Fic - the soul has bandaged moments (Sally Draper) pg-13, 1/1
Title: the soul has bandaged moments
Summary: Some things are just irrevocable. Sally learns this lesson too early on.
Rating: pg-13
Author's Notes: 6,427 words. Spoilers for everything to date. Written for the femgenficathon. Title for the credit goes to Emily Dickinson. Huge thank yous are due to justforyoudear for the handholding and brainstorming and lexiesloan for the beta. First time with this fandom, so con-crit is both welcome and appreciated. All remaining mistakes are mine. These characters, however, are not.
Prompt #148: The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there--you build yourself. Those are the high ones, the thick ones, the ones with no doors in. --Ursula K. LeGuin
[one]
Sally’s earliest memory isn’t a birthday or Christmas. It isn’t even significant in the whole scheme of things. It’s just a normal summer at the shore when she’s halfway between ages three and four. It’s hazy, the memory’s technicolor tacky when she looks back, but she can still remember her mother’s large, pregnant belly and brittle smile as she watched Sally and her father build the most exquisite sand castle that very first afternoon of vacation.
She remembers clearly the way her father’s hands had molded around her own - warm, strong, and gentle - as he taught her how to smooth and shape the edges of the castle to near perfection. Sally remembers the way he had smiled down at her after and the warmth she’d felt in response. The love.
Mostly, Sally remember crying as the tide washed it all away.
We’ll do it next time, her father had told her softly. In a rare moment he pulls her to him, allows Sally to nuzzle into his side and breathe in his warmth.
Years later she will remember distinctly the way he had smelled - the perfect mixture of sand, salt, soap, and something she wouldn’t be able to recognize until much, much later.
(It’s a lie, of course. They never build another one. )
When she’s young her mother tells her the most romantic stories about the young, beautiful model and the handsome salesman. She regales Sally endlessly with the story about how the handsome salesman swept the beautiful model right off her feet and saved her from a life of absolute despair. Her mother’s voice would get low and soft as she tells these tales, her tone almost loving as she smoothes the hair back from Sally’s round face and presses a gentle kiss to her forehead as she whispers goodnight.
When she’s young, Sally believes in silly little things like fairy tales and happily ever after. This childish naiveté doesn’t last for very long.
It’s not exactly clear when this changes, when Sally starts to realize that reality is no place for fairy tales and happily ever after doesn’t exist, but looking back she knows the first crack in the façade forms that summer when she’s five and they take that very first vacation without her father. It deepens shortly after when her mother’s smile becomes thinner, her touch more sparse and less loving. Sally’s always been more perceptive than most adults give her credit for, and she hears the whispered arguments that ensue, feels the tension and anger deep in within her bones.
Eventually, she unwillingly starts to make it her own, that anger driving her, controlling her. It makes her fingers curl into fists at her sides and her voice raise against those who try to control her. She never fully rids herself of it either - the anger that is not hers, but feels as though it is. She hides it, buries it, tries so very hard to ignore it, to forget it exists and where it stems from, but it never, ever fades completely.
It takes years for their marriage to fall apart completely of course, and Sally watches in awe and fear as it does, as the foundation crumbles right beneath all of their feet in the most spectacular and horrifying way.
When she looks back, those last two years her family spends together are hazy, almost a complete blur. It takes a while, but eventually she decides she prefers it that way. Prefers it because the hurt that stems from deep in her belly and tangles around her heart is easier to handle, easier to swallow when she can’t remember all the sordid details of what really went wrong.
What she does remember, what she will never forget, is those months she spent with her grandfather. The peace he gave her, the moments where he looked at her and she felt like maybe, just maybe, he understood her in a way that nobody else ever would.
“Know what you want to do,” he had told her. He was driving her from school to ballet and a soft song played on the radio. Sally had tapped her fingers in rhythm with the bass as Bobby looked on aimlessly in the back seat. “And never let go of it.”
That advice, those quiet moments she got to spend with him, are the only good things to come out of those last few years her family spends under the same roof.
She carries them with her for as long as she can, until the edges of her memories start to fade and decay.
[two]
Megan is pretty. Not beautiful, not even stunning, just… pretty. Definitely not as beautiful as Sally’s mother who has the blonde hair and the classic looks that remind Sally of the movie stars she likes to watch over and over in black and white. Megan would never be as beautiful as Sally’s mother, but she does have something that Sally’s mother never will - that warmth, that glow about her that brings life to everything in her presence, that puts Sally at ease, and lifts her spirits ever so slightly.
It is one of the first things Sally ever noticed about Megan - her lopsided smile, her crooked teeth, and how the genuine happiness radiated off of her in spades and warmed the very core of Sally just when she needed it most.
At her father’s wedding, Megan twirls Sally and Bobby around the dance floor for hours, her head tilted back, her laughter filling the room with light. When it is time for them to leave, Megan pulls Sally into her embrace and hugs her tightly. Sally wraps her small arms around the woman’s neck and doesn’t let go for the longest time.
“Everything is going to change now, Sally. Everything.” Megan’s arms are strong, comforting as they hold on to Sally’s small frame and Sally draws in everything the older woman has to offer. She stores it someplace deep inside for later use when things aren’t as bright, when she is back home with her mother and stepfather whose sparse touches wound Sally in ways she will never be strong enough to admit.
When Megan tries to pull away, Sally holds on for just a moment longer, her fingers fisting in the satin of her wedding gown. “Promise?” she asks.
Megan tilts her head back and laughs. “I would never lie to you,” she says.
Sally finally lets go and believes her.
Something inside of her mother shifts and nearly breaks altogether after her father marries Megan. Sally doesn’t know how to explain it, can’t even really put her finger on what exactly is the difference, she just knows something has forever been changed and there is nothing she can do about it.
Later, somewhere down the road when perspective and knowledge helps her see things more clearly, she will understand.
Sally’s mother always loved Sally’s father more than she let on, loved him almost as much as she loved herself. The change, the difference is that after he pledges the rest of his life to Megan, after he makes an honest go at being a good husband and a good father, the thin strand that held her mother’s heart together frayed at the ends and broke completely.
It would never be repaired - no matter how many cigarettes she smoked, no matter how many bottles of wine she drank, or how many men she tried to find herself in.
Some things are just irrevocable. Sally learns this lesson too early on.
“He’s not who he says he is, you know,” her mother tells her. “You’re old enough now. I think you should know these things.”
She’s not, really. Sally is only twelve, almost thirteen at this point. Her mother lights a cigarette and stares out the window. Sally thumbs the pages of the book in her lap and doesn’t bother to look up. By the door her suitcases stand proudly and neatly packed. She’s spending the summer in the city with her father and Megan and her mother, well… her mother has never dealt with not getting her way and playing second best. It makes her bitter and angry and Sally can gauge her mother’s moods by the smell of alcohol on her breath, by the number of cigarettes she’s smoked.
A part of Sally understands her motivations. She understands that her mother is just lashing out, just trying to make sure everyone around her hurts and aches the way she does - deeply and without any sense of remorse.
At just the tender age of twelve and a half, Sally has already acquired a great deal of immunity to it all.
“I don’t really care,” Sally replies. Outside the rain drips against the window, the steady crescendo filling the vast distance between them.
