CHAPTERS FIVE, SIX & SEVEN... thanks for asking readers, Deb P.

Chapter Five

(Solving Lonely, copyright 2001, Deborah McWatters Padgett)

“Karen, I don’t know what to do. What’s expected anyway? Don’t you think the people in the church, the community would understand? I mean, how much can one person bear?” Phoebe held her coffee cup in a death grip. She and her best friend Karen Kline had just walked Lake Calhoun. It was the first chance they’d had to really talk since before Marc died. It was September now and an unusually chill wind had sent them into Sherman’s Bakery for coffee. They’d ordered a fresh baguette, sweet cream butter and apricot jam as an added treat to warm the day. On more pleasant days, after their walks, they would sit on a bench or spread a blanket near the water.

Karen was the one friend Phoebe felt she could talk to about anything. She wasn’t a church friend. As a matter of fact Karen was an agnostic wild woman with whom Phoebe felt nearly free to be her own secret (sometimes naughty) self. Karen understood the various layers on which an individual woman could simultaneously experience life. Her own life was as unconventional as Phoebe’s was normal, everyday respectable, expected, conventional.

Karen was a bleach blonde black Jew — black because her father was African American; Jewish because her mother was a Russian Jew. She wore her nappy blond hair cropped close to her head. Her black eyes, big and set deep, dominated her face. Her flawless walnut shell skin stretched over high cheekbones, making her look absolutely regal when she smiled. She’d had her nose done in high school, but by the time she became a full-fledged feminist (which was when Phoebe met her) she was considering having the operation reversed since she felt shame for succumbing to some Waspish patriarchal idea of beauty that pretty much excluded the Jews and Blacks , “So what else is new, eh?” she’d said.

Together they read and discussed the latest writings of Erica Jong. They confided their adoration of the down and dirty, nasty, naughty Mick Jagger. Karen told Phoebe the lurid and luscious details of her sexual escapades. Phoebe had only and always been with Marc and was reluctant at first to talk candidly about the intimate details of the life of a minister and his wife. She didn’t know if Karen brought out the best or the worst in her, but she knew she felt set free in the company of the free-living, free-loving Karen. Karen’s love life spanned the map of the world but with an insistence on what she called “serial monogamy, which Phoebe figured out meant she was committed to only one lover in her bed, car, on the beach, the kitchen table at any given time. “Serial monogamy” meant she didn’t do threesomes or more than one lover during the time she was dallying with a single, particular person. She didn’t limit her loves to men only, but had never been seductive or flirtatious with Phoebe, completely respecting her straight, marital boundaries.

They’d both read J’s “Sensuous Woman” as young women and believed with absolute ferocity in the necessity for masturbation as an integral feature of the conscientious sex life. This aspect of her sexuality was another secret Phoebe kept from Marc.

Phoebe had met Karen in a women’s support group, when she was twenty-one, not long after she and Marc lost their first baby. She developed an interest in women’s rights and the Feminist Movement’s growth in the late 60’s. When she lost the first baby she decided to seek out a group of women who might understand her anguish. Also, she always felt she had to be a certain way with the Bethel College and Seminary wives, and then, of course she felt that way with the women in the congregation once Marc became a pastor. In the support group she met with eight women, once a week for six months.

Other friendships grew out of this group too. Rhonda was a stately, articulate, and stunning black woman basketball coach at the University. Susan, a single mom on welfare who was taking art classes at the University. Phoebe stayed in touch with all of them over the years but Karen Kline became her best friend. With Karen, though from outward appearance it would be hard to tell, she felt a sense of kindred spirit almost as if they were twins separated at birth.

Karen was feisty and brilliant. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a double major in Library Science and Fine Arts. For years she worked at the downtown Minneapolis Branch of the Hennepin County Library, saving her pennies for the day she could open an art gallery in the warehouse district.

Though Karen’s parents were quite well off, she had an independent streak that dictated she would win her gallery through the work of her own two hands.

She lived in a loft on Washington Avenue and walked to work everyday. She was one of the few mid-westerners Phoebe knew who didn’t own a car. Still, Karen worked as a librarian but she owned a gallery and paid a rotating staff of artists to keep it open and accessible the hours she couldn’t be there. In recent years she’d bought herself a small but lovely Tudor style house just off Dean Parkway by Lake of the Isles. Influenced, as so many were, by the emergence of Yuppie-dom, she broke down and bought a black package Toyota Corolla in 1980. She drove that car until there was nothing left to drive — all the blackness rusted off.

