“But it’s so pretty!” She lifts one of the little brass pulls and lets it fall with a jingle.
“I know, and I remember how you used to enjoy sitting on my lap and opening and shutting all those little drawers. But there won’t be room for two desks in our new apartment.”
“It sounds like a stinky little place.”
“It’s all we can afford. I’ll take you next week to see it. It’s bright. It’s full of sun. Your room has a bookshelf.”
Keith has come in, chewing on a piece of raisin toast. “I thought that desk belonged to your grandmother.”
“It did. It came up with all the other things from Washington when she died. This desk was always in the corner of her bedroom. She kept flowers on it and a photograph of her first husband—not your grandfather. He came around too late to be admired. The desk was a kind of shrine. She never actually used it. She sat up in bed with a tray on her lap to write her letters.”
“Why isn’t Daddy taking more stuff?”
“Ask him.”
We all look at the newspaper. Slowly it shifts, and David’s calm face appears. “What is it?”
I motion to Keith to repeat his question, but his mouth is conveniently full of raisin toast, and he simply stares. “I told your father weeks ago he could take anything he wanted, but he never could get a moving truck here,” I say.
“Why can’t he just keep the things he wants here?”
“Because the new people are going to move in.” My voice is crusty, dry. I am so tired of explaining, tired of my own righteousness. Where is the soft woman Edwin used to take in his arms?
“Well, nobody is going to sell my things,” Keith announces.
“You’ve told me that many times, and I’ve told you it simply can’t be. Now we haven’t been through your room together, and nothing is sorted, but you’re simply going to have to make your mind up to let the furniture go. The house has to be cleared out. Your father and I agreed on that. We can’t take all your junk to the city; there wouldn’t be room for it there.” As I pile argument on argument, I begin to lose my patience. Turning away, I knock my shin on the rocker. I lean down to rub the bump. “Now get dressed, both of you. It’s nearly time for the auction to begin. You may want to go outside when the people have all come.”
“I’m not going out there,” Keith says.
“Why not?”
He does not answer, and I know he means to guard the door to his room.
“He says it’s too embarrassing,” Molly explains.
“It is,” Keith says. “We’re getting rid of everything we own.”
“I’ve told you over and over, I’m sick of telling you—we have to have the cash to live on.”
“I can’t bear the idea of everybody picking over—” Suddenly he is crying, furiously beating me off with his hands when I try to comfort him.
“Keith,” David says, lowering the paper. “It will be all right, son.” He adds to me, “This is all very upsetting.”
“Of course it’s very upsetting. And it’s going to get worse. We are going to have to clear out Keith’s room.” At that, the boy breaks away from me and dashes up the stairs. I hear his door slam behind him. “There isn’t going to be any way around this one,” I tell David.
Looking at his calm face, his benevolent soft brown eyes that match his corduroy country suit, I am frightened by the extent of my own power. Pushing against David has always been like pushing against cream, or foam; I am left with the desolating awareness of my own strength. Normal assertiveness begins to seem in his presence like the high-pitched barking of a hysterical dog, leg-chained to a lamppost. I begin to falter. “I need you to persuade him, David. We really have to get his room cleared out.”
He lays the newspaper aside. On his lap I see the yellow pad. “There’s your theory as well. I don’t believe that people can start over, fresh, forget the past.”
Molly glances up from her drawing, scenting a confrontation. We both look at her, wish her away, and then settle for her presence as a potentially useful ally.
“Of course there’s my theory,” I admit, cornered. I listen to David’s silence for a while. In the next room, Jeff, oblivious, is pushing a metal toy tank around the floor. Upstairs, Keith is guarding his room. It seems to me that they are all waiting, listening for my explanation, and I realize that I have counted on their grudging consent. “You’d better tell me what you’re getting at,” I tell David.
He doesn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. I slip into silence along with him. I’ll never be able to shed my past, even if I wanted to. I’m keeping that loveseat because I used to sit there while my grandmother told me her stories about all the terrible things that can happen to women in this world, but even if I didn’t keep the loveseat, I’d hear her voice. The most I can do is just to change my way of life, and that’s hard enough—change what I eat, what I wear, how I spend my time, the rooms I live in. Maybe eventually rearrange things so I can go outside in good weather and stay inside in bad, be with people I like or be alone. But that’s ambitious. “All I’m trying to do now is just revise the look of the rooms where I’m going to live.” David glances at Molly. “Is that ridiculous?” I ask.
David looks at his yellow pad, touches a line with his finger. “That’s not ridiculous. But I’m not sure that’s all you’re trying to do.”
“Anyway, it’s too much!” Keith shouts from the top of the stairs. “It’s too much, and it’s not fair!” Then he stumps off to his room again and ostentatiously slams the door.
“Keith gets to keep everything. It’s not fair,” Molly whimpers.
I look at my husband. “David, you are going to have to deal with him. You can’t expect the other children to give up their furniture when Keith is keeping everything he has.”
“I’m sorry,” David says. “I don’t remember agreeing to help you with this. It was all your idea. I told you to go ahead and try. But I warned you it wouldn’t work. The children wouldn’t stand it. You were determined. There was nothing I could say. But I’m not going to bail you out at the last minute when it all starts to go wrong.”
