The Resurrection of Tess Blessing, Page 2

  Angel shmangels. How many times did I tell you not to have children, Theresa? Yours barely speak to you and look what they did to your figure and….

  If you’re thinking that’s me talking mean like that to Tess, well, you’d be wrong.

  That there is the unrelenting voice of her mother that she hears in her head even though the gal’s dead.

  When Louise Mary Fitzgerald Finley Gallagher passed on last year, instead of leaving her eldest daughter a 1940s bureau with a couple of missing porcelain handles or linen hankies with swirling lavender initials, she left Tess her remains, a heart full of pain, and her head full of criticism.

  I’m not sure where Louise is in her celestial education at the current time—upon the death of her body, her soul moved from the living room to the school room where she will be held accountable for her actions and be given the opportunity to learn from her mistakes—but while she was still on Earth that self-centered woman did indelible damage to my friend that I hope to heal when she allows me in. I have a couple of ideas on how to remove her thorny mother from her side, but have yet to come up with anything to stick in the hole to staunch the bleeding. (Not yet, anyway.)

  Tess sets the washed fry pan on the yellow-and-blue kitchen counter, wipes her hands dry on the seat of the bulky gray sweatpants she wears to conceal the blubber she’s put on in her efforts to show Haddie how much fun eating can be, checks the clock above the stove, and looks for the black purse that holds her good-luck totems—a hanging-by-a-thread copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, remnants of her children’s baby blankets, and her daddy’s Swiss Army knife that fell out of his pocket that fateful day on the boat. She doesn’t go anywhere without that lucky purse.

  “I’ve got an appointment this morning,” she tells the girl whose photographs are so remarkable for one so young that National Geographic has shown interest in hiring her as an intern next summer. “Why don’t you call me when you’re done shooting at the Nature Center? Maybe we could—”

  “What kind of appointment?”

  “No big deal. Just my yearly mammogram.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  Tess lays her cheek atop her daughter’s head and breathes deeply. Her natural aroma has always been earthy. Like she’d grown the child not in her womb, but her garden. Haddie’s hair is really something too. Not a deep red like her mother’s, but a daisy yellow like Will’s used to be, and the child was blessed with eyes that are a paler shade of blue than Tess’s that are almost navy. “Nothin’ to worry about, honey,” she reassures. “Cancer doesn’t run in the family. Mammograms are just part of the program when you get to be—”

  “Uh-huh,” her daughter says as she ducks away from her mom’s lips.

  My friend has been raked over these coals so often that she’s grown used to and accepts the rejection, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t try everything she can to change it. She’s sure that if she could only figure out why Haddie is so angry with her, she would get better and they could go back to the way they used to be. Inseparable.

  Tess wonders if it’s because of the way she reacted when she was first informed that her daughter planned to attend college at the Savannah School of Art and Design. Was that it?

  She can’t deny that she was far from thrilled that Haddie meant to fly off and leave her in her contrail. When the acceptance letter was waved in her face, Tess freely admits she said, “Georgia?” like it was the one on the Black Sea. (She also failed to hide the excruciating ripping sensation she was feeling that was not dissimilar to the eighteen-hour back labor she’d endured during the child’s birth.)

  But…once she’d gotten over the shock, hadn’t she tried her hardest to be supportive of Haddie’s desire to test her wings the year before she left?

  Unfortunately, due to the losses she had experienced as child, the profound sense of abandonment Tess was experiencing was almost impossible to contain. Even though she’s normally highly skilled at keeping her true emotions secret—she’s successfully hidden her severe emotional problems from her children and the rest of the world her whole life—it was pretty damn obvious that she didn’t mean it when she threw kisses and hollered, “Go get ’em, baby!” on the mid-August afternoon that her husband and daughter pulled out of the driveway in the packed-to-the-roof green Taurus her parents had given their overachieving, artistic child after she’d graduated with the highest grade-point average ever recorded at Ruby Falls High.

