WHAT’S EATING SARA

WHAT’S EATING SARA

“What has happened to that poor kid?”

     We were sitting in the dining room, the table set with coffee cups and cake plates.

     “She grew up.  They have a way of doing that.”

     “She was so adorable with those pale freckled cheeks and all that auburn hair.”

     May had laboriously gotten up and began to gather the cups.

     “Then she grew up.”

     “Don’t be so flippant, Will.  I just don’t understand her anymore.  She’s not the same person.”

     She took a fork and gently slid the slice of cake on Sara’s plate back onto the cake platter.

     “Maybe she was never that person.”

     “Oh, stop it!  She still comes to us.  Like, she has this need.  Then she..., oh, I don’t know.  I’d just like to know what it means.”

     May sat down again with a gesture of defeat.  I felt bad for her.

     “What?  That she comes to us?  I’m not surprised.  She doesn’t get along with her sister.  Never did.  Now that both of her parents are gone, we’re her only ‘relatives.’”

     “Then why does she behave the way she does?”

May has this way of waving her hand when she poses an unanswerable question.

“She has no ties to us, we’re not relatives.  Who is she rebelling against?  Us?  Why?  That’s what I mean.  She’s way past those rebel years.  She’s thirty-something now.  You’d think she’d have matured.”

Oh, Sara was mature all right.  I had no doubts about that.  I couldn’t answer her question about Sara’s behavior, really, but I offered something else.

     “Her father has a brother in California.  How often over the years has she seen him and her cousins?  Five times?  You’re right, we’re not her relatives.  But we’ve known her all her life.  That makes us closer to her than anyone else.  Look, she comes.  What else does that mean?”

     I wasn’t defending Sara but explaining, at least trying to explain, why she came all this way just to visit us.

     “But that’s my point, Will.  I understand why she comes.  I don’t understand her.  Why she says what she says, why she does what she does.  We’re not her parents!”

     “You take her too seriously.  Loosen up.  She’s probably not even aware of her affect on you.”

     “Us!  Her affect on us, Will.”

May had gotten up again and took Sara’s full cup from the table into the kitchen.

From the kitchen, May said, “I saw how you reddened when she snapped at you.  You were trying to help, that’s all, and she deliberately humiliated you.”

She had come back to the dining room and stood with her hands on her hips.  Her voice had changed and her eyes flooded.

“I felt so bad.  You didn’t deserve that treatment.  I wanted to smack her.  That’s what her mother would’ve done.”

     “I had to bite my tongue.  But, you know, a little while later she looked really closely into my face, into my eyes, actually.  And I kind of felt she apologized with that look.  Like she was saying, ‘Did I hurt you, Uncle William?’  She had a strange expression.  I took it that way, to mean that.  I felt sorry for her.”

     “Well, I don’t,” May snapped testily.  “She was mean to me the whole time she was here.  She didn’t like the coffee.  She wouldn’t eat the cake I made.  She wouldn’t even taste it.  Her remark about how I cook!  About our kitchen being old, with that sarcasm in her voice.  Then about my habits of dress, how old-fashioned I am, about my hair, why I still work, on and on and on.  She had nothing kind to say, not about you and not about me.  Why does she bother to come if everything about us annoys her, and bothers her, and upsets her.  I don’t know, Will.  I don’t know if we should worry about her or try to forget her.”

     “I have a feeling she’s not going to let us forget her.  She’ll get over whatever’s making her like this.  You’ll see.  One day she’s gonna hug you and say you were her lifeline all this time and how can she thank you enough for being that.  You’ll see.”

     “I hope you’re right.  I have no faith in it, though.  More likely she’ll just stop coming, and we’ll forget all about her.”

     “Not likely, May.  You’ll see.”

Sara is a beautiful woman.  She still has those freckles, her auburn hair is luscious, and her eyes are green.  Everything about her is striking.  She went to a women’s college in Pennsylvania and graduated Summa cum Laude.  She nested in New York until her mother died.  Her father had died while she was still a student in Pennsylvania, so when her mother passed, she came home and stayed in the family house for almost a year before returning to New York. 

She did that, I think, to spite her sister, who wanted the house and would have returned with her daughter if Sara hadn’t claimed it.  There was no work for Sara in our little town, nothing in her profession that is.  Sara majored in theater, but always the practical type, she turned her talents to stage management and tech.  She had steady work in New York.  After ten months in that house, though, she sold it, gave half the money to her sister, and took off.

During those months we were close.  She seemed to have transferred her affections for her mother to May, and May loved her like her own.  The first year after she returned to New York, she kept in regular touch with us and even came to us for Thanksgiving.  May was thrilled to add her to our family table.  She had grown up with our two.  She was too young for our son, though we used to kid the two of them all the time about getting engaged.  She would beam a huge smile at him, and he would go hide in the closet.  She was maybe five at the time and he ten.

But Sara’s last two visits were trying.  She wasn’t the same person anymore.  She had developed a meanness that devastated May, devastated her because it was so pronounced and vicious.  And deliberate.  I didn’t know what to make of it.

