has served three hundred hours of community service so far, but I could be wrong—maybe she had three hundred to go.) It is attached to a document that reads:
IN THE CIRCUIT COURT FOR MONTGOMERY
COUNTY MARYLAND
Criminal No *****
Upon consideration of Defendant’s Motion for Modification or Reduction of Sentence, the State having deferred to the Court’s ruling, and verification having been received that———has completed the terms of her probation, it is…
ORDERED, that the guilty finding against the Defendant in this case be, and the same hereby is, STRICKEN, and it is further ORDERED, that a disposition of Probation before Judgment under article 27, Section 641 be entered, and it is further ORDERED that supervised probation be, and the same hereby is TERMINATED, and case closed, and it is further ORDERED, that the hearing scheduled for August 5, 1989 be removed from the Court’s calendar.
I do not think that the above pertained to Ellen. I think it pertained to the woman who was sentenced along with her, and was sent to Ellen to prompt her to complete her community service. Curiously, the woman who was sentenced along with her was the same woman who called my mother to tell her—us—that Ellen was dead.
There are pharmacy receipts. I jot down the names of the drugs and make a note to look them up. Meprobamate, for short-term relief of the symptoms of anxiety. Tenormin, a beta blocker used to treat high blood pressure and angina pectoris. It is also used after a heart attack to improve survival. Dyazide, a potassium sparing and thiazide diuretic used to treat high blood pressure and swelling due to excess body water. Wygesic, an analgesic combination used to relieve pain. Premarin—conjugated estrogens used to reduce menopause symptoms. Imipramine, a tricyclic anti-depressant used to treat depression.
Just going through the list gives me chest pains. Maybe her father really did die of a heart attack—her maternal grandfather did at age fifty-three. Whatever was going on, it sounds complicated by her emotional state—did she have high blood pressure, did she have a heart condition? “It was all those damn diet pills,” my father said. “No matter what they said to her she wouldn’t stop taking the diet pills.” She was depressed, anxious, and dying when she checked herself out of the hospital, and she could have been saved.
Does any of this come as a shock? Not really. Among the first facts I had about my mother came from the private investigator—interestingly, an adopted woman who had never searched for her own family—who said, “In a nutshell she was indicted and driven out of town.” I never knew exactly what she was talking about, but it’s starting to make sense. I find articles about Ellen in the Washington Post—stories about her business practices, which amounted to her and a friend running a “chop shop” for documents in which they changed people’s income records, forged tax documents, and without customers’ knowledge qualified them for loans in excess of what they would otherwise be allowed to borrow. In court she admitted to falsifying documents for mortgages worth tens of millions of dollars and was sentenced to an eighteen-month suspended prison term, three years’ probation, and ordered to perform five hundred hours of community service.
What was surprising to me was how it all seemed to go on and on for years and years. The arrest and conviction were just the last straw. Not everything she did was illegal, but even that which wasn’t was done in the most difficult way possible—there was no grace. Did she plan these things? Was she scheming all along? Did she have a pathological need to make a deal, to do business in a certain way? Did she just not know how to do it the right way? It would seem that to do anything the way it was supposed to be done was fundamentally against her grain. There are times I think maybe she was a sort of Robin Hood and it’s okay, and then I think not. The possibility that it is pathological makes me want to know more about her father. I write to the FBI and request his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, only to find out that it was destroyed on schedule in 1971 according to government rules pertaining to document storage. But at least it confirms something—there was a file.
My mother as a kind of Bonnie and Clyde—always on the run, a Bonnie on her own always looking for Clyde, always looking for her father. And just as one worries about a genetic predisposition to a heart attack, I worry about a genetic predisposition to gambling, to midlife disaster. Will I suddenly become a criminal? I think about her in relation to the father—he too had midlife career disaster, not exactly criminal but certainly unbecoming. The bank he was president of went under largely due to a kind of good-old-boy mismanagement—the bank’s board favored loans to officers, directors, and their relatives above a responsibility to customers. I wonder if it was some sense of themselves as exempt from the rules that brought them together. Were they clever and crafty together? Did they take pleasure in their outlaw status—did they think they would somehow get away with it—what ever that might have meant? I think of Ellen in middle age—a woman with physical and emotional problems, cobbling it together, living alone in a kind of postmodern version of the Atlantic City portrayed in Louis Malle’s brilliant 1981 film.
