Tom and Fred begin to pull the sofa toward the door. Molly comes from the parlor to watch. Her father and her brother pass her, in retreat. “Is he taking everything in here?” Molly asks.
“Everything except for Great-Grandmother’s loveseat.”
“Why do you want to keep that old thing?”
“I used to sit on it when Grandmother told her stories. I’ve told you some of them.”
“Yes, that one about the woman who drowned in a cask of wine, all her blond hair going on growing.”
“They were terrible stories. I loved them.”
“Aunt Edna gave me my dollhouse. I should get to keep it too.”
“I’ve told you several times, Molly, if you want to give up your bed and keep your dollhouse …”
David says from the hall, “Let it go, Molly. We can always buy another dollhouse.”
Molly runs to him to seal the deal: my daughter who, unlike me, always knows when to press her advantage.
I try to rein in my irritation. David mutters from the doorway, “It’s really too hard on her, you know.”
“It’s not too hard on her. Nothing is too hard on her. She’s tough as nails.” I stop, lining up my priorities. This is not a fight I have to win.
“I saw one in FAO Schwarz that even has an elevator,” Molly says.
“Hold on there now.” They begin to discuss the amount of money David is willing to pay—a large sum which will buy his daughter’s allegiance for at least a week. I hear him haggling. He wants her cheap. No elevator, he decrees. They finally settle on a dollhouse that Molly has seen in a neighborhood store in the city. It has stairs and a fireplace and a porch and a chimney, but it does not have an elevator.
“What about the old dollhouse. I thought you were so fond of it,” I say.
“The windows are just plastic,” she says airily, and goes off with her father to the kitchen, hand in hand.
Fred and Tom begin to take the dinner table apart, stacking the leaves carefully against the wall. They push the two semicircular halves together, and the table is now small as it was when we first lived in the house. Then there was no one to eat with us.
There was a snowstorm our first Christmas. The wind blew the snow under the kitchen door while we sat at the table eating our small-family turkey. I cried after lunch because we had no family, except for the children, who were not enough, would never be enough, even if I continued to pump out a baby every two years. There was no ritual, no sustenance for me. At that point, we had no country friends. “You could have invited somebody,” David reminded me, clearing away the plates. The children had hardly touched the food, which I had spent two days preparing. “I didn’t want my mother to come,” I said—I did not dare to want her. She was not available. Freed at last from the thankless task of raising a daughter who was neither a beauty nor a scholar but a self-defeating combination, a bright girl who only cared about love, she moved to Palm Beach, growing younger and more handsome as I frayed, thriving in her beachfront condo. She sent us all big checks at Christmas. My grandmother by then was long dead, my uncle far gone into alcoholism, and so we were left with the children. They’d all been weaned by that first Christmas in the country.
Tom rolls the table swiftly to the front door, the casters squealing. He and Fred maneuver it onto its side and push it into the doorway. It is wedged briefly, its goat legs in the air, before Fred with a grunt shoves it through. I wonder who will sit at it next, and whether the new owner’s dream of a family for grownups, united by food and love and honesty, will by some wild stroke of luck be transformed into reality.
9
Long ago, in the middle of a hot week, Flora telephoned to ask me whether or not I had seen Dan, the plumber: Her septic tank was overflowing. At that point, I had never met Flora, who seemed as much in control of the contents of her septic tank as I was of Jeff’s diarrhea—that is, not at all. But Flora was detached. “Isn’t it too much?” she said. For me, Jeff really was too much. My eyes were swollen with fatigue, my lips dry and cracked as a nomad’s. I hadn’t slept through a night for almost two months. After I told Flora that I didn’t know where Dan was, I realized with a pang that I had disappointed her. To make up for that, I invited her to bring her children over to swim. She replied at once that she couldn’t stand swimming pools—“All that concrete”—but would be pleased to welcome me at the little pond, which Edwin had dug with a rented backhoe. There was clearly no argument, and again I felt almost embarrassed, as though Flora was a finger pointing a finer way.
At first glance, Flora’s size impressed me. Standing on the edge of the little pond wearing a pastel bathing suit of the kind my mother called Dressmaker, she seemed planted to the ankle in the dirt, and I was not surprised when she did not step forward to speak to me. She waited, and I went to her and held out my hand, which she took, graciously. Her rather small blue eyes checked me over carefully, looking for a certain signal or detail. I didn’t know whether or not I passed, but I knew my bikini was not appropriate for that patch of brown water. My children lingered behind me, looking askance at Flora’s three who were skirmishing in the water.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t find Dan,” I said.
“Never mind. I’ve called Edwin, and he’s coming up on the four o’clock train.”
“Meanwhile—”
“Meanwhile—“ Wrinkling her nose, she indicated the putrid stench which seemed to edge the air we shared. “Meanwhile, I suppose we will simply have to put up with the smell.” She led me to a picnic bench set at an angle in the mud, as though she was leading me to a throne.
She shouted at her children so suddenly I jumped: “Get out of there!” They jumped as well, and assembled, dripping and fidgeting, a little distance from my feet. She introduced them formally—“Saul, Frank, Seth”—and I shook their slippery hands and then introduced Molly and Keith. They were small brown creatures that summer, their hair bleached white. “And the baby?” Flora asked reprovingly. Jiggling him in my arms, I pronounced his name as though for the first time.