It was three o’clock when Sara left.  She had stayed with us only an hour.  She had come from New York for this visit.  We expected her to stay with us the whole weekend.  We had no idea where she went when she left us.  She left, though, with such rancor we didn’t expect her to come back.  She knew she had cut May deeply.  I didn’t know how she could face May if she returned.

May usually worked on Saturdays, the museum’s busiest day.  But she had taken the day off because of Sara’s visit.  She was just saying that she ought to go in for a couple hours when the doorbell rang.  She looked at me and said, “Do you think?”

I shrugged and got up to see who it was.  It was Sara.  The day was sunny and cold, and she stood at the door with her arms wrapped across her chest, the wind blowing her hair.  I let her in.

“When you come to South Dakota this time of year, you should wear more than a sweater,” I said, smiling at her red cheeks.

“I’ve been standing out there for twenty minutes,” she said.

“Well, let’s warm you up,” I said, ignoring her little declaration of contrition and nudging her across the living room towards the dining room and May, who was still sitting.  That, I thought, is not a good sign. 

Sara stopped at the archway between the living room and the dining room, looking at May, who was looking away from her.  Then she pivoted and made a dash for the front door.  I stepped in front of her to stop her.

“I can’t,” she whispered pleadingly.

“Yes you can,” I whispered back, and put my hand on her shoulder and turned her back towards the dining room.

She let me guide her there, and once again she stopped in the archway, looking at May who was still looking away.  I leaned to her ear and whispered, “Don’t worry, May loves you.”

That seemed to do it.  She went up to May and put a hand on her shoulder.  May looked up at her, of course.  But her look was stern and cold, very unMay-like.  If she looked at me like that, I’d have to go see my lawyer.  I didn’t realize until then how deeply Sara had wounded her.  Something was eating Sara and I took her tone and manner as expressions of that.  I certainly didn’t take them as personally as May did.  She was wounded.  I hoped Sara could find a way to heal that wound, or we just might not ever really see her again.  I felt bad, for both of them. 

“You’re not my mother,” Sara said. 

How incongruous is that? I thought.  Bad start.  I started to wonder if even Sara knew what was eating her.

“That’s too obvious, Sara,” May said, an eyebrow cocked, a look of interest on her face.

Good, good, I thought, that look usually means May is caught up, and once that happens, she is dogged.

“And that’s the whole thing, isn’t it?  I’m not your mother!  What gives you the right to criticize me like that?  To condemn, to humiliate, to berate me?  Sara!  How have I deserved that?  And Will?  Why, you just about slapped Will in the face!”

She was breathless and couldn’t say another word.  Her tone of wounded pride had turned Sara as white as I’ve ever seen her, and she stood, her hands at her sides and her head hanging, unmoving.  I didn’t dare intrude, in fact, I stepped back from the archway and behind the wall.  This was between them, and I didn’t belong anywhere near it.  Though I stayed close enough to hear. 

     I could hear a chair being pulled out from the table and assumed Sara was sitting.  I leaned my back against the wall just to the side of the archway and listened.

     “I was devastated when my mother died...,” Sara had begun to say when May cut in, “And you think I’m trying to take her place?  And that offends you?”

     “No, Aunt May.  That’s not it.  I would never think that.”

     “Well, what then?  I want to know how I’ve offended you.”

     “Aunt May, you haven’t, you haven’t.  I owe you so much.”

     “Child, I’m bewildered.  I don’t know what to say.”

     “Let me, I need to say it, if I don’t...,” her voice trailed off and they sat in silence for a while.

     “After mom died, I felt so lost,” she began once more.  “I thought living in that house would help ground me again.  But after a few months, I felt like I was going insane.  When I left for New York, I think I was insane.  It was only you and Uncle Will who kept me from going off the edge.”

     May was uncharacteristically silent during the long pause that followed what Sara had just said.  I knew if I peeked around the archway May would see me and that that would spoil the moment, so I braced myself, hardly breathing.  In the silence the furnace kicked on, and it’s sounds filled the two rooms.

     “You’re not my mother, Aunt May.  But you became her somehow.  I don’t know how to explain the effect you and Uncle Will have had on me.  I love you both, I do.  But you keep me connected to her, it’s like she can’t be dead, can’t leave me get over it.  I came here to end it.  I came to burn my bridge to South Dakota, know what I mean?  I wanted you to throw me out of this house.  I wanted to make strangers of you.”

     Silence.  It was awful.  The furnace thrummed like a heartbeat.  I stepped into the archway.  May had reached across the table and taken her hands and was holding them.  Finally, she got up and went around the table and put her hand on Sara’s back, and rubbed it, and just let her be silent.  She looked at me, and I looked at her.  Then she said,

     “Do you have a bag in that car on the drive?”

     “Yes,” Sara replied, closing her eyes and giving in to the motion of May’s hand on her back.  

     “Go bring it in, Will,” she said, “there’ll be no burning bridges this weekend.”

     At that, Sara rose and hugged her.