SOLVING LONELY
A Novel
By
Deborah McWatters Padgett
© 2001
SOLVING LONELY
a novel
© 2001 by Deborah McWatters Padgett
Company
I’ll remember you too clearly,
But I’ll survive another day.
Conversations to share,
When there’s no one there —
I’ll imagine what you’d say.
I’ll see you in another life now, baby.
I’ll free you in my dreams.
But when I reach across the
Galaxy
I will miss your company…
…So now you’re going off to live your life.
You say we’ll meet each other
Now and then.
But we’ll never, never be the same,
And I know I’ll never have this
Chance again.
No, not like you…Not like you.
… Look and listen through the years.
Someday you may hear me still crying…
I’m still crying —
Crying for company.
Rickie Lee Jones & Alfred Johnson, 1979, Warner Bros. Records
Chapter One
Jade Thorpe, slender back burdened with travel bags, threw a disdainful glance over her shoulder in Phoebe’s direction. “Get over yourself, Mom,” she said.
Jade’s image as she made her way through the living room, the dining room and then to the back door in the kitchen, was a blur on Phoebe’s retina. A checkerboard square of January dullness filtered through the bay window and laid like a cold blanket across the tiny, carpeted living room Phoebe had yet to clear of Christmas remains. A single blackened log burned faint behind the glass doors of the fireplace displaying the occasional glow of red ember. Phoebe held Erica Jong’s scarlet covered Anywoman’s Blues before her face. She hadn’t turned a single page in the forty-five minutes since her daughter had come home.
Phoebe, hearing a car in the alley behind the house, had nearly fallen over herself to get to the kitchen door to welcome the daughter she’d seen minimally over the Christmas break. “I got the ride to the airport covered, Mom.” Jade said, pecking her mom’s cheek and blowing the words at Phoebe as she pushed past her into the house and headed toward her room.
Phoebe closed the door and followed Jade through the house but arrived too late to the entry of Jade’s bedroom and the door closed in her face. Through the hollow door Phoebe detected the sounds of Jade opening and closing drawers and removing items from metal hangers. She could hear the music the hangers made as Jade discarded them one on top of the other on the bare wood of the closet floor. The music was another movement in the continuing dirge that played accompaniment to Phoebe and Jade Thorpe’s mother and daughter relationship.
Phoebe rapped lightly on the door and reached to turn the handle thinking Jade might allow her to help with her packing, but Jade, without opening the door, yelled, “… in a hurry here, Mom. Have to catch you later.”
Phoebe opened the door ready to tell Jade exactly what she thought of her rude and dismissive behavior. Jade stuffed a handful of underwear into the front pocket of her pack and aimed an impatient glare at her mother.
“Mom! Do you mind?”
“Jade, we need to talk. We’ve needed to talk for a long while, and, it’s apparent to me …” Phoebe gestured toward the room Jade disassembled, “that time is rapidly departing.”
A laugh of sorts escaped Jade’s nose in a burst of air. She smiled through a closed mouth and didn’t raise her eyes to meet Phoebe’s. “If you say so, Mom,” she said.
Phoebe folded her arms across her chest and watched her daughter proceed with her packing as if her mother was invisible. Phoebe, feeling her anger rise and fearing she might say something she’d regret, left the room and closed the door behind her. It took all her strength to keep from slamming the door. She savored the image of the flimsy door coming off in her hand and the idea that she would, without saying a word, carry the door with one hand and by its knob and lay it at Jade’s feet as a kind of carpet laying before the departing queen. The image helped dispel her anger but her amusement held an hysterical edge.
Though earlier in the day Phoebe had performed her ritual daily cartwheel, she felt the need come over her for a repeat performance. She raised one arm above her head, positioned the other on her hip, steadied herself on her left leg, extended her right foot, toe pointing toward the dining room at the other end of the hall, catapulted in a perfect one-handed cartwheel away from the anger her daughter inspired. Returning to the living room she sat down and, picking up her book, tried to escape into the life of the wild woman who lived between it’s scarlet covers.
The book didn’t swallow her whole, as she’d hoped, and she found herself listening in vain, actually holding her breath at points, for the least sign from Jade, the slightest indication Jade might allow however brief access for exchange of a few words of love and comfort between the two of them before departing for the airport and a semester abroad in Spain.
When Jade did emerge from her room flinging her parting comment at her mother, Phoebe stood abruptly and tried to bridge the distance from couch to disappearing daughter. “Honey … Jade, wait ….”