“OK. Get back into the water,” Flora ordered, and her children dove in at once, followed at a little distance by Keith and Molly, who stood in the shallows and watched while the others ostentatiously splashed and screamed.
“The noise!” Flora rolled her eyes. “Shall we go up to the house?”
“And leave them in the water? I don’t generally—”
“Yours don’t swim?”
“Molly doesn’t, not yet, really—she’s only four.”
“Absolutely essential for them to learn to swim. You must take them down to the village on Monday. They give lessons at the American Legion Pond. Now, you can sit by the kitchen window and watch their every move.” I followed her up the hill to the little gray house.
Inside, Flora fixed glasses of iced tea, dwelling on her dislike of the instant kind, which Frank had managed to buy behind her back at the IGA. He had slipped it into her cart at the last moment, and she had nearly missed it. “Nothing but chemicals,” she said grimly. “I made him pay for it.”
“Keith is the same,” I said. “Always snatching candy from those racks by the cash register.”
My arms were tired from holding Jeff, who was stamping up and down on my lap. “Will you hold this baby for minute?” I asked. Flora looked surprised, but she held out her hands, and I placed Jeff between them.
Jeff took one look at Flora and gave an indignant roar. She patted his back, expertly and remotely. “Gas, I expect. Is he on solids?”
“Not yet. I’ve nursed him for a year.”
“Oh, you’re one of those,” she said good-naturedly, glancing at my shirt, which was stained under my left nipple by a damp patch of milk.
“I’ve nursed all of mine,” I said, proudly.
“Edwin never would make that sacrifice.”
Dismayed, I explained that I had never met her husband.
“You will presently,” she said. “He’ll be here a little after six to de
al with this mess. Of course, he’ll have to go right back to town in the morning.”
“I won’t be staying that long. It’s only three now,” I protested.
“Why don’t we all have supper together? We can fix spaghetti,” she said. “It would give the children a chance to make friends.” Flattered, I still hesitated, thinking of my own dinner and the early evening alone, David at work in the city. “After all, we’re all in this together,” she went on. “There’s absolutely no one to visit with up here—which is why we chose this place! To be private.” She seemed to shine the word and hold it at arm’s length to admire it. “But of course, the children must have friends.”
In the end, I stayed till supper. The children had already begun to form alliances by the time they came up from the pool. Molly, the only girl, had been accepted as a mascot and a crybaby because Keith saved her when the others were holding her under the water. Frank, a sad, shabby nine-year-old with a fringe of wet hair in his eyes, had the distinction of his unhappiness. He was tormented by his brothers and yet respected because he was the one most apt to get into trouble. Seth, Flora’s silent one, was presumed to be holding secrets. As for Keith, he was still on his guard. He stood in one corner of the kitchen and watched the other children darting to the table like swallows with their plates of spaghetti. My eldest had always been the leader at home, and I saw that he now felt too evenly matched for prestige. Still, I was delighted by the easy way Flora’s three were interweaving with mine. There was material here for several summers. The weight of my concern for my children began to lift.
They all managed to crowd onto kitchen chairs around the table, dripping water as they ate. “Not on my clean floor, you beasts,” Flora objected, but they refused to dry outside, shouting together as though they had practiced it. Flora rapidly spread newspaper under their feet. My baby was howling again after a brief, jerky nap, and I asked her if I could nurse him in the kitchen. She glanced at me with a startling wince of distaste. “Edwin feels very strongly that the children shouldn’t be exposed to that sort of thing.”
I stood up. “Then I’ll go upstairs.”
She began to explain rapidly, “It’s not that I disapprove. Edwin feels the children are constantly stirred up and overexcited. They hardly have a chance at latency … Make yourself comfortable on our bed. I’ll take care of supper.”
Climbing the narrow stairs, my irritation died. After all, I thought, Flora was right to insist on her opinions, even if they were her husband’s. So few people had convictions, it seemed to me. Yet there had been an oddly artificial tinge to Flora’s voice, as though she was speaking from the book. I wondered if she often quoted Edwin. I had heard, casually, that he was a well-regarded pediatrician, and so of course it was perfectly appropriate that he should guide his children and instruct his wife. Yet the hint of shellac bothered me. I wondered if Flora had only been trying to explain her distaste.
I went into a low dim room under the eaves, still stuffed with heat from the long day. I waved the air away with one arm, making my way to the unmade double bed. The pillows were heaped up on one edge, and a pile of laundry lay across the foot. As I sat down and arranged the pillows with one hand behind my head, I suddenly realized that I had no business there. The room reeked of intimacy. It was as though each shabby and ordinary object—the telephone, the newspaper, and a broken-spined paperback—was covered with luminous fingerprints. At once I remembered the particular smell of my parents’ pillows, too. On the sly, I used to bury my nose in them, learning to distinguish my mother’s dry faded fragrance from my father’s leathery reek. Sitting upright, I resisted the impulse to turn and sink my face into these pillows. They are strangers, I thought. Still sitting up, I unbuttoned my shirt and nursed the baby distractedly, trying to sort out the afternoon, hardly aware, for the first time, of the delicious prickling of my milk.
