The Painted Table(60)

After their next movie date, they sit in the VW in front of the dormitory, idly chatting, watching light snow fall. It’s an hour and a half until curfew.

Saffee takes a deep breath and begins. “From the day we met, you’ve shared your good life with me, but I’ve, well, I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’m evasive sometimes.”

“I figured you’d tell me what you want me to know when the time is right,” Jack says.

She suddenly sees a measure of absurdity in her reticence. Does he think she might have a sinister past, raised by the Mafia or something? Just as Gloria believed her mother . . . For a moment, the humor of the situation eases her discomfort.

She begins by telling him that her mother is mentally ill, and although she understands little about her condition, a childhood trauma, a prairie fire, seems to have been a contributing factor. Trying to be light on details, but not completely succeeding, she tells him what she knows about her mother’s nightmares and how for years Joann obsessively painted a table she had hidden beneath during the fire. She recounts her mother’s temper tantrums and some of the aberrant episodes that finally led to repeated hospitalizations.

Summoning such scenes from the past puts Saffee’s stomach in knots. Her mouth is dry and she feels like a traitor. Even though most of her hometown probably knows about Joann’s unfortunate condition, Saffee, until now, has guarded the “family secrets.”

Jack listens, takes her hand when she falters, wipes a tear.

She tells him about some of the by-products of living in close quarters with mental illness—her own inadequacies and fears, both perceived and real; her sister essentially running away at the first opportunity; and her father’s denial and inability to help his very troubled wife. She is quick to add her admiration for his fidelity.

After several minutes of monologue, Saffee’s head tells her to stop. But once unbridled, she continues at a gallop, launching into the similarities she often notes between herself and her mother. Her mother imagines things. Saffee confesses she used to imagine herself to be every female character she met in books and movies. It’s, well, crazy. (Why did she use that word?) She tells him how, like her mother, she has always preferred a life hidden away. And also, like her mother, she is critical and negative. Her self-condemning litany goes on and on.

Finally, out of breath, she drops her tense shoulders and quits. She has finally exposed her troubled mother. And herself. She threads her long wool scarf in and out around her fingers and waits for him to respond, dreading what he might say.

He says nothing. In the silence, an ugly, condemning word throbs. Stigma. Association with mental illness always carries stigma.

Jack continues to look out the window while silence continues to crash the hated word.

A hand-holding couple walks by headed for the front door. The door opens. The young man returns to his car and drives away.

“Let’s get out and walk,” Jack says. “Shouldn’t waste this snowfall.”

She wraps the scarf loosely around her head and begins to open the car door, but Jack has already come around. Perhaps this will be their final walk together.

“Looks like we’ll have a white Christmas,” he says as they walk through gentle mounds that powder the sidewalk.

“Jack”—she can’t help but sound impatient—“I thought you might have something to say about what I’ve just told you. It was very hard for me to share those things.”

“Well. Okay. First of all, what’s wrong with dreaming about being someone else?” he says. “Imagination spurs achievement. And second, you weren’t in your mother’s prairie fire.”

She’s taken aback. He’s so dismissive. Doesn’t he realize that she just spilled her guts, her entire emotional being? “Of course I was not in the fire, but I grew up in a house contaminated with the memory of its trauma. It was not a good place, Jack.”

“I heard that. So what are you going to do about it?”

“Do? I don’t know. All I do is try to hide our family secrets and their influence on me and April and Dad. But I thought”—she whips around to face him—“I thought you’d want to know. In fact, I thought you had a right to know, because it seems to me”—she takes a softer tone mid-sentence—“it seems to me that we’ve become more than just two friends having fun times. I guess it all boils down to this: I’ve been hoping that our friendship will continue, even though now you know that I come from an odd family and I have . . . some hang-ups.”

She’s weak from being so bold. She’s afraid he will say something meaningless, like he understands, and then disappear.