And in the end, almost after the fact, I find an unopened letter from the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville, Maryland, dated March 29, 1989. I open the letter, “There are no words which can fully express my sincere appreciation for your most generous gifts to the Hebrew Home. The Computers will allow us to do our work more effectively and ultimately, the residents of the Home will benefit.” The letter goes on to acknowledge the donation of four computers, five monitors, five keyboards, and a printer. I find myself wondering if this is a Robin Hood moment—all the more compelling because the letter was never opened.
There are no pictures of her at seventeen—the age when my father asked her to marry him. No pictures of her at twenty-two, pregnant with me, no pictures of her in the hospital—holding me, dressing me in my “going-home” outfit. Do those pictures exist, were they in some other box I didn’t find? What did she dress like in the 1950s, when she worked for my father at the Princess Shop? After all, that was the time of the French designer knockoff—Dior’s A-line, Givenchy’s sack, the boxy Chanel jacket, the swing coat, perfect for hiding a pregnancy. Did she like the new “modern” materials, nylon, Crimplene, and Orlon? Did she wear cone bras or all-in-one girdles? Was she the kind of teenager who dressed like an adult, or was she wearing poodle skirts, bobby sox, and going to drive-in movies? What was she thinking? This was the era of atomic anxiety, of Perry Como, Dean Martin, Connie Francis, and the beehive hairdo. It was the time of air-raid sirens and fallout shelters, the Rosenberg electrocutions and the McCarthy hearings. This was Washington, D.C., in the 1950s—and it was prime time for my mother.
I had hoped to find her in these boxes, to find a description of her childhood, the games she had played, clues to her troubled relationship with her mother and what she really knew about her father, her memories, the trinkets that she kept as talismans to protect or guide her. I hoped to have some idea of how she saw herself, what her hopes and dreams had been. I wanted to know her secrets.
I take the empty boxes to the dump, crack them in half, and toss them into the recycling bin—I am sending dead Ellen around once more. Maybe she’ll come back as napkins or paper or some kind of shopping bag. I hurl the old metal file into one of the bins. It lands hard, the sound exploding like a grenade—everyone turns and looks. I shrug. I throw away the old mail, the scraps of paper, the bits and pieces, keeping enough to fill one box—a box to remind me. I put the box in the car and drive it back to New York, where it waits in a corner of my apartment, and then once again gets sent to ministorage.
It is 2005 and all I can think is that this is not how the woman who was so concerned about appearances would want to have been seen, this is not how the woman with thirty-two Chanel lipsticks would want to have been presented—but this is who she is and what she left behind.
Imagining my mother.
I think of my mother and imagine a young woman who hoped for more. I think of my mother and try to inhabit her experience.
In the 1950s ladies still wore hats and gloves and men wore overcoats. Young men and women met at socials, organized dances, chaperoned. The men hoped to go to college; the women hoped.
At Catholic school the nuns told Ellen very little about the birds and the bees and a lot about sin and all that could go wrong. Almost everything already had gone wrong for Ellen, but no one acknowledged that. She was surrounded by people who didn’t want to know, and quickly learned that faith got her nothing—in fact her belief that something would save her got her into trouble. At Catholic school she protected herself by insisting—at least to herself—that she was Jewish. Her mother was Catholic, her father was Jewish, and she always described herself as her father’s little girl.
Pin money. Her mother didn’t have much—whatever she had she got from her new husband, and she didn’t want to share. Ellen got a job working in the dress shop—one night, weekends, and holidays, and a good discount. She liked working, liked acting like a grown-up—helping the ladies with their shopping. They treated her in the motherly sort of way that she wished her own mother would.
Ellen opened a bank account—vowing to save half, or at least part, of what she earned. She had a future. The boss offered her a ride home—she accepted. In the car they talked. Again, her boss offered her a ride home, she accepted, and he asked if she wanted to go out for dinner.
And then again her boss offered her a ride, took her out to dinner, and after dinner they parked the car somewhere where they could talk. She asked him about what he hoped to be, what dreams he had—he found that appealing. He appeared interested in her—she found that appealing. She was practicing on him—being girlish and tempting. He took it as an opportunity. Imagine the fumbling. He wants it but doesn’t want to say what it is; she doesn’t want it but has no idea how to set a limit.
Where did it start—in a car, in a hotel, in the back of the store, in a borrowed place? What did he say to her? Did he believe it himself, did she believe him? How often did it happen? Does he think he’s stealing something—sampling something he shouldn’t? What part of her is his favorite? Imagine her newly formed figure, fresh, tender, perfect. Imagine him. Does she worry about getting pregnant—does she even know how girls get pregnant? Does he worry about it?
