“Settled it!” I am, in a breath, beside myself. I begin to beat my fists on his arm. “You settled it! We didn’t! You sabotaged me!”
He shoves my hands away, staring at me, appalled. Then he holds my wrists together. “Please, don’t let’s be violent. You are behaving viciously.”
Then, releasing his grip, “I thought we had settled this question about Keith, like two adults.”
“We never even discussed it. You sidetracked me. You’ve blown up my whole plan.”
“It was never my plan,” he says. Now I can see the gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.
“There’s something for you to write on your yellow pad. ‘Attacked by wife.’” I rub my wrists.
“I’ll get Keith,” he says, and leaves the kitchen.
I go to the telephone and dial my lawyer’s number in the city. A syrupy-voiced secretary answers: “No, Mr. Rodman is not in. No, he cannot be reached at the moment. He is in court.” She will pass the message on when he returns at some indefinite later hour.
“It’s urgent. Tell him to call me in the country. Something has happened here.” Used to female hysteria over the telephone, she calms me expertly. “Mr. Rodman will deal with everything as soon as he returns.”
I remember his chrome-and-glass office, his practiced smile: a handsome man, a fighter, who betrays his cupidity when he glances at the clock on the building outside his window. He does not have a clock on his desk. He makes it appear that we are friends—he even offers me a cup of coffee—but while I talk, he swivels in his chair and glances out the window. There is another woman sitting among the potted plants in the waiting room.
I am used to these timekeepers. Edwin used to lay his watch on the table beside the bed, where he could see it while we made love.
Keith comes into the kitchen, propelled by his father.
“I’m sorry if I made you mad,” he says, having been coached.
I speak to David. “How do you expect the other children to behave now?”
“They don’t need to know, do they?”
“They’re not fools. This has been hard for them too, but they agreed to give up their possessions. They had to. They didn’t have an alternative.”
“Daddy has a big apartment,” Keith says mildly.
“Yes. He can afford one. He’s been saving money for fifteen years.”
David says, “This is simply not appropriate, Ann.” He puts his arm around Keith, preparing to lead him away. My son shoots a glance back at me, stricken.
“I learned what I wanted finally,” I say. “Maybe too late.”
“The children have paid quite a price for that.” He opens the fridge, pulls out a Coke, offers it to Keith. “It’s a small thing, but for some reason you never allowed them to drink soda, even once in a while.”
“More to write on the yellow pad,” I say.
Keith adds carefully, “Well, it’s true. You weren’t around much at all, last year. You were never home when I came home from school.”
“You’re thirteen years old. You don’t need me at the door with cookies.”
“It was hard on Molly and Jeff too,” Keith says.
“Everything is hard on everybody. That’s something your father won’t understand. You blame everyone else for consequences, but they’re not avoidable. From the moment you draw your first breath, you’re caught in a maze of consequences. There is no safe place.”
“That’s a dangerous philosophy with small children,” David says, turning toward the living room. Keith turns too, as though attached by an invisible towline.
“It is not a philosophy. It’s reality, which is different.”
“I intend to protect my children from it,” David says. They both go into the living room and sit down side by side on the sofa.
Panic is a small mouthful; I swallow it down. I remember the delights that caused all this to begin: walking in the woods with Edwin, for example. He held me in his arms under the big sycamore at the edge of the pond and asked me to be patient. It was the only grain of hope he ever gave me, the only link to a future.
Tom comes in the door, his hands hanging, looking around for something more to take out.
“There’s the sofa,” I say.
“I’ll have to get Fred for that. What about upstairs?”
“Everything except what’s in the room at the end of the hall.”
“We have everything else.”
“All right, then take the sofa.”
He looks at David and Keith. “I was leaving that to the last so you people would have some place to sit.”
“This is the last,” I say, and he smiles, a little embarrassed, not sure where the joke lies, not sure—any more than I am—whether or not it is a joke at all.
7
Flora began to call in the children for Saul’s birthday party. “Saul! Keith! Frank! Chrissy—all of you! Come and open the presents!” She had assembled them in a pile beside the unlit fire.