  So, of course, when the homesick freshman called begging to return home sixteen days after her arrival in Savannah—“Mommy, please…I made a mistake. I miss you…I’ll eat whatever you want. Please, please come get me,” Tess didn’t think twice. She scribbled a late-night “Be Back Soon, xoxo” note to Will and Henry, and off she and Garbo drove to save Haddie from her freedom.

  She made it as far as Zionsville, Indiana, when the doubts she’d been wrestling with forced her to pull into an abandoned truck stop. Under the fluorescent lights, she finally admitted to herself that as much as she wanted to bring her girl back home, if she did, she’d be acting as selfishly as her own mother had. She cried herself dry, and then called Haddie to tell her in a barely used firm voice that she was sorry, but, “You need to stick it out.”

  Is that why she’s mad? Tess wonders. She thinks I wasn’t there for her when she needed me most? She takes another stab at connecting with Haddie before she leaves for her appointment. “Maybe we could get a little lunch today?” In the good old days, shrimp egg rolls followed by chicken chow mein used to be her daughter’s favorite. The number-four special would be out of the question, but maybe she could talk Haddie, who appeared to know the caloric content of every food ever created, into a lettuce wrap. “Wong Fat’s?”

  On her daughter’s generous lips even disgust looks good.

  What did you expect? Louise snipes in Tess’s head. You just invited a kid with an eating disorder to lunch at a place that has FAT in its name. Theresa…Theresa…Theresa…could you be a worse mother?

  I wish my friend could shout back, Yeah, I could be you! but at the present time, she doesn’t have the confidence to speak back to her mother, nor bury her either.

  Tess tries again. “Do you want to…?” She almost asked Haddie if she’d like to go to the mall instead. That would’ve been another mistake. Her girl used to adore shopping, but she won’t try on flouncy dresses or frilly blouses anymore. She’d grab armfuls of pretty things off the racks, but once they hung in the dressing room, she would collapse in tears after she stripped down to her panties and saw her “grossness” reflected back in the store mirror. “What about…?” Haddie adores illness movies. If she could find one about a young woman suffering with anorexia or bulimia she’d be in hog heaven and expect her mother to wallow in it with her. “We could watch a Lifetime movie tonight.”

  “Whatever.”

  Sensing that she’s hit yet another conversational dead end, Tess clears the rest of the breakfast dishes and slogs down the basement steps to turn off the TV that Will and Henry left on last night. When she steps back into the kitchen with her arms full of their leftovers, Haddie shudders at the greasy popcorn bowl, empty pop bottles, and gooey candy wrappers.

  “Thanks for rubbing it in,” she growls as she stomps past her mother toward the staircase.

  Tess calls after her, “I’m sorry…I’m stopping at the grocery store after my appointment. Do you need anything?” but she leaves the house uncertain if Haddie heard her before she slammed the bathroom door shut behind her.

  A Passed Life

  As Tess backs out of the driveway in the dinged-up ’83 silver Volvo she refuses to sell because she brought her children home from the hospital in it, she’s thinking about her family. It’s not just Haddie that she’s having such a hard time with. She’s no longer the star of Henry’s or Will’s lives either. On good days, she figures she has a supporting role, on the not so good ones, she fades into the scenery. Her carefully considered words are nothing more than background nois
e. Mommy Muzak.

  On her drive down Chestnut Street, she passes homes similar to hers, good-sized and over a hundred years old. Tess envies their rock solidness, their ability to withstand the onslaught of time. When was the last time she and Will strolled beneath the old-fashioned streetlights after the children turned in for the night? A month? Two? She’d made him laugh, and they’d shared stories of their day. When the time for words was over, Tess got a hooded look in her eyes and began to softly singing “their” song—Hernando’s Hideaway.

  “I know a dark secluded place….”