This is their courtship; she is waiting, she is waiting for him, she is waiting while he is at work, while he is with his family. While she is waiting she does mischievous things; she tells her friends, she makes sure her mother finds out, she thinks there is cachet in the fact that she is the younger girl of a much older man. She wants something else, something more—more than she wants him—but what she gets is sex, and then he’s gone. He has her in ways his wife would never allow, gets from her things he would otherwise never think to ask.
They go for drinks—martinis, gimlets, or Tom Collinses, mai tais, Singapore slings, and sea breezes. They snack on salty cocktail nuts and have prime rib and salad of iceberg lettuce with Maytag blue cheese dressing.
He offers to set her up in a place of her own—she’s thinking they’re setting up house, he’s thinking it’s a place to be alone with her. She’s thinking it’s a way out, an escape from her mother—and her mother’s husband. She accepts defiantly, half in anger, half wishing her mother could stop her—knowing she will not allow herself to be stopped.
At seventeen she is the boss of herself; she is glad to be getting out from under her mother’s coldness, the years of opposition, out from under the eye and hand of her stepfather.
“He’s nice to me—he cares about me,” she tells her mother.
“He doesn’t care about you—married men don’t care about girls like you,” her mother says.
“He’s getting an apartment for us.”
“He’s never going to leave his wife.”
“He’s going to marry me.”
“He’s already married.”
She starts to pack a suitcase.
“There is something wrong with you,” her mother says.
“You are what’s wrong with me,” Ellen says.
“I would send you to boarding school, but now that you’re ruined the nuns won’t take you—no one wants used goods.”
Her mother grabs the suitcase. “It’s my suitcase, I never said you could use it.”
Ellen gets paper bags, grocery sacks from the kitchen. She packs her clothes in the paper bags. Her mother goes through her dresser drawers throwing things at her. Ellen goes into the attic and finds an old traveling bag that had been her father’s—later she finds a dead mouse in it, a shriveled furry husk. She stuffs her bags with clothing, with the trinkets from the top of her dresser, with the stuffed animals her father gave her long ago. She goes out to the door.
“If you go out that door, don’t think you’re ever coming back,” her mother yells after her.
He is not waiting for her outside—he is afraid of her mother. He is down the street, around the corner. She toddles off, dropping things on the sidewalk as she goes.
The apartment is in a big building on Connecticut Avenue, a small one-bedroom in the back, with a view of another apartment. It is “furnished.”
Whose furniture was it? The woman who lived there before—who finally got married, who took a job in Ohio, who went home to live with her mother, who died lonely of old age at forty. Whose was it really? It was a little of this and that, what people left behind, what no one wanted.
They have fun together—he is able to play with her, to joke and push in a way that he has never been able to before. He has always been the one teased. She tolerates it because it is familiar, and she gives it back to him and then some. He teaches her to drive—he teases her, she gets mad, and he laughs all the more.
When he is not there, she sleeps with the stuffed animals she brought from home.
It is incredibly quiet. She has a radio and then a secondhand television set, and later a phone. There are a few mismatched dishes in the kitchen cabinets, things he’s taken from his mother’s basement, telling her it’s for the kids to play with or needed at the house. There are crocheted rugs on the floor—all of it is a little nubbly, a little dark and depressing, an echo of World War II, but she gets plants and sometimes she gets flowers and she feels like a grown-up, a woman with a home of her own. She sleeps with the light on. If she has one of her high school girlfriends over—they lie and say they are going to someone else’s house—they roast marshmallows on the gas stove, eat candy for dinner, and go to the movies and drink coffee for breakfast. There are other times when she goes to a friend’s house—and is reminded of what most girls/other girls are doing, living at home with their mothers and fathers, eating dinner in the dining room, wearing clothing that is washed and ironed for them, feeling protected. The mothers feel sorry for her and worry that she might be a bad influence. She walks to the zoo, she takes the bus downtown, and she works in the clothing store.
He and she are a good match, except that he is already married and is not going to divorce his wife, and she is already emotionally on edge. They are two people who lost their childhoods, two whose parents abandoned them to one degree or another, two people a little bit lost. I see her entertaining him, tempting and teasing him. I see him as being fatherly and calming and temperate, and I see the two of them having drinks and going wild. I see him excusing himself, washing up, and going home. I see her being angry and taking it out on him—she is dramatic and an actress.