She’d also baked a cake with green icing—Saul’s request—topping it with ten candles.
From the swings, from their clubhouse behind the woodshed, from the porch, the children came, the younger ones running, the older boys strolling as though they hardly cared at all. The three girls came, looking as though they were clutching secrets. They had been plotting something by the vegetable garden. Looking at the children, I tried to imagine their conception, on a night after a party, in the middle of a hot afternoon. It seemed unlikely that any of us could remember exactly when, or why, our children had been conceived. Chance, good temper, a sudden rush of optimism had together or separately produced this little band, tumbling or running or pacing steadily down the hill toward the fire.
As they came closer, I noticed how pleasantly ragged they looked in their bleached hand-me-down clothes—a pied piper’s rabble. There were no real friendships between them, other than that between Saul and Jeff. They hung together only as a group, reflecting the grownups’ precarious unity. When we were not getting along, the children fell apart and sulked in corners. When we were excited, feeding off a new experience or argument, the children fought and laughed indiscriminately. “The grownups are the children,” I told Edwin once. That was after Chrissy had telephoned the doctor in town because Sheila choked on a chicken bone. All the adults were off walking in the woods. The doctor advised bread, and the crisis had passed by the time we returned. “Thank God, this time we get to play the young ones,” Edwin had said, not to be shamed.
Saul, a knobby nine-year-old, Edwin’s youngest, squatted down by the pile of presents and ripped into the first one. “Read the card,” Flora reminded him crisply; she hated any display of greed. Saul stopped ripping and began to poke around for the card. Jeff had drawn it, painstakingly, complaining of the bumps in the road, while we were driving up from the city. Saul found the card and showed it around to polite exclamations: a huge mouth, without teeth, shouting, “Happy Birthday.” I was glad there were no teeth. As Saul handed me the card, I caught his eye, and he looked hastily away. The children were as unused to direct looks as cats. Saul had his father’s eyes, pale gray, wary and bright, the eyes of an animal drawn into company against its instincts.
Monday—five days before—Edwin had rushed in my front door, late as always, with only half an hour to spare for me between appointments. He stripped off his watch, then stood with his arms stretched out so that I could unbutton his blue-and-white striped shirt. He submitted to my touch with hesitation, fearful that I would leave a trace or smell, which would be detected by Flora. In spite of that, I took hold of him with his clothes on. Unbuttoning his shirt, I put my cold hands on his chest, unbuckled his worn leather belt, unzipped his fly.
Saul was ravaging his presents, throwing paper and ribbons in the air. Flora shouted, “Stop that at once!” Flora insisted that he look at each one again and thank each child. She knew the effort those meaningless toys represented—afternoons in stores while our own children fretted. The cards meant something
because they were homemade. Flora gathered them up to keep. We had bullied our children into producing a rudimentary drawing or collage to meet Flora’s expectations. She made everything she gave away herself, and my shelves were blessed by her blueberry jam and cucumber pickle, too precious to be eaten.
Edwin went around collecting the wrapping paper and stuffing it under the logs. Crouching, he struck a match. The flame traveled rapidly up through the paper, which glowed blue, yellow, and green; the logs began to pop; soon the fire was burning vigorously, and a thin column of smoke rose through the air. Edwin sharpened sticks with his pocketknife to use for hotdogs.
Flora and Helena settled themselves near the food and dealt out paper plates. Flora’s voice, scolding, rose over the crackling fire. “You boys are pigs—don’t snatch. Frank, one potato chip at a time. Jeff, you know better than to put your whole hand in the pickle jar. No marshmallow now for you, Chrissy. Those are for later. Don’t stuff your mouth! Wait for the rolls! Really,” she looked at me, rolling her eyes, “they are disgusting.” I smiled back at her. She always scolded more on weekends when Edwin and I had fucked during the previous week.
I sat down by my husband, who speared a hotdog on a stick, then poked it into the fire. He did not need to tell me that he was taking care of me even before he took care of himself. I snatched the stick out of his hand. If I rejected his care, his courtesy, he had nothing else to offer. I poked the stick deep into the fire, pulled it back—too late: the hotdog blazed up, sputtering.
