Free Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper Page B

like what Swedenborg called a Vastation. A dark night of the soul sort of thing.”
    Tenderly smoothing my hair and kissing my face and neck (tomorrow she would delete this from her mind, of course), Sara murmured, “Mmmm. Sounds like a breakdown to me. And I should know.”
    â€œAre you referring to your aunt who puts rocks in her dog’s dish to make it eat more slowly?”
    â€œOh, there are dozens of mad Sedgwicks.”
    A shiver passed through me. Why had I never considered the possibility that Father had suffered a nervous breakdown? Only now did it occur to me that whenever Father told this story, as he did frequently, a pained look crossed Mother’s features. There was another side to this story, and Mother and Aunt Kate had locked it up inside them so no one else would ever know.
    But Sara’s hands were fluttering over my body, and her lips were having their way with my breasts, and Father’s philosophies flew right out of my mind.
    I’m sorry to say that after five months in Cambridge, it was becoming apparent that Dr. Taylor’s cure was not holding. I was successful at disguising this at first, but toward the end of August, the collapse of my scaffolding became evident to the household. The difficulty lay, I suppose, in my inability to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in women.
    It started just after I’d spent the weekend with Fanny Morse in Brookline. We’d been sitting at her dressing table brushing out our hair and braiding it for the night and discussing the Cambridge Bee that was forming under the leadership of Susy Dixwell.
    Fanny said, “What a pity Sara will miss the first meetings but, of course, she can join when she gets back.”
    â€œBack from where?” I expected Fanny to say “Bar Harbor” or “New York.”
    â€œWhy, Europe, of course.”
    That was the way I learned that Sara was to join the Nortons on their upcoming Grand Tour. For weeks, Grace Norton had suffered from a verbal tic that compelled her to cite Ruskin, Leslie Stephen, Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the pre-Raphaelites at random moments. (Leave it to the Nortons to be on intimate terms with all of them!) Sara and I had been laughing about the Norton connections last week and Sara said nothing about her plans to travel with them. Now I learned that she’d been mentally packing her steamer trunks all this time, happy to toss me aside for a chance at the pre-Raphaelites.
    Was I being unfair? Had I lost all proportion? I hardly knew.
    Sara had so many ways of disavowing what we were to each other. When I told her about La Fille aux Yeux d’Or by Balzac, describing a love affair between two women, I thought she’d be intrigued. But her face snapped shut and she said she wasn’t interested. How could a man know what a woman feels anyhow? she asked peevishly. Her private fiction seemed to be that whatever transpired between us in the dark was a momentary accident that kept recurring despite her best efforts.
    When I confronted her about going abroad with the Nortons, she insisted she’d told me about it and was so adamant on this point that I half believed her. Not ten minutes later, she contradicted herself. “You can understand why I didn’t want to tell you, Alice. You have such a tendency to over-react, to take things so deadly seriously .”
    â€œWhat ‘things,’ Sara? Us, you mean?”
    This, like everything else I said that day, irritated her. “What do you mean us ? There is no ‘us.’ In a few years, Alice, we will marry and we’ll be occupied with housekeeping and children and what have you.”
    Really? Was that the future? We were at breakfast, and the muffin I’d been eating was stuck to my palate, dry as sawdust. I saw starkly at that moment that our relations were always conducted on Sara’s terms. Endearments such as “darling” or “dearest”