Beyond the field, a low limestone ridge marked the boundary of my land. Keith had found an old dump back there. He came running into the house to tell us that he had uncovered all sorts of treasures, including a doll buried to her waist in the dirt. We all rushed back to see, but when we pulled the doll out of the dirt, we saw that her legs were eaten through. Her obliterated face maintained a lipstick smile—a dead toy, abandoned years ago with the mottled tin coffeepot and the busted buckets.
I saw the children running from underneath the willow, running in all directions as though they had exploded. “Time to go to the party!” I shouted. Suddenly, I was pleased with it all—the close, smoky days, the house, the life I had laboriously made around children and dinner parties and the conversation of friends, all illuminated now by my secret life with Edwin.
Jeff came barreling toward me, and Molly and Keith followed behind. I had the uncomfortable feeling that the older two had been talking. They did not play anymore, turning that activity entirely over to Jeff. Instead, they talked and refused to share their long, half-whispered conversations. I suspected them of analyzing. At least Jeff had not outgrown his games. “They hid from me!” he whined, coming so close to me his face nudged my side. I imagined a calf butting its mother’s bag, getting down to the business of nursing. I turned away, ignoring him. “You’re not listening,” Jeff complained.
“I’ll listen when you tell me something I want to hear,” I told him, catching his hand and pulling him toward the house.
At the porch door, I looked back and considered them separately. Three children, all inconceivably mine, they clustered close to me to complain. Keith was looking, as always, sour and fat: at thirteen, he had lost his bones, and his shirt buttons strained across his plump chest. Molly was wearing one of his shirts and a pair of his jeans that hung loose from her hips: She was only ten, and she had not yet given up her hope of being transformed into a brother—not a boy plain, but a boy caught and held in the mystical union of brotherhood. She refused to put on anything except Keith’s clothes, maintaining her faith in flies and leather belts and torn striped jerseys that showed her startling breastbone. A beautiful girl, a little witch, the source of my undoing—as sometimes I thought when I saw her perched on Edwin’s lap. She was the only one of my children he liked, and she liked him too. All the girls’ mothers I knew joked about their daughters’ seductiveness, yet it still seemed strange to me that Molly was so flirtatious when she genuinely, painfully wanted to be a boy. The two wishes—to be seduced and to be seductive—were after all not contradictory, perhaps not even connected at all. Edwin responded to her, feeling her round bottom gently with his hands, as though she were a glass bauble dangling on a thread. Perhaps, after all, this was what Edwin wanted.
Jeff, whining along behind, looked like a ghost with his cobwebbed blue eyes and his shaggy head. His last hysterical fit at the barber’s in New York had convinced me never to have his hair cut again. David was supposed to do it at home, but since he was opposed to anything that smacked of force, he was against it too, and eventually I would have to cut Jeff’s hair myself. I would not have minded cutting it if it were not for his screams, my own child staring at me, panic-stricken. He had the same fear of being seen naked. At school, he went through elaborate contortions in the bathroom, hiding his genitals behind a towel, and when it was time to change for gym, he had permission to go and lock himself in the supply cupboard. Otherwise, he would not go to gym. These concessions sealed his disability. I imagined him as an old man shielding himself in men’s rooms, trying to explain with a joke that he had never, in seventy-three years, been seen without his pants.
It was easier, although I worked harder, when they were small. Then their needs were clear and mostly connected with feeding and elimination. Still, sometimes I cleaned their nails with my nail or inspected their ears or tried to catch them on my lap, but mostly they grew like cabbages, flourishing in my distraction, in some rich soil of their own invention. Only the recent intimacy between Molly and Keith alarmed me. When I heard them whispering together, I longed for the evil days when Keith hated his new baby sister and had walked the house at night, howling, clutching his ears, wetting his bed when I forced him back into it, and then screaming at the sight of the dark patch on the sheet. With Molly goggle-headed in the shoulder sling, I’d held Keith in my arms, trying to quiet him until my own arms were stiff as pistons with resentment, when he must have felt in my soothing hands the clutch that would have torn his hair out if I’d lost control. David was away that summer, working on the provisions and charters for a Saudi bank, and I was more proud than angry to be left with it all. David’s contribution had always been minimal. I had wanted it that way. The babies had needed me, separately, completely, devouring whole areas of my attention and patience until there was not an inch left for my discontent to sprout. All I had wanted in those first years was to get from one day to the next, or possibly, to sleep through the night. As soon as Molly was out of diapers, Jeff had come along. Devoured, devouring, I was satisfied for a long time with the pride I felt as a single-handed homemade mother of three small children.
