Transgressions and Other Stories

By Hilary Orbach

All human beings struggle to live with our own missteps and transgressions and those of others. In this compelling collection, stories with the depth and resonance of novellas offer a window into the challenging lives of contemporary men and women. From Alec and Mira, children of an unreliable mother, to Naomi and Graham, suburbanites who enter the wilderness of an affairand finally to Trevor, a psychiatrist who is himself a wounded healerOrbach presents a kaleidoscope of hopes, desires, longings and regrets of people as diverse as they are familiarpeople whose quandaries, whether ordinary or extreme, resonate with our own.
When Laura, a young widow, responds just for now to a man who is blind, she is drawn in by his compassionate voice. Matthew, trying to wall himself off from the dangers of deep emotion, finds his underlying fears exposed. Sharon, lunching with an ex-lover, commits a small but telling gesture of revenge. Jess, trying to remake her life, struggles to survive the cost to her children and herself. And Martin, involved in a tragic accident, tries in vain to avoid acknowledging the cost of his own shortcomings.
These are men and women seeking love, possibility, compassionand most of all the self-forgiveness needed to embrace the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475980462

Hilary Orbach

Hilary Orbach is a graduate of the University of Chicago and has held a Fiction Fellowship at Stanford University. She is author of the collection Transgressions and Other Stories (2013) and has published fiction and poetry in Seventeen, Redbook, The Chicago Review, The Nebraska Review (First Prize in Fiction, 2003), Crucible, and The Atlanta Review. She is a psychotherapist and lives in New York City.

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Copyright © 2013 Hilary Orbach

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Snow Falling on Upstate New York was originally published in The Nebraska Review, Summer 2003. Verona Waits for You was first published in Crucible, Fall 2007. Punishment was published in a slightly different version in Redbook, April 1970.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint these stories.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-8045-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8047-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8046-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013906184

iUniverse rev. date: 04/30/2015

Contents

Snow Falling on Upstate New York

Becoming Mira

Touch

Jeopardy

Chemistry

Four Mornings:

Home Movies

Punishment

Crossing Over

Innocents

Martin’s Remorse

Assault

Shopping Hours

Transgressions

Verona Waits for You

Acknowledgments

for Jack

and for our families

Snow Falling on Upstate New York

My sister Miranda and I grew up outside a university town far upstate near the Canadian border. There were four of us: Alec (that’s me, the big brother); Mira (that’s what we called her); Jamie (the elusive middle child); and Caitlin (known to us all as Cat). Now that we’re grown, Mira and I pride ourselves on being free agents. For most of my fifty-two years, I’ve remained aloof from the deep commitments that other people seek. As for Mira, she’s a roving rescue party. She travels the country, responding at intervals to distress calls from one or another of her siblings. She gives 150 percent wherever she is, but she doesn’t stay and never promises or even pretends to herself she’ll stay. She simply assumes she’ll remain as she is, her own person to the end. After all, if you give 150 percent all the time, how on earth could you stay?

Miranda and I both know the answer to that seemingly rhetorical question. We learned it as if our father had written it in the sky like an illumination by northern lights. You stay by obliterating yourself. You stay by trudging doggedly toward the kitchen door laden with bags of groceries, placing step after step in the snow that’s falling in large flakes, deepening inch by inch. You move always toward a dark house, maybe just a single lamp lit in somebody’s bedroom and the TV screen flickering in what we liked to call the wreck room. By the time you’ve entered the house and hefted the bags onto the kitchen table in the dark and turned on the switch so that the fluorescent fixture suddenly lights up everything like a flashbulb: the worn linoleum, the scarred table, the cabinets with their doors warped by the seeping cold; by the time the younger kids have heard you and rushed out to savage the grocery bags, hunting treats; by the time you’ve made it to the TV and shaken your daughter Miranda and your son Alec out of their glassy-eyed daze to demand, Where’s your mother?—by then, your footsteps in the snow are already gone.

Where is she, our mother? We shrug our shoulders, though we too have checked it out as soon as we walked into the house. She’s probably upstairs, asleep in her own bed with the curtains drawn. Yet even though that’s the likeliest place to find her, our hearts have thudded in our small chests as we approached the house. Knowing that our father wasn’t home yet, we’ve entered cautiously, listening to the quality of the silence, our antennae out for any unexpected sounds. And separately, without speaking to each other, we’ve each gone upstairs and tapped faintly on our mother’s bedroom door and then opened the door with exquisite care to see her flung across the bed like a discarded dress, or maybe half-covered by a blanket, still wearing her robe from morning, the pungent, sweet-sour smell of her breath infusing the room like something toxic.

