My Bess
By Sheila Brandon Hart
Copyright © 2012 Thomas J. Hubschman
Published by Savvy Press at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-0-9826069-2-6
All rights reserved.
All the characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Published by:
Savvy Press PO Box 63
Salem, NY 12865
http://www.savvypress.com
Cover art by
Eric Black
(ericblak@aol.com)
ISBN: 978-0-9826069-2-6
MY BESS
Her name says it all: Monique. I don’t know much French, but shouldn’t that mean “one of a kind”? Or would that be Unique? In any case, that’s what she is: one of a kind. All six-foot of her, even though her backside has expanded a bit since the birth of her second child shortly after she and her husband moved into the fix-me-up across the street. Those extra pounds seem to weigh her down more than either of the children when she has one of them tucked under her arm—the older is almost three—or when she’s hauling a stroller up the front stoop after a trip to the playground. But she’s so tall she can carry the extra pounds and make them seem negligible to anyone but nosy-josies like myself watching through the gaps in the twenty-year-old curtains I bought on sale back when I wasn’t much older than Monique myself.
I called their house a fix-me-up. But most of the interior renovations were done by the previous owner—meaning the real estate company that bought out the elderly couple who lived there before the wife went into a nursing home. The husband lived alone in the house less than a year before his son drove up in a big red SUV one winter afternoon and took him away. After that the place stood empty for several months, the front door boarded up by a slab of plywood like the one I put under my mattress to help my bad back, a for-sale sign in the areaway half-filled with junk the old man had accumulated over the years—almost fifty, according to some of my neighbors who are old enough to remember.
The real estate company gutted the place, opened up the space inside so you could see back to front, laid new oak floors and installed a modern kitchen. Even then, the property remained unsold another three months. I never heard what the asking price was, but other houses on that side of the street were going for astronomical sums. Then, one day the for-sale sign came down and a week later Monique and her family moved in.
At first they looked like any of the other young couples buying property in this part of town: white, well-off, usually not native to the city (who am I to talk). Usually they make some cosmetic improvements—a new front stoop, new sidewalk, a tree by the curbside (provided free by the city), and get on with their lives. But not this time.
The day after they moved in a truck pulled up, one of those white panel jobs plumbers and contractors use. Up went scaffolding—not the flimsy wooden boards and ropes provided by local shysters who employ illegal immigrants, but aluminum tubing with metal platforms that looked like some kind of modern sculpture but is solid as the George Washington Bridge. A team of barrel-chested Russians, or maybe Poles, stripped off the old siding and removed the original insulation and God knows what else, until there was nothing left but raggedy one hundred-year-old brick. Lots of people in this neighborhood have re-sided their houses—I did it myself—but I never saw anyone do more than tear off the old wood or aluminum and slap on new vinyl over whatever was underneath.
Then they hired painters—real professionals, you could tell by the way they went about their work, no detail too minor for their attention. They applied cobalt-blue to the new siding as if they were restoring an old master, installed new white window frames and put up a cornice that would not look out of place on an Etruscan villa. When they were done the effect was as if someone had taken a fancy home from someplace in New England and plunked it down between a couple slum dwellings, although till that point I and my neighbors had been rather proud of the way the neighborhood had been “coming up.” Next came iron workers to install railings on the stoops so the children wouldn’t fall off. Every time I thought to myself, ‘Well, they’re done now,’ another batch of workmen arrived, to replace the sidewalk or point and clean the bricks below the first-floor windows or sod the small areaway.
Meanwhile, Monique went about her mothering and housekeeping as if all this hammering and painting and drilling and dust—you wouldn’t believe the dust when they pulled off the old facade—were hardly taking place, and she seemed to enjoy coming out to help choose a color for the new siding from samples the painting contractor brought them. And she seemed perfectly comfortable inspecting the efforts of the ironworkers or the men replacing the sidewalk when her husband wasn’t there—he has some kind of high-powered job that takes him away from home several days at a time.