  Will knew that place too, and he took his wife of almost thirty years into his arms and they tangoed back to the ancient oak tree that he’d carved their initials into the same way his father had his mother’s. He pressed Tess against the rough bark and cupped her breasts in his hands, laid his lips against hers with insistent tenderness until she felt him rise to the occasion.

  They hadn’t made it up to the bedroom.

  After circling for a few minutes, Tess spots an open space in nearby St. Mary’s North Hospital lot and pulls in. She bustles toward the pneumatic doors, but once inside, she stomps her feet for an inordinately long time on the long black mat to loosen the snow trapped in her boots. She’s telling herself that she’s just being courteous, but she’s stalling. Her fear of hospitals, a.k.a. “gigantic petri dishes,” is one of many.

  “Good morning!” an elderly volunteer says to Tess as she dawdles into the hospital lobby.

  The greeter is wearing a white blouse with a bow and gold button earrings. The shiny label on her chest says—I’m Vivian. Now, some folks might find her overly arched penciled eyebrows and caked pancake makeup pathetic, but Tess thinks Vivian looks valiant, and nothing like Betty Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Though if her arm was twisted, she’d have to admit there are some similarities around the lips.

  Since she has had prior mammograms at the sister hospital of one of the biggest and best in Milwaukee, she knows where she’s going, but she steps up to the desk and asks, “The Women’s Center?” because she doesn’t want anybody to feel as unneeded as she does.

  “Down there, dear,” Vivian says as she points to a hall on the left with a knobby-knuckled finger. “Have a nice day!”

  Tess wants to wish her the same, but the cinnamon toast she’d gulped down for breakfast had begun to ball up in her throat when Vivian’s hair spray hit her nose. It was Aqua Net.

  Sense memories are the strongest, so even though Tess puts up her dukes, it’s more out of habit than hope. If she successfully overpowers the feelings that are barging into her brain, it’d be the first time she’s won the battle against the enemy that has attacked her thousands of times since the third of June, 1968, the day it first jumped out of the shadows of her mind to have its way with her.

  Barely nineteen years old at the time and already a year out of the house and on her own, Tess had picked up a pack of Juicy Fruit from the corner drugstore and was returning back to her efficiency apartment on Milwaukee’s Lower East Side when out of the blue, she broke into a shiny sweat. Her heart began beating like a war drum, and her breathing came in staggered, fast bursts. For no apparent reason—a madman wasn’t charging at her with a knife, nor had a car jumped a curb and come careening her way—she was experiencing the kind of gut-wrenching fear she’d only feel if both the above were true.

  When she tried to run from the invisible enemy, she found her legs were no longer able to do their job. She slid down Pizza Man’s front window onto the hot sidewalk where she sat immobilized physically and mentally, unsure if, or when, whatever was happening to her would stop. Passersby took her for just another stoned hippie grooving on the day and gave her the peace sign. She should’ve found this highly amusing, but it appeared that whatever had her in its grip had also snatched away her strongest coping device, her sense of humor, and that riled her up even more.

  When the panic eventually lessened its hold, Tess made it back to her tiny apartment above the bike shop terrified that whatever it was that had struck her down had followed her home. She spent the next two days rolled in a ball on the apartment floor convinced that she was losing her mind. As her mother and stepfather were not what one would call helpful, and she had no friends other than her equally emotionally unbalanced younger sister, Birdie, and the hairy strangers she smoked pot and listened to Jimi Hendrix with every so often in the alley behind the bike shop, she had nowhere to turn but inward, so she pulled herself together and did what she often did to find answers to life’s perplexing questions.

  Cautiously, she proceeded to the neighborhood library.

  She bypassed the medical books because she’d only briefly considered that what she was experiencing was physical in origin. The shortness of breath, the weakness, the cramps, and the sweating had dissipated once the attack was over. She was convinced that her problems had to be in her head, the same way they were in Birdie’s, so she made a beeline to the library’s self-improvement section. Nowadays it’s jammed with books about her condition, but it was slim pickings back then. All Tess could find in the stacks was a diet bestseller that mentioned how coffee put people on edge and sardines might give people nightmares, so she switched to a bland diet that consisted primarily of dry cereal and toast points.