It’s the truth. She never does.
[three]
Sally loses her virginity when she’s sixteen, almost seventeen. She hitches her way from Rye to Ossining in a blind rage, her left cheek stinging with all the reasons why her mother would never love her the way a daughter needs and aches to be loved. Her stomach turns when she passes her childhood home, when she sees strangers playing in her backyard, the light on in her old bedroom. Her heart pounds fiercely against her ribcage when she comes to stand in front of Glenn’s worn, but familiar door. Her knuckles rap hard against the wood, and when he swings it open she tries to smile as his face flickers through a wide range of emotions - surprised, confusion, and finally joy.
They had kept in touch after she moved away. Letters, strategically planned phone calls. When she starts to run, she’s already halfway there before she realizes she’s running towards him. She isn’t quite sure what that means, but she knows it must mean something. Sally hasn’t seen him in years, but she still recognizes him underneath the seemingly new person he appears to be. He’s filled out - tall, lean, almost boyishly handsome. His awkward years are behind him and he knows it and she smiles her practiced, wide smile, and cocks her hip to the side.
“Hi, Glenn,” she says. Her hair is long, her legs even longer. It’s the heat of summer and the sweat nearly soaks her summer dress all the way through, but she acts as though she is unfazed because there are some things she learns from her mother and takes in stride. This is one of them. Sally has become an expert at manipulating the opposite sex.
He fumbles his own hello, still unsure after all these years of how to act around her. She invites herself in, asks where his mother is while he grabs Sally a fresh bottle of cola from the fridge. His mother is out of town, not expected back until early tomorrow morning. When he tells her this, when he has one hip leaned up against the counter and his body angled towards hers, she kisses him. Her lips are chapped and warm against his cool ones, and she pauses as soon as they make contact because he doesn’t move, doesn’t even breathe for the longest time. Instead, Glenn’s breath hitches, his fingers reaching out and tightening around her hip. Only then does she slide her lips against his slowly, unsurely. She breathes a soft sigh of relief when he responds in kind.
It’s fumbled and messy - just as first times should be. He leads her up the stairs and into his childhood room, watches wide-eyed and jaw slack as she slips her dress over her head and her panties down her bare legs. He tastes like cola and mint. His mouth is sloppy when he kisses her, but his hands are smooth, callused in all the right places and they feel good against her warm skin.
It is nothing like she expects. It’s awkward, sweaty, too quiet. He asks for permission, his brow knotted as he whispers are you sure? against the smooth skin of her neck. Sally laughs and pushes her hips towards his, her knees bending on their own accord. He moves into her with force, his eyes pressed closed tightly. She watches him carefully - the way he bites his bottom lip, the way his arms quiver as they carry his weight, the way he mumbles her name over and over, the two syllables stringing themselves together until his murmurs become incoherent.
It is over just as soon as it starts. Glenn comes with a grunt and a cry, the muscles of his arms failing him as he collapses on top of her. Sally presses her eyes shut tightly as her innocence fades into oblivion.
After, she pulls on her panties and slides back on her dress. Her legs ache and her thighs are smeared with reminders, but she doesn’t feel any different. Sally always just assumed that she would feel different.
Years down the line Sally will understand why she does this. Sally will recognize that excitement pooling in the pit of her stomach as Glenn’s hands tangle in her long hair and his hips angle against hers as something completely separate from lust and love. She will recognize the sharpness as anger, the sweetness as revenge.
Years down the line, Sally will realize that she goes to Glenn and kisses him first because she knows her mother would hate it, that it would make her mother’s skin boil and that vein on her perfectly smooth forehead make it’s presence known. Most of all, Sally knows that this, above all else, would hurt her mother - her daughter losing her virginity to somebody she deemed unworthy and insignificant.
One day, Sally will realize that she will never be able to escape one, vital truth about herself: she is just as fucked up as her mother. She just exhibits it in very different ways.
The argument was about which college Sally was planning to attend. Sally wants to go to California; her mother demands she follow in the Hofstadt tradition and attend Bryn Mawr. Sally is smart, smarter than her mother, smarter than most girls her age, and she has the opportunity to go to any college she wants, in whatever state she wants. She doesn’t want to settle. She doesn’t think she should have to settle.
When Sally tells her mother this, her mother, in turn, takes it as a personal attack, an insult, and Sally’s cheek stings with the impact of her mother’s palm before she can even think twice.
It’s Megan who finally gets her to see the other side of things. “You know,” she starts in that low, soothing tone that Sally loves so dearly, “your mother isn’t always going to be there. I know it’s a hard thing to imagine and at times us girls can’t wait for that day, but when it comes, when you are faced with that reality, you are going to wish you had done everything you could have to make her happy. To let her know that you love her. Sometimes that means sacrificing what we want for what they want. It’s what good daughters do.”
Sally doesn’t look up from where she is perched on the edge of the sofa, her fingers steady as they paint her toenails a pale shade of pink. “I’m not a very good daughter,” Sally says.
Megan laughs and places her palm against Sally’s back. “None of us are. But we try. That’s what matters.”
Sally thinks about this for a long time. Much later, after weeks of cold, bitter silence between her and her mother, Sally accepts her admission to Bryn Mawr. Her mother’s smile is proud, tender when Sally tells her this.
It almost makes it worth it.
[four]
There is a time, during that first semester at Bryn Mawr, where she loses herself in the booze and cigarettes and boys. She drinks too much, studies too little, and gets lost in boys who mean nothing. Boys who touch her in all the right ways and tell her all the right things, but do nothing to fill the deep, vast void she’s tried so fruitlessly to bury and ignore.
It doesn’t bother her until it does, until she realizes that she is partaking in that vicious cycle, breaking the vow she made years before about not becoming her mother.
It is history repeating itself, that much she knows, that much she hates, but on one cold day in the early weeks of winter, Sally does what her parents and their parents before them could never do: she wakes up, looks at herself in the mirror, and decides right then and there that this is not the person she wants to be. She vows from that point on to be better, to do better, to be the type of person who lives without the oppressive feeling of regret.
The most important difference between Sally and her parents is and always will be that when Sally makes promises, she keeps them.
[five]
She meets a boy her sophomore year of college. He attends a small, private college nearby. She studies literature. He studies science and she falls in love too fast and too soon. It is a whirlwind romance. They are young, in love, and think they can take on the world. His name is Danny. He is smart, kind, loving. He takes her home to meet his family at Thanksgiving and his mother hugs her tight, her embrace warm and loving. She takes him into the city for Christmas at her father’s, and the two most important men in her life shake hands and talk about football over dinner and beer well into the night
Her father likes him, her mother approves, and for a while Sally starts to think that maybe this is it. Maybe he is her chance at a worthwhile future, at a family. They date for two happy, blissful years. But Sally gets it in her head during her final semester that as soon as she has that diploma in hand, she’s heading west, to California. She wants to buy a house near the beach, some place within walking distance to sand. She wants the sun and sand and bikini weather and to say goodbye to those hard, northeastern winters. She never asks him to go with her.
The night before graduation, Danny gets down on one knee and asks her to marry him with his grandmother’s engagement ring in hand. She’s both shocked and flattered, stunned into a loss of words. For the longest time she just stands there with her mouth gaping open and her fingers twisting into fists as her eyes flick from the ring, to him, and back again.
