Going Along Together

by Frank Albrecht

Chapter 3

 

    Barbara still hadn’t moved.

    "Back then," Wolfe said to her after waiting a minute, "we didn’t have the name, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Or Yuppie Flu either. But now they’re around. You heard them. I was at a conference and somebody was talking about it as nervous condition overachievers have. But I wasn’t paying much attention. I certainly never connected it with you."

    Silence.

    "I should have," he concluded lamely. "That is just what your doctor thought about you, when he sent you to me."

    "I’m sick," Barbara said, almost in a whisper. She still faced away from him, still hadn’t moved. "You can see I’m sick. Do you think I made myself this way to be fashionable?"

    "I’m sorry," he said again. "I wasn’t thinking."

    "Now you’re seeing it," she said softly, "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome." She paused. "It’s SO MUCH FUN!" she suddenly screamed. He had been leaning close to her again, close to her bare back. But her tone and the contorted reddening fury on her face straightened him up. She put her whole body into yelling toward the wall, but at him too, almost lifting herself off the couch with her fury. "I’M SO FUCKING GLAD I’M SICK. OH, BOY, I GET TO TAKE ALL THIS TIME OFF AND I DON’T HAVE TO BE AN OVERACHIEVER ANYMORE! OH BOY! WELL SCREW YOU, SCREW ALL OF YOU!!"

    She stopped, breathing hard and trembling.

    He reached for her, touched her shoulder, but she pulled away and turned further from him. "Barbara," he pleaded, leaning forward again. There was no response.

    Wolfe sat still as stone, afraid to move either closer or further away, afraid to speak, afraid to remain silent. He had hurt her and she rightly had abandoned him. And it served him right, messing with a client. Something he should never have done. He’d felt so alone he’d done it anyway, now the payback was to be more alone than ever.

    He felt he might as well cut his throat.

    But he sat still and gradually Barbara breathed more slowly, her red face became pale. "I’m sorry," she said finally, still looking away. "You didn’t deserve that."

    "Yeah," he said. "I do deserve it."

    She looked around, turning, shifting her body toward him. She lay on her back again and turned her face toward him as he leaned toward her again. Beads of sweat stood on her forehead and her chest, in spite of the cold room.

    "I run into a lot of that Yuppie stuff," she said. "Or things like, ‘Well, if so you tired, why don’t you take a nap?’ I’m usually polite about it. I hold it in."

    "Oh, God," he said. "I’m so sorry!"

    She reached for his hands with both of hers, clasping them, four hands together. "It’s all right now," she said. "It’s fine."

    "I thought I’d lost you," he told her.

    "No, no," she said, shaking her head. She squeezed his hands. "It’s kind of good I got that out. Usually I don’t feel I can scream at people."

    He smiled, tried to make light of it. "I didn’t even know you could use words like that," he said, "f-and s- words."

    "I can’t," she admitted. "’Damn’ is as far as I usually let myself go."

    "Not even ‘shit’?"

    "Not even," she confessed, also smiling. Then turned thoughtful. "I try to base myself on the nice little girl I was once, and on how proper my mother tried to be when she could. Bad words didn’t fit into that."

    "Too controlled?"

    "Sometimes I think so."

    Me too, Wolfe thought. He liked to think of himself as a rock. Chip off the old Army block, hardened, seen everything, nothing bothered him too much anymore he tried to believe. He knew every word of the Simon and Garfunkle song about being a rock, and appreciated the irony, but he kept saying that to himself anyway.

    She had a little smile again. "I guess I’m not so controlled with you—look at me!" she said, glancing down at her nakedness. "I can do anything with you, or say anything with you. Bad words or whatever. I can even say fuck. Fuck. Fuck!" She was laughing. Then her face went flat and serious and she looked him hard in the eye. "Fuck me," she told him.

    "All right!" he said, forgetting his fears and scruples, sliding off his perch on the coffee table, kneeling by her and throwing himself ardently at her, kissing her lips..

