“There they are,” David says. I think he means the children, then see that he is looking out the window. Tom’s green pickup has turned onto the gravel road. It stops at the slaughterhouse, and two men climb out. “I wonder if we ought to offer them coffee,” David says.
“I don’t think they expect it.”
David goes to the window to watch them. The two men let down the truck’s tailgate and begin to haul out a mound of canvas.
“What percentage are they getting?” David asks.
“The usual.”
“What,” he asks quietly, “is the usual?”
“I’ve forgotten. You can ask Tom when you take him out the coffee.”
“I’m not going to take them out coffee. This is another example of the way you get your finances into such a mess: you simply don’t remember detail.”
“I thought they were your finances too.”
“You were handling the money, paying the bills,” he says wearily, having been over this ground too many times.
“But you still haven’t told me what happened to your salary all those years, or why you kept it in a separate account.” I lean across the table to snap a dead bloom off the purple petunias I picked and arranged the day before.
“I’ve explained as well as I can. You are determined as far as I can see not to understand. I told you about the expenses for the house, the mortgage …” Catching my eye, he turns abruptly away. “I’m going upstairs to dress.” I glance at the fingers holding the dead petunia. My nails are cracking, the cuticles rising. And my hand is brown, worn from the summer working in the garden.
He walks off rapidly, unbuttoning his pajama jacket. Before I have to remind him, he remembers that he is no longer sleeping upstairs and turns into the guest room.
How well-mannered he is, how discreet still, even in the midst of what I must assume is outrage and resentment. He will never look at me with fury or abuse me; he will maintain our calm, and I will always feel something of a fool as I flounder and toss in it. Of course, he has explained everything—but when?—and of course, I have failed in the whirlwind of my resentment to listen, to understand. I have always been distracted by my worry over what he leaves out.
Yes, I know about his miserable childhood, only son of a mother addicted to drink and antiques. I know about her struggle to pay for college, graduate school—and the even harsher struggle to make the contacts he needed to be invited to join Smith and Harper, one of the most respected midrange investment houses. I know he used to view our marriage as his reward, and again I look down at my worn-out hand.
His explanations remind me of my mother’s lectures on sex, illustrated with a photograph of the naked Perseus in my book of Greek myths. I paid more attention to the snakes around Medusa’s face.
2
It was a party that started it. Almost two years ago, Mary Cassaday, a neighbor I’d seen in town doing errands, invited us to a dinner party. The week before, Molly came down with impetigo, Jeff was at home with the flu, and my husband cancelled a business trip I’d been counting on him to take. Mary Cassaday’s invitation, a sky-blue note with her handwriting streaming across it, consoled me completely—dear Mary, the true mother of invention, who would spend two days cooking in order to provide me with an excuse to see Edwin. In the city, he had been very busy. He did not return my calls. I knew better than to complain. So, Mary’s pale-blue note was as large a factor in my life as the presence of the children—perhaps larger. I knew Edwin and Flora were going because she asked me to buy her a new dress.
Flora was teaching and had no time for inessentials. She had always hated shopping, anyway. Although she was a size larger than me—occasionally in my dreams she loomed like a mountain—I was able to choose clothes for her unerringly. So on the day of the party, I brought over a substantial brown-and-white box lined with tissue paper and tied with a white ribbon, the dress inside.
She looked at the box disapprovingly when I laid it on her kitchen table. “I hate to think how much it must have cost.”
The children had gone fishing with their father, and the house was quiet.
“Wait till you see it. It’s worth every penny—you told me you wanted something well-made.” I took off the box top, folded back the tissue paper, and revealed a handsome clinging black woolen dress with a jacket to conceal the décolletage. Flora looked at the dress as though it might strike her. “Try it on,” I urged. Her unwillingness charmed me. She was neither a liar nor a hypocrite, would not spare her own feelings or anyone else’s, and her honesty, once accepted, proved instructive. She began slowly to unbutton her denim shirt.
Her big breasts flashed as she pulled off her shirt. I looked away. Flora’s fleshiness was an aspect of our situation, which I was trying to ignore. She was, too clearly, my opposite. Where I was flat or even concave, she was full and round. Her belly would have filled my indentation, her popped navel, relic of three pregnancies, would have stuffed my sunken one. I did not help her lift the evening dress out of the box.
She dropped the dress over her head and turned so I could zip up the back. Feeling at the neckline, she said discontentedly, “It’s much too low-cut. Edwin won’t like it.”
“I know. That’s why there’s a jacket.” I held up the little garment for her to slip in her arms. She pinched the front closed tightly with one hand, then turned to survey herself in the glass door. It was difficult to see anything except dark shifting planes. “Don’t you have a mirror?” I asked.
“Just Edwin’s shaving mirror in the bathroom, and that won’t do much good.”
Watching her turn uneasily, fingering the dress, I wondered whether Edwin’s dictum grew out of her unease or whether he had imposed on her the image she now held as though with the tips of her fingers: a large woman, very competent, and by her virtues entirely unsuited to a black evening dress.
