Helena stood up and came toward me carrying Chrissy, contentedly draped in her mother’s arms and sucking her thumb. “Is she all right?” I asked.
“Just a little dazed. I’ll sit out here with her for a while.” Helena’s dignity embarrassed me. As she sat down on the bench, I went inside.
“Just in time,” Flora said when she saw me. “I need you to carry out the food. What were you doing anyway, lurking out there?”
Yes, but—I reminded myself as I was loaded with a tray of hotdog rolls, mustard and ketchup—yes, but remember the glare of the television set that Saturday night when I lay alone in the huge bed, David out of town, my insomnia growing more ominous as time passed, until it seemed to lie on my chest like an enormous cat, its eyes pressed to mine, its furry weight crushing out my breath. By three a.m., I was convinced that I would never sleep again without David next to me, his placid touch on the back of my neck, his feet meekly gathered together with mine. Dummy love I called it, but it had its place. Then I put my hand between my legs and strummed, forcing the orgasm which only the vibrator brought me, until my clitoris was sore and I was crying, somehow betrayed by my own body, a kind of love that led nowhere, an addiction like a commonplace dependence on candy or cigarettes. I began to count the things I had never done with David: never traveled or cooked a meal or visited a museum. “He’s a zero,” I said under my breath, snatching up a tower of paper cups. Saying that shielded me, I was at best a very low number, a one or a two—for the list of things I’d never done alone was even longer. David and I together made a paltry figure.
“Chrissy was hit by the swing,” I said to Flora to distract myself.
“I knew something like that would happen. The children are overexcited. Let’s hope we won’t have to make a trip to the hospital today.” She opened the refrigerator. “My God! Look what they’ve done to my cake!”
One side had been clawed off. “How horrible—maybe it was Sheila,” I said.
“No chance. It was one of my dirty boys. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to stand them—Saul especially. He’s impossible this year. His language! I tell you, it’s foul.” Reaching in, she began to paste bits of cake and icing into the tear. “I fine him a dollar for each one of those words. He’s already run up fifteen dollars this weekend.” She took the cake out and slammed it on the counter.
“It doesn’t look too bad,” I said.
“It’s ruined, but I couldn’t care less. They can eat it or not. It doesn’t matter to me.” Turning to the freezer, she began to snatch out package after package of hotdogs. “I meant to take these out at breakfast, but we never had breakfast. Edwin was up at five tramping around in his boots. He woke me up—I was furious. I didn’t wake up again until eleven, and by then they were all out in the woods, hunting for pinecones for the bonfire. I forgot all about the damn hotdogs.”
They were solid as cartridges. “Maybe they’ll thaw out over the fire,” I suggested.
“All I really wanted to do today was stay in bed.”
“You’ve been very busy,” I said, offering a little sympathy. “I don’t know how you manage it all. That long day at school, and now you have the teachers’ strike to deal with—all those meetings with the union.” Flora was mollified. “Have you started to shop for my fall suit?” she asked shrewdly, seizing the opportunity, and I was ashamed to admit that I had not yet begun. She depended on me to choose her clothes, within the limit of her tight budget, claiming she had no time. “Oh well, it doesn’t matter,” she said, dismissing my effort as well as my failure.
The squeal of the chainsaw died, and I knew Edwin would be coming down the hill. I rushed out the door, hoping to catch him alone, to taste his voice. I stumbled on the step and nearly dropped my tray, awkward and eager as a child. The men were already coming toward me, carrying logs down the hill. Helena was waiting in the kitchen, oddly poised with Chrissy at her side. Edwin crouched down and deposited his armful of logs, the other two men following suit. They seemed to be laying gifts at Helena’s feet, and she bowed gracefully accepting. Or perhaps they were preparing to burn her at the stake? I felt as though I was running through water, hurrying clumsily to interrupt the scene. “No bonfire?” I asked. “Later,” said Edwin, smiling at Helena. I came up behind them, leaned down, and put my tray on the table, close enough to touch him, but he didn’t look at me. Crouching, he delicately aligned the logs, utterly remote from me, engrossed in his task, and would remain remote for as long as he sensed my need. I’d learned never to try to get his attention. Charles asked him, “Do you want the matches?”
“Not yet.”
I wished I had something to do.
David began to talk to Helena about the movie we’d all seen in the city the week before. “My wife called it a tour de force,” he said, going on to repeat my opinion in full.
“What did you think about it?” I asked with great restraint. I was trying to break David of the habit of quoting me. At dinner parties, I could hear his voice through the jumble of conversation: He would be relating my latest exploit with pride and animation. “She simply told the traffic cop she was not going to pay the speeding ticket …” At these times, I felt like a trained poodle walking on its hind legs for its keeper. His impression of me was odd. “You are an eagle,” he once blurted out, a few weeks after I had begun my affair with Edwin. No one knew what was going on at this point. Yet the atmosphere we all lived in, the sea of lies, was warmer by several degrees.
That evening, after we all saw the movie, David was already apologizing. “It’s just that you express yourself so well. I seem naturally to pick up your opinions.”