It was easy to convince myself it was just the elaborate renovations that were absorbing my attention and not Monique’s long legs. As I say, hers wasn’t the only house being renovated on my block. My next-door neighbor, a middle-age man I sometimes invite over for tea who lost his partner a few years back to Parkinson’s, loves to gossip and has nothing better to do. I get all my information about everyone on the block and surrounding neighborhood from him. He’s one of those people who can tell you what the pizzeria on the avenue is paying for rent and why the Indian couple who own the stationery store stopped living together, though they both still open up every morning at six a.m. and smile the same as ever when you buy your morning newspaper. He—his name is Ted—lived with the same man for thirty years, a good deal longer than Bess and I were together. He still talks about his deceased partner, but not like someone in deep mourning—more in the way of celebration, or as if Jerry were still alive, not literally, but living inside him and eager for a report about the recent fender-bender at the nearby intersection, where they still haven’t put up a traffic light.
I envy him. My Bess and I separated more than a year ago, and I still can’t get used to having breakfast alone and have trouble getting to sleep at night without the heft of her plump body beside me.
Which is, I think, apart from her drop-dead looks, partly why I’m so taken with Monique: She’s just starting out. Her love is fresh, scarcely older than those two young children. She’s no kid, don’t get me wrong, she must be the other side of thirty. But she looks newly minted to me, not just young and pretty but almost as innocent as the baby she carries around in one arm as easily as if she were a quart of milk.
I hope her husband treats her well. I worry about the time he spends away from home, though she seems as cheerful on her own as when he’s with her, no sign of suspicion tormenting her solitary nights. I know if I were married to someone as beautiful as Monique I’d never look at another woman, never mind be unfaithful. I was never attracted to anyone but Bess once we became lovers two weeks after meeting at a training program for senior librarians. We had been working in the same system just two branches from each other and somehow never met. We moved in together the following month and never spent more than a few days apart till we broke up. Even then, she called me every day for a while to see if I was all right—as all right as anyone can be under those circumstances. I still wonder why, after fifteen years of happiness, we couldn’t go on for another fifteen…or fifty.
I just got off the phone with Pat Myers, one of the other staff librarians at the small branch where I work—one of Mr. Carnegie’s gifts to this city, along with thousands of others he built across the country. We even had a Carnegie library in my hometown in Ohio.
Pat told me the director is planning to retire at the end of the year.
This is big news. Library systems, even in a big city, are little universes to themselves. Every time someone visits the john it’s something to analyze for how such a development might affect your position in the organization. A director’s resigning unexpectedly is an earthquake, a hurricane.
“She only started the job a couple, three years ago,” I said.
“Actually, it’ll be five in January. She started right after Jordan got his appointment in Kramer Heights.”
“That long ago? Time flies.”
“You know what this means.”
“You mean Brian.”
“If he isn’t named director he’ll have to double his medication.”
We both laughed. Brian is a damned good librarian, a thorough professional, but he’s the most hyper human being I’ve ever known. He’s also obviously gay. The system used to be full of Brians. Most of them died off before the HIV/AIDS “cocktail” became widely available. Brian was one of the few who survived. He’s not even HIV-positive. But he was passed over the last two times a branch directorship fell vacant. Not because he’s gay, not in this day and age. But you have to believe his off-the-wall personality has something to do with it.
After I hung up I fixed myself a cup of tea and sat down in my favorite chair, a Queen Anne-ish thing Bess and I carried home one summer evening after we spotted it at the curb outside one of the little brick detached houses further down the block, waiting for the next morning’s garbage pickup. We acquired a number of other, quite serviceable pieces the same way—two solid dining-room chairs that only needed a bit of carpenter’s glue to make them good as new, a lovely little night table with tiny drawers and real brass fittings. You would never see anyone throw out anything like that where I come from. Put it up in the attic, sure, or down in the cellar, but not out with the potato peels and empty milk containers.
If Brian is named new director of my branch, I would be next in line to move up the ladder. I should be feeling something, some kind of a frisson, to use a word my erstwhile partner was fond of. Why aren’t I? I’m not old enough to believe my career is over and be content to go on drawing a steady salary and count the days to my retirement. I actually enjoy my job and like the people I work with—most of them. Why does it matter so little if a slot opens up for me in the pecking order?