“It’s tight over the hips,” she complained.
“No, it isn’t. It fits perfectly.”
“Edwin doesn’t like me to wear anything tight.”
“I know that, silly.”
“I’ll try it on again later,” she said, turning her back for me to unzip her. “Maybe I’ll like it better. You wouldn’t mind frightfully returning it, would you?”
I slid down the zipper and studied her broad white back. That was a safe zone. “Of course I’ll take it back. That’s our deal.” Suddenly I was annoyed, and I wondered why I was always trying to please Flora. She paid me, of course.
“How much did it cost?” she asked suspiciously, turning away to put on her clothes.
“One hundred and fifteen.” Without thinking, I had cut thirty-five dollars off the price.
“That’s terrible!”
“Not really,” I began to show her the seams. “You’ll be able to wear it for years.”
“I have the money, of course, but I do resent spending it on clothes.”
“I know, but this is an investment.” I heard the servile sales-woman’s whine in my voice. “Look, Flora, if you don’t like it …”
“Oh, I like it, it’s very smart. It’s just so different from what I ordinarily wear.”
“It’s time for you to get rid of that old corduroy skirt,” I said, brusque as my mother.
“Edwin likes it.”
“I don’t care whether he likes it or not. It’s not flattering.”
Instead of contradicting me she began to complain about Saul, who was doing badly in school. A line of vexation settled between her eyes. Generally her children were a credit to here, quiet, well-mannered (except when they were with Edwin, and Flora took no responsibility for that). Saul had recently broken out of the model. Someone had reported seeing him sneaking on the back door of the Broadway bus. “Edwin won’t take him seriously,” Flora complained. “You know how he is.”
“He doesn’t like to scold.”
“Except when it’s Frank. He’s after him all the time. He won’t leave him alone. Frank cries easily.”
; I thought of Frank’s anxious face. He always caught his first cold in September and kept it until spring, and Edwin could make him cry at any hour of the night or day by reminding him that he was “sickly.” The other children drifted off one by one when Edwin began to point out their faults—he was always fair about it and even asked them afterward what they had felt when he lectured. Still, they drifted off to watch TV or do their homework until only Frank was left, a thin figure of misery, staring at his father through streaming tears. He was a courageous child, the only one of the three who always looked Edwin in the face.
“Sometimes Edwin frightens me,” Flora confided. “Last night he hit Frank and knocked him down.”
I gasped. Edwin’s violence had never broken out in front of me, although I had felt it, root and stem, in all his lovemaking. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. What could I do? Trying to stop Edwin only makes him worse. I’ve learned that at least in fifteen years.”
“Poor Frank,” I muttered, stunned by her complicity.
“He has to learn to be tough. He’ll never get by sniveling and crying.”
“He’s only eleven.”
“That has nothing to do with it. He simply won’t make any effort. He’s not doing at all well in school this semester.”
I turned toward the door.
“Don’t leave.”
“I have to go home and fix lunch.”
“Let David fix lunch for once.”
“I have to go.”
She sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t. Edwin will be coming soon with the boys. He’ll be so disappointed if you aren’t here.”
“Don’t you ever want to do what he does, Flora?”
She considered it from afar. “Well, of course sometimes I’m curious. Edwin’s the only man I’ve ever had. I’d like to see what it’s like with somebody else before I’m too old. But Edwin feels I’d probably get involved emotionally if I tried it.”
“So he doesn’t permit it.”
“It’s not like that. It’s never like that with us. Our marriage comes first. Neither of us would think of doing anything to threaten it. Edwin feels I’m more emotional …”
“Well, perhaps he’s right.”
“And then, it’s good for us in bed,” she went on demurely. “I really don’t have much appetite for anyone else.”
“I really must be going,” I said.
Jeff complained all the way home. “We didn’t stay any time at all! You made us leave too soon! Saul and I were going to look for mushrooms when he came back from fishing.”
“I’m sorry,” I said unfeelingly and turned up the radio to block further complaints. The children’s voices continued to nag for my attention, but I was able to maintain my separateness by thinking of Mary Cassaday’s party, imagining what Edwin would do there, what he would say, how he would look, and planning to snatch a few minutes alone with him.
Driving up to our house, I saw David raking the leaves near the porch. He waved. “Did you have a good time?” he called pleasantly as I stepped out of the car. I was annoyed by his useful compliance. My friends had automatically become his friends, my family had replaced his family, and now it seemed that my love affair too was becoming his—a source of vitality and vicarious excitement.
“Why should I have had a good time?” I asked, passing him rapidly. “I only went there to pick up the children.”
“Was everybody there?”
“No, only Flora.” Grudgingly I added, “The rest had gone off fishing.”
“If I had known it was only going to be Flora …” I went into the house before he could complete his customary compliment. He liked Flora and would have been pleased if we had all thought that they were having “a thing.”
