I was reading a while back at another university
and I actually had a request for this next story.
But the person didn't know the title.
She couldn't remember the title.
She said, oh, read that man-bashing story!
I said, what?
What are you talking about?
Well, it turned out she meant this one, which I had always--
always, since I wrote it--
I thought of as a sort of story of women rallying around one
of their own, rallying for one of their own.
So you decide, is it women rallying or is it man-bashing?
But it's a story that was, in fact, written
in anger as a response to something I thought
was pretty awful.
What started it is--
I had a good friend, a woman friend,
in California who had survived things most people don't
survive, such as Hodgkin's disease
and an open-heart surgery, other things.
And finally, things cleared up for her
and she became engaged to be married.
And then she found out she was going to have to have a radical
mastectomy, and when she told her fiancé, he left her.
And there were a number of us who were--
well, you can imagine what we were feeling like.
And it was the only time I can really
think of when I followed the advice you hear about
don't just go get in a rage and spout off.
Use that anger, use that energy, channel
it, make it work for you.
OK.
The one time that that worked.
This is a story called "The Day I Had Everything."
"When Mrs. Lawton phoned in the threat,
the threat was already a fact.
Her estranged husband said that he could hear it in her voice.
So he called for an ambulance, scheduled an appointment
with the city's finest doctor, left his office early,
and drove to the Lawton country home
where he closed up the house and boarded the dogs, then returned
to the city and his hospitalized wife.
Mr. Lawton brought Mrs. Lawton flowers, freesia
and yellow iris, and he brought her a bill for $500,
plus the cost of the opera tickets he
had been unable to use, plus another $100
for what he called same-day service.
At home a week later, Mrs. Lawton received callers.
She laid an alarming buffet of Budweiser and crullers
and answered the question on everyone's mind,
whether or not she had paid her husband's bill.
I heard Mrs. Lawton's story at the weekly meeting.
My friend Lee brought me six months
after the club was formed.
Lee died 10 years ago.
She can't stop talking about it.
No reason to stop.
That's what the club is for, she explained.
When Lee and I got to Mrs. Lawton's house,
the other members were already in Mrs. Lawton's living room.
The other members were women too.
Lee told me there had used to be a man who came,
a man who had died on the operating table.
When it would come his turn, the man
would laugh nervously and say, I can't tell you
what it was like.
I slept right through it.
After a couple of times of coming,
Lee said, the man had not come back.
I watched a youngish woman with shiny black hair,
who was leaning over Mrs. Lawton's baby grand,
pick out a slow as a dirge version of "Will
You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"
rather pointedly, it turned out.
For as Lee filled me in, the woman at the piano
had just been deserted when she told
her intended about the relapse.
And that this time, she was going to really lose
one, maybe even both.
I walked over and stood to one side of the piano
in an attitude of listening.
The woman looked up and past me out the opened window.
The devil is beating his wife, she said.
It was a sunny day and a rain shower had begun.
And I had not heard that expression, that explanation
since I was a child.
Outside was the kind of garden people
want for summer weddings.
I reached out the living room window
and picked a plum from a tree.
The sun made me squint while the rain was cold on my wrist.
The plum I left on the windowsill
reminded me of a time when I had not been dying
but had thought that I was from nausea that
ruled until I sucked the pulp from a dozen umeboshi plums,
those pickled pits that are packed in glass jars
and shipped to this country from Japan.
How did you die, the woman at the piano asked.
Me, I said, no, well, I mean, I got a divorce.
Talk about dying.
I can be so lame.
I was engaged, the woman at the piano
said listlessly and then said nothing.
Who knew what to say to that?
Sometimes I play when it would be so much better to be dumb.
There was a bang of cords as the black and white cat jumped up
on the black and white keys he was using as a launching pad
to get himself onto the coffee table
where he was going to skid into the tray of refreshments.
Mrs. Lawton looked in from the kitchen.
Lee's friend, she said to me, will you keep Steinway out
of the beignets?
The women took their places on Mrs. Lawton's
tailored white couch and side chairs
as Mrs. Lawton carried in a tray of mimosas.
When the drinks had been handed out,
Lee was the one who spoke first.
Many men named Pablo entered my life this week.
It was always Lee saying, politics?
Pee-ew.
Can't we talk about men?
Or it was Lee saying, religion?
Pee-ew.
Where are the boys?
