Honest Philomena
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
In one her pitiless self-assessments, occurring about a year into her new life as a parent, Philomena told her mother that, although she was very good at mathematics, she was no genius, and her aborted career in that field would never have been as stellar as her mentors imagined. Therefore, her precipitous plunge into motherhood had spared everyone their disappointment.
Her judgment was equally harsh on her parenting skills. Her ongoing “failure,” she concluded, had nothing whatever to do with love, since she loved her daughter with a fierceness that astonished and sometimes frightened her. Whether Philomena’s gift or curse of honesty was genetic or something rarer and less tangible, it was not passed on to Enid, and therein lay the problem. As her bitter experience with the father of her child had taught her, Philomena may have been involuntarily honest, but she was no better than anyone else at detecting falsehood in others.
Enid did inherit her parents’ good looks and high intelligence, and these advantages served her well as she grew up in ways that hadn’t been possible for her mother. With a child’s quick mind and instincts, she soon realized that her mother was not like her grandparents, or the parents of her friends who, charmed by her sweet face and eagerness to please, often bestowed unearned compliments. Her mother always said what she thought to everyone, without hesitation, and for that she was hated, reviled, and sometimes treated by other adults, even her own parents, as if she had a disability and was therefore to be indulged and forgiven her outrageous gaffes.
It was while silently watching her mother during these social immolations that Enid, at first sharing her humiliation and later distancing herself from it, began to understand how fundamental a building block of human relations lying is, and how naked and alone is that person without the capacity to feign, deceive, fabricate, gloss over, withhold, mislead, or exaggerate. It was a revelation to her, and was the first step down a long path that slowly led to a series of disastrous choices.
As they both grew older, Philomena could at times seem obtuse and even cruel to her daughter, incapable as she was of even the generous half-truth that is so important in buttressing the fragile ego of a growing girl. In the absence of a father, whom she liked to imagine would have taken her side in matters of discipline, Enid often found herself cringing in her mother’s untempered presence, as if she were come before a Justice of the High Court, about to receive the most blunt and unvarnished judgment on her grades, deportment, personal appearance, the condition of her room, her choice of friends and boyfriends, that might reduce her to tears or leave her seething with anger.
She knew her mother loved her, and in her own heart, the resentment of what she sometimes unfairly perceived as cruelty was usually, though not always, outweighed by love and a certain awe of her mother’s steely virtue, a goodness that she instinctively knew, even as a young teenager, she would never attain. Against her will, she saw herself as formed of commoner clay, and this bred in her, perhaps inevitably, not the aspiration to strive for a higher standard of truthfulness and purity than her peers and thus incur the same scorn and ostracism as her mother had, but rather a perverse and often self-wounding rebelliousness.
After all, her mother was a kind of freak, wasn’t she? What had her “gift” ever brought her besides an all-but-friendless solitude? Enid, who had proven a strong swimmer in the rip currents of high school, would not make the same mistake of setting herself against the world, but would embrace it as she found it, and fight her battles with the weapons at her disposal. Even at sixteen, she was more worldly than her mother had ever been or could be. And so it was that the daughter began to condescend to the mother.
In Enid’s sophomore year, they moved from Iowa to Maryland. Thrust among strangers, she soon found herself accepted into one of the wilder crowds at her new school in Baltimore, and her grades, never more than adequate, began to suffer.
In the intervening years, Philomena had become a highly sought-after writer of software code, and worked at home as a hired gun for any company willing to let her work solo, though at times she had no choice but to enter the workplace and fix problems onsite. Considering the quality of her work and her “difficult” personality — it was generally believed that she had a form of high-functioning autism — in even these brief encounters with other people, her employers were more than happy to let her work alone, and tried to minimize her contact with staff.
Though initially based in Baltimore, she soon found more contract work in the Washington D.C. area, and their next move was to northern Virginia. Not more than a year later, disliking the noise and traffic and now having the financial means to live as she chose, she decided to sell her condo in Arlington and buy a home in the mountains about an hour west of D.C. Three moves in two years had increased tensions between mother and daughter, and when Enid realized she would be spending her senior year at what she characterized as a hick school in rural Virginia, her rebellious behavior began to intensify.