“Ouch! Damn it…” The corner of the coffee table caught her in the shin. She jumped on one leg, bent at the waist, calling her daughter’s name and massaging her wounded right leg. It was too late. She landed in a heap on the dining room floor and watched the back of her nineteen-year old daughter leave home for a semester, six more long months between them, and all the miles between Hopkins, Minnesota and Seville, Spain.
Now Phoebe sat stunned and barely able to draw breath. She stared at the closed door that held for her the image of a jagged edged, life-sized, daughter-shaped opening, like in a Road Runner cartoon, where dynamite propels some undaunted character to freedom, rather than blowing him to bits. Though it was mid day and the sun reflected off snow piled high on the deck in the back yard, Phoebe saw only darkness through the jagged opening that swallowed her daughter. That blackness, her last impression of a daughter she’d only seen in brief fits and starts in the month Jade was home for Christmas.
It was January, 1994 and Jade was in her sophomore year at Cornell. Having little access to her daughter had become pretty familiar to Phoebe over the last few years. She felt she’d been chasing ways and means of connecting with the precocious Jade since she became a premature adolescent at age eleven. Always Phoebe comforted herself with thoughts of next time. Next time a road trip, next time a shopping spree, next time an intimate lunch out — just the two of them. Next time — someday.
Someday, Jade would want her mom to drive her east to college. Someday, Jade would want to talk to her mom about that book they both read and loved. Someday, she and Jade would share a campfire under a full moon and the conversation, the feeling between them — would be all about easy.
The past few weeks of Jade’s winter break had been a crash course in letting go for Phoebe. Now, she looked from the back door to her open hands, palm up in her lap where the first and, she hoped, the last of the day’s tears gathered in pools. Disgusted with herself for letting Jade get to her like this yet again, she smeared her hands dry against the cloth of her cotton leggings.
“So long, Sweetie.” She waved a limp hand in the direction of the back door and crawled forward to sit under the dining room table. Eyes still wet, Phoebe smiled a bit to realize how nicely her seated body fit under the table. She was quite comfortable here with the table providing a roof over her head. She hugged her knees to her chest. Eyes to the under side of the table she told herself she’d have to come here more often. “Suits me, I think.”
She sat hugging herself a bit longer. Reflecting. Taking stock. She noticed the comfort of her clothes. Days like this, when Phoebe was home all day, nowhere special to go, she dressed in knit cotton leggings and a tank top with an oversize flannel shirt. Today she wore navy blue pants, a good color on her she’d been told, and a green and navy tartan shirt with a button down collar. She tried to look herself over, could see, if she crouched forward, her reflection in the glass doors of the dining room corner cupboard. She tried to discern what it was that was so god awful horrible about her that her daughter could barely stand the sight of her.
She combed her hair with her fingers. Conceded the black curly stuff was sometimes a bit dry and unruly, pulled it back pony-tail fashion and turned her head side to side then let her hair fall where it would around her face and shoulders. She finger-combed it forward and covered her face then blew it out of the way with a giant breath like a sigh.
“It’s not your hair Phoebe. Face it, girlfriend! It is, for sure, not your hair that’s the problem here. Not even the way you dress. Don’t know what the problem is…specifically, that is, but … nope. That’s not it.”
She crawled from under the table and continued on hands knees until she reached the kitchen where she smacked closed the door Jade had been kind enough not to slam shut, then turned to lean her back against it. She looked around the room seeking physical evidence of her departed daughter.
Phoebe was forty-five years old but at that moment, felt at least fifty. Jade had left little but New Balance smudge marks in the dust on the kitchen linoleum. Why then, did Phoebe feel overwhelmed by a sense of the detritus left in the wake of her ever-departing daughter? She thought, not for the first time, about selling the house — making a final break with the past. Thought about what that might mean to Jade.
Oh she understood, all right, much of her daughter’s need to keep her distance from her childhood home as she established independence. Still, she knew Jade would not part easily with the memories residing here should her mother decide to sell and move toward independence in her own life.
It was a lovely house, Phoebe thought. A bit small, maybe, but quaint. Built in the 1950’s with a second floor added years later, it didn’t have an official name for its style, but Cape Cod came closest to describing it. It had been pale gray with white trim when Phoebe and her young family moved into it in 1974, just after Marc, her husband, now gone more than ten years, took on his first pastorate at Redeemer Baptist Church in Hopkins.
Phoebe considered herself something of a decorator, so had painted it forest green and accented its appearance by painting the front door a deep rose color. She and Marc hung a polished brass mailbox and light fixture at the front entrance and built a window box for flowers under the divided glass picture window. A mature oak and a river birch threesome shaded the front yard and an elm stood huge, majestic at the right side of the house. Marc was a good gardener and planted blooms in rotational fashion so that, always, spring through summer, an array of color filled the yard.
