A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

The Story

You wouldn’t have known me a year ago.

A year ago I had a husband and my best friend was Margeann at the post office. In no time at all my husband had a final heart attack, I got a new best friend, and house prices tumbled in our part of Connecticut. Realtors’ signs came and went in front of the house down the road: from the elegant forest-green-and-white “For Sale by Owner,” nicely handmade to show that they were in no hurry and in no need, to the “Martha Brae Lewis and Company,” whose agents sold only very expensive houses and rode their horses in the middle of the day when there was nothing worthwhile on the market, and then down, down to the big national relocator company’s blue-and-white fiberboard sign practically shouting “Fire Sale, You Can Have This House for Less Than They Paid for It.” I have thought that I might have bought that house, rented out my small white farmhouse, and become a serious capitalist. My place was nothing special compared to the architect’s delight next door, but it did have Ethan’s big stained-glass windows, so beautiful sightseers drove right up our private road, parked by the birches, and begged to come in, just to stand there in the rays of purple and green light, to be charmed by twin redheaded mermaids flanking the front door, to run their fingers over the cobalt blue drops sprayed across the hall, bezel set into the plaster. They stood between the cantering cinnabar legs of the centaur in the middle of the kitchen wall and sighed. I always said, “Come in,” and after coffee and cookies they would order two windows or six, or one time, wild with real estate money, people from Gramercy Park ordered a dozen botanical panels for their new house in Madison, and Ethan always said, “Why do you do that?” I did it for company and for money, since I needed both and he didn’t care. If I didn’t make noise or talk to myself or comment aloud on the vagaries of life, our house rang with absolute silence, and when Ethan asked for the mail, or even when he made the effort to ask about my bad knee, not noticing that we last spoke two days before, it was worse than the quiet, and if I didn’t ask the New Yorkers for money, he’d just shuffle around in his moccasins, picking at his nails, until they made an insulting offer or got back in their cars.

Six months after Ethan died, I went just once to the Unitarian Widows Group, in which all the late husbands were much nicer than mine had been and even the angriest woman only said, “Goddamn his smoking,” and I thought, His smoking? Almost all that I liked about Ethan was his stained glass and his small wide hands and the fact that he was willing to marry little Plain Jane when I thought no one would, and willing to stay by me during my miscarriage-depression. That was such a bad time that I didn’t leave the house for two months and Ethan invited the New Yorkers in just to get me out of bed. All in all it seemed that if you didn’t hate your silent, moody husband after twenty years and he didn’t seem to hate you and your big blob of despair, you could call it a good marriage, no worse than others.

I have dead parents — the best kind, I think, at this stage of life — two sisters, whom I do love at a little distance, a garden that is as close to God as I need it to be, and a book group I’ve been in for fourteen years, which also serves as mastectomy hotline, menopause watch, and PFLAG. I don’t mind being alone, having been raised by hard-drinking, elderly parents, a German and a Swede, with whom I never had a fight or a moment’s pleasure, and so I took off for college at sixteen, with no idea of what to say to these girls with outerwear for every season and underwear that was nicer than my church clothes. Having made my own plain, dark way, and having been with plain, dark, but talented Ethan all that time, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by middle age, with yoga and gardening for my soul and system, and bookkeeping to pay the bills. Clearly, my whole life was excellent training for money managing of all kinds, and now I do the books for twenty people like Ethan, gifted and without a clear thought in their heads about how to organize their finances or feed their families, if they are lucky enough to have more than a modest profit to show for what they do.

I didn’t call my new neighbors the Golddust Twins. Margeann, our postmaster, called them that. She nicknamed all the New Yorkers and pre-read their magazines and kept the catalogues that most appealed to her. Tallblondgorgeous, she said. And gobs of money, she said. Such gobs of money, and he had a little sense but she had none, and they had a pretty little blond baby who would grow up to be hell on wheels if the mother didn’t stop giving her Coca-Cola at nine in the morning and everything else she asked for. And they surely needed a bookkeeper, Margeann said, because Dr. Mrs. Golddust was a psychiatrist and Mr. Golddust did something mysterious in the import and export of art. I could tell, just from that, that they did need me, the kind of bookkeeper and accountant and paid liar who could call black white and look you straight in the eye. I put my business card in their mailbox, which they (I assumed she) had covered in bits of fluorescent tile, making a rowdy little work of art, and they called me that night. She invited themselves over for coffee on Sunday morning.