For Enid’s generation, to be entirely innocent of tattoos, studs and body rings (which, at seventeen, she still was) was a far more resounding statement of individuality than the eventually regretted alternative, but this was not a choice she’d made willingly. Her mother had informed her that she could “join the circus” anytime she liked, but drily added, “Your self-defacement will be self-financed.”
Enid had yet to take her first job, and since all her money came from a modest allowance earned doing household chores, she couldn’t really join the pack, and more importantly, get under her mother’s skin, without a source of income not readily available to high-schoolers. Philomena knew perfectly well how few jobs there were in the small town they now called home, almost none of which payed more than minimum wage to a teenager, and imagined, wrongly as it turned out, that the high cost of getting a tattoo would be sufficient to prevent her daughter from making herself look cheap.
In Iowa, Baltimore, and D.C., Enid had already sampled the usual controlled substances, and had weathered these experiments more or less unscathed, but it was here that she encountered home-made methedrine, courtesy of her first serious boyfriend, whose cousin was a locally infamous meth cook. Had Philomena known how immediate and serious a threat this scourge would prove to Enid’s future, she might have reconsidered her move from the city to the country, and had Enid listened to her own better judgment, she would have quickly distanced herself from a drug that proffers its devil’s bargain in big block letters, and begins to collect on the debt after the first taste.
Philomena didn’t have to ask Enid if she was involved with drugs. It was becoming plainer by the day, as she grew thinner, paler, and more impossible to deal with. She threatened to throw her out of the house if she didn’t straighten up, and Enid responded by quitting school and moving in with her boyfriend, who had also quit school. She had by this time become a small-time dealer herself, and had had several run-ins with the law, although she’d managed so far to avoid arrest for either possession or distribution.
Her skinny arms were now tattooed from shoulder to wrist, her once-pretty face marred by several piercings and too much make-up to hide her gray complexion, her teeth and gums were quickly deteriorating, and in little more than two years she had aged by a decade, looking more like a troubled younger sister than a daughter to her still-beautiful mother, who had just turned forty.
The estrangement by now seemed irreparable, and Philomena no longer waited by the phone to hear from Enid. They hadn’t spoken in months. She’d kept a polite distance from her neighbors and, not being a churchgoer, had little contact with anyone besides shopkeepers, her employers, whom she mostly spoke to by phone or email, and an occasional visit from the local sheriff, Rick Margrave, who had taken an interest in her after she’d reported her daughter missing in the early stages of her drug use. She found him pleasant, helpful and not unattractive, but hadn’t encouraged his attentions, afraid that if she offended him with an ill-timed remark, she might lose a key ally in the fight to save Enid from herself.
Margrave, who was divorced and lonely, had seen his county all but clear-cut of its younger generation by the spread of crystal meth. Even though his attempts to woo Philomena had apparently failed, he genuinely wanted to help her get her daughter into rehab.
More isolated than ever now, Philomena sat at her computer for hours at a time, stoically writing code while trying not to obsess about Enid. She blamed herself, with some justification, for her daughter’s anger, and unjustly, for her self-destructiveness. Through bitter experience, she had come to see herself in regard to other people, even her own child, as a volatile chemical reaction: her sodium to their water. Bring the two into contact, and a fiery explosion was inevitable.
As much as she liked the sheriff and looked forward to his visits, the more convinced she became that encouraging his romantic interest in her would only make the separation more painful, when he came to realize why she lived alone in the woods.
One day he brought her a gift in the form of a German Shepherd puppy and a large bag of dog food, telling her that a woman alone in the woods needed protection, and advised her to buy a rifle or shotgun and keep it clean and near at hand. At the last moment he had omitted the word “attractive” in describing her woman-alone status, but had the impression, as he often did around her, that she’d heard the unspoken thought. She thanked him for the dog, wondering why she hadn’t thought of it earlier, and promised to buy a gun the next time she drove into town.