I see her in cashmere sweaters. I see her body, new and fresh and entirely unmarked. I see her and him simultaneously discovering themselves. I see them going out on the town. I see a certain amount of swagger and bravado.
And sometimes he doesn’t have time—his wife needs him, his kids need him. Sometimes he brings one of the kids. His oldest boy waits in the living room while they talk privately for a few minutes in the bedroom; the talking involves giggling and sighing. And then he tells her he can’t do it anymore, it’s too hard on his family. He tells her he means it this time.
She cries. She thinks she will die. She is sure she will die, she feels sick, and she feels pain in her chest. She is up all night. She drinks. She calls a friend of his, his buddy—she cannot bear to be alone.
He returns, promising that soon he will be hers completely. She pretends she is not going to take him back—she pretends she has fallen for his friend. The friend gives her some money—he also gives her something that itches.
She is lonely. She goes out at cocktail hour, to get back at him, to remind him that she is alone and he is married with children. Men buy her drinks, sometimes they buy her dinner. He is irate. He is trying to be in two places at the same time. His wife has found out. She tells him that the girl can’t work at the store anymore.
When she is alone, she eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinks the liquor he has left behind. At night, when she’s sleeping, she sometimes hears the sound of the men who brought her father home—she hears their voices, their footsteps. She remembers being asleep when it happened, waking up, being afraid to open the door. She remembers looking through the keyhole—seeing her father’s arm hanging limp. She remembers being terrified.
His wife has told him to stop. He has told his wife that it is over and done—he tells Ellen that it is over and done. He sneaks around. He is angry with both of them for wanting so much—for wanting more, wanting it all.
There are times she wants to leave him. She tells him she has met someone new—it is a little bit true. She tries, she attempts to replace him, but it never lasts long. She spends time with friends of his—maybe they have wives, maybe not. Once she spent the night with a friend and his wife.
I picture Norman furious and jealous.
She and his wife are at the same holiday party—they see each other across the room, they know who they are. He is there with his wife, and he ignores Ellen—or tries to. She drinks too much and throws up on the new sea green carpet in the dining room. Someone has to drive her home.
“What was she doing there?”
“She was invited.”
“She should know better.”
“He should know better.”
Red faced.
What is she thinking? She wants to be a little girl, she wants to be taken care of, loved—she thinks his wife could take care of her if only she wanted to. It’s a strange thought but it makes a measure of sense to her—she wants to be part of a family.
And then she is pregnant.
Does she know she is pregnant, or does someone have to tell her?
Does she confide her symptoms to a girlfriend who says, You’re pregnant!
Does she go to the doctor thinking she’s ill?
Does she know that his wife is pregnant too?
She waits to tell him. The day he calls to tell her that his mother has died, she blurts, “We’re going to have a baby.” She wasn’t exactly planning on doing it this way, but it just comes out.
She is thinking that it is good news, that it will make him happy, that now finally they will be together.
He is speechless.
His mother is dead, his wife is pregnant, and now she is too.
What was supposed to be a moment that would inexorably bond them—sharing the grief of his mother’s death, sharing the news of a baby on the way—is all too much.
She is angry with him for not being pleased. He is angry with her for not being more careful.
They fight.
She is angry with herself and she is justifiably angry with the world. Is she angry with her baby?
He sends her to Florida, promising to follow. She waits for him; he never shows up. When she moves back to Maryland they get an apartment together; he stays for four days before going home.
He offers to take her shopping to buy things for the baby.
His wife finds out that she is pregnant and lays down the law.
At some point she tells her mother, or maybe her mother just figures it out. Her mother looks at her and says, “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”
She nods, wishing someone would have something nice to say. She likes being pregnant, likes the feel of this baby growing inside her, but has no idea what to do. She talks to her baby—she asks the baby, What should I do?
More pregnant and now unable to find work, she moves in with her mother, who has divorced the second husband.
In the end, in labor, she is alone at the hospital. And she still has the fantasy that he will come, that he will snap out of it and rush to her side. She wants to call him. A hundred times she wants to tell the nurse to dial his number.
“Where is your husband?” someone asks, and she cries hysterically.
The baby is beautiful. The nurses encourage her not to hold the baby. “After all, you’ll never see her again,” one of them says.
“You’re making it up,” someone says to me. Maybe and maybe not. I’m certainly imagining it. The only other option is for someone to tell me how it was, what really happened.
I think of Ellen and Norman before this, I picture them in the spring driving along the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., in a powder blue Cadillac convertible, the radio playing, wind blowing through their hair, and thinking, This is it, this is the life.