“Oh my God, this house is gorgeous. Completely charming. And that stained glass. You are a genius, Mrs. Baker. Mrs. Baker? Not Ms.? May I call you Janet? This is unbelievable. Oh my God. And your garden. Unbelievable. Miranda, don’t touch the art. Let Mommy hold you up to the purple light. Like a fairy story.”

Sam smiled and put out his hand, which was my favorite kind of male hand, what I would call shapely peasant, reddish-brown hairs on the first joint of each finger and just a little ginger patch on the back. His hands must have been left over from early Irish farmers; the rest of him looked right out of a magazine.

“I know I’m carrying on, but I can’t help it. Sam darling, please take Miranda so Janet and I can just explore for two minutes.”

We stood in the centaurea, and she brushed her long fingers against their drooping blue fringe.

“Can I touch? I’m not much of a gardener. That card of yours was just a gift from God. Not just because of the bookkeeping, but because I wanted to meet you after I saw you in town. I don’t think you saw me. At the Dairy Mart.”

I had seen her, of course.

“Sam, Janet has forgiven me for being such a ditz. Let’s see if she’ll come help us out of our financial morass.”

Sam smiled, scooped Miranda up just before she smacked into the coffee table corner, and said that he would leave the two of us to it and that he didn’t use his old accountant anymore, so any help at all would be better than what he had currently. He pressed my hands together in his and put two files between them, hard red plastic with “MoBay Exports, Incorporated” embossed across the front, and a green paper folder with Dr. Sandra Saunders’ stationery sticking out of it. I sent them away with blueberry jam and a few begonia cuttings. Coming from New York, any simple thing you could do in a garden was wonderful to her.

Sandra said, “Could you possibly watch Miranda tomorrow? Around five? Just for a half hour? Sam has to go to the city. Miranda’s just fallen in love with you.”

After two tantrums, juice instead of Coke, stories instead of videos, and no to her organdy dress for playing in the sandbox, it was seven o’clock, then eight. I gave Miranda dinner and a bath, and I thought that she was, in fact, a very sweet child and that her mother, like mine, might mean well but seemed not to have what was called for. When Sandra came home, Miranda ran to her but looked out between her legs and blew me a kiss.

“Say ‘We love you, Janet,’” Sandra said.

“We love you, Jah-net.”

“Say ‘Please come tomorrow for drinks, Janet.’”

Miranda sighed. “Drinks, Jah-net,” she said indulgently.

I planted a small, square garden for Miranda near Sam’s studio, sweet william and campanula and Violet Queen asters and a little rosemary bonsai that she could put her tiny pink plastic babies around. Sandra was gone more than Sam was. He worked in the converted barn with computers and screens and two faxes and four phone lines, and every time I visited he brought me a cup of tea and admired our latest accomplishments.

He said, “It’s very good of you to do this.” “I don’t mind,” I said.

“We could always get a sitter,” he said, but he knew I knew that wasn’t true, because I had done their books.

Can I say that the husband was not any kind of importer? Can I say that he was what he really was, a modestly well-known cartoonist? That they lived right behind me, in a house I still find too big and too showy, even now that I am in it?

I haven’t even introduced the boyfriend, the one Sandra went off to canoodle with while I baby-sat. Should I describe him as tall and blond when in fact he was dark and muscular, like the husband? It will be too confusing for the reader if both men are dark and fit, with long ponytails, but they both were. And they drove the same kind of truck, which will make for more confusion.