“I wish you’d get some help,” my mother had observed on one of her whirlwind visits from Florida. She’d brought me a bright pink dress which I was too thin and too pale to wear. I did not try to explain to her that I would never give over to some stranger even a tiny piece of my children. After all, they were all I had. On evenings in the city when David and I went out, I was pleased if the telephone-ordered sitter proved to be ugly or old: the children would not like her. Now, of course, if Edwin had been free in the evening, I would have quickly arranged the sitter, not caring whether or not the children fell in love while I was away.
We crowded onto the porch. “I wish you children would wash your faces and brush your hair before we go,” I said, realizing too late that I had put in exactly the inflection which would allow them to refuse.
“My hands are already clean,” Molly said.
Keith, in parody, waved his hands in my face. They were enormous, the half-inch nails lined with dirt.
Jeff grumbled, “Last year you made us put on all clean clothes for Saul’s party, and we were the only clean ones there.”
I laughed. Then I did not much care how I looked myself. Now the time I would have spent on getting the children ready could be spent on my own appearance. “I’m going to change, and I don’t want to be bothered,” I announced, marching off toward the stairs.
The children went into the kitchen and began to open and close the cabinets. “No eating!” I shouted down the stairs, knowing how wounded Flora would be if they turned down her spaghetti.
Upstairs in the bathroom, I spread the bathmat on the muddy floor (there was never time to clean the house, and we existed quite happily in dirt), stripped off my denim shirt, and washed myself, shivering, from the waist up. The house did not warm up or dry out from October until May. Even with the windows open all weekend, there wasn’t time to get rid of the sour damp smell that had accumulated during the week. For generations, the house had been crammed with people—relatives, farmhands, an occasional boarder; the big locks on all the inside doors recalled their need for privacy. The men had worked on the farm, the women had cooked and cleaned and raised children, and the house had never been empty or quiet or properly outfitted or decorated. It had been a funnel, a chute to the outdoors, or protection from it. How they would have stared at my pink towels, my crocks of dried weeds: so much for effect. Of course what would have astonished them most of all would have been my need for a city freezer and a country one, two enormous refrigerators, and enough food to feed a small army.
It was one of the things our little band never discussed: our twinned lives. We all kept egg cartons and mashed milk containers to start our fires; we all reprimanded our children for eating junk and kept odd dried bits of leftovers in our refrigerators. I remembered how angry Flora had been with me once when I had poured the bacon grease down th
e drain: we could have used it!
I put on a tight pink shirt—I enjoyed showing my nipples—and a clean pair of blue jeans. Anything else would have looked planned, which in our circle would have signified frivolity. We were all serious people after all, the women perhaps more so than the men, and spending time getting “dressed up” would have branded us as “silly.”
Downstairs, there was a crash, and Jeff came screaming up. I pushed him away when he burrowed into my thigh. Threatening him with being left behind, I started for the stairs. That threat frightened me a good deal more than it frightened him: I was terrified of delay as though the party were dissolving before I could get there. At my heels, Jeff launched into an endless litany: teasing at school, boredom at home. Injustices, injustices—I have never been able to explain them to my children, and their number was always legion. It did not matter now. I was armed with expectation—eventually his tears would stop and anyway, with the children for an excuse, I was going to spend the rest of the day with grownups. There would be plenty to eat and drink, a bonfire lighted later, and the promise, the miraculous promise of Edwin.