    "Oh, no, no, no," she said, pushing him way, laughing again. "Not now," she said. "I’m too sick. It won’t work. My heart is in it but my body won’t be able to perform. Later."

    Suddenly she looked stricken. "Oh!" she said, almost as if punched in the belly. She looked at Wolfe with big round eyes. "I forgot. Not later. Later we can’t. That’s tomorrow. We can’t do this tomorrow. Oh shit! Shit!!"

    "It’s not tomorrow yet," he said.

    "Shit," she said again.

    The phone rang.

    "Oh, fuck!!" she said.

    Wolfe answered it.

    It was Ann. The fundraiser was canceled. "Are you coming home for dinner?" she asked Wolfe.

    "I’m still doing some things here," he said. "I’ll be there in a bit."

    "We’ll eat late," she told him cheerfully.

    When he hung up Barbara said, "I meant that about tomorrow. We can’t do this again."

    He came to sit by her again. "We can be friends," he said.

    "Friends…" she echoed. Her voice trailed off. They held hands in the silence.

    "I’d better go," she said finally. She sat up, began pulling her bra and sweatshirt into place. "And it is cold in here, isn’t it?"

    Wolfe got up to close the windows. "Maybe before you go you should tell me why we came here in the first place," he answered.

    She turned a blank face to him. "You mean you need a better reason to be here than just me?" she queried.

    He was at the windows, pulling them down, smiling. "Suicide?" he asked, finishing. "You were going to commit suicide?"

    Barbara was trying to pull up her jeans without actually standing up. "Oh…well, yes… that…" she said. "I almost forgot. Oh Jesus, yes, I was, I really was. Oh my goodness, I must have been crazy!"

    She didn’t have much success with the jeans but she didn’t want to stand up yet, Wolfe helped her pull panties and jeans both up her legs and under her bottom.

    "I like the view while I’m doing this," he said.

    "Oh, shut up!"

    She stretched out on the couch on her back, clothed except for, resting her head on a little round pillow. Wolfe sat on the coffee table with his feet in the space between the table and the couch, leaning toward her and holding her hand. In spite of their banter he was filled with regret and dread. He knew he’d done something terribly wrong and that she really couldn’t be as all right as she claimed..

    "You look so worried," Barbara smiled at him, squeezing his hand. "It’s all right, really. And yesterday you saved my life."

    "I thought I did that today," he answered.

    "Today too. Twice in two days. Listen."

    On Friday, she explained, she had taken a day off and gone to West Virginia to visit her mother’s grave. She did this several times a year, usually on impulse. "I feel the need and I go." The graveyard was next to an old church that stands by itself in the hills east of Elkins, in an area Barbara’s mother’s family had helped settle early in the 19^th century. Her great-great-great-grandfather, people said, had himself cut down the trees from whose wood the church was built.

    "I go there to talk to Mama," Barbara told Wolfe. "I know she can’t really hear me but I talk to her anyway. It’s playacting I guess, but it comforts me. It makes me feel like I’m a little girl again, before Daddy got sick." Her face freshened as she recalled herself as a small, happy child. "I don’t talk in the same voice to Mama that I do to you," she said. "I talk like I used to. Ah talks lie-ak thee-us, lie-ak folks up thar deed whan Ah were a tie-nee chaye-ild."

    "I didn’t know you could sound like that," Wolfe said, charmed.

    He also didn’t believe he could have saved her life. Ruined it, more likely.

    "I’m country," Barbara told him. Suddenly she was proud of it. "I’m county right through. I’m mountain. But I don’t let it show. I talk city now. I talk correct, like I learned in school. Even to my family. Except Mama."

    But then her faced closed off. The smile ended and she looked away, toward the windows.

