When We Argued All Night

by Alice Mattison

  —You don’t have to do that, Jess said.

  —They’re barking.

  —So they’re barking. Nobody cares. Brenda and Jess lived in town, but there were only three houses on the block.

  Brenda opened the door and the dogs shouldered their way in. She liked the look of their muscular bodies coming forward almost as one body, their different colors and textures. She returned to the same chair. They had a little dining room and she was there, but the dining room led into the kitchen. Jess was still at the counter, gathering envelopes to recycle. It made Brenda desolate that Jess didn’t turn and look at her, didn’t say something affectionate, didn’t offer to feed the dogs or go and buy takeout for their own dinner. This was unfair: Jess had driven home. Jess had brought in the mail. Jess had let the dogs out. Jess had put up with months of Brenda’s absences.

  Artie had not done well at noticing other people’s needs, so it didn’t make sense to miss that today, but she wanted, at the moment, not a lover, not a wife, but someone who’d let her be a child.

  Jess put the empty envelopes and the catalogues into a wastebasket they kept in the kitchen for recycling, and went upstairs again. Now Brenda heard her tread crossing and recrossing their bedroom. Was she unpacking? How compulsive was that? Then she heard Jess take a shower. All she needed was for her longtime lover and wife to come down the stairs and say, Are you hungry, sweetie? Or even just, Are you hungry? Maybe even just, I’m hungry.

  It was a long shower. Brenda continued sitting where she was. When Jess came down at last, she was wearing a robe and her hair was wet. She came into the dining room and sat down in the chair she sat in at meals, which meant her back was to Brenda. She pushed the chair back and began rubbing her head with a towel she’d brought down. Jess had shoulder-length hair, blond, not gray, because she said she’d look old at work. She said nothing.

  Brenda stood up and moved to where she faced Jess. Don’t you care about me? she said.

  —What are you talking about? Jess said. I drove to New York. I was friendly to your relatives. I drove back. Now I am worn out. Taking a shower felt great. Go take a shower.

  —I took one this morning. Aren’t you hungry?

  —We had that cookie.

  —That was hours ago. Don’t you want dinner?

  —I don’t know, Jess said. Maybe some cold cereal.

  Brenda walked to the window and looked out. The yard was a mess. The grass hadn’t been cut in too long. I cannot bear this, she said.

  —Bear what?

  —You think my father dies and that’s the end of it?

  —Oh, for heaven’s sake, Jess said. She went upstairs again with the towel. This time she was gone for a long time. When she came down, she was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt again, with sandals on her feet. She put her arms around Brenda, who had been turning the pages of a catalogue from which she would never buy anything. You are an impossibility, she said. You want me to go pick up food?

  —I don’t know, Brenda said.

  Jess went to look in the refrigerator. Leftover chicken, she said. I forgot this leftover chicken.

  —Is it still okay?

  It was okay. Brenda washed her face. She said, Okay, I’ll cook. Now she wanted to. She cut up the chicken and put water on to boil for pasta. She went outside, and there were ripe tomatoes—the first ones. They were warm to touch. She brought them into the house and cut them up. It was night. Jess poured red wine, and they carried their food into the living room and turned on the TV. The Democratic National Convention was on, but everybody knew that Kerry and Edwards would be the candidates. Now it was time for the keynote address, and the commentators were talking about the man who’d give it. Brenda sat in an old upholstered chair near the TV, her plate on her lap, her wineglass on the arm of the chair, though she’d spilled wine on that chair before. Jess was on the sofa, her plate on the coffee table. One commentator said the speaker’s name, which was something like Baracco Bama—an Italian pol from Massachusetts or Rhode Island? No, he was running for the senate from Illinois.

  —Oh, yeah, Jess said. He’s black.

  Barack Obama was a good speaker, and nobody would forget how to spell his name because suddenly the whole convention waved signs with it.

  —You think at every session each one gets a bunch of signs with instructions? Brenda said. I never heard of this guy until one minute ago.

  —He’s gotten a lot of press lately, Jess said, but yeah.

  Brenda ate her spaghetti and drank her wine. We’ve got some gay friends in the red states, Barack Obama said, and Brenda said, over her shoulder, He said gay.

  —I heard, Jess said. Then she said, Honey, I care about you!

  —I know, Brenda said. Oh, sweetie, I know. She abandoned her spaghetti and Barack Obama and went to sit next to Jess, squeezing her shoulder. Jess’s fingers just grazed the back of Brenda’s neck.

  Now the speaker was saying something about Iraq. I read a book recently that put it well, Barack Obama said. This writer—his name is Harold Abrams—

  (Brenda gasped, and wine spilled on her shirt.

  —What? Jess said.)

  points out that though we mean well, we don’t always do the best thing for our children—we’re young, we’re inexperienced—but by the time our grandchildren come along, most of us are pretty good at looking after others. We’ve learned some wisdom. Abrams says we should resolve to treat other people’s grandchildren—in our own city or country or anywhere in the world—as we treat our own grandchildren. Maybe it’s that simple.