  But after changing her eating habits failed to keep three more attacks at bay, she decided that where she had experienced the fear must’ve been the trigger, and she composed one of the many lists she’s made throughout her life to keep her on track:

  BAD PLACES

  The sidewalk in front of Pizza Man.

  The Melting Spoon.

  Baker’s Drugs.

  The laundromat.

  The library.

  SOLUTIONS

  Walk on the other side of the street.

  I never liked the bossy waitresses at the Melting Spoon all that much.

  Stand out front of the drugstore and ask people with nice faces to buy Maalox for me.

  Wash my clothes in the bathtub.

  Read To Kill a Mockingbird for the fifty-first, fifty-second, fifty-third time, etc.

  Tess followed her instructions and was making do, until an insidious wave of terror swept her out of her balcony seat at the Oriental Theatre during a showing of Easy Rider. She stumbled down the darkened aisle with the realization that on top of everything else she’d given up to protect herself, she’d no longer be able to go to the beloved movies that had been one of her only means of escape since her sister’s and her Saturday matinee days. Almost penniless, alone, and suffering from an agonizing mental illness, she almost threw in the towel that night. If that sweet old lady hadn’t pulled alongside her on her frantic dash down the East Side streets and told her, “It’s awfully late for a girl to be out on her own. Can I give you a lift home, dear?” Tess might’ve jumped off the North Avenue Bridge.

  (A friend in need is a friend indeed.)

  Since Tess spent most of her time and energy coping with her out-of-control fear, holding down a job had become almost impossible. She’d had to quit answering the phones at Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics when she developed claustrophobia and could no longer stand being cooped up in a bus or an office. Waitressing at Vince’s Grill didn’t work out either. She was overwhelmed by happy chatter. Thank goodness for the HELP WANTED sign she spotted in the window of an Arthur Murray Dance Studio. (I might’ve had something to do with a position opening up.) She applied and got the job.

  A lover of musicals since childhood—the ones starring Shirley Temple and Ginger Rogers were her favorites—she picked up the dances quickly, especially loved the tango, and really took to the place. After a few months of working all the hours she could and saving most of her paycheck, she enrolled in two classes at nearby University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Along with a singing class—Tess had long ago set aside her desire to win the talent portion of Miss America, but dreamed of performing off Broadway—she also signed up for Psychology 101—Tess desperately wanted to b
e sane, and would be thrilled to not end up in an institution.

  Her quest for higher learning started out with a bang, but during the course of the semester, she was forced to come to terms with a few heartbreaking realities. Her desire to sing didn’t match her God-given abilities, so appearing in musical comedies two blocks over from The Great White Way was out. And by the fifth psych class, she had to admit to herself that she had more in common with the “abnormal” cases the professor shared with the class then she’d ever imagined.

  Since there wasn’t much she could do about her propensity to sing flat, she vowed to put what little energy she had into solving her emotional problems. She called for an appointment at the university’s counseling center. That took enormous courage on her part, because the first time she’d paid a visit to a professional years ago didn’t work out so hot.

  After the accident that claimed her father’s life, young Tess was unable to eat sloppy joes, her daddy’s favorite. She acted up at school. Got mouthy with Father Ted during catechism class. Told him that if it was true that God was all-powerful, he was also a flaming asshole. “Or maybe that’s the Holy Spirit,” she cracked to her fifth-grade class.

  Even her mother, who had her delusions-of-grandeur nose stuck up so far in the air that she was barely aware of any life growing below her waist, noticed that something was off with her firstborn. She told Tess, like she was doing her a big favor, “I scheduled a series of meetings with Father Ted to save your soul, and I met a psychologist tonight at Lonnigan’s—that’s someone who deals with head cases. We’ve got an appointment with him tomorrow.”