The front door of the house opened directly into the living room where a wood fire added warmth and color to the bleak Minnesota winters once all the flowers faded and covered over with snow. When she was in the living room, Phoebe could see through the small dining area and into the kitchen and the back door that led to a wooden deck, and the yard surrounded by a green picket fence. There was an alley behind the house and a garage for their car.
The perfect family home for the perfect family in a perfect neighborhood.
Phoebe crawled from the kitchen door to sit under the table again for a few minutes, then stood and walked into the living room. She had yet to pack away or discard the fading décor of Christmas. In the yards of the other houses that lined the street the remains of dirty snowmen held their frozen January poses.
Christmas, the year before this, when Jade was a freshman at Cornell insisting on her independence from her mother, Phoebe had made plans for a solitary North Sea holiday over the time Jade would be home from school on break. Her sense of unwelcome in her daughter’s life had convinced her she would be alone for the holidays anyway. She might as well content herself with her own good company, she thought, in a place that both chilled and warmed her, and ultimately offered a restful sort of melancholy.
She’d packed her CD player, her tape recorder and microphone and a leather bound tablet of lined, silken paper with gold edges and a sapphire blue Mount Blanc fountain pen along with cartridges of upscale-green ink. In her ocean side retreat she’d positioned herself by the open coal fire and near a window where she watched the sea. For two weeks she’d let herself live a life she’d only dreamed might be hers someday.
She’d returned home after her retreat with two weeks to spare before Jade’s return to school. The day Phoebe came home and called Jade to invite her to an Isabelle Allende reading at the Hungry Mind, she learned she’d returned to a hostile and indignant version of her daughter. Jade did not want to see her face, would not look at her, would only shout her feelings of mother-betrayal, mother-abandonment — “and at Christmas, no less” — Jade raged through the phone line.
For Phoebe, at that moment and in the face of Jade’s fury, all sense of refreshment gained at living her true self by the sea, disappeared and was replaced with a feeling of opportunity lost. Phoebe begged, pleaded and made promises for the coming summer as well as next year’s winter break. The winter break which ending she’d just now celebrated by sobbing under the dining room table. She had promised she would be there for Jade. Wouldn’t make other plans the way she had the year before. The Christmas holidays, she promised, would be designed to suit Jade’s wishes.
And so, this year, when Jade came home December 15th with more than a month before she had to leave for Spain, Phoebe was prepared to honor her promises. Jade had led her to believe she wanted nothing so much as a shared traditional Christmas between mother and child.
Jade had called home the night before leaving campus for Christmas at home and the call reinforced Phoebe’s sense she’d not been mistaken about Jade’s wishes. She told herself her daughter had grown up a lot since the year before, and certainly would want some intimacy with her mother before a semester spent half-way around the world.
When Phoebe answered the phone she’d almost felt as if Jade did the verbal equivalent of falling into her open and waiting arms.
“Oh Mom. I can’t believe this semester is finally over. It felt like it would never end!” Jade wailed. “My housemates and I have been way, way busy and haven’t had time to do anything Christmasy at all. Oh, except these couple of parties … Those were good, but, I mean, we don’t have a tree … Did you get a big tree like you know I like, Mom? I hope you didn’t get another Charlie Brown tree like you do sometimes. Those are just a big… well, no, not big… little, tiny, but still, a disgusting and big disappointment.”
Phoebe laughed, loving the very sound of Jade’s voice, eager to see her face. “Actually, honey, I thought it would be fun to wait and get our tree together once you got home. So — no. No. I didn’t get a tree. And, nope … not even a Charlie Brown tree for you to worry about. You can pick out whatever kind of tree you like when you get home.”
“Mom! You’ve got to be kidding! What could you possibly have been thinking? What? Tell me what!?” Jade nearly shouted incredulity through the phone line.
“You didn’t even get a tree yet? I can’t believe it!” Here a pause, a loud sigh, then, “Well, you might as well know now that I am certainly not going to have time! How could you be so insensitive? Unnh… You usually put your tree up right after Thanksgiving! What happened?”
“Jade …” Phoebe attempted a word, but Jade was off and running.
“I was anxious to come home and just relax in front of the tree.” These words a whine and a wail. “This semester has just been so awful! I thought you’d know that, Mom. The last thing I want to do is be responsible for getting a tree with everything else I have to fit in. I, God … I just can’t believe you’d expect me to help!”
Phoebe counted silently from one to ten before responding once Jade gave her an opening. In these ten seconds she tried to put herself in her daughter’s place. She did a quick tally of the current circumstances of Jade’s life.