That was during religious emphasis
week when ministers in the business of bagging souls
would come to the schools and pass around
in jars the brain of an alcoholic
and the lungs of a smoker, show photographs from prom night
wrecks, speak diatribes against jungle music,
and screen a film advertised as triple X for attendance,
but which was, in fact, the birth of triplets
and too disgusting to even neck in the dark to.
It was around that time back in Colorado
that, until a short time before, I had last
seen Lee heading into a cemetery after midnight, there
to make time on the grave of Alfred Packer, the state's
famed cannibal.
So when I got Lee's message 15 years after Lee had dropped
out, I called back right away.
I thought this can only be good or bad news.
The news as Lee proceeded to tell the club was tango lessons
and what those lessons had yielded,
a fiancé known as Pablo.
Pablo, the fellow taker of lessons as distinguished
from Pablo or Pablo, the instructors.
He's very, as we say in psychiatry,
inappropriate, Lee said.
But he's nice to you?
The words another woman put in Lee's mouth.
He's nice to anyone who's around him, Lee said.
I just happen to fall into that category a lot.
We don't speak the same language, Lee went on.
So we assume that we like each other.
Cuts out a lot of the, what did you mean by that?
As Lee went on there in Mrs. Lawton's living room,
I recall Lee's first husband, the one she had left school
to elope with.
Lee, the girl who was always very something I'm not,
married a man who did not like dogs.
Do you see, Lee was saying, what can
happen when you take your body and push it out the door?
I saw the woman at the piano turn around
to offer Lee a grim smile.
Oh, Jean, Lee said to the woman on the piano bench,
come take a lesson, come meet all these Pablos and Rauls.
And then Jean told a story about the man she would have married,
about a dinner they had shared.
The point of which seemed to me to be
that things get worse before they get really terrible.
I had just placed my order, Jean told the club.
And Larry went, ew.
That was fast, I said.
And Larry said, what?
What was fast?
I said, why, only a week ago, you would have said,
what a delightful selection, Jean said.
Next thing, said Jean, I'm telling
Larry what is really on my mind, that things with us
are out of sight, out of mind.
And he says to me, please don't talk in cliches.
It's so not you, you wouldn't believe it, Jean said.
And I thought, he knows me, Jean recalled.
He knows that cliches are not me.
Jean said she thought she might still hear from Larry
but that hoping he would call was
like the praying you do after the bowling ball has
left your hand.
Several of us reached for our drinks.
Another woman said to Jean, I'm reminding you
that you asked me to remind you that if things got nasty,
I was supposed to remind you that at first you found Larry
a little bit boring.
Jean looked genuinely pleased.
She said, Larry is the kind of guy who says,
did I ever tell you about the time
I was attacked by a pack of sled dogs in Alaska?
No?
I was in Fairbanks at the time, he starts out, Jean said.
And two years later, you find out it was one sled dog
and it was a puppy.
And his family, my god, Jean said,
these are people so boring it would have to come from a gene.
I listened as Jean explained how scientists had already
isolated a gene for shyness, so why not
a gene for being boring?
The deeply boring give themselves
away first by the exchange of facts, Jean said.
It's a family reunion, it's been five years, relatives walk in,
hey, how are you?
How'd you get here?
We took 101 South.
I just know he's going to call you,
said a woman who had not spoken before.
We'll see, Jean said.
We've seen, said Mrs. Lawton.
The party was planned for a week before Jean was scheduled
to go into the hospital.
Mrs. Lawton canceled the male stripper,
having had a brainstorm in the night.
Mrs. Lawton telephoned the members of the club
and asked each woman to bring a piece of lingerie.
She gave out Jean's measurements over the phone.
You remember the last time she went in,
Mrs. Lawton said to Lee.
She wore that old, white, faux, quilted robe
that looked like a panty liner.
Mrs. Lawton instructed Lee to buy something in satin.
Tap pants, maybe, or what she called a pop-up bra.
We learned that she had made Patsy Kendrick the designated
photographer--
she would have to stay in focus in the face of white wine
spritzers-- and told her to bring a jar of Vaseline
to smear centerfold-style on the lens.
Mrs. Lawton had figured the club would
have to get Jean tanked to agree to the pictures.
But after only one spritzer, Jean
was lounging on Mrs. Lawton's sofa
in a champagne teddy and marabou-trimmed satin
high-heeled slippers.
She slipped a strand of pearls into her mouth,
made as though biting them, and pouted for Patsy Kendrick.