Karen knew more than anyone the depths of despair Phoebe suffered through her miscarriages; knew more than anyone that Phoebe and Marc’s marriage was good, solid, loving and sexy as hell. She knew there were parts of Phoebe her friend withheld from expressing in front of Marc, but believed that sort of sacrifice was common even in the best of marriages. She, herself, had never found a love partner worth the sacrifices the thought marriage demanded. She knew a good thing when she saw it though — at least knew Phoebe felt blessed. Phoebe and Marc’s marriage was a rare, rare phenomenon and Karen had no reservations about noisily cursing God on Phoebe’s behalf for taking this rare love out of the life of her best friend.

“Jesus Christ, Phoebe, I wish to hell I knew what to tell you. I always felt a little cursed to not find my one true love; that that was somehow a cruel fate visited on me, but this … This. Goddamn it. You’re exactly right! How much can one woman take?” She reached across the table and took Phoebe’s cup from her hand. She took both Phoebe’s hands in hers and looked her square in the face.

“All I know,” she told her friend, “is that you will find a way. You will know what to do.”

“But I’m so frickin’ tired, Kare.”

Karen let go of Phoebe’s hands and brought her own hand to her mouth to cover a smile.

“What?” Phoebe picked up the remains of the baguette in the basket before them and clunked Karen on the head with it. She pulled Karen’s hand from her mouth and asked. “What the heck do you find so gosh darn funny, I’d like to know?”

“Phoebe. Listen to yourself! Holy shit woman. Frickin’? Heck? Gosh darn? What the hell is it gonna take to get you to cuss a little?”

Phoebe grinned, shrugged her shoulders a little and said, “Not ready for that yet. One step at a time here. Can’t I still live vicariously through you for a little while here? I mean, until I get my heathen or pagan or whatever bearings? I am open to tutoring you know. Just not yet. I’ve got some stuff to figure out here. There’s still Marc’s church to think of, and I told you didn’t I? They want me to fill in as pastor, kind of like when a Congressman dies, his spouse steps in …?”

“No. Phoebe that is too much. Hell, don’t they know you hardly believe in God anymore?”

“Well, of course they don’t know that! Even Marc hardly knew that. He preferred to think I was simply going through some normal periods of doubting. And the truth is I get some kind of spiritual vibes that there exists a source of good, truth, you know … that sort of thing, that is beyond but part of humanity somehow. And Marc was such a believer! My poor, cursed, beautiful boy!” She reached in her pocket and pulled out a wad of much used Kleenex.

“Shoot! Now I’m crying again. Hey, let’s walk some more okay? Then it’ll just look like the wind is making my eyes fill up.”

“’Shoot’, yes, honey.” Karen stood and helped Phoebe into her jacket, giving her shoulders a little squeeze in the act. “Let’s walk!”

* * *

For the first month after the funeral Phoebe managed on the money in the checking account she’d always shared with Marc. She just wasn’t ready to do all the research and what she thought of as begging for the resources she was entitled to after Marc’s death. Conversations about what part of his pension she could expect, just how much was the pay out on the life-insurance, how much did they still owe on the mortgage on their little house, were not conversations she wanted to have. She wanted a short time, at least, to just pretend nothing had changed that much. Maybe pretend during the day that Marc was just off at work. On the lonely weekends, make believe he was doing a guest-pastorate somewhere.

She and Jade hadn’t been able to adjust their relationship to the loss of Marc. Conversations were brief and perfunctory.

When Jade first came in the door after school in the afternoons she still carried some of the ordinary day-ness of the school day with her. Still had a bit of adrenaline from the walk home with Jolee and her other girlfriends. She told Phoebe sometimes things almost felt normal when she was at school. Usually they could keep up some sense things were all right until about 5 o’clock, the time Marc used to walk in the door and complete the family circle. So by dinnertime it hurt Phoebe to see how lost and alone Jade felt. It hurt Jade to feel lost and alone and she always harbored the hope her mom could say something to make it better. When this never happened they just went through the motions of dinner conversation with Phoebe trying to draw Jade out and Jade answering in monosyllables.

“Heard a joke today, baby. Wanna hear it?”

“Sure. I guess. How old is this can of tuna anyway?” Jade searched the label for the freshness date. She’d lately become obsessed with the idea of fresh food and kept catching her mother in the criminal act of keeping something in the cupboard or refrigerator past the stamped freshness date on its container.