“Give me another,” I told Edwin. He got up and went to get one from Flora, happy to oblige.
For a while, we were all as absorbed as the children in roasting and eating our hotdogs. Charles went around with a jug of wine, refilling our paper cups. The children, as a special treat, were given what Flora called “that Nasty Punch—full of chemicals.” The grownups, at least, would be half-drunk by the middle of the afternoon.
Frank took my cup without asking permission and gulped a mouthful of wine. Edwin, sitting on the other side of the fire diddling his hotdog over the coals, told Frank without force to behave. “How can I teach them anything when you—” Flora began, then chopped off the rest. Helena rose and moved over to sit by Edwin. The air seemed to stiffen and crack. Charles began at once to lecture. At first I did not understand what he was talking about, although I picked out each word. His monologues led to preordained conclusions—in this case, that we should all petition the village fathers to ban the use of ATVs in the woods. We were walkers except for Charles, who kept a horse and fancied himself in riding boots. One of the ATVs, careening through the woods, had frightened his horse and triggered a nasty fall. He suspected its owner was an overgrown high school student who collected mechanical junk in his front yard and lived in the euphoria of loud noises. I allowed myself to look at Edwin. He had edged closer to Helena, and they were chatting intimately.
I was unprepared for this. It was daytime after all. At evening parties, I adjusted myself, almost numb, to Edwin’s flirting. Like Flora, I tried to look away. Usually, he was too busy to make the effort to disguise what he was doing. Edwin and Helena were old comrades, old friends—as Edwin and I had been. Edwin had helped Helena through Chrissy’s bed-wetting crisis, as he had helped me to understand Jeff’s stammering. Charles was still lecturing. “I mean, why should we all lose the quiet—the peace,” he added abruptly, as though he saw it shining a long way off. David handed me another hotdog, perfectly roasted. Edwin leaned toward Helena, his face a few inches from her face. They had stopped talking. Helena closed her eyes. She tilted her head slightly, bringing her mouth in line with Edwin’s lips. His eyes were closed. In the firelight, he looked neutral and tense, a sleepwalker edging toward a precipice.
Flora blurted out, “I’m going to fetch the cake.” She lunged up and started for the house as Charles began to instruct David in the usefulness of the local zoning laws.
I slid over to my husband and leaned against him, curled like a snail. I did not look at Edwin. After a long time, I heard Flora returning with her damaged cake. “Birthday cake, anyone?” she asked brusquely, squatting in front of me to cut a slice. “Disgusting,” she murmured as she handed me the plate, grimacing toward her husband.
I looked again, under her custody. Their faces seemed to be two halves of the same sphere, moving in unison. Helena’s lips were open. They did not quite touch Edwin’s mouth.
“Otherwise people who enjoy horses will simply have to live somewhere else,” Charles concluded gloomily. David nodded in agreement.
“It’s the buildup I hate,” Flora told me.
I was sick. I wanted to go to Edwin and interject my body between his and Helena’s. “I’m going to take the question up with the mayor. Shipley has some sense, even if he is a plumber,” Charles told David.
Flora parceled out a few more slices, placing them precisely in the middle of paper plates. She had taken upon herself the role of comforter; I hated her for it. She made it impossible for me to believe what I wanted to believe: that what Edwin was doing was nothing. She began to sing with gusto and the rest of us joined in.
Flora began to pick up the paper plates, although some of the children had not finished eating. She ordered them to help, but except for Chrissy, who went on methodically chewing, the children took one look at Flora’s face and abandoned their dessert, running off and shouting back that they were going to play tag. I had never seen Flora’s will flouted before. She was biting her lips, her face grave. “Monsters,” she said, stuffing trash into the basket. Charles and David began to gather up the rest. In the midst of our activity, Edwin and Helena preserved their island of calm. We flitted around them, talking, united by a pretense that nothing was amiss. Edwin’s hand sat quietly on Helena’s knee.
“We’re going up to the house,” Flora sang to no one in particular, and we trooped after her, leaving Edwin and Helena by the fire with Chrissy, who was still chewing.