We were cheery in the car. David did not even make the children fasten their seatbelts. He drove a mile or two above the speed limit, which surprised me. Usually he drove with dazzling caution, noticing wetness or ice on the road which I could never see. Now he was at his ease, the fingers of one hand resting idly on the wheel. It was unlike him, but I did not mind. Sinking into my delicious euphoria, into the cottony layers of expectation, I looked out the window. The landscape seemed formed for my delight. Old fields sloped up from the road to barns and white frame houses. There were sheep in one pasture and a special set of trapezoid barns, which we’d always admired.
We turned onto the lumpy tree-hung side road. The children cheered. They shouted at their father to speed up over the big bump in the road, but David slowed down and began to explain to them about the car springs. We passed quietly over the bump without losing our stomachs. I remembered sailing over it with Edwin years before, his children shrieking on the roof of their car. They were quite small then, and I was startled by Edwin’s nonchalance. My own three were safely strapped into the back seat with David. “Do you think they will hold on to the luggage rack?” I asked Edwin politely, and he laughed, showing me his eyeteeth. “Perhaps we’ll be lucky and lose one or two.” He was able to say that sort of thing because he never appeared to be burdened by his children; he simply included them in his life. They went with him everywhere. I had often seen them monkeying around in the supermarket, shattering crackers in the diner, or creating some mild disturbance in the movies, with Edwin in the lead, beaming with charm to cover their dishevelment.
We turned into the little gravel drive, passing the trashcan on wheels which Frank, their eldest, was responsible for wheeling out every Sunday morning. In spite of their exuberance in public, the Field children were well-trained. Edwin and Flora did not seem troubled by the uncertainty that dissolved my rules as soon as I made them. I was still torn between the wish to do everything for my children and the conviction that they should at last begin to grow up. Edwin and Flora, I thought, had produced a set of small grownups with glee and a good sense of responsibility. It seemed as fine a recipe for raising children as any I could imagine.
The Fields’ little white house looked neat and bright inside its border of geraniums. Edwin had laid the brick terrace himself three summers before. That was the first time I saw him without his shirt, and I remembered being surprised that a man with so little hair on his chest could look so male, his muscles long and smooth under his glittering wet skin. I had lived my life with an eye to appearances, clothes jerked around on hangers, men who seemed costumed, and so Edwin’s bare chest had seemed a statement of intent, a signal of intimacy. Of course, nothing had happened then. Jeff was a hectic five-year-old, and I was drained and preoccupied. Two years later, when Jeff was in school all day, I stored the image of Edwin’s bare chest carefully among my fantasies—there were very few—waiting for the ripe time.
There was no one in sight as we drove up to the house, except for the dog, a dismal yellow mongrel that everyone hated except for Frank, who slept with Porky on his chest. Edwin, who walked Porky every morning in the city, had once referred to the dog as the ultimate pleasure. This raised my hopes that he and Flora had stopped sleeping together. Although we’d visited the house at least three hundred times, Porky began to snarl at us, and when Jeff reached out to pat him, the dog snapped. David avoided the source of conflict and led us all safely into the house.
A great pot of spaghetti sauce was popping away on the stove. Dishes and clothes lay everywhere. As always, the hosts had vanished. I called, and they appeared, emerging from the cellar, the bathroom, pounding down the stairs. Frank stepped out of the coat closet and smiled with his father’s mystery when I asked him why he had been hiding. Flora, her hair flying, dabbed my cheek with a kiss, brushed my forearm with her muscular breast and turned away to stir the spaghetti sauce.
I looked for Edwin, sorting through the milling bodies. He was there, but he passed me quickly without a look or a smile, heading for the telephone. Sometimes when we met, he lifted me up in his arms; other times he did not seem to see me. I was never sure of the difference, although I was sure of the hurt. Now I quickly reassembled myself—it was important not to show Edwin any sign of pique or pain—while he began to dial.
