Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

“That’s Jamie’s life. You need to take care of your own.”

Ellen doesn’t answer. Instead she closes her eyes and tries to take a few good, deep breaths.

“Ellen?”

Finally Ellen lowers her shoulders, sits up straighter. “I know. I’m here. It’s all right. You’re right. I can only do what I can do.”

“You can love him, Ellen. I know you can do that.”

And Ellen smiles. “I can. Thank you. Again and again and again.”

“I’ll see you when you get back,” Amanda Smithfield says, and she hangs up.

I can love him , Ellen tells herself again. And it calms her. Yes, that is something she can do.

“THERE’S A PLACE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE outside Malaga where people get a second chance to be alive.”

“This is the good part, right?”

Ellen nods, smiles at Jamie. “This is the good part.… I went from the hospital to Tracy’s and then to ‘A Safe Place’—that’s the name of it, ‘Un Lugar Seguro.’ And they’re not kidding. No one who isn’t wanted can get in, and no one who’s in can get out.”

“Sounds like a prison.”

“No, no, more like a womb.”

They’re driving from Jamie’s school, where Ellen has picked him up, into the heart of the San Diego downtown, to the annual ArtWalk. Hundreds of local artists display their work. There are usually several bands, including a mariachi, and food stalls. It’s a street festival, and Jamie goes every year. He wants to show it to Ellen.

It’s late on a Friday afternoon, and Ellen, who spent the week exploring, is at the wheel. She feels like she knows her way around now.

The week has gone well for both of them. Breakfasts and dinners together. Each day inching closer to that sense of seamlessness they shared as children. Jamie went to work. Ellen explored. One day she went to the Wild Animal Park and rode the little tram around its acres and acres, visiting the Elephant Valley and the African Outpost, where she saw cheetahs and warthogs, and the Gorilla Forest, and the giraffes, of course the giraffes, her favorite. Another day she drove to La Jolla and walked the wide, clear beaches for miles. When Jamie got home he found her sun- and wind-burned and lazy with relaxation. They watched a DVD that night of Doubt because neither had ever seen it and both had plenty of memories of nuns and priests to add to the mix. They stretched out on Jamie’s forest green couch, now with colorful throw pillows under their heads, and ate popcorn for dinner and talked to each other and the TV screen all the way through the movie. A perfect evening.

“If you want to be crass about it, it’s a rehab hospital,” Ellen continues as she drives, “only it looks like a spa — all the buildings have thick white walls and tile roofs, there’s bougainvillea draped over everything, I mean everything, in that shocking magenta. There are two pools, a massage room, a kitchen that turns out only organic food that is amazingly good, and acres of olive trees with paths and patios everywhere. You get the picture. Very tranquil. Muy tranquilo . Very expensive. Muy caro . Miguel paid for it. He sort of had to — he’d put me in the hospital twice. He didn’t want me to press charges.”

Jamie watches her as she talks and steers the car down the Pacific Coast Highway, through the crowded Friday afternoon traffic, the endlessly blue ocean on their right. She does it effortlessly, as if she were the world’s most competent person.

“What were you rehabbing from?”

“Are you kidding me? From our childhood.”

“Then all eight of us should be in a place like that.”

“Wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“Really, Ellen, can you be a bit more specific?”

She doesn’t answer him directly. She thinks about how to go about this conversation for a minute and then says, “You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were subjected to the kind of violence we were as kids, then as an adult, you’d avoid any situation that might conceivably lead there.”

“I have,” Jamie says.

“We’ll get to you in a minute. There’s a flip side to all this.”

“Oh, good.” Jamie turns from her and looks out his window at the ocean. The sky at the horizon line is turning purple. It will be dusk soon. “I can’t wait to hear the flip side,” Jamie says, his voice brittle and chopped.

“Jamie, I almost died because I wouldn’t look at what was driving my life. Don’t check out on me here.”

With effort he turns back to her, but he knows now that this “good part” is going to include things he doesn’t want to hear.

“I had to let go of everything I believed about who I was and how I worked and what had made me. They have doctors there who help you do that — to see clearly, to be naked, psychologically speaking. When I came to Dad’s funeral, I had only done that work. I had stripped myself to the bone, and I was terrified. I hadn’t put myself together in a new way yet. That’s what you saw when I came to Buffalo.”

“Who was that grim woman with the mustache?”

Ellen laughs. It’s open and free. “Estella. She works there as a sort of psychiatric aide. The only way they’d let me leave was to have someone with me, to take care of me, sort of. And they were right. I was barely functioning. It took another six months before I could see another way to be. Before I could leave all that need for violence behind.”

She looks over to see how Jamie is taking all this. His face gives nothing away, even to her.

“Here’s the thing — you can’t just bury all the shit we lived through and expect to have any sort of life.”

“I have a life,” he says through tight lips.

“Barely, Jamie, barely. Don’t you see how much you deny yourself?”

He shakes his head. Here it comes , he thinks, here comes the attack .

“Ellen,” he says as calmly as he can, “I hope you didn’t fly all this way to tell me how to live.”

“I did!” she crows, as if he’s won the jackpot. “That’s exactly why I’m here! Because I learned something vital. Because I know now that what you’re doing is just burying everything. I chose to act it out. You choose to stuff it down. It’s the same shit, and it’s ruining your life as much as it ruined mine.”

“Ellen …” and now his tone is a warning.

“I want you to see what I now see—”

“We’re different people, Ellen, you’re—”

“I want you to have more, Jamie—”

“I can’t!” And this last is a cry and it shuts Ellen’s mouth. She stares straight ahead as she takes Grape Street east, away from the ocean. At the first red light, she looks over at him. He looks so miserable.

“I love you, Jamie.”

“I know that, but we all have to find our own way through all this. I have something I love in my life, my teaching, and I consider myself lucky. Leave it be.”

As the light turns green, she pulls ahead slowly. It’s crowded here already. People walking in groups toward Little Italy, some on the sidewalks, the overflow at the edges of the street.

“Which street do I make a right on?”

“India, and then park anywhere after Fir that you can.”

“Okay.”

There’s silence, but it is an unresolved silence. Ellen hasn’t given up. Jamie can sense her pent-up frustration. Her hands on the steering wheel are tight. She pushes herself against the back of the driver’s seat as if she will stand up at any moment. Her foot on the accelerator is heavy, and he can see she’s trying to figure out how to frame the next volley. He braces himself for the onslaught as she starts to talk again, tightly restrained.

“I had to understand the violence in my life so I could eliminate it forever. Jamie, do you even realize how free I feel?”