So we know and yet are not sure that’s where she is. She may have moved, may be somewhere else—hopefully not up in the attic, frantically dredging old cartons for family pictures or baby clothes long since outworn; hopefully not in one of our rooms, snatching books off the shelves or sweeping makeup off the dresser, not in Jamie’s or Caitlin’s room, flinging their toys out the window one by one as she rages about the mess; or, our fondest hope, not running out into the snow to be coaxed back inside by Miranda as I look on, her bare feet ruddy and bruised.

And when our father, receiving no answer about her whereabouts, has also gone upstairs to scope out the situation himself, we sit very still, waiting to hear whether he’ll erupt in rage or, as happens more and more often, will just quietly close the bedroom door on her. And then we’ll breathe more easily, because now he’ll take charge.

Alec, he says, and I turn off the TV, knowing I’ll be told to, and lie down on the floor to start my homework. Miranda gets up and goes into the kitchen to unpack the groceries and start dinner. The other two sit at the kitchen table, squabbling and eating candy. Jamie talks nonstop in his high-pitched and somehow grating voice, while Caitlin, except for her outcries, is mostly silent, gazing into space with her shock of white-blond hair standing up on end.

In the family photo album, our father’s face would show, year by year, the signs of a hopeless weariness that must have crept into the house like a ghost following in his whited-out footsteps. But, in spite of all the pictures I took with my first camera, there is no such album until Miranda begins it, when we are all nearly grown, and then there are no more pictures of my father. If there were one, the caption should read, like a subversive sampler, He who devotes himself shall lose himself. The picture would show a man with sharp cheekbones, hollows worn beneath the eyes, the chin etched with the twin parentheses of a mouth turned down at the corners, making even the most ordinary remark into a bitter utterance. He died, in fact, carrying in the groceries. But that was still later, and by then our mother was gone, Jamie was off to the army, Caitlin to a teenage pregnancy and ill-fated marriage, and Mira and I, the stars of the family, long disappeared over the hill. Though Miranda was and is a rescuer by nature, nobody in that house got saved.

Of course our mother wasn’t always in the bed or making some bizarre kind of mischief. There were earlier years when she occupied the kitchen with her tremulous, wired-up presence, and we were young enough to take comfort in just the warmth and scent of her body, the smell of the fresh soil she tamped down for her plants, the aroma of her muffins or a dinner cooked all day in the crock pot. Later, during the years when I lived in a New York apartment, I’d come home around early dinnertime and be stopped in my tracks by the aroma of a rich, pungent beef stew that would spread through the hallway like an aromatic ad for family values. It never lost its power, that smell of cooking with its implication of nurturing and predictability.

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The farmhouse we lived in was located on a winding country road. You wouldn’t find it unless you knew where to look as you sped along the two-laner where it began. There were bushes that grew full and were rarely cut back, and they obscured the turn. Then there were two curves to the right, one to the left, a scattering of forlorn-looking bungalows, and then the one that was ours. It had been a pale gray-green with charcoal asbestos shingles on the roof, and in those earlier years our mother planted perennials outside the kitchen door and along the path, with here and there a bit of shrubbery. She was pretty then, or so we recalled later. She was blond—that’s where Caitlin gets it. There’s a picture of her chasing a toddler, it must have been Jamie, down the path; he looks like he’s squealing with delight. There’s a picture of Caitlin in a baby’s A-line sundress, holding our mother’s hand, bending over a rosebush. There’s a picture of her window boxes. She always favored petunias, and of course the morning glories that closed up, one by one, by the day’s end.

They weren’t farmers, our parents. They just didn’t have the money to live in town, closer to the state university where our father taught—certainly not by the time they had four children. They did live almost on campus in the beginning. When they came, newly married, they had the top floor of a crumbling Victorian, repainted on the outside in two colors so that it looked like a stage set. It was probably not unlike the apartments that were available for students, chopped-up portions of what once had been grand, or at least respectable, old houses.

Sometimes I wondered why we didn’t live in some sprawling old house like that, with large rooms, a fireplace, a leaking roof, and a furnace that kept giving out. It seems to me now that the university might have still owned places like that, might have provided one at a low rent for a faculty family like ours. After all, my dad had taught there for years and had that hammock to lie in called tenure, and to get that he must have been valued in the history department, at least in the early years. But later, after his first book and the single collection of essays, he probably didn’t publish enough, neither his own work nor the much easier critiques of others’. And then it must have become a problem to be right there on campus, so visible, considering the way our mother was.