The children stormed outside, and Flora and David sat down to their ritual cups of coffee. They had an odd friendship, foreclosed, narrow, and lasting. They began their standard dialogue, touching humorously on their difficulties as the responsible adults in their families. Flora’s condescension, as always, annoyed me. Meanwhile, Edwin was talking on the telephone, his back turned to me as he leaned against the wall. The call was long, detailed, and yet perfunctory—I was grateful for that—dealing, I finally realized, with a repair he was having made to his car.
Watching me watch him, Flora asked me if I would like a cup of coffee too and smiled tenderly at my guilty start and refusal. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, I knew that I was upholding all their expectations: I was the child who had drawn the short straw, who had to be “it.” “Aren’t you at all attracted to Edwin?” Flora had asked me curiously over the years. She had watched us together, before we were lovers, with her faint anticipatory smile. Her obvious certainty, which I was just beginning to recognize, took the edge off mine. It was beginning to be clear to me that I was the last of Flora’s country friends to draw the short straw.
Flora had remarked several times that fall that she knew I had “a thing” for Edwin. She seemed to find it amusing, as though I had finally revealed myself to be as foolish as she had always surmised. My authority and independence regarding “the thing” were gone and she had even begun to advise me about my children, reminding me to take them to have their shots, handing out aspirin as though I would not have any at home. David seemed to enjoy the situation too. “I have a tiger by the tail,” he observed once when I had spent the evening dancing with Edwin. At times, I grew tired of pleasing them and remembered my role in school. Bright, stiff-necked, spoiled, I had been the clown who could be counted on to say anything, do anything, and of course, to scream and cry when I was punished.
Finally Edwin hung up the receiver and said, “How are you?” without looking at me so that I was not quite sure who he meant. Then in one stride he came and took me in his arms—those long arms, the wrists as narrow as mine. He pressed me confidently, knowing that I would never lean back or wriggle away; I leaned against him for a moment. “A real kiss,” he said, and I tipped my head back. His lips brushed mine. He smelled as neutral as water, having a great love of baths. After sex, he would plunge into a hot bath and scrub every inch. He liked me to sit in the water with him. When he had finished washing, he would lie back and talk, the faucet dripping on his shoulder, and I listened with the greatest care, as close to his hidden spontaneity, his secret wishes, as
I would ever be. I hoped for illumination, for the final breaking of his code. Out of the water, Edwin talked in short bursts and enigmatic phrases, which, between ignorance and wishfulness, I could not quite decipher, yet it was our secret language shared with no one else. Like a primitive, Edwin used a code so precise it fascinated me, and explained exactly what he wanted.
He lifted me off my feet and swung me around, our poor substitute for the orgasms we wouldn’t have. “If only we had more time!” I used to plead, as though it would all work if we had hours to play. Of course, Edwin did not have time to give; I had to be sandwiched between appointments. Now, for an instant, he swung me off the ground, and I felt as light and helpless, as exuberant, as a child. Then he set me on my feet and disappeared down the steps to the cellar.
Indian giver, I thought.
“Now have a cup of coffee,” Flora advised. I wondered how much I was like her: We were sisters under the yoke. Sometimes at night, I ground my teeth until my jaws ached at that thought. At other times, our union called up terrifying fantasies: Flora’s nipple stoppering my mouth while Edwin fucked me. Flora’s mouth on my neglected clitoris. That image was more than I could bear, even in the far reaches of sleep, and I would wake up sweating. Now I sat down and accepted her cup of coffee.
Flora pushed the gritty sugar bowl in my direction. It was crusted because her children, starved, sometimes ate out of it with their hands. She looked at me with kindness. “Tell me, before Helena and Charles return …” (The two of them were mutual friends I hadn’t known were coming.) “… how do you think they’re getting along?” If I had been a little younger, she would have distracted me instead with a good smack.
“I think they’ve gotten everything straightened out. Apparently Charles has started seeing an analyst, and it’s really working.”
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