I’ve given them wholesome, blandly modern names, while wishing for the days of Aunt Ada Starkadder and Martin Chuzzlewit and Pompeo Lagunima. Sam’s real name conveys more of his rather charming shy stiffness and rectitude, but I will keep “Sam,” which has the advantage of suggesting the unlikely, misleading blend of Jewish and New England, and we’ll call the boyfriend Joe, suggesting a general good-natured lunkishness. Sandra, as I’ve named her, was actually a therapist but not a psychiatrist, and I disliked her so much I can’t bear to make you think, even in this story, that she had the discipline and drive and intellectual persistence to become a physician. She had nothing but appetite and brass balls, and she was the worst mother I ever saw.

I wished her harm and acted on that wish, without regret. Even now I regard her destruction as a very good thing, and that undermines the necessary fictive texture of deep ambiguity, the roiling ambivalence that might give tension to the narrator’s affection. Sandra pinched Miranda for not falling asleep quickly enough, she gave her potato chips for breakfast and Slurpees for lunch, she cut her daughter’s hair with pinking shears and spent two hundred dollars she didn’t have on her own monthly Madison Avenue cuts. She left that child in more stores than I can remember, cut cocaine on her changing table, and blamed the poor little thing for every disappointment and heartache in her own life, until Miranda’s eyes welled up just at the sound of her mother calling her name. And if Sandra was not evil, she was worse than foolish, and sick, and more to the point, incurable. If Sandra was smooshed inside a wrecked car, splattered against the inside of a tunnel, I wouldn’t feel even so sad for her as I did for Princess Diana, for whom I felt very little indeed.

I think the opening works, and the story about the widows’ group is true, although I left out the phone call a week later, when the nicest widow, who looked like an oversize Stockard Channing, invited me to dinner with unmistakable overtones and I didn’t go. I wish I had gone; that dinner and its aftermath would make a better story than this one I’ve been fooling with.

Parts of the real story are too good, and I don’t want to leave out the time Sandra got into a fistfight with Joe’s previous girlfriend, who knocked Sandra right into her own potato salad at the Democrats’ annual picnic, or the time Joe broke into the former marital home after Sandra moved out, and threw everything of Sam’s into the fire, not realizing that he was also destroying Sandra’s collection of first editions. And when he was done, drunk and sweating, as I sat in Sam’s studio watching through the binoculars Sam had borrowed from my husband (Ethan was very much my late husband, a sculptor, not a glassmaker, but correct in the essentials of character; he wasn’t dead before I met them, he died a year later, and Sam was very kind and Sandra was her usual charming, useless self), I saw Joe trip on little Miranda’s Fisher-Price roller skate and slide down the ravine. I walked home, and when Sam called me the next day, laughing and angry, watching an ambulance finally come up his long gravel drive and the EMTs put splints all over Joe the Boyfriend, I laughed too and brought over corn chowder and my own rye bread for Sam and Miranda.

I don’t have any salt-of-the-earth-type friends like Margeann. Margeanns are almost always crusty and often black and frequently given to pungent phrases and homespun wisdom. Sometimes they’re someone’s clever, sad-eyed maiden aunt. In men’s stories they’re either old and disreputable drinking buddies, someone’s tobacco-chewing, trout-fishing grandpaw, or the inexplicably devoted side-kick-of-color, caustic and true.

My friends in real life are two other writers, the movie critic for our nearest daily newspaper and a retired home-and-garden freelancer I’ve been playing tennis with for twenty years. Estelle, my tennis buddy, has more the character of the narrator than I do, and I thought I could use her experiences with Sandra to make a story line. Sandra had sprinkled her psychobabble dust all over poor Estelle, got her coming three times a week, cash on the table, and almost persuaded her to leave Dev, a very nice husband, to “explore her full potential.” Estelle’s entire full potential is to be the superb and good-natured tennis partner she is, a gifted gardener (which is where I got all that horticultural detail), and a poor cook and worse housekeeper for an equally easygoing man who inherited two million dollars when he was fifty and about whom I can say nothing worse than at eighty-three Dev’s not quite as sharp as he was, although he’s nicer. I could not imagine how else Estelle’s full potential, at seventy-seven, with cataracts in her left eye, bad hearing, and not the least interest in art, theater, movies, or politics, would express itself. I persuaded Dev to take her on a fancy cruise, two weeks through the canals of France, and when they came back, beaming pinkly a little chubby, and filled with lively remarks about French bread and French cheese, Estelle said nothing more about her underdeveloped potential and nothing more about meeting with Sandra.