    "Anyway," she said in an altered voice, "I went up there. There was snow on the ground and snow falling. It was cold too, colder than here. Pretty much nobody lives up there anymore. They’ve moved to Elkins or Charleston or Cincinnati or Baltimore to find work. So there was hardly anyone on the road. I didn’t care. I’ve got a four wheel and chains and I had to talk to her. I didn’t know why I did but I knew I had to. I went out to her headstone in my snowsuit, ski boots, gloves, I had my hood on with the drawstring pulled tight and tied. I must have looked like a big kid come out to play. I sat right down in the snow and laid down the flowers I’d brought. ‘Here, Mama," I said, ‘I brought you something.’ Then I couldn’t think what to say. I sat there a long time, cross-legged, hunched over, feeling like crying, the snow building up on me, like a little sad snowman. I was so sad! But I didn’t know why. It seemed like there was nothing in my mind, nothing at all. But then it popped out. ‘Mama,’ I said, and I started crying, ‘how come you let him do that to me?’"

    At that instant, as she spoke aloud to her mother, she had remembered it, all the years of it.

    "It was like, Snap!" she said. "I’d turned on the light." She was looking at Wolfe now. She wanted him to believe it could happen like that, though she hardly could believe it herself. "I’d turned on the light and there it was!"

    She’d been nine or ten the first time, her body undeveloped and hairless. She and her mother were in their living room. Her father was down the hall in the room he shared with her mother, screaming, throwing things, turning over furniture. "You got to go down there," her mother said to her. "You’re the only one can quiet him." Barbara was scared but she did what she was told. She’d done this before but he had only held her very tight. She had been frightened but not hurt. This time, though, he pulled off her pants and raped her. "I fought him best I could," she told Wolfe. "But I was little. I couldn’t do much. When he got what he wanted it hurt! I’d never been hurt nowhere near that bad. So I screamed. I screamed loud as I could. They all had had to heard me. Then he hit me an’ I shut up. I cried some but that’s all. After that when he did it I never made a sound."

    For years, almost until she married, her mother would send her down the hall when her father got out of control. "You’re the only one can do anything," she’d say.

    "I’ve always remembered walking down that hall feeling scared," Barbara said now. "But then I wouldn’t remember what came next. It was just blank. So I never told anyone because I didn’t know it myself."

    Her eyes filled with tears. "Mama had to know, didn’t she? She had to know what he was making me do?"

    "Certainly she knew." Wolfe assured her.

    "Sometimes I’d hear him with her at night," she said. "When I did I’d hope it hurt her like it did me. Then I’d be sorry and I’d hope she was all right. I never could get straight about that."

    "When you asked your Mom that, in the cemetery, about how had she let him do that to you, did she answer you?"

    "She said she had to. She said she knew what he did but she tried not to think about it, ‘cause if he didn’t do that he’d come out an’ beat the tar out of all of us."

    She was still for a minute, looking up at the ceiling. "When she told me that," she resumed in a colder voice, "I wanted to drag her out of that grave an’ hurt her like I’d been hurt, again and again. And then kill her, kill her and throw her back in the ground, hoping she still hurts, even dead."

    Suddenly she shouted, "GODDAMN HER for it! GODDAMN HER TO HELL FOREVER!! She hadn’t no right!"

    She stopped, breathing hard. Wolfe thought she would cry but she didn’t. She turned her head and looked at him, dry-eyed. "How can I say that?" she whispered. "My mother…. She was my mother… I love her. How could I say such a horrible thing?" Now tears did come. "I don’t care what she done, she’s my mother and I love her."

    "I forgot to tell you how you saved me," she said when she was calmer. "You got me out of there. I went into shock or something when I remembered it all. I sat in the snow a long time with it all playing in my head, over and over. I could see it like it was happening again. I could feel it too. I got pretty cold but I didn’t care. When I finally did get up I couldn’t even feel my feet. I almost couldn’t walk. I think I wouldn’t have got up, though, I’d have just sat there and froze to death if I hadn’t thought about you and started wanting to get near you. It didn’t seem like I needed to talk to you, just get near you. That was the only thing I could think of to do."

