Banshee. Rachel Dewoskin
Instead, I could skip across nature, an innocent, infatuated, middle-aged teenager.
As I walked toward the hill, I wondered about women who left their spouses. And then what, rented apartments? How boring and unbearable. An apartment seemed like the opposite of an affair. Not to mention, I couldn’t possibly leave Charles because 1) I loved him, and 2) then what, I would wheel myself from the hospital to a basket-case tank/bachelorette pad I had rented two days after being diagnosed with cancer?
That sounded mentally ill, even to me. The mere thought of looking for this grim potential apartment seemed a task so insurmountable and final, it required me to crawl into whatever bed was closest, likely Leah’s. Looking at apartments always made me feel not only mortal, but also deflated in the present tense—like, why even bother living if a drafty, dust-covered (or worse, object-filled) space is all it comes to? I’d fly around the room at the very thought and then land flat on the floor, a balloon weeks after the party.
Even without the sad bachelorette tank, if I moved out, I would have to tell Alexi what was happening, and that was obviously impossible. I wanted her to get through her finals first. No wonder men who had affairs kept them secret and tried to have it every possible way at once. How convenient it would be to stay married to Charles, live in our house, and recover or die from whatever illnesses ravage me, while also pretending I was twenty and loving whoever else I wanted to on the side, feeling reckless again as I careened into antiquity and death.
I suspected from Charles’s gentle, unfinished, “Are you—” that he was worried I was having a breakdown. That he didn’t know about Leah. He knew something was happening, but not precisely what or with whom. To his great credit, he didn’t ask that, even after I said I needed space. For Charles, the larger picture was always possible. He’s never been petty, but he wasn’t correct about the breakdown narrative. My mind was lucid. I didn’t blame him; all of our friends who’d been left had accused the deserters of being mentally ill. How else was it tolerable to be the victim of such a choice? Especially when you were as famously blameless as Charles?
It wasn’t him, it was me. I just wanted to leave him for a while, even though he was almost as perfect a person as he considered himself to be. This particular brand of certainty reminded me of what I experienced when I decided to marry him. I’d known I wanted it—but forever? For a while? For how long?
Maybe this would all turn out to have been an absolute bloodbath, but even that possibility—that there were reveals left that I couldn’t see, outcomes I couldn’t guess at, thrilled me. I remember when I was thirteen, I read “soap opera” and didn’t know what it meant, because I’d always thought the words—which I’d only heard up until then—were “soap bopper.” This had seemed, at the time, both terrible and exciting. I knew I’d had something deeply wrong, and understanding that indicated to me that there might still be other discoveries that awaited me. It’s not a great example, but I was reminded walking away from our house that getting something wrong often felt right.
If I had turned around, I would still have been able to see our house on Riverview Court. Charles, who studied engineering before becoming a lawyer, designed it and had it built: imposing, modern, made of light, blond wood that looked like his straight, straight hair. The house remained as chilly and unblemished as his family, no matter how many Midwestern seasons it endured. It was a beautiful palace, and when I first moved in, I felt like a Disney princess, promoted from my own ratty life to Charles’s lovely kingdom. He was very artsy in those days, hanging paintings and surprising me with throw pillows that complemented the red leather couch he’d chosen.
I found Leah at the sundial, leaning back on the stone bench, her eyes closed. The early sun looked like it might light her pale face on fire, and I wanted to warn her to hide her neck, lest some wild animal bite it. But I sat next to her and she opened her eyes slowly and calmly. “Hey,” she said. “Long time no see.”
She’d never been one for radical originality, but I laughed agreeably.
“Should we walk?” I asked, thinking that if we saw anyone—if anyone saw us—well, fine, we were having office hours, a student and her teacher on a stroll through the park. Right?
We headed along the park’s path, Leah chirping and chattering about a dream she’d had in which a squirrel leapt out of her tote bag and bit her. I tried to listen, watching young mothers pushing strollers, students in fleece staggering under the weight of their enormous book bags, two readers sitting on backpacks and sipping from thermoses of coffee. A child darted away from his mother and rolled through a pile of leaves and I remembered the story my fourth-grade teacher had told us in a ghoulish whisper, of kids in a pile of leaves being crushed by a car. The driver parked on the pile? Seriously? I guess her point was not to lie in the street even if there was a tempting leaf bed there, but the fact that every time I see toddlers playing in leaves even now, thirty-five years later, I think of that? It’s an instance of a teacher having a hideous and everlasting impact on her young student. I wonder why it was on my mind.
Leah spread a blanket, pink with leaves and needles remaining in its fibers from days she had already spent in the park, hopefully frolicking with people her own age. She sprawled upon it so earnestly that I wanted to either devour her or be her—if there was even a meaningful distinction between the two.
She rolled onto her stomach to take a book out of her bag and started reading. She was wearing textured tights and a very short cargo skirt, which now rode up her legs. She kicked her feet up and used one hand to hold the book, the other to shade her eyes. Sun filtered through the trees. It did not seem to occur to Leah to smooth her clothing down or cover herself. What was her mother like? I pushed the question from my mind.
The book was Janet Malcolm’s biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, which Leah was loving, maybe because Alice B. was its underdog heroine, a fun shock to the system for anyone who had grown up with the Gertrude-as-protagonist paradigm.
“Listen to this!” Leah said, beginning to read loudly enough that several other picnickers looked over at us. I neither apologized for nor shushed her. She wasn’t my child, after all.
Alexi was never like Leah, and neither was I. Leah showed up on the first day of Poetry and Performance wearing a black button-down lumberjack shirt with an olive tank top visible underneath, and the first three books on the syllabus already read. Read carefully. She always stayed three assignments ahead, and I didn’t know what exactly she was proving or to whom. Her adoration of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Audre Lorde was so undiluted as to be comical.
Leah’s eagerness would have been solely silly if it hadn’t been contained by a macho, unapologetic affect—her red hair a threat to the room, about to turn and burn us all down. Her shoulders, wings, arms slim and muscled, eyes absolutely frank. She was a living dare.
When she put anaphylaxis in a poem, I was surprised to learn it was hers, that she had allergies, but maybe she knew we’d feel doubt, because she showed us her EpiPen that day in class, tucked in her shirt pocket. Leah’s appeal was odd, linked to her way of thinking, and—patronizing though this was—to her way of trying. Leah tried very hard.
“She must have been furious,” she said now, meaning Alice Toklas.
“Probably,” I said, “but who knows whether more or less than any of the rest of us.”
“What does that mean?”
I shrugged, tipping my head back until the sun hurt my eyes. “Just that rage is part of the program,” I deflected.
“I’m not really enraged,” she said mildly.
Should I have said what I thought, which was “not yet?” I didn’t. Instead, I put a hand on her back, before remembering how wildly inappropriate this whole situation was and lifting it off like I’d burned myself.
“Keep your hand there,” she demanded, and I put it back.
“Move it down,” she said, louder, and I did so fast, wishing she’d say less, or at least speak quietly.
“How about Gertrude Stein not admitting she was Jewish?”