He asked her if she might trust him to choose one for her, and when she assented, he opened the trunk of his car and pulled out a 16-gauge double-barreled shotgun, a box of shells loaded with buckshot, and a gun-cleaning kit. After a few minutes spent instructing her on the safe use of a firearm, she asked him what she owed for the gun. He demurred and she insisted, so he named a figure that covered only the shells and the cleaning gear, admitting that the gun was from his own collection and hoping she’d accept it as a gift.
Managing to restrain herself from calling him on his blatant ploy to thaw her reserve, Philomena thanked him for his concern and generosity, paid him his money, and with a smile both warm and slightly sarcastic told him that he was always welcome to visit the dog and check on his progress. Daring to hope that he might yet find favor with this strange, beautiful but rather intimidating woman, the sheriff got into his car and drove away.
She named the dog Shams, after the Sufi dervish who had inspired the mystical poet, Rumi, partly because the animal, the first she had ever owned or been in continuous contact with, had a similarly stunning effect on the course of her life. She had somehow managed to live forty years without fully realizing that a dog or a cat could not become offended or enraged by undiluted honesty, were incapable of deceiving themselves or others, and that a well-fed, well-treated animal will reward its owner with a degree of loyalty and devotion rarely found in humans. Philomena had been almost a recluse since her daughter had moved out months before, and more or less solitary for much of her life, and the unguarded love of a dog was new to her.
Shams was a fine specimen of his breed, intelligent, gentle, yet fiercely protective of his mistress. She trained him to obey a variety of commands and, with considerably more subtlety, he trained her to depend on his quietly civilized presence. Her property comprised fifteen heavily wooded acres, and was bordered on the west by a large state park, and a long afternoon walk with Shams, after she’d finished her work, that made a several-mile circuit through the park, became their daily ritual.
He never strayed far from her side, and if he was tempted to chase rabbits or wild turkeys, he was quick to heel at her softly-spoken command. He traveled with her on her weekly trips to town, slept by her feet as she worked and in his basket near her bed as she slept, and he only barked when he had something important to say. The only other human he knew and trusted half as much was the sheriff, who was both pleased at the success of his gift and afraid that it had made him superfluous.
One chilly afternoon in April, after returning from one of their walks and having just entered the clearing that served as a yard, Shams growled warningly. There was no car other than hers in the driveway, but the front door was standing open. Philomena entered the house cautiously, her hand on the dog’s collar. The place had been ransacked. Her computer, printer, and television were gone, and her empty wallet was on the floor. She called the credit card company first, then the sheriff, who was there within half an hour. She told him precisely what had happened, and he dutifully wrote it all down, but the name that seemed to hover in the air between them was never spoken.
“They didn’t take the shotgun?” he asked.
She went into the bedroom, then came back. “It’s still there.”
“Where?”
“Under the bed.”
“Good. You’ll keep it close from now on, I hope.”
“Think they’ll come back?”
“They sometimes do.” What he didn’t say was: “You know she will. She’s a crank addict and can’t think straight anymore.”
She nodded, her serious gaze on him, as if she knew exactly what he hadn’t said. “Don’t worry. Shams will look out for me. And I’ll keep the gun where I can reach it.”
“All right, then.”
“Thanks for coming by, Rick.”
“Call me if you need me. Anytime, day or night.”
“I will.”
“By the way, does anyone know that you take a walk every afternoon?”
“You’re the only one I’ve told. But I guess someone could have been watching the house, learned my habits.”
“It might have been a random break-in,” he said. “In which case, they didn’t know you work at home. Or didn’t care. It’s lucky you were out.”
“Now you’re trying to scare me.”
“You bet I am. It might not look like it, but this is a high-crime area. You should install an alarm system, motion-sensitive lights, and a chain-link fence. A German Shepherd in a fenced yard is a big deterrent.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Rick. And thanks again for everything.”
“Take care, Philomena.”
She could tell that he didn’t like her name by the pained look of his mouth as he pronounced it. Nor could she blame him. She didn’t like it, either.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
