Becoming Mrs. Lewis(16)
“Oh, Joy, how can I ever thank you?” She placed one hand gently on top of each child’s head. I looked down at them. Bobby with cropped brown hair squashed under a cap speckled in snow. Rosemary, a dark-haired child with wide eyes, dressed as if for church, her patent leather shoes so shiny I saw a brief reflection of the porch light.
“Get inside, Joy,” Bill said as he stepped onto the porch, stomping the snow from his boots and weighed down by luggage. “It’s bitter out here.”
“Come in, come in,” I said. And then I felt it as a tremor under my ribs: the subtle shift beneath the foundation of our home, the change that arrived with these three stranded souls.
We settled around the table in the warm kitchen, and I served them tea and grilled cheese sandwiches. I fussed over them and made small talk. Renee had draped her woolen coat over the ladder-back chair, and she pulled pins from her hair, unfastening the snow-sprinkled hat and placing it on the sideboard. Her tweed dress had crept up, and I caught a glimpse of the black nylons covering her legs. Sitting beside her, I was a reverse image in my men’s corduroy pants and a button-down shirt.
I looked at my cousin’s familiar face, nearing thirty-five but with something close to ancient clouding her eyes. It was pain one should only carry after war, an agony I saw in my husband’s eyes. Yet there she was, a woman on the run, and her cat’s-eye liner and mascara were intact: the perfect image of the fifties housewife in an Electrolux advertisement. She’d always pulsed with an inclination toward beauty, and in spite of whatever battles she’d fought, that hadn’t left her. I tucked a stray hair into my bun and started chattering self-consciously.
The children stared quietly at one another, their shy looks flitting from one to the other like confused butterflies. As soon as they were full of food and thoroughly warm, they ran off to the playroom, Douglas at the forefront with his game ideas and unquenchable desire for more fun.
Jack:
The stories of your life: your cousin’s arrival, your animals, and the farm amuse both Warnie and me. Oh, and Davy trying to catch a wild snake to keep as a pet. Please keep sharing with us.
Joy:
I doubt I could stop now.
Later, upstairs, Renee and I were finally alone, and I told her. “We’ll share a bedroom,” I said. “Just like the old days.”
“You don’t sleep with Bill?” She dropped her large black purse onto the wooden dresser and turned to me with wide eyes. “Even when things were at their worst at home, Claude would’ve never permitted me to sleep in another room.”
“Well, that’s the difference,” I said. “Bill doesn’t permit or not permit me anything. His last foray with another woman almost did me in.” I wiped my hand through the air. “And look at you—you didn’t just leave Claude’s bed; you left him!” I winked at her.
Renee sighed as if she’d been holding her breath for years and sat on the single bed across from mine. “Thank you so much for letting us come here,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t. I promise not to be a bother. I’ll pull my weight.”
“Stop that, cookie. We’re family. We’ll get through this together. And frankly, I’m thrilled for the company, for a girlfriend to talk to. I’ve been very . . . confused. It will be wonderful to have you close again.” I brushed stray hair from my eyes. “Even if Mother did always say, ‘Why can’t you be more like Renee?’”
“Oh, Joy, she never meant that.” Tears brimmed like snow on the windowsill. “I’m glad to be here. It’s just been awful. We need something steady. All of us do.”
“I know.” I reached across the space between the beds and took her hands in mine. “Let’s get you settled. We can talk later.”
Joy:
Must the most awful parts of childhood always turn into unconscious urges that influence our life for all time? Why is it hard to overcome the past and fall into Greater Love, where our True Self can guide our life? It seems this should be the easiest thing in life. But ah, we return again and again to that word—surrender.
Jack:
And how do we feel about discovering we are not our own Master? Just when we believe we want our life to be our very own, we discover we can only have our life by surrendering our life to that Greater Love to which you refer.
After dinner, settling the children in bed, a round of Chinese checkers, and a few glasses of rum, Renee and I reclined in our single beds.
I sank onto the pillows, slightly buzzed and sleepy. I shifted my hands behind my head, knitting them together as my elbows splayed wide. “How did we come to this, Renee? How did we both fall in love with and marry alcoholics?”
“I’ve asked myself that many times, Joy. We did what was expected of us. And now look at this mess. Was it something in our childhood? Something we were unconsciously taught? I don’t know.”
“I think somewhat. We were taught to dim our light so the men might shine, or at the very least look good. We were trained to appease, to please, to dance to the tune of their needs. We were held hostage by my father’s rage and expectations of perfection, always scared to be who we were, to be ourselves. And now—how could we have done any differently with our own men?”
“We will do differently now, Joy. We must.”