    She had driven back in the falling snow, sleeping in a motel along the way. When she finally got to Annapolis she’d gone to the parking lot outside Wolfe’s office building. "But that wasn’t close enough. So I had to phone you. And that wasn’t close enough either, so you had to come down. And then just sitting there, you in your chair, me on the couch, that still wasn’t close enough. But I didn’t know how to get closer than that so I thought it was all over, that’s why I was gonna leave." She squeezed his hand. "So then you saved me again," she said. She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed its fingers. "So I’m all right now," she added. I won’t fall apart again."

    "We shouldn’t have done this," he said.

    He had betrayed her, he felt. She needed a therapist, not a lover, but he had invalidated himself in that role. And she had made love to him not because she loved him, but because she was dependent on him and needed his attention.

    "No," she said, "we did just what I needed."

    He avoided her eyes, not able to believe her.

    "I’ve loved you the longest time," she went on. "You just wouldn’t notice it."

    He was startled and looked at her.

    "After that first few times I saw you," she went on, "when I cried so much, you stopped being a doctor to me. Because you just took me as I was, with my real face. You just sat there and cared about me. I could see you liked me too, you weren’t just being nice because it was your job. That’s why I could talk to you. But you were a doctor to yourself, I could see that too. You had to be a doctor, it meant a lot to you to be that. So we couldn’t just go out to lunch or meet and have coffee and talk about stuff, like normal people who like each other. So I had to come in and act like a patient, even if I really wasn’t."

    "You were!" he protested.

    "Oh," she said, raising her eyebrows. "I guess I was wrong, then." She looked amused. "You weren’t attracted to me at all, I guess."

    He blushed, started to open his mouth. But he didn’t know what to say.

    Barbara smiled a sweet smile, sad and happy at once, utterly confident. She squeezed his hand. "I love you," you said. "Did you know that?"

    His voice caught. "No," he managed to say.

    "So you see," she said, "I was right. I wasn’t really a patient. You just thought I was."

    Later she talked again about her father. "Daddy wasn’t always horrible. When he took his medicine an’ didn’t drink he was quiet and kind of aimless. He couldn’t do anything because he’d forget he was doing it. And his hands weren’t steady. So he’d sit on the back porch. He had a rocker out there and he’d just sit in it, looking confused. It was mournful to see him. You could tell he’d lost himself and didn’t understand how to get found again. He was like an old dog that couldn’t hunt anymore but still wanted to. And he’d say things that didn’t make sense. We were watching some mockingbirds once. They were squawking about something, the way they do when they see a cat, and we were trying to see what it was they were upset about. Then they flew away. ‘The horses scart ‘em,’ Papa said. But there weren’t any horses around. I just looked at him. He’d talk sense one minute, nonsense the next. Mama would come out there and look at him in this sad way, like she’d lost him too. But he was still there underneath. The man he was before the war, that had been my Daddy when I was a little girl, the man Mama married, he was still in there but he couldn’t speak. He was locked inside himself somewhere and only the crazy person could speak or do anything. But you could feel who he was down underneath, sometimes, when he was quiet. It was the saddest thing I ever knew, him out there in that rocker."

    "I wish Mama and I had talked about it before she died," she said, "what he did to me. It would have been a comfort to both of us if we ever could have talked about it. But I’m all right now. It hurts when I think about it, that’s all."

    Barbara still didn’t feel well enough to drive herself home. She asked him to open the windows again. Winter’s early darkness had fallen and greater cold than ever seeped in through the open windows. Wolfe put his coat back on and sat in a chair looking at professional journals while Barbara lay with her eyes closed, asleep so far as he could tell. She wouldn’t let him put a cover over her. "I’m still hot," she insisted. After an hour she still couldn’t stand without support for more than a moment. She thought about phoning her husband to come get her. But Ralph, thinking she had not yet returned from West Virginia, would have gone to his brother’s house to watch sports and let his sister-in-law feed him. "He won’t stay home when I’m not there," Barbara told Wolfe. She could have phoned Ralph at the brother’s house but then the whole family would find out why she called.