Meanwhile, Monique is returning from the park to give the kids lunch, though I suppose the baby is still breast-feeding. I’ve seen women breast-feed in the park as unself-consciously as if they were in their own homes. I doubt I could do that. But I give them credit. Breast-feeding in public takes guts, even nowadays, even if other women are doing it. I suppose it becomes easier if your kid is screaming their head off and you know what they want is available just inside your blouse. I like to think I’d do the right thing. But in some ways I’m a lot like my mother, and she would no more breast-feed a child in public then she would walk down the street naked.
Bess and I used to talk about having a child. My preference would have been adoption, but Bess never ruled out insemination. To give her credit, she also volunteered to carry the baby, which meant of course half its genes would be hers. I didn’t mind that. I’d have been delighted to raise Bess’s child. It was those other genes, the ones not hers, that troubled me. It’s one thing for two people to take a little stranger into their home, an orphan from Guatemala or Vietnam, but it struck me as another matter entirely for my partner to get herself inseminated, however artificially. On the one hand, the idea was appealing because it would mean the baby was really hers—as much hers as if we had been able to conceive it between us. But I still felt somehow her getting pregnant through the agency of a man, however remotely, amounted to a kind of…infidelity. It’s illogical. Silly, even. But that’s how I felt.
I still do. But now I suspect I objected to the insemination idea for another reason as well, or for the same reason but with an angle I was ashamed to admit: I was afraid the donor, the man whose sperm had taken up residence in my partner’s womb—joined its genes to Bess’s and then developed into a little human being—I had a secret fear that man would somehow find out whom his seed had inseminated and would turn up to claim not just the child but, just by being who he was, father of her child, Bess as well.
I don’t mean Bess would actually leave me for him. She’s as much a dyke as I am, has never felt any sexual attraction for the opposite sex beyond some teenage pretending. What I was afraid of, was already jealous of, was the bond she might feel for the man as the biological father of her child, the sort of thing even divorced couples seem to feel as a result of parenting the same offspring. Not to mention how the child herself (she would be a girl, of course) would feel if her father became known to her and took an interest.
I saw myself being cut right out of the equation, a fifth wheel, little better than a nanny. But it was the man’s claim on Bess I feared most. How ironic to win the love of your life only to lose her, at least an important part of her, to someone she can’t even feel for the way she does for me. I would have been in the same spot as Kathy Warren’s boyfriend. Kathy was a girl in my senior high school class, a Catholic, who decided in senior year she wanted to become a nun and had to break the news to the boy she had been going steady with since sophomore year. She announced her decision when he had his head under the hood of his father’s pickup. He still has the scar on his forehead.
I sometimes wonder if we had had a child, either adopted or by insemination, if Bess and I would still be together. I suppose there are plenty of straight people in the same state of wondering, not to mention those who did have a child thinking it would straighten out their marriage only to discover it did nothing of the kind. Even so, I envy those who had children before they split up. I suppose there’s plenty of anguish involved, not being there full-time to watch your child grow up, not there for the bedtime story or when they jump into bed with you in the morning the way I used to do, feeling more secure in the warm gully between my mother’s and father’s bodies than I ever would again. But even in divorce no one can take a child away from you. Even if you only get to see them part of the time, they’re yours, beyond the reach of any divorce court. Even if the child rejects you, they remain in your heart. It’s a love that never dies, and what is that if not something to live for, however miserable the rest of your life may be.
Maybe I’m idealizing a bit, I’m leaving out the hard work and heartbreak of child-rearing (which I’ve actually experienced, I’ll get to that later). Even so, I’ll never know any of that with Bess, though despite what I’ve said about wanting a child I would have been happy to have had her all to myself, just the two of us for the rest of our lives. But that wasn’t to be or, to put it more accurately, we chose not to let it be, maybe not altogether consciously, but we chose nonetheless.