I think of her, for instance, at a department party in the home of some colleague of his. I can see her so clearly, as if I were watching a film, or making one. She arrives breathless, a little flushed from the cocktail she’s downed at home to give herself confidence. She doesn’t really know anyone at the party. How do I know that? Because I can dimly remember another place where we lived, a small place on the ground floor of another house. I must have been about three years old, Miranda still in the stroller. Our mother hauls out the stroller, makes me watch it while she gets the baby from inside, and then we walk the walk. But we don’t meet anyone we know; she doesn’t talk with anyone when we get to the playground. If some other mother comes over, eager to chat, she smiles, but she’s standing on one foot like she can’t wait to get away. I can hear her voice turn sharp like the kind of sunshine that hurts your eyes with its glare, like a cold wind cutting through your thin jacket.

Well, I have to go! she would say suddenly, or, Yes, we must get together, that would be good! Then she would give a little wave goodbye, swinging the stroller around, grabbing for my hand, and we’d head off down the street, walking too fast. I’d look back over my shoulder at the kid I’d been playing with, the bright-colored slide and the weathered swings. I’d learned not to ask why or where we had to go. The baby’s crying, she’d probably say. And, by then, Miranda usually was.

Nobody came for coffee. The neighbors were strangers. I think our mother was never at ease with other people, so that any interaction was an ordeal to be got through. She always thought people were looking at her, criticizing, talking about her afterward. So when I imagine her, not many years later, arriving at someone’s house for a party, I know she isn’t coming into a gathering of friends. Instead, she glances nervously around at a room of strangers, wisps of her blond hair curling around her face in sticky tendrils, her skin giving off a faint, sour scent of anxiety. She’s had that drink or two at home for good luck. She’s been frantic with getting the kids to bed, probably three of us by then. She’s never grasped the dowdy chic of rural academia, so she’s overdressed, wearing her one smart black cocktail dress, a little too short, and she’s tried to tease her hair into the old Jacqueline Kennedy beehive, but it’s falling down on one side already from the dampness of her scalp. She’s already beginning to sweat, smiling brightly at whoever has opened the door, offering up her coat.

They move on into the living room, my father holding her arm in a steel grip. She accepts only a glass of white wine, as she’s promised. He moves to join a small knot of his colleagues, keeping her tight by his side. They greet him with the comradely slap on the back, turn to her with a few pleasantries, then resume their discussion. He leans forward, listening, plunges in to dispute an opinion—he’s still alive back then. She has emptied her glass already and slips out of the knot to find some more wine. He doesn’t notice. The bar is set out on the buffet in the dining room. She refills her glass, wanders back into the smoky living room where the men and a few female faculty are all gathered in tightly meshed groups, the other women clustered on two loveseats. They glance over at her, a few of them nodding recognition, looking her up and down in her little black dress and high heels. She stands by the fireplace, twisting the re-emptied glass between her hands until it breaks or flies out of her hands to land on the carpet. She heads back to the bar for something stronger this time. Within an hour or so, my father starts looking around for her and finds she’s flirted outrageously or quarreled outrageously with someone, and suddenly it’s time to go.

On the Monday morning after such a party, our father takes Mira and me to school. Later, our mother ventures out with Jamie in the stroller. She pushes on to the supermarket or the post office, shaky after a Sunday in bed, assaulted by the frosty air, still suffering the pains in her head or her stomach. At some point in her journey, someone she knows passes her by without a word or else looks at her too long—the man she found so attractive at the party, or his wife, or some other woman she’s probably insulted but can’t remember how—and she tells my father she can’t go out of the house anymore, can’t face people, can’t stand it here. He starts to look around for a house in the country, some kind of house, something he can afford.

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For a few years after we moved to the farmhouse, our family experienced a reprieve. Our mother, relieved of the pressure of relating to other people, immersed herself first in the gardening and then, during the winter months, in repairing and painting her way through one after another of the small, neglected rooms. The task was daunting. Old wallpaper hung, one might say drunkenly, from corners and beside window frames. Most of the windows had shades that were ripped and filthy. There was an upright piano, grossly out of tune, in one corner of the front room, and once Jamie and then Caitlin could reach the keys, they would bang away until she screamed at them to stop and go watch TV. Caitlin was born after we moved to the farmhouse; I can remember our mother lying in bed, hugely pregnant, and then with the baby, nursing. My father sat in the tiny parlor, grading papers and trying to keep us other children occupied. She didn’t drink at all for a couple of years.

Then it began again, the steep downhill slide. One day Mira and I came home and found Jamie alone in front of the TV, Caitlin screaming in the playpen. She was upstairs on the bed, our mother. We called and shouted and pulled at her, trying to rouse her, but we ended up with me sitting down with Jamie and Mira heating up a bottle for the baby. Don’t worry, Mira told us. Dad will be home soon.