Jade had a long distance relationship with Evan, a young man she’d known in high school but came to love only after starting school two thousand miles from the college he attended. She would certainly be eager to be with him. Then there was Jade’s best friend, Jolee Page. Jade had moved out of the house and in with Jolee’s family almost as soon as she turned sixteen and got her driver’s license. It hadn’t been a formal move so. It was just that Jade seemed to always find a reason to stay with Jolee’s family — a family she considered to be normal — rather than bother to come home to Phoebe.
Phoebe had tried time and again to talk to Jade about the changes in her own faith in recent years and tried to draw her out to share her beliefs. She tried to bridge the gap their divergent faiths put between them and Marc’s memory. Jade refused to talk about it. If Jade was still attending church she was doing it on the sly, because Phoebe never heard or saw any signs of it. Maybe she went sometimes with Jolee to the Lutheran church. Phoebe didn’t know. She did know, though, that Jade felt included as family by Jolee and her parents and would certainly feel the pull of their household on her plans for break.
Phoebe determined it made sense to relax her expectations and roll with the circumstances as they presented themselves once Jade returned home. Reaching this determination Phoebe sent her voice the twelve hundred miles over the phone line to Jade, “I guess you probably will feel pulled all over the place by other people’s expectations, won’t you? Well, I’m happy to get the tree. Let’s just wait ‘till you get home to figure out if you want to help with the trimming and stuff, okay? I’m anxious to see you and glad the semester load is off your shoulders. Have a safe trip, honey, and I’ll see you at the airport tomorrow. I love you.”
Jade was quiet for a moment, then, somewhat calmed, said, “I love you too, Mom. See you tomorrow.”
Phoebe hung up the phone, poured herself a small glass of brandy, wrapped a blanket from the back of the couch around her shoulders and curled her feet under her to watch the fire spit and crackle in the cold night air.
She missed her husband, Marc. Sometimes she hardly knew who she was, what she felt, how she looked, without him there. For so long he’d been the gentle barometer, always raising rather than lowering her moods. He’d found her beautiful though she knew she lacked the Scandinavian, fair-haired beauty so popular in Minnesota.
Her hair was black, curly almost to the point of unruly, frizzy at times. She was tall, though, five seven, and slender enough, though her figure had more curves than the current fashion dictated. Marc called her voluptuous. She had light green eyes and her skin was tawny and tanned easily to a deep, nut brown. Since Marc left she’d tried to keep fit and felt she dressed reasonably well, but hadn’t devoted much energy to keeping up appearances.
Marc was handsome in a rugged sort of way. Six feet tall with light, straight hair he always kept short even in the sixties and seventies. His eyes were coal black with thick dark lashes. Jade had his eyes. Had his stature too. Marc’s skin was fair but never pale or pasty looking. Phoebe loved to remember the way his cheeks flushed the color of an antique rose right at his cheekbones with the exertion of making love to her.
Now this cold day in January, she wrapped her own arms around her aging and empty womb. She thought about her life as a mother. Memories filled the room and suddenly took up all the available space in Phoebe’s chest.
Jade, born seven years into their marriage and after the empty arms result of two prior pregnancies, was a much wanted, much-loved baby. Jade was born six weeks premature in March of 1974. Phoebe and Marc were told it would be less than wise to attempt more children — dangerous for Phoebe and any subsequent baby. In spite of all the anguish of the years preceding Jade’s conception, Phoebe’s pregnancy and the baby’s birth, the hours of nursing and rocking this tiny, perfect little girl, had been fulfillment like nothing else Phoebe had ever known.
The night before Jade arrived home for a traditional Christmas, after she hung up the phone from Jade’s call, Phoebe stood poking a favorite stick at the fire for a few minutes then closed the doors to be certain no errant sparks escaped. She climbed to the attic to get the boxes of Christmas ornaments collected over the years and brought them to the living room where she sat on the floor. She unwrapped each ornament separately, setting first one, then the other, on the coffee table. As she touched and examined them she let herself remember the circumstances that brought this porcelain teddy bear or that blue painted angel to the collection. She embraced then abandoned the memories and climbing the stairs to her room, fell exhausted into bed.
The next morning was filled with preparations for Jade’s return. Phoebe rose early, dressed in her red and black hunting jacket and went out into the day. It was sunny and warm for a Minnesota morning and loosened icicles cracked and dropped stabbing at the layer of snow that surrounded the wreathed houses. The yards were clean and white with snow but the streets and sidewalks were splattered with mud from the slush of the highways and streets. Winter had been late in coming so Phoebe was grateful there was at least some snow to make her feel like Christmas. Even that early in the day the sun had melted the snow from the car windows and there was no need to scrape.