Phoebe was annoyed at this eleven-year old Mother Superior or scientific genius bit Jade imposed on her. Why can’t she just cry and fall into my arms like the little girls in books do when their daddies die she thought.

She said, “It’s canned, honey. Canned tuna. Canned stuff lasts forever. It’s what they call non-perishable. They feed armies on this stuff, pack it up and keep it in a storeroom for years just in case war breaks out. Now, you wanna hear this Ole and Lena joke or not?”

“If it’s non-perishable, why does this say 09/85, Mom?” She shoved the can in Phoebe’s face.

“You caught me.” She put her hands up and extended them toward her daughter. “Here. You got those handcuffs handy or you gonna use the rope this time?”

“Uugh, Mom,” Her voice a kind of whispered grunt, “Why are you always joking about important stuff like this? People can die from bad tuna you know!” She opened the cabinet under the sink, tossed the tainted tuna in the garbage and left the room.

“I guess that’s a no to Ole and Lena.” Phoebe said to herself as she dug the perfectly good can of tuna out of the garbage.

That night when she tucked Jade into bed, things went a little better between them.

Phoebe smoothed her daughter’s hair from her face and pulled the comforter up under her chin.

“So, Lena says to Ole, she says…”

“Oh Mom! I love you.” Jade reached her arms around her mother’s waist and rested her head in her lap.

“’Ole,‘ she says, ‘I read there in the paper there’s goin’ t’ be a snow squall. One of them snow emergencies, don’t ya know. Yah. Yah. They say there’s gonna be no parking on those North South streets ya know.”

“’Ya don’t say Lena? I’d best move the car alright then.’

“Next day Lena says to Ole ‘Ole, paper says gotta park the cars East West. Yah, says there’s another snow emergency don’t ya know.’”

“Yah, you bet ya, Lena. I’d best go move the car again then.”

“Next day Lena’s looking at the paper, says to Ole, ‘Hey there now Ole, don’t ya know, this paper here says the snow emergency is all over wit’. No more parking North South/East West.’”

“’Yah, alright then, Lena! Guess I’ll go put that car there back in the garage then.”

Phoebe laughed at her own joke and it set Jade’s head to bouncing. She looked up at her mother and gave her a grin that said she thought she was pretty silly for a mom.

“Songs now, Mom! Start with “Thousand Stars.” She put her head back on Phoebe’s lap and her mom stroked her little girl’s face as she sang.

“A thousand stars in the sky, like the stars in your eyes. You are the one love that I’ll adore … Tell me you love me. Tell me you’re mine once more …” She looked to see her daughter sleeping and was grateful she’d managed to hold back the tears just long enough.

Chapter Six

“Never thought you’d be alone …” Phoebe sang as she dressed to go see Steve Dobbs, her accountant. “… this far down the line. And I know what’s been on your mind. You’re afraid it’s all been wasted time.” Now she sat on the bed to pull on her shoes. She tried to remember the words.

“So you’re back out on the street, and you’re tryin’ to remember ¾ how to start it over, but you don’t know if you can. You don’t care much for a stranger’s touch, but you can’t hold your man.”

“Okay, Phoebe my love,” she said to her image in the mirror, “get it together. You and me’s got places to go, peoples ta see. Oh, and by the way, I’m sick to death of your fuckin’ self-pity. That’s right, I said fuckin’.” She picked up her lipstick, put it in her purse and left the room.

More than three months had passed since Phoebe and Jade scattered Marc’s ashes to the wind. She’d had moments when she just wanted to quit; wanted to give up and die herself, but when all was said and done, she knew it wasn’t her time to go. Not only Jade needed her to weather this loss, but the church too.

She finally pulled herself together enough to meet with the Board of Deacons shortly after Marc’s death. At the meeting it was determined she had worked so closely with Marc as pastor and had, frankly, been the church’s behind the scenes administrator all the years he was pastor there. They felt they needed her help at least until they could complete a search for the new pastor.

Phoebe agreed to continue her work with the community outreach programs and the planning, personnel and organizational work, but said she had to draw the line at giving sermons. She said she would contact Bethel Seminary and try to retain some pastoral interns to lead the Sunday services and suggested that members of the congregation take turns leading the Wednesday night prayer meeting and various Bible Study groups. She’d still never confessed her faded faith to anyone associated with the church but her conscience certainly wouldn’t allow her to play a role from the pulpit.