She wants to say yes. A large, influential part of her forces her mouth to open and that single, life-changing word is right there on the tip of her tongue. Another smaller, just as influential part of her stops her from saying it. A part of her wants to say yes, to marry him and be born anew in his love and the family they could build together, but another part of her doesn’t.
It will forever remain one of the biggest mysteries of her life, but the latter somehow wins out.
“I can’t,” she tells him before she can stop herself. Her voice is soft, cold. She sounds entirely way too much like her mother. “I just can’t,” her voice cracks along the edges, a sob builds in the back of her throat. “I’m sorry.”
After graduation she never sees or hears from him again. She heads to California, rents a place a few blocks from the beach, and gets a job at a publishing house within town. She bikes to work every day, sunbathes in the afternoons, and runs along the beachfront as the sun rises. There are other men, of course. She falls in and out of lust frequently and with great joy. There are men she uses, men she likes, men she thinks she could probably love someday. They never stick around for long and she doesn’t mind. She finds that she actually likes it better that way.
Sally hears things, of course, from mutual friends over the years, people who knew him and her in passing. Eventually, he will marry a girl from his hometown. They have three children and build a house four blocks over from his parents while she is still finding herself in California.
She thinks of him often and wonders if he ever thinks about her. Is quite sure that she already knows the answer.
When his mother dies, she sends flowers.
He sends a thank-you note a month later. It only reads, I hope you found what you were looking for, Sally.
She’s not quite sure she ever does.
[six]
Her phone rings in the middle of the night. She doesn’t answer it the first time it rings, or the second, but halfway through the third try she reaches for it blindly, her voice gruff and half-asleep as she mumbles hello into the receiver.
It’s Bobby. She knows this before he even says a word - hears his sharp intake of breath, the hitch in his breathing right before he starts to talk. “Sally,” he starts and her stomach plummets. “It’s Dad. He’s…” he trails off and she rubs the sleep out of her eyes and fumbles for the light on her bedside table. His voice is tired and worn. Fear clamps down on her heart like a vice. “Sally, you need to come home.”
She doesn’t ask the questions she’s not ready to know the answers to, and merely nods to the empty darkness around her. She packs a suitcase and catches the first flight to New York possible, drinks too many Bloody Marys on the plane and starts to re-read To Kill a Mockingbird for the millionth time. She gives up halfway through the fifth chapter and allows the sound of the crying babies and snoring around her lure her into a false sleep.
Bobby and Gene meet her at the airport. Gene stands off to the side, his arms crossed over his chest, his nose pointed down at the floor. She didn’t come home last year for Christmas and he looks older than she remembers. His face is thinner, his body taller. She barely recognizes him. Bobby doesn’t look at her at first, not until she reaches for his hand, pulling and squeezing until he does.
“Tell me,” she says before she loses her nerve. He starts, stops, starts again. He shakes his head and begins to say something, but she squeezes his hand until her knuckles hurt. “Tell me now, Bobby,” she repeats, more firmly, adjusting her carryon over her shoulder before it falls to the floor.
He does. Her knees go weak and the world around her goes blurry, and then bright, then black as she presses her eyes closed so tightly she sees stars.
Her twenty-fourth birthday is in two weeks, her father is dead, and all she can think about is how she always thought her mother would be the one to go first.
Like most Ad Men before him, Sally’s father dies too young because of a heart attack, because the booze and cigarettes finally caught up with him. She doesn’t cry at the airport, or in the car, or even in the confines of her childhood bedroom at her mother’s house. She doesn’t even cry the first time she sees Megan, when her step mother’s footing falters as they hug, as she buries her head in Sally’s neck and sobs something fierce and gutting. No, she only cries at the funeral parlor, in the room in the back where they allow her to say goodbye, where they allow her to give him one final kiss, and apologize for not making it home for what would have been their very last Christmas together.
At the funeral she sits between her brothers, her eyes transfixed on the bright, glaring colors of the American flag draped over her father’s casket. She whispers her Amen a beat after everyone else, holds Bobby’s hand, and flinches at the sound of guns firing by the graveside burial. She thinks back all those years to the beach, to that sandcastle, to the way her father’s hands had guided hers, strong and warm around her own. She cries then, too.
She only stays a week. She can only stand it for a week. Her mother grieves for her first and only true love angrily - with harsh words and vodka and after seven days of standing back and taking every snide comment, every hurtful criticism in stride, she can stand it no longer. She books a flight, hails a taxi, and heads West without a second thought.
“You should come home more,” Bobby says over the phone a few days later. “You don’t have to stay with mom, we have a couch.”
Outside, the rain slants steadily against her windows. If she listens hard enough, Sally can hear the waves lapping against the shore. It puts her at ease. “You also have a baby on the way.”
Bobby laughs. He sounds happy. “A baby who would like to know her aunt.” Bobby pauses for a moment. “California really is too far, Sally. It’s always been far, but it feels farther now… with everything.”
“Yeah,” she sighs, conceding. She thinks of the airport then, of how she’d barely recognized Gene. Her heart hurts something fierce inside of her chest. “You’re probably right.”
Long after she hangs up the phone, she thinks of that very first vacation out here with her father and Megan, how happy she was then. How happy they all were then.
At the same time, Sally tries not to think about how long and hard she’s been chasing that happiness, trying to recreate it over and over again, and how she has failed miserably every single time.
Sally spends her twenty-fourth birthday with a bottle of wine and her typewriter. At first, she’s just typing memories - the beach, California, Christmases. At first, she’s just taking these images from her mind and putting them into words, coloring them with details both true and untrue. At first, she thinks it is a cheap version of therapy, that by doing this, by shedding her mind of these memories that haunt her, she can move on and forward. Then, suddenly, the memories twist and mold their way into prose, into a story of love and loss and abandonment, a story she knows like the back of her hand.
The story would take years to finish, to perfect, to form into something worth sharing with others. There would be weeks and months where she didn’t touch it, didn’t even think of it and others where she dedicated hours and days to writing and revising, to perfecting this lament she holds so dear.
A month later, her publishing company announces they’re starting an office in New York. Bobby’s wife is due in six weeks. Sally puts in for a transfer. She makes it back just in time for the birth.
[seven]
Henry leaves her mother after Sally’s been back in New York for exactly six months. The shadow of Don Draper exists even after his death, and it really was too much for him to handle. He gives Sally’s mother everything - the house in Rye, the cars, the money - and leaves in the middle of the night.
Sally figures her mother would have been more broken up about it if she weren’t still grieving over the death of her ex-husband. Sally and her brothers take turns going upstate for the weekends, but during the week she has Friday night dinners with Bobby, regular lunches with Gene, sees Megan in the afternoons. Her free time is dedicated to what is quickly becoming a novel, writing and re-writing until the tips of her fingers are numb from hours pounding away on the keys of the typewriter. She sees men regularly - writers, lawyers, doctors, but never Ad Men.
After a year, she starts to see the differences in her mother. She is thinner, paler, what little appetite she had is all but gone. Sally’s weekend stays become limited to Sundays only, and by the time she finally makes it up to Rye, her mother is still in bed, still in her pajamas. Her hair frizzy and untamed, yesterday’s makeup smeared at the corner of her eyes. That fall a cough develops and lingers, never fully going away. Eventually it progresses into something much worse, a cough-like spasm that takes her breath away entirely and shakes her whole, frail body with the movement.