The afternoon passed with the usual procession of obligations. I tracked down the bottled-gas man, who hummed away around the house hauling out the old canister and putting in another. Then he waited silently just inside the kitchen door while I wrote out his tiny check. Handing it to him, I watched him fold it carefully and store it in his shirt pocket.
At six, Mrs. T. the babysitter arrived, looming large in the doorway in her scarf and coat. She took off all her layers, then sat at the kitchen table to give me the week’s gossip. The light bulb burned above our heads, and the children argued on the stairs while she told me about her brother’s disloyalty, the pecuniary malpractices of the telephone company, and the probable fate of the proposed Grand Union. Meanwhile, Jeff and Keith began to fence in the living room with a pair of plastic swords. Molly settled herself on the couch, the cat in her arms, and started to croon and smooth it. Used to her sudden changes, the cat arched against her arms. “I must go up and dress,” I told Mrs. T.
“Why, yes, go right away,” she said, chagrined because she had not unloaded all her wares. She followed me into the living room and hissed, “Scat!” at the cat. Melvin leaped out of Molly’s arms. “Dirty thing!” Mrs. T.’s voice sawed across my daughter’s complaint.
Upstairs, I plunged into my ritual. Drawing a bath, I poured in capfuls of sweet oil; the dinner party gave me an excuse to pamper myself. I knew that in the other house three miles away, Flora would be getting ready, and I imagined Edwin in the bathroom with her, and perhaps even sharing her tub. I lay alone in my tub with my jealousy, my rubber duck.
David was already dressed and shaved, having used the downstairs bathroom. We avoided seeing each other naked. Six months of abstinence had made us both unusually polite. David arranged himself to suit my unspoken demands, dressed and undressed apart from me, and slid into bed beside me as apologetically as a stranger. I knew he hoped I would continue to put up with him as long as he continued to put up with me.
We went downstairs. The children were eating their supper in the kitchen in brutalized silence. They had offended Mrs. T., who was clashing pots in the sink. She made a face at me and shrugged at Jeff, who was crying into his soup. I could not afford to inquire into the trouble, which might cloud or even forestall my pleasure in the evening. I hacked off a slice of bread, buttered it lumpily, and offered it to Jeff. He pushed it away. “I hate dark bread.” I kissed each one of their resisting faces. David kissed them too, and we walked out of the house together.
A starry night: I took his arm, reminded of the nights of our first autumn in the country. After a day spent taking care of children, we would walk a little way down the dark road, afraid to be gone for more than a few minutes, holding each other’s hands. Pleased by my touch, David announced, “I thought it was a very nice day.”
“Yes.”
“A little hectic, as always, but the children had a good time.”
“Yes.”
“Molly seems to be coming down with a cold.”
“So it seems.”
We got into the car. David started the motor and negotiated the front gate. Snapping on the radio, I flooded the car with the ridiculous songs which had become my panacea and my revenge. David turned the volume very slightly down. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
There is a point in a marriage beyond which the only hope lies in silence—total, smooth, and entirely accepted silence, a wax over the unknown.
We were both fixed in our separate worlds by the time we reached the bright glass house ten miles up the river in the little town of Ransom. Light streamed out of the walls and roof of the house, which was a frame for panels of glass. Hurrying across the bridge to the front door, we were both animated for the first time in days. “That dress is very becoming,” David announced.
“You don’t think it’s too tight?”
“Not since you lost weight.”
Mary Cassaday welcomed us with open arms. Her beautiful delicate face was decorated with threadlike lines. It seemed that they would drift off any minute and leave her face smooth again. In a husky whisper, she directed me mysteriously to lay my shawl upstairs. Mary was full of secrets and suppositions, turning the dreariest country evening into a field for intrigue. I
loved her imagination and often asked her to repeat stories about the people we knew, stories which were always more thrilling than anything reality offered, or to describe the days when her children were small, and she turned them out into the snow, in desperation, to work on a poem.
Upstairs, I laid down my shawl and wondered what Flora would think when she saw it. She disliked the brightness of my clothes and might well cover my red shawl with her beige one. I stood for a minute by the window, listening to the stream that curled around the foundations of the house. The country sound swelled and filled my attention, and I was for a while relieved. I smiled, looking at the double bed, and entertained the vision of the four of us—David and me, Flora and Edwin—sitting up as straight as dolls against the plump pillows. Perhaps after all that was what we wanted: a family erotically entwined. The relief of laughing made me generous, and I understood for the first time how Edwin could lose himself talking to his patients or chopping wood, lose himself more effectively than he even lost himself with me, for with me, guilt admitted a pinpoint of light.
I arrived on the stairs as Flora was coming up. Edwin, below in the hall, was wearing the wrinkled prep-school blazer and shrunken white pants that made him look like the ill-fated captain of a mutinous ship. He snatched Mary Cassaday into his arms, kissed her ear, and hugged her firmly, rocking her back and forth; she fell in with the motion. I went down the stairs. When I held out my hand, Edwin took it, startled.
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