It’s strange about memory, how the images tumble and jostle each other like clothes in the dryer. I see her passed out on the bed. Then she’s up on the ladder, her carpenter’s pants splotched with color, every muscle in her thin body stretched to paint a clear, straight edge along the ceiling. I see her squatting in the garden, putting in tulip bulbs before the ground freezes. Then she’s sitting in an armchair with her trusty glass in hand, staring into space as if she sees her own ghost. Then she’s bent toward us, listening, just for a moment, to how Mira hurt her elbow or how I got into trouble with a teacher. In that single moment, she looks and listens with her whole self, a small line of concern etched between her eyes, her pale, worn face offered to receive what we have to say. Maybe she even clutches one of us to her chest, so tightly that we feel the sharp buttons on her blouse, the clammy skin of her neck, and pull back from her a little. Then she abruptly turns away, dismissing us with a shrug or a reproach, and we stand there in midsentence, our mouths still spilling out the words of our story, watching her walk away into another room.

Where was my father in all this? In the relentless winters, he was up at five, carrying in wood from the shed, starting a fire in the camp stove we used. Upstairs in their bedroom and both mine and Mira’s there were space heaters, but not for the younger ones, because they might start a fire. Jamie and Caitlin wore sleeping suits made of thick blanket material. But in winter our father would carry them downstairs as soon as he woke so that, with the stove going, they’d wake up in a room where you didn’t see your breath. Then he’d shovel the walk from the house to the driveway and turn over the car’s engine a few times so he knew that later he’d be able to start it and warm it up for the drive to the campus. He must have had an eight o’clock class.

Once our mother started drinking again, she didn’t get up those mornings. Mira and I would make our lunches and collect our schoolbooks. Before we did that, we’d get Jamie and Caitlin dressed, because he’d take them along and drop them, Jamie at nursery school, Cat at the home of Mrs. Bailey, a woman we thought of as old because she was gray-haired and, as my father put it, broad as a bed. If Mira and I missed the school bus and had to ride in with my father, we’d watch Cat jump out of the car and run awkwardly up the snowy walk into Mrs. Bailey’s arms, burying her face in the woman’s vast stomach. Mrs. Bailey would pick her up and, smiling, show her how to wave good-bye. Sometimes she’d keep Cat for dinner. Sometimes she’d send home a casserole. Or Jamie would be sick and stay there too instead of going to nursery school. Maybe she’d keep the two of them overnight until they both were ready to go home.

This went on until Caitlin was old enough for kindergarten. On her last day at Mrs. Bailey’s, my father tried to explain to her that she wouldn’t be coming back to the house every day, but only to visit or if she took sick. Cat wasn’t getting it. And then Mrs. Bailey put her hand on my father’s arm.

I have to tell you, Mr. Markower, I won’t be here after next month. I’m going to live with my daughter in Virginia.

My father looked stunned. He was silent for a minute, and then he said, God bless you, Mrs. Bailey. His words startled me, knowing as I did that he was an atheist. He had tears in his eyes, I noticed. Come on, Alec. He grabbed up Caitlin and carried her down the walk to the car.

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If Caitlin was five then, Jamie was seven; if he was seven, Miranda and I were ten and twelve. So it was that same September. My mother had turned over another new leaf. She still slept in at the beginning of the day, but by the time we came home she’d been up and cleaned the house, and we walked into a warm kitchen, the smells of something baking. Later my father brought the groceries—she still didn’t want to leave the house—but she cooked the dinner with Mira, shooing him off to his desk or to the living room to relax. He smiled, made a few jokes, took me out to his woodworking shop in the garage. Once he laid his hand on my shoulder and said, It’s good, isn’t it, now that your mother’s feeling better? I nodded carefully, and he turned back to our project, smiling a little, until she called us both in for dinner. This would be another night when they’d watch a movie with us and then tell us to get off to bed and head for the stairs themselves, holding hands like normal people. There was a vise that was beginning to loosen in my chest, in all of us.

So it came as a shock one evening when my mother served the dessert—cherry pie, as I remember—and then leaned back in her chair and said, her voice trembling a little, I have something to tell you all. We’re going to have a new member of the family.

We all sat staring at her—stupidly, I suppose, perhaps imagining some long-lost grandparent or aunt was about to join us, to help out. Then Mira and I met each other’s glance, suddenly understanding, and turned to my father. His face had flushed and darkened. He looked grimly at my mother.

Not another word, he said in a thick voice. This is not the time or the place. Clear the table, Miranda.

Jamie and Cat