This one is for the surgeon, Jean said, and dropped a strap,
exposing the breast she was going to lose.
I was once given a teddy, Lee said.
A man I had been out with only once
gave me half a dozen teddies.
Some were banded with the Alencon lace,
some were embroidered with seed pearls.
I know I should have returned them in a huff, Lee said.
But you should have seen them.
So I kept them in a huff.
Don't shoot me from that angle, Jean cried out.
I saw her motion Patsy Kendrick to aim from above, not below.
Jean sucked in her stomach.
Three months in a gym and I'd weigh
what I lied on my driver's license, she said.
None of the women seem to be expected back home.
The luncheon was heading into its fifth hour
when our pixelated hostess told us
the story of the love of her life, which was not,
it turned out, Mr. Lawton.
It seemed to be a story she had told before because, for one
thing, it had a title.
The day I had everything, Mrs. Lawton began.
The man told me a story about the day he had everything.
He was eight years old, he said, and was
spending in a hospital bed what his parents believed
was the last day of his life.
And his parents brought from home every one of his toys,
plus new ones bought for him just for that day.
Everything the eight-year-old boy had ever wanted.
The next day, the man told me, the doctor
said he was not going to perish after all.
That he instead had another, a highly contagious disease.
The boy would live, the doctor said.
And then ordered all the infected toys destroyed.
One day I had everything, the man said,
and the next day, I had nothing.
He said this as though he were giving instruction.
But your life, I said to the man,
you had nothing but your life, Mrs. Lawton said.
She waited a beat then went on.
Now I wish that man had told me something that began,
no one else knows this, so that I could tell the thing
to every one of you.
What is the point of these hot collisions if not to be
able to prove you were there?
Listen to what he said to me, Mrs. Lawton said.
He said he almost fainted from not touching me, she said.
He said that to me the first time I saw him
and the last time I saw him.
The day was the same, Mrs. Lawton said.
The day I had everything.
I wish I could say smart things just by saying them
because Mrs. Lawton's story made me feel something.
But the moment was lost.
The story seemed to be a sort of cue or simply a conversation
stopper.
The club members were on their feet, not exactly reeling,
but neither were they moving with dispatch toward the door.
Jean, the soft porn guest of honor,
was changing in the open into another
of her gifts, a black-lace camisole and matching tap
pants.
Her face was flushed.
She no longer looked as though she found the world intolerably
apocalyptic.
I heard a perfectly groomed blonde woman talking to Jean
while she was undressing.
A facial didn't seem like enough,
the blonde woman was saying, so I pointed myself
toward the jeweler.
When people ask me how I'm doing,
I say look at these pearls.
In the kitchen, I happened on to a sort
of you-think-that's-bad contest.
Him, a woman said.
The only book he ever read was the first chapter of Iacocca.
In a little while, it was just Lee, and me, and Jean, and Mrs.
Lawton.
Jean was talking about Larry again
and looking the worse for it.
I pictured us doing apples at Christmas,
all that cozy Currier and Ives shit, all that time thinking,
what we have.
Love sometimes passes for it.
When I should have been thinking love passes.
Mrs. Lawton told Jean to tell Lee and me the last thing
Larry had said before he left.
And Jean said that his last words to her had been,
everything I did with you was love.
That was awfully sweet of that fucking idiot to say, Lee said.
That cracked Jean up.
And then she seemed to think of something
that cracked her up more.
What she thought of she shared with the three of us
and I ran straight to the bathroom and wrote down what
she said.
I wanted to be able to pass it along.
Jean was trying to describe what she felt it would
be like to be married to Larry.
She said it would be like staying in a bad hotel
and being forced to send postcards of it to your friends
with arrows pointing to my room.
I'm glad I wrote that down.
When I came back into Mrs. Lawton's living room,
the women had recovered.
Lee's mascara had smeared.
Everyone turned to me.
What kind of look are you having, Lee's friend?
This from Jean.
It came back to me why the club had given Jean this party.
And I felt ashamed for my answer but I told Jane the truth.
I met someone, I said.
I'm happy.
I'm probably in love.
Jean didn't know me and Mrs. Lawton didn't know me,
but that didn't stop them from shrieking with glee.
Mrs. Lawton asked how we met.
I told an unexceptional story.
And he called you, Jean said.
He called me that night, I said.
Tell me everything, Jean said, moving closer.
Start from ring, ring, ring."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thanks very much.