When Sally suggests a trip to the doctors, her mother becomes angry and unreasonable. Sally does what she’s never been capable of before and lets it go.
(This, like so many other aspects of her relationship with her mother, she will come to regret deeply.)
“Why do you hate me so much?” her mother asks through contained tears, her voice thick with vodka. Her hands are shaking as they clutch the burning cigarette between her fingers. “I just don’t understand it, Sally. I’ve given you everything I could possibly give. Everything you could possibly want for.”
Sally is nearly twenty-seven now. Her hair is long and curling at the edges. She does not smile, barely even moves as she says, “I don’t hate you. I just don’t know how to love to you.”
(Sally does not move, but sweat pools at the base of her spine and her fingers twitch in her lap.
It takes months and years and countless hours of therapy to be able to tell her this, to be able to speak this honestly with a woman who inspires nothing but fear deep within her.
It’s easy to think it, you see, to say in her head, Mother, I can’t love anybody because you never taught me how and not care about the consequences. It’s another thing all together to tell her the truth, to place the blame she’s been carrying for years on the right shoulders and feel the fear coil deep in her belly in response. It’s why she chooses her words every-so-carefully and holds her breath afterwards until she feels like she’s about to gasp for air.)
Her mother says nothing, only stubs out the half-smoked cigarette between her fingers so she can busy her hands with lighting another one. She coughs, the sound shaking her bony body to the core.
After a while her mother says primly, “My hands are numb,” as she flexes her fingers and stares down at her perfectly manicured nails. “Can you go grab me my medicine?”
Like the good little girl her mother worked so hard to teach her to be, Sally does as she’s told.
A month later, after a trip to the doctor’s that Gene finally convinces her to take, Sally’s fears are confirmed: her mother has cancer of lungs and it’s spreading all over, ravaging her body as it does. Her mother tells them over dinner. Her lipstick is perfect, her hair curled and shiny, but her bony hands shake as she pours them wine. The glass clatters against the bottle. Bobby and Gene sit there for the longest time after, their faces long and drawn, shocked.
They manage it at first - alternate shifts at the house, call every day to make sure she’s doing alright. Her mother remains as independent as she knows how to be until the chemo makes her hair start to fall out. Something in her shifts then, that meanness, that drive to survive subsides into desolation, a severe sadness that worries even Sally. After, she refuses to go out to anywhere public that wasn’t the doctor’s office or the hospital. She won’t go to the grocery or go to church, she barely leaves the house. Sally carries the burden her brothers can’t because of their wives and children, and leaves her apartment in the city and moves into her childhood bedroom at her mother’s house.
Sally knows the end is near when her mother barely even protests the change. She watches as her mother loses the fight slowly but surely, as the cancer destroys everything in its path. Sally takes a leave from work when her mother’s condition worsens to the point of no return. She moves into her mother’s room, sleeps on the chair near the window so she’s just within ear shot, so she can count her breaths and study the evenness of them, the number, the harshness. What little free time she has, that she allows herself to spend away from her mother is spent hunched over Henry’s old desk, her fingers typing away, distorting memories and twisting them into prose.
Her novel would become her saving grace, her therapy. For years she will continuously scrap everything and re-start from scratch, perfecting every word, every sentence until it reads like poetry, until it is worthy of those she writes about.
When her mother draws her final breath, Sally is by her side. Her mother’s fingers are cold as her hand smoothes over her cheek and lingers there. Sally reaches for it, covers it with her own, and listens to her mother take one last gasp, one last choking breath as her body fails her completely. She does not say I love you, does not say anything, just holds her hand tightly in her own and does not let go.
Sally doesn’t realize she’s crying until she tastes the tears on her lips. She doesn’t stop for days.
Her mother survives months, months longer than the doctor originally predicted. At the funeral people smile softly, their pity noticeable and full of condescension that prickles at Sally’s skin. They tell Sally that she should be thankful for that, for those final months she got to spend with her mother, but she’s not.
In time, however, when she has distance and perspective, Sally will recognize that it is, in fact, fitting. Betty Draper did everything on her own time and in her own way - even dying.
They bury her in the same plot as her father. Deep down Sally knows that is what her mother would have wanted.
[eight]
“You think we’re better for it?” Bobby had asked once upon a time when their parents were still alive, still healthy, still there.
They’re at some family event - an anniversary or a birthday. The circumstances don’t matter as much as the question itself and Sally had drug a thumb across the rim of her wine glass and shrugged her shoulders softly. Across the way her father led Megan around the dance floor, his mouth spread into a wide smile as she throws her head back and laughs. For a moment, Sally tries to remember a time when he acted that way with her mother, when her parents were truly happy in the whole sense of the word - not just an act put on for show. Something had coiled deftly deep in her chest when she realized she couldn’t, when most of what she tried so hard to remember centered around hushed arguments and thin smiles, the stale smell of bourbon and whiskey and the salt of her mother’s tears.
She wishes with everything in her to have been able to know her parents before, when they were young and in love and happy. Before everything went so horribly wrong between them. She’s thinks life is made up of too many wishes and wants to be healthy.
“If nothing else, it taught us to be strong, didn’t it?”
Bobby chuckles softly to himself. “Yeah. I guess so.”
[nine]
Six months before her fortieth birthday, her book finally gets published.
The critics rave about the brutally honest prose, about the characters who read painfully realistic. She never tells anyone it is more autobiographical than fiction and a week before it goes on sale, the publishing company throws a quiet party in her honor.
Bobby stands by her side, his shoulder always there for support, his presence never wavering. Somewhere Gene stands with his wife and beautiful daughter. His face is blissfully happy as he speaks freely about how proud he is of his sister, how truly amazing he feels the book is. Of course, Sally thinks he’s foolishly naïve, that he doesn’t understand that this book is about them, his brother and sister, their parents.
Sally envies him that. She envies him that more than she’s ever envied anything in her entire life. Gene was born into a mess, sure, but he was far too young to remember it. Far too young for the scars to leave a lasting impact. Sally can trace her own like braille, like roadmaps carved into her skin.
After, she goes home to her tiny apartment in the Upper West Side, kicks off her shoes and pours herself onto her old, fading couch. Just inside her purse is a pack of cigarettes she keeps as a reminder of how far she’s come from that lonely teenager who wandered aimlessly at Bryn Mawr that first year. Sally’s fingers itch to reach for it, her mouth watering for that bitter taste of nicotine. She does not give in. Instead, she reaches for her book, her fingers gliding over the hard cover and tracing the dips and curves of her name. As she sits there with a wide smile and shining eyes, this immense, uncontrollable feeling of pride whips through her like a storm.
It warms her from head to toe and for a single, fleeting moment she allows herself to feel as though she’s finally made it. As though she has finally done something to live up to the name her father built from scratch all those years ago and turned in to something legendary in this town.
It is a wonderful, rewarding moment and she holds on to it for as long as she can.
The dedication of her book reads: To the parents I wish I had the chance to know better. For better or worse, you made me who I am. For that I will always be grateful.