I said, “What did you really think about the movie? I was so busy lecturing you about it, it’s no wonder you don’t remember.” I added hastily, stricken by his look. Then I explained to Helena, “The movie’s about a woman who can only fall in love after she’s become a victim, having allowing herself to be abused. The terrible thing about it is that it’s partly true.”
“You know you don’t believe that,” Flora said, coming up behind me with the hotdogs in a basket.
“Ah, but I do,” I said.
“Thank goodness female masochism has outlived its usefulness,” Edwin said.
We all laughed.
I went on, facing him, “Wasn’t it ridiculous when she kissed the man’s feet?”
“Those Frenchies,” Charles added. “They know about darkness.”
Flora said, “I hate their movies,” separating the frozen hotdogs with Edwin’s pocketknife.
Flora settled in with her various evasions. She had her own vocabulary, her own set of perceptions, and it was not necessary for her to enlarge either one or the other to suit the rest of us. She’d found a place and use for each of us in her hierarchy. Even Edwin had his niche, his function as her link to a network of lies and excuses.
Edwin was organizing us into a procession up the hill to the bonfire site, each of us carrying two logs. As we walked, I noticed that David looked crushed.
“I’m sorry I criticized you,” I told him.
Despite his intentions, Edwin noticed every change in my voice, more sensitive to my tone than to my expression, which he’d always thought of as veneer, like mascara or my perfume. He was particularly sensitive to the subdued signs of my affection for David, not out of jealousy, which he was not able to feel, but because he wanted to be able to squash my disillusion when I complained about my husband. “But you enjoyed arguing with him about the train schedule last Saturday,” he had reminded me a week before, interrupting one of my diatribes. Edwin had a longer view of my life than I could possibly tolerate. He wanted me never to change.
Once in our bath, I had stripped off my wedding ring, and he’d tensed up, and repeated as if instructing me, “Never leave your husband. Never leave your husband. Never leave him. I’ll never see you again if …”
I didn’t believe him.
6
The auction will begin in
half an hour. I must do something about Keith. Leaving the others in the living room, I start up the stairs. His door at the end of the hall is closed, and when I try the handle, the bolt rattles in its catch. I knock politely. “Keith, I want to talk to you. Let me in.”
He mutters something indistinguishable and does not open the door.
I knock again, too hard, my hand crashing into the wood till it hurts.
“Let me in! We have to talk, Keith. We can’t handle it this way.”
He does not answer. In the space of seconds, I feel like splitting the door with an ax. I go to sit down on the blanket chest at the other end of the hall, trying to wait, letting my hands rest idly in my lap. I look out over the field where the housing development will be. A year ago, I would have wept at the prospect. I felt like lying on the ground in front of the bulldozer to preserve that colony of pine trees. Now, I’m only concerned with escape.
I get up and go back to Keith’s door, which is for a moment transformed into his face set against me. I slap the panel and my palm stings. “Look, I’m not going to try to make you do anything you don’t want”—a lie to gain access. He will surely smell that out. “Let’s talk about this at least, Keith. Can’t you remember the good times? We painted your room together. We went to Hyde Park to get that bookshelf. I know how you feel.”
Nothing else for me to do. I remember Keith as a small boy, precariously carrying cups of tea when I was sick in bed, running up the stairs after school with his hands full of crumpled drawings, but sentimentality has no power in this situation.
“I’m going to get your father,” I say, calmly facing the closed door.
There is no response, although I sense a stirring, a rustle of curiosity on the other side of the door. He will open for a confrontation. I race down the stairs and into the kitchen where David is waiting for his toast. His Pooh Bear domesticity irritates me as usual. He has spent the whole morning eating and drinking. I stop on my first words—“Will you …”—having started on the note he hates most, that of hysterical demand. I begin again more tactfully, “Would you please come upstairs and help me? We have to do something about Keith.”
He looks at the toaster. “I’m just waiting for these slices to pop up. Would you like one?”
Once, our life together was made bearable by these gestures, these small courtesies: the delicate porcelain teacups with bluets on them, the well-chosen presents on my birthday and our anniversaries, the cab waiting at the door to bear us to city entertainments. I no longer accept these substitutes because they take the edge off my appetite for the real thing. “There is no time for toast now,” I announce. “I need your help with Keith.”
“What’s happened?” he asks mildly, his eyes on his reflection in the toaster.
“He has barricaded himself in his room, and he won’t come out or let me in.”
The toast pops up; David takes it gingerly and lays it on the waiting plate. Then he goes to the refrigerator for butter. “Keith and I went over this Friday when we drove up from the city. He wants to take his things with him to my place, and I told him he could.”
“You can’t do that, David. We agreed to this auction.”
“It’s your auction,” he says, carefully spreading butter in order not to tear the toast. “I told you before, I feel no obligation to help you make it a success. A teenaged boy …,” he begins, but I am no longer listening. My eyes are fixed on his short square hand manipulating the knife.
“Everything you do now, even buttering that toast, is to get back at me,” I say.
“I’ve noticed you’ve begun to interpret everything that way.”
“Even my silence about Edwin. Why didn’t you ask me to stop seeing him before it was too late?”