“It’s not all starting to go wrong. You are not going to sabotage it.” My power, or the illusion of my power, has drained away, leaving me watery. I go into the living room to escape their complicity—Keith and David, Molly and David, each couple united against me. I look down at Jeff, still busily running his tank across the floor. Thank God there is one extra for my side. As I watch him, the sun is abruptly cut off, and I turn to the window to see a straining patch of canvas slowly moving across the panes. While we were arguing, Fred and Tom have been putting up the tent. My helplessness vanishes: the tent is going up.
Molly has followed me into the living room. “Look, the tent is going up!” I exclaim. She glances at it perfunctorily. Jeff raises his head and stares, then darts to the window.
“It’s going to be really big!” he says.
Molly begins again at my elbow. “I want to keep my cradle. It’s not fair. Keith gets to keep everything in his room.”
“Keith is not going to keep everything in his room. Now go up and get dressed.”
“Daddy says I should get to keep my cradle. He says it’s an antique.”
“Daddy and I agreed on a set of rules,” I tell her. “We agreed two months ago, but now he wants to forget that.” Before she can begin again, I lean down and put my arms around her. “I’m sorry, Molly.”
She stands distrustfully within the circle of my arms, her body thin as a stalk of celery. After a while, she begins to mutter, “We used to have a good time, and now we don’t ever have a good time anymore.”
“We do have a good time still.” I sift my memory for examples. “We went to the Bronx Zoo that day—”
“It’s not the same,” she interrupts, and I do not contradict her. Of course it’s not the same. I hold her for as long as she will allow it, and then I let her go. The suffering of children arouses such terrible guilt in a
dults who are responsible for them. I must cling with all my strength to my faith that my happiness is worth as much as theirs.
David comes into the living room behind me. I catch a whiff of his shaving lotion, which makes me gag.
“The tent’s up,” Jeff announces at the window.
“You are going to help me with Keith,” I tell David.
David looks down at his pad and corrects a word.
“What are you writing there?” I shriek.
“Mommy, don’t scream like that!” Jeff is suddenly beside me, pulling at my arm. David tucks the pad quickly away.
“Just some notes.”
“My God, I can’t stand it.” I grip my hair with my hands.
“I’ll get you a glass of water,” David says. We look at each other. Hatred, so much more nourishing than love, is briefly illuminating his face. I know that I am looking flushed and vital too, rage speeding fresh blood through my veins. The energy with which we are trying to hurt each other was never available for loving.
“It’s all right,” I say, patting Jeff’s shoulder and at the same time trying to put him a slight distance off. “Don’t worry.” He goes back to his window.
I walk to the desk and pick up his yellow pad. At the top of the first page, David has written in crisp black script: Examples of hysteria. There are fifteen numbered examples. The first one reads, Shouting at Keith, completely out of control.
So he is planning a custody battle. Suddenly I’m calm. I remember the years when David and I were gentle and kind to each other, offering tidbits of comfort and understanding, adjusting a pillow, pouring a drink, united by our distrust of common reality. That was when the sex began to stop. Two invalids must spare each other. Instead, we lay side by side in bed, chastely, companionably, like two children sharing a fear of the dark.
It was better that way. The disappointment otherwise was too much for either of us to bear. David had stopped coming with me—he blamed his allergy medicine—and I had never come with him, even in the beginning when everything seemed possible.
For years I prevented myself from seeing the situation. I cooked and bought and made babies instead, filling up the gaps, and of course, I read. Eventually I stumbled on an article in a woman’s magazine, which convinced me that there was one cause for the despair which gnawed me after David was gone. I admitted in a French restaurant that I had never had an orgasm, either with him or with anybody else. It was wine-choosing time (or whine-choosing time, as Edwin, my pun-maker, would say), and David looked up from the list. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, with mild surprise. He comforted me then as he had for other disappointments, with a soft pat on my shoulder. The magazine, I told him, advised women to try a vibrator. That made sense to David, and he bought me one the following week, shielding me from the embarrassment of having to buy one for myself. It sat on the bedside table in its cheap box, a plastic wand I filled with two D-cell batteries; when I turned it on, it buzzed away like Jeff’s tin tank. I was half-afraid of it. Finally one night, when David was in the city, I tried it out. It gave me an intense spasm, a revelation, which should never have come to me so cheaply and so fast. Fascinated, I tried the device again and again, hurrying the children into bed in the evening so that I could experiment. There was relief hidden in that device, but after a while, it seemed to lose its magic, and the spasm did not come without ditch-digging work and fantasies, which embarrassed me. And I no longer had the warmth of David’s body pumping away vaguely above me for comfort. When I came, it was purely mechanical.
That was when the hope began. With Edwin.
It was the day after Thanksgiving, and all our children were playing Monopoly in the parlor; we had locked the door and fallen on the sofa. He took me rapidly, pulling off my pants, pressing his penis into me. It was over so quickly. As he washed himself in the bathroom next door, I pressed my hands between my legs. “It’s no good for me this way. Get a sitter for the boys tonight so we can have some time together.”