Wherever they are, she hopes they’re proud.
It’s all she’s ever wanted.
Summary: Some things are just irrevocable. Sally learns this lesson too early on.
Rating: pg-13
Author's Notes: 6,427 words. Spoilers for everything to date. Written for the femgenficathon. Title for the credit goes to Emily Dickinson. Huge thank yous are due to justforyoudear for the handholding and brainstorming and lexiesloan for the beta. First time with this fandom, so con-crit is both welcome and appreciated. All remaining mistakes are mine. These characters, however, are not.
Prompt #148: The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there--you build yourself. Those are the high ones, the thick ones, the ones with no doors in. --Ursula K. LeGuin
[one]
Sally’s earliest memory isn’t a birthday or Christmas. It isn’t even significant in the whole scheme of things. It’s just a normal summer at the shore when she’s halfway between ages three and four. It’s hazy, the memory’s technicolor tacky when she looks back, but she can still remember her mother’s large, pregnant belly and brittle smile as she watched Sally and her father build the most exquisite sand castle that very first afternoon of vacation.
She remembers clearly the way her father’s hands had molded around her own - warm, strong, and gentle - as he taught her how to smooth and shape the edges of the castle to near perfection. Sally remembers the way he had smiled down at her after and the warmth she’d felt in response. The love.
Mostly, Sally remember crying as the tide washed it all away.
We’ll do it next time, her father had told her softly. In a rare moment he pulls her to him, allows Sally to nuzzle into his side and breathe in his warmth.
Years later she will remember distinctly the way he had smelled - the perfect mixture of sand, salt, soap, and something she wouldn’t be able to recognize until much, much later.
(It’s a lie, of course. They never build another one. )
When she’s young her mother tells her the most romantic stories about the young, beautiful model and the handsome salesman. She regales Sally endlessly with the story about how the handsome salesman swept the beautiful model right off her feet and saved her from a life of absolute despair. Her mother’s voice would get low and soft as she tells these tales, her tone almost loving as she smoothes the hair back from Sally’s round face and presses a gentle kiss to her forehead as she whispers goodnight.
When she’s young, Sally believes in silly little things like fairy tales and happily ever after. This childish naiveté doesn’t last for very long.
It’s not exactly clear when this changes, when Sally starts to realize that reality is no place for fairy tales and happily ever after doesn’t exist, but looking back she knows the first crack in the façade forms that summer when she’s five and they take that very first vacation without her father. It deepens shortly after when her mother’s smile becomes thinner, her touch more sparse and less loving. Sally’s always been more perceptive than most adults give her credit for, and she hears the whispered arguments that ensue, feels the tension and anger deep in within her bones.
Eventually, she unwillingly starts to make it her own, that anger driving her, controlling her. It makes her fingers curl into fists at her sides and her voice raise against those who try to control her. She never fully rids herself of it either - the anger that is not hers, but feels as though it is. She hides it, buries it, tries so very hard to ignore it, to forget it exists and where it stems from, but it never, ever fades completely.
It takes years for their marriage to fall apart completely of course, and Sally watches in awe and fear as it does, as the foundation crumbles right beneath all of their feet in the most spectacular and horrifying way.
When she looks back, those last two years her family spends together are hazy, almost a complete blur. It takes a while, but eventually she decides she prefers it that way. Prefers it because the hurt that stems from deep in her belly and tangles around her heart is easier to handle, easier to swallow when she can’t remember all the sordid details of what really went wrong.
What she does remember, what she will never forget, is those months she spent with her grandfather. The peace he gave her, the moments where he looked at her and she felt like maybe, just maybe, he understood her in a way that nobody else ever would.
“Know what you want to do,” he had told her. He was driving her from school to ballet and a soft song played on the radio. Sally had tapped her fingers in rhythm with the bass as Bobby looked on aimlessly in the back seat. “And never let go of it.”
That advice, those quiet moments she got to spend with him, are the only good things to come out of those last few years her family spends under the same roof.
She carries them with her for as long as she can, until the edges of her memories start to fade and decay.
[two]
Megan is pretty. Not beautiful, not even stunning, just… pretty. Definitely not as beautiful as Sally’s mother who has the blonde hair and the classic looks that remind Sally of the movie stars she likes to watch over and over in black and white. Megan would never be as beautiful as Sally’s mother, but she does have something that Sally’s mother never will - that warmth, that glow about her that brings life to everything in her presence, that puts Sally at ease, and lifts her spirits ever so slightly.
It is one of the first things Sally ever noticed about Megan - her lopsided smile, her crooked teeth, and how the genuine happiness radiated off of her in spades and warmed the very core of Sally just when she needed it most.
At her father’s wedding, Megan twirls Sally and Bobby around the dance floor for hours, her head tilted back, her laughter filling the room with light. When it is time for them to leave, Megan pulls Sally into her embrace and hugs her tightly. Sally wraps her small arms around the woman’s neck and doesn’t let go for the longest time.
“Everything is going to change now, Sally. Everything.” Megan’s arms are strong, comforting as they hold on to Sally’s small frame and Sally draws in everything the older woman has to offer. She stores it someplace deep inside for later use when things aren’t as bright, when she is back home with her mother and stepfather whose sparse touches wound Sally in ways she will never be strong enough to admit.
When Megan tries to pull away, Sally holds on for just a moment longer, her fingers fisting in the satin of her wedding gown. “Promise?” she asks.
Megan tilts her head back and laughs. “I would never lie to you,” she says.
Sally finally lets go and believes her.
Something inside of her mother shifts and nearly breaks altogether after her father marries Megan. Sally doesn’t know how to explain it, can’t even really put her finger on what exactly is the difference, she just knows something has forever been changed and there is nothing she can do about it.
Later, somewhere down the road when perspective and knowledge helps her see things more clearly, she will understand.
Sally’s mother always loved Sally’s father more than she let on, loved him almost as much as she loved herself. The change, the difference is that after he pledges the rest of his life to Megan, after he makes an honest go at being a good husband and a good father, the thin strand that held her mother’s heart together frayed at the ends and broke completely.
It would never be repaired - no matter how many cigarettes she smoked, no matter how many bottles of wine she drank, or how many men she tried to find herself in.
Some things are just irrevocable. Sally learns this lesson too early on.
“He’s not who he says he is, you know,” her mother tells her. “You’re old enough now. I think you should know these things.”
She’s not, really. Sally is only twelve, almost thirteen at this point. Her mother lights a cigarette and stares out the window. Sally thumbs the pages of the book in her lap and doesn’t bother to look up. By the door her suitcases stand proudly and neatly packed. She’s spending the summer in the city with her father and Megan and her mother, well… her mother has never dealt with not getting her way and playing second best. It makes her bitter and angry and Sally can gauge her mother’s moods by the smell of alcohol on her breath, by the number of cigarettes she’s smoked.
A part of Sally understands her motivations. She understands that her mother is just lashing out, just trying to make sure everyone around her hurts and aches the way she does - deeply and without any sense of remorse.
At just the tender age of twelve and a half, Sally has already acquired a great deal of immunity to it all.
“I don’t really care,” Sally replies. Outside the rain drips against the window, the steady crescendo filling the vast distance between them.
It’s the truth. She never does.