    "None of them think I’m really sick," she said. "They think it’s put on. So I don’t like to get them involved."

    "Does Ralph think you’re sick?" he asked.

    "He’s knows I’m not making it up," Barbara explained. "But he still can’t accept the limitations I have. When I can’t do something with him, he gets upset. He just doesn’t know how to be idea about it."

    That’s what she said, "be idea about it."

    He blinked, his face showing confusion.

    Barbara looked distressed. "Be idea about it," she repeated. Now she looked pained. "That’s not what I meant," she said. She bit her lip. "I meant," she went on, "be idea about it. Damn! I did it again." She bit her lip again. "I know the right word. I just can’t say it."

    Wolfe felt frozen. He couldn’t understand what was wrong. Was she having some odd kind of seizure?

    "Wait a minute," she said. She closed her eyes, seemed to struggle with herself. Finally she said, eyes still closed, "Be patient about it. That’s what I meant to say. Ralph doesn’t know how to be patient about it."

    She opened her eyes and looked warily at him, as if afraid he might hurt her. She spoke very softly. "When I’m bad, like I am now," she explained, "a lot of times I can’t say the word I mean. I think I’ve said it but some other word pops out. Sometimes I don’t even know I’ve made a mistake until I notice people look at me funny. Or if I do hear what I’ve said, then I can’t think what was the right word. Or, like now, I do think of it but when I try to say it I get it wrong anyway. That’s happened at work, in meetings—everybody staring at me thinking I’m totally cracked. It’s so humiliating. Whenever it happens I want to crawl in a cave and hide."

    "Everyone makes slips," he said. "People can understand that."

    She shook her head. "It’s worse than a slip," she said. She looked almost as if she would cry. "It makes me feel like I’ve lost my mind. I’d rather sit there and pee on myself. My bladder, that’s just a bodily function. It’s not me! But my mind is me. I can’t stand to feel like I’m losing it."

    "It’s not just this thing about finding the right word," she added. "Sometimes my brain won’t work right. Like I forget things. I’ll forget I put the roast in the oven and go out to the kitchen to do it. Or my mind gets fuzzy, like my head is full of cotton wool, and I can’t think. I’ll mix up numbers or get dates wrong or get confused about who does want job, even if it’s people I’ve worked with for years. Everybody with this illness gets this kind of stuff—brain fog, we call it."

    "Anyway," she went on, "Ralph. He tries to help me but he gets resentful. He wouldn’t be happy coming up here to get me, especially after having to hear what his brother would say about it."

    Wolfe would drive her, then. Going down to the car she leaned heavily on his arm. The effort made her sweat again. She stumbled on a curb, almost fell in spite of his support. "I’m sorry," she said. "Sometimes I can’t half see."

    "It’s not your fault," he told her.

    "Feels like it is," she commented.

    She liked how the Beamer’s leather seats crinkled as you shifted your weight on them. "It reminds me of a saddle sound," she said. "Makes me feel like I’m a kid, riding a horse again." She put her seat as far back as it would go so she was almost lying down. As they drove she was silent, trying to gather strength. Snow started to fall again, lightly at first, then more heavily. It was colder and the snow now coming down was fine and dry. But the streets were clear because the earlier accumulation had melted off the pavement or been plowed away. Windshield wipers and tires on wet roads were the sounds they heard as we went up Ritchie Highway in exceptionally light traffic.

    "What kind of music do you like?" he asked.

    She turned her head and smiled at him. "Country, of course. But I don’t care. Anything you like."

    He clicked the radio. It was tuned to WJHU. That was before they went to a talk format. Something old was playing. Baroque, older than Mozart. He left it on, playing softly, its sound combining restfully with that of the wipers and the tires. She closed her eyes again.