As the baby finished up, I heard a car turn in at the gate, and leaned over to look out of the little low window. A car door slammed. Almost at the same moment, the screen door slapped, and I saw Flora flash out. She jumped and skipped like a rabbit toward the car. I saw her hold out her arms, and then a man in a dark suit disappeared briefly in her embrace. As he emerged, I saw his smile, narrow-lipped and rather set.
They came toward the house hand in hand, Flora talking rapidly.
I buttoned my shirt, snatched up the baby, and hurried down the stairs, shouting for my children.
In the kitchen, Keith was doling out big scoops of ice cream. The younger children stood around him in a circle with their bowls. “We can’t go home yet!” Molly wailed as soon as she saw me. I argued as Flora came in the door leading Edwin by the wrist. With a graceful gesture, she released him and steered him gently in my direction. He seemed dazed. He scarcely noticed me as Flora spoke my name. I held out my hand. He took it briefly and looked at me coolly. The skin of his palm under my fingertips felt rough and worn.
“I must go,” I said.
“Stay and have supper with us. We’ll get these monsters to bed and have some quiet time later,” Flora sang. Edwin said nothing.
“But you must want to talk—”
“Plenty of time for that,” Edwin said suddenly with a grin that came and went rapidly, leaving his face unchanged.
I stayed in spite of myself. The situation was ambiguous: I felt that I was wanted and not wanted about equally. That bedroom atmosphere seemed to be spreading solidly through the house. Edwin made us all whiskeys without asking our preference. He broke the ice out of the tray, took off his jacket—it had a light blue stripe—and hung it carefully on one of the cabinet knobs. That seemed to be a signal. He stretched and threw back his head to yawn. I noticed his shoulder blades as he reached his arms over his head. The shirttails fell out, and I saw the edge of his blue shorts, crumpled against the smooth skin of his back. He took a drink and smiled at me. “So you’re another victim of Dan’s mediocre plumbing skills? I hope he’s been better with you, less of a disappointment. I expect he would try harder with a lady. I must reach him now about this mess, or should I say this stink?” With relish, he stomped away toward the telephone. As he was dialing, Seth came and hung around his waist. Edwin put down the receiver and crouched to receive the little boy’s embrace. He nuzzled and squeezed Seth and then suddenly glanced at me.
“Have some spaghetti,” Flora said and heaped my plate. “How are you finding your first summer in the country?”
“It’s very lonely,” I said and realized that was the simple truth which I had been hiding for six weeks under my lists and my chores, my gardening and my sewing and my homemade blackcap jelly.
“You must come over whenever you want. The children will amuse each other. It will make life much easier for all of us. We’ll plan the summer together,” she said with such warmth I was stunned.
Edwin put Seth away gently and dialed again. He began a conversation with Dan, which was very long and, apparently, very funny. He could have been listening to an old boyhood friend. I understood now why the Fields’ house had been the first of the four houses to be finished.
Flora settled down across the table from me with her plate of spaghetti. Turning, she flapped the last children out of the kitchen. Then she bent her attention to me. “Have you met the Jacobis yet?”
“They have the new house on Miller Road, don’t they?”
“Yes. It’s just like ours—except it’s a horrible shade of brown. The children are very rude about it. Jacobi is all right—Edwin knows him professionally. He’s a dentist. But I don’t believe I’m going to be able to tolerate his wife, Wiggy, one of those professional volunteers. It is a shame when people like that decide to move to the country. They really don’t like it. They don’t know what to do, and they impose themselves on their friends. Besides, any grown woman who allows herself to be called Wiggy—”
“They have a green Mercedes,” Frank said, passing through with a flashlight.
“Here in the country!” Flora remarked. �
�Wiggy has a different enthusiasm every time I see her. First the homeless, then the blind. I’m sure it’s very worthy, but it annoys me. And they will drop in without telephoning ahead.”
“I hate that fat Arnold,” Frank said, still hovering. “He’s always breaking my models, and then he says he’ll pay me for them.”
“Hush. Arnold’s their oldest,” Flora explained, then turned to Frank: “Get out of here. Your father is trying to talk on the telephone.” As Frank left, Flora said, “The boys are horrible about Arnold. But he is really quite disgusting. They let the children eat all kinds of junk, and they have absolutely no responsibilities.”
“It sounds like you’d be better off without them.”
“Yes, but they will drop in. Edwin encourages them. He feels sorry for Wiggy. Apparently she’s going through some kind of crisis.”
“Premenopausal,” Edwin said, hanging up the telephone. “A good deal pre-. Also she has nice legs. Dan says he’ll be here with the pump truck in half an hour.”
We both exclaimed. “How did you do it?” Flora asked.
Edwin smiled, and I saw his eyeteeth set like seeds in his mouth. “You know my charm!”
“I thought it only worked on women.”
“I have my way with men too. Always have.”
“Now don’t be disgusting.” With a rapid motion, Flora snatched all the plates off the table. “How am I going to teach the boys not to boast if you go on that way?”
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