[three]
Sally loses her virginity when she’s sixteen, almost seventeen. She hitches her way from Rye to Ossining in a blind rage, her left cheek stinging with all the reasons why her mother would never love her the way a daughter needs and aches to be loved. Her stomach turns when she passes her childhood home, when she sees strangers playing in her backyard, the light on in her old bedroom. Her heart pounds fiercely against her ribcage when she comes to stand in front of Glenn’s worn, but familiar door. Her knuckles rap hard against the wood, and when he swings it open she tries to smile as his face flickers through a wide range of emotions - surprised, confusion, and finally joy.
They had kept in touch after she moved away. Letters, strategically planned phone calls. When she starts to run, she’s already halfway there before she realizes she’s running towards him. She isn’t quite sure what that means, but she knows it must mean something. Sally hasn’t seen him in years, but she still recognizes him underneath the seemingly new person he appears to be. He’s filled out - tall, lean, almost boyishly handsome. His awkward years are behind him and he knows it and she smiles her practiced, wide smile, and cocks her hip to the side.
“Hi, Glenn,” she says. Her hair is long, her legs even longer. It’s the heat of summer and the sweat nearly soaks her summer dress all the way through, but she acts as though she is unfazed because there are some things she learns from her mother and takes in stride. This is one of them. Sally has become an expert at manipulating the opposite sex.
He fumbles his own hello, still unsure after all these years of how to act around her. She invites herself in, asks where his mother is while he grabs Sally a fresh bottle of cola from the fridge. His mother is out of town, not expected back until early tomorrow morning. When he tells her this, when he has one hip leaned up against the counter and his body angled towards hers, she kisses him. Her lips are chapped and warm against his cool ones, and she pauses as soon as they make contact because he doesn’t move, doesn’t even breathe for the longest time. Instead, Glenn’s breath hitches, his fingers reaching out and tightening around her hip. Only then does she slide her lips against his slowly, unsurely. She breathes a soft sigh of relief when he responds in kind.
It’s fumbled and messy - just as first times should be. He leads her up the stairs and into his childhood room, watches wide-eyed and jaw slack as she slips her dress over her head and her panties down her bare legs. He tastes like cola and mint. His mouth is sloppy when he kisses her, but his hands are smooth, callused in all the right places and they feel good against her warm skin.
It is nothing like she expects. It’s awkward, sweaty, too quiet. He asks for permission, his brow knotted as he whispers are you sure? against the smooth skin of her neck. Sally laughs and pushes her hips towards his, her knees bending on their own accord. He moves into her with force, his eyes pressed closed tightly. She watches him carefully - the way he bites his bottom lip, the way his arms quiver as they carry his weight, the way he mumbles her name over and over, the two syllables stringing themselves together until his murmurs become incoherent.
It is over just as soon as it starts. Glenn comes with a grunt and a cry, the muscles of his arms failing him as he collapses on top of her. Sally presses her eyes shut tightly as her innocence fades into oblivion.
After, she pulls on her panties and slides back on her dress. Her legs ache and her thighs are smeared with reminders, but she doesn’t feel any different. Sally always just assumed that she would feel different.
Years down the line Sally will understand why she does this. Sally will recognize that excitement pooling in the pit of her stomach as Glenn’s hands tangle in her long hair and his hips angle against hers as something completely separate from lust and love. She will recognize the sharpness as anger, the sweetness as revenge.
Years down the line, Sally will realize that she goes to Glenn and kisses him first because she knows her mother would hate it, that it would make her mother’s skin boil and that vein on her perfectly smooth forehead make it’s presence known. Most of all, Sally knows that this, above all else, would hurt her mother - her daughter losing her virginity to somebody she deemed unworthy and insignificant.
One day, Sally will realize that she will never be able to escape one, vital truth about herself: she is just as fucked up as her mother. She just exhibits it in very different ways.
The argument was about which college Sally was planning to attend. Sally wants to go to California; her mother demands she follow in the Hofstadt tradition and attend Bryn Mawr. Sally is smart, smarter than her mother, smarter than most girls her age, and she has the opportunity to go to any college she wants, in whatever state she wants. She doesn’t want to settle. She doesn’t think she should have to settle.
When Sally tells her mother this, her mother, in turn, takes it as a personal attack, an insult, and Sally’s cheek stings with the impact of her mother’s palm before she can even think twice.
It’s Megan who finally gets her to see the other side of things. “You know,” she starts in that low, soothing tone that Sally loves so dearly, “your mother isn’t always going to be there. I know it’s a hard thing to imagine and at times us girls can’t wait for that day, but when it comes, when you are faced with that reality, you are going to wish you had done everything you could have to make her happy. To let her know that you love her. Sometimes that means sacrificing what we want for what they want. It’s what good daughters do.”
Sally doesn’t look up from where she is perched on the edge of the sofa, her fingers steady as they paint her toenails a pale shade of pink. “I’m not a very good daughter,” Sally says.
Megan laughs and places her palm against Sally’s back. “None of us are. But we try. That’s what matters.”
Sally thinks about this for a long time. Much later, after weeks of cold, bitter silence between her and her mother, Sally accepts her admission to Bryn Mawr. Her mother’s smile is proud, tender when Sally tells her this.
It almost makes it worth it.
[four]
There is a time, during that first semester at Bryn Mawr, where she loses herself in the booze and cigarettes and boys. She drinks too much, studies too little, and gets lost in boys who mean nothing. Boys who touch her in all the right ways and tell her all the right things, but do nothing to fill the deep, vast void she’s tried so fruitlessly to bury and ignore.
It doesn’t bother her until it does, until she realizes that she is partaking in that vicious cycle, breaking the vow she made years before about not becoming her mother.
It is history repeating itself, that much she knows, that much she hates, but on one cold day in the early weeks of winter, Sally does what her parents and their parents before them could never do: she wakes up, looks at herself in the mirror, and decides right then and there that this is not the person she wants to be. She vows from that point on to be better, to do better, to be the type of person who lives without the oppressive feeling of regret.
The most important difference between Sally and her parents is and always will be that when Sally makes promises, she keeps them.
[five]
She meets a boy her sophomore year of college. He attends a small, private college nearby. She studies literature. He studies science and she falls in love too fast and too soon. It is a whirlwind romance. They are young, in love, and think they can take on the world. His name is Danny. He is smart, kind, loving. He takes her home to meet his family at Thanksgiving and his mother hugs her tight, her embrace warm and loving. She takes him into the city for Christmas at her father’s, and the two most important men in her life shake hands and talk about football over dinner and beer well into the night
Her father likes him, her mother approves, and for a while Sally starts to think that maybe this is it. Maybe he is her chance at a worthwhile future, at a family. They date for two happy, blissful years. But Sally gets it in her head during her final semester that as soon as she has that diploma in hand, she’s heading west, to California. She wants to buy a house near the beach, some place within walking distance to sand. She wants the sun and sand and bikini weather and to say goodbye to those hard, northeastern winters. She never asks him to go with her.
The night before graduation, Danny gets down on one knee and asks her to marry him with his grandmother’s engagement ring in hand. She’s both shocked and flattered, stunned into a loss of words. For the longest time she just stands there with her mouth gaping open and her fingers twisting into fists as her eyes flick from the ring, to him, and back again.