I see that I make Sam sound more affably dodgy than he really is. He wouldn’t have caught my eye in the first place if he were no more than the cardboard charmer I describe, and he was tougher than Joe in the end. Even if Sandra hadn’t been a bad mother, I might have imagined a complex but rosy future with Sam and Miranda, if I were capable of imagining my future.

I don’t know what made Sandra think I would be her accomplice. If you are thin and blondly pretty and used to admirers, maybe you see them wherever there are no rivals. But hell, I read the ladies’ magazines, and I drove all the way to Westport for the new haircut and spent a lot of money at various quietly chic and designery stores, and although she didn’t notice that I was coming over in silk knit T-shirts and black jeans, Sam did. When Sandra called me, whispering from Joe’s bed, “Ohmigod, make something up, I lost track of the time,” I didn’t. I walked over and made dinner for Sam and Miranda, and while Miranda sat in front of her computer, I said, “I’m a bad liar. Sandra called from Joe’s. She asked me to make something up, but I can’t.”

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

After she moved out, she called me most mornings to report on the night before. She was in heaven. Joe was a sex god, but very jealous of Sam. Very silly, of course. Very flattering.

I called Joe in the late afternoons. I said, “Oh, Sandra’s not there? Oh, of course.” Joe was possibly the most easily led person God ever made. I didn’t even have to drop a line, I just dangled it loosely and flicked. I said, “She’s not at the office. She must be at home. I mean, at Sam’s. It’s great that they’re getting along, for Miranda’s sake. Honestly, I think they’re better friends now that they’re separated.”

I did that twice a week, alternating times and varying my reasons for calling. He hit her once. And she told me and I touched the greenish bruise along her jaw and begged her to press charges, for a number of reasons, but she didn’t.

The part where Joe drove his car into the back of Sam’s house is too good to leave out too, and tells funnier than it really was, although the rear end of his pickup sticking out through acres of grape arbor was pretty amusing, as was the squish-squish of the grapes as Joe tried to extricate himself, and the smell of something like wine sweeping over us as he drove off, vines twirling around his tires.

I reported Sandra to the Ethics Committee of the Connecticut Society for Marriage and Family Counselors. Even though the best of them hardly have anything you could pass off as ethics, all the things she told me — her financial arrangements with her patients, and the stock tips they gave her, and her insistence on being paid in cash, and in advance — and the fact that I, who was no kind of therapist at all, knew all these things and all her clients’ names, was enough to make them suspend her license for six months.

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it’s only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader’s mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.

The story I began to write would have skewered her, of course. Anyone who knew her would have read it and known it was she and thought badly of her while reading. She would have been embarrassed and angry. That really is not what I have in mind. I want her skin like a rug on my floor, warm throat slit, heart still beating behind the newly bricked-up wall. In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you, know you well enough not only to say, “It’s Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,” but well enough to say to the librarian, after you’ve left the building, “You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it’s been such a comfort to her since her little boy died”—if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can’t see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator.

I find that I have no sympathy with the women who have nannies on top of baby-sitters on top of beepers and pagers and party coordinators, or with the ones who want to give back their damaged, distressing adopted children, or with the losers who sue to get their children back from the adequate and loving parents they gave them to three years before. In my world none of them would be allowed to be mothers, and if they slipped through my licensing bureau, their children would be promptly removed and all traces of their maternal claims erased.

I can’t say I didn’t intend harm. I intended not only harm but death, or if not her death, which I think is a little beyond my psychological reach, then her disappearance, which is less satisfying because it’s not permanent but better because there is no body.