“I wanted you to be happy, and you seemed very happy, if a little hectic.”
“You profited from it.”
“Not really,” he says with dignity.
“You accepted it. You wouldn’t fight it. You justified my falling in love with another man. It took the pressure off you to perform, to please me, to make some attempt at understanding. Now you’ve decided to punish me for it anyhow. Now you’ve decided to take Keith’s side.”
“We both agreed to that,” David reminds me.
“I had no choice when Keith began to make my life unbearable last month, after you told him about Edwin.”
“I don’t believe there’s a connection. Besides, he already knew,” he says.
“Knowing and having to confront it are two different things. Edwin is his friend’s father. He will never forgive me—he’ll need never to forgive me—for spoiling that friendship.”
David says resignedly, “I don’t see that there’s anything I can do about that.”
“Back me up, give me your support. Tell him he has to let Tom take the furniture out of his room.”
David takes a bite of toast, swallows and glances at me. “I’m not going to do that. I don’t think it’s fair to Keith. I’ll have a truck here sometime next week to take my things and his.”
I plant myself at the kitchen table. “David, what are you up to? What are you trying to do?”
“I’m thinking of the children.” He wipes his fingers carefully on a bit of paper towel. At the same moment, we both glance at the yellow pad, which is lying on the counter next to the sink.
“This is your evidence, isn’t it?” I ask. The first page is thick with his handwriting.
He’s quiet for a moment, considering, weighing his chances of making an impression. “I haven’t seen you much in the past six months. I’m curious about some things, and so I’m writing them down—observations, thoughts.”
“Observations about what?”
He rinses his coffee cup and places it on the top rack of the dishwasher. “I’m trying to be fair about this, believe me. You’ve changed so much since we separated. The children do need stability.”
“No, it won’t work, David.”
He looks at me with his small smile. “I’m not so sure about that. The law has changed, you know.”
“You are not going to be able to take the other two children.”
“Only if it seems to be the best thing for them. Of course, you could see them whenever you want.”
“Not Molly and Jeff.”
“We have to think about their welfare, not just about what we want. It would be a tremendous amount of work for me, taking them on full-time. Of course, I’d hire a housekeeper, a nice, warm, competent woman.”
“Warmer and more competent than me.”
“I didn’t mean that. You’ve done a fine job with them, especially when they were younger. But when I see the amount of friction with Keith … I mean, it’s just a matter of time before the other two get to your wrong side.”
“My wrong side is the side I teach them from. Of course they complain. You give them everything, seduce them with presents and money and approval they haven’t earned. Of course they complain about me. I set their limits.”
“That’s not what bothers me. You’re a little erratic. You must know that. One minute screaming at them and the next smothering them with kisses. It has worried me for a long time, but it’s much more pronounced lately with the turmoil you’ve been going through.”
“Is that the kind of thing you’ve been writing on your yellow pad?”
Before he answers, I reach for it—the counter is just beyond the ends of my fingers—but David is quick on his feet. He snatches the yellow pad and clasps it under his arm. “Just watch yourself,” he snaps.
“You’re a spy. That’s what you’ve always been.”
“Think what you want to think. You kept me away from the children all those years.”
“You kept yourself away. You were always busy. Even when you were around, you were preoccupied. Remember when Jeff was a baby? I was going mad, up at night with him for six months. I pleaded with you to take some time off to help me out. You told me to hire a nurse. I didn’t want a nurse. I didn’t wa
nt another woman handling my baby. I wanted you to help me.”
“That was in the middle of the Con Ed suit. I couldn’t get away.”
“Yes, I know, I know. There were always reasons, good reasons. Now suddenly you have plenty of time for them. You have plenty of money, but you never even paid for their school bills!”
“I’ve always contributed my fair share,” David insists.
“I don’t believe it. I don’t understand your arrangements. The lawyers will have to straighten it all out. All I know is that you never supported us, never had any money, and never even told me how much you earned.”
David shakes his head. “I can’t believe we’re arguing about money.”
“Yes, we’ve fallen that low. I wish to God we’d fallen that low a long time ago. It was my fault. I never would complain. I felt as though I owed you my approval. I never told you how I hated to spend the evening paying bills, with the scraps left from Grandfather’s fortune, while you watched television. I felt as though I owed you a living, an atmosphere, a whole life made by hand.”
“I did take you out of a pretty desperate situation.”
“Yes, you’re right. I had to get away from home. And you seemed so warm, so civilized. That’s what I’ve paid for—your civility. The fact that you never make demands. I could live in my vacuum, in my private dream, with you.”
David sighs. “It worked, for a while.”
“Yes. But then I began to know what I wanted. You still haven’t begun to find out.”
“Actually, I have some idea. I do wish you’d go to one of those clinics.”
“Where they fix you up with a ‘partner’?”
“You can’t blame me for all your dysfunction,” he says wryly.
Before I can go on, he reminds me, “We were talking about the children.”
“Yes.” I come back to it from a long way off. “I want you to go upstairs and talk to Keith.”
“All right. I’ll tell him we’ve settled it.”
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