Her slow recovery was sped by a front-page write-up of Darkling in the Arts section of the Inquirer. The reporter, a recent women’s college graduate, said her whole world shifted when she saw it. “Through Cantor’s work,” she rhapsodized, “we see the plight of the housewife in contemporary America, pulled between the competing obligations to her family and a career of her own, the sad legacy of women’s liberation in this new decade of ours. It is a terrific sight, and one this reporter won’t forget for a very long time.”
After that, Blythe still spoke in a little-girl voice at times, still clutched me too hard around the waist. But for long stretches, weeks at a time, she donned a personality she’d concocted for the reporters who came to interview her: brash, chain-smoking, hinnying like a horse, raw with sex. I liked this new Blythe. I was afraid of her. She appeared so hard, though all the while, if I was in the room, Blythe held my hand and stroked it.
I adored her, even during those dark hours when she’d turn herself off, slip vegetative into her sadness. I saw her vision, and it shook me. What talent I had was quiet and web-like, a connecting of seemingly scattered elements, while Blythe imprinted herself upon the world with a grandiosity that awed me. She had a vast generosity, a daring charm. She brought armfuls of Gerbera daisies into my house because, she said, they were beautiful and I was beautiful in the same way, ruddy and angular and strong; she mixed me drinks until we were drunk by the pool in the early afternoon; she slipped off her heels with the gold buckles and handed them to me because I loved them. She laughed when her boys turned to me with a wound, and allowed me the pleasure of comforting them. Those boys, with their translucent little faces, their wariness, the way they sidled up to me shyly whenever I was around, broke my heart.
One day, in late summer, in the ladies’ room at the zoo on an excursion with Blythe and the boys, Susan looked up at me with a grave frown as I tried to wrestle her pants up her legs. “Mom,” she said, “which kid do you love most: me or Mackenzie or Blythe?” And though I felt terribly guilty later, at that moment I only stared at my littlest and broke into a surprised roar, and didn’t end up answering my daughter at all.
THOSE FIRST FOUR YEARS I had only seen Blythe’s mother once, though Blythe and I were more like sisters than friends. I doubt Blythe had ever truly told her about our friendship. The old crone was fearsome. I discovered this only by accident; one day I’d hurried through a department store with my hands full of bargain goods — Mackenzie needed shoes, money was tight — and I saw Blythe at the café with an older woman. They were dressed in suits identical save for their different shades of blue. The older woman was Blythe with a thinner face, gray hair, a wicked bauble on her finger, and she was avoiding her daughter’s hungry stare by addressing her remarks to the embossed tin of the ceiling.
I approached, eager to introduce myself, but stopped when I heard the mother’s voice. It was clipped and cold. “Shameful, really,” she was saying. “I must speak out: your sisters fear you, you know, and Pritch is useless. Why would you wallow like a pig in your episodes? Why? I tried to come to one of your performances, you know, and couldn’t stay for more than a minute. So dark and ugly. Why must you insist on making yourself so ugly, rubbing things all over you, saying those horrible things? Blythe, darling, we all wish you wouldn’t, you know. They’re no one’s business. Your boys will never get away from them. You will end up making them just like you, and I, well…It’s simply unfair,” she said.
Her webbed eyes fell from their focus and she saw me standing behind Blythe, staring at her. I was holding Mackenzie’s hand so tightly the poor child was squirming. Blythe’s mother pursed her lips and narrowed her dark eyes, which were so like my Blythe’s, but hard where her daughter’s were liquid. I suddenly felt so dirty and ugly and vulgar with my cut-price shoes that I turned and fled, despite Mackenzie’s whining, despite my own curiosity. And from then on I couldn’t help grimacing whenever Blythe spoke of her mother, because she always did so in a voice redolent with love.
BY THE TIME MY GIRLS were in school I had stopped writing poetry. Blythe was already making great waves with her pieces, and in the maelstrom of her success I began to lose my love for my own poems. I make no excuses for myself: had I been a real poet, her fame wouldn’t have affected me at all. I would have kept on writing my quiet things, sending them out, collecting the rejections and rejoicing in the few acceptances. But under Blythe’s reflected light my poems seemed so paltry and meek. I kept my love for poetry in general and for the more serious fiction I was reading in gulps, and it was this love that made me return to school for a Ph.D. in English. I would still be thinking deeply of writing and art, would still be doing what my poetry had been doing, trying to connect distant pieces of the world and draw them closer.
I could never tell Blythe why I had stopped writing: she needed the fiction that I was there solely for her. “Without you, Harriet,” she’d cry in her exuberance after a performance, “I’d be nothing, nothing.” We both knew it was true; only I knew it was bittersweet, and that before making my decision, I spent long nights at the kitchen table, my eyes sandpapered with sadness.
The day I was accepted at UPenn, Sam said, “You, Harriet, are going to be the most overeducated mommy in the world,” and I couldn’t tell you then why that statement seemed to suck the air right out of me.
Her new celebrity made Blythe grow first indiscreet, then downright flippant, about her lovers. She even invited her most recent beau to a February party she threw to celebrate her new artist’s grant. He was a florid Montana painter, tall and moustached, so full of himself that he didn’t seem to notice the inappropriateness of his presence or the poisonous way Blythe grinned at Pritch all night. As at all of the Cantors’ parties, there was too much whiskey, too little food, too loud house music. Their parties had such an air of permissiveness that inevitably some actor would paw his pretty-boy date in the corner or some matronly woman would disapear conspicuously into the bathroom with a man decades younger than she was.
I should have put a stop to Blythe’s display, I knew. But I was drunk, loving the silver bangles that chittered on my wrists when I danced, celebrating my own minor victory: I’d just had my first book review accepted for publication. So I thought, Yummy, looking at the cowboy-painter, instead of I’d better go stop this nonsense, which was more like me.
Just before dawn the second-to-last couple staggered out with the Montana painter to give him a ride home. Sam and I were left to pick up the empty glasses and clean the ashtrays and turn off the music. In the new silence, Pritch’s and Blythe’s whispers boiled up into shouts in the kitchen. Sam seized my arm, pulling me to the door, but I shook free to listen.
“Had to bring him here, in front of our goddamn friends. In our goddamn house with our goddamn children sleeping upstairs,” Pritch said.
“What do you want me to do? I can’t touch you, Pritchard. You make me sick,” said Blythe. There was a horrible sound of hand against flesh, a fall, a shattering of glass. Sam and I ran to the kitchen. Blythe was sitting in a pile of broken tumblers, bleeding from her hands and clutching her left cheek.
Before we could rouse ourselves, Pritch bent down and scooped her up as if she were light as a doll. Blythe buried her face in her husband’s chest and threw her arms around his neck, murmuring, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” Pritch gave me a stern look, then turned away, carrying Blythe upstairs. Sam cleaned up the blood, the glass, as I stood there, burning. We let ourselves out into the dove-gray dawn in silence, clutching each other’s hands with all the force we could muster.