She wants to say yes. A large, influential part of her forces her mouth to open and that single, life-changing word is right there on the tip of her tongue. Another smaller, just as influential part of her stops her from saying it. A part of her wants to say yes, to marry him and be born anew in his love and the family they could build together, but another part of her doesn’t.
It will forever remain one of the biggest mysteries of her life, but the latter somehow wins out.
“I can’t,” she tells him before she can stop herself. Her voice is soft, cold. She sounds entirely way too much like her mother. “I just can’t,” her voice cracks along the edges, a sob builds in the back of her throat. “I’m sorry.”
After graduation she never sees or hears from him again. She heads to California, rents a place a few blocks from the beach, and gets a job at a publishing house within town. She bikes to work every day, sunbathes in the afternoons, and runs along the beachfront as the sun rises. There are other men, of course. She falls in and out of lust frequently and with great joy. There are men she uses, men she likes, men she thinks she could probably love someday. They never stick around for long and she doesn’t mind. She finds that she actually likes it better that way.
Sally hears things, of course, from mutual friends over the years, people who knew him and her in passing. Eventually, he will marry a girl from his hometown. They have three children and build a house four blocks over from his parents while she is still finding herself in California.
She thinks of him often and wonders if he ever thinks about her. Is quite sure that she already knows the answer.
When his mother dies, she sends flowers.
He sends a thank-you note a month later. It only reads, I hope you found what you were looking for, Sally.
She’s not quite sure she ever does.
[six]
Her phone rings in the middle of the night. She doesn’t answer it the first time it rings, or the second, but halfway through the third try she reaches for it blindly, her voice gruff and half-asleep as she mumbles hello into the receiver.
It’s Bobby. She knows this before he even says a word - hears his sharp intake of breath, the hitch in his breathing right before he starts to talk. “Sally,” he starts and her stomach plummets. “It’s Dad. He’s…” he trails off and she rubs the sleep out of her eyes and fumbles for the light on her bedside table. His voice is tired and worn. Fear clamps down on her heart like a vice. “Sally, you need to come home.”
She doesn’t ask the questions she’s not ready to know the answers to, and merely nods to the empty darkness around her. She packs a suitcase and catches the first flight to New York possible, drinks too many Bloody Marys on the plane and starts to re-read To Kill a Mockingbird for the millionth time. She gives up halfway through the fifth chapter and allows the sound of the crying babies and snoring around her lure her into a false sleep.
Bobby and Gene meet her at the airport. Gene stands off to the side, his arms crossed over his chest, his nose pointed down at the floor. She didn’t come home last year for Christmas and he looks older than she remembers. His face is thinner, his body taller. She barely recognizes him. Bobby doesn’t look at her at first, not until she reaches for his hand, pulling and squeezing until he does.
“Tell me,” she says before she loses her nerve. He starts, stops, starts again. He shakes his head and begins to say something, but she squeezes his hand until her knuckles hurt. “Tell me now, Bobby,” she repeats, more firmly, adjusting her carryon over her shoulder before it falls to the floor.
He does. Her knees go weak and the world around her goes blurry, and then bright, then black as she presses her eyes closed so tightly she sees stars.
Her twenty-fourth birthday is in two weeks, her father is dead, and all she can think about is how she always thought her mother would be the one to go first.
Like most Ad Men before him, Sally’s father dies too young because of a heart attack, because the booze and cigarettes finally caught up with him. She doesn’t cry at the airport, or in the car, or even in the confines of her childhood bedroom at her mother’s house. She doesn’t even cry the first time she sees Megan, when her step mother’s footing falters as they hug, as she buries her head in Sally’s neck and sobs something fierce and gutting. No, she only cries at the funeral parlor, in the room in the back where they allow her to say goodbye, where they allow her to give him one final kiss, and apologize for not making it home for what would have been their very last Christmas together.
At the funeral she sits between her brothers, her eyes transfixed on the bright, glaring colors of the American flag draped over her father’s casket. She whispers her Amen a beat after everyone else, holds Bobby’s hand, and flinches at the sound of guns firing by the graveside burial. She thinks back all those years to the beach, to that sandcastle, to the way her father’s hands had guided hers, strong and warm around her own. She cries then, too.
She only stays a week. She can only stand it for a week. Her mother grieves for her first and only true love angrily - with harsh words and vodka and after seven days of standing back and taking every snide comment, every hurtful criticism in stride, she can stand it no longer. She books a flight, hails a taxi, and heads West without a second thought.
“You should come home more,” Bobby says over the phone a few days later. “You don’t have to stay with mom, we have a couch.”
Outside, the rain slants steadily against her windows. If she listens hard enough, Sally can hear the waves lapping against the shore. It puts her at ease. “You also have a baby on the way.”
Bobby laughs. He sounds happy. “A baby who would like to know her aunt.” Bobby pauses for a moment. “California really is too far, Sally. It’s always been far, but it feels farther now… with everything.”
“Yeah,” she sighs, conceding. She thinks of the airport then, of how she’d barely recognized Gene. Her heart hurts something fierce inside of her chest. “You’re probably right.”
Long after she hangs up the phone, she thinks of that very first vacation out here with her father and Megan, how happy she was then. How happy they all were then.
At the same time, Sally tries not to think about how long and hard she’s been chasing that happiness, trying to recreate it over and over again, and how she has failed miserably every single time.
Sally spends her twenty-fourth birthday with a bottle of wine and her typewriter. At first, she’s just typing memories - the beach, California, Christmases. At first, she’s just taking these images from her mind and putting them into words, coloring them with details both true and untrue. At first, she thinks it is a cheap version of therapy, that by doing this, by shedding her mind of these memories that haunt her, she can move on and forward. Then, suddenly, the memories twist and mold their way into prose, into a story of love and loss and abandonment, a story she knows like the back of her hand.
The story would take years to finish, to perfect, to form into something worth sharing with others. There would be weeks and months where she didn’t touch it, didn’t even think of it and others where she dedicated hours and days to writing and revising, to perfecting this lament she holds so dear.
A month later, her publishing company announces they’re starting an office in New York. Bobby’s wife is due in six weeks. Sally puts in for a transfer. She makes it back just in time for the birth.
[seven]
Henry leaves her mother after Sally’s been back in New York for exactly six months. The shadow of Don Draper exists even after his death, and it really was too much for him to handle. He gives Sally’s mother everything - the house in Rye, the cars, the money - and leaves in the middle of the night.
Sally figures her mother would have been more broken up about it if she weren’t still grieving over the death of her ex-husband. Sally and her brothers take turns going upstate for the weekends, but during the week she has Friday night dinners with Bobby, regular lunches with Gene, sees Megan in the afternoons. Her free time is dedicated to what is quickly becoming a novel, writing and re-writing until the tips of her fingers are numb from hours pounding away on the keys of the typewriter. She sees men regularly - writers, lawyers, doctors, but never Ad Men.
After a year, she starts to see the differences in her mother. She is thinner, paler, what little appetite she had is all but gone. Sally’s weekend stays become limited to Sundays only, and by the time she finally makes it up to Rye, her mother is still in bed, still in her pajamas. Her hair frizzy and untamed, yesterday’s makeup smeared at the corner of her eyes. That fall a cough develops and lingers, never fully going away. Eventually it progresses into something much worse, a cough-like spasm that takes her breath away entirely and shakes her whole, frail body with the movement.