  The speech ended and the commentators talked.

  —What was that book? one said, and a photograph of Harold’s book—black letters on white background—flashed on the screen. Brenda glanced to her left, where the book itself—the copy Harold had inscribed to her father—sat on a lamp table. For a second she thought it might not be there, as if there were only one copy, and to appear on TV it would have to disappear from her living room.

  —Harold’s famous, Jess said. What would your father have thought?

  —Oh, he’d be mad. And excited. He’d buy ten copies of the book and give them to everyone he knew. He’d show them his name in the index. That thought made her pick up the book and turn to the back, checking for Arthur Saltzman, who apparently appeared many times in the book. She stopped and turned off the TV.

  —Are you looking for the quote? Jess said.

  Brenda looked up grandchildren in the index but it wasn’t there.

  —It sounds like something from the first page or the last, Jess said, and she was almost right: there was a preface, and Brenda looked at the first page of the preface, and then the last page of the preface, and there it was.

  —This will sell copies, Jess said.

  —It will please Harold, Brenda said. Will it make him less sad?

  —About your father? Jess said. No. Sadder.

  —They can’t talk about it, Brenda said.

  —Argue about it.

  —Argue.

  Brenda’s cell phone rang. She took it out of her pocket and looked at the screen. David, she said. She took the call.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks first to Edward, who got well, and who makes a toast to literature whenever we eat out. He and Douglas Bauer, April Bernard, Susan Hulsman Bingham, Donald Hall, and Susan Holahan read the manuscript of this book and offered helpful suggestions. Warm thanks to them and to others who steadily gave help, wisdom, and companionship: Ben Mattison, Lisa Yelon, Andrew Mattison, Jacob Mattison, Jill Mulvey, Sandi Kahn Shelton, Anita Taylor, Ann Leamon, and Jude Stewart. Thanks, too, to Naomi Tannen and Joe Mahay for quiet time in the mountains.

  Thanks to the Crossett Library at Bennington College, and to my colleagues and students in the Bennington Writing Seminars, who remind me with their work and passion why we read and write.

  Thanks to my loyal and ever-surprising agent, Zoë Pagnamenta, and her associate Sarah Levitt. Much gratitude to my brilliant editor, Claire Wachte
l, to Elizabeth Perrella, and to all the clever people at Harper Perennial.

  Thanks always to the MacDowell Colony and to Yaddo.

  Many books were useful in the writing of this novel; I’d especially like to mention The New York City Teachers Union, 1916–1964, by Celia Lewis Zitron, New York, 1968.

  P. S.

  Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  A Note by Alice Mattison

  WHEN WE ARGUED ALL NIGHT is set in Brooklyn, where I grew up. It was after the time of immigrants from Europe and their politically radical children, but before the borough acquired its present lively cultural life. In the Brooklyn of my childhood—the late forties and fifties— the Dodgers played in Ebbets Field, the Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza smelled new, and each year school closed for Brooklyn Day, with a parade including scout troops and mothers (no fathers) pushing baby carriages with crepe paper streamers wound around the spokes of the wheels.

  I grew up near Highland Park, at the northeast end of the borough. Intellectual life was in Manhattan, where my college friends and I saw films at the Thalia, believed that the paintings in the (free) Frick Collection and Metropolitan Museum were our personal property, and walked the island late at night.

  Living at home, I commuted to Queens College. My spare time was spent not with fellow students in a dorm but with relatives who loudly said what they thought whether or not it made sense, and who stuck to positions so outlandish that anyone listening who cared to write would eventually write about people like them. While living the heartbreak and comedy of family life, I studied English literature, Latin, and Greek. The disparate parts of life had to be made to connect, and figuring out how could be a life’s work.

  After earning a doctorate in English literature at Harvard, I taught composition, mostly in community colleges; I was no scholar but loved to teach. I now teach fiction in the Bennington Writing Seminars, an MFA program at Bennington College.

  With my husband—who directs a project employing people with a history of mental illness, addiction, or homelessness—I live in New Haven, Connecticut, where we brought up our three children and where I am a longtime volunteer at a soup kitchen. My fiction, I believe, reflects a life spent in close touch with others, always— paradoxically—seeking time alone for writing. It’s about urban people with close bonds. My characters are often of my parents’ generation, and their concerns are not quite those of the present day—but are ours with a difference. I return to certain questions: How can we live morally in private life? How can we live private life at all, given history’s ravages? What are our responsibilities to the larger community? How can we endure the people we love?

  When We Argued All Night is Alice Mattison’s sixth novel. Her others include The Book Borrower, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, Hilda and Pearl, and The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman; her four story collections include In Case We’re Separated: Connected Stories. Mattison’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.

  “My fiction, I believe, reflects a life spent in close touch with others, always— paradoxically— seeking time alone for writing.”

  About the book

  An Interview with Alice Mattison

  by Ann Leamon

  Your earlier books have primarily dealt with women—women’s friendships and relationships between mothers and daughters. What was different in writing about the friendship between two men?