He looked at me, alarmed. “But I don’t want to get a sitter. The children depend on me to be with them, especially when Flora is away.”
“Flora asked me to take care of you when she went back to town.”
“You are taking care of me.” He smiled, came to the bed, reached down, and touched my hair. It was so rare for him to show this kind of affection my eyes filled with tears.
“Edwin, I need you—I need more of you than this. I need you to stay inside me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “but this is all there is.”
“I just want more of what you have, more time with you,” I pleaded.
He turned toward the door, buckling his belt. I went around the other way, through the kitchen to come into the living room separately. By then, I had adjusted my expression. It seemed to me that I would not be able to outlive my despair, and yet of course I went on, fixing the children’s snack, pouring their milk.
In the afternoon, we all went for a walk in the woods, the older children running ahead along the trail, the younger ones tagging behind, complaining about the cold. Edwin shouted and ran and leaped for the low branches. I ran beside him as though running and playing with him was familiar. To run, to eat, to talk—surely that would take the place of the deep touching he would not give me. “An affectionate relationship is the only thing that keeps two people together,” he said later when we were walking back. “That’s what you’re trying to build with me.”
“But I don’t want an affectionate relationship if it means just being friends.”
He looked at me, taken aback. In the house he went at once to the telephone to call Flora in the city. He discussed this and that with her, his face animated, his eyes fixed on me as I moved around the kitchen, pretending to ignore him. Finally I went upstairs and choked down a Valium, trying to put a cap on my rising anger. He must have hung up at once. He called to me from the bottom of the stairs: “Where are you? Where are you?” mocking his own uneasiness. When I came down, he said, “You see, I won’t even allow you to go to the bathroom alone anymore.” I wanted that—I wanted his need. It took the place of my own satisfaction. And yet I knew the next time I saw him, he would have forgotten.
Later that evening he took his children home. I woke up in the middle of the night in my small cold room, like the inside of my own head. I lay awake for a long time, my hands clenched by my sides. He had sex with me in the room next to my children. He had exposed them to my desire. He had forced me to do that because he was not willing to find a time when we could be alone—sex snatched like an irresistible bit of filth, a moment’s wallowing. I felt constrained, and yet full of flaming energy. I got out of bed. Dressing, jerking on my boots, I went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table until the sky turned gray beyond the pine trees on the rocky ledge. Then I wrote a note for my children and went out to the car. The windshield was frosted over, the steering wheel so cold I held it with the tips of my fingers. I drove down the two-lane highway between fences beginning to appear out of the dark. There was not a single other car. Chasing my own headlights, I drove as fast as the car would go: eighty, then ninety, till the trees leaped, and I was frightened. I slowed down and turned onto the field, stopped the car, and walked to the front door. The dog, as always, began to bark. I tried the door. To my surprise, it was locked. I had never thought of it being locked. I had imagined that I would open it silently and creep up into their bed. I began to bang on the door with my fists. Then I kicked it with the toes of my leather boots. Finally a light went on inside, and I saw Edwin’s wan face through the glass panel. He looked scared, and for a minute I thought he would not open the door.
He opened it.
I pushed inside, pushed against him, snatching his forearms, then his shoulders, holding him with all my strength. “I hate you. I hate you. You treat me like dirt. You fuck me with the children all around. You won’t find time for me, you don’t care.” I snatched his limp hand and bit into the fleshy part at the bas
e of his thumb, sinking so deep I could feel the muscle under the skin and tissue. He did not pull his hand back, did not exclaim. His other hand fell on the back of my neck. I unlocked my teeth and looked at his hand: it was set with the prints of my incisors. “Edwin. Edwin.” I was sobbing, terrified. He took me in his arms, standing rigid, staring over my head at the meadow appearing out of the shadows of the night. Later, he gave me oatmeal, and we sat in silence in the scruffy little kitchen, waiting for the children to wake up. He was the only man who had ever let me rage, and like a child with a sliver of pride, I inspected from time to time the blue dents I’d left at the base of his thumb.
5
“You’re not breaking up,” I said to Flora. We were in her kitchen.
She stared at me. Her brown eyes looked small in her large, rosy, always slightly damp face. When she turned her eyes away, the planes of her face continued to confront me with an appeal I did not want to see. “Edwin and I have our ups and downs. But I don’t believe anyone could come between us.”
“Of course not.”
“It breaks up other people’s relationships, but we have our arrangement. He can do what he wants on the side.” She glanced at Edwin, who was chopping lettuce for lunch.
“I think I’ll go see about the children,” David said tactfully and made his way out of the kitchen.
“David doesn’t like this kind of talk,” I said.
“I suppose it embarrasses him.”
“Your contract. Its consequences.”
She did not respond to my irony. “It works quite well actually. Edwin has his little pleasures, but they don’t intrude on our life together. He wouldn’t allow them to.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that Edwin and I had our contract too. Edwin had presented me with his terms before our first night in the field. “No marriages and no divorces,” he had said, and I, wanting him, had agreed, too naïve to understand exactly what he meant. Later I had begun to wonder about the order of events in his pronouncement. Surely divorces could precede marriages.
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