She wasn’t completely negative about church and the positive role it played in so many people’s lives. She loved the music program at their church and did take the opportunity to perform on occasion those songs that are part blues, part gospel, part hymn and part rock and roll. The church had what it referred to as it’s own little orchestra but really it was more equipped as an R&B band. A guitar, keyboards, trumpet and a drum were used increasingly even in the more formal Sunday morning services. The church had become a rockin’ place and attracted large numbers of young people in a time when a sense of community and family was lacking in so many children’s lives. Phoebe thought this was an aspect of the church and Christianity, even, that she could feel pretty good playing a part in.

In that same meeting with the Board she’d been given the paper work on her husband’s pension. In the nine years he’d served as pastor the fund had accumulated $42,864.72. This was offered to Phoebe in a bulk sum but she was urged to ask her accountant how best to invest it. The life insurance policy on Marc was for $250,000. Phoebe found out when she went to their safe deposit box. She hadn’t remembered it being that much and wondered if Marc had increased the policy without telling her. Sometimes he seemed to have a touch of a sixth-sense.

She took the mortgage information, the insurance policy and the pension check when she went to see Steve.

Steve Dobbs had graduated from Bethel the same year as Marc but with a degree in accounting. He had a dream of a private practice outside of town where he could set up a small riding stable and raise a few horses in his spare time. He married right out of college, had a couple little girls and, just after he bought the ranch, his wife, Lani, decided she wasn’t really cut out for married life and left him. That was several years back now and Steve had dated occasionally but he and Lani couldn’t entirely let go, had never formally divorced, and he and the girls still held out hope they’d all get back together as a family again someday.

Steve was leading a saddled chestnut mare by the reins into the stable yard when Phoebe pulled up in her Escort. He brought the horse with him and came close to give Phoebe a hug.

“Hey sweetheart. How you doing?”

“I’m okay, Steve. Doing pretty well I guess. There’s lots to be done I’m finding out.” She reached to stroke the horse’s muzzle.

“This is a pretty one. Is she gentle?”

“Like a lamb, this one. I let the girls ride her all the time. You and Jade should come out and ride some time. Jade like to ride?”

“She went to Y riding camp the summer she was seven and had a great time. We’re such city slickers we only occasionally get a chance to ride. But, we both love the thought of horses. They are such beautiful animals, aren’t they?”

“Well, come on with me while I put this one away and then we’ll get down to business. But ask Jade, okay? I really mean it. It would be fun to have the two of you out to ride.”

“Thanks, Steve. I’ll ask.” Phoebe followed him into the barn.

His office was in a building next to the horse barn. He hired seasonal accounting help around tax time every year, but took care of all his other business on his own. He had all the right equipment to make the money-earning part of his life convenient and free up maximum time for his horse hobby. He was, though, an excellent accountant and had kept both Phoebe and Marc responsible in regard to money management. He wasn’t an investment advisor by trade but was able to steer Phoebe in the right direction to safeguard her money.

She told him she wanted to pay off the house. It only cost $76,000 when she and Marc bought it in 1974. They still owed $45,000 and if she paid it off she’d have $600 extra dollars a month she wouldn’t have to send for house payments. Groceries cost about $250 or so a month for her and Jade, and though their Escort was paid off, it was old and she figured she’d soon have to buy another car.

Steve suggested some medium to low risk investments and gave her the name of a contact who could manage them for her. If she invested her $250,000 she could expect somewhere between $10 and $15,000 per year in return without having to touch the principal. The church would pay her $800 per month and she could set her own work schedule. When Steve added it up it looked like she would have about $20,000 per year to live on at minimum and no house payment. If she could delay buying a new car for awhile she might be able to put some money in savings as well.

She left Steve feeling reassured that she and Jade would get by just fine, financially anyway. She promised to call in a few days to set up a time to come out and ride. She rolled down her window and waved to him as she and drove away on the dirt road that led to the main highway.

Chapter Seven

Karen Kline had more personality, looks and brains than she realized and, even if she had realized, she was so consummately endowed she’d have been hard pressed to know what to do with her gifts. Gifts seldom come without a dark side, though. Unaware of the enormity of her talents, for the most part Karen perceived herself as cursed rather than gifted. She was an only child, born to educated, upper middle class parents who spoiled her rotten. She discounted her parents assessment of her talents believing they were, for one thing, strongly biased and lacking in perspective. For another thing, she believed they told her, not necessarily the truth in all things, but only what they thought it would be good for her to hear. She’d long felt her parents were oblivious, had to be, to the harsh realities of twentieth century life in the metropolis in which they lived.

