head.
“A suicide note?”
“Oh, Brenda, it’s more than that. It’s about us all.”
Upset Upstate It was only a few minutes past seven A.M. and Annie was already exhausted.
After Cynthia’s suicide, the weekend in Boston with Aaron, and Sylvie’s tearful good-bye to Chris yesterday, this day would surely be the roughest to get through yet.
She had already packed all of Sylvie’s necessities—plus lots of things that weren’t—and arranged for the porter to take down the baggage.
She put a bag of buttered rolls and fruit out, ready for the trip. She called the garage to be sure that Hudson and the car would be downstairs at eight. She no longer kept a driver, but Hudson had been one of those limo owners who catered to a few of “his ladies.”
Discreet and courteous, he had ferried Annie to Saks, Mortimer’s, Kenneth’s, and other exclusive daytime destinations. But this trip was different.
Annie had wanted to savor this time before she had to disturb Sylvie.
It was impossible, of course, she knew that already. Yet she shrank from waking her, and so she sat in the comfortable kitchen, taking in the last few moments of having her daughter in the house. Everything normal, for the last time.
When she looked back, Annie could clearly see that her life was divided into two parts, the twenty-seven years before Sylvie was born, and the sixteen years after. Real demarcations weren’t the shallow events-graduations, parties, relocations—but the bone-deep markings of birth, death, love, loss. And those only if they marked you forever.
Alex’s and Chris’s births had been wonderful, miraculous, of course, but they occurred during that long period when Annie was in the dream of her life, not her life itself. With Sylvie’s birth, Annie woke up.
Sylvie was a problem that prayers or patience or time would not heal.
And in the fire storm of rage, and pain and blame and guilt, Annie woke up—and finally grew up. She wished she’d done it years earlier.
Except in growing up, she’d left a husband and a son behind.
She worried about Alex sometimes, her beautiful, gifted golden son.
Did he really want to study medicine? She sighed. Most mothers would be grateful for a boy who was drug free, dean’s list, and about to go to med school. But Annie worried that he might be in that obscuring fog of ambition and social pressure that she had once lived in.
And Chris—she wondered, would he be all right? He was the middle child, the problem-free sunny one, but hadn’t Aaron always favored Alex and hadn’t she become immersed with Sylvie? Chris had dropped out of Princeton and was working with his father at the ad agency. Was it just his way of getting Aaron’s attention at last? Chris was working hard, and Alex was working hard, and both seemed headed for success.
But did they know joy? Were they really okay? Because the rest just didn’t matter.
And it was Sylvie who had made her see all this. Sylvie, without trying, had juggled Annie’s values, thrown the givens out the window.
It wasn’t what you earned, how you looked, what you achieved, whom you knew, how much you had. It wasn’t even how smart you were. Those were not important. Every precept Annie had been carefully taught, every value she had swallowed, they all amounted to nothing. Catholicism.
Being nice. Staying attractive. Ignoring the unpleasant.
Denial. Wrong, wrong. All wrong. But once you realized all this, once these precepts were abandoned, the world sometimes became a painfully ridiculous place.
Annie looked out the kitchen window, over the East River, watching the sunrise this last morning with Sylvie at home as it spread a blush across the man-made landscape below. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the illness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein,” she murmured.
She was no longer religious, having left the Catholic Church years ago, but she felt the truth and beauty of some of the psalms, and they comforted her.
“A suicide note?”
“Oh, Brenda, it’s more than that. It’s about us all.”
Upset Upstate It was only a few minutes past seven A.M. and Annie was already exhausted.
After Cynthia’s suicide, the weekend in Boston with Aaron, and Sylvie’s tearful good-bye to Chris yesterday, this day would surely be the roughest to get through yet.
She had already packed all of Sylvie’s necessities—plus lots of things that weren’t—and arranged for the porter to take down the baggage.
She put a bag of buttered rolls and fruit out, ready for the trip. She called the garage to be sure that Hudson and the car would be downstairs at eight. She no longer kept a driver, but Hudson had been one of those limo owners who catered to a few of “his ladies.”
Discreet and courteous, he had ferried Annie to Saks, Mortimer’s, Kenneth’s, and other exclusive daytime destinations. But this trip was different.
Annie had wanted to savor this time before she had to disturb Sylvie.
It was impossible, of course, she knew that already. Yet she shrank from waking her, and so she sat in the comfortable kitchen, taking in the last few moments of having her daughter in the house. Everything normal, for the last time.
When she looked back, Annie could clearly see that her life was divided into two parts, the twenty-seven years before Sylvie was born, and the sixteen years after. Real demarcations weren’t the shallow events-graduations, parties, relocations—but the bone-deep markings of birth, death, love, loss. And those only if they marked you forever.
Alex’s and Chris’s births had been wonderful, miraculous, of course, but they occurred during that long period when Annie was in the dream of her life, not her life itself. With Sylvie’s birth, Annie woke up.
Sylvie was a problem that prayers or patience or time would not heal.
And in the fire storm of rage, and pain and blame and guilt, Annie woke up—and finally grew up. She wished she’d done it years earlier.
Except in growing up, she’d left a husband and a son behind.
She worried about Alex sometimes, her beautiful, gifted golden son.
Did he really want to study medicine? She sighed. Most mothers would be grateful for a boy who was drug free, dean’s list, and about to go to med school. But Annie worried that he might be in that obscuring fog of ambition and social pressure that she had once lived in.
And Chris—she wondered, would he be all right? He was the middle child, the problem-free sunny one, but hadn’t Aaron always favored Alex and hadn’t she become immersed with Sylvie? Chris had dropped out of Princeton and was working with his father at the ad agency. Was it just his way of getting Aaron’s attention at last? Chris was working hard, and Alex was working hard, and both seemed headed for success.
But did they know joy? Were they really okay? Because the rest just didn’t matter.
And it was Sylvie who had made her see all this. Sylvie, without trying, had juggled Annie’s values, thrown the givens out the window.
It wasn’t what you earned, how you looked, what you achieved, whom you knew, how much you had. It wasn’t even how smart you were. Those were not important. Every precept Annie had been carefully taught, every value she had swallowed, they all amounted to nothing. Catholicism.
Being nice. Staying attractive. Ignoring the unpleasant.
Denial. Wrong, wrong. All wrong. But once you realized all this, once these precepts were abandoned, the world sometimes became a painfully ridiculous place.
Annie looked out the kitchen window, over the East River, watching the sunrise this last morning with Sylvie at home as it spread a blush across the man-made landscape below. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the illness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein,” she murmured.
She was no longer religious, having left the Catholic Church years ago, but she felt the truth and beauty of some of the psalms, and they comforted her.
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