In the kitchen, we all fell silent. The men piled the remains on the table and went off to the living room to look for cigarettes. “It doesn’t mean anything—it never does,” Flora told me, her forehead close to mine as we crammed paper plates into the garbage pail. “I’m going to give up using paper plates after this. Look at the disgusting waste. I hate to think of the trees …”
I was afraid that she was going to begin to cry.
Chrissy ran in, full tilt, slammed a ginger ale bottle on the table, and was nearly out the door again when I caught her arm. “Is there anything left down there by the fire?”
Headed away, she did not turn around. “Mommy and Edwin are bringing up the rest of the stuff.”
The intimacy of their cleaning up together hurt me more than the aborted kiss. I knew that I had to find a place to be alone before I broke down in Flora’s arms. I started for the stairs.
“Where are you going?” she called after me.
“Upstairs.” For a minute, I was afraid she would follow me. Then I heard water running in the sink.
At the top of the stairs, I went into Flora’s and Edwin’s bedroom, a chilly little space shaped by the eaves. On their bed the telephone, the newspaper, and several piles of folded laundry lay mixed together. I moved some of the clothes in order to sit down. Edwin’s faded blue undershorts were on top of one pile.
I reached for them and opened them out. The elastic in the waist was worn out, and the cotton felt thin too. I seized the material in my teeth, but the cotton did not give as easily as I had expected. I drew it into my mouth, sucking and chewing. Wet, it seemed thicker, even more resistant. I spat it out, took the pants between my hands and with all my strength, ripped them in two from the bottom of the fly to the waistband in the back. I sat holding them for a long while. The sound of the tearing lingered, and my mouth was soft and dry, like the cotton. I threw the rag on the floor and knocked it under the bed with my foot. I began to walk toward the door. Suddenly, I saw Jeff standing beside the bureau, shrinking into its shadow. In the kitche
n Flora was crashing pans. After a while, I noticed Jeff slip down the stairs. I followed him to the living room.
8
Tom and Fred are walking toward the sofa. David gets up, Keith too, after a little. I look at the room as though for the last time. It is my favorite place in the house. The children used to play here while I cooked. In winter, the fireplace was lit (it always smoked; there is a dark stain under the mantel), and when the Fields came to dinner, I opened out the table with all its leaves. The big white pediments over the doors and windows, the pale yellow walls make a frame now for a picture of contentment that no longer exists.
Veering off from the sofa, Tom inspects the rest of the furniture huddled in the corner. He is checking for red tags, which mean that the object is not for sale. “The only thing in here with a tag is that loveseat,” I tell him and smile at his relief. He did not believe me when I promised him that I would not be keeping most of the items. He wanted to go over the house with me to make sure. I refused. The deal almost collapsed then. I couldn’t bear to sort it all out with his thick face and the stink of his beer breath over my shoulder. The few things I am keeping are not valuable. I want them because they have stories attached to them.
Of course, everything in the house has a narrative of some sort—on a rainy day at an auction we bought an old white chamber pot, porcelain, covered with roses, for a vase—but most of the stories are trivial, and a few no longer bearable. The beds for instance: I will never sleep in any of these beds again. Most of the things that my family gave me have gradually shed their meaning, losing color, except for my grandmother’s loveseat, its mahogany back arched like a wave. I used to sit there, uncomfortably perched on the slippery horsehair, while she unwound her memories. Under a coating of Southern charm—brides like “lighted candles”—her reminiscing was more often about mayhem, murder and, particularly, rape. My grandmother prepared me for the ways of the world, teaching me to live with lies, rather than face the uncomfortable truth—“She died beautifully, beautifully. They never knew the cause.” Better, she thought, than: “They said he shot her in the throat.” But when I finally read her diary, I discovered otherwise. My grandmother never left her state, and she considered women who did gallivanting fools who deserved whatever calamity befell them. When a friend of hers was mugged in New York, she had no sympathy. “I told Matilda before she left here she was making a mistake.” Some of her wisdom still clings to me, and since it protected me for most of my life, I plan to keep her loveseat, which I plan to have re-covered with brown corduroy.
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