    As he parked she told him that she wouldn’t let him help her into the house. "I’m going to walk into my own damn house," she said, "on my own damn power."

    Her sidewalk and steps were cleared of all but the most recent snow. "I have a neighbor who always does that for me," she explained. "It embarrasses me, really, because she’s an old, old woman. I should be doing that for her. But she knows I’m pretty feeble so she just walks over and does it and I can’t very well stop her. Even if I told her not to she’d still do it, that’s what she’s like."

    Wolfe had to help her pull herself up to standing from the BMW’s low slung seat. She stood next to the car holding onto him and laughing at her clumsiness. "Don’t be shocked if I have to crawl up the stairs to the porch," she told him.

    "I couldn’t let you do that."

    "It wouldn’t be the first time," she said. "Better crawl than fall, that’s how I figure it. And you don’t let me do things. If I want to let you help me, I’ll let you know!"

    "You seem to be finding your words okay right now," he responded.

    She nodded. "Now, yeah. That kind of stuff comes and goes. And please don’t look so worried. I’m not nearly as bad off as a lot of people who are sick this way. I’ll be fine tomorrow, I really will."

    "Call me," he said, "tell me how you are."

    "I don’t know," she said. "That’s so tempting. But maybe I should just keep you for emergencies."

    "I’ll call you," he told her.

    She looked somberly at him. "You’re married too," she said. "We’re both married."
 
    They looked in silence into each other’s eyes. In the dim streetlight in the falling snow he couldn’t be sure if hers were glistening. He felt he couldn’t breathe. The world seemed to darken and fade away.

    Suddenly she moved toward him, put her hands on his chest, leaned on him a little, stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.

    "I love you," he told her.

    She smiled into his eyes, put her hand on his arm and squeezed it. "Bye," she said, and tottered away. She wove a little going up the sidewalk, then took the stairs up to the porch very slowly: step up, rest, step up, rest. She held the railing with both hands and used her arm strength to help herself up each riser. Crawling would have been safer and quicker, Wolfe realized.

    She tottered across the five or six feet between the stairs and the door, falling forward and catching herself against the building. She got her key out, struggled with getting it into the lock, got it, opened the door, turned to him and waved, went in, shut the door behind her.

    Wolfe stood in the falling snow watching her silent house. Lights came on in downstairs windows. The wind was picking up, blowing snow slanted in lines past the warm yellow streetlights. Nothing else moved. After a few minutes he began to get cold so he got back in his car and drove away.

    Ritchie Highway was almost deserted. Halos of windblown falling snow surrounded the streetlights. He was angry and drove too fast, thinking about Ann. He’d cheated on her. But if he told her she wouldn’t even care. Or she’d be pleased. He wasn’t pleased. He hated it. Now he felt like crying but was still angry. Just past Robinson road he skidded on the snowy, windblown street and slid sideways down the left lane. He corrected automatically, no harm done. In another mood he’d have enjoyed doing that. But now he was shaking a little so he pulled off to the side to collect himself. Sitting on the shoulder with the engine turning over quietly, he cried out, almost shouting, pounding on the wheel. "I try hard," he said aloud. "I always try. I do good. I help people. I enjoy that. And I’m prosperous. I do plenty of things I like. I have friends. I have a wife and children. I take care of them the way I should. But I feel so alone. I feel lost. God! Listen to me God. Tell me. Why do I feel so alone? Why am I so like a lost child?"

    Gusts of wind shook the car, snow slanted through the flooding white of his headlights. God had no comment. Perhaps He spoke through the wind but Wolfe couldn’t understand Him.
 

        This is the last of the sequence of three chapters posted here.  A separate chapter, number 8, in which Wolfe meets a teenager with CFS, is also posted.

            Go to Chapter 8
            Return to Main
            Go to For Parents of Sick and Worn-Out Children
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