Karen was so outspoken, funny and articulate that Phoebe loved her from the first night she listened to her tell her story to the support group they both attended.

“Get this,” Karen said, in 1970, during her fifteen minute turn to share in the support group where she and Phoebe first met, “My dad’s a Black, Republican, CEO of a multi-million dollar defense instrument manufacturing company in Golden Valley, Minnesota. My mom is a New York-born Jew. So Dad meets Mom when he’s just finishing up his advanced degree in Aerospace Engineering and she’s writing her American Studies dissertation on “Women of the Prairie in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Religious Thought.” I mean, did these two hatch un-aided from eggs or what? Neither of them has the slightest sense of personal heritage! None! So, they meet up in and around Columbia U., decide to settle all possible issues of incompatibility by turning Lutheran and moving to Minnesota. Now they live in St. Louis Park where every single one of their neighbors is Jewish. Their house is huge! It’s on a fucking cul de sac, no less, in what can appropriately be referred to as the hotel district, all the houses are so big and ostentatious.

“Me, I get born to these two, who, if they had any decency should, at the very least be Democrats given their heritage, but who anyone in their right mind would expect to recognize they’d achieved a level of privilege extremely unusual to a bi-racial couple. I mean, these two act like they think they’re second cousins to the Nelson Rockefeller’s. My mom waited until way too late, by which I mean until my nose and breasts started to outsize those of my fourth and fifth grade classmates, to tell me she and I are Jews and that she’d had a nose job and a breast reduction when she was eighteen.”

“Of course, I had eyes, so I could see my dad was Black, but he didn’t think race should be discussed in polite company and, as far as he was concerned, there was no politer company than family. We simply didn’t discuss it!”

“So, I turn out super tall, nappy-headed, long-nosed and big breasted and there’s nobody I can talk to about where I came from and what it’s all supposed to mean to me. I mean, this polite shit in a family can wreck havoc on a girl.

“How’s my time, anyway? I’m done, right?” she looked at the other support group members for permission to either go on or shut up.

“You got five more minutes.” Phoebe checked her watch. “Tell us the part about how you turned out so drop-dead gorgeous — oh, and blonde too.”

“Well, okay. That’s easy. By the time I was twelve it was clear to me I wasn’t going to get anything out of the folks except praise for my utter perfection, and, frankly, the praise just didn’t ring true to me. I decided then and there I would have to create myself. I would make myself over, to the extent possible, to fit an image I liked. I decided I wanted to be blond with a dainty little nose, but, ‘thank you, yes, I’ll keep the breasts if you don’t mind!’”

Karen had invented herself all right. She went to her parent’s alma mater and joined every Black and Jewish activist organization on campus. She was all Jew, all Black, all Lutheran, all Minnesota Nice and all Woman all the time. She double majored in Library Science and Art History and got her minor in twentieth century American sexual revolt.

In college she dated both men and women but didn’t fall in love with either. She protested the war, demonstrated for Civil Rights and, suffered from such severe homesickness she called her mother and father every single day from wherever she happened to be.

Karen gave exactly five years to her education and political and sexual activist pursuits away from home. She stayed on at Columbia the one extra year necessary after completing her undergraduate work and finished her Master’s in Library Science.

When she came home she took the first job she could get at the Downtown Library in Minneapolis, only a few blocks from the Gallery District. Every Sunday afternoon after services from the day Karen returned to Minnesota and got her library job and her loft apartment on Washington Avenue her dad picked her up in his Lincoln Town Car and brought her home to the St. Louis Park family mansion on the cul de sac so she could have Sunday dinner with her father and mother.

Except for those occasions when Karen was traveling or engaged in a particularly passionate love affair, this ritual continued right up until the day her father died of a sudden heart attack in 1986. After her father’s death Karen’s mother went back to New York City, where her own mother was still living. Karen inherited substantial wealth from her dad. She traveled to New York often but could never quite get over the change in her mother. It was as if, she too, had merely invented herself to suit her circumstances, and when that circumstance — the circumstance of her whole adult life — altered, she just went home and went back to being who she was fifty years earlier.

Karen missed her dad terribly but developed an amazing and new level of intimacy and sense of connection to her mother even though they lived further apart than ever before. Karen’s mom went home to her own mother and never once set foot in Minnesota again.

When Karen finished telling her story to group, she ended with the words, “Is that bizarre or what?” Her brow was creased, her mouth open as in “would somebody please explain my life to me?” and she held her hands open, palms up like she thought an answer might fall from on high and she could catch it.