As Sandra’s dear friend and reliable baby-sitter, it was easy for me to hire Joe to do a little work on my front porch, easy to have him bump into my research assistant, the two of them as much alike as two pretty quarter horses, easy to fuel Sandra’s anxious wish to move farther out of town. Easy to send the Ethics Committee the information they needed to remove her license permanently, easy to suggest she manage Joe’s business, easy to suggest that children need quality time, not quantity, and that young, handsome lovers need both, easy to wave Sandra and Joe off in a new truck (easy to come up with ten thousand dollars when you are such a steady customer of the local bank and own your home outright).

And I am like a wife now to this lovely, talkative man who thinks me devoted and kind, who teases me for trembling at dead robins on the patio, for crying openly at AT&T commercials. And I am like a mother to this girl as rapacious and charming and roughly loving as a lion cub. The whole house creaks with their love, and I walk the floors at night, up and down the handsome distressed-pine stairs, in and out of the library and the handmade-in-England kitchen and through a family room big enough for anything but contact sports. In the daylight I make myself garden, fruit trees, flowers, and herbs, and it’s no worse than doing the crossword puzzle, as I used to. I’ve taken a bookkeeping class, and we don’t need an accountant anymore. I don’t write so much as an essay for the library newsletter, although I still volunteer there, and at Miranda’s school, of course, and I keep a nice house. I go to parties where people know not to ask writers how it’s going, and I play quite a bit of tennis, in nice weather, as I always have. And although I feel like a fool and worry that the teacher will sense that I am not like the others, I go to tai chi twice a week, for whatever balance it will give me. I slip into the last row, and I do not look at the pleasant, dully focused faces of the women on either side of me. Bear Catching Fish, the teacher says, and moves her long arms overhead and down, trailing through the imaginary river. Crane, and we rise up on one single, shaky leg. At the end of class we are all sweating lightly and lying on the floor in the dusty near-dark of the Gelman School gym. The floor smells of boys and rubber and rosin, and I leave before they rise and bow to each other, hands in front of sternum, ostentatiously relaxed and transcendent.

In the northwest corner of our property, on the far side of the last stand of skinny maples, I put up twin trellises and covered them with Markham’s pink clematis and perle d’azur, and Dutchman’s-pipe, for its giant heart-shaped leaves. I carried the pieces of a large cedar bench down there one night and assembled it by flashlight. I don’t go there when Sam or Miranda are home; it would be unkind, and it would be deceitful. There is no one in this world now who knew my little boy or me when I was twenty-eight and married four years and living in graduate housing at the University of California at Berkeley. When Eddie was a baby we lived underneath a pale, hunched engineer from New Jersey, next to an anguished physicist from Chad and his gap-toothed Texan wife who baked cornbread for the whole complex, and across from a pair of brilliant Indian brothers, both mathematicians, both with gold-earringed little girls and wives so quick with numbers that when Berkeley’s power went out, as it often did during bad weather, the cash registers were replaced by two thin, dark women in fuchsia and turquoise saris rustling over raw silk cholis, adding up the figures without even a pencil. Our babies and toddlers played in the courtyard, and the fathers watched them and played chess and drank beer, and we all watched and brushed sand out of the children’s hair and smoked Marlboros and were friends in a very particular young and hopeful way.

When Eddie died, trapped inside that giant ventilator, four times his size without being of any use to him or his little lungs, they all came to the funeral at the university chapel, and filled our apartment with biscuits and samosas and brisket and with their kindness and their own sickening relief, and we left the next day like thieves. I did not finish my Ph.D. in English literature, my husband did not secure a teaching position at the University of San Francisco, and when I meet people who remember Mario Savio’s speeches on the steps of Sproul Hall and their own cinder-block apartments on Dwight Way, I leave the room. My own self is buried in Altabates Hospital, between the sheet and the mattress of his peach plastic isolette, twisted around the tubes that wove in and out of him like translucent vines.

I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world, made it out of the flax and netting and leftover trim of someone else’s life, I know, but made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it.