What’s with tea anymore? It takes two teabags to give the flavor you use to get from one. Even then, it doesn’t taste the same. I’m not a purist. I don’t have to brew loose tea in a pot to enjoy it. But I shouldn’t have to use two bags per cup.
Bess would say I’m “harping,” the same word my mother used. Bess would say, “Maybe it’s not the tea, maybe it’s your taste buds that have changed.” Meaning, of course, that I’m getting old. Bess was, is, five years younger than me and never let me forget it—in a nice way, she’s a bit of a tease but not a sadist. Not that I needed reminding. I went through menopause not long after we started living together. If there’s one experience I don’t wish on anyone it’s menopause. I know there are worse things—I watched my father die of cancer—but in my own experience so far menopause is as close to hell as I want to get.
Bess was great, rubbed my back, made me hot chocolate in the middle of the night—the best I’ve ever had—even though we both had to get up early the next morning to go to work. The sweats, hot flashes and other miseries went on for the better part of two years. Not exactly the ideal way to start a relationship. It must have been for Bess like marrying an invalid.
Not to mention what it did to my looks. I used to be a reasonably attractive woman. Some might have said I was even more than that. I had what my mother called the “Janeway skin,” i.e., not her own pockmarked complexion, the result of a bad bout of teenage acne, but her mother’s flawless skin. Even at the age of eighty, Grandma Janeway had a complexion most twenty-year-olds would give a decade off their lives for. Thanks to menopause I went from having that to looking like an old prune. So, I guess I didn’t have the Janeway skin after all.
Bess insisted I exaggerated. “You don’t look any different to me now than the day I fell in love with you,” she would say matter-of-factly as she tried to rub the cramps out of my legs. That was how she always delivered her most memorable statements, words someone else might have made into a dramatic event. She said, “I love you,” the way other people said, “I’ll pick up a quart of milk on my way home.” Of course, that was also the way she announced we should split up—matter-of-factly, no tears, no fuss. Even though I saw it coming, however much I tried to pretend otherwise, and never would have wanted to keep her with me against her will, I could never have been that cold-blooded if I had been in her place instead of mine.
Not that she really was all that sanguine (is it “sanguine” or “phlegmatic,” you’d think a librarian would know). Underneath she felt things as deeply as I or anyone else. But Bess is a New Englander—actually, she’s from a small town just outside Troy, NY, but she seems as gothic as any of those closemouthed characters in the longer poems of Robert Frost: Never say three words when two will do. Treat misfortune and good luck the same. Never let the world know what you’re thinking or, even more so, feeling. I used to call her Ms. Stoicism. She took it as a compliment, actually used to crack a little smile. Have I mentioned she was drop-dead gorgeous despite, or maybe enhanced by, that chilly demeanor? And talk about skin! But if I go there I’ll only started bawling in my cup of weak tea.
Monique is starting off on her afternoon trip to the park. First she lugs the stroller down the front stoop, the baby tucked under one arm while the three-year-old stands obediently in the doorway, watching. After she’s got the baby secured in the stroller she goes back for the boy and locks the front door. Did I mention they also have a dog—not a puppy, it must have been with them before the birth of their older child? It looks bemused by all the fuss about the two human puppies, bemused but accepting, willing to play whatever role is asked of it—playmate, protector—just to be allowed to remain a member of the family, in however diminished a status.
I feel sorry for dogs in that position. I’m sure it’s well looked after. There’s no danger of the family getting rid of it, not without having hell to pay from the kids, and not just in the present. My mother got tired of cleaning up after my brother’s dog when the animal became old and incontinent, called in the ASPCA and they took it away one afternoon when Mark and I were still in school. To this day he hasn’t forgiven my mother.
I’d have a dog myself, but can’t be bothered taking it for a walk twice a day, every day, in all kinds of weather. Ted, my gossipy neighbor, has an old mixed-breed, mostly wired-haired terrier. The dog is clearly older than Ted is, in dog years. It’s arthritic and has trouble controlling its bowels, even though Ted walks it three times a day. The vets have told him it’s time to put the dog down. Fat chance. Ted would no sooner let them kill Wolfgang then he would pull the plug on his sick mother.