Laura Gale - The Tie That Binds

To Arnold and Sophie Neuman, it didn’t matter that Rachel’s parents, Michael and Gloria Shannon, were well-educated, hard-working, caring individuals. In fact, that they had to work was another negative as far as the Neumans were concerned. Gloria was a teacher with a preference for teaching kindergarten. Michael was a veterinarian. Perhaps the Neumans would have been sufficiently impressed had he been a doctor who treated humans, rather than animals. But he wasn’t, so it was a moot point.

As for their opinion of Rachel, nothing could win her an objective audience with them. Not her natural beauty. Not her quiet intelligence. Not her zest for life. Not her gentle competence, her genuine compassion or inner strength—the very qualities sustaining her as a single mother and as head pediatric nurse.

They held inflexible ideas about her correct place in society and it wasn’t as Lucas’s wife. She was suitable mistress material.

Alana, as Lucas’s wife, would have understood a mistress. She’d been raised to understand that.

According to the Neumans, as a minority, Rachel should have been appreciative of such a desirable position. The Neumans had tried very hard to instruct Rachel on her “proper place.” Rachel had rejected their reasoning, had found their demands unacceptable. Yet she had felt pressure to somehow get along with them. They were her in-laws after all.

Lucas had never understood why Rachel didn’t want to be around his parents. He’d been confident that if she’d spend time with them, she’d come to like them. She just needed to give them a chance. If she would do that, he had said, his parents would come around and like her, too. Lucas did not understand prejudice, having never been on the receiving end of it. Rachel had been incapable of making him understand, had eventually quit trying.

Eventually Rachel had quietly tried to avoid Lucas’s parents more and more, whenever possible. To manage this, she had begun to withdraw from the social life she shared with Lucas. She had hoped to nourish their private life. Except that their private life, their relationship, had begun to disintegrate slowly, bit by bit.

“Well, I’m not withdrawing now,” she stated, clattering her spoon into her now-empty soup mug. “This isn’t about me, about whether or not I’m comfortable. This is about Michaela. And if that makes Lucas uncomfortable, well, that will make two of us. It’s about time.”

Her reverie was interrupted by the sound of the doorbell. Answering its summons, Rachel found herself confronted by the dazzling smile and click of beaded braids that accompanied Tanisha Davis everywhere she went.

“Hey, there,” Tanisha said in greeting.

“Hey,” Rachel answered. “What brings you here?”

“Are you kidding?” Tanisha’s eyebrows descended in mock disapproval as she breezed into Rachel’s home. “I’ve been in this house lately, more than you I might add, and I know what the food supply looks like.” Holding up a grocery bag that Rachel hadn’t noticed, Tanisha continued, “I’ve brought tostada stuff. It’s quick and it will be better than anything lurking in this house. And you a nurse.” Tanisha tsk-tsked at Rachel. “You should know better. When food starts to come back to life, when it can move all by itself—you really shouldn’t be eating it. It’s a basic rule.”

Rachel laughed and followed her friend into the kitchen, acknowledging that Tanisha spoke the truth. Or very nearly the truth, anyway.

Within minutes, busily filled with chopping vegetables and warming refried beans, the table was spread. Rachel couldn’t help noticing how much more appetizing this meal was than her tomato soup had been. Not to mention that being with Tanisha always relaxed Rachel, since she knew she could drop her guard and be herself.

Of course, Rachel thought, smiling to herself, the person who can fool Tanisha has not been born, so there’s really no point in trying to be anything less than open with her.

“Why are you home today?” Rachel asked, conversation rolling naturally and comfortably between them.

“Oh, well, it’s my weekend, you know,” Tanisha answered.

Tanisha, in order to avoid working off-shifts, had elected to take a schedule with rotating weekends. Therefore, rather than a Saturday-Sunday weekend, she sometimes had other combinations. In this case, it looked like Tuesday-Wednesday.

“And Vanessa is with Wayne?”

“Yeah,” Tanisha agreed, nodding her head, her beads rustling in her hair. “I have to admit, once we worked it out, he’s pretty sympathetic about the weekend time. He has alternating shifts, too, so we try to give Vanessa time with each of us on our weekends, but we try to give each other a free weekend now and then. We’ve been able to reduce day-care time for Vanessa, which is great. Not that it was easy to get it worked out.” Tanisha was shaking her head vehemently now, lending emphasis to her words, the beads increasing their gentle rhythm.

Rachel had never pressed Tanisha for the details of the situations, grateful that Tanisha had never pressed her either. Frankly, she was reluctant to risk asking anything that would change that. Rachel had never been inclined to complain about what life had thrown her—living it was all she could do. She assumed Tanisha had a similar philosophy.

Always, it had been enough that they were both single mothers of young daughters, doing their best. In that, they had much in common.

However, Rachel now considered the possibility that knowing how someone else had coped might be valuable information. Comforting, even. It was the reason for support groups, she reasoned.

Suddenly Rachel wanted to know more about Tanisha’s details. “How did you work it out?”

“Well—” Tanisha pondered a minute “—first, I had to let go of Wayne, I guess. I had to accept that he didn’t want to be married, or at least not to me. But he did want to be a father. Once I got used to those basic facts, things went a lot better.”

“He didn’t want to be married?”

“No. Well…I mean, I didn’t either, exactly. We were just, you know, seriously seeing each other, not dating anyone else. But we sure were not thinking about making babies. Then, when I realized that we were making a baby, whether or not we planned to be, well, that’s when we got married. No argument on that. But after a couple years, it was pretty obvious that Wayne really didn’t want to be married. I fought that. I didn’t want to give up, you know? I thought a marriage, no matter how bad, was better than no marriage. And I didn’t think ours was that bad. So, eventually he was moving out and filing for divorce and I was a nutcase over it. I was not—” she emphasized the word with a severely arched eyebrow “—very nice about it.” Tanisha shrugged, exchanging her harsh expression for a relaxed one. “But eventually I admitted to myself that it was losing the marriage that upset me, not losing Wayne. I liked him well enough, but—” she shrugged again “—I was not consumed with love for the man. Passion, oh, yeah. That part we did right, which is what got us together in the first place.”

She punctuated her story with a laugh. “But I wasn’t in love with him. He wasn’t in love with me. That was never really part of our marriage. So I finally let go. And now Wayne and me, we’re friends. I would have never believed it, but we are. And that’s the best we can do for Vanessa, which is the important thing, anyway.”

“Do you ever miss it? Being married, I mean?” Rachel wasn’t sure where the questions were coming from.

“Lord, yes, I miss it. I don’t miss Wayne, mind you, not anymore. But I miss being part of a couple. I’d like to have that again. You know what I’m saying?”