She drove all the way to the Y-Men’s Christmas tree lot over by Macalester College. All the way to St. Paul and, while wandering among the Christmas trees, she nurtured fond memories of her early years when she and Marc lived in St. Paul and he attended Bethel College and Seminary.
At the tree lot Phoebe indulged her spirits in the purchase of an eight foot tall Balsam with ornate and feathery branches. She loved the lumberjack feel of tying the tree to the top of her car. The weather was just cold enough to make her cheeks pink and bring out the need for a steaming cup of hot chocolate.
She parked the car in the lot behind Cafe Con Amore. She carried her leather notebook with her to an over stuffed chair in the corner of the coffee shop where she waited for the college kid behind the counter to bring her a baguette with raspberry jam and cocoa with whipped cream. She didn’t have a lot of extra time but allowed herself the brief indulgence of this coffee shop breakfast and a few moments to write in case there was a secret song waiting to visit her.
The songs that came were not her own, though she felt they were hers, since they were written and sung by hearts so similar to hers. She jotted down the words she could remember. Always when lyrics visited her she took note, tried to pay attention to the message they wanted her to feel. This morning she was so full of Jade that all the music that visited were those songs that had seeped from Jade’s bedroom door mornings before school when she was in junior high and high school. Tracy Chapman, Madonna, The Thompson Twins, U2, REM and The 10,000 Maniacs…. The memories made Phoebe smile. She made a list of all she wanted to accomplish in Jade’s visit home, took warming sips of cocoa and finished her breakfast in less than a half-hour. She was home cutting the twine from the Christmas tree before 10 a.m.
Jade’s plane was due in at 11:45 and Phoebe was at the gate with a fist full of white tulips with a couple of iris thrown in for colorful, welcoming accent. The plane pulled up to the gate and Phoebe positioned herself to watch as the passengers spilled through the corridor and up the ramp. About fifty passengers had already arrived and been greeted when Evan and Jolee appeared behind Phoebe, tapped her on the back and said “hello.” Phoebe hugged both Evan and Jolee, then turning again saw her daughter coming up the ramp.
Jade, looking a bit tired, tucked hair the color of aged and burnished maple behind her ear to keep it from sliding across her face. Her back was bent nearly double by the weight of the pack she carried. Benjamin, Jade’s worn and trusted Teddy Bear, feet secure inside the open flap of the pack, rode the air above Jade’s shoulders. Phoebe ran to Jade to touch her face, take her in her arms and hold her for a brief moment.
At the baggage claim Phoebe learned that Evan and Jolee had arranged to come to the airport together in Evan’s car and had a full agenda planned for Jade. Jade was clearly excited to be with Evan again and pleased, too, at the welcome she received from Jolee.
Phoebe suggested they all have lunch together at Jade’s favorite Uptown restaurant. Jade put her luggage in Evan’s car and climbed in next to him. Jolee climbed in the back and closed the door. Phoebe drove alone from the airport to the restaurant and left her daughter to her friends on that first afternoon with the knowledge there was a full month ahead for them to share time as mother and daughter.
That was Friday. On Monday Phoebe finally broke down and called Jade to invite her to come over and enjoy the Christmas tree. That and every other invitation issued in the coming month was treated by Jade as imposition.
Jade’s hurried visit to her mother on the morning she left for Spain was the final heartbreak in the month that began with Phoebe hoping this break would hold at least a few of the “someday” moments she’d longed for. Jade’s last words, “Get over yourself, Mom,” left Phoebe stung and baffled to say the least.
She struggled with the implication that Jade saw her as selfish — greedy for an entitlement she didn’t deserve. It seemed to Phoebe she had done nothing with her life but get over herself. It seemed, too, that her daughter, her friends and family had managed to get over her — they managed to get over the burden she was in wanting anything from them. Precocious, some would even say wise and mature, as Jade was, Phoebe knew at that moment her daughter had it wrong.
This month with Jade — without her, really — served as wake up call. The last thing Phoebe needed to do was get over herself.
Phoebe programmed the five disk CD player to shuffle, turned up the volume on the upstairs speakers, cartwheeled once more down the hall then climbed the stairs to the treadmill in her bedroom. She worked up an exhilarating sweat as she belted out one song after another, beginning with Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” She sang in a fine, clear voice that grew stronger with every refrain. “R-e-s-p-e-c-t, find out what it means to me. R-e-s-p-e-c-t! Take care of TCB!…”
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