  It didn’t occur to me to write from the viewpoint of men when I was younger. I remember hearing that Jane Austen never wrote a scene in which no woman is present—presumably because she’d never been present at such a scene, so she couldn’t say what might take place. One day, on a bus, I overheard a frank conversation between two men and realized that contemporary life gives us chances to guess what it’s like to be people different from ourselves. Jane Austen might never have overheard two men she didn’t know talking to each other. It’s easier now for a woman to imagine what a man might think or do than it used to be—or for a man to imagine being a woman.

  Still, though I wanted to write this book, I postponed it. It seemed daunting—maybe because the main characters would be men, maybe because it would cover so much time. But at last there was no other book to write except this one; I had to write this one. All writing projects are potential disasters, after all. It isn’t as if everything will be fine if you just write about what you know firsthand—and sometimes it’s harder to write what we’ve experienced; we become shy, or self-consciously awkward. The hard projects demand to be written eventually, and really, they are no harder than anything else.

  Once I began writing, maybe because I’d had the book in the back of my mind for many years, it came readily. Or maybe it came readily because I was writing about men. When the book was done, I happened to say in an e-mail to a former student that it was easier to write than my other novels, and she wrote back and asked why. All I could say was that the characters wanted to be written about, and some of my other characters had been reluctant, slower to make themselves known. That’s not something one can say about imaginary people and sound trustworthy—although we know that for many authors, characters seem to take on life as one writes. The men I know in real life seem to have, on the whole, a greater willingness than the women I know to take up space, to be visible—or maybe it’s a greater sense that they have a right to take up space and be visible. It was as if Artie and Harold were urging me on. Whether I felt this because of the era in which they grew up, because of their particular personalities, or because they are men, I can’t say.

  Some of your earlier books—particularly The Book Borrower and Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn—deal with an episode in the past and the impact of a moment in history on the characters’ later lives. When We Argued All Night takes in almost the entire sweep of the twentieth century. We meet Artie and Harold when they’re twenty-six, and they’re ninety-four at the end of the book. What challenges did this pose for you in conceptualizing and writing the book?

  When I set out to write this book, I’d just finished a novel (Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn) that takes place in two weeks’ time—two weeks that are fourteen years apart but are narrated in detail, day by day, morning, afternoon, evening. I didn’t feel like doing that again soon. Writing that book, I had to keep in mind whether the characters had eaten meals yet and make provision for them to do so; I had to put them to bed, get them up in the morning. Now I wanted to write a novel in which the characters would eat lunch on their own time.

  That gave me the opposite problem—writing about long stretches of time. In some chapters, decades pass. I’m more at ease describing a moment in time than several years all at once, and the chapters in which many years passed took the most work. Gradually I saw that I had to dip into a year and find the right moment in it, narrate that, and pull back again.

  My characters ate lunch only when that seemed to contribute to the story, but maybe every novel includes a certain amount of housekeeping—the kind of careful attention to not terribly interesting detail that doesn’t feel creative at the time but is essential. This time I had to keep track of how old the children were in any particular year, and since their birthdays are not all in the same month, I couldn’t just add the number of years since they’d last appeared. I suppose all novels present difficulties— it’s the nature of the form.

  As for writing about the whole twentieth century—or most of it—I am no historian, but I can read. I read newspaper stories to know what my characters might be thinking about during particular weeks and months. I also came to the task with some first- and secondhand experience. Some historical events are occasions I remember, like the war in Vietnam. Some I heard about. I knew from my parents and aunts and uncles, and my husband’s parents, that
although some people were embittered by the Great Depression, others, with little to expect or hope for, became adventurous and resourceful. I knew that not everyone in the “Greatest Generation” served in the war, and that in the fifties not everyone lived in the suburbs in households consisting of stay-at-home women and men with boring corporate jobs. Artie and Harold don’t resemble my parents in detail, but like them they are urban, they are not surprised when women work, and they are more threatened by the ugliness of McCarthyism than by corporate jobs or the need to conform—issues I never heard about growing up in Brooklyn in an opinionated family, with grandparents who worked in the garment trades, and aunts and uncles who did everything from driving a taxi to breeding German shepherd dogs, but who never ever conformed. There’s much about the twentieth century I don’t know, but I tried to be faithful to what I did know.

  How did the Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust affect people in your family? How did those events and your family’s experience of them affect you?

  During the Depression my mother’s degree from Hunter College, one of the free city colleges, didn’t help her get a job: she said that to be a Macy’s salesclerk you had to have gone to a fancier college than that. She worked in a factory for a while and later qualified for a WPA job and became a teacher of the homebound—children with disabilities who couldn’t get to school—and she did that all her life. My father, like Artie, sold photographs to newspapers; then he worked for the welfare department; eventually he learned stenography and became a court reporter. My parents were engaged for five years before they could marry—they couldn’t afford rent and lived with their families.