When Sally suggests a trip to the doctors, her mother becomes angry and unreasonable. Sally does what she’s never been capable of before and lets it go.
(This, like so many other aspects of her relationship with her mother, she will come to regret deeply.)
“Why do you hate me so much?” her mother asks through contained tears, her voice thick with vodka. Her hands are shaking as they clutch the burning cigarette between her fingers. “I just don’t understand it, Sally. I’ve given you everything I could possibly give. Everything you could possibly want for.”
Sally is nearly twenty-seven now. Her hair is long and curling at the edges. She does not smile, barely even moves as she says, “I don’t hate you. I just don’t know how to love to you.”
(Sally does not move, but sweat pools at the base of her spine and her fingers twitch in her lap.
It takes months and years and countless hours of therapy to be able to tell her this, to be able to speak this honestly with a woman who inspires nothing but fear deep within her.
It’s easy to think it, you see, to say in her head, Mother, I can’t love anybody because you never taught me how and not care about the consequences. It’s another thing all together to tell her the truth, to place the blame she’s been carrying for years on the right shoulders and feel the fear coil deep in her belly in response. It’s why she chooses her words every-so-carefully and holds her breath afterwards until she feels like she’s about to gasp for air.)
Her mother says nothing, only stubs out the half-smoked cigarette between her fingers so she can busy her hands with lighting another one. She coughs, the sound shaking her bony body to the core.
After a while her mother says primly, “My hands are numb,” as she flexes her fingers and stares down at her perfectly manicured nails. “Can you go grab me my medicine?”
Like the good little girl her mother worked so hard to teach her to be, Sally does as she’s told.
A month later, after a trip to the doctor’s that Gene finally convinces her to take, Sally’s fears are confirmed: her mother has cancer of lungs and it’s spreading all over, ravaging her body as it does. Her mother tells them over dinner. Her lipstick is perfect, her hair curled and shiny, but her bony hands shake as she pours them wine. The glass clatters against the bottle. Bobby and Gene sit there for the longest time after, their faces long and drawn, shocked.
They manage it at first - alternate shifts at the house, call every day to make sure she’s doing alright. Her mother remains as independent as she knows how to be until the chemo makes her hair start to fall out. Something in her shifts then, that meanness, that drive to survive subsides into desolation, a severe sadness that worries even Sally. After, she refuses to go out to anywhere public that wasn’t the doctor’s office or the hospital. She won’t go to the grocery or go to church, she barely leaves the house. Sally carries the burden her brothers can’t because of their wives and children, and leaves her apartment in the city and moves into her childhood bedroom at her mother’s house.
Sally knows the end is near when her mother barely even protests the change. She watches as her mother loses the fight slowly but surely, as the cancer destroys everything in its path. Sally takes a leave from work when her mother’s condition worsens to the point of no return. She moves into her mother’s room, sleeps on the chair near the window so she’s just within ear shot, so she can count her breaths and study the evenness of them, the number, the harshness. What little free time she has, that she allows herself to spend away from her mother is spent hunched over Henry’s old desk, her fingers typing away, distorting memories and twisting them into prose.
Her novel would become her saving grace, her therapy. For years she will continuously scrap everything and re-start from scratch, perfecting every word, every sentence until it reads like poetry, until it is worthy of those she writes about.
When her mother draws her final breath, Sally is by her side. Her mother’s fingers are cold as her hand smoothes over her cheek and lingers there. Sally reaches for it, covers it with her own, and listens to her mother take one last gasp, one last choking breath as her body fails her completely. She does not say I love you, does not say anything, just holds her hand tightly in her own and does not let go.
Sally doesn’t realize she’s crying until she tastes the tears on her lips. She doesn’t stop for days.
Her mother survives months, months longer than the doctor originally predicted. At the funeral people smile softly, their pity noticeable and full of condescension that prickles at Sally’s skin. They tell Sally that she should be thankful for that, for those final months she got to spend with her mother, but she’s not.
In time, however, when she has distance and perspective, Sally will recognize that it is, in fact, fitting. Betty Draper did everything on her own time and in her own way - even dying.
They bury her in the same plot as her father. Deep down Sally knows that is what her mother would have wanted.
[eight]
“You think we’re better for it?” Bobby had asked once upon a time when their parents were still alive, still healthy, still there.
They’re at some family event - an anniversary or a birthday. The circumstances don’t matter as much as the question itself and Sally had drug a thumb across the rim of her wine glass and shrugged her shoulders softly. Across the way her father led Megan around the dance floor, his mouth spread into a wide smile as she throws her head back and laughs. For a moment, Sally tries to remember a time when he acted that way with her mother, when her parents were truly happy in the whole sense of the word - not just an act put on for show. Something had coiled deftly deep in her chest when she realized she couldn’t, when most of what she tried so hard to remember centered around hushed arguments and thin smiles, the stale smell of bourbon and whiskey and the salt of her mother’s tears.
She wishes with everything in her to have been able to know her parents before, when they were young and in love and happy. Before everything went so horribly wrong between them. She’s thinks life is made up of too many wishes and wants to be healthy.
“If nothing else, it taught us to be strong, didn’t it?”
Bobby chuckles softly to himself. “Yeah. I guess so.”
[nine]
Six months before her fortieth birthday, her book finally gets published.
The critics rave about the brutally honest prose, about the characters who read painfully realistic. She never tells anyone it is more autobiographical than fiction and a week before it goes on sale, the publishing company throws a quiet party in her honor.
Bobby stands by her side, his shoulder always there for support, his presence never wavering. Somewhere Gene stands with his wife and beautiful daughter. His face is blissfully happy as he speaks freely about how proud he is of his sister, how truly amazing he feels the book is. Of course, Sally thinks he’s foolishly naïve, that he doesn’t understand that this book is about them, his brother and sister, their parents.
Sally envies him that. She envies him that more than she’s ever envied anything in her entire life. Gene was born into a mess, sure, but he was far too young to remember it. Far too young for the scars to leave a lasting impact. Sally can trace her own like braille, like roadmaps carved into her skin.
After, she goes home to her tiny apartment in the Upper West Side, kicks off her shoes and pours herself onto her old, fading couch. Just inside her purse is a pack of cigarettes she keeps as a reminder of how far she’s come from that lonely teenager who wandered aimlessly at Bryn Mawr that first year. Sally’s fingers itch to reach for it, her mouth watering for that bitter taste of nicotine. She does not give in. Instead, she reaches for her book, her fingers gliding over the hard cover and tracing the dips and curves of her name. As she sits there with a wide smile and shining eyes, this immense, uncontrollable feeling of pride whips through her like a storm.
It warms her from head to toe and for a single, fleeting moment she allows herself to feel as though she’s finally made it. As though she has finally done something to live up to the name her father built from scratch all those years ago and turned in to something legendary in this town.
It is a wonderful, rewarding moment and she holds on to it for as long as she can.
The dedication of her book reads: To the parents I wish I had the chance to know better. For better or worse, you made me who I am. For that I will always be grateful.
Wherever they are, she hopes they’re proud.
It’s all she’s ever wanted.